Thats you. Me, I am typing on this Thinkpad that we wasted money on an XP Pro license for that MIGHT have accumulated twenty hours of use in four years, because we didn't have a choice.
That's funny, because the XP option is cheaper, presumably because Google pays them a shit-ton to pre-install all their crap in Windows.
And Ironically Ubuntu 8.04 is free.
So it would be rather silly for someone to refuse the XP license, unless it was done on "religious" grounds. aka "I refuse to purchase Microsoft because they represent evil and I will not support them."
That's the only rational argument. If you choose to make that argument, so be it, but it is a bit silly from a purely utilitarian standpoint.
Well, if you'd asked me while i was playing MMOs for 50 hours per week, I would have said I was fine... and I did keep my job, even though my performance suffered somewhat... but I did what was needed.
However, after i quit the MMO, I was able to start a business, start working out, get back into shape AND volunteer in the community.
I regard my time in the MMO world as a low-level addiction, yes... along the same lines as a "functioning alcoholic"... where someone CAn maintain a job, but simply CANNOT get through a day without drinking... or at LEAST being completely preoccupied with NOT drinking when you can't do it.
lol
I used to try to sneak time on the MMO at work, even tho it could have got me fired. It was scary!
These days I would rank German above French, just given the general GDP of German speakers vs French speakers.
Even if you disagree, it's hard to put them on anything but equal footing.
Spanish, however, is up there with English and Chinese in terms of global adoption and up there with English and Japanese in terms of international business relevance.
We just watched a 3 minute video with marginally crappy editing of a 45 foot tall door with tic marks on it.
Did this even make sense to anyone? Because I was waiting for something interesting to happen the whole time... and then suddenly it ended.... And I was eyeing the credits, looking for something interesting because I kept thinking "wait... is that it?"
Uhm...
So, now that I've written this post, I want my 8 minutes back.
Because there are a variety of things that can improve performance, but require an amazing amount of effort and/or money on someone else's part to make you better.
The discussion is ongoing about the effects of genetic enhancement. In other words, you could insert DNA that naturally produces more steroid-like hormones within your cells.
Then can you be accused of doing drugs, since it's your own cells that creates it?
In general, using medical science to modify your internal workings while you lie on a bench in the doctors office is likely to remain banned.
I don't want creationism taught in a science class, though I think it makes a certain amount of sense to teach various concepts of the origin of life side by side.
Tell me, do these belong in science class, or a comparative theology class? World history, perhaps they deserve a mention as well...
But geology or biophysics? hehe.. that's funny shit.
.
The traditional belief of the Tagalog people is that three deities were created from the collision of the Sky (Langit) and the Sea (Linaw). They were Bathala, who reigned over the Sky, Aman Sinaya, who reigned over the Sea, and Amihan, the North Wind, who took over the realm in between.
Bathala and Aman Sinaya then became fierce rivals that led them to fight each other. In one of their battles, Aman Sinaya sent a tempest into the Sky to cause a commotion. Bathala threw giant boulders to stop her. This caused thousands of islands to be created onto the surface of the Sea (which became to be the Philippine archipelago). As the situation worsened, Amihan decided to intervene. In a form of a bird, Amihan flew back and forth between them causing the Sky and the Sea to become closer than it was before. Soon, the two realms met and both gods agreed to end the fight and become friends.
As a sign of friendship, Bathala planted a seed underneath the ocean floor. It soon grew into a bamboo reed, sticking out of the edge of the Sea. One day, Amihan flew by and heard voices, coming from inside the reed. "Oh, North Wind! North Wind! Please let us out.", the voices said. Amihan pecked the reed once, then twice, and all of a sudden, it cracked open. Inside were two human beings; a male and a female. Amihan named the man, Malakas ("strong"), and the woman, Maganda ("beautiful"). Both were flown then onto one of the islands where they settled, built a house, and had millions of offsprings that populated the Earth.
or...
Ancient Finns believed that the world was formed from an egg that was broken.
A bird was flying above the sea, seeking a place to make a nest and lay her eggs. She searched everywhere, but found nothing but water. Then she noticed the first dry place. In some stories it was an island, in other stories it was a boat and in other stories it was a body part of a floating being, like the wizard VÃinÃmÃinen. The place was too unstable for a nest: a big wave came and broke the eggs, spreading their parts all over. However the eggs were not wasted: the upper part of egg covers formed the sky, yolk became the sun, and lower parts of egg formed the mother earth. The first human was VÃinÃmÃinen, he was born from the maiden of air Ilmatar that was made pregnant by the sea. VÃinÃmÃinen ordered forests to be planted, and started human culture.
Hahah, because I'm definitely all for a hard-core creationist who is quoted to have said "creationism is more supported by modern science than evolution".
Nanotech is on the leading edge of engineering disciplines, but is hardly pure science, unless you're talking about atomic or quantum level manipulation of matter.
The idea of making really small electronics and things are really not fundamental science questions, but just a matter of refining manufacturing techniques.
Europe has gone a long way. The foundation of the EU has spurred a massive investment in science as the countries cooperate and increase funding to CERN.
It's no surprise that all of the "cool toys" planned in high-energy physics are located in Europe, including the Large Hadron Collider, JET Fusion Reactor, the planned ITER fusion reactor.
Ironically, the US government was a partner in the ITER reactor project, but withdrew funding when congress got their head stuck up their ass.
Fortunately, the other governments stepped up and covered the difference, but man does the US look like a bunch of ass-backwards idiots when they back out of promises to fund the next generation of research on fusion power, making Asian and Europe pick up the tab.
Hey, I think the US is going downhill, but the GP is still correct.
Why do you think that Asians are actually the majority at west coast schools.
The University of California system shows that 17% of high school graduates are Asian, but almost 45% of incoming freshmen at UC colleges are asian.
Doesn't that indicate to you that Asians are falling all over themselves to come to American schools?
I think that's still the case. Outside of Oxford and a few other schools, the top 20 or 30 schools in every discipline are still in the US and when you think of prestigious top schools, names like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Johns Hopkis, etc are still the names that come up, world-wide.
haha. Yeah, but usually not with your pinky finger... in 1.2 seconds.
woot!
Good local security is not impenetrable, but should require discernible effort. For example, if I have full-disk encryption, it takes an absurd level of effort to read the contents of my drive.
If I have an iPhone, it requires my pinky finger and 1.2 seconds.
Canadian wireless companies are the worst in the world.
I was looking into plans that would cover Canada and the US as if it was one big roaming/calling local area. US providers used to offer a $25 add-on to their national plans to cover Canada too, but they were getting raped by Rogers/Telus so they quit. Now the only way to cover both is to go with Rogers/Telus and take a Canadian number.
A plan with 1600 minutes costs on the order of $450 USD with unlimited data, and that's not "REAL" unlimited data. They also charge for text messages and many areas in Canada are "roaming" even though it's a national plan.
A comparable "nationwide" plan in the US with "real" unlimited data costs about $120. Too bad we can't just add on $25 any more. The problem is that Canadians were buying those plans and taking them home because they're SOO much cheaper.
nahhhh. I work in security as a penetration tester.
Almost all of our successful penetration attacks come from idiots in the mailroom having crappy passwords.
It's almost never from "Joe CEO" or "Full Access Frank", because it's those guy's job to know the consequences of their poor choices.
We get access to the VPN because Mike in the mailroom uses the word "password" and brags about it online.
From there, it's often trivial to do some privilege escalation or "internal" network attacks from the comfort of my couch at 2am.
There MIGHT be 5% of users who's password wouldn't get me a damn thing. They're usually call-center employees who's access is so locked down they can't even punch their own time cards.
But frankly, those accounts barely exist (from a security standpoint) so it's hardly worth talking about.
Unless you have one of the cool infrastructures like Aruba's controller/scanner scheme, you can't possibly monitor the spectrum.
Most big companies I look at run distributed operations. Fifteen buildings in one metro area, a few leased offices downtown, a couple of warehouses maybe a factory or three. Not to mention satellite offices.
I'm curious what you guys use to do rogue detection? Because simply walking around with netstumbler isn't a great solution, but most shops don't have the budget or the motivation to put together a cohesive product like Aruba's to detect for rogue APs.
The people able to put in a $50 router/AP would be the people who more or less have access to do so in a corporate environment, in which case they are aware of the security impacts or should be.
In a corp environment you normally don't have access to just put in a router anywhere, it would be noticed by the IT folks.
Most of what you state would be reflective of a small business not a large corp environment. If that is the case the company has a bigger problem to deal with than just password issues.
Every single one of the Fortune 1000 companies I've done a security audit for this year had rogue access points. Generally they're behind someone's desk, or behind the potted plant in the bigwig's office.
I found one just this morning sitting on the person's desk, blinking like mad (someone was downloading something... hmmmm...)
Of course, in my roll as a consultant, all I can do is notify the IT department and move on, but I always wonder what they do to follow up.
As far as the mental state of a IT security person...I'd have to say getting irritated and drained on having to repeat oneself and fixing the same issues over and over again. I'd think a virus outbreak would be the highlight of their day.
This is why i quit corporate security to work as a consultant doing assessments and penetration testing. I treat it like a hacking game... "capture the flag". Of course, there's the 90 page document to write at the end of it all, but it's really fun to go through and challenge myself with penetrating this multi-billion-dollar company. FYI, I'd put myself at about 75% successful and completely penetrating every aspect of any given business. Some shops (even the big ones), we own 8-ways-to-Sunday, others are pretty tough nuts, but I've never been on a job where we didn't get some pretty good access after awhile.
Its blasphemy to us, but for the normal person its like an IT person wanting to learn how to do the books in Accounting.
But... I do want to know.......:-)
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
That's on my wall at home and is my quote of the decade. Amen.
Yea, the government is so good at stopping armed resistance they stopped the 1993 World Trade Center bombing [wikipedia.org], Oklahoma City bombing [wikipedia.org], and 911. Except they didn't.
Those are isolated terrorist attacks. They're impossible to stop and it's a bit silly to aim policies at the expectation that we could stop them.
They're hardly indicative of the government's counter-insurgency or crowd-disbursal capability.
I would accept the collateral damage of such occasional attacks to remain an open and free society.
And with today's communications technologies there's no way the government could shutdown communications.
Wha? The entirety of a modern city's communication system is in the hands of no more than 6-8 companies. Sure, HAM radio might still operate, but if Clear Channel pulls their radio stations and Qwest, Comcast, Verizon, ATT (et. al.) are compelled to block telecommunications briefly, a city is pretty much in the dark. Internet, cell, landline, etc.
They can't stop personal communication without going way further than the Nazis ever did, but i don't know if modern technology has that sort of capability in the same sense, in the face of national insurgency.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats you. Me, I am typing on this Thinkpad that we wasted money on an XP Pro license for that MIGHT have accumulated twenty hours of use in four years, because we didn't have a choice.
That's funny, because the XP option is cheaper, presumably because Google pays them a shit-ton to pre-install all their crap in Windows.
And Ironically Ubuntu 8.04 is free.
So it would be rather silly for someone to refuse the XP license, unless it was done on "religious" grounds. aka "I refuse to purchase Microsoft because they represent evil and I will not support them."
That's the only rational argument. If you choose to make that argument, so be it, but it is a bit silly from a purely utilitarian standpoint.
I feel like I just read a poorly written book.
But all I read was marginal plot summary of a poorly written book, spoilers and all.
Maybe that's why I feel like I read a poorly written book...
That's because idle recently had a failed suicide attempt and has never been the same.
See, even idle doesn't want idle to show up on the main page.
Which is why the general clinical literature refers to the former as a "chemical dependence".
Addiction is a broader category.
It may be diluting your definition of it, but that doesn't make you right. :-)
Well, if you'd asked me while i was playing MMOs for 50 hours per week, I would have said I was fine... and I did keep my job, even though my performance suffered somewhat... but I did what was needed.
However, after i quit the MMO, I was able to start a business, start working out, get back into shape AND volunteer in the community.
I regard my time in the MMO world as a low-level addiction, yes... along the same lines as a "functioning alcoholic"... where someone CAn maintain a job, but simply CANNOT get through a day without drinking... or at LEAST being completely preoccupied with NOT drinking when you can't do it.
lol
I used to try to sneak time on the MMO at work, even tho it could have got me fired. It was scary!
There's a gross difference between chemical dependence and psychosocial addiction.
Sex, food, weed and MMO are all things you can have the latter, without the former.
To decide that there's no such thing as marajuana addiction, simply because there's no chemical dependence is a tad silly.
Having experienced the MMO side of it, I'd have to agree with the GP.
These days I would rank German above French, just given the general GDP of German speakers vs French speakers.
Even if you disagree, it's hard to put them on anything but equal footing.
Spanish, however, is up there with English and Chinese in terms of global adoption and up there with English and Japanese in terms of international business relevance.
We just watched a 3 minute video with marginally crappy editing of a 45 foot tall door with tic marks on it.
Did this even make sense to anyone? Because I was waiting for something interesting to happen the whole time... and then suddenly it ended.... And I was eyeing the credits, looking for something interesting because I kept thinking "wait... is that it?"
Uhm...
So, now that I've written this post, I want my 8 minutes back.
Why exactly was this posted?
Because there are a variety of things that can improve performance, but require an amazing amount of effort and/or money on someone else's part to make you better.
The discussion is ongoing about the effects of genetic enhancement. In other words, you could insert DNA that naturally produces more steroid-like hormones within your cells.
Then can you be accused of doing drugs, since it's your own cells that creates it?
In general, using medical science to modify your internal workings while you lie on a bench in the doctors office is likely to remain banned.
Iridium is quite common IN the Earth, just not near its surface.
I don't want creationism taught in a science class, though I think it makes a certain amount of sense to teach various concepts of the origin of life side by side.
Tell me, do these belong in science class, or a comparative theology class? World history, perhaps they deserve a mention as well...
But geology or biophysics? hehe.. that's funny shit.
.
The traditional belief of the Tagalog people is that three deities were created from the collision of the Sky (Langit) and the Sea (Linaw). They were Bathala, who reigned over the Sky, Aman Sinaya, who reigned over the Sea, and Amihan, the North Wind, who took over the realm in between.
Bathala and Aman Sinaya then became fierce rivals that led them to fight each other. In one of their battles, Aman Sinaya sent a tempest into the Sky to cause a commotion. Bathala threw giant boulders to stop her. This caused thousands of islands to be created onto the surface of the Sea (which became to be the Philippine archipelago). As the situation worsened, Amihan decided to intervene. In a form of a bird, Amihan flew back and forth between them causing the Sky and the Sea to become closer than it was before. Soon, the two realms met and both gods agreed to end the fight and become friends.
As a sign of friendship, Bathala planted a seed underneath the ocean floor. It soon grew into a bamboo reed, sticking out of the edge of the Sea. One day, Amihan flew by and heard voices, coming from inside the reed. "Oh, North Wind! North Wind! Please let us out.", the voices said. Amihan pecked the reed once, then twice, and all of a sudden, it cracked open. Inside were two human beings; a male and a female. Amihan named the man, Malakas ("strong"), and the woman, Maganda ("beautiful"). Both were flown then onto one of the islands where they settled, built a house, and had millions of offsprings that populated the Earth.
or...
Ancient Finns believed that the world was formed from an egg that was broken.
A bird was flying above the sea, seeking a place to make a nest and lay her eggs. She searched everywhere, but found nothing but water. Then she noticed the first dry place. In some stories it was an island, in other stories it was a boat and in other stories it was a body part of a floating being, like the wizard VÃinÃmÃinen. The place was too unstable for a nest: a big wave came and broke the eggs, spreading their parts all over. However the eggs were not wasted: the upper part of egg covers formed the sky, yolk became the sun, and lower parts of egg formed the mother earth. The first human was VÃinÃmÃinen, he was born from the maiden of air Ilmatar that was made pregnant by the sea. VÃinÃmÃinen ordered forests to be planted, and started human culture.
That has nothing to do with her being a woman.
it has a lot to do with her being a general snob and/or jackass. :-)
Hahah, because I'm definitely all for a hard-core creationist who is quoted to have said "creationism is more supported by modern science than evolution".
Awesome.
Negative.
Nanotech is on the leading edge of engineering disciplines, but is hardly pure science, unless you're talking about atomic or quantum level manipulation of matter.
The idea of making really small electronics and things are really not fundamental science questions, but just a matter of refining manufacturing techniques.
Europe has gone a long way. The foundation of the EU has spurred a massive investment in science as the countries cooperate and increase funding to CERN.
It's no surprise that all of the "cool toys" planned in high-energy physics are located in Europe, including the Large Hadron Collider, JET Fusion Reactor, the planned ITER fusion reactor.
Ironically, the US government was a partner in the ITER reactor project, but withdrew funding when congress got their head stuck up their ass.
Fortunately, the other governments stepped up and covered the difference, but man does the US look like a bunch of ass-backwards idiots when they back out of promises to fund the next generation of research on fusion power, making Asian and Europe pick up the tab.
lol
Recent polls indicate otherwise. [/sarcasm]
Hey, I think the US is going downhill, but the GP is still correct.
Why do you think that Asians are actually the majority at west coast schools.
The University of California system shows that 17% of high school graduates are Asian, but almost 45% of incoming freshmen at UC colleges are asian.
Doesn't that indicate to you that Asians are falling all over themselves to come to American schools?
I think that's still the case. Outside of Oxford and a few other schools, the top 20 or 30 schools in every discipline are still in the US and when you think of prestigious top schools, names like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Johns Hopkis, etc are still the names that come up, world-wide.
Good try though.
Yeah, because our next quarter is going to be PROFITABLE!
Do you honestly think commodity markets and stock brokers give a CRAP about scientific progress and future generations?
Nope. Q3 profits are published next week. Traders of Lucent are going to make a killing....
I seem to feel like you're saying this is a good thing? hmmmmm...
haha. Yeah, but usually not with your pinky finger... in 1.2 seconds.
woot!
Good local security is not impenetrable, but should require discernible effort. For example, if I have full-disk encryption, it takes an absurd level of effort to read the contents of my drive.
If I have an iPhone, it requires my pinky finger and 1.2 seconds.
AppleSauce!
One which categorizes those who dislikes the eating of tasty animals?
Canadian wireless companies are the worst in the world.
I was looking into plans that would cover Canada and the US as if it was one big roaming/calling local area. US providers used to offer a $25 add-on to their national plans to cover Canada too, but they were getting raped by Rogers/Telus so they quit. Now the only way to cover both is to go with Rogers/Telus and take a Canadian number.
A plan with 1600 minutes costs on the order of $450 USD with unlimited data, and that's not "REAL" unlimited data. They also charge for text messages and many areas in Canada are "roaming" even though it's a national plan.
A comparable "nationwide" plan in the US with "real" unlimited data costs about $120. Too bad we can't just add on $25 any more. The problem is that Canadians were buying those plans and taking them home because they're SOO much cheaper.
nahhhh. I work in security as a penetration tester.
Almost all of our successful penetration attacks come from idiots in the mailroom having crappy passwords.
It's almost never from "Joe CEO" or "Full Access Frank", because it's those guy's job to know the consequences of their poor choices.
We get access to the VPN because Mike in the mailroom uses the word "password" and brags about it online.
From there, it's often trivial to do some privilege escalation or "internal" network attacks from the comfort of my couch at 2am.
There MIGHT be 5% of users who's password wouldn't get me a damn thing. They're usually call-center employees who's access is so locked down they can't even punch their own time cards.
But frankly, those accounts barely exist (from a security standpoint) so it's hardly worth talking about.
Agreed.
Unless you have one of the cool infrastructures like Aruba's controller/scanner scheme, you can't possibly monitor the spectrum.
Most big companies I look at run distributed operations. Fifteen buildings in one metro area, a few leased offices downtown, a couple of warehouses maybe a factory or three. Not to mention satellite offices.
I'm curious what you guys use to do rogue detection? Because simply walking around with netstumbler isn't a great solution, but most shops don't have the budget or the motivation to put together a cohesive product like Aruba's to detect for rogue APs.
The people able to put in a $50 router/AP would be the people who more or less have access to do so in a corporate environment, in which case they are aware of the security impacts or should be.
In a corp environment you normally don't have access to just put in a router anywhere, it would be noticed by the IT folks.
Most of what you state would be reflective of a small business not a large corp environment. If that is the case the company has a bigger problem to deal with than just password issues.
Every single one of the Fortune 1000 companies I've done a security audit for this year had rogue access points. Generally they're behind someone's desk, or behind the potted plant in the bigwig's office.
I found one just this morning sitting on the person's desk, blinking like mad (someone was downloading something... hmmmm...)
Of course, in my roll as a consultant, all I can do is notify the IT department and move on, but I always wonder what they do to follow up.
As far as the mental state of a IT security person...I'd have to say getting irritated and drained on having to repeat oneself and fixing the same issues over and over again. I'd think a virus outbreak would be the highlight of their day.
This is why i quit corporate security to work as a consultant doing assessments and penetration testing. I treat it like a hacking game... "capture the flag". Of course, there's the 90 page document to write at the end of it all, but it's really fun to go through and challenge myself with penetrating this multi-billion-dollar company. FYI, I'd put myself at about 75% successful and completely penetrating every aspect of any given business. Some shops (even the big ones), we own 8-ways-to-Sunday, others are pretty tough nuts, but I've never been on a job where we didn't get some pretty good access after awhile.
Its blasphemy to us, but for the normal person its like an IT person wanting to learn how to do the books in Accounting.
But... I do want to know....... :-)
"When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty."
That's on my wall at home and is my quote of the decade. Amen.
Yea, the government is so good at stopping armed resistance they stopped the 1993 World Trade Center bombing [wikipedia.org], Oklahoma City bombing [wikipedia.org], and 911. Except they didn't.
Those are isolated terrorist attacks. They're impossible to stop and it's a bit silly to aim policies at the expectation that we could stop them.
They're hardly indicative of the government's counter-insurgency or crowd-disbursal capability.
I would accept the collateral damage of such occasional attacks to remain an open and free society.
And with today's communications technologies there's no way the government could shutdown communications.
Wha? The entirety of a modern city's communication system is in the hands of no more than 6-8 companies. Sure, HAM radio might still operate, but if Clear Channel pulls their radio stations and Qwest, Comcast, Verizon, ATT (et. al.) are compelled to block telecommunications briefly, a city is pretty much in the dark. Internet, cell, landline, etc.
They can't stop personal communication without going way further than the Nazis ever did, but i don't know if modern technology has that sort of capability in the same sense, in the face of national insurgency.