Exactly. What the hell are websites doing allowing people to upload Jet Databases to publicly accessible folders anyways?
Giving out your website's master FTP username/password is a vulnerability as well, but no sane web host would do such a thing. I hope it'd be the same for the former scenario as well as this latter one.
They're making a big deal of the following in both of the links in the article, repeating the same phrase over and over:
"some web servers could be at risk if users upload a malicious.asp /.mdb file and then execute it via calls to "ADODB.Connection"."
They say this twice in one paragraph at one point.
But what does that really mean?
That means a server running ASP, that also is allowing end users to upload.mdb databases to it (???), AND to expose them from whatever location they've been uploaded to so that Connections can be made to them, will be vulnerable.
That's a pretty hefty list of "ifs". If you're letting your users upload.mdb databases to your webserver at all, let alone to a publicly accessible folder, you're already asking for severe trouble. I can't imagine a website out there that would allow such uploading/public exposure to happen that doesn't already have severe security flaws merely by the amount of freedom its given its users in what they can do on the site.
This is definitely a vulnerability, but the impact to ASP/ASP.NET servers is minimal if the hosts are implementing common sense security practices/user restrictions already.
While I agree it's interesting that *some* environmentalists are rallying around Nuclear power, I think we need to make a few things clear that the poster of this news article seems to have missed.
1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on. This isn't ironic, it's evolutionary. It's the scientific process at its finest: new data comes in, and those looking out for the best interests of everyone reevaluate their previous conclusions based on that new data. The two are NOT mutually exclusive.
2) The "We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress," is a bit more blatent of an example of flamebaiting. The reason that environmental concerns occasionally "stifle our progress" is because it would be foolish for anyone NOT to think of environmental concerns. Would the poster of this article rather that environmental concerns never be taken into account in the case of new technology? It would be like a scientist intentionally ignoring a key variable in a study. You wouldn't tell a clinical group performing studies on a new (for example) vaccine to ignore if the vaccine causes heart attacks just because said vaccine is supposed to cure cancer.
Aye, I'd be worried about that too, but...
1) For people like me having to suffer with Comcast, ANY competition is welcome. I'm in an apartment with one of these "agreements", and I have to pay 60$ a month for service worse than what I can get for $20/month from AT&T or SureWest. Admittedly I'm in a lucky position here because both of those alternatives are available everywhere around this apartment complex, so it should be quick to absorb the complex itself as well.
2) They don't have a choice, they're restricted from such exclusions by the FCC. I'm sure a federal complaint or threat of lawsuit will get the ball moving if their dumb asses can't figure it out themselves.
3) If my landlord tells me that, I will bring some FCC wrath down. There's no excuse he can use to legally retain a communications contract struck down by the FCC. He's going to have to put up or shut up in court... and I'm pissed enough after two years with Comcast that I'll fight it to the end. I've had it, and I imagine my neighbors have had it too. Hopefully others would be willing to stand up and do the same.
Umm, 6.7% per year isn't bad compared to inflaction? That means it's DOUBLE the rate of inflation... yes, that's bad enough.
The worst part really is for the service you get. The "local node" in a cable setup is a shared node between the entire apartment complex usually. If it's spread out wide enough, you might get two. But that means everyone who has internet has Cable, and everyone's sharing the same 3mbps bandwidth.
That equates to a crappy time for all, at 6.7% price increases per year. No deal.
This has probably been one of the worst things about living in an Apartment (the exclusivity agreements with craptacular Comcast).
I've been trying to get away from their twice as expensive internet that's shared with the entire Apartment Complex for a long time now, but no other providers seem to be available mysteriously, even though houses right across the street in any direction can acquire services from at least three other providers.
It was then that I did some investigating, and found out my complex had one of these agreements.
Right. I call it extortion.
They have the balls to give us an all-or-nothing claim when you get an apartment here: pay for Comcast internet at twice the normal price, or get nothing. On top of that, the node only goes into the complex in general. So while you're promised 3mbps at 60$ a month (which other providers like AT&T will give for 20$/month), you actually get 3mbps divided by however many people in the complex happen to be using it at the time.
The net result, at least here, ends up in a 60$/month dial-up connection quality internet.
I've been pissed at this. I hope the end of these agreements will signal the beginning of the end for Comcast, who can't keep up with the FTTP times and who's been making the lion's share of their money off of these extortion deals for quite some time.
May they rot in hell. As soon as this passes, I'm waddling my happy fat ass over to SureWest for a 10mbps fiber connection at the same price I'm paying for Comcast's (chuckle) 3mbps "service" right now.
The situation isn't merely that most nerds are Libertarians. I think most nerds are decentralized on the political spectrum in general. I know as many Green Party nerds as I do Libertarian nerds, but very few who'd call themselves centrist or a member of one of the "ruling" political parties.
To me, the real question is why nerds choose to be (or have decided to be) outside of centrist politics.
Once we developed the level of sentience where we could build tools to create our own artificial "evolution", we disconnected ourselves greatly from the natural cycle of evolution (that of survival of the fittest due to genetic superiority). Posession of tools gave us a level of seperation from what our natural abilities could do: as you can see today, natural ability is secondary due to the abundance of artificial modifiers. A person can be unable to move, for example, can still live a full life and father children.
Lesson learned to all: if you're going to claim you're a nonprofit organization, BE A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.
This site was not nonprofit, and was having the funds sent to their own, private account.
Yes it's sad, but ask yourself the following: could you trust a nonprofit paypal donation if you knew that they only had to casually mention that they were nonprofit? That they didn't have to prove it?
There's nothing stopping the people who run that website, other than personal honor, from pocketing the cash and giving the finger to everyone who donated. And THAT is why PayPal has those policies. I'm surprised that they'd even hand over the cash after 180 days in fact.
It's sad, yes: but in the future, they should know to make an actual nonprofit organization with its own account. Doing such a thing isn't that hard: you just have to apply, and make a seperate checking account. My club at High School did it, and the people in that club were a bunch of idiots, especially in High School (myself included).
Asheron's Call had new earth-shaking player-driven events every month, and they had - what - 1/100th of the income and staff that World of Warcraft does?
World of Warcraft is making tens millions of dollars a month in subscription fees alone, and has an unimaginably large staff.
Asheron's Call made significantly less each month, and yet they'd make sure that every month there was something new and player driven. In some events, they would even have developers and admins manually control NPCs who helped or hindered players in person for the quests.
So don't tell me it isn't possible. I've seen it done much better with many less resources. The WoW team is just making so much money without doing it that they don't feel the need to. If WoW was struggling at 30k users and barely paying for their servers, you can bet they'd try harder with monthly dynamic content to try and get a larger market share.
That had to be my favorite Star Trek episode. The Inner Light rocked my socks. I think their estimate on its sentimental value to viewers was quite low... and I've got dibs on it anyways. =) lol =)
The Neo-Geo (which if I remember correctly had CARTRIDGES that sold for almost 1000$ let alone the system itself... granted, it's been a long time and my youthful memory might be decieving me... and no, I'm not going to bother to take the time and look it up, someone else go do that and report back =) ) was that expensive for a couple of critical reasons.
1) It was a console that had technology far exceeding any capabilities available at the time. When Neo-Geo was selling to the elitist rich kids, the masses were just beginning to poke their heads into the SNES/Genesis market. A system of comparable power to the Neo Geo was at least... what? 4 years away? Possibly 5?
2) It was a console that was not marketed for the masses. Its advanced technology was marketed only to the few that could afford it. They felt that point (1) justified that marketing. Sony cannot claim that for the PS3, because no matter how many processors its core system is equivalent to, the end user is not going to see a dramatic difference between it and, say, the XBox 360. It's not like it was back then, when gamers who were used to 2D pixels suddenly had a system powerful enough to render 3D scenes. THAT was a significant jump... the jump between the Neo-Geo and its peers at the time was infinitely larger than the jump between Sony and its peers in technology.
If Sony wants to market to an exclusive lot, that's fine and entirely their perogative. But they won't sell many copies that way, and they're not going to make a lot of money that way. Where's SNK right now? I think last I heard they went bankrupt. Sony could learn from that example.
Of course, in order to actually appeal to an elite few, you have to offer them a truly elite product. They're going to need to beef up those system specs if they want to hit a market like that... and beef it up in such a way that an actual end user could visibly tell the difference in each and every licensed game they purchase.
Did you guys notice that it claims in that article to withstand 68Gs of shock force and still operate? Isn't that an unusually high amount of force? I mean, I've dropped a hard drive a foot or so and it became completely useless. 68Gs is a lot of force. I'd be interested to know if this is some kind of new shock absorption technology.
Fat chance of this happening. The Mac is all about predictable, known and *finite* sets of hardware that will work with its system.
That's the real secret of why it is so stable (aside from the usual pointing to the Unix core). With predictable hardware, you can tailor your system specifically to it: and you can build a stable and reliable system around it that maximizes the benefits of that limited set of hardware.
The PC world, however, is a different beast. There is no regulation of hardware components (aside from interface standards in hardware and some loose API specs). Dispite the frowning-on of M$, it is really this lack of regulation that makes Windows unstable... or more specifically, the fact that it can't account for the innumerable variants and deviations from reccommended specifications and expected values.
I highly doubt that Apple would want to get themselves out of this particularly nice and manageable niche they are in. It's a profitable niche, and a niche that leaves them with far less headaches. If they sold the OS X for the unregulated PC world, there would slowly creep into OS X the same problems one sees in the operating systems of the PC world. It would not be a wise move on their part.
Their current strategy, of giving PC users a way to use their old system on their new environment, is the perfect strategy: it allows PC users to make the transition to the regulated Mac environment, and in a way it gives PC users a feeling that they are buying two computers for the price of one. One system that still uses their PC apps at full speed, and yet will use the Mac specific features that are greatly valued by the niche audience.
If Apple is planning to release OS X to the general PC market, I would highly advise them against it. They've got a good thing going with Boot Camp, and they just need to keep it up.
The shady part to me is that Marvel and DC claim co-ownership of it. Not to say that I'll point a stiff finger at them and accuse them of wrongdoing (though in an above post I poke some fun for the sake of humor), but I would like to know how they managed to "co-create" the term. Did they both happen to create it at the same time, or are they merely claiming co-creation as a way of allowing each other to have exclusive rights to an obvious term, at the detriment of smaller comic companies?
Perhaps someone has some insight into the history of the word "superhero" that might be helpful to this discussion?
Fine then. I'm going to go slap a trademark on men wearing tights, and file an injunction against Marvel and DC for violating my trademark. As an added bonus, I can sue people who are still lost in the 80's or perform theatrical choreography. Hmm...
Does anyone know the procedure to file an Amicus Curae (how is that spelled anyways? =) ) brief? Perhaps we, the technologically and scientifically inclined, could provide our insight in the form of briefs directly to the justices of the Supreme court.
That would probably prove most useful, as a lot of these patents (imho) have been won due to technical/scientific ignorance on the part of patent officers and the courts. You throw enough technobabble at someone, and they tend to agree with you simply because they don't understand the fundamental definitions needed to understand the argument. We need to fight that with some insightful statements of the truth of these claims being made, in a language that the justices can understand and thus realize the b.s. that are these patent claims.
I don't blame the justices for being ignorant in these manners... after all, they are versed in the ways of justice, not biology/chemistry/computer science etc... It is up to filings from experts (such as amicus curae briefs) to enlighten them to what the subject is really about so that they can use what they *ARE* experts in (law) to determine what is valid.
So perhaps we can help them out and file some briefs on behalf of our (imho more rational) perspective on these issues?
Maybe I quit too long ago, but back when I used to play AC, Decal had nothing to do with macroing: it allowed people to make similar UI mods like World of Warcraft has (map enhancements, monster statistics etc...). Unless they did a complete 180 of what Decal used to do (and why even CALL it Decal still if it did something so completely different?), Decal is not a "level up to 128" macro program. It doesn't do anything automatically in terms of combat... again, unless they totally changed what the program does since last I saw.
the "FUD" fallacy? (That is, the fallacious debasing of an argument by labeling it as "FUD", even when it is supported by scientific and statistical evidence.)
I suppose you could call it Ad hominem, except that it fallaciously slanders the argument without basis instead of the person making the argument. Perhaps we've stumbled on a whole new branch in the study of logical fallacies.
... but then again, there's a lot about music in the early-mid 90's that I blocked out of my mind. Sometimes I get nightmares of teenagers in baggy purple sequence pants, and I wake up screaming.
The author was right and just to question the authenticity of this list. I hereby modify my mod from "Flamebait (-1)" to "Just, but failed to rally a call for the author's death (+ 1/2)". I'll leave it to someone else to mod him "Replace 'DS9' With 'TNG' (-1)".
Or maybe it was a typo: we all make mistakes when it's been a long day. His fingers reached for TNG, but some strange cosmic force changed it to DS9. Obviously this was in error. Can an admin go up and fix that please?
"Remember, it was the Catholic church who was involved in the business of molesting children"
It sounds like you have been misinformed on the subject. There are individuals in the Catholic Church who committed some grievous misdeeds, but it was hardly the "business" of the church: this post was total flamebait.
The sample population drawn from is highly unrepresentative of the whole organization, and also of the teachings of the organization. There is no piece of dogma that allows the molestation of children in the Catholic Church: indeed, it is abhorrent to them as a religious rule. An organization cannot be faulted and accused of supporting an act that was committed by members who knowingly and willingly disobeyed the dogma of the organization.
Was America evil when Richard Nixon betrayed the laws of the country and hired people to break into the DNC files at Watergate? Of course not: Richard Nixon was the committor of an evil, in defiance of the laws set out by America. As such, America as an organization cannot be faulted. (This is not to say, however, that it cannot be faulted for other failings)
As another example more closely related, take post-Soviet Russia. There are a number (some would say, even a great number) of lower level officials who are horribly corrupt: they would be willing to let people loose from prison for a bribe, or look the other way to crime. Does that make the government of Russia evil? No, because these are rogue individuals in the organization who have chosen to defy the laws and statutes of Russia. Likewise, rogue priests and Bishops who choose to defy papal law are not acting with the sanction of the church as a whole: they are rogue and detestable components that have seeped into the whole, but they are not the whole.
Slashdot Mirror
waves hit YOU.
?
Exactly. What the hell are websites doing allowing people to upload Jet Databases to publicly accessible folders anyways? Giving out your website's master FTP username/password is a vulnerability as well, but no sane web host would do such a thing. I hope it'd be the same for the former scenario as well as this latter one.
They're making a big deal of the following in both of the links in the article, repeating the same phrase over and over: "some web servers could be at risk if users upload a malicious .asp / .mdb file and then execute it via calls to "ADODB.Connection"."
They say this twice in one paragraph at one point.
But what does that really mean?
That means a server running ASP, that also is allowing end users to upload .mdb databases to it (???), AND to expose them from whatever location they've been uploaded to so that Connections can be made to them, will be vulnerable.
That's a pretty hefty list of "ifs". If you're letting your users upload .mdb databases to your webserver at all, let alone to a publicly accessible folder, you're already asking for severe trouble. I can't imagine a website out there that would allow such uploading/public exposure to happen that doesn't already have severe security flaws merely by the amount of freedom its given its users in what they can do on the site.
This is definitely a vulnerability, but the impact to ASP/ASP.NET servers is minimal if the hosts are implementing common sense security practices/user restrictions already.
While I agree it's interesting that *some* environmentalists are rallying around Nuclear power, I think we need to make a few things clear that the poster of this news article seems to have missed.
1) Most environmentalists supporting the Nuclear option do so only because it is the lesser of two evils, the latter of which (Global Warming) was not known of or understood back when the Nuclear Power protests were going on. This isn't ironic, it's evolutionary. It's the scientific process at its finest: new data comes in, and those looking out for the best interests of everyone reevaluate their previous conclusions based on that new data. The two are NOT mutually exclusive.
2) The "We can only hope that environmental concerns will not again, stifle our progress," is a bit more blatent of an example of flamebaiting. The reason that environmental concerns occasionally "stifle our progress" is because it would be foolish for anyone NOT to think of environmental concerns. Would the poster of this article rather that environmental concerns never be taken into account in the case of new technology? It would be like a scientist intentionally ignoring a key variable in a study. You wouldn't tell a clinical group performing studies on a new (for example) vaccine to ignore if the vaccine causes heart attacks just because said vaccine is supposed to cure cancer.
Aye, I'd be worried about that too, but... 1) For people like me having to suffer with Comcast, ANY competition is welcome. I'm in an apartment with one of these "agreements", and I have to pay 60$ a month for service worse than what I can get for $20/month from AT&T or SureWest. Admittedly I'm in a lucky position here because both of those alternatives are available everywhere around this apartment complex, so it should be quick to absorb the complex itself as well. 2) They don't have a choice, they're restricted from such exclusions by the FCC. I'm sure a federal complaint or threat of lawsuit will get the ball moving if their dumb asses can't figure it out themselves. 3) If my landlord tells me that, I will bring some FCC wrath down. There's no excuse he can use to legally retain a communications contract struck down by the FCC. He's going to have to put up or shut up in court... and I'm pissed enough after two years with Comcast that I'll fight it to the end. I've had it, and I imagine my neighbors have had it too. Hopefully others would be willing to stand up and do the same.
Umm, 6.7% per year isn't bad compared to inflaction? That means it's DOUBLE the rate of inflation... yes, that's bad enough. The worst part really is for the service you get. The "local node" in a cable setup is a shared node between the entire apartment complex usually. If it's spread out wide enough, you might get two. But that means everyone who has internet has Cable, and everyone's sharing the same 3mbps bandwidth. That equates to a crappy time for all, at 6.7% price increases per year. No deal.
This has probably been one of the worst things about living in an Apartment (the exclusivity agreements with craptacular Comcast).
I've been trying to get away from their twice as expensive internet that's shared with the entire Apartment Complex for a long time now, but no other providers seem to be available mysteriously, even though houses right across the street in any direction can acquire services from at least three other providers.
It was then that I did some investigating, and found out my complex had one of these agreements.
Right. I call it extortion.
They have the balls to give us an all-or-nothing claim when you get an apartment here: pay for Comcast internet at twice the normal price, or get nothing. On top of that, the node only goes into the complex in general. So while you're promised 3mbps at 60$ a month (which other providers like AT&T will give for 20$/month), you actually get 3mbps divided by however many people in the complex happen to be using it at the time.
The net result, at least here, ends up in a 60$/month dial-up connection quality internet.
I've been pissed at this. I hope the end of these agreements will signal the beginning of the end for Comcast, who can't keep up with the FTTP times and who's been making the lion's share of their money off of these extortion deals for quite some time.
May they rot in hell. As soon as this passes, I'm waddling my happy fat ass over to SureWest for a 10mbps fiber connection at the same price I'm paying for Comcast's (chuckle) 3mbps "service" right now.
The situation isn't merely that most nerds are Libertarians. I think most nerds are decentralized on the political spectrum in general. I know as many Green Party nerds as I do Libertarian nerds, but very few who'd call themselves centrist or a member of one of the "ruling" political parties.
To me, the real question is why nerds choose to be (or have decided to be) outside of centrist politics.
Once we developed the level of sentience where we could build tools to create our own artificial "evolution", we disconnected ourselves greatly from the natural cycle of evolution (that of survival of the fittest due to genetic superiority). Posession of tools gave us a level of seperation from what our natural abilities could do: as you can see today, natural ability is secondary due to the abundance of artificial modifiers. A person can be unable to move, for example, can still live a full life and father children.
Lesson learned to all: if you're going to claim you're a nonprofit organization, BE A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.
This site was not nonprofit, and was having the funds sent to their own, private account.
Yes it's sad, but ask yourself the following: could you trust a nonprofit paypal donation if you knew that they only had to casually mention that they were nonprofit? That they didn't have to prove it?
There's nothing stopping the people who run that website, other than personal honor, from pocketing the cash and giving the finger to everyone who donated. And THAT is why PayPal has those policies. I'm surprised that they'd even hand over the cash after 180 days in fact.
It's sad, yes: but in the future, they should know to make an actual nonprofit organization with its own account. Doing such a thing isn't that hard: you just have to apply, and make a seperate checking account. My club at High School did it, and the people in that club were a bunch of idiots, especially in High School (myself included).
... hold on, this really isn't impossible.
Asheron's Call had new earth-shaking player-driven events every month, and they had - what - 1/100th of the income and staff that World of Warcraft does?
World of Warcraft is making tens millions of dollars a month in subscription fees alone, and has an unimaginably large staff.
Asheron's Call made significantly less each month, and yet they'd make sure that every month there was something new and player driven. In some events, they would even have developers and admins manually control NPCs who helped or hindered players in person for the quests.
So don't tell me it isn't possible. I've seen it done much better with many less resources. The WoW team is just making so much money without doing it that they don't feel the need to. If WoW was struggling at 30k users and barely paying for their servers, you can bet they'd try harder with monthly dynamic content to try and get a larger market share.
That had to be my favorite Star Trek episode. The Inner Light rocked my socks. I think their estimate on its sentimental value to viewers was quite low... and I've got dibs on it anyways. =) lol =)
The Neo-Geo (which if I remember correctly had CARTRIDGES that sold for almost 1000$ let alone the system itself... granted, it's been a long time and my youthful memory might be decieving me... and no, I'm not going to bother to take the time and look it up, someone else go do that and report back =) ) was that expensive for a couple of critical reasons.
1) It was a console that had technology far exceeding any capabilities available at the time. When Neo-Geo was selling to the elitist rich kids, the masses were just beginning to poke their heads into the SNES/Genesis market. A system of comparable power to the Neo Geo was at least... what? 4 years away? Possibly 5?
2) It was a console that was not marketed for the masses. Its advanced technology was marketed only to the few that could afford it. They felt that point (1) justified that marketing. Sony cannot claim that for the PS3, because no matter how many processors its core system is equivalent to, the end user is not going to see a dramatic difference between it and, say, the XBox 360. It's not like it was back then, when gamers who were used to 2D pixels suddenly had a system powerful enough to render 3D scenes. THAT was a significant jump... the jump between the Neo-Geo and its peers at the time was infinitely larger than the jump between Sony and its peers in technology.
If Sony wants to market to an exclusive lot, that's fine and entirely their perogative. But they won't sell many copies that way, and they're not going to make a lot of money that way. Where's SNK right now? I think last I heard they went bankrupt. Sony could learn from that example.
Of course, in order to actually appeal to an elite few, you have to offer them a truly elite product. They're going to need to beef up those system specs if they want to hit a market like that... and beef it up in such a way that an actual end user could visibly tell the difference in each and every licensed game they purchase.
Did you guys notice that it claims in that article to withstand 68Gs of shock force and still operate? Isn't that an unusually high amount of force? I mean, I've dropped a hard drive a foot or so and it became completely useless. 68Gs is a lot of force. I'd be interested to know if this is some kind of new shock absorption technology.
Fat chance of this happening. The Mac is all about predictable, known and *finite* sets of hardware that will work with its system. That's the real secret of why it is so stable (aside from the usual pointing to the Unix core). With predictable hardware, you can tailor your system specifically to it: and you can build a stable and reliable system around it that maximizes the benefits of that limited set of hardware. The PC world, however, is a different beast. There is no regulation of hardware components (aside from interface standards in hardware and some loose API specs). Dispite the frowning-on of M$, it is really this lack of regulation that makes Windows unstable... or more specifically, the fact that it can't account for the innumerable variants and deviations from reccommended specifications and expected values. I highly doubt that Apple would want to get themselves out of this particularly nice and manageable niche they are in. It's a profitable niche, and a niche that leaves them with far less headaches. If they sold the OS X for the unregulated PC world, there would slowly creep into OS X the same problems one sees in the operating systems of the PC world. It would not be a wise move on their part. Their current strategy, of giving PC users a way to use their old system on their new environment, is the perfect strategy: it allows PC users to make the transition to the regulated Mac environment, and in a way it gives PC users a feeling that they are buying two computers for the price of one. One system that still uses their PC apps at full speed, and yet will use the Mac specific features that are greatly valued by the niche audience. If Apple is planning to release OS X to the general PC market, I would highly advise them against it. They've got a good thing going with Boot Camp, and they just need to keep it up.
Perhaps someone has some insight into the history of the word "superhero" that might be helpful to this discussion?
Fine then. I'm going to go slap a trademark on men wearing tights, and file an injunction against Marvel and DC for violating my trademark. As an added bonus, I can sue people who are still lost in the 80's or perform theatrical choreography. Hmm...
That would probably prove most useful, as a lot of these patents (imho) have been won due to technical/scientific ignorance on the part of patent officers and the courts. You throw enough technobabble at someone, and they tend to agree with you simply because they don't understand the fundamental definitions needed to understand the argument. We need to fight that with some insightful statements of the truth of these claims being made, in a language that the justices can understand and thus realize the b.s. that are these patent claims.
I don't blame the justices for being ignorant in these manners... after all, they are versed in the ways of justice, not biology/chemistry/computer science etc... It is up to filings from experts (such as amicus curae briefs) to enlighten them to what the subject is really about so that they can use what they *ARE* experts in (law) to determine what is valid.
So perhaps we can help them out and file some briefs on behalf of our (imho more rational) perspective on these issues?
Maybe I quit too long ago, but back when I used to play AC, Decal had nothing to do with macroing: it allowed people to make similar UI mods like World of Warcraft has (map enhancements, monster statistics etc...). Unless they did a complete 180 of what Decal used to do (and why even CALL it Decal still if it did something so completely different?), Decal is not a "level up to 128" macro program. It doesn't do anything automatically in terms of combat... again, unless they totally changed what the program does since last I saw.
I suppose you could call it Ad hominem, except that it fallaciously slanders the argument without basis instead of the person making the argument. Perhaps we've stumbled on a whole new branch in the study of logical fallacies.
Only time, and /., can tell.
Come on, please someone tell me this was just a poorly timed April Fools' joke.
... but then again, there's a lot about music in the early-mid 90's that I blocked out of my mind. Sometimes I get nightmares of teenagers in baggy purple sequence pants, and I wake up screaming.
This is not news, not when bands have been doing this since the days of Napster (voluntarily releasing whole CDs on internet only free release MP3).
Let the "(-1) Belligerant hammering of bad slashdot news" begin! ;)
Or maybe it was a typo: we all make mistakes when it's been a long day. His fingers reached for TNG, but some strange cosmic force changed it to DS9. Obviously this was in error. Can an admin go up and fix that please?
It sounds like you have been misinformed on the subject. There are individuals in the Catholic Church who committed some grievous misdeeds, but it was hardly the "business" of the church: this post was total flamebait.
The sample population drawn from is highly unrepresentative of the whole organization, and also of the teachings of the organization. There is no piece of dogma that allows the molestation of children in the Catholic Church: indeed, it is abhorrent to them as a religious rule. An organization cannot be faulted and accused of supporting an act that was committed by members who knowingly and willingly disobeyed the dogma of the organization.
Was America evil when Richard Nixon betrayed the laws of the country and hired people to break into the DNC files at Watergate? Of course not: Richard Nixon was the committor of an evil, in defiance of the laws set out by America. As such, America as an organization cannot be faulted. (This is not to say, however, that it cannot be faulted for other failings)
As another example more closely related, take post-Soviet Russia. There are a number (some would say, even a great number) of lower level officials who are horribly corrupt: they would be willing to let people loose from prison for a bribe, or look the other way to crime. Does that make the government of Russia evil? No, because these are rogue individuals in the organization who have chosen to defy the laws and statutes of Russia. Likewise, rogue priests and Bishops who choose to defy papal law are not acting with the sanction of the church as a whole: they are rogue and detestable components that have seeped into the whole, but they are not the whole.