I just got more down mods in three hours than I've gotten in the rest of my eight years on slashdot put together. Most of them don't even make sense; I'm getting flamebait on two-page long posts where the person I'm actually responding to said "I enjoyed this conversation."

It's fairly clear that I'm being stalked by an out of control abuser. Pity of the problem is that Slashdot doesn't allow me to say "ah, it's this person who set *all* of my down mods."

>The whole point of being a bully is to build up your own self-respect at the expense of someone else's, a kind of mental vampirism

From ScrewMaster in http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190617&cid=15682919

The subject was "Teaching Engineers to Write".

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185119&cid=15279646 had a superb answer.

Present writing as an engineering problem
(Score:5, Insightful)
by MarkusQ (450076) on Saturday May 06, @08:50PM (#15279646)
(Last Journal: Tuesday January 10, @02:50AM)

Present writing as an engineering problem. This is an accurate, if somewhat unconventional, way to look at it. When you write, you have a goal (communicate a certain set of ideas), some constraints (target length, assumed audience, etc.) and some criteria for ranking proposed solutions (shorter is better, linking ideas in multiple ways gives a more robust treatment, etc.)

This fits neatly into the mold of classic engineering problems. Presented this way, they should be able to (with only a little guidance) bring their full skill set to bear on the problem. For example:

        * Top down design Starting with an outline and working out the details is the normal way of tackling an engineering problem.
        * Checking your facts Engineers should be used to checking anything that is even remotely doubtful before committing to it. So should writers.
        * Failure mode analysis For each sentence ask yourself, could it be misread? How? What is the best way to fix it?
        * Dependency analysis Are the ideas presented in an order that assures that each point can be understood on the basis of the readers assumed knowledge and the information provided by preceding points?
        * Optimization Are there any unnecessary parts? Does the structure require the reader to remember to many details at once, before linking them?
        * Structured testing If you read what you have written assuming only the knowledge that the reader can be expected to have, does each part work the way you intended? If you read it aloud, does it sound the way you intended?

One of the biggest problems with teaching people to write is getting them to read what they have written, think about it, and rewrite it until it does what they wanted it to. Here, at least, engineers should have a head start over most students, insofar as they are used to the fact that your first stab at a design is almost never viable.

--MarkusQ
--
Impeachment: It's not just for blow jobs [thenation.com]

Apple announced a display with image pickups built in between the pixels. Yes, just like 1984's "telescreen".

Richdun asked a logical question:

So if I throw a hammer at it...
(Score:5, Funny)
by richdun (672214) on Wednesday April 26, @01:46PM (#15207589) ...is that covered under the warranty?

Yeah, so I bit the bullet and made a blog. Granted it's not like this journal was ever particularly active anyway; still it's a more natural format, so off it goes.

Luckily, the USSR always gave a 15-day warning!
(Score:5, Insightful)
by NMerriam (15122) on Saturday March 25, @04:38PM (#14995683)
(http://www.artboy.org/)
Making the meetings public would amount to "giving our nation's enemies information they could use to most effectively attack a particular infrastructure and cause cascading consequences across multiple infrastructures," another departmental advisory council warned in August.

As I recall, in 1972, we were in the midst of fighting a Cold War that had, as a very real possible consequence, the end of life on Earth as we know it. We were fighting against a highly organized and well-funded enemy that had thousands of spies at all levels of government and industry, sleeper agents ready to be called on when necessary, and military capabilities that made us legitimately doubt whether we would prevail in any conventional armed conflict. An attack from their formidable stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles would give us less than an hour to pray to the God of our choice before the sun vanished and our component molecules were suddenly and violently redistributed into the ash that would, hopefully, someday support life again.

And yet, even with this Sword of Damocles hanging over our very survival, we had the conscience and foresight to realize that while we cannot control the behavior of those who would be our enemies, we can control ourselves, and refuse to sacrifice the ideals we believe more important than life in the vain hopes that by abdicating oversight of our government we will somehow gain immunity from outside aggressors.

I find it the greatest irony of all that those in power right now, who present themselves so vaingloriously, act with such great cowardice. Their willingness to preemptively sacrifice the ideals we hold dear is an insult to the oaths they took, and the people who trust them with their lives.

No bomb is capable of destroying the historical significance of the Constitution, the concept of modern representative democracy, religious freedom, free speech, or the notion that man has the right and responsibility to govern himself by reason. Yet we find ourselves in the peculiar position of surrendering these, our most valuable possessions, in the vain hope that they will purchase us safety, when we know with certainty that such safety is a chimera, that our lives will always be in danger so long as we espouse such dangerous ideas.

It does not take courage to hide in a shelter, to stifle dissent or cut yourself off from contrary opinions. It does not take courage to meet in secret, to persecute those who are different, to deny the humanity of those who oppose you.

What takes courage is knowing there are people in this world who hate you so much they will kill you, and to still get up in the morning and walk out the front door, refusing to change your life or your beliefs due to fear. We knew this after September 11th, we were even told this at the time by our leaders, but for some reason both they and we have lost sight of such a simple insight.

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.

I found this 'Patriot Search' on Reddit.com My thoughts on this whole ugly mess: Is this a joke or is it for real? Obviously, it's written with humor in mind, but will they honestly turn in the search terms? This simply amplifies an earlier point I had wondered about. If the government is reviewing search logs, how difficult could it be for somebody to change the focus of a botnet to spam search engines such as Yahoo! with obviously 'interesting' search queries? A simple, say, 100 - 500 word dictionary of words, grouped by category (say, 'terrorism', 'porn', 'cracking', etc.) would be randomly chosen, and then within that category, a random sampling of 1 - 4 words gets sent to the search engine. This could also be implemented with a fairly simple browser hijack or tricky link, I would think. When the gov. has to sift through millions of faked searches committed by innocent people, which they can't rule out by pattern, keyword, or IP address without also ruling out a huge portion of legit searches, perhaps they will give up? It would need to be complex at least to a degree so that each computer would only enter a search, say, every 1 - 10min. (also random), as well as other things, so that there would be minimal appearance of patterns, but it wouldn't not be extremely complex to implement. Unless this was just a one-time thing, I can't imagine how they could hope to succeed with this type of thing, when it would only take a few legitmately criminal people attempting to amp up the 'noise' in the system to let ALL the criminals flow through unnoticed. It is nothing short of depressing when not only does the American public allow itself to be needlessly spied upon, but the government does it in a flagrantly flawed manner, and yet it works.

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?

I had a little thread going about NLP. Last entry is here. Any additional comments anyone has are welcomed.

This is a letter I'm sending to the authors of the
relevant software:

Dear Devs,

No doubt you've heard of the controversial "rootkit" bundled with
many of Sony's CDs to prevent unauthorized copying. By now I hope
you've been informed that this rootkit contains and uses code from
your Free Software projects. (LAME, id3lib, mpglib, bladenc: see
http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/) I write as a concerned member of
the digital community in hopes that you will seek punative damages
against Sony, to ensure that this never happens again.

Statutory damages for copyright infringements go as high as
$150,000 per copy. Given that there are at least 20 cds, selling
hundreds of thousands if not millions of units even a modest
settlement quickly adds up to the largest copyright infringement
lawsuit ever. You all stand to earn tremendous judgements; think
of all the Free Software you could write when independantly
wealthy. But more importantly, this is a chance for the common
person to fight back.

I would urge you not to settle however. For far too long,
mega-corporations have been allowed to buy and sell the law, run
amok, and generally ruin the lives of common people. Until now,
even the largest class action lawsuit could be written off as a
cost of doing business. If we are ever to correct bad behavior
we MUST apply real punishment. A judgement that bankrupted Sony
would be a wakeup call to every corporation in the world, and
I urge you to persue this for the sake of social justice
everywhere.

It's pretty ironic that Sony violated copyright in software
designed to prevent copyright infringement. I like irony, and I'd
also like to see the irony of the media industry being bit by the
very teeth they lobbied into the law in the first place. Thanks
for reading this, and good luck.

Whew, long topic on ID. While reading through it, I was reminded of a passage from an ecology book I once read. I paraphrased it from memory, I hope its relevance to ID is obvious:

Let me tell you a little story about long shots and averages and how not understanding the two lead to an incorrect hypothesis. Some time ago ecologists were interested with the rate that trees would repopulate a volcano after an eruption. They observed the trees, and figured out the average distance that a seed would fall from the tree, and from that they calculated an expected movement of the treeline.

However this was wrong, the trees repopulated much more quickly than expected. While the ecologists had figured out the averages correctly, they failed to realize that a small proportion of seeds would be carried much further than the average. The seeds that came from these trees would have a head start and some small portion of the next generation would be carried even further.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?

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?