Re:Really OT, and i don't care.
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 1
How many sites with the exact noise filtering capabiltity as slashdot have you seen? 0. It's the moderation system...it's pretty smart within itself, and that's why it will not be released. Slashdot and andover want to have the market for this type forum in a ball grip, and as of now, it does....it's sad, too. If i were more of an advanced coder, i'd write the damn software myself.
Your argument makes no sense. A competent programmer could clone the slashdot system from scratch in a week. There's nothing terribly complex about it. The last release (which includes moderation in its first incarnation) includes 2784 lines of perl.
The moderation system is nothing special. It's a necessary evil because of the huge number of posts and the large number of willfully disruptive people. There's nothing about it that makes it difficult to implement. When faced with the problem they were, it's one of the obvious solutions.
What makes slashdot good has little to do with the underlying software.
More outrageous abuses of the moderation system. Moderated down as "offtopic"! How can a post about the confusing wording in an article be offtopic in a discussion about that article?
That's not too unreasonable a fear (though I'm not going to worry about it). All the elements needed to cause it already exist. Copyright keeps getting extended before old copyrights expire, so it essentially lasts forever. And, pharmaceutical manufacturers have no problem with selling physically addictive drugs (benzodiazepines and SSRIs to name two classes). The advertising we see on TV - ads that don't even say what the drug does but telling you that you need it, the Paxil ads that try to make everyone think they need some, advertising by the "news" and government (Bob Dole) for Viagra.
One thought, though... Who would pay $50-$100 to get rid of a cold three or four days sooner?!!? I can certainly understand painful meningitis, but a cold? Come on!
Even if medical insurance didn't cover it, I certainly would pay that much. Think of it as a net financial gain if it prevents lost work time.
People will pay that much for a night's worth of recreational drugs. My overpriced drinks at the strip bar probably came to $50 last night. I'm sure plenty of people value several days of not feeling bad over one night of feeling good.
To stay in the dorms for a simple internet connection is Sad. Living off campus is a much better experience in life than a stupid T1 connection. Come on people . . .
Bah. I've never lived in dorms and only went to college for a very short time. But I've visited dorms many times, and stayed numerous weekends in them (the girl's dorm, no less). Dorms are awesome, they alone justify college (I'm not sure what else would). It's a constant party.
Normally when you're watching news coverage, there's a trust that the audience puts into the news that they're getting the real deal.
The people who think that the news is telling the truth are ignorant. As much contempt as I have for the media, I have no sympathy for people who believe them. They should know better. Whenever I am in a position to be aware of it, I see blatant lies in the news. (failing to even attempt to check facts is the same thing as a deliberate lie, since they pretend that they do check facts).
It is new that they're faking video. But that's only because the technology to make it cost-effective is new. The lack of honesty or integrity is nothing new.
I don't think so. I think it's journalistist fraud.
This is so much less egregious than the usual deceptions perpetrated by the media that I don't think it's even worth complaining about. When they broadcast "news" that is willfully deceptive, how can we ignore that and complain about replacing a competetor's logo with their own?
Wow, they cloned monkeys... I'm still waiting to see scientists successfully get a single monkey drunk. Those poor little chimps are restrained from all the fun their human relatives can have. Lab animals have it pretty good. Scientists get them drunk/high all the time. It's not too good to be in one of the test groups getting a lethal dose, of course. But except for that, there's some lucky monkeys out there.
Consider these monkeys:
Neurotoxicol Teratol 1995 Sep-Oct;17(5):531-43
Behavioral and neurochemical effects of chronic methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) treatment in rhesus monkeys.
Frederick DL, Ali SF, Slikker W Jr, Gillam MP, Allen RR, Paule MG
Division of Neurotoxicology, National Center for Toxicological Research/FDA, Jefferson, AR 72079-9502, USA.
Effects of chronic treatment with the putative serotonergic neurotoxicant MDMA were assessed in rhesus macaques using behavior in an operant test battery (OTB) designed to model aspects of time estimation, short-term memory, motivation, learning, and color and position discrimination. After an initial acute dose-response assessment, escalating doses of MDMA (0.10-20.0 mg/kg, im, twice daily, for 14 consecutive days at each dose) were administered, followed by three additional acute dose-response assessments.[...]
That was probably a pretty happy group of monkeys. Now granted, the abstract does go on to say that the monkeys were killed and their brains sliced up. And there was a control group that wasn't lucky enough to get high at all.
I'd worry more about the mouse that mad scientists grew an ear on the back of.
More interesting than CNN having an article, is that they had the gall to give it the headline "Are we martians? Maybe, study says". Reading the article reveals that "They concluded it is theoretically possible." Now, "maybe" is a vague word, but I think it implies a vastly higher probability than "theoretically possible" does. To say nothing of the fact that the average person will not realize that the headline is in reference to microbes.
Of course, each additional click on a story is another ad impression. That's their standard procedure, to make as sensationalistic a headlie as possible.
They couldn't patent the use of copper in chips, that would be absurd.
Well, absurd or not, you can patent the idea of storing customer information on a server so that customers don't have to re-enter it, or the idea of using a different alphabet to allow for easier character recognition. You can patent the idea of doing electronic searches by entering a question. You can patent obvious techniques (XOR mouse pointer, overlapping windows in a GUI), mathematical theorems (RSA, DH). Regardless of supposed rules about prior art, you can patent something that's been in use for years. You can even get patents that violate the laws of physics, like perpetual motion machines, or are simply mathematically impossible, like compression algorithms that can compress all data down to 1 bit.
It seems that anything goes in the US patent system. While the DNA patent issue isn't as bad as patenting existing genes, from what I've seen, I don't see why existing genes couldn't be patented. It's basically a system without rules. If the patent office decides that genes can't be patented, someone will just shuffle some wording around to be able to do it.
Why would they charge more to offset losses due to fraud? If the goal of the business is to maximize profits, they are going to charge the amount that makes them the most money. Businesses just don't decide "oh, we need to make more money, well, let's raise prices". It will either lose them enough customers to make it not worth it, or it won't, in which case they should have done it in the first place.
This is especially disgusting when banks claim that they need to charge 21% interest on credit cards due to fraud losses. If they were truly concerned about fraud, they would implement at least a moderately secure system.
Only if they got your card. (and in reality, the bank never makes you pay the $50). In this case, without the physical card, you'd be out a maximum of $0.
The whole thing is just silly for many reasons. I knew I had to complain about just one of them, but if I complained about them all, I'd write more than the original article. Luckily, I found something that stands out.
From the article:
In Dr Forrest's system, every packet sent across the network is examined by stringing together the address of the sender, the address of the receiver, and the "port number" on which they are communicating to make a string of 49 binary digits (bits). These strings, the equivalent of naturally occurring molecules in a body, are compared to a pool of randomly generated 49-bit strings called detectors, the equivalent of the randomly generated lymphocytes. If a detector has more than a certain number (currently 12) of contiguous bits in common with a passing packet, the detector is deleted, and a new detector is generated to replace it. Detectors that survive for two days without matching any packets on the network are deemed to be different enough from legitimate strings to be likely to match only foreign invaders.
49 bits would hold a single IP address (32 bits), a single TCP or UDP port number (16 bits), and one additional bit. They claim that it's holding two IP addresses and one port. (80 bits). I don't even know what to say about the fact that it's holding only one, and not both port numbers. The article says "stringing together", so they're not generating a hash. I could do a lot of speculation as to what they're really putting in those 49 bits, since the article is obviously not correct, but I won't bother. For all I know, the 49 bits figure could be wrong as well.
So then, they compare these packets with a pool of random 49-bit numbers ("detectors"). 12 contiguous bits in common, and they throw the detector away. A detector must last for two days against this to be actually used. Let's look for ways to prevent any new detectors from ever being used. First, random chance. If there's enough traffic to make such "advanced" software necessary, every sequence of 12 bits will probably occur over the course of two days. Different port numbers (whether they save source or destination doesn't matter, because there will be traffic in both directions). Different IP addresses on either the remote or local network. An attacker purposely causing this to happen. 4096 consecutive legitimate connections from a machine that allocates its ports sequentially and isn't connecting to any other machines in that time. (SMTP, FTP, and HTTP could easily cause this. IRC could with an auto-reconnecting client that keeps getting disconnected.)
Let's say a detector manages to get by (maybe their network connection is down for a couple days). Let's see what happens next:
These strings are then used to detect deviations from the conditions in which they were originally selected. If they fail to match any network traffic within another seven days, they are deleted as redundant; but if they match more than a certain number of packets they trigger an alarm.
They don't say what a match is. A full match? That's worthless. They're probably using the same threshold, which leaves the same problems with false alarms.
Oh well. It's a really cute idea, as long as you don't throw any facts at it.
You're an idoit and a techno-snob. Strange isn't it how the two seem to go hand-in-hand.
I posted my observation that pre-recorded audio tapes are not commonly sold or played. Before posting, I asked two co-workers and they agreed with my observation. Nobody here has disagreed with that, not even you.
Go to Wal-mart and see just how fast a shipment of those $79.00 4-head stereo VCR's vanish from the sales floor.
That's not even relevant, I was talking about audio cassette tapes.
Movies released on VHS tapes aren't going to disappear anytime soon, no matter how losers like yourself scream,moan and bitch about it.
Considering the insanities in US trademark, copyright, and patent systems, I wouldn't be surprised if Taco Bell could trademark "chalupa". In fact, if they patented the chalupa, it would be no more severe an abuse than those we've already seen.
VHS insn't really a defunct standard. Look at how cassette tapes have survived despite the release of CD's.
Tapes are pretty much dead. I havn't bought or seen someone buy a pre-recorded audio tape in years. In the time that I've seen 100 people's CD collections, I havn't seen one tape collection. In recent memory, I've only listened to tapes in cars that didn't have CD players - and those tapes were recorded off of CDs.
People still buy them because they're writable with cheap hardware. But that's about the only common reason.
I would assume that this would make it easier to engineer the ablility to compromise the transaction.
I don't see how. The client just needs to send the credit card number, the price, and whatever information to identify the merchant. The server just needs to send back an authorization number or a failure reason. All this could take place over an encrypted connection if security is a concern. What possible danger could there be if the source to do this was available?
You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format.
Besides breaking existing software, as you said, it would also add needless confusion. Right now Perl's localtime function is identical to C's. C's can't be changed because it would also break a lot of existing software. It would just be a huge, huge mess, for no real benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
Your argument makes no sense. A competent programmer could clone the slashdot system from scratch in a week. There's nothing terribly complex about it. The last release (which includes moderation in its first incarnation) includes 2784 lines of perl.
The moderation system is nothing special. It's a necessary evil because of the huge number of posts and the large number of willfully disruptive people. There's nothing about it that makes it difficult to implement. When faced with the problem they were, it's one of the obvious solutions.
What makes slashdot good has little to do with the underlying software.
More outrageous abuses of the moderation system. Moderated down as "offtopic"! How can a post about the confusing wording in an article be offtopic in a discussion about that article?
That's not too unreasonable a fear (though I'm not going to worry about it). All the elements needed to cause it already exist. Copyright keeps getting extended before old copyrights expire, so it essentially lasts forever. And, pharmaceutical manufacturers have no problem with selling physically addictive drugs (benzodiazepines and SSRIs to name two classes). The advertising we see on TV - ads that don't even say what the drug does but telling you that you need it, the Paxil ads that try to make everyone think they need some, advertising by the "news" and government (Bob Dole) for Viagra.
Even if medical insurance didn't cover it, I certainly would pay that much. Think of it as a net financial gain if it prevents lost work time.
People will pay that much for a night's worth of recreational drugs. My overpriced drinks at the strip bar probably came to $50 last night. I'm sure plenty of people value several days of not feeling bad over one night of feeling good.
Why did they not use the perfectly good word "placebo" instead of making up the less-specific and confusing term "dummy pills"? Sigh.
More abuses of the moderation system. How can a post defending living in the dorms be offtopic in a discussion about dorm life?
Bah. I've never lived in dorms and only went to college for a very short time. But I've visited dorms many times, and stayed numerous weekends in them (the girl's dorm, no less). Dorms are awesome, they alone justify college (I'm not sure what else would). It's a constant party.
The outside world sucks.
It would be fabulous wealth to the "average" person in the US. But it's about what an entry-level sysadmin would make.
The people who think that the news is telling the truth are ignorant. As much contempt as I have for the media, I have no sympathy for people who believe them. They should know better. Whenever I am in a position to be aware of it, I see blatant lies in the news. (failing to even attempt to check facts is the same thing as a deliberate lie, since they pretend that they do check facts).
It is new that they're faking video. But that's only because the technology to make it cost-effective is new. The lack of honesty or integrity is nothing new.
This is so much less egregious than the usual deceptions perpetrated by the media that I don't think it's even worth complaining about. When they broadcast "news" that is willfully deceptive, how can we ignore that and complain about replacing a competetor's logo with their own?
Wow, they cloned monkeys... I'm still waiting to see scientists successfully get a single monkey drunk. Those poor little chimps
are restrained from all the fun their human relatives can have.
Lab animals have it pretty good. Scientists get them drunk/high all the time. It's not too good to be in one of the test groups getting a lethal dose, of course. But except for that, there's some lucky monkeys out there.
Consider these monkeys:
Neurotoxicol Teratol 1995 Sep-Oct;17(5):531-43
Behavioral and neurochemical effects of chronic methylenedioxymethamphetamine
(MDMA) treatment in rhesus monkeys.
Frederick DL, Ali SF, Slikker W Jr, Gillam MP, Allen RR, Paule MG
Division of Neurotoxicology, National Center for Toxicological Research/FDA, Jefferson, AR 72079-9502, USA.
Effects of chronic treatment with the putative serotonergic neurotoxicant MDMA were assessed in rhesus macaques using
behavior in an operant test battery (OTB) designed to model aspects of time estimation, short-term memory, motivation,
learning, and color and position discrimination. After an initial acute dose-response assessment, escalating doses of MDMA
(0.10-20.0 mg/kg, im, twice daily, for 14 consecutive days at each dose) were administered, followed by three additional acute
dose-response assessments.[...]
That was probably a pretty happy group of monkeys. Now granted, the abstract does go on to say that the monkeys were killed and their brains sliced up. And there was a control group that wasn't lucky enough to get high at all.
I'd worry more about the mouse that mad scientists grew an ear on the back of.
More interesting than CNN having an article, is that they had the gall to give it the headline "Are we martians? Maybe, study says". Reading the article reveals that "They concluded it is theoretically possible." Now, "maybe" is a vague word, but I think it implies a vastly higher probability than "theoretically possible" does. To say nothing of the fact that the average person will not realize that the headline is in reference to microbes.
Of course, each additional click on a story is another ad impression. That's their standard procedure, to make as sensationalistic a headlie as possible.
Well, absurd or not, you can patent the idea of storing customer information on a server so that customers don't have to re-enter it, or the idea of using a different alphabet to allow for easier character recognition. You can patent the idea of doing electronic searches by entering a question. You can patent obvious techniques (XOR mouse pointer, overlapping windows in a GUI), mathematical theorems (RSA, DH). Regardless of supposed rules about prior art, you can patent something that's been in use for years. You can even get patents that violate the laws of physics, like perpetual motion machines, or are simply mathematically impossible, like compression algorithms that can compress all data down to 1 bit.
It seems that anything goes in the US patent system. While the DNA patent issue isn't as bad as patenting existing genes, from what I've seen, I don't see why existing genes couldn't be patented. It's basically a system without rules. If the patent office decides that genes can't be patented, someone will just shuffle some wording around to be able to do it.
Even though it was overturned, it shows what the lawmakers think of people having the right to do what they want when it isn't hurting anybody else.
That's a feature. Look at the idiotic nicks you get on dalnet and undernet where 40 or so characters are allowed.
At least they also included the real information. I'm really sick of every numerical quantity being converted to football fields per novel.
I'm a little surprised at how large their newspaper pages are. But then, the figure is probably entirely fictitious anyway.
Why would they charge more to offset losses due to fraud? If the goal of the business is to maximize profits, they are going to charge the amount that makes them the most money. Businesses just don't decide "oh, we need to make more money, well, let's raise prices". It will either lose them enough customers to make it not worth it, or it won't, in which case they should have done it in the first place.
This is especially disgusting when banks claim that they need to charge 21% interest on credit cards due to fraud losses. If they were truly concerned about fraud, they would implement at least a moderately secure system.
Only if they got your card. (and in reality, the bank never makes you pay the $50). In this case, without the physical card, you'd be out a maximum of $0.
From the article:
49 bits would hold a single IP address (32 bits), a single TCP or UDP port number (16 bits), and one additional bit. They claim that it's holding two IP addresses and one port. (80 bits). I don't even know what to say about the fact that it's holding only one, and not both port numbers. The article says "stringing together", so they're not generating a hash. I could do a lot of speculation as to what they're really putting in those 49 bits, since the article is obviously not correct, but I won't bother. For all I know, the 49 bits figure could be wrong as well.
So then, they compare these packets with a pool of random 49-bit numbers ("detectors"). 12 contiguous bits in common, and they throw the detector away. A detector must last for two days against this to be actually used. Let's look for ways to prevent any new detectors from ever being used. First, random chance. If there's enough traffic to make such "advanced" software necessary, every sequence of 12 bits will probably occur over the course of two days. Different port numbers (whether they save source or destination doesn't matter, because there will be traffic in both directions). Different IP addresses on either the remote or local network. An attacker purposely causing this to happen. 4096 consecutive legitimate connections from a machine that allocates its ports sequentially and isn't connecting to any other machines in that time. (SMTP, FTP, and HTTP could easily cause this. IRC could with an auto-reconnecting client that keeps getting disconnected.)
Let's say a detector manages to get by (maybe their network connection is down for a couple days). Let's see what happens next:
They don't say what a match is. A full match? That's worthless. They're probably using the same threshold, which leaves the same problems with false alarms.
Oh well. It's a really cute idea, as long as you don't throw any facts at it.
I posted my observation that pre-recorded audio tapes are not commonly sold or played. Before posting, I asked two co-workers and they agreed with my observation. Nobody here has disagreed with that, not even you.
Go to Wal-mart and see just how fast a shipment of those $79.00 4-head stereo VCR's vanish from the sales floor.
That's not even relevant, I was talking about audio cassette tapes.
Movies released on VHS tapes aren't going to disappear anytime soon, no matter how losers like yourself scream,moan and bitch about it.
I didn't say anything at all about VHS tapes.
Considering the insanities in US trademark, copyright, and patent systems, I wouldn't be surprised if Taco Bell could trademark "chalupa". In fact, if they patented the chalupa, it would be no more severe an abuse than those we've already seen.
Tapes are pretty much dead. I havn't bought or seen someone buy a pre-recorded audio tape in years. In the time that I've seen 100 people's CD collections, I havn't seen one tape collection. In recent memory, I've only listened to tapes in cars that didn't have CD players - and those tapes were recorded off of CDs.
People still buy them because they're writable with cheap hardware. But that's about the only common reason.
I don't see how. The client just needs to send the credit card number, the price, and whatever information to identify the merchant. The server just needs to send back an authorization number or a failure reason. All this could take place over an encrypted connection if security is a concern. What possible danger could there be if the source to do this was available?
Besides breaking existing software, as you said, it would also add needless confusion. Right now Perl's localtime function is identical to C's. C's can't be changed because it would also break a lot of existing software. It would just be a huge, huge mess, for no real benefit.
What reasonably likely to occur power problem could cause hardware damage to your Starfire?