Hopefully you'll be able to plug a USB keyboard into it, to press ctrl-alt-del when it crashes.
You joke, but to me, a keyboard sounds like a damn good idea.
I have a few more feature requests:
Built-in speakers (headphones-free)
More HD space (100GB+)
Larger screen (say 15" or 17")
Enough CPU and RAM to handle real world apps (maybe Turion 64x2 with 2GB RAM?)
DVD Burner (so you can share movies you made with your Zune)
12-cell Lithium Ion battery so it can last more than an hour or two.
Zune has a real opportunity here. Sure, the iPod dominates the market, but I think a lot of people are frustrated with its lack of ability to author DVDs, host webservers or calculate Mersenne primes.
Aha - that's what I thought too, until I read TFM:
WARNING: The Nokia FeotalFone 772 is not to be used prior to week 10 of the first trimester, except with optional "hands-free" adapter which permits use as early as week 7. UNDER ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCE should an ear-less, hand-less fetus attempt to use the Nokia FeotalFone 772.
If I'm reading it right, your "proof" is that the US has a disproportionately high number of scientists/engineers and a disproportionately high number of anti-evolutionists. Fair enough. That neither supports nor refutes the assertion that the two groups are disjoint.
But your point is valid - without facts I'm just blowing air. This really isn't an unsolved mystery - a large random survey would answer it. Data from 1997 shows 5% of scientists to support creationism, 40% to support theistic evolution, and 55% naturalistic evolution. (A different poll showed 0.14% of earth and life-scientists to support creationism.) One would assume National Geographic had some credible data before writing in an article about religion and evolution "One would be hard pressed to find a legitimate scientist today who does not believe in evolution.", but I guess they might not have. I personally have not conducted such a survey, so I'm relying on the numbers produced by several sources that I deem credible to conduct a statistically fair survey. As I come across new, legitimate sources I'll keep updating my beleifs regarding the favor of evolution among scientists. In the end, the numbers game doesn't make the difference anyways, to quote TalkOrigins:
One needs to examine not how many scientists and professors believe something, but what their conviction is based upon... evidence, not personal authority, is what objective conclusions should be based on.
And yet somehow those awfully ignorant Americans are beating everyone else's buts off in every field of endevour, including science!
Something tells me that the set of Americans at the forefront of American science and the set of Americans who are ignorant of or anti-evolution are - not strictly, but more or less - disjoint sets. At any rate, the sloppiness of casual English* only complicates the process of argument.
I'll try it a bit more formally:
Let the domain be the set of all Americans. Let s(x) mean person x excels at science, let i(x) mean person x is ignorant. Then your implication:
ThereExists_x p(x) ^ ThereExists_x i(x) -> ThereExists_x ( p(x) ^ i(x) )
is not valid.
I'd be pissed if, say, Google possibly deleted some unread mail, and I'd never know if I was missing out.
Yeah, that would be pretty terrible. So to spare you that fate... here is exactly what you would be missing out on:
Hi,
Valjjum from 1, 25$ Vjjagra from 3, 35$ Ambjjen Cjjalis from 3, 75$
, , , , , these myths to justify their existence. There was a lot to argue with there, maybe not a lot but some. A good deal of jumping-to-conclusions and more than a bit of rationalization.
Hell, I could probably recover 95% of PlusNet customers' emails from my delete box.
God forbid one person write down his ideas on a piece of paper and 100 years later someone else picks it up, reads it, and understands what the author intended.
No doubt the standardization of written language slows language evolution and aids the preservation of written knowledge. However, spoken language, which is the true "natural" language, will continue to evolve, and written language tends to adjust to keep up with it. Eventually, the spoken and written (preserved) languages diverge significantly (e.g. the classical arabic of the Quran and the modern arabic dialects spoken today), which hinders the ability to "pick up, read, and understand what the author intended." Formal or not, there will come a time when the written word of 2006 is very difficult to read and understand. Also, it is preposterous to suggest that someone reading a transcript of colloquial spoken English from 100 years ago would sit and scratch their heads in bewilderment. Certainly there are benefits to a logical and well-organized argument - but this is really orthogonal to the spoken/written language gap, and has very little to do with "proper grammar." As much as the prescriptivists underestimate it, the natural abilities of a native speaker are often quite sufficient for strong, effectively writing.
Languages change, and much of that change is nessicary as new ideas emerge. But change, just for the sake of change and lazyness is bad, because it hinders communication.
Language doesn't change in a vacuum - it changes because people change it. Mutations that are deemed useful stick, and slowly the language evolves. Some of these changes are driven by convenience (or as you would say, "laziness"), some are driven by the need for additional expressive power. It is the balance between these forces that keeps language mangeable and useable. (If a language only grew and was never "pruned" it would substantially hinder communication.) Most of the time if a distiction or nuance is lost it is because people collectively determine that this naunce is not needed or can be determined by other means (e.g. context). If we really need to make a particular distinction, we will reintroduce it. Clinging to the snapshot of language which served yesterday's needs does no favor to today's speakers.
Any evolving language is subject to large tranformations, and just because the previous generation of linguists or literature majors doesn't agree with something doesn't mean it is wrong.
As has been mentioned, linguists take a descriptive and not prescriptive approach to language: any "linguist" who doesn't agree with a language phenomenon is no linguist at all.
That wonderful feeling of making the password hard to guess, but easy to recall.
If you are like me, it seems like almost everyday the bank or eBay is emailing about a new upgrade to the system, one that requires entering your old and new passwords, social security numbers, bank account numbers, and so on. Accordingly, I've developed some simple tips for coming up with making a hard-to-crack but easy-to-remember password:
Short but strong: you can make the password relatively short (e.g. one character) so that it is easy to remember, but random enough to be hacker-proof. Do you really think someone would guess 'q' or 'z' ?
Long but simple: if you are unsatisfied with the previous strategy, try this one on for size: the longer the better. So instead of 'a', you might want to use 'aaaaaaaaaaaa'. ('0000000' works, too.)
Mirror Mirror: use your username as your password and cut the memory load in half!
Long and strong: for the absolutely mission critical stuff, you may have to spice it up. Pair a common dictionary word, like 'dog', 'log' or 'hog' with a small digit ('1', '2', and so on), and you're golden.
Final Notes: don't forget to recycle your old passwords and - please - keep a public list!
Whenever I am faced with a complicated moral dilemma such as this, I turn to a higher authority and pose myself the question: "What would Starbucks do?"
You know the answer as well as I do: they'd open the f*cking universities.
In other words, a top notch Computer Science school. Both the graduate and undergraduate CSE programs are consistently ranked in the top 10. Last ranking I saw put the PhD program at 5th, after a four-way 1st place tie between MIT, CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.
When/If you are accepted to Stanford, congrats and enjoy. In the meanwhile, free course material from quality schools are greatly appreciated, be it from UW, MIT, or the many other universities with similar offerings.
TFA mentions "using high-tech scalpels that clot the blood as they cut tissue," but there is no elaboration. Does anyone know how these work or have a link to more information? Sounds like a cool invention and I'd like to read more.
The sinister side of this seemingly innocent comment will only be revealed when a string of slashdotters awake in ice-filled bathtubs, tube protuding where their kidney once was. In a puzzling twist, upon receiving closer medical attention, each will find that the intricate stitching spells out... porkmusket.
I am not sure that we are in disagreement, perhaps you misjudged the point of my comment. The threads of this conversation have been littered with misinformation, an abundance of analogies involving car doors, and random calls for people to be arrested and to never teach again. A great deal of this stems from the ISC's awful coverage of the issue, a diary which foresees "incarceration", "expresses sympathy" to the families of the students, accuses the professor of being a "miserable failure" and otherwise grossly distorts the reality of the situation. It was this that I aimed to clarify. And please, may I ask you to swap out your pronouns and put "you" back in the closet. I am not the professor, I am not in the class, I never proclaimed myself talented and I am not going to port scan you - relax, I am friendly.
Despite the sensationalism of the ISC's writeup, there are legitimate concerns about this assignment, some of which you addressed. Specifically, there is the potential for this assignment to pose a risk to the machines on networks of innocent bystanders, even without the illegal exploitation of vulnerabilities that the diary suggested. As much as I enjoy your condescension, I have in fact heard of a test lab, and personally, I think that a test lab / honey net / willing company would all be great solutions.
Despite the having read excerpts from the assignment, it is still clear that your ignorance flavors your judgment. Typically the instructions regarding an assignment go beyond the print-out, so you cannot know whether the concerns you expressed are being taken into consideration or not. Honestly, I don't blame you for jumping to the conclusions you have; with the amount of information available online, your jump was fairly sound. You have every right to feel the way you do, but if it provides any comfort, I am confident that you are underestimating the professor.
My point regarding the admins was merely that the university's machines and networks (unlike some, apparently) are robust enough to withstand the port scans. Obviously the set of appropriate activities differs from admin to student. In this case, it is simply a matter of the port scans posing a greater threat to the admins than to the network. The students had already self-censored themselves to avoid networks containing sensitive student information, the registration system and anything else that might affect important day to day operation. There are in fact many networks on campus that would be great for this assignment; the administration's over-reaction is unfortunate both for the students and for companies such as yours.
This is the first time that this class was offered at the university, and I would be surprised if serious changes weren't made the second time around. Even as this whole thing dies down, the discussion remains valuable because similar assignments are conducted at universities across the nation (it's always good to make an example out of someone now and then). I am not here to dissuade you of anything, merely to clarify the sensationalist one-sided journalism spewed from the ISC's diary. Their irresponsible writeup is pleasantly contrasted by the legitimate concerns discussed in your post, even with your scolding tone. Goodluck to you, I wish no harm to your network.
I would be more interested to know who approved publishing this tremendously misleading diary on an otherwise reputable site. I am personally familiar with the facts of this situation - I can assure you that the SANS write-up substantially skews the true nature of the situation, from the specifics of the assignment to the intent of the professor. This sensationalist misrepresentation goes beyond irresponsible, it is outright dishonest.
It is not that the ISC is ignorant of the facts: several students have sent them the full text of the assignment (which has also been posted here). It is that the full assignment, including the following:
Since your remote evaluations of computer systems cannot be purely passive, you must take care to ensure that your actions are not seen as intrusive or threatening to the computer site being investigated. You are to conduct your investigation using tools available in the public domain and must not attempt to hack into the system. If you detect vulnerabilities in the system, you must not exploit those vulnerabilities. If you are challenged by a system manager, you may explain your actions and provide a copy of this document. You may also offer to provide a copy of your report to the system manager on completion of your evaluation. If asked to cease and desist, you are to do so immediately and consider another site for your investigation.
contradicts the story they have fabricated about a reckless professor urging his students into felonious activity. At no point did the assignment require activities that were illegal, immoral, or in violation of a literal reading of the university's acceptable use policy. To the contrary, any student who commits a crime does so on his own will and against the explicit instructions of the professor.
Yes, there are system administrators at the university who oppose this assignment, but this opposition is far from unanimous. Obviously the administrator of a poorly secured network does not want the vulnerabilities exposed. However, security through obscurity is irresponsible, and ultimately it is these admins who deserve the punishment (perhaps this prompted the efforts to squash the assignment?). You should note that some of the same admins who oppose this assignment routinely port scan the entire university network.
The truth of the matter is that this assignment is painfully appropriate to a computer security course, and is a great example of an academic assignment providing valuable, real-world experience.
Please let go of the conspiracy theories, this is a group of mature, responsible* and talented students , not a rag-tag bunch of script kiddie / hacker / terrorists. The professor is a well-respected professor of which I have heard nothing but the best praise. I promise you that nobody affiliated with assignment has any intent to harvest your ill-secured server into some massive zombie net, stealing your information or otherwise harming you. Twenty students scanning twenty machines is not a DDOS, no one is going to lose thousands of dollars in man-hours hunting down that befuddling port scan. For better or worse, unsolicited port scans are a fact of life. Be glad that the machine at the other end is well-intending student who will relay to you - not exploit - any vulnerabilities he finds.
Now may we please put pressure on the ISC to promote responsible journalism by providing readers with the full story, even if it isn't as sensational as the story they wish it was? If anyone should be in risk of losing his/her jobs, it is the irresponsible and dishonest author of this diary.
* Yes, there is an ethics course - it's mandatory.
And by the way, to clear up one small additional point of confusion on the part of the author: winter quarter 2006 takes place, believe it or not, in the winter of 2006.
If there is a post to mod up, it is this one. There is going to be a lot of hype and over-reaction out of ignorance of the situation, and a misunderstanding of the intent of the assignment and the professor (the ISC's writeup of it is inflammatory and absurd). Help cut the sound-to-noise ratio and mod the parent up.
The Grub "included" with Gentoo's portage system works just fine dual booting between WinXP and Gentoo using amd64. The grandparent simply misconfigured it, and a quick post to Gentoo's forums would have solved it. (By now the solution has already been posted in various replies). I had the same problem and the same solution.
Slashdot Mirror
- Built-in speakers (headphones-free)
- More HD space (100GB+)
- Larger screen (say 15" or 17")
- Enough CPU and RAM to handle real world apps (maybe Turion 64x2 with 2GB RAM?)
- DVD Burner (so you can share movies you made with your Zune)
- 12-cell Lithium Ion battery so it can last more than an hour or two.
Zune has a real opportunity here. Sure, the iPod dominates the market, but I think a lot of people are frustrated with its lack of ability to author DVDs, host webservers or calculate Mersenne primes.I have to say, that may be the best correction I've seen on slashdot. You actually make me happy to have made the typo in the first place.
But your point is valid - without facts I'm just blowing air. This really isn't an unsolved mystery - a large random survey would answer it. Data from 1997 shows 5% of scientists to support creationism, 40% to support theistic evolution, and 55% naturalistic evolution. (A different poll showed 0.14% of earth and life-scientists to support creationism.) One would assume National Geographic had some credible data before writing in an article about religion and evolution "One would be hard pressed to find a legitimate scientist today who does not believe in evolution.", but I guess they might not have. I personally have not conducted such a survey, so I'm relying on the numbers produced by several sources that I deem credible to conduct a statistically fair survey. As I come across new, legitimate sources I'll keep updating my beleifs regarding the favor of evolution among scientists. In the end, the numbers game doesn't make the difference anyways, to quote TalkOrigins:
I'll try it a bit more formally: Let the domain be the set of all Americans. Let s(x) mean person x excels at science, let i(x) mean person x is ignorant.
Then your implication:
ThereExists_x p(x) ^ ThereExists_x i(x) -> ThereExists_x ( p(x) ^ i(x) )
is not valid.
*Or any natural language.
Hell, I could probably recover 95% of PlusNet customers' emails from my delete box.
Thanks for digging up those stats, btw. =)
*slams head against wall* I'm so stupid!
I would be interested to see the stats for Firefox versus IE coming from Microsoft...
Whenever I am faced with a complicated moral dilemma such as this, I turn to a higher authority and pose myself the question: "What would Starbucks do?"
You know the answer as well as I do: they'd open the f*cking universities.
I really digg those icons! (... now if I could only find the thumbs-up icon...)
O:)
In other words, a top notch Computer Science school. Both the graduate and undergraduate CSE programs are consistently ranked in the top 10. Last ranking I saw put the PhD program at 5th, after a four-way 1st place tie between MIT, CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.
When/If you are accepted to Stanford, congrats and enjoy. In the meanwhile, free course material from quality schools are greatly appreciated, be it from UW, MIT, or the many other universities with similar offerings.
Foam light sabers are so 8 hours ago, everyone is using Macbooks now.
Mangled in translation from Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, German? Perhaps. Or it could just be French:
= 14942146. It's a new tech catch phrase!
concurrence nf competition.
Anyway, your interpretation seems unlikely to be the intended meaning.
By the way, concurrence was used to mean competition in another recent thread http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=180524&cid
Concurrence is French for competition.
I am not sure that we are in disagreement, perhaps you misjudged the point of my comment. The threads of this conversation have been littered with misinformation, an abundance of analogies involving car doors, and random calls for people to be arrested and to never teach again. A great deal of this stems from the ISC's awful coverage of the issue, a diary which foresees "incarceration", "expresses sympathy" to the families of the students, accuses the professor of being a "miserable failure" and otherwise grossly distorts the reality of the situation. It was this that I aimed to clarify. And please, may I ask you to swap out your pronouns and put "you" back in the closet. I am not the professor, I am not in the class, I never proclaimed myself talented and I am not going to port scan you - relax, I am friendly.
Despite the sensationalism of the ISC's writeup, there are legitimate concerns about this assignment, some of which you addressed. Specifically, there is the potential for this assignment to pose a risk to the machines on networks of innocent bystanders, even without the illegal exploitation of vulnerabilities that the diary suggested. As much as I enjoy your condescension, I have in fact heard of a test lab, and personally, I think that a test lab / honey net / willing company would all be great solutions.
Despite the having read excerpts from the assignment, it is still clear that your ignorance flavors your judgment. Typically the instructions regarding an assignment go beyond the print-out, so you cannot know whether the concerns you expressed are being taken into consideration or not. Honestly, I don't blame you for jumping to the conclusions you have; with the amount of information available online, your jump was fairly sound. You have every right to feel the way you do, but if it provides any comfort, I am confident that you are underestimating the professor.
My point regarding the admins was merely that the university's machines and networks (unlike some, apparently) are robust enough to withstand the port scans. Obviously the set of appropriate activities differs from admin to student. In this case, it is simply a matter of the port scans posing a greater threat to the admins than to the network. The students had already self-censored themselves to avoid networks containing sensitive student information, the registration system and anything else that might affect important day to day operation. There are in fact many networks on campus that would be great for this assignment; the administration's over-reaction is unfortunate both for the students and for companies such as yours.
This is the first time that this class was offered at the university, and I would be surprised if serious changes weren't made the second time around. Even as this whole thing dies down, the discussion remains valuable because similar assignments are conducted at universities across the nation (it's always good to make an example out of someone now and then). I am not here to dissuade you of anything, merely to clarify the sensationalist one-sided journalism spewed from the ISC's diary. Their irresponsible writeup is pleasantly contrasted by the legitimate concerns discussed in your post, even with your scolding tone. Goodluck to you, I wish no harm to your network.
It is not that the ISC is ignorant of the facts: several students have sent them the full text of the assignment (which has also been posted here). It is that the full assignment, including the following:
contradicts the story they have fabricated about a reckless professor urging his students into felonious activity. At no point did the assignment require activities that were illegal, immoral, or in violation of a literal reading of the university's acceptable use policy. To the contrary, any student who commits a crime does so on his own will and against the explicit instructions of the professor.
Yes, there are system administrators at the university who oppose this assignment, but this opposition is far from unanimous. Obviously the administrator of a poorly secured network does not want the vulnerabilities exposed. However, security through obscurity is irresponsible, and ultimately it is these admins who deserve the punishment (perhaps this prompted the efforts to squash the assignment?). You should note that some of the same admins who oppose this assignment routinely port scan the entire university network.
The truth of the matter is that this assignment is painfully appropriate to a computer security course, and is a great example of an academic assignment providing valuable, real-world experience.
Please let go of the conspiracy theories, this is a group of mature, responsible* and talented students , not a rag-tag bunch of script kiddie / hacker / terrorists. The professor is a well-respected professor of which I have heard nothing but the best praise. I promise you that nobody affiliated with assignment has any intent to harvest your ill-secured server into some massive zombie net, stealing your information or otherwise harming you. Twenty students scanning twenty machines is not a DDOS, no one is going to lose thousands of dollars in man-hours hunting down that befuddling port scan. For better or worse, unsolicited port scans are a fact of life. Be glad that the machine at the other end is well-intending student who will relay to you - not exploit - any vulnerabilities he finds.
Now may we please put pressure on the ISC to promote responsible journalism by providing readers with the full story, even if it isn't as sensational as the story they wish it was? If anyone should be in risk of losing his/her jobs, it is the irresponsible and dishonest author of this diary.
* Yes, there is an ethics course - it's mandatory.
And by the way, to clear up one small additional point of confusion on the part of the author: winter quarter 2006 takes place, believe it or not, in the winter of 2006.
If there is a post to mod up, it is this one. There is going to be a lot of hype and over-reaction out of ignorance of the situation, and a misunderstanding of the intent of the assignment and the professor (the ISC's writeup of it is inflammatory and absurd). Help cut the sound-to-noise ratio and mod the parent up.
The Grub "included" with Gentoo's portage system works just fine dual booting between WinXP and Gentoo using amd64. The grandparent simply misconfigured it, and a quick post to Gentoo's forums would have solved it. (By now the solution has already been posted in various replies). I had the same problem and the same solution.