It's really not a bad idea at all even with the time lag. But I suspect that it doesn't waste enough money or risk enough lives unnecessarily to appeal to the space cadets who make funding decisions.
***Drugs, i.e. medicines, are highly regulated for efficacy & safety. The US FDA tests drugs and passes that cost onto the manufacturer, who passes it onto the patient (consumer). Once the Chinese & Indian consumers get the off-patent versions, years of data show the drugs to be safe, which lowers insurance costs to the manufacturer.***
Very plausible, but not actually correct I think. The FDA does not test drugs. The pharmaceutical companies test the drugs then try to persuade the FDA and it's overseas equivalents like the EMA (European Medicines Agency) to approve the drugs. Costs are higher in the US than elsewhere where national health programs are able to negotiate reduced costs whereas our enlightened conservative lawmakers who are dumber than a sack of rocks think that the free market will somehow reduce costs without a comparable negotiating organization to represent 300,000,000 American consumers.
As far as I can tell drug makers don't buy liability insurance. They self insure. But it probably doesn't much matter. If the drug maker screws up badly enough to end up in court, somebody will pay, and eventually that's probably the greatest available fool -- the American consumer.
***So you don't understand what this update will do. You're also fucking retarded***
He merely read the article which you apparently didn't.
"As part of the floor-mat issue, they're offering to install a software update that would cause 'the brake pedal to take precedence over the gas pedal if both were pressed' or, as their latest notice states, 'would cut power to the engine if both pedals were pressed.'"
You might want to work on your reading comprehension. Until it improves, perhaps a bit of civility would be in order.
Now, if you want to argue that the patch ought to drop the engine back to idle while the brake is depressed, I think you may well be right. I wouldn't be surprised that the patch doesn't do exactly that unless there is some reason that would be a bad idea.
***Unpatched PCs are bad enough. If I can't go outside because of morons with unpatched cars, I will be very unhappy.***
Good thinking. If we brick all the Windows/Ubuntu PCs and all the Toyotas, the roads and intertubes will be free of congestion.
(But on the whole, I think I'd rather that my car wouldn't run than that the accelerator could override the brakes. OTOH, I very much doubt that is the case even without a patch).
***because of our placement in a Milankovitch Cycle so it would be very odd if temperature was not increasing like we are seeing.***
Sigh... Milankovitch cycles are real. They clearly affect climate at any given location. Plenty of evidence to support that. They do NOT affect total energy received from the sun over the course of the year which remains constant. Further, there is no agreement whatsoever amongst those who believe that the cycles nonetheless affect planetary temperature on exactly what the affect of Milankovitch changes are or where we are headed.
In general, malware can also run just fine from a user account. And there is also that privilege escalation thing.
What the Linux/Windows security model was originally designed to do was to keep non-malicious users out of each other's files. It's quite good at that... really it is. AFAICS, that's all it is good at.
On top of which -- and not cited by snopes -- many sources claim that the Romans didn't actually have war chariots in the years that most of those old roads were built. They did have chariots, but the chariots were uncommon and were ceremonial and racing vehicles. The claim is that the Romans found that chariots were difficult to manage in combat and about as likely to exit the field through the friendly forces as they were to engage the enemy.
More like. We know it's broken, but we can live with it. Why spend money and time on a replacement that is also broken and that may not be as easy to live with?
***What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired?***
I would imagine that in many cases, their question would be why YOU are still employed. They have computers. The computers do what is needed. They perceive that the IT industry -- much like American car manufacturers in the 1970s -- is creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that is little, if any, better than what they have. Change for the sake of change.
And they might be right. Refusal to engage in a Red Queen's Race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race) is not necessarily a sign of cluelessness. You might want to meditate during leisure moments about who here is actually clueless.
FYI, Cruise Missiles -- or the Tomahawk at least which is the one I'm familiar with -- are unmanned aircraft that fly at fairly high speed at very low altitude. I suspect your local police SWAT team could shoot one down if they knew where it was going to be at some time, and were waiting for it.
Not a good target for a laser I would think as the attacker will probably choose a route that makes maximum use of terrain features. The target won't be in sight very long -- by intent. And the laser's tracking will need to be able to slew very quickly.
***I like it more than the "missile defense shield", but only marginally.***
Yeah, pretty much.
Except that a missile defense shield built with current technology is pretty much useless against any opponent with any sophistication at all.
But this could be the precursor to a system that will -- after 20 or 30 years of additional hard work -- stand a reasonable chance of looking at cloud of warheads, tank fragments, decoys and lord know what else, and taking out the warheads before they reach their target.
***Some people may worry that a laser this powerful could be used to build some sort of spaced-based precision bomber.***
Rather the reverse doncha think? Might be a dandy tool for shooting holes in space-based military systems.
There's a difference between controlling the high ground and climbing a tree. It's always seemed to me that putting weapons in space was sort of the equivalent of climbing a tree with a sack full of grenades then watching a tank haul over the horizon with a large chain saw mounted on the front.
Probably a fear that someone will find a bug that causes the password or information appended to it treated as a command to some subsystem. Isn't that sort of "no problem, it's just data, it can't do any harm" thinking, the fulcrum for a lot of attacks?
Ah come on. The 9.04 Ubuntu upgrade about four months ago -- Krackpot Kingfisher or some such -- did pretty much the same damn thing to a number of people. And some of the problems weren't especially easy to fix. (You ever tried booting a Linux PC with an empty menu.lst file and no kernel? Not as easy as you probably think) The major differences would be that Ubuntu users didn't pay money for the privilege of having their PC bricked. And that repairing a Unix PC is generally less painful than repairing a Windows PC.
The problem is that it is quite impossible to test updates against every possible hardware and software configuration that might be in use. I'm sure that Microsoft and Canonical try and try hard. But impossible means just that -- impossible.
The lessons, of course, are don't install updates until a few days after they are released, make sure that you have bootable media for your OS (if possible), and back up frequently. I learned that in 1963. Other people have been learning it ever since.
This incident, BTW, is a warning. It is highly likely if not inevitable that sooner or later the Windows automatic update mechanism is going to shut down much of the world's infrastructure either because the kids in Redmond have screwed up, or because some sociopaths somewhere in Eurasia have hijacked the update mechanism and used to to download something really grim, or because some country that the Western powers are trying to bully decides to retaliate.
*** *sigh* no - my technical blog still gets 40% of its traffic from old outdated browsers ***
If your web site is there to deliver technical content, why do you care what browsers are used to access it? Write simple web pages that comply with HTML 4.01 Transitional. Feed them through the W3C Validator before posting them. And possibly everyone will be happy?
Yes, I understand that not everyone lives in a world that can work like that, but I should think that many -- probably most -- people do. Why are they working so hard to make their world more painful for themselves and their users?
***This very page on ask.slashdot.org/comments faisl W3C Markup Validation Service with 23 errors, 5 warnings comparing it to HTML 4.01 Transitional. More failures if you move to strict as well.... Slashdot's code was written in perl probably before HTML4 came. Given perl's notoriously difficult maintainability, the coders would have been reluctant to adapt to HTML4.***
No problem with that. But if that's really the case, why does the DOCTYPE on the web page say ?
I very much doubt that "HTML4.01 Strict" compliance was ever an objective of the Slashdot designers at any point.
Shouldn't pick on Slashdot actually. I can't recall any major website that I've fed to the W3C validator that was actually standards compliant. At least Slashdot works pretty well with most browsers.
***Agreed. This is why browser sniffing is bad. Just design it to be standards compliant***
You reckon that the folks who design web sites are even aware that there are standards for HTML? I've never seen much sign of it.
Other than that, you are 100% correct and will continue to be 98% ignored, because doing things in the usual bizarre, gonzo fashion seems to be ever so much fun.
Unfortunately, I have no mod points today.
Well, actually, it wouldn't help if I did have mod points because Slashdot's mod point system is not compatible with Konqueror 3.5.9. I wonder why?
*** Markup Validation Service Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, ) of Web documents Jump To:
Validation Output
Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Strict! Result: 64 Errors, 2 warning(s) Address: http://slashdot.org/ Encoding: iso-8859-1(detect automatically) Doctype: HTML 4.01 StrictInline Root Element: HTML
***for the times you run out of power and can find AA batteries but not an outlet?***
More for the times you left the charger in Dayton, or the charger pins don't match the wall plug, or the $#@(*& charger just won't work for no very obvious reason. You really can get AA cells just about anywhere.
For me in konqueror, the site rendered in text that was overwritten in a few seconds by a pure black page with a couple of itsy white boxes with green text which then morphed into a pure featureless white page with no scrollbars. Does that count as "bogus and/or spam?"
***The reason they have this requirement is that they don't actually print faxes...***
This would imply that the USPTO actually reads applications before granting patents. Can you point to any evidence that would support this quite unlikely hypothesis?
My wife's eee PC plays DVDs from a USB drive just fine... now.
The problem: Incredibly, #@&$*( Windows Media Player on the eee PC not only doesn't have a DVD codec installed, it's not dead easy to install one. After a couple of hours of fumbling, plan D or E -- I forget which -- came thru. I managed to get Media Player Classic downloaded, installed and working.
The difference between getting stuff to work on Windows and on Linux get smaller every day. That's not necessarily because Linux is improving (although it is, of course).
***Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.***
Naw. Returning to the moon, while feasible, is pointless, and the chances that you were going to get to Mars were pretty close to nil. That's my idea of a boondoggle... if not yours. If you ask me, the US manned space program has been stuck on a wrong track for four decades. First, you learn to build cheap reliable transport -- which may take half a century or more. Then, and only then, do you start seriously putting people into space.
This test, on the other hand is a test of a DEFENSIVE system, not another tool for getting into trouble. As a result of stuff I did many years ago in another life, I actually knew something about this stuff at one time. I personally think that it is probably impossible to build an effective anti-missile system -- at least for use against significant opponents. It's simply cheaper for the guys building the missiles (them) to create and deploy countermeasures than it is for the defenders (us) to overcome the countermeasures.
But we don't know that for sure if that's true if we don't do our R&D. And that's what this is -- Research and Development.
What is a boondogle IMHO is the Bush administration initiated deployment of "operational" anti-missile systems that almost certainly would not work worth a damn if called into action. If you ask me (and no one did or will), that never even rose to the level of stupid.
***Of course, you can say the same thing about electronic interconnects, considering that they seem to work just peachy fine...***
I take it that you have never heard of Lucas Engineering -- motto purportedly "get home before dark" http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html... nor owned a 1995 Dodge Neon -- a vehicle where every electrical connector was suspect.
***Don't you think that companies like BP and such will embrace this to make oil cheaper ? Oil is not just used for energy, there are other major uses:***
By the time this results in practical generation facilities, oil will almost certainly be both scarce compared to the number of people that "need" (i.e. want) it and expensive.
BP, Esso, et al know that. Unlike our politicians, auto makers, economists and planners, the oil companies deal in long term realities. Probably BP will own large chunks of the engineering, construction, operating and distribution companies that handle fusion power.... assuming that fusion power ever turns out to be commercially viable.
I'm fine with that BTW. All I really want to see is enough rational conduct in the system to ensure stability.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really not a bad idea at all even with the time lag. But I suspect that it doesn't waste enough money or risk enough lives unnecessarily to appeal to the space cadets who make funding decisions.
***Drugs, i.e. medicines, are highly regulated for efficacy & safety. The US FDA tests drugs and passes that cost onto the manufacturer, who passes it onto the patient (consumer). Once the Chinese & Indian consumers get the off-patent versions, years of data show the drugs to be safe, which lowers insurance costs to the manufacturer.***
Very plausible, but not actually correct I think. The FDA does not test drugs. The pharmaceutical companies test the drugs then try to persuade the FDA and it's overseas equivalents like the EMA (European Medicines Agency) to approve the drugs. Costs are higher in the US than elsewhere where national health programs are able to negotiate reduced costs whereas our enlightened conservative lawmakers who are dumber than a sack of rocks think that the free market will somehow reduce costs without a comparable negotiating organization to represent 300,000,000 American consumers.
As far as I can tell drug makers don't buy liability insurance. They self insure. But it probably doesn't much matter. If the drug maker screws up badly enough to end up in court, somebody will pay, and eventually that's probably the greatest available fool -- the American consumer.
What's a Java? Does it bite? Is it housebroken?
***So you don't understand what this update will do. You're also fucking retarded***
He merely read the article which you apparently didn't.
"As part of the floor-mat issue, they're offering to install a software update that would cause 'the brake pedal to take precedence over the gas pedal if both were pressed' or, as their latest notice states, 'would cut power to the engine if both pedals were pressed.'"
You might want to work on your reading comprehension. Until it improves, perhaps a bit of civility would be in order.
Now, if you want to argue that the patch ought to drop the engine back to idle while the brake is depressed, I think you may well be right. I wouldn't be surprised that the patch doesn't do exactly that unless there is some reason that would be a bad idea.
***Unpatched PCs are bad enough. If I can't go outside because of morons with unpatched cars, I will be very unhappy.***
Good thinking. If we brick all the Windows/Ubuntu PCs and all the Toyotas, the roads and intertubes will be free of congestion.
(But on the whole, I think I'd rather that my car wouldn't run than that the accelerator could override the brakes. OTOH, I very much doubt that is the case even without a patch).
***because of our placement in a Milankovitch Cycle so it would be very odd if temperature was not increasing like we are seeing.***
Sigh ... Milankovitch cycles are real. They clearly affect climate at any given location. Plenty of evidence to support that. They do NOT affect total energy received from the sun over the course of the year which remains constant. Further, there is no agreement whatsoever amongst those who believe that the cycles nonetheless affect planetary temperature on exactly what the affect of Milankovitch changes are or where we are headed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Present_and_future_conditions
In general, malware can also run just fine from a user account. And there is also that privilege escalation thing.
What the Linux/Windows security model was originally designed to do was to keep non-malicious users out of each other's files. It's quite good at that ... really it is. AFAICS, that's all it is good at.
On top of which -- and not cited by snopes -- many sources claim that the Romans didn't actually have war chariots in the years that most of those old roads were built. They did have chariots, but the chariots were uncommon and were ceremonial and racing vehicles. The claim is that the Romans found that chariots were difficult to manage in combat and about as likely to exit the field through the friendly forces as they were to engage the enemy.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_did_the_Romans_use_chariots_for
***if not broken, do not fix?***
More like. We know it's broken, but we can live with it. Why spend money and time on a replacement that is also broken and that may not be as easy to live with?
***What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired?***
I would imagine that in many cases, their question would be why YOU are still employed. They have computers. The computers do what is needed. They perceive that the IT industry -- much like American car manufacturers in the 1970s -- is creating expensive and poorly crafted junk that is little, if any, better than what they have. Change for the sake of change.
And they might be right. Refusal to engage in a Red Queen's Race (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen's_race) is not necessarily a sign of cluelessness. You might want to meditate during leisure moments about who here is actually clueless.
FYI, Cruise Missiles -- or the Tomahawk at least which is the one I'm familiar with -- are unmanned aircraft that fly at fairly high speed at very low altitude. I suspect your local police SWAT team could shoot one down if they knew where it was going to be at some time, and were waiting for it.
Not a good target for a laser I would think as the attacker will probably choose a route that makes maximum use of terrain features. The target won't be in sight very long -- by intent. And the laser's tracking will need to be able to slew very quickly.
***I like it more than the "missile defense shield", but only marginally.***
Yeah, pretty much.
Except that a missile defense shield built with current technology is pretty much useless against any opponent with any sophistication at all.
But this could be the precursor to a system that will -- after 20 or 30 years of additional hard work -- stand a reasonable chance of looking at cloud of warheads, tank fragments, decoys and lord know what else, and taking out the warheads before they reach their target.
***Some people may worry that a laser this powerful could be used to build some sort of spaced-based precision bomber.***
Rather the reverse doncha think? Might be a dandy tool for shooting holes in space-based military systems.
There's a difference between controlling the high ground and climbing a tree. It's always seemed to me that putting weapons in space was sort of the equivalent of climbing a tree with a sack full of grenades then watching a tank haul over the horizon with a large chain saw mounted on the front.
***I can't think of a single valid reason why***
Probably a fear that someone will find a bug that causes the password or information appended to it treated as a command to some subsystem. Isn't that sort of "no problem, it's just data, it can't do any harm" thinking, the fulcrum for a lot of attacks?
***Install Ubuntu and live problem free***
Ah come on. The 9.04 Ubuntu upgrade about four months ago -- Krackpot Kingfisher or some such -- did pretty much the same damn thing to a number of people. And some of the problems weren't especially easy to fix. (You ever tried booting a Linux PC with an empty menu.lst file and no kernel? Not as easy as you probably think) The major differences would be that Ubuntu users didn't pay money for the privilege of having their PC bricked. And that repairing a Unix PC is generally less painful than repairing a Windows PC.
The problem is that it is quite impossible to test updates against every possible hardware and software configuration that might be in use. I'm sure that Microsoft and Canonical try and try hard. But impossible means just that -- impossible.
The lessons, of course, are don't install updates until a few days after they are released, make sure that you have bootable media for your OS (if possible), and back up frequently. I learned that in 1963. Other people have been learning it ever since.
This incident, BTW, is a warning. It is highly likely if not inevitable that sooner or later the Windows automatic update mechanism is going to shut down much of the world's infrastructure either because the kids in Redmond have screwed up, or because some sociopaths somewhere in Eurasia have hijacked the update mechanism and used to to download something really grim, or because some country that the Western powers are trying to bully decides to retaliate.
*** *sigh* no - my technical blog still gets 40% of its traffic from old outdated browsers ***
If your web site is there to deliver technical content, why do you care what browsers are used to access it? Write simple web pages that comply with HTML 4.01 Transitional. Feed them through the W3C Validator before posting them. And possibly everyone will be happy?
Yes, I understand that not everyone lives in a world that can work like that, but I should think that many -- probably most -- people do. Why are they working so hard to make their world more painful for themselves and their users?
***This very page on ask.slashdot.org/comments faisl W3C Markup Validation Service with 23 errors, 5 warnings comparing it to HTML 4.01 Transitional. More failures if you move to strict as well. ...
Slashdot's code was written in perl probably before HTML4 came. Given perl's notoriously difficult maintainability, the coders would have been reluctant to adapt to HTML4.***
No problem with that. But if that's really the case, why does the DOCTYPE on the web page say ?
I very much doubt that "HTML4.01 Strict" compliance was ever an objective of the Slashdot designers at any point.
Shouldn't pick on Slashdot actually. I can't recall any major website that I've fed to the W3C validator that was actually standards compliant. At least Slashdot works pretty well with most browsers.
***Agreed. This is why browser sniffing is bad. Just design it to be standards compliant***
You reckon that the folks who design web sites are even aware that there are standards for HTML? I've never seen much sign of it.
Other than that, you are 100% correct and will continue to be 98% ignored, because doing things in the usual bizarre, gonzo fashion seems to be ever so much fun.
Unfortunately, I have no mod points today.
Well, actually, it wouldn't help if I did have mod points because Slashdot's mod point system is not compatible with Konqueror 3.5.9. I wonder why?
***
Markup Validation Service
Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, ) of Web documents
Jump To:
Validation Output
Errors found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Strict!
Result: 64 Errors, 2 warning(s)
Address: http://slashdot.org/
Encoding: iso-8859-1(detect automatically)
Doctype: HTML 4.01 StrictInline
Root Element: HTML
***for the times you run out of power and can find AA batteries but not an outlet?***
More for the times you left the charger in Dayton, or the charger pins don't match the wall plug, or the $#@(*& charger just won't work for no very obvious reason. You really can get AA cells just about anywhere.
For me in konqueror, the site rendered in text that was overwritten in a few seconds by a pure black page with a couple of itsy white boxes with green text which then morphed into a pure featureless white page with no scrollbars. Does that count as "bogus and/or spam?"
***The reason they have this requirement is that they don't actually print faxes...***
This would imply that the USPTO actually reads applications before granting patents. Can you point to any evidence that would support this quite unlikely hypothesis?
My wife's eee PC plays DVDs from a USB drive just fine ... now.
The problem: Incredibly, #@&$*( Windows Media Player on the eee PC not only doesn't have a DVD codec installed, it's not dead easy to install one. After a couple of hours of fumbling, plan D or E -- I forget which -- came thru. I managed to get Media Player Classic downloaded, installed and working.
The difference between getting stuff to work on Windows and on Linux get smaller every day. That's not necessarily because Linux is improving (although it is, of course).
***Maybe if the US stopped wasting money on boondoggles like this, they wouldn't have had to cancel plans to return to the Moon.***
Naw. Returning to the moon, while feasible, is pointless, and the chances that you were going to get to Mars were pretty close to nil. That's my idea of a boondoggle ... if not yours. If you ask me, the US manned space program has been stuck on a wrong track for four decades. First, you learn to build cheap reliable transport -- which may take half a century or more. Then, and only then, do you start seriously putting people into space.
This test, on the other hand is a test of a DEFENSIVE system, not another tool for getting into trouble. As a result of stuff I did many years ago in another life, I actually knew something about this stuff at one time. I personally think that it is probably impossible to build an effective anti-missile system -- at least for use against significant opponents. It's simply cheaper for the guys building the missiles (them) to create and deploy countermeasures than it is for the defenders (us) to overcome the countermeasures.
But we don't know that for sure if that's true if we don't do our R&D. And that's what this is -- Research and Development.
What is a boondogle IMHO is the Bush administration initiated deployment of "operational" anti-missile systems that almost certainly would not work worth a damn if called into action. If you ask me (and no one did or will), that never even rose to the level of stupid.
***Of course, you can say the same thing about electronic interconnects, considering that they seem to work just peachy fine ...***
I take it that you have never heard of Lucas Engineering -- motto purportedly "get home before dark" http://www.mez.co.uk/lucas.html ... nor owned a 1995 Dodge Neon -- a vehicle where every electrical connector was suspect.
***Don't you think that companies like BP and such will embrace this to make oil cheaper ? Oil is not just used for energy, there are other major uses :***
By the time this results in practical generation facilities, oil will almost certainly be both scarce compared to the number of people that "need" (i.e. want) it and expensive.
BP, Esso, et al know that. Unlike our politicians, auto makers, economists and planners, the oil companies deal in long term realities. Probably BP will own large chunks of the engineering, construction, operating and distribution companies that handle fusion power. ... assuming that fusion power ever turns out to be commercially viable.
I'm fine with that BTW. All I really want to see is enough rational conduct in the system to ensure stability.