I am unsure about your reasoning regarding the effect of airplanes, seems like there are many dots missing. Firstly, link about the temperature drop from no aircraft? That is curious and I wonder if it has a much greater effect because of the altitude at which the gases are released (though the long-term result may be the same despite the immediate evidence, that is all the ground level gas released is just as damaging as that from the airplanes).
Secondly, What is the effect of noctilucent clouds on on our atmosphere? Is it clear? Could they be protecting us/earth from some solar radiation? Or are they having the opposite effect (increasing the greenhouse-effect, and/or reflecting more solar radiation into our atmosphere)?
Idea: Nanoparticles (or other charged dust) blasted beyond the stratosphere that we can control! Keep it where it can block the sun, occasionally produce festive light shows, and keep the alien's from reading our collective thoughts!
His device clearly works but I think he just couldn't figure out how it worked and just came up with the clearly bogus colliding "alcohol molecules explanation."
The real way it works, clearly, is that the aging device is a time-machine! It's quite normal for discoveries to be the unexpected reward for inventiveness and research in sometimes completely unrelated fields.
Logic is subjective. Or maybe you'd just prefer me using the term "rational" instead. Either way it's just my own reasoning. Mathematically it might not compute, but like you pointed out we do many things that don't make logical or mathematical sense.
See now, here's where I lost your post. You claim that one in a kazillion or two in a kazillion doesn't matter. Yet the very first thing you talked about is making the most of that one kazillionth. You don't care about kazillionths, but you care about fractions of kazillionths?
One in a kazillion I think matters because it's not zero. Two in a kazillion I think only matters as much as one in a kazillion, because again it's not zero. The only thing that matters logically to me is the difference between having a chance to win and not having a chance to win.
You're missing another important aspect of the lottery in your reasoning. The money made from the lottery goes back to the cities. So it's not just $1 wasted, it's $1 contributed to the city (minus the operating expenses of course).
While you're dollar sits in the bank, the $5 I spend per year on playing the lottery (when jackpots get huge) will go to the city as well as giving me 5 chances to win huge and do good things with the money. What are the odds of you making a ton of money that you can put to good philanthropic causes? Probably much bigger than mine but probably still statistically insignificant.
While individual rich people can help many by tossing their money at projects, distributed funding methods have proven extremely effective as well. The only problem is that they only tend to work at times of crisis where sometimes it's too late (I'm talking both about non-profit/small businesses as well as natural disasters). An easy way for many people to donate small amounts of money, especially on a monthly basis, might be more reliable... searching google revealed some begging sites though, perhaps Dunc could post a page for donations there... "Open-source operating system project managers must pay bills while saving world from..."
As for the lottery, my friend calls it a tax on the mathematically challenged. We'll see what he says after I win.
Buying a single ticket is logically worth it, especially if picking numbers that will have a higher return (less likely to have multiple winners). $1 for a chance to win huge! There's a bigger difference between a zero probability and nearly zero probability than there is between nearly zero and nearly zero. It's the people who buy more than $1 that I can't really understand. That's my logic and I'm sticking to it.
I also pledge to Dunc some OS devs/pm's if I win the lotto.
They've done enough testing to release it to the government, I'd think that it would be ready for a public beta too. There isn't a place to sign-up to test the plug-in? I just don't see a reason for withholding from the public, especially just for testing purposes.
It's unwise to get uppity about how "MY system can't possibly have that problem!"
Where did I get uppity? I stated that there might be bugs in any program, though I'd make the case that security software should be held to higher standards because of the risk of bugs having greater consequences.
AVG is superior because it detects infected files and removes them, and is simple to set up, update, and remove. Have you used the latest McAfee offerings for personal computers? Serious pain in the butt, especially if you "upgrade" or start with their on-line version.
I speak almost exclusively from experience. I haven't looked through the business methodologies of the companies, I haven't looked through their code (nor would I know what to look for even if I could). I fix computers, a lot of them. And many times I've had to fix computers that would have been fine had they not been running McAfee's or Norton's A-V/security software, and instead been running AVG or other non-free ones like Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Pandasoft, AntiVir... ). I've never had complaints about AVG. Does it keep computers safer? I think so, because it works... The only times I see it get out of date is when somebodies internet isn't working. McAfee I see out of date all the time because it expires, or was never registered when somebody bought a computer with it. And the computers that I see infected... a few didn't have A/V installed, but the vast majority either had Norton or McAfee installed and either expired or broken.
The only reason McAfee has such a large customer base is because their software is bundled with so many computers and they are a name brand. It's not because they keep computers safer from viruses than their competitors.
I don't know exactly how much you're defending McAfee. You're right about the risk of Malware though. It's more significant than viral risks, and all this A/V software doesn't do anything against it. And some malware is designed to compromise A/V software and usher in viruses.
Just noticed the screenshot on the McAfee page for W95/CTX. It shows some dlls from the Ethereal program as being infected. Of course those files are in their complete list of affected files, which comes in a convenient easily accesible PDF file as all the most important documents on the web should. It's 7 pages long, but an amusing list to skim through.
Who uses Ethereal and McAfee? Just found that funny/ironic on some levels.
This is no reason to NOT use anti-virus. You can have an anti-virus program that doesn't screw up your computer with updates. As previously mentioned AVG is one of them. But like a lot of other software there might be occasional bugs, but they shouldn't delete files. You don't have to go with a crappy product by McAfee or Symantec, besides free A/V software there is a lot of quality software you can pay for.
It's naive not to run anti-virus software. For people like me it's not about constant protection from my safe computer using habits. It's for that really tiny chance that something gets by. Not only is it important to have, it's also useless if not kept upto date. New virus attacks are designed to get on a system in the narrow window between virus release and A/V definition updates.
On a different note, another thing to be wary of when useing McAfee... losing internet access. On several occassions I've gone to clients and discovered that either a) McAfee firewall has decided to block Internet Explorer's access to the internet, or b) McAfee is broken and you can't change the firewall settings and manually removing it is the way to get the internet working again. Similar things happen with the Norton Internet Security package, though McAfee's, as hard as it is to believe, is worse.
Not only do these companies break their customers computers (which I get paid to fix as an independent PC Tech), they also provide crappy or non-existent phone "support." Apparently, nowhere in their manual does it say "Prior to rebooting, uninstall McAfee products."
Symantec is hardly a trusted objective source of security information. For them it's all about fear factor. Now with the two articles combined they paint both browsers as being unsecure.
A trusted source would say:
Keep computer upto date.
Use Firefox as default browser.
Don't trust any ads, pop-ups, or unexpected e-mails.
Don't install every free screensaver you run across (or other stupid games/junk you might download)
Keep your A/V software upto date. (And use something better, cheaper, and faster than Norton/McAfee like AVG.
But if Symantec said do these 5 simple things, and make sure your kids can do these 5 simple things (or keep them off computer), then they'd be undermining the fear factor they count on to sell their bloated POS products (their corp. products don't seem that bad though.) Symantecs software will NOT keep a computer clean if the people using it don't use safe computing practices. At least Dell stopped bundling exclusively Symantec and McAfee products, should save people some grief from having their security software breaking their computers.
Firstly, since my post ended up a bit long, I wanted to plug the movie Primer. Best sci-fi film made in a long time, doesn't pander to the audience at all. I think most on Slashdot will love it, despite the measly $7K it cost.... And now with the rest of the story:
Perhaps people would go to theaters more regularly if:
a) It wasn't so expensive.
b) The movie-going experience was more rewarding.
The cost of going out to a movie makes it difficult for the industry to compete with cheaper alternatives. The reward of seeing the movie needs to justify the cost; with todays movies it's rarely the case. Because people see so few movies in theaters, they usually choose to see the biggest movie out. Many of the quality movies get overlooked.
There are also fewer "easy yet rewarding" movies. Those that are accessible and enjoyable by all, yet aren't cheap comedies, dramas, horrors, or remakes. Directors used to make a few movies every year. Quality isn't about the movies needing to be films, they don't need to raise questions or be difficult to understand. Quality is just about them being entertaining and capturing the human imagination (The difference between episods 4-6 vs. 1-3).
Lucas is right, but I think for the wrong reasons. The poster that said King Kong failed because the studio couldn't pull in the reigns on Jackson is right on. It could have been a beautifully re-imagined version of the original, but instead has much directorial masturbation that dilutes the story.
It's not that quality movies aren't being made, it's that they are overlooked. That will change as the big studios get behind more of the small quality films. I think it's a similar trend that's happening in music and radio as well, as the large corporations realize the value in trying to sell quality products rather than market crappy products to death.
Primer
Google hasn't parsed Snow Crash yet?
If I recall, it's been a while for me too [since reading the book], you are correct. There was some derogatory word for people who were "reporters." They basically were walking computers recording everything in hopes of stumbling upon something sellable.
Precisely, they could opt out by by saying nobody is allowed to quote their articles.
I doubt any paper would choose to opt out of it. This is just a struggling entity flailing around for something to hold onto. It's just them fearing the new technology and therefore fighting against it...
(This is my first post on slashdot from a linux machine, it feels like a significant step for me).
There would be if people installed them, did not run the memory resident protection, and did not have it startup on boot (applies to some).
I'm not defending that review at all, it's aweful. Just saying that you could have the various scans installed without affecting performance, and just run the scans on an on-demand basis.
They don't mention what they infected the computers with or whether they ran a full scan with ad-aware, which would find more things likely. They also value detection over ability to remove the infection, which is understandable but only mildly forgiveable.
I can understand that they are looking at a corporate environment, but in a corporate environment with 150+ windows 2000 machines you'd think they'd have preventative measures in place and more security. I wouldn't let any user install anything on their machines and require going through IT to do it. Why spend all that money on spyware cleaning tools when it'd be more effective to setup a domain server.
As for the home... in a home or small office environment the computers tend to get so infected that they call when they can't get online, their browser gets hijacked, or windows doesn't boot. Running each and every one of those scans isn't going to fix it or even detect the culprit. It will involve lots of manual work and ingenuity, but in that situation it's faster and and better just to backup and reformat.
It's really not that hard to prevent infections nowadays, just need to be told what not to do. An anti-spyware program that will warn you of changes to startup items or new registry entries will NOT save you though. It might help but if you're doing stuff that constantly pop-ups warnings, it's inevitable you're going to get infected anyway.
It annoys me to no end when they completely neglect prevention and instead go for treating the symptoms. It's irresponsible, it's ineffective, and it's just to sell products. And I'll stop myself from going on a further rant in my first Slashdot response.
Slashdot Mirror
I am unsure about your reasoning regarding the effect of airplanes, seems like there are many dots missing. Firstly, link about the temperature drop from no aircraft? That is curious and I wonder if it has a much greater effect because of the altitude at which the gases are released (though the long-term result may be the same despite the immediate evidence, that is all the ground level gas released is just as damaging as that from the airplanes).
Secondly, What is the effect of noctilucent clouds on on our atmosphere? Is it clear? Could they be protecting us/earth from some solar radiation? Or are they having the opposite effect (increasing the greenhouse-effect, and/or reflecting more solar radiation into our atmosphere)?
Idea: Nanoparticles (or other charged dust) blasted beyond the stratosphere that we can control! Keep it where it can block the sun, occasionally produce festive light shows, and keep the alien's from reading our collective thoughts!
His device clearly works but I think he just couldn't figure out how it worked and just came up with the clearly bogus colliding "alcohol molecules explanation." The real way it works, clearly, is that the aging device is a time-machine! It's quite normal for discoveries to be the unexpected reward for inventiveness and research in sometimes completely unrelated fields.
Logic is subjective. Or maybe you'd just prefer me using the term "rational" instead. Either way it's just my own reasoning. Mathematically it might not compute, but like you pointed out we do many things that don't make logical or mathematical sense.
See now, here's where I lost your post. You claim that one in a kazillion or two in a kazillion doesn't matter. Yet the very first thing you talked about is making the most of that one kazillionth. You don't care about kazillionths, but you care about fractions of kazillionths?
One in a kazillion I think matters because it's not zero. Two in a kazillion I think only matters as much as one in a kazillion, because again it's not zero. The only thing that matters logically to me is the difference between having a chance to win and not having a chance to win.
You're missing another important aspect of the lottery in your reasoning. The money made from the lottery goes back to the cities. So it's not just $1 wasted, it's $1 contributed to the city (minus the operating expenses of course).
While you're dollar sits in the bank, the $5 I spend per year on playing the lottery (when jackpots get huge) will go to the city as well as giving me 5 chances to win huge and do good things with the money. What are the odds of you making a ton of money that you can put to good philanthropic causes? Probably much bigger than mine but probably still statistically insignificant.
While individual rich people can help many by tossing their money at projects, distributed funding methods have proven extremely effective as well. The only problem is that they only tend to work at times of crisis where sometimes it's too late (I'm talking both about non-profit/small businesses as well as natural disasters). An easy way for many people to donate small amounts of money, especially on a monthly basis, might be more reliable... searching google revealed some begging sites though, perhaps Dunc could post a page for donations there... "Open-source operating system project managers must pay bills while saving world from..."
As for the lottery, my friend calls it a tax on the mathematically challenged. We'll see what he says after I win.
Buying a single ticket is logically worth it, especially if picking numbers that will have a higher return (less likely to have multiple winners). $1 for a chance to win huge! There's a bigger difference between a zero probability and nearly zero probability than there is between nearly zero and nearly zero. It's the people who buy more than $1 that I can't really understand. That's my logic and I'm sticking to it.
I also pledge to Dunc some OS devs/pm's if I win the lotto.
They've done enough testing to release it to the government, I'd think that it would be ready for a public beta too. There isn't a place to sign-up to test the plug-in? I just don't see a reason for withholding from the public, especially just for testing purposes.
Maybe I can help. My AIM is in my info. If no AIM installed, try meebo.com .
It's unwise to get uppity about how "MY system can't possibly have that problem!" Where did I get uppity? I stated that there might be bugs in any program, though I'd make the case that security software should be held to higher standards because of the risk of bugs having greater consequences.
AVG is superior because it detects infected files and removes them, and is simple to set up, update, and remove. Have you used the latest McAfee offerings for personal computers? Serious pain in the butt, especially if you "upgrade" or start with their on-line version.
I speak almost exclusively from experience. I haven't looked through the business methodologies of the companies, I haven't looked through their code (nor would I know what to look for even if I could). I fix computers, a lot of them. And many times I've had to fix computers that would have been fine had they not been running McAfee's or Norton's A-V/security software, and instead been running AVG or other non-free ones like Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Pandasoft, AntiVir... ). I've never had complaints about AVG. Does it keep computers safer? I think so, because it works... The only times I see it get out of date is when somebodies internet isn't working. McAfee I see out of date all the time because it expires, or was never registered when somebody bought a computer with it. And the computers that I see infected... a few didn't have A/V installed, but the vast majority either had Norton or McAfee installed and either expired or broken.
The only reason McAfee has such a large customer base is because their software is bundled with so many computers and they are a name brand. It's not because they keep computers safer from viruses than their competitors.
I don't know exactly how much you're defending McAfee. You're right about the risk of Malware though. It's more significant than viral risks, and all this A/V software doesn't do anything against it. And some malware is designed to compromise A/V software and usher in viruses.
Just noticed the screenshot on the McAfee page for W95/CTX. It shows some dlls from the Ethereal program as being infected. Of course those files are in their complete list of affected files, which comes in a convenient easily accesible PDF file as all the most important documents on the web should. It's 7 pages long, but an amusing list to skim through.
Who uses Ethereal and McAfee? Just found that funny/ironic on some levels.
This is no reason to NOT use anti-virus. You can have an anti-virus program that doesn't screw up your computer with updates. As previously mentioned AVG is one of them. But like a lot of other software there might be occasional bugs, but they shouldn't delete files. You don't have to go with a crappy product by McAfee or Symantec, besides free A/V software there is a lot of quality software you can pay for.
It's naive not to run anti-virus software. For people like me it's not about constant protection from my safe computer using habits. It's for that really tiny chance that something gets by. Not only is it important to have, it's also useless if not kept upto date. New virus attacks are designed to get on a system in the narrow window between virus release and A/V definition updates.
On a different note, another thing to be wary of when useing McAfee... losing internet access. On several occassions I've gone to clients and discovered that either a) McAfee firewall has decided to block Internet Explorer's access to the internet, or b) McAfee is broken and you can't change the firewall settings and manually removing it is the way to get the internet working again. Similar things happen with the Norton Internet Security package, though McAfee's, as hard as it is to believe, is worse.
Not only do these companies break their customers computers (which I get paid to fix as an independent PC Tech), they also provide crappy or non-existent phone "support." Apparently, nowhere in their manual does it say "Prior to rebooting, uninstall McAfee products."
A trusted source would say:
But if Symantec said do these 5 simple things, and make sure your kids can do these 5 simple things (or keep them off computer), then they'd be undermining the fear factor they count on to sell their bloated POS products (their corp. products don't seem that bad though.) Symantecs software will NOT keep a computer clean if the people using it don't use safe computing practices. At least Dell stopped bundling exclusively Symantec and McAfee products, should save people some grief from having their security software breaking their computers.
Firstly, since my post ended up a bit long, I wanted to plug the movie Primer. Best sci-fi film made in a long time, doesn't pander to the audience at all. I think most on Slashdot will love it, despite the measly $7K it cost.... And now with the rest of the story: Perhaps people would go to theaters more regularly if: a) It wasn't so expensive. b) The movie-going experience was more rewarding. The cost of going out to a movie makes it difficult for the industry to compete with cheaper alternatives. The reward of seeing the movie needs to justify the cost; with todays movies it's rarely the case. Because people see so few movies in theaters, they usually choose to see the biggest movie out. Many of the quality movies get overlooked. There are also fewer "easy yet rewarding" movies. Those that are accessible and enjoyable by all, yet aren't cheap comedies, dramas, horrors, or remakes. Directors used to make a few movies every year. Quality isn't about the movies needing to be films, they don't need to raise questions or be difficult to understand. Quality is just about them being entertaining and capturing the human imagination (The difference between episods 4-6 vs. 1-3). Lucas is right, but I think for the wrong reasons. The poster that said King Kong failed because the studio couldn't pull in the reigns on Jackson is right on. It could have been a beautifully re-imagined version of the original, but instead has much directorial masturbation that dilutes the story. It's not that quality movies aren't being made, it's that they are overlooked. That will change as the big studios get behind more of the small quality films. I think it's a similar trend that's happening in music and radio as well, as the large corporations realize the value in trying to sell quality products rather than market crappy products to death. Primer
Google hasn't parsed Snow Crash yet? If I recall, it's been a while for me too [since reading the book], you are correct. There was some derogatory word for people who were "reporters." They basically were walking computers recording everything in hopes of stumbling upon something sellable.
Precisely, they could opt out by by saying nobody is allowed to quote their articles. I doubt any paper would choose to opt out of it. This is just a struggling entity flailing around for something to hold onto. It's just them fearing the new technology and therefore fighting against it... (This is my first post on slashdot from a linux machine, it feels like a significant step for me).
There would be if people installed them, did not run the memory resident protection, and did not have it startup on boot (applies to some). I'm not defending that review at all, it's aweful. Just saying that you could have the various scans installed without affecting performance, and just run the scans on an on-demand basis.
They don't mention what they infected the computers with or whether they ran a full scan with ad-aware, which would find more things likely. They also value detection over ability to remove the infection, which is understandable but only mildly forgiveable.
I can understand that they are looking at a corporate environment, but in a corporate environment with 150+ windows 2000 machines you'd think they'd have preventative measures in place and more security. I wouldn't let any user install anything on their machines and require going through IT to do it. Why spend all that money on spyware cleaning tools when it'd be more effective to setup a domain server.
As for the home... in a home or small office environment the computers tend to get so infected that they call when they can't get online, their browser gets hijacked, or windows doesn't boot. Running each and every one of those scans isn't going to fix it or even detect the culprit. It will involve lots of manual work and ingenuity, but in that situation it's faster and and better just to backup and reformat.
It's really not that hard to prevent infections nowadays, just need to be told what not to do. An anti-spyware program that will warn you of changes to startup items or new registry entries will NOT save you though. It might help but if you're doing stuff that constantly pop-ups warnings, it's inevitable you're going to get infected anyway.
It annoys me to no end when they completely neglect prevention and instead go for treating the symptoms. It's irresponsible, it's ineffective, and it's just to sell products. And I'll stop myself from going on a further rant in my first Slashdot response.