some of the tightly-wound type A engineers in Silicon Valley would sometimes go out into the dessert in a group and take hallucinogens
I don't know what they took, but just trying to visualize a bunch of guys going out into a dessert (I imagined something with ice-cream and lots of fruit, but YMMV) makes me wonder: which hallucinogen are you on?
Now those are people who do not understand the way people think. Mathematicians, not psychologists.
And they are the reason social engineering works so well.
People like having one, maybe two or three passwords.
So instead of making them change passwords regularly (and do note the analogy of having to change your front door lock every two months!), make them create one relatively secure password and drill them to memorize it, never, ever reveal it to anyone and never ever write it down.
Changing passwords does not affect their crackability in any way, anyway... it is a random security layer which can close the door to someone who has already cracked the old one, in which case your security sucks anyhow.
Damn... please, please don't start your posts like that... I just had a horrible vision of Clippy jumping out on my Gentoo box saying "It looks like you are using ps."
Had a moment of near heart failure... like vigor all over again.
If one copy of bash was the only program on the system, then bash would use 1 GB.
It's either:s/bash/Monad or:s/GB/KB.
However, 3 copies of bash, don't use 3 GB. They use much less.
When I was in high school - just as I was about to graduate, actually - some or other FPS was very popular (which FPSs were current in 2000?) and I thought I could design a level containing my school and its immediate surroundings.
So I talked to some people, to a few teachers and to the people in maintenance, who then gave me a whole bunch of plans of every single floor as well as the front and side views of the whole building to carry home and have fun.
Then, alas, came college and I never went through with it; I did toy with it for a while, but couldn't convert the units... much as I fiddled with the internal help (I had no Internet access back then), I could find no correlation between metres and whatever the unit used in the level editor, i.e. I had no idea which units the editor used.
However, had I succeeded, the level would have been available as a free download on my school's official website.
My teachers thought that in fact, yes, it could be good marketing for our school.
And mind you, that was in Croatia. Not that long after the war. During the time both angry kids and parents came (and they still do come, from time to time) armed to school and threaten teachers, or drop a bomb in the teachers' room because of a fail grade.
Yet for some reason no-one thought it might cause more violence.
Oh, yes... that's why we have at least twice as many posts such as this one as there are posts even remotely suggesting that they should have chosen Linux.
Wait, twice as many? There were but a few posts suggesting what may have been at fault; aside from ACs like you, I've read almost nothing but neutrally-toned comments.
However, repeating a lie a thousand thousand times is bound to make it true. I'm just surprised you believed that one the first time round.
Unless, of course, you're signing someone whose signature is intentionally developed to be forgeable.
When you have a situation like "oh, yes, everything is in order, but your supervisor forgot to sign this and this," you can either go back and do things the proper way or phone the supervisor and falsify the signature.
I don't know how you do it in the US, but guess what the accountants do in Croatia.
Do not think such typing patterns will not evolve, either... people - for whatever reason - do have other people logging in as them. All the time. They do not see the system as a protection, but as a nuisance, and they come up with ways to make it work more to their liking.
I swear, if fingerprint identification was required for all employees, they'd think of a simple way to dodge that, too.
Memory is a complex mechanism, both in the storage and in the retrieval part.
I somehow doubt that such drugs would be of any good use; even if you were able to memorize things while under the influence, your brain would still have to sort it all out and you'd still have trouble recalling everything - at least while not under the influence.
Really, I do loathe the mere idea of chemically achieving something that could be done much better by simple practice.
We needn't be super-human; if most people were human enough, even that would be a start...
My grandmother swears by amphetamines; she used to use them to prepare exams in med school.
That was before they were illegal, of course... yet even today she says she doesn't know why they're illegal, for she'd used them and she's quite fine.
Her liver condition certainly has nothing to do with that.
Luckily, she dropped out; with that kind of attitude, it's a damned good thing she never graduated.
it should be possible to improve memory and/or learning without going the whole hog.
Actually, I really think we needn't resort to biology, neurology and biochemistry to do that.
Schools, for one, could teach many more things, both facts and skills, if certain things were re-organized. With teachers throughout the world being as poorly appreciated as they are, that is just not going to happen, though.
Our capacity to learn and to memorize is near-infinite; it's not the capacity that's the problem, but the way we use it.
And TBH, I think the effect on Alzheimer's is likely to be limited; while IANAN, I imagine that it's not defective memory-activating genes that cause it as much as it is plaques 'n' stuff in the brain.
As I said, it may be of use in alleviating the symptoms; I did not for one second consider it a possible cure.
Besides, have you looked at the internet lately? It seems that it's not eidetic memory that causes one to lose one's ability to distinguish between the important and the irrelevent; it's a modem.
Besides, have you looked at the world lately? It's not a modem that causes one to lose one's ability to think clearly in any fashion, it's just the way people are. (Incidentally, some of my teachers from the Dept. of English Language and Literature were quite amused with the word sheeple. Apparently, they hadn't heard it before.)
Croatian schools are also pretty memory-centered, which is quite a nuisance to most students, who attempt to memorize things without understanding them.
If you ask me, it just sucks to be them.
I too meet the same people three times before I learn their names, can't remember a date to save my life and would probably leave my head on a bus were it not attached to my neck, yet I have twice in a row come first in the entrance exam to my university, which consists of an IQ test, a language test and a general knowledge test. Go figure. (Actually, it's because geeks like trivia, but shhh!;) )
Anyway, the point is: either eidetic memory suppresses your ability to dicriminate or the inability to discriminate allows everything to be stored in memory.
I, for one, am more inclined to the latter; I consider the ability to forget a very important filter which allows us to concentrate upon the important and dismiss the rest. And the ability to re-construct the less important bits is also very healthy mental exercise. One very related to language, at that.
... but I do hope no-one's looking forward to some sort of treatment which would drastically improve our memory, except maybe as a way to diminish symptoms of Alzheimer's or similar diseases.
Much as I've always wanted a btter memory, studies conducted on the few people with truly eidetic memory showed that while they indeed had nearly perfect recollection, they also lacked the ability to discriminate between important and unimportant, though I still have my doubts as to what is the cause of which.
No more is it "I'll just rip OSX/Windows/etc and replace it with Linux"... no the Slashdot folks aren't even happy when it is ALREADY RUNNING LINUX, they want their own favourite distro.
And what's wrong with that?
The mere possibility of changing the distro for whichever reason is one of the points of the whole thing.
Linux users often are tinkerers... at least the/. crowd. And we don't like things that are locked down.
And don't worry: even if it ran my favourite distro (i.e. Gentoo), I'd still want to tweak it. For instance, try to exchange Gnome with E17.
Microsoft should pre-publish a whole bunch of tasty looking security advisories that are 100% fake every time they publish one that is real. Make them the most enticing looking (remote code exploit with unvalidated input overflow in ssh). Any given cracker will probably pick the fake and quickly waste gobs of time.
OTOH, maybe the cracker will find his time had not gone to waste.
Just because MS think a piece of their code is good, it doesn't mean it is so. After all, they do need bugfixes and service packs and whatnot.
Putting up honeypots may just be giving the crackers some ideas...
And if you at any point just express the desire to upgrade the hardware - to say nothing of the software - suddenly half your money will be spent on supporting legacy hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I was merely trying to be funny instead of a spelling-Nazi.
The fact that I have to explain that proves I have failed.
I don't know what they took, but just trying to visualize a bunch of guys going out into a dessert (I imagined something with ice-cream and lots of fruit, but YMMV) makes me wonder: which hallucinogen are you on?
Now those are people who do not understand the way people think. Mathematicians, not psychologists.
And they are the reason social engineering works so well.
People like having one, maybe two or three passwords.
So instead of making them change passwords regularly (and do note the analogy of having to change your front door lock every two months!), make them create one relatively secure password and drill them to memorize it, never, ever reveal it to anyone and never ever write it down.
Changing passwords does not affect their crackability in any way, anyway... it is a random security layer which can close the door to someone who has already cracked the old one, in which case your security sucks anyhow.
I apologize.
As a non-native speaker, I obviously failed to comprehend the grammatical intricacies involved.
All your files are belong to us?
Damn... please, please don't start your posts like that... I just had a horrible vision of Clippy jumping out on my Gentoo box saying "It looks like you are using ps."
Had a moment of near heart failure... like vigor all over again.
It's either :s/bash/Monad or :s/GB/KB.
So very true.
Maybe this falls under 'giving unto others what you want for yourself, but can't have'?
Bah. What about Sledge Hammer?
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
Oh. My. Gods.
When I was in high school - just as I was about to graduate, actually - some or other FPS was very popular (which FPSs were current in 2000?) and I thought I could design a level containing my school and its immediate surroundings.
So I talked to some people, to a few teachers and to the people in maintenance, who then gave me a whole bunch of plans of every single floor as well as the front and side views of the whole building to carry home and have fun.
Then, alas, came college and I never went through with it; I did toy with it for a while, but couldn't convert the units... much as I fiddled with the internal help (I had no Internet access back then), I could find no correlation between metres and whatever the unit used in the level editor, i.e. I had no idea which units the editor used.
However, had I succeeded, the level would have been available as a free download on my school's official website.
My teachers thought that in fact, yes, it could be good marketing for our school.
And mind you, that was in Croatia. Not that long after the war. During the time both angry kids and parents came (and they still do come, from time to time) armed to school and threaten teachers, or drop a bomb in the teachers' room because of a fail grade.
Yet for some reason no-one thought it might cause more violence.
Actually, children usually learn to run before they learn to walk.
Admittedly, they don't learn how to run fast, but still...
Oh, yes... that's why we have at least twice as many posts such as this one as there are posts even remotely suggesting that they should have chosen Linux.
Wait, twice as many? There were but a few posts suggesting what may have been at fault; aside from ACs like you, I've read almost nothing but neutrally-toned comments.
However, repeating a lie a thousand thousand times is bound to make it true. I'm just surprised you believed that one the first time round.
Unless, of course, you're signing someone whose signature is intentionally developed to be forgeable.
When you have a situation like "oh, yes, everything is in order, but your supervisor forgot to sign this and this," you can either go back and do things the proper way or phone the supervisor and falsify the signature.
I don't know how you do it in the US, but guess what the accountants do in Croatia.
Do not think such typing patterns will not evolve, either... people - for whatever reason - do have other people logging in as them. All the time. They do not see the system as a protection, but as a nuisance, and they come up with ways to make it work more to their liking.
I swear, if fingerprint identification was required for all employees, they'd think of a simple way to dodge that, too.
Heh, almost...
I wanted to study one other thing along with my first choice, actually.
You mean, the liver condition she's been living with for the past 30-40 years at the very least?
Memory is a complex mechanism, both in the storage and in the retrieval part.
I somehow doubt that such drugs would be of any good use; even if you were able to memorize things while under the influence, your brain would still have to sort it all out and you'd still have trouble recalling everything - at least while not under the influence.
Really, I do loathe the mere idea of chemically achieving something that could be done much better by simple practice.
We needn't be super-human; if most people were human enough, even that would be a start...
My grandmother swears by amphetamines; she used to use them to prepare exams in med school.
That was before they were illegal, of course... yet even today she says she doesn't know why they're illegal, for she'd used them and she's quite fine.
Her liver condition certainly has nothing to do with that.
Luckily, she dropped out; with that kind of attitude, it's a damned good thing she never graduated.
Actually, I really think we needn't resort to biology, neurology and biochemistry to do that. Schools, for one, could teach many more things, both facts and skills, if certain things were re-organized. With teachers throughout the world being as poorly appreciated as they are, that is just not going to happen, though.
Our capacity to learn and to memorize is near-infinite; it's not the capacity that's the problem, but the way we use it.
As I said, it may be of use in alleviating the symptoms; I did not for one second consider it a possible cure.
Besides, have you looked at the world lately? It's not a modem that causes one to lose one's ability to think clearly in any fashion, it's just the way people are. (Incidentally, some of my teachers from the Dept. of English Language and Literature were quite amused with the word sheeple. Apparently, they hadn't heard it before.)
Thank you for illustrating my point so clearly.
Croatian schools are also pretty memory-centered, which is quite a nuisance to most students, who attempt to memorize things without understanding them.
If you ask me, it just sucks to be them.
I too meet the same people three times before I learn their names, can't remember a date to save my life and would probably leave my head on a bus were it not attached to my neck, yet I have twice in a row come first in the entrance exam to my university, which consists of an IQ test, a language test and a general knowledge test. Go figure. (Actually, it's because geeks like trivia, but shhh! ;) )
Anyway, the point is: either eidetic memory suppresses your ability to dicriminate or the inability to discriminate allows everything to be stored in memory.
I, for one, am more inclined to the latter; I consider the ability to forget a very important filter which allows us to concentrate upon the important and dismiss the rest. And the ability to re-construct the less important bits is also very healthy mental exercise. One very related to language, at that.
... but I do hope no-one's looking forward to some sort of treatment which would drastically improve our memory, except maybe as a way to diminish symptoms of Alzheimer's or similar diseases.
Much as I've always wanted a btter memory, studies conducted on the few people with truly eidetic memory showed that while they indeed had nearly perfect recollection, they also lacked the ability to discriminate between important and unimportant, though I still have my doubts as to what is the cause of which.
FIFM.
Mayhaps. But very few of those earn that kind of money by buying trash and keeping it.
And what's wrong with that?
The mere possibility of changing the distro for whichever reason is one of the points of the whole thing.
Linux users often are tinkerers... at least the /. crowd. And we don't like things that are locked down.
And don't worry: even if it ran my favourite distro (i.e. Gentoo), I'd still want to tweak it. For instance, try to exchange Gnome with E17.
OTOH, maybe the cracker will find his time had not gone to waste.
Just because MS think a piece of their code is good, it doesn't mean it is so. After all, they do need bugfixes and service packs and whatnot.
Putting up honeypots may just be giving the crackers some ideas...
Unless you're proposing that the British now own that land, I don't see the grounds for comparison.
And if you at any point just express the desire to upgrade the hardware - to say nothing of the software - suddenly half your money will be spent on supporting legacy hardware.
Talk about vendor lock-in...