Comment Re:Full blooded American here (Score 0) 671
The "Islamic State" is not a country, just a bunch of religious bigots going around killing people as if no one could have a different opinion or way of life.
Ah, Alabama!
The "Islamic State" is not a country, just a bunch of religious bigots going around killing people as if no one could have a different opinion or way of life.
Ah, Alabama!
He may now be famous enough that he couldn't be simply "disappeared" or sent to Guantanamo. That's the best guarantee.
Being famous (or infamous) is a gurantee against being "disappeared"?
I'm sure Jimmy Hoffa will be happy to hear that.
Better yet, go to Ukraine. Less Putin, more cute women. Sorta like Russia-Lite.
... and soon enough, Russia proper?
If you put an infected executable on my machine and gave it a TXT file extension it's totally harmless. So it tries to open the file in notepad....no harm there.
But how do you know that it will open it in notepad? Do you examine the registry?
How do you know that an app you tried a year ago and quickly uninstalled didn't change the extension association for
It doesn't have to be a trojan you ran either - it could have been done through an IE/Flash exploit a long time ago too.
You cannot tryst the extension to be what the file actually is. But you CAN trust the extension to determine what Windows will do with it. That
No, this is what I have tried to tell here, and keep getting modded down for. You cannot trust that. Really. You can trust that Windows will treat it as a
What Windows treats
All that's needed is to modify HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.jpg and it will override the system defaults. It's in the user hive, and does not even require admin privileges.
Apps do this all the time, benignly to associate file types with themselves. That your
So you cannot trust that Windows treats a
Few people will check the registry before "running" a file. They trust that Windows will open the
And you want to try to get the average end user to understand the difference between ".XLS", ".XLSX", and ".XLSX.EXE"?
Or to trust that no one is ever clever and malicious enough to use one trojan to modifiy the default action for
Seeing that it's named
That's too much trust.
OK, and how is opening the jpg in notepad going to harm your computer?
It could just as easily be opening the
You just don't know unless you go into the registry and check for yourself. Trusting the file extension is misplaced trust.
This is not about how your own application react to a file. this is how the operating system *does*. There is a convention in the operating system, particularly windows, that a
But the defaults are mutable, and not to be trusted to stay consistent.
There is nothing that prevents an application from changing the default for
Trusting that a
On Windows, extensions are meaningful to the operating system. It doesn't identify all files by magic numbers. Files are typed by their extensions. If the file is "fishhead.jpeg" then it is not a Win32 executable binary (barring flaws in the JPEG rendering system that lead to arbitrary execution).
You miss that it isn't like that in Windows either. A file named fishhead.jpeg can indeed be a a Win32 executable binary that gets executed by the OS as a binary if called without a named program to open it. That depends on what the end user and the programs he (spit) trusts have set the
You cannot trust the extensions any more than you can trust the "From:" address in an e-mail. Not in Windows either.
That being said, don't make people learn useless things.
What's a useless thing?
Any knowledge is useful for something.
You must have missed my "except on very immature operating systems".
And it's not even the case in Windows. Windows is user configurable to let any extension map to any "action". There is nothing that says it cannot open files with a
Again, the file name extensions are only advisory, not prescriptive, and that's why they should never be trusted.
The problem isn't not looking at file name extension. It's trusting them.
File name extensions are just a convention, and are not prescriptive except on very immature operating systems. There is nothing that prevents a JPEG file from being saved with a
I have a web server set up at home that serves html files with a
And then there's the Amiga, where you have prefixes, like mod.filename to signify a music score file with embedded samples. Again, it's just a convenience, and should never be trusted.
Doubtful, or we would have seen large effects.
But what's possible is that this galaxy is moving towards us as far as movement goes, which counteracts some of the effects of the universe expanding. It is still "receding" because the expansion of the universe is much bigger than any movement can be, but slower than other objects at the same distance. Which allows for it to be older than average.
If so, of even more interest would be those galaxies that are moving the fastest from us (in physical movement), and approaching the horizon of of the visible universe. Those would be the absolutely youngest we could observe, and would give us the best picture of the early universe.
And that last bit is what is causing the paradox with this new galaxy: although it is far away and should therefore appear younger (it is the same age today, but we see it as it was in the past), it looks much older than it ought to look.
"Today" makes no sense at intergalactic scales. There is no one clock that ticks for the entire universe that isn't bound to the cone of causality; time is only a local phenomenon.
If you could travel to that galaxy[*], it would be old when you reached it, but saying anything about its age now except that it is young from our point of view is wrong. There is no common frame of reference.
[*]: You can't, even at the speed of light. Due to the increasing rate of expansion of the universe, the galaxies near the end of what we can observe will appear to recede at a speed faster than c, into what cannot be observed and thus cannot be reached either.
Big Bang did not happen in one spot. It happened everywhere. Including where we are. Space itself expanded.
The universe continues to expand, and the distance to the parts the farthest away from us is growing faster than the speed of light, meaning that they disappear from our view, and we can never observe them again, except for the influence they have had on areas of space closer to us.
But both those parts and where we are were where big bang happened.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion