It's reasonable to believe that HTTP won't be the protocol of the future.
The one issue I have with this assumption is that it will be very difficult to remove HTTP and moved to something else, based solely on the installed base and inertia. Too much is invested in HTTP, so any attempt to switch will probably be glacial, at best.
Javascript is involved too much
I tend to agree. However, I think what is going to happen is not a redesign of HTTP and scrapping of javascript, but rather a continuation with http and Microsoft's Silverlight technology. One of the most annoying things today is the reliance on javascript, which I would say is a pretty crappy language (especially since it isn't even strongly typed). Silverlight packages an integrated.NET CLR, allowing client side programming with ANY of the.NET languages, assuming the client browser has a silverlight plugin. And since Microsoft is making silverlight plugins for Windows, Linux (collaborating with the mono folks), Mac, and making them cross browser, I think we will see that technology swoop in and undercut a lot of the annoyances we currently have with Javascript.
And for all of you that are familiar with the Eclipse development environment; There is a plugin called Erlide.
That's cool. Are there any.Net versions of the language? In fact, is that even possible given that Erlang is developed to be parallel from the bottom up, as opposed to other.Net languages?
Agreed. And just take a look at the countries of Eastern Europe as long as we are citing examples. They are doing FAR better than they ever were under the socialist/communist policies they followed throughout the cold war. Japan is another example of an Asian country that is no longer in poverty either. They got their buts kicked in WWII and didn't have anything, but now are one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Now lets look at countries that are following socialism. I'm betting heavilly that we aren't going to see Venezuela becoming an economic powerhouse under Hugo Chavez. They might stay afloat economically, but that will be almost entirely thanks to oil and nothing else. It certainly won't propel them into having any sort of real, diversified economy in which the vast majority of the population gets out of poverty.
The writer of the review talks about how server side languages have a richness benefit, but client side languages, while less powerful, benefit from a wide installation base due to being included in web browsers. He talks about how GWT tries to bridge the gap, but I would recommend getting a book on silverlight, reading it, and using that instead. The current 1.0 version of silverlight is mostly just good as an online media player, but the 1.1 alpha version bundles a version of the.Net framework. Therefore, all that power you get from the.Net framework on the server side, you can ALSO get on the client side. And silverlight is cross platform. There've been a number of these "bridging" technologies that try to bridge these gaps, but silverlight definately looks more useful than GWT.
What's really funny is I distinctively remember Reagan boasting to the world how open our society was, how our citizens could move about freely without presenting papers and didn't have to worry about their conversations being recorded by the state and used against them.
Oh well, it's for our security so it must be good! After all, if you have nothing to fear, then this won't affect you. If you complain, the terrorists win. We can't have that, can we?
Perhaps Reagan could make that bost with a straight face during the time he was president. Wiretaps may not have been as widespread as they are now, and for sure this system didn't exist, and wasn't even started, during those days.
On another note, I see by your reference to terrorism you are attempting to blame the Bush administration for this. Clearly you didn't read the article, so why don't I point out an interesting section that might shake your preconceived ideas a little bit.
From the article:
The law that makes the FBI's surveillance network possible had its genesis in the Clinton administration. In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.
Note this: In 1994, the congress was massively controlled by the democrats (yes, Republicans did win their huge election victory in November of that year, but they wouldn't take office until 1995). That democratically controlled congress was the one that passed the law that allowed the system to be created, and it was signed into law by president Clinton. So in fact, it is not the "we have to beat the terrorists" crowd of Republicans that started all this, but the "we respect your privacy" democrats. The fact is, politicians almost never do what they say they will, and both parties just say what is going to get them votes. Democrats say they are for transparent government and privacy, but this clearly shows they aren't, at least not any more than Republicans or anyone else. You can't keep going with this knee-jerk "bash Republicans because they spy on us all" mentality, because when Reagan, very much a true conservative, was in office, the FBI complained they didn't have enough surveillance powers. Then when Clinton and the democrats controlled all houses of government, this was one of the results. And at the time this law came out, terrorism wasn't a major concern like Bush says it is for him. When the dems passed this law, domestic wiretapping (i.e. watching us, or at least the criminals among us) was the primary concern.
As long as we are all talking about this, I'd like to request that the storm botnet speak up and send a few automated emails their way, hopefully enough to blow these trolls off the face of the Internet.
Care to try to explain the Clinton impeachment process then?
Sure. President Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath to a grand jury and committed perjury, which in this country is a federal class D felony. A man who is committing felonies while in office by obstructing justice and lying to grand juries deserves to be impeached. I'm a Republican, but if Bush takes an oath to tell the truth and then lies to a grand jury I'll support impeaching him to. Felons have no place in the oval office, and Clinton deserved what he got, and in fact deserved to be removed from office because of committing the felony.
Note that the Clinton impeachment really doesn't have anything to do with Monica as affairs aren't criminally prosecuted, but he ought to have been ridden out of town on a rail for disgracing the office in such a way.
I must be one of the only customers who never had a problem with Packard Bell. Are they really as bad as people claim they were? Our family bought several Packard Bell computers, and none of them ever had a problem. We eventually got rid of some of them as we upgraded, but we still have a 150 Mhz box that still runs to this day on 100% original hardware. Not one thing has ever failed, and I can't say that about any of the HP, Toshiba or Dell computers I have bought. For that matter, I don't even think I can say that about the computers I've built. At some point in their history Packard Bell must have been doing some things right.
I guess this just proves again that some companies unfortunately still believe in "Security through obscurity". Sony, quit trying to hide junk all over my drive!
Ok, and if you were a spammer, where would you rather host your spam bot? On grandma's Win98 box connected to a modem that ocassionally comes online, or a big Linux/Solaris/whatever server on a DS3? Because while Linux may not be very popular as a desktop OS, it's certainly common as a server. And servers tend to have much better connections than a normal computer.
If I was a spammer, I would CLEARLY rather have grandma's Win98 box host my spambot. And I'm not being sarcastic, either. Just think about this for a second. You talk about a big Linux server on DS3 being better for a botnet. Big servers typically have big IT support staffs running them. How long do you think it is going to take network personnel to notice a server spitting out a lot of spam or infecting emails. I'm not going to take a guess as to how long it would take to fix the problem, but I would bet money that at most organizations infections like that are detected within the day, if not within an hour or two.
So great, you've just compromised you big Linux server, and within a day it gets cleaned up. So you have to find a totally new exploit and try to do it again. And maybe you exploit it again, and then it gets cleaned up again. Contrast that with grandma's Win98 box... she will NEVER know she is sending out spam, and will consequently take NO ACTION to clean it up. If you are going to the trouble of assembling a huge botnet for profits, you want a botnet that is going to have operational capacity for a good length of time, as that is your source of income. You have much better odds of keeping control of user's desktop PC than you do of flying under the IT staff's radar. The minute you try to use their machine as a spambot, they will pull the network connection. You can use grandma's PC again, and again, and again.
Oh, one last point... your comparison of grandma's win98 box to a server is very naive. Yes, one on one, the server completely outperforms the grandma box, but when you have multiple millions of grandma boxes, and the potential to infect tens or hundreds of millions more, the power CLEARLY lies with the desktop machines. Reason 1: We've seen many times that grids of desktops, through their sheer number, can outperform the fastest supercomputers. Reason 2: Ignoring the fact that servers have IT staff, you still have to contend with the fact that the server market uses less machines by far, and that those machines are fragmented by OS. Your exploit that targets Linux can only potentially capture a fraction of the server market, as many others run Solaris, HP UX, Windows Server, etc. With desktops, the market is FAR larger, and consolidated with a single OS. Clearly you want to target the largest market, and the fact that that market also has the least policing by IT professionals makes it an even bigger sweet spot. If I'm a spammer, I'm TOTALLY going for the desktops when making a botnet. QED.
Good for certain uses anyway. I've participated in Iowa State University's Cyber Defense competitions as a red team hacker, and I've found they really help to take out the defending teams. Every team is required to run a regular Windows desktop that any user can access (the teams often play the part of universities or other facilities trying to secure a public lab), and it's fun to just walk up like a normal user, put in a "normal" music CD or game (courtesy of Sony), and then BOOM, rootkited. From there on, of course, things get easier... it's hard to remove malicious files when the OS won't let you know they are there:D.
Whine whine whine whine terrorists whine whine whine.
Keeping stuff a secret from your own citizens is far more harmful.
RIIIIIIIIGHT... And I suppose keeping information from citizens brings down 100+ story skyscrapers, sinks ships, destroys embassies, blows up hundreds of civilians, kills thousands, causes billions in damage... Wait, it's actually TERRORISTS that do that. I don't normally say anything personal to people when posting here, but you are flat out on crack if you somehow think that not telling citizens something is MORE HARMFUL than the horrific damage and death we've seen REPEATEDLY over the last decade from terrorists. The fact is, there are some things that citizens simply don't need to know. That's reality. Citizens do not have a NEED to know where our secret government bunkers are. They don't need plans to destroyers, they don't need to know every research finding a government agency makes (terrorists are the only ones that DO need to know such things and benefit from the information). If you had actually read my post, you would see that I CLEARLY favor giving citizens open access to government whenever possible. I favor letting them see just about everything, even things they don't need to know, UNLESS they are things that, when known, could be used by others to KILL them. You cannot have government reveal absolutely every database and every paper it has ever produced. Not because we want a closed government, but because we don't live in an ideal world, and there are crazies who want to kill everyone. That's reality bucko, and it's about time you start living in it.
I still think a line needs to be drawn where certain things are allowed to be kept secret in the interest of national security. For instance, if we are totally transparent about our latest weapons system, unfortunately people that are not US citizens are going to hear about it.
I think the guiding principle (knowing that anything disclosed by the government can and will be public knowledge potentially heard anywhere in the world) should be this: things that, if disclosed, will aid enemies and allow them to easilly hurt us should be kept secret. This would include things like weapons systems, security systems at nuclear power plants, and things of that nature. The second half is this: things that, if disclosed, don't present an enemy an opportunity to harm us, or would be easilly discovered anyway, should be disclosed. Obviously just about anything NHTSA does should fall into this category. Knowing about our highways or bridges doesn't really allow an enemy to hurt us any more than they could without the NHTSA. They can easilly walk around and see where bridges are, and if they are going to destroy infrastructure, it will be the bridge that presents the most impressive spectacle or has the heaviest traffic (again, easilly observed). Thus, terrorist gain little from anything the NHTSA says, but citizens have a true need to know. Therefore, their current policy is a bunch of garbage.
I agree. It's just a question of to what degree it was deliberate. Was it deliberate to the degree that they were targeting the specific company that runs it, or was it a lesser degree of deliberation in that they were looking for any thin target to test their skills on, and this happened to be convenient?
Nobody is held accountable for the actions of a corporation. The board of directors and all officers should be held personally liable.
The whole company collapsed on them. Do you think that isn't some kind of punishment? This was a private company, so you can guarantee that the board of directors all had a big hand in getting the company started and were all heavilly invested in it (unlike public corps, which tend to just appoint CEOs of other corps to their boards). It collapsed, and they would have lost all chance of recovering that investment. When it folded, they probably had to liquidate everything in an attempt to pay off as many of the initial startup loans as they could, but odds are there was still a lot of debt to be paid off. You make it sound like these guys are Enron execs making off like bandits, when in reality there is a pretty good chance they lost money when it collapsed. And they also lost their primary investment vehicle for making more money... and all because some stupid IT guy at the bottom somewhere was careless. I'm glad they are protected by the legal entity of a corporation, because they probably poured their hearts and souls into starting that company and making it succeed, only to have it collapse through no fault of their own because of some idiot worker. That's pretty heavy punishment for people who knowlingly did nothing wrong and were trying to do things right.
I happen to own a corporation, however as a professional engineer, I am also personally liable for everything which goes out the door.
Let's be clear here... you are not liable because you are a professional engineer who owns a corporation. You are liable because you are the professional engineer that DESIGNS the product or service being sold. If you just ran the corporation and didn't do design work and sign off on designs, you wouldn't be liable. These guys ran the corporation, but they weren't the ones designing products and turning firewalls on and off. They hired someone to do that, someone who was careless and didn't do his job right. If you didn't own the corporation but were a professional engineer employed by it who designed a faulty product, you would STILL be liable, because you did the shoddy work. In short, the fact that you are held personally liable for everything coming out the door has nothing to do with your company ownership, and shouldn't. It has everything to do with the fact that you are the one making designs that are supposed to be safe, and for that reason you are held liable. You should be calling for the head of the IT guy who dangerously left a firewall down, because like you, he was the one who was in charge of making the product safe, and unlike you, was negligent.
If someone invents something better by than HTML it won't matter how much better it is, the world isn't going to scrap the content on the internet for the sake of the new technology.
HTML 5.0 even being considered is a case in point, considering XHTML is far better from a Computer Science standpoint and has far more future potential.
Coming up with "radically new and advanced" architecture does little good in the tech world because no matter how much better it is going forward it has to still work with the technologies that got us here.
And even if we didn't have to keep the old tech, or even if the change to the new tech was really, really slight and easy, we still wouldn't make it because we would still have many, many idiots around who will refuse to learn something new or even consider a new technology. In fact, they will raise a stink for years until someone relents. It doesn't matter how much better the new technology is, how bad things were before, or how poor or illogical the arguments of those wanting to keep the old technology are: they will badger everyone until it is resurrected. Again, HTML 5 is a case in point.
I forgot about that Chex Quest game. I remember playing it when I was young. It was outstanding. Hmm... I wonder if there are any copies of that game still lying about here at work or in the archives, considering I now work for General Mills, the makers of Chex cereal, Chex Mix, etc. If not, I should add submit it!
On the bright side, my fiance is a huge fan or organics and natural products, of which I do not think J&J make any.
Lol, that's what you think (and probably what J+J wants you to think). I would bet money J+J does make organic products... they just don't put their name on them, and will use another brand name instead. That is becoming an extremely common practice these days, and the fact is that while most organic/natural product categories started out as niche markets with small players, almost all segments of the organic/natural market are now dominated by the same large consumer goods companies that dominate the rest of the market. They don't put their corporate logos on the products and come up with different brands for them (its a marketing thing to help consumers get that warm fuzzy feeling they get when they see a "natural, home cooked family brand" on the label), but make no mistake, they own, produce, and market those brands. And I can say this with certainty because I work for one of the very largest food companies in the US, and for that matter the world, and they are ALL over the organic/natural aisles, even though you could never tell by looking at the packaging.
Worse, this "standard" takes us back to the 90's when nothing was strict, well-formed, or enforced properly in any way whatsoever. The 90's were nothing than a big free for all in which you couldn't get anything to display consistently across browsers.
XHTML and CSS saved us from a lot of this by making things well formed, stricter, and less messy (by seperating content from presentation). Going back to what the article aptly calls the "cave-man" approach is a disaster and a disgrace. I had previously liked Mozilla up to now for their work on standards conforming firefox, but after seeing this all I can say is that they are a bunch of idiots. THe same goes for Apple and Opera. This will be a BIG setback to regular, structured, standards based web development.
Ironically, the only hope now is that Microsoft, with its huge installation base, will continue to march along its current path of better complying with XHTML (which will hopefully be fully complete by IE 8), thus making the efforts of the other three worthless. Heck, I'd even be content for Microsoft to follow the more traditional course of not applying with anyone's standards. At least that would also keep this "standard" from being widely supported, hopefully killing it or at least delaying it enough to give the W3C time to get off their butts and get XHTML 2 out the door.
Side Note: Why do we have to go back to HTML? Why can't we just add these new elements to XHTML and call it XHTML 1.2? Why do we have to go back to unclosed tags and crappy code that can't be parsed with the ubiquitous XML parser?
I went to ISU, and man was that ever celebrated when we got that computer.
One of the things we used it for (which I was involved with) was putting John the Ripper on it and using it to crack passwords at ISU's national cyber defense competition. That was fun:D....
Doesn't matter - the Chinese will get there first.
Unfortunately, that analysis is almost certainly correct. The Chinese are currently acting the way we did in the first half of the twentieth century: productive, energetic, industrious, etc... All Americans do is look for easy jobs, sit on their butts in front of the TV as much as possible, and generally just consume things and be lazy. There aren't enough engineers and scientists coming out of the current generation to sustain American, or even Western, dominance. And the effect is this: human presence in space will look FAR more like the closed, tightly controlled Romulan empire than any kind of Federation. America and other Western societies don't have the backbone anymore to build any kind of government/empire in space, and the communist Chinese do. They will take the lead, and in the end, when you look to human presence in the stars, you will see the stamp of authoritarianism and secretiveness that China will leave on it.
Are they doing some kind of man in the middle thing to get the keys for Gmail traffic? Since Gmail uses SSL (or if you use a mail client to connect SSL to the POP server and TLS to the SMTP server) one would think that you couldn't just "peice together" an email message and just read it. You would have to decrypt it first.
People can believe and are in fact poisoned by additives in our food and yet if pressed to detect if a given mean contained additives they wouldn't be able to tell.
You are misinterpreting what that means. When they talk about whether "people can tell" they mean whether their bodies can tell or not. Take your food additive example. Yes, someone isn't going to be able to immediately take a bite of food and then vebally tell you immediately if it had an additive or not. But if it is a sickening additive, those that ate it will soon communicate (via vomiting, diahrea, naseau) with their bodies that it was present, while those who ate food without it won't have the problem.
This is a fair study because they were checking what people would tell them (through their body) about cell phone towers. What they found was that they had the same amount of illnesses and symptoms whether or not there was a tower. Those people may have been truthfully reporting symptoms, but if so they obviously weren't being caused by the tower, because there was no measurable difference between the biological responses of the two groups.
If only they had sent a hummer up there instead, especially one of those robotically controlled hummers from the DARPA automation contests. Then we wouldn't have to worry about dust storms... the dust would have had to worry about its butt getting kicked by the hummer. The hummer is man enough for anything Mars can throw at it.
Slashdot Mirror
The one issue I have with this assumption is that it will be very difficult to remove HTTP and moved to something else, based solely on the installed base and inertia. Too much is invested in HTTP, so any attempt to switch will probably be glacial, at best.
Agreed. And just take a look at the countries of Eastern Europe as long as we are citing examples. They are doing FAR better than they ever were under the socialist/communist policies they followed throughout the cold war. Japan is another example of an Asian country that is no longer in poverty either. They got their buts kicked in WWII and didn't have anything, but now are one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Now lets look at countries that are following socialism. I'm betting heavilly that we aren't going to see Venezuela becoming an economic powerhouse under Hugo Chavez. They might stay afloat economically, but that will be almost entirely thanks to oil and nothing else. It certainly won't propel them into having any sort of real, diversified economy in which the vast majority of the population gets out of poverty.
The writer of the review talks about how server side languages have a richness benefit, but client side languages, while less powerful, benefit from a wide installation base due to being included in web browsers. He talks about how GWT tries to bridge the gap, but I would recommend getting a book on silverlight, reading it, and using that instead. The current 1.0 version of silverlight is mostly just good as an online media player, but the 1.1 alpha version bundles a version of the .Net framework. Therefore, all that power you get from the .Net framework on the server side, you can ALSO get on the client side. And silverlight is cross platform. There've been a number of these "bridging" technologies that try to bridge these gaps, but silverlight definately looks more useful than GWT.
Perhaps Reagan could make that bost with a straight face during the time he was president. Wiretaps may not have been as widespread as they are now, and for sure this system didn't exist, and wasn't even started, during those days.
On another note, I see by your reference to terrorism you are attempting to blame the Bush administration for this. Clearly you didn't read the article, so why don't I point out an interesting section that might shake your preconceived ideas a little bit.
From the article:
Note this: In 1994, the congress was massively controlled by the democrats (yes, Republicans did win their huge election victory in November of that year, but they wouldn't take office until 1995). That democratically controlled congress was the one that passed the law that allowed the system to be created, and it was signed into law by president Clinton. So in fact, it is not the "we have to beat the terrorists" crowd of Republicans that started all this, but the "we respect your privacy" democrats. The fact is, politicians almost never do what they say they will, and both parties just say what is going to get them votes. Democrats say they are for transparent government and privacy, but this clearly shows they aren't, at least not any more than Republicans or anyone else. You can't keep going with this knee-jerk "bash Republicans because they spy on us all" mentality, because when Reagan, very much a true conservative, was in office, the FBI complained they didn't have enough surveillance powers. Then when Clinton and the democrats controlled all houses of government, this was one of the results. And at the time this law came out, terrorism wasn't a major concern like Bush says it is for him. When the dems passed this law, domestic wiretapping (i.e. watching us, or at least the criminals among us) was the primary concern.
As long as we are all talking about this, I'd like to request that the storm botnet speak up and send a few automated emails their way, hopefully enough to blow these trolls off the face of the Internet.
Wow, I break IP constantly on my project if this is true. I write lots of automated notifications that I send by email. Come and get me Polaris!!!
Sure. President Clinton was impeached because he lied under oath to a grand jury and committed perjury, which in this country is a federal class D felony. A man who is committing felonies while in office by obstructing justice and lying to grand juries deserves to be impeached. I'm a Republican, but if Bush takes an oath to tell the truth and then lies to a grand jury I'll support impeaching him to. Felons have no place in the oval office, and Clinton deserved what he got, and in fact deserved to be removed from office because of committing the felony.
Note that the Clinton impeachment really doesn't have anything to do with Monica as affairs aren't criminally prosecuted, but he ought to have been ridden out of town on a rail for disgracing the office in such a way.
I must be one of the only customers who never had a problem with Packard Bell. Are they really as bad as people claim they were? Our family bought several Packard Bell computers, and none of them ever had a problem. We eventually got rid of some of them as we upgraded, but we still have a 150 Mhz box that still runs to this day on 100% original hardware. Not one thing has ever failed, and I can't say that about any of the HP, Toshiba or Dell computers I have bought. For that matter, I don't even think I can say that about the computers I've built. At some point in their history Packard Bell must have been doing some things right.
I guess this just proves again that some companies unfortunately still believe in "Security through obscurity". Sony, quit trying to hide junk all over my drive!
If I was a spammer, I would CLEARLY rather have grandma's Win98 box host my spambot. And I'm not being sarcastic, either. Just think about this for a second. You talk about a big Linux server on DS3 being better for a botnet. Big servers typically have big IT support staffs running them. How long do you think it is going to take network personnel to notice a server spitting out a lot of spam or infecting emails. I'm not going to take a guess as to how long it would take to fix the problem, but I would bet money that at most organizations infections like that are detected within the day, if not within an hour or two.
So great, you've just compromised you big Linux server, and within a day it gets cleaned up. So you have to find a totally new exploit and try to do it again. And maybe you exploit it again, and then it gets cleaned up again. Contrast that with grandma's Win98 box... she will NEVER know she is sending out spam, and will consequently take NO ACTION to clean it up. If you are going to the trouble of assembling a huge botnet for profits, you want a botnet that is going to have operational capacity for a good length of time, as that is your source of income. You have much better odds of keeping control of user's desktop PC than you do of flying under the IT staff's radar. The minute you try to use their machine as a spambot, they will pull the network connection. You can use grandma's PC again, and again, and again.
Oh, one last point... your comparison of grandma's win98 box to a server is very naive. Yes, one on one, the server completely outperforms the grandma box, but when you have multiple millions of grandma boxes, and the potential to infect tens or hundreds of millions more, the power CLEARLY lies with the desktop machines. Reason 1: We've seen many times that grids of desktops, through their sheer number, can outperform the fastest supercomputers. Reason 2: Ignoring the fact that servers have IT staff, you still have to contend with the fact that the server market uses less machines by far, and that those machines are fragmented by OS. Your exploit that targets Linux can only potentially capture a fraction of the server market, as many others run Solaris, HP UX, Windows Server, etc. With desktops, the market is FAR larger, and consolidated with a single OS. Clearly you want to target the largest market, and the fact that that market also has the least policing by IT professionals makes it an even bigger sweet spot. If I'm a spammer, I'm TOTALLY going for the desktops when making a botnet. QED.
Good for certain uses anyway. I've participated in Iowa State University's Cyber Defense competitions as a red team hacker, and I've found they really help to take out the defending teams. Every team is required to run a regular Windows desktop that any user can access (the teams often play the part of universities or other facilities trying to secure a public lab), and it's fun to just walk up like a normal user, put in a "normal" music CD or game (courtesy of Sony), and then BOOM, rootkited. From there on, of course, things get easier... it's hard to remove malicious files when the OS won't let you know they are there :D.
RIIIIIIIIGHT... And I suppose keeping information from citizens brings down 100+ story skyscrapers, sinks ships, destroys embassies, blows up hundreds of civilians, kills thousands, causes billions in damage... Wait, it's actually TERRORISTS that do that. I don't normally say anything personal to people when posting here, but you are flat out on crack if you somehow think that not telling citizens something is MORE HARMFUL than the horrific damage and death we've seen REPEATEDLY over the last decade from terrorists. The fact is, there are some things that citizens simply don't need to know. That's reality. Citizens do not have a NEED to know where our secret government bunkers are. They don't need plans to destroyers, they don't need to know every research finding a government agency makes (terrorists are the only ones that DO need to know such things and benefit from the information). If you had actually read my post, you would see that I CLEARLY favor giving citizens open access to government whenever possible. I favor letting them see just about everything, even things they don't need to know, UNLESS they are things that, when known, could be used by others to KILL them. You cannot have government reveal absolutely every database and every paper it has ever produced. Not because we want a closed government, but because we don't live in an ideal world, and there are crazies who want to kill everyone. That's reality bucko, and it's about time you start living in it.
I still think a line needs to be drawn where certain things are allowed to be kept secret in the interest of national security. For instance, if we are totally transparent about our latest weapons system, unfortunately people that are not US citizens are going to hear about it.
I think the guiding principle (knowing that anything disclosed by the government can and will be public knowledge potentially heard anywhere in the world) should be this: things that, if disclosed, will aid enemies and allow them to easilly hurt us should be kept secret. This would include things like weapons systems, security systems at nuclear power plants, and things of that nature. The second half is this: things that, if disclosed, don't present an enemy an opportunity to harm us, or would be easilly discovered anyway, should be disclosed. Obviously just about anything NHTSA does should fall into this category. Knowing about our highways or bridges doesn't really allow an enemy to hurt us any more than they could without the NHTSA. They can easilly walk around and see where bridges are, and if they are going to destroy infrastructure, it will be the bridge that presents the most impressive spectacle or has the heaviest traffic (again, easilly observed). Thus, terrorist gain little from anything the NHTSA says, but citizens have a true need to know. Therefore, their current policy is a bunch of garbage.
I agree. It's just a question of to what degree it was deliberate. Was it deliberate to the degree that they were targeting the specific company that runs it, or was it a lesser degree of deliberation in that they were looking for any thin target to test their skills on, and this happened to be convenient?
The whole company collapsed on them. Do you think that isn't some kind of punishment? This was a private company, so you can guarantee that the board of directors all had a big hand in getting the company started and were all heavilly invested in it (unlike public corps, which tend to just appoint CEOs of other corps to their boards). It collapsed, and they would have lost all chance of recovering that investment. When it folded, they probably had to liquidate everything in an attempt to pay off as many of the initial startup loans as they could, but odds are there was still a lot of debt to be paid off. You make it sound like these guys are Enron execs making off like bandits, when in reality there is a pretty good chance they lost money when it collapsed. And they also lost their primary investment vehicle for making more money... and all because some stupid IT guy at the bottom somewhere was careless. I'm glad they are protected by the legal entity of a corporation, because they probably poured their hearts and souls into starting that company and making it succeed, only to have it collapse through no fault of their own because of some idiot worker. That's pretty heavy punishment for people who knowlingly did nothing wrong and were trying to do things right.
Let's be clear here... you are not liable because you are a professional engineer who owns a corporation. You are liable because you are the professional engineer that DESIGNS the product or service being sold. If you just ran the corporation and didn't do design work and sign off on designs, you wouldn't be liable. These guys ran the corporation, but they weren't the ones designing products and turning firewalls on and off. They hired someone to do that, someone who was careless and didn't do his job right. If you didn't own the corporation but were a professional engineer employed by it who designed a faulty product, you would STILL be liable, because you did the shoddy work. In short, the fact that you are held personally liable for everything coming out the door has nothing to do with your company ownership, and shouldn't. It has everything to do with the fact that you are the one making designs that are supposed to be safe, and for that reason you are held liable. You should be calling for the head of the IT guy who dangerously left a firewall down, because like you, he was the one who was in charge of making the product safe, and unlike you, was negligent.
HTML 5.0 even being considered is a case in point, considering XHTML is far better from a Computer Science standpoint and has far more future potential.
And even if we didn't have to keep the old tech, or even if the change to the new tech was really, really slight and easy, we still wouldn't make it because we would still have many, many idiots around who will refuse to learn something new or even consider a new technology. In fact, they will raise a stink for years until someone relents. It doesn't matter how much better the new technology is, how bad things were before, or how poor or illogical the arguments of those wanting to keep the old technology are: they will badger everyone until it is resurrected. Again, HTML 5 is a case in point.
I forgot about that Chex Quest game. I remember playing it when I was young. It was outstanding. Hmm... I wonder if there are any copies of that game still lying about here at work or in the archives, considering I now work for General Mills, the makers of Chex cereal, Chex Mix, etc. If not, I should add submit it!
Lol, that's what you think (and probably what J+J wants you to think). I would bet money J+J does make organic products... they just don't put their name on them, and will use another brand name instead. That is becoming an extremely common practice these days, and the fact is that while most organic/natural product categories started out as niche markets with small players, almost all segments of the organic/natural market are now dominated by the same large consumer goods companies that dominate the rest of the market. They don't put their corporate logos on the products and come up with different brands for them (its a marketing thing to help consumers get that warm fuzzy feeling they get when they see a "natural, home cooked family brand" on the label), but make no mistake, they own, produce, and market those brands. And I can say this with certainty because I work for one of the very largest food companies in the US, and for that matter the world, and they are ALL over the organic/natural aisles, even though you could never tell by looking at the packaging.
Worse, this "standard" takes us back to the 90's when nothing was strict, well-formed, or enforced properly in any way whatsoever. The 90's were nothing than a big free for all in which you couldn't get anything to display consistently across browsers.
XHTML and CSS saved us from a lot of this by making things well formed, stricter, and less messy (by seperating content from presentation). Going back to what the article aptly calls the "cave-man" approach is a disaster and a disgrace. I had previously liked Mozilla up to now for their work on standards conforming firefox, but after seeing this all I can say is that they are a bunch of idiots. THe same goes for Apple and Opera. This will be a BIG setback to regular, structured, standards based web development.
Ironically, the only hope now is that Microsoft, with its huge installation base, will continue to march along its current path of better complying with XHTML (which will hopefully be fully complete by IE 8), thus making the efforts of the other three worthless. Heck, I'd even be content for Microsoft to follow the more traditional course of not applying with anyone's standards. At least that would also keep this "standard" from being widely supported, hopefully killing it or at least delaying it enough to give the W3C time to get off their butts and get XHTML 2 out the door.
Side Note: Why do we have to go back to HTML? Why can't we just add these new elements to XHTML and call it XHTML 1.2? Why do we have to go back to unclosed tags and crappy code that can't be parsed with the ubiquitous XML parser?
I went to ISU, and man was that ever celebrated when we got that computer. One of the things we used it for (which I was involved with) was putting John the Ripper on it and using it to crack passwords at ISU's national cyber defense competition. That was fun :D....
Unfortunately, that analysis is almost certainly correct. The Chinese are currently acting the way we did in the first half of the twentieth century: productive, energetic, industrious, etc... All Americans do is look for easy jobs, sit on their butts in front of the TV as much as possible, and generally just consume things and be lazy. There aren't enough engineers and scientists coming out of the current generation to sustain American, or even Western, dominance. And the effect is this: human presence in space will look FAR more like the closed, tightly controlled Romulan empire than any kind of Federation. America and other Western societies don't have the backbone anymore to build any kind of government/empire in space, and the communist Chinese do. They will take the lead, and in the end, when you look to human presence in the stars, you will see the stamp of authoritarianism and secretiveness that China will leave on it.
Are they doing some kind of man in the middle thing to get the keys for Gmail traffic? Since Gmail uses SSL (or if you use a mail client to connect SSL to the POP server and TLS to the SMTP server) one would think that you couldn't just "peice together" an email message and just read it. You would have to decrypt it first.
This is a fair study because they were checking what people would tell them (through their body) about cell phone towers. What they found was that they had the same amount of illnesses and symptoms whether or not there was a tower. Those people may have been truthfully reporting symptoms, but if so they obviously weren't being caused by the tower, because there was no measurable difference between the biological responses of the two groups.
If only they had sent a hummer up there instead, especially one of those robotically controlled hummers from the DARPA automation contests. Then we wouldn't have to worry about dust storms... the dust would have had to worry about its butt getting kicked by the hummer. The hummer is man enough for anything Mars can throw at it.