This is incredibly fucking retarded. Why would you need an "Internet Kill Switch"? What "Cyber Threat" could be so bad that it would be necessary? How did they sell this to what I'm hoping is a reasonably intelligent woman? Did they fill her head with images of a jihadist cracker loosing nuclear missiles on America? Or perhaps a disgruntled teen in a bedroom in Lille typing cryptic commands into a terminal and polluting the water supply with effluents, nuclear waste and barber-shop hair-sweepings?
The only possible reason for wanting to turn off the internet is if you think it's being used for command & control of real-life terrorist cells during attacks. Which it won't be. There's no valid reason to do this.
Those bastards. They're probably too busy blogging/tweeting etc. about the triviality of their daily lives. Maybe when they can just about be bothered we can get the much needed details of how they're doing it in the form of a wordpress blog or a flickr stream.
Hi, meet one of the people who could vote and influence this decision:
"I'm entitled to my vote and I think a galaxy should have at least as many stars as our galaxy: one. The sun is a star right?"
What next? A vote to decide how best to define the kilogram? A vote to decide whether homeopathy is scientifically sound?
From what I read in The Register's coverage, e.g. here, the tool they used is just the "LOIC" (Low Orbit Ion Cannon (named for the weapon from the C&C games)). AFAICT, the tool itself does nothing to anonymise users, so unless the people involved do it with a spoofed MAC from someone else's WIFI, they're going to get caught pretty easily.
As for shutting down 4chan, it wouldn't achieve anything, they'd just move somewhere else. Secondly, I'd wager the FBI, police etc get too many easy arrests (like these ones) to want to shut it down.
IANAHRE (I Am Not A Ham Radio Enthusiast) but the kind of equipment required to maintain internet connectivity to the outside world, for themselves and others, wouldn't be all that mobile would it? Presumably you'd need a fairly large antenna? And of course wouldn't most hams be licensed anyway? And lets be honest, these aren't going to be freedom fighters are they? As romantic an idea as it is, they're probably not going to be Paul Muad'Dib characters, moving from sietch to sietch, keeping the internet running...
"Mid-range automobile"? What possible use would it be to consider that? When there are multiple manufacturers with multiple "ranges" and multiple classes of cars from $2m supercars right down to $18,000 economy cars. If instead you asked a sensible question like: "What is the mid-range Ford saloon-car?" the Lexus owner would look at the most expensive model, then the least expensive, and tell you that the mid-range Ford saloon-car offering was the model closest to the mid-point.
The new "mid-range" GeForce is what we're talking about. Not the most expensive, nor the least expensive, but the new card which has a price-point somewhere between the two. The "mid-range" doesn't depend on what you or anyone else is prepared to pay, it depends only on the prices of the other cards in the range.
It's kudos. For that reason, I'd think Qwest might want to reconsider your appointment to a "QC" role;)
(Ironically, even if there were such a thing as a "kudo" that you pluralised and attributed to another who deserved praise, you would not need the apostrophe, it would simply be "kudos".)
NOT just illiteracy actually, you infant
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Nice try, and the elitism in your post will get your post modded up, but this isn't a problem limited to the illiterate, or those with a lackadaisical attitude to spelling and grammar. My Droid's touch-screen keyboard's keys are close together and a combination of mis-hit keys and auto-correct/auto-complete means that, if I hadn't proof-read them, some strange messages would have been sent. If I were in a hurry, or not concentrating, it's easy to imagine that even the most egregious example from damnyouautocorrect.com could come from my 'phone. So what's next? Are you now going to rail on the hasty and those with fat fingers?
No doubt you have a pretty strong opinion about people who send texts like "ur l8. where r u?". You know what, I've used the contraction "ur" and replaced "to" with "2" and "you" with "u". Not because I hate the English language, or am intrinsically lazy, but because I've had to revise a message down to fit into a 140 character limit. Do I deserve your ire too?
(I've seen a few on there, e.g. "vag" instead of "bag" that, as you say, are clearly just adjacent-key errors but there are some genuine auto-correct/auto-complete howlers on there)
I think this would be ten layers of evil awesome. Release "fart app". Have 6 buttons for different farts. First 5 make the requisite hilarious noises, with no smell. Last one makes no sound, and releases ever-increasing amounts of fart smell the more the button is frantically pressed by user.
More variety than you think...blood and dank, blood and burning plasma, blood and cordite, blood and ash/lava, blood and burning flesh, blood and rotting flesh, blood and bile...:)
You say that like it's a bad thing! I'm currently trying to play Amnesia: Dark Descent, imagine how much scarier it would be if you could smell the dank of the water on stone. Sure, if the sewer smells were horrendously over-powering it might suck...but I'm guessing there'd be a way to "turn it down". Done right, it would be incredibly awesome.
How incredibly cool would it be to *sniff sniff* detect a zombie approaching round a corner?
Soooo...the lesson we take from that is that 2001's vaporware is today's product? Team Fortress 2, Warcraft 3, DN:Forever, Photoshop for OSX, 3G Mobile.
Sure there are some real stinkers on that list, but it isn't exactly holding up well in hindsight.
Perhaps this is the year of smells on the desktop...
I did wonder whether that was what you meant.:) You're right, having them write/compile/debug a small program using command-line tools would introduce them to the basics nicely. I'm guessing the reason for the 100-level class is to prepare them for later on when they're doing something similar for real and they'll need it to be second-nature.
(...)tell them their grade for the class is going to be the one displayed on a web page served by apache under Linux installed on the machine they assemble from those parts by the end of the semester.
I trivialised the install of LFS into "Step 1" for the purposes of following the "4 step Profit! meme" and making light of the "grade displayed on a web page" part.
It is very educational, however you'll end up with 2 groups of students, those with 100% (Or higher) and those with 0%. The latter will dwarf the former. Either that, or a few entrepreneurial members of the former group will make a tidy sum! For a 100-level class, that is not an ideal situation. Either way, you end up with a large proportion of the class who are no closer to understanding Linux/Operating Systems.
I'm as clueless as you, perhaps more so, but the only thing I can think of is maybe for large amounts of raw data for Bio-Informatics or from a sufficiently large experiment, e.g. particle collider?
There's no way a sufficiently normalised data model for any normal,everyday application would require even 2,000 columns. This belief is normally tested whenever I go to TheDailyWTF though...
Ha! "Plain sailing"?:) Just when you think you have a handle on things, something'll pull your pants down and not even buy you breakfast aftewards.
Did you mean a bash script? A good lesson: write a bash script that takes a file containing lines of comma separated numbers and display the individual numbers and the average of each line, call it test.sh. Then try to run test.sh using a different shell, e.g. tcsh, ksh or zsh. (Or whatever reasonably trivial script that will show up differences between shells..iirc, there are differences in integer arithmetic syntax..?)
Another useful lesson:
Get them to log on to a CentOS server and restart apache and mysql. Now get them to log into a Slackware or Debian server and do the same.
I understand that the OP wants to teach them about GNU/Linux, but IMHO this lesson is very important: Not all GNU/Linux boxes are the same. Not all shells are the same (which can differ on the same OS for different users on the same box not just the same OS on different boxes). Certainly no *nix is the same, and most *nix boxes will differ from whatever Linux box they have access to. Maybe not in huge ways that will stop you dead in your tracks, but in small, minor, "trip you up and kick sand in your eyes" ways.
The problem as I see it is this: "Back in the day" (hah!) when I installed Mandrake for the first time, then Red Hat, then Slackware on my store-bought "first PC" at university, of my own volition, it was an absolute pain in the fucking neck to get it working. There seem to be a lot of people who are saying "the best way to learn is by installing it yourself" or "if they haven't already tried it they are n00bs and should quit CS and take up needlework". But the fact of the matter is that when most people try "Linux" these days, it's Ubuntu, which, I hear, is a piece of piss to install. Hell, the last time I installed Slackware (aside from the clunky-looking installer) it was incredibly straightforward.
My point is, there's actually value in teaching the inner workings of Linux because there's no guarantee anymore that you'll encounter sed, awk, vi or even a command line just because you're using "Linux".
Another misuse of the "Your Rights Online" tag and there are already a metric crap-tonne of morons saying that this is awful. It's a blog post that completely misses the fucking point. If wikileaks had reported that Australian police were allowed to look up information on citizens without a valid reason (i.e. for shits and giggles) everyone would be up in arms saying, "Isn't this terrible?". This isn't just a breach of an Acceptable Use Policy, it's against the law, for some very fucking good reasons. There are laws and procedures in place to stop simple invasions of privacy (like this) but also to stop criminals from bribing corrupt Police Officers to look up information for them.
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This is incredibly fucking retarded. Why would you need an "Internet Kill Switch"? What "Cyber Threat" could be so bad that it would be necessary? How did they sell this to what I'm hoping is a reasonably intelligent woman? Did they fill her head with images of a jihadist cracker loosing nuclear missiles on America? Or perhaps a disgruntled teen in a bedroom in Lille typing cryptic commands into a terminal and polluting the water supply with effluents, nuclear waste and barber-shop hair-sweepings?
The only possible reason for wanting to turn off the internet is if you think it's being used for command & control of real-life terrorist cells during attacks. Which it won't be. There's no valid reason to do this.
Those bastards. They're probably too busy blogging/tweeting etc. about the triviality of their daily lives. Maybe when they can just about be bothered we can get the much needed details of how they're doing it in the form of a wordpress blog or a flickr stream.
Indeed, mod parent up. Others give the same explanation of toto=foo, but not the "titi tata tutu" bit.
:)
Ghoser777's explanation is still deliciously poetic though
Hi, meet one of the people who could vote and influence this decision:
"I'm entitled to my vote and I think a galaxy should have at least as many stars as our galaxy: one. The sun is a star right?"
What next? A vote to decide how best to define the kilogram? A vote to decide whether homeopathy is scientifically sound?
From what I read in The Register's coverage, e.g. here, the tool they used is just the "LOIC" (Low Orbit Ion Cannon (named for the weapon from the C&C games)). AFAICT, the tool itself does nothing to anonymise users, so unless the people involved do it with a spoofed MAC from someone else's WIFI, they're going to get caught pretty easily.
As for shutting down 4chan, it wouldn't achieve anything, they'd just move somewhere else. Secondly, I'd wager the FBI, police etc get too many easy arrests (like these ones) to want to shut it down.
IANAHRE (I Am Not A Ham Radio Enthusiast) but the kind of equipment required to maintain internet connectivity to the outside world, for themselves and others, wouldn't be all that mobile would it? Presumably you'd need a fairly large antenna? And of course wouldn't most hams be licensed anyway? And lets be honest, these aren't going to be freedom fighters are they? As romantic an idea as it is, they're probably not going to be Paul Muad'Dib characters, moving from sietch to sietch, keeping the internet running...
Ah, but you're thinking: "One third...by number of contributors".
:)
It could be also: "one third by creative input" or "one third by mass"
Not so crazy...all we'd have to do is REVERSE THE POLARITY!
"Mid-range automobile"? What possible use would it be to consider that? When there are multiple manufacturers with multiple "ranges" and multiple classes of cars from $2m supercars right down to $18,000 economy cars. If instead you asked a sensible question like: "What is the mid-range Ford saloon-car?" the Lexus owner would look at the most expensive model, then the least expensive, and tell you that the mid-range Ford saloon-car offering was the model closest to the mid-point.
The new "mid-range" GeForce is what we're talking about. Not the most expensive, nor the least expensive, but the new card which has a price-point somewhere between the two. The "mid-range" doesn't depend on what you or anyone else is prepared to pay, it depends only on the prices of the other cards in the range.
It's kudos . For that reason, I'd think Qwest might want to reconsider your appointment to a "QC" role ;)
(Ironically, even if there were such a thing as a "kudo" that you pluralised and attributed to another who deserved praise, you would not need the apostrophe, it would simply be "kudos".)
Nice try, and the elitism in your post will get your post modded up, but this isn't a problem limited to the illiterate, or those with a lackadaisical attitude to spelling and grammar. My Droid's touch-screen keyboard's keys are close together and a combination of mis-hit keys and auto-correct/auto-complete means that, if I hadn't proof-read them, some strange messages would have been sent. If I were in a hurry, or not concentrating, it's easy to imagine that even the most egregious example from damnyouautocorrect.com could come from my 'phone. So what's next? Are you now going to rail on the hasty and those with fat fingers?
No doubt you have a pretty strong opinion about people who send texts like "ur l8. where r u?". You know what, I've used the contraction "ur" and replaced "to" with "2" and "you" with "u". Not because I hate the English language, or am intrinsically lazy, but because I've had to revise a message down to fit into a 140 character limit. Do I deserve your ire too?
(I've seen a few on there, e.g. "vag" instead of "bag" that, as you say, are clearly just adjacent-key errors but there are some genuine auto-correct/auto-complete howlers on there)
I think this would be ten layers of evil awesome. Release "fart app". Have 6 buttons for different farts. First 5 make the requisite hilarious noises, with no smell. Last one makes no sound, and releases ever-increasing amounts of fart smell the more the button is frantically pressed by user.
More variety than you think...blood and dank, blood and burning plasma, blood and cordite, blood and ash/lava, blood and burning flesh, blood and rotting flesh, blood and bile... :)
You say that like it's a bad thing! I'm currently trying to play Amnesia: Dark Descent, imagine how much scarier it would be if you could smell the dank of the water on stone. Sure, if the sewer smells were horrendously over-powering it might suck...but I'm guessing there'd be a way to "turn it down". Done right, it would be incredibly awesome.
How incredibly cool would it be to *sniff sniff* detect a zombie approaching round a corner?
Soooo...the lesson we take from that is that 2001's vaporware is today's product? Team Fortress 2, Warcraft 3, DN:Forever, Photoshop for OSX, 3G Mobile.
Sure there are some real stinkers on that list, but it isn't exactly holding up well in hindsight.
Perhaps this is the year of smells on the desktop...
I did wonder whether that was what you meant. :) You're right, having them write/compile/debug a small program using command-line tools would introduce them to the basics nicely. I'm guessing the reason for the 100-level class is to prepare them for later on when they're doing something similar for real and they'll need it to be second-nature.
(...)tell them their grade for the class is going to be the one displayed on a web page served by apache under Linux installed on the machine they assemble from those parts by the end of the semester.
I trivialised the install of LFS into "Step 1" for the purposes of following the "4 step Profit! meme" and making light of the "grade displayed on a web page" part.
It is very educational, however you'll end up with 2 groups of students, those with 100% (Or higher) and those with 0%. The latter will dwarf the former. Either that, or a few entrepreneurial members of the former group will make a tidy sum! For a 100-level class, that is not an ideal situation. Either way, you end up with a large proportion of the class who are no closer to understanding Linux/Operating Systems.
In Soviet Russia, Sue programs robots!
I'm as clueless as you, perhaps more so, but the only thing I can think of is maybe for large amounts of raw data for Bio-Informatics or from a sufficiently large experiment, e.g. particle collider?
There's no way a sufficiently normalised data model for any normal,everyday application would require even 2,000 columns. This belief is normally tested whenever I go to TheDailyWTF though...
Joke away but, going by some of the shit I've seen at TheDailyWTF, that could well come back and bite you in the ass one day.
Ha! "Plain sailing"? :) Just when you think you have a handle on things, something'll pull your pants down and not even buy you breakfast aftewards.
Did you mean a bash script? A good lesson: write a bash script that takes a file containing lines of comma separated numbers and display the individual numbers and the average of each line, call it test.sh. Then try to run test.sh using a different shell, e.g. tcsh, ksh or zsh. (Or whatever reasonably trivial script that will show up differences between shells..iirc, there are differences in integer arithmetic syntax..?)
Another useful lesson:
Get them to log on to a CentOS server and restart apache and mysql. Now get them to log into a Slackware or Debian server and do the same.
I understand that the OP wants to teach them about GNU/Linux, but IMHO this lesson is very important: Not all GNU/Linux boxes are the same. Not all shells are the same (which can differ on the same OS for different users on the same box not just the same OS on different boxes). Certainly no *nix is the same, and most *nix boxes will differ from whatever Linux box they have access to. Maybe not in huge ways that will stop you dead in your tracks, but in small, minor, "trip you up and kick sand in your eyes" ways.
The problem as I see it is this: "Back in the day" (hah!) when I installed Mandrake for the first time, then Red Hat, then Slackware on my store-bought "first PC" at university, of my own volition, it was an absolute pain in the fucking neck to get it working. There seem to be a lot of people who are saying "the best way to learn is by installing it yourself" or "if they haven't already tried it they are n00bs and should quit CS and take up needlework". But the fact of the matter is that when most people try "Linux" these days, it's Ubuntu, which, I hear, is a piece of piss to install. Hell, the last time I installed Slackware (aside from the clunky-looking installer) it was incredibly straightforward.
My point is, there's actually value in teaching the inner workings of Linux because there's no guarantee anymore that you'll encounter sed, awk, vi or even a command line just because you're using "Linux".
This was covered by The Register 17th September 2010, with several follow-ups!.
Incidentally these stories also address the issue of consequences for programmers/manufacturers whose robots, through incompetence or malfeasance, cause harm to their owners. (Slashdot 16th Jan: Robots May Inspire Suits Against Programmers)
Another misuse of the "Your Rights Online" tag and there are already a metric crap-tonne of morons saying that this is awful. It's a blog post that completely misses the fucking point. If wikileaks had reported that Australian police were allowed to look up information on citizens without a valid reason (i.e. for shits and giggles) everyone would be up in arms saying, "Isn't this terrible?". This isn't just a breach of an Acceptable Use Policy, it's against the law, for some very fucking good reasons. There are laws and procedures in place to stop simple invasions of privacy (like this) but also to stop criminals from bribing corrupt Police Officers to look up information for them.