This is +5 insightful? Have the mods lost their collective minds again?
What's the deal, r00t? Did you have two bad experiences, and assume this is all there is to programming?
If you limit yourself that way, it's your own affair. But programmers will also acquire problem solving skills that can be applied to other things. For instance, how to value an equity. The old saw, "Life is what you make it," has a lot of truth in it. Hacking your life is the coolest challenge of all.
Anyone programmer who won't accept that challenge has no cause for complaint if they find themselves a minor cog in a huge team constructing the next boring business system. You have a skill set that people who never learn anything beyond burger-flipping requirements don't.
Whether you use it is your 100% your own damn responsibility. I get *so* sick of whiners. I've met way too many people who put in the time at some boring job, then go home and spend their free time playing on a game console, watching TV, etc. Then come in the next day and whine some more.
Life isn't fair? Boo freaking hoo. Guess what? It never has been, for any large number of people, through all of history. A competent programmer would be well advised to simply treat that as another constraint--one which can definitely be worked around.
I couldn't really decipher the meaning of your post. But I've run CentOS 4 on a Pentium 3, 1GHz, 512M. A zero-cost wire speed Web server. This box did fine. No GUI on it (who on earth needs a cycle-chewing GUI to manage a simple Web server?) so I couldn't comment on how well it would function as a desktop. I suspect poorly, though, given my experience running early Fedora on such a machine.
Signed code as an application security model is fundamentally flawed. Transitive trust is a hard problem, and signed code as a security model is not a solution.
I don't know what you mean by "A signed/secure Java applet." I'm hoping that you're not implying that signed==secure. That's what has given us thousands of Active-X-related vulnerabilities and exploits. Signing Java isn't much better. You get a better sandboxing system (though many VMs have been replaced for security problems), but you're still working from a flawed security model.
Everyone believing it will fly on schedule, please stand on your head.
The first mission: Mission name: ST9 (Space Tech 9) Tentative launch date: 2010-2011
Then we have more: Mission name: Heliostorm Tentative launch date: 2016-2020 Mission name: SPI (Solar Polar Imager) Tentative launch daMission name: Interstellar Probe Tentative launch date: 2031-2035
These are science. As we all know, the US gubmint don't hold with that science stuff. And does anyone out there believe that NASA have any clue what they'll be doing five years from now, let alone 25-30?
Remember the two year delay on the James Web Space Telescope (successor to Hubble) announced back in November? That's nothing. In addition to the congressional criticism of the no-science budget, we have things like: http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/human-spa ceflight/dn8689-nasa-to-divert-cash-from-science-i nto-shuttle.html (Feb. 7) Wherein we learn that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been delayed indefinitely, and more, such as "The budget announcement was "extraordinarily depressing", says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a non-profit organisation in Pasadena, California, US, which promotes solar system exploration. "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now, with these kinds of deep cuts." Seven missions, or areas of research, or listed as cancelled or postponed. Of the postponed, all but one is indefinitely.
The Planetary Society has a statement here: (Feb. 16) http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/space_a dvocacy/budget_statement.html with gems like, "The Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science. The proposed budget directs three billion dollars (over five years) away from robotic exploration of the solar system to continue to operate the shuttle. Last year the Administrator said, "not one thin dime" would be so directed. Now we learn it is 30 billion dimes."
and
"In addition, a devastating 15% cut to science research funding -- including likely cuts to some approved 2006 research programs -- is being applied across all Earth and space science disciplines, and 50% is being cut from astrobiology research! This attack on basic science ironically comes at a time when the President announced in his State of the Union speech his intention "to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years." Apparently the physical sciences do not include either Earth or space sciences."
If you think the much advertised "Vision for Space" is really going to get us back on the moon, then to Mars, you may be in for a surprise as well. Yes there's been all the talk about the new heavy lift and crew exploration vehicles. Even methane engines, so we can 'live off the land'. Guess again, and see: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_Moon_Program _The_NASA_Administrator_Is_Really_Planing_For.html (Feb. 14). No methane engines, the Crew Exploration Vehicle diameter has been resized to five meters (can now be lifted by existing hardware), which the authors suggest was done to put the Crew Launch Vehicle on the chopping block. The Cargo Delivery Vehicle is gone, so we can't send control gyros to ISS after the shuttles retire in 2010. "This implies that the ISS won't be there at that time - or at least that NASA will not be supporting it."
So far, most popular reporting implies that science is being scrapped for Shuttle/ISS. That would be bad news, after the "not one thin di
There is no reason for parent to be modded to troll. DRM does, in fact, have valid corporate uses, such as basic defense in depth.
Suppose you have an R&D group doing work that's important to the future of your company. You can sequester the workers on their own subnet, then firewall that subnet. There are many other precautions you can take, as well. But they aren't foolproof, even in aggregate. This is simply one more layer. It's still not foolproof. But more layers can be a Good Thing until you hit a usability problem, or otherwise climb too far up the curve of diminishing returns.
The location of that point is determined by your threat model, the value of your data, etc.
First sentence in parent post was dead-on. Message to (apparently many) Slashdotters (at least one of whom had mod points): the way you use computers *does not* constitute the whole of computing.
DRM is just a technology. I personally believe that some companies, particularly Microsoft, Adobe, and Sony, will use it to line their coporate pockets. That doesn't make the technology evil.
Bad corporate behavior, to my mind, can only be curbed in the marketplace. As that relates to consumer issues, the place to start is the mainstream press. Whoever modded parent to troll should have spent the time looking for an organization that fights DRM from a consumer's perspective, getting a message to an editor of the local paper, etc.
Slashdotters are mostly technologists. Well, this is just a technology. Use it where you can do good things with it in technological systems. Corporate misuse is a social problem. Address it in a social context.
March 6, 2003 SCO sues IBM. Stock closes at $4.31. Today's close was $2.40. I can't friggin' believe they still exist. It's like Night of the Living Dead.
Of course, they were already desperate. A couple of years before, they were a $50 stock. They'd already been evaluated as the weakest commercial Unix for a couple of years. From a corporate perspective, things had gotten so bad that they'd actually nothing to lose by becoming one of the most despised software companies of all time.
You know that management team has to be proud of themselves...
"Except for the fact that water vapor is SEVEN TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is."
I had thought that water vapor variance was accounted for, to one degree or another, in climate models, and the theory was to ignore that, because we can't control it. As I understood it, current warming is calculated to be about 33 C, (keeping earth from snowball status) and of that only 2-3 degrees has a non-water cause. That's the bit we can potentially have an impact on.
IANAC, I just read a bit. I could well be wrong.
But it seems to me that the 'heat island' effect in large cities would be much more noticeable (I'd guess many orders of magnitude) before waste heat could be a possible cause. Our cities and generated power aren't large (unless you're like me, and prefer rural life).
Let's see, Earth is 30% land. As of 2000, 39% [1] of that had been converted to agriculture and urban or built-up areas. Ag lands are warmer than forests, but all that ag land didn't come from forests. Let's be conservative, and throw it in there, anyway. That gives us 12% of Earth's area as ag, urban, or built up. AT least one city (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) just to Google up a random example, contributes as much as 4 degrees at night, and 3.6 during the afternoon[2]. Call it 4. I'm sure cities vary enormously. But I don't think that raising the temperature of 12% of the earth's surface by a few degrees (certainly under 10) is the root cause of the warming we've seen.
In addition, waste heat has been thought of before. There's a discussion on Wikipedia [3] that's pretty interesting, as it discusses whether or not heat islands corrupted data. It also refers to and summarizes "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found"; J climate; Peterson; 2003.
I dug out an abstract for this paper: All analyses of the impact of urban heat islands (UHIs) on in situ temperature observations suffer from inhomogeneities or biases in the data. These inhomogeneities make urban heat island analyses difficult and can lead to erroneous conclusions. To remove the biases caused by differences in elevation, latitude, time of observation, instrumentation, and nonstandard siting, a variety of adjustments were applied to the data. The resultant data were the most thoroughly homogenized and the homogeneity adjustments were the most rigorously evaluated and thoroughly documented of any large-scale UHI analysis to date. Using satellite night-lightsderived urban/rural metadata, urban and rural temperatures from 289 stations in 40 clusters were compared using data from 1989 to 1991. Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures. It is postulated that this is due to micro- and local-scale impacts dominating over the mesoscale urban heat island. Industrial sections of towns may well be significantly warmer than rural sites, but urban meteorological observations are more likely to be made within park cool islands than industrial regions.
With IE, there's almost always an unpatched vulnerability. Even if you visit only the most mainstream of commercial sites, who's serving their adds, or possibly other content?
Your advice goes a long way to mitigate the risk. It doesn't eliminate it. Attacks always get better.
My preference is Linux, the Konqueror Web browser (Firefox for a couple of sites whose Javascript Konqueror can't deal with, though Konqueror generally does the better job of rendering HTML, IMHO), the netfilter firewall, regular system updates, and my own intrustion detection software. But I'm fortunate in that at the moment I don't have to deal with some lame corporate Web app which will only work with IE. Many aren't so fortunate.
But even after following these at least arguably non-stupid rules, there are still things I'd never do, such as surf as root. Attacks always get better.
There never was a day when a PC 'just was'. Before LAN or Internet connections met the PC, there were virusus on floppies. Win systems then were single-user. Nothing was off-limits to malware. The *concept* of off-limits hadn't been implemented in Win systems.
And users often had to futz around with memory segmentation (remember Quarterdeck's QEMM386? What a problem solver!), IRQs, etc. Adding hardware or just installing a game could cause you far more problems than you'll typically see now.
Putting away the rose-tinted glasses, I think we've just exchanged one set of problems for another.
Re: "They won't be happy with something which just browses the web and shows them pictures." That's where the problems truly begin! Win and Linux have had fairly recent problems with graphic rendering libraries, for example. And it's the network connection that's the primary driver for multiuser PC operating systems. That connection is what gives you that immediate and very broad attack surface.
What you just said was actually something like, "They won't be happy with something which just increases the risk to their system a hundredfold." The problem is that few people know the risks.
_I_ see people who are frustrated, have had identities stolen, etc. If _you_ see people who feel as if they're petting their friggin' bunny, please urge them to seek professional care.
If you're an admin, small-company Security Officer, orthe like,the problem remains effectively communicating it to the users. How many will stumble across an obscure piece of Yahoo news on their own? I just (2330 hours UT Feb. 10) checked news.yahoo.com, and and the article has already rolled off the front page, if it was ever there. And it was datelined "By Gregg Keizer TechWeb.com Thu Feb 9, 2:15 PM ET". So I went to techweb.com, and didn't find it there, either.
And of course the people who read TechWeb are probably less likely than most users to have a problem. Not that I'm a fan of the site, or their various 'pipelines'. At the end of the day, the news just isn't widespread enough, and it never has enough hang time. It's still a matter of either go do yet more face time, or send yet another mail which will largely go unread.
So, while it's good to have a recent argument on your side, it only helps so much.
This virus is very 'old school', in both propagation and effects. It's pretty much everything users have ever been warned about. For *years*. Which also makes it pretty much the final, unassailable proof that you can't patch users.
Or the media. The linked article on CNN keeps referring to it as a worm, for instance.
I just think of it as evolution in action. Uninformed or unintelligent people lose. At this late date I find it impossible to have any sympathy for them.
It's more work for admins who have to clean up systems, yes. But that's part of the job. OTOH, considering the state of the job market, maybe this is all a Good Thing. Some people who largely deserve it get wounded, some other people, who also largely deserve it, stay employed.
Well, I guess I'm not bothered by a lack of consistency this evening. Above, I replied to a post by YesIAmAScript that I'd take Digital Restrictions Management over Digital Rights Management, as a definition of DRM, and the devil take prior usage.
Now I'm going to defend prior usage, and go with Trusted Computing over Treacherous Computing. Thanks for saying a bit in it's defense. I've just spent several hours last week having to defend it from some people who bought into a whole lot of FUD. Frustrating, but either that, or the project wouldn't have gotten off the ground...
Then you pop this short post in, and I get a chance for a public FUD-fighting post. Which begins here.
Trusted Computing has been around a lot longer than it's been used as an enabler for DRM, and picked up the Treacherous Computing moniker. It goes well back into the history of government computing, for example. Anyone can probably Google up many OS design articles related to the size of TCBs (Trusted Computing Bases) being too large, etc.
As I'm sure you're aware (but not nearly enough other people are), TC can have some righteous non-government uses. Employers might use it to make sure that home workers connecting by VPN are running a sane environment, etc. That's getting to be an essential technique in protecting some networks. I don't see anything wrong with it, if it's company gear you're using. And there are tons of other uses.
There are some dangers, like there is in using many powerful tools. The trick will be to prevent MS (or other coporations or consortia, but I trust MS the least, given their legal history) from doing some enormous power grab through Palladium-like initiatives. But it's too useful to go away. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) drivers have been in Linux since the 2.6.12 kernel, and more are in development.
But there's some good info as well. There's a good corbet article and wide-ranging discussion at http://lwn.net/Articles/144681
I would urge anyone who isn't familiar with Trusted Computing to spend some quality time with your search engine of choice. TC has important implications, only one of which is as possible DRM enabler.
Nine times out of ten, I'd completely agree that the prior usage should stand. But in this case, I'll go with 'Restrictions'. The entire vendor DRM push, IMHO, has been disingenuous from square one. Forcing myself to respect prior usage is just too painful, and adds to public perceptions that DRM is a Good Thing.
It's acting against my own interests, in assistance of people who seem ruled by greed and shortsightedness.
I'm coming down on the side of accuracy. Perhaps this is, as you say, Orwellian. It's been years since I read the book, so I really couldn't judge. If so, I guess I have no problem being considered Orwellian.
Somebody please mod parent 'interesting'. That could be a serious downside, hitting marketshare, if it turned out to be the case. I'd not be surprised to see a minor hit based on a future MS Get The Facts campaign article trumpeting this--whether it's actually a possibility or not.
From the article (Ajax): "When you use Google Maps, the Web site doesn't pause to reload the page each time you zoom in or pan to the side, and the URL remains "maps.google.com" instead of the meaningless string of letters and numbers you see at older sites like MapQuest."
So according to Popular Mechanics, breaking Web bookmarking is now a feature. I like apps that break bookmarking about as much as I like apps that break the back button, style the scroll bar (usually in a way that would have a bad affect on usability), and/or write to my browser's status bar.
OK, the speed of Google Maps is a Good Thing, but everything comes at a cost. The cost, in this case, is pretty high. Breaking bookmarks breaks sharing, and ease of use for single users.
Thanks for the links. I've not had any failures with my home backups, probably because I use decent media already. But there are definitely some things I care about enough to give these a try. Backing up two deep, with one copy on archival quality media (but only one, as two media vendors also makes sense) sounds like a reasonable plan.
AO originated to increase the resolution of orbital platforms. The ones looking in, not out. And a bunch of SDI research probably contributed as well. The first bit, at the very least, is widely known, and no particular secret. See pages such as http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?sec tion_id=29&document_id=9011
If you can't properly sanitize user input please don't write Web applications. And don't forget the environment the software runs in, either. There are other inputs than a human user's.
The Army! Yeah, that's it! It was secret Army mind-ray experiments.
Predating autos? Well, even if that's proven, the phenomenon is still seen in an area that's known to be a good spot for viewing refractive affects. The same can be said of the Missouri Spook Light. Auto lights proven to be the cause of some of it, at a minimum, yet apparently seen before the auto.
It would seem to me that the more reasonable explanation is locales that are simply good locations to see interesting refaction affects, whatever the light source.
"...I imagine it would follow the same path every time..." The atmosphere isn't that uniform. Cells of a particular refractive index are constantly being disturbed by breezes, perhaps adiabatic effects, etc. I would be surprised if the changes *weren't* random.
That would imply that atmospheric conditions between the source and observer had wandered into the correct state required to cause a light at position A to be seen at position B, and then this inherently unstable system had somehow stabilized.
Finding refractive affects that take place on time scales from fractions of seconds to several seconds isn't difficult. Stars twinkling, even at the zenith, heat ripples over nearly any relatively warm surface (and the Big Bend country is desert), etc.
Add in periodic obscuration of auto headlights by terrain features, atmospherics closer to the source having a larger displacing affect than nearby atmospherics.
Also add in the probability of a sense of mystery being propagated by residents of a small town that certainly isn't noted for anything else and writers trying to sell copy by doing the same, which predisposes observers to believe something truly mysterious is happening.
Americans can be so credulous.
A January 2000 nationwide poll by Yankelovich Partners revealed that 1% of American adults believe they've encountered beings from other planets. And a Gallup Poll in May showed that 33% of Americans believe that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth-and another 27% aren't sure they haven't. http://www.centerchange.org/passport/shadowsintoli ght.html
Sixty-seven percent say they believe that the entire story of Christmasthe Virgin Birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem and the Wise Men from the Eastis historically accurate. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6650997/site/newsweek/
So what's wrong with a Cherry 2000? They probably run Linux, so it would be easy to remove the audio drivers. Bingo, the only problem they have is solved!
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody please mod this Interesting, AC posting or not.
This is +5 insightful? Have the mods lost their collective minds again?
What's the deal, r00t? Did you have two bad experiences, and assume this is all there is to programming?
If you limit yourself that way, it's your own affair. But programmers will also acquire problem solving skills that can be applied to other things. For instance, how to value an equity. The old saw, "Life is what you make it," has a lot of truth in it. Hacking your life is the coolest challenge of all.
Anyone programmer who won't accept that challenge has no cause for complaint if they find themselves a minor cog in a huge team constructing the next boring business system. You have a skill set that people who never learn anything beyond burger-flipping requirements don't.
Whether you use it is your 100% your own damn responsibility. I get *so* sick of whiners. I've met way too many people who put in the time at some boring job, then go home and spend their free time playing on a game console, watching TV, etc. Then come in the next day and whine some more.
Life isn't fair? Boo freaking hoo. Guess what? It never has been, for any large number of people, through all of history. A competent programmer would be well advised to simply treat that as another constraint--one which can definitely be worked around.
I couldn't really decipher the meaning of your post. But I've run CentOS 4 on a Pentium 3, 1GHz, 512M. A zero-cost wire speed Web server. This box did fine. No GUI on it (who on earth needs a cycle-chewing GUI to manage a simple Web server?) so I couldn't comment on how well it would function as a desktop. I suspect poorly, though, given my experience running early Fedora on such a machine.
Signed code as an application security model is fundamentally flawed. Transitive trust is a hard problem, and signed code as a security model is not a solution.
I don't know what you mean by "A signed/secure Java applet." I'm hoping that you're not implying that signed==secure. That's what has given us thousands of Active-X-related vulnerabilities and exploits. Signing Java isn't much better. You get a better sandboxing system (though many VMs have been replaced for security problems), but you're still working from a flawed security model.
Everyone believing it will fly on schedule, please stand on your head.
The first mission:
Mission name: ST9 (Space Tech 9)
Tentative launch date: 2010-2011
Then we have more:
Mission name: Heliostorm
Tentative launch date: 2016-2020
Mission name: SPI (Solar Polar Imager)
Tentative launch daMission name: Interstellar Probe
Tentative launch date: 2031-2035
These are science. As we all know, the US gubmint don't hold with that science stuff. And does anyone out there believe that NASA have any clue what they'll be doing five years from now, let alone 25-30?
Remember the two year delay on the James Web Space Telescope (successor to Hubble) announced back in November? That's nothing. In addition to the congressional criticism of the no-science budget, we have things like:
http://www.newscientistspace.com/channel/human-spa ceflight/dn8689-nasa-to-divert-cash-from-science-i nto-shuttle.html
(Feb. 7) Wherein we learn that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been delayed indefinitely, and more, such as "The budget announcement was "extraordinarily depressing", says Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a non-profit organisation in Pasadena, California, US, which promotes solar system exploration. "I would almost describe it as 'anti-science NASA' now, with these kinds of deep cuts." Seven missions, or areas of research, or listed as cancelled or postponed. Of the postponed, all but one is indefinitely.
The Planetary Society has a statement here:
(Feb. 16)
http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/space_a dvocacy/budget_statement.html
with gems like, "The Bush Administration's proposed 5-year budget for NASA, just submitted to Congress, is an attack on science. The proposed budget directs three billion dollars (over five years) away from robotic exploration of the solar system to continue to operate the shuttle. Last year the Administrator said, "not one thin dime" would be so directed. Now we learn it is 30 billion dimes."
and
"In addition, a devastating 15% cut to science research funding -- including likely cuts to some approved 2006 research programs -- is being applied across all Earth and space science disciplines, and 50% is being cut from astrobiology research! This attack on basic science ironically comes at a time when the President announced in his State of the Union speech his intention "to double the federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next 10 years." Apparently the physical sciences do not include either Earth or space sciences."
If you think the much advertised "Vision for Space" is really going to get us back on the moon, then to Mars, you may be in for a surprise as well. Yes there's been all the talk about the new heavy lift and crew exploration vehicles. Even methane engines, so we can 'live off the land'. Guess again, and see:
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/The_Moon_Program _The_NASA_Administrator_Is_Really_Planing_For.html
(Feb. 14). No methane engines, the Crew Exploration Vehicle diameter has been resized to five meters (can now be lifted by existing hardware), which the authors suggest was done to put the Crew Launch Vehicle on the chopping block. The Cargo Delivery Vehicle is gone, so we can't send control gyros to ISS after the shuttles retire in 2010. "This implies that the ISS won't be there at that time - or at least that NASA will not be supporting it."
So far, most popular reporting implies that science is being scrapped for Shuttle/ISS. That would be bad news, after the "not one thin di
There is no reason for parent to be modded to troll. DRM does, in fact, have valid corporate uses, such as basic defense in depth.
Suppose you have an R&D group doing work that's important to the future of your company. You can sequester the workers on their own subnet, then firewall that subnet. There are many other precautions you can take, as well. But they aren't foolproof, even in aggregate. This is simply one more layer. It's still not foolproof. But more layers can be a Good Thing until you hit a usability problem, or otherwise climb too far up the curve of diminishing returns.
The location of that point is determined by your threat model, the value of your data, etc.
First sentence in parent post was dead-on. Message to (apparently many) Slashdotters (at least one of whom had mod points): the way you use computers *does not* constitute the whole of computing.
DRM is just a technology. I personally believe that some companies, particularly Microsoft, Adobe, and Sony, will use it to line their coporate pockets. That doesn't make the technology evil.
Bad corporate behavior, to my mind, can only be curbed in the marketplace. As that relates to consumer issues, the place to start is the mainstream press. Whoever modded parent to troll should have spent the time looking for an organization that
fights DRM from a consumer's perspective, getting a message to an editor of the local paper, etc.
Slashdotters are mostly technologists. Well, this is just a technology. Use it where you can do good things with it in technological systems. Corporate misuse is a social problem. Address it in a social context.
March 6, 2003 SCO sues IBM. Stock closes at $4.31. Today's close was $2.40. I can't friggin' believe they still exist. It's like Night of the Living Dead.
Of course, they were already desperate. A couple of years before, they were a $50 stock. They'd already been evaluated as the weakest commercial Unix for a couple of years. From a corporate perspective, things had gotten so bad that they'd actually nothing to lose by becoming one of the most despised software companies of all time.
You know that management team has to be proud of themselves...
Seizing chattels. No trial. Yep, that's a fine idea. It shouldn't set the idea of sane government back more than three or four hundred years.
"Except for the fact that water vapor is SEVEN TIMES the green house gas that CO2 is."
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I had thought that water vapor variance was accounted for, to one degree or another, in climate models, and the theory was to ignore that, because we can't control it. As I understood it, current warming is calculated to be about 33 C, (keeping earth from snowball status) and of that only 2-3 degrees has a non-water cause. That's the bit we can potentially have an impact on.
IANAC, I just read a bit. I could well be wrong.
But it seems to me that the 'heat island' effect in large cities would be much more noticeable (I'd guess many orders of magnitude) before waste heat could be a possible cause. Our cities and generated power aren't large (unless you're like me, and prefer rural life).
Let's see, Earth is 30% land. As of 2000, 39% [1] of that had been converted to agriculture and urban or built-up areas. Ag lands are warmer than forests, but all that ag land didn't come from forests. Let's be conservative, and throw it in there, anyway. That gives us 12% of Earth's area as ag, urban, or built up. AT least one city (Salt Lake City, UT, USA) just to Google up a random example, contributes as much as 4 degrees at night, and 3.6 during the afternoon[2]. Call it 4. I'm sure cities vary enormously. But I don't think that raising the temperature of 12% of the earth's surface by a few degrees (certainly under 10) is the root cause of the warming we've seen.
In addition, waste heat has been thought of before. There's a discussion on Wikipedia [3] that's pretty interesting, as it discusses whether or not heat islands corrupted data. It also refers to and summarizes "Assessment of Urban Versus Rural In Situ Surface Temperatures in the Contiguous United States: No Difference Found"; J climate; Peterson; 2003.
I dug out an abstract for this paper:
All analyses of the impact of urban heat islands (UHIs) on in situ temperature observations suffer from inhomogeneities or biases in the data. These inhomogeneities make urban heat island analyses difficult and can lead to erroneous conclusions. To remove the biases caused by differences in elevation, latitude, time of observation, instrumentation, and nonstandard siting, a variety of adjustments were applied to the data. The resultant data were the most thoroughly homogenized and the homogeneity adjustments were the most rigorously evaluated and thoroughly documented of any large-scale UHI analysis to date. Using satellite night-lightsderived urban/rural metadata, urban and rural temperatures from 289 stations in 40 clusters were compared using data from 1989 to 1991. Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures. It is postulated that this is due to micro- and local-scale impacts dominating over the mesoscale urban heat island. Industrial sections of towns may well be significantly warmer than rural sites, but urban meteorological observations are more likely to be made within park cool islands than industrial regions.
1 http://earthtrends.wri.org/features/view_feature.
2 http://www.epa.gov/heatisland/pilot/salt_lake.htm
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
With IE, there's almost always an unpatched vulnerability. Even if you visit only the most mainstream of commercial sites, who's serving their adds, or possibly other content?
a _statement/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/22/falk_bofr
Your advice goes a long way to mitigate the risk. It doesn't eliminate it. Attacks always get better.
My preference is Linux, the Konqueror Web browser (Firefox for a couple of sites whose Javascript Konqueror can't deal with, though Konqueror generally does the better job of rendering HTML, IMHO), the netfilter firewall, regular system updates, and my own intrustion detection software. But I'm fortunate in that at the moment I don't have to deal with some lame corporate Web app which will only work with IE. Many aren't so fortunate.
But even after following these at least arguably non-stupid rules, there are still things I'd never do, such as surf as root. Attacks always get better.
There never was a day when a PC 'just was'. Before LAN or Internet connections met the PC, there were virusus on floppies. Win systems then were single-user. Nothing was off-limits to malware. The *concept* of off-limits hadn't been implemented in Win systems.
And users often had to futz around with memory segmentation (remember Quarterdeck's QEMM386? What a problem solver!), IRQs, etc. Adding hardware or just installing a game could cause you far more problems than you'll typically see now.
Putting away the rose-tinted glasses, I think we've just exchanged one set of problems for another.
Re: "They won't be happy with something which just browses the web and shows them pictures." That's where the problems truly begin! Win and Linux have had fairly recent problems with graphic rendering libraries, for example. And it's the network connection that's the primary driver for multiuser PC operating systems. That connection is what gives you that immediate and very broad attack surface.
What you just said was actually something like, "They won't be happy with something which just increases the risk to their system a hundredfold." The problem is that few people know the risks.
_I_ see people who are frustrated, have had identities stolen, etc. If _you_ see people who feel as if they're petting their friggin' bunny, please urge them to seek professional care.
If you're an admin, small-company Security Officer, orthe like ,the problem remains effectively communicating it to the users. How many will stumble across an obscure piece of Yahoo news on their own? I just (2330 hours UT Feb. 10) checked news.yahoo.com, and and the article has already rolled off the front page, if it was ever there. And it was datelined "By Gregg Keizer
TechWeb.com Thu Feb 9, 2:15 PM ET". So I went to techweb.com, and didn't find it there, either.
And of course the people who read TechWeb are probably less likely than most users to have a problem. Not that I'm a fan of the site, or their various 'pipelines'. At the end of the day, the news just isn't widespread enough, and it never has enough hang time. It's still a matter of either go do yet more face time, or send yet another mail which will largely go unread.
So, while it's good to have a recent argument on your side, it only helps so much.
What they really should have recorded is Making Money Out of Nothing at All.
This virus is very 'old school', in both propagation and effects. It's pretty much everything users have ever been warned about. For *years*. Which also makes it pretty much the final, unassailable proof that you can't patch users.
Or the media. The linked article on CNN keeps referring to it as a worm, for instance.
I just think of it as evolution in action. Uninformed or unintelligent people lose. At this late date I find it impossible to have any sympathy for them.
It's more work for admins who have to clean up systems, yes. But that's part of the job. OTOH, considering the state of the job market, maybe this is all a Good Thing. Some people who largely deserve it get wounded, some other people, who also largely deserve it, stay employed.
I sense a certain karmic balance...
Well, I guess I'm not bothered by a lack of consistency this evening. Above, I replied to a post by YesIAmAScript that I'd take Digital Restrictions Management over Digital Rights Management, as a definition of DRM, and the devil take prior usage.
_ trusted.html
Now I'm going to defend prior usage, and go with Trusted Computing over Treacherous Computing. Thanks for saying a bit in it's defense. I've just spent several hours last week having to defend it from some people who bought into a whole lot of FUD. Frustrating, but either that, or the project wouldn't have gotten off the ground...
Then you pop this short post in, and I get a chance for a public FUD-fighting post. Which begins here.
Trusted Computing has been around a lot longer than it's been used as an enabler for DRM, and picked up the Treacherous Computing moniker. It goes well back into the history of government computing, for example. Anyone can probably Google up many OS design articles related to the size of TCBs (Trusted Computing Bases) being too large, etc.
As I'm sure you're aware (but not nearly enough other people are), TC can have some righteous non-government uses. Employers might use it to make sure that home workers connecting by VPN are running a sane environment, etc. That's getting to be an essential technique in protecting some networks. I don't see anything wrong with it, if it's company gear you're using. And there are tons of other uses.
There are some dangers, like there is in using many powerful tools. The trick will be to prevent MS (or other coporations or consortia, but I trust MS the least, given their legal history) from doing some enormous power grab through Palladium-like initiatives. But it's too useful to go away. TPM (Trusted Platform Module) drivers have been in Linux since the 2.6.12 kernel, and more are in development.
There's tons of FUD being propagated about Trusted Computing, such as Cory Doctorow confusing TC and DRM (I get a lot of this) on BoingBoing at http://www.boingboing.net/2005/07/31/apple_to_add
But there's some good info as well. There's a good corbet article and wide-ranging discussion at http://lwn.net/Articles/144681
I would urge anyone who isn't familiar with Trusted Computing to spend some quality time with your search engine of choice. TC has important implications, only one of which is as possible DRM enabler.
Nine times out of ten, I'd completely agree that the prior usage should stand. But in this case, I'll go with 'Restrictions'. The entire vendor DRM push, IMHO, has been disingenuous from square one. Forcing myself to respect prior usage is just too painful, and adds to public perceptions that DRM is a Good Thing.
It's acting against my own interests, in assistance of people who seem ruled by greed and shortsightedness.
I'm coming down on the side of accuracy. Perhaps this is, as you say, Orwellian. It's been years since I read the book, so I really couldn't judge. If so, I guess I have no problem being considered Orwellian.
Somebody please mod parent 'interesting'. That could be a serious downside, hitting marketshare, if it turned out to be the case. I'd not be surprised to see a minor hit based on a future MS Get The Facts campaign article trumpeting this--whether it's actually a possibility or not.
From the article (Ajax):
"When you use Google Maps, the Web site doesn't pause to reload the page each time you zoom in or pan to the side, and the URL remains "maps.google.com" instead of the meaningless string of letters and numbers you see at older sites like MapQuest."
So according to Popular Mechanics, breaking Web bookmarking is now a feature. I like apps that break bookmarking about as much as I like apps that break the back button, style the scroll bar (usually in a way that would have a bad affect on usability), and/or write to my browser's status bar.
OK, the speed of Google Maps is a Good Thing, but everything comes at a cost. The cost, in this case, is pretty high. Breaking bookmarks breaks sharing, and ease of use for single users.
Thanks for the links. I've not had any failures with my home backups, probably because I use decent media already. But there are definitely some things I care about enough to give these a try. Backing up two deep, with one copy on archival quality media (but only one, as two media vendors also makes sense) sounds like a reasonable plan.
Anyway, thanks again.
AO originated to increase the resolution of orbital platforms. The ones looking in, not out. And a bunch of SDI research probably contributed as well. The first bit, at the very least, is widely known, and no particular secret. See pages such as http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?sec tion_id=29&document_id=9011
Or just Google around.
Hope the mods give you extra points for the obscure _Alas, Babylon_ sig.
If you can't properly sanitize user input please don't write Web applications. And don't forget the environment the software runs in, either. There are other inputs than a human user's.
"The reason why Windows is not bugless is that they have the budget to properly debug it... but little incentive to do so before launch."
Hell, Microsoft can't seem to get projects launched *anyway*. If they had to deliver 1 defect per 1K SLOC, Win95 wouldn't be out the door yet.
The Army! Yeah, that's it! It was secret Army mind-ray experiments.
i ght.html
/
Predating autos? Well, even if that's proven, the phenomenon is still seen in an area that's known to be a good spot for viewing refractive affects. The same can be said of the Missouri Spook Light. Auto lights proven to be the cause of some of it, at a minimum, yet apparently seen before the auto.
It would seem to me that the more reasonable explanation is locales that are simply good locations to see interesting refaction affects, whatever the light source.
"...I imagine it would follow the same path every time..." The atmosphere isn't that uniform. Cells of a particular refractive index are constantly being disturbed by breezes, perhaps adiabatic effects, etc. I would be surprised if the changes *weren't* random.
That would imply that atmospheric conditions between the source and observer had wandered into the correct state required to cause a light at position A to be seen at position B, and then this inherently unstable system had somehow stabilized.
Finding refractive affects that take place on time scales from fractions of seconds to several seconds isn't difficult. Stars twinkling, even at the zenith, heat ripples over nearly any relatively warm surface (and the Big Bend country is desert), etc.
Add in periodic obscuration of auto headlights by terrain features, atmospherics closer to the source having a larger displacing affect than nearby atmospherics.
Also add in the probability of a sense of mystery being propagated by residents of a small town that certainly isn't noted for anything else and writers trying to sell copy by doing the same, which predisposes observers to believe something truly mysterious is happening.
Americans can be so credulous.
A January 2000 nationwide poll by Yankelovich Partners revealed that 1% of American adults believe they've encountered beings from other planets. And a Gallup Poll in May showed that 33% of Americans believe that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth-and another 27% aren't sure they haven't.
http://www.centerchange.org/passport/shadowsintol
Sixty-seven percent say they believe that the entire story of Christmasthe Virgin Birth, the angelic proclamation to the shepherds, the Star of Bethlehem and the Wise Men from the Eastis historically accurate.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6650997/site/newsweek
I'm off to order my Q-ray ionized bracelet.
http://www.qray.com/Default.aspx
So what's wrong with a Cherry 2000? They probably run Linux, so it would be easy to remove the audio drivers. Bingo, the only problem they have is solved!