You sure seem to have missed the point. The AC poster (you?) already lost the argument, whether he responds or not.

I made my point with questions, and the point was that none of the Ubuntu security notices were anywhere near as serious as Microsoft's schannel or OLE vulns.

Unless I missed something in the Ubuntu bulletins, none of those vulns were even suspected of being remote code execution vulns. The AC poster was flat-out wrong in his assessment that the Ubuntu notice had more vulns, and especially wrong that it had more remotely exploitable vulns. I called him out on his bullshit, but at the same time threw him a softball so he could respond if he cared to actually read up and have a reasonable reply.

Sometimes there are people on Slashdot who do seek out intelligent discourse. I was leaving that possibility open, but certainly not holding my breath for it.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks

If I had points, I would mod this up. I'd also highly recommend Descartes' Error by Damasio.

He makes a strong case for his somatic marker hypothesis, which in a nutshell says the body participates in decision making, not just the brain.

Damasio should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand human intelligence.

You're implying you've read the Ubuntu vuln announcements for November. Why don't you explain to the class which of these are remote code execution vulns?

http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/

Maybe you can pick the worst one and explain why it's worse than Microsoft's schannel vuln.

Maybe you missed all the critical remote code execution vulns Microsoft announced just this month.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms14-nov.aspx

Four of the bulletins above are listed as critical remote execution. Two of them (schannel and OLE vulns) are very bad. The IE bulletin says it resolves 17 privately identified bugs.

As the previous poster said, Microsoft has placed convenience over security for many years now. They have improved dev processes a lot, but as you can see, many security folks still view MS as a liability.

Not to stray too far from the point, but I hope Linux distros arent repeating Microsoft's mistakes with feature-laden packages like systemd and its ilk. Tons of new features in an inchoate software package with no security audits? That is how Microsoft got its reputation for insecurity.

Or is it fixing the hard to locate bug in deep in the back end that deletes all the users data on seemingly random occurrences (and can be brushed off in dev's opinion as merely an aberration)

I completely agree with your point, but would like to observe that senior or mid-level management always cares the LEAST about fixing old, broken stuff.

Every place I've worked has had serious ghosts in the closet, but projects to go clean up old messes never get approved. This has been true across business, IT, and development roles (in my experience).

After all, leadership doesn't get bonuses for reducing risk to the company, they get rewarded for the next feature/launch/whatever.

Telling the difference between "eight" and "A" is much more involved than just context matching on a rough FFT of my voice.

To do it properly, we're really looking into problems that are the equivalent of the higher functions of AI.

Maybe the problem isn't with the AI techniques we're using, it's with the FFT.

FFT assumes a very periodic, stable signal. It doesn't handle transients well at all.

The proposed task, where the interference is correlated with the original sound, seems like fertile ground for superhuman performance again. The original signal gets replicated and redundantly presented. Our brains are hard-wired to be confused by that, but it seems like a well-designed speech-recognition system could take advantage of it.

Mammalian auditory systems actually have a lot of wiring that seems dedicated to processing reverberation.

I'm not familiar with the IBM demo you mention, but the key there is the controlled vocabulary. It was probably also trained on the speaker's voice. Those are huge constraints.

Haven't Microsoft, Apple and Google already spend billions of dollars on this?

All the speech recognition software I've used has relied on a controlled environment (e.g. yelling directly into your phone with almost no reverberation, no competing conversations, very little background noise).

Reverberation *should* be the easiest kind of noise to remove, because it has a simple mathematical model:

S(t) = signal(t) + f(signal(t - delay))

Where f() is a pretty simple function that may attenuate some frequencies more than others.

Modelling all the other kinds of background noise is much, much harder.

I just wonder how long it will be until the virus "discovers" a carrier..
Someone who is immune enough to not show symptoms, but can still carry the virus enough to infect others.

See typhoid Mary.

As long as we're being pedantic, the current chair was reappointed by Obama, after she was appointed by Bush. She donated to McCain, Romney, and the republican party. http://www.campaignmoney.com/p...

So let's just call it even.

CPB is required, by law, to be strictly objective, and has internal reviews to ensure objectivity. That is a better deal than you will get from Fox, MSNBC, WSJ, or NYT.

You are right that CPB != NPR, but they are tightly bound, and the exact relationship is complex. Regardless, there are plenty of conservatives in my city who listen to NPR and donate to local stations. The attempts to defund CPB and NPR have been defeated through bipartisan efforts.

I think if you actually listened to NPR, you would be surprised at how neutral and accurate the reporting is, and you would notice how the liberal slant of, say, salon.com is *not* present.

You know the board of directors for the Corp for Public Broadcasting is, by law, an even split between Republicans and Democrats, right?

I think *your* bias is showing.

I think it's hilarious that facebook paid 2 billion for Oculus, while Magic Leap has far superior tech and seems to value itself around 1.6 billion.

Here are two possible explanations:
1. Zuckerberg is an idiot CEO who overpays for things (he did pay 20 billion for whatsapp, after all).
2. Zucker knows his stock is way overpriced, so he is actually getting a better deal than it appears. Most of the Oculus acquisition is paid for with fb stock.

Either way, another very smart move by Google.

Kurzweil and academics like Jordan seem to have very different ideas about when we will solve the problems of intelligence.

Kurzweil says things like the "design of the human brain, while not simple, is nonetheless a billion times simpler than it appears, due to massive redundancy". He has predicted (as I understand it) that by 2029, we will have completely reverse engineered the brain.

In the interview, Jordan said, "but it's true that with neuroscience, it's going to require decades or even hundreds of years to understand the deep principles." This is in line with what other academics like Pinker say.

I think Jordan would not take Kurzweil's timelines seriously.. I know Kurzweil had some early accomplishments, but many of his predictions just seem naive.