I'll second this. I am teaching programming to my 11-yr-old totally blind son using Python and Emacspeak on Linux.
In another post I have mentioned
The WorldForge Project:
"Our vision is to foster an independent community in which many free games can develop and evolve with unique roleplaying-oriented worlds and rules, running on a wide selection of server and client implementations with a standard networking protocol tying everything together.
The WorldForge project hasn't produced any complete, playable games.
We have games that are under development, but we're still working on developing the underlying tools."
Future WorldForge games will be playable using many different clients, including graphical and entirely text-based ones, ideal for Emacspeak. Lots of WorldForge software is written in Python under Linux, which seems to be a perfect project for your son to learn advanced programming in the future and something interesting to know about today. I wish him the best luck.
Blind + Linux = BLINUX. This is the best solution in the long run and it doesn't cost anything, unlike solutions from Microsoft and other proprietary software. I wish you the best luck. The command-line interface is ideal for blind users.
Interestingly (but a tad OT) is that nethack can be configured for blind users as well.
All work and no play makes Johnny a dully boy.
Other games for the blind would probably include the many, many MUDs out there.
Not only MUDs but also future MMORPG games from The WorldForge Project where people will be able to play with each other on-line on the same servers and in the same worlds using different clients, including 2D isometric, full-3D OpenGL and entirely text-based ones. Not to even mention that thanks to Emacspeak a blind person can play even Tetris. This is not off-topic at all.
And to demonstrate how interfaces such as Emacspeak are impressive and important not only for blind users but for the general public, I am planning to develop a fully audio-desktop based car audio system, most probably using Oralux GNU/Linux, a Knoppix customization with Emacspeak user interface, with emphasis on making as much information and entertainment (music, games, WWW, etc.) accessible to the driver with absolutely no display distracting from the road, which in my opinion is the very direction every car manufacturer should follow to make cars safer. Projects like Emacspeak, BLinux and Oralux freely available make such a system trivial to build using an old laptop hidden somewhere under the seat, some cables and a simple input system, with almost no custom software needed.
I have been thinking about it since I first saw the most stupid idea in the history of car audio systems, i.e. text display of local traffic-related messages in real time. I thought that it is utterly moronic, since such messages should be spoken and in fact even the number of CD track I change to should be spoken instead of displayed in a place I have to look instead of focusing on the road. Hence the idea of full audio car audio system.
Donald Knuth number 40? With Steve Jobs number 2? Please don't get me wrong, I am all for gay and fashionable cool gadgets, I own many of them myself as well as recommend Macs for workstations in my institute which adds a little bit of fashion, bright colours and life to an otherwise sad and boring scientific laboratory, but I believe that an author of The Art of Computer Programming which American Scientist has included among the best twelve scientific monographs of the twentieth century, as the only one on computer science, along with works of Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot, just from the top of my head, rated as number 40 in this pathetic list is an outrage, for not only it proves that the author of this laughable list is an incompetent moron, but it is also an insult to our intelligence that we as a Slashdot community are linking and promoting such an idiotic stupidity. Misplacing Richard Stallman may be understandable and perhaps even justified in the context of popular opinion that one should avoid GNU in GNU/Linux but misplacing Donald Knuth is plainly an utter outrage and I would hereby like to sincerely apologise Donald Knuth in the name of the entire Slashdot community. Please do not identify us with the outrageous incompetence of the abovementioned list of "important" people.
I'd vote for a bagel over Bush just to see if it could run the country better, and even in that case I'd be more hopeful and optimistic than I am now.
funny, i said roughly the same thing about al gore last election, and look where it's gotten us....
Very true. Such a logic--and nothing else--is the very reason of the existance of two party system in the US. "I hate one guy so I'll vote for the second one, never mind there are more of them than only two. I will keep voting for 'the other guy' while waiting for the end of two party system." Wrong. The two party system is the result of voting, not vice versa. Anyone who is concerned about it should vote for the third most popular candidate, no matter who he is. Will he win? No. But after few elections "the third guy" might have enough votes so other people might start considering voting for the candidate they would like to win, not for the one who is most likely to beat the one who they would hate to win. This is the only way to finally end the two party farce but it may need a decade or two to gain momentum. People should never assume that voting for their prefered candidate is "throwing their vote away" because that is the very essence of democracy, while the "throwing vote away" nonsense is just the propaganda of two major parties, because they are the only people who benefit from the status quo. Please keep that in mind. By voting for "the lesser of two evils" you are really throwing your vote away. Just once, instead of voting for the less evil of two, try voting for someone good. I know that voting for someone else might be a hard concept for anyone who is used to having a "choice" between Coke and Pepsi or McDonald's and Burger King but The People have to learn that "you can chose any candidate as long as it is one of those two" is only an illusion of real choice, just enough to make people feel good but not enough to have any real influence. This is extremely important to understand if we ever want to change anything.
What I don't understand is why
rather than going 'all electronic' there are not more efforts to have a hybrid paper-computer model, off the top of my head:
What *I* don't understand is why
rather than going 'all electronic' or 'hybrid paper-computer model' there are not more efforts to have a simple paper model.
- the voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper token with a barcode that contains the polling ID station ID and a sequential number (note that the ID is not humanly readable, important for privacy)
The voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper sheet with candidates names--no privacy issues.
- the voter goes in the box, which has a touch screen and an 'easy' UI, voter inserts the paper token in the box which scans it
The voter goes in the box, which has--behold--a pen!
- voter votes on the touch screen (make it really easy, BIG buttons, BIG text, whatever)
The voter puts an 'X' mark on the paper in the circle next to his chosen candidate (make it really easy, BIG circles, BIG text, whatever)
- machine prints out a ballot with the voter's vote in humanly readable form (say, prints out a 'real' ballot with blackened out rectangles on the relevant candidate(s)) and a 2D barcode at the bottom with the vote in machine readable form including the ID on the 'paper token'
Voter's vote is already in human-readable form
- voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
Voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
I can continue ad nauseam...
There is one most important and completely ignored question: what is wrong with pen and paper voting? What is this problem that we have to solve using electronic black-box voting? What are those issues? Are they so serious that introducing all of the problems which are inevitable with e-voting is justified? Seriously, I am looking forward to hear any answers, because this is the only part of e-voting that I don't understand: "why."
We've proud of other countries copying our constitution and systems of government, why not our systems of elections too? Especially if they improve it, and give those improvements back to us?
Why? Because there is nothing wrong with pen and paper, that's why? Seriously, please check out the recent results of a much larger election than that for US president, in terms of voters as well as in terms of voting options and please tell me what in your opinion is wrong with pen and paper. This is not a rhetoric question, I would really like to hear an answer. Any answer. Anyone who reads Slashdot knows that I am all for open source and free software but I have yet to find any reason to use any software for counting votes. While giving us your answer please keep in mind that voting is the most fundamental concept in democracy and as such needs to be completely transparent--not only to computer scientists like you and me who can understand and verify the software used for voting, but for general public, profanum vulgus, The People.
I posted that because I thought it was funny that I read somewhere (some thing explaining the history of goatse.cx...) that some thought the person in the picture had *both sexes*, which in my book is just funny.
Yes, now I remember. I've read about in the Goatse.cx article on Wikipedia:
"Some have claimed that 'he' is actually a hermaphrodite, and he is actually pulling open his vagina. The developer of this theory later admitted that the theory was never intended to be serious, though some continue to believe the theory is correct."
So indeed, your comment was not only funny but actually encyclopædicly accurate at the same time--now I understand it.
Maybe I shoulda said "middle door"...
It probably depands on whether we might call penis a door. That's an interesting question, actually, even more philosophical than anatomical in nature, considering the social role of penis.
An article from The Register reports one begins gibbering uncontrollably because he/she can't get a fix without books and newspapers access after two weeks. That, at least, is according to a 'Book Deprivation Study' carried out by Yahoo! and advertising outfit OMD. Participants in the human experiment were deprived of books for 14 days, and found themselves quickly succumbing to 'withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness.' The reason for the rapid collapse of their universe is - say the researchers - because 'books readers feel confident, secure and empowered.'
One of the Reading Junkies asked whether he reads books every day answered: "Why, yes, indeed. I believe I read books every day." One of the 'Book Deprivation Study' researchers said "We might be able to help him but he needs a long therapy of reading and knowledge deprivation."
Comparing every aspect of computing and networking to biology is not any less fallacious than trying to understand how does a car work looking at it like it was a biological organism. Real life has evolved randomly together with virii and parasites but all of the software including any kind of malware was intelligently designed. The most common misconception resulting from such a reasoning is that computer malware will always be relatively harmless because killing the victim is not smart from any parasite's point of view. Wrong. A deadly worm quickly spreading and erasing all of the data an hour later would not survive so long as Code Red, but it doesn't have to survive in the first place if that is not important for its creator. Survival is not important because software doesn't have to live long enough to evolve. It is designed and created manually and then released. It can be written for months or years and then live only few hours if that is the purpose of writing it. I think that assessing the spreading patterns of Internet malware like those of human epidemics might be very interesting but there is a hidden fallacious reasoning that comparing the virii themselves to human diseases will somehow help fighting them which leads to concentrating on spectacular effects instead of boring causes of the problem. The problems are buffer overflows which can be completely eliminated, running code from untrusted sources, etc. It has nothing to do with literally anything known in the real world any more than proving a theorem does.
Another thing is comparing Internet to a population and fighting malware in the context of epidemics.
This is foolish. In reality, there is a user with a computer and her data. She can lose her data or some of her secrets may become public and in that case she won't say "that's OK because this epidemic disease is contained and the population of computer users will survive" because if she loses her work she doesn't care about other computers. When she gets broken into she shouldn't think "I am sure my system will keep working because killing it would be disadvantageous from the evolutionary standpoint for the software" becuase the ultimate reason of the attack is not just the existence itself. The reason may be getting user's credit card number or performing a DDoS attack. The reason may be causing panic by deleting everything. The reason may be anything. And the problem is not millions years of evolution side by side with parasites but using "gets" instead of "fgets." It's not that we don't know how does the malware work or that we cannot write secure code. Look at KeyKOS or EROS. Look at OpenBSD. Look at Debian. Do we have any "epidemics" there to contain and to fight? No. Such studies are interesting but only because observing symptoms and effects is interesting. If we really want to stop malware we should start from reading the source code of EROS instead of analysing global patterns in problems with Windows.
Please read this paper from 1979: GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s. The problem is that we have 2004 and still the most popular operating system completely ignore the solutions from the 1970s.
Sorry for the typo. Of course it should be:
Am I the only one who has read "underway" as "underwear."
Really, skimming through the headlines I looked at it for an instant, read something else and after a while I thought: "What? Camera that Sees through Undewear? That might be an interesting hardware to spend the grants on!" Imagine my disappointment when I scrolled back to read the article...
That means '911' takes more time to dial then '112'. My god, and the English picked '999'.
There is a reason for that.
A broken phone/socket/cable can easily dial 112 with two single circuit interrupts (there can be many seconds between them) followed by another two interrupts close to each other (closer than 0.2s). This is uncommon but not impossible. Also, that is the reason why the number is not 111 in the first place (which would be easier to remember and faster to dial) becuase any three single interrupts of the loop would dial it. From the switch point of view dialing 111 is indistinguishable from a socket losing contact because none of the iterrupts have to be close to each other which is not the case with any other number. On the other hand, numbers like 999, 997 or 961 are almost impossible to result from random interrupts.
I know that these are very difficult questions but they must be answered if anyone is going to make an informed decision and unfortunately they are rarely raised in the recent TV debates.
What is your position on sex, gay marriage, prostitution, pornography and the legal regulations thereof? What do you think about marijuana, abortion and euthanasia? Do you think there is anything which US should learn from Holland with regards to personal freedom?
What is your position on the age of consent and punishment for sex which is not rape? Do you think 30 years in jail for having sex with 17 years old teenager is a justified punishment and should be comparable to violent rape of 5 years old child?
What do you think about victimless crimes and punishing behavior which is not considered "moral"? What do you think about sodomy laws?
Do you think we should give up our freedoms because of "morality," "war on drugs," "war on terror" or any other future "war on"?
In the name of the entire Slashdot community thank you very much for your answers.
Are you seriously suggesting that anyone might have taken male rectum and colon for female genitalia with cervix? And penis for clitoris? Seriously?
(Thanks, I have just lost my apetite. And lust, for that matter.) This is 21st century and one doesn't have to "be with a girl" (by which I assume you mean cunnilingus) or "be with a man" for that matter (by which I mean anilingus) to know the human anatomy well enough to know the difference between anus and vulva. There is a reason we have Wikipedia and
Google Images and that reason is universal access to human knowledge, without the need for everyone to reinvent the wheel and rediscover said knowledge over and over again, like it was the case in previous, less fortunate centuries.
I've come up with the ultimate computer exploit, ever. You make a jpg of goatse, with this exploited code in it. The exploit code runs an application which activates any webcams, if present, and starts taking pictures, which it then sends back to the 31337 h4x0r.
Very interesting idea. Seriously. Drop me a line if you implement it or know anyone who does. I might use it in a feces recognition study.
Think of it, an entire gallery of horrified faces, kinda like in The Ring when people's faces went all nasty after watching the video.
And still the most horrifying would be the faces not horrified... "I am a proctologist! I swear! That is why I was not horrified!" Yeah, right!
A level system would be bastardized very quickly. There are so many possible permutations of hardware combinations that it would be difficult to even come up with general levels. You would instantly run into, for example, "Level 5 with the video card of a level 8." or "Level 7 but double the ram," ect., etc. You might also end up with "flavors" of a level such as maybe Dell's idea of a Level 5 ends up better than Compaq's. Once again, as I have often had occasion to say with regards to these type of ideas, we have a solution in search of a problem.
Not only that.
As the article says: "He provided a hypothetical example that a PC with a 'level 5' designation might have a medium processor speed, amount of RAM, and mid-range video card, while a 'level 7' PC might have a faster processor, more RAM, and a higher-end video card."
What on Earth is a "medium processor speed"? Does it change every month? It has to change or otherwise we'll be buying "level 1373" computers in two years. If it changes than we'll be buying "year 2005 level 3" which is 3 times faster than "year 2003 level 3" or the same as "year 2004 level 4" or-- You get the point.
And of course God forbid I might want 4GB of RAM and 8GB of HDD in a 200MHz Pentium for a database server or 64MB of RAM in another 3GHz number crunching node with no hard drive (I do).
What next? "Levels" of cars? This is a Very Very Stupid Idea.(TM)
"Casio announces a LCD display with the world's highest resolution. The 2.2 inch LCD display features VGA resolution."
Personally I have seen resolutions substantially higher than VGA... Or does "VGA" stand for something other than Video Graphical Array these days and I have just made an idiot out of myself? Unlikely.
If you read the parent post closely, you'll realize that the poster is FROM U ALBERTA.
Well... Yes. You see, actually that was the whole point.
Someone from The University of Alberta claim to have developed "a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously" which "has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now" [emphasis added] and yet says there is no threat in other people writing such programs: "Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs. If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make?" That is why I have written that The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group must be some kind of top secret project, because they are sure that no one else in the world can duplicate their work.
The problem exists in GDIPLUS, which is a DLL of which, for some bizarre reason known only to MS, an additional copy is installed for each application that uses it.
Bizarre, but true.
This is really hard to believe.
Do you know the rationale (or should I say irrationale?)
behind this unbelievable and unheard-of practice?
Haven't they discovered the advantages of shared objects and dynamic linking yet?
I thought that was the whole point of DLLs ?? Dynamic Link Library, right??
Apparently the advantages of dynamic linking (at least the security and patching related ones) must not have been the whole point of using DLLs by Microsoft.
Haven't they discovered the advantages of shared objects and dynamic linking yet?
Hey. This is Slashdot. Until some amateur clones an idea and offers it for free with no support, it doesn't exist.
I know that Microsoft has already cloned the idea (though I wouldn't call them amateurs--even if their software is hardly proffesional, I think at least some of their developers are actually quite competent programmers). The idea itself is at least as old as the Michigan Terminal System from the 60s, so basically everyone has already cloned it, including GNU in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, but than was not my point. I wasn't asking whether they had discovered shared objects and dynamic linking, but whether they had discovered the advantages thereof, which in that context obviously means the security and patching related ones. As Julesh has pointed out, they apparently have not, so as it turns out my question wasn't so "troll" as someone thought while mistakenly rating it as such.
I have read this sentence countless times and to be honest I completely fail to understand the humour thereof. Could you please provide any hint? (Somehow, I know I will deeply (pun not intended) regret it...)
This bug exists in most Microsoft Software. So for someone to patch they can't simply connect to Windows Update and consider themselves safe, they also have to patch Office, Visual Studio, some Microsoft Games, Server Software (misc, not covered by Update) and more.
Haven't they discovered the advantages of shared objects and dynamic linking yet? On my box I have literally hundreds of programs which were vulnerable to PNG exploits. All I did was write "apt-get upgrade" and forget about it to have them all patched at once after downloading a single 100kB package. When a similar vulnerability is found in Microsoft code everyone screams bloody murded, CNET writes about it, Slashdot writes about it, there is film at eleven and worms start to wreak havoc for years because, as you said, it is "hard to patch." But no, it is Linux that is somehow "not ready for the desktop."
Slashdot Mirror
In another post I have mentioned The WorldForge Project: "Our vision is to foster an independent community in which many free games can develop and evolve with unique roleplaying-oriented worlds and rules, running on a wide selection of server and client implementations with a standard networking protocol tying everything together. The WorldForge project hasn't produced any complete, playable games. We have games that are under development, but we're still working on developing the underlying tools."
Future WorldForge games will be playable using many different clients, including graphical and entirely text-based ones, ideal for Emacspeak. Lots of WorldForge software is written in Python under Linux, which seems to be a perfect project for your son to learn advanced programming in the future and something interesting to know about today. I wish him the best luck.
Not only MUDs but also future MMORPG games from The WorldForge Project where people will be able to play with each other on-line on the same servers and in the same worlds using different clients, including 2D isometric, full-3D OpenGL and entirely text-based ones. Not to even mention that thanks to Emacspeak a blind person can play even Tetris. This is not off-topic at all.
And to demonstrate how interfaces such as Emacspeak are impressive and important not only for blind users but for the general public, I am planning to develop a fully audio-desktop based car audio system, most probably using Oralux GNU/Linux, a Knoppix customization with Emacspeak user interface, with emphasis on making as much information and entertainment (music, games, WWW, etc.) accessible to the driver with absolutely no display distracting from the road, which in my opinion is the very direction every car manufacturer should follow to make cars safer. Projects like Emacspeak, BLinux and Oralux freely available make such a system trivial to build using an old laptop hidden somewhere under the seat, some cables and a simple input system, with almost no custom software needed.
I have been thinking about it since I first saw the most stupid idea in the history of car audio systems, i.e. text display of local traffic-related messages in real time. I thought that it is utterly moronic, since such messages should be spoken and in fact even the number of CD track I change to should be spoken instead of displayed in a place I have to look instead of focusing on the road. Hence the idea of full audio car audio system.
Donald Knuth number 40? With Steve Jobs number 2? Please don't get me wrong, I am all for gay and fashionable cool gadgets, I own many of them myself as well as recommend Macs for workstations in my institute which adds a little bit of fashion, bright colours and life to an otherwise sad and boring scientific laboratory, but I believe that an author of The Art of Computer Programming which American Scientist has included among the best twelve scientific monographs of the twentieth century, as the only one on computer science, along with works of Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot, just from the top of my head, rated as number 40 in this pathetic list is an outrage, for not only it proves that the author of this laughable list is an incompetent moron, but it is also an insult to our intelligence that we as a Slashdot community are linking and promoting such an idiotic stupidity. Misplacing Richard Stallman may be understandable and perhaps even justified in the context of popular opinion that one should avoid GNU in GNU/Linux but misplacing Donald Knuth is plainly an utter outrage and I would hereby like to sincerely apologise Donald Knuth in the name of the entire Slashdot community. Please do not identify us with the outrageous incompetence of the abovementioned list of "important" people.
Very true. Such a logic--and nothing else--is the very reason of the existance of two party system in the US. "I hate one guy so I'll vote for the second one, never mind there are more of them than only two. I will keep voting for 'the other guy' while waiting for the end of two party system." Wrong. The two party system is the result of voting, not vice versa. Anyone who is concerned about it should vote for the third most popular candidate, no matter who he is. Will he win? No. But after few elections "the third guy" might have enough votes so other people might start considering voting for the candidate they would like to win, not for the one who is most likely to beat the one who they would hate to win. This is the only way to finally end the two party farce but it may need a decade or two to gain momentum. People should never assume that voting for their prefered candidate is "throwing their vote away" because that is the very essence of democracy, while the "throwing vote away" nonsense is just the propaganda of two major parties, because they are the only people who benefit from the status quo. Please keep that in mind. By voting for "the lesser of two evils" you are really throwing your vote away. Just once, instead of voting for the less evil of two, try voting for someone good. I know that voting for someone else might be a hard concept for anyone who is used to having a "choice" between Coke and Pepsi or McDonald's and Burger King but The People have to learn that "you can chose any candidate as long as it is one of those two" is only an illusion of real choice, just enough to make people feel good but not enough to have any real influence. This is extremely important to understand if we ever want to change anything.
What *I* don't understand is why rather than going 'all electronic' or 'hybrid paper-computer model' there are not more efforts to have a simple paper model.
The voter comes to the poll, is identified and is given a paper sheet with candidates names--no privacy issues.
The voter goes in the box, which has--behold--a pen!
The voter puts an 'X' mark on the paper in the circle next to his chosen candidate (make it really easy, BIG circles, BIG text, whatever)
Voter's vote is already in human-readable form
Voter looks at the ballot to make sure it's ok, folds it, comes out, puts the ballot in one box and the paper token in the other. If the ballot is not ok there is a shredder right there inside the poll station and the voter votes again.
I can continue ad nauseam...
There is one most important and completely ignored question: what is wrong with pen and paper voting? What is this problem that we have to solve using electronic black-box voting? What are those issues? Are they so serious that introducing all of the problems which are inevitable with e-voting is justified? Seriously, I am looking forward to hear any answers, because this is the only part of e-voting that I don't understand: "why."
Why? Because there is nothing wrong with pen and paper, that's why? Seriously, please check out the recent results of a much larger election than that for US president, in terms of voters as well as in terms of voting options and please tell me what in your opinion is wrong with pen and paper. This is not a rhetoric question, I would really like to hear an answer. Any answer. Anyone who reads Slashdot knows that I am all for open source and free software but I have yet to find any reason to use any software for counting votes. While giving us your answer please keep in mind that voting is the most fundamental concept in democracy and as such needs to be completely transparent--not only to computer scientists like you and me who can understand and verify the software used for voting, but for general public, profanum vulgus, The People.
Yes, now I remember. I've read about in the Goatse.cx article on Wikipedia:
So indeed, your comment was not only funny but actually encyclopædicly accurate at the same time--now I understand it.
It probably depands on whether we might call penis a door. That's an interesting question, actually, even more philosophical than anatomical in nature, considering the social role of penis.
Experiment Cuts Off Reading Junkies from Books
An article from The Register reports one begins gibbering uncontrollably because he/she can't get a fix without books and newspapers access after two weeks. That, at least, is according to a 'Book Deprivation Study' carried out by Yahoo! and advertising outfit OMD. Participants in the human experiment were deprived of books for 14 days, and found themselves quickly succumbing to 'withdrawal and feelings of loss, frustration and disconnectedness.' The reason for the rapid collapse of their universe is - say the researchers - because 'books readers feel confident, secure and empowered.'
One of the Reading Junkies asked whether he reads books every day answered: "Why, yes, indeed. I believe I read books every day." One of the 'Book Deprivation Study' researchers said "We might be able to help him but he needs a long therapy of reading and knowledge deprivation."
Film at eleven.
Comparing every aspect of computing and networking to biology is not any less fallacious than trying to understand how does a car work looking at it like it was a biological organism. Real life has evolved randomly together with virii and parasites but all of the software including any kind of malware was intelligently designed. The most common misconception resulting from such a reasoning is that computer malware will always be relatively harmless because killing the victim is not smart from any parasite's point of view. Wrong. A deadly worm quickly spreading and erasing all of the data an hour later would not survive so long as Code Red, but it doesn't have to survive in the first place if that is not important for its creator. Survival is not important because software doesn't have to live long enough to evolve. It is designed and created manually and then released. It can be written for months or years and then live only few hours if that is the purpose of writing it. I think that assessing the spreading patterns of Internet malware like those of human epidemics might be very interesting but there is a hidden fallacious reasoning that comparing the virii themselves to human diseases will somehow help fighting them which leads to concentrating on spectacular effects instead of boring causes of the problem. The problems are buffer overflows which can be completely eliminated, running code from untrusted sources, etc. It has nothing to do with literally anything known in the real world any more than proving a theorem does. Another thing is comparing Internet to a population and fighting malware in the context of epidemics. This is foolish. In reality, there is a user with a computer and her data. She can lose her data or some of her secrets may become public and in that case she won't say "that's OK because this epidemic disease is contained and the population of computer users will survive" because if she loses her work she doesn't care about other computers. When she gets broken into she shouldn't think "I am sure my system will keep working because killing it would be disadvantageous from the evolutionary standpoint for the software" becuase the ultimate reason of the attack is not just the existence itself. The reason may be getting user's credit card number or performing a DDoS attack. The reason may be causing panic by deleting everything. The reason may be anything. And the problem is not millions years of evolution side by side with parasites but using "gets" instead of "fgets." It's not that we don't know how does the malware work or that we cannot write secure code. Look at KeyKOS or EROS. Look at OpenBSD. Look at Debian. Do we have any "epidemics" there to contain and to fight? No. Such studies are interesting but only because observing symptoms and effects is interesting. If we really want to stop malware we should start from reading the source code of EROS instead of analysing global patterns in problems with Windows. Please read this paper from 1979: GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s. The problem is that we have 2004 and still the most popular operating system completely ignore the solutions from the 1970s.
Sorry for the typo. Of course it should be: Am I the only one who has read "underway" as "underwear." Really, skimming through the headlines I looked at it for an instant, read something else and after a while I thought: "What? Camera that Sees through Undewear? That might be an interesting hardware to spend the grants on!" Imagine my disappointment when I scrolled back to read the article...
There is a reason for that. A broken phone/socket/cable can easily dial 112 with two single circuit interrupts (there can be many seconds between them) followed by another two interrupts close to each other (closer than 0.2s). This is uncommon but not impossible. Also, that is the reason why the number is not 111 in the first place (which would be easier to remember and faster to dial) becuase any three single interrupts of the loop would dial it. From the switch point of view dialing 111 is indistinguishable from a socket losing contact because none of the iterrupts have to be close to each other which is not the case with any other number. On the other hand, numbers like 999, 997 or 961 are almost impossible to result from random interrupts.
Am I the only one who has read "underway" as "uderwear"?
Dear Mr. Cobb,
I know that these are very difficult questions but they must be answered if anyone is going to make an informed decision and unfortunately they are rarely raised in the recent TV debates.
What is your position on sex, gay marriage, prostitution, pornography and the legal regulations thereof? What do you think about marijuana, abortion and euthanasia? Do you think there is anything which US should learn from Holland with regards to personal freedom?
What is your position on the age of consent and punishment for sex which is not rape? Do you think 30 years in jail for having sex with 17 years old teenager is a justified punishment and should be comparable to violent rape of 5 years old child? What do you think about victimless crimes and punishing behavior which is not considered "moral"? What do you think about sodomy laws? Do you think we should give up our freedoms because of "morality," "war on drugs," "war on terror" or any other future "war on"?
In the name of the entire Slashdot community thank you very much for your answers.
What bills would you have vetoed in the first place if you had been the president in the previous years?
Are you seriously suggesting that anyone might have taken male rectum and colon for female genitalia with cervix? And penis for clitoris? Seriously? (Thanks, I have just lost my apetite. And lust, for that matter.) This is 21st century and one doesn't have to "be with a girl" (by which I assume you mean cunnilingus) or "be with a man" for that matter (by which I mean anilingus) to know the human anatomy well enough to know the difference between anus and vulva. There is a reason we have Wikipedia and Google Images and that reason is universal access to human knowledge, without the need for everyone to reinvent the wheel and rediscover said knowledge over and over again, like it was the case in previous, less fortunate centuries.
Very interesting idea. Seriously. Drop me a line if you implement it or know anyone who does. I might use it in a feces recognition study.
And still the most horrifying would be the faces not horrified... "I am a proctologist! I swear! That is why I was not horrified!" Yeah, right!
Not only that. As the article says: "He provided a hypothetical example that a PC with a 'level 5' designation might have a medium processor speed, amount of RAM, and mid-range video card, while a 'level 7' PC might have a faster processor, more RAM, and a higher-end video card."
What on Earth is a "medium processor speed"? Does it change every month? It has to change or otherwise we'll be buying "level 1373" computers in two years. If it changes than we'll be buying "year 2005 level 3" which is 3 times faster than "year 2003 level 3" or the same as "year 2004 level 4" or-- You get the point.
And of course God forbid I might want 4GB of RAM and 8GB of HDD in a 200MHz Pentium for a database server or 64MB of RAM in another 3GHz number crunching node with no hard drive (I do).
What next? "Levels" of cars? This is a Very Very Stupid Idea.(TM)
"Casio announces a LCD display with the world's highest resolution. The 2.2 inch LCD display features VGA resolution."
Personally I have seen resolutions substantially higher than VGA... Or does "VGA" stand for something other than Video Graphical Array these days and I have just made an idiot out of myself? Unlikely.
Well... Yes. You see, actually that was the whole point. Someone from The University of Alberta claim to have developed "a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously" which "has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now" [emphasis added] and yet says there is no threat in other people writing such programs: "Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs. If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make?" That is why I have written that The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group must be some kind of top secret project, because they are sure that no one else in the world can duplicate their work.
This is really hard to believe. Do you know the rationale (or should I say irrationale?) behind this unbelievable and unheard-of practice?
Apparently the advantages of dynamic linking (at least the security and patching related ones) must not have been the whole point of using DLLs by Microsoft.
I know that Microsoft has already cloned the idea (though I wouldn't call them amateurs--even if their software is hardly proffesional, I think at least some of their developers are actually quite competent programmers). The idea itself is at least as old as the Michigan Terminal System from the 60s, so basically everyone has already cloned it, including GNU in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s, but than was not my point. I wasn't asking whether they had discovered shared objects and dynamic linking, but whether they had discovered the advantages thereof, which in that context obviously means the security and patching related ones. As Julesh has pointed out, they apparently have not, so as it turns out my question wasn't so "troll" as someone thought while mistakenly rating it as such.
I have read this sentence countless times and to be honest I completely fail to understand the humour thereof. Could you please provide any hint? (Somehow, I know I will deeply (pun not intended) regret it...)
Haven't they discovered the advantages of shared objects and dynamic linking yet? On my box I have literally hundreds of programs which were vulnerable to PNG exploits. All I did was write "apt-get upgrade" and forget about it to have them all patched at once after downloading a single 100kB package. When a similar vulnerability is found in Microsoft code everyone screams bloody murded, CNET writes about it, Slashdot writes about it, there is film at eleven and worms start to wreak havoc for years because, as you said, it is "hard to patch." But no, it is Linux that is somehow "not ready for the desktop."
Everyone knew it was a backdoor.