The only relevant motivation in an adventure story is "We've got to achieve The Thing!" and the dialogue boils down to"Have we achieved The Thing? No? How do we achieve The Thing? Ah, we need to (go somewhere/get something/kill someone/help someone/destroy something). Let's do that now!" repeated until the answer to the first question is "Yes! We have achieved The Thing!"
Hey, that was the exact dialogue between John Carpenter and Kurt Russel in the novelization of the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of one of Carpenter's best-loved moives. It was called "Fellowship of The Thing".
It nature is so cruel and barbaric, then for what reason did it evolve human beings who feel sympathy, empathy, are able to learn, and practice healing arts?
You said it yourself: So that we could anthropomorphize nature!
So it's entirely plausible that the gene might have been caused by a spot mutation very early on while all mammals were basically mice, and it then had a sufficiently small effect on actual survivability that the trait didn't get bred out. Later, once the small, disposable animals turned into large, expensive ones, it was too late.
Sure but if it's really as simple as one gene disabling another, if regeneration was advantageous in large mammals then it seems probably that a mutation re-activating the regeneration gene would have arose and thrived. Which suggests that it was not advantageous. Not a guarantee, it might just have not happened or happened in organisms who died for reasons regeneration couldn't fix. But it is suggestive...
Frankly I think some other posters are on the right track when they say it has to do with speed of healing. Scaring is faster than regeneration. Regeneration could have increased the risk of infection, or it could have simply increased the amount of time that an injury hindered the ability to escape predators or find food. In the extreme case of losing a limb, regrowing it sounds nice but in the wild an animal probably wouldn't live long enough for it to happen.
But probably won't happen soon and I'm certainly not volunteering to be the guinea pig...
Whoa wait! They have to turn you into an actual rodent to be able to regenerate? Okay fuck that.
Or if the damage is too severe, the cell is made senescent (they lose the ability to reproduce and instead lead out a gentle retirement, performing their normal job until they just die of old age)
I just heard one of my P21-arrested liver cells audibly scoff at that "gentle retirement" bit.:)
I have Philips bulbs. I timed my 60watt-equivalent (13 watt actual) and it took 4 minutes to reach full brightness. And no it wasn't just a bad set, because identical bulbs I bought a year later still exhibited the same behavior.
Maybe you should have tried a different brand then? I have CFLs in almost every fixture in the house. The only ones that take more than 1s to reach max brightness are a recessed light and my 200W-equivalent porch light.
Some of these lights were rather cheap, too.:)
I was not aware Philips make crap products?
Every company has at least the occasional piece of crap in their product line. Phillips has a good reputation, but that plus you holding a crappy Phillips CFL in your hand does not prove all CFLs are crap.
cleanness (not reactive power)
Huh? Is this your way of slipping in Power Factor as a reason CFLs are bad? Well at least you aren't still claiming it means CFLs don't save any energy. LOL.
Shouldn't our priorities be focused on more energy-expensive things like heating/cooling? If all new home standards were increased to "PassivHaus" standards, which bring heat/cooling to almost nothing, we'd save HUGE amount of energy.
Yes indeed! We need to push energy efficiency from all angles and insulation is a huge one. It is being pushed, too, but hey I agree it should be a bigger priority than it is.
After fifteen years of testing CFLs, I've concluded they are inferior.
Why do I get the impression you concluded that long before fifteen years had passed, and at best kept up the "experiment" in the form of buying a new CFL every year or two just to stave off people that you should try em, not all of em take forever to get bright, etc.
I mean, fifteen years and you haven't found a single CFL that performs well? It took me all of two trips to Home Depot to accomplish this. They exist. Your inability to find any after fifteen years is, um, shall we say, in conflict with the idea of this being a neutral unbiased experiment that you were conducting.
All religions have rules made up by people, whether they're mainstream or alternative.
Forget religion. Everything in human culture is made up by people, from their customs to the language.
The opposite statement, that everything a person makes up is part of that culture, is simply not true. "ZOOGBERGER", caps and all, is not an English word no matter how much I tell you it is. It could theoretically eventually become part of the language, but it isn't now. Similarly, if I claim that setting fire to cats is a proud tradition of my home state of Michigan, that's just a lie to cover up my psychosis.
The fact that all human interactions are governed by arbitrary and made-up behaviors should not be used as an excuse to fail to see the useful distinction between actual cultural traditions, and random shit some dude decided to do today.
Culture is worth respecting. Random shit you make up and try to use the cover of "culture" as an excuse to try to make people put up with your bullshit is not.
No one has to do anything - Sikhs don't have to have beards and wear turbans and bangles; Muslims don't have to where burkas. It's still a choice to do so.
That's a nice semantic trick with the word "has", but it misses the point.
A Sikh does have to have a beard and a turban and bangles if they want to live their life according to the precepts of the Sikh religion.
A Jedi does not have to wear their hood up to follow the precepts of the Jedi Order.
And if someone shows up something stupid by being a Jedi, or follower of the FSM, and they have a problem with it,
I have no problem with the guy claiming to be a Jedi. Just like in the GP's post, that sergeant had no problem with his soldier being a Wiccan.
I do have a problem with him making up random behaviors on the spot and claiming religious protection for them, just like the sergeant had a problem with his soldier making up the thing about always having to carry a non-regulation knife.
If the guy was, say, trying to get out of military service, and was quoting Yoda "Wars not make one great!", I'd totally have his back.
So how the hell do you seal that post card in an envelope that is trivial to open. Mail envelopes CAN be opened by ANYBODY (Even the carrier if they wanted to) That doesn't mean it is legal to do something just because you can. Email should be the same way.
Thank you.
Too many geeks around here seem to think "privacy" is the same as "security".
You don't encrypt your email or seal your correspondence in a tamper-proof opaque envelope because you want privacy, you do that because you want your private email to be secure against someone violating your privacy. Not to create the concept of expectation of privacy in the first place.
If that were the case, the 4th Amendment search and seizure clause would be pointless. "You can't read someone's private correspondence, unless you can, in which case it isn't private".
I don't know about you, but when I send an unencrypted email I have no expectation of privacy from the moment the text leaves my computer.
Expectation of privacy means you can reasonably expect your privacy to be respected, not that you can reasonably expect it to remain secure even in the face of someone trying to violate it!
Example: A conversation in your home is private, even though a simple glass held to your window can let someone listen in. It is reasonable to expect that people will not do this. A conversation in a restaurant is not private, because you cannot reasonably expect that nobody will listen to you -- in fact it's difficult for them not to.
Your ISP has no reason to read your email outside of the header. It is reasonable to expect that your ISP will respect your privacy in this case. It is doubly reasonable to expect that the police will respect your privacy, so long as they are obeying the law.
The interpretation that "expectation of privacy" means "how much privacy can you expect to have in the face of malicious people deliberately trying to violate it" is incorrect, and silly. It would make the 4th Amendment meaningless, because anything that someone can view is ipso-facto not private and thus not subject to the 4th.
He explicitly states that it works for laptops, though. And there is no way in hell that I'll buy that claim, because even if it does, it would require extra hardware and such a ridiculous amount of control (100% control of the computer during the scan) that you're better off just booting it from a clean live CD and scanning it from that.
Duh of course it requires complete control of the system, minus any potential malware. No extra hardware is needed but the external verifier which is really just another system. It'll still work.
And even if it could give you 100% assurance that the RAM is clean, it still wouldn't "guarantee" malware detection on the secondary storage.
Repeating myself: Yes, unless it's a known software stack. Which is why despite any other platforms he mentions, the conclusion of the paper and his primary thrust is about smart phones.
Since when do Jedi have to wear hoodies with the hood up? There are numerous points in the movies where Jedi do not wear their hoods up, and numerous occasions where they even wearing a garment that has a hood at all. Clearly, mandatory hoodies is not one of the precepts of Jediism as it existed in the Galactic Republic/Empire.
This reminds me of all the rituals and requirements Catholics make up that was never mentioned in the Bible. But at least they can point at a section in the Bible that can be read to say that the church leaders are allowed to make this stuff up.. As far as I know, not only is there no such statement in Star Wars, Lucas is quite serious about restricting who is allowed to expand upon Star Wars. Is there some Expanded Universe novel in which the Hoodie Requirement is created?
So dude, I mean Mr. Jedi, put your hood down. You don't need it up to be a Jedi. Insisting on putting it up isn't holding fast to your religion, it's playing dress-up.
"Don't worry, you have nothing to fear from Tongue Tongue - he's only tasting you. But likewise don't resist for he can crush you quite easily. The tongue is a very powerful muscle and Tongue Tongue is all tongue and I am Dr. Mong Mong. Now release the nice mothman, Tongue Tongue - here is an individually-wrapped slice of processed cheese."... and once Tongue Tongue is trapped in Arthur's body, and is sobbing and licking the floor...
"He weeps for he has but one small tongue with which to taste an entire world. "
He assumes that the virus is not smart enough to know that this is pseudo-random data.
Quite the opposite -- in the paper he explicitly assumes that the malware can steal the random seed (and every other attack vector you list plus others). Basically, by running through memory twice, and XORing the values with memory instead of simply overwriting them, he guarantees that malware has to either store the necessary portions of the bit pattern, or recompute them which will introduce noticeable delay calculating the Nth number in a random sequence.
We're not talking about a running system with an OS swapping tasks around and interrupts coming in constantly. We're talking about a system where the only thing that should be running is the checker. The performance in such a situation is vastly more predictable than the general case.
Or, as I described elsewhere, it could emulate the system timer and tell the scanner that an appropriate amount of time had elapsed
The external verifier knows how much time has elapsed.
In short... there is absolutely no way to boot up an infected system, scan the RAM, and then with 100% certainty say that the RAM is clean.
For every arbitrary computing environment, no. But given a few reasonable assumptions -- like, you have an external device with it's own clock and knowledge of the compute speed of the device being tested -- you can.
I suggest giving the paper a read. It's really quite a bit more clever than you give it credit for.
Correct, except that even if it gives your RAM a clean bill of health you still can't trust it 100%.
Outside of the non-zero chance of a hash collision, what makes you say that? He seems to have all the bases covered, even malware trying to recreate the data that would provide the same hash.
And yes, if the virus doesn't use memory hiding techniques to keep you from detecting it after you've tried to purge the memory (i.e. it's actually gone from the memory, at that point), you fall back to standard scanning techniques, which are not 100% reliable anyway.
The whole point is that this defeats memory hiding techniques.
But yes, once you've cleared the ram, you have to scan storage. Again with a known software stack, this is "not 100%" in the sense of hash collisions existing. But I can deal with that level of "not 100%".
The only sure way to scan a device is to boot a clean system so that you know the RAM is clean, attach the questionable storage devices, and scan them from that. You can either do this with a boot CD, or with a separate computer and attach the storage devices via USB or internally.
Which is typically not possible in the arena he's discussing.
The Loki Linux port of Heroes of Might and Magic III to pick my most recent indulgence. Which is usually followed by playing Loki port of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the most appropriately acronymed video game name ever.:)
Sure sentimentality is a big part of it, but the sign of a great game is the ability to pull it out after many years, already knowing everything in it, and having a fun time. Nostalgia works best when not confronted with the reality that your hazy, rozy memory thinks of. The best example for me is The Legend of Zelda, a truly ancient and classic game which I feel compelled to pull out every few years. And yeah, nostalgia gives me a big warm fuzzy feeling in the first couple levels. But that wears off pretty soon, and the reason I keep playing is because the game is wicked fun.
Slashdot Mirror
You should sue them for making fun of your religion.
Also sue slashdot for publishing your post and revealing the copyrighted secrets of your religion.
Then sue yourself for being the source of the leak.
Probably. He'll then appear in a spin-off: The Beorn Identity.
The only relevant motivation in an adventure story is "We've got to achieve The Thing!" and the dialogue boils down to"Have we achieved The Thing? No? How do we achieve The Thing? Ah, we need to (go somewhere/get something/kill someone/help someone/destroy something). Let's do that now!" repeated until the answer to the first question is "Yes! We have achieved The Thing!"
Hey, that was the exact dialogue between John Carpenter and Kurt Russel in the novelization of the behind-the-scenes documentary of the making of one of Carpenter's best-loved moives. It was called "Fellowship of The Thing".
LOL, good to know there's someone else out there that gets my Britishing references. :)
BTW, damn you for linking OMM and making me -- yes making me! -- re-read all those old reviews.
Also just noticed they predicted Stephen Colbert getting his own show!
Okay, we get it, you love GIMP.
Here.
I did find a nice description of the HFI "imager" device... Its resolution is about 5 arc minutes depending on frequency, etc.
Not bad for the smallest telescope possible!
Narture wants to be anthropomorphized ;)
It nature is so cruel and barbaric, then for what reason did it evolve human beings who feel sympathy, empathy, are able to learn, and practice healing arts?
You said it yourself: So that we could anthropomorphize nature!
So it's entirely plausible that the gene might have been caused by a spot mutation very early on while all mammals were basically mice, and it then had a sufficiently small effect on actual survivability that the trait didn't get bred out. Later, once the small, disposable animals turned into large, expensive ones, it was too late.
Sure but if it's really as simple as one gene disabling another, if regeneration was advantageous in large mammals then it seems probably that a mutation re-activating the regeneration gene would have arose and thrived. Which suggests that it was not advantageous. Not a guarantee, it might just have not happened or happened in organisms who died for reasons regeneration couldn't fix. But it is suggestive...
Frankly I think some other posters are on the right track when they say it has to do with speed of healing. Scaring is faster than regeneration. Regeneration could have increased the risk of infection, or it could have simply increased the amount of time that an injury hindered the ability to escape predators or find food. In the extreme case of losing a limb, regrowing it sounds nice but in the wild an animal probably wouldn't live long enough for it to happen.
But probably won't happen soon and I'm certainly not volunteering to be the guinea pig...
Whoa wait! They have to turn you into an actual rodent to be able to regenerate? Okay fuck that.
You may not be aware of this but the last immigration bill was pushed heavily by Bush, McCain, and other Republican leaders.
Best thing Bush tried to do while in office, too. Sadly while it was pushed by Republican leaders, it was defeated by Republicans too.
Or if the damage is too severe, the cell is made senescent (they lose the ability to reproduce and instead lead out a gentle retirement, performing their normal job until they just die of old age)
I just heard one of my P21-arrested liver cells audibly scoff at that "gentle retirement" bit. :)
*Jamaican^W WoW troll voice*
They say that when you cut off an extremity it regenerates a little bigger.
Don't believe it.
And the Rugged good looks - in your case, anyways.
It takes a special kind of man to pull off that haircut.
I have Philips bulbs. I timed my 60watt-equivalent (13 watt actual) and it took 4 minutes to reach full brightness. And no it wasn't just a bad set, because identical bulbs I bought a year later still exhibited the same behavior.
Maybe you should have tried a different brand then? I have CFLs in almost every fixture in the house. The only ones that take more than 1s to reach max brightness are a recessed light and my 200W-equivalent porch light.
Some of these lights were rather cheap, too. :)
I was not aware Philips make crap products?
Every company has at least the occasional piece of crap in their product line. Phillips has a good reputation, but that plus you holding a crappy Phillips CFL in your hand does not prove all CFLs are crap.
cleanness (not reactive power)
Huh? Is this your way of slipping in Power Factor as a reason CFLs are bad? Well at least you aren't still claiming it means CFLs don't save any energy. LOL.
Shouldn't our priorities be focused on more energy-expensive things like heating/cooling? If all new home standards were increased to "PassivHaus" standards, which bring heat/cooling to almost nothing, we'd save HUGE amount of energy.
Yes indeed! We need to push energy efficiency from all angles and insulation is a huge one. It is being pushed, too, but hey I agree it should be a bigger priority than it is.
After fifteen years of testing CFLs, I've concluded they are inferior.
Why do I get the impression you concluded that long before fifteen years had passed, and at best kept up the "experiment" in the form of buying a new CFL every year or two just to stave off people that you should try em, not all of em take forever to get bright, etc.
I mean, fifteen years and you haven't found a single CFL that performs well? It took me all of two trips to Home Depot to accomplish this. They exist. Your inability to find any after fifteen years is, um, shall we say, in conflict with the idea of this being a neutral unbiased experiment that you were conducting.
Well that's the very point being made, isn't it?
Then he made the point very poorly.
All religions have rules made up by people, whether they're mainstream or alternative.
Forget religion. Everything in human culture is made up by people, from their customs to the language.
The opposite statement, that everything a person makes up is part of that culture, is simply not true. "ZOOGBERGER", caps and all, is not an English word no matter how much I tell you it is. It could theoretically eventually become part of the language, but it isn't now. Similarly, if I claim that setting fire to cats is a proud tradition of my home state of Michigan, that's just a lie to cover up my psychosis.
The fact that all human interactions are governed by arbitrary and made-up behaviors should not be used as an excuse to fail to see the useful distinction between actual cultural traditions, and random shit some dude decided to do today.
Culture is worth respecting. Random shit you make up and try to use the cover of "culture" as an excuse to try to make people put up with your bullshit is not.
No one has to do anything - Sikhs don't have to have beards and wear turbans and bangles; Muslims don't have to where burkas. It's still a choice to do so.
That's a nice semantic trick with the word "has", but it misses the point.
A Sikh does have to have a beard and a turban and bangles if they want to live their life according to the precepts of the Sikh religion.
A Jedi does not have to wear their hood up to follow the precepts of the Jedi Order.
And if someone shows up something stupid by being a Jedi, or follower of the FSM, and they have a problem with it,
I have no problem with the guy claiming to be a Jedi. Just like in the GP's post, that sergeant had no problem with his soldier being a Wiccan.
I do have a problem with him making up random behaviors on the spot and claiming religious protection for them, just like the sergeant had a problem with his soldier making up the thing about always having to carry a non-regulation knife.
If the guy was, say, trying to get out of military service, and was quoting Yoda "Wars not make one great!", I'd totally have his back.
Oh great, I started a religious war again.
So how the hell do you seal that post card in an envelope that is trivial to open. Mail envelopes CAN be opened by ANYBODY (Even the carrier if they wanted to) That doesn't mean it is legal to do something just because you can. Email should be the same way.
Thank you.
Too many geeks around here seem to think "privacy" is the same as "security".
You don't encrypt your email or seal your correspondence in a tamper-proof opaque envelope because you want privacy, you do that because you want your private email to be secure against someone violating your privacy. Not to create the concept of expectation of privacy in the first place.
If that were the case, the 4th Amendment search and seizure clause would be pointless. "You can't read someone's private correspondence, unless you can, in which case it isn't private".
I don't know about you, but when I send an unencrypted email I have no expectation of privacy from the moment the text leaves my computer.
Expectation of privacy means you can reasonably expect your privacy to be respected, not that you can reasonably expect it to remain secure even in the face of someone trying to violate it!
Example: A conversation in your home is private, even though a simple glass held to your window can let someone listen in. It is reasonable to expect that people will not do this. A conversation in a restaurant is not private, because you cannot reasonably expect that nobody will listen to you -- in fact it's difficult for them not to.
Your ISP has no reason to read your email outside of the header. It is reasonable to expect that your ISP will respect your privacy in this case. It is doubly reasonable to expect that the police will respect your privacy, so long as they are obeying the law.
The interpretation that "expectation of privacy" means "how much privacy can you expect to have in the face of malicious people deliberately trying to violate it" is incorrect, and silly. It would make the 4th Amendment meaningless, because anything that someone can view is ipso-facto not private and thus not subject to the 4th.
He explicitly states that it works for laptops, though. And there is no way in hell that I'll buy that claim, because even if it does, it would require extra hardware and such a ridiculous amount of control (100% control of the computer during the scan) that you're better off just booting it from a clean live CD and scanning it from that.
Duh of course it requires complete control of the system, minus any potential malware. No extra hardware is needed but the external verifier which is really just another system. It'll still work.
And even if it could give you 100% assurance that the RAM is clean, it still wouldn't "guarantee" malware detection on the secondary storage.
Repeating myself: Yes, unless it's a known software stack. Which is why despite any other platforms he mentions, the conclusion of the paper and his primary thrust is about smart phones.
Since when do Jedi have to wear hoodies with the hood up? There are numerous points in the movies where Jedi do not wear their hoods up, and numerous occasions where they even wearing a garment that has a hood at all. Clearly, mandatory hoodies is not one of the precepts of Jediism as it existed in the Galactic Republic/Empire.
This reminds me of all the rituals and requirements Catholics make up that was never mentioned in the Bible. But at least they can point at a section in the Bible that can be read to say that the church leaders are allowed to make this stuff up.. As far as I know, not only is there no such statement in Star Wars, Lucas is quite serious about restricting who is allowed to expand upon Star Wars. Is there some Expanded Universe novel in which the Hoodie Requirement is created?
So dude, I mean Mr. Jedi, put your hood down. You don't need it up to be a Jedi. Insisting on putting it up isn't holding fast to your religion, it's playing dress-up.
"Don't worry, you have nothing to fear from Tongue Tongue - he's only tasting you. But likewise don't resist for he can crush you quite easily. The tongue is a very powerful muscle and Tongue Tongue is all tongue and I am Dr. Mong Mong. Now release the nice mothman, Tongue Tongue - here is an individually-wrapped slice of processed cheese." ... and once Tongue Tongue is trapped in Arthur's body, and is sobbing and licking the floor...
"He weeps for he has but one small tongue with which to taste an entire world. "
He assumes that the virus is not smart enough to know that this is pseudo-random data.
Quite the opposite -- in the paper he explicitly assumes that the malware can steal the random seed (and every other attack vector you list plus others). Basically, by running through memory twice, and XORing the values with memory instead of simply overwriting them, he guarantees that malware has to either store the necessary portions of the bit pattern, or recompute them which will introduce noticeable delay calculating the Nth number in a random sequence.
We're not talking about a running system with an OS swapping tasks around and interrupts coming in constantly. We're talking about a system where the only thing that should be running is the checker. The performance in such a situation is vastly more predictable than the general case.
Or, as I described elsewhere, it could emulate the system timer and tell the scanner that an appropriate amount of time had elapsed
The external verifier knows how much time has elapsed.
In short... there is absolutely no way to boot up an infected system, scan the RAM, and then with 100% certainty say that the RAM is clean.
For every arbitrary computing environment, no. But given a few reasonable assumptions -- like, you have an external device with it's own clock and knowledge of the compute speed of the device being tested -- you can.
I suggest giving the paper a read. It's really quite a bit more clever than you give it credit for.
Correct, except that even if it gives your RAM a clean bill of health you still can't trust it 100%.
Outside of the non-zero chance of a hash collision, what makes you say that? He seems to have all the bases covered, even malware trying to recreate the data that would provide the same hash.
And yes, if the virus doesn't use memory hiding techniques to keep you from detecting it after you've tried to purge the memory (i.e. it's actually gone from the memory, at that point), you fall back to standard scanning techniques, which are not 100% reliable anyway.
The whole point is that this defeats memory hiding techniques.
But yes, once you've cleared the ram, you have to scan storage. Again with a known software stack, this is "not 100%" in the sense of hash collisions existing. But I can deal with that level of "not 100%".
The only sure way to scan a device is to boot a clean system so that you know the RAM is clean, attach the questionable storage devices, and scan them from that. You can either do this with a boot CD, or with a separate computer and attach the storage devices via USB or internally.
Which is typically not possible in the arena he's discussing.
*fap fap fap* Uhhh, witty!
The Loki Linux port of Heroes of Might and Magic III to pick my most recent indulgence. Which is usually followed by playing Loki port of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the most appropriately acronymed video game name ever. :)
Sure sentimentality is a big part of it, but the sign of a great game is the ability to pull it out after many years, already knowing everything in it, and having a fun time. Nostalgia works best when not confronted with the reality that your hazy, rozy memory thinks of. The best example for me is The Legend of Zelda, a truly ancient and classic game which I feel compelled to pull out every few years. And yeah, nostalgia gives me a big warm fuzzy feeling in the first couple levels. But that wears off pretty soon, and the reason I keep playing is because the game is wicked fun.