How is that overkill? You have a device capable of introducing viral agents/trojans, or of covertly copying half a gigabyte of compressed data every day you work there, from systems designated "top-secret", and you think it is unreasonable for them to ask you to leave it at the door?
Two words: audit trail.
Real security doesn't come from from banning i-Pods. It comes from auditing who is accessing what data when. If a user is downloading 1/2 a gig of data per day which he doesn't need, that should be detected in the audit logs and questions should be asked.
Asinine security policies like this do not create real security -- they just piss off the people with whom you've entrusted your data. Even if you lock your computer in a faraday cage with no net access and strip-search everyone as they leave, they can still memorize things. If someone really wants to steal your data and sell it to the competition, they're going to find a way to do it.
If you can't trust your employees to do their jobs and to act in a professional manner, then you've got issues that won't be solved by banning iPods and USB pen drives.
If I have to chose between being instantly vaporized and have my internal organs liquefy over the course of a couple of weeks, infecting a couple dozen other people during that time, guess which one I'll chose?
Soviet scientists and engineers were (and still are) top-notch. That was never the problem with their technology. The main problem was that their manufacturing infrastructure (particuarly quality control) was for shit. Manufacturing limitations forced soviet engineers to design simple systems that would still sort of work even when they were slapped together and maintained by a bunch of drunken chimpanzees.
we have a few on our street who demand "GO SLOW! We love our children!" signs from the town instead of teaching their kids not to run into the road
You're obviously not a parent. If you were, you'd never make such a moronic statement. Kids do stupid things. You can teach your child not to run in the road - is that a guarantee that 100% of the time the lesson is going to stick?? Hell no!!!! That's why residential neighborhoods usually cap the speed limit at 25.
The original poster's complaint was not with the sign but with parents who expect the sign to be a substitute for teaching and supervising their children.
If careless drivers don't obey the 25-MPH speed limit sign, what's the probability that another sign is going to make any difference? Our neighborhood has "children at play" signs and people still drive down my street like bats out of hell. My back yard is fenced in, and my 6 year-old is old enough to know the rules (that she has to stay inside the fence unless she's with an adult), and she knows the concequences for breaking the rules (because she's been caught breaking them). Does this mean she's allowed to play in the back yard totally unsupervised? Hell no -- someone's still watching her even if we aren't hovering right over her.
I object to censorware on the grounds that it is snakeoil. It doesn't work, and is a fundimentally flawed concept. Shitty software is no substitute for good parenting -- actually supervising your children and teaching them right from wrong.
The fact that Congress wants to make unconstitutional laws requiring that local governments spend money in order to further a vocal minority's religious agenda is an entirely seperate issue.
It would seem that actual spammers on Comcast's network are shut down quite promptly by Comcast, so how is it that someone innocent isn't shut down equally quickly, too, whether or not they're guilty of intentionally spamming.
Because Comcast cannot afford to piss off large numbers of paying customers. Comcast does not have a monopoly on broadband internet, therefore they cannot do anything which would encourage customers to go to the competition. They may be able to get away with strong-arm tactics in some rural markets, but most other people have a choice and won't put up with too much crap.
A large proportion of cable modem subscribers (perhaps even the majority) can also get DSL service just as easily as they can get the cable modem. Since virtually all cable modem subscribers are also cable TV subscribers, their fear is that if they piss their broadband customers off to the point where they switch their internet to DSL, they will also switch their TV to a satellite service. For every 1000 customers lost this way, they're losing at least 1.2M in revenue (figuring $100/mo for internet + basic cable).
Puh-leeze. The Soviet Union would have collapsed regardless of whatever the US did. The Soviet economy was simply not viable, and it's collapse was inevitable. Furthermore, no amount of propeganda telling the Russian people they were living in a "worker's paradise" could disguise the fact that their standard of living was far worse than that of the poor exploited workers in the West.
The fact is that US intelligence consistently OVERestimated the Soviet GDP and consistently UNDERestimated the percentage of thier GDP that they spent on defense. Another important fact to remember is that the US/NATO was only one of their enemies -- China was always a more significant (conventional) military threat to them than NATO. We could have spent far less on defense in the 80s, and the Soviets would still have been spending more than they could afford on weapons.
The Soviet Communist party had an ingrained institutional paranoia dating back to it's inception, and would have bankrupted itself regardless of whether or not Reagan drew them into an arms race. At best Reagan's policies accelerated the process by a couple of years, but in all likelyhood he could have done nothing and still acheived the same result. Some have offered convincing arguments that Reagan's antics actually STRENGTHENED the Soviet economy by forcing them to modernize their manufacturing and transportation infrastructure.
By my observations, the current anti-bootlegging jihad bears more than a superficial resemblence to the anti-witchcraft hystera of the 15th-17th centuries. The battle against "piracy" has all the earmarks of a witchhunt.
More to the point, the cost of having the cops on salary has already been paid. Regardless of whether they are out chasing REAL bad guys, eating doughnuts, or writing speeding tickets, you still have to pay their salaries and buy their equipment. Like having a lawyer on retainer, it's a sunk cost -- so you might as well have them bring in some revinue to offset what you're spending on them already.
Traffic fines -- whether from speed traps, parking tickets, or red-light cameras -- are "stealth" taxes, pure and simple. States and municipalites COUNT on that cash flow for routine operations.
The fact that your (wife|girlfriend) doesn't get annoyed by pictures of half-nekkid hotties in your reading material is more likely a result of your choice in women rather than your choice in reading materials.
I have to disagree with your definitions of socialism and libertarianism
In my definitions, Libertarianism is the belief the needs of all individuals -- yourself as well as others -- outweigh the needs of the state.
Socalism is the belief that a society's needs as a whole are more important than any single individual's.
To present an alternative view of your drowning-in-the-lake example:
Libertarianism is having the freedom to decide whether or not to jump in and resecue someone, and having the freedom to swim in a lake with no lifeguard.
Socalisim is compelling everyone to pay for a lifeguard organization or penalizing people for not risking their own lives to save another.
To me, libertarianism is living the golden rule -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I find that such generalizations are very bad predictors of any individual person's behavior and beliefs
If you re-read what I wrote, you will see that I was not generalizing -- I was summarizing personal experience. Pay attention to my choice of words:"most (not all)... who I've (encountered|spoken to)".
My sample may be biased, but my personal observation is that the majority (>50%) of self-labelled conservitives with whom I've discussed politics, have been unthinking, close-minded bigots.
If you install the google toolbar, or edit your Mozilla/FireFox search preferences, SafeSearch is enabled by default. Still, even with that, you were correct to supervise your cousin's internet use. A young child should no more be allowed to use the net unsupervised than s/he should be allowed to roam a shopping mall unsupervised.
As a libertarian, my experience is completely opposite -- I generally find folks on the left to be more comfortable neighbors than those on the right.
Most self-professed liberals I've encountered genuinely respect the rights of others and want to make society more just and equitable for everyone.
Most self-professed conservitives I've encountered are intent on imposing their political and religious beliefs on everyone else.
Most liberals I've talked to are willing to have a rational discussion of the issues and are at least willing to listen to an opposing viewpoint
Most conservatives I've talked to are totally convinced that they are 100% right and everyone else is 100% wrong, and are not willing to even acknowledge a dissenting viewpoint.
I would say any decision, including 3NF,should be documented and backed up with a solid engineering case
Excellent point. A good engineer should always think about WHY s/he is chosing one architecture or technology over another, and be prepared to back up that decision with hard data.
but I WILL point out, in regards to objects, us in the modern day have a field type cald BLOB (Binary large object)/blockquote
And I will point out that BLOBs are, for all practical purposes, unusable from within the database. While you can store and retrieve BLOBs from SQL, that's about all you can do with them -- anything more elaborate has to be done outside of the database.
people pulled out the UML books in favor of a decent First Normal Form DB
I'm not sure I'd ever use the words "decent" and "First Normal Form" in the same sentence.
In 15+ years as a database developer, I've never seen a non-trivial problem which could be modelled correctly in 1NF. In my experience, 3NF is pretty universially considered to be the default level of normalization. Any decision to deviate from 3NF, either up or down, should be documented and backed up with a solid engineering case as to why it's necessary.
Compilers shouldn't generate warnings, they should generate errors.
That's a valid point of view. However it is not the ONLY valid point of view. C is built on the equally-valid point of view that the compiler should do EXACTLY what you tell it to do -- even if you to do something which violates some arbitrary standard of "good programming". This is not necessarily a bad thing -- you may have a very sound engineering reason why you want to allow a memory leak or have an unhandled exception. If you want or need additional hand-holding, you can pass the appropriate switch to your compiler to tell it that all warnings are fatal, like gcc's -pedantic-errors switch. If you need even more protection, you set up your makefiles to run lint or some other source-code analyzer.
The C compiler follows the Unix design philosophy, where a program does a single job. The C compiler's job is to turn source code into executable code, and nothing else. It's not the compiler's job to enforce coding standards; if you need something to do that you pick the appropriate tool and run it on your code before you invoke the compiler.
Just because you can cut your finger off with a power saw, doesn't make it a bad tool. You just need to be aware of the potential dangers, work carefully, and adopt the appropriate safeguards.
Using "managed code" does not "secure" your projects.
No, and it's not supposed to. What it does do is make it EASIER to write secure code by eliminating a very common source of security bugs. This allows you to concentrate on the big picture rather than having to waste time micromanaging the code.
The problem is, the vast majority of managers don't think in the long run. You're lucky if you can get them to think as far ahead as the next fiscal year.
In their defense, however, sometimes it is the correct business decision to sacrifice quality for delivery time. Managers have to consider many factors besides the purely technical aspects of the project. Writing the perfect program does you no good if the company folds because it wasn't ready when they needed it.
There are often contractual or market-based factors which dictate that you release on a given day whether the software ready or not. If you're counting on selling your product during the Christmas rush, then it's got to be on the shelves for "Black Friday" come hell or high water. There are many situations when "buggy, but on time and under budget" beats "good, but late over budget". Having the time and money to do it right the first time is a luxury many companies just don't have.
As an engineer, you have to do the best job you can do with the resources you have to work with, and to communicate to management the trade-offs you have to make in order to stay within the constraints you have been given.
Good security requires that you understand the principles of what makes a program secure as well as knowing the exploitable weaknesses of the language in which you are developing the software. Using a "more secure" language will not improve your security if your system architure is not built with security in mind. A securely implemented system is rendered insecure if it isn't administred intelligently.
The security advantage of some langages is that it makes it EASIER to write secure code, not that they make it impossible to write insecure code. There's a difference between protecting you from accidentially shooting yourself in the foot and preventing you from intentionally aiming at your foot and pulling the trigger.
It is possible to write secure code in C or C++ -- but it takes a whole lot more effort and talent to get it right than it would to do so in a language which does automatic bounds checking and runs in a sandbox. Unfortunately, history has shown us that it's extremely difficult to write secure C/C++ code -- only a handful of programmers are able to consistently get it right, and even the best of the best still make basic mistakes.
Huh? Without portknocking, you have to have at least/one/ listening service.
Again, what's the point? I can not see any legitimate purpose for this. The only reason I could see where you'd want to completely obscure the fact that a box has open ports is if you are up to no good -- eg, hiding a back door on a subverted box or running an unauthorized service on your employer's network. It may be an interesting hack, but it has zero practical value.
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Real security doesn't come from from banning i-Pods. It comes from auditing who is accessing what data when. If a user is downloading 1/2 a gig of data per day which he doesn't need, that should be detected in the audit logs and questions should be asked.
Asinine security policies like this do not create real security -- they just piss off the people with whom you've entrusted your data. Even if you lock your computer in a faraday cage with no net access and strip-search everyone as they leave, they can still memorize things. If someone really wants to steal your data and sell it to the competition, they're going to find a way to do it.
If you can't trust your employees to do their jobs and to act in a professional manner, then you've got issues that won't be solved by banning iPods and USB pen drives.
If I have to chose between being instantly vaporized and have my internal organs liquefy over the course of a couple of weeks, infecting a couple dozen other people during that time, guess which one I'll chose?
Soviet scientists and engineers were (and still are) top-notch. That was never the problem with their technology. The main problem was that their manufacturing infrastructure (particuarly quality control) was for shit. Manufacturing limitations forced soviet engineers to design simple systems that would still sort of work even when they were slapped together and maintained by a bunch of drunken chimpanzees.
If careless drivers don't obey the 25-MPH speed limit sign, what's the probability that another sign is going to make any difference? Our neighborhood has "children at play" signs and people still drive down my street like bats out of hell. My back yard is fenced in, and my 6 year-old is old enough to know the rules (that she has to stay inside the fence unless she's with an adult), and she knows the concequences for breaking the rules (because she's been caught breaking them). Does this mean she's allowed to play in the back yard totally unsupervised? Hell no -- someone's still watching her even if we aren't hovering right over her.
The fact that Congress wants to make unconstitutional laws requiring that local governments spend money in order to further a vocal minority's religious agenda is an entirely seperate issue.
Unfortunately there aren't any politicians ro cabinet officials with the integrity of Jack Ryan in the real world.
A large proportion of cable modem subscribers (perhaps even the majority) can also get DSL service just as easily as they can get the cable modem. Since virtually all cable modem subscribers are also cable TV subscribers, their fear is that if they piss their broadband customers off to the point where they switch their internet to DSL, they will also switch their TV to a satellite service. For every 1000 customers lost this way, they're losing at least 1.2M in revenue (figuring $100/mo for internet + basic cable).
The fact is that US intelligence consistently OVERestimated the Soviet GDP and consistently UNDERestimated the percentage of thier GDP that they spent on defense. Another important fact to remember is that the US/NATO was only one of their enemies -- China was always a more significant (conventional) military threat to them than NATO. We could have spent far less on defense in the 80s, and the Soviets would still have been spending more than they could afford on weapons.
The Soviet Communist party had an ingrained institutional paranoia dating back to it's inception, and would have bankrupted itself regardless of whether or not Reagan drew them into an arms race. At best Reagan's policies accelerated the process by a couple of years, but in all likelyhood he could have done nothing and still acheived the same result. Some have offered convincing arguments that Reagan's antics actually STRENGTHENED the Soviet economy by forcing them to modernize their manufacturing and transportation infrastructure.
By my observations, the current anti-bootlegging jihad bears more than a superficial resemblence to the anti-witchcraft hystera of the 15th-17th centuries. The battle against "piracy" has all the earmarks of a witchhunt.
Traffic fines -- whether from speed traps, parking tickets, or red-light cameras -- are "stealth" taxes, pure and simple. States and municipalites COUNT on that cash flow for routine operations.
In my definitions, Libertarianism is the belief the needs of all individuals -- yourself as well as others -- outweigh the needs of the state.
Socalism is the belief that a society's needs as a whole are more important than any single individual's.
To present an alternative view of your drowning-in-the-lake example:
Libertarianism is having the freedom to decide whether or not to jump in and resecue someone, and having the freedom to swim in a lake with no lifeguard.
Socalisim is compelling everyone to pay for a lifeguard organization or penalizing people for not risking their own lives to save another.
To me, libertarianism is living the golden rule -- do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
My sample may be biased, but my personal observation is that the majority (>50%) of self-labelled conservitives with whom I've discussed politics, have been unthinking, close-minded bigots.
If you install the google toolbar, or edit your Mozilla/FireFox search preferences, SafeSearch is enabled by default. Still, even with that, you were correct to supervise your cousin's internet use. A young child should no more be allowed to use the net unsupervised than s/he should be allowed to roam a shopping mall unsupervised.
Most self-professed liberals I've encountered genuinely respect the rights of others and want to make society more just and equitable for everyone.
Most self-professed conservitives I've encountered are intent on imposing their political and religious beliefs on everyone else.
Most liberals I've talked to are willing to have a rational discussion of the issues and are at least willing to listen to an opposing viewpoint
Most conservatives I've talked to are totally convinced that they are 100% right and everyone else is 100% wrong, and are not willing to even acknowledge a dissenting viewpoint.
In 15+ years as a database developer, I've never seen a non-trivial problem which could be modelled correctly in 1NF. In my experience, 3NF is pretty universially considered to be the default level of normalization. Any decision to deviate from 3NF, either up or down, should be documented and backed up with a solid engineering case as to why it's necessary.
The C compiler follows the Unix design philosophy, where a program does a single job. The C compiler's job is to turn source code into executable code, and nothing else. It's not the compiler's job to enforce coding standards; if you need something to do that you pick the appropriate tool and run it on your code before you invoke the compiler.
Just because you can cut your finger off with a power saw, doesn't make it a bad tool. You just need to be aware of the potential dangers, work carefully, and adopt the appropriate safeguards.
In their defense, however, sometimes it is the correct business decision to sacrifice quality for delivery time. Managers have to consider many factors besides the purely technical aspects of the project. Writing the perfect program does you no good if the company folds because it wasn't ready when they needed it.
There are often contractual or market-based factors which dictate that you release on a given day whether the software ready or not. If you're counting on selling your product during the Christmas rush, then it's got to be on the shelves for "Black Friday" come hell or high water. There are many situations when "buggy, but on time and under budget" beats "good, but late over budget". Having the time and money to do it right the first time is a luxury many companies just don't have.
As an engineer, you have to do the best job you can do with the resources you have to work with, and to communicate to management the trade-offs you have to make in order to stay within the constraints you have been given.
ActiveX was MS's answer to Java Applets. Flash is another applet alternative.
.Net is MS's answer to J2EE.
J2EE and Java Applets, despite being written in the same langage, have very little to do with one another.
The security advantage of some langages is that it makes it EASIER to write secure code, not that they make it impossible to write insecure code. There's a difference between protecting you from accidentially shooting yourself in the foot and preventing you from intentionally aiming at your foot and pulling the trigger.
It is possible to write secure code in C or C++ -- but it takes a whole lot more effort and talent to get it right than it would to do so in a language which does automatic bounds checking and runs in a sandbox. Unfortunately, history has shown us that it's extremely difficult to write secure C/C++ code -- only a handful of programmers are able to consistently get it right, and even the best of the best still make basic mistakes.