IBM and CA aren't even in the same league. As for MS, I'm assuming that means Microsoft, but that's a rather uncommon abbreviation... generally Microsoft just isn't abbreviated, or if it is, they use the stock ticker, which is MSFT.
I shouldn't have to click through a link to find out what an acronym means, especially because it's the only acronym used in the writeup. For the love of god, just because this is a nerd website does not automatically mean that everyone already knows that CA apparently stands for "Computer Associates".
Let's face it, email is a broken protocol. It has no built-in safeguards against these kinds of attacks. The problem I'm seeing is that we're giving up and just saying it's inevitable, when it's clearly not. There's lots of good methods out there that stop spam cold in its tracks. Some sort of actually enforced sender ID protocol would be a good start. The problem is that everyone thinks the current system has too much inertia, and that it can't be replaced.
For comparison purposes, WinRAR on its best setting only gets this down to 24MB. Doubtless 7zip could get even lower, but I don't think either could crack the 17MB mark. And certainly neither of those would be self-extracting, which this contest requires.
I got rather heavily into WoW two summers ago and during part of the school year. Luckily, WoW wasn't strong enough to defeat my best defense... my inate ADD. I simply cannot stay interested in any one game for longer than about half a year. It bores me to tears. WoW held out longer than most, though (other, "lesser" games, like Civ IV et al, last about two months tops). In the end I suffered a temporary downturn of grades for one semester, but I managed to escape successfully. I only wish other people the same luck.
And I simply cannot fathom playing the same game for so long. Even though it has the social aspect, the communities, whatever, it just bores me to tears.
What we need is a large number of ISPs to get together and say, "We trust each other to deal with botnets." Then, with a single command, any trusted ISP within the network could instantly send a command to another ISP to shutdown a site or server that is running a botnet. All of these actions would be logged and would be reviewed to make sure that it is only being used against botnets; any sort of abuse (like using it to shut down protest sites or copyright violation sites) would result in an instant revocation of privileges. This system would be much better than what we currently have: trying to call the other ISP, trying to get them to listen to you, trying to get them to trust you... it can take days, if ever, to shut down a botnet on another network.
Wikipedia isn't necessarily liberal, it just reflects a worldwide perspective. Internationally the United States is considered rather conservative; thus, Wikipedia, which is truly neutral, is perceived as being too liberal in the United States. And yes, other countries have the opposite perception. The Dutch, for instance, generally consider Wikipedia too conservative.
As a Wikipedia admin, I wish Larry Sanger the very best of luck. Any new free content is a good thing, and hopefully Sanger gets his expert model working and we can import his peer-reviewed articles back into Wikipedia. Everyone wins!
Copy protection is quite ridiculous. I'm a college student. I also happen to have a bit of an anime habit (and I buy lots of DVDs legally). I watch all of my DVDs on my computer, because my computer has a nice monitor, a good sound system, and I don't have a standalone DVD player anyway. Yet Windows Media Player absolutely refuses to play any of my DVDs because it thinks they are copied, which they aren't. So I end up having to use VLC. Now I won't even be able to play DVDs on my computer at all?! What the hell? Not everyone who watches DVDs has a DVD player, you know. I suspect that a lot of college students end up watching stuff on their computers because they are so cramped for space that they get gadgets that do lots of things at once, like computers...
What's more important, a single unremarkable life or a highly influential piece of software? Lives aren't so valuable that they are automatically more valuable than everything else. You wouldn't say that a single life was more valuable than the U.S.S. Eisenhower (which costs billions of dollars).
Yeah, no kidding. I was reading the Slashdot summary and I was thinking "Exactly how many galaxies are we supposed to think are within 400 light-years of ours? Especially considering that the diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light-years?"
I've been watching TDS for news for awhile now. I can't stomach the other news shows... they're so full of bullshit. Just yesterday Fox News repeatedly tried to claim that Mark Foley was a Democrat. No thanks, I think I'd rather watch funny satire than bald-faced lies and propaganda.
Don't be pessimistic. The use of frequent flier miles to get a ticket into space means that spaceflight is finally here in a real sense. It's not just for governments anymore.
Could anyone explain to me why freenode in particular has been so useful for OSS projects? I'm not saying it's a bad network, but there were hundreds of other IRC networks before freenode and still are. If it died, they could and would skip to EFNET or something. Yeah maybe it has a few netsplits, but I'm sure you could find more reliable ones if that really bothers you.
You're right, there's nothing particularly special about the network. It's the community. It's by far the largest gathering point for people working on open source projects. Inevitably, in situations like this, people will go to the place where everyone else is because the value of the network is the highest when everyone is in the same place. It didn't have to be Freenode, but that's just the way it ended up.
I sat on this one for a little bit after I first found out because it seemed sort of unconfirmed, but now that it's received significant press coverage, I've added it to the front page of Wikipedia. It's quite amazing how fast news travels these days.
As always it's a war of words in shaping the public's perception. And calling it a "Pre-Crime Registry" is the absolute best choice of words we could go for. This term from Phillip K. Dick just sounds incredibly Orwellian. Bravo on whoever came up with this name.
Just English, French, and Spanish? Don't be silly. There are a lot more viable languages than that. German is the second-largest language of Wikipedia, and they're doing some great work. All of the European languages have huge representation, as well as Japanese. As long as the people in Africa speak any "major" language as a second language, be it English, Spanish, French, Dutch, whatever, they have a huge Wikipedia resource available to them.
Jupiter is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit - it has asteroids at the Trojan points.
Earth is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit -- there exist Near-Earth asteroids and Earth-crossing asteroids. (One might argue that this is getting worse, what with all the space debris we keep flinging into near-Earth solar orbit).
To quote a response from Wikipedia: Even if you don't neglect the Trojan asteroids and other such objects, all the gas giants have cleared their orbits. The Trojans are at very specific points along Jupiters orbit that are defined by Jupiter's gravity. If Jupiter hadn't cleared its orbit they would not be restricted to those points. A massive body collects all bodies near it either into itself, its orbit, its L4 and L5 points with the sun, into resonant orbits, or it ejects them. Its just like cleaning your room. It doesn't mean nothing is in your room, but simply that it's all neatly put away.
Also, I highly recommend that you read this paper.
Actually it was noticed because it was vandalism. The account happens to be named Stephencolbert; there's no way to know for sure that it's him (and it probably isn't). We get lots of vandalism accounts named after various celebrities. It's not as if people were tracking this account because it was the account of a famous person.
point is, Colbert's point in fact, isn't that you guys can't fix the stuff you're looking for, it's that you can't fix the stuff you're NOT looking for. If he had chosen to not go on the air with his joke, then "wikiality" would actually show that his opinion has always been that Oregon is Idaho's Portugal (not Washington's Mexico, or California's Canada, both of which he actually said). No one would have noticed, but it would be up there as "wikifact" anyway.
Actually, his insertions of false material into those articles were both noticed and reverted quickly, one in under three minutes and the other in under seven minutes. This was still long before the show went live, and thus before it was pointed out to anyone.
You're reading that block log wrong; User:Stephencolbert is still very much banned. If you need help deciphering the block log, try looking at the timestamps. The most recent timestamp is a reinstatement of the block.
Actually, yes, there has been a bit of an increase in vandalism since the show aired. My guess is a lot of people showed up to add vandalism regarding elephant tripling numbers, but finding that all of the likely targets were protected, they went elsewhere. The vandalism was of very "low quality" though... so low that a lot of it was picked up by my bot and reverted automatically. My bot definitely has been a bit more active recently though.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM and CA aren't even in the same league. As for MS, I'm assuming that means Microsoft, but that's a rather uncommon abbreviation ... generally Microsoft just isn't abbreviated, or if it is, they use the stock ticker, which is MSFT.
I shouldn't have to click through a link to find out what an acronym means, especially because it's the only acronym used in the writeup. For the love of god, just because this is a nerd website does not automatically mean that everyone already knows that CA apparently stands for "Computer Associates".
Let's face it, email is a broken protocol. It has no built-in safeguards against these kinds of attacks. The problem I'm seeing is that we're giving up and just saying it's inevitable, when it's clearly not. There's lots of good methods out there that stop spam cold in its tracks. Some sort of actually enforced sender ID protocol would be a good start. The problem is that everyone thinks the current system has too much inertia, and that it can't be replaced.
For comparison purposes, WinRAR on its best setting only gets this down to 24MB. Doubtless 7zip could get even lower, but I don't think either could crack the 17MB mark. And certainly neither of those would be self-extracting, which this contest requires.
I got rather heavily into WoW two summers ago and during part of the school year. Luckily, WoW wasn't strong enough to defeat my best defense ... my inate ADD. I simply cannot stay interested in any one game for longer than about half a year. It bores me to tears. WoW held out longer than most, though (other, "lesser" games, like Civ IV et al, last about two months tops). In the end I suffered a temporary downturn of grades for one semester, but I managed to escape successfully. I only wish other people the same luck.
And I simply cannot fathom playing the same game for so long. Even though it has the social aspect, the communities, whatever, it just bores me to tears.
What we need is a large number of ISPs to get together and say, "We trust each other to deal with botnets." Then, with a single command, any trusted ISP within the network could instantly send a command to another ISP to shutdown a site or server that is running a botnet. All of these actions would be logged and would be reviewed to make sure that it is only being used against botnets; any sort of abuse (like using it to shut down protest sites or copyright violation sites) would result in an instant revocation of privileges. This system would be much better than what we currently have: trying to call the other ISP, trying to get them to listen to you, trying to get them to trust you ... it can take days, if ever, to shut down a botnet on another network.
Wikipedia isn't necessarily liberal, it just reflects a worldwide perspective. Internationally the United States is considered rather conservative; thus, Wikipedia, which is truly neutral, is perceived as being too liberal in the United States. And yes, other countries have the opposite perception. The Dutch, for instance, generally consider Wikipedia too conservative.
As a Wikipedia admin, I wish Larry Sanger the very best of luck. Any new free content is a good thing, and hopefully Sanger gets his expert model working and we can import his peer-reviewed articles back into Wikipedia. Everyone wins!
Copy protection is quite ridiculous. I'm a college student. I also happen to have a bit of an anime habit (and I buy lots of DVDs legally). I watch all of my DVDs on my computer, because my computer has a nice monitor, a good sound system, and I don't have a standalone DVD player anyway. Yet Windows Media Player absolutely refuses to play any of my DVDs because it thinks they are copied, which they aren't. So I end up having to use VLC. Now I won't even be able to play DVDs on my computer at all?! What the hell? Not everyone who watches DVDs has a DVD player, you know. I suspect that a lot of college students end up watching stuff on their computers because they are so cramped for space that they get gadgets that do lots of things at once, like computers ...
Here's another thing most people aren't saying ...
What's more important, a single unremarkable life or a highly influential piece of software? Lives aren't so valuable that they are automatically more valuable than everything else. You wouldn't say that a single life was more valuable than the U.S.S. Eisenhower (which costs billions of dollars).
Yeah, no kidding. I was reading the Slashdot summary and I was thinking "Exactly how many galaxies are we supposed to think are within 400 light-years of ours? Especially considering that the diameter of our galaxy is 100,000 light-years?"
I've been watching TDS for news for awhile now. I can't stomach the other news shows ... they're so full of bullshit. Just yesterday Fox News repeatedly tried to claim that Mark Foley was a Democrat. No thanks, I think I'd rather watch funny satire than bald-faced lies and propaganda.
Don't be pessimistic. The use of frequent flier miles to get a ticket into space means that spaceflight is finally here in a real sense. It's not just for governments anymore.
Could anyone explain to me why freenode in particular has been so useful for OSS projects? I'm not saying it's a bad network, but there were hundreds of other IRC networks before freenode and still are. If it died, they could and would skip to EFNET or something. Yeah maybe it has a few netsplits, but I'm sure you could find more reliable ones if that really bothers you.
You're right, there's nothing particularly special about the network. It's the community. It's by far the largest gathering point for people working on open source projects. Inevitably, in situations like this, people will go to the place where everyone else is because the value of the network is the highest when everyone is in the same place. It didn't have to be Freenode, but that's just the way it ended up.
I sat on this one for a little bit after I first found out because it seemed sort of unconfirmed, but now that it's received significant press coverage, I've added it to the front page of Wikipedia. It's quite amazing how fast news travels these days.
As always it's a war of words in shaping the public's perception. And calling it a "Pre-Crime Registry" is the absolute best choice of words we could go for. This term from Phillip K. Dick just sounds incredibly Orwellian. Bravo on whoever came up with this name.
Just English, French, and Spanish? Don't be silly. There are a lot more viable languages than that. German is the second-largest language of Wikipedia, and they're doing some great work. All of the European languages have huge representation, as well as Japanese. As long as the people in Africa speak any "major" language as a second language, be it English, Spanish, French, Dutch, whatever, they have a huge Wikipedia resource available to them.
No kidding, humans are the animals we all should instinctively have the most empathy with.
Fucking "animal rights" terrorists.
The situation you describe is impossible. In the process of forming and accreting those two planetoids would long since have collided and merged.
Basically what you just described would mean that there are no moons, only lots and lot of planets.
Jupiter is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit - it has asteroids at the Trojan points.
Earth is not a planet, because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit -- there exist Near-Earth asteroids and Earth-crossing asteroids. (One might argue that this is getting worse, what with all the space debris we keep flinging into near-Earth solar orbit).
To quote a response from Wikipedia: Even if you don't neglect the Trojan asteroids and other such objects, all the gas giants have cleared their orbits. The Trojans are at very specific points along Jupiters orbit that are defined by Jupiter's gravity. If Jupiter hadn't cleared its orbit they would not be restricted to those points. A massive body collects all bodies near it either into itself, its orbit, its L4 and L5 points with the sun, into resonant orbits, or it ejects them. Its just like cleaning your room. It doesn't mean nothing is in your room, but simply that it's all neatly put away.
Also, I highly recommend that you read this paper.
Actually it was noticed because it was vandalism. The account happens to be named Stephencolbert; there's no way to know for sure that it's him (and it probably isn't). We get lots of vandalism accounts named after various celebrities. It's not as if people were tracking this account because it was the account of a famous person.
point is, Colbert's point in fact, isn't that you guys can't fix the stuff you're looking for, it's that you can't fix the stuff you're NOT looking for. If he had chosen to not go on the air with his joke, then "wikiality" would actually show that his opinion has always been that Oregon is Idaho's Portugal (not Washington's Mexico, or California's Canada, both of which he actually said). No one would have noticed, but it would be up there as "wikifact" anyway.
Actually, his insertions of false material into those articles were both noticed and reverted quickly, one in under three minutes and the other in under seven minutes. This was still long before the show went live, and thus before it was pointed out to anyone.
You're reading that block log wrong; User:Stephencolbert is still very much banned. If you need help deciphering the block log, try looking at the timestamps. The most recent timestamp is a reinstatement of the block.
Actually, yes, there has been a bit of an increase in vandalism since the show aired. My guess is a lot of people showed up to add vandalism regarding elephant tripling numbers, but finding that all of the likely targets were protected, they went elsewhere. The vandalism was of very "low quality" though ... so low that a lot of it was picked up by my bot and reverted automatically. My bot definitely has been a bit more active recently though.