I think you have hit the nail on the head. Everyone wants a magic device or application that will stop all threats. Working as a security person I frequently interact with companies selling magic boxes and unfortunately it is most often at customer sites trying to integrate the steaming pile with the customer's existing system. My personal favorite interaction with a company selling a magic device was one that was selling a NIDS type device and my first question to them was "What does your product offer me over Snort". Their response was that their device did deep packet inspection and snort doesn't. At that point I told the guy to get out and not come back as they are either incompetent bordering on negligence or are liars and either way I don't deal with liars or people who are that incompetent.
When I work with customers to secure their systems I go after the things that actually provide value and don't cost a ton of money. Like limiting the amount of crap installed on a server, turning on and setting rules on the host based fire wall, putting a firewall applicace at the edge of your network and configuring it, staying up to date on patches, Configuring your system in a secure manner, etc. all of which probably fall into your "other low-tech solutions" bucket in addition to the other things you mention. I have been on site a number of times when customer systems have been audited for security, it is mandated and if an audit item fails there are real fines that are large and are assessed for each day of violation, so my goal is to provide a system for customers that is actually secure (well it has a good margin of security) and in all cases goes well beyond what is required for the audit.
It indicates that if true extra effort was used to obfuscate things on the server, likely before Clinton would have handed things over to her lawyers to sift through for things that needed to be turned over. To quote Hillary, "At this point what difference does it make". And to answer that question probably not a lot as even if there is a smoking gun found that proves that Hillary was selling nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden no one would likely prosecute as she seem to have accumulated too much power. At this point it seems like it is just making political hay. Those who hate her will say this proves that she is a criminal and still hate her. Those who love her will see this as just another right wing attack and still lover her. Of the three people who don't have an opinion of her one will make up their mind and the other 2 will likely walk into a post as they are so oblivious to things.
And to add to that the amount of people around her who were involved with various activities that she was a part of who have ended up in jail. When I heard her say "The company you keep says a lot about you" I immediately though about how that would apply to her over the years. Whitewater, cattle futures, Lincoln Bedroom, Travel Gate, Robert Byrd, Rose Law Firm, etc.
If the republicans wanted to run an ad that would seem like a good one, open with that quote from Clinton, then list off all of the people who ended up in trouble with the law or have a bad background and mention their relationship to Clinton. Then in closing replay the Clinton quote. Then again this year I am, jokingly, hoping for Russian intervention or Giant Meteor in the first debate as the best outcome.
But by voting third party, means that Trump will be favored, therefore you are actually helping him thus contradicting your purpose.
Not in Minnesota. If enough people voted for Johnson over Hillary so that this state went for Trump it would mean that the Libertarians would no longer be a minor party. Since everyone likes to say that the Libertarians take away from the Republicans more than the Democrats this would truly be a huge swing. If instead we assume that enough people vote for Stein in Minnesota that it turns the state to Trump it would again likely mean that they are not a minor party and would be granted automatic ballot access as well as matching funds in the next election cycle.
If I lived in a swing state I would likely have a very hard decision this year but as I don't I can say fuck off to the giant turds in the major parties and instead vote with a clean conscious for president. For those in swing states you will get to pick which authoritarian statist ass hole will be our leader, but at least you get to choose which rights get trampled on.
Well to be fair in my state a vote for Trump with be entirely wasted, just as in Texas a vote for Clinton would be wasted. So since I live in Minnesota and don't like Clinton or Trump what loss is it if I vote Johnson or Stein. Similarly if I lived in Texas and didn't like either of them what difference would it make voting for Johnson or Stein, I don't know if Stein is on the ballot there or not but it isn't important.
In the past when I had built machines it was usually the middle of the pack boxes that were more expensive to build your own. I don't know how the bottom end of the market has changed as I haven't built one of those machines in 14 years but when I last did it was close to $100 cheaper to build your own. Although that Zotac box I got is really what I would consider a bottom of the line box as it is has a Celeron processor, onboard graphics, a max ram capacity of 8GB, and one SATA connction, so does seem to fit the definition of a low end machine. However it has benefits in that it doesn't consume much power, is fanless, and has dual GigE ports which makes it an ideal candidate for a firewall box even if the CPU and max RAM is excessive for that it does allow pfSense to do a bunch of additional things and not slow down.
With my current main machine it was substantially cheaper to build what I needed especially since a lot of things needed to be at the top but I didn't need a high end GPU which if I got a pre-built system would have also been included. Add in that getting a pre-built machine that would accept 32GB RAM at the time would add substantially to the price, and yes for what I frequently do with that machine 32GB is needed.
It will cost you significantly more to find a Linux PC with your desired specs, compared to buying a Windows PC and installing Linux on it.
Not really unless you are running some really strange hardware. For example my most recent main machine I just went and picked out the hardware I wanted based off of the specs and dual boot into windows or linux. The oddest thing in it was the combination PATA/SATA card that I bought because it was cheaper than getting a new DVD-RW drive and now that I have a bunch of hard drives in that box the extra SATA 3.0 ports are nice. The other slightly odd thing is that I have a 4 port serial card. I had more issues getting windows on that machine than getting linux on it and the Linux distro I am running is Slackware (13.37 at the time). That said the issue getting windows on it was I had to load the driver for the PATA/SATA card from USB during the install process. It was rather bizarre given that the windows install process had started from the drive that was connected to that card.
Even the most recent computer I bought doesn't care what OS I put on it. It was a Zotac Cl323 bare bones machine that I put a 120GB SSD and 8GB RAM into to make a beefy little pfSense firewall as it is a dual nic box. With the current version of pfSense the wireless in the thing doesn't work but it sounds like that will be fixed as the wireless works in the most current version of FreeBSD and pfSense is a version behind. Even there I don't care that the WiFi doesn't work because I won't use it on that machine and just disconnected the weird little card (it isn't a standard connection) as it saves a little on power consumption.
After all, American ideologues are still amateurs compared to the Soviet ones.
Of all the day to not have mod points.
That said the American education system is also rather good at making learning suck. Things like science, history, math, are all taught in the most boring way possible. I have frequently seen this with the kids in my son's scout den. Thankfully myself and the other den leader try to make learning a lot more fun and actually do things. For example in class the kids learned about the 3 different types of rocks and how they were made. In scouts we went and spent a couple of weeks on geology and found a bunch of rocks, examined them to see which of the 3 types they were, broke them open to see some of the structure, looked at them under magnifying glasses, put some in a rock polisher, etc. The thing the kids got the biggest kick out of was making our own rocks from ones we found. We melted them in my forge and poured it into some crucibles to cool at different rates. The next week we broke those new rocks open to see what effect the rate of cooling had on them with the grain size. We have done similar things for other topics in science, math and history so that they get to have lots of hands learning that also goes into more depth.
That and just pipe the audio portion of the video to the mic and it would all be good. The last time heard that awful noise it was shortly followed by the discharge of a high power rifle.
There was a CNN panel (yes, admittedly absurd sampling)
I remember seeing either an XKCD or SMBC comic on this subject where the punch line was basically: And now to provide an opposing view is the dumbest person we could find
The NRA ? Actually... I'll bet there are some wingnuts who think the NRA is way too pro-gun-control.
Don't worry there are worse groups although most are pretty small there are a couple of larger ones in that list that I have actually heard of and I have heard a number of people referring to the NRA as meaning "Negotiating Rights Away".
Punishing this man would send a message discouraging other whistle blowers from doing what he did.
That is the whole point. Make an example out of Snowden so that no one dares even think about exposing the governments wrongdoing.
There are a lot of people who believe this line of reasoning and a number of them are in the military or people like my mother. It was interesting last year on 9/11 when I mentioned that the terrorists had won as we were well on our way to accomplishing everything Osama wanted with the exception of leaving the Middle East. My mother blew a gasket that I would ever question our government's actions to keep us safe even if it did cost us our rights. My cousin who was still a week end warrior (one weekend a month 2 weeks a year) was insistent that our actions in the middle east have made it a better place even though he was 8 years old when 9/11 happened. Both of them take the approach of at least we are trying so it must be good without even considering that doing nothing may have been a better option.
While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see: Napalm girl V-J Day Kiss The burning monk Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald Tienanmen Square Iwo Jima Marylin Monroe on the subway grate the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.
Probably not. Of the top of my head you would likely see napalm girl, the burning monk, the Afghan girl with green eyes, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, Tienanmen Square, Iwo Jima, Marylin Monroe on the subway grate, the V-J day kiss, and probably a few other common ones, also from those brief descriptions you probably know exactly what picture I am talking about. So while having 50 people generate a list of 20 important images will end up having more that 20 unique pictures it won't be anywhere close to 1000 unique pictures. You would probably end up with 100-150 pictures most of which would likely belong on the list.
There are probably lots of pictures that these people don't know or understand. My cousin who is much younger than I am didn't know what this picture was even though it is one of the most recognizable photos of the 20th century. He asked me about it when there was some promotion for the Minneapolis institute of Art (I think it was them) on photography that used it extensively several years back. How many of those people would know about the napalm girl photo, the self immolating Buddhist monk, and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, well maybe the last one as it has become an internet meme.
I have always viewed cellphone cameras as being of poor quality mostly because the only cameras I have used are nice film SLRs with good to really good lenses. To that end I just lump cell phone cameras into the same category as the old film point and shoots, in that they aren't great cameras but they are the camera of the masses and work for what most people want a camera for, to take pictures to capture an event. So long as the picture turns out reasonably non bury and has an acceptable exposure the picture is good enough. These were the cameras for the people who would also use 400 or 800 speed film and a 5x7 or 6x9 print would be as large as the print would go.
Then again the pictures I take are either for my enjoyment to blow up and put on my walls, to enter into local competitions, or as contract work for others to be published in books. While it is a hobby for me I am pretty good at it and the "contract" stuff is mostly my wife telling me to help out one of her friends who needs some professional quality quilt pictures for a book they are writing and I basically get my costs covered and money for lunch.
Also lets not forget the most important rule about cameras: The best camera is the one you have with you. So for the vast majority of people the best camera is their cell phone camera and it meets their needs just fine. So for the shit smells better comment it does apply as from a technical stand point but that doesn't mean that great photos can't be created with it. Just don't claim that by using objective measures it is even in the same class as that is silly, a Holga will never be a Hasselblad (both medium formats) just as my Pentax won't be a Hasselblad either).
While I wish I could take credit for this that right belongs to Arancaytar:
I am the very model of a modern Cyber General
I've information secretive and knowledge technological
I know my way around the tubes and quote the cryptological
From Adi, Bruce and Len to Ron in order alphabetical!
The digital backs are usually only available for medium formats not 35mm, or at least I haven't seen a 35mm digital back conversion and I have done some looking. I have thought about going to digital but I like film and understand how film fails at the extremes so I will likely stick with it but would encourage anyone starting fresh to at least learn on digital initially as learning on film is expensive. after that then decide if you like film or digital as it is a personal preference unless you are doing commercial work or are a point and shoot type of person in which case stick with digital. Also given the age of my camera when it craps out, could be next week or could be in another 40 years, I will have to start all over again but am thinking of just making the jump to an older Hasselblad medium format that uses film but has the option for a digital back if I can find one for a reasonable price.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you have hit the nail on the head. Everyone wants a magic device or application that will stop all threats. Working as a security person I frequently interact with companies selling magic boxes and unfortunately it is most often at customer sites trying to integrate the steaming pile with the customer's existing system. My personal favorite interaction with a company selling a magic device was one that was selling a NIDS type device and my first question to them was "What does your product offer me over Snort". Their response was that their device did deep packet inspection and snort doesn't. At that point I told the guy to get out and not come back as they are either incompetent bordering on negligence or are liars and either way I don't deal with liars or people who are that incompetent.
When I work with customers to secure their systems I go after the things that actually provide value and don't cost a ton of money. Like limiting the amount of crap installed on a server, turning on and setting rules on the host based fire wall, putting a firewall applicace at the edge of your network and configuring it, staying up to date on patches, Configuring your system in a secure manner, etc. all of which probably fall into your "other low-tech solutions" bucket in addition to the other things you mention. I have been on site a number of times when customer systems have been audited for security, it is mandated and if an audit item fails there are real fines that are large and are assessed for each day of violation, so my goal is to provide a system for customers that is actually secure (well it has a good margin of security) and in all cases goes well beyond what is required for the audit.
voting for a criminal in a twelve thousand dollar potato sack
No that wasn't a potato sack, it was the bag for my vacuum
It indicates that if true extra effort was used to obfuscate things on the server, likely before Clinton would have handed things over to her lawyers to sift through for things that needed to be turned over. To quote Hillary, "At this point what difference does it make". And to answer that question probably not a lot as even if there is a smoking gun found that proves that Hillary was selling nuclear weapons to Osama bin Laden no one would likely prosecute as she seem to have accumulated too much power. At this point it seems like it is just making political hay. Those who hate her will say this proves that she is a criminal and still hate her. Those who love her will see this as just another right wing attack and still lover her. Of the three people who don't have an opinion of her one will make up their mind and the other 2 will likely walk into a post as they are so oblivious to things.
And to add to that the amount of people around her who were involved with various activities that she was a part of who have ended up in jail. When I heard her say "The company you keep says a lot about you" I immediately though about how that would apply to her over the years. Whitewater, cattle futures, Lincoln Bedroom, Travel Gate, Robert Byrd, Rose Law Firm, etc.
If the republicans wanted to run an ad that would seem like a good one, open with that quote from Clinton, then list off all of the people who ended up in trouble with the law or have a bad background and mention their relationship to Clinton. Then in closing replay the Clinton quote. Then again this year I am, jokingly, hoping for Russian intervention or Giant Meteor in the first debate as the best outcome.
But by voting third party, means that Trump will be favored, therefore you are actually helping him thus contradicting your purpose.
Not in Minnesota. If enough people voted for Johnson over Hillary so that this state went for Trump it would mean that the Libertarians would no longer be a minor party. Since everyone likes to say that the Libertarians take away from the Republicans more than the Democrats this would truly be a huge swing. If instead we assume that enough people vote for Stein in Minnesota that it turns the state to Trump it would again likely mean that they are not a minor party and would be granted automatic ballot access as well as matching funds in the next election cycle.
If I lived in a swing state I would likely have a very hard decision this year but as I don't I can say fuck off to the giant turds in the major parties and instead vote with a clean conscious for president. For those in swing states you will get to pick which authoritarian statist ass hole will be our leader, but at least you get to choose which rights get trampled on.
Well to be fair in my state a vote for Trump with be entirely wasted, just as in Texas a vote for Clinton would be wasted. So since I live in Minnesota and don't like Clinton or Trump what loss is it if I vote Johnson or Stein. Similarly if I lived in Texas and didn't like either of them what difference would it make voting for Johnson or Stein, I don't know if Stein is on the ballot there or not but it isn't important.
In the past when I had built machines it was usually the middle of the pack boxes that were more expensive to build your own. I don't know how the bottom end of the market has changed as I haven't built one of those machines in 14 years but when I last did it was close to $100 cheaper to build your own. Although that Zotac box I got is really what I would consider a bottom of the line box as it is has a Celeron processor, onboard graphics, a max ram capacity of 8GB, and one SATA connction, so does seem to fit the definition of a low end machine. However it has benefits in that it doesn't consume much power, is fanless, and has dual GigE ports which makes it an ideal candidate for a firewall box even if the CPU and max RAM is excessive for that it does allow pfSense to do a bunch of additional things and not slow down.
With my current main machine it was substantially cheaper to build what I needed especially since a lot of things needed to be at the top but I didn't need a high end GPU which if I got a pre-built system would have also been included. Add in that getting a pre-built machine that would accept 32GB RAM at the time would add substantially to the price, and yes for what I frequently do with that machine 32GB is needed.
It will cost you significantly more to find a Linux PC with your desired specs, compared to buying a Windows PC and installing Linux on it.
Not really unless you are running some really strange hardware. For example my most recent main machine I just went and picked out the hardware I wanted based off of the specs and dual boot into windows or linux. The oddest thing in it was the combination PATA/SATA card that I bought because it was cheaper than getting a new DVD-RW drive and now that I have a bunch of hard drives in that box the extra SATA 3.0 ports are nice. The other slightly odd thing is that I have a 4 port serial card. I had more issues getting windows on that machine than getting linux on it and the Linux distro I am running is Slackware (13.37 at the time). That said the issue getting windows on it was I had to load the driver for the PATA/SATA card from USB during the install process. It was rather bizarre given that the windows install process had started from the drive that was connected to that card.
Even the most recent computer I bought doesn't care what OS I put on it. It was a Zotac Cl323 bare bones machine that I put a 120GB SSD and 8GB RAM into to make a beefy little pfSense firewall as it is a dual nic box. With the current version of pfSense the wireless in the thing doesn't work but it sounds like that will be fixed as the wireless works in the most current version of FreeBSD and pfSense is a version behind. Even there I don't care that the WiFi doesn't work because I won't use it on that machine and just disconnected the weird little card (it isn't a standard connection) as it saves a little on power consumption.
Centuries, try millennia
charged-particle optics
Now that just sounds way too fun to play with.
After all, American ideologues are still amateurs compared to the Soviet ones.
Of all the day to not have mod points.
That said the American education system is also rather good at making learning suck. Things like science, history, math, are all taught in the most boring way possible. I have frequently seen this with the kids in my son's scout den. Thankfully myself and the other den leader try to make learning a lot more fun and actually do things. For example in class the kids learned about the 3 different types of rocks and how they were made. In scouts we went and spent a couple of weeks on geology and found a bunch of rocks, examined them to see which of the 3 types they were, broke them open to see some of the structure, looked at them under magnifying glasses, put some in a rock polisher, etc. The thing the kids got the biggest kick out of was making our own rocks from ones we found. We melted them in my forge and poured it into some crucibles to cool at different rates. The next week we broke those new rocks open to see what effect the rate of cooling had on them with the grain size. We have done similar things for other topics in science, math and history so that they get to have lots of hands learning that also goes into more depth.
That and just pipe the audio portion of the video to the mic and it would all be good. The last time heard that awful noise it was shortly followed by the discharge of a high power rifle.
There was a CNN panel (yes, admittedly absurd sampling)
I remember seeing either an XKCD or SMBC comic on this subject where the punch line was basically:
And now to provide an opposing view is the dumbest person we could find
The NRA ? Actually... I'll bet there are some wingnuts who think the NRA is way too pro-gun-control.
Don't worry there are worse groups although most are pretty small there are a couple of larger ones in that list that I have actually heard of and I have heard a number of people referring to the NRA as meaning "Negotiating Rights Away".
Punishing this man would send a message discouraging other whistle blowers from doing what he did.
That is the whole point. Make an example out of Snowden so that no one dares even think about exposing the governments wrongdoing.
There are a lot of people who believe this line of reasoning and a number of them are in the military or people like my mother. It was interesting last year on 9/11 when I mentioned that the terrorists had won as we were well on our way to accomplishing everything Osama wanted with the exception of leaving the Middle East. My mother blew a gasket that I would ever question our government's actions to keep us safe even if it did cost us our rights. My cousin who was still a week end warrior (one weekend a month 2 weeks a year) was insistent that our actions in the middle east have made it a better place even though he was 8 years old when 9/11 happened. Both of them take the approach of at least we are trying so it must be good without even considering that doing nothing may have been a better option.
While the Marilyn picture isn't really a historic moment the picture is historic and considered among the best ever taken. I am surprised as you are only a couple of years younger than I am but was familiar with all of these images. I believe that the Napalm girl and burning monk photo were in my history book in high school as well as the one of Ruby shooting Oswald. For those who are unfamiliar with any of the pictures see:
Napalm girl
V-J Day Kiss
The burning monk
Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald
Tienanmen Square
Iwo Jima
Marylin Monroe on the subway grate
the green eyed Afghan girl
If for nothing else these pictures and the stories behind them are part of our culture and history. To that list I would also add Dewey Defeats Truman as another image.
Maybe one of these guys, if not I am at a loss.
I believe you are referring to Gaelic.
Probably not. Of the top of my head you would likely see napalm girl, the burning monk, the Afghan girl with green eyes, Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, Tienanmen Square, Iwo Jima, Marylin Monroe on the subway grate, the V-J day kiss, and probably a few other common ones, also from those brief descriptions you probably know exactly what picture I am talking about. So while having 50 people generate a list of 20 important images will end up having more that 20 unique pictures it won't be anywhere close to 1000 unique pictures. You would probably end up with 100-150 pictures most of which would likely belong on the list.
There are probably lots of pictures that these people don't know or understand. My cousin who is much younger than I am didn't know what this picture was even though it is one of the most recognizable photos of the 20th century. He asked me about it when there was some promotion for the Minneapolis institute of Art (I think it was them) on photography that used it extensively several years back. How many of those people would know about the napalm girl photo, the self immolating Buddhist monk, and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon, well maybe the last one as it has become an internet meme.
Because both parties should realize now that they have the worst possible candidate.
I keep hoping for Russin intervention in to the first debate to solve that problem
It is different this time. This time it is their ox that is getting gored. How can anyone want to deny Hillary from being the first female president.
I have always viewed cellphone cameras as being of poor quality mostly because the only cameras I have used are nice film SLRs with good to really good lenses. To that end I just lump cell phone cameras into the same category as the old film point and shoots, in that they aren't great cameras but they are the camera of the masses and work for what most people want a camera for, to take pictures to capture an event. So long as the picture turns out reasonably non bury and has an acceptable exposure the picture is good enough. These were the cameras for the people who would also use 400 or 800 speed film and a 5x7 or 6x9 print would be as large as the print would go.
Then again the pictures I take are either for my enjoyment to blow up and put on my walls, to enter into local competitions, or as contract work for others to be published in books. While it is a hobby for me I am pretty good at it and the "contract" stuff is mostly my wife telling me to help out one of her friends who needs some professional quality quilt pictures for a book they are writing and I basically get my costs covered and money for lunch.
Also lets not forget the most important rule about cameras:
The best camera is the one you have with you.
So for the vast majority of people the best camera is their cell phone camera and it meets their needs just fine. So for the shit smells better comment it does apply as from a technical stand point but that doesn't mean that great photos can't be created with it. Just don't claim that by using objective measures it is even in the same class as that is silly, a Holga will never be a Hasselblad (both medium formats) just as my Pentax won't be a Hasselblad either).
I am the very model of a modern Cyber General
I've information secretive and knowledge technological
I know my way around the tubes and quote the cryptological
From Adi, Bruce and Len to Ron in order alphabetical!
The digital backs are usually only available for medium formats not 35mm, or at least I haven't seen a 35mm digital back conversion and I have done some looking. I have thought about going to digital but I like film and understand how film fails at the extremes so I will likely stick with it but would encourage anyone starting fresh to at least learn on digital initially as learning on film is expensive. after that then decide if you like film or digital as it is a personal preference unless you are doing commercial work or are a point and shoot type of person in which case stick with digital. Also given the age of my camera when it craps out, could be next week or could be in another 40 years, I will have to start all over again but am thinking of just making the jump to an older Hasselblad medium format that uses film but has the option for a digital back if I can find one for a reasonable price.