Will someone dig Gould's book out and beat this idiot about the head with it? It's an fascinating read of many previous attempts by people who agendas or merely some naivete to grind to trivially quantify intelligence.
The news has been reporting for the last 14 hours (at least) that the four major credit cards are all affected.
News other than./, and quite a few of them are equating this breach with a 'Mastercard breach', which I why I added this comment here.
Also, this has been known since May 22, but everyone was keeping it quiet.
And given the current lack of comments from everyone except Mastercard, they are still keeping quiet. Most of the creditcard gateway product companies seem... overly disinterested in security. I expect this will prompt a long overdue audit of their collective security and turn up a bunch of other unrealised breaches.
B>
But that leaves a little under 3/4 who aren't mastercard branded. If it was a typical third-party payments system then it is likely that they handled other types of credit cards, just that those companies havent commented yet.
Which is why you no longer have a true DOS enviroment... in case you haven't noticed, 2000 on up no longer uses DOS as it's initial bootloader. It's gone, and it's been gone for a bit.
For people who aren't home computer weenies, *no* NT has ever had a 'DOS bootloader' and there is no logical progression from the DOS-shell type windows, to the DOS-extention type windows to NT apart from the shifting focus of microsoft marketing.
For reasons known only to themselves and their therapists, many of the students on our campus forward all their official mail to Hotmail accounts. This, despite the fact that we have a very nice webmail service that has great availabiliy, will never throw away important information, etc etc.
Inevitably, these same students come whining to us that their mail 'isn't getting through', typically because they aren't capable of looking in the junk mail area and certainly aren't capable of the four mouse clicks required to ensure mail to their student email address isn't marked by hotmail as spam.
This tool should be a useful way of showing how much of our mail is actually being thrown away by Hotmail and could provide some useful evidence to preventing any more of these misguided fools sending their important email to hotmail.
Had they merely shown the hole existed and confirmed it by logging in and out, that would have probably had them in less trouble.
And if they had done this they would be
just as liable for unauthorised access to systems and
would not have shown that they could use this access to grab everyone's social security numbers. Which is the whole point.
The only way to demonstrate that you can download social security numbers is by downloading social security numbers. I should point out explictly that I'm not defending these kids. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the real criminals (as opposed to these petty criminals) are the people who fail to protect such information. Moral criminals, anyway, since the US lacks data protection laws of any significance.
In a civilised country where personal data was actually protected and where personal responsibility existed, such an event would have generated very pointed questions of the people who failed to protect vital personal information for hundreds or thousand of students.
The focus on sound bites denouncing petty criminals makes a convenient smokescreen to avoid them though.
Do you feel that it's a bit of a stretch to look at the rise of interactive computing and computing hobbyists? They are where the personal computer revolution had its roots and, at least at MIT, were active during the 60s. See Levy.
It is a bit of a stretch to claim that a history of personal computing should start from the first day a customer got a personal computer.
Yes, it is more than what it is in Panther. That's what 'updated' generally means. Unlike the other Core technologies in Tiger though, CoreAudio is not completely new. The SDKs for dealing with applications and Audio Units have been around for quite a while now. That's why all the sound software manufacturers are supporting AUs with such gusto.
Unless you want to claim that all the documentation on Core Audio dating from early 2004 was actually about tiger?
The Core Audio functionality is already presnt in older OS X, see all the MIDI and Audio Unit handling functionality we're all using quite happily in 10.3. Perhaps the original poster meant Core Image and Core Video.
The 10GHz speed is how fast it can turn electrons into photons, but the chip is still primarily electron-based, so what is the real performance gain? They don't tell you because it probably isn't any yet.
The benefit comes about when you can use this technology to provide high-speed capacitance-free interconnections between chips or between modules on the same chip. As chips get faster, it becomes extremely difficult to push data at this rate along long traces. One consequence of this is the push to put a couple of levels of cache on the same die as a processor with the attendant huge price jumps. If the latency of optical translation was sufficiently small, this would allow caches to be moved onto a second die millimetres away!
Most people don't have a terribly realistic view of how they look. This is highlighted by their reactions to amateur home videos. "oh! I look terrible in that". Making people look attractive and not awkward in the video medium is extremely difficult.
So, I'd imagine this technology isn't going to be nearly as important as the technology to make various automatic subtle changes to a person so that their facial features and expressions look attractive, graceful, etc but are still recognisable both to themselves and, less importantly, to other people.
This reminds me of the time I tested the security of the passwords in a Computer Science departmental machine used by the staff. I was a little surprised that the other unix administrator's password was "Melinda". When confronted with this, his defence was "But it's not in the dictionary!".
While some of the basics might be getting through, the password education process is missing a few subtleties. Things like "avoid anything obviously linked to you" and so forth. Of course, adding these sorts of things adds the very real risk of informational overload on the part of the people who are most vulnerable.
I genuinely believe that the majority of computer users out there just aren't going to have the dexterity with words and letters to make typing such a password easy. If it's going to take you a whole minute to type with your lips moving as you pronounce every word, lots of other problems come up. This article isn't talking about the people who already use secure passwords.
A better solution is probably to use pass phrases rather than passwords. This allows people to type things directly from memory and gives you at least a fighting chance that they'll do it in a reasonable time. Modern hashes like MD5 don't care about length, either.
I wonder whether this was put together taking into account the recent, varyingly successful, lawsuits against earth-bound adventure tourism operators who provided white water rafting and rock climbing and who, despite all the no-liability clauses in their paperwork, manage to surprise the world by killing their customers periodically?
Given that at least some of those lawsuits were successful (if memory serves), one wonders how much value escape-from-liability contracts really have, unless the US signs a bill similar to the no-lawsuits-of-fast-food-providers into law. Even then, they'd still be taunted by various international courts.
Science' is not just a "magazine." It is a peer-reviewed journal, and one of the most prestigious in the natural sciences. And when I mentioned "cosmology" I am referring to what Nobel prize-winning astrophysicists mean when they say cosmology.
I know exactly what 'Science' is, but I would suggest you try reading a copy. The front third is a magazine, the next third is a good, albeit overgeneral, peer reviewed journal, and the last third is advertising of one shape or another.
As far as cosmology goes, presumably you feel there was no such thing until someone had won a Nobel Prize on it? You seem to be overawed by fame.
If I go to major research universities and see faculty publishing articles in major peer-reviewed journals, presenting at major conferences of scientific societies, and they call themselves scientists, and other people in related fields call them scientists, its pretty clear to me that there is a very good chance they are doing science, whether they qualify or not in your oh-so-enlightened opinion.
So your definition of doing science is "If you say you are doing science, and other people say you are doing science, then you must be doing science". Have you tried actually thinking about anything other than a consensus of famous people in terms of definition, or do you feel that this is sufficient?
Because they put the word 'reveal' in a title doesn't somehow banish them from the realm of science. Nor does the presence of a certain number of crackpots on the fringes demote a field: after all, the crackpots are almost always attracted to the most substantial fields. All sorts of crazy folks want to pull down Einstein and square the circle, not because he was wrong but because he was right.
So you don't feel that adding words without justification to a description of your work takes one outside the borders of science. How interesting. Is there anything which can take people outside the borders of science in your opinion?
Actually, 'science' isn't a field. You keep making this mistake. Even within a famous field that you're completely awestruck over and in which famous people have received famous accolades and been published in famous journals and peer reviewed by famous peers, you can have things which are not science. You appear to believe that once a certain critical mass of 'famous' builds up, that it's science all the way.
Einstein wasn't 'right'. If he had been right, there wouldn't have been two different relativities, nor would there be a conflict with quantum mechanics on small scales. I don't expect you to be able to grasp that 'not right' is not the same as 'a crackpot'.
Why don't you sit down and try to describe what 'science' is without resorting to the concept of 'famous'.
So do you think astrophysics is a science? Do you believe string theory and cosmology to be scientific?
I don't think anything in any of these fields is necessarily scientific merely because it has been assigned to these fields. Elephants standing on tortoises is 'cosmology'. Being scientific is rather more than being on a fashionable subject.
How about psychology? Archaeology? Physical anthropology?
See above. Anyone who believes than an entire field can be considered 'scientific' without further judgement is naive or possibly deluded. Some fields have a smaller proportion of science than others, however.
Do you believe that modern geneticists studying the relation between present-day species by sequencing DNA cannot say anything scientific about the origin of the DNA sequences?
The construct 'say anything scientific' is interesting. Surely science is a process and a philosophy? Do you mean 'say anything that is the result or outcome of science' ? Certainly, the rationalisation of various observations is nice, but I would certainly call into question people who claim to be definitive about long-past events based on some often-tweaked current theories happening to coincinde with some vaguely related measurements.
So when I open this week's issue of Science, and on p. 1618, I see an article discussing "Worldwide phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication" are these people doing science, or not?
The word 'reveals' alone puts this into the category of sensationalism. 'suggests' would have been more acceptable. You have to learn to be less naive. You can't state that everything in field X is science, just as you can't believe that all the steps and studies described in a magazine called 'Science' are science.
Your definition of proof simply dodges any sane definition of proof.
After all, why should two millennia of logicians be able to stand against your mighty assertions.
Things fall down, always have, always will as long there is a down, because there is a gravity field with gravitons merrily telling mass particles that there is other mass around.
Aren't gravitons so last year. Perhaps you should have put a little more effort into an appopriate theory de jour?
As for invisible matter: no one is forcing me or IMAX theaters to sotp talk about visible matter. It's a theory worked out by people who are trying to understand how stuff works, and they may well change their mind sometime in the future, and they will happily share their own doubts about it. It's not a holy book thing.
You appear to have some comprehension difficulties here. Are you saying that this is just working hypothesis? that maybe there aren't gravitons? IMAX has nothing to do with any of this. This is purely about people who say things like 'gravity can be proven'.
Newton's laws of motion were an approximation good for speeds well below that of light, and are fully acceptable in most contexts, other than being simpler.
Had you bothered to read my posts, you may in fact have stumbled across thet fact that this is precisely what I said. If you want to argue with me, repeating my own statements with added emphasis isn't a very effective way of doing it.
You are looking for a final solution to all physics, well there is none and probably there will never be in any foreseeable future.
In fact a large body of the world's theoretical physicists are engaged on this very problem. Since, as I've pointed out, I'm quite capable of recognising where these approximate laws so and don't apply, I feel no personal desire to go chasing GUTs.
Evolution has been observed countless times in science. Penicillin does not work anymore because bacteria have evolved on a worldwide scale. Giant crabs have taken over the Norwegian seabed replacing the previous sea fauna. 16% of humans in northern Europe have a gene that was selected by the black death and gives HIV immunity, before the black death it was just 1 human over 20,000
And every one of these examples, while lovely in itself, singularly fails to leap out and demonstrate conclusively that it's the source of all the speciation and variability we see today. 'Evolution' is really a huge pool of competing theories, which cannot all be true. Why are you so desperately certain that the current view contains all the major elements?
I'm fed up with this bullshit about evolution being "not proven". It is proven and is solid like a T-34 shell. As in every branch of science it's a large patchwork, it may require refining, adjustments, interpretations, contributions,
It's proven and solid but doesn't quite work, and needs to be modified and fiddled around with. You certainly have a strange definition of proof and solidity.
but there is no way the world was created from a space fart by some nutty long-bearded prick. Dammit, genetic algorithms are regularly used in mathematics! What other proof do you morons need to understand that it works?
I personally think that the creationist view is ridiculous. I've already pointed this out in several posts. There's always a chance that the word was sneezed out of the left nostril of the great Arkleseizure, but it's vanishingly unlikely. As far as genetic algorithms go, you shouldn't be so ready to take Computer Science analogies literally. They've got about as much relevance to any real system as Neural Networks.
And I'm puzzled why the creationist nuts don't use the most obvious argument against evolution: Americans are getting dumber and dumber.
From the knee-jerk, frothing-at-the-mouth attacks on myself, someone who clearly holds science in sufficient regard to be aware of its history and culture, merely because I point out some of its flaws, I'd say that you're doing a great job of presenting evidence for this.
But this is not about whether evolution is 'true' or 'false', whatever those happen to mean, particularly not faced with the vast plurality of inconsistent evolutionary theories. This discussion is about whether the various things that have led to the Evolution-Theory-Pool are scientific.
The answer to this is, sadly, only in a fringe sense, and only because the various people concerned with defining science have felt sorry for them and weakened appropriate definitions in order to not exclude them. Popper, towards the end of his life is a good example of this.
Or perhaps arbitrarily defined. Regardless, it's a great reason to deny the statement you made earlier without having to be insane.
Alchemy was quite common pre-chemistry. The assumptions of alchemy were wrong, but chemistry would probably never have been discovered if alchemy had not been dabbled with.
That was indeed what I had planned to get across by my descriptions of it as having a millenia-old basis.
I say that Newton would be a creationist because he was extremely religious, and rather significantly conservative. Creationism would appeal to him significantly. (Among other things, I've read that Newton was very proud, on his deathbed, to have died a virgin.)
Creationism doesn't spring out of being very religious, it springs out of being an idiot and seeking some way to avoid having to think for yourself. Newton himself was sufficently objective about religion to look at the evolution of bible fragments over time and with copying errors. That the Word of God could be adulterated was unheard of.
As far as conservative goes, you feel his turning science on its head, or having voluminous theologically reactionary writings that woudl have gotten him dismissed from Cambridge to be conservative? How could he possibly have escaped such a label?
Yes, I am going to have to insist that anyone denying that "unsupported things will generally fall down" is insane.
Sure, if they're being restricted to 'On Earth'. What about people who think that the Earth is a special case, such as any hypothetical space-dwelling humans? Lots of scientific stupidy comes about because people don't realise they're restricting their thinking to some strictly limited part of reality.
Much of what Newton wrote about was, in fact, stupid bullshit. His Physics have endured because they're "Close enough" for most real world situations. Einstein's relativity replaced most of Newton's principles when accuracy is necessary.
If you look at the new equations, you'll see that 'corrected' is a much more helpful term than 'replaced'. It isn't as much a condition of 'accuracy' as one of 'when the essential assumptions are violated'. Gravitational gradients, high velocities and so forth.
As far as Newton's other works, his Optics was, for the large part, very significant, but it was primarily his alchemy that people regard with scorn today. Perhaps you might want to remind yourslef that he didn't invent alchemy out of nothing becuase he was insane, instead he merely failed to break away from the preexisting philosophical frameworks that had existed for (1.8ish) millennia. In all fairness, there was little in Newton's world of observation and experiment that would have prompted him to break away and take a new approach to chemistry. It was several centuries before any significant progress was made towards modern Chemistry.
Newton was exactly the sort of person who would be a creationist today, so being a creationist doesn't mean being wrong about all things.
This is extremely unfair. Newton is more widely regarded as one of those who were most involved in the distinction between science method of seeking knowledge, and science as a branch of theological phenomenon. The father of the approach 'This is how it works. We don't know why and we don't care why, but we can show it works like this.' In the past, it was unthinkable to have mysterious action at a distance and so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Will someone dig Gould's book out and beat this idiot about the head with it? It's an fascinating read of many previous attempts by people who agendas or merely some naivete to grind to trivially quantify intelligence.
News other than ./, and quite a few of them are equating this breach with a 'Mastercard breach', which I why I added this comment here.
And given the current lack of comments from everyone except Mastercard, they are still keeping quiet. Most of the creditcard gateway product companies seem... overly disinterested in security. I expect this will prompt a long overdue audit of their collective security and turn up a bunch of other unrealised breaches. B>
But that leaves a little under 3/4 who aren't mastercard branded. If it was a typical third-party payments system then it is likely that they handled other types of credit cards, just that those companies havent commented yet.
So when is the other shoe going to fall?
For people who aren't home computer weenies, *no* NT has ever had a 'DOS bootloader' and there is no logical progression from the DOS-shell type windows, to the DOS-extention type windows to NT apart from the shifting focus of microsoft marketing.
For reasons known only to themselves and their therapists, many of the students on our campus forward all their official mail to Hotmail accounts. This, despite the fact that we have a very nice webmail service that has great availabiliy, will never throw away important information, etc etc.
Inevitably, these same students come whining to us that their mail 'isn't getting through', typically because they aren't capable of looking in the junk mail area and certainly aren't capable of the four mouse clicks required to ensure mail to their student email address isn't marked by hotmail as spam.
This tool should be a useful way of showing how much of our mail is actually being thrown away by Hotmail and could provide some useful evidence to preventing any more of these misguided fools sending their important email to hotmail.
And farewell Bandit. Don't these people know what their inconsiderate law-making is doing to the memories of cultural icons?
And if they had done this they would be
The only way to demonstrate that you can download social security numbers is by downloading social security numbers. I should point out explictly that I'm not defending these kids. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the real criminals (as opposed to these petty criminals) are the people who fail to protect such information. Moral criminals, anyway, since the US lacks data protection laws of any significance.
In a civilised country where personal data was actually protected and where personal responsibility existed, such an event would have generated very pointed questions of the people who failed to protect vital personal information for hundreds or thousand of students.
The focus on sound bites denouncing petty criminals makes a convenient smokescreen to avoid them though.
And how, pray tell, is such a problem to be verified if you don't attempt to exploit it?
Do you feel that it's a bit of a stretch to look at the rise of interactive computing and computing hobbyists? They are where the personal computer revolution had its roots and, at least at MIT, were active during the 60s. See Levy.
It is a bit of a stretch to claim that a history of personal computing should start from the first day a customer got a personal computer.
Yes, it is more than what it is in Panther. That's what 'updated' generally means. Unlike the other Core technologies in Tiger though, CoreAudio is not completely new. The SDKs for dealing with applications and Audio Units have been around for quite a while now. That's why all the sound software manufacturers are supporting AUs with such gusto.
Unless you want to claim that all the documentation on Core Audio dating from early 2004 was actually about tiger?
The Core Audio functionality is already presnt in older OS X, see all the MIDI and Audio Unit handling functionality we're all using quite happily in 10.3. Perhaps the original poster meant Core Image and Core Video.
The benefit comes about when you can use this technology to provide high-speed capacitance-free interconnections between chips or between modules on the same chip. As chips get faster, it becomes extremely difficult to push data at this rate along long traces. One consequence of this is the push to put a couple of levels of cache on the same die as a processor with the attendant huge price jumps. If the latency of optical translation was sufficiently small, this would allow caches to be moved onto a second die millimetres away!
Most people don't have a terribly realistic view of how they look. This is highlighted by their reactions to amateur home videos. "oh! I look terrible in that". Making people look attractive and not awkward in the video medium is extremely difficult.
So, I'd imagine this technology isn't going to be nearly as important as the technology to make various automatic subtle changes to a person so that their facial features and expressions look attractive, graceful, etc but are still recognisable both to themselves and, less importantly, to other people.
This reminds me of the time I tested the security of the passwords in a Computer Science departmental machine used by the staff. I was a little surprised that the other unix administrator's password was "Melinda". When confronted with this, his defence was "But it's not in the dictionary!".
While some of the basics might be getting through, the password education process is missing a few subtleties. Things like "avoid anything obviously linked to you" and so forth. Of course, adding these sorts of things adds the very real risk of informational overload on the part of the people who are most vulnerable.
I genuinely believe that the majority of computer users out there just aren't going to have the dexterity with words and letters to make typing such a password easy. If it's going to take you a whole minute to type with your lips moving as you pronounce every word, lots of other problems come up. This article isn't talking about the people who already use secure passwords.
A better solution is probably to use pass phrases rather than passwords. This allows people to type things directly from memory and gives you at least a fighting chance that they'll do it in a reasonable time. Modern hashes like MD5 don't care about length, either.
I wonder whether this was put together taking into account the recent, varyingly successful, lawsuits against earth-bound adventure tourism operators who provided white water rafting and rock climbing and who, despite all the no-liability clauses in their paperwork, manage to surprise the world by killing their customers periodically?
Given that at least some of those lawsuits were successful (if memory serves), one wonders how much value escape-from-liability contracts really have, unless the US signs a bill similar to the no-lawsuits-of-fast-food-providers into law. Even then, they'd still be taunted by various international courts.
Wouldn't it be easier to just set the snooze button to give you a slowly increasing electric shock?
I know exactly what 'Science' is, but I would suggest you try reading a copy. The front third is a magazine, the next third is a good, albeit overgeneral, peer reviewed journal, and the last third is advertising of one shape or another.
As far as cosmology goes, presumably you feel there was no such thing until someone had won a Nobel Prize on it? You seem to be overawed by fame.
So your definition of doing science is "If you say you are doing science, and other people say you are doing science, then you must be doing science". Have you tried actually thinking about anything other than a consensus of famous people in terms of definition, or do you feel that this is sufficient?
So you don't feel that adding words without justification to a description of your work takes one outside the borders of science. How interesting. Is there anything which can take people outside the borders of science in your opinion?
Actually, 'science' isn't a field. You keep making this mistake. Even within a famous field that you're completely awestruck over and in which famous people have received famous accolades and been published in famous journals and peer reviewed by famous peers, you can have things which are not science. You appear to believe that once a certain critical mass of 'famous' builds up, that it's science all the way.
Einstein wasn't 'right'. If he had been right, there wouldn't have been two different relativities, nor would there be a conflict with quantum mechanics on small scales. I don't expect you to be able to grasp that 'not right' is not the same as 'a crackpot'.
Why don't you sit down and try to describe what 'science' is without resorting to the concept of 'famous'.
I don't think anything in any of these fields is necessarily scientific merely because it has been assigned to these fields. Elephants standing on tortoises is 'cosmology'. Being scientific is rather more than being on a fashionable subject.
See above. Anyone who believes than an entire field can be considered 'scientific' without further judgement is naive or possibly deluded. Some fields have a smaller proportion of science than others, however.
The construct 'say anything scientific' is interesting. Surely science is a process and a philosophy? Do you mean 'say anything that is the result or outcome of science' ? Certainly, the rationalisation of various observations is nice, but I would certainly call into question people who claim to be definitive about long-past events based on some often-tweaked current theories happening to coincinde with some vaguely related measurements.
The word 'reveals' alone puts this into the category of sensationalism. 'suggests' would have been more acceptable. You have to learn to be less naive. You can't state that everything in field X is science, just as you can't believe that all the steps and studies described in a magazine called 'Science' are science.
After all, why should two millennia of logicians be able to stand against your mighty assertions.
Aren't gravitons so last year. Perhaps you should have put a little more effort into an appopriate theory de jour?
You appear to have some comprehension difficulties here. Are you saying that this is just working hypothesis? that maybe there aren't gravitons? IMAX has nothing to do with any of this. This is purely about people who say things like 'gravity can be proven'.
Had you bothered to read my posts, you may in fact have stumbled across thet fact that this is precisely what I said. If you want to argue with me, repeating my own statements with added emphasis isn't a very effective way of doing it.
In fact a large body of the world's theoretical physicists are engaged on this very problem. Since, as I've pointed out, I'm quite capable of recognising where these approximate laws so and don't apply, I feel no personal desire to go chasing GUTs.
And every one of these examples, while lovely in itself, singularly fails to leap out and demonstrate conclusively that it's the source of all the speciation and variability we see today. 'Evolution' is really a huge pool of competing theories, which cannot all be true. Why are you so desperately certain that the current view contains all the major elements?
It's proven and solid but doesn't quite work, and needs to be modified and fiddled around with. You certainly have a strange definition of proof and solidity.
I personally think that the creationist view is ridiculous. I've already pointed this out in several posts. There's always a chance that the word was sneezed out of the left nostril of the great Arkleseizure, but it's vanishingly unlikely. As far as genetic algorithms go, you shouldn't be so ready to take Computer Science analogies literally. They've got about as much relevance to any real system as Neural Networks.
From the knee-jerk, frothing-at-the-mouth attacks on myself, someone who clearly holds science in sufficient regard to be aware of its history and culture, merely because I point out some of its flaws, I'd say that you're doing a great job of presenting evidence for this.
But this is not about whether evolution is 'true' or 'false', whatever those happen to mean, particularly not faced with the vast plurality of inconsistent evolutionary theories. This discussion is about whether the various things that have led to the Evolution-Theory-Pool are scientific.
The answer to this is, sadly, only in a fringe sense, and only because the various people concerned with defining science have felt sorry for them and weakened appropriate definitions in order to not exclude them. Popper, towards the end of his life is a good example of this.
Or perhaps arbitrarily defined. Regardless, it's a great reason to deny the statement you made earlier without having to be insane.
That was indeed what I had planned to get across by my descriptions of it as having a millenia-old basis.
Creationism doesn't spring out of being very religious, it springs out of being an idiot and seeking some way to avoid having to think for yourself. Newton himself was sufficently objective about religion to look at the evolution of bible fragments over time and with copying errors. That the Word of God could be adulterated was unheard of.
As far as conservative goes, you feel his turning science on its head, or having voluminous theologically reactionary writings that woudl have gotten him dismissed from Cambridge to be conservative? How could he possibly have escaped such a label?
Sure, if they're being restricted to 'On Earth'. What about people who think that the Earth is a special case, such as any hypothetical space-dwelling humans? Lots of scientific stupidy comes about because people don't realise they're restricting their thinking to some strictly limited part of reality.
If you look at the new equations, you'll see that 'corrected' is a much more helpful term than 'replaced'. It isn't as much a condition of 'accuracy' as one of 'when the essential assumptions are violated'. Gravitational gradients, high velocities and so forth.
As far as Newton's other works, his Optics was, for the large part, very significant, but it was primarily his alchemy that people regard with scorn today. Perhaps you might want to remind yourslef that he didn't invent alchemy out of nothing becuase he was insane, instead he merely failed to break away from the preexisting philosophical frameworks that had existed for (1.8ish) millennia. In all fairness, there was little in Newton's world of observation and experiment that would have prompted him to break away and take a new approach to chemistry. It was several centuries before any significant progress was made towards modern Chemistry.
This is extremely unfair. Newton is more widely regarded as one of those who were most involved in the distinction between science method of seeking knowledge, and science as a branch of theological phenomenon. The father of the approach 'This is how it works. We don't know why and we don't care why, but we can show it works like this.' In the past, it was unthinkable to have mysterious action at a distance and so forth.