Its not like this is exactly hard to do. Slipstreaming updates to Windows CDs isnt rocket science; there are loads of sites out there with instructions and automated tools (MSFN, neowin, ryanvm, nlite, etc). It takes about 30 minutes to slipstream something onto CD.
The difference is if UAC is active and you are using a Chromium based or IE so that you have low rights mode (WTF Firefox? it has been FOUR YEARS already, get on the ball!) it is actually pretty damned hard to infect Windows 7 without getting the user actively involved.
Thats not entirely accurate. UAC is generally avoided by detecting whether the user has admin rights, and if so, rooting the machine; if not, installing a virus that launches on user login, stored to %appdata%. This can perform the role of "User-mode rootkit" (if you dont believe such a thing exists, google "n00bkit"), effectively locking down such things as task manager, registry editor, etc, at least for the current user (I dont believe UAC is tripped when writing to HKCU registry hive)-- and on MOST home machines, there is only one user, and users are not aware of how to remove such infections in such a scenario.
As for Chrome and IE, IE has some protection from its sandbox mode, but you still have to deal with the fact that MOST infections seem to stem from out of date plugins-- Java, Quicktime, Reader, Flash-- which effectively load external DLLs outside of the controls and protections of the browser. If you have a Java vulnerability which allows arbitrary code and privelege escalation, it matters not whether you use IE or Chrome or XP or seven (except insofar as ASLR, DEP, etc mitigate the flaw).
Chrome DOES have the benefit that it automatically updates its PDF and SWF plugins, which mitigates that attack vector by quite a bit; but a 0-day flash exploit will infect you just as easily regardless of browser.
UAC DOES, of course, make it about a zillion times easier to remove the virus, as a non-escalated virus install cannot infect the MBR, patch the kernel or system drivers, etc, and is easily removed by launching a startup editor with elevated permissions.
many people are taught that Columbus proved the world was round even though everyone thought it was flat (invented by Washington Irving), George Washington cut down his dad's cherry tree (also invented by Washington Irving), and that Paul Revere said "The British are coming!" (invented by Henry Longfellow).
Find me a school that teaches that, please. Ive never heard a school teach that throughout my educational years.
Let's say you have a school district which is incredibly poor, but has a highly motivated but not unusually smart set of parents (Such districts aren't hard to find - they exist in most US cities and more isolated rural areas).
You mean like New York and DC, who have the twin distinctions of being the MOST funded per pupil, and also the least performant, in the country?
To give our highly motivated parents the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume they've: * Ensured that their kids can read, count, and possibly add or subtract 1-digit numbers before entering first grade.
That puts them at about a second to third grade level in the public schools I went to, and FCPS (fairfax county) is one of the better school districts in the country. Id say "motivated parents putting kids 2 years ahead of peers" is a pretty good example of why motivated parents IS a solution. Heck, look at homeschooling scores (any of them), and THEN tell me that parents cant fix the issue.
Somehow, the OS X and iOS keychain manages to use encryption to protect passwords,
And if you had read any of the comments here at all-- including the one you replied to-- you would have understood that that does NOTHING AT ALL. A properly protected password will be inaccessable to apps without proper permissions, encrypted or not. If you encrypt it, anything using the login still needs the decryption key, which must be on the phone, and thus would be potentially accessible to any app trying to grab the password.
In otherwords, such encryption is worthless, because it is on the device by necessity.
Arent homeschoolers generally much higher performing on basically any metric that is thrown their way? (source-- 3 seconds of google; nea.org graphs; etc etc etc)
If you look historically, you MIGHT find that your hypothesis is utterly out of line with history. For a very very long time, higher learning institutions were religious (source). And a lot of the early scientific thinkers delved at least into philosophy (such as Aristotle), which falls into your "knowledge coming from what is already known"-- and yet they did not deny that knowledge comes from outside as well.
There are perhaps some people for which your statements hold; but to present it as some "religion (and, by your statement, philosophy) suppresses knowledge" is to ignore thousands of years of history which calls you wrong.
ever wonder why ultraconservatives were pushing so hard for a school voucher system? Could it be that such a system would make it frighteningly easy for this type of behavior to flourish, by essentially subsidizing extremist institutions?
Or could it be that more and more money spent on public schools gets less and less in the way of results? Or the fact that private schooled students consistently score higher than public schools, and home-schooled gets even higher scores than that? (not even providing a source, theres about a zillion resources on this if you take 5 seconds to google or wiki it)
Nah, it cant be that, its gotta be some anti-science conspiracy.
Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion.
People who quite enjoy tetris might remark that the two are not mutually exclusive. And as someone who used to do a lot of WoW, I would also remark that many aspects of that game relied on intelligence-- predicting enemy moves, positioning, multitasking (focusing on 3 opponents simultaneously, performing several simultaneous actions depending on class), optimally timing moves, etc.
Most games that are rewarding-- at least for me-- tend to involve some level of problem solving.
CS Lewis once remarked that society is forever most worried about the things it has least cause to worry about.
So here you are all a dither about the things being suggested and proposed, as we feed more and more money into failing school systems that continue to teach the things you think they should, while all the crazies go homeschool and outperform the national average.
Is it possible you're picking your battles rather poorly, and that this really isnt something-- even for someone adamantly opposed to religion in school-- that is of primary concern right now? One would think that a concerned citizen would be more worried about bolstering poor SAT scores, college admissions rates, etc rather than worrying about the grim spectre of a proposal that had no impact on the state of education in Texas.
The Creationists, ID-ists and the slew of others nutjobs all having their pound of flesh taught in the US school system seems to show that it certainly isn't simply a matter of getting the right teaching methods.
If you really think that is "the problem" our school system has, you should do some rethinking. For example, arent these nutjobs the people who generally homeschool, and go to catholic private schools? Wonder howthey scorein comparison to public schools?
So no, thats NOT whats dragging our education system down.
I just think that saying our best teachers, professors and mentors are second rate to an AI is a long stretch.
If we can see from the above that rote learning en masse is less effective than smaller classes (private schools) and more 1 on 1 teaching (homeschooling), what makes you think that an impersonal teacher would do better? We are a LONG way from an AI that can personally interact with someone in a meaningful way.
fueled by the educational system (which is running out of money).
If you look at nea.org info (nea.org PDF), you can see a number of interesting things.
First, that many "states" that rank quite high on "expenditure per pupil" (page 55)-- DC for example, which is #1-- do not coorelate to better education. In fact, DC is the top spender, and you will find MANY lamenting how bad schools are there.
Second, the total revenue of schools (page 68) has RISEN significantly over the last 10 years. Crying about constantly running out of money as you get more and more each year is perhaps an indicator that the money needs to be used more widely.
Third, if you look at "performance per dollar spent per pupil" (here) (2006), you can see that there isnt much of a correlation. NJ, NY, and DC are the top spenders, and are at the absolute bottom of the barrel in student SAT scores. Conversely, the top 15 or so scoring states all spend roughly 50% of what NJ, NY, and DC spend.
If you need another example, perhaps this article would be enlightening.
This is the same system that is demonizing teachers as greedy, unqualified babysitters
Perhaps the problem IS those teachers which are greedy, and unqualified, and have some ridiculous politically driven objection to merit-based pay (ie, if your 9th grade students consistently get awful grades in later years or dont go to college or get rejected from college, perhaps you suck at preparing them for later years), as well as ridiculous objections to vouchers (not really clear what possible grounds there are for objecting to them).
If your teachers are requesting ever more money, and yet we can see that there isnt really a correlation between "more money" and "better results"; and they also refuse to be evaluated in any meaningful way on how well they do their job-- and it absolutely CAN be done without people teaching to the test (which, dont get me wrong, I hate as much as the next person)-- forgive me if I think that the problem MIGHT not be the funding.
TP Michelle Bauchmann claiming that slavery was good for black families is not what the Republican Party needs at this juncture.
What she said was tactless and foolish, but she didnt say what youre claiming she did.
In fact, she didnt actually say it at all, it was a pledge she signed, and the controversial language was Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President Which is to say, it was lamenting the state of family values, and trying to emphasize its point with hyperbole.
It would be much the same as if someone had said Even under Hitler, people had more speech rights A rational interpretation of that statement will not read an endorsement of the Nazi regime into it, but rather a gross and insensitive use of hyperbole to emphasize how bad you think things are NOW.
Although I suppose if the goal is to demonize your political opposition, it sure is convenient to simply call it racist, and to make the claim that republicans are hankering for the days of slavery again; and a fig to any reasonable attempt to use context and language skills.
Incidentally, I wouldnt be ignorant if it were easy to just run/test OSX Lion in a virtual machine. But when I check the apple site, they seem to indicate that in order to run OSX Lion server, I need to own OSX Lion, which means I need to purchase hardware before even evaluating the software. What about that seems IT friendly? We need to request funding for something before even having a chance to evaluate it?
And I dont remember the full details for Leopard (as I cannot seem to find it on their site anymore), but I remember similar hoops when I attempted to get an evaluation version several years back.
Oh I see, you want businesses to roll out a brand NEW server infrastructure to cater to a couple of users who think "work" means" i need have a Mac because I like the aesthetics".
I dont really care about any of that. If Apple wants their equipment blessed by IT, they need to have the following: A) some way of dynamically mapping network shares; at logon would be nice. B) some way of controlling updates from the server C) some way of issuing security and password policies, from the server D) Centralized LDAP integration E) some method of pusing software from the server would be nice
Basically, without a method to configure the Mac from where I sit at my remote terminal, Macs remain a phenomenal pain to administer. Want to integrate into the business world? Start by not being the special-needs squeaky wheel on the network.
Er, not wanting higher taxes doesnt make you a sociopath. For various reasons, _I_ dont much want the government taking even more of my money; that hardly makes me a sociopath.
Lets see, he ended the war-- mission accomplished! Except then it wasnt, and we still have troops overseas. Whoops. But then, he closed gitmo! Except, he didnt. No more bills with earmarks! Oh wait, he didnt follow thru on that either. Unemployment wont go up! Except then it did.
Well, Osama was captured under his watch, so i suppose we can give him credit for that, sort of, in a "hes commander in chief" sort of way.
I know something he did! He started a new war, without congressional approval, after bold criticisms of Bush for that very thing (even though Bush HAD approval). Thats something, I guess.
A) A lot of the measures touted as "staving off the great depression" were agreed upon before Obama was elected B) we dont know that it would have been a great depression C) The unemployment rate has gotten worse since he got into office
But he sure does like to rail against the fat cats, and thats what counts.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not like this is exactly hard to do. Slipstreaming updates to Windows CDs isnt rocket science; there are loads of sites out there with instructions and automated tools (MSFN, neowin, ryanvm, nlite, etc). It takes about 30 minutes to slipstream something onto CD.
The difference is if UAC is active and you are using a Chromium based or IE so that you have low rights mode (WTF Firefox? it has been FOUR YEARS already, get on the ball!) it is actually pretty damned hard to infect Windows 7 without getting the user actively involved.
Thats not entirely accurate. UAC is generally avoided by detecting whether the user has admin rights, and if so, rooting the machine; if not, installing a virus that launches on user login, stored to %appdata%. This can perform the role of "User-mode rootkit" (if you dont believe such a thing exists, google "n00bkit"), effectively locking down such things as task manager, registry editor, etc, at least for the current user (I dont believe UAC is tripped when writing to HKCU registry hive)-- and on MOST home machines, there is only one user, and users are not aware of how to remove such infections in such a scenario.
As for Chrome and IE, IE has some protection from its sandbox mode, but you still have to deal with the fact that MOST infections seem to stem from out of date plugins-- Java, Quicktime, Reader, Flash-- which effectively load external DLLs outside of the controls and protections of the browser. If you have a Java vulnerability which allows arbitrary code and privelege escalation, it matters not whether you use IE or Chrome or XP or seven (except insofar as ASLR, DEP, etc mitigate the flaw).
Chrome DOES have the benefit that it automatically updates its PDF and SWF plugins, which mitigates that attack vector by quite a bit; but a 0-day flash exploit will infect you just as easily regardless of browser.
UAC DOES, of course, make it about a zillion times easier to remove the virus, as a non-escalated virus install cannot infect the MBR, patch the kernel or system drivers, etc, and is easily removed by launching a startup editor with elevated permissions.
Wall street is the world's greatest argument against the notion that capitalism rewards people in proportion to their skill and hard work.
And human nature (as well as history) is the greatest argument against any idea that tries to replace capitalism.
Eh? You dont need encryption for a VPN either.
many people are taught that Columbus proved the world was round even though everyone thought it was flat (invented by Washington Irving), George Washington cut down his dad's cherry tree (also invented by Washington Irving), and that Paul Revere said "The British are coming!" (invented by Henry Longfellow).
Find me a school that teaches that, please. Ive never heard a school teach that throughout my educational years.
Let's say you have a school district which is incredibly poor, but has a highly motivated but not unusually smart set of parents (Such districts aren't hard to find - they exist in most US cities and more isolated rural areas).
You mean like New York and DC, who have the twin distinctions of being the MOST funded per pupil, and also the least performant, in the country?
To give our highly motivated parents the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume they've:
* Ensured that their kids can read, count, and possibly add or subtract 1-digit numbers before entering first grade.
That puts them at about a second to third grade level in the public schools I went to, and FCPS (fairfax county) is one of the better school districts in the country. Id say "motivated parents putting kids 2 years ahead of peers" is a pretty good example of why motivated parents IS a solution. Heck, look at homeschooling scores (any of them), and THEN tell me that parents cant fix the issue.
Somehow, the OS X and iOS keychain manages to use encryption to protect passwords,
And if you had read any of the comments here at all-- including the one you replied to-- you would have understood that that does NOTHING AT ALL. A properly protected password will be inaccessable to apps without proper permissions, encrypted or not. If you encrypt it, anything using the login still needs the decryption key, which must be on the phone, and thus would be potentially accessible to any app trying to grab the password.
In otherwords, such encryption is worthless, because it is on the device by necessity.
Arent homeschoolers generally much higher performing on basically any metric that is thrown their way? (source-- 3 seconds of google; nea.org graphs; etc etc etc)
The scary thing is that you seem to think "democracy working properly" means "opposing viewpoints are never on the table to begin with".
If you look historically, you MIGHT find that your hypothesis is utterly out of line with history. For a very very long time, higher learning institutions were religious (source). And a lot of the early scientific thinkers delved at least into philosophy (such as Aristotle), which falls into your "knowledge coming from what is already known"-- and yet they did not deny that knowledge comes from outside as well.
There are perhaps some people for which your statements hold; but to present it as some "religion (and, by your statement, philosophy) suppresses knowledge" is to ignore thousands of years of history which calls you wrong.
ever wonder why ultraconservatives were pushing so hard for a school voucher system? Could it be that such a system would make it frighteningly easy for this type of behavior to flourish, by essentially subsidizing extremist institutions?
Or could it be that more and more money spent on public schools gets less and less in the way of results? Or the fact that private schooled students consistently score higher than public schools, and home-schooled gets even higher scores than that? (not even providing a source, theres about a zillion resources on this if you take 5 seconds to google or wiki it)
Nah, it cant be that, its gotta be some anti-science conspiracy.
Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion.
People who quite enjoy tetris might remark that the two are not mutually exclusive. And as someone who used to do a lot of WoW, I would also remark that many aspects of that game relied on intelligence-- predicting enemy moves, positioning, multitasking (focusing on 3 opponents simultaneously, performing several simultaneous actions depending on class), optimally timing moves, etc.
Most games that are rewarding-- at least for me-- tend to involve some level of problem solving.
CS Lewis once remarked that society is forever most worried about the things it has least cause to worry about.
So here you are all a dither about the things being suggested and proposed, as we feed more and more money into failing school systems that continue to teach the things you think they should, while all the crazies go homeschool and outperform the national average.
Is it possible you're picking your battles rather poorly, and that this really isnt something-- even for someone adamantly opposed to religion in school-- that is of primary concern right now? One would think that a concerned citizen would be more worried about bolstering poor SAT scores, college admissions rates, etc rather than worrying about the grim spectre of a proposal that had no impact on the state of education in Texas.
The Creationists, ID-ists and the slew of others nutjobs all having their pound of flesh taught in the US school system seems to show that it certainly isn't simply a matter of getting the right teaching methods.
If you really think that is "the problem" our school system has, you should do some rethinking. For example, arent these nutjobs the people who generally homeschool, and go to catholic private schools? Wonder how they score in comparison to public schools?
So no, thats NOT whats dragging our education system down.
I just think that saying our best teachers, professors and mentors are second rate to an AI is a long stretch.
If we can see from the above that rote learning en masse is less effective than smaller classes (private schools) and more 1 on 1 teaching (homeschooling), what makes you think that an impersonal teacher would do better? We are a LONG way from an AI that can personally interact with someone in a meaningful way.
fueled by the educational system (which is running out of money).
If you look at nea.org info (nea.org PDF), you can see a number of interesting things.
First, that many "states" that rank quite high on "expenditure per pupil" (page 55)-- DC for example, which is #1-- do not coorelate to better education. In fact, DC is the top spender, and you will find MANY lamenting how bad schools are there.
Second, the total revenue of schools (page 68) has RISEN significantly over the last 10 years. Crying about constantly running out of money as you get more and more each year is perhaps an indicator that the money needs to be used more widely.
Third, if you look at "performance per dollar spent per pupil" (here) (2006), you can see that there isnt much of a correlation. NJ, NY, and DC are the top spenders, and are at the absolute bottom of the barrel in student SAT scores. Conversely, the top 15 or so scoring states all spend roughly 50% of what NJ, NY, and DC spend.
If you need another example, perhaps this article would be enlightening.
This is the same system that is demonizing teachers as greedy, unqualified babysitters
Perhaps the problem IS those teachers which are greedy, and unqualified, and have some ridiculous politically driven objection to merit-based pay (ie, if your 9th grade students consistently get awful grades in later years or dont go to college or get rejected from college, perhaps you suck at preparing them for later years), as well as ridiculous objections to vouchers (not really clear what possible grounds there are for objecting to them).
If your teachers are requesting ever more money, and yet we can see that there isnt really a correlation between "more money" and "better results"; and they also refuse to be evaluated in any meaningful way on how well they do their job-- and it absolutely CAN be done without people teaching to the test (which, dont get me wrong, I hate as much as the next person)-- forgive me if I think that the problem MIGHT not be the funding.
TP Michelle Bauchmann claiming that slavery was good for black families is not what the Republican Party needs at this juncture.
What she said was tactless and foolish, but she didnt say what youre claiming she did.
In fact, she didnt actually say it at all, it was a pledge she signed, and the controversial language was
Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President
Which is to say, it was lamenting the state of family values, and trying to emphasize its point with hyperbole.
It would be much the same as if someone had said
Even under Hitler, people had more speech rights
A rational interpretation of that statement will not read an endorsement of the Nazi regime into it, but rather a gross and insensitive use of hyperbole to emphasize how bad you think things are NOW.
Although I suppose if the goal is to demonize your political opposition, it sure is convenient to simply call it racist, and to make the claim that republicans are hankering for the days of slavery again; and a fig to any reasonable attempt to use context and language skills.
Dunno about name jokes, but often enough Jon Stewart mocks Obama, and Ive never heard him being accused of being a Republican.
Clearly he was wrong, and a troll, therefore he represents Republicans-- is that how it works?
Very clever jab, well done.
Incidentally, I wouldnt be ignorant if it were easy to just run/test OSX Lion in a virtual machine. But when I check the apple site, they seem to indicate that in order to run OSX Lion server, I need to own OSX Lion, which means I need to purchase hardware before even evaluating the software. What about that seems IT friendly? We need to request funding for something before even having a chance to evaluate it?
And I dont remember the full details for Leopard (as I cannot seem to find it on their site anymore), but I remember similar hoops when I attempted to get an evaluation version several years back.
Oh, you can do that from a windows server?
Oh I see, you want businesses to roll out a brand NEW server infrastructure to cater to a couple of users who think "work" means" i need have a Mac because I like the aesthetics".
I dont really care about any of that. If Apple wants their equipment blessed by IT, they need to have the following:
A) some way of dynamically mapping network shares; at logon would be nice.
B) some way of controlling updates from the server
C) some way of issuing security and password policies, from the server
D) Centralized LDAP integration
E) some method of pusing software from the server would be nice
Basically, without a method to configure the Mac from where I sit at my remote terminal, Macs remain a phenomenal pain to administer. Want to integrate into the business world? Start by not being the special-needs squeaky wheel on the network.
Presumably youre not booting up Secure Portable Linux with Firefox+CAC support and Encryption wizard so that you can check out Huffington Post.
Er, not wanting higher taxes doesnt make you a sociopath. For various reasons, _I_ dont much want the government taking even more of my money; that hardly makes me a sociopath.
Its a company, what do you expect them to do? Ask for higher taxes? Ask for more job regulations?
Lets see, he ended the war-- mission accomplished! Except then it wasnt, and we still have troops overseas. Whoops.
But then, he closed gitmo! Except, he didnt.
No more bills with earmarks! Oh wait, he didnt follow thru on that either.
Unemployment wont go up! Except then it did.
Well, Osama was captured under his watch, so i suppose we can give him credit for that, sort of, in a "hes commander in chief" sort of way.
I know something he did! He started a new war, without congressional approval, after bold criticisms of Bush for that very thing (even though Bush HAD approval). Thats something, I guess.
stave off another Great Depression.
A) A lot of the measures touted as "staving off the great depression" were agreed upon before Obama was elected
B) we dont know that it would have been a great depression
C) The unemployment rate has gotten worse since he got into office
But he sure does like to rail against the fat cats, and thats what counts.