You're probably justified in being worried. However at the moment, the only people who really understand malware are the people who already propagate viruses. This database will even the odds, enabling security professionals to stand on a more even technological level with the people they're opposing. There's all sorts of interesting parallels to the gun control debate here.
And here we have emperical evidence that Microsoft's bundling of IE does hurt the competition. OpenOffice can get a foothold on Windows becuase its competitor costs money, but Firefox can't because its competitor is free, and is built into every copy of Windows.
Firefox has far more penetration into the Windows market than OpenOffice so what you said makes absolutely no sense.
Rewritten software is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you are able to finally discard the truly broken sections of your previous implementation; allowing you to make massive leaps forward. On the other you're getting rid of a large list of known bugs and replacing it with an even larger list of unknown ones.
One of the most useful features of old technolgy is that it breaks in predictable ways.
So it's not too surprising that something like this happened. Doesn't worry me either, I have firewalls and a NAT on all my machines, no reason not to. However since it's something that happened before, it's irritating that Microsoft didn't think to check for something like this.
Dogs won't fight to the death unless people train them to. Even wolves know when to yield the leadership of the pack to another wolf. People, on the other hand, are the most vicious, dangerous mammals on the planet.
Humans don't generally fight to the death either. In fact most people don't fight at all. Like I said, the self-hatred is strong.
Depends if the reflection deflects perfectly or if it bounces off a rounded angle and deforms. If it's rounded it will lose nearly all of it's power at distances exceeding "half the fucking planet".
Well I get called a "misanthrope" as well. It has nothing to do with being socially clueless. I've always felt that there was an understanding, you get summoned to perform a function, you turn up and you do it; then you leave. if you have nothing in common with your co-workers, then there's no real reason for you to bond with them and there's nothing wrong with working in companionable silence.
Team building exercises are a blight on co-operation. Getting a bunch of people who may have legitimate reason to not get along and forcing them together. The best part of them is complaining about them afterwards.
But as humans, we'd be better off funneling the money into space. Problem is, we'd rather fight.
Or rather you mean we'd rather live instead of being the target of whoever thinks their life would be better if they had someone else's stuff. The self hatred is strong within you. Is it just my impression or do people actually think that animals never fight each-other?
The DA has to pressure, because if he does NOT cave, they're facing a multi-million $ lawsuit for wrongful (or even malicious where less would be protected by privilige) prosecution. This will ruin careers. As it should.
Then that DA is exceptionally short-sighted. They've already gone so far as to set up a storm that won't blow over. Having a powerful official visibly give the shaft to an employee is not something that goes down well in a first world country. Whatever the city does at this point is meaningless, it's already over, the only important thing now is how long they intend to thrash around until they fall down.
It's the system's responsibility to maintain order. "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." should end in "...they can't." just like the other examples, and unlike your version which is "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." "...we prosecute them".
Except we might want to send or receive mass mail ourselves. Since I'm on several mailing lists that I want to keep aware of, including Slashdot; how do we stop the spammers without stopping legitimate mass mailing.
There's one quote that's going to stick with me, forgive me for not remembering it correctly however; I read this a while back.
Archeologists uncovered a tablet from thousands of years ago. Roughly about the same time as "The Epic of Gilgamesh", the oldest written story; in it, the writer sates. "I despair of the children of today, they are too interested in the modern stories, full of fire and fury, and do not pay attention to their crop records and studies."
So that's one thing that's been around forever. Self important idiots who think the world is ending with the next generation. Forgetting they were exactly the same.
In normal configs, Linux is vulnerable to this kind of problem by design because it runs unsafe programs and then for efficiency the kernel also has direct access to it's memory plus the memory for a process doing a syscall. And it's not just a NULL pointer, and preventing maps for page zero doesn't solve the problem... it just means you need to find a bug where you can corrupt a function pointer to point to mappable space.
What this demonstrates is that the cost of isolating programs from each other by using separate memory spaces has a much higher cost than commonly understood. It either has a ~10%-20% overhead and is insecure by design (kernel map includes calling process memory space) -or- it is far slower than even that, but safe (kernel memory is completely separate from process). Computers are already faster than many users need... maybe it's finally time for an OS with a single memory space, like JavaOS or jxos, or even Singularity.
That would be livable if there was also a "unsecured" mode we could use. Sometimes the machine doesn't have any worthwhile data on it and you just want maximum FPS for gaming or whatever. The early Windows was still very popular despite it's comparatively worse memory model.
If they didn't open it up to a public bidding process, then they have no idea what possible solutions were out there that could fit their needs.
You're assuming the Government's IT department is completely ignorant of the world outside their doors; is it seriously plausible that they wouldn't know their options?"
Yeah, you could, so could all the other people who replied to me and everyone else who doesn't like that they removed the LAN option. But instead people just post to Slashdot.
That's a good point, did you write in?.
I might not buy it at all, depending on how good it is, so it's pointless to threaten them.
FYI: Blizzard's revenue model doesn't give a shit about your bandwidth availability.
That reminds me of a an old response to White Wolf's comments along the lines of...
WW: We have no interest in publishing eratta for our old books, because Eratta doesn't have any money.
Response: No, the one that has money is me, and you're not getting any until I see some eratta.
So I could say the same to Blizzard. The one that has money is me and they won't get any until I see something I can play on a Lan.
I don't understand why it would be so hard. Good (or at least "above average") programmers should be pretty easy to spot in an interview.
The problem is that even if they have high technical skill, they might be crazy. If they have even a small bit of self-awareness, they'll be on their best during the interview, but later....
One of the reasons that I sit (and sat) safe at home is that even if it were relatively safe I still didn't think it was proper to subjugate others through violence. We don't currently have a draft, so anyone who chooses to become a soldier has chosen to use violence to impose their will upon others. I will grant, however, that in many cases it wasn't an uncoerced choice. And that much more of the evil adheres to those who command the actions than to those who merely act out the orders as if they were robots.
So you actually think that you're one of the first people to espouse pacifism as a way of life. There have been plenty of social arrangements throught Earth's history where humans agreed not to have a military. Generally they didn't make it past the "small village" stage because they get wiped out by their more violent neighbours. We don't have to like violence but necessity demands that we be good enough to stop people with fewer principles from imposing their will upon us. You think there aren't countries everywhere who would absolutely love to have the world march in lockstep to their philosophy and are willing to use violence to make that happen?
Right now Iran is supressing protesters through force and executing their leaders at show trials. Various far right muslim groups have been spreading videos of their public punishments for breaking whatever rules through their own news services. North Korea still thinks they're at war with America because it makes it easier to explain why everyone's starving while their leader has six mansions and a personal water slide.
Those are just examples off the top of my head. I don't agree with blowing up Iraq, but saying "let's not have soldiers" is silly.
I wasn't entirely clear I guess about how the robot war was presented in the series. One side had automated squadrons of mobile suits and the other side had regular people in mobile suits. The automatons were shown to be:
* nearly impossible for a human to defeat, even a very skilled human
* "willing" to execute maneuvers that would kill a human pilot, had there been one inside
* utterly without mercy
* far less discriminating target shooters, so to speak
So, it's not like the war in the cartoon is robots versus robots with no humans being killed. The ability of one side to go to war with no losses makes them more aggressive and cavalier about life. You seem to think that war is a necessary evil, but I would like to go further and say that it is simply evil without being necessary.
I saw that series, I remember it well. The side using the robots had killed previously many innocents to give war "meaning" while lamenting how regrettable it was that people had lost that meaning. I'm interpreting your comments that violence with robots is too "meaningless" in light of their hypocrisy.
More to the point, if it wasn't for the plot stupidity of the villans or the last episode Ass-Pull of the Zero system, the villans would have won and that would have been it. So the real lesson from this is that the heroes should have spent less time philosophizing and more time building their army of combat robots.
Really though, it's silly to talk about such a thing as a "fair" fight. You'd want to have as much advantage as possible so you can finish it cleanly without getting caught up in a two-sided meat-grinder that costs millions of men and ravages the landscape. Fair is for the boxing ring where your enemy won't try to kill you if they win.
Humans have to take the risk of dying to make them avoid violence. If they do not run the risk, it is easier to inflict violence on others. It is philosophically easier to kill with a gun than with a knife, because you are removed from the real physical act. A robot can kill on your behalf without you being on the same continent. How does that reduce the tendency for violence ?
And yet all modern soldiers use guns because guns are better.
Either you are against violence or you're not - which is it ? People shouldn't have to die at all. Making machines do your dirty work does nothing to alleviate suffering from war. Making people actually do the work themselves changes the risk analysis and helps prevent unnecessary bloodshed.
It must be so awesome to sit totally safe at home and talk about how it's good that soldier's lives are at risk, I bet you're not actually talking about risking your OWN life here are you. You're risking other's lives so you can feel better about a theoretical point.
If they are xenophobic, and their population is aging, wait for them to die out enough and then they will have little choice but to integrate with the Collective... urrhh or maybe just be forced to accept outside help.
Globalisation is a force that can now only be stopped by the scarcity of fuel for global travel. Deal with it. Forget race because we're all humans.
Or they can just use their own resources to make robots that take care of their problems. Why is it necessary that they suffer to the point where they are "forced" to accept outside help?
I recently watched Gundam Wing again, and even in a cartoon series, some of the characters make extensive speeches about how robot war desensitizes humanity and is therefore wrong. War should be fought by people so that they can understand its terrible cost and will work to oppose and end it.
That always filled me with hatred. The philosophical idea is that fighting with robots in war has no "meaning", I've always thought it was more important that humans survive than that war have "meaning". The idea that people need to die in order for you to feel better about voilence is indefensible.
It was portrayed as a good thing by the society in the book - I think you'd have a harder time proving that Stephenson himself was promoting that view.
I would have a harder time, not that this proves anything either way. My point simply is that while Diamond Age portrays nice societies, all of them are inferior to the western societies in which most of the people on this board live in now. Even modern day Iran acknowledges, at least tacitly; that their people are fully worthy of training and resources. The examples in DA didn't even do that, and while they could have guaranteed at least the most basic schooling, didn't bother.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, so I'm supposed to be upset that Microsoft didn't ship experimental drivers for an unratified standard in their new OS?
What's really telling is that the previous comment got modded +4 Informative without anyone noticing this at all.
IMHO, this is a bad, BAD idea.
You're probably justified in being worried. However at the moment, the only people who really understand malware are the people who already propagate viruses. This database will even the odds, enabling security professionals to stand on a more even technological level with the people they're opposing. There's all sorts of interesting parallels to the gun control debate here.
And here we have emperical evidence that Microsoft's bundling of IE does hurt the competition. OpenOffice can get a foothold on Windows becuase its competitor costs money, but Firefox can't because its competitor is free, and is built into every copy of Windows.
Firefox has far more penetration into the Windows market than OpenOffice so what you said makes absolutely no sense.
Rewritten software is a double-edged sword. On the one hand you are able to finally discard the truly broken sections of your previous implementation; allowing you to make massive leaps forward. On the other you're getting rid of a large list of known bugs and replacing it with an even larger list of unknown ones.
One of the most useful features of old technolgy is that it breaks in predictable ways.
So it's not too surprising that something like this happened. Doesn't worry me either, I have firewalls and a NAT on all my machines, no reason not to. However since it's something that happened before, it's irritating that Microsoft didn't think to check for something like this.
Dogs won't fight to the death unless people train them to. Even wolves know when to yield the leadership of the pack to another wolf. People, on the other hand, are the most vicious, dangerous mammals on the planet.
Humans don't generally fight to the death either. In fact most people don't fight at all. Like I said, the self-hatred is strong.
Depends if the reflection deflects perfectly or if it bounces off a rounded angle and deforms. If it's rounded it will lose nearly all of it's power at distances exceeding "half the fucking planet".
Well I get called a "misanthrope" as well. It has nothing to do with being socially clueless. I've always felt that there was an understanding, you get summoned to perform a function, you turn up and you do it; then you leave. if you have nothing in common with your co-workers, then there's no real reason for you to bond with them and there's nothing wrong with working in companionable silence.
Team building exercises are a blight on co-operation. Getting a bunch of people who may have legitimate reason to not get along and forcing them together. The best part of them is complaining about them afterwards.
But as humans, we'd be better off funneling the money into space. Problem is, we'd rather fight.
Or rather you mean we'd rather live instead of being the target of whoever thinks their life would be better if they had someone else's stuff. The self hatred is strong within you. Is it just my impression or do people actually think that animals never fight each-other?
The DA has to pressure, because if he does NOT cave, they're facing a multi-million $ lawsuit for wrongful (or even malicious where less would be protected by privilige) prosecution. This will ruin careers. As it should.
Then that DA is exceptionally short-sighted. They've already gone so far as to set up a storm that won't blow over. Having a powerful official visibly give the shaft to an employee is not something that goes down well in a first world country. Whatever the city does at this point is meaningless, it's already over, the only important thing now is how long they intend to thrash around until they fall down.
It's the system's responsibility to maintain order. "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." should end in "...they can't." just like the other examples, and unlike your version which is "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." "...we prosecute them".
Except we might want to send or receive mass mail ourselves. Since I'm on several mailing lists that I want to keep aware of, including Slashdot; how do we stop the spammers without stopping legitimate mass mailing.
Don't say "don't do it", that's not a solution.
There's one quote that's going to stick with me, forgive me for not remembering it correctly however; I read this a while back.
Archeologists uncovered a tablet from thousands of years ago. Roughly about the same time as "The Epic of Gilgamesh", the oldest written story; in it, the writer sates. "I despair of the children of today, they are too interested in the modern stories, full of fire and fury, and do not pay attention to their crop records and studies."
So that's one thing that's been around forever. Self important idiots who think the world is ending with the next generation. Forgetting they were exactly the same.
In normal configs, Linux is vulnerable to this kind of problem by design because it runs unsafe programs and then for efficiency the kernel also has direct access to it's memory plus the memory for a process doing a syscall. And it's not just a NULL pointer, and preventing maps for page zero doesn't solve the problem... it just means you need to find a bug where you can corrupt a function pointer to point to mappable space.
What this demonstrates is that the cost of isolating programs from each other by using separate memory spaces has a much higher cost than commonly understood. It either has a ~10%-20% overhead and is insecure by design (kernel map includes calling process memory space) -or- it is far slower than even that, but safe (kernel memory is completely separate from process). Computers are already faster than many users need... maybe it's finally time for an OS with a single memory space, like JavaOS or jxos, or even Singularity.
That would be livable if there was also a "unsecured" mode we could use. Sometimes the machine doesn't have any worthwhile data on it and you just want maximum FPS for gaming or whatever. The early Windows was still very popular despite it's comparatively worse memory model.
They should be on Wikileaks if they're that bad.
"In what appears to be a carefully planned suicide..." Is it possible to mod a story submission as flamebait?
I've seen the flamebait tag get used often around here, however this wouldn't be the first time I'm thinking it's a valid comment.
A man that should call everything by it's right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. --Lord Halifax
Obviously Fox News's site is a different animal but if you just had a Fox media site with reporting that was real, it could work.
You mean in a different universe not like our one, it's a workable plan.
If they didn't open it up to a public bidding process, then they have no idea what possible solutions were out there that could fit their needs.
You're assuming the Government's IT department is completely ignorant of the world outside their doors; is it seriously plausible that they wouldn't know their options?"
Yeah, you could, so could all the other people who replied to me and everyone else who doesn't like that they removed the LAN option. But instead people just post to Slashdot.
That's a good point, did you write in?.
I might not buy it at all, depending on how good it is, so it's pointless to threaten them.
FYI: Blizzard's revenue model doesn't give a shit about your bandwidth availability.
That reminds me of a an old response to White Wolf's comments along the lines of...
WW: We have no interest in publishing eratta for our old books, because Eratta doesn't have any money.
Response: No, the one that has money is me, and you're not getting any until I see some eratta.
So I could say the same to Blizzard. The one that has money is me and they won't get any until I see something I can play on a Lan.
I don't understand why it would be so hard. Good (or at least "above average") programmers should be pretty easy to spot in an interview.
The problem is that even if they have high technical skill, they might be crazy. If they have even a small bit of self-awareness, they'll be on their best during the interview, but later....
One of the reasons that I sit (and sat) safe at home is that even if it were relatively safe I still didn't think it was proper to subjugate others through violence. We don't currently have a draft, so anyone who chooses to become a soldier has chosen to use violence to impose their will upon others. I will grant, however, that in many cases it wasn't an uncoerced choice. And that much more of the evil adheres to those who command the actions than to those who merely act out the orders as if they were robots.
So you actually think that you're one of the first people to espouse pacifism as a way of life. There have been plenty of social arrangements throught Earth's history where humans agreed not to have a military. Generally they didn't make it past the "small village" stage because they get wiped out by their more violent neighbours. We don't have to like violence but necessity demands that we be good enough to stop people with fewer principles from imposing their will upon us. You think there aren't countries everywhere who would absolutely love to have the world march in lockstep to their philosophy and are willing to use violence to make that happen?
Right now Iran is supressing protesters through force and executing their leaders at show trials.
Various far right muslim groups have been spreading videos of their public punishments for breaking whatever rules through their own news services.
North Korea still thinks they're at war with America because it makes it easier to explain why everyone's starving while their leader has six mansions and a personal water slide.
Those are just examples off the top of my head. I don't agree with blowing up Iraq, but saying "let's not have soldiers" is silly.
I wasn't entirely clear I guess about how the robot war was presented in the series. One side had automated squadrons of mobile suits and the other side had regular people in mobile suits. The automatons were shown to be: * nearly impossible for a human to defeat, even a very skilled human * "willing" to execute maneuvers that would kill a human pilot, had there been one inside * utterly without mercy * far less discriminating target shooters, so to speak So, it's not like the war in the cartoon is robots versus robots with no humans being killed. The ability of one side to go to war with no losses makes them more aggressive and cavalier about life. You seem to think that war is a necessary evil, but I would like to go further and say that it is simply evil without being necessary.
I saw that series, I remember it well. The side using the robots had killed previously many innocents to give war "meaning" while lamenting how regrettable it was that people had lost that meaning. I'm interpreting your comments that violence with robots is too "meaningless" in light of their hypocrisy.
More to the point, if it wasn't for the plot stupidity of the villans or the last episode Ass-Pull of the Zero system, the villans would have won and that would have been it. So the real lesson from this is that the heroes should have spent less time philosophizing and more time building their army of combat robots.
Really though, it's silly to talk about such a thing as a "fair" fight. You'd want to have as much advantage as possible so you can finish it cleanly without getting caught up in a two-sided meat-grinder that costs millions of men and ravages the landscape. Fair is for the boxing ring where your enemy won't try to kill you if they win.
Humans have to take the risk of dying to make them avoid violence. If they do not run the risk, it is easier to inflict violence on others. It is philosophically easier to kill with a gun than with a knife, because you are removed from the real physical act. A robot can kill on your behalf without you being on the same continent. How does that reduce the tendency for violence ?
And yet all modern soldiers use guns because guns are better.
Either you are against violence or you're not - which is it ? People shouldn't have to die at all. Making machines do your dirty work does nothing to alleviate suffering from war. Making people actually do the work themselves changes the risk analysis and helps prevent unnecessary bloodshed.
It must be so awesome to sit totally safe at home and talk about how it's good that soldier's lives are at risk, I bet you're not actually talking about risking your OWN life here are you. You're risking other's lives so you can feel better about a theoretical point.
The answer is simple then.
If they are xenophobic, and their population is aging, wait for them to die out enough and then they will have little choice but to integrate with the Collective ... urrhh or maybe just be forced to accept outside help.
Globalisation is a force that can now only be stopped by the scarcity of fuel for global travel. Deal with it. Forget race because we're all humans.
Or they can just use their own resources to make robots that take care of their problems. Why is it necessary that they suffer to the point where they are "forced" to accept outside help?
I recently watched Gundam Wing again, and even in a cartoon series, some of the characters make extensive speeches about how robot war desensitizes humanity and is therefore wrong. War should be fought by people so that they can understand its terrible cost and will work to oppose and end it.
That always filled me with hatred. The philosophical idea is that fighting with robots in war has no "meaning", I've always thought it was more important that humans survive than that war have "meaning". The idea that people need to die in order for you to feel better about voilence is indefensible.
It was portrayed as a good thing by the society in the book - I think you'd have a harder time proving that Stephenson himself was promoting that view.
I would have a harder time, not that this proves anything either way. My point simply is that while Diamond Age portrays nice societies, all of them are inferior to the western societies in which most of the people on this board live in now. Even modern day Iran acknowledges, at least tacitly; that their people are fully worthy of training and resources. The examples in DA didn't even do that, and while they could have guaranteed at least the most basic schooling, didn't bother.