The "secure" argument may work with home users - who don't upgrade anyway, outside of buying a new box. However in a corporate setting all Win machines are behind layers of firewalls and proxies, running antiviruses, so that problem had been solved already. Vista gives nothing to the corporate user, and takes some things away, and requires massive upgrades. So there is absolutely zero advantage in upgrading, until the ISVs start dropping XP apps (not any time soon yet.)
But outside of that I guess you are right. I don't cook, so I can't say much about your recipe theory. I would only add news to the list, but that's hardly necessary, and all that matters will eventually propagate through traditional means anyway.
Ok, the student has now his new and shiny computer that can calculate tanh(0!/2). How much useful this will be if student doesn't understand what this notation means? And how much of a computer does your teacher need to teach math? Aside from the most basic arithmetic, all math is symbolic, and you don't need any computer to calculate integrals. An engineer does benefit from a differential equation solver in his pocket, but a student does not need to know the numeric answer; his task usually is to come up with an analytical solution that demonstrates his understanding of issues. Most math doesn't have a single, precise answer, and can't even be visualized (try to visualize an inverse matrix, NxM, for example.) And when a few, very few, students progress to the point they are ready to try some practical math, they will have access to a computer. Most students, though, will fall by the wayside - not everyone wants to be a programmer.
Computers in magnet type schools do not require personal attention of the government, in any country. A mayor would be the right person to set up a few of such schools for children who can (and want to) take the course. And about cancelation - this is the right time, and the only possible time, to do it. Children don't need computers if their teachers haven't been trained to use them, as the minister points out. You can always spend money on computers, this is not a one time offer; in the mean time, he thinks it's more practical to use the limited funds on hiring more teachers and paying them more.
"People in general" do not matter. You need to convince the Congress. For that, you need to explain to each and every congressman|senator why they will have more votes under this system. The trouble is that they may easily get less votes this way, and lose, because they are set up to game the current system and not some other.
My main argument is this: there are acceptable error rates with non-electronic voting, why the hell are we so adamant that because they are "computer" based they should magically be 100% accurate and reliable?
Because a computer is a deterministic machine, where for any given input you will get certain output, and only that output, and nothing else (or your computer is broken.) Quantum computers are not like that, but we don't yet have them either.
There is absolutely no reason to NOT expect a 100% correct accounting of all votes cast. The "power loss" scenario doesn't hold water. The voting machine can write the vote into the Flash (and/or print it on a tape), read it back from the Flash, compare, and if all is well then it tells the voter that he is done and can go. If not, summon maintenance. How often banks miscount your money? How often your Visa card incorrectly charges you? How often your paycheck is wrong? Almost never, barring software errors. But a voting machine is so simple, it can be mathematically proven that the algorithm is correct (and it can be also easily tested.)
Also, do you have different levels of tax for products of different "luxury" and different wages?
No, USA has no differentiation. Rich and poor pay the same sales tax on everything they buy. A few categories, primarily food, are exempt: link.
some of the discussing about politics could be more civilized. In/. for instance I have seen several instances of people calling people "leftish" or communist.
USA has a history of using the word communism as a curse, and most people don't want to stop and think how stupid this position is. People are raised here to believe in The System (no, you are not overusing the word) and anything that doesn't conform is seen as deviant, to be corrected by force, preferrably through bombing by remote control.
Most rich people think it's cheaper to buy a new Dell every 6 months than call the idiots at "geek squad" to tinker for a few hours and then charge $300+ for cleaning the PC when you can get a new one for $250.00-$280.00.
Those rich people are rich for a reason - they are smart. It is indeed cheaper to buy a new box than to fix the old one. Even smarter would be to sell the old box, but on this scale it is irrelevant. Rich people value their time - say, $100/hr (just as the geek squad) - so a $300 expense on a new computer is peanuts, and you get a new, faster and better, computer out of this.
So why doesn't anyone make a party dedicated to change the system?
Too few people realize such a need, and they don't have money and connections needed for this monumental job. But if they are finally successful, their candidate will wake up one day in a cheap hotel room with a dead girl sharing his bed, while the police is breaking the door down, and photographers following on their heels.
If the intent is to disclose code only then there are many other BETTER methods.
As I understand, the intent was not to disclose the code but to make it known that a copy of the code is out there. A person with government ties and sufficient understanding of what the disks contain was a perfect choice because the scheme worked and we all know what happened. The sender of the software also had to keep in mind that the recipient of the disks must be not personally interested in the outcome, since it's very easy to "discard the disks as worthless", or claim so. Appears that the sender wanted the story to get published.
With respect to your comment about "leaking it to an official who is critical of the machines" - such a person would not get any attention because he cries wolf every day. Such person's claims would be summarily dismissed. The trick indeed was to select a person who has no bias but has respect.
I have a laptop here which had a failure of the +5V power supply. The input was +16V (one of IBM Thinkpads), and when applied to a 5V-rated circuits it fried/everything/ in the notebook. I tested the drive - it's dead like a doornail.
There are several ways to encrypt the data on the HDD, and everything depends on how it is done. If you used a 3rd party s/w with a key that is generated from your passphrase then you are good. Just use the same s/w on the replacement computer, and it ought to recognize the drive.
Unfortunately, MS encrypted folders use a key that is uniquely generated for your account, and once you lose the account (on the dead computer) you can't decrypt anything. There are ways to add corporate keys to the system, so that in a company setting it's possible to recover the data; however this is/way/ beyond abilities of a typical user.
Finally, if the TCA is used then the TCA engine and the HDD controller can negotiate crypto keys, and the HDD can encrypt and decrypt data as it writes or reads the platters. This method is very secure because it ties several identities together (the TCA core, the internal HDD key data, the user's password, the account's GUID etc.) and I don't think it's worth trying to break. The good news is that I don't know of any computers today that can do this; maybe Vista will offer this.
If they forget a password and lose data, terminate their employment.
You are not a manager, clearly. Termination of someone's employment will cost your company a lot of money, time and lost opportunity (unless you wanted to get rid of that employee anyway; then you have your excuse.) People are trained to do their jobs, and they are not as replaceable as an elevator operator might be. Some people train for years to do certain things, and they become really good in their area of expertise. They may be highly paid (and valued) engineers, leading designs and themselves managing projects. If such a person forgets the password what do you do, fire him and cancel the already announced release of a new product, which the customers already paid for and the delivery is due in weeks, and penalties for failure to deliver would be immense? If you fire the guy, you will be kicked out of your job so hard you will overtake him on your trajectory to the door.
What a real manager does is this. He tries to understand how this happened, and then does his best to prevent this from happening again. This may require a private chat with the person, or an official department-wide training. The data... the data is lost already, and it's foolish to make it worse by firing the guy who is best to recreate it. Your job, as a manager, is to get the job done. Firing people in a fit of rage is not the way to do it.
I know about pre-Warp OS/2 but I never actually saw any. Besides, who cares when Win16 was added to the OS/2?
I think the Warp I used was Warp 4, but it was about 10 years ago and I don't remember the details. I only remember that it was not easy to use as a desktop OS, and there was hardly any software (outside of what I was developing). I got it (personally bought a copy for my work) around 1996, and it most definitely had TCP/IP (which 1994 release did not have.)
IBM's OS/2 had that. That was one thing that led to its demise.
Not really. I used OS/2 [Warp] around that time. It was a solid OS, compared to that day's Windows. But it had no appeal to the regular user; fonts were fat and ugly, GUI operations were somewhat unusual, and IIRC only 16-bit Windows apps were supported (Win95 was released a couple of years before that.) You practically had to learn some very alien scripting languages and C/C++ programming APIs to get anywhere with OS/2.
If anything, I would say that lack of good support of Windows apps was one of killer reasons. Lack of interest from IBM was another. Otherwise people would be installing OS/2 instead of Windows 95 and not even noticing the difference.
It would be indeed impractical, and that makes this method quite useless in most applications. The researchers asked themselves "what if that single pixel receptor is good and expensive" while most modern answers are quite opposite to that - it's easier to make plenty of medium quality sensors than one good sensor. Not even counting the micro-mechanics needed. Solid state already gives you several megapixels for a few dollars, and the cost is only going down.
Sure, you may know what data may serve as a container for the bot's orders. But how will you order/. and any number of other blogs to block comments that match a complex and daily changing algorithm? For example:
On every Monday the comment must contain the words "literally" and "exact", and the checksum from start to finish should be 0xF4. If that is true, then the checksums of the first four words of the second sentence indicate the IP to access for further instructions.
Even if you know all this, how practical would it be to block such comments on many blogs simultaneously, and keep updating the filtering rules every day or every hour? There are just too many blogs, and bots may access them all, in random order and so quickly that your "whack-a-mole" process would be inadequate. It would take weeks for any reasonable blog to insert a filtering code; NNTP (Google Groups) or Yahoo Groups or any other large system would be totally incapable of such filtering, considering that none of the groups providers benefit from this work.
You think so? Imagine a bot that loads/. and looks for a comment from anyone that has a specific checksum. Once found, the owner's journal is accessed and the instructions are loaded. For example. How do you close/. ?
How can the people "stop flying through their airport" if that's the only way to their destination? If your employer wants you to attend a business meeting, can you say "no" ? can you say "yes, but I need a month to drive there and back, and $10,000 for fuel and other expenses" ?
Fact is, air travel is essential to US businesses because of distances between locations. Travel by train or car will take forever, and you can't afford that. A tiniest private airplane will cost you a million dollars, and it is slow (3-4 times as slow as a commercial airliner) and it is very noisy, and you need a pilot unless you can qualify yourself (likely you can't, the requirements are difficult to meet and the skills are very different from what you normally do for a living.)
Slashdot Mirror
The "secure" argument may work with home users - who don't upgrade anyway, outside of buying a new box. However in a corporate setting all Win machines are behind layers of firewalls and proxies, running antiviruses, so that problem had been solved already. Vista gives nothing to the corporate user, and takes some things away, and requires massive upgrades. So there is absolutely zero advantage in upgrading, until the ISVs start dropping XP apps (not any time soon yet.)
There are a few more:
But outside of that I guess you are right. I don't cook, so I can't say much about your recipe theory. I would only add news to the list, but that's hardly necessary, and all that matters will eventually propagate through traditional means anyway.
Ok, the student has now his new and shiny computer that can calculate tanh(0!/2). How much useful this will be if student doesn't understand what this notation means? And how much of a computer does your teacher need to teach math? Aside from the most basic arithmetic, all math is symbolic, and you don't need any computer to calculate integrals. An engineer does benefit from a differential equation solver in his pocket, but a student does not need to know the numeric answer; his task usually is to come up with an analytical solution that demonstrates his understanding of issues. Most math doesn't have a single, precise answer, and can't even be visualized (try to visualize an inverse matrix, NxM, for example.) And when a few, very few, students progress to the point they are ready to try some practical math, they will have access to a computer. Most students, though, will fall by the wayside - not everyone wants to be a programmer.
A poll about educational matters failed because the citizens couldn't read :-)
Computers in magnet type schools do not require personal attention of the government, in any country. A mayor would be the right person to set up a few of such schools for children who can (and want to) take the course. And about cancelation - this is the right time, and the only possible time, to do it. Children don't need computers if their teachers haven't been trained to use them, as the minister points out. You can always spend money on computers, this is not a one time offer; in the mean time, he thinks it's more practical to use the limited funds on hiring more teachers and paying them more.
"People in general" do not matter. You need to convince the Congress. For that, you need to explain to each and every congressman|senator why they will have more votes under this system. The trouble is that they may easily get less votes this way, and lose, because they are set up to game the current system and not some other.
Because a computer is a deterministic machine, where for any given input you will get certain output, and only that output, and nothing else (or your computer is broken.) Quantum computers are not like that, but we don't yet have them either.
There is absolutely no reason to NOT expect a 100% correct accounting of all votes cast. The "power loss" scenario doesn't hold water. The voting machine can write the vote into the Flash (and/or print it on a tape), read it back from the Flash, compare, and if all is well then it tells the voter that he is done and can go. If not, summon maintenance. How often banks miscount your money? How often your Visa card incorrectly charges you? How often your paycheck is wrong? Almost never, barring software errors. But a voting machine is so simple, it can be mathematically proven that the algorithm is correct (and it can be also easily tested.)
No, USA has no differentiation. Rich and poor pay the same sales tax on everything they buy. A few categories, primarily food, are exempt: link.
some of the discussing about politics could be more civilized. In /. for instance I have seen several instances of people calling people "leftish" or communist.
USA has a history of using the word communism as a curse, and most people don't want to stop and think how stupid this position is. People are raised here to believe in The System (no, you are not overusing the word) and anything that doesn't conform is seen as deviant, to be corrected by force, preferrably through bombing by remote control.
Those rich people are rich for a reason - they are smart. It is indeed cheaper to buy a new box than to fix the old one. Even smarter would be to sell the old box, but on this scale it is irrelevant. Rich people value their time - say, $100/hr (just as the geek squad) - so a $300 expense on a new computer is peanuts, and you get a new, faster and better, computer out of this.
Too few people realize such a need, and they don't have money and connections needed for this monumental job. But if they are finally successful, their candidate will wake up one day in a cheap hotel room with a dead girl sharing his bed, while the police is breaking the door down, and photographers following on their heels.
In the current situation even an expert would be in doubt.
You are too late with this plan.
Because of the same reason why a stone that is rolling down from a mountain doesn't stop mid-way to enjoy the scenery.
As I understand, the intent was not to disclose the code but to make it known that a copy of the code is out there. A person with government ties and sufficient understanding of what the disks contain was a perfect choice because the scheme worked and we all know what happened. The sender of the software also had to keep in mind that the recipient of the disks must be not personally interested in the outcome, since it's very easy to "discard the disks as worthless", or claim so. Appears that the sender wanted the story to get published.
With respect to your comment about "leaking it to an official who is critical of the machines" - such a person would not get any attention because he cries wolf every day. Such person's claims would be summarily dismissed. The trick indeed was to select a person who has no bias but has respect.
There are several ways to encrypt the data on the HDD, and everything depends on how it is done. If you used a 3rd party s/w with a key that is generated from your passphrase then you are good. Just use the same s/w on the replacement computer, and it ought to recognize the drive.
Unfortunately, MS encrypted folders use a key that is uniquely generated for your account, and once you lose the account (on the dead computer) you can't decrypt anything. There are ways to add corporate keys to the system, so that in a company setting it's possible to recover the data; however this is /way/ beyond abilities of a typical user.
Finally, if the TCA is used then the TCA engine and the HDD controller can negotiate crypto keys, and the HDD can encrypt and decrypt data as it writes or reads the platters. This method is very secure because it ties several identities together (the TCA core, the internal HDD key data, the user's password, the account's GUID etc.) and I don't think it's worth trying to break. The good news is that I don't know of any computers today that can do this; maybe Vista will offer this.
You are not a manager, clearly. Termination of someone's employment will cost your company a lot of money, time and lost opportunity (unless you wanted to get rid of that employee anyway; then you have your excuse.) People are trained to do their jobs, and they are not as replaceable as an elevator operator might be. Some people train for years to do certain things, and they become really good in their area of expertise. They may be highly paid (and valued) engineers, leading designs and themselves managing projects. If such a person forgets the password what do you do, fire him and cancel the already announced release of a new product, which the customers already paid for and the delivery is due in weeks, and penalties for failure to deliver would be immense? If you fire the guy, you will be kicked out of your job so hard you will overtake him on your trajectory to the door.
What a real manager does is this. He tries to understand how this happened, and then does his best to prevent this from happening again. This may require a private chat with the person, or an official department-wide training. The data... the data is lost already, and it's foolish to make it worse by firing the guy who is best to recreate it. Your job, as a manager, is to get the job done. Firing people in a fit of rage is not the way to do it.
It depends on what has died in your laptop, and how.
I think the Warp I used was Warp 4, but it was about 10 years ago and I don't remember the details. I only remember that it was not easy to use as a desktop OS, and there was hardly any software (outside of what I was developing). I got it (personally bought a copy for my work) around 1996, and it most definitely had TCP/IP (which 1994 release did not have.)
Not really. I used OS/2 [Warp] around that time. It was a solid OS, compared to that day's Windows. But it had no appeal to the regular user; fonts were fat and ugly, GUI operations were somewhat unusual, and IIRC only 16-bit Windows apps were supported (Win95 was released a couple of years before that.) You practically had to learn some very alien scripting languages and C/C++ programming APIs to get anywhere with OS/2.
If anything, I would say that lack of good support of Windows apps was one of killer reasons. Lack of interest from IBM was another. Otherwise people would be installing OS/2 instead of Windows 95 and not even noticing the difference.
It would be indeed impractical, and that makes this method quite useless in most applications. The researchers asked themselves "what if that single pixel receptor is good and expensive" while most modern answers are quite opposite to that - it's easier to make plenty of medium quality sensors than one good sensor. Not even counting the micro-mechanics needed. Solid state already gives you several megapixels for a few dollars, and the cost is only going down.
On every Monday the comment must contain the words "literally" and "exact", and the checksum from start to finish should be 0xF4. If that is true, then the checksums of the first four words of the second sentence indicate the IP to access for further instructions.
Even if you know all this, how practical would it be to block such comments on many blogs simultaneously, and keep updating the filtering rules every day or every hour? There are just too many blogs, and bots may access them all, in random order and so quickly that your "whack-a-mole" process would be inadequate. It would take weeks for any reasonable blog to insert a filtering code; NNTP (Google Groups) or Yahoo Groups or any other large system would be totally incapable of such filtering, considering that none of the groups providers benefit from this work.
You think so? Imagine a bot that loads /. and looks for a comment from anyone that has a specific checksum. Once found, the owner's journal is accessed and the instructions are loaded. For example. How do you close /. ?
Storing a video is not the same as playing it :-)
Fact is, air travel is essential to US businesses because of distances between locations. Travel by train or car will take forever, and you can't afford that. A tiniest private airplane will cost you a million dollars, and it is slow (3-4 times as slow as a commercial airliner) and it is very noisy, and you need a pilot unless you can qualify yourself (likely you can't, the requirements are difficult to meet and the skills are very different from what you normally do for a living.)