The sun has discovered the best acne medication in the universe.
You unscientific clod! The is clearly yet another symptom of man made global warming!! Our population is now so big, and the number of cows we raise is so large, and the quantity of their flatulence is so great that the methane is reaching all the way to the sun!!
I'm not saying it's right; I'm just saying that if you think the current U.S. government is going to lift a finger to help anybody without it being for their own significant political gain, you've clearly been living under a rock the last eight years.
Bush Presidency Countdown Clock
I find it odd that you would say we won't lift a finger to help anybody unless it gives someone significant political gain, and you then post a Bush countdown clock. If anyone was likely to get into a war that didn't help them politically, it was Bush. Some would argue he thought it would help him politically, but I don't think so... He said multiple times when we first went into Iraq that it would be a long war, and historically it's clear that long wars are always negative politically. Vietnam, anyone?
Whether he was ultimately right or wrong on Iraq, I really think he went in at the beginning because he thought it was the right thing to do, and not because he thought it would get him political points. Again, I'm not saying he was right... just that he did it BECAUSE he thought it was right, rather than any other reason.
You want to talk about us not lifting a finger unless it's politically expedient, just wait till you see the Obama presidency, if it happens. And this isn't a flame or a troll, more just an observation that we would probably have to lose our OWN state of Georgia to someone before Obama would do more than talk. And even then I'm not so sure...
Problem this time is, the US and Europe aren't going to let Russia roll their tanks into every Eastern European nation bulldozing their people into submission.
I have not in my lifetime seen any amount of guts displayed by the Europeans (or at least the Western ones) over any issue whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing that would lead me (or the Russians) to believe for a second that they would stand up and do anything of consequence. Hitler himself could reincarnate, and Europe would do the Neville Chamberlain thing all over again. And as for us in the US, I don't know that we'd really fight Russia over an Eastern European country. Just look what we did when the Russians rolled their tanks into Georgia. Still though, I suppose we sent aid and a few diplomats, military advisors and some military hardware. That's more than the rest of the Europeans did, as usual (and we also had the excuse of already being in two other wars).
Note: I'm not saying we shouldn't fight for those Eastern European countries, just that it's exceedingly unlikely anyone would. Which leads me to ask the biological origin question that I know everyone is wondering about: do the Europeans have the same evolutionary line as the rest of the world? Observational evidence so far would make it appear that they're invertebrates...
How long before there's a hacker tool version of this to spot vulnerabilities that exist because the sys admin isn't using it to defend his network?
Probably not that long. This technology isn't overly groundbreaking or original. I don't want to take anything away from those who worked on this, because I'm sure they did a great job, but they weren't the only ones who thought of this. I was working on a similar project at Iowa State three years ago. I haven't followed the project since I left the university, so I don't know where they are at, but it does prove that MIT wasn't the only place to think about this. It's quite possible that hackers also thought of this and have been working on something similar.
In addition, when it comes to the visualization portion of this, I know from my experience at Iowa State that there are multiple open source graph display frameworks they can use for this that would speed their development. And of course, there are freely obtainable network scanners such as nmap, freely obtainable vulnerability tools like nessus, packet capture tools like wireshark, etc. Such a program as MIT's could largely be done by integrating several F/OSS peices of software together, and while I'm sure that wouldn't be trivial, a lot of the base technologies already exist to for hackers to take advantage of. Again, though, I don't want to take away too much from MIT, because as someone who makes his living assembling systems out of other systems developed by other groups, I know that the integration part is often the hardest of all. But, the hackers do have the tools should they choose to use them.
I am getting more comfortable with Javascript, though I still think DHTML and CSS are fundamentally f*****,
I also agree with you on the Javascript side of things. I'm a professional web developer, and I'm writing very complicated applications these days that use almost no postbacks, doing everything in the browser with javascript. It's necessary for performance reasons a lot of times, but developing in javascript is slow and tedious.
The primary flaws in javascript are its lack of namespaces, true OO, and, most of all, its lack of types and type safety. The types alone cause no end of headaches, because the compiler can't easilly find errors before runtime. We're back to the days of running the code, getting a disaster, and then trying to hunt through to figure out what went wrong. Additionally, it is impossible to have full intellisense in such language, so you have to remember large parts of the library, and even if you get pretty good at that (which I have), you still have to constantly go through javascript reference books as you code trying to remember the name of that one function you want to use and can't remember at the moment...
and it really is time, if this web delivery of apps thing is for real, to find some more rational means of actually dealing with dynamic content.
You are right, and such a way has appeared. It is silverlight 2.0. Now those of us who program in.Net can easilly use the.Net framework on the client and the server, and use the same (typesafe!) languages in both locations as well. Silverlight 2 is in beta but should be out by the end of the year, and as soon as it is, I quit javascript. I've trained and used the Silverlight beta already, and within an hour of it I vowed I wouldn't go back to the way things were.
Note: There are still some advantages to DHTML, assuming browsers are standards compliant. Then you don't have to worry about actually drawing animations on the screen... you just go through the DOM, add or remove some elements, change some css here or there, and the browser handles all the drawing for you. I might have stuck with DHTML had the new version of ECMAScript (the official name of Javascript) actually passed, since it was going to have features like namespaces, true OO, etc. But it was foolishly killed, and with that I leave. I wouldn't be suprised if vast portions of the web migrate away from HTML over the next 10 years because of that. And the glacial slowness at moving to XHTML 2 doesn't help either. It's gotten so bad vendors are trying to start an HTML 5 in the meantime, and I'm not going back to a DOM not based on XML, either. I refuse to be stuck in the past with all the problems of the HTML line.
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
Turner said the move highlights why the U.S. needs more "genuine broadband competition."
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
If you are a reader of Asimov it looks like the galactic empire's fall as well. Slowly but surely, science and technology stagnate, innovation dries up, people no longer understand how their technology works as they get lazier and more complacent, and soon enough, you collapse.
I think the wind is whistling through the trees now, and the rotten trunk, which no one can see yet, will snap soon enough. My company is having a terrible time finding computer engineers, and every time we go to universities to recruit we are tolled that enrollment in math and science nationwide continues to drop. Not trying to bash on "marketers" or "business majors" here, because there is some need for those people, but man, we need a lot less of them. Too bad everyone in college these days is more concerned about four years of fun than a good education, because if that's your motivation, it's business studies over engineering any day.
Sadly enough, there's no Hari Seldon around to spawn a second technological empire, either.
Note: For those wondering what series I cited, it is the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Blue states are the ones with residents who desperately want taxes to go up, and go up they do. In red states, they avoid passing state tax laws. The citizens campaign for lawmakers who will return taxes to the people. They probably itemize much more carefully to avoid sending even a dime more to the federal government than it is owed. They are quick to support and take any economic stimulus packages the government will hand out, because that means more money to the people. It short, it is the goal of these states to get as much of their money back to the people as possible, and their representatives to congress work that way to. It's not surprising that they suck more out and pay less in.
I think the key test would be to stop taxing so much (therefore sending less back to all states) and see if the red states complain. I bet they don't. Blue states would go nuts about welfare, but I bet red states would be fine not getting much money as long as taxes were low. When they are high, though, they'll find a way, earmarks or otherwise, to get money out of the government.
A: Perspectives actually keeps a record of the keys used by a service over time. "
Somehow I doubt this. Or I should say, I doubt this will be extensive or practical enough to be useful for the following reasons:
How can keep a record of all the keys used by different services? I understand that storage is increasing, but there are potentially billions of websites. How are you going to keep track of all those keys?
And continuing along that line, how do you keep track of those billions (or at the very least many millions) of keys over time? Are you going to remember them all for years, or is there going to be a 30 day cache or something? That seems more likely, but far less useful since uncommon sites won't be cached, and the man in the middle could then succeed in compromising all paths to the destination.
What is the mechanism for key revocations for all these notaries?
I personally think a combination of a good certificates process, PKI and encryption is still the best answer to all these problems. If those systems are perfected, man in the middle attacks can't succeed. I know there are problems with getting these to be used in a wide scale manner, but they are some of the same problems that this notary system seems to suffer from (that I listed above), so I'm not really sure what we gain here except additional complexity. Not saying the notary system is a bad idea, but I'm not sure how you implement it in a practical manner without solving the problems that led to the need of this process in the first place.
I don't really agree with this ruling though. I don't think that's protecting our fifth ammendment right. A laptop is just a peice of property, and digital information or not, a judge has always had the right to subpeona emails, chat conversations, issue search warrants for a physical house, etc. We have the right under the 5th ammendment to not admit that we did the crime, but we don't have the right to not have others search if there is probable cause and a judge issues a warrant.
I'm still not seeing how this is any different than a judge requireing you to open your locked house for a search. This is just a key to another location where potential contraband is stored, and they had the maximum amount of probably cause.
At the Associates or Bachelors level how many subjects are really moving that fast?
That's very true in most cases, but I suspect the reason so many people are arguing otherwise here is because of the high number of people in computer related fields that visit this site. Computer books are the glaring exception to this rule. The only ones that may not change that fast are core computer science books on math theory, proofs, core algorithms and the like.
However, all the rest of the computer books which are related to actual technologies or implementations are out of date in a year or two. When I was getting my bachelor's degree I focused on information security, and that field changes incredibly rapidly. New forms of attack are discovered, DOS was hot one day and passe the next, etc. Some core concepts like encryption are similar, but even with those, changes are relatively rapid. Older books are all about DES, while new ones are about AES; older ones talk about WEP, new ones talk about WPA2; the MD5 hash algorithm is broken, and on and on.
And coding books are like that too, with a new hot language, or hot language on rails, apparently arriving every day.
If consumers would grow a pair of balls and realize that TV isn't really worth this much money Time Warner would eventually have to lower their rates or be content with less subscribers. I remember when basic cable (roughly 40-50 channels back in the day) cost $20/mo around here. That was as recent as nine years ago before the local cable company got bought out by Time Warner. Now it costs $60/mo for the same number of real channels and about a dozen home shopping channels that weren't available before.
Agreed. The reason most things cost so much in this country is because consumers are cowards and are afraid to negotiate on prices, and won't walk away from things that are too expensive. I find it ironic that now most families have gone to the two working spouses model because they say they want "higher quality of life" (read: they want to buy more). But then they can't actually buy more, because all these two spouse families make more money, and none of them are willing to walk away from high prices, so prices just rise until it now takes two people working to afford what one person used to be able to buy. A case in point is all these things in the services sector, like cable, cell phone and internet plans.
And the other thing I find ironic is all these people who say they are living paycheck to paycheck. That is also a result of consumers being spineless and having no discipline. I think the numbers are around 70% of people say they are living paycheck to paycheck, and 90-95% have cable or satellite TV. They get on the air and whine about the economy and how there is too much month left at the end of the money, and I just want to scream, "Drop the darn cable package already!!!!" That right there would save most people 100 bucks a month, and if everyone did it prices would have to come back down.
But I'm not holding my breath for that. I wanted standard cable, but I'm not paying 60 per month for it. I've bought my 5 dollar a month broadcast basic package from Time Warner, and I'll stick with that until prices come down or I move to an area that has a TV transmitter (2 hours away from the nearest city here).
I've never been to DefCon before, so I'm just curious... do people actually get in trouble for any of the things they do there? If you do a man in the middle attack, do people get mad? Or is it just assumed that anyone on this network is fair game and you can 0wn them as you see fit?
Or don't get the new iPhone at all. Who needs that thing?
Agreed. I'm not standing in line for a phone until Microsoft makes one. Then I might, though, because MS products are 1337. Or at least better than their Apple counterparts. Microsoft only needed 2 generations to make a Zune MP3 player that is better and has more features than a 7th generation iPod.
And, as a corrollary, they charge less in America because Americans aren't willing to pay prices higher than that. It's all basic free market laws of supply and demand: you sell at the price people will buy at.
The proven existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life will have a profound effect on a lot of people's core religious beliefs. That alone will have a major effect on society and it might just turn a few people away from their outdated superstitious beliefs. I consider that a tangible benefit.
Yes, but is there any alien life? Certainly there's been no evidence of any, though you talk as though it certainly, and inevitably, exists. It sure sounds like you are the one making assumptions and promoting a faith based argument!
And as for this changing anyone's beliefs, that's highly debatable. Christian author CS Lewis wrote a trilogy in the late '40s that imagined intelligent life to be on both Mars and Venus. He was a noted apologist and theologian for the Christian faith, and he had no problem with considering the existence of extraterrestrials. (Note: The starting book of the trilogy was called Out of the Silent Planet).
I fell in love with AMD many years ago. They had the price and performance edge, and were also more stable than Intel. I think they need to take a step back an evaluate what the hell they're doing. They need to find a way to pull out of the competition while they clean up their act so they can start giving their customers what they want: cutting edge technology
I agree with you saying they need to step back and look at what they are doing, but I don't agree with you on the cutting edge performance part. Granted, I want them to get back that that point, and so do a lot of other people, but I don't think they absolutely need to have the greatest performance in the industry to do well or attract new customers. The reason I started buying them was that they had the best price to performance ratio of anyone out there. To use an oversimplification, I got more megahertz for my money. That's what they did right.
So when it comes to fixing the company, they need to quit putting all their marketing dollars and hype into graphics and ati, or even into noise about how fast their latest and greatest processer is going to be. In fact, they especially need to quit hyping the perforamance of their upcoming processors, because if they are late (45nm anyone?), bungled (barcelona anyone?), etc, that's a big embarrassment. And even if everything is going to come off without a hitch, saying "we are going to have the fastest processer by the end of the year" only reinforces that you definately do not have it now. That's a negative differentiator for them, and they aren't going to win there.
Intel is faster than them right now, period. What they have to do is start heavilly marketing their price performance edge, because that is the one good differentiator they have in their favor right now. I'm one of those people that games, programs, and wants the fastest CPU possible, but I learned years ago I can't ever have it because I can't afford it, especially from Intel. However, I found I could get some great performance from AMD for a fraction of the price of a comparable Intel processor, and I've been hooked ever since. I'd be willing to bet they could hook a lot more customers just like me, especially in this economic climate. When they get the performance edge back, then they can start talking about that again, but the key to marketing is to play to your products' strengths, and price to performance is their current strength.
This last paragraph is kind of an afterthough... AMD might have a strong future as a business that makes most of its money on volume. An example of this would be Wal-Mart, which sells massive amounts of goods and makes almost zero profit on any of them, but sells so much of them that eventually those tiny little fractions of profits add up to billions. Intel is a premium product being sold at a premium price. There is no way that they should be selling more CPUs overall than AMD, especially on low to midrange PCs. AMD ought to be able to corner a vast portion of the market, maybe not making very much on each CPU, but surviving on volume. Its performance is good enough for most, and its price is better than Intel's, and having that kind of steady market share would give it a more permanent platform to compete from, and give it a steady enough source of income to take a shot at the performance crown again. But that all goes back to AMD realizing what strength it currently has, and playing to that strength, and we'll have to see if that ever happens. I think they had better hurry up though, because VIA is starting to make a play on that low end market, and if they get entrenched there, with Intel at the high end, AMD will have no place to go and will literally be squeezed out of the middle.
This "no drivers" myth continues to be quite pervasive.
There are lots of drivers, as long as you don't want to install something non-mainstream and you're okay with the binary blob drivers for the NVIDIA and ATI/AMD graphics cards (although, my understanding is that the ATI/AMD front is changing and AMD is pushing the specs out the community now).
You are missing the point. "Lots" is a subjective term, and you need a definition or benchmark to measure by. The benchmark for drivers and device compatibility is Windows, and compared to Windows Linux does not have lots of drivers. Linux supports only a very small percentage of the devices Windows supports.
The trick is that you have to buy hardware that is known to work well and be supported on Linux. You might have to buy stuff that's a bit behind, too.
And this is another point you missed. When most people talk about "lots" of driver support, there is an additional factor they use for benchmarking, and that is current hardware. Windows and its support of the newest and most obscure hardware is the benchmark for the term "lots".
I'm a Linux user myself and love FOSS. I really wish things were different in this area, but anyone taking an objective look at the situation has to admit that Linux does not have lots of drivers. The only way you can say it does is to make up your own arbitrary definition of what "lots" means, but then the other 99% of PC users who have agreed on using Windows as the measuring stick are going to call BS on you. Having to list as many caveats as you did and still concluding that Linux has "lots" of drivers smacks of fanboyism.
I actually use pageflakes over the google version, because it is far superior. If Yahoo is superior as well, then maybe google has quite a way to go before winning in the personal homepage battle.
No, they are the reason they are in their current situation. They have a ridiculous, violent religion they serve, and they chose to radically overthrow their own government to put that ridiculous religion into power. And, suprise suprise, it turned out not to be a good idea and their government enslaved them the same way all the other middle eastern Islamic states were already doing. Because of their actions, they remain enslaved by their government to this day.
At some point, people have to take responsibility for their own actions. The US didn't like being ruled by a king, so we overthrew the king and took the risk of instituting democracy. It turned out well, in this case. Other countries are ruled by dictators and people do not choose to rise up and remain enslaved. Or if they do rise up, they don't always install a democracy when they throw out the government (in Iran's case, they picked a theocracy instead). That's their choice, the consequences are theirs, and the blame rests on their shoulders. The US is not responsible for what people in other countries choose to do with their governments.
I would say this is a little bit wrong. Flash in applications can provide better UI animations and better user experiences. In the latest site I worked on, sometimes the user clicked something and something on the page would smoothly move. This effect could be used to draw a user's eye to the next step of the process, making the app less confusing. Just because UI usability often involves colors and animations rather than adding new content doesn't make it fluff, or worthless. It is important.
In addition, we had a lot of client code written into the flash rather than using javascript. I didn't actually write the flash code, but I do know that with silverlight, it is way easier to write the code in.Net, and the.Net framework is way better than the javascript framework. Additionally, it's easier to debug and tends to be cleaner. That's not a fluffy reason for moving away from AJAX, and can allow you to provide richer, or even more, content because development time is shortened.
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You unscientific clod! The is clearly yet another symptom of man made global warming!! Our population is now so big, and the number of cows we raise is so large, and the quantity of their flatulence is so great that the methane is reaching all the way to the sun!!
WAHAHHA! Mod parent Funny!! HILARIOUS++;
I find it odd that you would say we won't lift a finger to help anybody unless it gives someone significant political gain, and you then post a Bush countdown clock. If anyone was likely to get into a war that didn't help them politically, it was Bush. Some would argue he thought it would help him politically, but I don't think so... He said multiple times when we first went into Iraq that it would be a long war, and historically it's clear that long wars are always negative politically. Vietnam, anyone?
Whether he was ultimately right or wrong on Iraq, I really think he went in at the beginning because he thought it was the right thing to do, and not because he thought it would get him political points. Again, I'm not saying he was right... just that he did it BECAUSE he thought it was right, rather than any other reason.
You want to talk about us not lifting a finger unless it's politically expedient, just wait till you see the Obama presidency, if it happens. And this isn't a flame or a troll, more just an observation that we would probably have to lose our OWN state of Georgia to someone before Obama would do more than talk. And even then I'm not so sure...
I have not in my lifetime seen any amount of guts displayed by the Europeans (or at least the Western ones) over any issue whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing that would lead me (or the Russians) to believe for a second that they would stand up and do anything of consequence. Hitler himself could reincarnate, and Europe would do the Neville Chamberlain thing all over again. And as for us in the US, I don't know that we'd really fight Russia over an Eastern European country. Just look what we did when the Russians rolled their tanks into Georgia. Still though, I suppose we sent aid and a few diplomats, military advisors and some military hardware. That's more than the rest of the Europeans did, as usual (and we also had the excuse of already being in two other wars).
Note: I'm not saying we shouldn't fight for those Eastern European countries, just that it's exceedingly unlikely anyone would. Which leads me to ask the biological origin question that I know everyone is wondering about: do the Europeans have the same evolutionary line as the rest of the world? Observational evidence so far would make it appear that they're invertebrates...
I also agree with you on the Javascript side of things. I'm a professional web developer, and I'm writing very complicated applications these days that use almost no postbacks, doing everything in the browser with javascript. It's necessary for performance reasons a lot of times, but developing in javascript is slow and tedious.
The primary flaws in javascript are its lack of namespaces, true OO, and, most of all, its lack of types and type safety. The types alone cause no end of headaches, because the compiler can't easilly find errors before runtime. We're back to the days of running the code, getting a disaster, and then trying to hunt through to figure out what went wrong. Additionally, it is impossible to have full intellisense in such language, so you have to remember large parts of the library, and even if you get pretty good at that (which I have), you still have to constantly go through javascript reference books as you code trying to remember the name of that one function you want to use and can't remember at the moment...
You are right, and such a way has appeared. It is silverlight 2.0. Now those of us who program in .Net can easilly use the .Net framework on the client and the server, and use the same (typesafe!) languages in both locations as well. Silverlight 2 is in beta but should be out by the end of the year, and as soon as it is, I quit javascript. I've trained and used the Silverlight beta already, and within an hour of it I vowed I wouldn't go back to the way things were.
Note: There are still some advantages to DHTML, assuming browsers are standards compliant. Then you don't have to worry about actually drawing animations on the screen... you just go through the DOM, add or remove some elements, change some css here or there, and the browser handles all the drawing for you. I might have stuck with DHTML had the new version of ECMAScript (the official name of Javascript) actually passed, since it was going to have features like namespaces, true OO, etc. But it was foolishly killed, and with that I leave. I wouldn't be suprised if vast portions of the web migrate away from HTML over the next 10 years because of that. And the glacial slowness at moving to XHTML 2 doesn't help either. It's gotten so bad vendors are trying to start an HTML 5 in the meantime, and I'm not going back to a DOM not based on XML, either. I refuse to be stuck in the past with all the problems of the HTML line.
That statement actually relates well to a very insightful point made at the end of the article:
You are lucky to have some genuine competition in the form of FIOS. If I could, I would switch to that in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay a relatively large installation fee (probably up to 200 dollars). Unfortunately, just about everywhere I go I'm locked down to one provider. In the tiny town of Jackson, OH, I am restricted to Time Warner Cable (another company working on a cap), and before I was transferred here I lived in Minneapolis, subject to Comcast. I suppose I could potentially get DSL, but that is so much slower than cable it almost doesn't count as competition in the broadband market, and satellite is so latency heavy it doesn't count either. That leaves cable standing alone, unless you are lucky enough to have true broadband competition through FIOS.
In my opinion, cable providers are starting to stifle innovation and competition the same way large cell phone providers do. They see one company screwing the customers with a cap, and figure, "Hey, I can do that too! Now I can keep more money for profits instead of network upgrades." And with no competition to force changes on them, that's the way things will stay. Both cell phone companies and cable companies are able to stay the way they are because of huge barriers to entry... you can't lay another set of cable lines in every town, and it's prohibitively expensive to try to set up another nationwide cellular network. In instances like these, the government does need to step in to regulate the monopolies/oligopolies. My water company doesn't put a cap on how much I use because the government regulates that monopoly (granted, I do pay more the more I use, but if the cable companies went to that model without government intervention, it would probably be priced like the cell phone companies price text messages: 10 cents a kilobyte or something ridiculous. That's why I'm currently opposed to anything other than a flat rate from them).
If you are a reader of Asimov it looks like the galactic empire's fall as well. Slowly but surely, science and technology stagnate, innovation dries up, people no longer understand how their technology works as they get lazier and more complacent, and soon enough, you collapse.
I think the wind is whistling through the trees now, and the rotten trunk, which no one can see yet, will snap soon enough. My company is having a terrible time finding computer engineers, and every time we go to universities to recruit we are tolled that enrollment in math and science nationwide continues to drop. Not trying to bash on "marketers" or "business majors" here, because there is some need for those people, but man, we need a lot less of them. Too bad everyone in college these days is more concerned about four years of fun than a good education, because if that's your motivation, it's business studies over engineering any day.
Sadly enough, there's no Hari Seldon around to spawn a second technological empire, either.
Note: For those wondering what series I cited, it is the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense. Blue states are the ones with residents who desperately want taxes to go up, and go up they do. In red states, they avoid passing state tax laws. The citizens campaign for lawmakers who will return taxes to the people. They probably itemize much more carefully to avoid sending even a dime more to the federal government than it is owed. They are quick to support and take any economic stimulus packages the government will hand out, because that means more money to the people. It short, it is the goal of these states to get as much of their money back to the people as possible, and their representatives to congress work that way to. It's not surprising that they suck more out and pay less in.
I think the key test would be to stop taxing so much (therefore sending less back to all states) and see if the red states complain. I bet they don't. Blue states would go nuts about welfare, but I bet red states would be fine not getting much money as long as taxes were low. When they are high, though, they'll find a way, earmarks or otherwise, to get money out of the government.
Somehow I doubt this. Or I should say, I doubt this will be extensive or practical enough to be useful for the following reasons:
I personally think a combination of a good certificates process, PKI and encryption is still the best answer to all these problems. If those systems are perfected, man in the middle attacks can't succeed. I know there are problems with getting these to be used in a wide scale manner, but they are some of the same problems that this notary system seems to suffer from (that I listed above), so I'm not really sure what we gain here except additional complexity. Not saying the notary system is a bad idea, but I'm not sure how you implement it in a practical manner without solving the problems that led to the need of this process in the first place.
I don't really agree with this ruling though. I don't think that's protecting our fifth ammendment right. A laptop is just a peice of property, and digital information or not, a judge has always had the right to subpeona emails, chat conversations, issue search warrants for a physical house, etc. We have the right under the 5th ammendment to not admit that we did the crime, but we don't have the right to not have others search if there is probable cause and a judge issues a warrant.
I'm still not seeing how this is any different than a judge requireing you to open your locked house for a search. This is just a key to another location where potential contraband is stored, and they had the maximum amount of probably cause.
That's very true in most cases, but I suspect the reason so many people are arguing otherwise here is because of the high number of people in computer related fields that visit this site. Computer books are the glaring exception to this rule. The only ones that may not change that fast are core computer science books on math theory, proofs, core algorithms and the like.
However, all the rest of the computer books which are related to actual technologies or implementations are out of date in a year or two. When I was getting my bachelor's degree I focused on information security, and that field changes incredibly rapidly. New forms of attack are discovered, DOS was hot one day and passe the next, etc. Some core concepts like encryption are similar, but even with those, changes are relatively rapid. Older books are all about DES, while new ones are about AES; older ones talk about WEP, new ones talk about WPA2; the MD5 hash algorithm is broken, and on and on.
And coding books are like that too, with a new hot language, or hot language on rails, apparently arriving every day.
I'm sure he watches broadcast TV for that, like Americans have been doing for decades.
Agreed. The reason most things cost so much in this country is because consumers are cowards and are afraid to negotiate on prices, and won't walk away from things that are too expensive. I find it ironic that now most families have gone to the two working spouses model because they say they want "higher quality of life" (read: they want to buy more). But then they can't actually buy more, because all these two spouse families make more money, and none of them are willing to walk away from high prices, so prices just rise until it now takes two people working to afford what one person used to be able to buy. A case in point is all these things in the services sector, like cable, cell phone and internet plans.
And the other thing I find ironic is all these people who say they are living paycheck to paycheck. That is also a result of consumers being spineless and having no discipline. I think the numbers are around 70% of people say they are living paycheck to paycheck, and 90-95% have cable or satellite TV. They get on the air and whine about the economy and how there is too much month left at the end of the money, and I just want to scream, "Drop the darn cable package already!!!!" That right there would save most people 100 bucks a month, and if everyone did it prices would have to come back down.
But I'm not holding my breath for that. I wanted standard cable, but I'm not paying 60 per month for it. I've bought my 5 dollar a month broadcast basic package from Time Warner, and I'll stick with that until prices come down or I move to an area that has a TV transmitter (2 hours away from the nearest city here).
I've never been to DefCon before, so I'm just curious... do people actually get in trouble for any of the things they do there? If you do a man in the middle attack, do people get mad? Or is it just assumed that anyone on this network is fair game and you can 0wn them as you see fit?
Agreed. I'm not standing in line for a phone until Microsoft makes one. Then I might, though, because MS products are 1337. Or at least better than their Apple counterparts. Microsoft only needed 2 generations to make a Zune MP3 player that is better and has more features than a 7th generation iPod.
And, as a corrollary, they charge less in America because Americans aren't willing to pay prices higher than that. It's all basic free market laws of supply and demand: you sell at the price people will buy at.
Yes, but is there any alien life? Certainly there's been no evidence of any, though you talk as though it certainly, and inevitably, exists. It sure sounds like you are the one making assumptions and promoting a faith based argument!
And as for this changing anyone's beliefs, that's highly debatable. Christian author CS Lewis wrote a trilogy in the late '40s that imagined intelligent life to be on both Mars and Venus. He was a noted apologist and theologian for the Christian faith, and he had no problem with considering the existence of extraterrestrials. (Note: The starting book of the trilogy was called Out of the Silent Planet).
So where is a good place to find such patches that aren't contaminated with viruses or malware?
I agree with you saying they need to step back and look at what they are doing, but I don't agree with you on the cutting edge performance part. Granted, I want them to get back that that point, and so do a lot of other people, but I don't think they absolutely need to have the greatest performance in the industry to do well or attract new customers. The reason I started buying them was that they had the best price to performance ratio of anyone out there. To use an oversimplification, I got more megahertz for my money. That's what they did right.
So when it comes to fixing the company, they need to quit putting all their marketing dollars and hype into graphics and ati, or even into noise about how fast their latest and greatest processer is going to be. In fact, they especially need to quit hyping the perforamance of their upcoming processors, because if they are late (45nm anyone?), bungled (barcelona anyone?), etc, that's a big embarrassment. And even if everything is going to come off without a hitch, saying "we are going to have the fastest processer by the end of the year" only reinforces that you definately do not have it now. That's a negative differentiator for them, and they aren't going to win there.
Intel is faster than them right now, period. What they have to do is start heavilly marketing their price performance edge, because that is the one good differentiator they have in their favor right now. I'm one of those people that games, programs, and wants the fastest CPU possible, but I learned years ago I can't ever have it because I can't afford it, especially from Intel. However, I found I could get some great performance from AMD for a fraction of the price of a comparable Intel processor, and I've been hooked ever since. I'd be willing to bet they could hook a lot more customers just like me, especially in this economic climate. When they get the performance edge back, then they can start talking about that again, but the key to marketing is to play to your products' strengths, and price to performance is their current strength.
This last paragraph is kind of an afterthough... AMD might have a strong future as a business that makes most of its money on volume. An example of this would be Wal-Mart, which sells massive amounts of goods and makes almost zero profit on any of them, but sells so much of them that eventually those tiny little fractions of profits add up to billions. Intel is a premium product being sold at a premium price. There is no way that they should be selling more CPUs overall than AMD, especially on low to midrange PCs. AMD ought to be able to corner a vast portion of the market, maybe not making very much on each CPU, but surviving on volume. Its performance is good enough for most, and its price is better than Intel's, and having that kind of steady market share would give it a more permanent platform to compete from, and give it a steady enough source of income to take a shot at the performance crown again. But that all goes back to AMD realizing what strength it currently has, and playing to that strength, and we'll have to see if that ever happens. I think they had better hurry up though, because VIA is starting to make a play on that low end market, and if they get entrenched there, with Intel at the high end, AMD will have no place to go and will literally be squeezed out of the middle.
You are missing the point. "Lots" is a subjective term, and you need a definition or benchmark to measure by. The benchmark for drivers and device compatibility is Windows, and compared to Windows Linux does not have lots of drivers. Linux supports only a very small percentage of the devices Windows supports.
And this is another point you missed. When most people talk about "lots" of driver support, there is an additional factor they use for benchmarking, and that is current hardware. Windows and its support of the newest and most obscure hardware is the benchmark for the term "lots".
I'm a Linux user myself and love FOSS. I really wish things were different in this area, but anyone taking an objective look at the situation has to admit that Linux does not have lots of drivers. The only way you can say it does is to make up your own arbitrary definition of what "lots" means, but then the other 99% of PC users who have agreed on using Windows as the measuring stick are going to call BS on you. Having to list as many caveats as you did and still concluding that Linux has "lots" of drivers smacks of fanboyism.
Unless you are inept, which, given that this is a government system, could be a plausible explanation here.
I actually use pageflakes over the google version, because it is far superior. If Yahoo is superior as well, then maybe google has quite a way to go before winning in the personal homepage battle.
No, they are the reason they are in their current situation. They have a ridiculous, violent religion they serve, and they chose to radically overthrow their own government to put that ridiculous religion into power. And, suprise suprise, it turned out not to be a good idea and their government enslaved them the same way all the other middle eastern Islamic states were already doing. Because of their actions, they remain enslaved by their government to this day.
At some point, people have to take responsibility for their own actions. The US didn't like being ruled by a king, so we overthrew the king and took the risk of instituting democracy. It turned out well, in this case. Other countries are ruled by dictators and people do not choose to rise up and remain enslaved. Or if they do rise up, they don't always install a democracy when they throw out the government (in Iran's case, they picked a theocracy instead). That's their choice, the consequences are theirs, and the blame rests on their shoulders. The US is not responsible for what people in other countries choose to do with their governments.
I would say this is a little bit wrong. Flash in applications can provide better UI animations and better user experiences. In the latest site I worked on, sometimes the user clicked something and something on the page would smoothly move. This effect could be used to draw a user's eye to the next step of the process, making the app less confusing. Just because UI usability often involves colors and animations rather than adding new content doesn't make it fluff, or worthless. It is important.
In addition, we had a lot of client code written into the flash rather than using javascript. I didn't actually write the flash code, but I do know that with silverlight, it is way easier to write the code in .Net, and the .Net framework is way better than the javascript framework. Additionally, it's easier to debug and tends to be cleaner. That's not a fluffy reason for moving away from AJAX, and can allow you to provide richer, or even more, content because development time is shortened.