why is it that the US government wants to deprive its citizens from the benefits of encryption?
Actually.. for all that the US government does, it doesn't try to deprive its citizens of encryption. For all of DOJ's pleading for key escrow, the NSA seems to have little problem with purely domestic use; they just don't want any non-Americans to get access to cryptography. Hence, they wanted DES to be hardware only, because then Americans would have access to it, but export would be more easily controlled than it can be for a published algorithm.
My guess is, regardless of what Janet Reno, Bill Clintion, and their thugs want, the long-term NSA strategists (the guys who REALLY control crypto policy) would be perfectly happy if every US citizen and business used 2048-bit RSA and 168-bit tripleDES, as long as the rest of the world used a broken RSA implementation, and 40-bit single DES. In fact, I wouldn't put it above them to use their power of decryption to help a US business or two...
1) Open immigration, while a great boon for people around the world, would only be harmful to the US as a whole, because of the sudden, large increase in population that would result. The time-bomb's already ticking, ticking until the population density's too high to be livable, so we needn't hasten it. In the shorter term, it'd also drive wages way down.
2) Free trade, while a nifty thing for American corporations, isn't supposed to be a great thing for everyone. While arguments of economic efficiency may sound nice, maximizing productivity is no ticket to prosperity for all. (ask every Asian country facing massive over-production) Free trade has caused the loss of some jobs in the US... exchanged for money earned by those still holding jobs. Open immigration would do the same thing, only to a greater degree.
I think it would be interesting if, for instance, the Indian government made it a requirement for technical workers exported to the U.S. that they receive equal pay.
--
So you propose that foreign governments be granted the power to regulate US businesses?
Seriously, if the immigrants don't like their jobs, they don't have to TAKE them... or they can always return to their home country, where they'll have job flexibility again.
Oh, wait. The US economy's the only strong one around these days you say? Single digit unemployment's tough to find you say? Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't say that the US is the worst game in town, then say that it's the best.
End H1-B visas, or limit them severely. Bang! End of sweatshops, because they won't be able to import enough labor to survive. Bang! End of the masses of people bound to a bad job, whining all the way, because the few that are brought in will have to be the best; the kind of people you Want to treat well, pay well, keep around, and help to get a green card. Bang! More incentive for a shift in the technology workplace, toward a 40 hour work week and better benefits.
The H1-B is the modern-day strikebreaker; the poor men supporting families trucked (now flown) in at a lower wage, because the locals refuse to work 80 hour weeks for less than $75k or whatever a year.
The point of the visas was to bring in highly skilled people to fill hard-to-fill positions. But, other posters have pointed out that the companies circumvent that by writing the job description to fit the recruits found, down to speaking some random (typically Asian) language.
Thus, they write the description so that the otherwise-qualified Americans don't get the job.
If the jobs are then exported; then that's the way it goes. Somehow I think that if company X can find people who work for a whole lot less, in a country with a whole lot less overhead, then the talent pool will be thinner, and the quality of the product will be lower. Then, a startup American company, with higher quality, will mop them up.
But, in the 80s the doomsayers said that America was dead in the auto-manufacturing world... yet European and Japanese car companies are building factories here all the time. I, for one, am sick of hearing of the "Decline and Fall of America", when the evidence time and again shows that America still has some juice left.
In my case, I hate my current job, and my current boss. But what can I do?
Well, you can always leave the United States. What's that? The pay's too good to leave? The government's too stable to go? Is it that you feel a country whose worst northern border conflict is over salmon fishing is safer than one on the brink of nuclear war?
And, in all honesty, we are taking jobs from American workers here. But look on the other side. None of my American colleagues work 80 hour weeks - they don't have the reason to.
80 hour work week... sounds to me like that job could be split into two. Sure, it would mean lower profits, but hey, the economy's good right now. If every company had to stop hiring immigrants, and pay reasonable wages for reasonable hours, there'd be no economic collapse. Additionally, the resulting wage increases would provide plenty of incentive for a bunch of people to start learning C.
...but it's the bigots who stand out. Before you tell me to "Go back to my own country"...
Why does telling you to go back to your country of origin make me a bigot? I have no problem with educated, intelligent immigrants... I just have a problem with immigrants whining about jobs that don't involve, especially when the jobs don't involve bending over picking fruit in the hot sun.
True, I came here to support my family, and myself, but I also truly came here searching for a better way of life.
You came in search of a better life.... would you say you found one? If so, be happy, grin, and bear the job as you obey the law and legally become a resident. If you haven't found a better life... go away and make room for an immigrant who would like it here.
The immigrants now can always just hop the next jet home, if they should desire...
Give me a break. If it were really comparable to slavery, they'd go home. But, actually, they're 1) lucky to be able to come to the US in the first place and 2) making enough money to live quite well by world standards.
I've heard that there are magazines out there that do reviews, and such.. but accept no advertising. Of course, the subscriptions cost in the hundreds...
The basic problem with publicly held corporations is that they act in a manner no person would act.
They have no loyalty to customers, employees, or their country.
Layoff 500 people, and make the rest work harder to fill their place? no problem.
Make all decisions from a marketing perspective, to the detriment of customer service and quality? no problem.
Put brands and 3rd party advertising on everything? naturally.
Move jobs that have been in a town for 50 years to a place that's slightly cheaper overall? of course.
Pollute freely, because being cleaner would cost more than the potential fine or lawsuit later? sure.
In general, make all decisions to please some otherwise disinterested shareholders, only to improve their value, without caring about anything else at all? That's their job.
While ethical companies can exist... ethical, publicly-owned corporations cannot.
Once a corproation is publically owned, then its only goal is profit. It must care about nothing else.. or people will be fired. In fact, a corporation must consider laws, death, and other things as potential costs.... and work toward maximal profit regardless of those things.
What is needed is reform in corporate law.. but until then, Be == IBM == MS == Apple == Sun... None can be "trusted."
The trouble is.. the US Constitution does not grant the National government the right to tax interstate commerce... only to regulate it. The whole reason the first US government was scrapped was because the customs tariffs between states were getting unbearable
On the flipside... when a guy in San Francisco buys from Clearwater... the Clearwater guy has no representation in CA's legislature, so the California sales tax shouldn't apply.
(though I wouldn't mind a few of Jeb Bush's supporters replacing the voters of San Francisco:-) Then maybe California wouldn't have the big lie in sales tax -- a "temporary" 0.5% increase in tax rate due to the San Francisco earthquake... for roughly 10 years now.)
Yeah.. would communities rather collect sales tax on some adult book store.. or would they rather the book store close down, because the business went over to internet porn?
I personally tend to the libertarian side of things... but here's a reply that's not a flame.
1) taxes aren't supposed to be about equality, nor about fairness per se.. They're supposed to be about funding the government's actions. Now, taxes should be levied fairly, naturally...
2) Current taxes *are* levied fairly... it's just that a state has questionable authority to levy sales tax on a transaction that doesn't clearly occur between two people/bodies within the state. After all.. it's not a business that's being taxed, it's a transaction. The state just collects from the business when the time comes...
3) Consumers are better off, at least for now, with mail/phone/internet orders being free of sales tax. This is because these kinds of transactions give much less of a competitive advantage to large corporations. The little guy can make a buck selling directly... but that might not be the case if additional taxes are levied, making internet orders more expensive than buying from the local mall. This hurts consumers because they lose choice, in two ways: a) fewer retailers mean less competition (and more government yoke when the hounds of DOJ harass the remaining retailers. see WalMart, Barnes&Noble) b) fewer small retailers mean less choice of product, because small retailers are more likely to have a diverse selection, especially of specialty items that big stores refuse to touch.
If you're using a music CD as a one time pad, I'd suggest dropping all data which represents silence. Otherwise you'll get nice repeating patterns for your adversary's cryptanalysts to play with at the start and end of each song.
Note 2) rule complex enough to foil casual observation
a) if you're only trying to foil casual observation, then you might as well just use RSA public key and triple DES or something, instead of a pseudo-one time pad. b) you might as well use the secure channel used to agree upon the rule to exhange a better pad itself, or agree upon a pseudo-random number generator and seed. That way, if you use a good generator, your pad will have less of a pattern to it. Especially when Janet Reno breaks down the door and sees that program on your drive that lets you use 12:22 on the CD as a one time pad.:-)
Civ CTP still has Diplomats and unit bribing, doesn't it? Probe Teams are pretty well developed in Alpha Centauri (along with 3d accerated Quake 2, the only reason I have Win98)
The signal/slot mechanism is slightly superior to message maps in MFC, however they are merely a kludge, they don't fit at all in the C++ object model. (Hint for framework developers: If your language is class based, try to use its class construct) What is more, the classes in QT are convenient for a couple of apps, but that's it; they're no thicker (?) than MFC stuff.
Qt does use the C++ class construct... Qt classes are C++ classes, with a macro thrown in. The macro, and the code created by the moc (meta-object compiler) just creates some standard functions, and framework, to allow the signal/slot system to work. Here's a quote from Qt 2.0's qobjectdefs.h
// The following macros are our "extensions" to C++ // They are used, strictly speaking, only by the moc. #define slots// slots: in class #define signals protected// signals: in class #define emit// emit signal
moc uses the signal and slot definitions to decide what to put into the moc code. You may call it a kludge, but the only other way to conveniently add that functionality to all objects independently would be to modify the compiler. And that may be theoreticallly possible for gcc, but Qt aims to be a lot more portable than that.
(I haven't examined QT2.0 very closely, so you can attack from that angle;)
How much have you actually examned Qt 1.x? Have you ever studied the output of moc on a non-trivial class?
Slashdot Mirror
While the Java client (that was the original reason for the TOC protocol) wasn't open source... the TiK (Tcl/Tk) client was GPL.
where GPL stands for GNU General Public License
Then California's one vote closer to having a Senate delegation, instead of a Senate embarassment.
Now all we need is a pro-choice Republican, and Feinstein may just go down.
why is it that the US government wants to deprive its citizens from the benefits of encryption?
Actually.. for all that the US government does, it doesn't try to deprive its citizens of encryption. For all of DOJ's pleading for key escrow, the NSA seems to have little problem with purely domestic use; they just don't want any non-Americans to get access to cryptography. Hence, they wanted DES to be hardware only, because then Americans would have access to it, but export would be more easily controlled than it can be for a published algorithm.
My guess is, regardless of what Janet Reno, Bill Clintion, and their thugs want, the long-term NSA strategists (the guys who REALLY control crypto policy) would be perfectly happy if every US citizen and business used 2048-bit RSA and 168-bit tripleDES, as long as the rest of the world used a broken RSA implementation, and 40-bit single DES. In fact, I wouldn't put it above them to use their power of decryption to help a US business or two...
It seems like half are anarchists, the other half are socialists (quibbling over their title)...
/. get knocked down as flamebait.
I'm surprised this article is at +2 as I read it... typically views that are against the mainstream
1) Open immigration, while a great boon for people around the world, would only be harmful to the US as a whole, because of the sudden, large increase in population that would result. The time-bomb's already ticking, ticking until the population density's too high to be livable, so we needn't hasten it. In the shorter term, it'd also drive wages way down.
2) Free trade, while a nifty thing for American corporations, isn't supposed to be a great thing for everyone. While arguments of economic efficiency may sound nice, maximizing productivity is no ticket to prosperity for all. (ask every Asian country facing massive over-production) Free trade has caused the loss of some jobs in the US... exchanged for money earned by those still holding jobs. Open immigration would do the same thing, only to a greater degree.
I think it would be interesting if, for instance, the Indian government made it a requirement for technical workers exported to the U.S. that they receive equal pay.
--
So you propose that foreign governments be granted the power to regulate US businesses?
Seriously, if the immigrants don't like their jobs, they don't have to TAKE them... or they can always return to their home country, where they'll have job flexibility again.
Oh, wait. The US economy's the only strong one around these days you say? Single digit unemployment's tough to find you say? Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't say that the US is the worst game in town, then say that it's the best.
End H1-B visas, or limit them severely. Bang! End of sweatshops, because they won't be able to import enough labor to survive. Bang! End of the masses of people bound to a bad job, whining all the way, because the few that are brought in will have to be the best; the kind of people you Want to treat well, pay well, keep around, and help to get a green card. Bang! More incentive for a shift in the technology workplace, toward a 40 hour work week and better benefits.
The H1-B is the modern-day strikebreaker; the poor men supporting families trucked (now flown) in at a lower wage, because the locals refuse to work 80 hour weeks for less than $75k or whatever a year.
The point of the visas was to bring in highly skilled people to fill hard-to-fill positions. But, other posters have pointed out that the companies circumvent that by writing the job description to fit the recruits found, down to speaking some random (typically Asian) language.
Thus, they write the description so that the otherwise-qualified Americans don't get the job.
If the jobs are then exported; then that's the way it goes. Somehow I think that if company X can find people who work for a whole lot less, in a country with a whole lot less overhead, then the talent pool will be thinner, and the quality of the product will be lower. Then, a startup American company, with higher quality, will mop them up.
But, in the 80s the doomsayers said that America was dead in the auto-manufacturing world... yet European and Japanese car companies are building factories here all the time. I, for one, am sick of hearing of the "Decline and Fall of America", when the evidence time and again shows that America still has some juice left.
In my case, I hate my current job, and my current boss. But what can I do?
Well, you can always leave the United States. What's that? The pay's too good to leave? The government's too stable to go? Is it that you feel a country whose worst northern border conflict is over salmon fishing is safer than one on the brink of nuclear war?
And, in all honesty, we are taking jobs from American workers here. But look on the other side. None of my American colleagues work 80 hour weeks - they don't have the reason to.
80 hour work week... sounds to me like that job could be split into two. Sure, it would mean lower profits, but hey, the economy's good right now. If every company had to stop hiring immigrants, and pay reasonable wages for reasonable hours, there'd be no economic collapse. Additionally, the resulting wage increases would provide plenty of incentive for a bunch of people to start learning C.
Why does telling you to go back to your country of origin make me a bigot? I have no problem with educated, intelligent immigrants... I just have a problem with immigrants whining about jobs that don't involve, especially when the jobs don't involve bending over picking fruit in the hot sun.
True, I came here to support my family, and myself, but I also truly came here searching for a better way of life.
You came in search of a better life.... would you say you found one? If so, be happy, grin, and bear the job as you obey the law and legally become a resident. If you haven't found a better life... go away and make room for an immigrant who would like it here.
The immigrants now can always just hop the next jet home, if they should desire...
Give me a break. If it were really comparable to slavery, they'd go home. But, actually, they're 1) lucky to be able to come to the US in the first place and 2) making enough money to live quite well by world standards.
Hardly slavery.
I've heard that there are magazines out there that do reviews, and such.. but accept no advertising. Of course, the subscriptions cost in the hundreds...
you have to have actually bought the game, and have the files with the graphics, sound, and levels from the CD
So what's your excuse for Mozilla on Linux?
The basic problem with publicly held corporations is that they act in a manner no person would act.
They have no loyalty to customers, employees, or their country.
Layoff 500 people, and make the rest work harder to fill their place? no problem.
Make all decisions from a marketing perspective, to the detriment of customer service and quality? no problem.
Put brands and 3rd party advertising on everything? naturally.
Move jobs that have been in a town for 50 years to a place that's slightly cheaper overall? of course.
Pollute freely, because being cleaner would cost more than the potential fine or lawsuit later? sure.
In general, make all decisions to please some otherwise disinterested shareholders, only to improve their value, without caring about anything else at all? That's their job.
And wouldn't it be great if we built a Beowulf cluster of them!
If Be isn't publicly owned.. then I look like an idiot by now. :-)
While ethical companies can exist... ethical, publicly-owned corporations cannot.
Once a corproation is publically owned, then its only goal is profit. It must care about nothing else.. or people will be fired. In fact, a corporation must consider laws, death, and other things as potential costs.... and work toward maximal profit regardless of those things.
What is needed is reform in corporate law.. but until then, Be == IBM == MS == Apple == Sun... None can be "trusted."
The trouble is.. the US Constitution does not grant the National government the right to tax interstate commerce... only to regulate it. The whole reason the first US government was scrapped was because the customs tariffs between states were getting unbearable
On the flipside... when a guy in San Francisco buys from Clearwater... the Clearwater guy has no representation in CA's legislature, so the California sales tax shouldn't apply.
:-) Then maybe California wouldn't have the big lie in sales tax -- a "temporary" 0.5% increase in tax rate due to the San Francisco earthquake... for roughly 10 years now.)
(though I wouldn't mind a few of Jeb Bush's supporters replacing the voters of San Francisco
Yeah.. would communities rather collect sales tax on some adult book store.. or would they rather the book store close down, because the business went over to internet porn?
zoning vs budget.. what a quandry for the cities!
I personally tend to the libertarian side of things... but here's a reply that's not a flame.
1) taxes aren't supposed to be about equality, nor about fairness per se.. They're supposed to be about funding the government's actions. Now, taxes should be levied fairly, naturally...
2) Current taxes *are* levied fairly... it's just that a state has questionable authority to levy sales tax on a transaction that doesn't clearly occur between two people/bodies within the state. After all.. it's not a business that's being taxed, it's a transaction. The state just collects from the business when the time comes...
3) Consumers are better off, at least for now, with mail/phone/internet orders being free of sales tax. This is because these kinds of transactions give much less of a competitive advantage to large corporations. The little guy can make a buck selling directly... but that might not be the case if additional taxes are levied, making internet orders more expensive than buying from the local mall. This hurts consumers because they lose choice, in two ways:
a) fewer retailers mean less competition (and more government yoke when the hounds of DOJ harass the remaining retailers. see WalMart, Barnes&Noble)
b) fewer small retailers mean less choice of product, because small retailers are more likely to have a diverse selection, especially of specialty items that big stores refuse to touch.
Note 1) lead time
:-)
If you're using a music CD as a one time pad, I'd suggest dropping all data which represents silence. Otherwise you'll get nice repeating patterns for your adversary's cryptanalysts to play with at the start and end of each song.
Note 2) rule complex enough to foil casual observation
a) if you're only trying to foil casual observation, then you might as well just use RSA public key and triple DES or something, instead of a pseudo-one time pad.
b) you might as well use the secure channel used to agree upon the rule to exhange a better pad itself, or agree upon a pseudo-random number generator and seed. That way, if you use a good generator, your pad will have less of a pattern to it. Especially when Janet Reno breaks down the door and sees that program on your drive that lets you use 12:22 on the CD as a one time pad.
Hence the value of Diplomats bribing units :-)
Civ CTP still has Diplomats and unit bribing, doesn't it? Probe Teams are pretty well developed in Alpha Centauri (along with 3d accerated Quake 2, the only reason I have Win98)
The signal/slot mechanism is slightly superior to message maps in MFC, however they are merely a kludge, they don't fit at all in the C++ object model. (Hint for framework developers: If your language is class based, try to use its class construct) What is more, the classes in QT are convenient for a couple of apps, but that's it; they're no thicker (?) than MFC stuff.
Qt does use the C++ class construct... Qt classes are C++ classes, with a macro thrown in. The macro, and the code created by the moc (meta-object compiler) just creates some standard functions, and framework, to allow the signal/slot system to work. Here's a quote from Qt 2.0's qobjectdefs.h
// They are used, strictly speaking, only by the moc.
#define slots
#define signals protected
#define emit
moc uses the signal and slot definitions to decide what to put into the moc code. You may call it a kludge, but the only other way to conveniently add that functionality to all objects independently would be to modify the compiler. And that may be theoreticallly possible for gcc, but Qt aims to be a lot more portable than that.
(I haven't examined QT2.0 very closely, so you can attack from that angle ;)
How much have you actually examned Qt 1.x? Have you ever studied the output of moc on a non-trivial class?
I should think that 2 big factors cause US networks to have more reliability problems than Europe's:
1) US networks were built earlier, as a result of a heavy-handed government push for rich-guy subsidized access for poor guys
2) US networks are more spread out geographically, because the US has a lower population density. Thus, there are more vulnerable points.