Slashdot Mirror

For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed

Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.

From Chomsky's comments...

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.

systrace?

Have you looked at tuition and book costs these days? At EMU, grad-level classes are about $1K apiece between tuition, fees, and books. Subtract $300 for undergrad classes. Figure $4K-$5K per full time semester. Whatever job you get will make a dent in that but won't cover it, especially if you have living expenses. The UofM a few miles down the road charges double what EMU does, for the priviledge of being taught by TAs (Teaching Assistants) who generally don't speak English very well.

Now, if EMU hadn't torched $5 MILLION on the new President's McMansion, maybe tuition would be slightly lower. They claim it'll help with fundraising. Personally, if I was a donor and I saw that palace, I'd assume that EMU had more money than they knew what to do with, but I'm not in the plutocrat set so maybe I just don't understand these things. Not that plutocrats would be slumming at EMU...

Anyhow, these days you may well be better off burning through classes as quickly as possible and racking up debt. Definitely do the Spring/Summer semester classes. Do co-op, by all means, since that directly helps your career (best thing I did as an undergrad). Other than that, minimize your expenses and study, study, study.

While taking a physics class at the University of Michigan, I was required to sign up for an "online homework" website. It was 30 some dollars, and was considered homework for the class (i.e. you take the class, you sign up and pay).

Sure enough, their Terms of Service require me to prevent others from obtaining my login/password. It goes on to say that if someone steals it, there is basically no way to reverse their actions.

Fine. Except for the fact that after signing up, they immediately e-mail me my password in plaintext. There's no SSL whatsoever on the site, and no way whatsoever to change my password.

After e-mailing the company involved, I was simply informed that the site will not be changed. I complained to both the professor and the University. Apparently no one pays attention to this, or they just don't care enough to do something about it. What else can I do? (besides leave the University, obviously)

File a real complaint with the university and sue under FERPA.

UMichagan is a state school, and state laws apply. The university is violating its password policy and its student records policy.

Call your student government, and get them involved.

Call your student newspaper, and get them involved.

Call your local TV news, and get them involved.

And talk to a lawyer.

You'd be amazed how quickly a university can respond when bad publicity and legal threats rear their ugly heads.

While taking a physics class at the University of Michigan, I was required to sign up for an "online homework" website. It was 30 some dollars, and was considered homework for the class (i.e. you take the class, you sign up and pay).

Sure enough, their Terms of Service require me to prevent others from obtaining my login/password. It goes on to say that if someone steals it, there is basically no way to reverse their actions.

Fine. Except for the fact that after signing up, they immediately e-mail me my password in plaintext. There's no SSL whatsoever on the site, and no way whatsoever to change my password.

After e-mailing the company involved, I was simply informed that the site will not be changed. I complained to both the professor and the University. Apparently no one pays attention to this, or they just don't care enough to do something about it. What else can I do? (besides leave the University, obviously)

File a real complaint with the university and sue under FERPA.

UMichagan is a state school, and state laws apply. The university is violating its password policy and its student records policy.

Call your student government, and get them involved.

Call your student newspaper, and get them involved.

Call your local TV news, and get them involved.

And talk to a lawyer.

You'd be amazed how quickly a university can respond when bad publicity and legal threats rear their ugly heads.

"Lounge Singer?"

You'd actually want Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back by Brent Spiner.

A cursory google search turned up this sample.

Fugu is nice for SFTP, too. BSD'ed ;)

Eh? Not at all. The "roman thing" is quite well documented.

I should know better than to respond to somebody who quotes Fox News as a source on science (particularly when the opening paragraph contains the words "junk," "science," and "environmental" -cheerleaders for the smokestack lobby), but if you feel so good about DDT, why not try sprinkling some on your morning breakfast cereal?

First, Rachel Carson is not a researcher, so Fox's refuting of her writings, and her interpretation of one of the researchers she quotes, doesn't address the large body of research regarding correlations between DDT and its effects on wildlife.

Look at the Peter Chen's Rio project (Rio, Rio-Vista...)

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/Rio/

not exactly what you want, but sort of what can be done with it.

A. Systems purchased or developed by the University of Michigan will not use Social Security numbers as identifiers unless required by law or business necessity.

B. Each member of the University community will be assigned a unique identification number that is not the same as, or derived from, the individual's Social Security number.

C. Systems purchased or developed by the University of Michigan will use Social Security numbers as data elements only, not as keys to databases.

D. Systems purchased or developed by the University of Michigan will not display Social Security numbers visually, whether on computer monitors or on printed forms or other system output, unless required by law or business necessity.

E. Name and directory systems purchased or developed by the University of Michigan will be tied to individuals' unique identification numbers, not to Social Security numbers.

F. When databases require Social Security numbers, the databases may automatically cross-reference between the Social Security numbers and other information through the use of conversion tables within systems or other technical mechanisms.

G. No new system or technology will be developed or purchased by the University of Michigan unless it is compatible with these regulations.

If you're concerned about the use of your SSN, and your school does something that blantently stupid (especially if they print your SSN on all your documents and on your ID card), you should go to a meeting of the governing body of the University (Regents, etc.) and present your case. Bring some examples of policy from other schools. It's kind of pointless to argue with the desk staff who ask for your SSN, as they are just doing what they are told and can't do much to help your privacy concerns. It might be hard to change the system, but it's worth a try.

There are many good articles out there about Common Carrier laws and regulations. I suggest you read them. I think this lawsuit will have minimal impact on ISP's common carrier status.

Internet service today, as far as I understand, is not a Common Carrier service by anyones definition. The government doesn't require anyone to provide Internet service at a fixed price. The government doesn't regulate Internet service (although, perhaps some of the underlying infrastructure). I don't think this relatively minor (in the context of common carrier status) point makes a difference.

That said, most ISP's want to act like common carriers. They usually want to sell to everyone at the published price, and want to carry all content without making editorial decisions. There are some (large) exceptions, but that's broadly true. Does that mean they should be regulated? Probably not. Common Carrier's history was to provide service to people private companies didn't want to service. Since ISP's seem to want to service everyone (within some limits) in a sense for now they can have the best of both worlds.

Of course, that could all change at any time.

The way we do it is that we have some underlying file store running on unix machines. At the moment we've got a couple Sun machines with large RAID arrays.

Then, to provide access to clients, we use Samba as a bridge to the Windows desktops and NFS for trusted linux clients; untrusted hosts can use SFTP or, if they just need read access, HTTP.

Having multiple storage nodes on multiple sites synchronized is a SAN, not client access, problem. NFS just doesn't provide multiple-node functionality. NFSv4 (link, link) may have some interesting features that could help; AFS was designed with multiple sites in mind and does intelligent caching and has other useful features over NFS but does have some limitations; and then there's things like IBM's Storage Tank which I haven't had a chance to look at properly yet.

Bottom line: If you have a flexible SAN infrastructure, you can use bridging nodes to provide access to the SAN tailored to whatever your clients require. The infrastructure is the hard part; with commodity packages like Samba client support is a much simpler seperate issue.

Actually, this was tried (and came damn close to working) a number of times on El Al flights. The most well known:

...in April 1986 Nezar Hindawi, a freelance Syrian-funded Jordanian terrorist and would-be agent of Syrian intelligence, sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight to Israel, promising to meet her there to be married. Unknown to her, however, Hindawi had hidden a bomb (provided by the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO)) in a false bottom to her hand luggage. His attempt to bomb the airliner in midair by duping his pregnant girlfriend was thwarted when the bomb was discovered by Heathrow security personnel...

That's a verbatim quote from this.

The article goes on to say

...Taylor regards Hindawi's behavior in this incident as psychopathic because of Hindawi's willingness to sacrifice his fiance and unborn child...

But I don't buy that - a suicide bomber is willing to sacrifice himself, after all, and I don't believe most people consider all suicide/ murderers insane. Evil, yes. Often brainwashed by even more evil people. But not automatically insane.

Anyway, this guy may well have wanted to get rid of an embarrasing situation at the same time he killed some Jews (a 'win-win' from his point of view).

Anyway, "did you pack your own bags" is a fine and useful tool, when asked by a trained interrogator.

The point is not the content of the answer, but the out of band information - demeanor, attitude, non-verbal communication, etc. etc.

That's why American Airlines was *unusually* clueless when they set up their automated check in machine to ask this question (!)

Senator Tom Harkin (D - Iowa) is a proponent of human cloning (not just stem cell research, mind you, but human cloning). He was in a public discussion a while ago with Doctor Ian Wilmut (the guy in charge of the Dolly sheep-cloning experiment). Wilmut said "it would be quite inhumane" to clone people. Harkin blasted him:

"Human cloning will take place and it will take place within my lifetime. I think it is right and proper. ... It holds untold benefits for humankind in the future."

Article about it

I've been using Red Hat 8 in a lab setting with 16 workstations and 1 server for over a year now, with no complaints ... well, no BIG ones.

However, the University I work for is preparing to have a meeting for which version of Linux to standardize on and get support for... Red Hat (I'm assuming Enterprise), SuSe, or Fedora.

If I had a time machine and could travel to the future, I would not be the least bit surprised if 500 years from now the Big Bang theory and Evolution were considered myths from the past.

For instance, we are now beginning to accept that an organism inherits more than its genotype (ie. genetic makeup). In the same way humans inherit knowledge and property created by their parents, organisms too can inherit changes their ancestors made to their environment or behaviour - changes that are capable of modifying the selective pressures that determine which traits perish or survive.

See The extended phenotype and Aspects of behavioural inheritance

The mistake you make is that you don't care about security in multiple layers. Additionally, I would recommend to use a ProProlice-enabled gcc to compile your server applications, to enable (if your OS provides it) non-executable-stack features, and (when it's finished) my self-written ContraPolice, which adds protection against heap overflows to your applications. Additionally, systrace might also be a good feature against possible attacks against your system.

Of course, the things I presented here are only for a small percentage of all services and machines in "big" production environment. So, for more protection, a close look at the client has to be done, too.

Where also sits an x86 computer running Windows that has a fully operational version of the BBC Digital Domesday Book since June 2003. It took about 3 years to retrieve the data and write an emulator that could run the software, which originally ran on the BBC Micro computer, but they did it.

I think the best example is probably the domesday book and the domesday project.

A thousand years ago (more or less) the Domesday book recorded a snapshot of life in England (and Wales I think ,but I think the scots gave'em the finger :-), it's still available today.

20 (or so) years ago, the domesday project did the same thing - recorded to a laserdisk, and intended to be a resource of all things at that time. For the time, it was pretty fantastic - schools up and down the country took part, videos were made, maps, testaments from people of all walks of life.

There is now a project to try and resurrect the domesday project, because no technology available can read it. The book (though written in latin) is still perfectly legible. Which is the better technology ?

Paper every time, apart from when you're searching :-)

Simon.

( Koran search for Judah, Judea, or Gaza. Your boolean query produced no results. Hmmm)

>Users are going to click "YES" anyway, without reading the warning, then call you later to say they're missing a file and need it restored from tape.

That's the problem with India. Their responses to double negatives are actually correct; unlike North American dialects.

"Would you please not to delete this file?"

What you expect to answer depends on your dialect. I'm dead serious on this.

'Yes' and 'no' agreeing to the form of a question, not just its content --
A: 'You didn't come on the bus?'
B: 'Yes, I didn't.'"

Redo your resume in plain ASCII. If the potential employers pay that much attention to poofy resume fonts then you don't want to work there anyway.

Actually I think more people should have plain text resumes. Of course it's probably best to honor a preference if a potential employer expresses one, but ascii is a good default, because a lot of people have to go through extra steps to deal with attachments, while noone is ever going to have trouble reading plain text included in the body of an email message.

My solution: Bruce's resume-o-matic

--Bruce Fields

In larswm, you have something that remotely resembles Expo.+ (you see all windows at once, but only the upper left corner instead of the resized version if minimized), and the
ability to combine virtual desktops with cycling within a desktop works wonders on me.

Ouch... sounds like you need automation just a *tad*. Try out radmind which will save you the 262 duplicate updates you otherwise would be doing.

I would like to encourage you to watch this great lecture streamed through the internet. Prof. David D. Cole of Georgetown University Law Center explores the parallels between the first Red Scare, the era of McCarthyism and todays equivalent... terrorism. If you have a good internet connection with Real player and an hour of your time, I would recommend catching this enlightening lecture. To learn how denying the civil liberties of others may later trample on your very on liberties and rights in the future. Parts of the original Patroit Act are in this lecture as well.

"Freedom and Terror: September 11th and the 21st Century Challenge Freedom"
by Professor David D. Cole, Georgetown University Law Center
Real Player stream

The lecture is available by webstream on demand:
http://www.umich.edu/~sacua/webstream.htm

For more information on the Academic Freedom Lecture
Series please see:
http://www.umich.edu/~sacua/AFL/afllecture.html
----

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't trade unionists.
THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
THEN THEY CAME for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Martin Niemoeller, Lutheran Pastor.

if faced with the task of drawing rigorously attributed quotations from a blog, well, I'd prefer not to

Ha. Very good. ;^)

Fair enough on the blog comment, but you might be surprised with the quality of what some people are, ah, heck, I'll say it, "e-publishing" these days.

The US and UK came out with 10 centimeter radar in 1943 to sink U-boats. It turned the war around for us! God Bless you Magnetron.

High frequency EM waves also travel around anything metal (skin effect), like sheet metal siding and power lines.

This is why I'm sticking with the sheilding idea for now.

The US and UK came out with 10 centimeter radar in 1943 to sink U-boats. It turned the war around for us! God Bless you Magnetron.

High frequency EM waves also travel around anything metal (skin effect), like sheet metal siding and power lines.

This is why I'm sticking with the sheilding idea for now.

Press release after a recent APS conference

Extended summary of research (PDF) and

Research projects currently underway by the same U of Michigan group. Some cool stuff. Check it out. The microwave noise project is the first link. Nice PIC of the setup. Also a couple audio files showing the noise interference to a cordless phone before and after the modification.

Low-noise microwave magnetrons by azimuthally verying axial magnetic field - here

Seems like a pretty cool concept. Definitly sort of offensive.

Welcome to the club :)
I just recently bought a 12" PB and I'm loving it.

6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.

Fetch is no longer included in the OS, and its not free. You can find freeware clients at Version Tracker. I've never found a need for a graphical client, since I use ftp so rarely.

Also check out Fugu. Its a graphical SFTP, SCP and SSH tunneling client. Its also under a BSD style license :)

8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.

This is less of a problem in Panther than it was in Jaguar, but the fastest speed is still too slow for some. There is a nice little freeware PrefPane wigit called MouseZoom that will let you increase the acceleration number above the max that the Keyboard & Mouse PrefPane will.

11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.

My advice: Invest in a Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse. Right clicking does bring up a list of suggested words (command-click has the same effect). The sweetest thing about the MS bluetooth mouse is that it has 5 buttons, so you can map Expose functions to the two thumb buttons. Having a scroll wheel is also something that I can't live without. Its also very nice to not have to plug in anything to use an external mouse.

Hope you find some of this useful.

No--the average students out of the top national schools get the opportunity to earn 125 K. Don't take me out of context. I didn't say all lawyers. I said "standard garden variety law student fresh out of one of the top national schools." I'm not talking about people who go to their local law school and get a job with their local firm or the DA's office. But $125K is both the 25th and 75th percentile salary for just about every "top 10" law school. If you want to go work for a large law firm in NYC or Chicago, and you're in the middle of the grade curve at a top national school, you're golden unless you have serious personality defects. Even in this market.

I don't know what "people" really think, but as a student at a top national school, I know the numbers. See for instance Michigan. Same entry level salary in six large legal markets.

The top students at the top national schools often end up making less than the average students--because it's the top students that have the opportunity to get the few meaningful, prestigious paid jobs there are.

to have been influenced by matrix.

And the matrix was heavily influenced by these two books:
Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
&
Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (you can read the whole book online)

Just though I'd share, I found both these books amazing and giving me better insight into the Matrix, as well as introducing me to new topics.

Here's a mirror for you

Pastiche isn't from Microsoft, it's from the University of Michigan. Here's the link.

wait, here it is.

There's nothing surprising about this, unfortunately. The phenomenon was described at least as early as 1833 by William Forster Lloyd. Any common, limited resource that is not regulated will be destroyed by misuse.

What's sad, to me, is just how self destructive it all is. With all our intelect our behavior is no better than a parasite that dies when it kills it's host.

Cheers.

I would like to point out that we have had some amazing nuclear technology ready for primetime since the mid 80's known as Pebble-bed. I know many of the /.'rs know about this, but to some it is quite new.

The pebble bed reactor design is intrinsically safe both while operating and during dismantling. The fuel (which can be uranium or mixed with plutonium) is encased in small high strength ceramic beads. The encapsulation serves to prevent the release of radioactive material even if the reactor vessel is breached as well as separate the fuel and prevent it from melting into a large mass.

The reactor is then cooled with high temperature helium gas, which also acts as a moderator. Here is the second line of safety; should the reactor get too hot or the helium is released, no moderation occurs. This means that the fast neutrons stay fast and are unable to cause a chain reaction. Hence, a catastrophic failure of both the containment vessel and cooling system would cause the reactor to physically shut itself down.

But the best part about the high-temperature gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors (long name) is that they burn up over 90% of the primary fuel and the waste products are still encapsulated by the pebbles. This is radically different from the water-cooled reactors which usually are only capable of 10% fuel efficiency and generate (instead of eliminate) plutonium.

Because of the efficiency, these reactors can be fueled by the waste of our current light water reactors, which between 1968 and 1998 generated 38400 metric tons of waste containing mostly uranium and plutonium (which if not eliminated could be used by to build bombs).

Although it is a pipe dream to think that the oil industry and the US government might actually support these newer nuclear technologies, let us take one step farther in waste disposal. Today, we are all set to bury those 40ktons of waste in Yucca Mountain for 10,000 years... but this is useless. Who knows if there will even be a United States in 10,000 years? By putting the spent pebbles from the reactors into a particle accelerator, we can use neutron transmutation (fun word huh?) to cut the dangerous half-life of waste to less than 100 years and about break even on power consumption. 100 years is far more manageable than 10,000.

Of course, these ideas aren't my own, just compiled from many other well respected scientists and others. If any one is interested in some this material, including a little more history and comparison of other fossil and renewable energy sources, please take a look at this proposal on energy policy.

But has PG begun to preserve "musical works []; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works"?

Yes, to some of those. We have some transcribed musical texts, (and one top forty song), and some of us have started working on early movies; so far PG only has a few short, low-res Government clips.

I thought PG etexts were plain ASCII text.

Common misconception. PG usually keeps an ASCII edition where feasable, but that doesn't exclude them making other editions or ignoring that when it isn't reasonable. (In any case, we could just do like the movie companies used to when they would print out every frame for copyright, and run every frame of a movie through a graphic to ascii filter.)

Those are "literary works" under 17 USC 101.

I don't think you have a concept of just how many literary works were printed before 1922. Take a look at the Canadiana or Making of America sites one day to see a great wealth of eligible books that aren't in PG yet. My old library at OSU probably had 10,000 eliglible books we hadn't done yet.

This is a finite set as well.

The number of atoms in the universe is also a finite set.

I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.

Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?

You like worrying, don't you? What will happen, will happen, and maybe once we get a lot closer, we'll have to worry about it, but so long as we have a large supply of texts, there's no need to worry about it. What's the worst that happens, Project Gutenberg stops getting larger nearly as fast?

Fugu is a good, free SFTP program for OS X. It would be nice to have this integrated into Finder, though.

It is a SIMD machine. It looks like they've put some real thought into the software, which is the hard part in something like this. The debugger certainly looks pretty.

The ported C code on slide 13 is a bit scary. The intermediate language appears to rely on the compiler to distribute the workload to the PEs (otherwise why is the loop the same in both.) I'd much prefer the intermediate language give you complete control of the PEs rather than letting the compiler do it for you.

It does look like there are actual dies out there. Maybe not functional, but built. Also, it looks like the PE communication is more limited than I'd like. There are only two communcation ports. I'd expect four if they want this architecture to scale past 64 PEs.

Other comments.

• "multi-treaded" is as close to a false description as you can get. Only one thread (instruction stream) runs at a time. Sure, you get 64 data streams but that is SIMD, not MT.

• The peak GFLOPS numbers are actually really really poor compared to a P4. 25 vs. 12? And while both are much higher than actually achievable on real programs, the P4 is probably easier to come close on.

• 64 PEs on chip? It looks like there only 12 million logic transistors. Which after the main core means that only slightly more than 100,000 transistors are spent per PE. I'd really expect to see a whole lot more logic transistors. The Itanium 2 (which uses a newer process) has about 75 million logic transistors ((see here). Doing the same here would give space for more than 256 PEs.

Given the above issues I don't think this thing is going to take off anytime soon for "super computer" purposes. The big win is high FLOPS per Watt, which isn't all that important for SCs (well not that important). As part of a graphics processor or DSP I could see potential. I still think that in a few years (say 5 to 10) this type of thing will be a coprossesor on a fair number of those Linux clusters used for scientific computing. But this one isn't there yet.

I've seen people toss around $16,000 as a price point, but I can't find that anywhere. I assume I'm missing something obvious. At that price it is useless. It needs to be under $1,000, and really wants to be a lot cheaper than that to be interesting.

Is this the best face they could find to put in an article dealing with Open Source adoptation?
I agree. This one is much cuter.

I'm hosting two upcoming games in Michigan, one this fall and one next spring.

I'm hosting two upcoming games in Michigan, one this fall and one next spring.

In this interview he said:
Question: When will we here in the US be able to see [one of] your books put to movie?
DNA: The Dirk Gently books are currently in development as a television series. The "Hitchhiker's Guide" is currently under development. I'm very confident that it will actually go into production any decade now. When... I want to know when too.

So this is what he wanted, and I hope it's done well.

This reminds me of a very old short story... I can't remember the title or author, but it's about these intelligent robots that arrive at a planet and put the main character (an android salesman) out of business by giving away much superior ones. Eventually everyone has one of these robots and they become increasingly "protective" of people, eventually preventing them from doing anything at all. Ah, I remembered the title: With Folded Hands - "The title refers to the only thing left for humanity to do: sit with folded hands as the robots take care of all their troubles." Creating a virtual world, where humans could be happy but not be in any physical danger, would be a logical extension of this.

When Chinese worked on U.S. government atomic warheads, China soon had a design very much like it. Now that Microsoft is showing its source code, does that mean that there will soon be a Chinese version of Microsoft Windows, not owned by Microsoft?

Will Bill Li soon be the richest man in the world and complain about governments stifling innovation? Will Bill Gates then say that it doesn't really matter?

In the short term, the mailing viruses are willing. I think it's to early to say that the spammers are going to benefit from this in the long run. True -- anti-spam services (especially those that are poorly funded or inadequately scalable) have been shutting down recently. They've been taxed, incredibly taxed, but the last two months' virus activity -- like the rest of the mail infrastructure. Add in some highly publicized ddos attacks, and, hell, many services would buckle under that kind of pressure. I think the real lesson is that many centralized spam services are inflexible and not hardened enough to meet the task (and the resistance). Maybe, generally speaking, that's the wrong idea. Maybe. In an even longer term, I think things are even less clear. Technologically, right now, it's spam/viruses 1, civiliam e-mail 0. But the troubles have been so well publicized, and so generally annoying, that already institutions are finally starting to implement basic hygiene measures, in some cases overcoming substantial status-quo / administrative pressure.

Fugu for OS X is quite a nice open source app for doing SCP / SFTP and also setting up SSH tunnels. I use it to connect to my home (linux) server from my G4 at work.