My sarcasm sensor is flickering at a sub-alarm level here.
They should be very careful to spell out the terms, but provided that it's not an exorbitant amount per person (say, 5 cents per month), think about the flip side of that deal: for say 5 cents per person per month (or whatever nominal fee they work out), copyright holders are paid. That means that all people are free to copy as much music as they want.
I don't know about you, but I would really strongly object to paying a horrendous fee of 0.05$ per month to download as much music as I'd like. I'd think that I'm being massively overcharged, at the rate of (approximately) 2,000,000,000,000G$ per note of music that I want. You see, heretical as it may sound, I don't want music. Not just downloaded music, but music full stop. I gave away my music collection in 1996 because it was stopping people from talking to me, which is the purpose of having them back to the house. I don't want it back. And I certainly don't want to pay to support other people's time-wastes. You want music in your life, you choose to buy it or steal it, but don't ask me to pay for it.
Good points. They really only apply to bespoke software, in the situations you describe. For example, most of your petty data entry clerks will be using a relatively dumb terminal (application/ device) into a database. So, presuming that you've not given them printing facilities (including to file), and there's super glue in the floppy drive and USB ports (if they exist - think terminal device), then they're pretty much restricted to pencil and paper. And since there's enough that goes on that way in any case...
Logging... in remote machines. I understand your words, but I don't understand the situation. Well... yes, OK, I do understand the scenario, but it sounds pretty contrived. You've got to have the machines off-network, which pretty much implies that your scenario is for a "road warrior" going into client premises. So, you give every "road warrior" the whole customer database? Or the database filtered for their area? Or the database for today's planned site-visits, maybe tomorrow's visits, and let them keep the logs of the last couple of days visits in case someone calls them back... these are issues of the design of the bespoke application and the business process, which should have been addressed at that design stage. I can see that there could seem to be a need for application-level encryption here, but think further : either your "road warrior" is already crooked, in which case he's got his key into the system (to review what yesterday's customer is talking about over the phone today - got to be able to access those logs!) and the encryption is effectively non-existent. Or your "road warrior" is honest, and the data thieves extract the passwords from him with a blowtorch, pliers and his credit-card PINs. Again, the application-level encryption is effectively non-existent. Are you mixing between encoding and encrypting? If the (bespoke) application stores it's logs in it's own format (as opposed to plain text), and the end user in the field simply doesn't have the modules of the program that can convert that code ("Friday"=0xFE ; "bananas"=0xFD ; "Location 48, Port Harcourt"=0xFC) back into a human readable form, then there is a considerable reverse-engineering problem facing the hacker, but it's not a decrypting problem, it's a decoding problem. (In the case of the "one-time pad" of random characters to act as your encoding key, and if the message is shorter than the one-time pad, then the encoding can be unbreakable, while an encryption of the same message might be, in principle, breakable. Of course, the logistical problems of distributing and synchronising the use of one-time pads make public-key key management seem simple.) Besides - shouldn't logging be done by calls to write into the system's logging partition, to log files owned by a system-level user instead of user level, and the logging partition is encrypted at the system or hardware level. All of this is stuff that the end-user account doesn't have read-access to.
Application-level encryption might be easier than system-level encryption, but you haven't convinced me that it's the right thing to do. You may have made a point in favour of putting access to system-level encryption tools into developer tools and tool kits for customising "application builder" systems. Which things like MSOrifice and FoxPro were moving towards when I was last caring about their internals. But you'd have to specify the user environment a bit more closely - and provide tools for userland to interrogate the environment about it's encryption capabilities.
Depends on whether the laws under which Skype was set up allows Skype to enter into contracts like that. IANAL, but I wouldn't be certain that they could (or that they couldn't). Law is complex, because lawyers make it so (so that lawyers can profit from interpreting it).
If Luxembourg (or European) law does not allow Luxembourg (EU) companies to enter into contracts to violate their customers/ citizen's privacy, then would that invalidate the purchase of Skype by eBay, or would it force the transfer of Skype from eBay(Global/US) to eBay(Luxembourg) ? Thorny area of law. Of course, possibly by not complying immediately (to allow them to get legal opinion), the eBay(US) employees could be signing themselves up for being "disappeared" by the US courts. Not nice. (I was just recently having a "problem" at work due to our travel contractors requesting from everyone the identity-theft kit of information that the US require. For a time there was implication that our contract with them required us to violate our privacy like that. I think that we've got that stopped now. I hope we've got that stopped now. And of course, less than 1/20th of the travelling staff members ever travel to the US.)
Here's another potential complication - recently-joined Skype people presumably signed an EULA that included a phrase like "this contract is governed by the laws of Antigua" (or wherever was legally convenient for eBay to be legally headquartered ; I can't find my Skype EULA, but then I've just turned the program on for the first time in a week) ; however, older Skype users would have a contract that is governed by the laws of Luxembourg. So, which country's laws apply? And what are the Luxembourg laws about unfair contract terms? Did the old users agree to the new terms, and was that a fair change of contract?
BIG can of worms. Nice and open. Want a spoonful - fresh and writhing and juicy.
My guess about Skype is that they are harvesting usernames and selling those to spammers and/or providing those usernames to a government agency. In case anyone missed it, the U.S. government has been doing quite a bit of data mining since 9/11/2001
Two possibly true facts which are not necessarily connected. Unless something has changed significantly since eBay brought Skype out, the company is still headquartered in Luxembourg and so not directly affected by US legislation. That doesn't mean that the USG don't have the opportunity to try interference like this, but one of the first obstacles they'd have to face would be travelling to a foreign continent in order to talk to the people who can agree to their requests. Then they'd have to deal with the regulatory regimes of the foreign (i.e. non-US) countries (plural!) where the servers reside. Then they'd have to be sure of maintaining secrecy over such negotiations, assuming that they have sufficient influence over everyone they're talking to. And they'd have to face the prospect of losing their access to people's communications if the fact got out and non-US people stopped using the service (forcing US-people to move to other services). Eavesdropping is a definite worry for me when I use Skype for commercial work (as instructed by some clients ; I don't consider it secure for personal use), but I don't think you've made the case for me to take decisive action to the extent of upsetting clients by declining to use the service. (It should be pointed out that others of my clients ban Skype from their networks because their security people can't [be bothered to] eavesdrop on Skype. Some of these are American, some Canadian, some European, some others ; there's no clear pattern.)
Dealing with a heterogenous world which is not necessarily appreciative-of or complaisant-with US desires must be a difficult pill for the US foreign policy people to swallow. It took the UK government several generations to swallow their lesson (assuming that HMG've swallowed it by now, which is often not clear).
Why copy the wrong answers too? (On the subject of "Intelligent Design")
Isn't it obvious that all these different species produced by "Intelligent Design" are actually exam scripts?
Some student Intelligent-Designers are doing their freshman exams and just producing minor variants of the "primate" basic design, using 2~4% variation to generate species and genus level changes ; second level students are producing new taxonomic classes, for example by cutting a hippo's ankle out and pasting it into a wolf-like carnivore's blood cells to produce whales ; third-level students are producing whole new orders such as mixing the warm-bloodedness and trichromic vision of the mammals with the skeletal characteristics of dinosaurs to produce birds. Graduate students are pasting alpha-proteo bacteria into methanogenic archean bacteria to produce whole new domains of life, while post-graduate students get to play with the laws of physics themselves to try producing a complete new universe.
So, doesn't that mean that the Intelligent-Design-believing-people (be they also Jews-Classic, Jews-following-Christ, Jews-believing-in-Mohammed's-inspiration, Jews-following-Mormon, or Jews-following-Koresh, with no descent-with-modification implied in that re-naming of major religious groupings and no sarcasm hiding in the choice of taxonomic labels) are actually praying to the exam-sitter, rather than the exam-setter? Which is rather like putting the organ behind the monkey when they want to find the organ-grinder.
Religion, like home-made explosives, is good fun. But it's definitely not for little children; and long spoons, blast walls, safety goggles and ear plugs are strongly recommended.
(Some people may have noticed the lack of phylum level production ; that's done by Intelligent Designers studying under Scottish rules, who get to do a 4th year of undergraduate study before going for a working life, or staying in the ivory tower of Intelligent Design research.)
It should also be pointed out that many of his complaints would require application specific extensions in ODF as well. i.e. ODF doesn't define a way to encrypt documents,
I remain to be convinced that encryption is a useful concept at the application level. (Note : this is a challenge ; convince me!)
For encryption to be useful as a protection against e.g. laptop theft, then it needs to be active at the operating system or platform level, so that all data in non-volatile storage is encrypted. User's can't be relied upon to do this in day-to-day operations, so the management needs to be done at quite a high level, which effectively requires a password per user session, viz either user log-on or on laptop-power-up. So low-level encryption has a clear need.
Encryption is useful while data is in transit between the (hopefully) secure workstations of the authorised users of the data, so there's a clear need for encryption for communication protocols.
But encryption at the application level... that's weird. You're implying that the user needs to choose to protect certain data (which they have legitimate access to) from themselves. Or are multiple users using one account on the system? Oh dear.
Does the file need to be communicated to another (authorised) user over an unsecure channel? Then you can encrypt the application-level data and then send your decryption key over your unsecure channel. And while you're at it, please perform the following high-security activities : put your credit card details onto my SlashDot user page ; mail me all the pictures of your sex partner using the grocery for illegal practices. The cheque is in the post and I promise that I won't come in your mouth (I'm not sure that I'd want to, anyway.)
Nope, encryption at the application level simply doesn't convince me as being useful. That's not to say that it's not a buzz-word which suits might be sold on, but that's not an actual need.
Now if you guys want to see some serious space programm, watch Top Gear's take on building a space shuttle:-)
That is some serious, industrial-grade, 100 octane stupidity. Well done, whoever the lunatics were. It won't save Clarkson from his well-earned death (after a year of torture by an intelligent telepathic carnivore ; the crime is "being Jeremy Clarkson"), but at least the sentence is reduced slightly.
Placing an item into the mouth of a person who is having a seizure is a potentially fatal mistake. They can swallow it or chip their teeth on a spoon. Worse is that there is absolutely no evidence that having a seizure requires any special spur of the moment help beyond making sure that the area contains no sharp objects.
The ground is not normally considered a "sharp object", but is perfectly capable of inflicting serious injuries to those who manage to come into hard contact with it. People do forget this from time to time, with unhealthy consequences.
Stellarium doesn't integrate with maps of the world, that's why. With Stellarium, you specify your location in Lat./Lon. or you specify the location of a known observatory.
Hmmm, I get the feeling that you think that knowing your present latitude and longitude is some sort of a problem. Maybe it's just a consequence of my having to deal with geographical data on a day-to-day basis, maybe it's because I've been a mountaineer for nearly thirty years, may be it's because I work out at sea regularly, maybe it's because I'm of the mindset that thinks the Degree Confluence Project is a fun idea... whatever the reason, I have a job understanding that someone can not know where they are at any particular time. OK, I'll cede that there are technical grounds for having a GPS (it's part of my work), but even without GPS technology a person ought to know where they are - to a close approximation - at any time that they're not actually a passenger in transit. Concerning people who can get lost, I have to take Marvin's answer : it gives me a headache thinking down to that level.
57N 2W at the moment, and not too far from here.
In practical terms - most people can't tell their latitude from the stars at all, and without instruments of some sort you'd be really hard-pushed to be more accurately than +/- 10 anyway. But you'd have your orientation within a matter of minutes in most places.
More vexing than that though : why doesn't Slashdot's rendering handle the "degree" HTML entity?
And then there is the problem with clogged drains and stuff. A plumbers snake might not hurt it too bad unless it is one of those rotary ones that scrape the sides. And how about chemical drain cleaners like liquid plumber? How is the fiber going to react to those being used?
Since the university is large enough to employ several electricians just to maintain the north halls complex (Hillhead, Hellhole to it's friends), I'd expect them to have their own plumber or several who would know where the relevant cables are installed. As for students putting chemicals down the shitter - that was a disciplinary offence when I was in Hellhole, and I'd expect it to still be one. Besides, with an on-call utilities service, why would you want to clean out your own drains? Obvious answer is to cover up some other illegal activity.
Without having talked to the sparkys involved (I could call round his house in 10 minutes if you really wanted - Hi Bob! Broken your computer again yet?), I don't know for sure, but I'd expect them to be using the drains because they'd avoid the need to dig up the only road to the site (disrupting lucrative summer conference accommodation) and because digging a trench through the adjacent park (Seaton) would be unpopular-making, and would then lead to needing to dig up roads in a listed building area. Lots of hassles. Compared to the problems of running a cable through pipe... well I was using fibre-optic run through a 4km coil-tubing pipe a decade ago, so it's not exactly cutting edge. And that was operating up to 7000psi pressure, 110deg C, in a corrosive oil+salt+grit mixture for the 25 days I was on site. Solidly-established technology, I'd say.
Currently it get flushed back out but a cable might let it spout out and into the dorm. where people could get sick from it.
Someone is envisaging every room being connected by this. Strange idea, having toilet facilities in every room - They'd have to re-build every room in every building to do that. I envisage it more as being a building-to-building and site-to-site solution myself. Down in the bowels of each building there are utility rooms where the cable could be brought out of the pipe and patched into the existing network infrastructure (assuming that the student halls have a network infrastructure - they certainly didn't when I was in HellHole).
People in states refusing to comply will need to show passports even for domestic flights.
People have had to show their internal passports every time they buy a plane ticket, or an inter-state rail ticket, for decades now. What's this latest palaver about? Oh, hang on - you're talking about Uh-Meri-Kah? I thought that you were talking about Russia. (Which reminds me to sort out the daughter's Russian internal passport before her international passport expires.) Just think of the possibilities for bureaucratic incompetence and trouble-causing that will exist when you've got your state ID cards, federal ID cards, drivers licenses and international passports which you've got to keep up to date and synchronised. Better start getting those new jails built - you're going to be needing them.
They think positively and while they may have some remote recollections of the Tacoma Narrows they do not quite understand why it collapsed. At least this is the case in the computer science and networking industry.
I'd hope that my friend who recently completed a network engineering degree would have a damned sight better idea of why the Tacoma bridge collapsed than that! Then again, his networking degree was taken in the engineering department, not the computing department.
Surely management understands that redundancy is good.
No. Management understands that redundancy of equipment is expensive, and that failures of equipment normally leads to redundancies in the technical staff who failed to work the correct miracles on the day of the failure.
That sounds like a recommendation for deliberately setting up occasional problems to be solved, just to remind the management that there is a need to listen to what the technical staff say. Dropping network performance to 30% for a week, and gradually restoring it by cutting down on the PHB's porn-downloading bandwidth should work adequately. But you'll need to write the log files carefully before the event.
This is why infrastructure failure disasters go in cycles determined by the attention span and age of management - each new generation has to see a major failure before they listen while engineers have the benefit of written knowlege going back years.
That implies that the engineering department can still read records from years ago, while management-type people can't. I was going to make a bitchy comment showing management types to be the morons we all know that they are. Peter Principle and all that. Then I thought about the turnover rate of obfuscated paradigm-changing bullshit that one sees coming out of management types (and going into management types, judging from the drivel in airport book shops)... and one wonders if they really can't understand the records from the previous management cycle. Plus, of course, this generation of management know that the previous generation were knuckle-dragging retards unfit to supervise the pencil-sharpening rota in a word-processing office (if they weren't such retards, they'd still be here. Right?) I think this might be the kernel of an excuse for some of the stupidities of management. Not a very good kernel, and screaming out for a more scientific approach to "management" as a subject to try to get the foundations right. But who really cares?
It is unlikely you own shares because you have a pension fund. More likely the pension fund owns shares and you are a (I forget the word, not Investor... in the pension fund). Shareholders get a number of rights (voting, prospectus, AGM, etc. that your pension fund manager will be excercising but unless it is a really transparent pension fund I doubt you'd be able to ask for the shares you 'own' via it.
Money. Weird stuff. SEP (Someone Else's Problem).
As you noted, a broker over the bus station is the sort of thing you're looking for. They will be a 'full service' broker which means you'll pay more (fee is usually 4% from memory) and get their advice and coffee - I generally value the latter more highly.
"Full Service" - doesn't that normally refer to penetrative sex, as opposed to a hand job, blow job or tit job. Certainly it used to mean that back when I used hookers. So... hookers and stock brokers have more than the obvious in common with each other.
PS: I wouldn't advise investing right now as a strategic move, rising oil prices have traditionally been tied to a falling share market.
I work in the oil industry, at the supply end. High prices are good for me ; the rest of the global economy can go and star in a porn movie (but yes, I do appreciate that they need to have the money to pay the oil price to pay me, so I suppose I should care slightly about the pips squeaking.
But a few thousand SCO shares for prosterity would be fun if you had a grand lying around not doing anything.
I was thinking of something more like 3 shares than 3000. This isn't about putting even the tiniest dribble of meaningful money towards the loathsome scumbags of SCO : it's about kicking them while they're down, not pissing on them while they're on fire, giving their boyfriends venereal diseases which result in obvious facial sores and getting their daughters pregnant on their 16th birthday parties (or whatever the age of consent is in Utah - SCO is Utah they're based, isn't it?). Oh, I forgot to add that their chiefs of religion are already embezzling their tithes, and SCO's staff have got muggings booked for every second night next week. I wouldn't shoot their dogs, but I'm sure that Slashdot could come up with an armed gun-nut to apply Linus' solution to software patents ("whack the stupid gits"). Now, what I need to do is work out if there is some affordable level of investment which is actually so small that the costs it imposes on SCO for paperwork actually exceed the benefit they derive from it. (I don't know if that is possible - if I were trying to design an economic system I would make sure that it wasn't possible; but then, I'm a science graduate, not a lawyer or beancounter so I wouldn't rule the possibility out. It's conceivable that it could be good for tax reasons.) The purposes of the share certificates are : for framing; for photocopying onto thick & absorbent paper for the toilets at the next LUG installfest; for lighting bonfires of Windows Vista discs with. That sort of socially useful function.
Which sort of begs a question : how does one do that? (I have reason to believe that I own shares, since I have a pension fund ; but that's as close as I want to get to the horrors of the money system.) Hang on... ISTR there's a shop over the road from the bus station whose sign says something about being a stock broker. That could be a source of good entertainment value in itself, even if I end up unable to get a certificate. The bankruptcy cheque would be an added bonus. I think I'd keep it with my collection of £0.01 unemployment benefit cheques.
The second would be a large increase in changes in DNA. This would cause many mutations, including cancers.
I am not at all sure that the change in mutation rates and cancer rates would be significantly different. FTFA:
Overall, secondary muons are responsible for about 85% of the total equivalent dose delivered by CRs. CR products account for 3040% of the annual dose from natural radiation in the US. ["CR" standing for Cosmic Rays]
... combining those figures, during one of these proposed high-CR episodes then organisms generally would receive around 85% of 35% or 29.75% higher radiation than during a non-high-CR interval. Less than a third of the normal dose. That's likely to have an effect, but less effect than the natural geographic variation in background radiation levels. So, any species (or family) with significant geographical range is likely to always have some part of it's gene pool residing in relatively high-radiation areas of the Earth. I'm sure that any increased radiation from this mechanism would have an effect, but I'm much less sure that the effect would be strong enough to be seen without strong statistics at work. True, strong statistics are at work here...
Rohde & Muller (2005) (hereafter RM) performed Fourier analysis of detrended data from Sepkoski's compendium (Sepkoski 2002) and found a very strong peak at a period of about 62 My. Monte Carlo simulations based on random walk models with permuted steps reveal a 99% probability that any such major spectral peak would not arise by chance, thus putting the diversity cyclicity on a firm statistical basis. ... but it's based on a fairly incomplete raw data (Sepkoski's compendium is from the fossil record, which has well-known shortcomings), and that makes it less than convincing to me (BTW, I use fossil data in my day job ; I don't deny that it's useful, but I do doubt that it's good enough to support this sort of conclusion). An interesting idea. But scarcely novel.
Evolution tends towards the more complex. Not simplification.
There is no evidence for evolution producing increasing complexity rather than producing increasing diversity over time. The results are the same (assuming the the first organisms to evolve had a fairly minimal level of complexity, which is a fairly safe assumption), but the implications for mechanisms are quite different.
There's no more energy required for a species with 23 pairs of chromosomes to breed than a species with only 22.
Ah, so you'd be the man walking down the street putting dollar bills into the beggar's cap beside the sign saying "spare 50 cent for a useless beggar". All of these structures have a manufacturing and maintenance cost, and it's hard to predict a priori which organisms will have larger genomes than others. Humans have genomes something like 20% bigger than mice, which might support this position ; but some salamanders (and other amphibians) have genomes that are bigger than any mammal's by a factor of many. It may be instructive to note that one of the classes of animals with the most energy-intensive lifestyles also has the most trimmed-down genomes : Aves (birds) . But even within the birds there are unpredictable variations. This may be science, but that doesn't mean that the answers are known.
Technology builds on itself, accelerating its own advancement. Hence, its exponential growth.
The factorial function [ n! = n * (n-1) * (n-2) *... * 2 * 1 ] builds on itself in that n! = n * (n-1)!, but it's not exponential. If I recall my maths correctly, it grows faster than any exponential function (eventually!). In vernacular speech you can get away with equating "exponential" and "fast-growing", but I'd like to think that you'd expect more precise understanding from the self-proclaimed elite on Slashdot.
Look at Chernobyl or the Savannah river plant...Both shut down, both radioactive, both experiencing a resurgence of pretty healthy wildlife across the board.
And both lasted how many minutes?
When my wife was a student in Russia she was under the fallout cloud from Chernobyl. That was 21 years ago, and she's still pretty wild.
(We live in Aberdeen, Britain's most radioactive large city. The streets aren't glowing green at night, but I am considering getting a decent geiger counter for checking my collection of uranium glass. And collecting radioactive minerals. Now, if I were to get that job off Sakhalin and have to fly over the north pole on a bi-monthly basis, then I'd start worrying about my cumulative dose. Some people need to get realistic about radiation.)
Gitmo? This guy is NOT a non-uniformed combatant attacking US troops or supporting those that do.
Being in or out of uniform (such as it existed at all in the Taliban army) had no relationship to whether or not you ended up in Gitmo. If you wore a uniform, you could end up in Gitmo ; if you didn't wear a uniform, you could end up in Gitmo ; if you drove a taxi, you might or might not end up in Gitmo. Whatever rules existed (if any) over who ended up in Gitmo, being "in uniform", being Taliban, being Al-Quaeda, being a taxi driver, being a citizen of any country (other than America)... all things that didn't have any significant effect on whether or not you ended up in Gitmo. I suspect that gender and skin colour are the two main discriminators of whether or not you would end up in Gitmo (and I'm not sure that either of them were particularly significant).
Doh!
someone in Tadjikistan thinks that Dubya Bush has offended against their laws about defaming their [insert] president
, and wants to extradite Bush Concentrating on the HTML and forgetting the content! Who do I think I am? Microsoft Word producing "Office-HTML"?
You speak of universal rights, but don't even see the bigotry in narrowing rights abuses concerns to humans. Other life forms and machines have feelings too.
Since there is much debate as to whether lawyers are a form of anti-matter or merely another type of subhuman,
Setting aside the joking, a few months ago an animal rights group in (IIRC) Austria was seriously (as in High Court, if not Supreme Court) trying to challenge the treatment of a chimpanzee in a zoo on the grounds of violation of it's "humane" rights. The court accepted that there was a case to consider, and by implication that the full panoply of human rights might extend to non-human primates. Which then opens up a whole big can of worms (which as we know, intrinsically an inalienably have more human rights than a terrorist).
They accused US investigators of trying to coerce McKinnon into accepting a secret plea bargain by threatening him with a long prison sentence if he did not collaborate.
Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.
This may come as a surprise to you, but the relevant jurisdiction practices in an extradition case are those of the country being asked to send someone away, not those of the country doing the asking. Or, to put it another way, the US has to demonstrate it's case according to English standards (where plea bargaining is almost unknown, beyond a routine 20~30% discount for pleading guilty before trial ; in Scotland you'd probably not even get that).
Look down the other end of the telescope : someone in Tadjikistan thinks that Dubya Bush has offended against their laws about defaming their, and wants to extradite Bush according to their rules of jurisprudence. In cases involving presidential insults, accepted practice is to boil the accused, slowly, until he confesses.
Slashdot Mirror
My sarcasm sensor is flickering at a sub-alarm level here.
I don't know about you, but I would really strongly object to paying a horrendous fee of 0.05$ per month to download as much music as I'd like. I'd think that I'm being massively overcharged, at the rate of (approximately) 2,000,000,000,000G$ per note of music that I want. You see, heretical as it may sound, I don't want music. Not just downloaded music, but music full stop. I gave away my music collection in 1996 because it was stopping people from talking to me, which is the purpose of having them back to the house. I don't want it back.
And I certainly don't want to pay to support other people's time-wastes.
You want music in your life, you choose to buy it or steal it, but don't ask me to pay for it.
Good points. ...
... in remote machines. I understand your words, but I don't understand the situation. Well ... yes, OK, I do understand the scenario, but it sounds pretty contrived. You've got to have the machines off-network, which pretty much implies that your scenario is for a "road warrior" going into client premises. So, you give every "road warrior" the whole customer database? Or the database filtered for their area? Or the database for today's planned site-visits, maybe tomorrow's visits, and let them keep the logs of the last couple of days visits in case someone calls them back ... these are issues of the design of the bespoke application and the business process, which should have been addressed at that design stage.
They really only apply to bespoke software, in the situations you describe. For example, most of your petty data entry clerks will be using a relatively dumb terminal (application/ device) into a database. So, presuming that you've not given them printing facilities (including to file), and there's super glue in the floppy drive and USB ports (if they exist - think terminal device), then they're pretty much restricted to pencil and paper. And since there's enough that goes on that way in any case
Logging
I can see that there could seem to be a need for application-level encryption here, but think further : either your "road warrior" is already crooked, in which case he's got his key into the system (to review what yesterday's customer is talking about over the phone today - got to be able to access those logs!) and the encryption is effectively non-existent. Or your "road warrior" is honest, and the data thieves extract the passwords from him with a blowtorch, pliers and his credit-card PINs. Again, the application-level encryption is effectively non-existent.
Are you mixing between encoding and encrypting? If the (bespoke) application stores it's logs in it's own format (as opposed to plain text), and the end user in the field simply doesn't have the modules of the program that can convert that code ("Friday"=0xFE ; "bananas"=0xFD ; "Location 48, Port Harcourt"=0xFC) back into a human readable form, then there is a considerable reverse-engineering problem facing the hacker, but it's not a decrypting problem, it's a decoding problem. (In the case of the "one-time pad" of random characters to act as your encoding key, and if the message is shorter than the one-time pad, then the encoding can be unbreakable, while an encryption of the same message might be, in principle, breakable. Of course, the logistical problems of distributing and synchronising the use of one-time pads make public-key key management seem simple.)
Besides - shouldn't logging be done by calls to write into the system's logging partition, to log files owned by a system-level user instead of user level, and the logging partition is encrypted at the system or hardware level. All of this is stuff that the end-user account doesn't have read-access to.
Application-level encryption might be easier than system-level encryption, but you haven't convinced me that it's the right thing to do. You may have made a point in favour of putting access to system-level encryption tools into developer tools and tool kits for customising "application builder" systems. Which things like MSOrifice and FoxPro were moving towards when I was last caring about their internals. But you'd have to specify the user environment a bit more closely - and provide tools for userland to interrogate the environment about it's encryption capabilities.
Depends on whether the laws under which Skype was set up allows Skype to enter into contracts like that.
IANAL, but I wouldn't be certain that they could (or that they couldn't). Law is complex, because lawyers make it so (so that lawyers can profit from interpreting it).
If Luxembourg (or European) law does not allow Luxembourg (EU) companies to enter into contracts to violate their customers/ citizen's privacy, then would that invalidate the purchase of Skype by eBay, or would it force the transfer of Skype from eBay(Global/US) to eBay(Luxembourg) ? Thorny area of law. Of course, possibly by not complying immediately (to allow them to get legal opinion), the eBay(US) employees could be signing themselves up for being "disappeared" by the US courts. Not nice.
(I was just recently having a "problem" at work due to our travel contractors requesting from everyone the identity-theft kit of information that the US require. For a time there was implication that our contract with them required us to violate our privacy like that. I think that we've got that stopped now. I hope we've got that stopped now. And of course, less than 1/20th of the travelling staff members ever travel to the US.)
Here's another potential complication - recently-joined Skype people presumably signed an EULA that included a phrase like "this contract is governed by the laws of Antigua" (or wherever was legally convenient for eBay to be legally headquartered ; I can't find my Skype EULA, but then I've just turned the program on for the first time in a week) ; however, older Skype users would have a contract that is governed by the laws of Luxembourg. So, which country's laws apply? And what are the Luxembourg laws about unfair contract terms? Did the old users agree to the new terms, and was that a fair change of contract?
BIG can of worms. Nice and open. Want a spoonful - fresh and writhing and juicy.
Two possibly true facts which are not necessarily connected.
Unless something has changed significantly since eBay brought Skype out, the company is still headquartered in Luxembourg and so not directly affected by US legislation. That doesn't mean that the USG don't have the opportunity to try interference like this, but one of the first obstacles they'd have to face would be travelling to a foreign continent in order to talk to the people who can agree to their requests. Then they'd have to deal with the regulatory regimes of the foreign (i.e. non-US) countries (plural!) where the servers reside. Then they'd have to be sure of maintaining secrecy over such negotiations, assuming that they have sufficient influence over everyone they're talking to. And they'd have to face the prospect of losing their access to people's communications if the fact got out and non-US people stopped using the service (forcing US-people to move to other services).
Eavesdropping is a definite worry for me when I use Skype for commercial work (as instructed by some clients ; I don't consider it secure for personal use), but I don't think you've made the case for me to take decisive action to the extent of upsetting clients by declining to use the service. (It should be pointed out that others of my clients ban Skype from their networks because their security people can't [be bothered to] eavesdrop on Skype. Some of these are American, some Canadian, some European, some others ; there's no clear pattern.)
Dealing with a heterogenous world which is not necessarily appreciative-of or complaisant-with US desires must be a difficult pill for the US foreign policy people to swallow. It took the UK government several generations to swallow their lesson (assuming that HMG've swallowed it by now, which is often not clear).
Isn't it obvious that all these different species produced by "Intelligent Design" are actually exam scripts?
Some student Intelligent-Designers are doing their freshman exams and just producing minor variants of the "primate" basic design, using 2~4% variation to generate species and genus level changes ; second level students are producing new taxonomic classes, for example by cutting a hippo's ankle out and pasting it into a wolf-like carnivore's blood cells to produce whales ; third-level students are producing whole new orders such as mixing the warm-bloodedness and trichromic vision of the mammals with the skeletal characteristics of dinosaurs to produce birds. Graduate students are pasting alpha-proteo bacteria into methanogenic archean bacteria to produce whole new domains of life, while post-graduate students get to play with the laws of physics themselves to try producing a complete new universe.
So, doesn't that mean that the Intelligent-Design-believing-people (be they also Jews-Classic, Jews-following-Christ, Jews-believing-in-Mohammed's-inspiration, Jews-following-Mormon, or Jews-following-Koresh, with no descent-with-modification implied in that re-naming of major religious groupings and no sarcasm hiding in the choice of taxonomic labels) are actually praying to the exam-sitter, rather than the exam-setter? Which is rather like putting the organ behind the monkey when they want to find the organ-grinder.
Religion, like home-made explosives, is good fun. But it's definitely not for little children; and long spoons, blast walls, safety goggles and ear plugs are strongly recommended.
(Some people may have noticed the lack of phylum level production ; that's done by Intelligent Designers studying under Scottish rules, who get to do a 4th year of undergraduate study before going for a working life, or staying in the ivory tower of Intelligent Design research.)
I remain to be convinced that encryption is a useful concept at the application level. (Note : this is a challenge ; convince me!)
Nope, encryption at the application level simply doesn't convince me as being useful. That's not to say that it's not a buzz-word which suits might be sold on, but that's not an actual need.
That is some serious, industrial-grade, 100 octane stupidity. Well done, whoever the lunatics were. It won't save Clarkson from his well-earned death (after a year of torture by an intelligent telepathic carnivore ; the crime is "being Jeremy Clarkson"), but at least the sentence is reduced slightly.
The ground is not normally considered a "sharp object", but is perfectly capable of inflicting serious injuries to those who manage to come into hard contact with it. People do forget this from time to time, with unhealthy consequences.
Since the university is large enough to employ several electricians just to maintain the north halls complex (Hillhead, Hellhole to it's friends), I'd expect them to have their own plumber or several who would know where the relevant cables are installed. As for students putting chemicals down the shitter - that was a disciplinary offence when I was in Hellhole, and I'd expect it to still be one. Besides, with an on-call utilities service, why would you want to clean out your own drains? Obvious answer is to cover up some other illegal activity.
Without having talked to the sparkys involved (I could call round his house in 10 minutes if you really wanted - Hi Bob! Broken your computer again yet?), I don't know for sure, but I'd expect them to be using the drains because they'd avoid the need to dig up the only road to the site (disrupting lucrative summer conference accommodation) and because digging a trench through the adjacent park (Seaton) would be unpopular-making, and would then lead to needing to dig up roads in a listed building area. Lots of hassles. Compared to the problems of running a cable through pipe
Someone is envisaging every room being connected by this. Strange idea, having toilet facilities in every room - They'd have to re-build every room in every building to do that. I envisage it more as being a building-to-building and site-to-site solution myself. Down in the bowels of each building there are utility rooms where the cable could be brought out of the pipe and patched into the existing network infrastructure (assuming that the student halls have a network infrastructure - they certainly didn't when I was in HellHole).
People have had to show their internal passports every time they buy a plane ticket, or an inter-state rail ticket, for decades now. What's this latest palaver about?
Oh, hang on - you're talking about Uh-Meri-Kah? I thought that you were talking about Russia. (Which reminds me to sort out the daughter's Russian internal passport before her international passport expires.) Just think of the possibilities for bureaucratic incompetence and trouble-causing that will exist when you've got your state ID cards, federal ID cards, drivers licenses and international passports which you've got to keep up to date and synchronised. Better start getting those new jails built - you're going to be needing them.
I'd hope that my friend who recently completed a network engineering degree would have a damned sight better idea of why the Tacoma bridge collapsed than that!
Then again, his networking degree was taken in the engineering department, not the computing department.
No. Management understands that redundancy of equipment is expensive, and that failures of equipment normally leads to redundancies in the technical staff who failed to work the correct miracles on the day of the failure.
That sounds like a recommendation for deliberately setting up occasional problems to be solved, just to remind the management that there is a need to listen to what the technical staff say. Dropping network performance to 30% for a week, and gradually restoring it by cutting down on the PHB's porn-downloading bandwidth should work adequately. But you'll need to write the log files carefully before the event.
That implies that the engineering department can still read records from years ago, while management-type people can't.
I was going to make a bitchy comment showing management types to be the morons we all know that they are. Peter Principle and all that. Then I thought about the turnover rate of obfuscated paradigm-changing bullshit that one sees coming out of management types (and going into management types, judging from the drivel in airport book shops)
I think this might be the kernel of an excuse for some of the stupidities of management. Not a very good kernel, and screaming out for a more scientific approach to "management" as a subject to try to get the foundations right. But who really cares?
Money. Weird stuff. SEP (Someone Else's Problem).
"Full Service" - doesn't that normally refer to penetrative sex, as opposed to a hand job, blow job or tit job. Certainly it used to mean that back when I used hookers. So
I work in the oil industry, at the supply end. High prices are good for me ; the rest of the global economy can go and star in a porn movie (but yes, I do appreciate that they need to have the money to pay the oil price to pay me, so I suppose I should care slightly about the pips squeaking.
I was thinking of something more like 3 shares than 3000. This isn't about putting even the tiniest dribble of meaningful money towards the loathsome scumbags of SCO : it's about kicking them while they're down, not pissing on them while they're on fire, giving their boyfriends venereal diseases which result in obvious facial sores and getting their daughters pregnant on their 16th birthday parties (or whatever the age of consent is in Utah - SCO is Utah they're based, isn't it?). Oh, I forgot to add that their chiefs of religion are already embezzling their tithes, and SCO's staff have got muggings booked for every second night next week. I wouldn't shoot their dogs, but I'm sure that Slashdot could come up with an armed gun-nut to apply Linus' solution to software patents ("whack the stupid gits").
Now, what I need to do is work out if there is some affordable level of investment which is actually so small that the costs it imposes on SCO for paperwork actually exceed the benefit they derive from it. (I don't know if that is possible - if I were trying to design an economic system I would make sure that it wasn't possible; but then, I'm a science graduate, not a lawyer or beancounter so I wouldn't rule the possibility out. It's conceivable that it could be good for tax reasons.)
The purposes of the share certificates are : for framing; for photocopying onto thick & absorbent paper for the toilets at the next LUG installfest; for lighting bonfires of Windows Vista discs with. That sort of socially useful function.
Which sort of begs a question : how does one do that? (I have reason to believe that I own shares, since I have a pension fund ; but that's as close as I want to get to the horrors of the money system.)
Hang on
The bankruptcy cheque would be an added bonus. I think I'd keep it with my collection of £0.01 unemployment benefit cheques.
I am not at all sure that the change in mutation rates and cancer rates would be significantly different.
FTFA
That's likely to have an effect, but less effect than the natural geographic variation in background radiation levels. So, any species (or family) with significant geographical range is likely to always have some part of it's gene pool residing in relatively high-radiation areas of the Earth.
I'm sure that any increased radiation from this mechanism would have an effect, but I'm much less sure that the effect would be strong enough to be seen without strong statistics at work. True, strong statistics are at work here
An interesting idea. But scarcely novel.
There is no evidence for evolution producing increasing complexity rather than producing increasing diversity over time. The results are the same (assuming the the first organisms to evolve had a fairly minimal level of complexity, which is a fairly safe assumption), but the implications for mechanisms are quite different.
Ah, so you'd be the man walking down the street putting dollar bills into the beggar's cap beside the sign saying "spare 50 cent for a useless beggar".
All of these structures have a manufacturing and maintenance cost, and it's hard to predict a priori which organisms will have larger genomes than others. Humans have genomes something like 20% bigger than mice, which might support this position ; but some salamanders (and other amphibians) have genomes that are bigger than any mammal's by a factor of many. It may be instructive to note that one of the classes of animals with the most energy-intensive lifestyles also has the most trimmed-down genomes : Aves (birds) . But even within the birds there are unpredictable variations. This may be science, but that doesn't mean that the answers are known.
The factorial function [ n! = n * (n-1) * (n-2) *
In vernacular speech you can get away with equating "exponential" and "fast-growing", but I'd like to think that you'd expect more precise understanding from the self-proclaimed elite on Slashdot.
When my wife was a student in Russia she was under the fallout cloud from Chernobyl. That was 21 years ago, and she's still pretty wild.
(We live in Aberdeen, Britain's most radioactive large city. The streets aren't glowing green at night, but I am considering getting a decent geiger counter for checking my collection of uranium glass. And collecting radioactive minerals. Now, if I were to get that job off Sakhalin and have to fly over the north pole on a bi-monthly basis, then I'd start worrying about my cumulative dose.
Some people need to get realistic about radiation.)
Don't worry, you can get an operation to fix that.
Being in or out of uniform (such as it existed at all in the Taliban army) had no relationship to whether or not you ended up in Gitmo. If you wore a uniform, you could end up in Gitmo ; if you didn't wear a uniform, you could end up in Gitmo ; if you drove a taxi, you might or might not end up in Gitmo.
Whatever rules existed (if any) over who ended up in Gitmo, being "in uniform", being Taliban, being Al-Quaeda, being a taxi driver, being a citizen of any country (other than America)
I suspect that gender and skin colour are the two main discriminators of whether or not you would end up in Gitmo (and I'm not sure that either of them were particularly significant).
Setting aside the joking, a few months ago an animal rights group in (IIRC) Austria was seriously (as in High Court, if not Supreme Court) trying to challenge the treatment of a chimpanzee in a zoo on the grounds of violation of it's "humane" rights. The court accepted that there was a case to consider, and by implication that the full panoply of human rights might extend to non-human primates. Which then opens up a whole big can of worms (which as we know, intrinsically an inalienably have more human rights than a terrorist).
This may come as a surprise to you, but the relevant jurisdiction practices in an extradition case are those of the country being asked to send someone away, not those of the country doing the asking. Or, to put it another way, the US has to demonstrate it's case according to English standards (where plea bargaining is almost unknown, beyond a routine 20~30% discount for pleading guilty before trial ; in Scotland you'd probably not even get that).
Look down the other end of the telescope : someone in Tadjikistan thinks that Dubya Bush has offended against their laws about defaming their, and wants to extradite Bush according to their rules of jurisprudence. In cases involving presidential insults, accepted practice is to boil the accused, slowly, until he confesses.
Hey, maybe this isn't such a bad idea after all.