>In a world of so-so thinkers, any bright sparks will have trouble fitting in.
The problem is that too many people think they're this precious snowflake. Perhaps your friend is this bright, but the Citrix Admin or Network admin you have to deal with at work sure as heck isnt. Or the snooty level 1 support guy you need to deal with to get to level 2. Or the asshole MCSE who didnt even go to college or has never written a script.
Not to mention, being bright isnt an excuse to be a misanthrope. Part of being smart is seeing that people are emotional creatures and learning how to hack their rules and systems. The really smart ones are the bright but pleasant ones who know that at any moment they can use their networking skills to get a different job, butter up their boss, etc and have mindblowing technical skills. The guy with the greasy hair who hides in the server room isnt bright, he's probably just lucky enough to be born with parents who could help him own a computer when he was a kid and get him into a good college as a teenager.
The really smart dudes I know dont even let it show that often. They know in the game of human society that showing it off too much isnt good in the long run. I see the misanthrope "bright guy" stereotype as really just a self-important poseur. Those who can: do. Those who cant just blame everyone else and make a big spectacle over who they think they are and how much better they are than everyone else.
I think its interesting that many misanthropes are usually the lifers at the company. Turns out theyre not that good and if they were they would be moving up to better jobs and better paying jobs. Instead they're the office trolls who got promoted from the support desk or customer service and know damn well they can barely compete in the market.
Without drama and conflict there's no story. Would you pay to see a story about a guy who went about his day in the future and didnt have any problems or anything interesting happen to him?
Perhaps someone can combine twitter with scifi:
futureguy: I am using my future toilet futureguy: I am driving my futurecar futureguy: I am sleeping in my futurebed
>What did these viruses have in common? They were very virulent, killing the host quickly, but it didn't matter because their RNA code was spread via fleas.
Right, but the modern world, at least in wealthier countries, are fairly hygienic. I dont think Ive ever seen a flea outside the woods. For a virus to be successful in today's world it would probably need to keep the host alive a lot longer. Perhaps this is why we just arent seeing pandemics on this level since around we got a good understanding of germ theory. Toss in modern quarantine options and a extra lethal virus might just burn itself out before it can spread.
>. One quick text message, and my friend had let 12 of us know that he was getting off work earlier than expected, and were free to drop by. Five of us RSVP'd, and a fun night was had.
Or he would have just selected all of you on his cell phone and sent one group sms.
It looks more and more like twitter is a way to get around some of the more crappier SMS cell plans. I wonder if its not as popular in Europe and Asia where you can cheaply get SMS.
Why send that out to a third party? snmp, syslog, smtp, etc on the local LAN are all far better solutions. If you need a notification on your cell phone then use an SMS gateway.
Even if you have a reason, twitter cant scale to handle everyone's mousetrap/mailbox/toilet/toaster.
They do a lot more than just sit on them. At my last job I supported our BES and about 50 or 60 BBs. I thuink I replaced one a month. People would text in the bathroom and drop them in the bowl. People would put them in their sweatpants pocket and go jogging or mow the lawn, thus ensuring theyre dripping with their own sweat. People spill things on them all the time. People throw them across tables. People wash them in the washer.
Its really incredible how careless most people are with electronics. Im not necessarily defending Apple, but Occam's razor suggests abuse more than a manufacturing fault or corporate conspiracy. As more information is released to the public, we'll know more, but right now I would think something as delicate as the iphone would have all sorts of problems from abuse.
One thing I am curious about is whether any of these people have been using the iphone with a cracked screen. I was just at the movies and saw a girl with a cracked iphone. Its structural integrity really depends on that firm piece of glass holding it together. If someone cracked theirs and they kept stressing the case, they could easily be shorting the battery or cracking the battery itself. There's a lot of energy in the LiOn battery pack, thus all the "explosions."
Considering Marvel has had many owners, I doubt this will make any difference. Heck, Disney is probably buying this because its suddenly extremely profitable to make movies based on comic book characters, not because they feel there's a need for a Disneyfied Thor or Dr Strange.
I know this is slashdot and we're supposed to see every change as being a corporate conspiracy against us, but frankly, Marvel could use some direction from Disney. A lot of the artwork in Marvel comics is terrible. Its a company that always seems mismanaged to me. The Disney people really understand audiences and producing quality produts.
My PoS linksys with ddwrt can do ssh tunnels that are just as demanding as VPN. Heck, compared to a DES-based IPSEC tunnel an ssh AES tunnel is more demanding.
>If it is such a minor feature, then you would think competitors could wait another ten years
This is what dish network is doing. They cannot have this feature and cannot have it for at least 4 more years. Fine. Dish's product is at a market disadvantage because of this. Thus the patent system is still helping tivo -YET TIVO IS STILL GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.
The real problem is that tivo's monthly fees have always been ridiculous and their lifetime fee is a joke. Who wants to pay 200 dollars for just listings? They defacto take your privacy away with all their spying and then they tivoize the device so its not hackable.
So why would I pay more for a non-hackable device when my satellite provider offers me a cheaper non-hackable device? Tivo's patent obsessed, control everything, and charge and arm and a leg mentality killed the company.
Now they'll go down in a blaze of patent lawsuits.
>If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext
Thats quite a jump. I'd like to see some cites that IPSEC cracking is this easy. The idea behind VPN is that, yes, your potential attackers can see all the cyphertext they want, but cannot decypher or compromise the tunnel (outside a DDOS).
>You're talking about 7,493,015, right? How does this show that patents are way too powerful?
Because its a minor feature in a ten year old product. Patenting every UI trick and every little feature defeats the purpose of patents. Now everyone is patented to the hilt with patents that are almost all non-novel and non-original. Companies promise to not go crazy with lawsuits, but once their profits are dropping, like we are seeing with Tivo, then the kid gloves are off.
Ten years is a long time. Patents shouldnt even be 4 years imho, let alone the 14-20 they are now.
Considering how life was in even the richest countries just a couple hundred years ago, we should be ecstatic to be alive right now. Turns out humans have a misery set point, which is probably good. It keeps horrying things from breaking us, but also makes us somewhat miserable when things are good.
Life in the early 1800s in the richest countries involved being povery-stricken compared to today's standards, all sorts of health problems with no treatments, slavery, indentured servitude, powerless if you didnt own any land, very strict conservative society, debtor's prison, polio, smallpox, poor education, extreme religiosity, etc etc
I know how the system work. Guess what? Its 2009. The tivo has been out for TEN YEARS. Thats an eternity in the electronics world. The current system that gives monopologies for 14-20 years is ridiculous. Tivo had its time.
Its not unique. Digital video predates the tivo by decades.
What exactly should be be protecting here?
Already my DVR cannot do a lot of things because of patents. With a Tivo you can fast forward, press stop, and it will jump back a few seconds. Thats a tivo patent.
They are well protected in the market. If anything, this shows us how patents are way too powerful in the modern world. The guy with the best lawyer wins, not the originator or the small inventor.
So the originator should be the only one to produce that item and should have the market to themselves? Thats ridiculous. Thats like only have Ford cars or only having licensed IBM desktops - no clones.
Well, there is. We are sitting in a sea of energy. Sure, oil is convenient now because you bought a car that runs on oil, but thats just a source of energy. You can get energy elsewhere.
I completely disagree. The target audience is always slashdot and other techies. The idea is to get them riled up and to feed their MS hate so they donate money. FSF isnt stupid. They know how to get the big bucks from donors and it has nothing to do with being sensible or practical or level-headed. It has everything to do with being loud and obnoxious. The FSF uses the exact same PR template as PETA. They preach strictly to the choir.
Id normally say this kind of thing is a problem and makes all non-profits look bad, but thankfully no one takes the FSF seriously, so it doesnt matter.
If OSS software is successful it will be on its own merits; not because the FSF is yelling out 'POISONING EDUCATION' from the hilltops.
>it obeys the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else.
Yes, like its high specific heat its going to pull a lot of heat from those pipes. He's just cooling one machine, not a server farm. I think he'll be alright. Perhaps he'll be better off with radiant pipe, but 18 feet of copper has a lot of surface area.
The worst he'll do is only manage to drop the temp a few degrees. Toss a fan and now he's got a hybrid cooling system. Big deal.
Certainly not in grade school, which is what creationists are shooting for. Im not even sure how many US high schools offer comparative religion. I didnt get a formal class in it until college.
I doubt skype can do anything. This trojan runs locally with admin rights. Somewhere in there skype needs to put the encryption key in memory. The trojan probably just grabs it and then decrypts the VOIP packets. The solution here is to not run trojans.
>Creationism is ok in the classroom, but not in a science class. It's not science, it's philosophy.
No, its not. Its religion, no philosophy. It should be taught in a world religions class along with:
1. Turtles holding up the world 2. Buddhist cosmology 3. Hindu cosmology 4. Muslim cosmology 5. Jewish cosmology
Something tells me that Joe and Jane Conservative dont want their kids exposed to any of this stuff and the "teach creationist" movement isnt a way to broaden our understanding of religion but a bald-face attack on evolution.
>Is to try to overrule the verdict of the scientific community because they don't like what it says.
Exactly. They know how to game the system. They'll file in the most conservative Texas federal district. They'll know all the lawyers and judges and will more or less be fairly confident in the trials outcome.
Funny how those who complain about judicial activism engage in it the most. Well, I guess its not activism if they agree with it (teach creationism in science class, put religion icons on public lands, etc).
>It's a trojan that only installs if you're stupid enough to download a program from a dodgy source
Err, thats pretty much the biggest vector for malware. Pick any popular app for Windows, go to pirate bay, download it, run it, and guess what? You have an infection.
Storm botnet was built by people double-clicking greetingcard.exe.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.
Slashdot Mirror
>In a world of so-so thinkers, any bright sparks will have trouble fitting in.
The problem is that too many people think they're this precious snowflake. Perhaps your friend is this bright, but the Citrix Admin or Network admin you have to deal with at work sure as heck isnt. Or the snooty level 1 support guy you need to deal with to get to level 2. Or the asshole MCSE who didnt even go to college or has never written a script.
Not to mention, being bright isnt an excuse to be a misanthrope. Part of being smart is seeing that people are emotional creatures and learning how to hack their rules and systems. The really smart ones are the bright but pleasant ones who know that at any moment they can use their networking skills to get a different job, butter up their boss, etc and have mindblowing technical skills. The guy with the greasy hair who hides in the server room isnt bright, he's probably just lucky enough to be born with parents who could help him own a computer when he was a kid and get him into a good college as a teenager.
The really smart dudes I know dont even let it show that often. They know in the game of human society that showing it off too much isnt good in the long run. I see the misanthrope "bright guy" stereotype as really just a self-important poseur. Those who can: do. Those who cant just blame everyone else and make a big spectacle over who they think they are and how much better they are than everyone else.
I think its interesting that many misanthropes are usually the lifers at the company. Turns out theyre not that good and if they were they would be moving up to better jobs and better paying jobs. Instead they're the office trolls who got promoted from the support desk or customer service and know damn well they can barely compete in the market.
Without drama and conflict there's no story. Would you pay to see a story about a guy who went about his day in the future and didnt have any problems or anything interesting happen to him?
Perhaps someone can combine twitter with scifi:
futureguy: I am using my future toilet
futureguy: I am driving my futurecar
futureguy: I am sleeping in my futurebed
>What did these viruses have in common? They were very virulent, killing the host quickly, but it didn't matter because their RNA code was spread via fleas.
Right, but the modern world, at least in wealthier countries, are fairly hygienic. I dont think Ive ever seen a flea outside the woods. For a virus to be successful in today's world it would probably need to keep the host alive a lot longer. Perhaps this is why we just arent seeing pandemics on this level since around we got a good understanding of germ theory. Toss in modern quarantine options and a extra lethal virus might just burn itself out before it can spread.
>. One quick text message, and my friend had let 12 of us know that he was getting off work earlier than expected, and were free to drop by. Five of us RSVP'd, and a fun night was had.
Or he would have just selected all of you on his cell phone and sent one group sms.
It looks more and more like twitter is a way to get around some of the more crappier SMS cell plans. I wonder if its not as popular in Europe and Asia where you can cheaply get SMS.
Why send that out to a third party? snmp, syslog, smtp, etc on the local LAN are all far better solutions. If you need a notification on your cell phone then use an SMS gateway.
Even if you have a reason, twitter cant scale to handle everyone's mousetrap/mailbox/toilet/toaster.
They do a lot more than just sit on them. At my last job I supported our BES and about 50 or 60 BBs. I thuink I replaced one a month. People would text in the bathroom and drop them in the bowl. People would put them in their sweatpants pocket and go jogging or mow the lawn, thus ensuring theyre dripping with their own sweat. People spill things on them all the time. People throw them across tables. People wash them in the washer.
Its really incredible how careless most people are with electronics. Im not necessarily defending Apple, but Occam's razor suggests abuse more than a manufacturing fault or corporate conspiracy. As more information is released to the public, we'll know more, but right now I would think something as delicate as the iphone would have all sorts of problems from abuse.
One thing I am curious about is whether any of these people have been using the iphone with a cracked screen. I was just at the movies and saw a girl with a cracked iphone. Its structural integrity really depends on that firm piece of glass holding it together. If someone cracked theirs and they kept stressing the case, they could easily be shorting the battery or cracking the battery itself. There's a lot of energy in the LiOn battery pack, thus all the "explosions."
Considering Marvel has had many owners, I doubt this will make any difference. Heck, Disney is probably buying this because its suddenly extremely profitable to make movies based on comic book characters, not because they feel there's a need for a Disneyfied Thor or Dr Strange.
I know this is slashdot and we're supposed to see every change as being a corporate conspiracy against us, but frankly, Marvel could use some direction from Disney. A lot of the artwork in Marvel comics is terrible. Its a company that always seems mismanaged to me. The Disney people really understand audiences and producing quality produts.
Considering Disney owns Touchstone, Miramax, Pixar, ESPN, Lifetime, A&E, and a few dozen radio stations, I doubt they are going to suddenly go against the Marvel audience and make any serious changes. Frankly, Marvel is very much kiddified to begin with, so Im not sure what grittiness you're hoping to preserve.
My PoS linksys with ddwrt can do ssh tunnels that are just as demanding as VPN. Heck, compared to a DES-based IPSEC tunnel an ssh AES tunnel is more demanding.
>If it is such a minor feature, then you would think competitors could wait another ten years
This is what dish network is doing. They cannot have this feature and cannot have it for at least 4 more years. Fine. Dish's product is at a market disadvantage because of this. Thus the patent system is still helping tivo -YET TIVO IS STILL GOING OUT OF BUSINESS.
The real problem is that tivo's monthly fees have always been ridiculous and their lifetime fee is a joke. Who wants to pay 200 dollars for just listings? They defacto take your privacy away with all their spying and then they tivoize the device so its not hackable.
So why would I pay more for a non-hackable device when my satellite provider offers me a cheaper non-hackable device? Tivo's patent obsessed, control everything, and charge and arm and a leg mentality killed the company.
Now they'll go down in a blaze of patent lawsuits.
>If they then know of a way to recover the 'cleartext' from the VPN cyphertext
Thats quite a jump. I'd like to see some cites that IPSEC cracking is this easy. The idea behind VPN is that, yes, your potential attackers can see all the cyphertext they want, but cannot decypher or compromise the tunnel (outside a DDOS).
>You're talking about 7,493,015, right? How does this show that patents are way too powerful?
Because its a minor feature in a ten year old product. Patenting every UI trick and every little feature defeats the purpose of patents. Now everyone is patented to the hilt with patents that are almost all non-novel and non-original. Companies promise to not go crazy with lawsuits, but once their profits are dropping, like we are seeing with Tivo, then the kid gloves are off.
Ten years is a long time. Patents shouldnt even be 4 years imho, let alone the 14-20 they are now.
Considering how life was in even the richest countries just a couple hundred years ago, we should be ecstatic to be alive right now. Turns out humans have a misery set point, which is probably good. It keeps horrying things from breaking us, but also makes us somewhat miserable when things are good.
Life in the early 1800s in the richest countries involved being povery-stricken compared to today's standards, all sorts of health problems with no treatments, slavery, indentured servitude, powerless if you didnt own any land, very strict conservative society, debtor's prison, polio, smallpox, poor education, extreme religiosity, etc etc
I know how the system work. Guess what? Its 2009. The tivo has been out for TEN YEARS. Thats an eternity in the electronics world. The current system that gives monopologies for 14-20 years is ridiculous. Tivo had its time.
Its not unique. Digital video predates the tivo by decades.
What exactly should be be protecting here?
Already my DVR cannot do a lot of things because of patents. With a Tivo you can fast forward, press stop, and it will jump back a few seconds. Thats a tivo patent.
They are well protected in the market. If anything, this shows us how patents are way too powerful in the modern world. The guy with the best lawyer wins, not the originator or the small inventor.
So the originator should be the only one to produce that item and should have the market to themselves? Thats ridiculous. Thats like only have Ford cars or only having licensed IBM desktops - no clones.
Well, there is. We are sitting in a sea of energy. Sure, oil is convenient now because you bought a car that runs on oil, but thats just a source of energy. You can get energy elsewhere.
>The Slahsdot crowd is not the target audience
I completely disagree. The target audience is always slashdot and other techies. The idea is to get them riled up and to feed their MS hate so they donate money. FSF isnt stupid. They know how to get the big bucks from donors and it has nothing to do with being sensible or practical or level-headed. It has everything to do with being loud and obnoxious. The FSF uses the exact same PR template as PETA. They preach strictly to the choir.
Id normally say this kind of thing is a problem and makes all non-profits look bad, but thankfully no one takes the FSF seriously, so it doesnt matter.
If OSS software is successful it will be on its own merits; not because the FSF is yelling out 'POISONING EDUCATION' from the hilltops.
>it obeys the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else.
Yes, like its high specific heat its going to pull a lot of heat from those pipes. He's just cooling one machine, not a server farm. I think he'll be alright. Perhaps he'll be better off with radiant pipe, but 18 feet of copper has a lot of surface area.
The worst he'll do is only manage to drop the temp a few degrees. Toss a fan and now he's got a hybrid cooling system. Big deal.
Certainly not in grade school, which is what creationists are shooting for. Im not even sure how many US high schools offer comparative religion. I didnt get a formal class in it until college.
>Government supported malware...
I dont see a problem with this as long as it requires a warrant, like how the US uses programs like CIPAV.
I doubt skype can do anything. This trojan runs locally with admin rights. Somewhere in there skype needs to put the encryption key in memory. The trojan probably just grabs it and then decrypts the VOIP packets. The solution here is to not run trojans.
>Creationism is ok in the classroom, but not in a science class. It's not science, it's philosophy.
No, its not. Its religion, no philosophy. It should be taught in a world religions class along with:
1. Turtles holding up the world
2. Buddhist cosmology
3. Hindu cosmology
4. Muslim cosmology
5. Jewish cosmology
Something tells me that Joe and Jane Conservative dont want their kids exposed to any of this stuff and the "teach creationist" movement isnt a way to broaden our understanding of religion but a bald-face attack on evolution.
>Is to try to overrule the verdict of the scientific community because they don't like what it says.
Exactly. They know how to game the system. They'll file in the most conservative Texas federal district. They'll know all the lawyers and judges and will more or less be fairly confident in the trials outcome.
Funny how those who complain about judicial activism engage in it the most. Well, I guess its not activism if they agree with it (teach creationism in science class, put religion icons on public lands, etc).
>Is it April 1st?
No, this is what happens when you vote in competent Democrats to run things instead of Republicans like Bush and Cheney.
>It's a trojan that only installs if you're stupid enough to download a program from a dodgy source
Err, thats pretty much the biggest vector for malware. Pick any popular app for Windows, go to pirate bay, download it, run it, and guess what? You have an infection.
Storm botnet was built by people double-clicking greetingcard.exe.
Dont underestimate people's abilities to go out of their way to find malware to run. You'll find tha you dont need to exploit any vulnerability other than ignorant on the user's part to root the machine.