I don't buy the "crippling economies" argument. Making the changes, whether needed or not, will not destroy the economy it will only force money to change hands.
Relative to what I was talking about, it doesn't matter if you (or even I!) buy that argument. The point is that Hemos was speaking in terms of whether or not "climate change" has been "accepted" or not. That's such a gross over simplification as to be absurd, and more to the point, assumes that comments like the ones you just made don't need to be made, because - among smart people - it's all already been settled, and it's just the non-accepting idiots that are holding things up. The point is that conversations about economic impact (slight or devastating), whether China should be held to the same standards that, say, Germany is held, whether firing up lots of new nuke facilities despite the screaming intolerance of uneducated localities would actually make a difference... all of that stuff is not "accepted" as settled in any way that matters.
the vast body of the evidence indicates climate change is real
That's scarcely the issue. The stuff that generates the most friction are the discussions over who exactly, if anyone, is responsible for what part of things that may or may not have any bearing on anything that will amount to actual problems, and what policy/economic changes are or aren't worth the cost, heartache, investment, and so on. Or, is the human component of this lost in the noise, or enough so that crippling economies isn't the right way to look at changing it, etc. Of course climate changes. It always has and will. This whole topic will be a lot easier to discuss if folks don't use the phrase "climate change" to mean the same thing as "damaging global warming that some people in certain countries with certain habits are causing more than others and could change if they only switched to hydrogen which we'll all pretend doesn't require other energy sources to put to work blah blah."
People project whatever they want to see associated with "climate change," to the point where it's a useless phrase. What part of climate change? Which part that would or wouldn't be happening in much the same way anyway, or which does or doesn't have some benefit for one group that outweighs something happening elsewhere? It doesn't matter what the answers to those things are, just that they are way more complex than "accepting" or not that the climate changes.
How did slashdot know that, based on my use of search engines and other meta-ish things to find things that I want, need, or would like, that the thing the article describes is exactly something I won't use! It works so well that even posted summaries about articles about it are un-compelling. For extra credit, mod this comment overrated so more people will read it.
Nah. Because he gets really mad when he spends all morning using his nose to find one stray molecule of quail scent under a bush in 200 acres of fields and brush, and then stands there for ten minutes on point to show me where it is, and exhibits saint-like patience while I kick around in the cover to get the bird up into the air where it's safe to use a shotgun... and then... miss. You've never seen such a look of reproach. Plus, quail is some very tasty meat, and we usually share (although I think it's the butter in which it's sauteed that really gets the dog going).
However, I have no doubt that any good retieving dog would be happy to go fetch that 8-iron you threw in the woods out of disgust. We could probably get that process worked out in one afternoon. You bring a bag of liver treats, and we'll have it on his resume in an hour. The real solution, though, is to give up that silly game of golf, and try your hand at shooting trap and skeet. You'd like it: it's expensive, frustrating, and you have to keep buying fancy equipment, since only your other, less-expensive equipment could possibly explain any competitive failures. It's like golf, only you can easily kill yourself or someone else if you're not careful.
Great minds think alike. Basically Taco should seed the population with paid insightful posters. Lead by example and demonstrate the way it should be, instead of letting the mob mentality drag everyone down.
Well, I keep sending him my PayPal account id, but he keeps never sending me money. It's probably just his spam filter, I'm sure. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Bitch of a question, isn't it? If you've got an answer, I'm sure the slash-mods would love to hear it.
The only thing I can think of is: persistent, lucid, compelling, and sometimes (as needed, since it's a great tool) satirical contributions to the groupthink's self-conversation - designed to cause a little bit of reflection and to realize that not everyone with a different perspective is stupider than they are, less funny than they are, unable to see irony as well as they can, or anything close to the cartoonish villains that they imagine/hope them to be. In other words: take the high road. It's hard work, trying to rattle the groupthink cage, and you usually get shot down for trying, or err on the side of rhetorical excess when you're particularly dismayed by what you're seeing... but it's the good fight. I'd rather have a republic's flaws and attempt to change people's minds than find a way to trot out intellectual affirmative action and consider that a victory.
Not that I'm getting any traction, here! Although I do have fewer freaks than friends, which is slightly unsettling since I'm such an ornery cuss. I guess there are more ornery cusses out there than I thought. All is not lost.
A few million more is pocket change... leave the chasing of Romanian teenage script kiddies to someone else.
OK, so if some stupid punk kids decided to torch a NASA training jet worth a few $million, that wouldn't be worth the trouble, either? Wasting NASA's resources (my tax dollars) on the physical destruction of property, or the collosal waste of human energy hunting down pointless script kiddie vandalism is just as bad. And just as worth runing down.
Moderators are chosen from a large pool according to rules described in moderation guidelines. It stands to reason that if these moderators come to consensus about a post, then that consensus would be descriptive of the post.
No, it just means that their behavior, and the meta-mods of their mods continue to enable their periodic role as mods. In other words, groupthink also impacts who gets to mod.
You can: deal with it; bugger off to a pro-MS site; or you could, shock horror, not read Microsoft stories if the lack of blind acceptance of Microsoft's incredible brilliance offends you.
Gee, that sounds a little different than your previous comment, wherein you referred to people to don't bash MS as "shills." Never mind.
Freedom of speech exists to protect the "antagonistic little shit". The good citizen who proclaims his love for everything middle of road rarely needs protected.
Who said anything about protection? The point is that a disporportionate number of slashdotters thrive on being antagonsitic for the sake of being atagonistic. Without regard for the merits of what's being said. It's a native hostility that comes across as caustic on purpose, not matter whether it's useful to anybody (even to the person who's being antagonistic). Simply being an ass because being an ass is known to irritate people is fine, consitutionally. But it doesn't work so well in the context of what school students are supposed to be digesting (which is to say, polishing the sort of skills that allow you to make your thoughts known and argue them on the merits, rather than having no particular thoughts about anything, and just being socially toxic because you're starved for attention and at least then people will talk about you). Schools owe it to the students who are there to actually learn things to maintain a certain sense of decorum, even within the context of school-related activities that aren't directly in the classroom.
The only Slashdot groupthink I ever come across is the Microsoft shill section.
That's funny. One of the most predominant forms of slashdot groupthink I see is the manifestation says things like that. Thanks for reminding me that I'm right.
That has got to be the most cynical post I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Nope! I'm calling it like I see it. I'm in favor of what he's doing. Who could argue with spending a foundation's money in a way that encourages the underpinnings of a healthy populace and economy? Don't treat the symptoms, treat the problems. The third world has had its symptoms treated for decades, with essentially no improvement. The Gates Foundation is working on the underlying problems. I happily support them. Now, if that's cynical, we have to have a discussion about semantics.
A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular mail and the letter subsequently got lost?
I'm sorry, this is slashdot. You are not allowed to use reasonable, constructive analogies to make a point. Also, you should sound just a little more hysterical, and be sure to somehow blame Steve Balmer if at all possible.
Thanks, though! I should have used that analogy from the beginning. It's a perfect one.
Stop hiding behind law to justify technical failures
I'm a little mystified at how you come up with this, but just to be clear: all I'm pointing out is that, as we sit, the proverbial "cyber attack" CAN indeed cause considerable economic disruption. I'm not sure what you think I'm hiding behind when I say that. It's just a statement of fact, and this one little event shows how disruptive it could be. I've made no particular call to action, but I certainly wouldn't mind if people who use bot-nets to cause business damage through extortion are prosecuted, just like people who threaten to burn down office buildings should be prosecuted.
Who is the bright boy that put a spam filter on a a drop box for important tax info. This is the digital equivalent of the government refusing to accept mail and claiming you missed the deadline.
I believe the official policy is that things are supposed to take place by postal mail, and FAX by fallback. But folks at both ends had been swapping mail for months with no problem (and more reliably AFTER the spam filtering went in), and got seduced into assuming it would always work. That's what happens, I see it all the time.
Yup. But when (in the case I'm citing) an accounting type and a person at a tax office have been happily swapping mail for many months, with little or no lag, they tend to get lulled into a sense of false reliability. And that's what happens.
Maybe a)it shouldn't be left until the deadline and b)sent via email, if it's so damn important.
Hey! I don't do management consulting for their accounting people. But sometimes this sort of thing tends to have that effect, once the dust settles.
And maybe you not tell clients to use a free DNS hosting service as their sole DNS provider...
Not my call on this one either. Our team is involved on a peripheral project, and this part of their infrastructure was in place long before we got on board. We've already updated their domain records to name additional name servers on other networks, which spreads the pain. They're learning.
What reason could there be for botnet owners to attack EveryDNS? I can't see that they'd gain anything from it.
It's an indirect attack against people who use EveryDNS to get traffic to their own sites (or mail servers, etc). If you ran, say, an online casino, and your main competition for a particular type of customer happened to have EveryDNS doing their forward lookups... and you could shut down your competition for at least a full business day by torpedoing the DNS they need to be seen - presto, done. EveryDNS wasn't the target, their customers were the target.
Shoud those acts be illegal because of a butterfly effect caused by bad programming? Get real, please.
If by "bad programming" you mean: the DDoS attack on the name servers was working, and thus a receiving mail server couldn't decide whether to trust another party's sent message... then, sure. Except that's not bad programming "on the site" (as you put it), is it? No. It's a vulnerability in using DNS in the first place. The only thing that would have prevented that would have been sticking with good old IP addresses for everything. But then, what stops a massive bot-net army from launching a DDoS attack against an IP address? Prosecution against the people who do it is at least somewhat helpful.
"Oh no, the evil Demoncrats will ban your bibles if they're elected".
Do you really find that to be different, qualitatively, from "OMG! The republicans want people like Michael J. Fox and your grandmother to die!"
a network of *death camps*
Just out of curiosity, would you consider all prisons to be "death camps?" Prisoners die all the time (just like non-prisoners do). So, when someone from Syria is caught helpding to build IEDs in Afghanistan - with the purpose of blowing up supply and security personnel - is taken in for questioning (to find out who's giving him the materials and cash), what is it you're proposing, exactly: that he get assigned a public defender from New Jersey, and that everyone he works with is sent a memo so that they'll know exactly which part of their team is, right now, coughing up the details their network? It's an active armed conflict. I supposed you'd consider Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, Lincoln, Johnson, and all sorts of other laudable folks to also ran "death camps?" You might want to use just a little perspective (and maybe talk to someone who actually survived a real one).
right wing echo chamber fantasies
That's rich, that is. You're spouting tinfoil-lined stuff without any sense of context whatsoever. You're also amazingly short on suggestions about just how you'd deal with catching - in the act of planning/preparing - say, one of the guys involved in something like the Madrid bombing. Or one of the recruiters, working on a fake travel visa with out-of-town money, busy slipping bombmaking materials and coaching to teenagers in suburban London. Do you pop them into the county lockup and treat them like someone who's been caught driving drunk? Or do you recognize that he's the tip of a big, toxic, actively murderous iceburg, and that you'll lose precious opportunities if you make his capture (and the operational details of it) readily known?
A client (a pretty large retail chain) was using EveryDNS for forward lookups to the mail server's A record. Mail they were sending out started to bounce because receiving mail servers weren't happy when trying to validate the sending box. In once case, a vital piece of mail sent to a state taxing authority couldn't get through on a month-end calendar deadline, causing much grief. Yes, alternate communcations channels are always an option, but it wasn't immediately clear why the two mail servers in question appeared to be hating each other.
Worse, the state government box's spam filtering appliance blacklisted the retailer's server, and a third party admin had to get involved to free things up. Quite a mess.
But the real lesson? People who say that a "cyber attack" couldn't really hurt the economy are wrong, wrong, wrong. This stuff can be really disruptive, and this was a pissant little scaled-down example. No major damage, but a lot of thrashing around, untold manhours of lost productivity, and (in the case of the anecdote in question, involving just one retail company), probably some tax fines which will require much tail chasing to get waived once the the story is clearly told, assuming the state government in question is feeling sporting about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't buy the "crippling economies" argument. Making the changes, whether needed or not, will not destroy the economy it will only force money to change hands.
... all of that stuff is not "accepted" as settled in any way that matters.
Relative to what I was talking about, it doesn't matter if you (or even I!) buy that argument. The point is that Hemos was speaking in terms of whether or not "climate change" has been "accepted" or not. That's such a gross over simplification as to be absurd, and more to the point, assumes that comments like the ones you just made don't need to be made, because - among smart people - it's all already been settled, and it's just the non-accepting idiots that are holding things up. The point is that conversations about economic impact (slight or devastating), whether China should be held to the same standards that, say, Germany is held, whether firing up lots of new nuke facilities despite the screaming intolerance of uneducated localities would actually make a difference
Not!
the vast body of the evidence indicates climate change is real
That's scarcely the issue. The stuff that generates the most friction are the discussions over who exactly, if anyone, is responsible for what part of things that may or may not have any bearing on anything that will amount to actual problems, and what policy/economic changes are or aren't worth the cost, heartache, investment, and so on. Or, is the human component of this lost in the noise, or enough so that crippling economies isn't the right way to look at changing it, etc. Of course climate changes. It always has and will. This whole topic will be a lot easier to discuss if folks don't use the phrase "climate change" to mean the same thing as "damaging global warming that some people in certain countries with certain habits are causing more than others and could change if they only switched to hydrogen which we'll all pretend doesn't require other energy sources to put to work blah blah."
People project whatever they want to see associated with "climate change," to the point where it's a useless phrase. What part of climate change? Which part that would or wouldn't be happening in much the same way anyway, or which does or doesn't have some benefit for one group that outweighs something happening elsewhere? It doesn't matter what the answers to those things are, just that they are way more complex than "accepting" or not that the climate changes.
How did slashdot know that, based on my use of search engines and other meta-ish things to find things that I want, need, or would like, that the thing the article describes is exactly something I won't use! It works so well that even posted summaries about articles about it are un-compelling. For extra credit, mod this comment overrated so more people will read it.
Why? Can he fetch an 8 iron?
Nah. Because he gets really mad when he spends all morning using his nose to find one stray molecule of quail scent under a bush in 200 acres of fields and brush, and then stands there for ten minutes on point to show me where it is, and exhibits saint-like patience while I kick around in the cover to get the bird up into the air where it's safe to use a shotgun... and then... miss. You've never seen such a look of reproach. Plus, quail is some very tasty meat, and we usually share (although I think it's the butter in which it's sauteed that really gets the dog going).
However, I have no doubt that any good retieving dog would be happy to go fetch that 8-iron you threw in the woods out of disgust. We could probably get that process worked out in one afternoon. You bring a bag of liver treats, and we'll have it on his resume in an hour. The real solution, though, is to give up that silly game of golf, and try your hand at shooting trap and skeet. You'd like it: it's expensive, frustrating, and you have to keep buying fancy equipment, since only your other, less-expensive equipment could possibly explain any competitive failures. It's like golf, only you can easily kill yourself or someone else if you're not careful.
I'd have thought that the worst spacecraft failure would be one that directly resulted in loss of life, like that rocket that veered off course
I don't know, this is China we're talking about. Loss of life can be a result of just having your blog veer off course.
Great minds think alike. Basically Taco should seed the population with paid insightful posters. Lead by example and demonstrate the way it should be, instead of letting the mob mentality drag everyone down.
Well, I keep sending him my PayPal account id, but he keeps never sending me money. It's probably just his spam filter, I'm sure. That's the only explanation I can come up with.
Bitch of a question, isn't it? If you've got an answer, I'm sure the slash-mods would love to hear it.
The only thing I can think of is: persistent, lucid, compelling, and sometimes (as needed, since it's a great tool) satirical contributions to the groupthink's self-conversation - designed to cause a little bit of reflection and to realize that not everyone with a different perspective is stupider than they are, less funny than they are, unable to see irony as well as they can, or anything close to the cartoonish villains that they imagine/hope them to be. In other words: take the high road. It's hard work, trying to rattle the groupthink cage, and you usually get shot down for trying, or err on the side of rhetorical excess when you're particularly dismayed by what you're seeing... but it's the good fight. I'd rather have a republic's flaws and attempt to change people's minds than find a way to trot out intellectual affirmative action and consider that a victory.
Not that I'm getting any traction, here! Although I do have fewer freaks than friends, which is slightly unsettling since I'm such an ornery cuss. I guess there are more ornery cusses out there than I thought. All is not lost.
A few million more is pocket change ... leave the chasing of Romanian teenage script kiddies to someone else.
OK, so if some stupid punk kids decided to torch a NASA training jet worth a few $million, that wouldn't be worth the trouble, either? Wasting NASA's resources (my tax dollars) on the physical destruction of property, or the collosal waste of human energy hunting down pointless script kiddie vandalism is just as bad. And just as worth runing down.
Moderators are chosen from a large pool according to rules described in moderation guidelines. It stands to reason that if these moderators come to consensus about a post, then that consensus would be descriptive of the post.
No, it just means that their behavior, and the meta-mods of their mods continue to enable their periodic role as mods. In other words, groupthink also impacts who gets to mod.
You can: deal with it; bugger off to a pro-MS site; or you could, shock horror, not read Microsoft stories if the lack of blind acceptance of Microsoft's incredible brilliance offends you.
Gee, that sounds a little different than your previous comment, wherein you referred to people to don't bash MS as "shills." Never mind.
Freedom of speech exists to protect the "antagonistic little shit". The good citizen who proclaims his love for everything middle of road rarely needs protected.
Who said anything about protection? The point is that a disporportionate number of slashdotters thrive on being antagonsitic for the sake of being atagonistic. Without regard for the merits of what's being said. It's a native hostility that comes across as caustic on purpose, not matter whether it's useful to anybody (even to the person who's being antagonistic). Simply being an ass because being an ass is known to irritate people is fine, consitutionally. But it doesn't work so well in the context of what school students are supposed to be digesting (which is to say, polishing the sort of skills that allow you to make your thoughts known and argue them on the merits, rather than having no particular thoughts about anything, and just being socially toxic because you're starved for attention and at least then people will talk about you). Schools owe it to the students who are there to actually learn things to maintain a certain sense of decorum, even within the context of school-related activities that aren't directly in the classroom.
The only Slashdot groupthink I ever come across is the Microsoft shill section.
That's funny. One of the most predominant forms of slashdot groupthink I see is the manifestation says things like that. Thanks for reminding me that I'm right.
That has got to be the most cynical post I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Nope! I'm calling it like I see it. I'm in favor of what he's doing. Who could argue with spending a foundation's money in a way that encourages the underpinnings of a healthy populace and economy? Don't treat the symptoms, treat the problems. The third world has had its symptoms treated for decades, with essentially no improvement. The Gates Foundation is working on the underlying problems. I happily support them. Now, if that's cynical, we have to have a discussion about semantics.
being an antagonistic little shit
Which, on slashdot, is sort of like having a professional certification. You'll have to come up with a different argument on that one, I'm afraid.
A lot of mail is misdelivered or just lost. Yet the tax people do not demand that we send in our tax returns by registered mail. And would you be as pissed at the miniseries people if they'd sent you a letter by regular mail and the letter subsequently got lost?
I'm sorry, this is slashdot. You are not allowed to use reasonable, constructive analogies to make a point. Also, you should sound just a little more hysterical, and be sure to somehow blame Steve Balmer if at all possible.
Thanks, though! I should have used that analogy from the beginning. It's a perfect one.
Stop hiding behind law to justify technical failures
I'm a little mystified at how you come up with this, but just to be clear: all I'm pointing out is that, as we sit, the proverbial "cyber attack" CAN indeed cause considerable economic disruption. I'm not sure what you think I'm hiding behind when I say that. It's just a statement of fact, and this one little event shows how disruptive it could be. I've made no particular call to action, but I certainly wouldn't mind if people who use bot-nets to cause business damage through extortion are prosecuted, just like people who threaten to burn down office buildings should be prosecuted.
Who is the bright boy that put a spam filter on a a drop box for important tax info. This is the digital equivalent of the government refusing to accept mail and claiming you missed the deadline.
I believe the official policy is that things are supposed to take place by postal mail, and FAX by fallback. But folks at both ends had been swapping mail for months with no problem (and more reliably AFTER the spam filtering went in), and got seduced into assuming it would always work. That's what happens, I see it all the time.
For casual communications, there is e-mail.
Yup. But when (in the case I'm citing) an accounting type and a person at a tax office have been happily swapping mail for many months, with little or no lag, they tend to get lulled into a sense of false reliability. And that's what happens.
Maybe a)it shouldn't be left until the deadline and b)sent via email, if it's so damn important.
Hey! I don't do management consulting for their accounting people. But sometimes this sort of thing tends to have that effect, once the dust settles.
And maybe you not tell clients to use a free DNS hosting service as their sole DNS provider...
Not my call on this one either. Our team is involved on a peripheral project, and this part of their infrastructure was in place long before we got on board. We've already updated their domain records to name additional name servers on other networks, which spreads the pain. They're learning.
What reason could there be for botnet owners to attack EveryDNS? I can't see that they'd gain anything from it.
It's an indirect attack against people who use EveryDNS to get traffic to their own sites (or mail servers, etc). If you ran, say, an online casino, and your main competition for a particular type of customer happened to have EveryDNS doing their forward lookups... and you could shut down your competition for at least a full business day by torpedoing the DNS they need to be seen - presto, done. EveryDNS wasn't the target, their customers were the target.
Shoud those acts be illegal because of a butterfly effect caused by bad programming? Get real, please.
If by "bad programming" you mean: the DDoS attack on the name servers was working, and thus a receiving mail server couldn't decide whether to trust another party's sent message... then, sure. Except that's not bad programming "on the site" (as you put it), is it? No. It's a vulnerability in using DNS in the first place. The only thing that would have prevented that would have been sticking with good old IP addresses for everything. But then, what stops a massive bot-net army from launching a DDoS attack against an IP address? Prosecution against the people who do it is at least somewhat helpful.
"Oh no, the evil Demoncrats will ban your bibles if they're elected".
Do you really find that to be different, qualitatively, from "OMG! The republicans want people like Michael J. Fox and your grandmother to die!"
a network of *death camps*
Just out of curiosity, would you consider all prisons to be "death camps?" Prisoners die all the time (just like non-prisoners do). So, when someone from Syria is caught helpding to build IEDs in Afghanistan - with the purpose of blowing up supply and security personnel - is taken in for questioning (to find out who's giving him the materials and cash), what is it you're proposing, exactly: that he get assigned a public defender from New Jersey, and that everyone he works with is sent a memo so that they'll know exactly which part of their team is, right now, coughing up the details their network? It's an active armed conflict. I supposed you'd consider Winston Churchill, FDR, Truman, Lincoln, Johnson, and all sorts of other laudable folks to also ran "death camps?" You might want to use just a little perspective (and maybe talk to someone who actually survived a real one).
right wing echo chamber fantasies
That's rich, that is. You're spouting tinfoil-lined stuff without any sense of context whatsoever. You're also amazingly short on suggestions about just how you'd deal with catching - in the act of planning/preparing - say, one of the guys involved in something like the Madrid bombing. Or one of the recruiters, working on a fake travel visa with out-of-town money, busy slipping bombmaking materials and coaching to teenagers in suburban London. Do you pop them into the county lockup and treat them like someone who's been caught driving drunk? Or do you recognize that he's the tip of a big, toxic, actively murderous iceburg, and that you'll lose precious opportunities if you make his capture (and the operational details of it) readily known?
A client (a pretty large retail chain) was using EveryDNS for forward lookups to the mail server's A record. Mail they were sending out started to bounce because receiving mail servers weren't happy when trying to validate the sending box. In once case, a vital piece of mail sent to a state taxing authority couldn't get through on a month-end calendar deadline, causing much grief. Yes, alternate communcations channels are always an option, but it wasn't immediately clear why the two mail servers in question appeared to be hating each other.
Worse, the state government box's spam filtering appliance blacklisted the retailer's server, and a third party admin had to get involved to free things up. Quite a mess.
But the real lesson? People who say that a "cyber attack" couldn't really hurt the economy are wrong, wrong, wrong. This stuff can be really disruptive, and this was a pissant little scaled-down example. No major damage, but a lot of thrashing around, untold manhours of lost productivity, and (in the case of the anecdote in question, involving just one retail company), probably some tax fines which will require much tail chasing to get waived once the the story is clearly told, assuming the state government in question is feeling sporting about it.
'nuff said.
(I leave it as an exercise to the reader to recursively apply the principle to this post as well.)
Ah hah! A challenge! But first, let me talk about the idealogy that leads you to your comment...
But seriously, you're right, and thanks for getting my larger point. It's especially true when in comes to more polarizing topics like Bill.