There's a little glimmer of hope on Feinstein. There's some whispering about the possibility of her running for governor in 2010. It's considered something of a long-shot, but it could happen. However, since her next election bid for senator isn't until 2012, a loss wouldn't necessarily mean the end of her career in the Senate. A win would end it, but would probably doom California unless the redistricting due in 2011 after census results are known dramatically shifts political power.
On top of that, a gubernatorial win means Boxer becomes the senior Senator from California. Also not good. Neither is trustworthy, but Feinstein is merely crazy, while Boxer is completely insane.
A quick check of the California Code for the word 'nuclear' finds that no law along those lines exists on the books, though that doesn't mean that something like it didn't exist before. I suspect the fine would have been far higher, though.
Could she? Perhaps. But I worry about people that come out of the biggest players in the market and the favoritism that may develop. (I'd be similarly concerned about someone coming out of Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or Time-Warner, for example.) I just don't know enough about her to make any educated guesses about her qualifications, so skepticism reigns.
You're reading what are essentially press releases and deciding that they're qualified from that? One or both might well be the best person for the job, but I can write some pretty glowing words about myself that make me sound like the best fit for the job, too.
Where I work, we're largely a Foundry shop. Most of our Cisco gear is legacy equipment. A few years back, our network guys wired up a six-story building with a Cisco-designed solution. Everything was fine during testing, but as soon as it went production, with all users going about their daily business, huge latency issues hit. It turned out that the router on the first floor that coordinated traffic for the network was out of RAM and the CPU was pegged. Cisco had only one solution: buy a bigger router (for significant additional expense, even factoring in trade-in value on the installed router). The network team pulled a Foundry router from spares that originally cost less and had less memory than the Cisco that was installed, and the latency went away, with the Foundry humming along at about 20% CPU utilization.
It's not all roses with Foundry, though. We've learned recently that their newest line, the XMR, shipped without the ability to handle multicast MAC. It was deemed to be a less important feature, despite the growth in HA products out there that rely on it. We have had to delay firewall HA architecture changes to wait for this code upgrade, which is still a few months out. Lame.
Still, I don't trust most people from Cisco any further than I can throw a 6509. A few exceptions aside, their best people seem to leave to form other, more interesting (and ethical) companies. I know that sales people in general are not to be trusted, but Cisco reps seem to have carved their own special niche on that point.
I generally agree; my Fedora installation runs about 4GB, including all of the various tools, office apps, and utilities, plus two desktop environments, but excluding swap. However, a reduction by half of the disk footprint of a major OS is still impressive.
Buildings don't need to be especially flashy, but architects do some wonders making them look interesting and unique while adding functionality. Does a building need a false brick facade? No, but it might look good. Otherwise you end up with streets that look like Soviet-era apartment blocks.
Some of the changes that have been made do look flashy, and do add to the utility. Compiz adds some handy features that allow fast flipping through workspaces, but does them with some neat-looking animations. Likewise, I can move the cursor to the upper right corner and get all the windows shrunk down so that I can see them. Both are mixes of function and flash. Windows 7 does make use of some of the flash by utilizing Glass features to add function, some of which were mentioned in the Ars Technica article. KDE4 has a lot of new flash, and as I understand it, Gnome has added some recently, too (I'm a KDE fan, only using Gnome when I have to). Apple has also polished their UI since the original release of OS X.
You're welcome to stick around on Xfce or perhaps even Fluxbox if that's what works for you. I have a couple of friends who refuse to upgrade past XP because they can't get a Win2000-style desktop out of it. It works for them.
I was using the disk space pre-installation compared to the disk space post-installation. If Vista's hard links cause the system to think that it has less space than it does, there's no effective difference between the hard link and an actual copy of the file for purposes of disk space.
GUIs were once seen as cheap, flashy effects, too, but evolved. And if the power is there to run it with some flash, why not take advantage of it? I do think that those users who prefer to run without it should be able to do so, but those that want it should still have the option.
They've definitely improve the basic disk footprint. Vista-64 defaulted to nearly 14GB on my notebook (including swap and hibernation files). Windows 7 came in at a little over 7GB.
It is, as timmarhy points out, akin to Win98 compared to Win95. But Win98 is the part of Win9x that everyone remembers most pleasantly (or for some least painfully). There are still some things that I don't like about Windows 7, but as I just installed it over the weekend, I haven't had much chance to beat up on it yet. I do seem to recall that there were fewer UAC prompts installing software, though.
Joe Baca is generally a problem. He was influential in getting new regulations passed to make it easier for lower-income families to get loans, and now his district is one of the highest, if not the highest, foreclosure rates in the nation. He has steered PAC money to his sons' election attempts when the use of that money explicitly conflicted with the guidelines for their use. His election to head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was a public one when the Caucus is supposed to hold private votes. When Rep. Loretta Sanchez -- also a Democrat, Hispanic, and from the same state -- pointed this out and called for a new, secret ballot, he called her a whore.
Even for a Washington politician, Baca is quite capable of some low deeds.
My family is mostly GM, though there's a Toyota and a Honda in there. Both the latter were purchased from one dealer but found on another's lot. It may also include what the dealer is willing to do, as there may be a lot of back-end paperwork for moving around inventory.
Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever bought a new car right off the sales lot. They've either been found with the desired features in nearby locations or (as in my case) were custom-ordered from the factory. Sure, you have to wait a little bit (or four months in my case), but you get exactly what you want.
I don't have people over that often, and when I do, we generally remain downstairs while the computers are upstairs. Multiplayer games are played online; I haven't doubled up on a game with two people in the house in a few years. If they want to play a game I have as a trial, they play it on my computer under a separate profile so as not to corrupt my own settings.
I don't play console games, and haven't since around the time of the SNES, save for an hour playing SMB on a Wii a year or two ago. I spend enough on my PC to play current games (and not enough hours of that as it is); I wouldn't be buying enough console games to make it worthwhile. In any case, I consider the console interfaces to be inferior to those available on a PC.
I work with compromise and worry about precedent every day. My career is in network security, and there's often compromise on new projects. The precedent that is set is worrisome, because it comes down to, "They did this over there, why can't we do it?" We then have to explain why the exception was granted, and why it can't be granted in this situation.
SecuROM is DRM. Steam is DRM with a trade-off of useful features. I know some people have been burned, and if I were Valve, I'd be working harder to establish a method by which those issues could be resolved. But the response where someone was burned once and therefore the entire technology is null and void is another issue I deal with on a regular basis. We have to convince the project managers why it is that we need firewalls, IPS, certificates, or encryption in particular places. They don't understand that while they had problems with it in their last job, we've got a good system here, and we're willing to work with them to improve it. Sometimes, we break something, and they decide that it's not worth it and they're not going to use it, and we have to explain what we broke, why the technology is still valid, and how it provides a benefit.
You and I are not as far apart as you may think. I bought Railroad Tycoon III a year ago (picked it up for $5 or so), and the DRM on it refused to let me install it at all. Even after the (weak) tech support suggestions, I couldn't get it to work, and I finally just tossed it aside in frustration, and since then I've not bought any CD-based games that have DRM. I don't have an iTunes account, and I'm suspicious of any application that wants to connect to the network for reasons that are not clearly defined. When I started using Digsby for IM a little while back, I broke out Wireshark and was monitoring the traffic, trying to figure out how it was securely saving the passwords server-side, until I managed to find an explanation which placated me.
I don't see this as compromising for short-term gain. I'm still playing games that I played years ago, and which I expect to continue playing for some time to come. I do, however, draw clear lines as to what I will allow when it comes to DRM. They just encompass a little more space than do yours.
Any successful DRM scheme in any industry is an argument for the acceptability of DRM in general.
This is not necessarily true. While DRM for you may be completely unacceptable, there are those of us who do not necessarily mind relatively unintrusive DRM. Steam has been repeatedly mentioned in recent Slashdot conversations about this, with numerous users (myself included) happy with what it provides. A recent story did raise the point that SecuROM was in the Steam distribution for one or more games, but this raised the ire of Slashdot users, and EA, at least, has since taken pains to explain that its more recent releases have been stripped of SecuROM when distributed via Steam.
It really does come down to the benefits and drawbacks of a particular scheme. Steam can be easily removed with little or no trace left behind, allows for virtually unlimited installations on either the same or multiple devices, and simplifies gaming life by providing supplemental features such as a friends list and the ability to save settings across the network. Apple's system, while allowing downloading to a limited number of devices, allows for burning CDs, from which unencumbered files can be derived. SecuROM digs deeply into the system, is difficult or impossible to remove, limits lifetime installations requiring special tools to decrement the installation count, and generally causes more trouble than many gamers find it to be worth.
Again, you may find all forms of DRM to be abhorrent, but the more moderate forms are acceptable to many.
In the simplest form, you intercept two, not letting either through directly, then you send the first one when receiving the second one, and save the second one for your own login. This is exactly how phishers got around a European bank that used a list of OTPs. Depending on the OTP generation method, you may be limited on the timespan in which you can use it, but even time-synced token numbers are valid for a time range to account for clock drift in the tokens.
Tokens don't make phishing impossible or even really hard. You just have to set up an additional layer that checks for varying passwords. If two passwords in a row are significantly different while also being the same length, it's probably a token, in which case you grab a couple of them, let the user in with the first (saving the password until the third attempt), and then sign in on your own to do whatever.
Session attribute checks (such as those used by Chase) can further increase the difficulty, but if someone falls for a phishing scam, there's a good chance that they're not noticing that you're doing a MITM attack.
There have been quite a few more than that. Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir were probably the first two heads of government that affected world politics, but they've not been alone, especially in the last two decades or so.
This is one of the things that puzzles me. All of the battles launched by the Arabs began with, "We will be victorious and wipe Israel from the map, God willing." And yet they were unsuccessful in 1948 and 1973, and caught off-guard in 1967 when Israel attacked prior to a likely attack by the forces from three Arab nations. Hezbollah and Hamas repeatedly cite their mere survival as God showing them favor (despite the kill ratio of 50:1 or more enjoyed by the Israelis).
I understand the idea that they may perceive these as challenges from God to be overcome, but at some point, someone has to be thinking that maybe these are messages from God telling them that they're not going to win.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first saw rumblings of this a few days ago, my first thought was that they were using it to get out of Stern's contract early.
There's a little glimmer of hope on Feinstein. There's some whispering about the possibility of her running for governor in 2010. It's considered something of a long-shot, but it could happen. However, since her next election bid for senator isn't until 2012, a loss wouldn't necessarily mean the end of her career in the Senate. A win would end it, but would probably doom California unless the redistricting due in 2011 after census results are known dramatically shifts political power.
On top of that, a gubernatorial win means Boxer becomes the senior Senator from California. Also not good. Neither is trustworthy, but Feinstein is merely crazy, while Boxer is completely insane.
You can get up to three free beers at my place.
However, there is a $25 cover charge...
A quick check of the California Code for the word 'nuclear' finds that no law along those lines exists on the books, though that doesn't mean that something like it didn't exist before. I suspect the fine would have been far higher, though.
Could she? Perhaps. But I worry about people that come out of the biggest players in the market and the favoritism that may develop. (I'd be similarly concerned about someone coming out of Microsoft, IBM, Sun, or Time-Warner, for example.) I just don't know enough about her to make any educated guesses about her qualifications, so skepticism reigns.
You're reading what are essentially press releases and deciding that they're qualified from that? One or both might well be the best person for the job, but I can write some pretty glowing words about myself that make me sound like the best fit for the job, too.
Where I work, we're largely a Foundry shop. Most of our Cisco gear is legacy equipment. A few years back, our network guys wired up a six-story building with a Cisco-designed solution. Everything was fine during testing, but as soon as it went production, with all users going about their daily business, huge latency issues hit. It turned out that the router on the first floor that coordinated traffic for the network was out of RAM and the CPU was pegged. Cisco had only one solution: buy a bigger router (for significant additional expense, even factoring in trade-in value on the installed router). The network team pulled a Foundry router from spares that originally cost less and had less memory than the Cisco that was installed, and the latency went away, with the Foundry humming along at about 20% CPU utilization.
It's not all roses with Foundry, though. We've learned recently that their newest line, the XMR, shipped without the ability to handle multicast MAC. It was deemed to be a less important feature, despite the growth in HA products out there that rely on it. We have had to delay firewall HA architecture changes to wait for this code upgrade, which is still a few months out. Lame.
Padmasree Warrior is a woman.
Still, I don't trust most people from Cisco any further than I can throw a 6509. A few exceptions aside, their best people seem to leave to form other, more interesting (and ethical) companies. I know that sales people in general are not to be trusted, but Cisco reps seem to have carved their own special niche on that point.
I generally agree; my Fedora installation runs about 4GB, including all of the various tools, office apps, and utilities, plus two desktop environments, but excluding swap. However, a reduction by half of the disk footprint of a major OS is still impressive.
Buildings don't need to be especially flashy, but architects do some wonders making them look interesting and unique while adding functionality. Does a building need a false brick facade? No, but it might look good. Otherwise you end up with streets that look like Soviet-era apartment blocks.
Some of the changes that have been made do look flashy, and do add to the utility. Compiz adds some handy features that allow fast flipping through workspaces, but does them with some neat-looking animations. Likewise, I can move the cursor to the upper right corner and get all the windows shrunk down so that I can see them. Both are mixes of function and flash. Windows 7 does make use of some of the flash by utilizing Glass features to add function, some of which were mentioned in the Ars Technica article. KDE4 has a lot of new flash, and as I understand it, Gnome has added some recently, too (I'm a KDE fan, only using Gnome when I have to). Apple has also polished their UI since the original release of OS X.
You're welcome to stick around on Xfce or perhaps even Fluxbox if that's what works for you. I have a couple of friends who refuse to upgrade past XP because they can't get a Win2000-style desktop out of it. It works for them.
I was using the disk space pre-installation compared to the disk space post-installation. If Vista's hard links cause the system to think that it has less space than it does, there's no effective difference between the hard link and an actual copy of the file for purposes of disk space.
GUIs were once seen as cheap, flashy effects, too, but evolved. And if the power is there to run it with some flash, why not take advantage of it? I do think that those users who prefer to run without it should be able to do so, but those that want it should still have the option.
They've definitely improve the basic disk footprint. Vista-64 defaulted to nearly 14GB on my notebook (including swap and hibernation files). Windows 7 came in at a little over 7GB.
It is, as timmarhy points out, akin to Win98 compared to Win95. But Win98 is the part of Win9x that everyone remembers most pleasantly (or for some least painfully). There are still some things that I don't like about Windows 7, but as I just installed it over the weekend, I haven't had much chance to beat up on it yet. I do seem to recall that there were fewer UAC prompts installing software, though.
Joe Baca is generally a problem. He was influential in getting new regulations passed to make it easier for lower-income families to get loans, and now his district is one of the highest, if not the highest, foreclosure rates in the nation. He has steered PAC money to his sons' election attempts when the use of that money explicitly conflicted with the guidelines for their use. His election to head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was a public one when the Caucus is supposed to hold private votes. When Rep. Loretta Sanchez -- also a Democrat, Hispanic, and from the same state -- pointed this out and called for a new, secret ballot, he called her a whore.
Even for a Washington politician, Baca is quite capable of some low deeds.
My family is mostly GM, though there's a Toyota and a Honda in there. Both the latter were purchased from one dealer but found on another's lot. It may also include what the dealer is willing to do, as there may be a lot of back-end paperwork for moving around inventory.
The Chinese execute most prisoners by a single rifle bullet to the back of the head. The brain would therefore be useless.
Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever bought a new car right off the sales lot. They've either been found with the desired features in nearby locations or (as in my case) were custom-ordered from the factory. Sure, you have to wait a little bit (or four months in my case), but you get exactly what you want.
I don't have people over that often, and when I do, we generally remain downstairs while the computers are upstairs. Multiplayer games are played online; I haven't doubled up on a game with two people in the house in a few years. If they want to play a game I have as a trial, they play it on my computer under a separate profile so as not to corrupt my own settings.
I don't play console games, and haven't since around the time of the SNES, save for an hour playing SMB on a Wii a year or two ago. I spend enough on my PC to play current games (and not enough hours of that as it is); I wouldn't be buying enough console games to make it worthwhile. In any case, I consider the console interfaces to be inferior to those available on a PC.
I work with compromise and worry about precedent every day. My career is in network security, and there's often compromise on new projects. The precedent that is set is worrisome, because it comes down to, "They did this over there, why can't we do it?" We then have to explain why the exception was granted, and why it can't be granted in this situation.
SecuROM is DRM. Steam is DRM with a trade-off of useful features. I know some people have been burned, and if I were Valve, I'd be working harder to establish a method by which those issues could be resolved. But the response where someone was burned once and therefore the entire technology is null and void is another issue I deal with on a regular basis. We have to convince the project managers why it is that we need firewalls, IPS, certificates, or encryption in particular places. They don't understand that while they had problems with it in their last job, we've got a good system here, and we're willing to work with them to improve it. Sometimes, we break something, and they decide that it's not worth it and they're not going to use it, and we have to explain what we broke, why the technology is still valid, and how it provides a benefit.
You and I are not as far apart as you may think. I bought Railroad Tycoon III a year ago (picked it up for $5 or so), and the DRM on it refused to let me install it at all. Even after the (weak) tech support suggestions, I couldn't get it to work, and I finally just tossed it aside in frustration, and since then I've not bought any CD-based games that have DRM. I don't have an iTunes account, and I'm suspicious of any application that wants to connect to the network for reasons that are not clearly defined. When I started using Digsby for IM a little while back, I broke out Wireshark and was monitoring the traffic, trying to figure out how it was securely saving the passwords server-side, until I managed to find an explanation which placated me.
I don't see this as compromising for short-term gain. I'm still playing games that I played years ago, and which I expect to continue playing for some time to come. I do, however, draw clear lines as to what I will allow when it comes to DRM. They just encompass a little more space than do yours.
Any successful DRM scheme in any industry is an argument for the acceptability of DRM in general.
This is not necessarily true. While DRM for you may be completely unacceptable, there are those of us who do not necessarily mind relatively unintrusive DRM. Steam has been repeatedly mentioned in recent Slashdot conversations about this, with numerous users (myself included) happy with what it provides. A recent story did raise the point that SecuROM was in the Steam distribution for one or more games, but this raised the ire of Slashdot users, and EA, at least, has since taken pains to explain that its more recent releases have been stripped of SecuROM when distributed via Steam.
It really does come down to the benefits and drawbacks of a particular scheme. Steam can be easily removed with little or no trace left behind, allows for virtually unlimited installations on either the same or multiple devices, and simplifies gaming life by providing supplemental features such as a friends list and the ability to save settings across the network. Apple's system, while allowing downloading to a limited number of devices, allows for burning CDs, from which unencumbered files can be derived. SecuROM digs deeply into the system, is difficult or impossible to remove, limits lifetime installations requiring special tools to decrement the installation count, and generally causes more trouble than many gamers find it to be worth.
Again, you may find all forms of DRM to be abhorrent, but the more moderate forms are acceptable to many.
In the simplest form, you intercept two, not letting either through directly, then you send the first one when receiving the second one, and save the second one for your own login. This is exactly how phishers got around a European bank that used a list of OTPs. Depending on the OTP generation method, you may be limited on the timespan in which you can use it, but even time-synced token numbers are valid for a time range to account for clock drift in the tokens.
Tokens don't make phishing impossible or even really hard. You just have to set up an additional layer that checks for varying passwords. If two passwords in a row are significantly different while also being the same length, it's probably a token, in which case you grab a couple of them, let the user in with the first (saving the password until the third attempt), and then sign in on your own to do whatever.
Session attribute checks (such as those used by Chase) can further increase the difficulty, but if someone falls for a phishing scam, there's a good chance that they're not noticing that you're doing a MITM attack.
There have been quite a few more than that. Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir were probably the first two heads of government that affected world politics, but they've not been alone, especially in the last two decades or so.
This is one of the things that puzzles me. All of the battles launched by the Arabs began with, "We will be victorious and wipe Israel from the map, God willing." And yet they were unsuccessful in 1948 and 1973, and caught off-guard in 1967 when Israel attacked prior to a likely attack by the forces from three Arab nations. Hezbollah and Hamas repeatedly cite their mere survival as God showing them favor (despite the kill ratio of 50:1 or more enjoyed by the Israelis).
I understand the idea that they may perceive these as challenges from God to be overcome, but at some point, someone has to be thinking that maybe these are messages from God telling them that they're not going to win.