It's inevitable... the government will demand for accountability of all actions on the internet. Run with me on this argument before you call me chicken little, and you will see the slippery slope that we're treading upon. Already the internet has entered case law and precedent has been set in many situations. Congress has also made some laws over actions on the net, and they plan to do more. It's only a matter of time until the whole thing gets regulated.
And what does this imply? Well, for starters it'll require something like a SOX regulation; while it won't demand packet sniffing per se, it will demand that source and destination ip addresses, MAC addresses, and ports be logged, so that people who release viruses/trojans/spyware/spam et. al. can be held accountable. Then anyone running a "web service" may be required to take logs of activites (to be used in investigations of fraud or terrorist activities), so that authorities may request these materials upon subponea.
And even then it won't be enough to stop identity theft, copyright infringement, and other criminal activities on the net. That when Congress will come to the "realization" that programming is what makes everything on the net possible, and finally demand that programmers be held accountable for their code. That will be the death-knell of amateur computer science, for you won't be permitted to write a program and run it on an internet-enabled computer without having to take responsibility for that program's actions, limiting one's recreational programing to toy computers and sandboxes. It will progress to the point where it will be "impossible" for a programmer to take responsibility for writing something on the internet, because he/she cannot afford the insurance that he/she will have to take out to cover the insurance necessary to protect themselves from programming lawsuits when a program they authored is used to perform evil actions.
Obviously some people will have to be allowed to program on the net everyday, to patch programs that users find bugs in or black-hats find exploits in. The only way for these programmers to obtain programming insurance is to partake in several programming certification classes in order to obtain a license to program. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but this seems to be the logical extension of the government's desire to determine accountability for all activities towards the internet.
It's true that they don't have as much capacity as DVDs, but how many multi-disc Gamecube games have there been?
My sibling post already mentioned Resident Evil and Metal Gear, but those aren't the only ones. The two best RPGs on the Cube (Tales of Symphonia and Baten Kaitos) are multidisk as well.
Either morbus is trying to use scare-tactics to slow the game down, or abliss got this posted on slashdot in order to use the resulting/. effect to win the game by just saying yes a lot of times.. I'd like to believe the latter; it seems too clever of a tactic not to be tried.
It's REALLY weird but here's a quick summation... Nomic is a game where the game IS the collection of rules of the game, as sort of a metamathematical proof of concept of such a thing. There's no board or any game impelement involved (first set of rules I saw did have 1 six-sided die). People would present proposals and in turn you'd vote on them. If you vote for the winning side you would score points, and if you were in the minority you would lose points. If proposals were above a certain percentage they became new rules to the game and must be followed.
The rules for Nomic also have a distinction between immutable and mutable rules, kind of like a file-lock on really important system files, to enforce important restrictions (like a player may quit at any time, the game is not legally binding, you are never forced to perfore an action before being allowed to quit, etc) and keep them protected. However, it is possible to make immutable rules mutable in order for them to be changed, and that's when the game gets really weird.
Also, almost nobody wins by making it to 100 points (by the initial rules of the game). 9 times out of 10 the rules are ammended to allow another winning condition that is either easier or harder to achieve. A lot of times Nomic games are created just to keep them going for as long as possible. In many ways it's like a grown-up blend of AD&D and politics.
Nomic is really fun to mix with other games. Specifically my friends and I would play a mix of Nomic and Monopoly we'd call Nominopoly, and games would last for literally days or weeks. Mixing Nomic with a card game (essentially this is similar to Mao) is fun as well, especially if there's drinking involved.
I imagine a lot of businesses either have a central server that downloads the patch or have automatic updates set up at different times so that the load on their internet servers is load-balanced, especially with Microsoft suggesting Automatic Updates for everyone. This'd mean that the pull on the servers would be more load-balanced than normal.
Either that or Microsoft forcing everyone on SP2 last month has stopped a lot of people from updating.
The test kits are used for internal quality control checks to demonstrate that a lab is able to correctly identify viruses or as a way for labs to get certified by the College of American Pathologists.
The kits involve blind samples. The lab then has to correctly identify the pathogen in the vial in order to pass the test. Usually, the influenza virus included in these kits is one that is currently circulating, or at least one that has recently been in circulation.
I bet the test designer is pissed that his "trick question" got blabbed to the press. Scientists can be so absent-minded sometimes.
Assuming that this isn't a troll because it'd be a really lame one if it were, I'll respond in kind.
Maybe if you did your job correctly and restricted installation rights on those machines or better yet placed GoBack or some ghosting program on the machines to wipe them clean between users you wouldn't have to worry about losing $5000.00 a week.
Just a friendly message from one sysadmin to another.
Oh, I probably should disclose that I use both Firefox and Thunderbird at work.
Actually the U. Waterloo team has always been strong. They also have a very strong TopCoder following, with several targets (SnapDragon and ChristopherH come to mind) owning top spots there. I'm actually surprised that they placed fourth.
I now firewall my system like a son of a bitch because I don't trust those fuckers in Richmond.
As much as I don't like Micors**t myself, I think your reaction is a bit too overboard. Besides, if those fuckers in Redmond really wanted to spy on systems en masse, they would implement a socket stream that piggybacks on port 80 transmissions and would penetrate your firewall, and you wouldn't be any wiser. Not even a rootkit revealer would be able to suspect foul play in an original OS binary.
It's too late to be paranoid about computers in this day and age, because the complexity has grown beyond the grasp of any one mind; if people really want to know what's on your system they'll find a way to get at it. Just accept the invasion of privacy that is assumed when fire up a computer.
I have firsthand experience to the easing of the eyes created by switching to LCD screens. I run an IT department at a trucking firm, and recently converted our dispatch department to LCD screens. Immediately there was a noticed difference; the dispatchers didn't get the headaches that they used to get at the end of the week from spending 5 days staring at a CRT screen, and they also commented on better eyesight in general (one dispatcher uses a higher resolution now that he can see the screen better).
I think the "healthiness" of the LCD screens as opposed to the CRT screens has to do with the flicker. On an LCD the pixels don't fade, so there's not that pulsing and required brightness as there is with a CRT display. Ask anyone who has discovered their HZ setting on their monitor drivers and pressed the HZ from 60 to 75 what effect the flicker has on eyesight problems with CRTs. Some people can't even look at a 60hz screen for longer than a minute without it hurting their eyes. Think of a CRT as a finely tuned array of strobe lights and you'll understand why LCDs are better on the eyes.
This could turn a google-bomb into an effective DDOS attack... have all kind of blogs set up a google-bomb against a website and link to an image off of the page. Then, when that link hits the top it gets hit automatically, as well as with every other blog (that scales the pagerank for pointing to the popular hit) that puts that picture up. Since they all get prefetched, the images will load up and that page will get nailed by 100x requests.
Google will end up shutting this service down before long because of similar abuses.
Type the following into Metafor: "Requirements: Create a class that has a function satisfy that takes a String containing an arbitrary boolean expression and returns a Map with keys as boolean variables and values as Booleans. The map must be able to assign values to the arbitrary boolean expression that makes it true, or the function must return a null. Furthermore, the function must run in polynomial time with respect to the number of distinct boolean variables in the given expression."
Either a) Metafor finds it or b) Metafor crashes, citing the impossibility of such code.
Submit proof to peer-review journals.
Profit?!?
Obviously there will always be limits to this kind of meta-programming, so the only purpose of it is to make programming easier. However I can't see how spewing code from requirements is going to make any coder's life easier, considering it'll probably have bugs or run really slowly, and in the end not save any time at all for the coder who'll eventually have to rewrite it. This is natural-language programming we're talking about here, which invites ambiguity, and the last thing we need in software development is more ambiguity.
If anything, the original thief doesn't have the laptop by now... he probably hawked it for cash the firsh chance he got. I bet you that the original thief is kicking himself right now while the trafficker is salivating over his newest purchase.
ABC blew a good chance here...
on
Girls Got Game
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I saw this report on Easter morning with my sister on GMA. At first I commented that this is really old news (heck even Slashdot commented on this about a year or so ago, focusing on the female game developers).
My sister was pretty happy to see the report, even though it was old news, because she gamed a lot growing up (still has any plays her Dreamcast), until the commentary afterwards. The two female hosts were playing The Sims II, and instead of getting into any of the game mechanics or showing the sim aspects they spent two minutes accessorising one sim. Because, y'know, the only reason the women are interested in the game is because they accessorise the clothing. Aghast, my sister flipped the station.
If ABC didn't have their heads so far up their asses to see their colons, they would have given this growing demographic some credit. Instead, I think they might be producing a lot of hate-mail (of which my sister's email will be one of them).
Um, both writeups came from Reuters, so how can one be better than the other if they're the same article??? Although I do admit that MSNBC had some really good pictures to go along with their copy of the Reuters story, as opposed to Yahoo which sadly didn't have pictures...
To make the process complete when you give a book to someone else and relenquish the certificate, they'd have to wipe it from your memory so that no copies of the book remain when you pass it on.
update EMPLOYEES set SALARY=2*SALARY where NAME="Joe Blow"
But even with just raw SELECT access, managers can place themselves in sticky situations, gining them access to information that they are not supposed to know, like salary information, location of the personal residence of that "hottie" in logistics, sick-leave details (OMG that guy has what?), and other private information. The scariest part of this is with SOX legislation; he could blab about something sitting in some database that's really important to the stock price to his friend, and then all hell breaks loose, because not only do you have to suffer the embarassment of seeing the inside trader get carted off but also if you're the sysadmin you better be able to pull up all of his conversations that day on all protocols or possibly be faced with a nasty fine.
It's scary enough that some managers are given a copy of Crystal Reports or Impromptu with a root password to the database and are told to go to town. My conclusion is that no manager should be taught how to use SQL for their own deniability in mischief, except for the CIO, and he should have access to as little as he needs, so he is not found culpable.
Information is a lot more dangerous than it used to be.
Beware the "public shaming" bomb. It's easy to let off, but very hard to defuse if you made a mistake or the issue turned out to be minor and is rapidly resolved. In addition companies may become very defensive in such cases and decide to "tough it out". We want to build bridges and giving a company no way to avoid losing face hinders that, especially in certain cultures.
Doesn't having a public representitive walk around and hand out warning latters in front of lots of people at a highly publicized convention constitute "public shaming"?
I can see how this software can come in real handy, but it won't work in every situation. It states in TFA that Hindsight doesn't do the naive approach of recording every instrction, but rather takes snapshots and tries to fill in the gaps. There are many types of calculations out there (think The Game of Life or other CAs) that by their nature cannot be reversed, so all of those states would have to be stored or it would be mathematically impossible to calculate the reverse steps.
Therefore, I can't see their approach being foolproof, and the over-obvious advertisement (this is what normal debugging toolbars look like, but they don't have a nifty step-one-back feature) seems too bright to be withot caveat. At $5,000 a seat I'd say buyer beware.
Actually, you'll end up paying, not them. If they can get away with "proving" that the charge was not fradulent, they won't refund your money, and then if you refuse to pay they sell the debt to a collection agency that hounds you until you pay the fee just to shut them up.
It is evident that you have never been in debt before.
There is nothing wrong with your system. In the.chm file provided with the RootkitRevealer it explains:
Hidden from Windows API discrepancies are the ones exhibited by most rootkits, however you should expect to see a number of such entries on any NTFS volume since NTFS hides its metada files, such as $MFT and $Secure, from the Windows API. In addition, there are a number of Registry keys that are inaccessible from the Windows API and will report as access-denied discrepancies.
This explains all of the listed entries except for the last one(the $BADCLUS entry is due to missing clusters, like the previous poster said, and you need to do a scandisk). Your last entry is there because you had Firefox open when you ran the scan. Again from the help file:
Files or Registry data created after a scan starts will also show up as discrepancies, so run RootkitRevealer on an idle system.
You're fine, although your reaction will be similar to many other users who will see the same thing and freak out similarly, because they don't understand NT internals... I think this is not a good tool to release to the masses, and should only be used by sysadmins, just like how HijackThis is really good for detecting spyware, but only to someone who knows something about Windows systems.
Not to mention that if you have a rootkit installed, you better be prepared to wipe your system clean and reinstall the OS, because otherwise there's no way of knowing if you have the whole thing removed.
Now that's a first. The classical demo requires a Mozilla-type (they say Gecko type) browser for the enhanced javascript capability. IE 6 won't even run it correctly.
I would counterclaim that your argument is without merit. The problem with it is that there really are altruistic people out there working for companies, there really are benificient software developers, there really are thoughtful and civic-minded companies that have morals and forethought. I'm only pointing out that those people obviously don't work for the XBOX division of Microsoft, because otherwise they wouldn't have manipulated the UL testing that much to allow something so haneous to occur in the first place.
UL cerification is there for a reason, and if a power cord is causing fires (which isn't that common anymore), then either someone at UL screwed up or someone at UL got paid/pressured to pass that cord. This is a safety issue that Microsoft should have had their finger on and corrected before release. My 2 cents is that they already knew of the issue (because while Microsoft may be evil, they aren't stupid), and it was only until recently that they were called on the carpet for it.
Slashdot Mirror
And what does this imply? Well, for starters it'll require something like a SOX regulation; while it won't demand packet sniffing per se, it will demand that source and destination ip addresses, MAC addresses, and ports be logged, so that people who release viruses/trojans/spyware/spam et. al. can be held accountable. Then anyone running a "web service" may be required to take logs of activites (to be used in investigations of fraud or terrorist activities), so that authorities may request these materials upon subponea.
And even then it won't be enough to stop identity theft, copyright infringement, and other criminal activities on the net. That when Congress will come to the "realization" that programming is what makes everything on the net possible, and finally demand that programmers be held accountable for their code. That will be the death-knell of amateur computer science, for you won't be permitted to write a program and run it on an internet-enabled computer without having to take responsibility for that program's actions, limiting one's recreational programing to toy computers and sandboxes. It will progress to the point where it will be "impossible" for a programmer to take responsibility for writing something on the internet, because he/she cannot afford the insurance that he/she will have to take out to cover the insurance necessary to protect themselves from programming lawsuits when a program they authored is used to perform evil actions.
Obviously some people will have to be allowed to program on the net everyday, to patch programs that users find bugs in or black-hats find exploits in. The only way for these programmers to obtain programming insurance is to partake in several programming certification classes in order to obtain a license to program. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but this seems to be the logical extension of the government's desire to determine accountability for all activities towards the internet.
My sibling post already mentioned Resident Evil and Metal Gear, but those aren't the only ones. The two best RPGs on the Cube (Tales of Symphonia and Baten Kaitos) are multidisk as well.
What a cool way to run a Nomic game!
The rules for Nomic also have a distinction between immutable and mutable rules, kind of like a file-lock on really important system files, to enforce important restrictions (like a player may quit at any time, the game is not legally binding, you are never forced to perfore an action before being allowed to quit, etc) and keep them protected. However, it is possible to make immutable rules mutable in order for them to be changed, and that's when the game gets really weird.
Also, almost nobody wins by making it to 100 points (by the initial rules of the game). 9 times out of 10 the rules are ammended to allow another winning condition that is either easier or harder to achieve. A lot of times Nomic games are created just to keep them going for as long as possible. In many ways it's like a grown-up blend of AD&D and politics.
Nomic is really fun to mix with other games. Specifically my friends and I would play a mix of Nomic and Monopoly we'd call Nominopoly, and games would last for literally days or weeks. Mixing Nomic with a card game (essentially this is similar to Mao) is fun as well, especially if there's drinking involved.
Either that or Microsoft forcing everyone on SP2 last month has stopped a lot of people from updating.
As long as they're not mutated of course... then we'd have to pull out our spaceships and blast the hell out of them.
Maybe if you did your job correctly and restricted installation rights on those machines or better yet placed GoBack or some ghosting program on the machines to wipe them clean between users you wouldn't have to worry about losing $5000.00 a week.
Just a friendly message from one sysadmin to another.
Oh, I probably should disclose that I use both Firefox and Thunderbird at work.
Actually the U. Waterloo team has always been strong. They also have a very strong TopCoder following, with several targets (SnapDragon and ChristopherH come to mind) owning top spots there. I'm actually surprised that they placed fourth.
It's too late to be paranoid about computers in this day and age, because the complexity has grown beyond the grasp of any one mind; if people really want to know what's on your system they'll find a way to get at it. Just accept the invasion of privacy that is assumed when fire up a computer.
I think the "healthiness" of the LCD screens as opposed to the CRT screens has to do with the flicker. On an LCD the pixels don't fade, so there's not that pulsing and required brightness as there is with a CRT display. Ask anyone who has discovered their HZ setting on their monitor drivers and pressed the HZ from 60 to 75 what effect the flicker has on eyesight problems with CRTs. Some people can't even look at a 60hz screen for longer than a minute without it hurting their eyes. Think of a CRT as a finely tuned array of strobe lights and you'll understand why LCDs are better on the eyes.
This could turn a google-bomb into an effective DDOS attack... have all kind of blogs set up a google-bomb against a website and link to an image off of the page. Then, when that link hits the top it gets hit automatically, as well as with every other blog (that scales the pagerank for pointing to the popular hit) that puts that picture up. Since they all get prefetched, the images will load up and that page will get nailed by 100x requests. Google will end up shutting this service down before long because of similar abuses.
- Type the following into Metafor: "Requirements: Create a class that has a function satisfy that takes a String containing an arbitrary boolean expression and returns a Map with keys as boolean variables and values as Booleans. The map must be able to assign values to the arbitrary boolean expression that makes it true, or the function must return a null. Furthermore, the function must run in polynomial time with respect to the number of distinct boolean variables in the given expression."
- Either a) Metafor finds it or b) Metafor crashes, citing the impossibility of such code.
- Submit proof to peer-review journals.
- Profit?!?
Obviously there will always be limits to this kind of meta-programming, so the only purpose of it is to make programming easier. However I can't see how spewing code from requirements is going to make any coder's life easier, considering it'll probably have bugs or run really slowly, and in the end not save any time at all for the coder who'll eventually have to rewrite it. This is natural-language programming we're talking about here, which invites ambiguity, and the last thing we need in software development is more ambiguity.If anything, the original thief doesn't have the laptop by now... he probably hawked it for cash the firsh chance he got. I bet you that the original thief is kicking himself right now while the trafficker is salivating over his newest purchase.
My sister was pretty happy to see the report, even though it was old news, because she gamed a lot growing up (still has any plays her Dreamcast), until the commentary afterwards. The two female hosts were playing The Sims II, and instead of getting into any of the game mechanics or showing the sim aspects they spent two minutes accessorising one sim. Because, y'know, the only reason the women are interested in the game is because they accessorise the clothing. Aghast, my sister flipped the station.
If ABC didn't have their heads so far up their asses to see their colons, they would have given this growing demographic some credit. Instead, I think they might be producing a lot of hate-mail (of which my sister's email will be one of them).
Um, both writeups came from Reuters, so how can one be better than the other if they're the same article??? Although I do admit that MSNBC had some really good pictures to go along with their copy of the Reuters story, as opposed to Yahoo which sadly didn't have pictures...
Kinda creepy when you think about it.
It means he does a good job at dodging the garbage collector.
Therefore, I can't see their approach being foolproof, and the over-obvious advertisement (this is what normal debugging toolbars look like, but they don't have a nifty step-one-back feature) seems too bright to be withot caveat. At $5,000 a seat I'd say buyer beware.
Actually, you'll end up paying, not them. If they can get away with "proving" that the charge was not fradulent, they won't refund your money, and then if you refuse to pay they sell the debt to a collection agency that hounds you until you pay the fee just to shut them up.
It is evident that you have never been in debt before.
Not to mention that if you have a rootkit installed, you better be prepared to wipe your system clean and reinstall the OS, because otherwise there's no way of knowing if you have the whole thing removed.
Now that's a first. The classical demo requires a Mozilla-type (they say Gecko type) browser for the enhanced javascript capability. IE 6 won't even run it correctly.
UL cerification is there for a reason, and if a power cord is causing fires (which isn't that common anymore), then either someone at UL screwed up or someone at UL got paid/pressured to pass that cord. This is a safety issue that Microsoft should have had their finger on and corrected before release. My 2 cents is that they already knew of the issue (because while Microsoft may be evil, they aren't stupid), and it was only until recently that they were called on the carpet for it.
Most companies have better scruples than that.