Of course there are people that prefer the reliability and dependability of commercial software. For example, the spamming industry could never survive without the ability to reliably and dependably create all those Windows botnets.
Microsoft can put whatever they want in as the default search engine and it makes no difference to me. I'll still be using Firefox at home and work. The only things I use IE for is Windows Updates and to check my web pages to make sure Microsoft's poor CSS support isn't screwing them up too much.
Remember that this $5.4 Billion loss is an estimate made by the same folks who would benefit most from an exagerated perception of the problem. Scare the Congress-Critter into believing that the government is losing out on the tax revenue from that big a hunk of money and you get a vote for that new mandatory DECEITBAB law you so desperately want.
DECEITBAB = DRM Enforcement Chip Embedded In The Brain At Birth
Congress always likes to give new laws catchy acronyms.
If the kid wants to be a lawyer, then yes, he or she needs to learn how to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie. At least if he or she wants to be a reasonably successful lawyer.
I never said there was no one providing funding for research that opposes global warming theory, only that it was easier to get funding if you are pro global warming. I was thinking in terms of government funding, where the pro gets vastly more funding than the con.
While there are private funds available for the con, there are also private funds available for the pro, so they probably cancel out.
Ultimately my point had nothing to do with the validity, or lack thereof, of current global warming theory arguements pro or con. My point was that the source of the funding and the motivations of those providing the funds greatly influence the direction the "research" is going to take.
You've pretty much nailed it as to why I distrust most politically contentious research. The current grant situation with global warming is an good example of how political motivations can bias the funding of research. Currently funding is much easier to get if your project is geared to "proving" global warming than "disproving" it. Many grant proposals these days take global warming as a given. If you want money from the federal government, just name your project using this format: "A study of the effects of global warming on insert endangered species' name here." Politicians on the left just love to give public funds to proposals like this, and politicians on the right either support the project outright in order to appear "compassionate" or don't say much at all to avoid the "raping the environment" label.
The outcome of all this is that any evidence that supports the politically popular theory gets examined in full, while opposing evidence goes unresearched. What gets funded gets proven. Why do you think Microsoft is always funding "studies"?
I'm still very much a fence sitter on the whole global warming debate. There seems to me to be credible evidence on both sides of the arguement, but all of it is tainted by the political agendas involved. Each side chooses to discount that which opposes their own viewpoint. That is of course what politics is all about, promote your viewpoint and demonize anything that opposes it.
...this still smells of encouraging them to "game the game" from a tender age.
Why not teach them to "game the game" when they are young if that is what they will have to do in their adult careers? Sooner or later they are going to have to make the transistion from child to adult. They might as well be prepared for all the unpleasentries of that transistion.
At the Federal Government Agency I work for we also ban game playing at work. Of course we then take the next logical step and actually remove the games from the machines we set up for our users. We also lock down the permissions so the users can't put the games back on. If they don't want people playing solitare on their office PCs, then they shouldn't be providing it.
IANAL, but I would think if the guy gets himself a decent lawyer he probably could get something for wrongful termination. The application he was fired for using was after all provided to him by management. It is also incumbent upon management to demonstrate that they were actively enforcing this rule on all employees. If other employees had been playing games at work and had not been disciplined for it, then there's a real good "disparity of treatment" case here.
I expect that this guy is going to come out of this okay, as long as he actually fights back. Either he gets his job back with full back pay and an apology, or he picks up a chunk of change via lawsuit. I also expect that the office he worked at is finally going to get serious about the no games at work rule, once they find out how defective their termination of this guy was.
I know that the moon landings were not a hoax for one very simple reason. While I personally do not have the means by which to prove the landings real or not, the Soviet Union certainly did. The Soviet's would have loved nothing more than to expose the Americans as cheats and frauds. Therefore if the moon landings were faked, the Soviet Union would have wasted no time exposing the deception.
I used to be a maintenance supervisor for the US Postal Service. The technicians working for me were always digging things out of the sortation equipment that didn't survive the transit though the machinary. One such item was those wooden postcards that tourists would buy at the tourist traps. Not being flexible, they often would get jammed into places where a mailpiece was expected to take a tight turn. I can imagine these cameras would fair no better. Granted my experience is limited to the US postal system, but I would suspect that many countries have similar sortation equipment.
It isn't enough that this guy's invention mimics a postcard's dimensions. It must be just as flexible as a piece of thin cardboard. It must be able to withstand the g-forces of whipping around pulleys and slamming to a sudden stop in a stacker. The sortation equipment was designed around certain expectations of what would be fed through it, and there are no guarentees (and little hope) that things that deviate from those expectations will survive.
I left the Postal Service just a few weeks before 9/11/01. It wouldn't surprise me if there are even more things a mailpiece needs to survive these days, such as x-rays or other bomb detecting equipment. There are also regulations concerning what can and cannot be mailed. I've no idea what those regulations would say about a camera that could still be taking pictures as it goes through the post office's security procedures. Bottom line is this camera may not be mailable, no matter what the kid who invented it thinks.
I am also the webmaster of a Federal web site. I've actually had people write to complain that our site doesn't do things like prefill web forms with data they entered the last time they were at the site. They figure that if Amazon can remember who they are between visits we should be able to as well.
As a federal government employee, I've long accepted that there are thousands of people out there who have no clue as to how many regulations I have to try to comply with, and who couldn't do five minutes of my job successfully if their very lives depended on it. Yet these same people feel they have to constantly tell me how to do the job. Every so often, you get someone who thinks federal employees should be sent to jail for even the most innocuous mistake. Never mind that this would result in nobody at all working for the federal government.
Either I make the first mistake and get sent to prison myself, or I see someone else make a stupid little mistake and get jail time for it. Either way my public service would end there, as I'm not stupid enough to hang around that high risk of a work environment. Anybody smart enough not to make mistakes too often, will also be smart enough to bail ASAP.
I once had to chase down what appeared to be a webserver problem, that eventually turned out to have been caused by Windows incorrectly autodetecting a filetype based upon the "Magic String".
The server was set up to archive files generated by our operations folk. These files are plain old ASCII text, and have no file extensions. One particular file was constantly coming up as an invalid file format in the browser. Remoting into the server and opening the file in vi showed no problems, it looked like any other text file in the archive.
After much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I eventually tried to do a 'Save link as...' to download the file to the Windows box, and discovered the file save dialog was defaulting to Windows Bitmap (BMP). Turns out that the 'Magic String' for the BMP file format is an ASCII 'BM' in the first two bytes of the file. This text file started with those two characters. Reference BMP: http://www.fileformat.info/format/bmp/egff.htm#MIC BMP-DMYID.3.2/
Apparently when Microsoft designed the BMP format, they assumed that nobody would ever use those two characters to begin a text file. They probably also assumed that any text file would have a TXT file extension. Since file extensions don't really mean anything to the OS in the Unix/Linux world, we never saw a need to put extensions on these files.
At any rate, after seeing first hand how easily Windows can incorrectly autodetect a file type, I have no problem believing this attack can succeed with an extension other than WMF. The black hat just makes sure his attack has the right magic string in it and he can give it any extension he wants. Reference WMF: http://www.fileformat.info/format/wmf/#MICMETA-DMY ID.3.1/
I get most of my online news from Google's News Page. If a topic interests me, I'll cntl-click a few of the links to pop up new tabs in Firefox. Any tab that wants me to register is immediately closed back down. There is always plenty of tabs that have the content without any registration requirements.
On the incredibly rare occasion I have to get into a site that requires registration, I just go ahead and sign up as an 87 year old Asian Woman who lives in Caribou Maine, and has an e-mailaddress like spamsucks@example.com. What do I care if I jack up their demographics?
If one man can cause pain to another man with no risk to himself, then it's basically torture.
The intent of military action is not to cause pain to another. It is to impose one group's desires over anothers. In the current hostilities, we desired that our country be free from terrorist attacks. Our leadership believed that Saddam desired to continue his support of terrorist groups hostile to the United States. Diplomacy was unable to obtain the result we desired, so military action was initiated to impose our desires over Saddam's.
One very important point I think you are missing is this: Sooner or later some country will develop the technology to engage in military action without subjecting its own soldiers to any appreciable risk. When that happens, I sure as hell hope that the country with that technology is ours.
Comparing a person or group of persons whom you disagree with to Hitler and the Nazis does nothing to convince me of the correctness of your position. To be honest, I feel the Hilter references are only brought out when you have no rational arguement to support your position.
If you want to convince me your position is the superior one, leave the facist references out of the debate. Try to present a well reasoned position and you'll have a much better chance of bringing me over to your viewpoint.
Let's see For the most part, the ladies are choosing career paths other than computer science and all indications are that they are doing this of their own free will. Likewise a larger percentage of men are selecting computer science as their freely choosen career field. All this free will stuff is screwing up the 50/50 split demanded by political correctness.
So now that we've identified free will as the culpret behind the problem, what do we do about it? There are a couple of possible "solutions".
We draft large numbers of females into computer science, even if they wish to do something else and have little aptitude for the computer science field.
We cap the number of males allowed into the profession, even if that means excluding men with a great aptitude and desire for a career in the field.
The second option wouldn't work because that would simply gut the profession. The first option wouldn't work either since someone with no desire to be in the field will be pretty much useless anyway.
Maybe what we really need to do is to finally realize that there is no problem here. Nobody is being forced into or out of the profession on the basis of gender. People are simply exercising their God given right to choose their own path in life. The fact that a smaller percentage of women than men find personal fulfillment in the computer sciences is just one of those things that is neither good or bad, it just is.
It sounds to me like Bell South realised that there are unethical business people out there willing to pay hackers to DoS a competitor, and decided they need to get into the action.
What if the charity or charities that benifit from this settlement are objectionable to the stockholders who were harmed by Ellison's actions? After all one could reasonably argue that this money came out of their pockets.
For example, give the money to Handgun Control Inc. and you anger one group of people. Give it to the NRA and you upset the opposing group. Give to Planned Parenthood or NOW and the prolife crowd objects. Give to Operation Save America and the abortion rights advocates will scream bloody murder. The point is there are plenty of charities with agendas that fall into one political affiliation or the other.
Personally I think this settlement is flawed as it does nothing to compensate those actually harmed by Ellison's actions, and it can easily add insult to injury unless the money goes to the most politically benign charities possible.
Wouldn't you get a lot more than 26 single character names when you throw in non-US centric characters? I can imagine someone in the banking industry would love to get €.com.
I think that the most effective solution to this whole DRM rootkit issue would be for everyone to celebrate a Sony-Free Christmas this year. Don't purchase Sony products as gifts for others, and return & exchange any Sony products received as gifts for non-Sony products. We can't count on the politicians or the courts to bring justice Sony's way, but I bet if we ruin Sony's Christmas sales the stockholders will be screaming for the appropriate heads to roll.
At work I have the Web Developer Extension installed on my web development box. This very useful toolset has helped me to diagnose and solve many tricky design issues. I highly recommend it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there are people that prefer the reliability and dependability of commercial software. For example, the spamming industry could never survive without the ability to reliably and dependably create all those Windows botnets.
Look on the bright side. At least this Nasa Management screw-up didn't require body bags.
Microsoft can put whatever they want in as the default search engine and it makes no difference to me. I'll still be using Firefox at home and work. The only things I use IE for is Windows Updates and to check my web pages to make sure Microsoft's poor CSS support isn't screwing them up too much.
Remember that this $5.4 Billion loss is an estimate made by the same folks who would benefit most from an exagerated perception of the problem. Scare the Congress-Critter into believing that the government is losing out on the tax revenue from that big a hunk of money and you get a vote for that new mandatory DECEITBAB law you so desperately want.
DECEITBAB = DRM Enforcement Chip Embedded In The Brain At Birth
Congress always likes to give new laws catchy acronyms.
If the kid wants to be a lawyer, then yes, he or she needs to learn how to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie. At least if he or she wants to be a reasonably successful lawyer.
I never said there was no one providing funding for research that opposes global warming theory, only that it was easier to get funding if you are pro global warming. I was thinking in terms of government funding, where the pro gets vastly more funding than the con.
While there are private funds available for the con, there are also private funds available for the pro, so they probably cancel out.
Ultimately my point had nothing to do with the validity, or lack thereof, of current global warming theory arguements pro or con. My point was that the source of the funding and the motivations of those providing the funds greatly influence the direction the "research" is going to take.
You've pretty much nailed it as to why I distrust most politically contentious research. The current grant situation with global warming is an good example of how political motivations can bias the funding of research. Currently funding is much easier to get if your project is geared to "proving" global warming than "disproving" it. Many grant proposals these days take global warming as a given. If you want money from the federal government, just name your project using this format: "A study of the effects of global warming on insert endangered species' name here." Politicians on the left just love to give public funds to proposals like this, and politicians on the right either support the project outright in order to appear "compassionate" or don't say much at all to avoid the "raping the environment" label.
The outcome of all this is that any evidence that supports the politically popular theory gets examined in full, while opposing evidence goes unresearched. What gets funded gets proven. Why do you think Microsoft is always funding "studies"?
I'm still very much a fence sitter on the whole global warming debate. There seems to me to be credible evidence on both sides of the arguement, but all of it is tainted by the political agendas involved. Each side chooses to discount that which opposes their own viewpoint. That is of course what politics is all about, promote your viewpoint and demonize anything that opposes it.
Why not teach them to "game the game" when they are young if that is what they will have to do in their adult careers? Sooner or later they are going to have to make the transistion from child to adult. They might as well be prepared for all the unpleasentries of that transistion.
At the Federal Government Agency I work for we also ban game playing at work. Of course we then take the next logical step and actually remove the games from the machines we set up for our users. We also lock down the permissions so the users can't put the games back on. If they don't want people playing solitare on their office PCs, then they shouldn't be providing it.
IANAL, but I would think if the guy gets himself a decent lawyer he probably could get something for wrongful termination. The application he was fired for using was after all provided to him by management. It is also incumbent upon management to demonstrate that they were actively enforcing this rule on all employees. If other employees had been playing games at work and had not been disciplined for it, then there's a real good "disparity of treatment" case here.
I expect that this guy is going to come out of this okay, as long as he actually fights back. Either he gets his job back with full back pay and an apology, or he picks up a chunk of change via lawsuit. I also expect that the office he worked at is finally going to get serious about the no games at work rule, once they find out how defective their termination of this guy was.
They'll probably go after St. George after that. That shield of his clearly violates the Red Cross' trademark.
I know that the moon landings were not a hoax for one very simple reason. While I personally do not have the means by which to prove the landings real or not, the Soviet Union certainly did. The Soviet's would have loved nothing more than to expose the Americans as cheats and frauds. Therefore if the moon landings were faked, the Soviet Union would have wasted no time exposing the deception.
I used to be a maintenance supervisor for the US Postal Service. The technicians working for me were always digging things out of the sortation equipment that didn't survive the transit though the machinary. One such item was those wooden postcards that tourists would buy at the tourist traps. Not being flexible, they often would get jammed into places where a mailpiece was expected to take a tight turn. I can imagine these cameras would fair no better. Granted my experience is limited to the US postal system, but I would suspect that many countries have similar sortation equipment.
It isn't enough that this guy's invention mimics a postcard's dimensions. It must be just as flexible as a piece of thin cardboard. It must be able to withstand the g-forces of whipping around pulleys and slamming to a sudden stop in a stacker. The sortation equipment was designed around certain expectations of what would be fed through it, and there are no guarentees (and little hope) that things that deviate from those expectations will survive.
I left the Postal Service just a few weeks before 9/11/01. It wouldn't surprise me if there are even more things a mailpiece needs to survive these days, such as x-rays or other bomb detecting equipment. There are also regulations concerning what can and cannot be mailed. I've no idea what those regulations would say about a camera that could still be taking pictures as it goes through the post office's security procedures. Bottom line is this camera may not be mailable, no matter what the kid who invented it thinks.
Maybe we could have called it Darth Katrina
I am also the webmaster of a Federal web site. I've actually had people write to complain that our site doesn't do things like prefill web forms with data they entered the last time they were at the site. They figure that if Amazon can remember who they are between visits we should be able to as well.
As a federal government employee, I've long accepted that there are thousands of people out there who have no clue as to how many regulations I have to try to comply with, and who couldn't do five minutes of my job successfully if their very lives depended on it. Yet these same people feel they have to constantly tell me how to do the job. Every so often, you get someone who thinks federal employees should be sent to jail for even the most innocuous mistake. Never mind that this would result in nobody at all working for the federal government.
Either I make the first mistake and get sent to prison myself, or I see someone else make a stupid little mistake and get jail time for it. Either way my public service would end there, as I'm not stupid enough to hang around that high risk of a work environment. Anybody smart enough not to make mistakes too often, will also be smart enough to bail ASAP.
I once had to chase down what appeared to be a webserver problem, that eventually turned out to have been caused by Windows incorrectly autodetecting a filetype based upon the "Magic String".
The server was set up to archive files generated by our operations folk. These files are plain old ASCII text, and have no file extensions. One particular file was constantly coming up as an invalid file format in the browser. Remoting into the server and opening the file in vi showed no problems, it looked like any other text file in the archive.
After much hair pulling and gnashing of teeth, I eventually tried to do a 'Save link as...' to download the file to the Windows box, and discovered the file save dialog was defaulting to Windows Bitmap (BMP). Turns out that the 'Magic String' for the BMP file format is an ASCII 'BM' in the first two bytes of the file. This text file started with those two characters.C BMP-DMYID.3.2/
Reference BMP: http://www.fileformat.info/format/bmp/egff.htm#MI
Apparently when Microsoft designed the BMP format, they assumed that nobody would ever use those two characters to begin a text file. They probably also assumed that any text file would have a TXT file extension. Since file extensions don't really mean anything to the OS in the Unix/Linux world, we never saw a need to put extensions on these files.
At any rate, after seeing first hand how easily Windows can incorrectly autodetect a file type, I have no problem believing this attack can succeed with an extension other than WMF. The black hat just makes sure his attack has the right magic string in it and he can give it any extension he wants.Y ID.3.1/
Reference WMF: http://www.fileformat.info/format/wmf/#MICMETA-DM
I get most of my online news from Google's News Page. If a topic interests me, I'll cntl-click a few of the links to pop up new tabs in Firefox. Any tab that wants me to register is immediately closed back down. There is always plenty of tabs that have the content without any registration requirements.
On the incredibly rare occasion I have to get into a site that requires registration, I just go ahead and sign up as an 87 year old Asian Woman who lives in Caribou Maine, and has an e-mailaddress like spamsucks@example.com. What do I care if I jack up their demographics?
If one man can cause pain to another man with no risk to himself, then it's basically torture.
The intent of military action is not to cause pain to another. It is to impose one group's desires over anothers. In the current hostilities, we desired that our country be free from terrorist attacks. Our leadership believed that Saddam desired to continue his support of terrorist groups hostile to the United States. Diplomacy was unable to obtain the result we desired, so military action was initiated to impose our desires over Saddam's.
One very important point I think you are missing is this: Sooner or later some country will develop the technology to engage in military action without subjecting its own soldiers to any appreciable risk. When that happens, I sure as hell hope that the country with that technology is ours.
Gravity doesn't exist. The Earth just sucks.
Comparing a person or group of persons whom you disagree with to Hitler and the Nazis does nothing to convince me of the correctness of your position. To be honest, I feel the Hilter references are only brought out when you have no rational arguement to support your position.
If you want to convince me your position is the superior one, leave the facist references out of the debate. Try to present a well reasoned position and you'll have a much better chance of bringing me over to your viewpoint.
Let's see For the most part, the ladies are choosing career paths other than computer science and all indications are that they are doing this of their own free will. Likewise a larger percentage of men are selecting computer science as their freely choosen career field. All this free will stuff is screwing up the 50/50 split demanded by political correctness.
So now that we've identified free will as the culpret behind the problem, what do we do about it? There are a couple of possible "solutions".
The second option wouldn't work because that would simply gut the profession. The first option wouldn't work either since someone with no desire to be in the field will be pretty much useless anyway.
Maybe what we really need to do is to finally realize that there is no problem here. Nobody is being forced into or out of the profession on the basis of gender. People are simply exercising their God given right to choose their own path in life. The fact that a smaller percentage of women than men find personal fulfillment in the computer sciences is just one of those things that is neither good or bad, it just is.
It sounds to me like Bell South realised that there are unethical business people out there willing to pay hackers to DoS a competitor, and decided they need to get into the action.
What if the charity or charities that benifit from this settlement are objectionable to the stockholders who were harmed by Ellison's actions? After all one could reasonably argue that this money came out of their pockets.
For example, give the money to Handgun Control Inc. and you anger one group of people. Give it to the NRA and you upset the opposing group. Give to Planned Parenthood or NOW and the prolife crowd objects. Give to Operation Save America and the abortion rights advocates will scream bloody murder. The point is there are plenty of charities with agendas that fall into one political affiliation or the other.
Personally I think this settlement is flawed as it does nothing to compensate those actually harmed by Ellison's actions, and it can easily add insult to injury unless the money goes to the most politically benign charities possible.
Wouldn't you get a lot more than 26 single character names when you throw in non-US centric characters? I can imagine someone in the banking industry would love to get €.com.
I think that the most effective solution to this whole DRM rootkit issue would be for everyone to celebrate a Sony-Free Christmas this year. Don't purchase Sony products as gifts for others, and return & exchange any Sony products received as gifts for non-Sony products. We can't count on the politicians or the courts to bring justice Sony's way, but I bet if we ruin Sony's Christmas sales the stockholders will be screaming for the appropriate heads to roll.
At work I have the Web Developer Extension installed on my web development box. This very useful toolset has helped me to diagnose and solve many tricky design issues. I highly recommend it.