Would you rather be a genius with poor working conditions and little chance of reproduction for the chance to get your name somewhere in a list of "et al"s on a scientific paper, or someone of normal intelligence who made a boat load of money doing something the majority of the population thinks is cool? Man, that's a really tough one, isn't it?
I just picked hang gliding as an example at random. Having been a small plane pilot myself, there is definitely a draw to various forms of powered and un-powered aviation to more technically inclined people. Perhaps I should have used bungee jumping or something instead. However, I still think there is a much higher degree of risk aversion among nerds (not necessarily technical people -- after all, most of the original astronauts had engineering degrees and were military test pilots -- but, you know... the mountain dew moustache and cheetos-fingered d&d tshirt wearing nerd)
Yes, but let's look at business school types. Your typical MBA probably at least was on a crew team in high school or college. Lacrosse is a good substitute, too. Their undergrad major was probably in a subject where there were lots of girls, so they had more opportunity to get to know women and how to interact with them, thus more chances for breeding.
They then went on to get an MBA, bought a new BMW 'cause the one their dad gave them for their 16th birthday was showing its age, and probably kept on playing squash or basketball at the Harvard Club with their alumni friends. So, now they're in shape and have shiny things to use as bait to attract a mate (the BMW).
The professional athletes skip the MBA step and go straight to the fancy cars and lots of money.
-----
But, back to the text of the article itself, it indicates: 1) that males who merely interacted with females on a more regular basis were less nervous in general than the ones who only got to see a female every 2 weeks. 2) the ones who were sexually active were less risk-adverse, such as more willing to eat food in strange places.
compare this to humans: 1) your typical nerd male who spends all his time in a lab or on a computer and doesn't get out much, doesn't really know what is and is not ok to say to girls in the rare instances where its required to interact with one outside of the context of a checkout clerk at the convenience store. 2) your typical nerd male is going to be harder to talk into doing risky behavior such as hang gliding or whatever, because he'll be too busy worrying about the elevated risk of death, subconsciously due to the fact that he more than likely hasn't reproduced yet, and therefor would lose evolution.
So, the immediate lesson from the study basically boils down to if you have more experience around the opposite sex you're not going to freak out and be awkward, and if you've already passed on your genes then it really doesn't matter what happens to you, from an evolutionary standpoint. The MBA works just as well as the pro athlete.
Besides, if I just wanted to be a dick about it, I could always just pull out Brian May, the guitarist for Queen, who recently finished a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in London. That's a good counter-argument to the original poster's Bon Jovi jab.
Just because they chose to focus on physical mastery over themselves, then managed to get a sweet gig making millions of dollars doing something fun doesn't make them "morons." Hell, if I could make a mint playing games all day, why would I bother looking for the Higgs Boson?
Besides, consider the following: The major goal in any living being's life is to ensure the survival of his genes. Those who get the most action have the best chance of doing so, which means on a sub-conscious, primal level they're going to have less to worry about. That means they won't be distracted from focusing on what's important to them.
If more nerds got some, maybe we'd have the Higgs Boson on lock already.
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads? Maybe I just missed it, but I thought that they actually had real products and weren't just some spooty ad company trying to ingratiate themselves on the world with free swag? Actually, they hardly seem to have ingratiated themselves with anyone for any reason.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google, which is basically just a spooty ad company trying to ingratiate itself on the world with free swag. Otherwise, I see no reason for them not to make delivering ads 10x harder, thus sticking it to the GOOG.
You do know your beloved FDR's administration originally came up with the "Enemy Combatant" designation for German saboteurs and spies in the US during World War II and it's not some newfangled Bushism, right? No, you probably didn't. Not that makes it right or anything, but its not like they pulled this out of their ass for the current adventurist pursuit.
Then there will be another 3 years of court cases and lobbying to make the government pay the cell carriers to upgrade their equipment, although much of the issue is on the phones not properly realizing they're on a bogus tower and not providing the required notification. So everyone will have to upgrade phones if they're on a GSM network.
Of course, we'll be on iPhone 7 by the time AT&T finally concedes to the upgrade, and iPhone 10 by the time its done, and as they're the only GSM carrier of consequence in the US, user upgrades likely won't be an issue 'cause everyone will be clamoring for it while remaining blissfully ignorant of this situation.
But the reality of the situation is probably closer to the fact that the government will just let this whole thing slide under the assumption that the easier it is to do, the cheaper they'll be able to obtain 3rd-party products to conduct intercepts for investigations.
Re:Lines of code isn't the only thing that counts
on
First GNOME Census Results
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· Score: 1, Informative
Really? Because all I've ever seen while browsing Ubuntu forums is someone posting a problem, followed by 12 pages of people going "me too!" and a few "so, does anyone know how to fix this yet?" It's the AOL of linux distributions. And its not like I haven't tried Ubuntu before. The problems that I've run into with it generally require me to step outside of the approved Ubuntu point-and-click way of doing things and edit config files by hand. Nothing is where it should be, and often my manual changes get over-written by GUI config bullshit. It's exasperating to say the least.
The majority of Ubuntu users that I've met in person fall into two camps: people who never should have been using Linux or Unix in the first place, and Rubyists. I don't have particularly charitable feelings towards Ubuntu or Canonical. The fact is, they aren't really contributing much of anything of value to the wider world, and their marketing is a detriment to society. I once had the misfortune of taking an over-flow support call while working at a web hosting company where the customer couldn't figure out how to use FTP to upload his website. Of course, I assumed he was using Windows. In the most heinous fucking southern, hvac-guy accent, he was like, "I don't use windows, I use that linux ubuntu." There used to be minimum standards of competency which were de-facto enforced. Back in the golden days. Before Twitter.
RedHat has been around for a long time, contributed a lot to various projects, and deserves credit. I don't typically have good things to say about any for-profit company, however I'm willing to trust RedHat fairly well. I've used their products in a production environment in the past and used to buy all the box releases they used to sell in stores for my Linux machine I ran along side a FreeBSD machine.
The original story when the torrent was first released indicated that the so-called "hack" was merely scraping the publicly listed information of people with search listings turned on. So the torrent is just convenient, not useful.
I wouldn't have modded you troll if for no other reason than your post is pretty in character with your username's namesake. But I'm pretty sure you weren't trying to be funny either.
Or, it could be a random NSA employee posting to provide a cover of plausible deniability to the monitoring! But seriously, the only thing the torrent does is make the information more easily obtained at one go. You can still click through the whole database and get all the information at http://facebook.com/directory. I really don't see where any actual news is involved in this story, even from the beginning.
it looks like you can also define policy in the RPZ zone so that the domain you're trying to block can pointed to a web server were you have a block message up, presumably describing the policy reason that the site is being listed.
additionally, there is no requirement that says one must subscribed to a Spamhause-style service, that's just a hypothetical option. Besides, if your recursive DNS servers are blocking stuff you want to get to anyway, you can choose different ones, or set up your own. Setting up BIND as a recursive DNS server is ridiculously easy, and you can ignore RPZ zones to your hearts content then.
It doesn't just prevent the name from resolving, though. It will also return the fact the query was blocked by RPZ via a STATUS code. At that point, I think it should be up to the application, such as the browser, which is causing the DNS query, to read the STATUS code for the query and provide the appropriate message, such as "server not found" in response to a query with an NXDOMAIN status.
I actually think this is pretty cool and am excited about it, although I suspect that I'm in the minority on this here. Just pretend I said something scary about evil corporate overlords or fascists or whatever.
No, this is the type of topic that tends to get the hairs up on the backs of the more sarcastic among us. Probably everyone is trying for "Funny" mods by attempting to over-exemplify the behavior and attitudes being talked about in the article, but offending people who a) have mod points and b) happen to actually be on the side the poster is attacking in their attempted joke.
Or they could all be a bunch of bitch-ass trolls and I'm just giving them too much benefit of the doubt.
We should have an industrial action day. e-commerce, and thus a large swath of the economy, grinding to a halt for a day would be the wake-up everyone needs. And it wouldn't cost us any air time fees
Because of all the things Chinese citizens could possible complain about, which state-owned pipe to the great firewall to choose from is totally going to rank in the top 5?
Canada isn't a poor country begging for multi-billion dollar handouts due to alleged "damages" in some sort of *AA fashion, nor does your country have a history of manipulating facts to gain leverage on the world stage. You're just so... honest. If your country has a sinister political agenda with regards to foreign policy, you do a pretty good job of playing it close to your chest but I suspect Canada to be on the up-and-up. Take it as a compliment, I suppose.
AIM and ICQ aren't any more secure in that I don't have control over the server. However, its more private in that the content of my communication is not routinely broadcast to the rest of my contacts, whether they were a participant or not.
"back in the day," aka the mid-to-late 90s, I managed just fine to keep track of contacts on ICQ and later moving to AIM, plus the people I knew in various IRC channels on a couple of different servers, though I mostly hung out on EFNet. Most of the IRC people and about half the ICQ people, I had never met in person and never did. All the AIM people where from school. Different "friend circles" didn't know, or need to know, about each other in 90% of cases. Email was completely separate. If I wanted to give information to one group of people, but not others, that was incredibly easy.
When FB was for.EDUs only, it was fairly useful for me, but now its really not. It's actually down-right creepy. Maybe I'm just not hip enough, with my choosing Perl over Ruby and my none-smartphone that actually makes calls, but I'm not sure that an "open source social network" would actually end up being any better than Facebook is now. I skunked by FB data over the course of time, slowly started removing fields, and then ultimately did the account delete about a week or so ago. If people want to contact me, they can get me on IM, via Email, or just friggin' call me. People I don't want to know certain things never find out, and I don't have to worry about bullshit.
Personally, I'm not sure it matters what the mechanism for the 'social network' is, or who controls the mechanism. Who is going to guarantee that an "open source" social network is going to be any better for my privacy or security? I don't think they can. I'd just be another thing to waste time on and cause problems. I can still keep in contact with everyone who matters without the facebook or myspace or other bullshit and am of the opinion that if someone won't answer the phone when you call or send an sms, they probably aren't your friend anyway, no matter how many status updates they "like" when they mindlessly go through clicking "like" on everything that pops up while they're trying not to pay attention in class or life.
Exchange uses SMTP to send and receive mail. Linux and unencumbered BSDs pretty much killed off the commercial UNIX market. Solaris is limping along, and AIX is off in its little world, but that's not really saying much. OS X technically counts, but their target market isn't really the same. What happened to the gazillion other Unicies? All dead.
I'm not sure I get the fixation everyone has with Microsoft. Exchange provides additional services which many people apparently find useful. Zimbra is a competing open source product, not SMTP. SMTP and IMAP is good enough for my purposes, and I suspect good enough for many other geek types, however we generally also attempt to avoid meetings and other crap that calendar sharing and whatnot provided by Exchange, Zimbra, Google Apps, or Lotus all provide.
There are still plenty that do, although it's true that gone are the days of Cronkite. It's sad, really, but 24-hour news cycles mean they can't put as much time and effort into making sure that they cover relevant information accurately. That's not an excuse, more of an indictment. Do people even watch the evening news anymore?
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Would you rather be a genius with poor working conditions and little chance of reproduction for the chance to get your name somewhere in a list of "et al"s on a scientific paper, or someone of normal intelligence who made a boat load of money doing something the majority of the population thinks is cool? Man, that's a really tough one, isn't it?
I just picked hang gliding as an example at random. Having been a small plane pilot myself, there is definitely a draw to various forms of powered and un-powered aviation to more technically inclined people. Perhaps I should have used bungee jumping or something instead. However, I still think there is a much higher degree of risk aversion among nerds (not necessarily technical people -- after all, most of the original astronauts had engineering degrees and were military test pilots -- but, you know... the mountain dew moustache and cheetos-fingered d&d tshirt wearing nerd)
Yes, but let's look at business school types. Your typical MBA probably at least was on a crew team in high school or college. Lacrosse is a good substitute, too. Their undergrad major was probably in a subject where there were lots of girls, so they had more opportunity to get to know women and how to interact with them, thus more chances for breeding.
They then went on to get an MBA, bought a new BMW 'cause the one their dad gave them for their 16th birthday was showing its age, and probably kept on playing squash or basketball at the Harvard Club with their alumni friends. So, now they're in shape and have shiny things to use as bait to attract a mate (the BMW).
The professional athletes skip the MBA step and go straight to the fancy cars and lots of money.
-----
But, back to the text of the article itself, it indicates:
1) that males who merely interacted with females on a more regular basis were less nervous in general than the ones who only got to see a female every 2 weeks.
2) the ones who were sexually active were less risk-adverse, such as more willing to eat food in strange places.
compare this to humans:
1) your typical nerd male who spends all his time in a lab or on a computer and doesn't get out much, doesn't really know what is and is not ok to say to girls in the rare instances where its required to interact with one outside of the context of a checkout clerk at the convenience store.
2) your typical nerd male is going to be harder to talk into doing risky behavior such as hang gliding or whatever, because he'll be too busy worrying about the elevated risk of death, subconsciously due to the fact that he more than likely hasn't reproduced yet, and therefor would lose evolution.
So, the immediate lesson from the study basically boils down to if you have more experience around the opposite sex you're not going to freak out and be awkward, and if you've already passed on your genes then it really doesn't matter what happens to you, from an evolutionary standpoint. The MBA works just as well as the pro athlete.
Besides, if I just wanted to be a dick about it, I could always just pull out Brian May, the guitarist for Queen, who recently finished a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College in London. That's a good counter-argument to the original poster's Bon Jovi jab.
Just because they chose to focus on physical mastery over themselves, then managed to get a sweet gig making millions of dollars doing something fun doesn't make them "morons." Hell, if I could make a mint playing games all day, why would I bother looking for the Higgs Boson?
Besides, consider the following: The major goal in any living being's life is to ensure the survival of his genes. Those who get the most action have the best chance of doing so, which means on a sub-conscious, primal level they're going to have less to worry about. That means they won't be distracted from focusing on what's important to them.
If more nerds got some, maybe we'd have the Higgs Boson on lock already.
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads? Maybe I just missed it, but I thought that they actually had real products and weren't just some spooty ad company trying to ingratiate themselves on the world with free swag? Actually, they hardly seem to have ingratiated themselves with anyone for any reason.
I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason is they're afraid that it would be seen as an anti-competitive move against Google, which is basically just a spooty ad company trying to ingratiate itself on the world with free swag. Otherwise, I see no reason for them not to make delivering ads 10x harder, thus sticking it to the GOOG.
Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords.
-- Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus
You do know your beloved FDR's administration originally came up with the "Enemy Combatant" designation for German saboteurs and spies in the US during World War II and it's not some newfangled Bushism, right? No, you probably didn't. Not that makes it right or anything, but its not like they pulled this out of their ass for the current adventurist pursuit.
Then there will be another 3 years of court cases and lobbying to make the government pay the cell carriers to upgrade their equipment, although much of the issue is on the phones not properly realizing they're on a bogus tower and not providing the required notification. So everyone will have to upgrade phones if they're on a GSM network.
Of course, we'll be on iPhone 7 by the time AT&T finally concedes to the upgrade, and iPhone 10 by the time its done, and as they're the only GSM carrier of consequence in the US, user upgrades likely won't be an issue 'cause everyone will be clamoring for it while remaining blissfully ignorant of this situation.
But the reality of the situation is probably closer to the fact that the government will just let this whole thing slide under the assumption that the easier it is to do, the cheaper they'll be able to obtain 3rd-party products to conduct intercepts for investigations.
Really? Because all I've ever seen while browsing Ubuntu forums is someone posting a problem, followed by 12 pages of people going "me too!" and a few "so, does anyone know how to fix this yet?" It's the AOL of linux distributions. And its not like I haven't tried Ubuntu before. The problems that I've run into with it generally require me to step outside of the approved Ubuntu point-and-click way of doing things and edit config files by hand. Nothing is where it should be, and often my manual changes get over-written by GUI config bullshit. It's exasperating to say the least.
The majority of Ubuntu users that I've met in person fall into two camps: people who never should have been using Linux or Unix in the first place, and Rubyists. I don't have particularly charitable feelings towards Ubuntu or Canonical. The fact is, they aren't really contributing much of anything of value to the wider world, and their marketing is a detriment to society. I once had the misfortune of taking an over-flow support call while working at a web hosting company where the customer couldn't figure out how to use FTP to upload his website. Of course, I assumed he was using Windows. In the most heinous fucking southern, hvac-guy accent, he was like, "I don't use windows, I use that linux ubuntu." There used to be minimum standards of competency which were de-facto enforced. Back in the golden days. Before Twitter.
RedHat has been around for a long time, contributed a lot to various projects, and deserves credit. I don't typically have good things to say about any for-profit company, however I'm willing to trust RedHat fairly well. I've used their products in a production environment in the past and used to buy all the box releases they used to sell in stores for my Linux machine I ran along side a FreeBSD machine.
The original story when the torrent was first released indicated that the so-called "hack" was merely scraping the publicly listed information of people with search listings turned on. So the torrent is just convenient, not useful.
I wouldn't have modded you troll if for no other reason than your post is pretty in character with your username's namesake. But I'm pretty sure you weren't trying to be funny either.
Or, it could be a random NSA employee posting to provide a cover of plausible deniability to the monitoring! But seriously, the only thing the torrent does is make the information more easily obtained at one go. You can still click through the whole database and get all the information at http://facebook.com/directory. I really don't see where any actual news is involved in this story, even from the beginning.
that's old hat. it's all about subspace tachyons these days.
it looks like you can also define policy in the RPZ zone so that the domain you're trying to block can pointed to a web server were you have a block message up, presumably describing the policy reason that the site is being listed.
additionally, there is no requirement that says one must subscribed to a Spamhause-style service, that's just a hypothetical option. Besides, if your recursive DNS servers are blocking stuff you want to get to anyway, you can choose different ones, or set up your own. Setting up BIND as a recursive DNS server is ridiculously easy, and you can ignore RPZ zones to your hearts content then.
It doesn't just prevent the name from resolving, though. It will also return the fact the query was blocked by RPZ via a STATUS code. At that point, I think it should be up to the application, such as the browser, which is causing the DNS query, to read the STATUS code for the query and provide the appropriate message, such as "server not found" in response to a query with an NXDOMAIN status.
I actually think this is pretty cool and am excited about it, although I suspect that I'm in the minority on this here. Just pretend I said something scary about evil corporate overlords or fascists or whatever.
No, this is the type of topic that tends to get the hairs up on the backs of the more sarcastic among us. Probably everyone is trying for "Funny" mods by attempting to over-exemplify the behavior and attitudes being talked about in the article, but offending people who a) have mod points and b) happen to actually be on the side the poster is attacking in their attempted joke.
Or they could all be a bunch of bitch-ass trolls and I'm just giving them too much benefit of the doubt.
We should have an industrial action day. e-commerce, and thus a large swath of the economy, grinding to a halt for a day would be the wake-up everyone needs. And it wouldn't cost us any air time fees
s/NSA/GCHQ/g ... same UKUSA, different side of the pond.
Because of all the things Chinese citizens could possible complain about, which state-owned pipe to the great firewall to choose from is totally going to rank in the top 5?
Canada isn't a poor country begging for multi-billion dollar handouts due to alleged "damages" in some sort of *AA fashion, nor does your country have a history of manipulating facts to gain leverage on the world stage. You're just so... honest. If your country has a sinister political agenda with regards to foreign policy, you do a pretty good job of playing it close to your chest but I suspect Canada to be on the up-and-up. Take it as a compliment, I suppose.
AIM and ICQ aren't any more secure in that I don't have control over the server. However, its more private in that the content of my communication is not routinely broadcast to the rest of my contacts, whether they were a participant or not.
"back in the day," aka the mid-to-late 90s, I managed just fine to keep track of contacts on ICQ and later moving to AIM, plus the people I knew in various IRC channels on a couple of different servers, though I mostly hung out on EFNet. Most of the IRC people and about half the ICQ people, I had never met in person and never did. All the AIM people where from school. Different "friend circles" didn't know, or need to know, about each other in 90% of cases. Email was completely separate. If I wanted to give information to one group of people, but not others, that was incredibly easy.
When FB was for .EDUs only, it was fairly useful for me, but now its really not. It's actually down-right creepy. Maybe I'm just not hip enough, with my choosing Perl over Ruby and my none-smartphone that actually makes calls, but I'm not sure that an "open source social network" would actually end up being any better than Facebook is now. I skunked by FB data over the course of time, slowly started removing fields, and then ultimately did the account delete about a week or so ago. If people want to contact me, they can get me on IM, via Email, or just friggin' call me. People I don't want to know certain things never find out, and I don't have to worry about bullshit.
Personally, I'm not sure it matters what the mechanism for the 'social network' is, or who controls the mechanism. Who is going to guarantee that an "open source" social network is going to be any better for my privacy or security? I don't think they can. I'd just be another thing to waste time on and cause problems. I can still keep in contact with everyone who matters without the facebook or myspace or other bullshit and am of the opinion that if someone won't answer the phone when you call or send an sms, they probably aren't your friend anyway, no matter how many status updates they "like" when they mindlessly go through clicking "like" on everything that pops up while they're trying not to pay attention in class or life.
Exchange uses SMTP to send and receive mail. Linux and unencumbered BSDs pretty much killed off the commercial UNIX market. Solaris is limping along, and AIX is off in its little world, but that's not really saying much. OS X technically counts, but their target market isn't really the same. What happened to the gazillion other Unicies? All dead.
I'm not sure I get the fixation everyone has with Microsoft. Exchange provides additional services which many people apparently find useful. Zimbra is a competing open source product, not SMTP. SMTP and IMAP is good enough for my purposes, and I suspect good enough for many other geek types, however we generally also attempt to avoid meetings and other crap that calendar sharing and whatnot provided by Exchange, Zimbra, Google Apps, or Lotus all provide.
There are still plenty that do, although it's true that gone are the days of Cronkite. It's sad, really, but 24-hour news cycles mean they can't put as much time and effort into making sure that they cover relevant information accurately. That's not an excuse, more of an indictment. Do people even watch the evening news anymore?
Or when Kennedy came out saying that no Americans would be involved in any invasion of Cuba right about the time of Bay of Pigs fiasco with the CIA...