I see what you're saying and you make a good point. Of course you don't really "need" to run the stupid CD, but the sales pitch tries to convince you that you do. I went around and around with my DSL installer (then FIOS) and finally demanded: "just give me the SSID and WPA key and leave me alone." It wasn't the installer's fault since the CD was all he knew. I also understand why providers prefer that customers use the CD software, since it helps them in assisting "lowest common denominator" customer troubleshooting by "lowest common denominator" tech support. So, my family transition to Linux was enabled by a pathfinder family member who learned through forums, trial, and error, and much web search. That said, I recall much the same dynamic learning DOS then Windows, minus the rich user forums and web search (but there were "bulletin boards"). The ability to listen to what a tech supporter is describing and mentally running in-line translation to a Linux paradigm has been essential on a number of occasions. So, new WIndows (or Mac) users are better off than new Linux Gnome or KDE users only in that commercial tech support by ISPs and other services are limited to nonexistent. I don't know of a mechanism for improving that situation.
I disagree too with the assertion that one should use windows if "You are new to using computers." Gnome on Linux as applied by the Ubuntu distribution is so user-friendly and functional that my very computer-challenged wife picked it up with no problem. If you're new starting out, Ubuntu may in fact be the easiest to learn and effectively employ, since it comes with such a rich application environment. Also, I put 3 daughters through the college with new PC's, and after the 3rd or 4th time I had to reload Windows in their Freshman year, because their machines got corrupted/owned/trashed from the college network environment, Windows would give me crap trying to reload from the OEM disk (probably a run-counter to thwart piracy, but not applicable in my case). So rather than repurchase Windows, I just loaded Ubuntu. All finished college just fine on Ubuntu with no further crashes. The interesting side-effect is that when they graduated, none of my daughters bought a Windows PC, instead going for Macs, the slicker *nix option, but *nix nonetheless. Also, "You are interested in open source programming" should be modified to say "You are interested in open source applications or programming."
First of all, whatever code was "copied" so long ago has likely long since been overwritten by updates over the years.
Secondly, and on topic only because it was brought in by the troll, the visceral and inane hatred by lefties of Palin, who has not actually killed or eaten any babies or loved ones that has been proven as far as I know, seems rather pathological. What specific ideas of hers have you people so spooked? If she's actually so stupid and vacuous as so often screeched by the haters, then isn't she actually harmless? Chill. You look like idiots.
Not only that, but DoD accounts for a huge number of "invalid" reports, since DoD runs its own PKI. So, they may be identified by some browsers as "invalid," but are in fact valid and apply reasonable security, especially with CAC tokens.
If Washington DC is too "information rich to handle everything on its plate" then why not return to first principles by simplifying government to its core constitutional functions? The hubris of Leninism-Stalinism was the mad idea that government can effectively and efficiently dictate the omni-variable complexity of an entire modern industrialized state's economy as well as all societal institutions, down to speech and even thought. Why do we always strive to replicate madness?
I find it encouraging that people are finally voicing concern over the political manipulation of K-12 history textbooks. I agree with such concerns. However, I find it more than a little hypocritical that such outrage is just beginning, when the political left has had its way with history textbooks since the nineteen-seventies. Three cheers for the promotion of intellectual honesty, however belated.
And corporations are made up of...wait for it...prairie dogs in suits! Thats right! Stand up, looks out across the cube-tops and greet your fellow prairie dogs! We are corporation! We are America! We deserve representation! Meer cats suck, by the way. Freakin' commies.
First of all, it is clear to anyone who actually reads Schneier's article, that he said nothing of the sort. Secondly, the popular leftist and anti-American narrative that the US' response to 911 is responsible for fostering more terrorism is equally specious and circular, especially the equine excrement fairy tales of oppressed muslims in the US treated as "second class citizens" by "racist extremist groups." I call BS. BS. BS. BS. Propaganda unanswered is nothing short of complicity.
They don't have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. Nor do that have to work all the time; they just need to work when needed, and for just long enough to allow the first shot. ("Spock, what's tha...doh!")
Bottom line is that if you're buying COTS, then you get whatever the license says. If you're paying for development, then you get whatever you negotiate. Articulate your requirement for data rights in the RFP, carefully review the proposals for meeting your requirements, then follow-up to ensure the contract says what you need it to say.
The coined term "cyberwar" is an abstraction. Like all abstractions, it's an imperfect model of a much more complex reality. It would be foolish to believe that capable nation states would not conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, and when conditions are favorable, offensive operations, and therefore defensive as well, in cyber-space as one would in any other physical medium (not that cyber-space is not physical -- it is). The same is true for criminality, organized certainly, but not exclusively, by demonstration, for example, here: http://www.ic3.gov/media/default.aspx. Why would one expect otherwise where there are risks and rewards in favorable ratios? So, offensive and defensive cyber-warfare is one very likely potential, if not an ongoing and evolving reality. So is cyber-crime. So are script kiddies. So are average people behaving typically well, badly, and all points in between in a complex environment. For policy makers, the challenge is in changing the risk to reward ratio. So, what is bullshit? Depends on your bullshit criteria and thresholds, I suppose.
Since it is a simple matter to download KDE and configure Ubuntu for the choice to select KDE or Gnome at the start screen, that is exactly what I always do. That said, I always end up defaulting to back to the Gnome desktop. I'm not sure what the major gripe against Gnome is, but having gotten used to it for a number of years, I find it fast and stable, and it's grown on me. I'm glad to have a choice. So, what is the problem, exactly? BTW I remember having problems back in 2005 (-ish?) with sound and other driver related issues, but I've found no problems for the longest time. When I last messed with Kubuntu, even, everything worked fine. Not taking exception BetterSense's post, just needed a convenient place to attach this observation.
Concur regarding disagreement on premise "anti-Obama means that your are pro-Bush," and all other such false dichotomies. So, who thinks "wire taps from the Bush era are okay"? Well, the Obama administration, it seems, who just signed another one year extension to such wire taps. See the article at: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100228/D9E4T02G0.html. When you hitch your wagon to the politician rather than analysis of individual issues and conditions, you lose your objectivity. The degree to which you lose your objectivity is the degree to which you abrogate reason. I'd recommend starting with the null hypothesis that all politicians suck and can't be trusted; therefore all must be watched carefully and engaged forcefully on the issues.
You're right, Occam's Razor. Conspiracy is generally too hard, even if you know what you're doing. Who needs conspiracy? Group-think, socio-political cliques, popular public funding streams, fashion, peer pressure, yearning for acceptance by an in-crowd. Know what really brought the US to its knees in Viet Nam? Hippy Chicks. Wanted to get laid? You were anti-war.
This is obviously an artifact of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a little know provision of which provides federal Senior Executive Service (SES) level positions for "Special Needs" individuals. Here inside the DC Beltway a little yellow short-bus now runs between every department and agency on a 5 minute schedule, sometimes confusing school children from out of town. Seriously folks, this reflects the worst of a bureaucratic mindset that attempts to overlay finite and rigid rule-sets on a richly infinite and chaotic world. Rules are necessary and good, helping us to abstract from the unmanageably complex to humanly manageable bite-sizes. The best rules also enable such concepts as "fairness" and "impartiality" by enforcing consistency to agreed standards on decision-making processes. However, the world is not really so simple, and any abstraction is necessarily imperfect. So, man evolved mental faculties to survive in a complex environment. We call some of these faculties "reason," and "judgment," sometimes referring to a concept called "common sense." Rules, regulations, guideline, and laws must account for some measure of judgment. That is in fact why we employ people we call "managers" and "executives." We, in fact, usually pay such individuals more money than others with the thought, sometimes a delusion, that the education, background, or connections that these people have indicate a superior capacity to occasionally rise above the rule sets as needed to apply common sense where rigid rules may not apply, or, indeed, need to be changed, lest they might be confused with symptoms of insanity, stupidity or malice. So, let me be the first to call for the firing of the dumb SOB SES at USPTO who approved this rule.
Re: "does anyone here work for an organization of any sort (government, industry, academia, whatever) that requires that everyone use "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer"? Answer is yes. See http://nvd.nist.gov/fdcc/index.cfm
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I see what you're saying and you make a good point. Of course you don't really "need" to run the stupid CD, but the sales pitch tries to convince you that you do. I went around and around with my DSL installer (then FIOS) and finally demanded: "just give me the SSID and WPA key and leave me alone." It wasn't the installer's fault since the CD was all he knew. I also understand why providers prefer that customers use the CD software, since it helps them in assisting "lowest common denominator" customer troubleshooting by "lowest common denominator" tech support. So, my family transition to Linux was enabled by a pathfinder family member who learned through forums, trial, and error, and much web search. That said, I recall much the same dynamic learning DOS then Windows, minus the rich user forums and web search (but there were "bulletin boards"). The ability to listen to what a tech supporter is describing and mentally running in-line translation to a Linux paradigm has been essential on a number of occasions. So, new WIndows (or Mac) users are better off than new Linux Gnome or KDE users only in that commercial tech support by ISPs and other services are limited to nonexistent. I don't know of a mechanism for improving that situation.
I disagree too with the assertion that one should use windows if "You are new to using computers." Gnome on Linux as applied by the Ubuntu distribution is so user-friendly and functional that my very computer-challenged wife picked it up with no problem. If you're new starting out, Ubuntu may in fact be the easiest to learn and effectively employ, since it comes with such a rich application environment. Also, I put 3 daughters through the college with new PC's, and after the 3rd or 4th time I had to reload Windows in their Freshman year, because their machines got corrupted/owned/trashed from the college network environment, Windows would give me crap trying to reload from the OEM disk (probably a run-counter to thwart piracy, but not applicable in my case). So rather than repurchase Windows, I just loaded Ubuntu. All finished college just fine on Ubuntu with no further crashes. The interesting side-effect is that when they graduated, none of my daughters bought a Windows PC, instead going for Macs, the slicker *nix option, but *nix nonetheless. Also, "You are interested in open source programming" should be modified to say "You are interested in open source applications or programming."
First of all, whatever code was "copied" so long ago has likely long since been overwritten by updates over the years. Secondly, and on topic only because it was brought in by the troll, the visceral and inane hatred by lefties of Palin, who has not actually killed or eaten any babies or loved ones that has been proven as far as I know, seems rather pathological. What specific ideas of hers have you people so spooked? If she's actually so stupid and vacuous as so often screeched by the haters, then isn't she actually harmless? Chill. You look like idiots.
Not only that, but DoD accounts for a huge number of "invalid" reports, since DoD runs its own PKI. So, they may be identified by some browsers as "invalid," but are in fact valid and apply reasonable security, especially with CAC tokens.
If Washington DC is too "information rich to handle everything on its plate" then why not return to first principles by simplifying government to its core constitutional functions? The hubris of Leninism-Stalinism was the mad idea that government can effectively and efficiently dictate the omni-variable complexity of an entire modern industrialized state's economy as well as all societal institutions, down to speech and even thought. Why do we always strive to replicate madness?
...and we would become 1960's Bulgaria.
I find it encouraging that people are finally voicing concern over the political manipulation of K-12 history textbooks. I agree with such concerns. However, I find it more than a little hypocritical that such outrage is just beginning, when the political left has had its way with history textbooks since the nineteen-seventies. Three cheers for the promotion of intellectual honesty, however belated.
And corporations are made up of...wait for it...prairie dogs in suits! Thats right! Stand up, looks out across the cube-tops and greet your fellow prairie dogs! We are corporation! We are America! We deserve representation! Meer cats suck, by the way. Freakin' commies.
So, I must agree with the "reality-based community" or risk being "embarrassing?" I'd prefer reason over dogma, thank you.
I'm seriously suggesting that innuendo and unsupported assertions are BS. Show me the data.
First of all, it is clear to anyone who actually reads Schneier's article, that he said nothing of the sort. Secondly, the popular leftist and anti-American narrative that the US' response to 911 is responsible for fostering more terrorism is equally specious and circular, especially the equine excrement fairy tales of oppressed muslims in the US treated as "second class citizens" by "racist extremist groups." I call BS. BS. BS. BS. Propaganda unanswered is nothing short of complicity.
They don't have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. Nor do that have to work all the time; they just need to work when needed, and for just long enough to allow the first shot. ("Spock, what's tha...doh!")
Hail Darth Sidious...
So, the Global Warming campaign an excuse for elitists to impose enlightened socialist rule...never saw that coming...
Bottom line is that if you're buying COTS, then you get whatever the license says. If you're paying for development, then you get whatever you negotiate. Articulate your requirement for data rights in the RFP, carefully review the proposals for meeting your requirements, then follow-up to ensure the contract says what you need it to say.
The coined term "cyberwar" is an abstraction. Like all abstractions, it's an imperfect model of a much more complex reality. It would be foolish to believe that capable nation states would not conduct surveillance and reconnaissance, and when conditions are favorable, offensive operations, and therefore defensive as well, in cyber-space as one would in any other physical medium (not that cyber-space is not physical -- it is). The same is true for criminality, organized certainly, but not exclusively, by demonstration, for example, here: http://www.ic3.gov/media/default.aspx. Why would one expect otherwise where there are risks and rewards in favorable ratios? So, offensive and defensive cyber-warfare is one very likely potential, if not an ongoing and evolving reality. So is cyber-crime. So are script kiddies. So are average people behaving typically well, badly, and all points in between in a complex environment. For policy makers, the challenge is in changing the risk to reward ratio. So, what is bullshit? Depends on your bullshit criteria and thresholds, I suppose.
The entire Federal Government of the United States is a publicly funded Microsoft Shop. What's the issue?
I give it a resounding "Machs Nix." First thing I do anyway is set up the theme to my taste anyway.
Would this be an inappropriate time to simply say a big "thank you" to Canonical and the Ubuntu community?
Since it is a simple matter to download KDE and configure Ubuntu for the choice to select KDE or Gnome at the start screen, that is exactly what I always do. That said, I always end up defaulting to back to the Gnome desktop. I'm not sure what the major gripe against Gnome is, but having gotten used to it for a number of years, I find it fast and stable, and it's grown on me. I'm glad to have a choice. So, what is the problem, exactly? BTW I remember having problems back in 2005 (-ish?) with sound and other driver related issues, but I've found no problems for the longest time. When I last messed with Kubuntu, even, everything worked fine. Not taking exception BetterSense's post, just needed a convenient place to attach this observation.
Concur regarding disagreement on premise "anti-Obama means that your are pro-Bush," and all other such false dichotomies. So, who thinks "wire taps from the Bush era are okay"? Well, the Obama administration, it seems, who just signed another one year extension to such wire taps. See the article at: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100228/D9E4T02G0.html. When you hitch your wagon to the politician rather than analysis of individual issues and conditions, you lose your objectivity. The degree to which you lose your objectivity is the degree to which you abrogate reason. I'd recommend starting with the null hypothesis that all politicians suck and can't be trusted; therefore all must be watched carefully and engaged forcefully on the issues.
"Political fact"? Freudian slip?
You're right, Occam's Razor. Conspiracy is generally too hard, even if you know what you're doing. Who needs conspiracy? Group-think, socio-political cliques, popular public funding streams, fashion, peer pressure, yearning for acceptance by an in-crowd. Know what really brought the US to its knees in Viet Nam? Hippy Chicks. Wanted to get laid? You were anti-war.
This is obviously an artifact of the "Americans with Disabilities Act," a little know provision of which provides federal Senior Executive Service (SES) level positions for "Special Needs" individuals. Here inside the DC Beltway a little yellow short-bus now runs between every department and agency on a 5 minute schedule, sometimes confusing school children from out of town. Seriously folks, this reflects the worst of a bureaucratic mindset that attempts to overlay finite and rigid rule-sets on a richly infinite and chaotic world. Rules are necessary and good, helping us to abstract from the unmanageably complex to humanly manageable bite-sizes. The best rules also enable such concepts as "fairness" and "impartiality" by enforcing consistency to agreed standards on decision-making processes. However, the world is not really so simple, and any abstraction is necessarily imperfect. So, man evolved mental faculties to survive in a complex environment. We call some of these faculties "reason," and "judgment," sometimes referring to a concept called "common sense." Rules, regulations, guideline, and laws must account for some measure of judgment. That is in fact why we employ people we call "managers" and "executives." We, in fact, usually pay such individuals more money than others with the thought, sometimes a delusion, that the education, background, or connections that these people have indicate a superior capacity to occasionally rise above the rule sets as needed to apply common sense where rigid rules may not apply, or, indeed, need to be changed, lest they might be confused with symptoms of insanity, stupidity or malice. So, let me be the first to call for the firing of the dumb SOB SES at USPTO who approved this rule.
Re: "does anyone here work for an organization of any sort (government, industry, academia, whatever) that requires that everyone use "the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer"? Answer is yes. See http://nvd.nist.gov/fdcc/index.cfm