"$NOT_SO_RANDOM_WEBSITE crashes a browser" IS noteworthy. If a browser accepts untrusted data, then is closed by the operating system for doing something un-program-like (in other words, crashing), then it reveals a programming flaw that might be exploited six months down the road.
The point of Firefox is the extensions. Get Adblocker, you can block just about anything. Get the CopyURL extension so that you can highlight text, then copy the Title+Selection+URL to your clipboard. Block all Flash elements until you click on them with the FlashBlock extension. Get the BookmarkFTP extension so you can keep your bookmarks sync'd on multiple systems. There's hundreds.
There's extensions for everyone. I use Firefox for browsing, and Safari for "safe" sites.
It is in the Tolkein genre, but more personal, less "grand armies crashing". It's more accessible than Tolkein, but still grand. The hero is an -ine, which makes it a little more appropriate for the nieces. Everyone I have introduced to the book has loved it, including my in-the-Marines brother. And all of my sisters.
If they are in the Christian-way, I can also recommend the Stephan R Lawhead books: The Dragon King trilogy and the Empyrion saga.
My other favorites are more mainstream, and have probably already been mentioned.
One more book to consider is The Count of Monte Cristo. Long, but oh so good. I first read it when I was in sixth grade with a five-day flu, and it has been on my top 5 list ever since.
Don't just count vulnerabilities. Every month (except, I think, one in the last couple years) Microsoft has patched vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to "make your system their bitch
can remember only one Firefox vulnerability this year that allowed the running of arbitrary code. Examples of other serious vulnerabilities in Firefox include: faking the site address (phishing), reading cookies in other windows, reading files on your hard drive. These are serious, but none of them require reformatting your hard drive for exploit recovery.
Firefox vulnerabilies just tend to be safer than IE vulnerabilities.
Because of OS X default security, even when running as the administrator, you still need to click to run the program, then type in your password. Deceptive, but not really secretive or automatic, thanks to the default Mac security.
In Windows, you just insert the CD. Maybe into someone else's system when their back is turned. Windows OS trusts external content much more than the user sitting at the desk. "Do me", it says.
Unfortunately, people are still stupid enough to follow these ludicrous steps. Remember the teddy bear "virus" in Windows? Consisted only of an email, the instructions to delete a standard Windows exe file, and a directive to resend the email to all of your friends.
This sounds like such a BAD setup: security through obscurity (in Perl?!), basic inability to understand root. After all, if hackers can reverse-engineer DVD software to decrypt all movies, your Perl script doesn't stand a chance. And I bet you're putting a password in it!!
But assuming you know what you're talking about, it's an interesting puzzle.
Read-only as root? Mount a write-protected media. CD, floppy, USB dongle. Some hard drives let you set a write-protect jumper. Or you could go with that modified kernal that someone else mentioned here.
Obfuscating Perl? Install a Sony rootkit!:) Modify the script to load once, delete the file, and respond to requests. See perldoc -q 'hide the source'.
I think you meant to say that "Dog breeding IS evolution, even though it is human-directed." I do want to disagree, and say that many dogs CAN survive in the wild.
However, modern corn can not reproduce without human assistance, and really CAN NOT survive in the wild.
I think that evolution in humans has just about stopped, but mostly because of the huge population size. Given the vast population, any mutation has an insignificant chance of making it into a majority of the population, even when considering the vast numbers of mutations happening each generation. Only something like the Plague or a nuclear winter would have a chance at creating a real shift in our specios. In my opinion.
Asthma is a poor example, though. It seems to be concentrated in urban and "civilized" (er, poor choice of words) areas, and is only a recent change. So it's not really around "because we can treat it", but rather because we caused it.
You dumbass. We uncover new fossils every day. The theory of evolution makes predictions on the location, age, and appearance of these fossils. We sequence more DNA from many different species every day. These distribution of these sequences are also predicted by evolutionary theory. Using your requirements, we can't even tell if the Earth was round last year.
Why are there only two theories? One that is based on real-world facts and exhaustive peer-review collected over the centuries. And one solely based on a document that hasn't been updated in 2000 years, and claims that all land-based life on Earth are descendants from a few pairs of animals brought together on a wooden ark at a time when all of the Earth was covered in floods up to the highest mountains?
Care to explain why your non-scientific version of creationism should be taught in a science class and not the Indian/pagan/Chinese/Muslim/Aboriginese claims for the origins of life and the Earth? What makes your version of creationism stand out *scientifically* from the others?
Are you sure you're not simply pushing your religious agenda?
You described the odds of something, but not evolution.
What you described is the odds of spontaneous generation, which has already been debunked thanks to Louis Pasteur, and is no longer considered a valid theory. Thanks for playing, and try to catch up.
The IT group has to answer to the needs of their users, not the other way around. Granted, they are trying to keep out viruses and lawsuits, but they still need to address your needs.
It sounds like their heads have swelled too much, so talk to their boss, or their bosses boss. Explain that your work is better with this tool, and that it is unreasonable to ban your tool given the known lack of risks. This is not a garage-built closed-source piece-of-shareware; but a globally used, open source, well-inspected and maintained tool. Remember the talking points: ZERO viruses (macs), not running as Administrator, updates are applied regularly and consistently.. (well, there's better Persuader lists out there.)
I've been in IT for the last 10 years, and we are there specifically to help the users do their job. Sometimes it's to disable all email attachments, and sometimes it's setting up a Windows 98 machine for a critical job.
You may need to compromise.. a probabation peroid of increased firewall monitoring, maybe a "I'm responsible" contract to cover their butts. Thing is.. if their argument comes down to "Because we said so", then they are enforcing a personal agenda, and have ceased being effective at their primary responsibilities.
(Falling asleep at this point, so my ramblings will go unedited..) Hope this helps.
"Here's my second plan. Back in the Sixties I had a weather changing
machine that was in essence a sophisticated heat beam which we called a
"laser." Using this laser, we punch a hole in the protective layer around
the Earth, which we scientists call the "Ozone Layer." Slowly but surely,
ultraviolet rays would pour in, increasing the risk of skin cancer. That
is, unless the world pays us a hefty ransom." -- Dr. Evil
. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left.
Cause nothing shows "more" like a single anecdote. PC activists, while sometimes overzealous in trying to rectify a known problem with discrimination in our culture, can hardly be called "anti-science".
Of course, some people from every group fear or distrust science, but the religious right is the most vocal group trying to ban science from the schools and museums. (Yes, they are.) Many of them also believe that global warming, evolution, most astronomy, historical geology, and so much more areas of modern science.. are conspiracies invented primarily to discredit Christianity. Read the popular Christian books and magazines if you don't believe me. Gosh, the last time I flipped past the 700 Club on TV, they were using those same terms.. specifically that the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was leftist propoganda for global warming!
What other large group in America is so damned paranoid about science!?
Another laptop user here... I'd also prefer FairPlay style checks, since 1) it's a hassle to carry around CD/DVDs, and 2) my battery life drops to nuthin' when I put in a DVD/CD.
Wow! (no pun intended) So there's in the neighborhood of 50,000 to 100,000 new characters created every day? I'm flabbergasted.
I think it would be possible, and more importantly, fairly simple, to flag accounts for review or even prevent them on creation based on some sort of letter-distribution. For instance, "Cmd", "mdr" aren't legit sequences of characters. Neither is having mid-word caps that don't follow normal prefixes like "de", "le".
Can you tell how old the ink is on those policies? (Seriously) He's been playing for six months before they 'caught' him, why?
I'm not taking sides cause I don't know the full story, but you'd think that Blizzard employees could review the names in a reasonable period of time since it's such an emotional (ie. costly) policy. If they'd have caught it within a week, well, it wouldn't be on the front page of Slashdot.
*laugh* The best reason to read Piers Anthony books in high school. They introduced me to a lot of these puzzles including this one, and the Prisoner's Dilemma, as "plot" points. (I think this one was in the Incarnations series). Fluff fiction otherwise, but this brings back good memories.:)
That's where the "arbitrary" number of times comes in. The prisoners can wait until they have all been in at least f(k,n) times, and the king will eventually comply. So what's f(k,n)?
Well, that's interesting. She told me that the correct term was "Der Schwartze" (black). So I've been thinking that only Americans were so (pardon me) self-absorbed to use the weird, hybrid-citizenship term to refer to skin color. If we actually meant nationality, it would make more sense to me. But it seems it's only refers to skin color. If the typical American saw Grace Jones walking down the street, they'd call her an African-American. (Well, actually, they'd call her Grace Jones.)
The term-to-use doesn't make much difference to me. I know that racism is a big problem in America, but I don't know whether what we're doing (affirmative action, "empowering" rap, etc.) is helping or hurting the problem.
At least I can feel superior to my dad, who thought that Jackie Chan was Japanese, and didn't see what the difference was.;)
Being racist is an attitude. Using the wrong term-of-the-day doesn't make you racist. Not knowing people doesn't make you racist. It might make you out of touch, or ignorant, or it might be because in a global medium, you can't ever avoid pissing off everybody. The poster meant well, so instead of overreacting, try to help.
For the record, he referred to a very "founded" statistical remark. He was talking about how few non-white he -personally- knew, probably something he knows more about than you. Moreover, he said that he "could only blame his own ignorance".
If I thought you were a troll I wouldn't bother replying, but I think you just responded blindly.
LOL! You really want to know about people with dark skin, right? You don't care if they are of African descent (more recently than the rest of us), or if they are American, or if they are African-Americans with light skin tones. You're looking for a chocolate-colored role model, regardless of anscestry or nationality.
My girlfriend told me a story about a trip she took to Europe. Trying to point out a black man on the subway that she thought was attractive, she tried describing him (in German) to her friend by his outfit and failed. In her political-correctness, she first tried to avoid mentioning his skin-color, which would've been the obvious and easy way, then tried to translate into German...
Slashdot Mirror
"$NOT_SO_RANDOM_WEBSITE crashes a browser" IS noteworthy. If a browser accepts untrusted data, then is closed by the operating system for doing something un-program-like (in other words, crashing), then it reveals a programming flaw that might be exploited six months down the road.
Browsers should never crash.
if this device prevents one from driving a car, its because one didn't follow through with their part of the contract...
Right. You have delusion level 1. You trust the system to always work as intended.
The next level is distrust/skeptism. I trust the system to break down occasionally, and see if it degrades gracefully.
This no-pay, no-drive system does not look like it degrades gracefully, so those of us who are cautious don't trust it or like it.
The point of Firefox is the extensions. Get Adblocker, you can block just about anything. Get the CopyURL extension so that you can highlight text, then copy the Title+Selection+URL to your clipboard. Block all Flash elements until you click on them with the FlashBlock extension. Get the BookmarkFTP extension so you can keep your bookmarks sync'd on multiple systems. There's hundreds.
There's extensions for everyone. I use Firefox for browsing, and Safari for "safe" sites.
The Deed of Paksenarrion - by Elizabeth Moon
It is in the Tolkein genre, but more personal, less "grand armies crashing". It's more accessible than Tolkein, but still grand. The hero is an -ine, which makes it a little more appropriate for the nieces. Everyone I have introduced to the book has loved it, including my in-the-Marines brother. And all of my sisters.
If they are in the Christian-way, I can also recommend the Stephan R Lawhead books: The Dragon King trilogy and the Empyrion saga.
My other favorites are more mainstream, and have probably already been mentioned.
One more book to consider is The Count of Monte Cristo. Long, but oh so good. I first read it when I was in sixth grade with a five-day flu, and it has been on my top 5 list ever since.
Don't just count vulnerabilities. Every month (except, I think, one in the last couple years) Microsoft has patched vulnerabilities that would allow a remote attacker to "make your system their bitch
can remember only one Firefox vulnerability this year that allowed the running of arbitrary code. Examples of other serious vulnerabilities in Firefox include: faking the site address (phishing), reading cookies in other windows, reading files on your hard drive. These are serious, but none of them require reformatting your hard drive for exploit recovery.
Firefox vulnerabilies just tend to be safer than IE vulnerabilities.
They could go work at Diebold. /ducks
Because of OS X default security, even when running as the administrator, you still need to click to run the program, then type in your password. Deceptive, but not really secretive or automatic, thanks to the default Mac security.
;)
In Windows, you just insert the CD. Maybe into someone else's system when their back is turned. Windows OS trusts external content much more than the user sitting at the desk. "Do me", it says.
Unfortunately, people are still stupid enough to follow these ludicrous steps. Remember the teddy bear "virus" in Windows? Consisted only of an email, the instructions to delete a standard Windows exe file, and a directive to resend the email to all of your friends.
PS. Join us... you know you want to.
This sounds like such a BAD setup: security through obscurity (in Perl?!), basic inability to understand root. After all, if hackers can reverse-engineer DVD software to decrypt all movies, your Perl script doesn't stand a chance. And I bet you're putting a password in it!!
:) Modify the script to load once, delete the file, and respond to requests. See perldoc -q 'hide the source'.
But assuming you know what you're talking about, it's an interesting puzzle.
Read-only as root? Mount a write-protected media. CD, floppy, USB dongle. Some hard drives let you set a write-protect jumper. Or you could go with that modified kernal that someone else mentioned here.
Obfuscating Perl? Install a Sony rootkit!
I think you meant to say that "Dog breeding IS evolution, even though it is human-directed." I do want to disagree, and say that many dogs CAN survive in the wild.
However, modern corn can not reproduce without human assistance, and really CAN NOT survive in the wild.
I think that evolution in humans has just about stopped, but mostly because of the huge population size. Given the vast population, any mutation has an insignificant chance of making it into a majority of the population, even when considering the vast numbers of mutations happening each generation. Only something like the Plague or a nuclear winter would have a chance at creating a real shift in our specios. In my opinion.
Asthma is a poor example, though. It seems to be concentrated in urban and "civilized" (er, poor choice of words) areas, and is only a recent change. So it's not really around "because we can treat it", but rather because we caused it.
You dumbass. We uncover new fossils every day. The theory of evolution makes predictions on the location, age, and appearance of these fossils. We sequence more DNA from many different species every day. These distribution of these sequences are also predicted by evolutionary theory. Using your requirements, we can't even tell if the Earth was round last year.
Sorry, it's been happening for several years already, like the breakup of the Antartic ice.
Why are there only two theories? One that is based on real-world facts and exhaustive peer-review collected over the centuries. And one solely based on a document that hasn't been updated in 2000 years, and claims that all land-based life on Earth are descendants from a few pairs of animals brought together on a wooden ark at a time when all of the Earth was covered in floods up to the highest mountains?
Care to explain why your non-scientific version of creationism should be taught in a science class and not the Indian/pagan/Chinese/Muslim/Aboriginese claims for the origins of life and the Earth? What makes your version of creationism stand out *scientifically* from the others?
Are you sure you're not simply pushing your religious agenda?
You described the odds of something, but not evolution.
What you described is the odds of spontaneous generation, which has already been debunked thanks to Louis Pasteur, and is no longer considered a valid theory. Thanks for playing, and try to catch up.
The IT group has to answer to the needs of their users, not the other way around. Granted, they are trying to keep out viruses and lawsuits, but they still need to address your needs.
It sounds like their heads have swelled too much, so talk to their boss, or their bosses boss. Explain that your work is better with this tool, and that it is unreasonable to ban your tool given the known lack of risks. This is not a garage-built closed-source piece-of-shareware; but a globally used, open source, well-inspected and maintained tool. Remember the talking points: ZERO viruses (macs), not running as Administrator, updates are applied regularly and consistently.. (well, there's better Persuader lists out there.)
I've been in IT for the last 10 years, and we are there specifically to help the users do their job. Sometimes it's to disable all email attachments, and sometimes it's setting up a Windows 98 machine for a critical job.
You may need to compromise.. a probabation peroid of increased firewall monitoring, maybe a "I'm responsible" contract to cover their butts. Thing is.. if their argument comes down to "Because we said so", then they are enforcing a personal agenda, and have ceased being effective at their primary responsibilities.
(Falling asleep at this point, so my ramblings will go unedited..) Hope this helps.
. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left.
Cause nothing shows "more" like a single anecdote. PC activists, while sometimes overzealous in trying to rectify a known problem with discrimination in our culture, can hardly be called "anti-science".
Of course, some people from every group fear or distrust science, but the religious right is the most vocal group trying to ban science from the schools and museums. (Yes, they are.) Many of them also believe that global warming, evolution, most astronomy, historical geology, and so much more areas of modern science.. are conspiracies invented primarily to discredit Christianity. Read the popular Christian books and magazines if you don't believe me. Gosh, the last time I flipped past the 700 Club on TV, they were using those same terms.. specifically that the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was leftist propoganda for global warming!
What other large group in America is so damned paranoid about science!?
Another laptop user here... I'd also prefer FairPlay style checks, since 1) it's a hassle to carry around CD/DVDs, and 2) my battery life drops to nuthin' when I put in a DVD/CD.
Wow! (no pun intended) So there's in the neighborhood of 50,000 to 100,000 new characters created every day? I'm flabbergasted.
I think it would be possible, and more importantly, fairly simple, to flag accounts for review or even prevent them on creation based on some sort of letter-distribution. For instance, "Cmd", "mdr" aren't legit sequences of characters. Neither is having mid-word caps that don't follow normal prefixes like "de", "le".
It's just a thought.
Can you tell how old the ink is on those policies? (Seriously) He's been playing for six months before they 'caught' him, why?
I'm not taking sides cause I don't know the full story, but you'd think that Blizzard employees could review the names in a reasonable period of time since it's such an emotional (ie. costly) policy. If they'd have caught it within a week, well, it wouldn't be on the front page of Slashdot.
*laugh* The best reason to read Piers Anthony books in high school. They introduced me to a lot of these puzzles including this one, and the Prisoner's Dilemma, as "plot" points. (I think this one was in the Incarnations series). Fluff fiction otherwise, but this brings back good memories. :)
That's where the "arbitrary" number of times comes in. The prisoners can wait until they have all been in at least f(k,n) times, and the king will eventually comply. So what's f(k,n)?
Simple, the barber is a Cretan.
Well, that's interesting. She told me that the correct term was "Der Schwartze" (black). So I've been thinking that only Americans were so (pardon me) self-absorbed to use the weird, hybrid-citizenship term to refer to skin color. If we actually meant nationality, it would make more sense to me. But it seems it's only refers to skin color. If the typical American saw Grace Jones walking down the street, they'd call her an African-American. (Well, actually, they'd call her Grace Jones.)
;)
The term-to-use doesn't make much difference to me. I know that racism is a big problem in America, but I don't know whether what we're doing (affirmative action, "empowering" rap, etc.) is helping or hurting the problem.
At least I can feel superior to my dad, who thought that Jackie Chan was Japanese, and didn't see what the difference was.
Being racist is an attitude. Using the wrong term-of-the-day doesn't make you racist. Not knowing people doesn't make you racist. It might make you out of touch, or ignorant, or it might be because in a global medium, you can't ever avoid pissing off everybody. The poster meant well, so instead of overreacting, try to help.
For the record, he referred to a very "founded" statistical remark. He was talking about how few non-white he -personally- knew, probably something he knows more about than you. Moreover, he said that he "could only blame his own ignorance".
If I thought you were a troll I wouldn't bother replying, but I think you just responded blindly.
LOL! You really want to know about people with dark skin, right? You don't care if they are of African descent (more recently than the rest of us), or if they are American, or if they are African-Americans with light skin tones. You're looking for a chocolate-colored role model, regardless of anscestry or nationality.
:)
My girlfriend told me a story about a trip she took to Europe. Trying to point out a black man on the subway that she thought was attractive, she tried describing him (in German) to her friend by his outfit and failed. In her political-correctness, she first tried to avoid mentioning his skin-color, which would've been the obvious and easy way, then tried to translate into German...
"Der Afrikan-Americanisch"
She got a totally blank stare.