The problem I have with fines in general is they do no real harm to companies. The cost of the fine is then funneled back into the price tag of the product and considered a "cost of doing business". It's you and me that get screwed in the end with higher prices to cover losses in fines.
Assuming that companies are trying to maximize their profits, this is not true. The price is already whatever brings them most income; there is no room for rising it.
The argument that a company "tunnels" its fines to its customers requires one to assume that the company isn't already taking as much money as it could from said customers, and that is not a reasonable assumption about a for-profit company. No, the ones who get hit by the fine are shareholders, which is as it should be; after all, they are the ones who got the ill-gained profits.
Each and every company already screws its customers as much as it can. Getting bitchslapped doesn't give them any more metaphorical sexual prowess.
every other post calling America a fascist police state.
Yeah, it annoys me too. America is not a fascist police state; America is a plutocratic police state. The difference is that under fascism, economy booms, while under plutocracy, economy goes kaboom.
Perhaps it is the fact that there might just be 72 virgins waiting for you on the other end once you have sacrificed your life. I know that would put a smile even on the biggest prude geek.
Wouldn't it be better if at least one partner knew what they were doing - and no, having watched japanese porn cartoons doesn't count ?
Yes, OMG! How am I going to survive this day, the day that youtube.com went down the tubes?
It's not that you can't survive without YouTube; it's that a lot of people are going to be quite pissed at Pakistan right now. I'm sure that all the major *chans are planning an invasion as we speak, the Pirate Bay is arming torrents of mass destruction, and the botnet owners are bringing their armies to DEFCON 1.
/b-tards, pirate fleets, and zombie hords; Pakistan is going to feel the full wrath of the Internet. It will retaliate with nuclear weapons before being going down before the onslaught. A long, dark and silent winter will result; and when the first rays of Sun shine through the radiactive clouds and the remains of humanity once again begin the long, hopeless climb on the endless staircase, the memories have turned to myths and myths to legends, and even the legends are long forgotten before the Internet is born again.
So yes, the world will Break and End. It will End like there was no tomorrow, because there won't be. We'll all die, die and be forgotten, and I'll never find out how Drakuun ends. All is lost.
It is true that adaption happens at the individual level.
No, it happens at group level. Individuals are unable to adapt, at least evolutionary speaking; whatever genes you happened to be born with, you are stuck with. The group, on the other hand, can and does vary its genetic composition from generation to generation.
Additionally "ability to adapt" is not a genetic trait.
Group's ability to adapt depends on its genetic variablity. This, in turn, depends on its genetic traits. So you are incorrect.
As far as my being selfish and evil,
I haven't said you are. I have simply said that your bullshit argument has been used as a justification for both enough times. Please practice your reading comprehension.
In a perfect world, our government would cut the spending on armament and give the decrease to the CAI to build schools.
Unfortunately, if the US did that, the fundamentalists would use that as an excuse to attack the schools for being in collaboration with the Great Satan.
That's the best long-term strategy to solving fundamentalism, IMO.
Ultimately, the only solution to fundamentalism is that the surrounding society deems it not acceptable. Education is essential in achieving this; however, it is by no means sufficient. It is perfectly possible to be well-educated and an evil fanatic.
Adaption happens at the level of individuals. When groups develop that protect their less adapted members, the group as a whole becomes less well adapted. It has nothing to do with qualitative judgments and is entirely objective.
Incorrect. What has actually taken place in such case is that the environment has changed: it now includes the fact that the group takes care of its weaker members. The group itself will likely also be more adapted, that is, more able to pass its genetic material onward, since its members are now less likely to die before getting offspring, resulting in population growth and greater genetic variability - and thus greater ability to adapt to meet future challenges.
Your bullshit argument is known as Social Darwinism, and has caused quite enough damage to this world and mankind by acting as a thin rationalization for selfish evil, so kindly stop it.
You guys bitch when it doesn't work with your old shit and if it DOES work with your old shit, you bitch because the OS is bloated and runs like shit. There's a price for compatibility and if you think you have the easy and simple solution, you're probably wrong.
Not true. Wine emulates every version of Windows from 2.0 to XP, and doesn't incur any horrible performance overhead for any of them, or at least I haven't noticed so. The only performance problems I've noticed are in file I/O access, and bitdepth conversion for old DirectDraw games which use paletted modes.
While Wine is certainly far from perfect, it does prove that support for legacy systems on a modern one doesn't mean either horrendous overhead nor cruft. So no, whatever reason Vista has for being bloated and running like shit, backwards compatibility is not it.
And I don't bitch about Vista. I'm happy that I made the right choice and switched to Linux rather than upgrading to XP. Microsoft keeps on proving the validity of that decision time after time:).
And if you throw them down from the LEO, they won't cool on their way down. Coming to think of it: you could simply take the prepared raw pizza, throw it down, and let the heat of re-entry cook it. That's some time saved right there.
Yes, we all hate the midistupidans. Let's get over it already. We won't convince Lucas to cut them out of the new trilogy, so either endure it or refuse to watch it.
Actually, I don't recall Episodes II & III mentioning them, so I'd say that Lucas did in fact cut them out as a response to the reaction they got.
Besides, Star Wars is hardly the first or only work to fall into this trap. It is therefore useful to analyze and discuss why midi-chlorians were a bad idea, so that future makers of creative works might avoid the pitfall.
Sorry, but it's really getting old. It's a friggin' movie. Well, two trilogies, but it's not a religion for crying out loud.
Star Wars might not be a religion, but creating culture cuts into the very heart of what it actually means to be human, just as deep if not deeper than religion; and it is therefore perfectly reasonable to take it seriously enough to think what works and what doesn't and why.
No, but you're confusing orbit - a special state of being in freefall - with altitude.
You could have orbital velocity at ground level, that wouldn't make the craft an orbiter.
Yes, it would. It would make the entity which achieved that speed orbit the Earth, therefore making it an orbiter. Of course an orbit at ground level is not stable, due to air friction, but it is an orbit nonetheless.
I wish I could attribute sarcasm to your post, but it is obvious you're being serious. And it's obvious you know nothing about children or the raising thereof.
I neither know or care anything about rising children. I will learn if I ever have any. I simply answered the question "why the parents need to be kept out"; since the summary gave me the impression that the it is the child who wants a "parent-proof" PC, I took this question to mean "why would a child want to keep its parents out".
You are seeing moral judgements where there is none, merely an attempt to see the world through someone elses - the kids, in this case - eyes while attempting to solve an interesting problem: how to secure a computer against an attacker who has physical access to both it and the onwer. Since the rest of your post proceeds from this flawed assumption, commenting on it further would be pointless.
So, you're saying that a 7 year old accidentally tripping over a Goatse link is a good thing?
I'm not going to argue about rights of parents or children; I merely answered the parent's question. That said, I fail to see why a seeing someone's butt, even if particularly ugly, would harm anyone.
Why the parents need to be kept out, and why the AC thinks that any password will keep out parents who presumably have physical access to the system.
More importantly, they have physical access to her. There is no way to keep secrets from someone who can beat them out of you, except by not letting them know that there is a secret in the first place. Given this, I suggest rigging a system which, if a certain button is not pushed during system boot, the home directories will be quietly replaced by a decoy "harmless" directory. The actual home directory can be kept in a crypted loopback device file, preferably with a name which suggests it was a temporary swap space set up for a particularly memory intensive operation and simply never deleted.
As for why... Well, do you want anyone go snooping through your affairs ? Neither do chilren. Parents, of course, consider their concern for the safety or the purity of the religious or ideological views of their children to trump over said childrens desire for privacy and uncensored influx of information, and children disagree. The article poster apparently sides with the latter, at least in this case.
In other architectures, namely Harvard architecture, there are physically seperate memory locations for programs and data and the processor WILL not carry out instructions "hidden" in data. A shift towards seperate memory architectures is required to secure computers. Unfortunately a paradigm shift at this level is all but impossible in general purpose computing.
No, but whatever program is running on the processor and interpreting the data will. SQL database, Python interpreter, Mozilla... all of these are based on treating text (data) as a list of instructions (program). It is obvious in the case of Python, since that is openly a programming language, but HTML itself can be considered a series of instructions for building the DOM tree, which then gets rendered, as dictated by default rules and those given by optional CSS; and of course there is always Javascript.
It is impossible for a general purpose computing to be immune for this class of attacks. Not just "all but impossible", but flat out impossible due to a logical flaw: the very ability to simulate different machines which treat data as a list of instructions - program - is what makes it a "general purpose" computer. If you can program it, you can program it to misbehave when it reads a suitably malformed PDF/PNG/HTML/SQL/whatever file. The only way around that would be for the computer to be intelligent and capable of common sense, so it could understand that the programmer propably didn't mean for it to execute any random piece of SQL someone feeds into a Web forum login box; but then it would be vulnerable to social engineering.
That America is a living, breathing abomination to every leftist theory that ever existed.
No, it isn't, for the simple reason that it isn't capitalist. Public funds getting channeled into various corporations in exchange for financial aid in political campaigning is not capitalist. Victory in courts being handed to the party with the biggest warchest may or may not be capitalist, but if it is, it certainly doesn't speak against the leftist theories. And the constant complaints posted here about the lack of competition in the broadband market due to local monopolies speak on their own.
I don't think that a purely capitalist economic can logically exist, because it turns into aristocracy - or plutocracy, if you prefer - very fast. Historically, aristocrats were simply wealthy landowners who, since they controlled this vital resource, were able to boss everyone else around and equip personal armies. It was the rise of strong central government which crushed the feudal system and limited the power of aristocracy; without such government, whoever happens to control the local production of food, water or some other important resource can pretty much rule as a despot over his little serfdom. And of course he is going to crush all competition, out of simple self-interest.
According to Europeans, Americans should be rioting in the street and killing their leaders.
How many US presidents out of how many have been killed by their own subjects ? And how does the percentage compare to leaders in general ?
Is a text file containing a single line of text followed by a carriage return a program?
It can be. For example:
'; ROLLBACK; UPDATE users SET admin = true WHERE username = 'ultranova'; '
If the virtual machine which handles the username field of Slashdot login form naively passed this string to the database layer without specifically quoting it, this text string would make my account an admin account; well, actually, since I haven't studied Slashdcode, it propably wouldn't, but the point still stands: even text is not an inherently safe data format in all circumstances.
How about the standard input device? When I type at the console keyboard, is that a program feeding into a "virtual machine" created by the console driver?
The virtual machine in this case would be whatever program receives the input. And yes, the text you type is indeed a program being executed by that machine; each time it receives a keypress from you, that keypress instructs it to do something, right ? Even if that something is merely to output the letter (altought a text editor would also store the input internally, of course). And that is what a program is: a list of instructions.
If not, why is a disk device different from another device?
Why would you instruct them all yourself ? Send the instruction into 10 machines (or even a single one). They each send it to ten other machines, they each to 10 and so on. While some machines will of course receive the same instruction twice, it still won't take long to cascade the instruction through the network.
To make matters worse, some attacks may even occur if you are dealing with safe file types, like a PNG or even PDF.
There are no safe file types. All files can be viewed as programs meant to run in a specialized virtual machine (the program which is used to open them). For example, a PNG file is a program which, when run, will compute an array of bytes (the image pixels). The same goes to PDF. In this view, since all files are programs, it is in principle possible that any of them could contain code which can result in unexpected behavior of the virtual machine executing them.
Of course some file types are easier to compromize than others, either due to sheer complexity or ambiguity of the specification or because they are Turing complete. However, it is impossible to guarantee that every viewer for any file type is free of defects. Anyone still remember ANSI codes for DOS, which could be embedded to text to change color but also to set macros to keyboard keys when the file was viewed ? And of course SQL injection attacks are based on formatting a text string so it will cause unexpected results, not to mention causing a buffer overflow with an overlong string.
I repeat: there are no safe file types. They all have a potential to contain malicious code, because there is no such thing as data which is not also a program. From a certain point of view, GIMP is simply a very specialized compiler...
It only takes a few nukes to so seriously damage the cities of an invading country that it will surrender.
Imagine you are a soldier of an invading army. You hear that your homeland has been nuked. There is nothing to go back to but radiactive wasteland. Will you surrender, in which case your best hope for future is to return and die in said wasteland, or will you redouble your efforts to capture as much land as you can for yourself ?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - Adolf Hitler.
And I'm pretty sure most other succesful dictators have had similar notions. Don't attribute to Rand what she clearly didn't invent; whether this should be considered to be to her credit or discredit is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming that companies are trying to maximize their profits, this is not true. The price is already whatever brings them most income; there is no room for rising it.
The argument that a company "tunnels" its fines to its customers requires one to assume that the company isn't already taking as much money as it could from said customers, and that is not a reasonable assumption about a for-profit company. No, the ones who get hit by the fine are shareholders, which is as it should be; after all, they are the ones who got the ill-gained profits.
Each and every company already screws its customers as much as it can. Getting bitchslapped doesn't give them any more metaphorical sexual prowess.
Yeah, it annoys me too. America is not a fascist police state; America is a plutocratic police state. The difference is that under fascism, economy booms, while under plutocracy, economy goes kaboom.
But isn't the whole idea of an anal bead to be shoved where Sun doesn't shine ? How would a solar powered self-cleaning system help there ?
Wouldn't it be better if at least one partner knew what they were doing - and no, having watched japanese porn cartoons doesn't count ?
It's not that you can't survive without YouTube; it's that a lot of people are going to be quite pissed at Pakistan right now. I'm sure that all the major *chans are planning an invasion as we speak, the Pirate Bay is arming torrents of mass destruction, and the botnet owners are bringing their armies to DEFCON 1.
/b-tards, pirate fleets, and zombie hords; Pakistan is going to feel the full wrath of the Internet. It will retaliate with nuclear weapons before being going down before the onslaught. A long, dark and silent winter will result; and when the first rays of Sun shine through the radiactive clouds and the remains of humanity once again begin the long, hopeless climb on the endless staircase, the memories have turned to myths and myths to legends, and even the legends are long forgotten before the Internet is born again.
So yes, the world will Break and End. It will End like there was no tomorrow, because there won't be. We'll all die, die and be forgotten, and I'll never find out how Drakuun ends. All is lost.
No, it happens at group level. Individuals are unable to adapt, at least evolutionary speaking; whatever genes you happened to be born with, you are stuck with. The group, on the other hand, can and does vary its genetic composition from generation to generation.
Group's ability to adapt depends on its genetic variablity. This, in turn, depends on its genetic traits. So you are incorrect.
I haven't said you are. I have simply said that your bullshit argument has been used as a justification for both enough times. Please practice your reading comprehension.
Unfortunately, if the US did that, the fundamentalists would use that as an excuse to attack the schools for being in collaboration with the Great Satan.
Ultimately, the only solution to fundamentalism is that the surrounding society deems it not acceptable. Education is essential in achieving this; however, it is by no means sufficient. It is perfectly possible to be well-educated and an evil fanatic.
Incorrect. What has actually taken place in such case is that the environment has changed: it now includes the fact that the group takes care of its weaker members. The group itself will likely also be more adapted, that is, more able to pass its genetic material onward, since its members are now less likely to die before getting offspring, resulting in population growth and greater genetic variability - and thus greater ability to adapt to meet future challenges.
Your bullshit argument is known as Social Darwinism, and has caused quite enough damage to this world and mankind by acting as a thin rationalization for selfish evil, so kindly stop it.
Not true. Wine emulates every version of Windows from 2.0 to XP, and doesn't incur any horrible performance overhead for any of them, or at least I haven't noticed so. The only performance problems I've noticed are in file I/O access, and bitdepth conversion for old DirectDraw games which use paletted modes.
While Wine is certainly far from perfect, it does prove that support for legacy systems on a modern one doesn't mean either horrendous overhead nor cruft. So no, whatever reason Vista has for being bloated and running like shit, backwards compatibility is not it.
And I don't bitch about Vista. I'm happy that I made the right choice and switched to Linux rather than upgrading to XP. Microsoft keeps on proving the validity of that decision time after time :).
And if you throw them down from the LEO, they won't cool on their way down. Coming to think of it: you could simply take the prepared raw pizza, throw it down, and let the heat of re-entry cook it. That's some time saved right there.
This means that new series are available to fansubbers even sooner than previously ! Yarrrr !
"The God Particle has decayed. And we are the ones to have split it."
Actually, I don't recall Episodes II & III mentioning them, so I'd say that Lucas did in fact cut them out as a response to the reaction they got.
Besides, Star Wars is hardly the first or only work to fall into this trap. It is therefore useful to analyze and discuss why midi-chlorians were a bad idea, so that future makers of creative works might avoid the pitfall.
Star Wars might not be a religion, but creating culture cuts into the very heart of what it actually means to be human, just as deep if not deeper than religion; and it is therefore perfectly reasonable to take it seriously enough to think what works and what doesn't and why.
Not a problem; CERN is already working on it.
No, but you're confusing orbit - a special state of being in freefall - with altitude.
Yes, it would. It would make the entity which achieved that speed orbit the Earth, therefore making it an orbiter. Of course an orbit at ground level is not stable, due to air friction, but it is an orbit nonetheless.
I neither know or care anything about rising children. I will learn if I ever have any. I simply answered the question "why the parents need to be kept out"; since the summary gave me the impression that the it is the child who wants a "parent-proof" PC, I took this question to mean "why would a child want to keep its parents out".
You are seeing moral judgements where there is none, merely an attempt to see the world through someone elses - the kids, in this case - eyes while attempting to solve an interesting problem: how to secure a computer against an attacker who has physical access to both it and the onwer. Since the rest of your post proceeds from this flawed assumption, commenting on it further would be pointless.
I'm not going to argue about rights of parents or children; I merely answered the parent's question. That said, I fail to see why a seeing someone's butt, even if particularly ugly, would harm anyone.
More importantly, they have physical access to her. There is no way to keep secrets from someone who can beat them out of you, except by not letting them know that there is a secret in the first place. Given this, I suggest rigging a system which, if a certain button is not pushed during system boot, the home directories will be quietly replaced by a decoy "harmless" directory. The actual home directory can be kept in a crypted loopback device file, preferably with a name which suggests it was a temporary swap space set up for a particularly memory intensive operation and simply never deleted.
As for why... Well, do you want anyone go snooping through your affairs ? Neither do chilren. Parents, of course, consider their concern for the safety or the purity of the religious or ideological views of their children to trump over said childrens desire for privacy and uncensored influx of information, and children disagree. The article poster apparently sides with the latter, at least in this case.
No, but whatever program is running on the processor and interpreting the data will. SQL database, Python interpreter, Mozilla... all of these are based on treating text (data) as a list of instructions (program). It is obvious in the case of Python, since that is openly a programming language, but HTML itself can be considered a series of instructions for building the DOM tree, which then gets rendered, as dictated by default rules and those given by optional CSS; and of course there is always Javascript.
It is impossible for a general purpose computing to be immune for this class of attacks. Not just "all but impossible", but flat out impossible due to a logical flaw: the very ability to simulate different machines which treat data as a list of instructions - program - is what makes it a "general purpose" computer. If you can program it, you can program it to misbehave when it reads a suitably malformed PDF/PNG/HTML/SQL/whatever file. The only way around that would be for the computer to be intelligent and capable of common sense, so it could understand that the programmer propably didn't mean for it to execute any random piece of SQL someone feeds into a Web forum login box; but then it would be vulnerable to social engineering.
No, it isn't, for the simple reason that it isn't capitalist. Public funds getting channeled into various corporations in exchange for financial aid in political campaigning is not capitalist. Victory in courts being handed to the party with the biggest warchest may or may not be capitalist, but if it is, it certainly doesn't speak against the leftist theories. And the constant complaints posted here about the lack of competition in the broadband market due to local monopolies speak on their own.
I don't think that a purely capitalist economic can logically exist, because it turns into aristocracy - or plutocracy, if you prefer - very fast. Historically, aristocrats were simply wealthy landowners who, since they controlled this vital resource, were able to boss everyone else around and equip personal armies. It was the rise of strong central government which crushed the feudal system and limited the power of aristocracy; without such government, whoever happens to control the local production of food, water or some other important resource can pretty much rule as a despot over his little serfdom. And of course he is going to crush all competition, out of simple self-interest.
How many US presidents out of how many have been killed by their own subjects ? And how does the percentage compare to leaders in general ?
It can be. For example:
'; ROLLBACK; UPDATE users SET admin = true WHERE username = 'ultranova'; 'If the virtual machine which handles the username field of Slashdot login form naively passed this string to the database layer without specifically quoting it, this text string would make my account an admin account; well, actually, since I haven't studied Slashdcode, it propably wouldn't, but the point still stands: even text is not an inherently safe data format in all circumstances.
The virtual machine in this case would be whatever program receives the input. And yes, the text you type is indeed a program being executed by that machine; each time it receives a keypress from you, that keypress instructs it to do something, right ? Even if that something is merely to output the letter (altought a text editor would also store the input internally, of course). And that is what a program is: a list of instructions.
It isn't.
Why would you instruct them all yourself ? Send the instruction into 10 machines (or even a single one). They each send it to ten other machines, they each to 10 and so on. While some machines will of course receive the same instruction twice, it still won't take long to cascade the instruction through the network.
There are no safe file types. All files can be viewed as programs meant to run in a specialized virtual machine (the program which is used to open them). For example, a PNG file is a program which, when run, will compute an array of bytes (the image pixels). The same goes to PDF. In this view, since all files are programs, it is in principle possible that any of them could contain code which can result in unexpected behavior of the virtual machine executing them.
Of course some file types are easier to compromize than others, either due to sheer complexity or ambiguity of the specification or because they are Turing complete. However, it is impossible to guarantee that every viewer for any file type is free of defects. Anyone still remember ANSI codes for DOS, which could be embedded to text to change color but also to set macros to keyboard keys when the file was viewed ? And of course SQL injection attacks are based on formatting a text string so it will cause unexpected results, not to mention causing a buffer overflow with an overlong string.
I repeat: there are no safe file types. They all have a potential to contain malicious code, because there is no such thing as data which is not also a program. From a certain point of view, GIMP is simply a very specialized compiler...
Imagine you are a soldier of an invading army. You hear that your homeland has been nuked. There is nothing to go back to but radiactive wasteland. Will you surrender, in which case your best hope for future is to return and die in said wasteland, or will you redouble your efforts to capture as much land as you can for yourself ?
There is a reson why Cortez burned his ships.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - Adolf Hitler.
And I'm pretty sure most other succesful dictators have had similar notions. Don't attribute to Rand what she clearly didn't invent; whether this should be considered to be to her credit or discredit is another matter.