I'm late, but someone else posted and I replied about Actionscript elsewhere in the thread. I basically think you're completely on target about the goalset of being able to quickly leverage GUI power. But I believe Actionscript (Flex, Flash) is a much better first-choice.
Actionscript is much more consistent than browser JS, which makes it less frustrating to develop in. (I'm not trying to say this is a philosophical problem in JS, and indeed Actionscript is also an ECMAScript language, so they're very close. This is basically just browser divergence, and the political causes of that are beyond the scope of this post.)
In Flex (compared to a browser) the layout language is MXML instead of HTML. MXML has powerful features that expect to interact with Actionscript. And HTML is less consistent, and CSS is browsers is less consistent, for the same reasons listed above.
MXML makes it trivial to add considerably more complex GUI elements, like a tiled list of images or a pretty chart. (Trivial as long as your data is in a convenient format, XML setup the way it expects. If your schema is different it's still easy, but it's more than 3 lines of code.)
Late to the discussion, I would've modded the parent up, but it's already at +5.
Actionscript 3 is strongly typed and OOP, so it won't teach the bad habits of some introductory languages.
For the artistically/animationly inclined, Flash gives you tons of power there. For the more programmatically inclined, Flex is an awesome programming environment that gives you all the application power of Flash Player using MXML, an XML layout language. Both are Actionscript 3. And I agree that there's tons of community. Being web based, it's trivial to share with lots of people.
But most importantly, the investment to build an interactive GUI application in, say, Flex is, in my opinion, as low as it can be and still be a full featured programming language. I'm sure you can build a non-interactive application just as easily in a lot of languages, but applications now, even trivial ones, should be able to let you show things on a screen and click on buttons. I think this is really key. You can DO something, something modest but still cool, and grow what you know by learning to do one more thing at a time. So without teaching you tons of bad practice, you can learn fairly incrementally. (Obviously you should grow up and learn more structure at some point... but that's later.)
If it wasn't clear I think whoever else in the chain said that it's better to start a kid by making them bash their brains against some really initially unrewarding stuff for the big payoff later - where the payoff is big BECAUSE it was hard - is basically crazy. I mean, if the kid WANTS to, they can go ahead. But if the goal is to encourage the programming itself, that's pretty crazy. The goal of that unrewarding stuff would be to make them set and work for long term goals... an admirable skill to learn, but one that's learned by extending what the kid WANTS to work on... you can't both move them into something they don't care about AND set the goals far ahead. It's fun to remember that I wrote stuff in assembly, but only a few people would've kept with programming if that's where they started.
I've been thinking about this... and I'm happy to have FF3 mark the unsecure, secure, and EV-secure sites differently. But it's really, really lame to say that any self-SSL site is WORSE than a random non-SSL site. It's only the same. If they're going to go through the trouble of getting people used to trust markings, they should just mark the self-SSL sites like they mark the unsecure sites. Changing the URL bar to say: (unverified) https:///
Would be enough, if they were changing the color/style of the secure sites. (Sure, don't give the self-SSL a lock icon. Fine.)
There was a/. story maybe a year ago about all sorts of obviously fake ones... what the major cert providers verify is that your payment cleared. Which is _something_ because there's SOME kind of traceability. But it's not much.
I don't really blame them, though, because the problem is fundamental. There's just no real way for them to verify someone is who they say they are, because we don't really have a definition of who that "we" is. It's not like the gov't issues you a social security private key at birth and each corporation too (not to mention going international)
So the thing keeping them secure IS the payment and the record of the payment, and the fact that so many people fall prey to phishing without a valid cert that no one cares.
*****
In my opinion, the best we can do is issue physically linked certs. Cryptographically identical to existing certs, this changes the people part - The certificate authority a) must require a payment, but there's no minimum they can charge b) mails a physical letter with a code c) makes an automated, repeating voice call with a code d) if both codes are entered and they own the domain, issues a cert for that contact info, which can optionally be used to generate certificates for multiple servers.
Now, the hard part is that you haven't verified IDENTITY at all, you've only verified contact information. So the browser would have to literally display this information, if it was one of these contact-certs (perhaps in a bar just below the URL bar) I say in 'these certs' because for these certs you're not even implying that you can trust anything except the
You COULD set this authority up with a relatively small expense. You might be able to write a FF extension to display the addresses. If you have reasonable internal security, you probably could get FF to add you as a trusted authority, at least FOR contact-certs.
That's not GREAT, but it's the best we can do for simply automation for general-purpose merchants/certs... beyond that it's trying to do credit and background checks the old fashioned way.
My only OTHER idea is that the FDIC/NCUA/etc ought to get together and create a CA for US banks. Then you could even make the bank-trusted bar a DIFFERENT color. And presumably the regulators have a secure way to talk to the banks. (I'm not suggesting that this be legally mandatory for the banks to sign up for or use, but I think there's no one who is more likely to be able to authentically verify the authenticity of a US financial institution than the US regulators...)
Honestly I wouldn't have bothered, except some anarchist-leaning mods gave you +5 insightful for being totally wrong. But as is unfortunately often true, in this case the anarchistic position has the effect of being a shill for Big Telecom; what you're suggested is exactly what their monopolies want. And don't mistake me here for a big government advocate in the broad scheme of things - I believe in the power of the free market, and I want things to be cheaper and more efficient for everyone which does not USUALLY mean done by the government, but does in some cases. And it also means the government has to be involved to keep a check on monopolies which are NOT part of the free market and keep the marketplace fair and predictable,... without those checks you don't have a free market.
First of all, WiFi per se might not be a utility, but Internet is a utility now for many people. And it SHOULD be treated exactly like a utility. It may not be as life-critical as some, but everyone else's - and the law's - definition of utility includes cable TV. For that matter different places have different utilities - some people don't get any. Being a utility has nothing to do with it being a right. By the way, you don't have a mandated right to ANY utilities, except that usually your heat can't be cut off during the winter. More farther down.
Importantly, if you have broadband your government IS involved. Let's face it, practically speaking, broadband in the US means DSL or cable for now. You can't just go laying cables wherever you like - the government grants a license (to an easement) - with varying levels of exclusivity - for utility companies (such as phone and cable) to arbitrarily tear up property within certain limits to establish the service. Consumers don't get to consent to having the lines strung across their property, except through their government. Without infringing on all those real-property rights - and without the government penalizing people who cut down cables that run across THEIR land - you can't HAVE utilities, including cable and phone.
In the case of phone, tax dollars paid for the installation of all the lines until pretty recently. The phone company DOES have a monopoly on these lines. It was believed, accurately imo, that it would make the country better and stronger and be better for all the citizens, overall. I think this was accurate. Tax dollars are still taken specifically for keeping phone service in rural areas. Doing this for Internet communication makes total sense to me; it makes us more competitive in the global marketplace.
Now I'm going to talk about why we have utilities. Let's talk about another common municipal service - garbage collection. There are private ways to deal with this, but basically every municipality has garbage collection because a) it's much more efficient and cheaper if we all get in on doing it together and perhaps b) because some people think they benefit from making sure their neighbors have easy access to it. So we all get together and start a garbage service. In many medium sized places, this doesn't mean the town actually administers this service, but it means they contract with someone (usually Waste Management, now) to do it - at a bulk rate for the whole town. And on at least some size level it's optional - it's common for large apartment buildings to contract privately instead of as part of the municipal contract, presumably because they think they're big enough that they can find a better deal. But it not be optional to pay at least part of the taxes that support the service. That's how municipal services work.
If you're really an anarchist you should go live on a boat or oil rig by yourself in international waters without a flag. While that's inflammatory, I'm not JUST being inflammatory - if you live in a city the POINT is to be by other people and have access to municipal services. If you don't want to participate - which means getting those services and paying those taxes, and be
I'm reasonably sure you're misinformed - which is understandable, because the media has gotten worse and worse about accurate reporting in recent years.*
Obama promised to run a publicly funded campaign IF HIS OPPONENT(s) ALSO AGREED TO DO SO. His opponents have not. He did not agree to run with one hand tied behind his back while his opponents weren't restricted, only to have a fair publicly funded competition. Honestly given their relative funding this might be a great idea for McCain at this point - but that doesn't mean I see it happening.
However, I'll completely agree that I haven't bothered to look this up, because I just don't care enough.
*I'm not primarily accusing the media of bias here, although it certainly exists in many directions and has gotten worse as a lot of news has funneled through very outlets owned by just a couple people. But when they aren't being biased, they're at least being sensationalist, superficial, and non-critical.
Also their focus on "balanced" instead of "accurate" is pretty disappointing. Equal time to two people with each of two opposite positions isn't good reporting if one of them has a minority opinion refuted by almost everybody and the other represents a consensus of the majority of scientists. I'm not saying you should never present a minority opinion, but it's your job to make sure you SAY that it's the minority opinion. Or when you present Lieberman as the "Democrat" in something, after he left the party. etc.
It's not a fair comparison if the quality of the light is important to you.
The light is way better than an el cheapo flourescent, especially if color matters to you at all. Or if spraying mercury in the room when the bulb breaks does. So plenty of people might be willing to take the penalty.
Obviously that depends somewhat on how sunny your locale is, though.
You'll get no argument from me that there are many fewer part options that go into a mac than all possible PCs. I'm sure there's a lot more _options_ available for a Ford truck than for a racecar - because the market is huge and the diversity of tasks is broader.
But if you think you just can't change things under the hood of a mac you're, at best, really out of date. At worst you're taking some snippets of truth and trolling with them. I'm not saying YOU should buy a Mac, but I think intentionally or not you're spreading disinformation. (I'm assuming for this discussion your idea of hardware hacking isn't soldering new components onto your motherboard.)
Certainly, there are only a few motherboards (those from Apple) that OS X is guaranteed to work with, and therefore only the few CPUs that go in them. Of course, while Apple has made it infringement to install a legit copy of OS X on them, so you can't SELL clones, they have clearly not been squashing - and have sometimes been helping in very general ways - the people trying to get it to run on other motherboards. But they're selling a total package not just software and you aren't their target market.
This is somewhat semantic, but in my opinion you can't replace the motherboard in a computer, because that's the part that, more than anything else defines it as being THAT computer, and it's the part that defines the compatibility of most everything else.
But you can put your Apple MB in any case you want. It uses industry standard RAM, standard (currently SATA) HDs, optical drives, PCI, etc. If there's a peripheral you can't use, it's almost always because there's no driver provided by the hardware vendor for OS X, never because Apple wouldn't allow it. (The in between case is where the peripheral has incompatible firmware that would have to be updated.) While it wasn't true a long time ago, this compatibility has been true since Apple went PCI a decade ago. (It's easier to port arbitrary software now that it's an Intel chip, which is more recent, and more likely to have a driver - but the hardware went industry standard much earlier.)
I'm not trying to trivialize a lack of vendor-drivers. That's an issue that limits your flexibility, but it's not the same as Apple lockout.
So in other words, drivers aside, any Mac you buy is just as customizable as any normal motherboard you'd buy for a PC.
There are other limitations I'm certainly willing to freely admit:
- I'm mostly talking about the Mac Pro above. Apple laptops are just as configurable as other typical laptops, in my experience, but that isn't much. The iMac series is a laptop sans battery. The Mini is a little better... But if you really want to configure it, buy a Mac Pro! (And fill it with the supported 32 GB of RAM)
- Since Apple is only a subset of the PC market, you certainly can usually buy a PC motherboard that's more bleeding-edge than the most bleeding edge Apple one that exists - because at any point only a handful of Apple ones exist, and all of them target bigger marketshares than the absolute bleeding edge.
- For similar reasons, you can certainly buy SOME PC motherboard that has way more configuration than any particular Mac... One that supports multiple kinds of RAM in the same board, for instance. But that's not exactly your typical PC, either.
I agree completely - getting the files TO the consultant securely is relatively easy... a GPGP key exchange followed by a phone call can pretty simply ensure who they are as well as anything. (I mean, as well as you know who the company is now - it's whoever answers their phone number.)
But then they HAVE the data, and if you care about your data, that's a problem.
In a perfect world, I would start by finding a new consultant - one who wouldn't even consider RECEIVING such data through email. I suppose in a PERFECT world, there wouldn't BE such consultants.
But failing that you need to lay out every security policy you think is important to secure your data, including INSIDE a network... firewalls, care with files, background checks on IT staff, background checks on the consultants. You need this laid out in excruciating detail. And you need it in the contract with them.
Ideally YOUR company needs to do the background checks on their staff... At a minimum you need to do a really sound credit check of them and have your attorney draw up a contract where they indemnify you for any loss due to a breach and any attorney fees to defend against and to recover from it. Etc.
Basically the same kind of due diligence you'd have for someone you were letting come in and install new servers and new firewalls on your site with access to everything you've already got. Or if they refuse to get up to a reasonable standard, you can tell them they need to do their work on your site.
First we need to test people for driving while incompetent. Perhaps with real simulators? I shouldn't have been able to learn things about driving from Gran Turismo AFTER having been driving for years. With effective simulators we can simulate high-stress high-risk situations without actual danger, so we can do it in a lot less time.
Parent seems to confuse being brilliant at calculus with being a good driver. Those are pretty much totally unrelated skills. At 18, she MUST be an inexperienced driver, because she couldn't have been driving very long - and because we don't use effective simulators to condense high risk driving situations, so you only get into them as a small fraction of your driving (unless you're very reckless)
The level of qualification that we apparently think is sufficient to let people drive is ridiculously low. They're not tested under even the tiniest of duress or stress, or in any sort of challenge that involves any real skill at driving or even having any reflexes at all. Even a 15 mph slalom would rule out SO many people, or force them to acquire greater skills.
We're getting in a giant death-machine here, people - we need to do a reasonably good job of knowing who is qualified.
I knew a case of an 80 year old man whose reflexes had clearly gone, but he wanted to keep driving. He rear ended someone with no extenuating factors whatsoever. Just up and drove into them, over a long lead distance.
To their credit the state made him take the driving test again... His family told everyone who would listen (his doctor, the DMV) that he shouldn't be driving. And he passed, and kept driving. (He passed the vision test, so apparently he could SEE what was going on, but he couldn't DO anything about it.) The family eventually prevailed on him to get rid of his car, but it was substantially later.
Also people who get _multiple_ DUI convictions... really? A serious DUI ought to be grounds for license suspension and ought to come with a stern warning - that if you drive on that suspended license you go to jail until you convince them you aren't going to wield any more implements of destruction.
I would be willing to wager that I could drive better in a manual transmission car after being awake for 30 hours while having a heated discussion on a cellphone, eating pasta, and/or changing my shoes than at least 10% of drivers, perhaps more. Note that I'm not saying I SHOULD do these things, or that I have a superhuman ability to multitask or drive, only that the state of things on the road is terrible.
The FUNDAMENTAL problem, of course, is that we treat driving more like a right than a privilege, which it needs to be since so many of our living spaces are designed to only work if you have a car. *sigh*
I'm not trying to pretend I know what Gilmore MEANT by his statement, but the way the first statement reads to me I certainly think is true. (I'm not saying there aren't bad things going on we should fight against - only that the statement is only false for a very idealist and broad interpretation.)
First let's strip away youthful idealism - routing around it doesn't mean it NEVER works or magically disappears - it just means it's much less likely to work, easier to fix, etc.
Second, let's be clear that "the Internet" includes all of us. When someone involved with that site posts it to/., that's part of routing around, and so is when we blog about it. This includes us doing hard work to keep it that way.
Finally, while it's obviously possible to keep information _out_ (away from some people), it's very hard to keep information _in_ on the internet. If you're going to (for the purposes of this discussion) strictly interpret the word censorship until it was only one of these things, it would definitely be the attempt to keep information in.
Traditionally censorship is keeping you from printing a newspaper (or killing you if you do) - that's different than going around town and taking away all the newspapers you can find, which is what's really going on here. The second technique only completely silences the _author_ if the newspaper only circulates inside that town.
Again, I'm not saying this isn't bad... but in pre-Internet censorship we wouldn't even HEAR about this story. Wikileaks is a great example of the Internet being positive in this regard. The world knows about Tibet. The Great Firewall doesn't even really keep people from viewing outside content - you just need a little technical savvy - and a lot of bravery! - to view outside content.
I understand that EC2 is *nix only, with nonpersistent filesystems, and that S3 is an apparently very reliable remote filesystem that you can get to really fast from EC2 for free.
I understand the huge value of this for transient (1 month) intensive very bursty workloads. Which, mostly, seems to be what's it's targeted at.
But for actual normal servers I don't quite see it... I mean one option is that it's cheap. Which it might or might not be, depending on who you compare it to. Maybe it's the most reliable option out there at some price point, but the static IPs (for instance) are pretty young to consider this true, and it's not necessarily cheaper than the discounter's dedicataed servers. If we just assert for the discussion that it's not cheaper per power, then the question is, is it advantageous in other ways?
It seems like you can take your same instance and reboot it bigger, which is nice, but not _really_ that different than most hosting, which will move your drives to newer machine. And it seems like coordinating this would still be a fair headache, and you don't really want to ever have 0 instances during the transition, so you're talking about some overlap.
So it seems like you'd only be really interested in this if you were always going to have your main instance up, and then you were sometimes going to have none but sometimes going to have many other instances up. Past a certain scale it might be worth your time to have more instances 9-5 and less at night, or something (depending on your users) But the setup seems like a lot of issues (not to make it just run, but to really take advantage of it.)
I'm also curious whether it supports automatic instance restarting... e.g. if a zone goes down, can you tell it you definitely want it to put your instance up again in a new zone? (Understanding that your instance has to be smart enough to boot into a useable state unmanaged... but it's a lot better than you having to monitor it.)
Flash is a great platform; parent is wrong (as are most respondents so far)
---Flash Video
Flash Video is a wrapper, not a codec. H.264 is in many ways superior to H.263 (Flash7+) or VP6 (Flash8+) However, Flash Player 9+ natively supports H.264, so whether H.264 is the right codec isn't really the issue here; you can certainly only distribute H.264 if you like. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLV
Flash Video is highly standard; in addition to Flash itself, a significant number of other players can play it.
--- Flash Player Certainly Flash is used to make a lot of junk, but that's true of everything on the internet; it's full of junk. And the more powerful the technology it is, the more junk will be made with it. I certainly think it's better to use HTML when it will suffice, but it simply cannot do what Flash can.
Obviously Flash can make both awesome and terrible games.
Since you "turned off Flash long ago" perhaps you've failed to realize that in 2002 they upgraded the underlying Actionscript to be a largely legitimate programming language, which they improved again in 2004 and again in 2006; Actionscript 3 is a strongly typed fully object oriented language that lets you make powerful clientside applications that run in a well protected sandbox. In short, it's everything Java applets in 1997 were supposed to be by 2007. (Except that Sun didn't manage it well and Microsoft actively tried to kill it by shipping a dysfunctional JVM.) You can make any general purpose application in Flash. It obviously runs more slowly than native local code (and even moreso if you animate the heck out of everything) but it requires no installation, is strongly sandboxed and runs safely on any platform.
Macromedia was very slow in releasing Flash Player 8 for Linux; so slow they never did. But Adobe released Flash Player 9 rapidly and has committed to keeping up.
There are two OSS Flash Players that I'm aware of. These certainly haven't kept up with Adobe's development, but the sibling poster's suggestion that it's illegal to make a competing player just isn't true.
And other than very "basic" HTML, Flash Player is the most standard thing on the web. It has a higher adoption rate than IE, which has a higher adoption rate than any other browser. It's more standard than any implementation family of HTML, because IE's HTML isn't like everybody else's. The same is true, but moreso, for Javascript. It is certainly higher than any other video playing capability.
--- The Flash and Flex development environments Certainly the Flash development environment isn't ideally suited to the needs of a serious programmer, which is why many people were using their own code editors and only using Flash as a compiler. Adobe recognized this need and released Flex - which creates Flash swfs but creates them using a much saner and more programmer oriented strongly OOP experience.
You can make powerful, beautiful apps quickly - which can certainly include arbitrarily complex server interaction.
Of course I'm biased; that's what we do all the day. And we're always hiring good programmers.
In just the last few days there was an article about someone who previously sued a group of defendants including/., and later dropped/. from the suit. It was in the/. summary; I didn't read TFA.
Mars could already be a shorter trip (each way) - that we know MUCH more about, and have more ability to deploy resources for - than Magellan's was, just as an example.
But, I have two opposing points:
2. Think of the robots. Basically, we have robots now, which simply are better for this kind of exploring. So we don't need a human there to EXPLORE Mars (or the moon.) Obviously the current rovers are massively, massively cheaper than a manned mission... and I think we could get more done with hundreds of rovers than some dude. a) For any given cost, the robots will probably do the exploring better. In other words, I think we should send a person to Mars when it's economically profitable to send a _person_ there compared to the robots. We just don't NEED some guy to go there anymore.
b) I think the cost involved in a human mission would be tremendous if the gain is largely symbolic. You don't go there just to touch it, you go there to find out a lot more about all sorts of things you didn't know.
c) So the other reason to go there is to _colonize_ to really expand the scope of human life to a new place.
c) in my opinion involves either: i) generate resources FROM Mars instead of spending a ton to be there or to ii) have a sufficient breeding population of humanity off earth that we'll survive a colossal extinction event. I believe i) will come before ii) AND I think i) is more likely to be done by remote control, too... or at least most of it. So wait for a NEED for a person - which personally I feel like will be a long time coming; the robots will get better faster than our ability to cheaply get a person there So maybe the first person will be a paying tourist.
3. While I think Mars is close enough to be within reach, there are things we've skipped. I think all of the above applies to the moon, but I think it's so significantly cheaper to send stuff to the moon than to Mars. We're just finally going to put a telescope on the moon... For that matter, I think we should have orbiting solar power pretty soon.
We only have like 3 people living outside our atmosphere. I think that's shameful in some ways... but there's no reason we need to "touch" Mars with a real person before we have commercial occupation of something closer / cheaper* - the technology we need for that to be sustainable - longer term, more sustainable, cheaper inhabiting of harsh environments - is something we can demonstrate much closer.
*unless it turns out a person on Mars would help us mine something ridiculously expensive, or something. But a cluster of robots could have a higher chance of finding that for less money.
I'd certainly accept that having the nice thin unbreathable atmosphere there might involve some cost savings in radiation damage/shielding, pressurization, etc. But that's only a justification if those costs are going to outweigh the much-higher lift costs and the much-lower chance of a bail-out.
The good news is we're getting there - commercial boost to space is becoming practical, commercial space tourism is growing, and that means soonish a space hotel could be a reality - and as costs drop, hopefully attendance will increase. And by all means explore Mars extensively before we're ready to go there... just don't waste a ton of money on symbolism; spend that money wisely.
I disagree with the basic premise that people are always logical about their long-term goals. People's actions tend to be dominated by short term rewards, and the feeling that they're having long term success is just one of those. So if you take the most-improved person out to lunch every week (or a gift cert, or something) you can get surprising compliance.
I like company wikis. I think that's a great step, but I think it's maybe step 3. But it's not step 1 (unless you're already past what I said below) because it unnecessarily requires people learning a pretty new way of doing things. To clarify that - I'd go ahead and set it up, and let any dept/team/person that you can get excited about using it of their own volition use it. But it wouldn't be the first thing I recommend to management to really push.
If you mostly have users actually in an office, Step 1 in my opinion is a versioned shared drive. A big place on a shared drive where everyone is supposed to save essentially everything. If it's not big and you have restrictive requirements on what can go in there, this won't work. This should have individual home directories, but should also have top level directories by project and team - it should be clear that putting things there is preferred. You can claim (accurately) that putting stuff there guarantees that if their HD dies they'll be able to really quickly get to the files on someone else's computer. (And obviously you'll be frequently backing up the shared drive, because you're putting a lot of eggs in that basket.)
The biggest technical problem with this theory is overwriting. You need frequent versioned backups to keep overwriting from being a problem, and - less commonly true - you need to be able to recover them very quickly. If this were my problem, I'd use Subversion. That is, I'd setup a Subversion server on a different server & drives (for increased redundancy) and I would automate a process of committing all the shared-drive changes to Subversion, probably several times a day, but at least every night. People who merely use the shared drive never touch Subversion, but people DO have access to the Subversion repository(ies) directly.
This technique means that: a) desktop users don't need to understand syncing at all, just use a remote drive you can setup for them. b) desktop users who WANT to recover earlier versions without asking you can choose to learn how to get old versions from Subversion - so those people who are most likely to be really worried about some other person touching their files can feel MORE in control than they did before. c) laptop users who learn syncing can participate with a local copy of stuff from the Subversion repository, too - which they can update with internet but can ALSO work on remotely.
You can treat Anthrax with relatively common antibacterials, if you've realized you're infected with Anthrax (which isn't always obvious)
You'd probably be MORE successful with the plague. One of the big things about Anthrax is that it's NOT generally transmittable person to person (per your CDC link, even) - you catch it only from livestock, or weapons. That's a large part of WHY Anthrax is special.
As a MILITARY weapon, this is a big advantage - it kills enemies WHERE you dropped it on purpose, but it doesn't have any chance of spreading back over to your side and killing everyone. If you have the technology to weaponize it, it's durable and predictable - friendly fire is a big problem.
But as a imbalanced warfare / REAL TERRORIST weapon, this is a big disadvantage. You can't cause a plague with it, because it won't spread, and weaponizing it isn't especially easy. You'd be better off to have unprotected sex with a ton of people and spread HIV, and/or just get yourself the regular flu and fly to different cities coughing. Seriously.
On the other hand, as a FAUX TERRORIST weapon, it's pretty perfect... mysterious white powder is easy and cheap to acquire, and it's preventable enough to generate a noticeable response.
Everyone knows what it is, though, because of the original military weaponization - which was completely because it's NOT good for spreading randomly in a city or anything.
It's more than just CONCEPTUALLY antithetical. It's completely impossible, using the modern, practical meaning of the word "DRM". My summary is basically this: while "digital rights management" is a sensible phrase, in practice "DRM" only means systems that are fundamentally flawed AND that for the same reasons depend on being 100% closed source.
If I send you a file and you promise not to share it, that's a promise between us. You would never install DRM for yourself, because it's simple for you to not share it, yourself.
If we do the same thing but we want to make sure an eavesdropper can't swipe it, we use encryption. We have some kind of secret to make this happen. (With public key encryption I don't have to know your whole secret, but on your machine there's still a secret.)
If we do the same thing but I'm dealing with a lot of different people, I might use some kind of software that manages that encryption to distribute it automatically to the right people.
DRM is different. In practical use, DRM is where, essentially (e.g.) Microsoft** makes me a promise that THEY won't LET you copy the files. This is the ONLY fundamental difference between what's commonly called encryption and what's commonly called DRM.
This is completely impossible with OSS - because by it's very definition an OSS app is one where you could trivially, legally recompile an alternative "hacked" version which used your same secrets but did not actually keep you from making copies.
In practice, such hacked versions happen all the time even WITH secret DRM. Microsoft can't actually back this promise up effectively, because people all over the world have physical access to the HDs that their software, AND any secrets, AND the media are on, so hacking it is basically easy. But to try to back it up, they have to basically rely on the idea that they're going to make it as hard as possible for you to modify your OS and software, and that you therefore won't BE ABLE to change it to being decrypted without destroying your OS.
In other words, there's no way around this fundamental problem, when the end user you're trying to block and the machine admin with full control over the machine are the same person. The MS solution is to try and make it so that even the admin is very limited in certain ways - so your computer isn't really your computer even more than it already isn't. And this is, in a nutshell, what Trusted Computing is - motherboard support for your computer not being your computer.
This means that the fundamental difference between what is practically called DRM and encryption is that encryption can sometimes be strong and DRM must by definition be very weak.
On the OTHER hand, rights-management schemes are not fundamentally broken* if the final use of the file can only ever occur on a machine the end-user doesn't really have control over. e.g., if Apple's files played ONLY on the iPod and not in iTunes etc, it could hypothetically be made fundamentally unbreakable without someone taking apart an iPod and wiring it up to find some kind of secret in it.
This doesn't have to be DEDICATED hardware, of course - if the end user has limited privileges on a secure* OS and no access to the physical hardware, that's even better. (For definitions of "no access" that are "harder than reverse engineering iPod hardware" Depending on your audience, you might need a pretty good cage/alarm for that to actually be true... but much less might be sufficient.)
This is EXACTLY what the OP is asking for... a managed encryption system allowing central control over who can see files. But to be effective, any such system requires that the machines be locked down. And IF the machines are locked down, there are simpler, less problematic, less error-prone encryption methods to address this than the things we call DRM.
*Security is still hard, of course - because any flaw that allows someone to gain control of something breaks this lack of control. If they have physical acce
I'm an engineer by training and a programmer by profession - and I have quite a bit of old hardware running.
1. Starting up anything definitely induces extra wear (thermal changes, power surges, changing states) However, even without any power savings, the wear of starting up in the morning may or may not be greater than the wear of 15 hours of being on for no good reason.
2. There are many, many states in a computer that only exist during startup. There therefore MUST be many, many failure modes which will only be obvious at startup. Some of these are gradual and some not... So as the parent said, perhaps the most important tradeoff is whether you want to a) never, ever power down the machine to avoid those modes being important as long as possible or b) restart machines occasionally just to DETECT such a failure mode as it's happening. I agree that "b" sounds more important in most use cases, as long as a good fraction of these failure modes are gradual, which I personally think sounds likely.
3. From a physical wear point of view, you probably ARE spinning down your HD all the time, whenever you're not using it for a little while.
4. In a complex device (e.g. HD) a friendly power-down (turning it off) should not be considering equivalent to a sudden loss of power (e.g. UPS/power/PSU failure) Things ARE more likely to fail when the UPS dies...
5. Don't ignore the value of purposeful engineering. New ATA HDs are expected to be slept routinely, and are therefore designed with that in mind...
6. I'm confident the above applies to the mechanical spinning part of both HDs and also of all kinds of fans (including of course the PSU fans) In my experience, these are by far the most common significant parts to go bad in a PC... I believe they probably apply in principle to everything else, but I can't be sure.
Overall, I think expanding on #3, if you sleep the machine certainly a lot of other stuff is getting turned off etc. If you don't sleep the machine or any components at all (which you pretty much have to do on purpose at this point) I think the amount of power we're talking about wasting is significantly higher than the typical numbers people are throwing around, and is probably pretty significant.
If you're NOT going to do that, then I have a hard time imagining you're going to save a lot of machine life in a modern machine in any place other than the fans. Which are actually pretty cheap... So to me the summary of this seems to be: a) turn your machine off when you're not using it b) use motherboards etc that can track fan failure and switch off before they burn up, and/or use redundant fans. And listen to when your fan noises change.
I'm totally ignoring failure during the initial burn-in period in the above discussion.
and, naturally, if they weren't being deceitful Submitted this to the original article; no idea if it'll show up.
I think rob/ahoutx/maddawg are missing the point. Exclusivity and top billing have nothing to do with security.
MS COULD demand certain security measures or, more uniformly, require the service to send the user to MSN where they must agree to a warning about how this startup may do lord knows to their info. It should be up to the user.
Keep in mind that if this article is accurate, they are NOT doing this. But they ARE saying that it's totally fine to do whatever you want IF you only use MSN.
Generally these types of services at least require you to enter your IM info AND PASSWORD for them to get all your contacts. And if you give _anybody_ this info they can sign on using an IM client and get all your contacts.
Not exactly a lot here that this policy is keeping safer.
And leave it to Forbes to get all that and to miss THE ONE MOUSE BUTTON - seriously. The DESKTOPS now have plenty of buttons, but the laptops still only, really have one.
The one thing everyone has been legitimately complaining about for years...
Actually, round shoelaces work fine. I agreed with you for a while, until I tried some alternative solutions. Specifically: If your flat shoelaces get all tangled up in any kind of knot that isn't a bow, they're very difficult to untangle. If your round shoelaces are tied in a bow, they will almost immediately become untied.
But if you put a square knot (two overhand loops in opposite directions) in round shoelaces, it's like magic. It holds tight and never slips. BUT they're so slippery you can still untie them whenever you like just by pulling really hard on either exposed end. And since that's PUTTING an actual knot into them and can get it out, you're showing it's basically impossible for them to tangle.
I agree with the sibling post that there already ARE other formats that are allowed. Including iTunes. I would presume the difference is all in the price. I would NOT be surprised, at the idea that* Microsoft convinced the MPAA that their DRM was "better" and should therefore be the one that has rentals at the lowest price.
*Until tomorrowish, when Apple will announce they negotiated a better deal for essentially business reasons separate from claiming their DRM is really "better".
In other words, the lower the price, the harder to keep/copy/distribute it should be. The same principle upon which nonDRM iTunes songs cost more. DVDs at this point should essentially be benchmarked as "almost totally unprotected in a technical sense, but protected in a legal sense"
And if your definition of "better" DRM is "most annoying to remove" I believe that in a broad, general way they're going to be right about Windows DRM being generally better than anything Apple is ever going to use. Now, obviously it's all breakable, and most of it isn't even especially hard. But we're talking about a big curve of users who have problems just USING Windows, much less doing stuff it's actively trying to stop you from doing. And I'm not trying to say Microsoft has better engineers.
I'm about to tell you another reason I think Apple is awesome, but let me lead by saying this isn't a claim that they're just being benevolent; I think they see what we all see in terms of the way things are going. Apple fundamentally believes that when you buy a general purpose computer, you should be able to do with that computer whatever you like. It's not perfect, but it's designed to do YOUR bidding. As is Linux, of course. (Apple does not believe this for appliances like an iPod - or an iPhone, but I hold out hope there.) They make sure you can actually use the media you have, even if that comes at some sacrifice. You can burn a backup CD of anything you buy on iTunes.
Microsoft has shown they fundamentally do not believe in this, which is funny considering they don't actually sell you the computers. But they continuously show themselves to be in the pocket of big media - or at least having no spine - installing more and more things on your computer that try to limit what you can do - and breaking compatibility with their own stuff a few years later to try to make it more secure. Obviously this never serves the user, and it just makes things worse for them.
And I'm CERTAINLY not saying you can't break Windows DRM per se, but I'd be willing to firmly bet that someone with equal skills doing equal research would be far more likely to corrupt Windows somehow trying to disable all the various DRM-related operations than the equivalent modification to OS You don't have the source, but you're basically allowed to change whatever OS X files you want, and Windows is just fundamentally, philosophically not like that, it tries to detect and prevent certain changes.
The motherboard manufacturers aren't necessarily onboard with all this, because since the users don't want it, it doesn't help them sell motherboards, which is good for the user, at least.
Apple obviously lives in a world of compromise, unlike, say, Debian, so Apple does give you DRMed stuff because that's the only way to get the mainstream media's content. They have never been in the forefront of this the way much smaller, more fringe competitors (e.g. eMusic) can be, but they have always been steadily pushing that boundary. (Again, I think at least in large part because they see the reality of where this is going.)
Altered diagnosis from other categories is insufficient - to my recollection the per capita rate of autism now exceeds the TOTAL diagnosis rates from all even mildly similar categories.
Perhaps we're diagnosing a lot of kids who previously we only would have called 'weird' and never taken to a doctor...
Parent is dead on. You should be allowed to not wear a seatbelt if and only if you pay a highly financially sound insurance company to cover all plausible costs for your medical care if you get in an accident - and all disability payments you might get for the same reason.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm late, but someone else posted and I replied about Actionscript elsewhere in the thread. I basically think you're completely on target about the goalset of being able to quickly leverage GUI power. But I believe Actionscript (Flex, Flash) is a much better first-choice.
Actionscript is much more consistent than browser JS, which makes it less frustrating to develop in. (I'm not trying to say this is a philosophical problem in JS, and indeed Actionscript is also an ECMAScript language, so they're very close. This is basically just browser divergence, and the political causes of that are beyond the scope of this post.)
In Flex (compared to a browser) the layout language is MXML instead of HTML. MXML has powerful features that expect to interact with Actionscript. And HTML is less consistent, and CSS is browsers is less consistent, for the same reasons listed above.
MXML makes it trivial to add considerably more complex GUI elements, like a tiled list of images or a pretty chart. (Trivial as long as your data is in a convenient format, XML setup the way it expects. If your schema is different it's still easy, but it's more than 3 lines of code.)
Late to the discussion, I would've modded the parent up, but it's already at +5.
Actionscript 3 is strongly typed and OOP, so it won't teach the bad habits of some introductory languages.
For the artistically/animationly inclined, Flash gives you tons of power there. For the more programmatically inclined, Flex is an awesome programming environment that gives you all the application power of Flash Player using MXML, an XML layout language. Both are Actionscript 3. And I agree that there's tons of community. Being web based, it's trivial to share with lots of people.
But most importantly, the investment to build an interactive GUI application in, say, Flex is, in my opinion, as low as it can be and still be a full featured programming language. I'm sure you can build a non-interactive application just as easily in a lot of languages, but applications now, even trivial ones, should be able to let you show things on a screen and click on buttons. I think this is really key. You can DO something, something modest but still cool, and grow what you know by learning to do one more thing at a time. So without teaching you tons of bad practice, you can learn fairly incrementally. (Obviously you should grow up and learn more structure at some point... but that's later.)
If it wasn't clear I think whoever else in the chain said that it's better to start a kid by making them bash their brains against some really initially unrewarding stuff for the big payoff later - where the payoff is big BECAUSE it was hard - is basically crazy. I mean, if the kid WANTS to, they can go ahead. But if the goal is to encourage the programming itself, that's pretty crazy. The goal of that unrewarding stuff would be to make them set and work for long term goals... an admirable skill to learn, but one that's learned by extending what the kid WANTS to work on... you can't both move them into something they don't care about AND set the goals far ahead. It's fun to remember that I wrote stuff in assembly, but only a few people would've kept with programming if that's where they started.
I think FF3's cert thing is lamer and lamer
I've been thinking about this... and I'm happy to have FF3 mark the unsecure, secure, and EV-secure sites differently. But it's really, really lame to say that any self-SSL site is WORSE than a random non-SSL site. It's only the same. If they're going to go through the trouble of getting people used to trust markings, they should just mark the self-SSL sites like they mark the unsecure sites. Changing the URL bar to say:
(unverified) https:///
Would be enough, if they were changing the color/style of the secure sites. (Sure, don't give the self-SSL a lock icon. Fine.)
You think Verisign et al reliably do that? How?
There was a /. story maybe a year ago about all sorts of obviously fake ones... what the major cert providers verify is that your payment cleared. Which is _something_ because there's SOME kind of traceability. But it's not much.
I don't really blame them, though, because the problem is fundamental. There's just no real way for them to verify someone is who they say they are, because we don't really have a definition of who that "we" is. It's not like the gov't issues you a social security private key at birth and each corporation too (not to mention going international)
So the thing keeping them secure IS the payment and the record of the payment, and the fact that so many people fall prey to phishing without a valid cert that no one cares.
*****
In my opinion, the best we can do is issue physically linked certs. Cryptographically identical to existing certs, this changes the people part - The certificate authority a) must require a payment, but there's no minimum they can charge b) mails a physical letter with a code c) makes an automated, repeating voice call with a code d) if both codes are entered and they own the domain, issues a cert for that contact info, which can optionally be used to generate certificates for multiple servers.
Now, the hard part is that you haven't verified IDENTITY at all, you've only verified contact information. So the browser would have to literally display this information, if it was one of these contact-certs (perhaps in a bar just below the URL bar) I say in 'these certs' because for these certs you're not even implying that you can trust anything except the
You COULD set this authority up with a relatively small expense. You might be able to write a FF extension to display the addresses. If you have reasonable internal security, you probably could get FF to add you as a trusted authority, at least FOR contact-certs.
That's not GREAT, but it's the best we can do for simply automation for general-purpose merchants/certs... beyond that it's trying to do credit and background checks the old fashioned way.
My only OTHER idea is that the FDIC/NCUA/etc ought to get together and create a CA for US banks. Then you could even make the bank-trusted bar a DIFFERENT color. And presumably the regulators have a secure way to talk to the banks. (I'm not suggesting that this be legally mandatory for the banks to sign up for or use, but I think there's no one who is more likely to be able to authentically verify the authenticity of a US financial institution than the US regulators...)
Honestly I wouldn't have bothered, except some anarchist-leaning mods gave you +5 insightful for being totally wrong. But as is unfortunately often true, in this case the anarchistic position has the effect of being a shill for Big Telecom; what you're suggested is exactly what their monopolies want. And don't mistake me here for a big government advocate in the broad scheme of things - I believe in the power of the free market, and I want things to be cheaper and more efficient for everyone which does not USUALLY mean done by the government, but does in some cases. And it also means the government has to be involved to keep a check on monopolies which are NOT part of the free market and keep the marketplace fair and predictable, ... without those checks you don't have a free market.
First of all, WiFi per se might not be a utility, but Internet is a utility now for many people. And it SHOULD be treated exactly like a utility. It may not be as life-critical as some, but everyone else's - and the law's - definition of utility includes cable TV. For that matter different places have different utilities - some people don't get any. Being a utility has nothing to do with it being a right. By the way, you don't have a mandated right to ANY utilities, except that usually your heat can't be cut off during the winter. More farther down.
Importantly, if you have broadband your government IS involved. Let's face it, practically speaking, broadband in the US means DSL or cable for now. You can't just go laying cables wherever you like - the government grants a license (to an easement) - with varying levels of exclusivity - for utility companies (such as phone and cable) to arbitrarily tear up property within certain limits to establish the service. Consumers don't get to consent to having the lines strung across their property, except through their government. Without infringing on all those real-property rights - and without the government penalizing people who cut down cables that run across THEIR land - you can't HAVE utilities, including cable and phone.
In the case of phone, tax dollars paid for the installation of all the lines until pretty recently. The phone company DOES have a monopoly on these lines. It was believed, accurately imo, that it would make the country better and stronger and be better for all the citizens, overall. I think this was accurate. Tax dollars are still taken specifically for keeping phone service in rural areas. Doing this for Internet communication makes total sense to me; it makes us more competitive in the global marketplace.
Now I'm going to talk about why we have utilities. Let's talk about another common municipal service - garbage collection. There are private ways to deal with this, but basically every municipality has garbage collection because a) it's much more efficient and cheaper if we all get in on doing it together and perhaps b) because some people think they benefit from making sure their neighbors have easy access to it. So we all get together and start a garbage service. In many medium sized places, this doesn't mean the town actually administers this service, but it means they contract with someone (usually Waste Management, now) to do it - at a bulk rate for the whole town. And on at least some size level it's optional - it's common for large apartment buildings to contract privately instead of as part of the municipal contract, presumably because they think they're big enough that they can find a better deal. But it not be optional to pay at least part of the taxes that support the service. That's how municipal services work.
If you're really an anarchist you should go live on a boat or oil rig by yourself in international waters without a flag. While that's inflammatory, I'm not JUST being inflammatory - if you live in a city the POINT is to be by other people and have access to municipal services. If you don't want to participate - which means getting those services and paying those taxes, and be
I'm reasonably sure you're misinformed - which is understandable, because the media has gotten worse and worse about accurate reporting in recent years.*
Obama promised to run a publicly funded campaign IF HIS OPPONENT(s) ALSO AGREED TO DO SO. His opponents have not. He did not agree to run with one hand tied behind his back while his opponents weren't restricted, only to have a fair publicly funded competition. Honestly given their relative funding this might be a great idea for McCain at this point - but that doesn't mean I see it happening.
However, I'll completely agree that I haven't bothered to look this up, because I just don't care enough.
*I'm not primarily accusing the media of bias here, although it certainly exists in many directions and has gotten worse as a lot of news has funneled through very outlets owned by just a couple people. But when they aren't being biased, they're at least being sensationalist, superficial, and non-critical.
Also their focus on "balanced" instead of "accurate" is pretty disappointing. Equal time to two people with each of two opposite positions isn't good reporting if one of them has a minority opinion refuted by almost everybody and the other represents a consensus of the majority of scientists. I'm not saying you should never present a minority opinion, but it's your job to make sure you SAY that it's the minority opinion. Or when you present Lieberman as the "Democrat" in something, after he left the party. etc.
It's not a fair comparison if the quality of the light is important to you.
The light is way better than an el cheapo flourescent, especially if color matters to you at all. Or if spraying mercury in the room when the bulb breaks does. So plenty of people might be willing to take the penalty.
Obviously that depends somewhat on how sunny your locale is, though.
You'll get no argument from me that there are many fewer part options that go into a mac than all possible PCs. I'm sure there's a lot more _options_ available for a Ford truck than for a racecar - because the market is huge and the diversity of tasks is broader.
But if you think you just can't change things under the hood of a mac you're, at best, really out of date. At worst you're taking some snippets of truth and trolling with them. I'm not saying YOU should buy a Mac, but I think intentionally or not you're spreading disinformation. (I'm assuming for this discussion your idea of hardware hacking isn't soldering new components onto your motherboard.)
Certainly, there are only a few motherboards (those from Apple) that OS X is guaranteed to work with, and therefore only the few CPUs that go in them. Of course, while Apple has made it infringement to install a legit copy of OS X on them, so you can't SELL clones, they have clearly not been squashing - and have sometimes been helping in very general ways - the people trying to get it to run on other motherboards. But they're selling a total package not just software and you aren't their target market.
This is somewhat semantic, but in my opinion you can't replace the motherboard in a computer, because that's the part that, more than anything else defines it as being THAT computer, and it's the part that defines the compatibility of most everything else.
But you can put your Apple MB in any case you want. It uses industry standard RAM, standard (currently SATA) HDs, optical drives, PCI, etc. If there's a peripheral you can't use, it's almost always because there's no driver provided by the hardware vendor for OS X, never because Apple wouldn't allow it. (The in between case is where the peripheral has incompatible firmware that would have to be updated.) While it wasn't true a long time ago, this compatibility has been true since Apple went PCI a decade ago. (It's easier to port arbitrary software now that it's an Intel chip, which is more recent, and more likely to have a driver - but the hardware went industry standard much earlier.)
I'm not trying to trivialize a lack of vendor-drivers. That's an issue that limits your flexibility, but it's not the same as Apple lockout.
So in other words, drivers aside, any Mac you buy is just as customizable as any normal motherboard you'd buy for a PC.
There are other limitations I'm certainly willing to freely admit:
- I'm mostly talking about the Mac Pro above. Apple laptops are just as configurable as other typical laptops, in my experience, but that isn't much. The iMac series is a laptop sans battery. The Mini is a little better... But if you really want to configure it, buy a Mac Pro! (And fill it with the supported 32 GB of RAM)
- Since Apple is only a subset of the PC market, you certainly can usually buy a PC motherboard that's more bleeding-edge than the most bleeding edge Apple one that exists - because at any point only a handful of Apple ones exist, and all of them target bigger marketshares than the absolute bleeding edge.
- For similar reasons, you can certainly buy SOME PC motherboard that has way more configuration than any particular Mac... One that supports multiple kinds of RAM in the same board, for instance. But that's not exactly your typical PC, either.
I agree completely - getting the files TO the consultant securely is relatively easy... a GPGP key exchange followed by a phone call can pretty simply ensure who they are as well as anything. (I mean, as well as you know who the company is now - it's whoever answers their phone number.)
But then they HAVE the data, and if you care about your data, that's a problem.
In a perfect world, I would start by finding a new consultant - one who wouldn't even consider RECEIVING such data through email. I suppose in a PERFECT world, there wouldn't BE such consultants.
But failing that you need to lay out every security policy you think is important to secure your data, including INSIDE a network... firewalls, care with files, background checks on IT staff, background checks on the consultants. You need this laid out in excruciating detail. And you need it in the contract with them.
Ideally YOUR company needs to do the background checks on their staff... At a minimum you need to do a really sound credit check of them and have your attorney draw up a contract where they indemnify you for any loss due to a breach and any attorney fees to defend against and to recover from it. Etc.
Basically the same kind of due diligence you'd have for someone you were letting come in and install new servers and new firewalls on your site with access to everything you've already got. Or if they refuse to get up to a reasonable standard, you can tell them they need to do their work on your site.
First we need to test people for driving while incompetent. Perhaps with real simulators? I shouldn't have been able to learn things about driving from Gran Turismo AFTER having been driving for years. With effective simulators we can simulate high-stress high-risk situations without actual danger, so we can do it in a lot less time.
Parent seems to confuse being brilliant at calculus with being a good driver. Those are pretty much totally unrelated skills. At 18, she MUST be an inexperienced driver, because she couldn't have been driving very long - and because we don't use effective simulators to condense high risk driving situations, so you only get into them as a small fraction of your driving (unless you're very reckless)
The level of qualification that we apparently think is sufficient to let people drive is ridiculously low. They're not tested under even the tiniest of duress or stress, or in any sort of challenge that involves any real skill at driving or even having any reflexes at all. Even a 15 mph slalom would rule out SO many people, or force them to acquire greater skills.
We're getting in a giant death-machine here, people - we need to do a reasonably good job of knowing who is qualified.
I knew a case of an 80 year old man whose reflexes had clearly gone, but he wanted to keep driving. He rear ended someone with no extenuating factors whatsoever. Just up and drove into them, over a long lead distance.
To their credit the state made him take the driving test again... His family told everyone who would listen (his doctor, the DMV) that he shouldn't be driving. And he passed, and kept driving. (He passed the vision test, so apparently he could SEE what was going on, but he couldn't DO anything about it.) The family eventually prevailed on him to get rid of his car, but it was substantially later.
Also people who get _multiple_ DUI convictions... really? A serious DUI ought to be grounds for license suspension and ought to come with a stern warning - that if you drive on that suspended license you go to jail until you convince them you aren't going to wield any more implements of destruction.
I would be willing to wager that I could drive better in a manual transmission car after being awake for 30 hours while having a heated discussion on a cellphone, eating pasta, and/or changing my shoes than at least 10% of drivers, perhaps more. Note that I'm not saying I SHOULD do these things, or that I have a superhuman ability to multitask or drive, only that the state of things on the road is terrible.
The FUNDAMENTAL problem, of course, is that we treat driving more like a right than a privilege, which it needs to be since so many of our living spaces are designed to only work if you have a car. *sigh*
I'm not trying to pretend I know what Gilmore MEANT by his statement, but the way the first statement reads to me I certainly think is true. (I'm not saying there aren't bad things going on we should fight against - only that the statement is only false for a very idealist and broad interpretation.)
/., that's part of routing around, and so is when we blog about it. This includes us doing hard work to keep it that way.
First let's strip away youthful idealism - routing around it doesn't mean it NEVER works or magically disappears - it just means it's much less likely to work, easier to fix, etc.
Second, let's be clear that "the Internet" includes all of us. When someone involved with that site posts it to
Finally, while it's obviously possible to keep information _out_ (away from some people), it's very hard to keep information _in_ on the internet. If you're going to (for the purposes of this discussion) strictly interpret the word censorship until it was only one of these things, it would definitely be the attempt to keep information in.
Traditionally censorship is keeping you from printing a newspaper (or killing you if you do) - that's different than going around town and taking away all the newspapers you can find, which is what's really going on here. The second technique only completely silences the _author_ if the newspaper only circulates inside that town.
Again, I'm not saying this isn't bad... but in pre-Internet censorship we wouldn't even HEAR about this story. Wikileaks is a great example of the Internet being positive in this regard. The world knows about Tibet. The Great Firewall doesn't even really keep people from viewing outside content - you just need a little technical savvy - and a lot of bravery! - to view outside content.
I understand that EC2 is *nix only, with nonpersistent filesystems, and that S3 is an apparently very reliable remote filesystem that you can get to really fast from EC2 for free.
I understand the huge value of this for transient (1 month) intensive very bursty workloads. Which, mostly, seems to be what's it's targeted at.
But for actual normal servers I don't quite see it... I mean one option is that it's cheap. Which it might or might not be, depending on who you compare it to. Maybe it's the most reliable option out there at some price point, but the static IPs (for instance) are pretty young to consider this true, and it's not necessarily cheaper than the discounter's dedicataed servers. If we just assert for the discussion that it's not cheaper per power, then the question is, is it advantageous in other ways?
It seems like you can take your same instance and reboot it bigger, which is nice, but not _really_ that different than most hosting, which will move your drives to newer machine. And it seems like coordinating this would still be a fair headache, and you don't really want to ever have 0 instances during the transition, so you're talking about some overlap.
So it seems like you'd only be really interested in this if you were always going to have your main instance up, and then you were sometimes going to have none but sometimes going to have many other instances up. Past a certain scale it might be worth your time to have more instances 9-5 and less at night, or something (depending on your users) But the setup seems like a lot of issues (not to make it just run, but to really take advantage of it.)
I'm also curious whether it supports automatic instance restarting... e.g. if a zone goes down, can you tell it you definitely want it to put your instance up again in a new zone? (Understanding that your instance has to be smart enough to boot into a useable state unmanaged... but it's a lot better than you having to monitor it.)
Flash is a great platform; parent is wrong (as are most respondents so far)
---Flash Video
Flash Video is a wrapper, not a codec. H.264 is in many ways superior to H.263 (Flash7+) or VP6 (Flash8+) However, Flash Player 9+ natively supports H.264, so whether H.264 is the right codec isn't really the issue here; you can certainly only distribute H.264 if you like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLV
Flash Video is highly standard; in addition to Flash itself, a significant number of other players can play it.
--- Flash Player
Certainly Flash is used to make a lot of junk, but that's true of everything on the internet; it's full of junk. And the more powerful the technology it is, the more junk will be made with it. I certainly think it's better to use HTML when it will suffice, but it simply cannot do what Flash can.
Obviously Flash can make both awesome and terrible games.
Since you "turned off Flash long ago" perhaps you've failed to realize that in 2002 they upgraded the underlying Actionscript to be a largely legitimate programming language, which they improved again in 2004 and again in 2006; Actionscript 3 is a strongly typed fully object oriented language that lets you make powerful clientside applications that run in a well protected sandbox. In short, it's everything Java applets in 1997 were supposed to be by 2007. (Except that Sun didn't manage it well and Microsoft actively tried to kill it by shipping a dysfunctional JVM.) You can make any general purpose application in Flash. It obviously runs more slowly than native local code (and even moreso if you animate the heck out of everything) but it requires no installation, is strongly sandboxed and runs safely on any platform.
Macromedia was very slow in releasing Flash Player 8 for Linux; so slow they never did. But Adobe released Flash Player 9 rapidly and has committed to keeping up.
There are two OSS Flash Players that I'm aware of. These certainly haven't kept up with Adobe's development, but the sibling poster's suggestion that it's illegal to make a competing player just isn't true.
And other than very "basic" HTML, Flash Player is the most standard thing on the web. It has a higher adoption rate than IE, which has a higher adoption rate than any other browser. It's more standard than any implementation family of HTML, because IE's HTML isn't like everybody else's. The same is true, but moreso, for Javascript. It is certainly higher than any other video playing capability.
--- The Flash and Flex development environments
Certainly the Flash development environment isn't ideally suited to the needs of a serious programmer, which is why many people were using their own code editors and only using Flash as a compiler. Adobe recognized this need and released Flex - which creates Flash swfs but creates them using a much saner and more programmer oriented strongly OOP experience.
You can make powerful, beautiful apps quickly - which can certainly include arbitrarily complex server interaction.
Of course I'm biased; that's what we do all the day. And we're always hiring good programmers.
In just the last few days there was an article about someone who previously sued a group of defendants including /., and later dropped /. from the suit. It was in the /. summary; I didn't read TFA.
1. Parent is dead on; wish I had mod points.
Mars could already be a shorter trip (each way) - that we know MUCH more about, and have more ability to deploy resources for - than Magellan's was, just as an example.
But, I have two opposing points:
2. Think of the robots. Basically, we have robots now, which simply are better for this kind of exploring. So we don't need a human there to EXPLORE Mars (or the moon.) Obviously the current rovers are massively, massively cheaper than a manned mission... and I think we could get more done with hundreds of rovers than some dude. a) For any given cost, the robots will probably do the exploring better. In other words, I think we should send a person to Mars when it's economically profitable to send a _person_ there compared to the robots. We just don't NEED some guy to go there anymore.
b) I think the cost involved in a human mission would be tremendous if the gain is largely symbolic. You don't go there just to touch it, you go there to find out a lot more about all sorts of things you didn't know.
c) So the other reason to go there is to _colonize_ to really expand the scope of human life to a new place.
c) in my opinion involves either: i) generate resources FROM Mars instead of spending a ton to be there or to ii) have a sufficient breeding population of humanity off earth that we'll survive a colossal extinction event. I believe i) will come before ii) AND I think i) is more likely to be done by remote control, too... or at least most of it. So wait for a NEED for a person - which personally I feel like will be a long time coming; the robots will get better faster than our ability to cheaply get a person there So maybe the first person will be a paying tourist.
3. While I think Mars is close enough to be within reach, there are things we've skipped. I think all of the above applies to the moon, but I think it's so significantly cheaper to send stuff to the moon than to Mars. We're just finally going to put a telescope on the moon... For that matter, I think we should have orbiting solar power pretty soon.
We only have like 3 people living outside our atmosphere. I think that's shameful in some ways... but there's no reason we need to "touch" Mars with a real person before we have commercial occupation of something closer / cheaper* - the technology we need for that to be sustainable - longer term, more sustainable, cheaper inhabiting of harsh environments - is something we can demonstrate much closer.
*unless it turns out a person on Mars would help us mine something ridiculously expensive, or something. But a cluster of robots could have a higher chance of finding that for less money.
I'd certainly accept that having the nice thin unbreathable atmosphere there might involve some cost savings in radiation damage/shielding, pressurization, etc. But that's only a justification if those costs are going to outweigh the much-higher lift costs and the much-lower chance of a bail-out.
The good news is we're getting there - commercial boost to space is becoming practical, commercial space tourism is growing, and that means soonish a space hotel could be a reality - and as costs drop, hopefully attendance will increase. And by all means explore Mars extensively before we're ready to go there... just don't waste a ton of money on symbolism; spend that money wisely.
I disagree with the basic premise that people are always logical about their long-term goals. People's actions tend to be dominated by short term rewards, and the feeling that they're having long term success is just one of those. So if you take the most-improved person out to lunch every week (or a gift cert, or something) you can get surprising compliance.
I like company wikis. I think that's a great step, but I think it's maybe step 3. But it's not step 1 (unless you're already past what I said below) because it unnecessarily requires people learning a pretty new way of doing things. To clarify that - I'd go ahead and set it up, and let any dept/team/person that you can get excited about using it of their own volition use it. But it wouldn't be the first thing I recommend to management to really push.
If you mostly have users actually in an office, Step 1 in my opinion is a versioned shared drive. A big place on a shared drive where everyone is supposed to save essentially everything. If it's not big and you have restrictive requirements on what can go in there, this won't work. This should have individual home directories, but should also have top level directories by project and team - it should be clear that putting things there is preferred. You can claim (accurately) that putting stuff there guarantees that if their HD dies they'll be able to really quickly get to the files on someone else's computer. (And obviously you'll be frequently backing up the shared drive, because you're putting a lot of eggs in that basket.)
The biggest technical problem with this theory is overwriting. You need frequent versioned backups to keep overwriting from being a problem, and - less commonly true - you need to be able to recover them very quickly. If this were my problem, I'd use Subversion. That is, I'd setup a Subversion server on a different server & drives (for increased redundancy) and I would automate a process of committing all the shared-drive changes to Subversion, probably several times a day, but at least every night. People who merely use the shared drive never touch Subversion, but people DO have access to the Subversion repository(ies) directly.
This technique means that: a) desktop users don't need to understand syncing at all, just use a remote drive you can setup for them. b) desktop users who WANT to recover earlier versions without asking you can choose to learn how to get old versions from Subversion - so those people who are most likely to be really worried about some other person touching their files can feel MORE in control than they did before. c) laptop users who learn syncing can participate with a local copy of stuff from the Subversion repository, too - which they can update with internet but can ALSO work on remotely.
You can treat Anthrax with relatively common antibacterials, if you've realized you're infected with Anthrax (which isn't always obvious)
You'd probably be MORE successful with the plague. One of the big things about Anthrax is that it's NOT generally transmittable person to person (per your CDC link, even) - you catch it only from livestock, or weapons. That's a large part of WHY Anthrax is special.
As a MILITARY weapon, this is a big advantage - it kills enemies WHERE you dropped it on purpose, but it doesn't have any chance of spreading back over to your side and killing everyone. If you have the technology to weaponize it, it's durable and predictable - friendly fire is a big problem.
But as a imbalanced warfare / REAL TERRORIST weapon, this is a big disadvantage. You can't cause a plague with it, because it won't spread, and weaponizing it isn't especially easy. You'd be better off to have unprotected sex with a ton of people and spread HIV, and/or just get yourself the regular flu and fly to different cities coughing. Seriously.
On the other hand, as a FAUX TERRORIST weapon, it's pretty perfect... mysterious white powder is easy and cheap to acquire, and it's preventable enough to generate a noticeable response.
Everyone knows what it is, though, because of the original military weaponization - which was completely because it's NOT good for spreading randomly in a city or anything.
It's more than just CONCEPTUALLY antithetical. It's completely impossible, using the modern, practical meaning of the word "DRM". My summary is basically this: while "digital rights management" is a sensible phrase, in practice "DRM" only means systems that are fundamentally flawed AND that for the same reasons depend on being 100% closed source.
If I send you a file and you promise not to share it, that's a promise between us. You would never install DRM for yourself, because it's simple for you to not share it, yourself.
If we do the same thing but we want to make sure an eavesdropper can't swipe it, we use encryption. We have some kind of secret to make this happen. (With public key encryption I don't have to know your whole secret, but on your machine there's still a secret.)
If we do the same thing but I'm dealing with a lot of different people, I might use some kind of software that manages that encryption to distribute it automatically to the right people.
DRM is different. In practical use, DRM is where, essentially (e.g.) Microsoft** makes me a promise that THEY won't LET you copy the files. This is the ONLY fundamental difference between what's commonly called encryption and what's commonly called DRM.
This is completely impossible with OSS - because by it's very definition an OSS app is one where you could trivially, legally recompile an alternative "hacked" version which used your same secrets but did not actually keep you from making copies.
In practice, such hacked versions happen all the time even WITH secret DRM. Microsoft can't actually back this promise up effectively, because people all over the world have physical access to the HDs that their software, AND any secrets, AND the media are on, so hacking it is basically easy. But to try to back it up, they have to basically rely on the idea that they're going to make it as hard as possible for you to modify your OS and software, and that you therefore won't BE ABLE to change it to being decrypted without destroying your OS.
In other words, there's no way around this fundamental problem, when the end user you're trying to block and the machine admin with full control over the machine are the same person. The MS solution is to try and make it so that even the admin is very limited in certain ways - so your computer isn't really your computer even more than it already isn't. And this is, in a nutshell, what Trusted Computing is - motherboard support for your computer not being your computer.
This means that the fundamental difference between what is practically called DRM and encryption is that encryption can sometimes be strong and DRM must by definition be very weak.
On the OTHER hand, rights-management schemes are not fundamentally broken* if the final use of the file can only ever occur on a machine the end-user doesn't really have control over. e.g., if Apple's files played ONLY on the iPod and not in iTunes etc, it could hypothetically be made fundamentally unbreakable without someone taking apart an iPod and wiring it up to find some kind of secret in it.
This doesn't have to be DEDICATED hardware, of course - if the end user has limited privileges on a secure* OS and no access to the physical hardware, that's even better. (For definitions of "no access" that are "harder than reverse engineering iPod hardware" Depending on your audience, you might need a pretty good cage/alarm for that to actually be true... but much less might be sufficient.)
This is EXACTLY what the OP is asking for... a managed encryption system allowing central control over who can see files. But to be effective, any such system requires that the machines be locked down. And IF the machines are locked down, there are simpler, less problematic, less error-prone encryption methods to address this than the things we call DRM.
*Security is still hard, of course - because any flaw that allows someone to gain control of something breaks this lack of control. If they have physical acce
I'm an engineer by training and a programmer by profession - and I have quite a bit of old hardware running.
1. Starting up anything definitely induces extra wear (thermal changes, power surges, changing states) However, even without any power savings, the wear of starting up in the morning may or may not be greater than the wear of 15 hours of being on for no good reason.
2. There are many, many states in a computer that only exist during startup. There therefore MUST be many, many failure modes which will only be obvious at startup. Some of these are gradual and some not... So as the parent said, perhaps the most important tradeoff is whether you want to a) never, ever power down the machine to avoid those modes being important as long as possible or b) restart machines occasionally just to DETECT such a failure mode as it's happening. I agree that "b" sounds more important in most use cases, as long as a good fraction of these failure modes are gradual, which I personally think sounds likely.
3. From a physical wear point of view, you probably ARE spinning down your HD all the time, whenever you're not using it for a little while.
4. In a complex device (e.g. HD) a friendly power-down (turning it off) should not be considering equivalent to a sudden loss of power (e.g. UPS/power/PSU failure) Things ARE more likely to fail when the UPS dies...
5. Don't ignore the value of purposeful engineering. New ATA HDs are expected to be slept routinely, and are therefore designed with that in mind...
6. I'm confident the above applies to the mechanical spinning part of both HDs and also of all kinds of fans (including of course the PSU fans) In my experience, these are by far the most common significant parts to go bad in a PC... I believe they probably apply in principle to everything else, but I can't be sure.
Overall, I think expanding on #3, if you sleep the machine certainly a lot of other stuff is getting turned off etc. If you don't sleep the machine or any components at all (which you pretty much have to do on purpose at this point) I think the amount of power we're talking about wasting is significantly higher than the typical numbers people are throwing around, and is probably pretty significant.
If you're NOT going to do that, then I have a hard time imagining you're going to save a lot of machine life in a modern machine in any place other than the fans. Which are actually pretty cheap... So to me the summary of this seems to be: a) turn your machine off when you're not using it b) use motherboards etc that can track fan failure and switch off before they burn up, and/or use redundant fans. And listen to when your fan noises change.
I'm totally ignoring failure during the initial burn-in period in the above discussion.
and, naturally, if they weren't being deceitful
Submitted this to the original article; no idea if it'll show up.
I think rob/ahoutx/maddawg are missing the point. Exclusivity and top billing have nothing to do with security.
MS COULD demand certain security measures or, more uniformly, require the service to send the user to MSN where they must agree to a warning about how this startup may do lord knows to their info. It should be up to the user.
Keep in mind that if this article is accurate, they are NOT doing this. But they ARE saying that it's totally fine to do whatever you want IF you only use MSN.
Generally these types of services at least require you to enter your IM info AND PASSWORD for them to get all your contacts. And if you give _anybody_ this info they can sign on using an IM client and get all your contacts.
Not exactly a lot here that this policy is keeping safer.
And leave it to Forbes to get all that and to miss THE ONE MOUSE BUTTON - seriously. The DESKTOPS now have plenty of buttons, but the laptops still only, really have one.
The one thing everyone has been legitimately complaining about for years...
Actually, round shoelaces work fine. I agreed with you for a while, until I tried some alternative solutions. Specifically: If your flat shoelaces get all tangled up in any kind of knot that isn't a bow, they're very difficult to untangle. If your round shoelaces are tied in a bow, they will almost immediately become untied.
But if you put a square knot (two overhand loops in opposite directions) in round shoelaces, it's like magic. It holds tight and never slips. BUT they're so slippery you can still untie them whenever you like just by pulling really hard on either exposed end. And since that's PUTTING an actual knot into them and can get it out, you're showing it's basically impossible for them to tangle.
I agree with the sibling post that there already ARE other formats that are allowed. Including iTunes. I would presume the difference is all in the price. I would NOT be surprised, at the idea that* Microsoft convinced the MPAA that their DRM was "better" and should therefore be the one that has rentals at the lowest price.
*Until tomorrowish, when Apple will announce they negotiated a better deal for essentially business reasons separate from claiming their DRM is really "better".
In other words, the lower the price, the harder to keep/copy/distribute it should be. The same principle upon which nonDRM iTunes songs cost more. DVDs at this point should essentially be benchmarked as "almost totally unprotected in a technical sense, but protected in a legal sense"
And if your definition of "better" DRM is "most annoying to remove" I believe that in a broad, general way they're going to be right about Windows DRM being generally better than anything Apple is ever going to use. Now, obviously it's all breakable, and most of it isn't even especially hard. But we're talking about a big curve of users who have problems just USING Windows, much less doing stuff it's actively trying to stop you from doing. And I'm not trying to say Microsoft has better engineers.
I'm about to tell you another reason I think Apple is awesome, but let me lead by saying this isn't a claim that they're just being benevolent; I think they see what we all see in terms of the way things are going. Apple fundamentally believes that when you buy a general purpose computer, you should be able to do with that computer whatever you like. It's not perfect, but it's designed to do YOUR bidding. As is Linux, of course. (Apple does not believe this for appliances like an iPod - or an iPhone, but I hold out hope there.) They make sure you can actually use the media you have, even if that comes at some sacrifice. You can burn a backup CD of anything you buy on iTunes.
Microsoft has shown they fundamentally do not believe in this, which is funny considering they don't actually sell you the computers. But they continuously show themselves to be in the pocket of big media - or at least having no spine - installing more and more things on your computer that try to limit what you can do - and breaking compatibility with their own stuff a few years later to try to make it more secure. Obviously this never serves the user, and it just makes things worse for them.
And I'm CERTAINLY not saying you can't break Windows DRM per se, but I'd be willing to firmly bet that someone with equal skills doing equal research would be far more likely to corrupt Windows somehow trying to disable all the various DRM-related operations than the equivalent modification to OS You don't have the source, but you're basically allowed to change whatever OS X files you want, and Windows is just fundamentally, philosophically not like that, it tries to detect and prevent certain changes.
The motherboard manufacturers aren't necessarily onboard with all this, because since the users don't want it, it doesn't help them sell motherboards, which is good for the user, at least.
Apple obviously lives in a world of compromise, unlike, say, Debian, so Apple does give you DRMed stuff because that's the only way to get the mainstream media's content. They have never been in the forefront of this the way much smaller, more fringe competitors (e.g. eMusic) can be, but they have always been steadily pushing that boundary. (Again, I think at least in large part because they see the reality of where this is going.)
Altered diagnosis from other categories is insufficient - to my recollection the per capita rate of autism now exceeds the TOTAL diagnosis rates from all even mildly similar categories.
Perhaps we're diagnosing a lot of kids who previously we only would have called 'weird' and never taken to a doctor...
Parent is dead on. You should be allowed to not wear a seatbelt if and only if you pay a highly financially sound insurance company to cover all plausible costs for your medical care if you get in an accident - and all disability payments you might get for the same reason.