It's not more accessible. Well, maybe Brawl is, but Brawls sucks as a fighting game. Melee was *quite* technical. Knowing how to do any one move doesn't mean you know anything about the game.
That's true of any good fighting game. People who don't recognize that haven't even scratched the surface of the intended gameplay.
I don't think you know what "accessible" means. "Accessible" means you can get into the game and do something with a fairly small learning curve. Not that once you have done this you know everything there is to know. A game can both be accessible and have depth; they aren't opposites.
Ever heard of Othello: "Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master"?
Randi's as bad as the hoaxers. No objectivity at all. I'd like to see an objective study using MRI scanning at the time a "psychic" makes a prediction, see if there's anything odd happening.
I'd like to see a "psychic" make a correct prediction before I start giving a shit whether anything odd is happening in their brain, unless it's to try to distinguish whether it's the "lie" center of the brain that's firing, or the "self delusion" center. Trying to figure out the cause before you've confirmed there is an effect is the definition of wild goose chase.
How you get that a mere lack of objectivity and a predisposition to disbelieve in psychic phenomenon, makes Randi as bad as people lying in order to scam innocent but gullible people out of their money is beyond me.
You do realize that many of the greatest experiments in history were performed by people who were not anything close to objective? Michelson and Morely were not objective in the slightest, they were absolutely convinced that the Luminiferous Ether existed and their experiment would prove it, and they re-ran it all over the world and with every modification they could think of to explain why they continued to get null results. They continued even after much of the scientific community had started to take their result to mean that the Ether wasn't real. Eventually they had to admit defeat and accept reality, reluctant though they were to do so. Yet at no point did their lack of objectivity actually effect the reality that the Ether doesn't exist.
So let me know when there's a douser who can identify water 9/10 of the time consistently, and Randi still denies that there's anything to it even after the guy passes every test he throws at him, and then I'll agree that a lack of objectivity is in some way relevant. Unless it's your theory that his lack of belief somehow interferes with the sprits' communications or the quantum-prediction-power or whatever nonsense you think is powering these "powers". Which I'm sure the shysters themselves will say. "Ooh your skepticism is putting the spirits off. I can only talk to them in front of completely credulous gullible idiots."
We've already seen how plants exploit quantum effects for their benefit, and I've heard theories (just theories mark you) of how an evolved response in humans where they'd use a quantum effect to ascertain probability, or even influence probability. And that's just pre-cognisance, one of the harder telepathic skills to explain. Telepathy, empathy, all of them are scientifically possible.
LOL. Yeah, QM interpretations based on puns on the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment, and ordinary chemistry that incorporates QM effects (which happens all the time), totally explain how pre-cognizance is possible. Psychic Invisible Pink Unicorns are scientifically possible, since we haven't proven that they aren't, we just have no reason to think they exist and all semi-plausible mechanisms by which they could exist show nothing, and none of the people who claim to be able to find them with ease can demonstrate this ability to anyone who doesn't already believe in them.
hence why some of them may exhibit the skill at home when they're not really caring, but might not work in a stressful environment when they *want* something to happen to get their grubby mitts on the $1 million.
Some? You mean all. You can use the same reason to explain why some people can't answer easy questions on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but at the end of the day some people win. But there's not one person with paranormal powers out there who is confident enough in their ability to make it work for a million bucks?
Fine. Then send them my way and I'll give them some practice. I'll give them $20 and a six pack if they can demonstrate their ability, and I promise not to record it so they won't be embarrassed in front of anyone but me when they fail. Oh wait, that lacked objectivity -- I meant if they fail. I hope that slip-up didn't nullify their powers!
By telling them they will respawn in the next life... Or respawn in heaven or some variation of that.
Well, you know, I don't really know if there's a heaven or not, or if there is how it works. What I do know, though, is that if I do "respawn" in anyplace that looks like the afterlife, the very first thing I'm going to do is move my ass from that spot, because I sure as hell don't want to be standing on the respawn spot when I find out if heaven has telefrags.
If there was an appropriate return on the investment, the project would be taken up by private industry.
Except they aren't the same kinds of ROI. You're talking profit, GP was talking benefit. As in benefit to society. Things that are of benefit to society are not necessarily profitable to private industry.
Hey, Betamax isn't dead; It lives in my apartment. Seriously though, the Internet truly is the graveyard of technology. Where else could you find someone who offers Betamax cleaning instructions and repair service? Hang in there Superbeta HiFi!
Technology graveyard and technology necromancer's laboratory! The internet has everything!
Oh, btw, the fps drop is really because the opengl rendering path works much better than the directx path, but was significantly less optimized by Blizzard. Mac users get the same thing afaik.
Give the nerds that and many more would try it, especially if you promised more fps during raids.
Yes, I am being serious.
I'm running WoW with the stock version of Wine that comes with 8.10. The only thing missing was automagic support for the nvidia binary drivers, which 9.4 now has.
It would also depend on whether you're using a well supported wifi card or not... I had to download a driver from the chipset manufacturer's website* and spend a while pouring over man pages and editing/etc/network/interfaces to get it working the first time. I don't know how much better 9.4 is in this regard; some wireless cards would simply work in 8.4/8.10 with no hassle. And if you connect your computer to your modem with Cat5, you should be fine.
You will get fewer fps than when running in Windows (at least, so I've heard as I don't have any MS OS to boot into for comparison), but the hit isn't that big. But if playing WoW is the only motivation for these geeks to use Linux, that's not really going to motivate them. Especially when they discover that wine/cedega compatibility is yet another way things can horribly break on patch day.
* Chipset, not card. Oh how Linksys has fallen since being bought by Cisco.
More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
By odds, sure. All I use though is Flashblock and disabling just annoying javascript features not the whole thing, basically the stuff that can actually get in my way but leaving whatever degree of visually obtrusive ads remain. I can really just block them out 99% of the time, not even registering them. Largely from browsing the web in that time before enlightened browsers, but after animated gifs.
I remember reading on/. many years ago about a study where people try to find information on some websites, and consistently fail to see the giant gaudy supposedly eye-catching graphics telling them exactly what they want to know, instead busily scanning the web site's text. Heh, seemed about right to me, when I'm trying to find something specific I don't even see the bright flashing shit that seems designed to catch my eye.
For that last 1%, I'll admit I also have Nuke Anything, which is also nice for fixing broken web pages where a sidebar will mis-render and block an article and such.
A well-written post may indicate a command of the English language, but that command only goes so far.
I appreciate the pun, and I know insisting people use language properly is futile. Just don't act like using language incorrectly is anything but using it incorrectly.
Not at all. Bombing an Army base is a military attack. Bombing a banking district is a financial attack. Bombing the highways is an infrastructure attack.
No, those are all military attacks. Just like a nuclear attack is an attack by nuclear weapons not on nuclear weapons, amphibious attack is an attack by water-to-land forces not an attack on the enemy's amphibious watercraft and troops, and an aerial assault is an attack from the air not on the freaking air.
Aside from simply being correct usage, why does it matter? Because, like I said, defense is largely determined by the nature of the attack. Laying multiple fiber backbones is the same as laying multiple long distance power lines in terms of protecting the associated infrastructure from physical assault, so in what universe is it logical to call one "cyber defense" and the other not? "Financial defense" is an AA battery on top of a bank? That's ridiculous. This reverse usage of terms leads to ridiculousness.
If you consider protecting a buried fiber optic backbone vs buried DC transmission line to be fundamentally different kinds of defense, then you've allowed misuse of language to lead you to ridiculous and inefficient modes of defense.
Bruce's whole point here is that if we think of cyber defense as making the internet stronger, were missing the big picture. It's not about securing the internet, it's about securing our entire communications infrastructure.
I'm not sure that's Bruce's point in calling this a "cyber attack", but yes, the big picture is about securing all infrastructure, and in particular for this case protecting it from physical assault, which has nothing to do with "cyber"-anything. Sabotage on the power grid or power generation would damage many forms of communications, but that's not a "cyber attack", any more than its effect on a refrigerator manufacturer would make it a "refrigerator attack".
Yes, securing our communications infrastructure means more than securing the software in the routers and servers that make it up (actual "cyber defense"). Which really all that means is that you can't just think in terms of "cyber" as in "online", you have to think of the off-line risks as well. That does not mean "cyber" has bled into the physical world, neither in a grammatical nor real sense.
Recognizing the physicality of our communications substrate will improve our security, not irrationally shoving their physicality under the umbrella of "cyber" as if it were different. That will only harm our security.
This is an attack on the latter -- an attack on a city by going after its comms infrastructure.
Okay, that even makes sense. But seriously, to make a close analogy, when I read the morning e-news and see the headline "Robot Attack in San Francisco", that damn well better mean an attack by robots, not an attack on SF's burgeoning sex-robot industry.
An attack that uses, say, the Internet, in the form of email, instant messaging, forums, etc. to convince someone to jump off a cliff, would therefore not be a "cyber attack" (used a "cyber" means, but not against a cyber target), nor would simply planting a bomb, or launching a missile at the location of an ISP (non-cyber means attacking a cyber target).
Obviously, there are gray areas, and room for interpretation. A lot can be clarified by looking at the intent of the attack, to the extent it can be determined. In the Morgan Hill case, we don't really know what the intent was -- we don't even know who the attackers were. So it's not the best example.
Well the induced-suicide thing is a social engineering hack... But I do think there's room for "cyber attacks" that have physical results, like if the missile that was launched was one of ours that we had for some idiotic reason attached to the net, or if they overloaded our power system by a similar hack, and so on. By and large I agree with you though.
Also, I think there's even room for the Cyber Command to defend against things that wouldn't technically be considered "cyber attacks" by our definition. For example, educating the makers of internet infrastructure on how to make their systems resilient against physical attack -- e.g. by having redundant lines that are physically separate so a single back hoe/bomb won't take them all out -- is a perfectly valid pursuit for them, even though it doesn't take place in the "cyber" realm.
I think the important lesson to take away here is that communications networks are becoming increasingly vital resources to our communities and our country as a whole.
That's very true, and why I'm all for things like the NSA creating Secure Enhanced Linux and otherwise working with people to secure our infrastructure from electronic intrusion (hey isn't that a better term than "cyber attack"?), and even the Pentagon being prepared to face all-out assault on our communication infrastructure, as though it were just as important as protecting any other critical aspect of our country.
I guess it's kinda reasonable to use the term for an attack on the "cyber" domain (by going after its physical substrate) as well as for attacks that occur within that domain. Either way, it screws up people's access to comms.
I don't think it's reasonable, at least not enough that we should accept it and start using "Cyber Attack" to refer to the target of the attack rather than the means. The reason basically boils down to the opposite of attack, which would be Cyber Defense, and what was mentioned earlier on/., the Pentagon Cyber Command.
If we accept this meaning of Cyber Attack, then that means that an airplane that drops a bomb on an ISP is a "Cyber Attack", while bombing any other form of infrastructure would be a "regular attack". Logically this would also mean that an anti-aircraft gun that is placed near an ISP is a form of "Cyber Defense". Except that isn't logical, it makes no sense. Anti-aircraft defenses should not be under the purview of Cyber Command regardless of where they are located.
No. I insist that the adjective "Cyber" before the word "Attack" should indicate the means, not the target, in the same way that Cyber Defense should mean securing computer networks, not preventing physical assaults that may or may not happen to hit internet infrastructure.
This was nothing more than plain ol' sabotage. It's the same as them destroying a sewage line, except the impact was different. If it was a power line, that too would have cut off many forms of communication, is that a cyber attack? No. It's an attack.
And ~500Mhz of processing power is all you really need for that.
Yeah, well, in the days of the Pentium II which topped out at 450MHz, that would have been "hardcore".
So clearly the needs of even the most modest computer users have gone up substantially.
And assuming the software industry continues to find interesting things for people like your mom to do with their computer, then this will continue.
Don't get me wrong, there's a "good enough" in every computing generation and there's nothing wrong with people targeting that instead of the latest n' greatest. More and more people are, which is why netbooks are becoming so popular. But the bottom-end netbook of five years from now will be significantly more powerful than the bottom-end netbook of today, and odds are that extra performance will give someone who doesn't need anything more than a netbook a real benefit.
Point is -- "good enough" is real and valid, but still a moving target.
This is very interesting but no where near as exciting as finding another Earth like planet. I suppose we will have to wait for the next generation of telescopes before we find it though.
Well the 'e' planet is somewhat earth-like in mass and possibly earth-like in composition. It's not in the habitable zone for the star, but the closer a planet is to the star the easier it is to detect, and this exoplanet is at the very edge of our ability to detect (thus why this is news -- smallest exoplanet ever found). So you're right, we'll have to wait for technology to advance to find earth-sized rocky planets in the habitable zone (especially of non-dwarf stars).
What is a little surprising though is how many planetary systems we have found that are very different to our own. I can't believe ours is unique but perhaps it's quite rare.
I'm not sure anything we've found suggests that our type of solar system is rare. The limitations of our detection method by and large assures we'd find systems different from our own first. Astrophysicists might not have expected to find gas giants very close in to stars, but if they exist, we were going to find those first. The two main things that seem to have changed to me are that 1) we've gone from having nothing but our own solar system as an example and thus assuming ours was the model for all of them, to have many more examples showing different types and 2) we've learned that solar systems seem to be pretty common.
If we get to the point where detecting a solar system like ours would be simple, and despite finding thousands of others we don't find any like ours, then maybe that points to rarity. Right now though I doubt we're anywhere near being able to say that.
Water worlds always have the crappiest minerals. Oh look more alkalines. Yay. It won't be worth spending the fuel to land on Gliese 581 d, much less the cargo hold space. Gliese 581 e might have iron and other metals, but being so close to the star it probably has major hot spots. So that's probably not worth landing on either until we meet the Melnorme and buy some tech off them.
Oh well. Eliminating planets to explore is good too. There's a lot of stars in the sky, you know, and only so much time to explore them before the UrQuan return.
For disclosing trade secrets that you have been given under license the penalties are far worse than copyright violation.
I don't understand trade secret law very well. I thought thought that one aspect was that it truly only protected secrets, as in once something is common knowledge then trade secret status was lost. That doesn't help someone trying to sneak the source out of a company, but would mean that implementations based on published documentation, decompiled/reverse-engineered source code would be free and clear and essentially back in Free Software land.
Going back to my last post, though, I think this is another case where the underlying change of attitudes that would be necessary to create the reality of such a radical shift in the law would end up making this mostly moot. Pretty much anyone who distributed software binaries would be expected to not restrict the usage of the software, and at least the distributed proprietary software market would be dead.
There is very little you can do about reverse engineering, but any non-derivative implementation has roughly the same status with copyright law. How you nail down clean-room implementations is through patents, which got a lot more popular after 1990 or so.
Don't even get me started on software patents. Look, I'm by no means convinced that the world is better off without copyright. Really, I think just going back to at least near the original fairly short period and cutting out some of the stupid laws like DMCA would be the perfect balance.
Software patents though are simply an abomination. Software is literally -- no analogy no decomposition no translation or anything -- a symbolic representation of mathematical expressions. It is math, as surely as "a^2 = b^2 + c^2" is math. Not something that can be described by math, it's something which itself is intended to describe math using language. Math is the most fundamental language of human progress, which is why you can't and shouldn't allow it to be . Combine software as an aspect of inventive hardware and that's fine. Yes, the computer itself, a machine designed to read symbolic representations of math and perform the calculations among other things, does. No, "my software running on commodity processors" doesn't count. Imagine if all the sorting and scheduling and other algorithms invented just a few decades before the software patent regime had been patented, how progress would have been held back by granting monopolies on math. We need to end this software patents bullshit./end rant
The students are not using copyright law to prevent their plagiarism from being detected. Please, tell me where it says that these students plagiarized the works they submitted to turnitin.com
I was not intending to accuse the particular plaintiffs of plagiarism. I was giving an example of irony, based on the assumption that there were students who committed plagiarism, and who wanted the lawsuit to succeed because it would prevent detection of said plagiarism.
You seem to be one of these people that thinks anyone who tries to exercise their rights must be guilty of something.
You seem to be one of those people that whenever someone says something that you take issue with, you assume they are the polar opposite of your ideology in every way.
In other words, no, you're completely incorrect.
The students were bringing up a valid point that turnitin.com is using other people's work to make a profit. Somehow, this is "fair use".
Slashdot Mirror
It's not more accessible. Well, maybe Brawl is, but Brawls sucks as a fighting game. Melee was *quite* technical. Knowing how to do any one move doesn't mean you know anything about the game.
That's true of any good fighting game. People who don't recognize that haven't even scratched the surface of the intended gameplay.
I don't think you know what "accessible" means. "Accessible" means you can get into the game and do something with a fairly small learning curve. Not that once you have done this you know everything there is to know. A game can both be accessible and have depth; they aren't opposites.
Ever heard of Othello: "Minutes to learn, a lifetime to master"?
Compare Smash Bros Melee to Soul Calibur.
Randi's as bad as the hoaxers. No objectivity at all. I'd like to see an objective study using MRI scanning at the time a "psychic" makes a prediction, see if there's anything odd happening.
I'd like to see a "psychic" make a correct prediction before I start giving a shit whether anything odd is happening in their brain, unless it's to try to distinguish whether it's the "lie" center of the brain that's firing, or the "self delusion" center. Trying to figure out the cause before you've confirmed there is an effect is the definition of wild goose chase.
How you get that a mere lack of objectivity and a predisposition to disbelieve in psychic phenomenon, makes Randi as bad as people lying in order to scam innocent but gullible people out of their money is beyond me.
You do realize that many of the greatest experiments in history were performed by people who were not anything close to objective? Michelson and Morely were not objective in the slightest, they were absolutely convinced that the Luminiferous Ether existed and their experiment would prove it, and they re-ran it all over the world and with every modification they could think of to explain why they continued to get null results. They continued even after much of the scientific community had started to take their result to mean that the Ether wasn't real. Eventually they had to admit defeat and accept reality, reluctant though they were to do so. Yet at no point did their lack of objectivity actually effect the reality that the Ether doesn't exist.
So let me know when there's a douser who can identify water 9/10 of the time consistently, and Randi still denies that there's anything to it even after the guy passes every test he throws at him, and then I'll agree that a lack of objectivity is in some way relevant. Unless it's your theory that his lack of belief somehow interferes with the sprits' communications or the quantum-prediction-power or whatever nonsense you think is powering these "powers". Which I'm sure the shysters themselves will say. "Ooh your skepticism is putting the spirits off. I can only talk to them in front of completely credulous gullible idiots."
We've already seen how plants exploit quantum effects for their benefit, and I've heard theories (just theories mark you) of how an evolved response in humans where they'd use a quantum effect to ascertain probability, or even influence probability. And that's just pre-cognisance, one of the harder telepathic skills to explain. Telepathy, empathy, all of them are scientifically possible.
LOL. Yeah, QM interpretations based on puns on the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment, and ordinary chemistry that incorporates QM effects (which happens all the time), totally explain how pre-cognizance is possible. Psychic Invisible Pink Unicorns are scientifically possible, since we haven't proven that they aren't, we just have no reason to think they exist and all semi-plausible mechanisms by which they could exist show nothing, and none of the people who claim to be able to find them with ease can demonstrate this ability to anyone who doesn't already believe in them.
hence why some of them may exhibit the skill at home when they're not really caring, but might not work in a stressful environment when they *want* something to happen to get their grubby mitts on the $1 million.
Some? You mean all. You can use the same reason to explain why some people can't answer easy questions on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, but at the end of the day some people win. But there's not one person with paranormal powers out there who is confident enough in their ability to make it work for a million bucks?
Fine. Then send them my way and I'll give them some practice. I'll give them $20 and a six pack if they can demonstrate their ability, and I promise not to record it so they won't be embarrassed in front of anyone but me when they fail. Oh wait, that lacked objectivity -- I meant if they fail. I hope that slip-up didn't nullify their powers!
By telling them they will respawn in the next life... Or respawn in heaven or some variation of that.
Well, you know, I don't really know if there's a heaven or not, or if there is how it works. What I do know, though, is that if I do "respawn" in anyplace that looks like the afterlife, the very first thing I'm going to do is move my ass from that spot, because I sure as hell don't want to be standing on the respawn spot when I find out if heaven has telefrags.
If there was an appropriate return on the investment, the project would be taken up by private industry.
Except they aren't the same kinds of ROI. You're talking profit, GP was talking benefit. As in benefit to society. Things that are of benefit to society are not necessarily profitable to private industry.
Hey, Betamax isn't dead; It lives in my apartment. Seriously though, the Internet truly is the graveyard of technology. Where else could you find someone who offers Betamax cleaning instructions and repair service? Hang in there Superbeta HiFi!
Technology graveyard and technology necromancer's laboratory! The internet has everything!
That must have been an echo from "For that last 1%, I'll admit I also have Nuke Anything".
Given the time delta, I'm guessing it bounced off the end of a cut cable in Canada.
He meant it's been two and a half years since he missed a day. That was when he had to go to the ER to get his bedsores and burst bladder treated.
Make it run ventrilo out of the box too, and half the WoW playerbase will switch!
It works minus the microphone. I think that's a separate problem though.
No, WoW guilds won't switch to teamspeak just so the uber nerd can play on linux, believe me i've asked!
Me too. :(
On one server I used to play on, Teamspeak was the default voice client. I miss those days.
Oh, btw, the fps drop is really because the opengl rendering path works much better than the directx path, but was significantly less optimized by Blizzard. Mac users get the same thing afaik.
Give the nerds that and many more would try it, especially if you promised more fps during raids.
Yes, I am being serious.
I'm running WoW with the stock version of Wine that comes with 8.10. The only thing missing was automagic support for the nvidia binary drivers, which 9.4 now has.
It would also depend on whether you're using a well supported wifi card or not... I had to download a driver from the chipset manufacturer's website* and spend a while pouring over man pages and editing /etc/network/interfaces to get it working the first time. I don't know how much better 9.4 is in this regard; some wireless cards would simply work in 8.4/8.10 with no hassle. And if you connect your computer to your modem with Cat5, you should be fine.
You will get fewer fps than when running in Windows (at least, so I've heard as I don't have any MS OS to boot into for comparison), but the hit isn't that big. But if playing WoW is the only motivation for these geeks to use Linux, that's not really going to motivate them. Especially when they discover that wine/cedega compatibility is yet another way things can horribly break on patch day.
* Chipset, not card. Oh how Linksys has fallen since being bought by Cisco.
More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
By odds, sure. All I use though is Flashblock and disabling just annoying javascript features not the whole thing, basically the stuff that can actually get in my way but leaving whatever degree of visually obtrusive ads remain. I can really just block them out 99% of the time, not even registering them. Largely from browsing the web in that time before enlightened browsers, but after animated gifs.
I remember reading on /. many years ago about a study where people try to find information on some websites, and consistently fail to see the giant gaudy supposedly eye-catching graphics telling them exactly what they want to know, instead busily scanning the web site's text. Heh, seemed about right to me, when I'm trying to find something specific I don't even see the bright flashing shit that seems designed to catch my eye.
For that last 1%, I'll admit I also have Nuke Anything, which is also nice for fixing broken web pages where a sidebar will mis-render and block an article and such.
I'll
A well-written post may indicate a command of the English language, but that command only goes so far.
I appreciate the pun, and I know insisting people use language properly is futile. Just don't act like using language incorrectly is anything but using it incorrectly.
Not at all. Bombing an Army base is a military attack. Bombing a banking district is a financial attack. Bombing the highways is an infrastructure attack.
No, those are all military attacks. Just like a nuclear attack is an attack by nuclear weapons not on nuclear weapons, amphibious attack is an attack by water-to-land forces not an attack on the enemy's amphibious watercraft and troops, and an aerial assault is an attack from the air not on the freaking air.
Aside from simply being correct usage, why does it matter? Because, like I said, defense is largely determined by the nature of the attack. Laying multiple fiber backbones is the same as laying multiple long distance power lines in terms of protecting the associated infrastructure from physical assault, so in what universe is it logical to call one "cyber defense" and the other not? "Financial defense" is an AA battery on top of a bank? That's ridiculous. This reverse usage of terms leads to ridiculousness.
If you consider protecting a buried fiber optic backbone vs buried DC transmission line to be fundamentally different kinds of defense, then you've allowed misuse of language to lead you to ridiculous and inefficient modes of defense.
Bruce's whole point here is that if we think of cyber defense as making the internet stronger, were missing the big picture. It's not about securing the internet, it's about securing our entire communications infrastructure.
I'm not sure that's Bruce's point in calling this a "cyber attack", but yes, the big picture is about securing all infrastructure, and in particular for this case protecting it from physical assault, which has nothing to do with "cyber"-anything. Sabotage on the power grid or power generation would damage many forms of communications, but that's not a "cyber attack", any more than its effect on a refrigerator manufacturer would make it a "refrigerator attack".
Yes, securing our communications infrastructure means more than securing the software in the routers and servers that make it up (actual "cyber defense"). Which really all that means is that you can't just think in terms of "cyber" as in "online", you have to think of the off-line risks as well. That does not mean "cyber" has bled into the physical world, neither in a grammatical nor real sense.
Recognizing the physicality of our communications substrate will improve our security, not irrationally shoving their physicality under the umbrella of "cyber" as if it were different. That will only harm our security.
This is an attack on the latter -- an attack on a city by going after its comms infrastructure.
Okay, that even makes sense. But seriously, to make a close analogy, when I read the morning e-news and see the headline "Robot Attack in San Francisco", that damn well better mean an attack by robots, not an attack on SF's burgeoning sex-robot industry.
An attack that uses, say, the Internet, in the form of email, instant messaging, forums, etc. to convince someone to jump off a cliff, would therefore not be a "cyber attack" (used a "cyber" means, but not against a cyber target), nor would simply planting a bomb, or launching a missile at the location of an ISP (non-cyber means attacking a cyber target).
Obviously, there are gray areas, and room for interpretation. A lot can be clarified by looking at the intent of the attack, to the extent it can be determined. In the Morgan Hill case, we don't really know what the intent was -- we don't even know who the attackers were. So it's not the best example.
Well the induced-suicide thing is a social engineering hack... But I do think there's room for "cyber attacks" that have physical results, like if the missile that was launched was one of ours that we had for some idiotic reason attached to the net, or if they overloaded our power system by a similar hack, and so on. By and large I agree with you though.
Also, I think there's even room for the Cyber Command to defend against things that wouldn't technically be considered "cyber attacks" by our definition. For example, educating the makers of internet infrastructure on how to make their systems resilient against physical attack -- e.g. by having redundant lines that are physically separate so a single back hoe/bomb won't take them all out -- is a perfectly valid pursuit for them, even though it doesn't take place in the "cyber" realm.
I think the important lesson to take away here is that communications networks are becoming increasingly vital resources to our communities and our country as a whole.
That's very true, and why I'm all for things like the NSA creating Secure Enhanced Linux and otherwise working with people to secure our infrastructure from electronic intrusion (hey isn't that a better term than "cyber attack"?), and even the Pentagon being prepared to face all-out assault on our communication infrastructure, as though it were just as important as protecting any other critical aspect of our country.
Ok great, you like having an old system, more power to you.
But, but, that's exactly what they don't want!
I guess it's kinda reasonable to use the term for an attack on the "cyber" domain (by going after its physical substrate) as well as for attacks that occur within that domain. Either way, it screws up people's access to comms.
I don't think it's reasonable, at least not enough that we should accept it and start using "Cyber Attack" to refer to the target of the attack rather than the means. The reason basically boils down to the opposite of attack, which would be Cyber Defense, and what was mentioned earlier on /., the Pentagon Cyber Command.
If we accept this meaning of Cyber Attack, then that means that an airplane that drops a bomb on an ISP is a "Cyber Attack", while bombing any other form of infrastructure would be a "regular attack". Logically this would also mean that an anti-aircraft gun that is placed near an ISP is a form of "Cyber Defense". Except that isn't logical, it makes no sense. Anti-aircraft defenses should not be under the purview of Cyber Command regardless of where they are located.
No. I insist that the adjective "Cyber" before the word "Attack" should indicate the means, not the target, in the same way that Cyber Defense should mean securing computer networks, not preventing physical assaults that may or may not happen to hit internet infrastructure.
This was nothing more than plain ol' sabotage. It's the same as them destroying a sewage line, except the impact was different. If it was a power line, that too would have cut off many forms of communication, is that a cyber attack? No. It's an attack.
And ~500Mhz of processing power is all you really need for that.
Yeah, well, in the days of the Pentium II which topped out at 450MHz, that would have been "hardcore".
So clearly the needs of even the most modest computer users have gone up substantially.
And assuming the software industry continues to find interesting things for people like your mom to do with their computer, then this will continue.
Don't get me wrong, there's a "good enough" in every computing generation and there's nothing wrong with people targeting that instead of the latest n' greatest. More and more people are, which is why netbooks are becoming so popular. But the bottom-end netbook of five years from now will be significantly more powerful than the bottom-end netbook of today, and odds are that extra performance will give someone who doesn't need anything more than a netbook a real benefit.
Point is -- "good enough" is real and valid, but still a moving target.
Don't touch that, you fool! That's the History Eraser button!
Major hot spots? The place will be swarming with college students on spring break before you know it.
Huh, maybe we can then collect them for the organic information we need to trade with the Melnorme! This could work!
Oh wow, you mean the population of the universe isn't really zero?
Give this man a Nobel Prize!
As in Moonraker, we send the sexy geniuses first, right? Or do we send the Telephone Sanitizers and hairdressers, like in HHGG?
Well according to the travel register, you're booked on the first flight! Take that however you want.
This is very interesting but no where near as exciting as finding another Earth like planet. I suppose we will have to wait for the next generation of telescopes before we find it though.
Well the 'e' planet is somewhat earth-like in mass and possibly earth-like in composition. It's not in the habitable zone for the star, but the closer a planet is to the star the easier it is to detect, and this exoplanet is at the very edge of our ability to detect (thus why this is news -- smallest exoplanet ever found). So you're right, we'll have to wait for technology to advance to find earth-sized rocky planets in the habitable zone (especially of non-dwarf stars).
What is a little surprising though is how many planetary systems we have found that are very different to our own. I can't believe ours is unique but perhaps it's quite rare.
I'm not sure anything we've found suggests that our type of solar system is rare. The limitations of our detection method by and large assures we'd find systems different from our own first. Astrophysicists might not have expected to find gas giants very close in to stars, but if they exist, we were going to find those first. The two main things that seem to have changed to me are that 1) we've gone from having nothing but our own solar system as an example and thus assuming ours was the model for all of them, to have many more examples showing different types and 2) we've learned that solar systems seem to be pretty common.
If we get to the point where detecting a solar system like ours would be simple, and despite finding thousands of others we don't find any like ours, then maybe that points to rarity. Right now though I doubt we're anywhere near being able to say that.
Water worlds always have the crappiest minerals. Oh look more alkalines. Yay. It won't be worth spending the fuel to land on Gliese 581 d, much less the cargo hold space. Gliese 581 e might have iron and other metals, but being so close to the star it probably has major hot spots. So that's probably not worth landing on either until we meet the Melnorme and buy some tech off them.
Oh well. Eliminating planets to explore is good too. There's a lot of stars in the sky, you know, and only so much time to explore them before the UrQuan return.
For disclosing trade secrets that you have been given under license the penalties are far worse than copyright violation.
I don't understand trade secret law very well. I thought thought that one aspect was that it truly only protected secrets, as in once something is common knowledge then trade secret status was lost. That doesn't help someone trying to sneak the source out of a company, but would mean that implementations based on published documentation, decompiled/reverse-engineered source code would be free and clear and essentially back in Free Software land.
Going back to my last post, though, I think this is another case where the underlying change of attitudes that would be necessary to create the reality of such a radical shift in the law would end up making this mostly moot. Pretty much anyone who distributed software binaries would be expected to not restrict the usage of the software, and at least the distributed proprietary software market would be dead.
There is very little you can do about reverse engineering, but any non-derivative implementation has roughly the same status with copyright law. How you nail down clean-room implementations is through patents, which got a lot more popular after 1990 or so.
Don't even get me started on software patents. Look, I'm by no means convinced that the world is better off without copyright. Really, I think just going back to at least near the original fairly short period and cutting out some of the stupid laws like DMCA would be the perfect balance.
Software patents though are simply an abomination. Software is literally -- no analogy no decomposition no translation or anything -- a symbolic representation of mathematical expressions. It is math, as surely as "a^2 = b^2 + c^2" is math. Not something that can be described by math, it's something which itself is intended to describe math using language. Math is the most fundamental language of human progress, which is why you can't and shouldn't allow it to be . Combine software as an aspect of inventive hardware and that's fine. Yes, the computer itself, a machine designed to read symbolic representations of math and perform the calculations among other things, does. No, "my software running on commodity processors" doesn't count. Imagine if all the sorting and scheduling and other algorithms invented just a few decades before the software patent regime had been patented, how progress would have been held back by granting monopolies on math. We need to end this software patents bullshit. /end rant
The students are not using copyright law to prevent their plagiarism from being detected. Please, tell me where it says that these students plagiarized the works they submitted to turnitin.com
I was not intending to accuse the particular plaintiffs of plagiarism. I was giving an example of irony, based on the assumption that there were students who committed plagiarism, and who wanted the lawsuit to succeed because it would prevent detection of said plagiarism.
You seem to be one of these people that thinks anyone who tries to exercise their rights must be guilty of something.
You seem to be one of those people that whenever someone says something that you take issue with, you assume they are the polar opposite of your ideology in every way.
In other words, no, you're completely incorrect.
The students were bringing up a valid point that turnitin.com is using other people's work to make a profit. Somehow, this is "fair use".
Yes, it is.