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There used to be an Office of Technology Asessment, but it was shuttered in the mid 90's when the new Republican majority decided it didn't need to pay any eggheads to tell it what worked.

Yeah, it's a flame.

Actually, some small companies do patch all their bugs. Especially when we're talking about reality, the facts that matter: reported bugs, known bugs, security bugs. While Microsoft, which could patch all those bugs with their vast resources and experience, does not.

Some more points about your criticism: strawman arguments aren't what you accuse the original post of being. They are weak or sham arguments created by an opponent to easily refute, not arguments made by the original party. And your Opera example is predicated on exactly the strawman I pointed out in the reponse to the original post: you read "if smaller software companies" as "if all smaller software companies", and then argues that one smaller company doesn't patch all of their bugs. When in fact the implicit qualifier in "if smaller software companies" is "if some (or any) smaller software companies". So their predicate is valid if even a single smaller software company patches all its bugs. And, as I mentioned, the bugs that matter in this argument are those that are reported, known, and security. If you insist on "all bugs" being literally all-inclusive, you're arguing for that release to be the final one, without even new features - sometimes known to some users as fixing bugs of omitted features.

So, as usually seen in posts by people who call factual, logical criticism "bashing" (of MS or any other party), you at last accuse the fair criticism of being "sophistry" and "sport". True to form, you project the serious flaws in your own strawman and absurdly reductionist argument onto your targets. It might be sport for you, but it's unsporting conduct.

This is your brain on the Internet.

Just say NO to the Internet!

This is definitely not the "world's first" smart mouse... Mickey and Jerry aside, scientists created a smart mouse at Princeton six years ago - check it out. Luckily you can catch these suckers with a smart mouse trap.

you are an EX-employee. where is the guarantee that the current employees did not, uhm, 'improve' upon your work?

The company was going in that direction. That's when I quit.

I don't have a garantee, but I know FooFighters was released with mediamax, rev 3, (the same described in the halderman document). There is no 'download/update' code in rev 3, so if you have that CD, rev 3 is all you have.

Sorry, not true. This particular kind of DRM doesn't break the CD spec. Other kinds of "copy protection", such as SunComm's MediaCloQ, do violate the CD specification and are technically not CDs. But schemes which are based on autorun trojans, like the scheme in the article or like SunComm's MediaMax, don't violate the CD specification at all.

That's from WordNet, actually. It's just an alternate definition dictionary.com gives on its result page. Apparently, 'prise' is also a spelling variant of 'prize', so the relation is valid. But it is always important to find the right source before blasting them to bits. ;)

Try CoDeeN, courtesy of your local PlanetLab node.

If that doesn't work, run an SSH tunnel through it. Of course they'll know you're using SSH, but what you're doing is very securely encrypted.

Okay, let me see if I can put this in terms you understand. I'm trying to establish that the minimum wage (i.e., legal price floor on per-unit-time price of labor) does not accomplish the goals you have outlined. I have explained a simple reason why: if a law can increase the real compensation of a worker, why stop at $10/hour? Why not $100/hour? You declined to answer this at least three times.

I answered it as many times by saying that you do not know how minimum wage works in practise, that while it is a legal price floor, that legal price floor is not entirely arbitrary, AND ONLY APPLIES TO THE MINIMUM.

So why stop there? because in all other cases it is no longer minimum wage (tho it may e in your definition, it is not for the rest of the world)

What I want you to do is, (like I asked you three times) explain why a $100/hour minimum wage would be a bad idea. Then explain why that exact argument does not apply to the minimum wage you advocate. If you can't do that, all your grandstanding about how, golly gee, shouldn't we have a law that makes employers PAY SOMEONE ENOUGH TO LIVE FROM is seen as irrelevant.

If you cannot understand why something can work when used with moderation while it won't work when taken into the extreme then that is your problem.

Just to show how much you know of what you are talking about:

You claim the minimum wage is working "quite well" wherever it is that you happen to live. I dispute this. You see the workers get raises from increases in the minimum wage (er... at least until the employer rides out the employment contract and moves the jobs elsewhere). You do not see the jobs that never get offered in the first place like internships that would give "risky" workers a foot in the door and a chance to earn money.

Internships here are not covered by minimum wage laws, so those internships exist and the risky people do get a foot in the door. An internship is actually how I landed my first job at IBM.

Like, the Google Summer of Code project that would not have happened if people like you were in the California legislature. "Hey! Pay a fair wage!" "That is a fair wage... the coders certainly like it." "No! You pay what we say you pay ... if you hire at all." "Okay, then we will do something else with the funds." "Yeah! That's right! Take that, Google! That's what you get for trying to give people jobs! Good riddance."

Grants like given by Google are not a wage, and hence are not covered by minimum wage laws. This is only the third time I point that out to you, and I am not the only one who pointed this out to you either.

So, again what you are arguing is not true and again it shows that you really have no fucking clue whatsoever what you are talking about.

Now, regarding your other point about the "justification" of the minimum wage... is this really a road you want to go down? Did you know that the original OFFICIAL justification of the original minimum wage in America was keep industry from fleeing from the North to the South? Or what if I told you it was also originally justified on eugenics grounds. Don't believe me? Read this:

http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Womenswo rk.pdf

Progressives wanted to make women and other groups (you know, the blacks and disabled people you claim to care about) unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.

Ah yes, someone a long long time ago tried to use this for their own purposes. Now, maybe just maybe you might consider this to be an incident, an annecdote, and ,maybe you should look at the feew dozen countries around that have a minimum age, and just notice how on average they have much less poverty.

For the rest, stop making assumptions about my political preferences. I am not what you americans would call a liberal, and I have nothign whatseever to do with the democrat party other then just agreeing with a few specific ideas they also happen to agree with.

Okay, let me see if I can put this in terms you understand. I'm trying to establish that the minimum wage (i.e., legal price floor on per-unit-time price of labor) does not accomplish the goals you have outlined. I have explained a simple reason why: if a law can increase the real compensation of a worker, why stop at $10/hour? Why not $100/hour? You declined to answer this at least three times. Until you answer this, your argument in favor a labor price floors is non-existent. If you propose policy X to accomplish Y, and policy X does not accomplish Y, your policy prescription is in error. It does not matter that there are "hidden costs" to poverty. If the minimum wage does not affect poverty, it doesn't quite do a whole hell of a lot for the "hidden costs of poverty", now, does it?

What I want you to do is, (like I asked you three times) explain why a $100/hour minimum wage would be a bad idea. Then explain why that exact argument does not apply to the minimum wage you advocate. If you can't do that, all your grandstanding about how, golly gee, shouldn't we have a law that makes employers PAY SOMEONE ENOUGH TO LIVE FROM is seen as irrelevant.

You claim the minimum wage is working "quite well" wherever it is that you happen to live. I dispute this. You see the workers get raises from increases in the minimum wage (er... at least until the employer rides out the employment contract and moves the jobs elsewhere). You do not see the jobs that never get offered in the first place like internships that would give "risky" workers a foot in the door and a chance to earn money. Like, the Google Summer of Code project that would not have happened if people like you were in the California legislature. "Hey! Pay a fair wage!" "That is a fair wage... the coders certainly like it." "No! You pay what we say you pay ... if you hire at all." "Okay, then we will do something else with the funds." "Yeah! That's right! Take that, Google! That's what you get for trying to give people jobs! Good riddance."

Now, regarding your other point about the "justification" of the minimum wage... is this really a road you want to go down? Did you know that the original OFFICIAL justification of the original minimum wage in America was keep industry from fleeing from the North to the South? Or what if I told you it was also originally justified on eugenics grounds. Don't believe me? Read this:

http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/Womenswo rk.pdf

Progressives wanted to make women and other groups (you know, the blacks and disabled people you claim to care about) unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.

Quoth the author Thomas Leonard: "...these progressives argued that minimum-wage-induced disemployment was a social benefit. Legal minimum wages and other statutory means of inducing undesirable groups to leave the labor force were, in the progressive view, a eugenic benefit."

And that's even setting aside the whole issue of whether the fact that a law "feels good" makes it a good idea. You seem to say yes, I say no.

just like at national parks. Someone who never sets foot in a national park does still have an interest in preserving them, but most of that cash flow should still come from the people that drive their RVs through them, or need rangers to run off the bear that has them up a tree.

I've always thought this was particularly fucked up.

Why is it that poor people shouldn't be allowed into the park?
Seems pretty regressive and fucked up to me, especially for something that is already subsidized by tax dollars.

The whole "let's just charge the people who use it" concept willfully ignores the fact that charges affect who uses it in the first place. This is true for parks, the radio spectrum, roads, etc.

Some people just don't have that much money, should these people be denied access to public services as a result? If so, then maybe these things aren't really that essential after all and the gov't shouldn't be providing them in the first place. Hey, the poor can do without it, why can't you?

Sell the land. Let the "free market" decide what to do with Yellowstone. After all the people with the largest chunk of money to throw at it deserve the most access to it, right?

Hey, I think humane interface guidelines would be a great place to start. Interfaces which are marked or motivated by concern with the alleviation of suffering would be much better than the status quo.

Definitions of frivolous on the Web:
* not serious in content or attitude or behavior; "a frivolous novel"; "a frivolous remark"; "a frivolous young woman"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Related phrases: list of frivolous parties frivolous complaint frivolous lawsuits frivolous lawsuit frivolous suit

That's the question: I even resent calling pugs "a toy Perl6 interpreter". I think it's a serious project, optimized for the fun of its committers. And watchers, like me. But it works a lot and it's teaching me a lot of stuff I didn't know. Being fun is not the opposite of being serious, that is to say, being fun is not the same of being frivolous.

Rather than promoting your prejudice, why not RTFA, or this 19-year-old paper.

I'll await your learned rebuttal.

Here is a paper (PostScript) from 1987 on the topic of GC being faster than manual allocation.

The author went on to make a very fast GC that set speed records.

If you are looking for factual arguments, with performance measurements and so on, just look at his work over the last few decades -- you'll see he did a lot of work in these very practical areas.

When you see how productive guys like him can be, it makes me wish that some people would just stay alive, and keep working, for a few hundred years more, instead of our typical mortal lifespans.

Here's an Excel spreadsheet that displays that data and automatically updates every minute (it's a start)

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~savraj/gc-live.xls

Can't believe no one jumped on this.
"Wrest": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrest
"Wrestle": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrestle

Can't believe no one jumped on this.
"Wrest": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrest
"Wrestle": http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=wrestle

Andrew Appel's papers include many on this topic; the first is "Garbage Collection can be better than Stack Allocation" and the most recent seems to be "Cache Performance of Fast-Allocating Programs". Basically, the amortized time taken by fast allocation and then later garbage collection is less than the combined time to allocate and deallocate memory the "usual" way. The memory locality of the garbage collector can be made very good as well. I believe a detailed discussion in in Appels "Modern Compiler Implementation" textbook(s).

Andrew Appel's papers include many on this topic; the first is "Garbage Collection can be better than Stack Allocation" and the most recent seems to be "Cache Performance of Fast-Allocating Programs". Basically, the amortized time taken by fast allocation and then later garbage collection is less than the combined time to allocate and deallocate memory the "usual" way. The memory locality of the garbage collector can be made very good as well. I believe a detailed discussion in in Appels "Modern Compiler Implementation" textbook(s).

Andrew Appel's papers include many on this topic; the first is "Garbage Collection can be better than Stack Allocation" and the most recent seems to be "Cache Performance of Fast-Allocating Programs". Basically, the amortized time taken by fast allocation and then later garbage collection is less than the combined time to allocate and deallocate memory the "usual" way. The memory locality of the garbage collector can be made very good as well. I believe a detailed discussion in in Appels "Modern Compiler Implementation" textbook(s).

Wordnet is a free semantic database with ~150,000 words and their semantic relations, and libs for several programming languages. I have played with it a lot over the years and it's an amazing database. (There are also versions being created for other languages than English.)
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

http://www.princeton.edu/~ecouncil/froshhelp/cours es.htm

Enterprise:

From http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=enterpri se

1. a purposeful or industrious undertaking (especially one that requires effort or boldness); "he had doubts about the whole enterprise"
2. an organization created for business ventures; "a growing enterprise must have a bold leader"

There you go, a purposeful undertaking that requires effort. Now try to imagine something done in business that does not fit that criteria. Or, an organization created for business. Hmm... ok, in other words, a company.

From http://www.cit.nih.gov/dnst/handbook/Main/glossary .htm

In the computer industry, an enterprise is an organization that uses computers.

Ha! There you go. PLEASE people, when you see this word, like others here have said, they are trying to shovel a load of shit directly down your throat, through the esophagus, into the stomach (possibly interacting with the spleen and/or liver), through both sets of intestines, and directly out your ass before recycling it back to your mouth.

That's exactly what they're trying to do, it means their product doesn't have any features that can be described in human readable language, so they need to say "well OUR product is specifically designed for organizations that require effort and use computers".

Well congratu-freakin-lations, get a patent, quick.

Like many other born-again Christians who are hiding from their own dark side, he lacks the intellectual rigour to think critically, and has no problem projecting an air of confidence. Hence, bullshit. See his comments on Intelligent Design, Iraqi WMD, terrorism and dozens of other topics.

The Macrovision CDS "copy control" logo should be on the front of the CD as a sticky label and on the back cover printed; it definitely is on all copy-control releases I've ever seen. It's multi-language as well. I certainly will not purchase any CC CD, and advise others against it.

The good news is that they're becoming less common - I've seen some very unwelcome uses of CDS here in the UK (including a jazz CD) but most new CDs I've seen from EMI/subsidiaries, the biggest users of CDS previously, have been protection-free; and new issues of some of the previously protected CDs, like Blur's Think Tank, have been CP-free. Which is certainly a good thing.

As for the Switchfoot protection, this is almost certainly the pain-in-the-ass SunnCOMM MediaMax system as seen on a lot of Sony USA albums. It's basically a legal trojan - it will install its Windows service even if you decline the licensing agreement (illegal in the UK under the Computer Misuse Act, which may be why we haven't seen many MediaMax CDs outside the States; they usually turn up as either CDS or unprotected instead.) It may be a good idea not to load the CD as Administrator, as well as turning off autorun.

Since it's a service, it's removable from the Computer Management services screen and from a hard to find link on he SunnCOMM website, but it has an obscure name - "SbcpHid" according to the CD3 analysis here, although I suspect they've either changed it now or added a partner (can't find any info to suggest otherwise). Can't someone sue them?

Definitions of reporter on the Web:

• a person who investigates and reports or edits news stories
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A reporter is a type of journalist who researches and presents information in certain types of mass media.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter

Definitions of journalist on the Web:

• a writer for newspapers and magazines
• diarist: someone who keeps a diary or journal
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A journalist is a person who practices journalism.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist
• Someone who works in the news gathering business, such as a photographer, editor or reporter.
  edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec670/Cardboard/board/p/ pulitzer/pulitzer5.html

Definitions of reporter on the Web:

• a person who investigates and reports or edits news stories
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A reporter is a type of journalist who researches and presents information in certain types of mass media.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporter

Definitions of journalist on the Web:

• a writer for newspapers and magazines
• diarist: someone who keeps a diary or journal
  wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A journalist is a person who practices journalism.
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist
• Someone who works in the news gathering business, such as a photographer, editor or reporter.
  edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec670/Cardboard/board/p/ pulitzer/pulitzer5.html

Someone should send a couple copies to Princeton's "Engineering Anomalies Research" project.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

... This seems to be the biggest problem with this whole issue. It is a game, not real and just a few minors, (Yes, I'm a minor as well,) end up having a nice little rock for politicians to grab onto in that giant Climbing-Wall-O-Politics. This is not a problem, this is not an epidemic.

As for the argument that it partly is the community's responsiblity to teach a child what is right and wrong, I agree to an extent. If I were to see a child running around screaming his/her head off and approach that child, the mother or (worse yet) the father might respond in a negative fasion. A question with this responsibility is, 'Should I get involved when I could just as easily be pointed out as the bad guy.' There are those parents out there that just don't want to be told how to run thier lives, (much like a minor), and abhore the thought of someone telling them how to raise thier child.

Another issue here is the fact that a lot of people claim 'Ignorance'. Ignorance does not work here. How many years has the ESRB been in effect, working for the education for the parents?

Over TEN years. This is no longer ignorance, this is 'Stupidity'. We can no longer claim ignorance as an attack on the Gaming Industry as there has been more than enough warnings, and attempts at teaching adults how to choose a game that is right for thier children.

According to Princeton University's Dictionary stupidity is as follows: Noun

* S: (n) stupidity (a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience)

This seems like a poor ability to understand to me.

There was an excellent talk at Cornell a year or two ago by Rob Nelson (a Princeton physicist), who has been researching the potential for these new nuclear technologies. His conclusion about bunker busters is that collatoral damage in a populated area would still be around 10,000-50,000 civillian deaths since a missile cannot penetrate to a depth sufficient for even a low-yield nuclear detonation to be contained underground.

The talk slides are in powerpoint format, and it would help to have more text explanations, but even as it is these talk slides make a VERY solid case against new nuclear initiatives:

http://www.princeton.edu/~rnelson/papers/cornell.p pt

His results have received a little bit of media attention, but are certainly not widely known. Of course, the neglegence of scientific research is one of the hallmarks of our current administration!

He goes on to invalidate the claim that a nuclear weapon can sterilize biological agents being stored in a building. He concludes that is a catastrophically effective delivery mechanism for the agents rather than a means of sterilizing them!

I'll paste the conclusion here:

* No EPW can penetrate deeply enough to contain a nuclear explosion; it would produce lethal fallout over several square kilometers..

* If bunkers contain stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, the agents would probably not be destroyed and may be dispersed with the fallout.

* New warhead development may require renewed underground nuclear weapons testing, ending the U.S.-Russia moratorium that has existed since 1992.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=niggardl y

That was done before at Princeton.
And they needed one of this to trap some of the rodents that used its new superior skills to escape.

Google a bit for the term Aryan before commenting please...

What was that sentence ? ah, yes : I don't think it means, what you think it means...

Also, your answer could participate in favor of the long stanging argument on eugenics (which means selection by breeding of certain specific, desirable traits, like we do with cattle...=>

        * pertaining to or causing improvement in the offspring produced
            http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn2.1

        * Eugenics (from the Greek, for "well-born") is a philosophy which advocates the manipulation of human reproduction for the purposes of attempting to improve the human species over generations in regards to hereditary features. The term was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton (though the idea had been put forward by Galton some time before), and eventually came to encompass the idea of using social policies which fell into the categories of "positive" ....
            en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenic

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that for people getting their first system, Windows is even more common than average. This obviously isn't because they're used to it.

How nice that you arouse that point, I am reading the book Rational Ritual which talks mainly about Common Knowledge.

And after reading your comment I think the Linux/Windows problem is about common knowledge. See, one of the main examples Suk-Young (the book author) states is the Apple superbowl commercial. That was in a time when a lot of people used IBM PC or compatible as their main computing platform.

So what they did is to advertise in the superbowl and try to generate a "common knowledge" about the Mac (e.g. if you saw the ad, you knew about the Mac, and you knew a lot of more people would knew about the mac and that they will knew that a lot of more people will knew... and so on ad infinitum).

This, translates into the Linux/Windows problem in some way, as the normal user will not leave Windows because he knows that it is what is commonly used. And that has a lot of advantages in terms of compatibility etc (the author calls those products as "social products" because in some way or another that other users use the product influence your desicion).

Compare it with an alarm clock software, you really do not care if someone else uses MS alarm clock or GNUClock or gClock or iClock, because it could be categorized as a "non social product", that only you will use.

What the Linux community has to do is to create a "massive common knowledge" about the operating system, right now we are at the level of "we know Linux is easy to use, secure, compatible, etc", and maybe we are kind of certain about the fact of "we know that someone else knows that Linux is easy to use...etc", but we really do not know if "someone else knows that everyone else knows that linux is...", this is it is NOT common knowledge, and hence the standard users will just think that as all the above applies to Windows (windows usage is common knowledge, and sorry for the ones that does not want to believe on it) the worst thing that can happen when someone choses to use Windows is that if someone else happens to be using Linux, they can just say, "okey, but you know how to use Window no?, and if you use that geek OS such as Linux, you wont have a problem opening my mdb,doc,xls,ppt or whatver file".

No. He's at Princeton.

Private universities are not, to the best of my knowledge, non-profits.

Indeed they are. Universities are without, any exception I know of, chartered as non-profit, charitable institutions that are tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the US tax code. If they weren't charities, then you would not be able to deduct your donations to them from your taxes.

For example see:
http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/ofs/tax_services/gen_ex e.shtml
http://www.ucop.edu/raohome/cgmemos/83-33.html
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/legal/legalfacts_su.h tml

and especially:

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pub/rrr/02/12.htm

So, my extensive analogy is not off at all.

If a University were organized as a private, for-profit enterprise, which is certainly conceivable, there would be no immorality in productizing knowledge -- by which I mean subjecting access to it so it can be sold for the highest possible profit. At least there would be no immorality that stems from its identity as a University: for profit entitites are first and formost profit making, and only secondarily whatever else they may be.

Harvard
Cornell
Princeton
Dartmouth
U Penn

Everything in science is INHERENTLY UNPROVABLE.

Have you ever heard of deductive reasoning? This is reasoning from the general to the particular. You start with general premises which you know (or assume) to be true, and work toward specific consequences which you can therefore also know (or assume) to be true. This is logically air tight reasoning.

Simplified example: First, we start with a general premise: "White pixels have value 0xffffff". Then we add a specific case: "I see a white pixel". Using deductive logic, we can deductively conclude that the value of the pixel is 0xffffff. Using deductive logic, if the general premis is true, then the deductive consequence will also be true.

Then there is inductive reasoning. This is also known as generalization. This goes in the opposite direction. It goes from a specific case to a general case. And guess what? You can never make a sweeping generalization that will always be true based on a limited number of data points.

Simplified example: I just flipped this coin three times and got heads. Therefore, the next time I flip this coin, it will also be heads.

Science is based on generalization: it takes a limited number of data samples and attempts to make sweeping generalizations about them. The fact that it works at all is quite astounding!

Science may, in fact, be useful in making more or less reliable conjectures about the world around us.

But science never PROVES anything.

for that purpose, lcc is pretty good. The source is available for free, but there's also a college-level compiler book which goes along with it. The parsing and lexing are done manually (rather than generated via flex/lex and bison/yacc).

First of all, a vast majority of people who actually write software for a living don't work for a software company.

This sounds like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Can you support this assertion?

In this article from USA Today Gates seems disappointed that kids and students using the technology don't seem more interested in it. And I don't blame him. I don't know about many other Slashdotters around here, but every time I used to get a new gadget or toy, I wanted to know how it worked.

Oh, and Maria Klawe seems like a qualified lady to be talking about this subject.

I found this through wikipedia : VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future (direct pdf link). The author's homepage also contains some other interesting material (ZORK for CMS (!))

I found this through wikipedia : VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future (direct pdf link). The author's homepage also contains some other interesting material (ZORK for CMS (!))

Me too, have seen it for more than a year. After three days totalling 2K+ connections (logrotate could barely keep up (= ), I slapped together a very simple perl script.

Script

It is by no means flawless, nor elegant. At start up I run
tail -f /var/log/pwdfail/current | ssh_blklst.pl
and drop the connection for 1 hour after 5 pwd fail attempts.

Oh, and comments and improvements are welcome.

I did look into IDS, but I realized that the only open port being my SSH port, I probably don't need all that sophisticated software...

That's the difference between "lies" and "bullshit". Bush might technically have not "lied", if the British government had "learned" such a fact. Even if some official in the British government "learned" that fact from one source, and then learned that fact was a lie - Bush technically could have told the truth by qualifying his statement as a fact "learned by the British". But it's really just bullshit.

That doesn't mean that Bush's statement wasn't also a "lie". As we now know, the British government had actually learned about Bush that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" - British for "Bush is bullshitting everyone so he can invade Iraq". Americans are starting to find the difference between lies and bullshit to be meaningless: it's all becoming known generally as "bushit". Especially as THERE WAS NO URANIUM, THERE WAS NO WMD, BUSH LIED TO INVADE IRAQ, WHERE'S OSAMA?

It sounds like this guy is trying to jump on Prof Frankfurt's bandwagon (On Bullshit.) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691 122946/qid=1121094466/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/102-0 573459-7462505?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7929.ht ml
The problem, as Mr Frankfurt seems well aware of in his 80 page book, is that people can endlessly bullshit about how much bullshit there is out in the world. Don Watson also seems aware of this and intends on capitalizing on it.

* marauding: characterized by plundering or pillaging or marauding; "bands of marauding Indians"; "predatory warfare"; "a raiding party"
* predaceous: living by or given to victimizing others for personal gain; "predatory capitalists"; "a predatory, insensate society in which innocence and decency can prove fatal"- Peter S. Prescott; "a predacious kind of animal--the early geological gangster"- W.E.Swinton
Here

* hunting and killing others
Here

Using MD5 and a single master password isn't such a good idea.

Suppose a bad guy steals your password for one site and wants to learn your master password (which you input to the hash function along with the domain name of the site). He can perform a brute force attack by checking each possible input password up to a certain length to see whether hashing it produces the stolen site password.

The problem is that MD5 is very fast to compute: for small blocks it takes <0.5us on a modern CPU. That means testing every possible password is surprisingly fast. For example, searching the space of all 8 character alphanumeric passwords (single case) would take only 16 days! With your master password in hand, the attacker can almost immediately determine your passwords for every other site where you employ this scheme. Of course, the attacker can work even faster if your password is in any way guessable.

Splitting a password with a hash function *can* work very well, but doing it securely is tricky. See this paper.

There are, however, genuinely successful examples from the same time period. Germans aren't doing this any more (or bombing London); Japanese aren't doing this any more (or bombing Honolulu). Why not? Because we didn't give every German POW their own copy of Mein Kampf with gloved hands and bent knees. We didn't have a President telling us that Nazism or Japanese militarism was an "ideology of peace". We wiped them out: not the Germans and Japanese, note, who are now our friends and allies, but the ideologies.