Yeah, what he said! No-one's accusing the BBC of sexing up the dossier, indeed as the dossier was written by HMG and the intelligence agencies I can't imagine how they could have any input. Story poster obviously hasn't been following the story at all.
I also don't understand how the BBC can be accused of ANYTHING, after all they (accurately) reported a story, namely that an intelligence source (now known to be Dr Kelly) had told them that Campbell et al had sexed up the dossier. Whether or not that allegation was true is irrelevant, the story was that an intelligence source was making this allegation, which was definnitely true and gives a good indication that in fact the intel orgs (*or at least some small part therof) felt they were being inappropriately manipulated for political ends - ie to con the British people into supporting Dubya's latest colonial war.
My first car, and first real love (*choke!*) was a humble Lada saloon car. It was based on an Fiat design of the early 60s; apparently when the design became obsolete, Fiat sold the entire plant lock stock & barrel to the then Soviet Union, who carried on building the same basic design under the Lada name. It was a great little car - built like a tank, if you hit a modern vehicle in this thing it would have just gone straight through and out the other side, none of your modern 'crumple zone' nonsense - the heater was fsckin amazing, blasting out intense heat in a few seconds from the engine starting - and as it only cost 200 (in 1988) it was capable of being driven anywhere, in particular all up and down the Portstewart strand, a beautiful long (10 miles) beach on the north coast of Ireland near where I was at college - an area of outstanding natural beauty, ancient ountouched sand dunes, much rare wildlife and the perfect place to experiment with handbreak turns at 40mph. [No U.U.C. alumni in the house I suppose?] It was also the vehicle wherein I experienced a transcendental revelation that driving under the influence of L.S.D. is a _very_bad_idea_, when the steering wheel appeared to disconnect from the rest of the vehicle and float in my hands. This was also the experience which means I can't drive at night in rain when stoned, as the coloured traffic lights etc refracting through the wet glass causes instant and spectacular flashbacks.
After leaving college I moved to London - didn't need a car so left it with my folks - returned to find they'd sold it! Apparently my younger brother had "serviced" it before the new owner drove it away, afterwards forgetting to replace the wheelnuts "with hilarious consequences" as a wheel fell off as the new owner drove it away...
I have to say that this was the most sexually intense period of my entire life, indeed this was the car I was driving when I tried to shag three people who were all best friends, and shared a house... I woulda got away with it, too, if I hadn't gone to that party...
Immediately before the Lada I'd been driving my Dad's FSO - I believe this was the Polish attempt at modern mass produced car - suffice to say that having survived driving that for several months I feel confident I can cope with the very worst emergency on the road; the shocks were completely shot and it lurched around the road as if it had a mind of it's own.
Nowadays of course I'm older and wiser but that lil' Lada has a place in my heart still. It's a shame that you don't see them around any more, new EU regs to do with exhaust emissions meant the entire range was declared illegal overnight. Shame.
(I'm Doe #13 in the original restraining order) I found the whole surreal experience both interesting and enlightening experience - really brought home to me how broken the US legal system is, that it took over 4 years for them to accept that actually, I have at no time ever offered to sell pirated movies. I aonly just discovered that they'd accused me of this by following some links and searching for 'zpok' (my hostname at the time) on the EFF - found testimony by a DVDCCA attorney about how he found I was an evil pirate, sent me a letter "by electronic mail" and so forth. Laughable if it wasn't so serious. Of course I never pirated a movie or audio recording in my life, I don't run any P2P or file trading apps, all I did was mirror deCSS source on the site. Pah! Losers!:)
I'd still like to know why they thought California state law had jurisdiction over the UK though.
As luck would have it we have a delayed departmental Xmas do tonight (we were all working too hard before xmas to have it then) - look out London, I'm really ready to party now:))
Who really gives a shit? Goodbye and good riddance, I say. Enterprise is lame. Voyager has some good points, ng had some good storylines, but most of the rest of the franchise resounds to the hollow sound of a dead horse being flogged.
I've said it before & I'll say it again. This is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The USA borrows $500 billion a year from the rest of the world just to pay for the trade deficit. If you really think that the US govt as presently carried on, in the present circumstances, is capable of the long-term planning and huge expense needed to put man on Mars, I've got a proverbial bridge you might like to take a look at.
satire? yes, sort of,.. actually it's really in a category of it's own, or rather, a small category along with Alan Partridge, perhaps League of Gentlemen (Royston Vasey, not Alan Moore), er,... can anyone think of any more? I'd love to see how these go down in the US. It's not funny, per se, it's more... cruel? David Brent always seems on the very verge of a complete breakdown. It exposes us all as the shallow, ignorant, self-regarding fools we are... I couldn't watch more than the first couple of episodes of Series Two; it just makes you screw your face up in a permanent wince, curl your toes in cringing embarrassment and shame. Utter genius. I can't imagine anything further away from Friends, or Dilbert come to that.
Tim as Arthur Dent is a good call - Tim is really the tragic everyman character, doomed to realise his own, uh, doom, and completely unable to do anything about it. Sounds rather like Arthur already;)
For those that don't get it, I strongly recommend the work of Jean Baudrillard. In particular, America is utterly wonderful stuff. It's the sort of book that you have to stop reading once a sentence, think about it (or rather, luxuriate in the... uh, text) befgore going on to the next one. Hit the link & then the 'look inside' link to get a flavour of the style. I can quite understand why people might not understand what he means but that's really not needed to get enormous pleasure from his writing. IMHO.
It's rather depressing how few people here seem to be prepared to do anything more than take the lazy "hurr hurr, these people think they're clever cos they use long words, ha ha how lame they are" approach rather than actually thinking about anything - particularly given the supposed imporance of Zen and zen-like ideas to the alleged hacker ethos/mindset. And I speak as a professional geek, writing this on a Linux box.
>Instead of aiming your ire / consternation / disapproval at NASA for 'wasting' money, why not examine the kleptocratic warlords, juntas and strongmen who use food, water and education as weapons against their ethnic, cultural and political foes?
Because poor ol' Dubya has enough problems trying to distract people's attention from the non-existant WMDs and the new Vietnam without Slashdotters getting on his case.
Most of the radiation comes from periods of sunspot activity.
Er, apart from the high-energy cosmic rays from other stars, of course, 99.9% of which are deflected by the earth's magnetosphere and thus never reach low earth orbit, of course. By 'high energy' we're talking about particles carrying the energy of a fast moving baseball, yes, that much energy in a single sub-atomic particle. Imagine those dumping their energy in a long thin tube through a human body. If you want to go float out at L2 for a few months asa guinea-pig to see how bad it really is for living tissue, well, good luck but I suggest you get your affairs in order first.
> this country didn't get to where it is today by being overly cautious.
And that makes you think you should be less cautious? You don't really know WHERE your country is now, do you? Some free clues. Your government is feared and loathed the world over. Your economy is completely fscked - you have to borrow (IIRC) $500 bn [1] every year from the rest of the world to subsidise your absurdly fat lazy lifestyles, which your productivity in no way justifies. Your country, my friend, are fucked. The thing that bothers the rest of us is how badly the American empire will destroy the rest of the world in it's death-throes. Forget the ex-Soviet islamic republics - it's the thought of all those Minuteman silos in Tennessee and Texas that scare me...
Disclaimer: Yes, I have American friends, and I have nothing at all against them as individuals. I am not anti-american.
I don't get this whole story about goign into space for mining. Aren't we living on top of a big ass heap o' rocks right now? I don't notice any shortage of steel, copper, zinc, aluminium, blah blah - why would we want to go to the ludicrous expense of climbing out of our gravity well to collect some rocks and bring them back to earth? (Not to mention how on earth we're going to get large quantities of raw materials back down to earth without making a bloody big hole in the ground...)
It just makes no sense at all as far as I can see.
As a thought experiment, imagine that expensive, small & light manufactured items were floating around in space. Let's say, oh I don't know, Opteron 64 bit CPUs. All we have to do is go up, float around, catch them in a big net and fly them back to earth. It would still be far more cost-effective to make them down here on earth than to fly into space to collect them. So if that's the case, just how much crack do you have to smoke to think that mining raw materials in space is a good idea?
Seriously, this whole idea is bullshit from start to finish. And if humans are on Mars by 2020 I'll eat my hat.
> We need to get to the Asteroid Belt and secure
> access to the resources out there.
Quick! Before the lizard people come and steal the precious lumps of carbonaceous rock! Save the rocks for the Merkin Pipple!!
Seriously, people who think we need to go to the asteroids to mine them know nothing about anything except lame 50s sf. Forget your adolescent dreams & start worrying about the imminent collapse of the global environment, sparky.
You're asking if an idea from a Phillip K Dick book 'is feasible'?? I just got through reading a bunch of interesting stuff linked to from comments on the last Slashdot PKD story, excellent stuff especially as I have 'Eye in the Sky' sitting waiting for me when I get back from me holidays - anyway Google for the recent Hermenaut essay and take especial note of the stuff about how questioning the very basis of reality is one of the quintessential PKD themes. It's nto so much "is it feasible" as "how do you know it's not already happening? How do you know you aren;t actually a secret ninja reverse engineer who's just completed a big gig and had his/her brain zapped as part of the deal?"
I work for a company that is a managed security services provider as a pentester. The majority of the customers I do pentests / VAs for are already customers of ours. Personally I've never come under any pressure to slant my reports one way or another. (Of course that doesn't mean it doesn't happen in other companies but the idea that my employer is especially ethical and moral in this respect is... unlikely;)
Now having said all that, I do often find client sites with horrible glaring problems. Indeed I recently heard that an overseas office of (A.N. multinational megacorp that you'd have heard of) actually had their entire network shutdown as a direct result of a thoroughly stinking report I gave them. They got this stinking report because they had a single W2K machine on a DSL broadband connection running (unpatched) IIS, SQL server, PC Anywhere, VNC, FTP, Exchange (yes all on one box!) and a bunch of other stuff, oh yes including all the 137, 139, 445 Windows RPC ports wide open. No firewall at all. My report basically said "this machine is so insecure that the prudent thing to do is pull it off the network and give it a thorough audit - or save some time and just reformat and rebuild from scratch, because this is absolutely the easiest low-hanging fruit that any common-or-garden kiddie could trivially own.")
The funny thing (?) is that I got 90% of that data just from a careful use of Nessus and Nmap. You do need to read the docs and experiment and be sure you know what they're telling you, but running those against your own network from the outside is well within the capabilities of any Unix-head out there and probably the majority of Slashdot readers.
Normally I'd add a disclaimer about making sure you get authorised before you do this, but to be honest if you do "-TPolite " quiet scans from your home connection it shouldn't even get noticed amongst the normal background noise that any arbitary IP gets. (of course it may be a bit embarrassing if your own testing turns up lots of holes when you go to your boss to show them the results and you DIDN'T get authorisation first...)
I'd suggest something like this (using a current Nmap or post 3.45 - -V rocks!)
And then setup Nessus, remembering to turn off DoS and other non-safe plugins, and configure the portscanners carefully, and away you go. If you can provide the same data that my employers would charge your employer several thousand pounds for, perhaps you'll get a raise instead of the sack.
Don't run these internally unless you're 100% certain that there's no IDS anywhere. Otherwise you WILL be sacked (and may have problems getting another job - you can certainly forget a reference!)
when you can smoke dope and fly?
Once upon a time I was a passenger in a car when the driver got the passenger to rack em out & hold up the lines just under his face. He took his eyes off the road, took a careful look, pinched up the spare nostril and carefully did a line, going back for the bits he'd missed. Eyes back to road, slight swerve, drive on like 'no big deal...'. Jeez, he was a helluva boss...
**DISCLAIMER** Consuming illegal drugs is dangerous and Bad. Doing so and then driving is criminally irresponsible. Doing so WHILST driving suggests you should be in hospital, preferrably before you get carried there in a blue-light vehicle. Apart from a spot of weed late at night on those empty motorways...
> the fact is that Linux is being stopped dead in its' tracks.
Ah, I see. Linux is dead in the water. This must be why Novell, Sun, IBM, HP and Dell either have already, or will shortly announce massive promotions of Linux on the desktop / workgroup server level, along with technical support? Ho yus, a river of red ink, et al.
You have to look at their survey. It's talking about the CORPORATE web servers. I work for a major corporate america company. We have close to 4000 servers handling our "web" environment. That consists of web, app, and database servers. There's more IIS then anything else out there for sure in corporate america. Expecially on the WEB front end. In a corporate environment there are about 20 Windows to 1 Unix boxes. Mostly due to Windows servers being so cheap and can't handle as much load per server. But on the DATABASE backend there is much more UNIX to Windows.
Yes but you don't really seem to know what you're talking about. Yes, there's a proportionally much more IIS in corporate environments, but *less so* in corporate public web sites. Intranets, yes I grant you that. To say that corporates are only just getting their feet wet with Apache / Linux is completely wrong, though. Sounds like you're generalising from a small sample, ie your own anecdotal evidence... BZZZT, sorry, worthless.
my favourite post-modernist is Jean Baudrillard. I picked up his book 'America' years ago and was completely blown away by it - it's the sort of thing you have to read a sentence at a time because you have to go away and think about it for a few minutes before tackling the next one. Many many people will loathe & detest his style of course but then, that's probably why I like him so much...
A friend who was lucky enough to land a job on the tech side of the first film forwarded me an internal mail that went round which had the same sort of statistics, but with a much more realistic bent. Something like...
Cups of coffee: 2,398,394
Abandoned shots: 82
grammes of cocaine: 1982
nervous breakdowns: 4
sceaming matches between (someone I'd never heard of and someone else I'd never heard of): 12
...
You get the idea. Surely someone here has a copy of this and would post anonymously... c'mon you know it makes sense...
Slashdot Mirror
I also don't understand how the BBC can be accused of ANYTHING, after all they (accurately) reported a story, namely that an intelligence source (now known to be Dr Kelly) had told them that Campbell et al had sexed up the dossier. Whether or not that allegation was true is irrelevant, the story was that an intelligence source was making this allegation, which was definnitely true and gives a good indication that in fact the intel orgs (*or at least some small part therof) felt they were being inappropriately manipulated for political ends - ie to con the British people into supporting Dubya's latest colonial war.
(c) Playschool, BBCTV, MCMLXXIV
After leaving college I moved to London - didn't need a car so left it with my folks - returned to find they'd sold it! Apparently my younger brother had "serviced" it before the new owner drove it away, afterwards forgetting to replace the wheelnuts "with hilarious consequences" as a wheel fell off as the new owner drove it away...
I have to say that this was the most sexually intense period of my entire life, indeed this was the car I was driving when I tried to shag three people who were all best friends, and shared a house... I woulda got away with it, too, if I hadn't gone to that party...
Immediately before the Lada I'd been driving my Dad's FSO - I believe this was the Polish attempt at modern mass produced car - suffice to say that having survived driving that for several months I feel confident I can cope with the very worst emergency on the road; the shocks were completely shot and it lurched around the road as if it had a mind of it's own.
Nowadays of course I'm older and wiser but that lil' Lada has a place in my heart still. It's a shame that you don't see them around any more, new EU regs to do with exhaust emissions meant the entire range was declared illegal overnight. Shame.
I'd still like to know why they thought California state law had jurisdiction over the UK though.
As luck would have it we have a delayed departmental Xmas do tonight (we were all working too hard before xmas to have it then) - look out London, I'm really ready to party now :))
Anyway, Blake's 7 was always miles better ;p
I've said it before & I'll say it again. This is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. The USA borrows $500 billion a year from the rest of the world just to pay for the trade deficit. If you really think that the US govt as presently carried on, in the present circumstances, is capable of the long-term planning and huge expense needed to put man on Mars, I've got a proverbial bridge you might like to take a look at.
Tim as Arthur Dent is a good call - Tim is really the tragic everyman character, doomed to realise his own, uh, doom, and completely unable to do anything about it. Sounds rather like Arthur already ;)
It's rather depressing how few people here seem to be prepared to do anything more than take the lazy "hurr hurr, these people think they're clever cos they use long words, ha ha how lame they are" approach rather than actually thinking about anything - particularly given the supposed imporance of Zen and zen-like ideas to the alleged hacker ethos/mindset. And I speak as a professional geek, writing this on a Linux box.
Because poor ol' Dubya has enough problems trying to distract people's attention from the non-existant WMDs and the new Vietnam without Slashdotters getting on his case.
Er, apart from the high-energy cosmic rays from other stars, of course, 99.9% of which are deflected by the earth's magnetosphere and thus never reach low earth orbit, of course. By 'high energy' we're talking about particles carrying the energy of a fast moving baseball, yes, that much energy in a single sub-atomic particle. Imagine those dumping their energy in a long thin tube through a human body. If you want to go float out at L2 for a few months asa guinea-pig to see how bad it really is for living tissue, well, good luck but I suggest you get your affairs in order first.
And that makes you think you should be less cautious? You don't really know WHERE your country is now, do you? Some free clues. Your government is feared and loathed the world over. Your economy is completely fscked - you have to borrow (IIRC) $500 bn [1] every year from the rest of the world to subsidise your absurdly fat lazy lifestyles, which your productivity in no way justifies. Your country, my friend, are fucked. The thing that bothers the rest of us is how badly the American empire will destroy the rest of the world in it's death-throes. Forget the ex-Soviet islamic republics - it's the thought of all those Minuteman silos in Tennessee and Texas that scare me...
Disclaimer: Yes, I have American friends, and I have nothing at all against them as individuals. I am not anti-american.
[1]: http://www.uaw.org/publications/jobs_pay/02/no3/jp e04.html
As a thought experiment, imagine that expensive, small & light manufactured items were floating around in space. Let's say, oh I don't know, Opteron 64 bit CPUs. All we have to do is go up, float around, catch them in a big net and fly them back to earth. It would still be far more cost-effective to make them down here on earth than to fly into space to collect them. So if that's the case, just how much crack do you have to smoke to think that mining raw materials in space is a good idea?
Seriously, this whole idea is bullshit from start to finish. And if humans are on Mars by 2020 I'll eat my hat.
> access to the resources out there.
Quick! Before the lizard people come and steal the precious lumps of carbonaceous rock! Save the rocks for the Merkin Pipple!! Seriously, people who think we need to go to the asteroids to mine them know nothing about anything except lame 50s sf. Forget your adolescent dreams & start worrying about the imminent collapse of the global environment, sparky.
You're asking if an idea from a Phillip K Dick book 'is feasible'?? I just got through reading a bunch of interesting stuff linked to from comments on the last Slashdot PKD story, excellent stuff especially as I have 'Eye in the Sky' sitting waiting for me when I get back from me holidays - anyway Google for the recent Hermenaut essay and take especial note of the stuff about how questioning the very basis of reality is one of the quintessential PKD themes. It's nto so much "is it feasible" as "how do you know it's not already happening? How do you know you aren;t actually a secret ninja reverse engineer who's just completed a big gig and had his/her brain zapped as part of the deal?"
Now having said all that, I do often find client sites with horrible glaring problems. Indeed I recently heard that an overseas office of (A.N. multinational megacorp that you'd have heard of) actually had their entire network shutdown as a direct result of a thoroughly stinking report I gave them. They got this stinking report because they had a single W2K machine on a DSL broadband connection running (unpatched) IIS, SQL server, PC Anywhere, VNC, FTP, Exchange (yes all on one box!) and a bunch of other stuff, oh yes including all the 137, 139, 445 Windows RPC ports wide open. No firewall at all. My report basically said "this machine is so insecure that the prudent thing to do is pull it off the network and give it a thorough audit - or save some time and just reformat and rebuild from scratch, because this is absolutely the easiest low-hanging fruit that any common-or-garden kiddie could trivially own.")
The funny thing (?) is that I got 90% of that data just from a careful use of Nessus and Nmap. You do need to read the docs and experiment and be sure you know what they're telling you, but running those against your own network from the outside is well within the capabilities of any Unix-head out there and probably the majority of Slashdot readers.
Normally I'd add a disclaimer about making sure you get authorised before you do this, but to be honest if you do "-TPolite " quiet scans from your home connection it shouldn't even get noticed amongst the normal background noise that any arbitary IP gets. (of course it may be a bit embarrassing if your own testing turns up lots of holes when you go to your boss to show them the results and you DIDN'T get authorisation first...)
I'd suggest something like this (using a current Nmap or post 3.45 - -V rocks!)
$ nohup nmap -sSVR -O -P0 -v -TPolite (your-netblock-here) -o sSVR-scan.log &
And then setup Nessus, remembering to turn off DoS and other non-safe plugins, and configure the portscanners carefully, and away you go. If you can provide the same data that my employers would charge your employer several thousand pounds for, perhaps you'll get a raise instead of the sack.
Don't run these internally unless you're 100% certain that there's no IDS anywhere. Otherwise you WILL be sacked (and may have problems getting another job - you can certainly forget a reference!)
hey,wait a sec! Whose side am I on?!
when you can smoke dope and fly? Once upon a time I was a passenger in a car when the driver got the passenger to rack em out & hold up the lines just under his face. He took his eyes off the road, took a careful look, pinched up the spare nostril and carefully did a line, going back for the bits he'd missed. Eyes back to road, slight swerve, drive on like 'no big deal...'. Jeez, he was a helluva boss... **DISCLAIMER** Consuming illegal drugs is dangerous and Bad. Doing so and then driving is criminally irresponsible. Doing so WHILST driving suggests you should be in hospital, preferrably before you get carried there in a blue-light vehicle. Apart from a spot of weed late at night on those empty motorways...
Ah, I see. Linux is dead in the water. This must be why Novell, Sun, IBM, HP and Dell either have already, or will shortly announce massive promotions of Linux on the desktop / workgroup server level, along with technical support? Ho yus, a river of red ink, et al.
my favourite post-modernist is Jean Baudrillard. I picked up his book 'America' years ago and was completely blown away by it - it's the sort of thing you have to read a sentence at a time because you have to go away and think about it for a few minutes before tackling the next one. Many many people will loathe & detest his style of course but then, that's probably why I like him so much...
<bitterness>
"from the they-like-it dept." indeed - next Slashdot will be telling us Gollum doesn't get the girl.
</bitterness>
</irony>
-- "Peace in Ireland is an issue Goodbye bombs, we're gonna miss ya" - Electronic
- Cups of coffee: 2,398,394
- Abandoned shots: 82
- grammes of cocaine: 1982
- nervous breakdowns: 4
- sceaming matches between (someone I'd never heard of and someone else I'd never heard of): 12
... You get the idea. Surely someone here has a copy of this and would post anonymously... c'mon you know it makes sense...