Yeah, that's a great idea. Next, why don't we kill all the people that talk out of their ass about how great it would be to take a bunch of people to an island and nuke them all, you heartless bastard. Also, I'm not sure I agree that theft is best punished by death. I think you're priorities are way out of whack, and maybe you should go down to your local back alley at midnight and get them realigned by a thug.
That's how the killing always starts. As soon as you start treating a person as an arbitrary object, then it's okay to do anything you want to them and there's no moral consequences. Would you like it if the U.S. Gov'ment went on through with the "equation" terrorists != "people".
geeks ~= (close enough) programmers,
programmers ~= (close enough) hackers,
hackers ~= (close enough) terrorists... therefore
G.W.B. says, "Kill all the geeks and let God sort 'em out."
Please think carefully before you say that such-and-such group aren't people--even if you're saying it in jest.
I think the DOSing of black list sites pretty much shows that the people sending spam have little moral problem with invading your computer to break the law. (emphasis mine)
No. I think the fact that the people sending spam are sending spam shows that they are morally bankrupt. The inference that they may also be DDoSing a bunch of blacklists is just extra evidence over the top.
It's not polite to call people "retard"s, dummy.:-P One man's junk traffic is another man's "important info". Just look at slashdot--it's nothing but a bunch of geeks ('self included) sending random insults to each other in the guise of intelligent discussion while occasionally DDoSing some poor sap. E.g. this thread and this article.
Yeah, you and the original article author have a point that the Internet does face some big troubles. But I'm not so sure we're in a boat that's bound to sink into the sea. Instead, I see a bunch of people diligintly bailing water out of a leaky boat. Then, every now and then, someone plugs some holes. Have more faith in the resilience of the Internet overall.
Error. Although this may be the full text of the FUD (er... I mean "article") this is most emphatically not informative. People have been predicting the imminent death of the 'net since before it went commercial. Now there was an event sure to kill the 'net--how could we ever possibly get by with all that commerical junk? Surely that would kill the 'net. Right? Right?
Yes, there will likely be many problems with the Internet in the future--just as there have already been many problems with it in the past. I anticipate at some point people will undergo "clean up efforts". Various groups going around and convincing private bodies to move away from this or that broken/outmoted protocol onto the new, shiny, more robust protocol. This sort of thing has already been going on for some time now.
Actually, I think this depends on how beuracratic and how large the organization is. Sure most of the time the decision to fix the file server is going to be a no-brainer. But if the organization is sufficiently large enough that 50 people is less than 1% of the org, then some random suit might get pissed that you postponed projects A, B, and C just to fix the file server for some subordinates that he (the suit) doesn't care about. Politics is messy.
Alright, I'm stepping out into theoretical (and shakey) ground, but here goes:
For Roomba to do what it does (even Roomba Pro Elite), it doesn't have to be very bright. Specifically, it doesn't have to know the shape or size of the room(s) and it doesn't have to have a "mental map" of the terrain.
For Roomba to be able to go back to it's charger, it would have to know where it's charger is. This requires it to make (or have programmed into it) a "mental map" of the terrain. Possibly also a homing signal just to help make sure it gets there. And/or something approximating "eyesight". It also would have to have an algorithm to let it know that if it's x distance away from the charger, then it can vacuum for y more time before it needs to head back. (In other words, it has to calculate how much charge it has left based on distance from the charging station to make sure it gets back before it runs out of juice.)
Now it doesn't sound so easy does it? Remember, the people responsible for Roomba are a company intending to make money (at least in theory). At this time, the Roomba people probably don't feel that automatic recharging is a cost-effective feature for them to include. It looks like the remote control feature is intended as an in-between solution.
If the company doesn't die, I imagine they'll eventually branch out into producing a more general house robot that will be significantly more advanced than Roomba. At that time, it's likely that self recharging along with many other features will be added. For now though, it's really just a semi-automated vacuum cleaner.
Imminent death of SMT predicted...
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Well, not really. But if a SoBig distributed network of worm nodes acting as SMTP servers gets up and running, it could bring email client Inboxes to their knees (couldn't it?)
Time to upgrade those mail servers and mail clients. Let's use only the more advanced versions of SMTP that have lots of security/accountability features added.
Okay, I'm not really trying to say that this is a hoax or anything. It's just... the name Pangea Intellectual Properties is difficult to believe. I mean that's the kind of name the antagonist would have in a movie about IP litigation. Basically, they're saying, right there in their name,
"ALL YOUR IP ARE BELONG TO US!"
How did you get this through the "lameness filter". Don't get me wrong--I don't think your ASCII Gnome foot is lame, I think it's cool. I'm just curious--most ASCII art things get rejected by the filter.
They have their audience and respond to how they think. They have no consistent viewpoint..., they just lisen to their masters voice.
Of course slashdot does (mostly) have a consistent viewpoint on "civil liberties". But if we leave that part out of your message, it seems to me these sentences could easily apply to the site this comment is posted on.
The ethics come from the ethics board. For real. For virtually any experiment involving humans, and many involving animals, the scientist(s) proposed experiment has to be reviewed to make sure its ethical sound first.
The actual goal of pure science is to increase knowlege. "Producing something" is the goal of applied science.
As to your "non-native speaker question": I was born and raised in the U.S. and I'm not really sure which sounds more correct "where *are* the ethics" or "where *is* the ethics" I think "where *is*..." might be more correct but it sounds odd. Perhaps a grammar pedant will reply to your post. He or she would be able to answer your question decisively.
But if they keep ranting, surely it could be installed...
Or, perhaps you could make a shell script of `find' that takes their perameters, then runs the normal `find' with `2>/dev/null' on the end.
Those are just ideas that pop up. I'm sure you can find (no pun intended) some solution to the problem other than giving them root access.
On a related note: if they feel `2>/dev/null' is too much work, then they obviously haven't been indoctrinated into the Unix culture yet. It's important that you manage to somehow do this as quickly as possible. Until you do, they will find quibble after quibble to rant over: "vi doesn't work right--I can't copy/paste!!--windoze key don't work" etc, etc.
If you actually read the article, it seems fairly clear this tax would be aimed at business LANs, not home LANs. The Orlando Business Journal's target audience is business people not nerds. In Florida, they have a "communications tax" on business communications. There's a "proposed rule [that] pushes the definition of communications systems to include local area networks, or LANs, as well as wide area networks, or WANs, which connect computers across distances." Now it doesn't seem so bizarre does it? Or at least--it seems only as bizarre as the "communications tax" does.
But will they make it hard for someone to release a hacked version of the OS that doesn't have all these locks?
I seem to remember a big hub bub about XP activation, but MS apparently released some versions of their OS that don't require activiation and people that don't really want to pay simply find a friend that has one of those versions (and copy it).
Basically, when it comes to MS and security (even evil security like the kind you describe): I'll believe it when I see it. MS drops the ball all the time (because they're so big and they want to make profit and their users are lazy so MS is lazy). Why should Longhorn be any different?
[Mr Dyke] predicted that everyone would benefit from the online archive, from people accessing the internet at home, children and adults using public libraries, to students at school and university.
I predict a major slashdotting. But with a lot of luck, and a program that lets me save real player streams, I might finally be able to collect the Dr. Who eps that I don't already have.
As much as I love to MS bash (and I do--I really do), I also love to play "Devil's Advocate" because I like to argue, but also because I feel it fosters more interesting discussion.
With that in mind: isn't it possible that these other searches turn up screwy results for Linux simply because they suck? Or maybe because not many people use them. Or at least, if people do use them, maybe they don't use them to search for Linux all that often. Remember Hanlon's Razor.
Windows Is 'Insecure By Design,' Says Washington Post
In other news, really, really smart scientists that spent a lot of grant money determined that: living people breath (air), fish generally live in water, Battlefield Earth was a mindwitheringly bad movie, and cutting down a tree with a herring is inherently impractical.
Windows Insecure By Design? a world of ***!!DUH!!*** It's nice to see the general public starting to wake up to this fact. Expect to see the standard ports (135, 445, etc) closed when Longhorn comes out... maybe And even then, I doubt MS will make any other changes. Or, if they do, they'll open up five or six more ports in the process.:-P Not that I'm bitter... oh no.
Let's never forget the conversation between a fictional Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in "Pirates of Silicon Valley": fictional Steve Jobs: We're better than you are. We have better stuff. fictional Bill Gates: You don't get it, Steve--that doesn't matter!
Another poster says "at least this is a change from the Kevin Mitnick days" (or something similar)
That poster is mistaken. We had a recent story on slashdot where someone was threatened with legal action for revealing a bug in some code.
IMHO there should be standards for how and when you are allowed to attempt to break into a piece of software or system to demonstrate its vulnerability. I suppose one way to go is:
find out that it's vulnerable
tell the company that you believe it's vulnerable and you'd like their permission to demonstrate that to them then
show them how you break in
It's a rather round-about process since you'll usually have to break in (secretly!) in part one to be sure that it really is vulnerable. But you can't let them know you did that or they'll prosecute you in step two. Suggestions?
For myself, personally, I began to seriously dislike MS when I found out that my Win 3.11 was woefully behind the times when compared with the Mac and OS/2. Of course, first I had to find out that those other two OSes existed and overcome the standard "I-don't-want-to-learn-how-to-use-Macintosh-it-loo ks-strange-and-different" syndrome. But about a month after all that, I began to get seriously dissasisfied with Win 3.11. It felt like I'd been conned. Nobody had even told me that there was this alternative (OS/2). It was as if MS was some big monopolistic entity. Oh wait...
The clincher was when I got this "magazine" from MS about a month after I registered my Win 3.11. It was really all just an MS commercial in the guize of a magazine. It had the opposite effect of the one intended.
First I want to make it clear that I'm not some card carrying ESR zealot. I think ESR is a really smart guy, but sometimes he's nuts. In this case, however, I think he was spot on. Specifically, he had a really cool line:
"To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy."
I think Gandalf said something similar regarding Saruman somewhere around the Voice of Saruman chapter. No big deal, just great art and reality reflecting in each other.
Some of ESR's other comments about Mr. McBride remind me that Mr. McBride should go here and pick up some cool gadgets for the enevitable last reel where a bunch of military types bust in on him.
I retract my earlier remarks about Linus Torvalds. He was right. They really, really are smoking crack. At least Mark Heise is.
And I thought Linus was just being figurative...
Mark Heise says,
"SCO is not the one that put its copyrighted System 5 source code into the GPL." (emphasis mine--he uses this phrase several more times)
-->Clue for Mark Heise<--: You don't actually put things into the GPL because it's a license not a refrigerator. You release software/docs under the GPL, but you don't put things into the GPL unless you're modifying it! You're a lawyer so you should have no problem with these basic semantics. Or are you just trying to make us think you're stupid? Well, it's working.
(now, if only all devices with a clock in the house were networked and could sync to *that*...)
It will hapen very soon I'm sure. Oh and when it does--pray that they have better NTP clients than the ones in these Netgear routers--'else your VCR might get "0wn3d". (It's only hysterical until the first time it happens, folks.)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's a great idea. Next, why don't we kill all the people that talk out of their ass about how great it would be to take a bunch of people to an island and nuke them all, you heartless bastard. Also, I'm not sure I agree that theft is best punished by death. I think you're priorities are way out of whack, and maybe you should go down to your local back alley at midnight and get them realigned by a thug.
That's how the killing always starts. As soon as you start treating a person as an arbitrary object, then it's okay to do anything you want to them and there's no moral consequences. Would you like it if the U.S. Gov'ment went on through with the "equation"
terrorists != "people".
geeks ~= (close enough) programmers,
programmers ~= (close enough) hackers,
hackers ~= (close enough) terrorists... therefore
G.W.B. says, "Kill all the geeks and let God sort 'em out."
Please think carefully before you say that such-and-such group aren't people--even if you're saying it in jest.
It's not polite to call people "retard"s, dummy. :-P One man's junk traffic is another man's "important info". Just look at slashdot--it's nothing but a bunch of geeks ('self included) sending random insults to each other in the guise of intelligent discussion while occasionally DDoSing some poor sap. E.g. this thread and this article.
Yeah, you and the original article author have a point that the Internet does face some big troubles. But I'm not so sure we're in a boat that's bound to sink into the sea. Instead, I see a bunch of people diligintly bailing water out of a leaky boat. Then, every now and then, someone plugs some holes. Have more faith in the resilience of the Internet overall.
Error. Although this may be the full text of the FUD (er... I mean "article") this is most emphatically not informative. People have been predicting the imminent death of the 'net since before it went commercial. Now there was an event sure to kill the 'net--how could we ever possibly get by with all that commerical junk? Surely that would kill the 'net. Right? Right?
Yes, there will likely be many problems with the Internet in the future--just as there have already been many problems with it in the past. I anticipate at some point people will undergo "clean up efforts". Various groups going around and convincing private bodies to move away from this or that broken/outmoted protocol onto the new, shiny, more robust protocol. This sort of thing has already been going on for some time now.
Actually, I think this depends on how beuracratic and how large the organization is. Sure most of the time the decision to fix the file server is going to be a no-brainer. But if the organization is sufficiently large enough that 50 people is less than 1% of the org, then some random suit might get pissed that you postponed projects A, B, and C just to fix the file server for some subordinates that he (the suit) doesn't care about. Politics is messy.
Alright, I'm stepping out into theoretical (and shakey) ground, but here goes:
For Roomba to do what it does (even Roomba Pro Elite), it doesn't have to be very bright. Specifically, it doesn't have to know the shape or size of the room(s) and it doesn't have to have a "mental map" of the terrain.
For Roomba to be able to go back to it's charger, it would have to know where it's charger is. This requires it to make (or have programmed into it) a "mental map" of the terrain. Possibly also a homing signal just to help make sure it gets there. And/or something approximating "eyesight". It also would have to have an algorithm to let it know that if it's x distance away from the charger, then it can vacuum for y more time before it needs to head back. (In other words, it has to calculate how much charge it has left based on distance from the charging station to make sure it gets back before it runs out of juice.)
Now it doesn't sound so easy does it? Remember, the people responsible for Roomba are a company intending to make money (at least in theory). At this time, the Roomba people probably don't feel that automatic recharging is a cost-effective feature for them to include. It looks like the remote control feature is intended as an in-between solution.
If the company doesn't die, I imagine they'll eventually branch out into producing a more general house robot that will be significantly more advanced than Roomba. At that time, it's likely that self recharging along with many other features will be added. For now though, it's really just a semi-automated vacuum cleaner.
Well, not really. But if a SoBig distributed network of worm nodes acting as SMTP servers gets up and running, it could bring email client Inboxes to their knees (couldn't it?)
Time to upgrade those mail servers and mail clients. Let's use only the more advanced versions of SMTP that have lots of security/accountability features added.
Okay, I'm not really trying to say that this is a hoax or anything. It's just... the name Pangea Intellectual Properties is difficult to believe. I mean that's the kind of name the antagonist would have in a movie about IP litigation. Basically, they're saying, right there in their name,
"ALL YOUR IP ARE BELONG TO US!"
How did you get this through the "lameness filter". Don't get me wrong--I don't think your ASCII Gnome foot is lame, I think it's cool. I'm just curious--most ASCII art things get rejected by the filter.
Of course slashdot does (mostly) have a consistent viewpoint on "civil liberties". But if we leave that part out of your message, it seems to me these sentences could easily apply to the site this comment is posted on.
.The ethics come from the ethics board. For real. For virtually any experiment involving humans, and many involving animals, the scientist(s) proposed experiment has to be reviewed to make sure its ethical sound first.
The actual goal of pure science is to increase knowlege. "Producing something" is the goal of applied science.
As to your "non-native speaker question": I was born and raised in the U.S. and I'm not really sure which sounds more correct "where *are* the ethics" or "where *is* the ethics" I think "where *is*..." might be more correct but it sounds odd. Perhaps a grammar pedant will reply to your post. He or she would be able to answer your question decisively.
But if they keep ranting, surely it could be installed...
Or, perhaps you could make a shell script of `find' that takes their perameters, then runs the normal `find' with `2>/dev/null' on the end.
Those are just ideas that pop up. I'm sure you can find (no pun intended) some solution to the problem other than giving them root access.
On a related note: if they feel `2>/dev/null' is too much work, then they obviously haven't been indoctrinated into the Unix culture yet. It's important that you manage to somehow do this as quickly as possible. Until you do, they will find quibble after quibble to rant over: "vi doesn't work right--I can't copy/paste!!--windoze key don't work" etc, etc.
(apology in advance: sorry for sounding ranty)
If you actually read the article, it seems fairly clear this tax would be aimed at business LANs, not home LANs. The Orlando Business Journal's target audience is business people not nerds. In Florida, they have a "communications tax" on business communications. There's a "proposed rule [that] pushes the definition of communications systems to include local area networks, or LANs, as well as wide area networks, or WANs, which connect computers across distances." Now it doesn't seem so bizarre does it? Or at least--it seems only as bizarre as the "communications tax" does.
But will they make it hard for someone to release a hacked version of the OS that doesn't have all these locks?
I seem to remember a big hub bub about XP activation, but MS apparently released some versions of their OS that don't require activiation and people that don't really want to pay simply find a friend that has one of those versions (and copy it).
Basically, when it comes to MS and security (even evil security like the kind you describe): I'll believe it when I see it. MS drops the ball all the time (because they're so big and they want to make profit and their users are lazy so MS is lazy). Why should Longhorn be any different?
As much as I love to MS bash (and I do--I really do), I also love to play "Devil's Advocate" because I like to argue, but also because I feel it fosters more interesting discussion.
With that in mind: isn't it possible that these other searches turn up screwy results for Linux simply because they suck? Or maybe because not many people use them. Or at least, if people do use them, maybe they don't use them to search for Linux all that often. Remember Hanlon's Razor.
In other news, really, really smart scientists that spent a lot of grant money determined that: living people breath (air), fish generally live in water, Battlefield Earth was a mindwitheringly bad movie, and cutting down a tree with a herring is inherently impractical.
Windows Insecure By Design? a world of ***!!DUH!!*** It's nice to see the general public starting to wake up to this fact. Expect to see the standard ports (135, 445, etc) closed when Longhorn comes out... maybe And even then, I doubt MS will make any other changes. Or, if they do, they'll open up five or six more ports in the process. :-P Not that I'm bitter... oh no.
Let's never forget the conversation between a fictional Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in "Pirates of Silicon Valley":
fictional Steve Jobs: We're better than you are. We have better stuff.
fictional Bill Gates: You don't get it, Steve--that doesn't matter!
Newsman: Next up on our program--when l33t sp33k meets Engrish
Example: !4ANG3R! A d@n93r0u5 +0y. +h15 +0y 15 b31n9 m@d3 4 +h3 x+r3m3 pr10r1+y +h3 900d luk5. The l1++l3 p@rt wh1ch 5uph0c@+35 when the sharp p@r+ which 93+5 hurt 15 5w@ll0w3d is c0n+@1n3d 93n3r0u5ly. 0n1y the p3r50n wh0 c@n +@k3 r35p0n51b1l1+y by 1+53lph 15 +0 p1@y.
You may now gibber.
but MS doesn't have to let the attachments be "runnable" in the first place does it?
Another poster says "at least this is a change from the Kevin Mitnick days" (or something similar)
That poster is mistaken. We had a recent story on slashdot where someone was threatened with legal action for revealing a bug in some code.
IMHO there should be standards for how and when you are allowed to attempt to break into a piece of software or system to demonstrate its vulnerability. I suppose one way to go is:
It's a rather round-about process since you'll usually have to break in (secretly!) in part one to be sure that it really is vulnerable. But you can't let them know you did that or they'll prosecute you in step two. Suggestions?
For myself, personally, I began to seriously dislike MS when I found out that my Win 3.11 was woefully behind the times when compared with the Mac and OS/2. Of course, first I had to find out that those other two OSes existed and overcome the standard "I-don't-want-to-learn-how-to-use-Macintosh-it-loo ks-strange-and-different" syndrome. But about a month after all that, I began to get seriously dissasisfied with Win 3.11. It felt like I'd been conned. Nobody had even told me that there was this alternative (OS/2). It was as if MS was some big monopolistic entity. Oh wait...
The clincher was when I got this "magazine" from MS about a month after I registered my Win 3.11. It was really all just an MS commercial in the guize of a magazine. It had the opposite effect of the one intended.
First I want to make it clear that I'm not some card carrying ESR zealot. I think ESR is a really smart guy, but sometimes he's nuts. In this case, however, I think he was spot on. Specifically, he had a really cool line:
"To a manipulator, all behaviors are manipulation. To a conspirator, all opposition is conspiracy."
I think Gandalf said something similar regarding Saruman somewhere around the Voice of Saruman chapter. No big deal, just great art and reality reflecting in each other.
Some of ESR's other comments about Mr. McBride remind me that Mr. McBride should go here and pick up some cool gadgets for the enevitable last reel where a bunch of military types bust in on him.
And I thought Linus was just being figurative...