It turns them into Nickel Metal Hydride? Hmm, that makes a fully mouse operated home generator/backup system more feasible when you can use the brainy mice as batteries while their slightly moronic brethren run around on wheels all day.
Hey! The best way to understand any topic in the world (especially on slashdot) is to compare it to a car. Politics, Religion, Science, Computing, FOSS, Education, Economic, Weather - it all obviously boils down to cars in the end.
Should we all move on to Family picnic analogies instead?;)
Yep but the grandparent of my original post was mostly just talking about cosmetic ways to stop "aging", nothing to do with slowing the actual process of aging.
It's the people who go into helicopters with a 50/50 chance of making it back just to save one life out in the middle of some frozen sea in horrific weather.
I'd expect the odds are a bit higher otherwise there would be no rescue service, because like it or not, helicopters are expensive, and you'd be wasting the pilot and the rescuer's life as well as the helicopter just for one person's life.
I don't see how someone is a 'good' person just because they go into space or climb everest. Brave? sure. Likely to get a darwin award? Sure. I don't see how moral's have much to do with it though, they could still be assholes. Those who get into medicine also may just be doing it for money, though saying that a few people will do it because they are good people who care.
I don't see the logic in good people living longer - think of all the dictators, serious drug dealers, etc, they all will have pretty short life expectancies compared to a researcher..
Giving life extension drugs to a fireman may be a bit of a waste too, if they're very expensive. A fireman's chances of surviving decrease to zero over time:p
That will cause an even more annoying divide between the rich and the poor as the rich can just live indefinitely off of their interest after a while and the indefinite-lifers would be the only ones who could afford life extending drugs:/
Except that the computer in the story knows more than we do about physics, and though it is impossible by the rules we currently know, it somehow reverses entropy:P That story did change the way I thought a few years ago - why can't some being eventualy evolve to become as a 'god', even if it is through technology. While we can only survive as long as the universe survives (unless we figure out a way to hop to another universe), that's not to say that technically we couldn't extend our lifespan indefinitely (within the bounds of the life of the universe) with enough medical advances. We'd have to be able to colonise other planets though otherwise we would suffer severe overcrowding and even worse wars over land and other resources..
There is when it's only an external thing. To use an obvious car analogy, you can sand and paste a rusty chassis every few weeks so that it looks okay, but if the rust is eating away at the inside then it's all just for appearance's sake, and the thing will fall apart eventually. I think that aiming to indefinitely prolong life is a good goal, but things like face lifts and botox are just sad..
Yeah, I'd heard American news was bad, but I didn't realise just how bad.
"How can a human cope with going that fast?"
What is this, 1850? The scientist didn't explain very well that you only feel any force under acceleration admittedly, maybe he thought that when the guy said 'going fast' he meant 'accelerating fast'. But OMFG, some people obviously just don't think... don't notice that travelling at 500mph on a plane feels no different to being at a 'standstill' (ignoring the earth/galaxy's rotation), it's only the acceleration that stresses the body. Later on he was saying "Surely they need some kind of special equipment?":/ sure, they need a hypersonic plane..
The version info matching works fine. I did kinda suspect last night that maybe you're leading me on a wild goose chase, and now I have decided that's just what it was:P Perhaps your point is that it took me that long to find out, either that or you just wanted to laugh at me >_> . I thought perhaps it was going to take some combination of letters out of the version string and form them into a malicious command..
Okay, so even though http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/qx.html claims that qx is just a generalised quotes operator, apparently it is actually used for system calls so that sorts out that. I'm not sure what the m($music)=> bit will do though, possibly match art within the version info? I'm using ActivePerl so the version info will be different from perl on Linux, can check up on OSX later though to see what is in there and if it's relevant.
I get most of the program but I don't understand why m()=> executes a file? The only thing I can find on m is that it's the match operator. I did run it with the perl -v string but haven't searched through the resulting string to see what substr will get out of that mess yet, and lunch is over.
Ah, don't mind me, q must be the same as single quotes whereas I usually use qq which does interpolation of variables (which is awesome compared to always having to concatenate as with other languages I've used over the years)
heh no I didn't run it I was just going through it in my head while checking back and forth with online documentation, mostly perlvar. It ended up being more like an hour and 20 minutes of looking at the actual code and then I was thinking about running parts of it today (not all of it obviously if it is going to do something malicious, just want to find out what effect changing $" has on quotes in practice etc) as I was heading to sleep:P
I'm not familiar with that use of q at all, I usually just use qq and curly braces for my quoting needs. I thought it perhaps was using the newline as the delimiter (which it could be if \n was assigned to S", though I'm not sure if reverse would also reverse a quoted string in that context, again something I'd have to try out) so blues would be a valid variable. If the quote does carry on to that line, wouldn't an error be thrown up when perl can't find $blues?
I might have a go trying a few things at lunchtime or after work, but for now I must get back to my not-quite-so-advanced perl hacking:) Actually I just realised I must have been using perl since Feb 2007 when I started writing a web app for work to track the movements of their equipment. I for some reason though I'd only been using perl since feb this year - the time has flown by! 8|
Hmm okay I only started using perl this year so am not familiar with all the special operators but here I go:P
Heh I was going through that piece by piece, had got to the grep bit when I happened to read something about @_ . I've no idea what would happen when the split function tries to operate on the @_ variable since split itself works with that variable? The rest of the program being disguised as just another perl hacker (just being the numbers, another and hacker being matchen in rock/blues and the perl executable name presumably coming from $^X).
I'm pretty lost overall on the grep line too, I'm not sure how a reference would work from what I think is just a quote of 'art'. But presumably you're setting things up to run the perl executable in the eval statement. If I hadn't started looking at this so late then I'd keep looking into it but seeing as it's 12:30am and I have work tomorrow I'm off to bed. I'll leave you to leave me stewing or give me some hints, I've been looking at obscure perl operator documentation for the last hour:P
Humour is highly subjective though, so to some it is funny. Our German language teacher once told us some German jokes. They just weren't funny even when accurately translated. Similarly, tastes in music, food, beer, whatever, vary widely from culture to culture. So to some people they are funny. I myself find them quite funny but only if they are done well
This exploit is done via AppleScript and the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which should hopefully give you some kind of hint as to why this particular issue is not going to be a problem on Linux.
OSX is certified yes, and presumably some of the basic shell commands will be exactly the same at a source level as in Linux, but in the Linux world patches are uploaded to repositories pretty quickly and users can then download updates immediately. Apple users (of which I am one) have to wait for Apple to release updates, unless they compile everything themself. I don't know if there's an equivalent of apt-get for OSX, I haven't looked..
Then there's the fact that 99.99% (number pulled out of my ass obviously) of exploitable bugs will have already been patched in the common OS level commands by now simply because they are being used in so many different distros. Sure there is the odd high profile bug, I remember one a few weeks ago on/. about a bug in some file listing function, though I don't think it was actually a security risk as opposed to just an annoying bug.
Uh. So the endless Beowulf jokes are funny to you, but the nowhere near as long running Vista ones aren't? You perhaps should go into therapy to resolve your Vista issues. I'm intrigued as to why you consider it better than XP in any way.. apart from apparently the calendar is more comprehensive than XP for tracking changes in our date system over the last while.. but other than that. I honestly don't see the benefits. I'm not being hypocritical either - I was doing fine with 98 until games started requiring XP. And I'm writing this on OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
It turns them into Nickel Metal Hydride? Hmm, that makes a fully mouse operated home generator/backup system more feasible when you can use the brainy mice as batteries while their slightly moronic brethren run around on wheels all day.
Hey! The best way to understand any topic in the world (especially on slashdot) is to compare it to a car. Politics, Religion, Science, Computing, FOSS, Education, Economic, Weather - it all obviously boils down to cars in the end.
Should we all move on to Family picnic analogies instead? ;)
Yep but the grandparent of my original post was mostly just talking about cosmetic ways to stop "aging", nothing to do with slowing the actual process of aging.
It's the people who go into helicopters with a 50/50 chance of making it back just to save one life out in the middle of some frozen sea in horrific weather.
I'd expect the odds are a bit higher otherwise there would be no rescue service, because like it or not, helicopters are expensive, and you'd be wasting the pilot and the rescuer's life as well as the helicopter just for one person's life.
I don't see how someone is a 'good' person just because they go into space or climb everest. Brave? sure. Likely to get a darwin award? Sure. I don't see how moral's have much to do with it though, they could still be assholes. Those who get into medicine also may just be doing it for money, though saying that a few people will do it because they are good people who care.
I don't see the logic in good people living longer - think of all the dictators, serious drug dealers, etc, they all will have pretty short life expectancies compared to a researcher..
Giving life extension drugs to a fireman may be a bit of a waste too, if they're very expensive. A fireman's chances of surviving decrease to zero over time :p
That will cause an even more annoying divide between the rich and the poor as the rich can just live indefinitely off of their interest after a while and the indefinite-lifers would be the only ones who could afford life extending drugs :/
Except that the computer in the story knows more than we do about physics, and though it is impossible by the rules we currently know, it somehow reverses entropy :P That story did change the way I thought a few years ago - why can't some being eventualy evolve to become as a 'god', even if it is through technology. While we can only survive as long as the universe survives (unless we figure out a way to hop to another universe), that's not to say that technically we couldn't extend our lifespan indefinitely (within the bounds of the life of the universe) with enough medical advances. We'd have to be able to colonise other planets though otherwise we would suffer severe overcrowding and even worse wars over land and other resources..
Nobody wearing nappies at least.. suddenly the phrase "as soft as a baby's bottom" makes more sense.
There is when it's only an external thing. To use an obvious car analogy, you can sand and paste a rusty chassis every few weeks so that it looks okay, but if the rust is eating away at the inside then it's all just for appearance's sake, and the thing will fall apart eventually. I think that aiming to indefinitely prolong life is a good goal, but things like face lifts and botox are just sad..
That reporter definitely didn't seem like he was acting. He's either a genius, or an idiot. I'm guessing the latter.
Yeah, I'd heard American news was bad, but I didn't realise just how bad.
"How can a human cope with going that fast?"
What is this, 1850? The scientist didn't explain very well that you only feel any force under acceleration admittedly, maybe he thought that when the guy said 'going fast' he meant 'accelerating fast'. But OMFG, some people obviously just don't think... don't notice that travelling at 500mph on a plane feels no different to being at a 'standstill' (ignoring the earth/galaxy's rotation), it's only the acceleration that stresses the body. Later on he was saying "Surely they need some kind of special equipment?" :/ sure, they need a hypersonic plane..
Thanks :)
The version info matching works fine. I did kinda suspect last night that maybe you're leading me on a wild goose chase, and now I have decided that's just what it was :P Perhaps your point is that it took me that long to find out, either that or you just wanted to laugh at me >_> . I thought perhaps it was going to take some combination of letters out of the version string and form them into a malicious command..
Ah - hadn't noticed quite how comprehensive that page actually was.. thanks.
Kinda makes me wish I had a virtual machine setup just so I didn't have to be quite so cautious.
Okay, so even though http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/qx.html claims that qx is just a generalised quotes operator, apparently it is actually used for system calls so that sorts out that. I'm not sure what the m($music)=> bit will do though, possibly match art within the version info? I'm using ActivePerl so the version info will be different from perl on Linux, can check up on OSX later though to see what is in there and if it's relevant.
I get most of the program but I don't understand why m()=> executes a file? The only thing I can find on m is that it's the match operator. I did run it with the perl -v string but haven't searched through the resulting string to see what substr will get out of that mess yet, and lunch is over.
I'm also wondering if you ever actually sleep.
Ah, don't mind me, q must be the same as single quotes whereas I usually use qq which does interpolation of variables (which is awesome compared to always having to concatenate as with other languages I've used over the years)
heh no I didn't run it I was just going through it in my head while checking back and forth with online documentation, mostly perlvar. It ended up being more like an hour and 20 minutes of looking at the actual code and then I was thinking about running parts of it today (not all of it obviously if it is going to do something malicious, just want to find out what effect changing $" has on quotes in practice etc) as I was heading to sleep :P
I'm not familiar with that use of q at all, I usually just use qq and curly braces for my quoting needs. I thought it perhaps was using the newline as the delimiter (which it could be if \n was assigned to S", though I'm not sure if reverse would also reverse a quoted string in that context, again something I'd have to try out) so blues would be a valid variable. If the quote does carry on to that line, wouldn't an error be thrown up when perl can't find $blues?
I might have a go trying a few things at lunchtime or after work, but for now I must get back to my not-quite-so-advanced perl hacking :) Actually I just realised I must have been using perl since Feb 2007 when I started writing a web app for work to track the movements of their equipment. I for some reason though I'd only been using perl since feb this year - the time has flown by! 8|
Hmm okay I only started using perl this year so am not familiar with all the special operators but here I go :P
Heh I was going through that piece by piece, had got to the grep bit when I happened to read something about @_ . I've no idea what would happen when the split function tries to operate on the @_ variable since split itself works with that variable? The rest of the program being disguised as just another perl hacker (just being the numbers, another and hacker being matchen in rock/blues and the perl executable name presumably coming from $^X).
I'm pretty lost overall on the grep line too, I'm not sure how a reference would work from what I think is just a quote of 'art'. But presumably you're setting things up to run the perl executable in the eval statement. If I hadn't started looking at this so late then I'd keep looking into it but seeing as it's 12:30am and I have work tomorrow I'm off to bed. I'll leave you to leave me stewing or give me some hints, I've been looking at obscure perl operator documentation for the last hour :P
Humour is highly subjective though, so to some it is funny. Our German language teacher once told us some German jokes. They just weren't funny even when accurately translated. Similarly, tastes in music, food, beer, whatever, vary widely from culture to culture. So to some people they are funny. I myself find them quite funny but only if they are done well
All the memory aiding goodness but with added tasty mnemniness?
Is that some kind of mnemonic?
This exploit is done via AppleScript and the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which should hopefully give you some kind of hint as to why this particular issue is not going to be a problem on Linux.
OSX is certified yes, and presumably some of the basic shell commands will be exactly the same at a source level as in Linux, but in the Linux world patches are uploaded to repositories pretty quickly and users can then download updates immediately. Apple users (of which I am one) have to wait for Apple to release updates, unless they compile everything themself. I don't know if there's an equivalent of apt-get for OSX, I haven't looked..
Then there's the fact that 99.99% (number pulled out of my ass obviously) of exploitable bugs will have already been patched in the common OS level commands by now simply because they are being used in so many different distros. Sure there is the odd high profile bug, I remember one a few weeks ago on /. about a bug in some file listing function, though I don't think it was actually a security risk as opposed to just an annoying bug.
you're saying that has a high percentage of Latter Day Saints among its employees? Or are you being ironic?
Nopes, I switched to OS X to avoid the need for malware and virus checkers when downloading pron. I play all my games on PS3 at the moment :)
Uh. So the endless Beowulf jokes are funny to you, but the nowhere near as long running Vista ones aren't? You perhaps should go into therapy to resolve your Vista issues. I'm intrigued as to why you consider it better than XP in any way.. apart from apparently the calendar is more comprehensive than XP for tracking changes in our date system over the last while.. but other than that. I honestly don't see the benefits. I'm not being hypocritical either - I was doing fine with 98 until games started requiring XP. And I'm writing this on OS X.