Regardless of what Bush II did, the spending under Obama stuck up in that level. If it were really Bush's fault Obama could have simply got the spending to the levels they were when Clinton left office.
That's not exactly easy to do when 19% of your budget goes to pay for a war that you can't just suddenly yank troops out of, 40% go to entitlements that can't easily be scaled back, and most of the rest is mandatory spending. The reason our government is in trouble is that the economy is in the tank. The government's problems can't feasibly be fixed without either fixing the economic downturn first or raising taxes.
I don't think you realize what the numbers look like if you're blaming the current administration in any significant way. The deficit in FY2010 was $1.171 trilion, and total discretionary spending was only $1.378 trillion, which means that basically the government would have to cut out nearly eighty-five percent of discretionary spending just to not have a deficit. To get back to the spending level from the 2000 budget, the government would have to cut out all discretionary spending and $374 billion in mandatory spending.
The bottom line is that there is simply no way to sustain the current level of mandatory expenditures without raising tax revenue in one way or another. Therefore, unless we are wiling to cut medicare/medicaid/social security payouts (and basically screw over a lot of the elderly in our country), our only real options are to either pump more money into the economy so that businesses will then pay more money in taxes, or raise taxes.
The only absolutely guaranteed way to solve the problem is by raising taxes. Neither party appears to be willing to do that. And that's why we are in the situation we're in now, with one of the lowest marginal tax rates on average income workers of nearly any developed country, and a government that can't pay its bills. Unfortunately, we have Republicans who campaign on "no new taxes" and Democrats who are so afraid of Republicans blaming them for new taxes that they aren't willing to raise taxes either. That's how we got into this mess, and I have exactly zero faith in either party having the testicular fortitude to get us out. Until the public accepts that our tax rates are exceptionally low by the standards of most first-world countries and agree to an increase in marginal tax rates, our country is basically screwed, and all the Keynesian stimuli in the world are just going to push the problem a little further down the road.
While we're at it, we should roughly double the current minimum wage and add some import tariffs to counteract the increase in taxation and bring jobs back to the U.S. Again, though, both parties are too afraid of losing the next election to actually do any of those things.... And this, ultimately, is why the Founding Fathers wanted Congress positions to be spare-time jobs, not principal employment, but I digress....
I think a quarter acre might be a little on the small side, depending on the size of your home. I've always found a third of an acre to be just about right for a comfortable lot, assuming that your lot backs up against a forest, a corn field, or some similar piece of largely uninhabited space.
If you're backed up against another home, I think I'd want at least twice that, with all of the extra space added in the form of additional depth behind the house. That way you can have reasonable privacy without having too many trees to mow around. Doing this doesn't reduce the sense of community, but still gives you a sense of privacy.
In fact, the ideal situation would be to alternate between streets and long park areas between subsequent rows of houses. That way, you aren't far from your neighbors, your kids don't have to go very far away to play, and there isn't a house immediately behind yours. Take your pick whether it's part of the lots or not, based on whether you'd rather mow it yourself or pay the HOA to pay someone else to mow it en masse.
Who the hell has time to get up in the morning and mow the fucking six-acre lawn?
In most places, an acre is about the largest area that anybody actually mows. Beyond about an acre, you don't have a lot; you have a field. Thus, if you have six acres, you don't have a lawnmower; you have a tractor. There are exceptions, but it's a good rule of thumb.
I you own a parcel that's over an acre, chances are, you mow somewhere between a third of an acre and an acre around your house, and you either let the rest of it grow naturally or you lease it out to farmers (depending largely on whether it is arable land).
That said, for the rare individual who actually wants a six acre lawn, there are lawn tractors that can mow it in about forty-five minutes as long as you don't have very many trees.
As someone who when driving a small car frequently found themselves being merged into by SUV drivers changing lanes where their "height advantage" evidently caused them to completely overlook my car I think the height is a problem rather than a solution.
Speaking as somebody who drives an SUV, they merge into us all the time, too, so I'm pretty sure it is much less the height and more the drivers. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. A guy turned right out of the left lane, directly in front of me. Glad I have good brakes and good reflexes. I couldn't even swerve because there were pedestrians at the curbside.
BTW, were the vehicles cutting you off usually Lexus SUVs, perchance? I've noticed that the worst driving around here seems to be by people with luxury cars. Maybe it's regional, but I've noticed it often enough to suspect that at least around here, that's not purely anecdotal....
What do you need to see around the car in front of you for?
Because if I actually leave a safe stopping distance, three cars will cut in front of me, and I will no longer have a safe stopping distance. Therefore, the only way to drive safely is to be aware not just of the vehicle in front of you, but two or three cars ahead. If you've never driven in California, you probably can't understand this concept, but that's the unfortunate reality.
You also don't need to be seen more easily. If that's true, then what effect does the presence of SUVs and other large vehicles have on motorcycles and other smaller vehicles?
Motorcycle drivers have always been screwed due to being hard to see. It's one of the first things you learn in driver's ed. This is why I said that you need to try to push people away from smaller vehicles (including motorcycles) and towards uniformly sized vehicles.
Don't get me wrong, in theory, you're absolutely correct. In practice, it doesn't work. Of course, the best thing we could do as a society is to remove the meatbags from the drivers' seats entirely. Since that won't happen for at least another decade or two, the best thing we can do in the interim is to try to minimize obvious problems like huge discrepancies between vehicle sizes, huge discrepancies between the slowest and fastest vehicles on the road (enforcing both minimum and maximum speeds, eliminating truck speed limits where possible, etc.), making vehicles safer in the event of rollovers, and so on.
Cars don't have room for the whole family, can't easily carry your kids and their friends to soccer practice, etc. Nothing beats a minivan or a full-size SUV or van for carrying lots of people.
Also, this is anecdotal, but I've also had less trouble with hydroplaning in my RAV4 than I have in cars or minivans that I have driven over the years. I figure it probably has to do with the weight of the vehicle pressing the water out from under your tires better. Or maybe California's roads have just improved. (*snickers under breath*)
If the original poster is responsible for the convention center Wi-Fi, what he/she can do is crank down the transmit and receive gain and add more access points. If he/she is a vendor on the trade floor, that might not be enough; if the convention center doesn't set up such high density Wi-Fi for everybody, then every other vendor is going to leave their base station hardware set at the default setting, which, while appropriate for a house in the suburbs, or maybe an apartment complex, is WAY TOO LOUD in a crowded convention hall. The more devices you get in close proximity, the more interference issues you're going to see. Of course, all the other non-Wi-Fi devices aren't affected by such changes, so this only works if most of the interference is actually coming from other Wi-Fi sources.
Alternatively, as you suggested, move to the 5 GHz band. (I assume that's why you were recommending 802.11a, but it isn't limited to "a"; you can also run 802.11n up there with some hardware.)
Finally, you can use a high-gain external directional antenna to provide coverage for just your section of the floor at high enough gain to drown out everybody else (e.g. a 25 dBi yagi pointed down from the ceiling or something). Bear in mind that this is the Wi-Fi equivalent of a tactical nuke, so you should expect retaliation from other vendors the following year....
Alternatively, try renting one of these guys and see how you fare. That said, this is probably the Wi-Fi equivalent of a fuel-air bomb, so again, talk to the nearby vendors and try to convince them to share your connection rather than making a further mess of the spectrum.
There's a problem with this: if everyone drives an SUV, there's no more advantage in being able to see over anyone.
You may not be able to see over them, but at least you aren't at a height disadvantage; you can see through their rear window. If you're in a car and an SUV is in front of you, even that is not true.
You'll notice I explicitly did not include heavy trucks in what I said the vehicle height laws should cover. That said, bumper height laws should apply to semis. There's no good reason for them not to.
If that were true, everyone would be buying Oldsmobiles. Those things are big, heavy tanks. No, people buy SUVs because they better allow you to see over and around other vehicles. When half the vehicles on the road are SUVs, drivers in cars are at a significant disadvantage.
By being closer to the average height of traffic, you're not just making yourself safer. You're also making everyone around you safer because you can react more quickly to problems up ahead. In larger vehicles, you are also more easily seen by other vehicles because of your larger overall footprint, which, again, makes everyone safer.
What we need are strict standards for vehicle height consistency, and the standard needs to move towards the size of small SUVs, not cars. And those laws should apply to SUVs and light trucks, not just cars and minivans. And so should bumper height laws, but that's another issue.... Uniformity is a virtue when it comes to traffic safety. Outliers on either side of the norm put people at risk.
Sony might have been able to better repel the multitude of attacks if they hadn't just recently laid off a significant number of their network security team. Great timing, guys.
I'm waiting for the next story, which reads "Former Sony network security admins charged with breaking into PSN." While most think of such timing as unfortunate, security-conscious folks tend to instead think of it as suspicious.
Except when they're rich and give millions of dollars a year to the DNC or RNC. Then, they get a light slap on the wrist. And that is why the rest of us can't have nice things.
Not much in there has surprised me so far. SSL is something that users probably don't understand. It depresses me greatly, however, to think that the difference between a document and an application is something that users would not understand, which is what would be necessary for that phenomenon to explain people clicking "Continue" or "OK" on a dialog box warning that they are about to open an application downloaded from the Internet for the first time....
One thing that did surprise me greatly, however, was that the "Accept this certificate for this session" and "Accept this certificate permanently" checkboxes translate "Accept this certificate for this session/permanently, even when used for things other than their original purpose". Any rational person would expect the determination of trust in an otherwise untrusted cert to remain in the browser domain where the conditional trust can be evaluated based on usage, not to be pushed up into the SSL layer domain where a cert is either trusted or not in a binary fashion. The very idea that accepting a certificate as trusted for identifying a site and accepting a certificate as trusted for signing other certs is a fairly fundamental failure of the basic design of any app that does this. If such behavior is widespread, then that's just plain appalling. It should require a difficult and deliberate action to trust a new CA cert. I don't just mean clicking "OK" difficult. I mean "Copy the cert into a folder on your hard drive by typing a command in a Terminal window and entering your admin password to sudo" difficult.
Why now? Why this quarter, all of a sudden? Clearly half the country didn't wake up one morning and think, "I've always heard there was free porn on the Internet. Why don't I go look for it?" If it were simply Internet erosion, it would have been a continuous, gradual erosion, not a sudden drop in a single quarter.
In my experience, paradigm shifts have a trigger. Did Netflix suddenly get streaming porn, for example? Now, granted, Weekly World News isn't exactly a reliable source, but I'd be willing to bet that even if that story isn't true, something similarly catastrophic must have happened to suddenly cause such a shift in behavior.
Of course, cable companies would never admit that a competitor was cutting into their business, as that would make them look incompetent to their shareholders, so they instead must look for a scapegoat that they can semi-plausibly blame—a circumstance beyond their control, like piracy.
I just don't buy the "free porn on the internet cut into sales of PPV porn" excuse. Heck, it would be more plausible if they had said that people had a habit of buying PPV porn to relax after wrestling matches, and with fewer wrestling matches, they now view less PPV porn as well.
My problem is that the article makes it sound like they've found lots of huge flaws in the way Mac OS X handles passwords, yet it doesn't give even one specific example. It also talks about authentication policies for services that don't even involve authentication. And then it implies that all of these supposed flaws are somehow specific to Mac OS X Server, when none of the things listed are specific to the Server version of Mac OS X (or even specific to Mac OS X, with the exception of Apple Remote Desktop, and even that is, IIRC, at least partially based on the VNC protocol, which isn't specific to Mac OS X).
I'm not saying that these folks haven't legitimately found security problems. I'm saying that the IT World article is pure crap, and with such an appalling information void, I can't even tell if they have found a legitimate problem or not....
And Mac OS X explicitly warns you if you are about to open an application downloaded from the Internet. This means that getting someone to run your code requires tricking them (through social engineering) into knowingly launching an application that they've never launched before, as opposed to tricking them into running your code by making it look like a JPEG file of Lindsay Lohan naked or whatever. Maybe Windows 7 does the same thing (I'm not sure), but that was at least historically a big problem on Windows.
Agreed. If they're talking about an authentication model in the context of mDNS, that's prima facie evidence that they don't know the first thing about Mac OS X... or mDNS. mDNS is:
Not authenticated at all; it's a multicast service advertisement protocol. The service has security, not the advertisement.
On Windows, too.
And on most Linux distros.
And they seem to think Kerberos is insecure. Kerberos is, of course:
An open, published standard.
On Windows, too.
And on Linux.
And the rest of their comments seemed to be about the ability to brute force passwords locally. Yeah. No kidding. You can do this... yup, you guessed it:
On Windows, too.
And on Linux.
As far as I can tell, there's basically nothing but pure FUD here, with no real information to back up the rather sweeping generalizations. As they say in Apple developer circles, specifics and Radar number or GTFO.
Besides, access to any machine on a network is generally access to the data flowing across it and the files stored on it. It doesn't really matter how secure the keychain is if half the corporate networks in the world are sending confidential email around in cleartext, sending passwords to web servers in cleartext, etc., and if all the user's email is stored in an unencrypted mail spool file on the hard drive. In the grand scheme of security problems, if you're worried about somebody brute forcing a keychain password, you're either trolling for article views or you've grossly overestimated the security of most corporate infrastructure.
I'm in the process of preparing three novels, and I took a rather different approach. I'm using AppleWorks as my editing tool (because that's what I started with). From there, I'm:
exporting the results as HTML,
running a nasty piece of Perl (is there any other kind?) to turn AppleWorks HTML into valid HTML,
running another nasty piece of Perl to translate that HTML into DocBook plus a bunch of custom tags, and
running dblatex with some rather large custom style files and custom xsl to translate that into suitable code for xelatex.
The advantage to this process is that I have valid XHTML on the way into the process, and with minimal effort, I could go from there to usable ePub content.
If I were starting from scratch on a new document, I would be writing XHTML with some custom CSS as my source format. That would give me full semantic markup capabilities (which would give me slightly more flexibility than I have now, but not enough to convince me to ditch the convenience of editing in a WYSIWYG editor for this project). Then, I would tweak my XHTML to DocBook translation tools to handle that. So for ePub, it would just require containerizing the source material, and for nice PDF output, it would just require using the translator bits I already have.
Of course, none of this is a general solution. Novels and theses are rather different in the way you write them, and the former was made a lot more difficult by LaTeX being designed so heavily for typesetting things like the latter. There are also a lot of flaws in LaTeX stemming out of the core design that make for less than ideal typesetting.
For example, as far as I can tell, there is no good way to indicate that a section break (three stars, for example) cannot be the first thing on a page, and that at least two lines of the content above it must be pulled down with it. The closest you can do is to make it part of an unbreakable container with the previous whole paragraph, but that doesn't really do what you want most of the time.
Similarly, it does not support proper widow control. LaTeX supports widow line control—that is, saying that you cannot have fewer than the last n lines of a paragraph on a page/column by themselves. What it lacks is widow paragraph control—that is, treating a single-paragraph line as though it were the last line of the previous paragraph for widow calculation purposes. The result is poor typography if a page break happens to fall near the end of a chapter. You can fix this by hand-tweaking the TeX markup to force a page break earlier, but I assert that good page layout software should produce good layout by default without hackery.
And LaTeX does not handle UTF-8 very well at all. In my XHTML to DocBook translator, I've had to hack in extra markup (\hspace{0.001pt}) after em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens to force TeX to allow the line to wrap. Without that hack, I get serious overfull hbox problems.
I could probably go on for hours about all the problems I've encountered, but it suffices to say that I'm not impressed by TeX, and at several points, I was tempted to build my own PDF generator using WebKit and CSS styles, but I didn't want to spend the time. (Yet, in hindsight, it would have been faster than trying to force TeX to behave.) That said, if you started with something like the hyphenator project, someone could probably replace most of TeX with a few hundred lines of JavaScript, and that would almost inarguably produce better typesetting with a lot more flexibility (particularly given that pretty much every programmer already understands JavaScript and the DOM).
And objects just a little farther away that wouldn't have impacted anything are now skewed slightly enough towards the earth to reach the moon's orbit and impact the far side of the moon.
FTFY.
It is only equal when the moon is roughly 90 degrees from Earth's orbital plane. At that point, the side of the moon facing in the direction of Earth's orbit is going to simply get different impacts.
When the moon is ahead of Earth, objects flying towards the moon hit the back side of the moon anyway.
When the moon is behind Earth, objects flying towards the moon are being actively pulled directly away from it by Earth's gravitational field. Therefore, there will be fewer impacts on that side of the moon.
How so? I agree the gravity field of the earth screws around with "lots" of incoming trajectories. But that still means it hits just about as often.
Because gravity sucks. Earth's gravity is pulling material away from the side facing Earth and towards the side that is away from it. In your model, the number of objects that hit the moon might be the same, but the impacts are now skewed towards objects that would have been farther away in the absence of gravity, and thus, the face of the moon that receives the most impact events isn't the same.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not exactly easy to do when 19% of your budget goes to pay for a war that you can't just suddenly yank troops out of, 40% go to entitlements that can't easily be scaled back, and most of the rest is mandatory spending. The reason our government is in trouble is that the economy is in the tank. The government's problems can't feasibly be fixed without either fixing the economic downturn first or raising taxes.
I don't think you realize what the numbers look like if you're blaming the current administration in any significant way. The deficit in FY2010 was $1.171 trilion, and total discretionary spending was only $1.378 trillion, which means that basically the government would have to cut out nearly eighty-five percent of discretionary spending just to not have a deficit. To get back to the spending level from the 2000 budget, the government would have to cut out all discretionary spending and $374 billion in mandatory spending.
The bottom line is that there is simply no way to sustain the current level of mandatory expenditures without raising tax revenue in one way or another. Therefore, unless we are wiling to cut medicare/medicaid/social security payouts (and basically screw over a lot of the elderly in our country), our only real options are to either pump more money into the economy so that businesses will then pay more money in taxes, or raise taxes.
The only absolutely guaranteed way to solve the problem is by raising taxes. Neither party appears to be willing to do that. And that's why we are in the situation we're in now, with one of the lowest marginal tax rates on average income workers of nearly any developed country, and a government that can't pay its bills. Unfortunately, we have Republicans who campaign on "no new taxes" and Democrats who are so afraid of Republicans blaming them for new taxes that they aren't willing to raise taxes either. That's how we got into this mess, and I have exactly zero faith in either party having the testicular fortitude to get us out. Until the public accepts that our tax rates are exceptionally low by the standards of most first-world countries and agree to an increase in marginal tax rates, our country is basically screwed, and all the Keynesian stimuli in the world are just going to push the problem a little further down the road.
While we're at it, we should roughly double the current minimum wage and add some import tariffs to counteract the increase in taxation and bring jobs back to the U.S. Again, though, both parties are too afraid of losing the next election to actually do any of those things.... And this, ultimately, is why the Founding Fathers wanted Congress positions to be spare-time jobs, not principal employment, but I digress....
I think a quarter acre might be a little on the small side, depending on the size of your home. I've always found a third of an acre to be just about right for a comfortable lot, assuming that your lot backs up against a forest, a corn field, or some similar piece of largely uninhabited space.
If you're backed up against another home, I think I'd want at least twice that, with all of the extra space added in the form of additional depth behind the house. That way you can have reasonable privacy without having too many trees to mow around. Doing this doesn't reduce the sense of community, but still gives you a sense of privacy.
In fact, the ideal situation would be to alternate between streets and long park areas between subsequent rows of houses. That way, you aren't far from your neighbors, your kids don't have to go very far away to play, and there isn't a house immediately behind yours. Take your pick whether it's part of the lots or not, based on whether you'd rather mow it yourself or pay the HOA to pay someone else to mow it en masse.
In most places, an acre is about the largest area that anybody actually mows. Beyond about an acre, you don't have a lot; you have a field. Thus, if you have six acres, you don't have a lawnmower; you have a tractor. There are exceptions, but it's a good rule of thumb.
I you own a parcel that's over an acre, chances are, you mow somewhere between a third of an acre and an acre around your house, and you either let the rest of it grow naturally or you lease it out to farmers (depending largely on whether it is arable land).
That said, for the rare individual who actually wants a six acre lawn, there are lawn tractors that can mow it in about forty-five minutes as long as you don't have very many trees.
Oh, and for your iPhone and GSM or CDMA iPad hardware, you might consider a picocell instead.
Speaking as somebody who drives an SUV, they merge into us all the time, too, so I'm pretty sure it is much less the height and more the drivers. Happened to me yesterday, in fact. A guy turned right out of the left lane, directly in front of me. Glad I have good brakes and good reflexes. I couldn't even swerve because there were pedestrians at the curbside.
BTW, were the vehicles cutting you off usually Lexus SUVs, perchance? I've noticed that the worst driving around here seems to be by people with luxury cars. Maybe it's regional, but I've noticed it often enough to suspect that at least around here, that's not purely anecdotal....
Because if I actually leave a safe stopping distance, three cars will cut in front of me, and I will no longer have a safe stopping distance. Therefore, the only way to drive safely is to be aware not just of the vehicle in front of you, but two or three cars ahead. If you've never driven in California, you probably can't understand this concept, but that's the unfortunate reality.
Motorcycle drivers have always been screwed due to being hard to see. It's one of the first things you learn in driver's ed. This is why I said that you need to try to push people away from smaller vehicles (including motorcycles) and towards uniformly sized vehicles.
Don't get me wrong, in theory, you're absolutely correct. In practice, it doesn't work. Of course, the best thing we could do as a society is to remove the meatbags from the drivers' seats entirely. Since that won't happen for at least another decade or two, the best thing we can do in the interim is to try to minimize obvious problems like huge discrepancies between vehicle sizes, huge discrepancies between the slowest and fastest vehicles on the road (enforcing both minimum and maximum speeds, eliminating truck speed limits where possible, etc.), making vehicles safer in the event of rollovers, and so on.
Cars don't have room for the whole family, can't easily carry your kids and their friends to soccer practice, etc. Nothing beats a minivan or a full-size SUV or van for carrying lots of people.
Also, this is anecdotal, but I've also had less trouble with hydroplaning in my RAV4 than I have in cars or minivans that I have driven over the years. I figure it probably has to do with the weight of the vehicle pressing the water out from under your tires better. Or maybe California's roads have just improved. (*snickers under breath*)
If the original poster is responsible for the convention center Wi-Fi, what he/she can do is crank down the transmit and receive gain and add more access points. If he/she is a vendor on the trade floor, that might not be enough; if the convention center doesn't set up such high density Wi-Fi for everybody, then every other vendor is going to leave their base station hardware set at the default setting, which, while appropriate for a house in the suburbs, or maybe an apartment complex, is WAY TOO LOUD in a crowded convention hall. The more devices you get in close proximity, the more interference issues you're going to see. Of course, all the other non-Wi-Fi devices aren't affected by such changes, so this only works if most of the interference is actually coming from other Wi-Fi sources.
Alternatively, as you suggested, move to the 5 GHz band. (I assume that's why you were recommending 802.11a, but it isn't limited to "a"; you can also run 802.11n up there with some hardware.)
Finally, you can use a high-gain external directional antenna to provide coverage for just your section of the floor at high enough gain to drown out everybody else (e.g. a 25 dBi yagi pointed down from the ceiling or something). Bear in mind that this is the Wi-Fi equivalent of a tactical nuke, so you should expect retaliation from other vendors the following year....
Alternatively, try renting one of these guys and see how you fare. That said, this is probably the Wi-Fi equivalent of a fuel-air bomb, so again, talk to the nearby vendors and try to convince them to share your connection rather than making a further mess of the spectrum.
Yeah, I noticed the "supposedly"s. I was just amplifying the sentiment.
You may not be able to see over them, but at least you aren't at a height disadvantage; you can see through their rear window. If you're in a car and an SUV is in front of you, even that is not true.
You'll notice I explicitly did not include heavy trucks in what I said the vehicle height laws should cover. That said, bumper height laws should apply to semis. There's no good reason for them not to.
If that were true, everyone would be buying Oldsmobiles. Those things are big, heavy tanks. No, people buy SUVs because they better allow you to see over and around other vehicles. When half the vehicles on the road are SUVs, drivers in cars are at a significant disadvantage.
By being closer to the average height of traffic, you're not just making yourself safer. You're also making everyone around you safer because you can react more quickly to problems up ahead. In larger vehicles, you are also more easily seen by other vehicles because of your larger overall footprint, which, again, makes everyone safer.
What we need are strict standards for vehicle height consistency, and the standard needs to move towards the size of small SUVs, not cars. And those laws should apply to SUVs and light trucks, not just cars and minivans. And so should bumper height laws, but that's another issue.... Uniformity is a virtue when it comes to traffic safety. Outliers on either side of the norm put people at risk.
I'm waiting for the next story, which reads "Former Sony network security admins charged with breaking into PSN." While most think of such timing as unfortunate, security-conscious folks tend to instead think of it as suspicious.
Except when they're rich and give millions of dollars a year to the DNC or RNC. Then, they get a light slap on the wrist. And that is why the rest of us can't have nice things.
Not much in there has surprised me so far. SSL is something that users probably don't understand. It depresses me greatly, however, to think that the difference between a document and an application is something that users would not understand, which is what would be necessary for that phenomenon to explain people clicking "Continue" or "OK" on a dialog box warning that they are about to open an application downloaded from the Internet for the first time....
One thing that did surprise me greatly, however, was that the "Accept this certificate for this session" and "Accept this certificate permanently" checkboxes translate "Accept this certificate for this session/permanently, even when used for things other than their original purpose". Any rational person would expect the determination of trust in an otherwise untrusted cert to remain in the browser domain where the conditional trust can be evaluated based on usage, not to be pushed up into the SSL layer domain where a cert is either trusted or not in a binary fashion. The very idea that accepting a certificate as trusted for identifying a site and accepting a certificate as trusted for signing other certs is a fairly fundamental failure of the basic design of any app that does this. If such behavior is widespread, then that's just plain appalling. It should require a difficult and deliberate action to trust a new CA cert. I don't just mean clicking "OK" difficult. I mean "Copy the cert into a folder on your hard drive by typing a command in a Terminal window and entering your admin password to sudo" difficult.
Why now? Why this quarter, all of a sudden? Clearly half the country didn't wake up one morning and think, "I've always heard there was free porn on the Internet. Why don't I go look for it?" If it were simply Internet erosion, it would have been a continuous, gradual erosion, not a sudden drop in a single quarter.
In my experience, paradigm shifts have a trigger. Did Netflix suddenly get streaming porn, for example? Now, granted, Weekly World News isn't exactly a reliable source, but I'd be willing to bet that even if that story isn't true, something similarly catastrophic must have happened to suddenly cause such a shift in behavior.
Of course, cable companies would never admit that a competitor was cutting into their business, as that would make them look incompetent to their shareholders, so they instead must look for a scapegoat that they can semi-plausibly blame—a circumstance beyond their control, like piracy.
I just don't buy the "free porn on the internet cut into sales of PPV porn" excuse. Heck, it would be more plausible if they had said that people had a habit of buying PPV porn to relax after wrestling matches, and with fewer wrestling matches, they now view less PPV porn as well.
So why do so many people seem to fall for such tricks anyway? That's what I really don't get.
Try a contest where the first person to break any platform gets to choose which hardware he/she wins, and see if it still falls first. Just saying.
My problem is that the article makes it sound like they've found lots of huge flaws in the way Mac OS X handles passwords, yet it doesn't give even one specific example. It also talks about authentication policies for services that don't even involve authentication. And then it implies that all of these supposed flaws are somehow specific to Mac OS X Server, when none of the things listed are specific to the Server version of Mac OS X (or even specific to Mac OS X, with the exception of Apple Remote Desktop, and even that is, IIRC, at least partially based on the VNC protocol, which isn't specific to Mac OS X).
I'm not saying that these folks haven't legitimately found security problems. I'm saying that the IT World article is pure crap, and with such an appalling information void, I can't even tell if they have found a legitimate problem or not....
And Mac OS X explicitly warns you if you are about to open an application downloaded from the Internet. This means that getting someone to run your code requires tricking them (through social engineering) into knowingly launching an application that they've never launched before, as opposed to tricking them into running your code by making it look like a JPEG file of Lindsay Lohan naked or whatever. Maybe Windows 7 does the same thing (I'm not sure), but that was at least historically a big problem on Windows.
Agreed. If they're talking about an authentication model in the context of mDNS, that's prima facie evidence that they don't know the first thing about Mac OS X... or mDNS. mDNS is:
And they seem to think Kerberos is insecure. Kerberos is, of course:
And the rest of their comments seemed to be about the ability to brute force passwords locally. Yeah. No kidding. You can do this... yup, you guessed it:
As far as I can tell, there's basically nothing but pure FUD here, with no real information to back up the rather sweeping generalizations. As they say in Apple developer circles, specifics and Radar number or GTFO.
Besides, access to any machine on a network is generally access to the data flowing across it and the files stored on it. It doesn't really matter how secure the keychain is if half the corporate networks in the world are sending confidential email around in cleartext, sending passwords to web servers in cleartext, etc., and if all the user's email is stored in an unencrypted mail spool file on the hard drive. In the grand scheme of security problems, if you're worried about somebody brute forcing a keychain password, you're either trolling for article views or you've grossly overestimated the security of most corporate infrastructure.
If it is really just a case of visual inspection, then I suspect that this device + CCD + software = viable electronic sensor.
I'm in the process of preparing three novels, and I took a rather different approach. I'm using AppleWorks as my editing tool (because that's what I started with). From there, I'm:
The advantage to this process is that I have valid XHTML on the way into the process, and with minimal effort, I could go from there to usable ePub content.
If I were starting from scratch on a new document, I would be writing XHTML with some custom CSS as my source format. That would give me full semantic markup capabilities (which would give me slightly more flexibility than I have now, but not enough to convince me to ditch the convenience of editing in a WYSIWYG editor for this project). Then, I would tweak my XHTML to DocBook translation tools to handle that. So for ePub, it would just require containerizing the source material, and for nice PDF output, it would just require using the translator bits I already have.
Of course, none of this is a general solution. Novels and theses are rather different in the way you write them, and the former was made a lot more difficult by LaTeX being designed so heavily for typesetting things like the latter. There are also a lot of flaws in LaTeX stemming out of the core design that make for less than ideal typesetting.
For example, as far as I can tell, there is no good way to indicate that a section break (three stars, for example) cannot be the first thing on a page, and that at least two lines of the content above it must be pulled down with it. The closest you can do is to make it part of an unbreakable container with the previous whole paragraph, but that doesn't really do what you want most of the time.
Similarly, it does not support proper widow control. LaTeX supports widow line control—that is, saying that you cannot have fewer than the last n lines of a paragraph on a page/column by themselves. What it lacks is widow paragraph control—that is, treating a single-paragraph line as though it were the last line of the previous paragraph for widow calculation purposes. The result is poor typography if a page break happens to fall near the end of a chapter. You can fix this by hand-tweaking the TeX markup to force a page break earlier, but I assert that good page layout software should produce good layout by default without hackery.
And LaTeX does not handle UTF-8 very well at all. In my XHTML to DocBook translator, I've had to hack in extra markup (\hspace{0.001pt}) after em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens to force TeX to allow the line to wrap. Without that hack, I get serious overfull hbox problems.
I could probably go on for hours about all the problems I've encountered, but it suffices to say that I'm not impressed by TeX, and at several points, I was tempted to build my own PDF generator using WebKit and CSS styles, but I didn't want to spend the time. (Yet, in hindsight, it would have been faster than trying to force TeX to behave.) That said, if you started with something like the hyphenator project, someone could probably replace most of TeX with a few hundred lines of JavaScript, and that would almost inarguably produce better typesetting with a lot more flexibility (particularly given that pretty much every programmer already understands JavaScript and the DOM).
FTFY.
It is only equal when the moon is roughly 90 degrees from Earth's orbital plane. At that point, the side of the moon facing in the direction of Earth's orbit is going to simply get different impacts.
When the moon is ahead of Earth, objects flying towards the moon hit the back side of the moon anyway.
When the moon is behind Earth, objects flying towards the moon are being actively pulled directly away from it by Earth's gravitational field. Therefore, there will be fewer impacts on that side of the moon.
Because gravity sucks. Earth's gravity is pulling material away from the side facing Earth and towards the side that is away from it. In your model, the number of objects that hit the moon might be the same, but the impacts are now skewed towards objects that would have been farther away in the absence of gravity, and thus, the face of the moon that receives the most impact events isn't the same.