Of course there is. Just to do a completely extreme example: If gas was taxed so it got priced at $1000/gallon, people would hardly drive at all.
I think it would probably be cheaper, economically, to assassinate the people taxing it up to $1000/gallon than it would be to not drive. Just saying, when a gallon of gas can hire a relatively competent hitman, and all subsequent gallons of gas would be cheaper as a result, someone's going to pull out their siphon hose and get themselves a cheap hitman.
If you're only worried about economics and ignore all other factors, wouldn't it be cheaper, economically speaking, to just steal gas today rather than pay $3.50/gallon?
If gas were taxed to $1000/gallon, then that would mean that some extraordinary circumstance happened that dramatically cut the global supply of oil (like if someone nuked the entire middle east and Canada found that when they dug deeper into their huge shale reserves, all they had was worthless diamonds instead of oil shale), so that $1000/gallon gasoline (as well as the vehicles that are fueled with it) will be protected by armed men, probably US Military. At that point, killing those that control the oil becomes much more risky, are you sure it's "cheaper"?
Once drivers are faced with paying $10/gallon, they'll look for fuel efficient commute alternatives themselves (which includes transit (which can be funded from the fuel tax), cycling and moving closer to work, so it will reduce congestion at the same time -- just putting everyone in an EV doesn't help with congestion).
I love that argument. Nirvana can come if we just raise taxes enough! We'll all bike to work on green parkways serenaded by bluebirds. If we just raise taxes enough.
Of course, costs for food and everything else we don't make at home from stuff we already have at home, will skyrocket, but hey, who cares? We'll all just ride public transit funded by high taxes that no one can afford, that being the point of raising the cost of gas in the first place. You know, to make people stop using gas? How will that work exactly?
I'm not the one that suggested that taxing fuel would lead to lower prices -- I was just pointing out that $1/gallon in taxes isn't enough to change behavior.
I don't think fuel taxes are a solution, user fees would be better -- make roads into toll roads to cover the cost of maintaining them.
Though I do think that fuel prices are held artificially low - the USA spends a lot of money trying to keep calm in the middle east, and it's not for humanitarian reasons, when's the last time we launched an all-out war against a Burundi warlord because he's killing innocent civilians? If Burundi had oil, we might.
So I'd go with a 2 pronged approach - tax fuel to cover the cost of maintaining a stable energy supply, and charge user fees for roads instead of using fuel-tax money to partially fund roads, making up the rest from general tax revenue.
Of course, costs for food and everything else we don't make at home from stuff we already have at home, will skyrocket
To a certain point, that's probably reasonable - A carrot trucked in 1000 miles from Mexico should cost more than one from a local farmer, but if road taxes/fees make goods too expensive, society could tax truck drivers less, letting other road users pick up the slack. Which is what happens today - even though truck drivers pay a lot of money in road taxes, they still don't cover all of the wear and tear from trucks, so everyone else ends up subsidizing them.
The easiest way to reduce demand is to just tax fuel - don't add $1 in taxes, add $5 in taxes phased in over 10 years.
I'm not looking to stop driving my car?!?!?
I'm wanting gas to be back to about $2/gal...I don't drive SUV's either, I love sports cars.
But I'm not interested in anything (taxes like you mention) to make my gas more $$$. Most people are not either...
You just proposed adding 1 dollar in fuel taxes over the next 4 years, how will that not make the price of fuel rise? Large shifts in consumer behavior don't happen overnight, and a dollar is probably not much of an increase to entice people to give up their large cars are move to more fuel efficient cars or EV's.
I was posting to say originally that we could increase the regulations in the US, to keep our fuels harvested here from going onto the open market, and keep more for us and keep our prices low.
You didn't say anything about regulations to keep "our" oil in this country - if demand decreases in this country, why do you think the fuel would stay in this country? Crude is valuable enough that it's worth literally shipping it to the other side of the planet to get a better price, if fuel prices decrease in the USA, there's plenty of global demand.
And after you "move our new vehicles over to none-oil, " why do you think that fuel will remain cheap? It will become a specialty fuel used only by car enthusiasts such as yourself. USA refining capacity will decline and you'll lose the economies of scale that make fuel as cheap as it is now (cheaper than bottled water).
I'm not against research for electric or other types of vehicles, but they aren't gonna be viable any time soon, so I want to enjoy my combustion engine for the rest of my lifetime at previously low, affordable levels.
EV's are already viable for most people for their daily needs.
Taxing things to change behavior does not work, because one thing government likes as much as power is MONEY. Once they have succeeded in reducing demand through taxes, the revenue will go down and they'll cry that some other tax (probably the income tax) will have to go up to make up the "shortfall".
But if the behavior is changed so much that other taxes are needed to make up the shortfall, then it sounds like it worked.
If you REALLY want to see the price of gas lowered, there is a simple way to do this.
Do a compromise on keystone, where it is approved, and then 2 limited time subsidies are created for electric cars, and the other for nat. gas commercial vehicles.
We already have large subsidies for electric vehicles, how do you envision these subsidies being different? If you expect the subsidies to get a significant portion of drivers to switch to EV's, how will these subsidies be funded? You've already earmarked the fuel taxes for road repairs.
At the same time, raise federal road taxes on gas/diesel by.25/gal/ year for the next 4 years, and then convert it to a % of the price, with a minimum. Next, give the gas tax to the state in which it comes from, and the diesel tax is used by the federal DOT. Then work on our roads
So add a dollar to the existing 55 cent fuel tax over 4 years, making fuel cost around $4.50 - $5.00 gallon.
By doing this, we will see the tar sands hit global market, raising our local prices. BUT, with the above limited time subsidies, it will move our new vehicles over to none-oil, which will drop demand for gas rather quickly, and then will allow diesel and gas to be around 2/gal.
So we'll pay more for fuel, but fuel will be cheaper? I'm not sure I follow that logic. Also, it's not clear how you'll pay for roads when the fuel tax goes away.
You underestimate how long it would take to switch the USA over to EV's -- even if there was enough world-wide battery capacity to do it (there's not), there would be grid problems -- the grid wasn't designed for everyone to go home and plug in a 6000W charger for 6 hours every night. Smart chargers could help with that by letting the power company control chargers to distribute load, but they aren't here yet, and won't be ready on a large scale in 4 years. If everyone switched to Natural Gas vehicles, then the cost to generate electricity would rise since power companies have been taking advantage of cheap NG to generate electricity
The easiest way to reduce demand is to just tax fuel - don't add $1 in taxes, add $5 in taxes phased in over 10 years. Once drivers are faced with paying $10/gallon, they'll look for fuel efficient commute alternatives themselves (which includes transit (which can be funded from the fuel tax), cycling and moving closer to work, so it will reduce congestion at the same time -- just putting everyone in an EV doesn't help with congestion). Of course, it's not that simple, since drivers know that such a tax would never happen, and they can just vote in someone that will continue to keep fuel cheap.
But that doesn't mean it necessarily will be offshored. The company I work for is headquartered in Atlanta, but has a small satellite office in Scotland (because the CEO grew up there and wants to provide jobs in his hometown). I'm on the same scrum team as one of the guys over there and therefore work closely with him without any problems (all our meetings are during morning our time, afternoon his time).
Ironically, I'm not allowed to telecommute except in exceptional circumstances...
I'm not sure that an anecdote demonstrating how well offshoring can work really makes the point that jobs won't necessarily be offshored.
The only question is -- are you the offshore worker, or is the team in Scotland the offshore workers?
Only sometimes. If you want employees to be available for teleconferencing, or prefer for them to be under the same legal system the offshore outsourcing doesn't work out at all.
Depends how often you want them to be available for teleconferencing.
When I last worked with an offshoring company, the company had a USA based project manager that worked our normal business hours. We had an Indian based project manager/development manager that got to the office at noon our time (which I believe was midnight his time), and the developers were online by 4pm our time (4am their time) so we had a couple hours of overlap.
The project managers were USA educated and spoke fluent english, and the developers spoke pretty good english -- enough to communicate with them, but most communication went through the PM's.
But INRIX's theory creates as many questions as it answers. For example, the U.S. GDP has been steadily growing since 2009. So why did congestion decline in 2011 and 2012?"
I know in my area, transit has become decidedly less desirable in the past year or so as it's become more crowded. A few years ago I could almost always get a seat and commute in relative comfort. Now the trains are so full that some days it skips my stop (or even if it stops to let someone off, there's not enough room to squeeze on). Biking is an option for me, so I've been biking regularly, but if that wasn't an option, I'd probably drive rather than take an unreliable train that's uncomfortably full. Equipment purchases are large capital expenses that can take years or evena decade to plan, fund, and complete, so public transit lags demand.
companies are starting to get smart and letting their employees work from home.
Yes. Why should I hire someone to commute from across town, when I can reduce congestion and hire someone to work from their home in Bangalore.
It's true -- if it's easy to do your job from home because you don't need regular interaction with your coworkers, it's probably also easy to offshore it.
Has anyone actually tried their code to see how effective it is? I don't have a system to compile it on at the moment.
Seems to work as advertised, if you don't care how long it takes to convert an image.
I compiled their source and ran their cjpeg against/usr/bin/cjpeg already installed on my system, and it did create jpegs that are 6 - 10% smaller in filesize with the same apparent image quality (I just zoomed in and eyeballed them side by side, I didn't do any extensive analysis).
However, at a quality level of 75, the Mozilla code took 10 times longer to run, while at a quality level of 90, the Mozilla code took nearly 20 times longer to run.
I only tested with a few images (with the lossless.ppm file ranging from 2MB to 90MB), so this was by no means a comprehensive test.
Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.
The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.
For completeness, I took a 94MB full color 6496x4872 TIFF and converted it to PNG (compressionlevel=9) and got a 64MB file. Then compressed the same TIFF to JPG (Quality=90), and got a 7MB file.
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.
Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.
The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.
For busy websites, an improvement of 2-6% better jpeg compression can save significant money without changing the user experience at all.
I used to save my camera images as loss-less TIFF's or RAW's, but as my camera megapixels grew, the image sizes did too, and now I have so many megapixels that I don't even care that I'm throwing away some image quality by only saving JPG's... and I found that I rarely go back to edit older photos, I just look at them, or sometimes reprint them. No need to store files in a huge lossless format for that.
But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
That sounds unreasonable. What about companies offering Windows installation services, do they need to advertise it as "Installing the world's most popular PC operating system" instead?
That would depend on Microsoft's licensing, not Mozilla's. I'd imagine that Microsoft has even more stringent restrictions on the use of Microsoft branding.
"Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus"
I wasn't clear if that meant out of their research building and onto the campus at large, or from offsite onto campus, but now I see a quote in TFA that clarifies it:
. Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus: wild birds, NIAS vehicles, and supply deliveries
So this seems much less scary, when I first read the summary, I thought a research virus had escaped from their facility to their bird flocks, but now it seems clear that someone tracked in the virus from outside, which is not surprising since it's hard to disinfect an entire supply truck.
I read TFA, but I'm still not clear on this...did the virus escape from the facility's biosecurity defenses and infect animals in the wild, or did the virus penetrate the biosecurity defenses from animals in the wild to infect the facility's animals?
My company just flat out says if you bring your own device and want to use it on the corporate network, you need to install remote management software that pushes security updates and such and gives them complete access to the device.
That's fine, as long as they also provide dedicated, company-owned and -controlled equipment for all company work. A lot of places don't want to pay that expense and encourage employees to use their own devices, at which point the rules aren't so black and white.
I don't think those are the places distributing their own root CA certificate to corporate desktops so they can inspect SSL traffic at the firewall.
That's a bit of an outdated attitude. Any "secure corporate network" has dozens or even hundreds of compromised client devices on it at any moment (and possibly a compromised employee or two). Not allowing personal devices doesn't increase security all that much. On the other hand, the benefits of BYOD are accepted by most companies that employ knowledge workers. Most places I've worked (some were really big corporations) simply require an employee to sign an acceptable use policy before connecting.
Let me turn that attitude around: are you willing to be held personally responsible when a client is compromised by a zero-day? Control is an illusion in the twenty-first century, it's way past time to start building networks that are able to function properly even with untrusted devices on them.
Well, no it's not an outdated attitude -- corporate security is about mitigating risk, not eliminating risk, and part of that mitigation is preventing unmanaged devices from connecting to the corporate "trusted" network through NAC policies -- if your device doesn't pass the NAC check, it's not getting on the network, either let IT manage your device, or you can connect to the guest network.
A signed AUP does little to protect the network (though it may help in terminating employees that insist on violating policies) - all the signed AUP shows is that the employee knows what he is and isn't *supposed* to do, but since humans are responsible for carrying out the policy, even without malicious intent, it's possible that employees are violating the policy. We may *ask* them to keep their antivirus software up to date in the AUP, but with NAC, we can *force* them to keep their antivirus up to date or they can't connect to the network.
Part of the IDS system relies on decrypting your network traffic so it can detect and mitigate threats as they happen, rather than waiting until we read about it in the newspaper.
While I'm not held *personally* responsible when a client has been compromised from a zero-day vulnerability, I'm held *professionally* responsible, and I'm the one that would get called in to explain to senior management why that client has been sending to and outside server for 3 weeks without being noticed, and I can't say "Oh, well it was SSL encrypted and sent the data through a Gmail account, so how could we have known!?" -- even the CEO has read enough management magazines to know corporate IT can have visibility into SSL.
My company installed a cell signal booster near our lunchroom, which is in the middle of the building. Is it possible they could even be monitoring THAT web activity?
/posting from work, living dangerously
Unlikely since it's probably either an RF booster, so they have no visibility into the signals at all, or they had the cellular company (or companies) install a mini cell site in the building.
It's unlikely that a private employer would get permission from the cellular companies to install their own private cellular equipment that connects to the cellular network.
Honestly I WOULD entirely agree if not for the MITM aspect.
If they really want to do that, setup a proxy and whitelist allowed sites. Deny SSL connections. Fine. Silent MITM attacks expose people in an unsuspecting manner; in ways that its unrealistic to expect most employees outside of IT to understand.
How did this get modded insightful?
The same people that can't understand that an employer monitors all communications whether SSL or not are the same people that will click on a "Your bank account has been disabled, click here to validate your information" phishing link and happily enter their banking information to re-enable their account because the logo on the https://f1rstfederal.com/ site looks just like the logo at their real bank. So they are the ones that most need a decrypting proxy to try to block these attacks.
With modern smartphones and cellular enabled tablets, there's no reason to do your personal browsing on your employer's network. If you don't want your employer to see it, don't do it on their equipment/network.
True up to a point, but the moment anyone mentions the phrase "bring your own device" and anyone from your company touches your employee's private property, a whole bunch of similar issues are going to come up.
No company should allow employees to use untrusted personal devices on their secure corporate network. If the employee insists to use a personal device on the secure network, then the company should take over the device management through whatever tool they use to manage corporate owned devices.
Honestly I WOULD entirely agree if not for the MITM aspect.
If they really want to do that, setup a proxy and whitelist allowed sites. Deny SSL connections. Fine. Silent MITM attacks expose people in an unsuspecting manner; in ways that its unrealistic to expect most employees outside of IT to understand.
Blanket SSL blocking won't work -- employees often *need* to use SSL to do their job (i.e. Finance needs to connect to the bank websites, employees need to use SSL protected logins at other sites - most any site that allows logins will require SSL).
No one has time to compile a big whitelist for every site that an employee might need to connect to, which is why the decrypting proxies are so popular -- if you can inspect and do malware scanning on every site, there's no need to make an employee submit a form and wait for someone to test the site to see if it's a valid work related site. And a whitelist doesn't solve the problem of data leakage if a whitelisted site can enable that leakage. The company may allow access to Gmail so employees can check email (they may even use Gmail themselves for email), but they still want to inspect outgoing data to make sure an employee hasn't inadvertently (or purposely) tried to send an email with protected data.
A well managed decrypting proxy is a limited risk to employees. While a poorly managed proxy may be a risk, a poorly managed desktop computer is also a risk if it's been infected by Malware. Either you trust your employer's IT department to run a secure network or you don't.... and if you don't trust them, then don't use their network or equipment.
Pretty evil when you figure that people routinely think little of jumping onto their bank's website and checking their account balance. I mean it is one thing to disallow that... it makes you a huge prick of course, but to MITM silently so anyone who does it is risking their personal financial data? That is absolutely unconscionable.
Not so evil since the company is responsible for what you do with their equipment and internet connection, so they often monitor your usage for things like preventing data leakage (which could result in large penalties against the employer) and browsing inappropriate web sites (if a coworkers sees you surfing porn, the *company* may be liable for allowing a hostile workplace).
With modern smartphones and cellular enabled tablets, there's no reason to do your personal browsing on your employer's network. If you don't want your employer to see it, don't do it on their equipment/network.
2: Use an encryption algorithm known only to the parties intending to communicate. Try not to use ROT13. It's trivial to shit out an algorithm that is so complex and bizarre no one will ever figure it out, but hard to make one that is also easy to use without leaving shit for your enemies to find.
Do you have a reference for this? The prevailing wisdom suggests that it's quite difficult to create a secure encryption algorithm - so difficult that only a few algorithms are in widespread use. An algorithm that is complex and bizarre is also complex to prove that it's secure, and could have some fatal weakness that's unearthed that makes cracking it feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course there is. Just to do a completely extreme example: If gas was taxed so it got priced at $1000/gallon, people would hardly drive at all.
I think it would probably be cheaper, economically, to assassinate the people taxing it up to $1000/gallon than it would be to not drive. Just saying, when a gallon of gas can hire a relatively competent hitman, and all subsequent gallons of gas would be cheaper as a result, someone's going to pull out their siphon hose and get themselves a cheap hitman.
If you're only worried about economics and ignore all other factors, wouldn't it be cheaper, economically speaking, to just steal gas today rather than pay $3.50/gallon?
If gas were taxed to $1000/gallon, then that would mean that some extraordinary circumstance happened that dramatically cut the global supply of oil (like if someone nuked the entire middle east and Canada found that when they dug deeper into their huge shale reserves, all they had was worthless diamonds instead of oil shale), so that $1000/gallon gasoline (as well as the vehicles that are fueled with it) will be protected by armed men, probably US Military. At that point, killing those that control the oil becomes much more risky, are you sure it's "cheaper"?
Once drivers are faced with paying $10/gallon, they'll look for fuel efficient commute alternatives themselves (which includes transit (which can be funded from the fuel tax), cycling and moving closer to work, so it will reduce congestion at the same time -- just putting everyone in an EV doesn't help with congestion).
I love that argument. Nirvana can come if we just raise taxes enough! We'll all bike to work on green parkways serenaded by bluebirds. If we just raise taxes enough.
Of course, costs for food and everything else we don't make at home from stuff we already have at home, will skyrocket, but hey, who cares? We'll all just ride public transit funded by high taxes that no one can afford, that being the point of raising the cost of gas in the first place. You know, to make people stop using gas? How will that work exactly?
I'm not the one that suggested that taxing fuel would lead to lower prices -- I was just pointing out that $1/gallon in taxes isn't enough to change behavior.
I don't think fuel taxes are a solution, user fees would be better -- make roads into toll roads to cover the cost of maintaining them.
Though I do think that fuel prices are held artificially low - the USA spends a lot of money trying to keep calm in the middle east, and it's not for humanitarian reasons, when's the last time we launched an all-out war against a Burundi warlord because he's killing innocent civilians? If Burundi had oil, we might.
So I'd go with a 2 pronged approach - tax fuel to cover the cost of maintaining a stable energy supply, and charge user fees for roads instead of using fuel-tax money to partially fund roads, making up the rest from general tax revenue.
Of course, costs for food and everything else we don't make at home from stuff we already have at home, will skyrocket
To a certain point, that's probably reasonable - A carrot trucked in 1000 miles from Mexico should cost more than one from a local farmer, but if road taxes/fees make goods too expensive, society could tax truck drivers less, letting other road users pick up the slack. Which is what happens today - even though truck drivers pay a lot of money in road taxes, they still don't cover all of the wear and tear from trucks, so everyone else ends up subsidizing them.
I'm not looking to stop driving my car?!?!?
I'm wanting gas to be back to about $2/gal...I don't drive SUV's either, I love sports cars.
But I'm not interested in anything (taxes like you mention) to make my gas more $$$. Most people are not either...
You just proposed adding 1 dollar in fuel taxes over the next 4 years, how will that not make the price of fuel rise? Large shifts in consumer behavior don't happen overnight, and a dollar is probably not much of an increase to entice people to give up their large cars are move to more fuel efficient cars or EV's.
I was posting to say originally that we could increase the regulations in the US, to keep our fuels harvested here from going onto the open market, and keep more for us and keep our prices low.
You didn't say anything about regulations to keep "our" oil in this country - if demand decreases in this country, why do you think the fuel would stay in this country? Crude is valuable enough that it's worth literally shipping it to the other side of the planet to get a better price, if fuel prices decrease in the USA, there's plenty of global demand.
And after you "move our new vehicles over to none-oil, " why do you think that fuel will remain cheap? It will become a specialty fuel used only by car enthusiasts such as yourself. USA refining capacity will decline and you'll lose the economies of scale that make fuel as cheap as it is now (cheaper than bottled water).
I'm not against research for electric or other types of vehicles, but they aren't gonna be viable any time soon, so I want to enjoy my combustion engine for the rest of my lifetime at previously low, affordable levels.
EV's are already viable for most people for their daily needs.
Taxing things to change behavior does not work, because one thing government likes as much as power is MONEY. Once they have succeeded in reducing demand through taxes, the revenue will go down and they'll cry that some other tax (probably the income tax) will have to go up to make up the "shortfall".
But if the behavior is changed so much that other taxes are needed to make up the shortfall, then it sounds like it worked.
If you REALLY want to see the price of gas lowered, there is a simple way to do this.
Do a compromise on keystone, where it is approved, and then 2 limited time subsidies are created for electric cars, and the other for nat. gas commercial vehicles.
We already have large subsidies for electric vehicles, how do you envision these subsidies being different? If you expect the subsidies to get a significant portion of drivers to switch to EV's, how will these subsidies be funded? You've already earmarked the fuel taxes for road repairs.
At the same time, raise federal road taxes on gas/diesel by .25/gal/ year for the next 4 years, and then convert it to a % of the price, with a minimum. Next, give the gas tax to the state in which it comes from, and the diesel tax is used by the federal DOT. Then work on our roads
So add a dollar to the existing 55 cent fuel tax over 4 years, making fuel cost around $4.50 - $5.00 gallon.
By doing this, we will see the tar sands hit global market, raising our local prices. BUT, with the above limited time subsidies, it will move our new vehicles over to none-oil, which will drop demand for gas rather quickly, and then will allow diesel and gas to be around 2/gal.
So we'll pay more for fuel, but fuel will be cheaper? I'm not sure I follow that logic. Also, it's not clear how you'll pay for roads when the fuel tax goes away.
You underestimate how long it would take to switch the USA over to EV's -- even if there was enough world-wide battery capacity to do it (there's not), there would be grid problems -- the grid wasn't designed for everyone to go home and plug in a 6000W charger for 6 hours every night. Smart chargers could help with that by letting the power company control chargers to distribute load, but they aren't here yet, and won't be ready on a large scale in 4 years. If everyone switched to Natural Gas vehicles, then the cost to generate electricity would rise since power companies have been taking advantage of cheap NG to generate electricity
The easiest way to reduce demand is to just tax fuel - don't add $1 in taxes, add $5 in taxes phased in over 10 years. Once drivers are faced with paying $10/gallon, they'll look for fuel efficient commute alternatives themselves (which includes transit (which can be funded from the fuel tax), cycling and moving closer to work, so it will reduce congestion at the same time -- just putting everyone in an EV doesn't help with congestion). Of course, it's not that simple, since drivers know that such a tax would never happen, and they can just vote in someone that will continue to keep fuel cheap.
But that doesn't mean it necessarily will be offshored. The company I work for is headquartered in Atlanta, but has a small satellite office in Scotland (because the CEO grew up there and wants to provide jobs in his hometown). I'm on the same scrum team as one of the guys over there and therefore work closely with him without any problems (all our meetings are during morning our time, afternoon his time).
Ironically, I'm not allowed to telecommute except in exceptional circumstances...
I'm not sure that an anecdote demonstrating how well offshoring can work really makes the point that jobs won't necessarily be offshored.
The only question is -- are you the offshore worker, or is the team in Scotland the offshore workers?
Only sometimes. If you want employees to be available for teleconferencing, or prefer for them to be under the same legal system the offshore outsourcing doesn't work out at all.
Depends how often you want them to be available for teleconferencing.
When I last worked with an offshoring company, the company had a USA based project manager that worked our normal business hours. We had an Indian based project manager/development manager that got to the office at noon our time (which I believe was midnight his time), and the developers were online by 4pm our time (4am their time) so we had a couple hours of overlap.
The project managers were USA educated and spoke fluent english, and the developers spoke pretty good english -- enough to communicate with them, but most communication went through the PM's.
But INRIX's theory creates as many questions as it answers. For example, the U.S. GDP has been steadily growing since 2009. So why did congestion decline in 2011 and 2012?"
I know in my area, transit has become decidedly less desirable in the past year or so as it's become more crowded. A few years ago I could almost always get a seat and commute in relative comfort. Now the trains are so full that some days it skips my stop (or even if it stops to let someone off, there's not enough room to squeeze on). Biking is an option for me, so I've been biking regularly, but if that wasn't an option, I'd probably drive rather than take an unreliable train that's uncomfortably full. Equipment purchases are large capital expenses that can take years or evena decade to plan, fund, and complete, so public transit lags demand.
companies are starting to get smart and letting their employees work from home.
Yes. Why should I hire someone to commute from across town, when I can reduce congestion and hire someone to work from their home in Bangalore.
It's true -- if it's easy to do your job from home because you don't need regular interaction with your coworkers, it's probably also easy to offshore it.
Has anyone actually tried their code to see how effective it is? I don't have a system to compile it on at the moment.
Seems to work as advertised, if you don't care how long it takes to convert an image.
I compiled their source and ran their cjpeg against /usr/bin/cjpeg already installed on my system, and it did create jpegs that are 6 - 10% smaller in filesize with the same apparent image quality (I just zoomed in and eyeballed them side by side, I didn't do any extensive analysis).
However, at a quality level of 75, the Mozilla code took 10 times longer to run, while at a quality level of 90, the Mozilla code took nearly 20 times longer to run.
I only tested with a few images (with the lossless .ppm file ranging from 2MB to 90MB), so this was by no means a comprehensive test.
Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.
I picked a random Wikipedia image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.
For completeness, I took a 94MB full color 6496x4872 TIFF and converted it to PNG (compressionlevel=9) and got a 64MB file. Then compressed the same TIFF to JPG (Quality=90), and got a 7MB file.
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.
Seems like a negligible improvement. I mean really. With hard drive space plentiful, and bandwidth faster than most users can use at any given moment, saving 20-60Kb on a 1Mb file is like a fart in the wind, even for mobile users.
I'm with the AC in the first post, I use PNG for 90% of my images, since it supports transparency. The file may be slightly bigger, but who cares.
Slightly better? For full color photographs, PNG is *much* bigger. Anyone that's serving up a lot of images to users cares because of bandwidth and storage costs.
I picked a random Wikipedia image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
The 1200x900 JPG is around 300KB. I converted to PNG with Gimp, and the resulting file was 1.7MB - almost 6 times larger. The Filesize after converting with Imagemagick was about the same.
For busy websites, an improvement of 2-6% better jpeg compression can save significant money without changing the user experience at all.
I used to save my camera images as loss-less TIFF's or RAW's, but as my camera megapixels grew, the image sizes did too, and now I have so many megapixels that I don't even care that I'm throwing away some image quality by only saving JPG's... and I found that I rarely go back to edit older photos, I just look at them, or sometimes reprint them. No need to store files in a huge lossless format for that.
But you may not use the firefox trademark in your ads/product page etc.
That sounds unreasonable. What about companies offering Windows installation services, do they need to advertise it as "Installing the world's most popular PC operating system" instead?
That would depend on Microsoft's licensing, not Mozilla's. I'd imagine that Microsoft has even more stringent restrictions on the use of Microsoft branding.
"Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus"
I wasn't clear if that meant out of their research building and onto the campus at large, or from offsite onto campus, but now I see a quote in TFA that clarifies it:
. Lee said they were looking at three possible routes the virus could have taken onto campus: wild birds, NIAS vehicles, and supply deliveries
So this seems much less scary, when I first read the summary, I thought a research virus had escaped from their facility to their bird flocks, but now it seems clear that someone tracked in the virus from outside, which is not surprising since it's hard to disinfect an entire supply truck.
I read TFA, but I'm still not clear on this...did the virus escape from the facility's biosecurity defenses and infect animals in the wild, or did the virus penetrate the biosecurity defenses from animals in the wild to infect the facility's animals?
My company just flat out says if you bring your own device and want to use it on the corporate network, you need to install remote management software that pushes security updates and such and gives them complete access to the device.
That's fine, as long as they also provide dedicated, company-owned and -controlled equipment for all company work. A lot of places don't want to pay that expense and encourage employees to use their own devices, at which point the rules aren't so black and white.
I don't think those are the places distributing their own root CA certificate to corporate desktops so they can inspect SSL traffic at the firewall.
That's a bit of an outdated attitude. Any "secure corporate network" has dozens or even hundreds of compromised client devices on it at any moment (and possibly a compromised employee or two). Not allowing personal devices doesn't increase security all that much. On the other hand, the benefits of BYOD are accepted by most companies that employ knowledge workers. Most places I've worked (some were really big corporations) simply require an employee to sign an acceptable use policy before connecting.
Let me turn that attitude around: are you willing to be held personally responsible when a client is compromised by a zero-day? Control is an illusion in the twenty-first century, it's way past time to start building networks that are able to function properly even with untrusted devices on them.
Well, no it's not an outdated attitude -- corporate security is about mitigating risk, not eliminating risk, and part of that mitigation is preventing unmanaged devices from connecting to the corporate "trusted" network through NAC policies -- if your device doesn't pass the NAC check, it's not getting on the network, either let IT manage your device, or you can connect to the guest network.
A signed AUP does little to protect the network (though it may help in terminating employees that insist on violating policies) - all the signed AUP shows is that the employee knows what he is and isn't *supposed* to do, but since humans are responsible for carrying out the policy, even without malicious intent, it's possible that employees are violating the policy. We may *ask* them to keep their antivirus software up to date in the AUP, but with NAC, we can *force* them to keep their antivirus up to date or they can't connect to the network.
Part of the IDS system relies on decrypting your network traffic so it can detect and mitigate threats as they happen, rather than waiting until we read about it in the newspaper.
While I'm not held *personally* responsible when a client has been compromised from a zero-day vulnerability, I'm held *professionally* responsible, and I'm the one that would get called in to explain to senior management why that client has been sending to and outside server for 3 weeks without being noticed, and I can't say "Oh, well it was SSL encrypted and sent the data through a Gmail account, so how could we have known!?" -- even the CEO has read enough management magazines to know corporate IT can have visibility into SSL.
My company installed a cell signal booster near our lunchroom, which is in the middle of the building. Is it possible they could even be monitoring THAT web activity?
Unlikely since it's probably either an RF booster, so they have no visibility into the signals at all, or they had the cellular company (or companies) install a mini cell site in the building.
It's unlikely that a private employer would get permission from the cellular companies to install their own private cellular equipment that connects to the cellular network.
That's funny! I'm still of the opinion that not enough sites require HTTPS. It should be 100% of them.
I think he meant "Too many" as in "Too many to whitelist them all", not as in "I wish sites would stop using SSL encryption to protect my data".
Honestly I WOULD entirely agree if not for the MITM aspect.
If they really want to do that, setup a proxy and whitelist allowed sites. Deny SSL connections. Fine. Silent MITM attacks expose people in an unsuspecting manner; in ways that its unrealistic to expect most employees outside of IT to understand.
How did this get modded insightful?
The same people that can't understand that an employer monitors all communications whether SSL or not are the same people that will click on a "Your bank account has been disabled, click here to validate your information" phishing link and happily enter their banking information to re-enable their account because the logo on the https://f1rstfederal.com/ site looks just like the logo at their real bank. So they are the ones that most need a decrypting proxy to try to block these attacks.
With modern smartphones and cellular enabled tablets, there's no reason to do your personal browsing on your employer's network. If you don't want your employer to see it, don't do it on their equipment/network.
True up to a point, but the moment anyone mentions the phrase "bring your own device" and anyone from your company touches your employee's private property, a whole bunch of similar issues are going to come up.
No company should allow employees to use untrusted personal devices on their secure corporate network. If the employee insists to use a personal device on the secure network, then the company should take over the device management through whatever tool they use to manage corporate owned devices.
Honestly I WOULD entirely agree if not for the MITM aspect.
If they really want to do that, setup a proxy and whitelist allowed sites. Deny SSL connections. Fine. Silent MITM attacks expose people in an unsuspecting manner; in ways that its unrealistic to expect most employees outside of IT to understand.
Blanket SSL blocking won't work -- employees often *need* to use SSL to do their job (i.e. Finance needs to connect to the bank websites, employees need to use SSL protected logins at other sites - most any site that allows logins will require SSL).
No one has time to compile a big whitelist for every site that an employee might need to connect to, which is why the decrypting proxies are so popular -- if you can inspect and do malware scanning on every site, there's no need to make an employee submit a form and wait for someone to test the site to see if it's a valid work related site. And a whitelist doesn't solve the problem of data leakage if a whitelisted site can enable that leakage. The company may allow access to Gmail so employees can check email (they may even use Gmail themselves for email), but they still want to inspect outgoing data to make sure an employee hasn't inadvertently (or purposely) tried to send an email with protected data.
A well managed decrypting proxy is a limited risk to employees. While a poorly managed proxy may be a risk, a poorly managed desktop computer is also a risk if it's been infected by Malware. Either you trust your employer's IT department to run a secure network or you don't.... and if you don't trust them, then don't use their network or equipment.
Pretty evil when you figure that people routinely think little of jumping onto their bank's website and checking their account balance. I mean it is one thing to disallow that... it makes you a huge prick of course, but to MITM silently so anyone who does it is risking their personal financial data? That is absolutely unconscionable.
Not so evil since the company is responsible for what you do with their equipment and internet connection, so they often monitor your usage for things like preventing data leakage (which could result in large penalties against the employer) and browsing inappropriate web sites (if a coworkers sees you surfing porn, the *company* may be liable for allowing a hostile workplace).
With modern smartphones and cellular enabled tablets, there's no reason to do your personal browsing on your employer's network. If you don't want your employer to see it, don't do it on their equipment/network.
What you described is not an encryption algorithm. Its a key exchange protocol (or possibly a one time pad)
2: Use an encryption algorithm known only to the parties intending to communicate. Try not to use ROT13. It's trivial to shit out an algorithm that is so complex and bizarre no one will ever figure it out, but hard to make one that is also easy to use without leaving shit for your enemies to find.
Do you have a reference for this? The prevailing wisdom suggests that it's quite difficult to create a secure encryption algorithm - so difficult that only a few algorithms are in widespread use. An algorithm that is complex and bizarre is also complex to prove that it's secure, and could have some fatal weakness that's unearthed that makes cracking it feasible.