Mod parent up. Everytime I see that stat saying, "WinXX will be infected x minutes after installation!" it just makes me want to beat my head. Sweet zombie Jesus, is it so hard to exercise proper protocol when you set these things up? Yes, windows sucks hard and fast, but as technologists, we've got to work around it.
Look who's talking about liberty and control. The courts effectively trampled on liberty with this latest decision. All that the government must do is maintain neutrality, not favoring one view over another. Thus, if both evolution and ID are taught, neutrality is maintained. If ID is banned simply because it is religious, neutrality has been violated. If evolution is banned only because it is religious, neutrality has likewise been violated.
Wrong. Just because someone presents an alternate conjecture about the accuracy of a scientific principle does not mean that said conjecture is automatically on the same level of legitimacy as whichever principle one seeks to disprove. If that were the case, I could argue that computers run on magic, and then protest when my theory of devine computation was not taught in computer science classes. The antecedents of ID are undoubtedly religious in nature; ergo, the conclusions postulated by ID proponents are derived from sources known to be false, or at the very least untestable.
I said "effectively trampled on", because ID was rejected for being unscientific in this particular case.
ID, not being a scientific hypothesis, will *always* be rejected by legitimate scientists, due to the fact that it:
Cannot be tested
Cannot be seperated from religious dogma
Requires belief in the supernatural as part of its core support structure
Negates many scientific principles which *are* tested and well-regarded among people of learning.
That is the fault of the defense, and I can't actually fault the judge on that count, from what I've heard at least. However, if ID ever gets a decent legal and scientific team on its side, we should make some headway.
While what you say is probably true, I find the truth of the statement to be a sad reflection on public education, and the gullibility of American Christians. Allow me to be blunt-- ID is not science, and no amount of legal or psuedo-scientific doublespeak will make it so. Science is a process wherein the natural laws governing the universe are explored, tested, pulled, stretched, and examined. A key aspect of scientific study is impartiality; which is to say that a true scientist will not endorse any particular outcome to an experiment until that experiment has been performed and tested by many independant researchers. ID differs from science in that the key promoters of its hypothesis begin with their own surity of their ideas, and then disregard conflicting facts.
Literal Creationism has at least four main tenets:
- the earth is young, probably around 6000 years old
- God created all "kinds" of animals within 6 evening-morning days (fish vs. birds vs. land mammals vs. humans, etc.)
- the earth was devastated by a global flood early in its history
- all humans descended from a single couple known in the English Bible as Adam and Eve
Allow me to rebut:
The Earth is not young. Carbon dating, fossil records, geology, atomic theory, astronomy, and many other scientific disciplines have all independantly dated the earth at more than four billion years old.
If God did create the world, and all the things in it, in six days, then how were days reckoned before the creation of the sun?
If God created all the animals, why were so many of them such complete failures as to become extinct?
If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, then why the biblical prohibition on incest? And, furthermore, I am not a genetic researcher, but I'm fairly certain that thousands of generations of familial in-breeding would result in a rather, shall we say, shallow gene pool.
If it could be shown that any one of these propositions does not hold, then Biblical creationism would crumble. The fact that they are extraordinarily difficult to challenge certainly does not mean that creationism is not a scientific theory. Furthermore, all of the evidence we have ever uncovered and understand quite we
Ditto me-- A group of friends and myself all migrated to IpCop (http://ipcop.org/ routers for our home networks a couple years back, because of its super-easy-to-use IpSec VPN capability. Allows us to do productive and important things, like playing network games. Hell, I've even used it for more boring, business uses, like moving word documents between a small office and telecommuter's homes.
You're a touch late. The optimal time to jump ship was 9-10-2001. After all, IP theft finances terrorism, just like smoking pot, and not shopping at Wal-Mart.
I recently saw, first hand, how Visual Studio should *not* be used. The problem with rapid application development is that generally, as with any precise scientific endevor, the more rapidly the work is done, the more opportunity to make massive mistakes. In my recent experience, I came across a fellow who had started working on a database system for a small mechanical company. He obviously had programming experience, and even wrote some fairly good conditional loops for processing payroll taxes. However (and largely due to inept management who did not have any programming expertise) he found himself making larger and more extravagant promises of expanded features to his bosses. Eventually, because of the way his program had been rapidly banged together, he found himself 'paited into a corner,' unable to deliver his promised new features without an extensive rewrite. In this respect, I feel that RAD tools, such as MS-VS, can lead to even greater delays than carefully planning and writing all the code by hand.
I'm sorry but do you people take the time to read up before you complain? This is a wonderful opportunity for the open source movement. EFI makes booting multiple operating systems like a thousand times easier. Instead of having a single boot record on the hard disk boot information is stored in a data table and given as an option to the user who selections the OS they want.
A thousand times? Is it really *that* hard right now? It seems like EFI is basically just moving GRUB from the MBR into a bit of flash rom, then adding DRM to make sure I'm not trying to boot an OS the EFI chip doesn't approve of.
This means that Linux can be installed without breaking the existing installations or screwing with the boot loader at all. The DRM is a problem but there is not too much information about if there is going to be a lot of DRM in this new bios replacement.
I can do all of this with existing technology. And without DRM. You imply that people having doubts in regards to this technology have those feelings out of ignorance, yet you yourself say that "...there is not too much information...there is going to be a lot of DRM..."
So, basically, we should be exicited that a number of tech companies want to replace a working technolgy with a version, which while it may work marginally better, will also prevent us from using and controlling the use of our machines as we see fit? Now *that's* ignorance.
You don't need another machine nearby to troubleshoot a non-booting PC. Aside from swapping out actual hardware, what good would it do?
If the choice is between buying a $30 simple LED debug card which plugs into a PCI slot and indicates where the boot is failing, or being required to use a DRM-enforcing BIOS-replacement, I think I'll pop the thirty bucks.
The article didn't go quite as in depth as I would have liked. Specifically, the Debian apt repositories have literally, and you may quote me, zillions* of packages. I'm fairly certain they have quite a few more than, say, Red Hat has binary packages in their repositories.
Therefore, it would follow that if 4% of Debian packages had security vulnerabilities that would equate to a substantially greater number of packages than would the same 4% of Red Hat packages.
The other important thing to keep in mind is that it's unlikely many users would install all zillion packages at one time.
Finally, the article implies Debian and Red Hat are in competition. However, as literate geeks will know, Debian is the OS of "Software in the Public Interest" http://www.spi-inc.org/about which is a non-profit entity. Therefore, while one could argue that Red Hat (a for-profit enterprise) and Debian are in competition for userbase, by no means are they in direct competition for 'business'.
*Debian website says "over 15490." Which begs the question, how many more than 15490? 15491?
I'm from Grand Junction, Colorado, which is very near the Utah border.
Despite protestations you may hear, Utah is very socially backward, largely as a result of the regional government being completely controlled by the Mormon church.
While I have had several Mormon friends over the years, and have a good deal of respect for those individuals, the leadership of the church frankly frightens me. For many years, they have accumulated extremely lucrative and widespread business interests, which they use to finance their social engineering projects.
Frankly, for anyone used to the ideas of seperation of church and state, personal liberties, and freedom of expression, I would advise you avoid relocating to Utah.
Hell, you can't even buy a drink at a bar, unless you're a member of the 'club.'
Quoted: If you keep saying that Abu Ghraib (sp?) and Gitmo are important national issues that should occupy our minds on a daily basis, that's a perspective that I disagree with. They matter, I'm not saying we shouldn't avoid abuses, but I just don't care much about a few non-citizens locked up in a prison someplace. If abuses are happening, correct them (investigate, fire people, whatever) and shut up.
Isn't our revised reason* for invading Iraq that we wanted to liberate all those non-white, non-US-citizens, from horrible prisons, torture, and murder?
If America really wanted to be the great nation that politicians, left and right, claim it to be, then arbitrary imprisonment and brutal torture is hardly the best strategy to winning the hearts and minds of the world.
*Since our original reason for invasion (The hunt for WMDs) didn't really pan out?
Re:It's the responsability of the ISPs to monitor.
on
Zombie Report By ISP
·
· Score: 1
There's a difference between a college or university providing internet access to their students than a public ISP.
The school owns most of their own equipment, and are ultimately the ones purchasing the bandwidth which they then provide as part of their student services. Because of this, they are at liberty to protect their networks and investment. For example: A compromised machine is basically robbing legitimate users of system capacity; the same way that someone who repeatedly flushes a toilet while you're in the shower is 'stealing' water pressure from the rest of the users of the water system.
With a public ISP, or any utility, there is the basic assumption that as long as a customer continues to pay for the use of the service, they are free to do whatever they like with it. If I want to water my lawn with three sprinkler zones right as the neighborhood is showering and getting ready for work, it makes me an asshole, but I am still within my rights as a consumer to do so. Additionally, it would be highly unlikely the water company would terminate my service for this behavior, as they do of course *like* when people use a lot of the product they're selling.
The metaphore is not entirely accurate, of course, as the majority of internet users are now paying flat-rate fees for unlimited access. The comparison in business practice still holds, however, that it would be highly unlikely an ISP would willingly send business to a competitor. In short, as long as you're paying your bill, an ISP wouldn't care if your machine was relaying a million spam messages a day.
The *only* way that the ISPs will ever take on the problem of spyware and botnets is if it starts impacting their bottom line.
Now, as a slight tangent, I would like to add:
Norton *does* make a Winbox run slower. The on-access scanning increases filesystem access times exponentially.
I do feel that we can all be confident that, if for no other reason, Microsoft have pretty well doomed themselves by never addressing these fundamental security issues. Eventually the consumer public *will* realize the difference, though it will take on the same order of time it took for people to realize that yes, lawn darts are dangerous as well.
Having been raised by three generations of hardworking women, this is totally correct. We geeks can have nothing by high-minded ideals, but the fact of the matter is that software developement requires a huge investment of time. You want to talk about cultural bias? Why is it that there's a general expectation of women to take care of things men deem themselves too important to trifle with? How many male programmers are able to write code, do laundry, fix perhaps more than one meal, tend to young children, vacuum, dust, clean the kitchen, clean the bathroom, code some more, and then hit an at least forty hour work week?
Frankly, I think we can all see who the real tougher sex is.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the best way to stop it would be to have people who are functionally illiterate run from a read-only partition. ;-)
Mod parent up. Everytime I see that stat saying, "WinXX will be infected x minutes after installation!" it just makes me want to beat my head. Sweet zombie Jesus, is it so hard to exercise proper protocol when you set these things up? Yes, windows sucks hard and fast, but as technologists, we've got to work around it.
This from a guy who advocates killing for peace in his sig. If you don't get it when it's spelled out like that, you probably never will.
If you've got enough money, you can buy one from a prestigeous, accedited university.
See: Dr. Condoleeza Rice, currently Secretary of State for a small, unimportant country.
The cost of living in Japan vs. the cost of living in the US is fairly equivalent these days. Even gas is nearly the same, where I live in Colorado.
Wrong. Just because someone presents an alternate conjecture about the accuracy of a scientific principle does not mean that said conjecture is automatically on the same level of legitimacy as whichever principle one seeks to disprove. If that were the case, I could argue that computers run on magic, and then protest when my theory of devine computation was not taught in computer science classes. The antecedents of ID are undoubtedly religious in nature; ergo, the conclusions postulated by ID proponents are derived from sources known to be false, or at the very least untestable. I said "effectively trampled on", because ID was rejected for being unscientific in this particular case.
ID, not being a scientific hypothesis, will *always* be rejected by legitimate scientists, due to the fact that it:
That is the fault of the defense, and I can't actually fault the judge on that count, from what I've heard at least. However, if ID ever gets a decent legal and scientific team on its side, we should make some headway.
While what you say is probably true, I find the truth of the statement to be a sad reflection on public education, and the gullibility of American Christians. Allow me to be blunt-- ID is not science, and no amount of legal or psuedo-scientific doublespeak will make it so. Science is a process wherein the natural laws governing the universe are explored, tested, pulled, stretched, and examined. A key aspect of scientific study is impartiality; which is to say that a true scientist will not endorse any particular outcome to an experiment until that experiment has been performed and tested by many independant researchers. ID differs from science in that the key promoters of its hypothesis begin with their own surity of their ideas, and then disregard conflicting facts.
Literal Creationism has at least four main tenets: - the earth is young, probably around 6000 years old - God created all "kinds" of animals within 6 evening-morning days (fish vs. birds vs. land mammals vs. humans, etc.) - the earth was devastated by a global flood early in its history - all humans descended from a single couple known in the English Bible as Adam and Eve
Allow me to rebut:
The Earth is not young. Carbon dating, fossil records, geology, atomic theory, astronomy, and many other scientific disciplines have all independantly dated the earth at more than four billion years old.
If God did create the world, and all the things in it, in six days, then how were days reckoned before the creation of the sun?
If God created all the animals, why were so many of them such complete failures as to become extinct?
If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, then why the biblical prohibition on incest? And, furthermore, I am not a genetic researcher, but I'm fairly certain that thousands of generations of familial in-breeding would result in a rather, shall we say, shallow gene pool.
If it could be shown that any one of these propositions does not hold, then Biblical creationism would crumble. The fact that they are extraordinarily difficult to challenge certainly does not mean that creationism is not a scientific theory. Furthermore, all of the evidence we have ever uncovered and understand quite we
Ditto me-- A group of friends and myself all migrated to IpCop (http://ipcop.org/ routers for our home networks a couple years back, because of its super-easy-to-use IpSec VPN capability. Allows us to do productive and important things, like playing network games. Hell, I've even used it for more boring, business uses, like moving word documents between a small office and telecommuter's homes.
You're a touch late. The optimal time to jump ship was 9-10-2001. After all, IP theft finances terrorism, just like smoking pot, and not shopping at Wal-Mart.
I recently saw, first hand, how Visual Studio should *not* be used. The problem with rapid application development is that generally, as with any precise scientific endevor, the more rapidly the work is done, the more opportunity to make massive mistakes. In my recent experience, I came across a fellow who had started working on a database system for a small mechanical company. He obviously had programming experience, and even wrote some fairly good conditional loops for processing payroll taxes. However (and largely due to inept management who did not have any programming expertise) he found himself making larger and more extravagant promises of expanded features to his bosses. Eventually, because of the way his program had been rapidly banged together, he found himself 'paited into a corner,' unable to deliver his promised new features without an extensive rewrite. In this respect, I feel that RAD tools, such as MS-VS, can lead to even greater delays than carefully planning and writing all the code by hand.
I'm sorry but do you people take the time to read up before you complain? This is a wonderful opportunity for the open source movement. EFI makes booting multiple operating systems like a thousand times easier. Instead of having a single boot record on the hard disk boot information is stored in a data table and given as an option to the user who selections the OS they want.
A thousand times? Is it really *that* hard right now? It seems like EFI is basically just moving GRUB from the MBR into a bit of flash rom, then adding DRM to make sure I'm not trying to boot an OS the EFI chip doesn't approve of.
This means that Linux can be installed without breaking the existing installations or screwing with the boot loader at all. The DRM is a problem but there is not too much information about if there is going to be a lot of DRM in this new bios replacement.
I can do all of this with existing technology. And without DRM. You imply that people having doubts in regards to this technology have those feelings out of ignorance, yet you yourself say that "...there is not too much information...there is going to be a lot of DRM..."
So, basically, we should be exicited that a number of tech companies want to replace a working technolgy with a version, which while it may work marginally better, will also prevent us from using and controlling the use of our machines as we see fit? Now *that's* ignorance.
You don't need another machine nearby to troubleshoot a non-booting PC. Aside from swapping out actual hardware, what good would it do?
If the choice is between buying a $30 simple LED debug card which plugs into a PCI slot and indicates where the boot is failing, or being required to use a DRM-enforcing BIOS-replacement, I think I'll pop the thirty bucks.
The article didn't go quite as in depth as I would have liked. Specifically, the Debian apt repositories have literally, and you may quote me, zillions* of packages. I'm fairly certain they have quite a few more than, say, Red Hat has binary packages in their repositories.
Therefore, it would follow that if 4% of Debian packages had security vulnerabilities that would equate to a substantially greater number of packages than would the same 4% of Red Hat packages.
The other important thing to keep in mind is that it's unlikely many users would install all zillion packages at one time.
Finally, the article implies Debian and Red Hat are in competition. However, as literate geeks will know, Debian is the OS of "Software in the Public Interest" http://www.spi-inc.org/about which is a non-profit entity. Therefore, while one could argue that Red Hat (a for-profit enterprise) and Debian are in competition for userbase, by no means are they in direct competition for 'business'.
*Debian website says "over 15490." Which begs the question, how many more than 15490? 15491?
I'm from Grand Junction, Colorado, which is very near the Utah border.
Despite protestations you may hear, Utah is very socially backward, largely as a result of the regional government being completely controlled by the Mormon church.
While I have had several Mormon friends over the years, and have a good deal of respect for those individuals, the leadership of the church frankly frightens me. For many years, they have accumulated extremely lucrative and widespread business interests, which they use to finance their social engineering projects.
Frankly, for anyone used to the ideas of seperation of church and state, personal liberties, and freedom of expression, I would advise you avoid relocating to Utah.
Hell, you can't even buy a drink at a bar, unless you're a member of the 'club.'
Quoted:
If you keep saying that Abu Ghraib (sp?) and Gitmo are important national issues that should occupy our minds on a daily basis, that's a perspective that I disagree with. They matter, I'm not saying we shouldn't avoid abuses, but I just don't care much about a few non-citizens locked up in a prison someplace. If abuses are happening, correct them (investigate, fire people, whatever) and shut up.
Isn't our revised reason* for invading Iraq that we wanted to liberate all those non-white, non-US-citizens, from horrible prisons, torture, and murder?
If America really wanted to be the great nation that politicians, left and right, claim it to be, then arbitrary imprisonment and brutal torture is hardly the best strategy to winning the hearts and minds of the world.
*Since our original reason for invasion (The hunt for WMDs) didn't really pan out?
There's a difference between a college or university providing internet access to their students than a public ISP.
The school owns most of their own equipment, and are ultimately the ones purchasing the bandwidth which they then provide as part of their student services. Because of this, they are at liberty to protect their networks and investment. For example: A compromised machine is basically robbing legitimate users of system capacity; the same way that someone who repeatedly flushes a toilet while you're in the shower is 'stealing' water pressure from the rest of the users of the water system.
With a public ISP, or any utility, there is the basic assumption that as long as a customer continues to pay for the use of the service, they are free to do whatever they like with it. If I want to water my lawn with three sprinkler zones right as the neighborhood is showering and getting ready for work, it makes me an asshole, but I am still within my rights as a consumer to do so. Additionally, it would be highly unlikely the water company would terminate my service for this behavior, as they do of course *like* when people use a lot of the product they're selling.
The metaphore is not entirely accurate, of course, as the majority of internet users are now paying flat-rate fees for unlimited access. The comparison in business practice still holds, however, that it would be highly unlikely an ISP would willingly send business to a competitor. In short, as long as you're paying your bill, an ISP wouldn't care if your machine was relaying a million spam messages a day.
The *only* way that the ISPs will ever take on the problem of spyware and botnets is if it starts impacting their bottom line.
Now, as a slight tangent, I would like to add: Norton *does* make a Winbox run slower. The on-access scanning increases filesystem access times exponentially.
I do feel that we can all be confident that, if for no other reason, Microsoft have pretty well doomed themselves by never addressing these fundamental security issues. Eventually the consumer public *will* realize the difference, though it will take on the same order of time it took for people to realize that yes, lawn darts are dangerous as well.
Having been raised by three generations of hardworking women, this is totally correct. We geeks can have nothing by high-minded ideals, but the fact of the matter is that software developement requires a huge investment of time. You want to talk about cultural bias? Why is it that there's a general expectation of women to take care of things men deem themselves too important to trifle with? How many male programmers are able to write code, do laundry, fix perhaps more than one meal, tend to young children, vacuum, dust, clean the kitchen, clean the bathroom, code some more, and then hit an at least forty hour work week?
Frankly, I think we can all see who the real tougher sex is.