http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165789&cid=13831029

Construct a URL like this:
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?op=users&start=664202

Thanks to Zobier for pointing it out here:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165604&cid=13813977

Add following to Friends list when the maximum of 100 f/f limit is resolved or worked around:

steeltoe
rolltissue

I picked on in a /. comment today:

Your post involves a

( ) technical (x) social ( ) moral

comment about computer security. This comment is incorrect. Here's why it's incorrect:

( ) You have no idea how system security works
(x) You assume that popularity is inversely proportional to security
( ) You make improper use of technical language
(x) You assume that part of the problem is the entire problem
(x) You fail to account for different security models.

Specifically, your comment fails to consider that:

( ) Security flaws can be exploited in an automated manner
(x) Not all bugs are security flaws
( ) Security flaws can be exploited manually
( ) Legions of script kiddies use point-and-drool tools
( ) Dedicated black-hats can cause damage using home-designed tools
(x) Privilege separation prevents many problems
( ) Some security flaws are strictly theoretical
(x) Different systems are inherently more or less vulnerable to exploits
( ) Security flaws can be independently discovered
( ) Security flaw discovery and exploit does not require source code
(x) Not all security flaws are of the same severity
(x) Running as root is almost always a problem, no matter the system
( ) Not all viruses are transmitted by e-mail
( ) Not all viruses are self-propagating
( ) Not all security flaws are buffer overruns
( ) Stupid people do stupid things

and the following general objections may also apply:

( ) Full disclosure completely informs affected system administrators
( ) Exploit code has legitimate uses
(x) Security is by design, not accident
( ) Security isn't magic, and thinking of it that way is harmful
( ) Hackers/crackers aren't evil magicians who can get around anything
( ) Security starts with the user
( ) Why should we trust the government?
( ) Why should we trust you?

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Nice idea, but it's been said before and that doesn't make it any more true.
( ) That's an incredibly stupid idea, and you're stupid for suggesting it.
( ) You're a moron, and I'm surprised you have enough brain cells to continue breathing.

India backs cheap drug clampdown Tuesday March 22, @05:42PM Pending

According to this BBC story, the Indian Government is close to banning indigenously produced low-cost versions of patented drugs, to comply with WTO regulations. According to the current Indian patent law, drug makers are allowed to copy patented drugs as long as they use a different manufacturing process. Campaigners say the move will deprive millions of people around the world of access to cheap life-saving medicines . According to the article fifty percent of people with AIDS in the developing world depend on generic drugs from India. It should be mentioned that the last time the Indian government deliberated on WTO patent regulations was when US Company RiceTec obtained a patent on Basmati rice, a variety which has been grown in India for centuries.

Befriend once 100 limit is resolved.

CNN and Rediff are reporting that Bill Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day, making him world's most spammed person. However, unlike lesser mortals, he has an entire department dedicated to filter unsolicited e-mails and only a few of them actually get through to his inbox, said Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft Research event in Singapore. Other sources are also reporting the breaking news story.

Submitted: 2004-11-04 15:14:08, Rejected

CNN's reporting that a scientist at the University of Florida has developed a "brain" grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat's brain that is capable of flying a plane in the F-22 flight simulator. According to the article, the brain and the simulator established a two-way connection to send and receive signals and eventually, the brain learnt to control the flight of the plane based on the information it received about flight conditions.

By 808140 (welcome to my friend's list! BTW, his handle and UID are the same ?! )
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126468&cid=10582302

Re:A Brief Explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
by 808140 (808140) Friend of a Friend on Wednesday October 20, @10:27PM (#10582302)

Your question is a good one, but it has no answer. I'd like to explain why. It's a matter of philosophy.

You see, science (especially in popular consciousness) is seen as the discipline which endeavors to answer the question "why?" with respect to various observable phenomena. These questions have been at the center of human thought for well, ever. We created religion in its various forms to answer this very class of questions.

With the advent of science, it seemed as though we finally had a way to truly answer these questions, but unfortunately this stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. Science does not try to answer nor can it answer the why. The why has no answer.

Let me explain. Science (and specifically the scientific method) is designed to determine, through experiment and falsifiability of hypothesis, the way the world behaves and to model its behaviour. Because these theories often have far reaching consequences, laymen (and even scientists, unfortunately) often make the mistake of thinking that their theories explain the why. But they do not; they simply explain the how.

Let's explore this a bit. Newton's law of gravity did not explain why gravity exists. Why two bodies fall together is anyone's guess -- why, as a question, demands a reason. There may very well be a reason that two bodies fall together -- a popularly believed one is that some supernatural being designed it that way -- but physics does not, indeed, cannot, conjure up a reason by simply observing and modeling the way those two objects fall together.

An example of this in more human terms: suppose you have a batty friend, and everytime you say foo, he says bar, like clockwork. You would quickly observe this and would, in your mind, be able to construct a hypothesis based on this behaviour -- when the subject hears foo, he says bar. And you could construct a series of experiments that test this hypothesis -- perhaps you would find that in the presence of blondes, he utters baz instead. This knowledge would allow you to predict his behaviour in certain situations, but it would say nothing whatsoever about his reasons for it. Nor could any amount of observation ever explain the reasons.

Now, in physics this is obfuscated by the discipline's drive to isolate core phenomena. That is, it has been noted that often phenomena we observe are caused by smaller, less obvious phenomena. So, for example, attempts to make gravity fit into quantum mechanics have driven physicists to suggest that gravity as a force is mediated by a graviton, or what not. If this were ever demonstrated by experiment and became widely accepted, a laymen might ask, "why does gravity behave the way it does?" and a physicist might explain that it has to do with property xyz of gravitons. But this is not an explanation.

This is simply telling the listener that the macroscopic observable phenomenon of gravity is actually made up of several, less easily observable phenomena. This is all well and good, but you'll notice that it actually explains "how" gravity works. "Why does my house keep out the rain?" "Because it has a roof." It seems logical, but it isn't. Because the roof is how it keeps out the rain -- the reason it keeps out the rain is something much more subtle, like, "Because the designers felt that the house's inhabitants would rather not get wet."

Science answers the how of things, and it does this exceedingly well. It cannot (and for the most part, does not even attempt) to answer the why. But why and how are so muddled in the way people think that lots of folks (scientists included) are deluded into thinking that science will eventually explain the big questions like "why does the universe exist", and "why are we here."

If you've ever asked a scientist the latter question, you may have gotten something along the lines of "We're here as a result of abiogenisis, followed by billions of years of evolution, catelysed by Darwinian natural selection and occasional random mutations." He hasn't lied to you; there's evidence to support everything he says. But he's explaining how we got here, not why we're here, which is why this answer is somewhat less satisfying than we hoped it would be. He's not answering the question we asked. He probably doesn't even realize it. In fact, we ourselves may not realize it.

When a religious person says, "We're here because God made us in his image", he has no evidence, and is essentially selling you what he believes and so we're often unsatisfied, because we feel that he lacks the credibility of science, which is based on falsifiable principles deduced from observable phenomena. But the religious person is actually attempting to answer the question you asked: he's giving you a reason for our existence, even if it seems to be a facile one.

Religions don't make this distinction easy on themselves because they foolishly get caught up in trying to answer the how, too. So they make up stories about Adam and Eve or Pandora's Box or whatever their creation story is -- this mythology is a primitive attempt at answering the how, and science does this in an infinitely better and more reliable way.

But Science can never answer the why. This is chiefly the realm of religion an philosophy. Who knows why gravity works the way it does? It just does. Obviously, if I drop an apple, it falls. It has done this for all time and I induced from this that next time I drop an apple, it will also fall. I explain at what speed it falls by careful measurement, and find that for bodies with mass that differs enough, the acceleration is relative the masses of the two bodies and inversely proportional to the square of their distance from each other. All good, that. But it isn't why.

I'm agnostic myself, by which I mean that I don't believe in God but don't write off the possibility that such a being could exist (in the days of the luminferous aether, I probably wouldn't have believed that special relativity was true, either, but as I've been shown proof, I've changed by viewpoint -- I suppose I would do the same if "proof" of God could be given). But I think that this subtle distinction between the how and why is one of the reasons that so many of the most brilliant scientists have been religious. Ultimately, you realize that you can never induce intent by just observing operation. At best you can make educated guesses. At best.

So, yeah, to sum up, Science: how? Religion: why? And the two are linearly independent, if you will. And therefore do not conflict. You just need to make sure that you let science answer the how and religion the why, and not get caught up in ridiculous mythologies that are falsifiable by modern science (Noah's Ark, for example, or Adam and Eve).

A few hours after Slashdot posted this story, the NASA link to the 250+MB file originally at this location now reads:

We are sorry but the slashdoting of a 250MB file was a bit more than we had planned for. We will re-post this file later in the day or this evening once the initial rush cools off. Thank you for your patience.

Microsoft Pays Dearly for Insults through Ignorance OSTG |SourceForge -ThinkGeek -IT Manager's Journal -Linux.com -NewsForge -freshmeat -Newsletters -TechJobs -SlashdotBroadband X "); //--> GillBates0 Preferences
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Submitted Comment Comment Submitted. There will be a delay before the comment becomes part of the static page. What you submitted appears below. If there is a mistake...well, you should have used the 'Preview' button!

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by GillBates0 (664202) on Thursday August 19, @05:58PM (#10017515)
(http://slashdot.org/~GillBates0 | Last Journal: Wednesday July 14, @10:15AM) Microsoft Pays Dearly for Insults through Ignorance

Microsoft has lost millions of dollars simply because its employees were not geographically aware. Interesting laundry list of decisions that were made without taking political or religious aspects into consideration.
--
PS:Slashdot's 10^7th comment [slashdot.org] [ Reply to This ] Starting Score: 1 point Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 (Edit) Total Score: 2 I/O, I/O, It's off to disk I go, A bit or byte to read or write, I/O, I/O, I/O... "); //--> All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2004 OSTG. [ home | awards | contribute story | older articles | OSTG | advertise | about | terms of service | privacy | faq | rss ]

An dead-on insightful AC comment about insomnia.

In this day and age of superfluous patents and frivolous lawsuits, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gently reminds us of the importance of free and selfless contribution for the betterment of humanity. Speaking at the ceremony for winning the Millennium Technology Prize (as reported earlier on Slashdot), he said that he would never have succeeded if he'd tried to charge money for his inventions. The prize committee agreed, citing the importance of Berners-Lee's decision never to commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he had developed, and recognizing his revolutionary contribution to humanity's ability to communicate.

This submission was rejected, but I think it's an interesting story:

According to this CNN story, Chief executives from 150 of the largest U.S. companies (including Coca-Cola, Alcoa, Boeing, Burlington Northern, Deere and General Motors) are lobbying against the technology industry, accusing them of selling software vulnerable to hackers and too difficult for consumers to use safely. The group cites estimates from the nation's banks and savings institutions that attacks by viruses and worms cost that industry more than $1 billion a year. Their complaints "reflect exasperation by companies over the expense and hassle of keeping their computer networks safe for consumers". Interesting that they seem to be addressing about the entire "technology industry", when most of their complaints stem from software produced by a single Company. Good to see Joe MegaCorp industries beginning to realize the importance of computer security, nevertheless. Hope it's not too late for them to withdraw their grandiose Windows ATM plans.

Saving it here for me to read when I need it.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105817&cid=9013783

  Re:Not Applicable! (Score:5, Informative)
by statusbar (314703) on Thursday April 29, @07:16PM (#9013783)
(http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/)
The problem that I have experienced with tomboys is that:

1) They dislike other women
2) They prefer to hang out with other guys instead
3) They end up having lots of male friends
4) These males, unless they are gay, are usually not real friends
5) 'Accidental' cheating occurs.

--jeff++