"Culture vs. law.... If it isn't illegal than that culture should have passed laws to protect itself "
Well maybe that's not the culture to do that in Japan;).
Seriously, in most countries there are plenty of unwritten rules.
In Japan I believe you're not supposed to eat while walking about on the street.
And in most (all?) countries, I believe it's the unwritten rule that you are supposed to face the doorway in an elevator, not put your back to the doorway and smile at everyone;)...
If you're an alien from another world (or an observant human) you'll see plenty of interesting unwritten rules.
Nobody writes all of them down.
It should not be illegal to break those rules once in a while, but if you keep doing that, you're being an asshole.
It's not illegal to be an asshole in most countries. Do we make it illegal to be an asshole?
I don't think that's such a good idea. I'm sure most of us have been assholes a few times in our lives.
To me, a country with a high proportion of persistent and unrepentant assholes shows a failure of society/culture, to outlaw "behaving like an asshole" is not addressing the real problem - many will remain assholes and just behave "almost but not quite an asshole" in legal terms.
Good thing my ISP (TM Net/Streamyx) sucks eh? They're not even giving me the 512kbps I paid for.
Let's see 10 hours * 1Gbps / 512kbps = 2.22 years.
If you have a 10Mbps link that makes it 41 days.
I think I would have made a dns request and got the valid dns reply into my cache before the 2 years are up. Or my connection would have gone down and I'd get a different IP by then. Thanks to TM Net for protecting me from such attacks;).
Either that or I'll be safe because the site would have DoSed me off the net with the flood of udp packets at 1Gbps...
BTW I'm using djbdns (any bets on whether my ISP would have patched their nameservers already?;) ). So I'm not sure if the attack might work as well.
I actually set my expectations low, cranked my IQ down and set suspension of disbelief to high. After all it's Indy Jones, you're not supposed to be thinking too much.
But when Indy Jones did the ball bearings stuff, those Standard Indy settings started to show their shortcomings... I went "OK turn off physics"
Things totally fell apart when Tarzan Boy started swinging from tree to tree. I had to do some major changes at that point. How does that add to the story line or show?
I enjoyed the first one and temple of doom was ok. This one, save your money/bandwidth. Go watch something else. I heard Batman is good.
I'm actually quite sure there are talented and skilled Indian programmers. But many of the good ones have either left India, or already charge quite high. So the odds of getting a good one on a random outsource is low. Plus even if you get them, they might get reassigned away from your project - bait and switch.
In one of the companies I worked for, the top management decided to outsource part of a project to India. We're in a cheap country and they decide to spend USD1 million to outsource to a "famous" Indian company. USD1 million would have paid a fair bunch of full time permanent locals for quite a number of years. Go figure.
I even checked and a number of the Indian programmers were getting higher salaries than me! And my then boss kept saying I'm overpaid. I know I'm not that good, but hey my colleagues/peers definitely know I'm better than those Indian programmers- you might fool your boss (just one person after all), but it's harder to fool your peers - they're the ones who often have to deal with or clean up your messes. Lets say we were spending a lot of time fixing the bugs from India (and I think they still are to this day;) ).
My code has relatively few bugs. And in my biased opinion the dhcp server I wrote for work is better than ISC dhcpd, or dnsmasq's dhcpd (but that's not a high bar;) I heard some versions of ISC dhcpd are not RFC compliant in a way that causes problems with Vista ).
Maybe coders can be ranked on a log scale based on the time it takes for them to do something nontrivial. What a rank 5 coder can do in one day, a rank 4 will take 10 days, a rank 3 will take 100 days, and a rank 2 will take 1000 days.
I see a lot of coders who think they are 7/10 or even 8/10 on a quasilinear scale, more than it makes sense based on expected population curves;).
There's one thing to keep in mind though about hiring the not so good. The top coder might get bored and want to do something else.
I'm thinking you could have the top coder could code in English, then get the "not so good" team to compile it to Java or Python or something. Then the cheaper bunch can maintain the stuff, whilst the top coder can be assigned to a new project.
BTW: some places pay you to donate sperm (if it's of good quality - can't have too many duds/blanks).
Anyway I'm with you. If copyright terms were shorter, perhaps Microsoft would have produced something better than Vista.
As I've been saying - if the pace of progress is supposed to be getting faster and faster (and marketing and distribution is so much better) then copyright terms should be getting shorter and shorter if you are trying to encourage progress.
I actually heard that the popular method of forcing people to talk about something traumatic does more harm than good. Go google it.
If they keep having to talk about it, it gets more stuck in their mind. I mean after all that's one common way of remembering stuff - keep repeating it.
So if you don't want it to build up, you don't have them talk or think about it, you give them something else to do that distracts them from it and occupies their mind and memory - their "bandwidth".
If they have to think of 100 other things to remember later, it has a higher chance of making their their traumatic memory weaker and not as vivid.
A lot of leaders get to the top by not caring about others and just being very good at pretending to care.
You want your leaders to care, try my proposal:
In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.
But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on death row.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).
This proposal has many advantages: 1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly. 2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it. 3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war. 4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
"Actually there is a shortage of TALENTED IT people"
Seems there's a shortage of barely competent people, not just talented ones.
Just look at Slashdot for example. This is supposed to be a nerd site, and yet so many posters have reading comprehension problems, difficulties with basic reasoning and logic, even simple "mental leaps" are beyond them - you have to explain every little step to them, and when you start to do that, they fixate on the wrong thing first and they miss the forest for the trees (even if the forest was mentioned earlier, they would have forgotten it;) ).
Go pick a random slashdot story and you might see what I mean.
It's sad, but on the bright side it does mean less competition!
I'm a bit above average in IT stuff, but in my experience the average is so crap, that being a bit above average gets me a long way[1]. On a _log_ scale of IT skill/talent I'm probably about 2 or 3, and I suppose the 9s and 10s are the Carmacks and Knuths. But it's amazing how few alleged IT bunch crawl past 1 - give some of these so called IT people a year and they can't do what I can do in a month (or even 3 days ). Whereas give me 10 years and I probably still wouldn't be able to do what the top people do in a month (or 3 days).
[1] Especially since I'm in a cheap country (where USD1.50 gets you a decent lunch) - a high salary here would be the same as what burger flippers or a cashier at a fancy coffee place get in a "Developed Nation".
So think about it, are you competitive if you live in some expensive country?
Here's my advice, if you don't want to be outsourced stick to something that _requires_ you to "be there".
For example: it'll be a long while before the US outsources dentists to India/China - nobody wants a dentist with 200 millisecond lag or one with "connectivity problems" halfway through drilling (and you still need an expensive robot at the US end ).
If you're an IT security auditor that does physical security audits, then yes you must "be there".
But if you're just some code monkey, it's bang for buck.
Having to pay more for a network engineer than a hamburger flipper (or vice versa) is not evil.
BUT encouraging women to be low paid hamburger flippers when they aren't interested AND have other better options, is either stupid or evil. Especially when in those very articles they keep claiming that it will be such a good thing for women.
Now if they said "It'll be a good thing for the CEOs, if more women went into IT", then that's probably a bit more truthful.
Haven't you heard? There is a shortage of women in IT.
We need to encourage more women to go into IT, so that they can:
1) Lose their jobs promptly 2) Have difficulty finding jobs in IT 3) Increase the supply of IT jobs and thus lower IT wages
This must be a good thing right?
After all every few months there is some mass media prattle about encouraging women in IT.
Obviously they'd rather women not go into pharmacy, law, dentistry, nursing and other jobs which are a bit harder to send overseas.
Maybe a career in IT is good for women in Mumbai, but if the US women aren't interested (and sure looks like they aren't), I think it is rather stupid or even _evil_ to encourage them to go into IT.
I agree. It's not the lack of industry specific apps that should bother people that much.
It's the lack of non industry specific apps - HR, Finance/Accounting. You mentioned that sort of stuff. Stuff that every fair sized company needs.
Then there's also stuff like calendaring/scheduling.
Lots of people are resorting to MS Outlook and Exchange because the OSS options just aren't compelling.
You need an OSS client AND server that work well together for email, calendaring, etc AND the client must run on Windows/OSX - because that's what Microsoft Office runs on.
Because OpenOffice sucks. It does - it takes ages to launch, and there are plenty of WTF bugs - just having some normal character at the end of a line messed up formatting on my OpenOffice Impress presentation - I had to _downgrade_ to an _earlier_ version to have that work right - but that means accepting OTHER bugs.
Say what you like about MSOffice, but the 97 and 2003 versions are still better than OOo. The latest? Well let's say the latest MS Office is an opportunity for OOo to gain significant market share if they get their act together.
And Vista should be a dream come true for Desktop Linux. But..
Yes. What a lot of people miss is elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Enough voters have to be able to look at the elections and say "OK it's been done reasonably fairly, and looks like we lost fair and square".
So when their candidates lose, most of them will "go home", and the cops can handle the few sore losers left that try to do stupid stuff.
And also this way the rest of the world won't laugh at your elections.
A fair and fancy electronic voting system with complex checks and all that might not satisfy Trailer Park Joe (or even Harry the Hacker - since Harry knows how easy it is to hack systems).
Whereas hand counted ballots might, especially when observers from Trailer Park Joe's party can see every vote that's counted, from sealed ballot boxes that never left the polling area (nor the sight of the observers - party and independents).
You might be able to rig one area, but to rig many areas without being caught is going to be tough.
I'm a coder and I think electronic voting is a bad idea AND pointless.
Hand counting scales with voter population. The more voters you have the more people you should have to count your votes.
And what's the rush? You don't need the results in 1 minute. Take the time to do it right.
The USA is willing to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to pick a government for Iraq, but when it comes to picking the Government of the Most Powerful Nation in the World, diebolded elections are good enough.
Not really. An SELinux policy tends to be a lot more verbose than sandboxing templates like "Guest Game" or "Standard Screensaver".
What I'm proposing is a layer above SELinux/AppArmor, that's more suitable for "normal folk".
It's still not going to be 100%, but an exceedingly few people are going to be able to read and understand an SELinux policy, so if an app says "I want this SELinux policy" and it's followed by a few pages of the policy, people are just going to click "OK".
Whereas with my suggestion, there's a slightly higher chance of people doing the right thing. I could teach my uncles and aunts to "Don't click OK when you see this Red Striped Warning Dialog".
Custom policies (for special apps) would have to be signed by the distro or a trusted party, and these shouldn't normally require user intervention.
It is easier to certify that a policy is reasonably safe, than it is to certify that a program will be reasonably safe. There are plenty of examples of "sneaky" code.
3rd party code should say what it is and what sandbox template it requires to run.
If the requested sandbox is in line with what the code claims to be, and "what it is" is what the user wants, then the user can decide to allow it.
The O/S then sandboxes the code according to those privileges.
Expecting users or software to identify good code from bad code is similar to expecting them to solve the "Halting Problem".
With my suggestion, it is a lot easier to train users to understand that a "Paris Hilton Video" which requires "Full System Privileges" is likely to be malware.
Whereas a "Cute Game" that requires "Guest Game Privileges" should be OK and since the O/S sandboxes it, there's little the "Cute Game" can do - it should not even be able to access the user's Documents (which unfortunately is possible in most Desktop O/Ses today - almost anything the user launches can access the user's documents, microphone, webcam etc).
So chop trees down, make furniture, paper, packaging out of them, landfill the discards then grow more trees.
Simple:).
Not so simple - work out a way to do it efficiently so that you only need to use the equivalent of a small percentage of trees chopped down to provide energy and resources for all that.
Slashdot Mirror
"Culture vs. law.... If it isn't illegal than that culture should have passed laws to protect itself "
;).
;)...
Well maybe that's not the culture to do that in Japan
Seriously, in most countries there are plenty of unwritten rules.
In Japan I believe you're not supposed to eat while walking about on the street.
And in most (all?) countries, I believe it's the unwritten rule that you are supposed to face the doorway in an elevator, not put your back to the doorway and smile at everyone
If you're an alien from another world (or an observant human) you'll see plenty of interesting unwritten rules.
Nobody writes all of them down.
It should not be illegal to break those rules once in a while, but if you keep doing that, you're being an asshole.
It's not illegal to be an asshole in most countries. Do we make it illegal to be an asshole?
I don't think that's such a good idea. I'm sure most of us have been assholes a few times in our lives.
To me, a country with a high proportion of persistent and unrepentant assholes shows a failure of society/culture, to outlaw "behaving like an asshole" is not addressing the real problem - many will remain assholes and just behave "almost but not quite an asshole" in legal terms.
Good thing my ISP (TM Net/Streamyx) sucks eh? They're not even giving me the 512kbps I paid for.
;).
;) ). So I'm not sure if the attack might work as well.
Let's see 10 hours * 1Gbps / 512kbps = 2.22 years.
If you have a 10Mbps link that makes it 41 days.
I think I would have made a dns request and got the valid dns reply into my cache before the 2 years are up. Or my connection would have gone down and I'd get a different IP by then. Thanks to TM Net for protecting me from such attacks
Either that or I'll be safe because the site would have DoSed me off the net with the flood of udp packets at 1Gbps...
BTW I'm using djbdns (any bets on whether my ISP would have patched their nameservers already?
Agh. I meant Last Crusade instead of Temple of Doom!
;).
*smacks head*
See that's what happens when you keep tweaking your brain settings for movies
I actually set my expectations low, cranked my IQ down and set suspension of disbelief to high. After all it's Indy Jones, you're not supposed to be thinking too much.
But when Indy Jones did the ball bearings stuff, those Standard Indy settings started to show their shortcomings... I went "OK turn off physics"
Things totally fell apart when Tarzan Boy started swinging from tree to tree. I had to do some major changes at that point. How does that add to the story line or show?
I enjoyed the first one and temple of doom was ok. This one, save your money/bandwidth. Go watch something else. I heard Batman is good.
I added barely because I was trying to be nice :).
;) ).
;) I heard some versions of ISC dhcpd are not RFC compliant in a way that causes problems with Vista ).
;).
I'm actually quite sure there are talented and skilled Indian programmers. But many of the good ones have either left India, or already charge quite high. So the odds of getting a good one on a random outsource is low. Plus even if you get them, they might get reassigned away from your project - bait and switch.
In one of the companies I worked for, the top management decided to outsource part of a project to India. We're in a cheap country and they decide to spend USD1 million to outsource to a "famous" Indian company. USD1 million would have paid a fair bunch of full time permanent locals for quite a number of years. Go figure.
I even checked and a number of the Indian programmers were getting higher salaries than me! And my then boss kept saying I'm overpaid. I know I'm not that good, but hey my colleagues/peers definitely know I'm better than those Indian programmers- you might fool your boss (just one person after all), but it's harder to fool your peers - they're the ones who often have to deal with or clean up your messes. Lets say we were spending a lot of time fixing the bugs from India (and I think they still are to this day
My code has relatively few bugs. And in my biased opinion the dhcp server I wrote for work is better than ISC dhcpd, or dnsmasq's dhcpd (but that's not a high bar
Maybe coders can be ranked on a log scale based on the time it takes for them to do something nontrivial. What a rank 5 coder can do in one day, a rank 4 will take 10 days, a rank 3 will take 100 days, and a rank 2 will take 1000 days.
I see a lot of coders who think they are 7/10 or even 8/10 on a quasilinear scale, more than it makes sense based on expected population curves
There's one thing to keep in mind though about hiring the not so good. The top coder might get bored and want to do something else.
I'm thinking you could have the top coder could code in English, then get the "not so good" team to compile it to Java or Python or something. Then the cheaper bunch can maintain the stuff, whilst the top coder can be assigned to a new project.
BTW: some places pay you to donate sperm (if it's of good quality - can't have too many duds/blanks).
Anyway I'm with you. If copyright terms were shorter, perhaps Microsoft would have produced something better than Vista.
As I've been saying - if the pace of progress is supposed to be getting faster and faster (and marketing and distribution is so much better) then copyright terms should be getting shorter and shorter if you are trying to encourage progress.
Not longer and longer. Simple logic.
I actually heard that the popular method of forcing people to talk about something traumatic does more harm than good. Go google it.
If they keep having to talk about it, it gets more stuck in their mind. I mean after all that's one common way of remembering stuff - keep repeating it.
So if you don't want it to build up, you don't have them talk or think about it, you give them something else to do that distracts them from it and occupies their mind and memory - their "bandwidth".
If they have to think of 100 other things to remember later, it has a higher chance of making their their traumatic memory weaker and not as vivid.
A lot of leaders get to the top by not caring about others and just being very good at pretending to care.
You want your leaders to care, try my proposal:
In the old days kings used to lead their soldiers into battle. In modern times this is impractical and counterproductive.
But you can still have leaders lead the frontline in spirit.
Basically, if leaders are going to send troops on an _offensive_ war/battle (not defensive war) there must be a referendum on the war.
If there are not enough votes for the war, those leaders get put on death row.
At a convenient time later, a referendum is held to redeem each leader. Leaders that do not get enough votes get executed. For example if too many people stay at home and don't bother voting - the leaders get executed.
If it turns out later that the war was justified, a fancy ceremony is held, and the executed leaders are awarded a purple heart or equivalent, and you have people say nice things about them, cry and that sort of thing.
If it turns out later that the leaders tricked the voters, a referendum can be held (need to get enough signatories to start such a referendum, just to prevent nutters from wasting everyone elses time).
This proposal has many advantages:
1) Even leaders who don't really care about those "young soldiers on the battlefield" will not consider starting a war lightly.
2) The soldiers will know that the leaders want a war enough to risk their own lives for it.
3) The soldiers will know that X% of the population want the war.
4) Those being attacked will know that X% of the attackers believe in the war - so they want a war, they get a war - for sufficiently high X, collateral damage becomes insignificant. They might even be justified in using WMD and other otherwise dubious tactics. If > 90% of the country attacking you want to kill you and your families, what is so wrong about you using WMD as long as it does not affect neighbouring countries?
"Actually there is a shortage of TALENTED IT people"
;) ).
Seems there's a shortage of barely competent people, not just talented ones.
Just look at Slashdot for example. This is supposed to be a nerd site, and yet so many posters have reading comprehension problems, difficulties with basic reasoning and logic, even simple "mental leaps" are beyond them - you have to explain every little step to them, and when you start to do that, they fixate on the wrong thing first and they miss the forest for the trees (even if the forest was mentioned earlier, they would have forgotten it
Go pick a random slashdot story and you might see what I mean.
It's sad, but on the bright side it does mean less competition!
I'm a bit above average in IT stuff, but in my experience the average is so crap, that being a bit above average gets me a long way[1]. On a _log_ scale of IT skill/talent I'm probably about 2 or 3, and I suppose the 9s and 10s are the Carmacks and Knuths. But it's amazing how few alleged IT bunch crawl past 1 - give some of these so called IT people a year and they can't do what I can do in a month (or even 3 days ). Whereas give me 10 years and I probably still wouldn't be able to do what the top people do in a month (or 3 days).
[1] Especially since I'm in a cheap country (where USD1.50 gets you a decent lunch) - a high salary here would be the same as what burger flippers or a cashier at a fancy coffee place get in a "Developed Nation".
So think about it, are you competitive if you live in some expensive country?
Here's my advice, if you don't want to be outsourced stick to something that _requires_ you to "be there".
For example: it'll be a long while before the US outsources dentists to India/China - nobody wants a dentist with 200 millisecond lag or one with "connectivity problems" halfway through drilling (and you still need an expensive robot at the US end ).
If you're an IT security auditor that does physical security audits, then yes you must "be there".
But if you're just some code monkey, it's bang for buck.
Read my post again, I think you didn't get it.
Having to pay more for a network engineer than a hamburger flipper (or vice versa) is not evil.
BUT encouraging women to be low paid hamburger flippers when they aren't interested AND have other better options, is either stupid or evil. Especially when in those very articles they keep claiming that it will be such a good thing for women.
Now if they said "It'll be a good thing for the CEOs, if more women went into IT", then that's probably a bit more truthful.
Your calculation appears to assume starting with an 800 core supercomputer, and presumably just staying with the cost of that computer.
I believe Google has a lot more than 800 cores available for their employees for "fun" right now.
Most estimates are that they have more than 100K dual core computers (I'm assuming they still prefer dual cores).
See: http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/01/google-mapreduce-stats.html
and: http://www.webfoot.com/blog/2006/03/05/how-many-computers-does-google-have/
So in theory Google could take one of their shards off line to play Go for a few hours and beat the human champion. Today. Not in 32 years time.
How many cans of insecticide are there?
How many roaches can be killed with a can of insecticide?
How many roaches are there?
You could. Keep in mind if you use savecred with runas there's some security gotchas.
Haven't you heard? There is a shortage of women in IT.
We need to encourage more women to go into IT, so that they can:
1) Lose their jobs promptly
2) Have difficulty finding jobs in IT
3) Increase the supply of IT jobs and thus lower IT wages
This must be a good thing right?
After all every few months there is some mass media prattle about encouraging women in IT.
Obviously they'd rather women not go into pharmacy, law, dentistry, nursing and other jobs which are a bit harder to send overseas.
Maybe a career in IT is good for women in Mumbai, but if the US women aren't interested (and sure looks like they aren't), I think it is rather stupid or even _evil_ to encourage them to go into IT.
Well now that apple has pulled the app, it means your phone would be one of the only 8 in the world that legitimately has that app.
Then you find a sucker I mean collector of iphones and you sell him your rare collectible for say USD10K.
Yeah, they got $999.99 worth of education.
If they get a refund that education is wasted - they end up learning the wrong thing.
I agree. It's not the lack of industry specific apps that should bother people that much.
It's the lack of non industry specific apps - HR, Finance/Accounting. You mentioned that sort of stuff. Stuff that every fair sized company needs.
Then there's also stuff like calendaring/scheduling.
Lots of people are resorting to MS Outlook and Exchange because the OSS options just aren't compelling.
You need an OSS client AND server that work well together for email, calendaring, etc AND the client must run on Windows/OSX - because that's what Microsoft Office runs on.
Because OpenOffice sucks. It does - it takes ages to launch, and there are plenty of WTF bugs - just having some normal character at the end of a line messed up formatting on my OpenOffice Impress presentation - I had to _downgrade_ to an _earlier_ version to have that work right - but that means accepting OTHER bugs.
Say what you like about MSOffice, but the 97 and 2003 versions are still better than OOo. The latest? Well let's say the latest MS Office is an opportunity for OOo to gain significant market share if they get their act together.
And Vista should be a dream come true for Desktop Linux. But..
Yes. What a lot of people miss is elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be seen as fair.
Enough voters have to be able to look at the elections and say "OK it's been done reasonably fairly, and looks like we lost fair and square".
So when their candidates lose, most of them will "go home", and the cops can handle the few sore losers left that try to do stupid stuff.
And also this way the rest of the world won't laugh at your elections.
A fair and fancy electronic voting system with complex checks and all that might not satisfy Trailer Park Joe (or even Harry the Hacker - since Harry knows how easy it is to hack systems).
Whereas hand counted ballots might, especially when observers from Trailer Park Joe's party can see every vote that's counted, from sealed ballot boxes that never left the polling area (nor the sight of the observers - party and independents).
You might be able to rig one area, but to rig many areas without being caught is going to be tough.
I'm a coder and I think electronic voting is a bad idea AND pointless.
Hand counting scales with voter population. The more voters you have the more people you should have to count your votes.
And what's the rush? You don't need the results in 1 minute. Take the time to do it right.
The USA is willing to spend trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to pick a government for Iraq, but when it comes to picking the Government of the Most Powerful Nation in the World, diebolded elections are good enough.
It's mostly theatre. Bad people get valid passports too.
Only in a few cases are those passports revoked.
Nokia's idea seems rather different - the focus is more on signing apps. Closer to Microsoft's signing approach.
Whereas my approach focuses on having a finite and hopefully manageable number of sandboxes for apps.
Custom sandboxes will have to be signed by the vendors, but these should be for the O/S special programs or rather specialized 3rd party software.
Not really. An SELinux policy tends to be a lot more verbose than sandboxing templates like "Guest Game" or "Standard Screensaver".
What I'm proposing is a layer above SELinux/AppArmor, that's more suitable for "normal folk".
It's still not going to be 100%, but an exceedingly few people are going to be able to read and understand an SELinux policy, so if an app says "I want this SELinux policy" and it's followed by a few pages of the policy, people are just going to click "OK".
Whereas with my suggestion, there's a slightly higher chance of people doing the right thing. I could teach my uncles and aunts to "Don't click OK when you see this Red Striped Warning Dialog".
Custom policies (for special apps) would have to be signed by the distro or a trusted party, and these shouldn't normally require user intervention.
It is easier to certify that a policy is reasonably safe, than it is to certify that a program will be reasonably safe. There are plenty of examples of "sneaky" code.
I've proposed this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
3rd party code should say what it is and what sandbox template it requires to run.
If the requested sandbox is in line with what the code claims to be, and "what it is" is what the user wants, then the user can decide to allow it.
The O/S then sandboxes the code according to those privileges.
Expecting users or software to identify good code from bad code is similar to expecting them to solve the "Halting Problem".
With my suggestion, it is a lot easier to train users to understand that a "Paris Hilton Video" which requires "Full System Privileges" is likely to be malware.
Whereas a "Cute Game" that requires "Guest Game Privileges" should be OK and since the O/S sandboxes it, there's little the "Cute Game" can do - it should not even be able to access the user's Documents (which unfortunately is possible in most Desktop O/Ses today - almost anything the user launches can access the user's documents, microphone, webcam etc).
"Unlike college courses, those 'teachers' charge by the hour"
Do they provide "hands on" training as well?
I find I often can learn a lot more from "hands on" training.
So chop trees down, make furniture, paper, packaging out of them, landfill the discards then grow more trees.
:).
Simple
Not so simple - work out a way to do it efficiently so that you only need to use the equivalent of a small percentage of trees chopped down to provide energy and resources for all that.
Once you worked that out, you're carbon negative.
This is a nerd site. We usually want better technical details than that.