The problem is that not everyone has been recorded on the Internet doing something which might meet the disapproval of others, even though everyone has done such a thing. Once no-one is able to cast the first stone, everyone's equal again.
The winners are only those who aren't caught - usually by chance rather than design - and those who have the influence to erase history.
Perhaps one day a student union of a first tier college will be enlightened and recommend that all its members take one photo of themselves naked cuddling a blow-up doll and holding a bottle of vodka. If this practice spreads like the spawn of Satan that was Facebook, suddenly employers will find that all their candidates have the naked-sheep-vodka pose. Demand > supply of Chrisian virgin angels. Attitude readjusted.
I take it that if 30 people show up at your mother's funeral to protest her, and to declare that she is bound for hell, all very noise and obtrusive, that you'll still be cool with their right to protest?
If they were noisy then it might be a local ordinance matter. if they were obstructing my movements then it would probably be a police matter.
But if they were hanging out in a big group with placards and leaflets informing all funeral-goers that my mother was a whore and would be going to hell, so what? I can cope with the idea that some people think my mother is evil - hell, she's no saint. I can especially cope with a bunch of irrational blowhards thinking my mother is evil.
Imagine right now that every human knew all your opinions and actions and the opinions and actions of those close to you. It is inevitable that millions of people would find many aspects of your/their lives repulsive and would consider you evil. The only reason people aren't picketing outside you or your loved ones' houses is that they can't be bothered concentrating on you/them. But so many people, if they knew about you or your loved ones, would hate you or them and be happy to tell you and them.
The same applies to me, and it doesn't bother me. Why would it? I'm a grown-up now, I understand that people think insane thoughts. For example, you want people dead because they express a disagreeable opinion at your opinion of the "wrong time". Maybe you'll want to picket my mother's funeral to make a point about how annoying it is. Go ahead. It might provide some distraction and amusement. She'll already be dead, so it won't spoil any memories I have of her.
(Western funerals are a far too concentrated opportunity to express emotion anyway. Perhaps you should take this message from Phelps' picketing: Western mourning rituals suck.)
The best justice would be for the police to announce that they would not intervene, and if the public wanted to rip them limb from limb, that would be fine.
They deserve nothing but contempt, censure, restraining orders, bankruptcy by litigation, incarceration, and psychiatric supervision and chemical restraint.
If there was ever a candidate for a policeman in a totalitarian government, you are it.
The man who kills any member of Phelps' crew has done something far worse than any member of WBC. He is a murderer.
He is for killing people based on their unpalatable opinions.
In particular, he is for killing someone who is a fairly good test of an American's freedom to express unpalatable opinions.
Someone who also fairly accurately represents a fundamentalist religious message ("God hates fags" - not "humans should hate fags") and exposes the angry roots of Abrahamic religion.
Someone who reminds us of several millennia of thinking about homosexuality, tweaked only in the past 40 years and extant in many parts of the world. An argument cannot be fought if its defenders are simply oppressed.
Someone, finally, whose messages are more complex than simple gay-bashing. I can guarantee you that every man you respect has at least one opinion which would make your blood boil, but you're happy to listen to everything else they say. Is it good to speak out against pedophilia in the Catholic church? To question the military's idolatrous respect of the US flag? To point out that Iraq was quite secular for an Arab nation while Bush was on a warmongering anti-Muslim campaign? To protest hate speech laws? Phelps has done all these things. And does his politically incorrect, courage-of-convictions straight talking have a place in modern debate? Certainly. If a mad cunt from the middle of nowhere can achieve that sort of international public recognition over such a long period, we all have something to learn from him.
Even if all you learn is that "God hates fags". Which is true. Abrahamic God as described in the OT hates fags.
And if this makes you not respect Abrahamic God because Abrahamic God sounds like a bit of a douche, well, all's the better.
What is there to lose by allowing Phelps to speak? He's not even wrong.
If people like Phelps cannot protest at military funerals any more, then America has lost and the American military's missions are yet more futile and other than in the spirit of defending America's freedom. If that's even possible.
Perhaps I was too ambiguous with my language. I felt otherwise, but sometimes I guess I overdo it on the nuance.
I said: Banks don't pay people who find ways... (cheekily nonrestrictive "who")
I did not say: Banks don't pay people to find ways...
IOW, banks don't pay people just because they happen to find ways. In general, banks don't pay money to random people on the street, and the person on the street who makes a hobby of finding ways is no exception. They instead pay selected people specifically to go about the task of finding ways.
Indeed. They pay people to do it, not because they've already done it.;-)
Ballmer is one of the last dinosaurs in that organization that thinks a VMS-based operating system is still up-to-date
The NT kernel as a bastard stepchild of VMS is really not the cause of any unique-to-MS problems, and MS are experimenting with a major rewrite with Midori if that's really what you're looking for.
NT was the step up from DOS-3.1-95-98-ME becoming mainstream just a little before OS X superceded OS 9 - OS X itself being mostly NeXT work, in turn Mach + BSD + ObjC - in turn standard microkernel theory + Unix + Smalltalk. It's all a nice evolution. I don't see any benefit in making everything another Unix-alike.
Consider the "problem" of the heavy process in a VMS-derived OS. Unix (classically) says, "Let's make fork()ing quick and easy and do everything by forking." NT says, "That's better implemented by threads, with the benefit of full sharing." Midori (and others) ask, "Actually, do we need all these hardware-isolated processes in the first place?" Which is "correct"?
They're right. Banks don't pay people who find ways to get into their vaults.
You're going to get better results by employing researchers with an interest in computer security. Unfortunately, these are hard to find, and most people claiming to be in "IT security" are actually just PR handwavers, egotists and people who know how to install Snort and write a few lines of Perl (I'm tempted to identify a few fairly well-known people by name, but you never start a fight with an idiot with a hammer and a conviction on appropriateness to use it...).
Fortunately, MS has the resources to find, pay and provide the right environment for such people. Hell, it has a research group which dwarfs Google in terms of variety of output and leaves Apple holding the baton wrongly at the starting line. I'm not sure it interfaces these people optimally with its mainstream operations (the whole "executive project sponsorship" thing is very political), but it has a great basis.
We've decided we can do it because we assume the conclusion is correct, and we assume the conclusion is correct because we've decided we can do it. It's all too easy in astronomy and theoretical physics to go all Platonic and rejoice at something seductively beautiful rather than something with enough evidence.
What if we are misinterpreting the results as referring to a combination of other signatures or combination fo sources, perhaps partially absorbed? What if we're hearing local noise? This is a uniquely sensitive telescope and results have not been duplicated.
Step 1: Private profit-making business wants to make money by hosting other people's work (not necessarily without authorisation).
Step 2: Some woman points out that her work was up without her authorisation.
Step 3: Private profit-making business takes down her work and instead makes a copy of her work as part of an algorithm to prevent further infringement.
Step 4: Woman points out the business is still making an unauthorised copy of her work.
Step 5: Slashdot protects the "right" ("sense of entitlement") of the private profit-making business to make a profit, arguing that it would be somehow "unreasonable" or "evil" for exceptions to copyright law to be made to private profit-making businesses which would otherwise find it "difficult" to operate.
Essentially,/. is pulling an MPAA/RIAA. It's not this woman's problem that it's difficult for Scribd to otherwise police for copyright infringement. It could keep short extracts; it could keep summary statistics (not just a hash - any amount of data on sentence/word structure/length which wouldn't be significantly adjusted by making small tweaks); it could hire humans. It could even find that its business model is unworkable. But no -/. thinks, like MPAA/RIAA, that some corporation should have the right to its profits, and that exceptions should be made in law to protect the corporation's sense of entitlement to profits.
Why, technically speaking, is your power grid in the CA area in such poor condition? Were there missteps in its construction or maintenance? Why isn't capacity being increased? Is it a problem of deciding responsibility for organising interstate builds, and if so why don't other states suffer the problem? Spain has this on-and-off problem of autonomous regions with lots of water not providing to areas with less water; the ("federal") government of the day can determine the outcome.
Right, I see a diagram with three big areas surrounded by both circles and rectangles and with more little rectangles inside: STORAGE - CLOUD FILES INTERFACE - PUBLIC APIS COMPUTE - CLOUD SERVERS and two smaller areas surrounded only by one rectangle: CONTROL PANEL AUTHENTICATION & ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
And I hear quotes like:
"OpenStack enabled us to better serve our customers. In an open-standards based cloud world, cloud interoperability and cloud portability is increased [...] Our cloud today is the second largest cloud in the marketplace and by launching OpenStack we further increase our commitment to the cloud."
...I was shocked that this little speech didn't end with, "Praise be to the cloud."
Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.
Why is it that any article about something "cloud"y doesn't tell me what is actually being sold. Could someone give me a functional overview of what this software achieves, perhaps putting into the context of similar software? Thank you.
(I haven't interacted with Rackspace since some fairly poorly supported dedicated server hosting about 8 years ago!)
BT can pay for it themselves. Roll out the universal service obligation for broadband. BT's already got special treatment thanks to its representative in government, Ofcom. It's time it also enjoyed obligations.
I don't want the bloody government paying for this. I don't want the government doing anything else with the Internet in this country, in fact. From the IWF to Cameron telling Facebook to take down troll comments praising some guy with obvious mental health problems who went on a killing spree, this government is more New Labour and less Liberal than the last.
How often must the government / industry claim there is a lack of qualified workers in some field before people just laugh and wonder who wants to bring down whose salary?
How about giving them loans for training which are paid back as part of their salary once they've secured a job?
Wow, took the words out of my mouth. I interviewed a guy who had a cert in solaris and windows. Looked great, then found he knew neither of them very well. After that I take certs with a grain of salt.
To almost but not quite counter my own point, I've also met people with many years of experience at some fairly well-known firms and no degrees/certs/etc who really have no sense of ingenuity in architecting a system. They haven't expanded beyond what they learnt on/for the job.
IOW, someone who hasn't spent time in formal education and/or training needs to have caught up otherwise. (And many people have.)
as well as basic computer science concepts such as BNF, data normalization, OOP, MVC, etc.
Put 10 seasoned programmers in a room and, without access to references or preparation, ask them to write the BNF for some subset of a well-known language, normalise a database in stages up to 5th normal form, give a detailed description of OOP implementation in any language (not just "how is inheritance formed?" but "demonstrate polymorphic behaviour - suggest how it might have been implemented - describe its disadvantages" etc.) and ask them to fit some app description into MVC pattern.
You know what? Zero of them will succeed in all of your tasks. And, dear reader, if you claim that you will then you are lying.
You know why? Because testing like this doesn't reveal anything. I passed University with top grades throughout because I knew how to bone up for an exam and cough up the syllabus as requested, as well as having a moderately mathematical head. I can demonstrate prior performance and I can grasp new concepts. I can remind myself quickly of old concepts when given access to a reference.
But I don't have some magical savant-level ability to memorise everything I've ever done (and, experiments on savants suggest, if I did then I'd lack the skills to apply my elephantine knowledge to solving general commercial development problems). It's never hindered me. This sort of ability might be necessary if I were, say, a field intelligence agent(?), and not being able to concoct the right deception within a subsecond time interval might result in my death. Otherwise, it's just a dog and pony show.
The backlash on the annoyance of UAC is proof enough that users don't want this sort of fine-grained privilege security, as secure an implementation of permissions that it is most end users would just turn off notifications and go for a 'yes to all'.
I thought that one of the worst things about UAC was its not explaining in layman's terms what privilege was needed. "Cancel/Allow?" just sitting there means nothing. Contrast:
OstensibleToy wants:
Access to your database of site passwords. This may include banking and other sensitive sites.
To capture and record information you type into any web site. This may include passwords, personal conversations and business transactions.
The author of OstensibleToy will have full access to information gathered. Do you trust him/her? --- Type TRUST to indicate your trust. A list of trust relationships and an opportunity to revoke them is available from Tools/Trust.
While the rest of your post is pretty good, the above shows a great deal of ignorance about how the Unix security model works. Please spend a bit of time looking into groups, permissions, PAM, etc. before making such broad statements.
The traditional Unix security model simply doesn't give the level of control I'm suggesting, whence much Unix software even today choosing the lowest common denominator of temporarily becoming root for anything requiring more than regular user privileges.
I haven't done any signficant work with PAM, but I don't recall its alone providing an API for fine-grained time-limited access control to IPC/general kernel services. IOW, it's an add-on for Unix software which chooses to use it, but it's not what one thinks of when one talks of the Unix security model.
SELinux does go way beyond the traditional model but it's a royal pain to get distributors/developers/users moved over to thinking in its terms. It's not helped that - for whatever reason - genuinely skilled security types are almost universally bad at making accessible interfaces and documentation.
As a former VMS/Unix sysadmin myself, I also know it was a major PITA for anyone who had a job that changed scope frequently. I can't imagine how you'd successfully implement it in a consumer friendly way.
This isn't an org sysadmin granting privileges to users, it's a user granting privileges to apps. Apps tend not to change their scope so frequently.
Ideally[tm] all data collected by a web page using a client machine is, as others have suggested, tagged with a level of importance. As the data passes through the browser it can be walled off from any apps which are not given permission to see that class of data. For example, a default for any data collected in an input type="password" entry to be regarded as a login which requires third party password collection privilege to find its way into any other app, whether that's by keystroke listeners or login db readers.
Do you mean to say that, when I install a Firefox add-on, Firefox won't give a list of requested privileges? Why has it taken 30 years for people who think in Unix security terms to not catch up to the VMS "fine-grained privileges to executables for users" security model?
The whole regular user / root thing is awful. Microsoft is still doing it wrong because, while the NT kernel may approach the right idea, it builds atop it a mess of get-out-of-jail-free paths.
It's not impossible.
(1) By default, allow nothing;
(2) Never allow everything - require software to specify exactly what it needs;
(3) Classify permissions so the user is alerted more violently for more risky permissions - this may depend on the circumstances (e.g. a browser add-on usually shouldn't be asking for the same sort of privileges as backup software);
(4) Software which needs an unusually privileged environment may benefit from auditing and signing, but never make this compulsory because this pisses off everyone;
(5) But, by default, refuse in such circumstances and indicate why. The user needs to make a conscious effort to override a reasonable set of auto-refusal defaults;
(6) Distinguish explicitly between once, occasional, time-limited and forever permissions. To take a particularly insidious example: iPhones ask if you want to give permission for your app to read your GPS location. This isn't permission for the next 15 minuts or day; it's permission forever. That is wrong. Looked at from the other end, don't do a Vista and ask every time. This is worse than not asking at all.
and there are basically no oil-fueled electrical power plants out there.
Potential government is often heavily (esp. Bush dynasty) connected with oil; the fossil fuel electricity generation companies have the same "anti-environmentalist" stances as these people; the campaign donations support these people. For example, AEP's CEO donated about $100k to Gingrich's 2009 oil drilling promotional and Southern gave $250k to Bush's last campaign. The AEP amount may seem small, but opensecrets asserts total $9 million p.a. lobbying in 2008-2009. The oil lobby often is the government, and the fossil fuel lobby acts in symbiosis.
Your car won't run off uranium,
But it will run off a battery charged by a uranium power plant.
People get scared because all the cheap junk they buy says "Made in China" and don't notice the heavy equipment, jumbo jets, commercial trucks, et al,
It's the decline that's scary, not the overall output. And making a killing on heavy items does not give you the same stability as a giant consumer manufacturing base.
I guess I was taking the post by Styopa more literally than others have.
Those (such, perhaps, as yourself) who have made the effort to contribute toward a realistic assessment of environmental impact can end up stopping power plants being built. And those who argued for increased standardisation in nuclear power plant design and maintenance were hardly "environmental wackjobs". Their argument has won out and we now have safer designs to show for it.
But those who make for the best news coverage and who end up being raised as a straw man to represent the opposition - the stereotypical smelly hippy who lies down in front of a bulldozer - are never lone effectors of change. I do, of course, understand their role in delaying while some other group completes a legal challenge.
You do realise that these "long-haired hippy protesters" didn't actually "stop" anything, merely pccasionally slightly delay? Because, you know, rule of law, policemen, arrest, etc. What you're guilty of here is absorption and regurgitation of well-prepared exaggerated and emotional news images beamed to your front room.
Environmentalist wackjobs shouldn't get a free pass on their irrational fear of nuclear power
Yes, but you're not going to get anyone on-side by complaining about "wackjobs" with an "irrational fear". It is quite healthy and rational to fear nuclear power, just as it is healthy to fear a tiger - but the response to fear doesn't always have to be to run away. Translate into a list of perceived hazards; provide explanation of how resultant risks are managed.
It is also important to be honest about the unique problems of nuclear power - waste management in particular - with a demonstration of how any expansion of a nuclear power programme can be matched by increased waste containment.
Fossil fuel lobbyists aren't going to change their minds because they already know you're right - it's just not in their interest to admit it. But some environmentalists are simply misguided by a lack of knowledge of nuclear power or by rhetoric from those who have a pecuniary or power interest in pseudo-environmentalism (Greenpeace, PETA, etc.). These organisations aren't "wackjobs" either - they're working on the same basis as the fossil fuel lobbyists.
Following hot on the heels of, "American manufacturing is dying because of the unions," we'll see, "America lacks nuclear reactors because of the environmentalists."
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government, and America lacks manufacturing because it's cheaper to outsource somewhere with lower CoL and a glut of desperate workers. In each case, precisely as is logical, it's the people in control who get to make the decisions and not some group convenient to demonise.
Slashdot Mirror
At least I can avoid Google as a private citizen when I find its privacy practices abhorrent.
I feel sorry for the family I have in LA who won't have a choice but to have some of their government-handled private data on Google's servers.
The problem is that not everyone has been recorded on the Internet doing something which might meet the disapproval of others, even though everyone has done such a thing. Once no-one is able to cast the first stone, everyone's equal again.
The winners are only those who aren't caught - usually by chance rather than design - and those who have the influence to erase history.
Perhaps one day a student union of a first tier college will be enlightened and recommend that all its members take one photo of themselves naked cuddling a blow-up doll and holding a bottle of vodka. If this practice spreads like the spawn of Satan that was Facebook, suddenly employers will find that all their candidates have the naked-sheep-vodka pose. Demand > supply of Chrisian virgin angels. Attitude readjusted.
I take it that if 30 people show up at your mother's funeral to protest her, and to declare that she is bound for hell, all very noise and obtrusive, that you'll still be cool with their right to protest?
If they were noisy then it might be a local ordinance matter. if they were obstructing my movements then it would probably be a police matter.
But if they were hanging out in a big group with placards and leaflets informing all funeral-goers that my mother was a whore and would be going to hell, so what? I can cope with the idea that some people think my mother is evil - hell, she's no saint. I can especially cope with a bunch of irrational blowhards thinking my mother is evil.
Imagine right now that every human knew all your opinions and actions and the opinions and actions of those close to you. It is inevitable that millions of people would find many aspects of your/their lives repulsive and would consider you evil. The only reason people aren't picketing outside you or your loved ones' houses is that they can't be bothered concentrating on you/them. But so many people, if they knew about you or your loved ones, would hate you or them and be happy to tell you and them.
The same applies to me, and it doesn't bother me. Why would it? I'm a grown-up now, I understand that people think insane thoughts. For example, you want people dead because they express a disagreeable opinion at your opinion of the "wrong time". Maybe you'll want to picket my mother's funeral to make a point about how annoying it is. Go ahead. It might provide some distraction and amusement. She'll already be dead, so it won't spoil any memories I have of her.
(Western funerals are a far too concentrated opportunity to express emotion anyway. Perhaps you should take this message from Phelps' picketing: Western mourning rituals suck.)
The best justice would be for the police to announce that they would not intervene, and if the public wanted to rip them limb from limb, that would be fine.
They deserve nothing but contempt, censure, restraining orders, bankruptcy by litigation, incarceration, and psychiatric supervision and chemical restraint.
If there was ever a candidate for a policeman in a totalitarian government, you are it.
The man who kills any member of Phelps' crew has done something far worse than any member of WBC. He is a murderer.
He is for killing people based on their unpalatable opinions.
In particular, he is for killing someone who is a fairly good test of an American's freedom to express unpalatable opinions.
Someone who also fairly accurately represents a fundamentalist religious message ("God hates fags" - not "humans should hate fags") and exposes the angry roots of Abrahamic religion.
Someone who reminds us of several millennia of thinking about homosexuality, tweaked only in the past 40 years and extant in many parts of the world. An argument cannot be fought if its defenders are simply oppressed.
Someone, finally, whose messages are more complex than simple gay-bashing. I can guarantee you that every man you respect has at least one opinion which would make your blood boil, but you're happy to listen to everything else they say. Is it good to speak out against pedophilia in the Catholic church? To question the military's idolatrous respect of the US flag? To point out that Iraq was quite secular for an Arab nation while Bush was on a warmongering anti-Muslim campaign? To protest hate speech laws? Phelps has done all these things. And does his politically incorrect, courage-of-convictions straight talking have a place in modern debate? Certainly. If a mad cunt from the middle of nowhere can achieve that sort of international public recognition over such a long period, we all have something to learn from him.
Even if all you learn is that "God hates fags". Which is true. Abrahamic God as described in the OT hates fags.
And if this makes you not respect Abrahamic God because Abrahamic God sounds like a bit of a douche, well, all's the better.
What is there to lose by allowing Phelps to speak? He's not even wrong.
If people like Phelps cannot protest at military funerals any more, then America has lost and the American military's missions are yet more futile and other than in the spirit of defending America's freedom. If that's even possible.
Perhaps I was too ambiguous with my language. I felt otherwise, but sometimes I guess I overdo it on the nuance.
I said: Banks don't pay people who find ways... (cheekily nonrestrictive "who")
I did not say: Banks don't pay people to find ways...
IOW, banks don't pay people just because they happen to find ways. In general, banks don't pay money to random people on the street, and the person on the street who makes a hobby of finding ways is no exception. They instead pay selected people specifically to go about the task of finding ways.
They hire people to penetrate
Indeed. They pay people to do it, not because they've already done it. ;-)
Ballmer is one of the last dinosaurs in that organization that thinks a VMS-based operating system is still up-to-date
The NT kernel as a bastard stepchild of VMS is really not the cause of any unique-to-MS problems, and MS are experimenting with a major rewrite with Midori if that's really what you're looking for.
NT was the step up from DOS-3.1-95-98-ME becoming mainstream just a little before OS X superceded OS 9 - OS X itself being mostly NeXT work, in turn Mach + BSD + ObjC - in turn standard microkernel theory + Unix + Smalltalk. It's all a nice evolution. I don't see any benefit in making everything another Unix-alike.
Consider the "problem" of the heavy process in a VMS-derived OS. Unix (classically) says, "Let's make fork()ing quick and easy and do everything by forking." NT says, "That's better implemented by threads, with the benefit of full sharing." Midori (and others) ask, "Actually, do we need all these hardware-isolated processes in the first place?" Which is "correct"?
They're right. Banks don't pay people who find ways to get into their vaults.
You're going to get better results by employing researchers with an interest in computer security. Unfortunately, these are hard to find, and most people claiming to be in "IT security" are actually just PR handwavers, egotists and people who know how to install Snort and write a few lines of Perl (I'm tempted to identify a few fairly well-known people by name, but you never start a fight with an idiot with a hammer and a conviction on appropriateness to use it...).
Fortunately, MS has the resources to find, pay and provide the right environment for such people. Hell, it has a research group which dwarfs Google in terms of variety of output and leaves Apple holding the baton wrongly at the starting line. I'm not sure it interfaces these people optimally with its mainstream operations (the whole "executive project sponsorship" thing is very political), but it has a great basis.
We've decided we can do it because we assume the conclusion is correct, and we assume the conclusion is correct because we've decided we can do it. It's all too easy in astronomy and theoretical physics to go all Platonic and rejoice at something seductively beautiful rather than something with enough evidence.
What if we are misinterpreting the results as referring to a combination of other signatures or combination fo sources, perhaps partially absorbed? What if we're hearing local noise? This is a uniquely sensitive telescope and results have not been duplicated.
Step 1: Private profit-making business wants to make money by hosting other people's work (not necessarily without authorisation).
Step 2: Some woman points out that her work was up without her authorisation.
Step 3: Private profit-making business takes down her work and instead makes a copy of her work as part of an algorithm to prevent further infringement.
Step 4: Woman points out the business is still making an unauthorised copy of her work.
Step 5: Slashdot protects the "right" ("sense of entitlement") of the private profit-making business to make a profit, arguing that it would be somehow "unreasonable" or "evil" for exceptions to copyright law to be made to private profit-making businesses which would otherwise find it "difficult" to operate.
Essentially, /. is pulling an MPAA/RIAA. It's not this woman's problem that it's difficult for Scribd to otherwise police for copyright infringement. It could keep short extracts; it could keep summary statistics (not just a hash - any amount of data on sentence/word structure/length which wouldn't be significantly adjusted by making small tweaks); it could hire humans. It could even find that its business model is unworkable. But no - /. thinks, like MPAA/RIAA, that some corporation should have the right to its profits, and that exceptions should be made in law to protect the corporation's sense of entitlement to profits.
Why, technically speaking, is your power grid in the CA area in such poor condition? Were there missteps in its construction or maintenance? Why isn't capacity being increased? Is it a problem of deciding responsibility for organising interstate builds, and if so why don't other states suffer the problem? Spain has this on-and-off problem of autonomous regions with lots of water not providing to areas with less water; the ("federal") government of the day can determine the outcome.
Right, I see a diagram with three big areas surrounded by both circles and rectangles and with more little rectangles inside:
STORAGE - CLOUD FILES
INTERFACE - PUBLIC APIS
COMPUTE - CLOUD SERVERS
and two smaller areas surrounded only by one rectangle:
CONTROL PANEL
AUTHENTICATION & ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
And I hear quotes like:
"OpenStack enabled us to better serve our customers. In an open-standards based cloud world, cloud interoperability and cloud portability is increased [...] Our cloud today is the second largest cloud in the marketplace and by launching OpenStack we further increase our commitment to the cloud."
...I was shocked that this little speech didn't end with, "Praise be to the cloud."
Am I the only one that wants to stab my head with a fork whenever someone starts talking about "cloud" technology? Look, we've had compute and storage clusters for decades... tell us in precise technical terms what you're offering that's new and why it'd be suitable for general projects.
Why is it that any article about something "cloud"y doesn't tell me what is actually being sold. Could someone give me a functional overview of what this software achieves, perhaps putting into the context of similar software? Thank you.
(I haven't interacted with Rackspace since some fairly poorly supported dedicated server hosting about 8 years ago!)
BT can pay for it themselves. Roll out the universal service obligation for broadband. BT's already got special treatment thanks to its representative in government, Ofcom. It's time it also enjoyed obligations.
I don't want the bloody government paying for this. I don't want the government doing anything else with the Internet in this country, in fact. From the IWF to Cameron telling Facebook to take down troll comments praising some guy with obvious mental health problems who went on a killing spree, this government is more New Labour and less Liberal than the last.
How often must the government / industry claim there is a lack of qualified workers in some field before people just laugh and wonder who wants to bring down whose salary?
How about giving them loans for training which are paid back as part of their salary once they've secured a job?
Wow, took the words out of my mouth. I interviewed a guy who had a cert in solaris and windows. Looked great, then found he knew neither of them very well. After that I take certs with a grain of salt.
To almost but not quite counter my own point, I've also met people with many years of experience at some fairly well-known firms and no degrees/certs/etc who really have no sense of ingenuity in architecting a system. They haven't expanded beyond what they learnt on/for the job.
IOW, someone who hasn't spent time in formal education and/or training needs to have caught up otherwise. (And many people have.)
as well as basic computer science concepts such as BNF, data normalization, OOP, MVC, etc.
Put 10 seasoned programmers in a room and, without access to references or preparation, ask them to write the BNF for some subset of a well-known language, normalise a database in stages up to 5th normal form, give a detailed description of OOP implementation in any language (not just "how is inheritance formed?" but "demonstrate polymorphic behaviour - suggest how it might have been implemented - describe its disadvantages" etc.) and ask them to fit some app description into MVC pattern.
You know what? Zero of them will succeed in all of your tasks. And, dear reader, if you claim that you will then you are lying.
You know why? Because testing like this doesn't reveal anything. I passed University with top grades throughout because I knew how to bone up for an exam and cough up the syllabus as requested, as well as having a moderately mathematical head. I can demonstrate prior performance and I can grasp new concepts. I can remind myself quickly of old concepts when given access to a reference.
But I don't have some magical savant-level ability to memorise everything I've ever done (and, experiments on savants suggest, if I did then I'd lack the skills to apply my elephantine knowledge to solving general commercial development problems). It's never hindered me. This sort of ability might be necessary if I were, say, a field intelligence agent(?), and not being able to concoct the right deception within a subsecond time interval might result in my death. Otherwise, it's just a dog and pony show.
The backlash on the annoyance of UAC is proof enough that users don't want this sort of fine-grained privilege security, as secure an implementation of permissions that it is most end users would just turn off notifications and go for a 'yes to all'.
I thought that one of the worst things about UAC was its not explaining in layman's terms what privilege was needed. "Cancel/Allow?" just sitting there means nothing. Contrast:
While the rest of your post is pretty good, the above shows a great deal of ignorance about how the Unix security model works. Please spend a bit of time looking into groups, permissions, PAM, etc. before making such broad statements.
The traditional Unix security model simply doesn't give the level of control I'm suggesting, whence much Unix software even today choosing the lowest common denominator of temporarily becoming root for anything requiring more than regular user privileges.
I haven't done any signficant work with PAM, but I don't recall its alone providing an API for fine-grained time-limited access control to IPC/general kernel services. IOW, it's an add-on for Unix software which chooses to use it, but it's not what one thinks of when one talks of the Unix security model.
SELinux does go way beyond the traditional model but it's a royal pain to get distributors/developers/users moved over to thinking in its terms. It's not helped that - for whatever reason - genuinely skilled security types are almost universally bad at making accessible interfaces and documentation.
As a former VMS/Unix sysadmin myself, I also know it was a major PITA for anyone who had a job that changed scope frequently. I can't imagine how you'd successfully implement it in a consumer friendly way.
This isn't an org sysadmin granting privileges to users, it's a user granting privileges to apps. Apps tend not to change their scope so frequently.
Ideally[tm] all data collected by a web page using a client machine is, as others have suggested, tagged with a level of importance. As the data passes through the browser it can be walled off from any apps which are not given permission to see that class of data. For example, a default for any data collected in an input type="password" entry to be regarded as a login which requires third party password collection privilege to find its way into any other app, whether that's by keystroke listeners or login db readers.
Do you mean to say that, when I install a Firefox add-on, Firefox won't give a list of requested privileges? Why has it taken 30 years for people who think in Unix security terms to not catch up to the VMS "fine-grained privileges to executables for users" security model?
The whole regular user / root thing is awful. Microsoft is still doing it wrong because, while the NT kernel may approach the right idea, it builds atop it a mess of get-out-of-jail-free paths.
It's not impossible.
(1) By default, allow nothing;
(2) Never allow everything - require software to specify exactly what it needs;
(3) Classify permissions so the user is alerted more violently for more risky permissions - this may depend on the circumstances (e.g. a browser add-on usually shouldn't be asking for the same sort of privileges as backup software);
(4) Software which needs an unusually privileged environment may benefit from auditing and signing, but never make this compulsory because this pisses off everyone;
(5) But, by default, refuse in such circumstances and indicate why. The user needs to make a conscious effort to override a reasonable set of auto-refusal defaults;
(6) Distinguish explicitly between once, occasional, time-limited and forever permissions. To take a particularly insidious example: iPhones ask if you want to give permission for your app to read your GPS location. This isn't permission for the next 15 minuts or day; it's permission forever. That is wrong. Looked at from the other end, don't do a Vista and ask every time. This is worse than not asking at all.
More thoughts, guise?
and there are basically no oil-fueled electrical power plants out there.
Potential government is often heavily (esp. Bush dynasty) connected with oil; the fossil fuel electricity generation companies have the same "anti-environmentalist" stances as these people; the campaign donations support these people. For example, AEP's CEO donated about $100k to Gingrich's 2009 oil drilling promotional and Southern gave $250k to Bush's last campaign. The AEP amount may seem small, but opensecrets asserts total $9 million p.a. lobbying in 2008-2009. The oil lobby often is the government, and the fossil fuel lobby acts in symbiosis.
Your car won't run off uranium,
But it will run off a battery charged by a uranium power plant.
People get scared because all the cheap junk they buy says "Made in China" and don't notice the heavy equipment, jumbo jets, commercial trucks, et al,
It's the decline that's scary, not the overall output. And making a killing on heavy items does not give you the same stability as a giant consumer manufacturing base.
(Aside: "et al" is for people.)
I guess I was taking the post by Styopa more literally than others have.
Those (such, perhaps, as yourself) who have made the effort to contribute toward a realistic assessment of environmental impact can end up stopping power plants being built. And those who argued for increased standardisation in nuclear power plant design and maintenance were hardly "environmental wackjobs". Their argument has won out and we now have safer designs to show for it.
But those who make for the best news coverage and who end up being raised as a straw man to represent the opposition - the stereotypical smelly hippy who lies down in front of a bulldozer - are never lone effectors of change. I do, of course, understand their role in delaying while some other group completes a legal challenge.
lying in front of trains and bulldozers to stop
You do realise that these "long-haired hippy protesters" didn't actually "stop" anything, merely pccasionally slightly delay? Because, you know, rule of law, policemen, arrest, etc. What you're guilty of here is absorption and regurgitation of well-prepared exaggerated and emotional news images beamed to your front room.
Environmentalist wackjobs shouldn't get a free pass on their irrational fear of nuclear power
Yes, but you're not going to get anyone on-side by complaining about "wackjobs" with an "irrational fear". It is quite healthy and rational to fear nuclear power, just as it is healthy to fear a tiger - but the response to fear doesn't always have to be to run away. Translate into a list of perceived hazards; provide explanation of how resultant risks are managed.
It is also important to be honest about the unique problems of nuclear power - waste management in particular - with a demonstration of how any expansion of a nuclear power programme can be matched by increased waste containment.
Fossil fuel lobbyists aren't going to change their minds because they already know you're right - it's just not in their interest to admit it. But some environmentalists are simply misguided by a lack of knowledge of nuclear power or by rhetoric from those who have a pecuniary or power interest in pseudo-environmentalism (Greenpeace, PETA, etc.). These organisations aren't "wackjobs" either - they're working on the same basis as the fossil fuel lobbyists.
Following hot on the heels of, "American manufacturing is dying because of the unions," we'll see, "America lacks nuclear reactors because of the environmentalists."
America lacks nuclear reactors because we have a strong oil lobby tied with government, and America lacks manufacturing because it's cheaper to outsource somewhere with lower CoL and a glut of desperate workers. In each case, precisely as is logical, it's the people in control who get to make the decisions and not some group convenient to demonise.