I have tried to explain to my relatives and friends, with "real world" analogies. Like, "OK, the cable company says just leave the door unlocked, that way our tech can get in and install your new cable box and you dont have to house sit. Will you agree? Wont you feel outraged if all the merchants in town walk into your living room and paste their advertisement on your wall? Yes, security will entail some inconvences like staying at home and letting in the technician. But you would not leave the home unlocked, would you?"
The usual responses are that "You are exaggerating the dangers", and "I have nothing of value for anyone to steal in my computer" or "it is too complex to lock the machine down" or "I dont know how to lock the machine down" or "there are millions of people who dont lock their machine down, are they all fools and are you the only smart guy out there".
Their file sharing stops working. They call the tech. Some cousin of me from India walks them step-by-step to turn off the firewall in the router so that "he can come in and fix it", turns off the firewall in the machine, turns on remote assistance, fixes something and leaves. For the tech guy the metric is "minutes to solve the problem". Staying on line to turn back all the firewalls and turning off remote-assistances "does not pay". The machine gets pwend even before he is done and he recommends wiping the hard disk and restoring, wiping out everything the customer had in the disk.
It is a torture to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
These merchants, Netflix, Blockbuster and others signed with people with very low ethical standards. These spyware vendors install software without consent, fool people, irritate people with pop-ups etc. And these companies thought that is how they should get their customers. It should not surprise anyone, least of all these merchants, that the spyware vendors use every trick in the book and then some to cheat them and charge fees and commissions. Let them go bankrupt. Serves them right for providing food to these cockroaches.
No wonder SETI could not get any signal from them. They learnt their lessons. Last time they visited us on the Independance Day we uploaded a virus into their system. So they just set their modem "To ignore pings from the WAN side."
Usually when computers and numerical modeling techniques are used to understand and solve problems in sciences the term we use is computational. Using computers in fulid mechanics, it is computational fluid mechanics. Similarly there are computational electromagnetics, computational solid mechanics (usually finite element methods) computational geometry etc. So in that way, the correct term here would have been, "computational biology".
The military is designed to attack and subjugate an enemy. It is trained fundamentally to kill the enemies and destroy their country. Take a machine like that use to build a country? To build friendship and cooperation? What a stupid idea. Military is designed to inspire fear and respect, and may be hatred as a side effect. But dont blame the politicians. Blame the Generals. The way the admin thinks, "Someone has to do it. And we have only military over there. So let them do it".The Generals should have stood firm and said, "We are not trained to get municipal sewer system running. We are trained to bomb sewage treatment plants. Dont give this shitty job to us. Send someone else".
An officer is supposed to protect the soldiers under his command. It is the duty of the Generals to make sure that the job given to his division is within the capability of his troops. Just because the civilian authority orders "Find a cure for cancer", they should not embark on ordering their colnels and majors to mess with test tubes.
Serves me right for posting without even the summary carefully. Looks like there is incompetance even in the documentation process! Releasing docs without purging history. Wow! Bad Govt Agency! No ISO 9007 for you!
Very high competance and ability shown in the Documentation Process! Of course the what is documented might be fiascos, fumbles and general incompetance in other areas. But still it would qualify for the ISO 9007 (or whatever is their latest version) certification.
I am more likely to think of it as a PR stunt. If anyone votes against OOXML, they would issue press releases saying, "We voted for their standard, and they are voting against our standard". Lost in the argument would be the basic need to have just one standard.
But still, as long as customers dont know the difference between interoperability and "microsoft compatibility" they win these games. Sad.
Did not read the linked article. Seems to have been slashdotted. Wonder if he wrote, "I have a truly remarable solution for cosmology, unfortunately this website is too small to write down".
Mulla Aziz of the Northwest Frontier Province was invited to preside over a local football (soccer to us Americans) match. He was astounded to see all the players chasing a single ball. He thundered, "We, the citizens of Peshawar are not only rich and prosperous, we also value of tradition of treating our honoured guests with dignity and respect. I will not have my people or my guests fighting for a single ball. Give each of them, I command, a ball."
If each player modifies a multiplayer game so much who else will be able to play with them? Or would want to?
My guess is that it can overwrite protected system files, and gain kernel level privileges using this attack vector.
But it is a conjecture or speculation on your part. It is possible that MSFT has given more privileges to BITS over other parts and a privelege escalation vulnerability could be found in future. But as of now, malware using windows downloader is no different from malware using firefox, Infernal Exploder or plain vanilla ftp.
Well, have you whitelisted Firefox? Or do you click "allow" everytime you launch the browser? Looks like you
are paranoid enough to avoid trojans. But if you do get such a malware, and if it uses Firefox to download more stuff, would you blame Firefox?
Yes, it makes life a little easy for the hackers, after they have compromised your system. But all users whitelist their browsers in their firewall software to make outbound connections. So in what way is it more dangerous than the virus using IE (or Firefox for that matter) to download more bad stuff into the computer? Once the machine is compromised, it can use even ftp to download stuff. Dont blame ftp or Firefox or IE. Blame the OS that allows the machine to be compromised so easily.
Nielsen is biased. It will exaggerate the amount of TV watched. Most people turn the tv on in the morning only to catch the weather reports and let it run providing a general background noise.
The report you cited is from 2005.
Even if they are home by 8PM, they might not watch what the networks are pushing at 8PM. They might easily
watch the previous day's prime time show or a movie from the previous weekend. Channels like BBC, TVland, AMC, TCM run old classics in marathon sessions. "24 hours of Gunsmoke" etc. Some would rather store these marathons and watch then over next two weeks at 8PM instead of yet another inane gameshow. Tue, Not many would watch Gunsmoke. But there are hundreds of such niche shows, and each will have a small audience. They will fragment the audience.
Further, those who do really watch 8 hours of TV a day are gullible and could be persuaded to spend quite easily. But the problem is they tend to be poor and they dont have much of disposable income to spend.
Once DVRs, vTunes, video-podcasts and such things cherry pick the audience, what is left over could be as many as 100 million Americans. But collectively they would represent less 10% of the discretionary spending in the country. Pitching ads to them wont even cover the basic running costs of cable TV.
People still cling to the idea that you have to watch a stream in real time. That idea is as quaint as televison = three networks. People mostly watch about 10 to 15 hours of TV a week. Some more, some less. People who watch lots of TV tend to be poorer and have less disposable income. People who watch less than 10 hours a week would typically be willing to pay for the content to avoid commercials.
There is already enough capacity to stream in 15 hours worth of DVD quality TV over the course of one week to your hard disk over simple broadband. Of course this requires a little deliberate action and thinking about what you want to watch and what you dont want to. TV networks hate that idea, they would rather have you pick the remote surf and stumble on to their show and (hopefully) watch it. But the idea of a subscription service that works like podcasts makes so much sense, it would be impossible for cable/network TVs to fight it. Once the affluent people desert the cable/on-air networks, cable companies will go bankrupt and on-air TV will be like radio of today. Mainly low cost talk shows with 20-33% of the time spent on commercials.
The malicious websites just have to skip the malicious code when the user agent string is google crawler. Are they going to change the user agent string? Will it be considered pretexting (the euphemism for impersonating)?
Just give virtual punishment in a virtual court.
on
Is Virtual Rape a Crime?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
May be using virtual laws supported by virtual evidence, heard by a virtual judge...
Slashdotters, please dont get worked up.He knows it is a stupid thing to say to a tech savvy audience. He was talking to the chumps who paid big bucks to have their movies "protected by" the DRM. Some weasel clause in the contract would say something like, "while we dont guarantee that this mechanism will never be broken, all we promise to do is to take vigorous action". He will eventually argue that issuing such ridiculous statements constitutes vigorous action. That is all.
Having solved the problem of search, and providing a breakthrough product that has consciousness to what was previously mere series of tubes, now the National University of Ireland announced that it is going to solve world hunger next, may be in three months. Other projects in the pipeline includes cure for cancer and solving full Navier Stokes equation.
Nicoli Tesla (finally got the spelling right) experimented with wireless transmission of power. Jagdish Chandra Bose was working on wireless transmission of data. Tesla was into transmission of power. The key to transmit data was what Bose called "coherer" which is essentially a coil with a very precise resonating frequency. The second issue was an amplifier that would not distort the signal. Marconi saw Bose's coherer design and built his radio based on that. Bose remained in India in 1890s did not see the commercial potential or patent requirements. Bose did not build a commercial empire but he did more research and tele-collaborated with Einstein and published the famed Bose-Einstein statistics.
Coming to wireless transmission of power, the most significant thing was that the signal carries enough power to drive the device. (Kids build the "crystal radio sets" that run without any batteries purely on the transmitted power). So he did not have to invent an amplifier. Details of Tesla and his wireless power transmission can be seen in here
Slashdot Mirror
... that you must work to earn a living.
The usual responses are that "You are exaggerating the dangers", and "I have nothing of value for anyone to steal in my computer" or "it is too complex to lock the machine down" or "I dont know how to lock the machine down" or "there are millions of people who dont lock their machine down, are they all fools and are you the only smart guy out there".
Their file sharing stops working. They call the tech. Some cousin of me from India walks them step-by-step to turn off the firewall in the router so that "he can come in and fix it", turns off the firewall in the machine, turns on remote assistance, fixes something and leaves. For the tech guy the metric is "minutes to solve the problem". Staying on line to turn back all the firewalls and turning off remote-assistances "does not pay". The machine gets pwend even before he is done and he recommends wiping the hard disk and restoring, wiping out everything the customer had in the disk.
It is a torture to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.
These merchants, Netflix, Blockbuster and others signed with people with very low ethical standards. These spyware vendors install software without consent, fool people, irritate people with pop-ups etc. And these companies thought that is how they should get their customers. It should not surprise anyone, least of all these merchants, that the spyware vendors use every trick in the book and then some to cheat them and charge fees and commissions. Let them go bankrupt. Serves them right for providing food to these cockroaches.
No wonder SETI could not get any signal from them. They learnt their lessons. Last time they visited us on the Independance Day we uploaded a virus into their system. So they just set their modem "To ignore pings from the WAN side."
The cited Wikipedia article starts with an implication that bioinformatics and "computational biology" are synonymous.
Usually when computers and numerical modeling techniques are used to understand and solve problems in sciences the term we use is computational. Using computers in fulid mechanics, it is computational fluid mechanics. Similarly there are computational electromagnetics, computational solid mechanics (usually finite element methods) computational geometry etc. So in that way, the correct term here would have been, "computational biology".
An officer is supposed to protect the soldiers under his command. It is the duty of the Generals to make sure that the job given to his division is within the capability of his troops. Just because the civilian authority orders "Find a cure for cancer", they should not embark on ordering their colnels and majors to mess with test tubes.
Serves me right for posting without even the summary carefully. Looks like there is incompetance even in the documentation process! Releasing docs without purging history. Wow! Bad Govt Agency! No ISO 9007 for you!
Very high competance and ability shown in the Documentation Process! Of course the what is documented might be fiascos, fumbles and general incompetance in other areas. But still it would qualify for the ISO 9007 (or whatever is their latest version) certification.
Dont have the time to read all the cofig theories. Let me know when the guy on the grassy knoll is proved to be Arlene Specter.
It is too confusing everyone using the word standard to mean whatever they want. We need a standard definition of standard.
But still, as long as customers dont know the difference between interoperability and "microsoft compatibility" they win these games. Sad.
Did not read the linked article. Seems to have been slashdotted. Wonder if he wrote, "I have a truly remarable solution for cosmology, unfortunately this website is too small to write down".
If each player modifies a multiplayer game so much who else will be able to play with them? Or would want to?
But it is a conjecture or speculation on your part. It is possible that MSFT has given more privileges to BITS over other parts and a privelege escalation vulnerability could be found in future. But as of now, malware using windows downloader is no different from malware using firefox, Infernal Exploder or plain vanilla ftp.
Well, have you whitelisted Firefox? Or do you click "allow" everytime you launch the browser? Looks like you are paranoid enough to avoid trojans. But if you do get such a malware, and if it uses Firefox to download more stuff, would you blame Firefox?
Yes, it makes life a little easy for the hackers, after they have compromised your system. But all users whitelist their browsers in their firewall software to make outbound connections. So in what way is it more dangerous than the virus using IE (or Firefox for that matter) to download more bad stuff into the computer? Once the machine is compromised, it can use even ftp to download stuff. Dont blame ftp or Firefox or IE. Blame the OS that allows the machine to be compromised so easily.
The report you cited is from 2005.
Even if they are home by 8PM, they might not watch what the networks are pushing at 8PM. They might easily watch the previous day's prime time show or a movie from the previous weekend. Channels like BBC, TVland, AMC, TCM run old classics in marathon sessions. "24 hours of Gunsmoke" etc. Some would rather store these marathons and watch then over next two weeks at 8PM instead of yet another inane gameshow. Tue, Not many would watch Gunsmoke. But there are hundreds of such niche shows, and each will have a small audience. They will fragment the audience.
Further, those who do really watch 8 hours of TV a day are gullible and could be persuaded to spend quite easily. But the problem is they tend to be poor and they dont have much of disposable income to spend.
Once DVRs, vTunes, video-podcasts and such things cherry pick the audience, what is left over could be as many as 100 million Americans. But collectively they would represent less 10% of the discretionary spending in the country. Pitching ads to them wont even cover the basic running costs of cable TV.
Prius has bladdered fuel tank. So it clicks of + or - 0.5 gallons apart.
There is already enough capacity to stream in 15 hours worth of DVD quality TV over the course of one week to your hard disk over simple broadband. Of course this requires a little deliberate action and thinking about what you want to watch and what you dont want to. TV networks hate that idea, they would rather have you pick the remote surf and stumble on to their show and (hopefully) watch it. But the idea of a subscription service that works like podcasts makes so much sense, it would be impossible for cable/network TVs to fight it. Once the affluent people desert the cable/on-air networks, cable companies will go bankrupt and on-air TV will be like radio of today. Mainly low cost talk shows with 20-33% of the time spent on commercials.
The malicious websites just have to skip the malicious code when the user agent string is google crawler. Are they going to change the user agent string? Will it be considered pretexting (the euphemism for impersonating)?
May be using virtual laws supported by virtual evidence, heard by a virtual judge ...
Slashdotters, please dont get worked up.He knows it is a stupid thing to say to a tech savvy audience. He was talking to the chumps who paid big bucks to have their movies "protected by" the DRM. Some weasel clause in the contract would say something like, "while we dont guarantee that this mechanism will never be broken, all we promise to do is to take vigorous action". He will eventually argue that issuing such ridiculous statements constitutes vigorous action. That is all.
Having solved the problem of search, and providing a breakthrough product that has consciousness to what was previously mere series of tubes, now the National University of Ireland announced that it is going to solve world hunger next, may be in three months. Other projects in the pipeline includes cure for cancer and solving full Navier Stokes equation.
Coming to wireless transmission of power, the most significant thing was that the signal carries enough power to drive the device. (Kids build the "crystal radio sets" that run without any batteries purely on the transmitted power). So he did not have to invent an amplifier. Details of Tesla and his wireless power transmission can be seen in here