Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: WMCoolmon on June 07, 2005, 12:33:25 am
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http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/06/06/milk.terror/index.html
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i care for neither :D
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I don't think it's censorship, since it's not really being forced on them to withhold it at this point. Just take the fine details out of the public copy of the article, seems like what they want.
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wtf is this gay >:(
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You know what's even more stupid then censoring the research? (as opposed to implimenting its suggestions)
The fact that the CNN article about it has enough information for the average idiot to do some homemade bioterrorism.
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Yep. I find it funny that the CNN article is actually more of a threat than the original paper.
Somehow I doubt that Osama uses his downtime by flicking through though scientific journals.
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Stupidity in my opinion : "Ho no, they've found vulnerability in the way we do things. Let's censor them instead of trying to fix these vulnerabilities."
Moron....
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Rofflecakes!
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Originally posted by Genryu
Stupidity in my opinion : "Ho no, they've found vulnerability in the way we do things. Let's censor them instead of trying to fix these vulnerabilities."
Moron....
If they held back the release of the complete paper until they fixed the problems, then I'd see no problem. But we all know they won't try to fix it, because living on the edge is cheaper.
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Originally posted by Ace
You know what's even more stupid then censoring the research? (as opposed to implimenting its suggestions)
The fact that the CNN article about it has enough information for the average idiot to do some homemade bioterrorism.
Actually, I thought of that the instant I read the article. I put it down to a liberal bias on the part of CNN.
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Under the most likely scenario, he wrote, a terrorist would buy toxin from an overseas black market laboratory, fill a one gallon jug with a sludgy substance containing a few grams of botulin, and pour it into an unlocked milk tank, or into a milk truck at a truck stop.
They stop just short of telling you which lab to buy it from.
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I don't know about the level of detail in the original paper but the CNN article doesn't really give that much away or at least, nothing someone who *really* wanted to contaminate the US milk supply wouldn't already know. If 9/11 showed the world anything it that these guys can, and do, do their homework.
The part about what toxin to use is like saying "to build a nuclear bomb, first you need Plutonium". Botulin was probably used in the article because that's what the paper said. Realistically, you could use any number of toxins. Any even remotely organised terrorist organisation would not only know this, they would know how to aquire it. Actually, botulin would be easier to aquire than that article makes out. You guys all know what Botox is, right? Yup, Botulin. They use its neurotoxi nature to paralyse the muscles in the face to smooth out lines and wrinkles. OH NOES!!1!! I'M GIVING INFO TO TERORISTS!!!11! ...:rolleyes:
The only thing in the article that highlights a potential weakness is saying milk distribution is largely unguarded but I'd imagine that would already be obvious to both you and I and potential terrorists. Short of giving every milk truck and depot in the country an armed guard/escort (which kick up a whole other "right impingment" debate) there isn't an awful lot they can do against anyone really wanting to contaminate the milk supply.
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Originally posted by Solatar
If they held back the release of the complete paper until they fixed the problems, then I'd see no problem. But we all know they won't try to fix it, because living on the edge is cheaper.
[color=66ff00]Welcome to the Microsoft world my friend.
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...which isn't much better from the "if it ain't broke, 'fix' it so it is" open source world
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Originally posted by Admiral LSD
...which isn't much better from the "if it ain't broke, 'fix' it so it is" open source world
Looks like someone has been suckling from the MS FUD teat again. :rolleyes:
The problem with the CNN article is not that gives details that the terrorists couldn't think of themselves but the fact that it puts the idea in their heads in the first place.
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Originally posted by karajorma
Looks like someone has been suckling from the MS FUD teat again. :rolleyes:
More like waking up from 7 years of suckling the open source propaganda teat.
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Originally posted by karajorma
Looks like someone has been suckling from the MS FUD teat again. :rolleyes:
No, that's pretty accurate. I would use Linux if I could do the same things on it that I could do on Windows, as well as or better than I could do them on Windows.
Unfortunately, while there may be six different players that do musepack, three probably won't even compile, one will crash constantly, one will malfunction if you use the wrong audio system, and the last won't crash but can only play half the file formats of one of the ones that's crashing.
Everyone in the Linux community is so intent on flexibility and customization that there there are very few programs that are intelligently designed, easy to use/install, and do what you'd expect (without crashing). Not to mention that this insistence on 1980s-style file structure is a pain in the ass; sure, all your programs can be run from "bin", but all the help documents are buried somewhere in /etc, and the libraries are in some subdir of /lib. Uninstall not working? Good luck finding all the files for that particular program.
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
No, that's pretty accurate. I would use Linux if I could do the same things on it that I could do on Windows, as well as or better than I could do them on Windows.
How often has Firefox fixed something that wasn't broken?
Notice he said Open Source not Linux. Had he said Linux I might have agreed with him for the reasons you gave.
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Firefox is a subset of OSS, and it and Thunderbird has actually been pretty good about not breaking stuff.
Linux itself has also been pretty good about things.
Once you move away from big-name projects though, things start to go downhill.
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So there's good and bad open source. Not really a revelation.
I just don't like seeng it all tarred with the same brush. Hell look at FS2 Open. Would you say that you're continually fixing stuff that isn't broken?
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Originally posted by WMCoolmon
No, that's pretty accurate. I would use Linux if I could do the same things on it that I could do on Windows, as well as or better than I could do them on Windows.
Unfortunately, while there may be six different players that do musepack, three probably won't even compile, one will crash constantly, one will malfunction if you use the wrong audio system, and the last won't crash but can only play half the file formats of one of the ones that's crashing.
Everyone in the Linux community is so intent on flexibility and customization that there there are very few programs that are intelligently designed, easy to use/install, and do what you'd expect (without crashing). Not to mention that this insistence on 1980s-style file structure is a pain in the ass; sure, all your programs can be run from "bin", but all the help documents are buried somewhere in /etc, and the libraries are in some subdir of /lib. Uninstall not working? Good luck finding all the files for that particular program.
[color=66ff00]Check out the portage system in Gentoo dude, it's excellent for installing and uninstalling software.
The only problem I've had with it is that it doesn't have the complete library of linux based apps in the database and in those cases I've had to do manual compiles. Still windows does have its uses, it's just that I'd rather upgrade my OS because I want to not because I'm forced to.
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Yeah, check out Portage for Gentoo... If you can get the ****ing thing installed in less than 10 attempts. Maeg, I dont know why you keep recommending Gentoo to those who aren't the hardest of core linux fans.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, Ubuntu is probably the best entry-mid level distro there is right now. Period.
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Another political thread...
Got milk?
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I tried Gentoo, and got it installed, although only after discovering that the people who maintained the install manual were too ****ing lazy to note ALL the flags that were required.
As a result, I spent awhile building myself a minimalist set of USE flags, then doubled that number due to dependencies over the course of a number of hours.
Eventually, I ran out of hard drive space before I could even finish installing the apps that I wanted. (I just had thunderbird, kaffeine, abiword, firefox, and fluxbox installed) Once I moved the old (stable) kernel source to my home dir and still didn't have enough space, I reinstalled Yoper. (Then I discovered that my 6600GT didn't work properly with sax, nor would it work after several attempts to upgrade, including installing the new version of Yoper, which I discovered had removed nearly all the features I'd found useful with it and seemed half as reliable.)
I've finally moved to Ubuntu, but my soundcard is only half-supported by ALSA and doesn't sound near as good as it does on Windows. The X server is apparently running in software mode, and no one on the forums has been able to figure out how to fix it, making everything half as responsive as Windows. I find the coding environment rather cumbersome to work with; debugging is done mostly via command line and the reference is 20 pages or so long. And none of the games I play will run on linux, because there is no 64-bit Cedega yet. Setting up a 32-bit chroot nullifies the entire point of using 64-bit linux.
I could probably spend several hours and puzzle out some of those problems, but quite frankly I don't have the inclination to do that when I might as well keep using Windows programs. Especially since due to the GUI situation, they'll run faster no matter what I do.
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Originally posted by Dark RevenantX
Another political thread...
Got milk?
Nope, but I do have GOPiganda ;)
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Originally posted by Scuddie
Yeah, check out Portage for Gentoo... If you can get the ****ing thing installed in less than 10 attempts. Maeg, I dont know why you keep recommending Gentoo to those who aren't the hardest of core linux fans.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, Ubuntu is probably the best entry-mid level distro there is right now. Period.
[color=66ff00]I practically started off with Gentoo, learned a lot more than I did with Fedora.
I have heard that Ubuntu is an excellent starter distro but I've got little time lately to mess with it.
Gentoo just works for me and it's pretty easy to make it do what you need. :)
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Er...I thought that the point of that CNN article was censorship = security? I think that they should be allowed to publish it...if not, they'll find another country, and there's always the Internet. Now don't tell me the Feds control the Internet. :P (irc not counted, mwahah).