Why would anyone want to give their copyright - their right to what they have created - an expression of an idea to anyone ever?
This discussion's getting pretty far offtopic, but: Why should one single person be allowed to hold the rights to a particular combination of words forever and ever amen? Would you like to be paying royalties on expressions like, "it's Greek to me," "vanished into thin air," "too much of a good thing," or "dead as a doornail"? If Shakespeare had been able to get eternal copyright on his works, you might be. English literature would have been completely stifled by now if every written work could be copyrighted forever; either that, or creative people would simply change the language so radically and quickly (as Shakespeare did) that the work of a previous generation might as well be in a foreign language.
Copyrights expire so that the creative people of future generations will have room to work, so that the creativity of an entire society is not bottled up.
And you need to leave multiple copies laying around for people to snatch up.
Windows Server 2003 contains (and strongly promotes) a feature that does just that: Shadow Copies of Shared Folders, an XP/2000-compatible feature that keeps multiple old revisions of a file around, up to 64 versions. Want all the revisions of a document? Right-click, go to Properties, and select Previous Versions. There they are, ready to be copied.
Microsoft promotes Shadow Copies as a big convenience to the IT professional, since (ab)users themselves can now retrieve old versions of the documents they trash, instead of pestering you to restore them from backups.
(I'm glad we don't depend on MS Office password encryption in our documents. In fact, our need for security is so slight that I've gradually been converting our Word documents to HTML.)
Would this same author argue that the dramatic drop in the price of CD players in the 1980's was because Sony or some other particular company entered the marketplace? Microsoft doesn't target in specialty markets like CADD software. If 50 million consumers suddenly decided they needed professional CADD software, the price of AutoCAD and other existing products would probably plummet. If Microsoft suddenly issued WindowCAD, would this author give them the credit for the drop in price?
The only way Microsoft is responsible for any price drop is by their aggressive marketing, contributing substantially to the expansion of the consumer computer market. From TFA:...only 6 percent [of adult computer users] said that "reducing Microsoft's influence" was a "major issue" to them. Most consumers love Microsoft's products. In my personal experience, only about a tiny fraction (6 percent, perhaps?) of computer users have any significant experience with competing products; the ones who love MS products mostly haven't used anything else.
A) The cop is a citizen, in addition to being a cop. B) Protecting the citizens involves stopping criminals. Someone who points a laser-sighted gun at a cop is a criminal who might just as readily point it at a civilian.
The cop has no right to protect his safety (life) by any means necessary. It is his job to risk his life.
Interesting--how do you feel about all that expensive, taxpayer-funded $afety gear for firemen? How do you feel about your city paying the ho$pital bill$ when a cop gets shot in the line of duty?
Cops are people too. They don't abandon all of their civil rights when they willingly (and for far too little pay) take on the responsibility of helping to protect yours.
Microsoft's Passport sign-on was never a single-entry system, even within Microsoft's sites. Not long ago they started requiring a Passport account to post to the MS support newsgroups, so I reactivated an old Hotmail account. Surprise! Logging on to Passport thru their newsgroups did not get me into Hotmail; I had to enter the Passport account and password individually for each system, whether I entered them sequentially or simultaneously thru two browser windows.
As usual, Microsoft paid as little attention to their proposed standard systems as the rest of the industry. (Remember, Windows Notepad didn't get the Ctrl-O and Ctrl-S shortcuts until Windows 2000, even though other MS programs had them in Windows 3.x.)
Because when faced with the possibility of a disaster so horrible to contemplate, people have a hard time believing, or will willfully disbelieve, that it can ever happen to them.
No, it's just that when faced with the possibility of a disaster about as probable as having a meteor hit them, most people decide not to worry about it. From TFA: "But . . . mega-tsunami . ..are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the island of Réunion." People get struck by lightning fairly frequently. People have been struck by meteors. Should we all carry around portable lightning rods, or get meteor insurance?
"Ah, but now there's been an Indian Ocean tsunami! That proves it could happen, and that we should have built a warning system years ago!" "Ah, but there's evidence in the Bahamas that this has happened before!" If you throw an honest die, you have a 1-in-6 chance of rolling a 6. But if you roll the die, observe a 6, and state, "This die rolls a 6 100% of the time," you haven't changed the odds for the next roll at all.
I have car insurance, because a car accident is not that improbable. But once I had two car crashes in a single night. Neither one was my fault, neither one involved alcohol, neither one was a mechanical failure; I simply encountered two idiots unusually close together--a "one-in-a-million" chance, I could say. I never expect it to happen to me again, even though it is just as likely to happen the next time I go out driving as it was that night. An improbable event is not made less improbable by having actually happened before.
I think it was summer 1979 that some loon pseudoscientist predicted an earthquake that would sink Louisiana, east Texas, and central Arkansas, doubling the size of the Gulf of Mexico. I was in college in the target zone at the time, and there was much discussion of the prediction. When the day arrived when we were supposed to see a hundred-foot wall of water sweeping over us, nobody headed for Missouri, although several people carried umbrellas.
The effects of such a disaster, should it occur, are not "far beyond our comprehension" at all; hell, in the last few years the movie industry has given us several startlingly graphic versions of mass disaster. Stunned horror is not the same as incomprehension; I was stunned on 9/11, but I comprehended perfectly--instantly--what was happening. But what I also comprehended--much faster than the news media did then or has since--is that no matter how often somebody proposed such an event (e.g. Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor, 1994), until it actually happened it remained fantastically improbable. And it is still fantastically improbable that it will happen again any time soon.
Back in the mid-80's a friend expressed her outrage to me that airbags were not yet required in all vehicles. "Even if you only save one life," she said, "it's worth all the millions it would cost!" (At this point, disregard cases where children and small adults have been killed by an airbag--that's a failure of design, not of concept.) My argument to her was that, at the time, an airbag added about a thousand dollars to the cost of a car. Mandatory airbags would have pushed some people across the border between being able to afford a new car and continuing to drive their old unsafe clunker, reducing the overall safety of the driving population. She didn't like that argument a bit. If we'd kept going, she'd have doubtless suggested a government subsidy for airbags, pushing taxes higher.
Does anybody complain that there aren't tornado sirens in Manhattan? Or that Texas doesn't have as tight a net of seismographs as southern California or St. Helens? You put the money where the probabilities are. Whether you're a scientist or a politician, yo
Can't. It's my wife's car. She hates it when I change the stations, especially when she's driving.
--
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -B.F.
No offense, please, but I can't help finding a certain irony in the justaposition of your comment and your current sig.:)
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Now I just sit back and wait. Somebody here will give me grounds for a CFAA prosecution, I just know it.
But what happens when some IE vulnerability allows shady characters to hijack a browser session to your bank's online services ? Or install software into your computer - say, a webserver for a pedophile picture trading ring ? Will you survive that ?
One of my coworkers has had his identity stolen, has had his credit bitched up by thieves, and has had his computer repeatedly hosed by malware. Has he been annoyed and frustrated? Yes. Has it cost him considerable time and money? Yes. Has his entire way of life come to an end? No. All I was commenting on was the parent poster's sense of proportion.
One more question: Has his trust in computers been eroded? No, because like a lot of people he didn't trust computers to begin with. He's not a nerd; he's a shop worker with kids.
Furthermore, presumably anyone who pays for an Internet access does so because they want said access. ..
Most of the people I know live outside of Nerdville, and a good many of them pay for internet access because modern business leaves them little choice. ("Can't get your internet connection to work? Visit our website for assistance!") To deal with their job, their bank, their school, their kids' school, they need email and internet connections, but they view computers as fundamentally alien and even hostile. To them, Microsoft is an ally, defending them from something mysterious and dangerous.
The internet's not a way of life for them, just a means to communicate, like their cell phone, and many of them wish they didn't depend so heavily upon it. They don't trust it, they don't trust the people running it, they find it awkward and incomprehensible, but they use it because other people push them into it.
And of course you are quite correct--it's a matter of proportion, not of fact. I've spent a great deal of time myself ranting about Microsoft and the harm they continue to do to the industry in general. My nickname is not idly chosen; it's the language I first programmed professionally in. But even I, a former "computer professional," have been too lazy to try Firefox yet, and am just bumbling along in IE. (Although security headaches at work are probably going to force the necessary trials on me soon.)
But I can't name any other profession in which it is possible to profitably release product after product while being completely incompetent to produce. [Ignore management; it's not their job to produce.] You don't have to be a good programmer to succeed; you only have to look good. I was taught programming by a college professor who believed--seriously believed--that having five consecutive GOTO statements was a valid result of "structured programming"! I've seen countless examples (as have most people here) of bad programming. I decided years ago that anybody who actually trusts a computer is insane. I rely on computer records; I have no choice unless I want to live in a hovel in the woods and keep all my money in a mason jar. But I don't trust them, and I never will; I've known too doggone many programmers.
Just yesterday I had a lengthy discussion with my boss (the company owner) about why IE (and Windows in general) is so weak. With all the resources of an almost monopoly on the market, you said--that is exactly the problem. Microsoft has little motivation to do more than keep hot-patching the holes in IE and Windows instead of tearing up the whole street and laying a solid foundation. In the 1960's and 1970's, IBM stayed on top of the mainframe market despite having one of the worst OS's around, because they had the most ruthlessly effective body of marketeers anybody'd ever seen; only the virtual disappearance of the mainframe market took IBM from the top. As long as Microsoft's marketeering position stays strong, MS software will stay weak.
Quality is good. Many people will pay for quality when they can find it; people are downright amazed when they can get quality for free. But the majority of available products are going to remain Wal-Mart quality, because the vast majority of people are still going to get whatever is on the shelf at Wal-Mart.
And their world won't end. But its shine may tarnish a lot more easily.
ON an up-to-date W2K system with IE 6.0, the exploit works exactly as described. And, sorry, but a browser that craps out when attacked is only marginally preferable to a browser with leaks.
TFA was quite clear on what it was supposed to do. BTW, the exploit doesn't claim to be in anything but IE.
SCARE people into realizing that their entire way of life is AT RISK if they continue to use IE. [Emphasis mine.]
Get a grip. The internet is only the entire way of life for slashdotters and other nerds. "Outside of nerdville," most people will continue to be quite able to play softball, mow the lawn, and tell stories to their kids even without IE. Even I shall survive. Even thou mightest.
So by your reasoning, Asimov's PhD in biochemistry qualified him to create the "science of psychohistory" and write some of the most highly-regarded SF books of the second millenium--books which contain, surprisingly, relatively few references to chemistry.
Are you saying that Asimov's The Gods Themselves is a great story because of Asimov's understanding of the underlying constants of our physical universe and the atomic properties of tungsten? I think it succeeds because he shows realistic and understandable human characters in a tense situation, then likewise shows completely fantastic and alien characters in a tense situation and makes them realistic and understandable.
The primary qualification for an SF writer--like any other kind of fiction author--is to be able to tell a hell of a good tale, and make you care about it. Larry Niven, for instance, is widely known as a "hard science" writer, but Ringworld depends heavily on highly imaginative superstrong materials and hyperdrive scarcely distinguishable from space opera. Ringworld succeeds as a story not because of Niven's (admittedly quite clever) central invention, but because he tells a tale that captivates and entertains the reader.
That said, I'm sure Miss Le Guin's stories have been improved by her background in anthropology, but such a background does not automatically make her an imaginative or entertaining storyteller. The Lathe of Heaven has been on my short shelf almost since I discovered it, and not because of its several theoretical social structures.
We're talking about desktops, not workstations. If that's the case just don't give away the admin password and they can't do squat on a properly set up machine. They would not be responsible for troubleshooting anyway.
On a desktop, one often has to troubleshoot their own machine, or send it to a shop to get it fixed, in which case they have to pay for it. In both cases they must deal with the consequences, so you would assume if they knew more about what they were doing, they wouldn't even break stuff by accident (much less on purpose).
As it happens, the idiot in question wiped out his home machine, and emailed me for help from his office workstation. He did know what he was doing, and he broke it anyway. Frankly, I hope he had to pony up for a new OS install disk. (By the way, Windows ME doesn't have an admin password.)
Over the distance in the photo, anything much slower than a bullet would show a visible curve. Is the Australian military developing a secret lamppost antimissile system?
I also attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, btw. Now its time for me to get my paper diploma at UIC.
My lowest semseter grade is a 98. My lowest single grade is an 89.
My brother and I both grew up having our own color TV set in our bedroom - but I can't remember ever really even using it except when I was sick and lying in bed during the day.
Yes, and some cancer patients go into remission after taking Laetrile. Individual cases do not prove a general trend. That's why statisticians do big massive studies like the one in the article.
People won't touch something if they know it breaks their PC, and they'll be less cautious in checking those options if something IS broken.
I love optimists; they make life so entertaining for the rest of us.
One of my coworkers was not computer-illiterate; he was simply an idiot. He formatted the hard drive on his Windows ME system, knowing it would wipe it out, then emailed me (from a different machine): "I don't have an installation disk. What do I do now?"
There is too much monkey-business in most users. If it's there, they'll fiddle with it. If it isn't working the same as it did yesterday, they'll randomly change settings and then system-restore to last week.
Oops, you're right. I wrote a Q&D simulator for it, and sure enough you can swap the A's to solve the puzzle.
For this to work right, you also have to color the squares in a checkerboard pattern, like the old plastic ones I used to have. Then the two R's are the same color, but the two A's are not. So if your victim uses the other A, the puzzle still won't look right
A nasty variant of that I've read (but never seen) about is a 15-block puzzle that starts with the pattern:
R A T E Y O U R M I N D P A L
Show your victim the solved puzzle, then scramble it up. Before you give it to him, make sure the R from YOUR is moved into the top-left corner (replacing the R from RATE). If your target is someone who thinks he already knows how these things work, he's likely to leave that R right where you put it - destroying the parity of the puzzle. He's seen that the puzzle can be solved, but he'll never solve it until he moves that R (so I'm told).
He didn't write a program to solve the puzzle; he wrote a program to invent the puzzle. "Given a specific class of simple-looking puzzles, find the most difficult to solve." A much broader and deeper problem than finding the solution for a specific puzzle.
The process is interesting, but their description of how they tested their algorithm is less than confidence-inspiring.
1) Manually create a set of hypothetical data.
2) Run a mathematical algorithm to generate new data.
3) Run the converse of the algorithm on the generated data.
If an algorithm is truly reversable then, without the necessary randomization, such a process is likely to generate the original data with 100% accuracy. I'd have felt much better if they'd run two independent algorithms against each other: create descendants with ForwardA() and extract ancestors with BackwardB(), then do the same thing with ForwardB() and BackwardA().
"It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface
Any serious attempt to colonize Mars will include serious attempts to thicken, warm, and humidify the atmosphere, probably opening underground aquifers or mining the water ice cap. Once you introduce planetary climate change, much of that "beautiful barrenness and desolation" is going to change whether people visit it or not. It's possible that Olympus Mons, which for practical purposes sticks out of the atmosphere, might survive such changes, but the rest of the Martian surface? Not likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would anyone want to give their copyright - their right to what they have created - an expression of an idea to anyone ever?
This discussion's getting pretty far offtopic, but: Why should one single person be allowed to hold the rights to a particular combination of words forever and ever amen? Would you like to be paying royalties on expressions like, "it's Greek to me," "vanished into thin air," "too much of a good thing," or "dead as a doornail"? If Shakespeare had been able to get eternal copyright on his works, you might be. English literature would have been completely stifled by now if every written work could be copyrighted forever; either that, or creative people would simply change the language so radically and quickly (as Shakespeare did) that the work of a previous generation might as well be in a foreign language.
Copyrights expire so that the creative people of future generations will have room to work, so that the creativity of an entire society is not bottled up.
And you need to leave multiple copies laying around for people to snatch up.
Windows Server 2003 contains (and strongly promotes) a feature that does just that: Shadow Copies of Shared Folders, an XP/2000-compatible feature that keeps multiple old revisions of a file around, up to 64 versions. Want all the revisions of a document? Right-click, go to Properties, and select Previous Versions. There they are, ready to be copied.
Microsoft promotes Shadow Copies as a big convenience to the IT professional, since (ab)users themselves can now retrieve old versions of the documents they trash, instead of pestering you to restore them from backups.
(I'm glad we don't depend on MS Office password encryption in our documents. In fact, our need for security is so slight that I've gradually been converting our Word documents to HTML.)
Would this same author argue that the dramatic drop in the price of CD players in the 1980's was because Sony or some other particular company entered the marketplace? Microsoft doesn't target in specialty markets like CADD software. If 50 million consumers suddenly decided they needed professional CADD software, the price of AutoCAD and other existing products would probably plummet. If Microsoft suddenly issued WindowCAD, would this author give them the credit for the drop in price?
...only 6 percent [of adult computer users] said that "reducing Microsoft's influence" was a "major issue" to them. Most consumers love Microsoft's products. In my personal experience, only about a tiny fraction (6 percent, perhaps?) of computer users have any significant experience with competing products; the ones who love MS products mostly haven't used anything else.
The only way Microsoft is responsible for any price drop is by their aggressive marketing, contributing substantially to the expansion of the consumer computer market. From TFA:
God, yes, I remember September 11th. Only one online news service was still responding by about 10am Eastern. To my utter astonishment, it was AOL.
The cop has to protect the citizens, not himself.
A) The cop is a citizen, in addition to being a cop. B) Protecting the citizens involves stopping criminals. Someone who points a laser-sighted gun at a cop is a criminal who might just as readily point it at a civilian.
The cop has no right to protect his safety (life) by any means necessary. It is his job to risk his life.
Interesting--how do you feel about all that expensive, taxpayer-funded $afety gear for firemen? How do you feel about your city paying the ho$pital bill$ when a cop gets shot in the line of duty?
Cops are people too. They don't abandon all of their civil rights when they willingly (and for far too little pay) take on the responsibility of helping to protect yours.
Microsoft's Passport sign-on was never a single-entry system, even within Microsoft's sites. Not long ago they started requiring a Passport account to post to the MS support newsgroups, so I reactivated an old Hotmail account. Surprise! Logging on to Passport thru their newsgroups did not get me into Hotmail; I had to enter the Passport account and password individually for each system, whether I entered them sequentially or simultaneously thru two browser windows.
As usual, Microsoft paid as little attention to their proposed standard systems as the rest of the industry. (Remember, Windows Notepad didn't get the Ctrl-O and Ctrl-S shortcuts until Windows 2000, even though other MS programs had them in Windows 3.x.)
Why was this not news when it was first known?
No, it's just that when faced with the possibility of a disaster about as probable as having a meteor hit them, most people decide not to worry about it. From TFA: "But . . . mega-tsunami . . .are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the island of Réunion." People get struck by lightning fairly frequently. People have been struck by meteors. Should we all carry around portable lightning rods, or get meteor insurance?
"Ah, but now there's been an Indian Ocean tsunami! That proves it could happen, and that we should have built a warning system years ago!" "Ah, but there's evidence in the Bahamas that this has happened before!" If you throw an honest die, you have a 1-in-6 chance of rolling a 6. But if you roll the die, observe a 6, and state, "This die rolls a 6 100% of the time," you haven't changed the odds for the next roll at all.
I have car insurance, because a car accident is not that improbable. But once I had two car crashes in a single night. Neither one was my fault, neither one involved alcohol, neither one was a mechanical failure; I simply encountered two idiots unusually close together--a "one-in-a-million" chance, I could say. I never expect it to happen to me again, even though it is just as likely to happen the next time I go out driving as it was that night. An improbable event is not made less improbable by having actually happened before.
I think it was summer 1979 that some loon pseudoscientist predicted an earthquake that would sink Louisiana, east Texas, and central Arkansas, doubling the size of the Gulf of Mexico. I was in college in the target zone at the time, and there was much discussion of the prediction. When the day arrived when we were supposed to see a hundred-foot wall of water sweeping over us, nobody headed for Missouri, although several people carried umbrellas.
The effects of such a disaster, should it occur, are not "far beyond our comprehension" at all; hell, in the last few years the movie industry has given us several startlingly graphic versions of mass disaster. Stunned horror is not the same as incomprehension; I was stunned on 9/11, but I comprehended perfectly--instantly--what was happening. But what I also comprehended--much faster than the news media did then or has since--is that no matter how often somebody proposed such an event (e.g. Tom Clancy, Debt of Honor, 1994), until it actually happened it remained fantastically improbable. And it is still fantastically improbable that it will happen again any time soon.
Back in the mid-80's a friend expressed her outrage to me that airbags were not yet required in all vehicles. "Even if you only save one life," she said, "it's worth all the millions it would cost!" (At this point, disregard cases where children and small adults have been killed by an airbag--that's a failure of design, not of concept.) My argument to her was that, at the time, an airbag added about a thousand dollars to the cost of a car. Mandatory airbags would have pushed some people across the border between being able to afford a new car and continuing to drive their old unsafe clunker, reducing the overall safety of the driving population. She didn't like that argument a bit. If we'd kept going, she'd have doubtless suggested a government subsidy for airbags, pushing taxes higher.
Does anybody complain that there aren't tornado sirens in Manhattan? Or that Texas doesn't have as tight a net of seismographs as southern California or St. Helens? You put the money where the probabilities are. Whether you're a scientist or a politician, yo
Can't. It's my wife's car. She hates it when I change the stations, especially when she's driving.
No offense, please, but I can't help finding a certain irony in the justaposition of your comment and your current sig.--
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety -B.F.
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Now I just sit back and wait. Somebody here will give me grounds for a CFAA prosecution, I just know it.One of my coworkers has had his identity stolen, has had his credit bitched up by thieves, and has had his computer repeatedly hosed by malware. Has he been annoyed and frustrated? Yes. Has it cost him considerable time and money? Yes. Has his entire way of life come to an end? No. All I was commenting on was the parent poster's sense of proportion.
One more question: Has his trust in computers been eroded? No, because like a lot of people he didn't trust computers to begin with. He's not a nerd; he's a shop worker with kids.
Most of the people I know live outside of Nerdville, and a good many of them pay for internet access because modern business leaves them little choice. ("Can't get your internet connection to work? Visit our website for assistance!") To deal with their job, their bank, their school, their kids' school, they need email and internet connections, but they view computers as fundamentally alien and even hostile. To them, Microsoft is an ally, defending them from something mysterious and dangerous.
The internet's not a way of life for them, just a means to communicate, like their cell phone, and many of them wish they didn't depend so heavily upon it. They don't trust it, they don't trust the people running it, they find it awkward and incomprehensible, but they use it because other people push them into it.And of course you are quite correct--it's a matter of proportion, not of fact. I've spent a great deal of time myself ranting about Microsoft and the harm they continue to do to the industry in general. My nickname is not idly chosen; it's the language I first programmed professionally in. But even I, a former "computer professional," have been too lazy to try Firefox yet, and am just bumbling along in IE. (Although security headaches at work are probably going to force the necessary trials on me soon.)
But I can't name any other profession in which it is possible to profitably release product after product while being completely incompetent to produce. [Ignore management; it's not their job to produce.] You don't have to be a good programmer to succeed; you only have to look good. I was taught programming by a college professor who believed--seriously believed--that having five consecutive GOTO statements was a valid result of "structured programming"! I've seen countless examples (as have most people here) of bad programming. I decided years ago that anybody who actually trusts a computer is insane. I rely on computer records; I have no choice unless I want to live in a hovel in the woods and keep all my money in a mason jar. But I don't trust them, and I never will; I've known too doggone many programmers.
Just yesterday I had a lengthy discussion with my boss (the company owner) about why IE (and Windows in general) is so weak. With all the resources of an almost monopoly on the market, you said--that is exactly the problem. Microsoft has little motivation to do more than keep hot-patching the holes in IE and Windows instead of tearing up the whole street and laying a solid foundation. In the 1960's and 1970's, IBM stayed on top of the mainframe market despite having one of the worst OS's around, because they had the most ruthlessly effective body of marketeers anybody'd ever seen; only the virtual disappearance of the mainframe market took IBM from the top. As long as Microsoft's marketeering position stays strong, MS software will stay weak.
Quality is good. Many people will pay for quality when they can find it; people are downright amazed when they can get quality for free. But the majority of available products are going to remain Wal-Mart quality, because the vast majority of people are still going to get whatever is on the shelf at Wal-Mart.
And their world won't end. But its shine may tarnish a lot more easily.
ON an up-to-date W2K system with IE 6.0, the exploit works exactly as described. And, sorry, but a browser that craps out when attacked is only marginally preferable to a browser with leaks.
TFA was quite clear on what it was supposed to do. BTW, the exploit doesn't claim to be in anything but IE.
SCARE people into realizing that their entire way of life is AT RISK if they continue to use IE. [Emphasis mine.]
Get a grip. The internet is only the entire way of life for slashdotters and other nerds. "Outside of nerdville," most people will continue to be quite able to play softball, mow the lawn, and tell stories to their kids even without IE. Even I shall survive. Even thou mightest.
So by your reasoning, Asimov's PhD in biochemistry qualified him to create the "science of psychohistory" and write some of the most highly-regarded SF books of the second millenium--books which contain, surprisingly, relatively few references to chemistry.
Are you saying that Asimov's The Gods Themselves is a great story because of Asimov's understanding of the underlying constants of our physical universe and the atomic properties of tungsten? I think it succeeds because he shows realistic and understandable human characters in a tense situation, then likewise shows completely fantastic and alien characters in a tense situation and makes them realistic and understandable.
The primary qualification for an SF writer--like any other kind of fiction author--is to be able to tell a hell of a good tale, and make you care about it. Larry Niven, for instance, is widely known as a "hard science" writer, but Ringworld depends heavily on highly imaginative superstrong materials and hyperdrive scarcely distinguishable from space opera. Ringworld succeeds as a story not because of Niven's (admittedly quite clever) central invention, but because he tells a tale that captivates and entertains the reader.
That said, I'm sure Miss Le Guin's stories have been improved by her background in anthropology, but such a background does not automatically make her an imaginative or entertaining storyteller. The Lathe of Heaven has been on my short shelf almost since I discovered it, and not because of its several theoretical social structures.
We're talking about desktops, not workstations. If that's the case just don't give away the admin password and they can't do squat on a properly set up machine. They would not be responsible for troubleshooting anyway.
On a desktop, one often has to troubleshoot their own machine, or send it to a shop to get it fixed, in which case they have to pay for it. In both cases they must deal with the consequences, so you would assume if they knew more about what they were doing, they wouldn't even break stuff by accident (much less on purpose).
As it happens, the idiot in question wiped out his home machine, and emailed me for help from his office workstation. He did know what he was doing, and he broke it anyway. Frankly, I hope he had to pony up for a new OS install disk. (By the way, Windows ME doesn't have an admin password.)
Over the distance in the photo, anything much slower than a bullet would show a visible curve. Is the Australian military developing a secret lamppost antimissile system?
I never heard of George W. Bush until a few years ago, and look where he is now. Things change. Quickly. In unexpected ways.
I also attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, btw. Now its time for me to get my paper diploma at UIC.
My lowest semseter grade is a 98. My lowest single grade is an 89.
My brother and I both grew up having our own color TV set in our bedroom - but I can't remember ever really even using it except when I was sick and lying in bed during the day.
Yes, and some cancer patients go into remission after taking Laetrile. Individual cases do not prove a general trend. That's why statisticians do big massive studies like the one in the article.
People won't touch something if they know it breaks their PC, and they'll be less cautious in checking those options if something IS broken.
I love optimists; they make life so entertaining for the rest of us.
One of my coworkers was not computer-illiterate; he was simply an idiot. He formatted the hard drive on his Windows ME system, knowing it would wipe it out, then emailed me (from a different machine): "I don't have an installation disk. What do I do now?"
There is too much monkey-business in most users. If it's there, they'll fiddle with it. If it isn't working the same as it did yesterday, they'll randomly change settings and then system-restore to last week.
Oops, you're right. I wrote a Q&D simulator for it, and sure enough you can swap the A's to solve the puzzle.
For this to work right, you also have to color the squares in a checkerboard pattern, like the old plastic ones I used to have. Then the two R's are the same color, but the two A's are not. So if your victim uses the other A, the puzzle still won't look right
He didn't write a program to solve the puzzle; he wrote a program to invent the puzzle. "Given a specific class of simple-looking puzzles, find the most difficult to solve." A much broader and deeper problem than finding the solution for a specific puzzle.
- 1) Manually create a set of hypothetical data.
- 2) Run a mathematical algorithm to generate new data.
- 3) Run the converse of the algorithm on the generated data.
If an algorithm is truly reversable then, without the necessary randomization, such a process is likely to generate the original data with 100% accuracy. I'd have felt much better if they'd run two independent algorithms against each other: create descendants with ForwardA() and extract ancestors with BackwardB(), then do the same thing with ForwardB() and BackwardA().from the this-is-Slashdot-so-why-remember-the-past dept.
Wal-mart, remember?
"It is the right of every person to stand and stare across the beautiful barrenness and desolation of the Martian surface
Any serious attempt to colonize Mars will include serious attempts to thicken, warm, and humidify the atmosphere, probably opening underground aquifers or mining the water ice cap. Once you introduce planetary climate change, much of that "beautiful barrenness and desolation" is going to change whether people visit it or not. It's possible that Olympus Mons, which for practical purposes sticks out of the atmosphere, might survive such changes, but the rest of the Martian surface? Not likely.