Lazy, perhaps... but lazy like foxes!! Imagine, quitting the workaday world on a whim, hatching a scheme to ride across America on what has to be one of the least inspiring forms of transportation available (I'd rather jog and I don't jog!), and film it, get it shown at Sundance (the new "buzz generator" [sorry Hollywood]) and reap the rewards as thousands of their friends (who have just as little life and money as they do) pay $10 a pop to see this in some theatre! Brilliant!
Wake me when someone crosses America on Oprah's back...
Bill Gates was bad... Murdoch eats people and companies for lunch. As soon as I heard about this, I knew MySpace was doomed. Not that I use it or care about it. I imagine the denizens of MySpace will revolt, usage stats will plummet, someone will start an alternate site with no restrictions, and next thing you know Murdoch will be flogging his "yes-men" for making him buy the fsck-ing company.
...but negative style points to Yahoo for trotting out Ellen Degeneres (not very funny anymore, just pathetic) and Tom Cruise (Scientology postery boy and all-around nutcase) to promote Yahoo Go. If these are the people who are going to be using it, I'll pass.
...but negative style points to Yahoo for trotting out Ellen Degeneres (really not that funny anymore) and Tom Cruise (Scientology poster boy and general nutcase). If these are the kind of people using Yahoo Go, I'll just do without thanks.
Maybe so, but fabricated data doesn't necessarily mean that the process he used to achieve his previous results were not sound. He may have messed up his technique or missed crucial signs that things weren't exactly right. Point being, it's easy to take all this as given based on the words of others, but until the process is peer-reviewed and confirmed not to yield the results he said he got, I'm not making any judgements.
From SecuriTeam Blogs: Is there anything that you think should be done to make vulnerabilities like this less dangerous in the future?
Good design and good coding practices, but that is easier said than done.
But shouldn't that be everybody's focus? We're seeing a lot of articles this week on coding practices, bugs, and vulnerabilities, and it all boils down to how hard every programmer is going to work to eliminate them. It's unrealistic to think that there will be no bugs in any piece of code, but if there are to be bugs/vulnerabilities, their impact should at least be minimized. And it's going to take teamwork; the day of the lone programmer capable of wiping out the bugs is long over.
Real scientists need to stand up and denounce frauds loudly and strongly whenever they appear. Too many otherwise learned men stand idly by while charlatans ply their wares to the unsuspecting.
But just suppose the Seoul National University panel completes their investigation and it turns out he did what he said he did, then what? It's very easy to describe a scientist as a charlatan, but the jury is still out, and in this case it is a jury of his peers. Others will perform the same expeiments and try to verify his results. In the end, even if he is found to have done what he claimed, his reputation is now stained.
Remember, even Galileo "recanted" to save his skin from persecution by the Roman Catholic church, but that does not diminish what he accomplished.
Shouldn't we be asking the more pertinent question: why do all the various operating systems have so many vulnerabilities? When it comes to such things, this shouldn't be a competition. OS builders should be striving for zero tolerance to vulnerabilities and there shouldn't be an quibbling over the number that exist.
...the greatest carnival barker ever. "Step right up and see the iPod... no looking behind the curtain... Step right up, get your first look at the new Intel Macintosh... No sir, no touching the merchandise unless you plan to buy..."
The problem becomes where does the right to free speech stop? Slashdot has rules about posting; not many, but enough. Despite the fact that the Bill of Rights guarantees your right to say what you think, Slashdot is under no obligation to promote your ideas or encourage you to speak them.
For example, you may be a racist; you have a vaild right to be one and to say anything you like about any group that doesn't fit in your personal view of the world. Slashdot does not have to give you a forum for your ideas; in fact, it would probably be deluged with complaints about what you said and eventually forced to remove your words from the site. That's not censorship, but responsibility to the public. Because the individual has a right to free speech does not mean that society at large has to be forced to listen.
Do the Chinese people have a right to free speech? Inherently, yes. Does the Chinese government have the right to curtail that freedom? Yes, since they are the duly empowered government of the country. Do the Chinese people have to take this? No, in the sense that there are a 1.3 billion Chinese and I dare say the number in government is not that large. Of course, the government has the guns and bombs. In the end, we may rail against the injustice we see in China, but it is up to the Chinese people to change it, as we did when we were ruled by the British in the 18th Century.
A defect rate of 0.04bugs/KLOC is not zero bugs/KLOC. The difference is infinite in magnitude if that single bug is -- kills the user.
A variation on Law of Large Numbers would seem to apply. As the number of lines of code increases, the probability that you will encounter a bug increases proportionately. The ideal would be to build programs with as little code as possible, to keep the defect rate low. But of course, even one bug in a billion lines of code is no good, if, as stated above, that bug leads to a catastrophic result (nuclear war, stock market crash, Bill Gates making more money, etc.).
And we know how good the government is at collecting back taxes. Oh, and lets not forget the beauty of jetting off to some country with no extradition treaty with the US. Let's face it: if this guy doesn't want to pay, he won't, and all the government will get is his assets, which certainly isn't going to cover 1 billion+ USD.
No details to be found about amount of charge required. It won't be very useful if it's stealing power from an already strapped laptop battery. They should just cover it with solar cells and let it charge using ambient light.
From QuadCity Times: The lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent more than 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages into CIS's network...
He claimed that under state law in effect at the time, he was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail.
Kramer said then that he likely will not see any of the judgment money.
Then what precisely, would be the point? If the claim is that this will somehow economically damage a spammer, when in fact not even a single dollar may be paid out ultimately to the aggrieved party. Not to mention the ruling is in Iowa but the spammer is in Florida, so there may be jurisdictional disputes, reciprocity or not.
This is merely smoke and mirrors, to make some people feel like they are doing their part in the war on spam. I don't see spam drying up. It seems to be getting worse. There has to be a real crackdown, perhaps even prison time if any inroads are to be made.
Wake me when they string this spammer up to a tall tree by his thumbs.
Apple advertises using Bono and U2. Microsoft goes with Justin Timberlake.
Mind you, in a stunning twist, Bono and Mr. Gates & wife were Time agazine's Persons of the Year. Assuming you believe BG is a person and not some warped engine of destruction from the future bent on global domination.
Of course there's bias. But physics is physics and those laws are absolutes (until someone comes up with better theories). SUVs tend to be more massive and have a higher center of gravity than a passenger car. If an SUV outweighs a typical passenger car by say 20-30%, it packs a more significant wallop at highway speeds. Given that they sit higher off the ground, so their bumper height is significantly greater, they are effectively mobile battering rams.
The journal "Pediatrics" just came out with a study stating that SUVs are no safer then passenger cars, based mainly on their tendency to roll over in crashes, a problem which is well documented and which the government has done nothing about. Now you might want to claim they're biased too, but the preponderance of evidence and common sense indicates that SUVs are in fact dangerous. Frankly, I'd trust the scientists over the auto industry any day.
Tell that to Goodyear, Fuji Film, Met Life, and the vast number of other companies that operate them. And don't forget to mention it to ESPN, ABC Sports, Fox Sports, and all the other networks who use them for their sports coverage.
As to WWII, the blimp was used very successfully. To quote: "The United States was the only power to use airships during World War II, and the airships played a small but important role. The Navy used them for minesweeping, search and rescue, photographic reconnaissance, scouting, escorting convoys, and antisubmarine patrols. Airships accompanied many oceangoing ships, both military and civilian. Of the 89,000 ships escorted by airships during the war, not one was lost to enemy action.
But once the analog to digital switch is made, then the TV pirates can come out and broadcast their subversive message in analog so all those with the old sets and no way to upgrade will receive it. After all, the government won't be able to jam the wavelength, as it will interfere with the digital signals as well.
This looks like a great feature, but it also looks like it could be a consistant security breach waiting to happen.
See, happening already. IE would be flamed for having another "Security Hole" in its browser; In Firefox, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread... we think. Haven't actually seen it.
It's simple: browsers shouldn't do everything. If you want P2P, use standalone software. If you want read news, shop online, and browse the net, use a browser.
Uhm, you do realise you don't need to install it, right? This is optional, non-mandatory stuff. You choose to use it if it appeals to you.
That's part of my point. Firefox as it is now is an effective, efficient, secure browser. And I have a handful of add-ons I find useful. But there comes a point of diminishing returns. The more and more apps that suddenly fall under the "killer" banner, the more Firefox will be diminished as greater numbers of tools are grafted onto it. This is a trend, the browser-as-Swiss-Army-knife, that inevitably leads to bloated code. IE might have been a greate browser, but MS tried to stuff it full of things while at the same time ignoring standards laid out to keep things orderly. End result? Garbage. I just don't want to see Firefox run down the same road.
So the parade of new apps for Firefox continues. And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat? I'm not a P2P fan, so this doesn't appeal to me at all, but it will to a great many people. And so will the next big thing, and the next, ad infinitum, until the complaints begin that Firefox is crawling and unmanageable. If this is such an important functionality, build it right in and make sure its optimized.
Lindner found that by convincing a Blackberry user to click on a special image attachment, that handheld device could be made to pass on malicious code to the Blackberry server...
I would like to try and convince most people with a Blackberry to see if they could use it as a suppository, but I digress...
From the Washington Post: RIM didn't mention anything about the flaw allowing attackers to download and execute programs on the targeted device, but I'm left wondering whether they escalated this because of just such a threat.
I really don't think RIM is going to shout this from the rooftops. If the exploit is as bad as is disclosed, there's some serious trouble brewing that makes the brouhaha with NTP look like a cakewalk.
From the Washington Post: Lindner said he started looking into Blackberry's proprietary communications protocols because the Blackberry server requires an unusual level of access inside of a corporate network: the server must be run inside a company's network firewall and on a Windows machine that is granted full and direct administrative access to the customer's internal e-mail server.
And RIM thought this was a good idea because...? It's like building a 50-ft high wall around the castle, then creating a hole for an 8-lane superhighway to pass through. Imagine the enterprising and inventive hacker that can plant a zombie process on that machine. Talk about spam! Imagine if a Fortune 500 company starts getting nipped because their email servers are dumping spam on the unsuspecting public. Lawsuits for everyone!!
When you can't make it through one paragraph before resorting to namecalling,
you must not have a very strong argument to make.
Of course they don't. They're busy trying to capitalize off the explosion in patents. They'd hate for the process to become fair and reasonable, because then the number of numbskulls they could charge $2000 for their services would dry up and they's have to go back to their paper routes.
It's always easier to pooh-pooh complaints about a problem when you're helping to create the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Lazy, perhaps... but lazy like foxes!! Imagine, quitting the workaday world on a whim, hatching a scheme to ride across America on what has to be one of the least inspiring forms of transportation available (I'd rather jog and I don't jog!), and film it, get it shown at Sundance (the new "buzz generator" [sorry Hollywood]) and reap the rewards as thousands of their friends (who have just as little life and money as they do) pay $10 a pop to see this in some theatre! Brilliant!
Wake me when someone crosses America on Oprah's back...
Bill Gates was bad... Murdoch eats people and companies for lunch. As soon as I heard about this, I knew MySpace was doomed. Not that I use it or care about it. I imagine the denizens of MySpace will revolt, usage stats will plummet, someone will start an alternate site with no restrictions, and next thing you know Murdoch will be flogging his "yes-men" for making him buy the fsck-ing company.
...but negative style points to Yahoo for trotting out Ellen Degeneres (not very funny anymore, just pathetic) and Tom Cruise (Scientology postery boy and all-around nutcase) to promote Yahoo Go. If these are the people who are going to be using it, I'll pass.
...but negative style points to Yahoo for trotting out Ellen Degeneres (really not that funny anymore) and Tom Cruise (Scientology poster boy and general nutcase). If these are the kind of people using Yahoo Go, I'll just do without thanks.
Maybe so, but fabricated data doesn't necessarily mean that the process he used to achieve his previous results were not sound. He may have messed up his technique or missed crucial signs that things weren't exactly right. Point being, it's easy to take all this as given based on the words of others, but until the process is peer-reviewed and confirmed not to yield the results he said he got, I'm not making any judgements.
From SecuriTeam Blogs: Is there anything that you think should be done to make vulnerabilities like this less dangerous in the future?
Good design and good coding practices, but that is easier said than done.
But shouldn't that be everybody's focus? We're seeing a lot of articles this week on coding practices, bugs, and vulnerabilities, and it all boils down to how hard every programmer is going to work to eliminate them. It's unrealistic to think that there will be no bugs in any piece of code, but if there are to be bugs/vulnerabilities, their impact should at least be minimized. And it's going to take teamwork; the day of the lone programmer capable of wiping out the bugs is long over.
But just suppose the Seoul National University panel completes their investigation and it turns out he did what he said he did, then what? It's very easy to describe a scientist as a charlatan, but the jury is still out, and in this case it is a jury of his peers. Others will perform the same expeiments and try to verify his results. In the end, even if he is found to have done what he claimed, his reputation is now stained.
Remember, even Galileo "recanted" to save his skin from persecution by the Roman Catholic church, but that does not diminish what he accomplished.
Shouldn't we be asking the more pertinent question: why do all the various operating systems have so many vulnerabilities? When it comes to such things, this shouldn't be a competition. OS builders should be striving for zero tolerance to vulnerabilities and there shouldn't be an quibbling over the number that exist.
...the greatest carnival barker ever. "Step right up and see the iPod... no looking behind the curtain... Step right up, get your first look at the new Intel Macintosh... No sir, no touching the merchandise unless you plan to buy..."
The problem becomes where does the right to free speech stop? Slashdot has rules about posting; not many, but enough. Despite the fact that the Bill of Rights guarantees your right to say what you think, Slashdot is under no obligation to promote your ideas or encourage you to speak them.
For example, you may be a racist; you have a vaild right to be one and to say anything you like about any group that doesn't fit in your personal view of the world. Slashdot does not have to give you a forum for your ideas; in fact, it would probably be deluged with complaints about what you said and eventually forced to remove your words from the site. That's not censorship, but responsibility to the public. Because the individual has a right to free speech does not mean that society at large has to be forced to listen.
Do the Chinese people have a right to free speech? Inherently, yes. Does the Chinese government have the right to curtail that freedom? Yes, since they are the duly empowered government of the country. Do the Chinese people have to take this? No, in the sense that there are a 1.3 billion Chinese and I dare say the number in government is not that large. Of course, the government has the guns and bombs. In the end, we may rail against the injustice we see in China, but it is up to the Chinese people to change it, as we did when we were ruled by the British in the 18th Century.
A variation on Law of Large Numbers would seem to apply. As the number of lines of code increases, the probability that you will encounter a bug increases proportionately. The ideal would be to build programs with as little code as possible, to keep the defect rate low. But of course, even one bug in a billion lines of code is no good, if, as stated above, that bug leads to a catastrophic result (nuclear war, stock market crash, Bill Gates making more money, etc.).
And we know how good the government is at collecting back taxes. Oh, and lets not forget the beauty of jetting off to some country with no extradition treaty with the US. Let's face it: if this guy doesn't want to pay, he won't, and all the government will get is his assets, which certainly isn't going to cover 1 billion+ USD.
No details to be found about amount of charge required. It won't be very useful if it's stealing power from an already strapped laptop battery. They should just cover it with solar cells and let it charge using ambient light.
From QuadCity Times: The lawsuit claimed that McCalla sent more than 280 million illegal spam e-mail messages into CIS's network...
He claimed that under state law in effect at the time, he was entitled to $10 per illegal e-mail.
Kramer said then that he likely will not see any of the judgment money.
Then what precisely, would be the point? If the claim is that this will somehow economically damage a spammer, when in fact not even a single dollar may be paid out ultimately to the aggrieved party. Not to mention the ruling is in Iowa but the spammer is in Florida, so there may be jurisdictional disputes, reciprocity or not.
This is merely smoke and mirrors, to make some people feel like they are doing their part in the war on spam. I don't see spam drying up. It seems to be getting worse. There has to be a real crackdown, perhaps even prison time if any inroads are to be made.
Wake me when they string this spammer up to a tall tree by his thumbs.
Mind you, in a stunning twist, Bono and Mr. Gates & wife were Time agazine's Persons of the Year. Assuming you believe BG is a person and not some warped engine of destruction from the future bent on global domination.
From the complaint (via Groklaw): V. PRAYER FOR RELIEF
Wherefore, Plaintiff SCO prays this Court enter judgment for SCO and against Novell:
Although I doubt God will be listening, as he's upgrading his SUSE Linux...
Of course there's bias. But physics is physics and those laws are absolutes (until someone comes up with better theories). SUVs tend to be more massive and have a higher center of gravity than a passenger car. If an SUV outweighs a typical passenger car by say 20-30%, it packs a more significant wallop at highway speeds. Given that they sit higher off the ground, so their bumper height is significantly greater, they are effectively mobile battering rams.
The journal "Pediatrics" just came out with a study stating that SUVs are no safer then passenger cars, based mainly on their tendency to roll over in crashes, a problem which is well documented and which the government has done nothing about. Now you might want to claim they're biased too, but the preponderance of evidence and common sense indicates that SUVs are in fact dangerous. Frankly, I'd trust the scientists over the auto industry any day.
Tell that to Goodyear, Fuji Film, Met Life, and the vast number of other companies that operate them. And don't forget to mention it to ESPN, ABC Sports, Fox Sports, and all the other networks who use them for their sports coverage.
As to WWII, the blimp was used very successfully. To quote: "The United States was the only power to use airships during World War II, and the airships played a small but important role. The Navy used them for minesweeping, search and rescue, photographic reconnaissance, scouting, escorting convoys, and antisubmarine patrols. Airships accompanied many oceangoing ships, both military and civilian. Of the 89,000 ships escorted by airships during the war, not one was lost to enemy action.
But once the analog to digital switch is made, then the TV pirates can come out and broadcast their subversive message in analog so all those with the old sets and no way to upgrade will receive it. After all, the government won't be able to jam the wavelength, as it will interfere with the digital signals as well.
Ever been the McDonald's? How would you like your fat today?
See, happening already. IE would be flamed for having another "Security Hole" in its browser; In Firefox, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread... we think. Haven't actually seen it.
It's simple: browsers shouldn't do everything. If you want P2P, use standalone software. If you want read news, shop online, and browse the net, use a browser.
That's part of my point. Firefox as it is now is an effective, efficient, secure browser. And I have a handful of add-ons I find useful. But there comes a point of diminishing returns. The more and more apps that suddenly fall under the "killer" banner, the more Firefox will be diminished as greater numbers of tools are grafted onto it. This is a trend, the browser-as-Swiss-Army-knife, that inevitably leads to bloated code. IE might have been a greate browser, but MS tried to stuff it full of things while at the same time ignoring standards laid out to keep things orderly. End result? Garbage. I just don't want to see Firefox run down the same road.
So the parade of new apps for Firefox continues. And how long before there are so many "killer" apps available, that Firefox begins to suffer IE bloat? I'm not a P2P fan, so this doesn't appeal to me at all, but it will to a great many people. And so will the next big thing, and the next, ad infinitum, until the complaints begin that Firefox is crawling and unmanageable. If this is such an important functionality, build it right in and make sure its optimized.
I would like to try and convince most people with a Blackberry to see if they could use it as a suppository, but I digress...
From the Washington Post: RIM didn't mention anything about the flaw allowing attackers to download and execute programs on the targeted device, but I'm left wondering whether they escalated this because of just such a threat.
I really don't think RIM is going to shout this from the rooftops. If the exploit is as bad as is disclosed, there's some serious trouble brewing that makes the brouhaha with NTP look like a cakewalk.From the Washington Post: Lindner said he started looking into Blackberry's proprietary communications protocols because the Blackberry server requires an unusual level of access inside of a corporate network: the server must be run inside a company's network firewall and on a Windows machine that is granted full and direct administrative access to the customer's internal e-mail server.
And RIM thought this was a good idea because...? It's like building a 50-ft high wall around the castle, then creating a hole for an 8-lane superhighway to pass through. Imagine the enterprising and inventive hacker that can plant a zombie process on that machine. Talk about spam! Imagine if a Fortune 500 company starts getting nipped because their email servers are dumping spam on the unsuspecting public. Lawsuits for everyone!!
Of course they don't. They're busy trying to capitalize off the explosion in patents. They'd hate for the process to become fair and reasonable, because then the number of numbskulls they could charge $2000 for their services would dry up and they's have to go back to their paper routes.
It's always easier to pooh-pooh complaints about a problem when you're helping to create the problem.