People are not robots. Even you, who purports not to care, will be affected negatively by a shitty work environment where you spend your time dealing with the tolerated incompetence of a senior programmer, and it will affect your attitude and skills when a poorly run business folds and you have to find a job at another company and suddenly find that you spent 5-10 years of your life getting practice fixing problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place rather than getting actual, marketable experience.
I feel like if you're junior to someone who won't take criticism well, and you can't get the manager to do something about it, then you have a management problem. You should be doing what you should always do in this situation: move to a different position where you are not under this manager or leave your job for a one with a decent boss.
This is not an issue just about his ability to program at this point.
To throw lead downrange, you need ammunition, which is not easy to get either.
Pretty sure "terrorists" in TFA are not going to be stopped or "get away scott-free" because they weren't able to print some damn plastic guns. Apparently, it's more likely these days that they would buy a pressure cooker.
Senator Yee is dumb and doesn't know what he's talking about.
But, you are dumber, and don't understand the basic concept of laws and enforcement. There are plenty of place with stricter bans on guns than the US that are not Mexico. The difference is obviously an effective enforcement system and corrupt government and enforment officials OWNED BY THE DRUG CARTELS .
Stop trying to fit reality into your world view. You don't know jack shit about gang-related crimes. The people living in Chicago that have to deal with shootings are hardly living in a "criminal paradise," and arming the non-violent citizens of the city would not help the crime situation. There are all kinds of exisiting issues including poverty, segregation due to social-economic status, and existing problems of gun violence that each new generation of young, poor men is dragged into. I assure you that Chicago is not a "criminal paradise," and that relaxing gun laws there or in any other city would make the situation worse, not better.
Somehow, you got it into your dumb head that not only is more violence the solution to the current violence problem, but that everyone else thinks the same way you do and would go and arm themselves with guns to shoot other human beings to "protect themselves" if only the government would get out of their way and let them own guns. And that if the government had laws against buying guns, that they would go out and print their own guns, if only there were those damn laws against 3-D printers.
I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally do not look at web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.
I will make three points here: 1. Brute-force attacks are not the main vulnerability of passwords at this point, so debating entropy is a little pointless 2. Your calculation of 4 sextillion combinations of words is overly optimistic 3. And 4 sextillion doesn't even compare that favorably to current password schemes
1. It's almost trivially easy to defeat brute-force attacks compared to securing passwords from being lost through social engineering, trojans, and general poor password practice.
2. There may be a quarter of a million words, but the average user will choose a passphrase that has: (a) an adjective-noun pair, (b) words all 4 characters or more (c) from a vocabulary of about 2000-4000 commonly used words, (d) and include a lot of nouns that are animals, places, sports, or objects found around the office (rather than more abstract nouns like "conciousness" or "ambiguity") The entropy in that is much lower than 4 sextillion.
3. Even if we went with your 4 sextillion (4 * 10^21) value of entropy, that is 1/5th the entropy of a 12-character password that can be any combination of upper/lower-case characters, digits, or one of 10 punctuation characters (72^12 = 2 * 10^22). At best, your scheme is better than an 11-digit password. A slight improvement, but not revolutionary.
Also, I can't think of any 2-factor authentication that doesn't involve a central authority of some sort, which poses incredible scaling and logistics issues. Since the internet is international, you'd need an international authority. Good luck getting people to agree on one. Cell phones might be the closest thing we have to a consensus, but that obviously leaves out huge populations of the world where that can't be relied on.
For better or worse, passwords are probably going to remain the same as they have been for the past decade.
I feel like everyone is so focused on the "inequality" part of the article that no one is paying attention to "holy crap, 8 weeks is a lot of time off." Seriously? 8 weeks of paid leave to spend with your kid? I don't think that constitutes a policy that "discourages dads from participating in their kids lives." At most, there's a bit of grumbling about how it's unfair that your coworker in the next office got 8 more weeks paid off than you did, but then your wife will smack you in the head, remind you that you didn't have to carry a baby around for 9 months including many weeks where a lot of basic movements we take for granted become very difficult, and then force a small person through our genitals. And it's not like you can't take additional unpaid time off, no questions asked.
I've seen people who've worked with a company for years still have to take vacation time to make up for a very meager paternity leave, so even if you have a point to make about sexism, which I may or may not agree with, you are simply moaning and groaning about a completely unrelated topic if you're complaining that 8 weeks of paid paternity leave somehow is inhibiting the fathers from being parents or that this somehow reduces fathers to only a source of income.
And please, even when making a valid point that we should start treating dads as equal parents as moms, don't ignore the huge difference in physical changes that happens to a woman giving birth that do not happen her husband.
Which is the cause and which is the effect though? I think there are a lot of valid arguments that standardized testing is hurting the ability of schools provide their kids an education.
With all the reprecussions schools face these days for not testing well, it could well be that schools that have smart kids (read: higher social-economic status) can teach Algebra and have kids do well in testing, while school where the students are already struggling in the testing cannot focus on teaching Algebra over teaching testing because if they don't improve their test scores, everyone assumes the school isn't doing a good job.
I'm not saying that teachers are saints or anything, but most people who decide to go into the US's public school system with its terrible pay and long hours already have the desire to give kids a real eduation and also realize that teaching to the test is not doing so.
Yes, but the school is supposed to be the a source of wisdom and knowledge for developing adults. Instead of being the voice of reason that acknowledges and points out the heightened sensitivity to the child (and yes, a 16-year-old is still very much a child when it comes to making non-malicious mistakes like this), and teaches her to exercise better judgement, the school system is teaching her that if her curiosity leads her to accidentally crossing the line on what will freak out parents, the who system will come down on her and try to throw the book at her.
Although, after reading what I just wrote, that's probably a pretty accurate and depressing lesson of our current paranoid state. Still, I don't think kids should be subjected to such treatment.
I agree completely. Polk County School's justification for expullsion was (from TFA)
Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions.
Yes, Polk County School, I think the 16-year-old understands what the general concept of punishment is and that actions have consequences. I don't see how they're going to be able to explain why a small explosion that produced as much force as any other gas reaction in a sealed bottle deserves expulsion, a felony charge, and being tried as an adult.
This one comment on TFA also seems appropriate:
User: [ideasrule]
Guys and girls, we should be engaging in activism instead of just posting comments! I've collected the sites and emails offered by other users into one place:
The other email someone offered, lbryan.pd@cityofbartow.net, is of "Crime Prevention Practioner" Lyn Bryan and it doesn't work (my email was blocked). Remember that the school principal is a reasonable person who rightly thinks the girl didn't intend any harm, so we should be supportive of him.
What if the unarmed assault was unprovoked? There's no reason to believe that the stranger you've never met before who is randomly hitting you in the face is suddenly going to stop.
I don't see why these devices are creating so much anger. Seriously? You're so ticked off by someone wearing a device that you're going to physically assault them?
I agree that Mozilla should have no problem stopping Gamma International from using their trademark, but I think you are wrong about the libGMP case. Using FOSS according to the license in no way makes your code more vulnerable to getting its libraries hijacked. It means appropriately releasing the parts of your own source code as FOSS. If your implementation is any good, it shouldn't be possible to tamper with the device.
How on earth does open source provide the means to identify imposters more readily? What central authority are you talking about? md5 will allow you to check that binary whether it's FOSS or not, and your eyeballs are pretty good at determining if another program is stealing a logo/name.
Stop being stupid. There are some obvious benefits with only allowing certain people to successfully operate something like a gun. I'd definitely pay more for a car I could park and lock than one that I couldn't. Whether the locking mechanism is reliable is another issue.
You make other good points, but this isn't DRM any more than a password on my desktop so that someone can't randomly walk up and use it is DRM. It's a lock.
I think if you were given evidence of god, you should believe in god whether you were previously Buddist, Wiccan, agnostic, or aetheist. To do otherwise would just be willful blindness.
Why not just read a book or magazine? It's probably good to diversify your reading, and given that you thought of using a desktop + numpad on a treadmill, you probably get enough computer screen time as is.
No. You are not right. Stop being stupid. He didn't say that there was no benefit to a fly-by. He said there would be no benefit to a fly-by OVER testing in space or actually landing on Mars. And a fly-by of Mars is many many times harder than a fly-by of the moon.
Similarly, there would be no point in my trying to commute to work in a city on a horse. Sure, people in history have done great things using horses, and for a long time horses made sense, but today, with the option of driving a car, taking the bus, or riding a bike on well-paved roads that are decidedly horse-unfriendly. So yes, even though riding a horse to work is better than walking, it is pointless for me to go buy a horse.
Well, you could read the link first before commenting. Obviously if they were doing analysis at that low a level, they wouldn't have a job:
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
One of the problems is that while Target SELLS feminine supplies and/or birth control, people don't view Target as the source for such things and will go to CVS for those items, Target for the diapers, Safeway for baby food, and maybe Sears for the baby supplies, and Target wants to sell them every thing. So the analysis isn't as easy as it would be if you knew their entire purchase history. From the NYT article:
new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper.
However, don't blame Target or Google. Every company would do this if they could, and most try. The only Microsoft or another company would bring this sort of profiling to light is because they can't compete playing Google's or Facebook's game and they want to level the playing field. It doesn't make any more sense to trust Microsoft with your privacy than Google; they're only looking out for themselves.
AT&T is already selling my information too. And gouging me on prices. If anyone should offer utility prices, it should be the telecom companies. Wireless service needs to be less stupid.
How does this work? You can't keep tracking the money until it hits fuel. Otherwise, you could just as easily use the same argument to say that any money you spend eventually goes into toasters or puppies.
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People are not robots. Even you, who purports not to care, will be affected negatively by a shitty work environment where you spend your time dealing with the tolerated incompetence of a senior programmer, and it will affect your attitude and skills when a poorly run business folds and you have to find a job at another company and suddenly find that you spent 5-10 years of your life getting practice fixing problems that shouldn't have existed in the first place rather than getting actual, marketable experience.
I feel like if you're junior to someone who won't take criticism well, and you can't get the manager to do something about it, then you have a management problem. You should be doing what you should always do in this situation: move to a different position where you are not under this manager or leave your job for a one with a decent boss.
This is not an issue just about his ability to program at this point.
To throw lead downrange, you need ammunition, which is not easy to get either.
Pretty sure "terrorists" in TFA are not going to be stopped or "get away scott-free" because they weren't able to print some damn plastic guns. Apparently, it's more likely these days that they would buy a pressure cooker.
Senator Yee is dumb and doesn't know what he's talking about.
But, you are dumber, and don't understand the basic concept of laws and enforcement. There are plenty of place with stricter bans on guns than the US that are not Mexico. The difference is obviously an effective enforcement system and corrupt government and enforment officials OWNED BY THE DRUG CARTELS .
Stop trying to fit reality into your world view. You don't know jack shit about gang-related crimes. The people living in Chicago that have to deal with shootings are hardly living in a "criminal paradise," and arming the non-violent citizens of the city would not help the crime situation. There are all kinds of exisiting issues including poverty, segregation due to social-economic status, and existing problems of gun violence that each new generation of young, poor men is dragged into. I assure you that Chicago is not a "criminal paradise," and that relaxing gun laws there or in any other city would make the situation worse, not better.
Somehow, you got it into your dumb head that not only is more violence the solution to the current violence problem, but that everyone else thinks the same way you do and would go and arm themselves with guns to shoot other human beings to "protect themselves" if only the government would get out of their way and let them own guns. And that if the government had laws against buying guns, that they would go out and print their own guns, if only there were those damn laws against 3-D printers.
I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally do not look at web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see git://git.gnu.org/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly.
I think this is the key.
Get your friends' computers infected instead!
There's an evolutionary reason for racism too, but we've made much better progress on that front.
I will make three points here:
1. Brute-force attacks are not the main vulnerability of passwords at this point, so debating entropy is a little pointless
2. Your calculation of 4 sextillion combinations of words is overly optimistic
3. And 4 sextillion doesn't even compare that favorably to current password schemes
1. It's almost trivially easy to defeat brute-force attacks compared to securing passwords from being lost through social engineering, trojans, and general poor password practice.
2. There may be a quarter of a million words, but the average user will choose a passphrase that has:
(a) an adjective-noun pair,
(b) words all 4 characters or more
(c) from a vocabulary of about 2000-4000 commonly used words,
(d) and include a lot of nouns that are animals, places, sports, or objects found around the office (rather than more abstract nouns like "conciousness" or "ambiguity")
The entropy in that is much lower than 4 sextillion.
3. Even if we went with your 4 sextillion (4 * 10^21) value of entropy, that is 1/5th the entropy of a 12-character password that can be any combination of upper/lower-case characters, digits, or one of 10 punctuation characters (72^12 = 2 * 10^22). At best, your scheme is better than an 11-digit password. A slight improvement, but not revolutionary.
Also, I can't think of any 2-factor authentication that doesn't involve a central authority of some sort, which poses incredible scaling and logistics issues. Since the internet is international, you'd need an international authority. Good luck getting people to agree on one. Cell phones might be the closest thing we have to a consensus, but that obviously leaves out huge populations of the world where that can't be relied on.
For better or worse, passwords are probably going to remain the same as they have been for the past decade.
I feel like everyone is so focused on the "inequality" part of the article that no one is paying attention to "holy crap, 8 weeks is a lot of time off." Seriously? 8 weeks of paid leave to spend with your kid? I don't think that constitutes a policy that "discourages dads from participating in their kids lives." At most, there's a bit of grumbling about how it's unfair that your coworker in the next office got 8 more weeks paid off than you did, but then your wife will smack you in the head, remind you that you didn't have to carry a baby around for 9 months including many weeks where a lot of basic movements we take for granted become very difficult, and then force a small person through our genitals. And it's not like you can't take additional unpaid time off, no questions asked.
I've seen people who've worked with a company for years still have to take vacation time to make up for a very meager paternity leave, so even if you have a point to make about sexism, which I may or may not agree with, you are simply moaning and groaning about a completely unrelated topic if you're complaining that 8 weeks of paid paternity leave somehow is inhibiting the fathers from being parents or that this somehow reduces fathers to only a source of income.
And please, even when making a valid point that we should start treating dads as equal parents as moms, don't ignore the huge difference in physical changes that happens to a woman giving birth that do not happen her husband.
Which is the cause and which is the effect though? I think there are a lot of valid arguments that standardized testing is hurting the ability of schools provide their kids an education.
With all the reprecussions schools face these days for not testing well, it could well be that schools that have smart kids (read: higher social-economic status) can teach Algebra and have kids do well in testing, while school where the students are already struggling in the testing cannot focus on teaching Algebra over teaching testing because if they don't improve their test scores, everyone assumes the school isn't doing a good job.
I'm not saying that teachers are saints or anything, but most people who decide to go into the US's public school system with its terrible pay and long hours already have the desire to give kids a real eduation and also realize that teaching to the test is not doing so.
Yes, but the school is supposed to be the a source of wisdom and knowledge for developing adults. Instead of being the voice of reason that acknowledges and points out the heightened sensitivity to the child (and yes, a 16-year-old is still very much a child when it comes to making non-malicious mistakes like this), and teaches her to exercise better judgement, the school system is teaching her that if her curiosity leads her to accidentally crossing the line on what will freak out parents, the who system will come down on her and try to throw the book at her.
Although, after reading what I just wrote, that's probably a pretty accurate and depressing lesson of our current paranoid state. Still, I don't think kids should be subjected to such treatment.
I agree completely.
Polk County School's justification for expullsion was (from TFA)
Anytime a student makes a bad choice it is disappointing to us. We urge our parents to join us in conveying the message that there are consequences to actions.
Yes, Polk County School, I think the 16-year-old understands what the general concept of punishment is and that actions have consequences. I don't see how they're going to be able to explain why a small explosion that produced as much force as any other gas reaction in a sealed bottle deserves expulsion, a felony charge, and being tried as an adult.
This one comment on TFA also seems appropriate:
User: [ideasrule]
Guys and girls, we should be engaging in activism instead of just posting comments! I've collected the sites and emails offered by other users into one place:
Change.org petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/the-bartow-police-and-bartow-high-school-drop-charges-against-kiera-wilmot
Police department complaint form: http://www.cityofbartow.net/index.aspx?recordid=103&page=18
School superintendent: john.stewart@polk-fl.net
School principal: Ronald.Pritchard@polk-fl.net
The other email someone offered, lbryan.pd@cityofbartow.net, is of "Crime Prevention Practioner" Lyn Bryan and it doesn't work (my email was blocked).
Remember that the school principal is a reasonable person who rightly thinks the girl didn't intend any harm, so we should be supportive of him.
What if the unarmed assault was unprovoked? There's no reason to believe that the stranger you've never met before who is randomly hitting you in the face is suddenly going to stop.
I don't see why these devices are creating so much anger. Seriously? You're so ticked off by someone wearing a device that you're going to physically assault them?
Yes. Very much so.
I agree that Mozilla should have no problem stopping Gamma International from using their trademark, but I think you are wrong about the libGMP case. Using FOSS according to the license in no way makes your code more vulnerable to getting its libraries hijacked. It means appropriately releasing the parts of your own source code as FOSS. If your implementation is any good, it shouldn't be possible to tamper with the device.
How on earth does open source provide the means to identify imposters more readily? What central authority are you talking about? md5 will allow you to check that binary whether it's FOSS or not, and your eyeballs are pretty good at determining if another program is stealing a logo/name.
Stop being stupid. There are some obvious benefits with only allowing certain people to successfully operate something like a gun. I'd definitely pay more for a car I could park and lock than one that I couldn't. Whether the locking mechanism is reliable is another issue.
You make other good points, but this isn't DRM any more than a password on my desktop so that someone can't randomly walk up and use it is DRM. It's a lock.
I think if you were given evidence of god, you should believe in god whether you were previously Buddist, Wiccan, agnostic, or aetheist. To do otherwise would just be willful blindness.
Why not just read a book or magazine? It's probably good to diversify your reading, and given that you thought of using a desktop + numpad on a treadmill, you probably get enough computer screen time as is.
No. You are not right. Stop being stupid. He didn't say that there was no benefit to a fly-by. He said there would be no benefit to a fly-by OVER testing in space or actually landing on Mars. And a fly-by of Mars is many many times harder than a fly-by of the moon.
Similarly, there would be no point in my trying to commute to work in a city on a horse. Sure, people in history have done great things using horses, and for a long time horses made sense, but today, with the option of driving a car, taking the bus, or riding a bike on well-paved roads that are decidedly horse-unfriendly. So yes, even though riding a horse to work is better than walking, it is pointless for me to go buy a horse.
Well, you could read the link first before commenting. Obviously if they were doing analysis at that low a level, they wouldn't have a job:
One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.
One of the problems is that while Target SELLS feminine supplies and/or birth control, people don't view Target as the source for such things and will go to CVS for those items, Target for the diapers, Safeway for baby food, and maybe Sears for the baby supplies, and Target wants to sell them every thing. So the analysis isn't as easy as it would be if you knew their entire purchase history. From the NYT article:
new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper.
However, don't blame Target or Google. Every company would do this if they could, and most try. The only Microsoft or another company would bring this sort of profiling to light is because they can't compete playing Google's or Facebook's game and they want to level the playing field. It doesn't make any more sense to trust Microsoft with your privacy than Google; they're only looking out for themselves.
AT&T is already selling my information too. And gouging me on prices. If anyone should offer utility prices, it should be the telecom companies. Wireless service needs to be less stupid.
I agree on most points, but I'm pretty sure almost no one is going to pay money to look at a Nobel Prize.
How does this work? You can't keep tracking the money until it hits fuel. Otherwise, you could just as easily use the same argument to say that any money you spend eventually goes into toasters or puppies.