http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=180268&cid=14924013

Re:Not really...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Daniel Dvorkin (106857) * on Wednesday March 15, @07:12AM (#14924013)
(http://www.sff.net/people/Daniel.Dvorkin)
>Besides, the average marine has about a high school education, no morals and a low threshold for the sanctity of life. They >might as well be robots anyways. :-)

>Sorry folks there ain't no draft and it isn't a mystery that the US war machine is a "tad" corrupt. you sign up for the >military because you want to profit from the misery of others. That is unless you sign up for the military to do something >outside of being a grunt [e.g. doctor, engineer, etc]. Then you're ok.

These people you so casually dismiss as "robots" sign up, generally speaking, when they're eighteen or nineteen years old; they believe, almost without exception, that they are doing so to serve their country, to protect the Constitution and the flag and Mom and apple pie. And you know what? At most times throughout our country's history, they've been right.

Just a few years later, if they're unlucky enough to have enlisted at a time like the current one, they're old men, scarred by things no human being should ever have to see. That's what war (any war, including the "good" ones) does to people. That doesn't happen to robots.

I started out as one of those nineteen-year-old grunts; a couple of years later, dimly sensing what was coming down the pike, I cross-trained as a medic, in which capacity I served in Desert Storm. I had no desire whatsoever to "profit from the misery of others" -- I wanted to serve, and I was, relatively speaking, one of the lucky ones. I don't have anyone's death on my conscience. I do have memories of things that will give me nightmares and flashbacks for the rest of my life ... and mine was a very, very short war. What those kids over there are going through now is so much worse I can't quite get my mind around it.

They're not robots. They're your son, your niece, your little brother, caught up in a horrible situation not of their own making. Don't take your anger out on them. Save it for the evil old men who never exposed themselves to that kind of horror, who would never allow their own children to go through it, who casually, thoughtlessly, cheerfully send other people's kids off to hell.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177160&cid=14701902
Some things about Darwin
(Score:5, Insightful)
by plunge (27239) on Sunday February 12, @03:36PM (#14701902)
Many people don't really know anything about who he was or what he thought or how it applies to modern biology.

The guy was:
1) A careful and thoughtful scientist who spent countless hours studying tihngs most people would find incrediby boring. Darwin spent EIGHT YEARS studying BARNACLES.
2) Fairly shy.
3) A Christian for most of his life, and only an agnostic in later life (which had more to do historically with death in the family than with evolution, just ike Lincoln's rediscovering of Christianity)

The guy is/was NOT:
1) a guy who's ideas are a dogma. What Darwin thought is historically important in the development of evolution, but has no bearing on what and where that theory will lead.
2) 100% right about a LOT of things. He not only got the patterns of heredity completely wrong (he thought it was analog: by trait blending, when it was really digital), but was embarassingly forced to admit it when people with better arguments pointed out that blending was in contradiction with the evidence.
3) Someone that thought fossils had proved his case. To Darwin, fossils showed mainly the fact that past life was very different from present life: hence that most of species that existed in the past no longer existed in his day. This was one of the chief inspirations for his idea. The current creationist obsession with fossils overlooks the fact that Darwin put forward his theory, and was considered to be correct, long before we had anything like the fantastically rich fossil record of today. Darwin predicted that future fossils would all confirm his theory, but he NEVER expected that we'd find anywhere as many as we have, or that an entirely unimaginable field (genetics) would someday come to exist and provide an indepedent second check on the fossil record, allowing us to figure out actual lineages.

Darwin also didn't propose that the origins of life were part of evolution. The most he ever said on the subject was that maybe life had started in some warm little pool somewhere... in a private letter. He didn't publish this idea as scientific work.

There are so many misconceptions about the man that this otherwise fairly reserved guy is just buried under layers of legend. He was neither an exceptional genius and phropet, nor was he arrogant, careless about jumping to conclusions, or an atheist. He was a bright, studious man who worked hard, amassed tons of evidence, and hit upon a stunningly innovative realization about how evolution could have occured (one which was as much due to the new discoveries in geology and biology of his time as to his own thinking: as is obvious from the fact that no one in the history of earth had thought of it before... and then suddenly two guys did indepedently around the same time). He's worth remembering and learning about, not worshiping or demonizing.

This is one of the best pieces of writing I've ever seen about how design affects security. It's about a dangerous Windows vulnerability in which graphics files of type WMF (Windows MetaFile) could be booby-trapped to take over a computer.

Re:Over/Under
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Malor (3658) on Monday January 02, @07:41AM (#14378616)
It's probably a hard problem to patch. From what I've gathered, this is a feature of WMFs, not a bug. They were designed before people even knew what the Internet was. WMFs, apparently, have the ability to specify code to be run on a failure to render. So the bad guys give you a bad WMF file, cleverly renamed as JPG, and stick it in an ad banner. You browse a site (with any browser), Windows fails to render the WMF (which it will recognize even if the filename says JPG), runs the specified failure code, and you're hacked. That fast.

Changing code that's this deeply buried in Windows is risky. The interpreter for WMF is one of the remnants of code left over from single-user computers, and they'll have to test changes very thoroughly. They're GOING to break things with this patch, because they're removing a designed-in feature. They're probably working feverishly to figure out how to minimize the damage, but some damage is inevitable. And the problem could be far worse than it appears; that DLL could be riddled with problems. It may not have been audited in many years.

This is yet another example of how you can't retrofit security; the first Windows versions were designed when security wasn't even an issue, when the Internet was barely a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. There's a mountain of code that was written just to work, not to worry about being handed malicious data. If a user passed bad values to a system call and it crashed, oh well. It was their fault for doing it. It's not like they had anything to gain from it, after all. They owned the computer. Why on earth would the computer need to protect itself from its owner?

With the advent of the Net, Microsoft decided to both stay backward-compatible and extend what they had onto the Internet. And their focus for many years was on new features, not security. Essentially every security person at the time warned them -- stridently -- against the choices they were making. It was obviously going to be a trainwreck. This is just the latest in that ongoing collision between a single-user operating system and exposure to every computer in the world.

This particular exploit is BY FAR the worst one yet...even very competent administrators, doing everything exactly as they should, can get nailed by this one. As bad as this is, though, it's not like they're going to stop here.

Trying to retrofit security onto the Win3.1/Win95 model is like trying to use scotch tape to make cheesecloth waterproof. No matter how much tape you use, even if it's a lot more tape than cloth, it will ALWAYS leak. It might hold water for a bit, but leaks will constantly spring up. They've added tremendous functionality in the NT/2k/XP kernels which can limit what users can do and limit the possible scope of compromises, but many many programs (especially games) require administrator privs just to run. So most people run as Administrator even though they shouldn't. And that makes hacks like this one very easy and *extremely* damaging.

Hopefully Microsoft will get a patch out fast.... they certainly must understand how overwhelmingly bad this problem is. The fact that they're reacting slowly is likely an indication that it's hard to fix.
--
We were once willing to go nuclear to avoid secret prisons, torture, and indefinite detention. What happened?

ajs, user id 35953, included this though in the comments about hurricane control:

>My rule of thumb is: don't mess with large systems that you depend on for your survival.

He was writing about weather modification but that's also the best one-sentence description I've ever seen of real conservatism. Society is a large system that we depend on for our survival. Actual conservatives are leery of trying to reform it.

What is willful ignorance (Score:5, Insightful)
by vena (318873) Neutral on Sunday September 11, @09:19PM (#13535404) ...if not malice?

On the subject of Mars exploration:

How soon until this happens? (Score:1)
by GWBasic (900357) Neutral on Friday September 09, @06:27PM (#13523851)
( http://www.andrewrondeau.com/ )

How soon until someone proposes that we not worry about the return trip and leave the astronauts there permenently?
[ Reply to This | ]

Re:How soon until this happens? (Score:2)
by Quinn_Inuit (760445) Neutral on Friday September 09, @06:44PM (#13523918)

Heck, if I weren't married, I might take that trip. I don't know. Dying doesn't exactly appeal to me, but I could do a lot of really useful research, set up stuff so future expeditions don't have to be one-way...and see Mars. I'm no astronaut or scientist or millionaire, so I doubt I'll see it any other way in my lifetime.

I know it sounds crazy. But to walk just once under an alien sky...darnit, our children deserve the stars, and someone needs to claim that inheritance for them. IMO, if you've never looked up at the sky and wondered why we're stuck here, well, call God and see if you can get a refund or warranty repair job on your soul.

--

Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.

From user antifoidulus, id 807088:

"The hardest thing to find in this sea of information is the truth. "

Um, we're getting what we paid for (Score:5, Interesting)
by Colin Smith (2679) Neutral on Monday August 15, @09:43AM (#13322166)
( http://mrprecision.blogspot.com/ )

We're not paying for space travel, or even space exploration. We're paying for programmes. We get a space programme, then another one, then another one.

When we start paying for results, we'll get space travel and space exploration.

From http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148578&cid=12451624
by John Sokol:

Has anyone ever stopped to think about how well evolution works? And that it's all encompassing.

It's an inescapable law of nature. Everything from our software and computer designs (meme's) to music, language and DNA based life is affected by evolution.

Not only that, it's impossible to create something not effected by it.
Even our views of God and our religions evolve. (what blasphemy)

After studying evolution for some time, I became a believer in GOD! Because only god could have created something as powerful as evolution.

My argument goes like this. If we are made in Gods image, and we make machines and tools to build more complex things. Then shouldn't God also? If God were to what would that tool look like. EVOLUTION....

So all this arguing over GOD vs. Evolution is totally stupid. No Evil.

I see science as the study of God's creation. It's sort of our responsibility to understand is and in doing this we can come to know God better

This is from user expro at http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=148137&cid=12413978:

"That is why the smartest thing you can do is to figure out how to stay out of court, unless you are evil and rich and like injustice."

DEVELOPER RANT - Version checking. (Score:5, Interesting)
by argent (18001) Neutral on Thursday April 28, @04:27AM (#12369887)
( http://www.scarydevil.com/~peter/ )

DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).

DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.

Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.

One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.

I agree censorship is a bad idea, but the problem with a pervasive, persuasive and centralized media (e.g. ClearChannel) in a democracy is that without a critically thinking population the system becomes unstable. A functioning democracy is a self correcting system, but a hidden dependancy of that system is that accurate, verifiable information is provided to the people who must make the decisions. I.e., the voters. It's usually AVAILABLE, granted, but if they don't have it and settle for what they are told by an organized media the end result is EXACTLY the same as if they don't have it. If you can get statistically large numbers of them to dance to your tune, you have effectively taken over the country. The key question is, do enough people engage critical thinking to avoid the electorate being systematically manipulated by misinformation?

Re:Is Windows fit for the internet? (Score:1)
by nytmare (572906) Neutral on Tuesday November 23, @08:00AM (#10898719)
( http://www.nytmare.org/ )

No it isn't. A secure OS would make it easy for normal users to RECOGNIZE and REMOVE any illegitimate software or processes that have managed to wend their way onto their PC. Windows does not. It takes experts to figure out most infestations, often by using third-party apps like Hijack This to analyze the system. It takes third-party anti-virus and anti-spyware apps to remove the problems, and then only on a case-by-case basis. It takes third-party firewalls to control and inform users about internet traffic entering and leaving their own PC.

Hiding information from users is a mantra that directly undermines security.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129214&cid=10778910

Your friends are watching you (Score:5, Interesting)
by caitsith01 (606117) Friend of Friend on Tuesday November 02, @07:46AM (#10700179)
( Last Journal: Thursday March 11, @02:32AM )

All around the world, we're watching you today. We love America, we want you to lead and inspire and show us what democracy and freedom and technology can do. But right now we're feeling scared, confused, and angry about what your President has lead you to do over the past three years.

Please, give us back the America we admire and believe in. Don't turn yourselves into a religious state. Don't turn your back on the UN and the other peoples of the world - in the end we are people first, American or French or Iraqi or Chinese second. Give us back the America that went to the moon and carried out the Berlin airlift and brought us the IT revolution. Give us back the America of Kennedy's vision and MLK's dream.

And please, don't let the world's most successful democracy be reduced to a joke with a repeat of last election's Floridan antics.