....a DHCP vuln that allows you full access to the file system just using the DHCP protocol.....
I said over the Internet! What you are talking about only works on a local network or from a malicious ISP if the user has no firewall. Some hacker in China cannot use that on my Mac.
......the developers would have made their crap work in a limited envirionment after getting calls from lusers.....
It is more likely that MS would get most of those calls.
User: I just installed your latest OS (service pack) and now programs (names a list) don't run.
MS rep: Those programs require administrator privileges. See your system administrator.
User: But it is MY computer and I am the only one that uses it!
MS rep: We have discontinued allowing users to administer their computers in order to increase security. You'll have to call the people who wrote the program. Sorry!
User hangs up angrily and, already in a bad mood wastes productive time to find and call up (named vendor).
Acrobe Systems: How maybe help you?
User: I just had called MS and they tell me it is your fault that my copy of your (names pgm) no longer runs after I upgraded to their latest secure OS.
Acrobe Systems: Oh but that is an old version of that program. You'll have to upgrade to version 9.9.9 for (names ridiculous price)
User angrily slams down the receiver calls back MS, pushes 10 buttons on phone menus, waits on hold for a half hour.
MS rep: How may I help you.
User: I just called Acrobe and they said that I have to buy an upgrade for (names price) just because I installed your new OS. How can I get my computer program to work again?
MS: That's not our problem. You'll have to take that up with the vendors of the software.
So the user shells out the cash he can't really afford and upgrades the program. Later it turns out he has to repeat this whole charade for half the programs on his computer, getting no work done that day.
That is such an old saw which sounds like a broken record. If I had the money, I'd offer $100K to the first person that can infect a standard OSX Mac over the Internet with a self-replicating, spreading malware without requiring user interaction such as entering a password. That also goes for turning such a Mac into a remotely controlled zombie. In business and schools as well as in many homes, the admin passwords could be kept away from most users.
There are uncountable Windows malwares that require nothing more than having the stock, running computer connected to the Internet. I know of no such thing for Macs. Surely there must be hackers out there who would love to be able to brag that they were the first to come up with a nasty worm/virus that hoses milions or at least thousands of unprotected Macs.
Anti virus companies, such as Symantec of course fear that if the Macs did get a huge market share, their business which depends on all the MS security lapes, would nosedive. This is why they are putting out increasing amounts of fear propaganda to try to dissuade folks from switching to Macs because they are much more secure.
.....Mac users are so used to typing in that password that if an installation ask for it the user automatically types it in.....
That assumes the Mac user knows the admin password. In a business or school environment the password could be kept only by a few administrators and in a home the parents could keep it. Everybody else is just an ordinary user and the computer is therefore safe from any attack that needs adminsistrator access.
In Windows that is much harder and often impossible to do, because so much software for mostly stupid reasons will not run correctly if the user is not an adminsitrator.
Restricting users like this would go a long way to reducing the spread of malware. Only those clueless computer users that are running as as adminsitrators could be affected if they type in their password after they have downloaded something from the Internet.
Unlike Windows, there are NO known exploits that can come over the Internet that DON'T require some action on the part of a user. If the action involves an unknown admin password, then that stops the nast stuff right then and there.
That assumes the turnip has a job. If he/she did, they wouldn't be on welfare. Besides, there are other ways of making/getting money legally or illegally that don't involve a job. How can money be gotten out of someone who is say a day laborer who gets money under the table, never paying taxes etc. or a panhander? A detective would have to follow them around 24/7 and that is expensive and is normally done only for criminals. There are also laws as to how much of someone's wages can be garnished. Someone on minimum wages or just above can't have much wages taken away from them. If society did, that person might turn to crime and in the end have to be warehoused in prison at public expense.
If a mother is on welfare or disability can they take her disability check? Also, to garnish wages they have to find the person and where they work. People like that don't stay in one place long enough for anybody but the most determined to keep up with them. When push come to shove, nobody, even the courts can't get blood out of a turnip or money out of a deadbeat.
So what difference does personal bankruptcy make to a single mother and her 8 year old kid on welfare? She is already bankrupt for practical purposes and is dependent on a government handout. Her credit score is likely negative already. What can bankruptcy do to make that worse? As I see it, such person is entirely safe from any kind of lawsuit and court judgement unless actually convicted of a crime.
So suppose an 8 year old is sued and totally ignores every shred of paper and summons sent by those idiots and then some stupid judge issues a default judgement against the kid. So what? Will they ever collect so much as one red cent from an 8 year old? Would they ever collect a red cent from a single mother on welfare? Why would such a penniless person even need bother to reply to these thugs using the legal system to oppress people? What difference does it make whether the judgment is for $1000, $10,000 to the size of the national debt? You can't get water out of a stone or blood out of a turnip. If I were in such a position of poverty, I would just let them make whatever judgement they liked.
All kinds of onerous DRM, all incompatible with each other. I can lend a book to a friend or sell it at a garage sale. How will this work with a DRM hobbled e-book? Until the publishers all get on the same page and get over their DRM paranoia, e-books will be toys that might get bought by a few wealthy gadget lovers in special stores, but not at the supermarket checkstand. I think we'll still see a lot of dead trees in the forseeable future.
....enormous number of desktops left unattended each lunch hour...
I simply put the system to sleep when I leave and then it asks for a password in order to get back in after waking. It also goes to sleep own its own after 20 min or so. I suppose on a Mac the closes thing to an attention key is the force quit combination which brings up the force quitting window to enable killing of locked up programs. As for Kiosk systems, I was able to subvert a Kiosk Mac (os7) at a museum once by turning it off and then on and holding down the shift key to prevent extensions from loading. After that it was just a regular Mac. I then rebooted it with the normal restart command and it was back to its nice friendly kiosk program.
....Colleague or other student enters the room, logs in, the login "fails"....
It is extremely difficult if not impossible to secure any computer if a person with nastyness in mind has access to it physically. Most computers can be rebooted from a CD or external HD and then then the "vulcan neck pinch" login sequence is no good either. If the perp is really bad, he'll just take you whole computer, which is easy to do with a laptop.
...it's trivial for someone to write a little app that fakes the password entry screen...
Such a thing may be possible on Windows computers, since those are insecure by design and must be used with full administrative rights because there are so many programs that will not work for restricted users. I hope MS finally fixes this in VISTA.
On Mac OSX it is possible to restrict users severely, yet still allow them to run all the programs they need. There would be no way a restricted user can get such a fake login program installed and run deliberately or ignorantly. Even a user with admin privs would have to type in a password in order to install such a program onto the system.
....Ultimately, risk management is about severity v.s. chance of occurence......
It seems that we're saying the same thing in different ways. Life is filled with risk from all sorts of hazards, natural and man caused. In terms of death and destruction all throughout human history, the deliberately man caused ones have by far exceeded all the natural calamities. Just think of the wars and acts of terror and crime everywhere today and throughout history. Man is no more civilized today than at the dawn of history. Technology just has allowed humans to be more efficient at destruction of each other, our property and the natural environment. It also has made life easier in many respects of course.
We like to think that our fancy technology have made us less vulnerable to calamities, but the opposite seems to be the case. In the old days, when a nasty storm blew in, it did NOT make the lights go out, spoil our food and prevent us from doing business for days or weeks afterwards because there was no electricity, communication and clean water.
This planet is not ours since we did not create it, but we are allowed to live here for a short time. One of the things we all ought to learn while here is to be humble and thankful to the ONE who did make it.
.....but to still misinterpret the "ctrl+alt+del" instruction.....
Why does there, on a modern computer still have to be such a funky key combination just to get into the system? Apple has it right. Just click on a cute picture next to the users name. After typing a password into the little window that appears the user is logged on. Why does it have to be more complicated? On my win2k computer it works that way, except the user has to type the login name above the password space also.
That is a big if which is most certainly not true. Most things in nature are NOT constant, but are always changing, most often in a cyclical manner. There are so many variables that can affect climate. Solar output is a big one.
Warmer oceans evaporate more water. Water vapor is a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2 simply because the specific heat of water is so high. That is why in humid Florida it stays quite warm even at night, while in California it cools off much more after dark. As it gets warmer, most plants grow better and there are more of them and CO2 gets locked up in organic matter.
That is what happened ages ago to make all the fossil fuels we are burning now. If it gets warm enough to grow things in the cold places of the planet, we can use those growing things to make fuel and eventually there will be a balance of plants taking carbon out of the air and humans putting it back. As it gets warmer, there will be more water in the air and result in changed patterns of precipitation, such as more water in desert areas.
There is evidence that the Sahara was once fruitful territory. The large amounts of oil under the barren sands of Saudi Arbia is witness that at some time in the past that part of the world had abundant life upon it.
Perhaps some day the arctic north slope climate and that of Hawaii wil be very similar. Just because the arctic gets warmer doesn't mean that the tropics will get hot enough to be uninhabitable. A warm humid atmosphere could even out world wide climate differences in the same way the oceans or even the Great Lakes mitigate temperature variations. Global warming could make the planet very different, but a very pleasant warm place for all.
.....I can live in fear everytime the winter storms come around; fear that another 1953 will wipe out all that I own (I live in the Netherlands. We know what happens when flood barriers are not up to the task)......
When it will it finally dawn on us humans that we are not in control of the forces of nature and ultimately cannot defend ourselves 100% against them. If you live below sea level, such as much of New Orleans also, you WILL get flooded at some point. That is a chance you take. Someone who lives near an earthquake fault takes a chance that they may lose all they own and/or their life. Someone who lives in a forest may have to flee a raging inferno fire, such as we had to do three years ago when almost 500,000 acres of forest land went up in smoke.
Every time you get in a car, bus, airplane or turn on the lights in your house, YOU are contributing to this supposed problem. The big corporations sell you the cars, run the air and bus lines and operate the generators that enable the light to come on when you flip the switch. Without you and millions like you, the big eeevil corprations would not exist for you to shift the blame off onto.
...."PROVE to me that there's an icy patch on the highway up ahead!"....
That doesn't really need to be proved, but you have to know the nature of the road ahead, not whether it has ice in a certain spot. If the ice patch is on a straight piece of road, such as a bridge, then a higher speed will actually make it less dangerous because the high intertia of the fast moving car far exceeds the momentary loss of friction of the tires on the ice. It therefore tends to just go in a straight line in such a short time the driver may not even have realized that there was an ice patch. So in your analogy you would also have to know whether the ice patch is on a curved section of the road, where the car would go straight off the road into the ditch. If you have never traveled that particular road before, you would not know whether there was a curve or the road is straight.
Nobody has traveled the road of the future climate before, so of course nobody knows where the climate is really headed long term. Most things in nature are cyclical and so it is highly likely, although not certain that climate also goes in cycles.
....What matters is a consensus among reputable, peer-reviewed scientists....
Yes and that consensus resisted for 50 years the measured experimental fact that light takes a finite amount of time to travel, rather than being instantneous. Finally the 'respected peer reviewed scientists' accepted the idea that light had a finite constant velocity. Now they are resisting increasing evidence that the velocity is not constant. Show me ONE scientific journal or texbook that does not somwhere therein contain the phrase 'it is believed' or 'we assume' or any number of such implied faith statements.
Of course scientists believe in their religion just as others believe in theirs. Unlike other faiths normally classed as "religious", scientists are able to use computers and mathematics to bolster their faith and somehow try to convince the rest of us that because they get a boost of their faith from a computer printout or display, their faith is not as "subjective" as other faiths. As you and others here have pointed out, computer models are based on "assumptions" which is a code word for nothing more than what other religions call faith or belief. A very basic assumption or belief of most "reputable peer reviewed" scientists is that there is no God and there are no realities beyond what they can measure or grasp with their human intellect and reasoning. Nobody KNOWS for sure that this assumption is true or not, it is just believed like any other religion's basic tenets. Any scientist who doubts this basic article of faith is by definition NOT a "reputable peer reviewed" scientist.
So choose whether you want to believe in the Johnny come lately religion of science or one of the older ones, some of them as old as human civilization itself. Everybody is religious, even atheists. The difference is that the religion of science is not called a religion and so it is OK to teach its faith and beliefs in public schools. Humans are religious creatures with an urge to worship someone or something outside of ourselves including other humans, a trait that makes us fundamentally different than animals.
.... an adaptive grammar parser can work starting with dictionaries consisting of only a handful of words....
I don't think that would work too well by itself since in human language there are many idioms, which in order to translate correctly need to have their meaning understood. I could give you many between English and German since I know both quite well.
Here is are two examples:
German: Da stehn einem ja die Haar' zu Berge" English literal: "There stand one yes the hairs to mountain" English meaning: "one having a hair raising experience"
German: "Gleich geht's los" English literal: Equal goes it loose" English meaning: It'll start shortly" (such as a race or game)
Your translation computer would have to store things like this and "know" when to use them.
Correct spelling is not nearly as important to understanding as is correct word order and grammar. the following paragraph illustrates this:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
So a spell checker is nice, but knowing to choose the right words and sentence structures is important to communications. A computer, is not much help here, since a computer doesn't "understand meaning".
....Communication is more so, only without the advantage of being able to be explicitly incorrect in the same way one can be with math.....
Most math is deterministc and it therefore excels in describing nature's deterministic processes very well. Computers, are deterministic machines, which is why they are so good at math and many people are lousy. Humans and their communications are not deterministic. That's why nobody has yet come up with a foolproof stock market prediction software, human language translation systems, or the ability to program a computer in any natural human language. Another big reason is that we have not yet managed to quantify "meaning" in a way such that a computer can "understand" what we are trying to get it to do. In a computer "language" each word or symbol can have only ONE value or action, each utilmately translated into a string of ones and zeros.
Computers are tools in the same way saws and hammers are. It takes a skilled human to use the latter to build even a chicken coop and the former to write a good story or essay. Computers with their various language software helps can let a skilled writer communicate more easily in the same way that a power saw and pneumatic nailing tool allows a skilled carpenter to build something faster than he could with simple hand tools. A poor writer will not communicate as well even though the work may be passable at some level.
In the end it is still humans that communicate with each other not computers, fax machines or phones. Like any life skill, good communication takes practice. This practice is largely supplanted for many kids these days by all sorts of useless electronic entertainments. Our kids had to keep a daily written Journal on the computer of their activities and things they learned. At regular intervals they had to read this to their parents and explain what they meant. If their writing was not precise, the needed to re-write that part in complete sentences to make its meaning clear.
.....god's punishment for debauchery in New Orleans....
What you won't hear anywhere is that the week of the hurricane New Orleans was to observe "Southern Decadence Day" with 100,000 homosexuals gathering there to commit unspeakable acts in public. Previous events were photographed and sent to the mayor and police officials but they did not care. They had their own lust: The $100,000,000 the event brings in. Gambling casinos took a hit on the coast as this is where the eye of the storm hit.
.....not adress the issue at hand, natural disasters.....
Looked at superficially, most people think that what happened in New Orleans was a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina. However, the events we saw on or TV screens there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster. In a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild what was ruined by wind and water. Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicles, as if they were suppressing Al Quaida terrorists in Iraq. The story was not only about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting. This was not a natural disaster, but a man-made disaster. The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, but man-made disaster is the welfare state. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. What we saw on TV is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country. When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. We work together to rescue people in danger, and spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. We remember the response of New Yorkers to September 11. What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Quote from Washington Times: "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on." 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plans for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails, but instead many of them were let loose. There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves. While the Katrina was yet far out in the Gulf, the city officials were specifically warned be the Federal Government that a total evacuation of the city might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters. What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men. Criminals and welfare parasites don't worry about saving their houses and property, because they don't own any. They don't worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living. They have never had such concerns. Neither do they worry about crime and looting because living off of the productivity of others is a way of life for them. The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. This is the story that is not reported in the mass media, because for many it is politically incorrect.
.....even the dumbest user is better at sorting out new information...
It is not a question of dumbness, at least it should not be. Ordinary users in an enterprise or school should not be allowed to install and run any code that was not installed by the administration which presumeably knows more than most users. In those environments, who needs a cool new screensaver anyway? Even in a home, parents can keep the admin status to themselves and thereby limit kids from screwing up the computer every week or getting a summons from the *aa.
Slashdot Mirror
....a DHCP vuln that allows you full access to the file system just using the DHCP protocol.....
I said over the Internet! What you are talking about only works on a local network or from a malicious ISP if the user has no firewall. Some hacker in China cannot use that on my Mac.
......the developers would have made their crap work in a limited envirionment after getting calls from lusers .....
It is more likely that MS would get most of those calls.
User: I just installed your latest OS (service pack) and now programs (names a list) don't run.
MS rep: Those programs require administrator privileges. See your system administrator.
User: But it is MY computer and I am the only one that uses it!
MS rep: We have discontinued allowing users to administer their computers in order to increase security. You'll have to call the people who wrote the program. Sorry!
User hangs up angrily and, already in a bad mood wastes productive time to find and call up (named vendor).
Acrobe Systems: How maybe help you?
User: I just had called MS and they tell me it is your fault that my copy of your (names pgm) no longer runs after I upgraded to their latest secure OS.
Acrobe Systems: Oh but that is an old version of that program. You'll have to upgrade to version 9.9.9 for (names ridiculous price)
User angrily slams down the receiver calls back MS, pushes 10 buttons on phone menus, waits on hold for a half hour.
MS rep: How may I help you.
User: I just called Acrobe and they said that I have to buy an upgrade for (names price) just because I installed your new OS. How can I get my computer program to work again?
MS: That's not our problem. You'll have to take that up with the vendors of the software.
So the user shells out the cash he can't really afford and upgrades the program. Later it turns out he has to repeat this whole charade for half the programs on his computer, getting no work done that day.
....With a 3% market share,.....
That is such an old saw which sounds like a broken record. If I had the money, I'd offer $100K to the first person that can infect a standard OSX Mac over the Internet with a self-replicating, spreading malware without requiring user interaction such as entering a password. That also goes for turning such a Mac into a remotely controlled zombie. In business and schools as well as in many homes, the admin passwords could be kept away from most users.
There are uncountable Windows malwares that require nothing more than having the stock, running computer connected to the Internet. I know of no such thing for Macs. Surely there must be hackers out there who would love to be able to brag that they were the first to come up with a nasty worm/virus that hoses milions or at least thousands of unprotected Macs.
Anti virus companies, such as Symantec of course fear that if the Macs did get a huge market share, their business which depends on all the MS security lapes, would nosedive. This is why they are putting out increasing amounts of fear propaganda to try to dissuade folks from switching to Macs because they are much more secure.
.....Mac users are so used to typing in that password that if an installation ask for it the user automatically types it in.....
That assumes the Mac user knows the admin password. In a business or school environment the password could be kept only by a few administrators and in a home the parents could keep it. Everybody else is just an ordinary user and the computer is therefore safe from any attack that needs adminsistrator access.
In Windows that is much harder and often impossible to do, because so much software for mostly stupid reasons will not run correctly if the user is not an adminsitrator.
Restricting users like this would go a long way to reducing the spread of malware. Only those clueless computer users that are running as as adminsitrators could be affected if they type in their password after they have downloaded something from the Internet.
Unlike Windows, there are NO known exploits that can come over the Internet that DON'T require some action on the part of a user. If the action involves an unknown admin password, then that stops the nast stuff right then and there.
...By garnishing wages....
That assumes the turnip has a job. If he/she did, they wouldn't be on welfare. Besides, there are other ways of making/getting money legally or illegally that don't involve a job. How can money be gotten out of someone who is say a day laborer who gets money under the table, never paying taxes etc. or a panhander? A detective would have to follow them around 24/7 and that is expensive and is normally done only for criminals. There are also laws as to how much of someone's wages can be garnished. Someone on minimum wages or just above can't have much wages taken away from them. If society did, that person might turn to crime and in the end have to be warehoused in prison at public expense.
....until they start garnishing future wages....
If a mother is on welfare or disability can they take her disability check? Also, to garnish wages they have to find the person and where they work. People like that don't stay in one place long enough for anybody but the most determined to keep up with them. When push come to shove, nobody, even the courts can't get blood out of a turnip or money out of a deadbeat.
......That is, it will be almost pointless to file since you'll still have to pay off everything.....
How can a mother on welfare or her eight year old pay if they have nothing? How do you get blood out of a turnip? We don't have debters prisons.
...or suffering a personal bankcrupcy.....
So what difference does personal bankruptcy make to a single mother and her 8 year old kid on welfare? She is already bankrupt for practical purposes and is dependent on a government handout. Her credit score is likely negative already. What can bankruptcy do to make that worse? As I see it, such person is entirely safe from any kind of lawsuit and court judgement unless actually convicted of a crime.
....It's called: Sue children.....
So suppose an 8 year old is sued and totally ignores every shred of paper and summons sent by those idiots and then some stupid judge issues a default judgement against the kid. So what? Will they ever collect so much as one red cent from an 8 year old? Would they ever collect a red cent from a single mother on welfare? Why would such a penniless person even need bother to reply to these thugs using the legal system to oppress people? What difference does it make whether the judgment is for $1000, $10,000 to the size of the national debt? You can't get water out of a stone or blood out of a turnip. If I were in such a position of poverty, I would just let them make whatever judgement they liked.
...Imagine....
All kinds of onerous DRM, all incompatible with each other. I can lend a book to a friend or sell it at a garage sale. How will this work with a DRM hobbled e-book? Until the publishers all get on the same page and get over their DRM paranoia, e-books will be toys that might get bought by a few wealthy gadget lovers in special stores, but not at the supermarket checkstand. I think we'll still see a lot of dead trees in the forseeable future.
....enormous number of desktops left unattended each lunch hour...
I simply put the system to sleep when I leave and then it asks for a password in order to get back in after waking. It also goes to sleep own its own after 20 min or so. I suppose on a Mac the closes thing to an attention key is the force quit combination which brings up the force quitting window to enable killing of locked up programs. As for Kiosk systems, I was able to subvert a Kiosk Mac (os7) at a museum once by turning it off and then on and holding down the shift key to prevent extensions from loading. After that it was just a regular Mac. I then rebooted it with the normal restart command and it was back to its nice friendly kiosk program.
....Colleague or other student enters the room, logs in, the login "fails"....
It is extremely difficult if not impossible to secure any computer if a person with nastyness in mind has access to it physically. Most computers can be rebooted from a CD or external HD and then then the "vulcan neck pinch" login sequence is no good either. If the perp is really bad, he'll just take you whole computer, which is easy to do with a laptop.
...it's trivial for someone to write a little app that fakes the password entry screen...
Such a thing may be possible on Windows computers, since those are insecure by design and must be used with full administrative rights because there are so many programs that will not work for restricted users. I hope MS finally fixes this in VISTA.
On Mac OSX it is possible to restrict users severely, yet still allow them to run all the programs they need. There would be no way a restricted user can get such a fake login program installed and run deliberately or ignorantly. Even a user with admin privs would have to type in a password in order to install such a program onto the system.
....Ultimately, risk management is about severity v.s. chance of occurence......
It seems that we're saying the same thing in different ways. Life is filled with risk from all sorts of hazards, natural and man caused. In terms of death and destruction all throughout human history, the deliberately man caused ones have by far exceeded all the natural calamities. Just think of the wars and acts of terror and crime everywhere today and throughout history. Man is no more civilized today than at the dawn of history. Technology just has allowed humans to be more efficient at destruction of each other, our property and the natural environment. It also has made life easier in many respects of course.
We like to think that our fancy technology have made us less vulnerable to calamities, but the opposite seems to be the case. In the old days, when a nasty storm blew in, it did NOT make the lights go out, spoil our food and prevent us from doing business for days or weeks afterwards because there was no electricity, communication and clean water.
This planet is not ours since we did not create it, but we are allowed to live here for a short time. One of the things we all ought to learn while here is to be humble and thankful to the ONE who did make it.
.....but to still misinterpret the "ctrl+alt+del" instruction.....
Why does there, on a modern computer still have to be such a funky key combination just to get into the system? Apple has it right. Just click on a cute picture next to the users name. After typing a password into the little window that appears the user is logged on. Why does it have to be more complicated? On my win2k computer it works that way, except the user has to type the login name above the password space also.
.....if all other factors are held constant.....
That is a big if which is most certainly not true. Most things in nature are NOT constant, but are always changing, most often in a cyclical manner. There are so many variables that can affect climate. Solar output is a big one.
Warmer oceans evaporate more water. Water vapor is a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2 simply because the specific heat of water is so high. That is why in humid Florida it stays quite warm even at night, while in California it cools off much more after dark. As it gets warmer, most plants grow better and there are more of them and CO2 gets locked up in organic matter.
That is what happened ages ago to make all the fossil fuels we are burning now. If it gets warm enough to grow things in the cold places of the planet, we can use those growing things to make fuel and eventually there will be a balance of plants taking carbon out of the air and humans putting it back. As it gets warmer, there will be more water in the air and result in changed patterns of precipitation, such as more water in desert areas.
There is evidence that the Sahara was once fruitful territory. The large amounts of oil under the barren sands of Saudi Arbia is witness that at some time in the past that part of the world had abundant life upon it.
Perhaps some day the arctic north slope climate and that of Hawaii wil be very similar. Just because the arctic gets warmer doesn't mean that the tropics will get hot enough to be uninhabitable. A warm humid atmosphere could even out world wide climate differences in the same way the oceans or even the Great Lakes mitigate temperature variations. Global warming could make the planet very different, but a very pleasant warm place for all.
.....I can live in fear everytime the winter storms come around; fear that another 1953 will wipe out all that I own (I live in the Netherlands. We know what happens when flood barriers are not up to the task)......
When it will it finally dawn on us humans that we are not in control of the forces of nature and ultimately cannot defend ourselves 100% against them. If you live below sea level, such as much of New Orleans also, you WILL get flooded at some point. That is a chance you take. Someone who lives near an earthquake fault takes a chance that they may lose all they own and/or their life. Someone who lives in a forest may have to flee a raging inferno fire, such as we had to do three years ago when almost 500,000 acres of forest land went up in smoke.
Every time you get in a car, bus, airplane or turn on the lights in your house, YOU are contributing to this supposed problem. The big corporations sell you the cars, run the air and bus lines and operate the generators that enable the light to come on when you flip the switch. Without you and millions like you, the big eeevil corprations would not exist for you to shift the blame off onto.
...."PROVE to me that there's an icy patch on the highway up ahead!"....
That doesn't really need to be proved, but you have to know the nature of the road ahead, not whether it has ice in a certain spot. If the ice patch is on a straight piece of road, such as a bridge, then a higher speed will actually make it less dangerous because the high intertia of the fast moving car far exceeds the momentary loss of friction of the tires on the ice. It therefore tends to just go in a straight line in such a short time the driver may not even have realized that there was an ice patch. So in your analogy you would also have to know whether the ice patch is on a curved section of the road, where the car would go straight off the road into the ditch. If you have never traveled that particular road before, you would not know whether there was a curve or the road is straight.
Nobody has traveled the road of the future climate before, so of course nobody knows where the climate is really headed long term. Most things in nature are cyclical and so it is highly likely, although not certain that climate also goes in cycles.
....What matters is a consensus among reputable, peer-reviewed scientists....
Yes and that consensus resisted for 50 years the measured experimental fact that light takes a finite amount of time to travel, rather than being instantneous. Finally the 'respected peer reviewed scientists' accepted the idea that light had a finite constant velocity. Now they are resisting increasing evidence that the velocity is not constant. Show me ONE scientific journal or texbook that does not somwhere therein contain the phrase 'it is believed' or 'we assume' or any number of such implied faith statements.
Of course scientists believe in their religion just as others believe in theirs. Unlike other faiths normally classed as "religious", scientists are able to use computers and mathematics to bolster their faith and somehow try to convince the rest of us that because they get a boost of their faith from a computer printout or display, their faith is not as "subjective" as other faiths. As you and others here have pointed out, computer models are based on "assumptions" which is a code word for nothing more than what other religions call faith or belief. A very basic assumption or belief of most "reputable peer reviewed" scientists is that there is no God and there are no realities beyond what they can measure or grasp with their human intellect and reasoning. Nobody KNOWS for sure that this assumption is true or not, it is just believed like any other religion's basic tenets. Any scientist who doubts this basic article of faith is by definition NOT a "reputable peer reviewed" scientist.
So choose whether you want to believe in the Johnny come lately religion of science or one of the older ones, some of them as old as human civilization itself. Everybody is religious, even atheists. The difference is that the religion of science is not called a religion and so it is OK to teach its faith and beliefs in public schools. Humans are religious creatures with an urge to worship someone or something outside of ourselves including other humans, a trait that makes us fundamentally different than animals.
.... an adaptive grammar parser can work starting with dictionaries consisting of only a handful of words....
I don't think that would work too well by itself since in human language there are many idioms, which in order to translate correctly need to have their meaning understood. I could give you many between English and German since I know both quite well.
Here is are two examples:
German: Da stehn einem ja die Haar' zu Berge"
English literal: "There stand one yes the hairs to mountain"
English meaning: "one having a hair raising experience"
German: "Gleich geht's los"
English literal: Equal goes it loose"
English meaning: It'll start shortly" (such as a race or game)
Your translation computer would have to store things like this and "know" when to use them.
....a spelling error....
Correct spelling is not nearly as important to understanding as is correct word order and grammar. the following paragraph illustrates this:
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt!
So a spell checker is nice, but knowing to choose the right words and sentence structures is important to communications. A computer, is not much help here, since a computer doesn't "understand meaning".
....Communication is more so, only without the advantage of being able to be explicitly incorrect in the same way one can be with math.....
Most math is deterministc and it therefore excels in describing nature's deterministic processes very well. Computers, are deterministic machines, which is why they are so good at math and many people are lousy. Humans and their communications are not deterministic. That's why nobody has yet come up with a foolproof stock market prediction software, human language translation systems, or the ability to program a computer in any natural human language. Another big reason is that we have not yet managed to quantify "meaning" in a way such that a computer can "understand" what we are trying to get it to do. In a computer "language" each word or symbol can have only ONE value or action, each utilmately translated into a string of ones and zeros.
Computers are tools in the same way saws and hammers are. It takes a skilled human to use the latter to build even a chicken coop and the former to write a good story or essay. Computers with their various language software helps can let a skilled writer communicate more easily in the same way that a power saw and pneumatic nailing tool allows a skilled carpenter to build something faster than he could with simple hand tools. A poor writer will not communicate as well even though the work may be passable at some level.
In the end it is still humans that communicate with each other not computers, fax machines or phones. Like any life skill, good communication takes practice. This practice is largely supplanted for many kids these days by all sorts of useless electronic entertainments. Our kids had to keep a daily written Journal on the computer of their activities and things they learned. At regular intervals they had to read this to their parents and explain what they meant. If their writing was not precise, the needed to re-write that part in complete sentences to make its meaning clear.
.....god's punishment for debauchery in New Orleans....
What you won't hear anywhere is that the week of the hurricane New Orleans was to observe "Southern Decadence Day" with 100,000 homosexuals gathering there to commit unspeakable acts in public.
Previous events were photographed and sent to the mayor and police officials but they did not care. They had their own lust: The $100,000,000 the event brings in. Gambling casinos took a hit on the coast as this is where the eye of the storm hit.
.....not adress the issue at hand, natural disasters.....
Looked at superficially, most people think that what happened in New Orleans was a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina.
However, the events we saw on or TV screens there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
In a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild what was ruined by wind and water.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicles, as if they were suppressing Al Quaida terrorists in Iraq. The story was not only about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting. This was not a natural disaster, but a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, but man-made disaster is the welfare state.
People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. What we saw on TV is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. We work together to rescue people in danger, and spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. We remember the response of New Yorkers to September 11.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction?
Quote from Washington Times: "Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on."
75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plans for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails, but instead many of them were let loose.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
While the Katrina was yet far out in the Gulf, the city officials were specifically warned be the Federal Government that a total evacuation of the city might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men. Criminals and welfare parasites don't worry about saving their houses and property, because they don't own any. They don't worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living. They have never had such concerns. Neither do they worry about crime and looting because living off of the productivity of others is a way of life for them.
The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. This is the story that is not reported in the mass media, because for many it is politically incorrect.
.....even the dumbest user is better at sorting out new information...
It is not a question of dumbness, at least it should not be. Ordinary users in an enterprise or school should not be allowed to install and run any code that was not installed by the administration which presumeably knows more than most users. In those environments, who needs a cool new screensaver anyway? Even in a home, parents can keep the admin status to themselves and thereby limit kids from screwing up the computer every week or getting a summons from the *aa.