able to quickly hire and fire anyone they like without the cumbersome and frustrating effort of dealing with health, dental and life insurance as well as 401k and training/certification benefits. Thats right, the art of oursourcing is also a clever means of engineering around your inherent value as a human being.
I'm all for it. I don't need company-provided "health, dental and life" insurances; I reject them whenever I work as an employee; I can take care of my own needs myself, thank you very much.
Much the same as "benefits" are a delightful means of ensuring corporations never pay their employees what theyre really worth.
Every human, employee or a contractor, is always paid what he is worth in the given time and place, by definition. His compensation defines the worth. There is no other, divine measure of worth. If you are a genius, stop digging trenches and start working on a pocket teleportation device or on an LNR car. If you can't, you are in your rightful place already.
why the fuck do we have to always shoot around in 3d games?
We don't have to, as Portal demonstrated. There are plenty of sports games, puzzles, etc. (which I only see on shelves but don't buy.)
its now possible to see the world from a medieval peasant's perspective, or a prehistoric caveman's perspective. with 3d, total immersion can be provided.
The life of a medieval peasant is incredibly dull. Do you want a game where you work the field for 12 hours per day and drink ale for two more hours, every day, every year, until you die? Assassin's job, on the other hand, can be quite active, regardless of the century (Assassin's Creed, Thief, Hitman, etc.)
imagine - when patrician 1 (amiga, pc) came out
Never heard of it. Perhaps there is a reason? Regardless, plenty of modern games (if not all) provide an excellent immersion.
i guess it is much easier to create 3d environments, then fill it with scripted bots and have the player shoot at them. shitty, lazy game development.
Yes, it is easier. But the "open world" approach also makes you free. The difference is well visible if you compare the original Postal 2 and the Apocalypse Weekend. In the latter you are locked into a scenario and you can't do anything out of ordinary.
Freedom to roam is important for humans - they learn the environment this way. Other games, those that shoehorn you into a specific path, like Halo, make sure that you don't even look at the environment around you - it's pointless because you aren't going to make any decisions anyway. If that cave is full of Elites you must clear them out before proceeding. Climbing a wall or jumping or using a rope that you carried in your backpack for three levels... forget about it.
it will most likely get stale soon. It will probably end up being a hide-and-sneak game where you have to get to a certain spot so you can take a good picture
There are recon missions in Far Cry 2 that are exactly like that. You get somewhere, covertly approach the camp, take a single photo, and the mission is done. A child could do it.
On the other hand, infiltrating such a camp (in order to free a future companion) is a far more complex affair, and you often have several strategies to accomplish that.
Thief is a true FPS because you can shoot broadhead arrows at your enemy. The sneaking part is just a strategy - and even then nothing stops you from barging in through the main entrance of the castle. Not that you will easily win this way, but you can do it.
The main difference between Quake and Portal (as an example) is the amount of violence you are willing to unleash. In Portal only your beloved companion cube may be somewhat offended. In Quake you vaporize your enemies; in Thief you stab them.
The plastic card is vulnerable to the first crooked cashier you encounter.
Not if you scan the card yourself or watch it done. Only at a restaurant the waiter is likely to walk away with the card; but nothing stops you from following her with the card in hand.
A smart card might be better
Yes; US banks don't use them, though, for one simple reason: losses from card fraud are smaller than the cost of smart cards.
The problem with "personal wallets" is that once you are in full control of your cash in that wallet the bank will not refund a fraudulent transaction. That may expose you to theft or torture. Today all that is covered. A c/c today is actually safer than cash.
The most obvious danger to mag strip cards comes from card skimmers. A smart card may be able to defeat those, but I'm not sure - considering that the skimmer may be installed deep inside the circuit. External skimmers would of course be useless.
A plastic card weighs about 2 grams. It doesn't depend on power or on the wireless network; it is far more reliable than the phone; it can't be remotely hacked into. You may want the phone payment as a novelty, but in practical terms this is a solution without a problem.
It may even be that most people need as difficult a payment system as it can be - so that they start thinking about what they are paying for. Easy payments often lead to big debts. All these "wallets" simply facilitate impulse buying; the faster they do it, the less time the customer has to think about the purchase. Parting with silver coins has a certain psychological effect - here you hold them in your hand, and here you give them away. This effect is not present when you pay with plastic or those digital wallets.
Not sensoring, removing copyrighted content probably.
All content, on YouTube or elsewhere, is copyrighted (unless made by the US government or by a robot.) Copyright, AFAIK, is assigned automatically. If YouTube starts removing everything that is copyrighted they'd have nothing.
I understand that they can remove content that infringes other people's copyrights but by all indications these clips were taken by spectators who then own the copyright and are free to do whatever they please with it.
While I'm not saying interface design can't have an effect, none of the interfaces Office has used have been so horrible as to make you "not as productive".
If you ever spent even one second looking for an item that you knew where it is in Office 2003 then you lost productivity, as long as you haven't gained elsewhere.
My experience shows that ribbons don't make you more productive to compensate for training time. The purpose of ribbons is just to reduce the interface to the level of pictographs of the type that you find on doors of restrooms. Once you do that, the IQ required to work MS Office is, in theory, the same as one required to use a bathroom.
If something that minor was all it took to make you "not as productive" you should start thinking about how you're going to live on the measly amount that unemployment insurance pays
That's one good way to fire Albert Einstein; after all, he was less computer-literate than a modern secretary.
Unless they use more cars, or find a better way to update this stuff, I can see it getting very jumbled and inaccurate.
The snail mail databases that are sold and resold and sold again are so old that they are useless. I'm still receiving junk mail addressed to someone who doesn't live here for 10 years. Executives that sell and buy those lists don't care how bad they are since there is no feedback. A list with 10 million addresses is better than a list with 5 million addresses, even though 90% of entries in the larger list are incorrect. Often generations of tenants are layered one on top of another in those lists. A simple SQL query would find that it's physically impossible for five families to live at a given address - just as it is tough for one family to live at five different addresses at the same time. Those lists are purely additive; nothing is ever deleted. Lots of money is wasted on delivering "special offers" to those addresses.
Google also benefits from this confusion. They can claim that they mapped 10 million routers and they know where every one is, to a millimeter. In reality 10% of those routers moved to some other location within a year (how long does a typical apartment dweller stay at one place?) But since there is no way, aside from anecdotes on/., to call their bluff, Google presents this claim as truth in order to appear larger and more powerful that it already is.
Lets say you search for "sony". Their main website is sony.co.jp... which is completely useless to anyone who doesn't speak japanese.
That's not their "main" web site. It's their Japanese web site. It ends in.jp, of all things!
Their global web site is www.sony.net, and the USA web site is - completely unsurprisingly - www.sony.com.
Why do you need Google to help you in such a simple matter? Would you completely fail to find Sony on the Internet without Google nudging your mouse with its noodly appendage? Your geek card is about to be canceled!
By the way, even the Japanese web site has a link to the global one; the link is in English. Plenty of other Web sites (of international megacorps) ask you to select your country as soon as you access the site. Google should keep its paws away.
With the $10 price tag for the retail version the biggest fear those developers have is not piracy - it's obscurity.
Besides, I believe you are overestimating the percentage of p1rates vs. legitimate users. As teenagers grow up and start earning money they begin valuing their time more than dollars (or euros or roubles, whatever.)
Personally, I got myself a PS3 a long time ago, and so far I'm happy as a clam. My PCs are no longer bothered by endless video card upgrades, bug fixes and multi-gigabyte installs of stuff. I work on PCs and play on PS3, and that's how I like it. No licensing issues anymore too - it's all transparent to me; just insert the BlueRay disk and you are good to go. Multi-core CPU in PS3 is also not hurting. The video is excellent, smooth and doesn't require me to go out from time to time and buy yet another video card and then have fun time with its drivers. The cost of the console is lost in the noise long time ago; but the advantage of having it remains. I even have the mouse-based controller for it, though I don't use it very often - just no need.
I have heard stories of ham radio guys with cutting edge 1296 preamps and high gain mobile antennas blowing their preamps by driving down the street next to the airport full of hundred watt peak class 1090 MHz active transponders.
The 10 GHz LNA that I bought recently from DB6NT can't take more than 1 mW at its input. They specifically stress this point; a bad relay can blow the FET.
A common ham dish antenna for 10 GHz can have gain of about 30 dB. If two such dishes are pointed at each other and one transmits only 200 mW, the minimum safe distance between those dishes is:
Since we want to lose 23 dB (200 mW to 1 mW) the 'd' will be only 33.7 meters. Any closer and the amp burns up. This is actually well known in practice when hams show up with their microwave rigs and try them out in a parking lot. They are very careful to not point dishes to anything they don't want to cook:-) Many 10 GHz rigs run more than 200 mW; 3W is typical, but some do up to 10W (it just costs more.)
Radar operators also know to not point their radars at nearly objects. Some radars on civilian airplanes can't be ran on the ground - both due to radiation danger and due to the overload of the front end (burnination is optional but likely.)
we've really got maybe 50 years to make the transition to largely renewable sources
In the beginning of 20th century large cities had a huge problem of removal of horse-generated waste from streets. It was considered to be nearly a disaster, since cities grew fast. Needless to say, the problem disappeared on its own.
You are worrying too much about what will happen in 200 years from now. We may be able to tap into dark energy within 50 years, for example. Also don't forget that fusion power is only 20 years away (as always.)
The lesson here is that attempting things before you are ready is not productive. You could build an airplane in 1700's but without an engine it would be very useless. Designs of space rockets were proposed around 1900, decades before technology advanced enough to make them happen. You could invest all your money (and all world's money) into a powder-filled rocket and you'd still not reach the Moon in 1900.
My competence and essential position as the only guy with any product knowledge meant they weren't about to fire me.
Many managers were in that position, including me (though I'm not a manager, really, just someone with some influence in decision-making.)
The problem is that you can't allow this guy to do just anything. He might be super-valuable, but there is always a threshold where you have to fire him. If talking too much wasn't enough to fire you, try some orgies, with drugs and hookers, at the office (at night first, then during business hours.) Anyone would be fired for that.
In essence, any developer is one bus away from being unable to code. This is not a high threshold - people get sick, change jobs, relocate for family reasons... the usual stuff. If the PHB doesn't have a backup - guess what, now is a good time to look for one. In practical terms your project will be thrown over the cubicle wall onto someone else's desk. That guy will swim or sink, but you won't be there to observe the results.
Slashdot readers then proceed to ask, "what's the intrinsic value of chicks?"
Any educated/. reader would immediately tell you that chicks quickly grow into chickens. Then they lay eggs, or you can eat the birds. They are quite useful.
If CAs sign new certificates without checking much, do you think they'd be checking anything at all to add a signature to an existing certificate?
The whole problem stems from the fact that CA companies are full of people who cut corners. People always made mistakes, and they will be making more mistakes until a computer replaces them. You can't fix that by adding more bad CAs into the mix - out of several signers it will be always "the other one" responsible. At least with one CA they have an incentive to remain honest (the future of DigiNotar is probably not very exciting.)
This tells us nothing about relative security of the fax or the email. The same guy would cheerfully send loan documents (a complete identity theft kit) to foobar@hotmail.com and not blink an eye.
The fax gives him the connection information, but if he isn't willing to look at it... not much can be done. A human is in charge, not a robot.
regulators and courts turn a blind eye to the vulnerabilities of the phone system in general
1) The vulnerabilities of the phone system are few and far between. If you dial the right number you will be connected. If you made a mistake you most likely will not get a fax on the other end. If you get a wrong fax it will send you a different CSID and then you know that something is not right.
2) Internet-based replacements are hard to set up basically because there is no equivalent replacement. Consider what you need here:
A simple dialing interface. Numbers are preferred to complex and unwieldly email addresses.
A reasonably secure communication channel. Phone networks are sufficiently secure because they are not connected to the Internet. Local intrusions are possible, but all the script kiddies are kept away.
An instant connection status. Once you enter the number (whatever that is) you need to know that the connection is successful.
A positive confirmation of the identity of the other end. Faxes have CSID. While it is not a strong crypto, if you dial 1-123-456-7890 and you see the same response on the LCD then it's good enough for government work. An Internet-based fax replacement could do the same and it would be also good enough, but there isn't such a thing in nature.
Simple and integrated scanning mechanism.
Immediate confirmation of reception.
If you want you can go ahead and invent an Internet Fax that would do such a thing. Email isn't it, though. You send an email and you never know if it gets anywhere, or who intercepts it. Email is equivalent to sending a postcard with a passing caravan, hoping that eventually it will be routed to the destination. Fax is equivalent to sending a courier, point to point, no routing needed.
Even when the other person insists they must send the document as a fax, don't be surprised if it takes 4 or 5 rounds
If the fax machine is THAT unobvious, be sure that there will be a huge sticky note with words "Put it in this way" where it can't be ignored. But most people learn the delicate art of the forest^W faxing pretty quickly. Those who can't figure it out have a secretary to do it for them.
With regard to contrast, as long as you don't fiddle with the defaults you will get a reasonable image out of a reasonable original. Approximately 100% of faxed documents are 2-level monochrome images printed with a very dark ink on a very white paper, so it's not a rocket science to tell the black and the white apart.
But when you figure that a significant number of people are using e-mail to fax services, its false security. They might as well address their issues directly and secure their e-mail process.
People who can't afford a $100 fax machine (and a $25/mo phone line for it) don't need the security; what they need is convenience. People who want relative security own a fax machine.
With regard to ease of hacking, fax doesn't protect against industrial espionage. Nothing does (ask Bradley Manning, even though he was with the Army.) What fax protects against is remote hackers. For each spy with clip leads there is a million of script kiddies out there. They can compromise not only your Web server - they can break into the mail server of your ISP or someone else's ISP and intercept all the email. A script kiddie can't break into a fax line remotely. Some companies get a trunk line and use PBX; then it may be theoretically easier... if the PBX is connected to the Internet, which it doesn't need to be. The last company I worked for used Cisco VoIP phones; they were on a separate network, physically. I couldn't ping them from the LAN, and that's how IT liked it.
Saying self-signed certs are somehow better than certs signed by a compromised CA is rather silly.
Is it?
Self-signed certificate: you have no idea who created it, and you tread lightly.
CA-signed certificate: you are absolutely sure that you know who owns the Web site, and you gladly open the kimono.
As you can see, a fake CA-signed certificate is far more dangerous than a no-name certificate.
However it must be said that WoT is not a perfect solution either. It will be a more expensive solution, that's for sure. Instead of one signature of a trusted party you need tens of signatures of less trusted parties - and a fake trust can creep somewhere between those signatures. Most of signers will not be known, personally or otherwise, to a common Web user, so trust in entities is not going anywhere. The only difference is that several poorly trusted entities are required to validate a key instead of one poorly trusted entity.
Is there anyone here that works for a large business customer of HP and used there software?
I worked for one. They bought a bunch of HP notebooks, and they came with HP ProtectTools. It was worse than worthless - it was a typical case of bland corporateware. It also didn't work. You probably don't expect your fingerprint reader to cause BSOD instead of logging you in; but that's how the software worked. In the end the local IT outlawed installation of this software.
The kinetic energy of 100 [short] tons moving at 80 mph would be 58 MJ. The energy of 4 MW during 30 seconds will be 90 MJ. So the numbers appear to be correct, plus or minus my guesses on the weight and speed and everything else.
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able to quickly hire and fire anyone they like without the cumbersome and frustrating effort of dealing with health, dental and life insurance as well as 401k and training/certification benefits. Thats right, the art of oursourcing is also a clever means of engineering around your inherent value as a human being.
I'm all for it. I don't need company-provided "health, dental and life" insurances; I reject them whenever I work as an employee; I can take care of my own needs myself, thank you very much.
Much the same as "benefits" are a delightful means of ensuring corporations never pay their employees what theyre really worth.
Every human, employee or a contractor, is always paid what he is worth in the given time and place, by definition. His compensation defines the worth. There is no other, divine measure of worth. If you are a genius, stop digging trenches and start working on a pocket teleportation device or on an LNR car. If you can't, you are in your rightful place already.
why the fuck do we have to always shoot around in 3d games?
We don't have to, as Portal demonstrated. There are plenty of sports games, puzzles, etc. (which I only see on shelves but don't buy.)
its now possible to see the world from a medieval peasant's perspective, or a prehistoric caveman's perspective. with 3d, total immersion can be provided.
The life of a medieval peasant is incredibly dull. Do you want a game where you work the field for 12 hours per day and drink ale for two more hours, every day, every year, until you die? Assassin's job, on the other hand, can be quite active, regardless of the century (Assassin's Creed, Thief, Hitman, etc.)
imagine - when patrician 1 (amiga, pc) came out
Never heard of it. Perhaps there is a reason? Regardless, plenty of modern games (if not all) provide an excellent immersion.
i guess it is much easier to create 3d environments, then fill it with scripted bots and have the player shoot at them. shitty, lazy game development.
Yes, it is easier. But the "open world" approach also makes you free. The difference is well visible if you compare the original Postal 2 and the Apocalypse Weekend. In the latter you are locked into a scenario and you can't do anything out of ordinary.
Freedom to roam is important for humans - they learn the environment this way. Other games, those that shoehorn you into a specific path, like Halo, make sure that you don't even look at the environment around you - it's pointless because you aren't going to make any decisions anyway. If that cave is full of Elites you must clear them out before proceeding. Climbing a wall or jumping or using a rope that you carried in your backpack for three levels... forget about it.
it will most likely get stale soon. It will probably end up being a hide-and-sneak game where you have to get to a certain spot so you can take a good picture
There are recon missions in Far Cry 2 that are exactly like that. You get somewhere, covertly approach the camp, take a single photo, and the mission is done. A child could do it.
On the other hand, infiltrating such a camp (in order to free a future companion) is a far more complex affair, and you often have several strategies to accomplish that.
Thief is a true FPS because you can shoot broadhead arrows at your enemy. The sneaking part is just a strategy - and even then nothing stops you from barging in through the main entrance of the castle. Not that you will easily win this way, but you can do it.
The main difference between Quake and Portal (as an example) is the amount of violence you are willing to unleash. In Portal only your beloved companion cube may be somewhat offended. In Quake you vaporize your enemies; in Thief you stab them.
The plastic card is vulnerable to the first crooked cashier you encounter.
Not if you scan the card yourself or watch it done. Only at a restaurant the waiter is likely to walk away with the card; but nothing stops you from following her with the card in hand.
A smart card might be better
Yes; US banks don't use them, though, for one simple reason: losses from card fraud are smaller than the cost of smart cards.
The problem with "personal wallets" is that once you are in full control of your cash in that wallet the bank will not refund a fraudulent transaction. That may expose you to theft or torture. Today all that is covered. A c/c today is actually safer than cash.
The most obvious danger to mag strip cards comes from card skimmers. A smart card may be able to defeat those, but I'm not sure - considering that the skimmer may be installed deep inside the circuit. External skimmers would of course be useless.
A plastic card weighs about 2 grams. It doesn't depend on power or on the wireless network; it is far more reliable than the phone; it can't be remotely hacked into. You may want the phone payment as a novelty, but in practical terms this is a solution without a problem.
It may even be that most people need as difficult a payment system as it can be - so that they start thinking about what they are paying for. Easy payments often lead to big debts. All these "wallets" simply facilitate impulse buying; the faster they do it, the less time the customer has to think about the purchase. Parting with silver coins has a certain psychological effect - here you hold them in your hand, and here you give them away. This effect is not present when you pay with plastic or those digital wallets.
Not sensoring, removing copyrighted content probably.
All content, on YouTube or elsewhere, is copyrighted (unless made by the US government or by a robot.) Copyright, AFAIK, is assigned automatically. If YouTube starts removing everything that is copyrighted they'd have nothing.
I understand that they can remove content that infringes other people's copyrights but by all indications these clips were taken by spectators who then own the copyright and are free to do whatever they please with it.
While I'm not saying interface design can't have an effect, none of the interfaces Office has used have been so horrible as to make you "not as productive".
If you ever spent even one second looking for an item that you knew where it is in Office 2003 then you lost productivity, as long as you haven't gained elsewhere.
My experience shows that ribbons don't make you more productive to compensate for training time. The purpose of ribbons is just to reduce the interface to the level of pictographs of the type that you find on doors of restrooms. Once you do that, the IQ required to work MS Office is, in theory, the same as one required to use a bathroom.
If something that minor was all it took to make you "not as productive" you should start thinking about how you're going to live on the measly amount that unemployment insurance pays
That's one good way to fire Albert Einstein; after all, he was less computer-literate than a modern secretary.
Unless they use more cars, or find a better way to update this stuff, I can see it getting very jumbled and inaccurate.
The snail mail databases that are sold and resold and sold again are so old that they are useless. I'm still receiving junk mail addressed to someone who doesn't live here for 10 years. Executives that sell and buy those lists don't care how bad they are since there is no feedback. A list with 10 million addresses is better than a list with 5 million addresses, even though 90% of entries in the larger list are incorrect. Often generations of tenants are layered one on top of another in those lists. A simple SQL query would find that it's physically impossible for five families to live at a given address - just as it is tough for one family to live at five different addresses at the same time. Those lists are purely additive; nothing is ever deleted. Lots of money is wasted on delivering "special offers" to those addresses.
Google also benefits from this confusion. They can claim that they mapped 10 million routers and they know where every one is, to a millimeter. In reality 10% of those routers moved to some other location within a year (how long does a typical apartment dweller stay at one place?) But since there is no way, aside from anecdotes on /., to call their bluff, Google presents this claim as truth in order to appear larger and more powerful that it already is.
Lets say you search for "sony". Their main website is sony.co.jp... which is completely useless to anyone who doesn't speak japanese.
That's not their "main" web site. It's their Japanese web site. It ends in .jp, of all things!
Their global web site is www.sony.net, and the USA web site is - completely unsurprisingly - www.sony.com.
Why do you need Google to help you in such a simple matter? Would you completely fail to find Sony on the Internet without Google nudging your mouse with its noodly appendage? Your geek card is about to be canceled!
By the way, even the Japanese web site has a link to the global one; the link is in English. Plenty of other Web sites (of international megacorps) ask you to select your country as soon as you access the site. Google should keep its paws away.
With the $10 price tag for the retail version the biggest fear those developers have is not piracy - it's obscurity.
Besides, I believe you are overestimating the percentage of p1rates vs. legitimate users. As teenagers grow up and start earning money they begin valuing their time more than dollars (or euros or roubles, whatever.)
Personally, I got myself a PS3 a long time ago, and so far I'm happy as a clam. My PCs are no longer bothered by endless video card upgrades, bug fixes and multi-gigabyte installs of stuff. I work on PCs and play on PS3, and that's how I like it. No licensing issues anymore too - it's all transparent to me; just insert the BlueRay disk and you are good to go. Multi-core CPU in PS3 is also not hurting. The video is excellent, smooth and doesn't require me to go out from time to time and buy yet another video card and then have fun time with its drivers. The cost of the console is lost in the noise long time ago; but the advantage of having it remains. I even have the mouse-based controller for it, though I don't use it very often - just no need.
I have heard stories of ham radio guys with cutting edge 1296 preamps and high gain mobile antennas blowing their preamps by driving down the street next to the airport full of hundred watt peak class 1090 MHz active transponders.
The 10 GHz LNA that I bought recently from DB6NT can't take more than 1 mW at its input. They specifically stress this point; a bad relay can blow the FET.
A common ham dish antenna for 10 GHz can have gain of about 30 dB. If two such dishes are pointed at each other and one transmits only 200 mW, the minimum safe distance between those dishes is:
FSPL (dB) = 20 log10 (d_in_km) + 20 log10 (f_in_MHz) + 32.44 -Gtx - Grx
Since we want to lose 23 dB (200 mW to 1 mW) the 'd' will be only 33.7 meters. Any closer and the amp burns up. This is actually well known in practice when hams show up with their microwave rigs and try them out in a parking lot. They are very careful to not point dishes to anything they don't want to cook :-) Many 10 GHz rigs run more than 200 mW; 3W is typical, but some do up to 10W (it just costs more.)
Radar operators also know to not point their radars at nearly objects. Some radars on civilian airplanes can't be ran on the ground - both due to radiation danger and due to the overload of the front end (burnination is optional but likely.)
we've really got maybe 50 years to make the transition to largely renewable sources
In the beginning of 20th century large cities had a huge problem of removal of horse-generated waste from streets. It was considered to be nearly a disaster, since cities grew fast. Needless to say, the problem disappeared on its own.
You are worrying too much about what will happen in 200 years from now. We may be able to tap into dark energy within 50 years, for example. Also don't forget that fusion power is only 20 years away (as always.)
The lesson here is that attempting things before you are ready is not productive. You could build an airplane in 1700's but without an engine it would be very useless. Designs of space rockets were proposed around 1900, decades before technology advanced enough to make them happen. You could invest all your money (and all world's money) into a powder-filled rocket and you'd still not reach the Moon in 1900.
My competence and essential position as the only guy with any product knowledge meant they weren't about to fire me.
Many managers were in that position, including me (though I'm not a manager, really, just someone with some influence in decision-making.)
The problem is that you can't allow this guy to do just anything. He might be super-valuable, but there is always a threshold where you have to fire him. If talking too much wasn't enough to fire you, try some orgies, with drugs and hookers, at the office (at night first, then during business hours.) Anyone would be fired for that.
In essence, any developer is one bus away from being unable to code. This is not a high threshold - people get sick, change jobs, relocate for family reasons... the usual stuff. If the PHB doesn't have a backup - guess what, now is a good time to look for one. In practical terms your project will be thrown over the cubicle wall onto someone else's desk. That guy will swim or sink, but you won't be there to observe the results.
in this case this guy should tell his roommate to get his own internet connection, or stop the illicit activities, or both.
In this case the owner of the connection can't verify that the illegal activities stopped. His only recourse is to cancel the Internet sharing.
Slashdot readers then proceed to ask, "what's the intrinsic value of chicks?"
Any educated /. reader would immediately tell you that chicks quickly grow into chickens. Then they lay eggs, or you can eat the birds. They are quite useful.
Multiple CA signatures seems like a good idea.
If CAs sign new certificates without checking much, do you think they'd be checking anything at all to add a signature to an existing certificate?
The whole problem stems from the fact that CA companies are full of people who cut corners. People always made mistakes, and they will be making more mistakes until a computer replaces them. You can't fix that by adding more bad CAs into the mix - out of several signers it will be always "the other one" responsible. At least with one CA they have an incentive to remain honest (the future of DigiNotar is probably not very exciting.)
This tells us nothing about relative security of the fax or the email. The same guy would cheerfully send loan documents (a complete identity theft kit) to foobar@hotmail.com and not blink an eye.
The fax gives him the connection information, but if he isn't willing to look at it ... not much can be done. A human is in charge, not a robot.
regulators and courts turn a blind eye to the vulnerabilities of the phone system in general
1) The vulnerabilities of the phone system are few and far between. If you dial the right number you will be connected. If you made a mistake you most likely will not get a fax on the other end. If you get a wrong fax it will send you a different CSID and then you know that something is not right.
2) Internet-based replacements are hard to set up basically because there is no equivalent replacement. Consider what you need here:
If you want you can go ahead and invent an Internet Fax that would do such a thing. Email isn't it, though. You send an email and you never know if it gets anywhere, or who intercepts it. Email is equivalent to sending a postcard with a passing caravan, hoping that eventually it will be routed to the destination. Fax is equivalent to sending a courier, point to point, no routing needed.
Even when the other person insists they must send the document as a fax, don't be surprised if it takes 4 or 5 rounds
If the fax machine is THAT unobvious, be sure that there will be a huge sticky note with words "Put it in this way" where it can't be ignored. But most people learn the delicate art of the forest^W faxing pretty quickly. Those who can't figure it out have a secretary to do it for them.
With regard to contrast, as long as you don't fiddle with the defaults you will get a reasonable image out of a reasonable original. Approximately 100% of faxed documents are 2-level monochrome images printed with a very dark ink on a very white paper, so it's not a rocket science to tell the black and the white apart.
But when you figure that a significant number of people are using e-mail to fax services, its false security. They might as well address their issues directly and secure their e-mail process.
People who can't afford a $100 fax machine (and a $25/mo phone line for it) don't need the security; what they need is convenience. People who want relative security own a fax machine.
With regard to ease of hacking, fax doesn't protect against industrial espionage. Nothing does (ask Bradley Manning, even though he was with the Army.) What fax protects against is remote hackers. For each spy with clip leads there is a million of script kiddies out there. They can compromise not only your Web server - they can break into the mail server of your ISP or someone else's ISP and intercept all the email. A script kiddie can't break into a fax line remotely. Some companies get a trunk line and use PBX; then it may be theoretically easier ... if the PBX is connected to the Internet, which it doesn't need to be. The last company I worked for used Cisco VoIP phones; they were on a separate network, physically. I couldn't ping them from the LAN, and that's how IT liked it.
Saying self-signed certs are somehow better than certs signed by a compromised CA is rather silly.
Is it?
Self-signed certificate: you have no idea who created it, and you tread lightly.
CA-signed certificate: you are absolutely sure that you know who owns the Web site, and you gladly open the kimono.
As you can see, a fake CA-signed certificate is far more dangerous than a no-name certificate.
However it must be said that WoT is not a perfect solution either. It will be a more expensive solution, that's for sure. Instead of one signature of a trusted party you need tens of signatures of less trusted parties - and a fake trust can creep somewhere between those signatures. Most of signers will not be known, personally or otherwise, to a common Web user, so trust in entities is not going anywhere. The only difference is that several poorly trusted entities are required to validate a key instead of one poorly trusted entity.
Is there anyone here that works for a large business customer of HP and used there software?
I worked for one. They bought a bunch of HP notebooks, and they came with HP ProtectTools. It was worse than worthless - it was a typical case of bland corporateware. It also didn't work. You probably don't expect your fingerprint reader to cause BSOD instead of logging you in; but that's how the software worked. In the end the local IT outlawed installation of this software.
The kinetic energy of 100 [short] tons moving at 80 mph would be 58 MJ. The energy of 4 MW during 30 seconds will be 90 MJ. So the numbers appear to be correct, plus or minus my guesses on the weight and speed and everything else.