It seems to me that the minimum number of episodes for syndications has increased over the past 20or 30 years. Now it seems important for a show to have 100 eps or about 5 seasons. In the 70's early 80's I seem to recall a number of shows that had 50-75 eps being stripped. Star Trek is one example. B.J and the bear is another. Of course the networks produced enough content so shows tended to be syndicated after the fact to local independents, which made the whole thing much more interesting.
I wonder how much a show like andromeda will make. It seems to be that the value is syndication prior to the end of the run, as to squeeze out money and build value. Once a run has ended, it seems that shows now quickly move to DVD, thus reduceing the value for syndication.
One this about this 100 episode things in the requirement it puts on shows. A final useless season with a stupid ending.
and you are acting like a scientific illiterate. Finding a boat on a mountain merely indicates that somehow a boat got on a mountain. Finding animals in the boat merely indicates that there were animal in the boat.
All previous statements are valid because, as scientists, we should we should not be making assumption about the identity of the boat. We should in fact be coming up with test to prove the boat is not the Arc, and then, after the tests are proven false, reluctantly stating that it probably is.
By assuming the positive result, people are showing themselves as extremists, and the mission has not scientific value at all.
The ABL is one of the systems proposed to destroy an ICBM during boost phase. As you say, many have given up hope of destroying an ICBM during midcourse due to the many ways an ICBM can defend itself against such an attack.
However, the ability of an ABL to defend against an ICBM is questionable. The APS conducted a detailed study of how we might go about destroying an inbound ICBM, a summary of which is published in Physics Today, and thier findings are not hopeful.
The most intersting finding is the debris from such a defense is not likely to land anywhere near the launch site. If the defense is not careful the debris could very well land in the original target country. It would be best to time everything carefully so that the debris lands in the ocean. And timing is everything since you have much less than four minutes to identify, target, launch and destroy the ICBM.
WRT the ABL, the most intersting quote follows: In assessing the usefulness of the ABL, the study group adopted its publicly reported design goals: 3 MW of power focused into a 1.2-m-diameter beam (close to the diffraction limit) that could illuminate the target missile for up to 20 s. We also considered the utility of systems with greater and lesser capabilities. We found that if the ABL achieves its design goals, it would have a range of about 600 km against liquid-propellant ICBMs. That would be useful against liquid-propellant ICBMs launched from North Korea, but not from Iran. Against solid-propellant ICBMs, its range would be only about 300 km, too short to be useful in any of the scenarios we examined. The ABL's range is relatively insensitive to its power.
What this means is that if we had a near perfect 3MW laser, which we don't, and the ICBM was of an ancient design, then we could defend against some countries in the far east, but not the middle east. And even in the best case scenario, we might have to forget Alaska.
If you want to make as much as say a PE, say $60k+, that probably is not going to happen. A CS major is not an EE or ME person. The CS major is not going to get a government license, and the software firm is not going to take on the risks that and engineering firm will.
A CS degree without additional certifications and qualification is just a degree. It is a more vocational degree, so the employer can assume that you have the ability to run machines, but that is about it. And since you did not mention any professional work, the employer will also have to assume that you will have to be trained in the basics of business, and the reality of meatball programming, which will significantly cut your efficiency for the first couple years.
Then there's the fact, that like so many other professions, CS has been overrun by people who have little interest in doing a good job programming, but simply want to get rich. Employers no longer have to cater to such people, so, like most other professions, the pay is set at a reasonable rate, but not so high that you have employees who merely want to get paid incredible amounts of money for doing not much of anything. Such positions are reserved for the elite and their brethren.
I will get flamed for this, but I would say anything approaching $15 an hour, or 30K a year, is good(and 25K very acceptable, depending on geograph), especially if the insurance and retirement is also good. As a young ex-student retirement and insurance should be a big concern. Continuous health insurance starting when you don't need is critical. Also, saving for retirement is something that all of us wish we hard stated, and not spent, when we were just lads. Also remember that any employer is going to invest tons in you with in kind services. You will get much more out of the first few years of work that just money.
It could still be construed as a defensive move. There are uncounted number of families that are now safe in their midsize sedans. Not to mention the wildlife that won't be harrashed when insecure men and women want to play in the woods, but can't imagine actually exposing themselves to the elements.
It is because they did not want to make the browser the application front end. They wanted to keep the browser standard, and through technologies that allows them to combine the render engine and various other technologies, create the GUI.
This also means that they did not get in the trouble of other music services. It is clear that the interface is customized GUI, and therefore must be rewritten for each platform. What people get confused about is that IE is HTML based application front end, not a browser. The additional features, which often cause security problems, and are not useful for a browser, are ideal for when you want to turn a PC into a DRM dumb terminal.
Four things are important in teaching. First, you must understand, respect, and be relevant the kids. Not just kids in general, but the kids you are teaching. What they want, what they need, where they are coming from. This is hard to do in detail, but the details are not important. You just don't want a situation in which the teachers wishes they had a different kind of kid.
Second, the teacher must know how to set appropriate boundaries, and enforce those boundaries in ways that are natural to the teacher and appropriate to the student. No learning goes on if the kids do not get to class. No learning goes on if the kids do sit down. No learning goes on if the kids are not actively involved. In math that may mean solving a dozen irrelevant problems every week. We must, after all, build automaticity. Hopefully the problems are accessible. It makes no sense asking about a Polo game when everyone plays soccer.
Third, the teacher must know the various methods to present concepts, and how those concepts are interpreted. The teacher must understand that what the student hears is not always what was intended. The teacher must understand that most kids are very goal oriented and not involved in the process of learning. They must be forced into that mode.
Third, the teacher must be familiar with the subject matter. How familiar depends on the kids and what the kids are eventually expected to do. Everything else being equal, the teacher will have an easier time if they have a solid background in math. OTOH, if the first three properties are not present, the teacher will dead weight in most public US schools.
I see a lot of good teachers with advanced math degrees, and I think it is great that there e is streamlined process to get them into the classroom. But the degree, by itself, is not a predictor of success. if you think a bad math education results from teachers without degrees, you are fooling yourself. Students are sometimes saddled with teachers that do not understand pedagogy, and in that case the school bears some responsibility. Students are sometimes saddled with school that as a entity do not enforce boundaries, and, again, students bear some responsibility. But the students and parents often bear full responsibility because they choose to not engage the child the education process.
To me the issue is not about the camcorder. Most movies prohibit such things and therefore is against the whatever license is issued. It is probably copyright violation.
The issue is whether it serves any purpose to criminalize this behavior. It certainly creates a chain of events and opportunity costs that may make the process impractical. To me the most important is the opportunity costs. Unless you believe that prison space is an unlimited resource, and have an unlimited number of persons is beneficial, prison time for something that in other cases would merely result in the ejection and possible ban of the customer seems silly. You would say that filming is the equavilent of drunk driving.
The consequences must also be considered. Severe punishments increase the possibility of violence. I will certainly feel less safe in theaters knowing that someone may have to make a choice between risking a year of life or beating up the usher. Since the person has already chosen to break the law, one would imagine that such a person would not hesitate to severely injure the usher. And if a police officer is called, then the possibility of shootout emerges. I am not just playing the reductio ad absurdum game. Business tend to think of the level of possible violence when determining these policies.
This is one of those security things that only result in less security for everyone else.
I think there are two related reasons. First, MS can set the price of products to whatever they want. That means that they have a high profit margin, for the time being. They need to invest that money in some way. They are increasingly becoming even less of a devlopment company. The two flagship products, Windows and Office, are more or less stagnant. The OS they promised next year has been pushed to the next decade. Office has had no significant improvements in years. So they don't invest in new software products, and the xbox can only eat so much. So where to invest the money?
This leads to reason two. They say they want to follow the IBM path of making monye off IP. This means that they have to clean up thier IP portfolio. The money is largely irrelevent as it is almost free and there is probably no better investment. The license fess they collect will be pure profit.
As an aside, it is a very shrewd tactical move. Intertrust now has another company paying it royalties. It has a basis to demand payment from any software that uses the technology. This means that MS, with sony and Philips, has cornered the market on this particular DRM. In the end it mean a new oligarchy of music distribution. Goodbye fair use on *nix systems, goodbye iTunes.
It is more than that. The question is do you want your email archived by a third party. Yes, other services archive your mail. Most services, however, are not going to spend the money to archive the mail indefinitely. Economics would tend to suggest that after a while the email will disappear, even if you don't explicitly delete it.
Google is different. Not only will email be archived, it might not be deleted even if you delete your account. This has profound implication for business, implication that I am disappointed that Forbes, a responsible magazine targeted toward business owners and investors, did not explore. How many such people have gotten bitten in the ass over the past few years due to an errant email. How many of those even knew the email in question was archived. Remember, Arthur Anderson was destroyed largely because they did not follow their policy of periodically destroying records. I believe many businesses, especially investment firms, forbid the use of such free mail services.
This is the type of article that really makes me think the magazines like Forbes lack basic common sense.
It depends on what the end user is doing. Certainly for a the varied tasks that the home user might do, a GUI is very good. I question if the GUI is best for office use. Most of the time a boss needs the average employee to do a few things. Write some memos. Run some reports. That sort of thing. Employees can be trained to type in the proper commands, or press the proper numbers. In the old days, command applications could be easily reconfigured to display a text menu that allowed the user to choose the exact options or reports they needed. This innovation was only recently copied in GUI application. It was not uncommon for a user to have to execute several mouse clicks, several times a day, to do what they once did with three or four keystrokes. Of course, to get back on topic, the GUI allowed untrained employees to gain access to the database and screw everything up.
I cought myself in the middle of a very interesting discussion last Friday over Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee
I like the little cups of strong coffee. Could never understand the appeal of Krispy Kreme doughnuts though. I am lucky enough to have a local place which knows that a doughnut is supposed to be light and fluffy. The more sugar the better.
I suppose the security issue comes from insufficient caffiene and sugar. All these people on low carb diets have no idea what they are doing to thier minds.
I quote from the preface of Bruce Schneier Secrets and Lies, without permission
I have written this book partly to correct a mistake.
Seven years ago I wrote another book: Applied Cryptography. In it I described a mathematical utopia: algorithms that would keep your deepest secrets safe for millennia, protocols that could perform the most fantastical electronic interactions-unregulated gambling, undetectable authentication, anonymous cash-safely and securely. In my vision cryptography was the great technological equalizer; anyone with a cheap (and getting cheaper every year) computer could have the same security as the largest government....I went so far as to write: "It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics."
It's just not true. Cryptography can't do any of that.
It's not that cryptography has gotten weaker since 1994, or that the things I described in that book are no longer true; it's that cryptography doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Cryptography is a branch of mathematics. And like all mathematics, it involves numbers, equations, and logic. Security, palpable security that you or I might find useful in our lives, involves people: things people know, relationships between people, people and how they relate to machines. Digital security involves computers: complex, unstable, buggy computers.
Mathematics is perfect; reality is subjective. Mathematics is defined; computers are ornery. Mathematics is logical; people are erratic, capricious, and barely comprehensible.
The error of Applied Cryptography is that I didn't talk at all about the context. I talked about cryptography as if it were The Answer(TM). I was pretty naïve.
The result wasn't pretty. Readers believed that cryptography was a kind of magic security dust that they could sprinkle over their software and make it secure.... A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography.
Since writing the book, I have made a living as a cryptography consultant: designing and analyzing security systems. To my initial surprise, I found that the weak points had nothing to do with the mathematics. They were in the hardware, the software, the networks, and the people. Beautiful pieces of mathematics were made irrelevant through bad programming, a lousy operating system, or someone's bad password choice....
Any real-world system is a complicated series of interconnections.... No system is perfect; no technology is The Answer(TM).
This is obvious to anyone involved in real-world security. In the real world, security involves processes. It involves preventative technologies, but also detection and reaction processes, and an entire forensics system to hunt down and prosecute the guilty. Security is not a product; it itself is a process. And if we're ever going to make our digital systems secure, we're going to have to start building processes.
A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
This book is about those security problems, the limitations of technology, and the solutions.
We had one the first Hondas. The primary issue was not cost. It was the fact that Honda gave us a better warranty. It was also a time when the car industry had yet to discover that women's money was just as valuable as men's money. Both of these issue drove us, as many others, away from the US car dealers.
The Walmart example, OTOH, is very appropriate. You sacrifice your self respect to shop there. Of course, since the owners and management have already sold thier sould to the devil, it matters little.
I think the user interface research is cool, but I really have to say 'so what'. We are a civilization that is dependent on our technology. We use it no matter the consequences or user interface. We use it without understanding of what makes it work. And we don't care. This applies to a shovel, a pencil, a tv, or a computer.
Right now the computers are in their infancy. The people who will ultimately use these pervasive computing environments, those that are just now in grade school, will be trained to use whatever interface the producers of this technology develop. It is nice to have academic research to back up the production and marketing guys, but which group has the most years of experience getting users to use electronics?
Take some examples. I never had any trouble learning or figuring out what the dials, yes the dial, on the TV did. I never had any trouble figuring out the top dial had to be set to a certain place in order to use the bottom dial. It was actually a complex logic puzzle. I figured it out. The same thing with the VCR. I now see three year old children able to navigate the complex buttons of the modern TV with no trouble at all. And they can't even read. The do by spatial position.
The same is true for vending machines, microwave ovens, whatever you like. There is no such thing as a truly intuitive interface, although some are more intuitive than others. There is really no reason to make the audio controllers on a computer the same as on a radio, except as a crutch to the older users. The young will choose the design that works for them. They will use it in ways that the researchers never thought of. And most will use it without any understanding of the technology, not even the basic notion that the color of the LED is created by the quantum mechanics.
First, i think we all will agree that russians know how to do space on the cheap. Part of it is that the free market and democracy, for all it's benefits, tends to make these things cost more. We have to do bidding and worry about safety. If we were just able to tell factories what to produce, how much it would cost, and then tell some militaries guys it was time to die for their country, the whole things become much more manageable. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.
That said, perhaps they have a chance. Part of the reason a US Mars mission is going to be so expensive is that we want to carefully set up mars for human exploration. That means that in addition to crashing probes into the planet, as we did for the moon, we are also going to send slow transport ships to provision the planet for a long comfortable human stay, as well as the return vehicle. For the actual crew transport, we will use a very expensive trajectory that will get them to mars quickly. Once there, I think we plan to keep them on planet for a year or so.
From the timeline we can assume the Russians are going just going to load up a ship with as much stuff as possible and send it on it's way. The three year mission timeline with several months on the planet indicates that they will use the minimum energy/longest duration flight path. This will significantly reduce fuel costs at the expense on human provisions. Perhaps a single nuclear drive will get them there and back. They will likely stay on the planet just long enough to meet the return launch requirements. If they use a moon lander type ship, then the big ship will only have to have fuel to enter and leave orbit. This is a significantly more risky venture. They are probably likely to reach the planet, even odds to survive until they can leave, and probably starve on the way back, but that has pretty much been the norm for exploration over human history.
All this is just a guess. I haven't really looked at the mars mission profiles in a long time.
Can anyone tell me why designers set up sites to store cookies prior to delivering any data? To me this is so ignorant. I mean how many times have you been surfing for information or a product, click a link, and have a cookie request pop up. You don't know the site from Adam, you don't know if it is going to have anything useful. You have no way to decide, as no content has been delivered. You don't want to have to go and delete the cookie or change the settings. I mean after all you just want to look for a second. They don't ask you for an ID when you browse at the mall. Some shady car dealers do this, but when they do i tell them to fuck off and go somewhere else.
So, being a prudent surfer, you deny the cookie. I mean how useful can a site be if they won't even allow a page to render before setting a cookie. This is one of the first rules of usability. Before asking the user to do anything, the site must clearly establish a benefit. I mean if I accepted every cookie of every site that wanted to set it before rendering I would have hundreds of useless site cookies. Much of the time I look at the page, decide it is useless, and go on my way.
So to those of you who are currently in the middle of this modern client/server design, why do require a token even before the user has a chance to establish the identify of the website.
Considering the number of double agents we have caught in the US lately, I think our concern should be the employees of closed source companies sticking evil easter eggs into the code used in national defense. We have all these Americans selling secrets for years before being caught. OTOH, we keep arresting these residents only to release them for lackof evidence. It is not the foreign agent that is the danger, but the domestic agent doing anything to pay a mortgage, private school, and vacations.
I wonder if 100K for such a machine is so outlandish. There is a significant segment of the population, at least in the US, that have 70K cars. And they apparantly can afford to put in $40 dollars of gas every week. If a robot could be leased for 20k a year, there might be enough customers to support a small production.
This is quite competative with humans, which seem to cost 25K for unskilled helpers to 60K for a nurse. If nothing else, the robots would be useful if full time help were unaffordable.
Absolutely, it is a design issue. It is putting all rules in a well known location and everyone uses those rules to access the data. There is no sneaking around and looking at or changing data outside of the agreed upon rules. If the rules are implemented as perfectly as possible in one place, then we are halfwa to good code.
When we wrote in Fortan and C and the other old style languages, we talked about modules and minimizing the coupling, or how much one module knew about the other modules. For example, there is no reason for modules other than the one that accesses the data to know exactly how the data is stored or what rules need to be followed to safely and securely access the data. As a matter of fact, it would be foolish to assume that the other modules could know, and even if they did, could implement the rules perfectly in multiple functions.
Nowadays we admit that programmers are sneaky and will not follow the agreed upon rules. They will in fact get pompous and creative and try to re-implement the rules in new and unique ways. So we encapsulate data under increasingly complex layers of abstraction and hope that no one looks in the include files to figure out what the original structure is. It still is an honor system, but at least now any violations can be considered willful and malicious.
It kind of depends on how often the out of data conditions occur and how long they occur. My understanding is that the design of proper alarms is actually a complicated security issue, and improper alarms leads to less effective security.
For example, I once worked at a place with many many Window web servers. Every time a server failed, an alarm would sound. But the reason we used Window servers is that they were dirt cheap so we could buy enough to compensate for the expected frequent failures. The result were near constant alarms that were uniformly ignored. Therefore, the alarms resulted in no security benefits. This place had many other example of impressive front door security with nonexistent backdoor security.
It could be that the data was often "not live". Such 'failures' might be due to perfectly legitimate and expected condition. As such, these would not be exception in the sense that it was not unexpected. It is quite possible that the system was designed to have a human check some board on a periodic basis to confirm the age of the data. It may be that as long as an operator did this job once an hour there would be no problem. Some group decided that additional indication would not do any good because the data was so often "not live" that the operators would suffer blindness to the alarm.
Of course we do not know this for sure, but it could happen. But it is a consideration. As another example my check engine light has been on for a long time, and yet the mechanic says that nothing is significantly wrong with the engine. How will I ever trust the light again?
This is going to be the key. Can MS own the Asian market. We have seen some attempts to do this. The latest seems to be program to install an OS on a donated machine.
However, we have also seen the signs of failure. Asia seems to be putting money into *nix and open standards. This makes sense because no sane country is going to standardize on foreign technology, especially technology that costs multiples of the median income. The west must do business with the east, so anything that impedes that business will not be tolerated. Since the MS monopoly is standard base this could be spell the beginning of open standards and the end of MS.
And, of course, the most cost effective developers are in India which puts MS at an economic disadvantage.
None of this means that MS will die, just that it will have to honestly compete. This may mean OS pricing more in line with the rest of the industry.
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I wonder how much a show like andromeda will make. It seems to be that the value is syndication prior to the end of the run, as to squeeze out money and build value. Once a run has ended, it seems that shows now quickly move to DVD, thus reduceing the value for syndication.
One this about this 100 episode things in the requirement it puts on shows. A final useless season with a stupid ending.
All previous statements are valid because, as scientists, we should we should not be making assumption about the identity of the boat. We should in fact be coming up with test to prove the boat is not the Arc, and then, after the tests are proven false, reluctantly stating that it probably is.
By assuming the positive result, people are showing themselves as extremists, and the mission has not scientific value at all.
However, the ability of an ABL to defend against an ICBM is questionable. The APS conducted a detailed study of how we might go about destroying an inbound ICBM, a summary of which is published in Physics Today, and thier findings are not hopeful.
The most intersting finding is the debris from such a defense is not likely to land anywhere near the launch site. If the defense is not careful the debris could very well land in the original target country. It would be best to time everything carefully so that the debris lands in the ocean. And timing is everything since you have much less than four minutes to identify, target, launch and destroy the ICBM.
WRT the ABL, the most intersting quote follows:
In assessing the usefulness of the ABL, the study group adopted its publicly reported design goals: 3 MW of power focused into a 1.2-m-diameter beam (close to the diffraction limit) that could illuminate the target missile for up to 20 s. We also considered the utility of systems with greater and lesser capabilities. We found that if the ABL achieves its design goals, it would have a range of about 600 km against liquid-propellant ICBMs. That would be useful against liquid-propellant ICBMs launched from North Korea, but not from Iran. Against solid-propellant ICBMs, its range would be only about 300 km, too short to be useful in any of the scenarios we examined. The ABL's range is relatively insensitive to its power.
What this means is that if we had a near perfect 3MW laser, which we don't, and the ICBM was of an ancient design, then we could defend against some countries in the far east, but not the middle east. And even in the best case scenario, we might have to forget Alaska.
A CS degree without additional certifications and qualification is just a degree. It is a more vocational degree, so the employer can assume that you have the ability to run machines, but that is about it. And since you did not mention any professional work, the employer will also have to assume that you will have to be trained in the basics of business, and the reality of meatball programming, which will significantly cut your efficiency for the first couple years.
Then there's the fact, that like so many other professions, CS has been overrun by people who have little interest in doing a good job programming, but simply want to get rich. Employers no longer have to cater to such people, so, like most other professions, the pay is set at a reasonable rate, but not so high that you have employees who merely want to get paid incredible amounts of money for doing not much of anything. Such positions are reserved for the elite and their brethren.
I will get flamed for this, but I would say anything approaching $15 an hour, or 30K a year, is good(and 25K very acceptable, depending on geograph), especially if the insurance and retirement is also good. As a young ex-student retirement and insurance should be a big concern. Continuous health insurance starting when you don't need is critical. Also, saving for retirement is something that all of us wish we hard stated, and not spent, when we were just lads. Also remember that any employer is going to invest tons in you with in kind services. You will get much more out of the first few years of work that just money.
It could still be construed as a defensive move. There are uncounted number of families that are now safe in their midsize sedans. Not to mention the wildlife that won't be harrashed when insecure men and women want to play in the woods, but can't imagine actually exposing themselves to the elements.
This also means that they did not get in the trouble of other music services. It is clear that the interface is customized GUI, and therefore must be rewritten for each platform. What people get confused about is that IE is HTML based application front end, not a browser. The additional features, which often cause security problems, and are not useful for a browser, are ideal for when you want to turn a PC into a DRM dumb terminal.
Second, the teacher must know how to set appropriate boundaries, and enforce those boundaries in ways that are natural to the teacher and appropriate to the student. No learning goes on if the kids do not get to class. No learning goes on if the kids do sit down. No learning goes on if the kids are not actively involved. In math that may mean solving a dozen irrelevant problems every week. We must, after all, build automaticity. Hopefully the problems are accessible. It makes no sense asking about a Polo game when everyone plays soccer.
Third, the teacher must know the various methods to present concepts, and how those concepts are interpreted. The teacher must understand that what the student hears is not always what was intended. The teacher must understand that most kids are very goal oriented and not involved in the process of learning. They must be forced into that mode.
Third, the teacher must be familiar with the subject matter. How familiar depends on the kids and what the kids are eventually expected to do. Everything else being equal, the teacher will have an easier time if they have a solid background in math. OTOH, if the first three properties are not present, the teacher will dead weight in most public US schools.
I see a lot of good teachers with advanced math degrees, and I think it is great that there e is streamlined process to get them into the classroom. But the degree, by itself, is not a predictor of success. if you think a bad math education results from teachers without degrees, you are fooling yourself. Students are sometimes saddled with teachers that do not understand pedagogy, and in that case the school bears some responsibility. Students are sometimes saddled with school that as a entity do not enforce boundaries, and, again, students bear some responsibility. But the students and parents often bear full responsibility because they choose to not engage the child the education process.
The issue is whether it serves any purpose to criminalize this behavior. It certainly creates a chain of events and opportunity costs that may make the process impractical. To me the most important is the opportunity costs. Unless you believe that prison space is an unlimited resource, and have an unlimited number of persons is beneficial, prison time for something that in other cases would merely result in the ejection and possible ban of the customer seems silly. You would say that filming is the equavilent of drunk driving.
The consequences must also be considered. Severe punishments increase the possibility of violence. I will certainly feel less safe in theaters knowing that someone may have to make a choice between risking a year of life or beating up the usher. Since the person has already chosen to break the law, one would imagine that such a person would not hesitate to severely injure the usher. And if a police officer is called, then the possibility of shootout emerges. I am not just playing the reductio ad absurdum game. Business tend to think of the level of possible violence when determining these policies.
This is one of those security things that only result in less security for everyone else.
This leads to reason two. They say they want to follow the IBM path of making monye off IP. This means that they have to clean up thier IP portfolio. The money is largely irrelevent as it is almost free and there is probably no better investment. The license fess they collect will be pure profit.
As an aside, it is a very shrewd tactical move. Intertrust now has another company paying it royalties. It has a basis to demand payment from any software that uses the technology. This means that MS, with sony and Philips, has cornered the market on this particular DRM. In the end it mean a new oligarchy of music distribution. Goodbye fair use on *nix systems, goodbye iTunes.
Google is different. Not only will email be archived, it might not be deleted even if you delete your account. This has profound implication for business, implication that I am disappointed that Forbes, a responsible magazine targeted toward business owners and investors, did not explore. How many such people have gotten bitten in the ass over the past few years due to an errant email. How many of those even knew the email in question was archived. Remember, Arthur Anderson was destroyed largely because they did not follow their policy of periodically destroying records. I believe many businesses, especially investment firms, forbid the use of such free mail services.
This is the type of article that really makes me think the magazines like Forbes lack basic common sense.
It depends on what the end user is doing. Certainly for a the varied tasks that the home user might do, a GUI is very good. I question if the GUI is best for office use. Most of the time a boss needs the average employee to do a few things. Write some memos. Run some reports. That sort of thing. Employees can be trained to type in the proper commands, or press the proper numbers. In the old days, command applications could be easily reconfigured to display a text menu that allowed the user to choose the exact options or reports they needed. This innovation was only recently copied in GUI application. It was not uncommon for a user to have to execute several mouse clicks, several times a day, to do what they once did with three or four keystrokes. Of course, to get back on topic, the GUI allowed untrained employees to gain access to the database and screw everything up.
I like the little cups of strong coffee. Could never understand the appeal of Krispy Kreme doughnuts though. I am lucky enough to have a local place which knows that a doughnut is supposed to be light and fluffy. The more sugar the better.
I suppose the security issue comes from insufficient caffiene and sugar. All these people on low carb diets have no idea what they are doing to thier minds.
I have written this book partly to correct a mistake.
Seven years ago I wrote another book: Applied Cryptography. In it I described a mathematical utopia: algorithms that would keep your deepest secrets safe for millennia, protocols that could perform the most fantastical electronic interactions-unregulated gambling, undetectable authentication, anonymous cash-safely and securely. In my vision cryptography was the great technological equalizer; anyone with a cheap (and getting cheaper every year) computer could have the same security as the largest government. ...I went so far as to write: "It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics."
It's just not true. Cryptography can't do any of that.
It's not that cryptography has gotten weaker since 1994, or that the things I described in that book are no longer true; it's that cryptography doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Cryptography is a branch of mathematics. And like all mathematics, it involves numbers, equations, and logic. Security, palpable security that you or I might find useful in our lives, involves people: things people know, relationships between people, people and how they relate to machines. Digital security involves computers: complex, unstable, buggy computers.
Mathematics is perfect; reality is subjective. Mathematics is defined; computers are ornery. Mathematics is logical; people are erratic, capricious, and barely comprehensible.
The error of Applied Cryptography is that I didn't talk at all about the context. I talked about cryptography as if it were The Answer(TM). I was pretty naïve.
The result wasn't pretty. Readers believed that cryptography was a kind of magic security dust that they could sprinkle over their software and make it secure. ... A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography.
Since writing the book, I have made a living as a cryptography consultant: designing and analyzing security systems. To my initial surprise, I found that the weak points had nothing to do with the mathematics. They were in the hardware, the software, the networks, and the people. Beautiful pieces of mathematics were made irrelevant through bad programming, a lousy operating system, or someone's bad password choice. ...
Any real-world system is a complicated series of interconnections. ... No system is perfect; no technology is The Answer(TM).
This is obvious to anyone involved in real-world security. In the real world, security involves processes. It involves preventative technologies, but also detection and reaction processes, and an entire forensics system to hunt down and prosecute the guilty. Security is not a product; it itself is a process. And if we're ever going to make our digital systems secure, we're going to have to start building processes.
A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
This book is about those security problems, the limitations of technology, and the solutions.
The Walmart example, OTOH, is very appropriate. You sacrifice your self respect to shop there. Of course, since the owners and management have already sold thier sould to the devil, it matters little.
Right now the computers are in their infancy. The people who will ultimately use these pervasive computing environments, those that are just now in grade school, will be trained to use whatever interface the producers of this technology develop. It is nice to have academic research to back up the production and marketing guys, but which group has the most years of experience getting users to use electronics?
Take some examples. I never had any trouble learning or figuring out what the dials, yes the dial, on the TV did. I never had any trouble figuring out the top dial had to be set to a certain place in order to use the bottom dial. It was actually a complex logic puzzle. I figured it out. The same thing with the VCR. I now see three year old children able to navigate the complex buttons of the modern TV with no trouble at all. And they can't even read. The do by spatial position.
The same is true for vending machines, microwave ovens, whatever you like. There is no such thing as a truly intuitive interface, although some are more intuitive than others. There is really no reason to make the audio controllers on a computer the same as on a radio, except as a crutch to the older users. The young will choose the design that works for them. They will use it in ways that the researchers never thought of. And most will use it without any understanding of the technology, not even the basic notion that the color of the LED is created by the quantum mechanics.
That said, perhaps they have a chance. Part of the reason a US Mars mission is going to be so expensive is that we want to carefully set up mars for human exploration. That means that in addition to crashing probes into the planet, as we did for the moon, we are also going to send slow transport ships to provision the planet for a long comfortable human stay, as well as the return vehicle. For the actual crew transport, we will use a very expensive trajectory that will get them to mars quickly. Once there, I think we plan to keep them on planet for a year or so.
From the timeline we can assume the Russians are going just going to load up a ship with as much stuff as possible and send it on it's way. The three year mission timeline with several months on the planet indicates that they will use the minimum energy/longest duration flight path. This will significantly reduce fuel costs at the expense on human provisions. Perhaps a single nuclear drive will get them there and back. They will likely stay on the planet just long enough to meet the return launch requirements. If they use a moon lander type ship, then the big ship will only have to have fuel to enter and leave orbit. This is a significantly more risky venture. They are probably likely to reach the planet, even odds to survive until they can leave, and probably starve on the way back, but that has pretty much been the norm for exploration over human history.
All this is just a guess. I haven't really looked at the mars mission profiles in a long time.
So, being a prudent surfer, you deny the cookie. I mean how useful can a site be if they won't even allow a page to render before setting a cookie. This is one of the first rules of usability. Before asking the user to do anything, the site must clearly establish a benefit. I mean if I accepted every cookie of every site that wanted to set it before rendering I would have hundreds of useless site cookies. Much of the time I look at the page, decide it is useless, and go on my way.
So to those of you who are currently in the middle of this modern client/server design, why do require a token even before the user has a chance to establish the identify of the website.
Considering the number of double agents we have caught in the US lately, I think our concern should be the employees of closed source companies sticking evil easter eggs into the code used in national defense. We have all these Americans selling secrets for years before being caught. OTOH, we keep arresting these residents only to release them for lackof evidence. It is not the foreign agent that is the danger, but the domestic agent doing anything to pay a mortgage, private school, and vacations.
that the company now has $150 million that can be targeted by the enterprising trial lawyers. Let the litigation begin!
This is quite competative with humans, which seem to cost 25K for unskilled helpers to 60K for a nurse. If nothing else, the robots would be useful if full time help were unaffordable.
When we wrote in Fortan and C and the other old style languages, we talked about modules and minimizing the coupling, or how much one module knew about the other modules. For example, there is no reason for modules other than the one that accesses the data to know exactly how the data is stored or what rules need to be followed to safely and securely access the data. As a matter of fact, it would be foolish to assume that the other modules could know, and even if they did, could implement the rules perfectly in multiple functions.
Nowadays we admit that programmers are sneaky and will not follow the agreed upon rules. They will in fact get pompous and creative and try to re-implement the rules in new and unique ways. So we encapsulate data under increasingly complex layers of abstraction and hope that no one looks in the include files to figure out what the original structure is. It still is an honor system, but at least now any violations can be considered willful and malicious.
For example, I once worked at a place with many many Window web servers. Every time a server failed, an alarm would sound. But the reason we used Window servers is that they were dirt cheap so we could buy enough to compensate for the expected frequent failures. The result were near constant alarms that were uniformly ignored. Therefore, the alarms resulted in no security benefits. This place had many other example of impressive front door security with nonexistent backdoor security.
It could be that the data was often "not live". Such 'failures' might be due to perfectly legitimate and expected condition. As such, these would not be exception in the sense that it was not unexpected. It is quite possible that the system was designed to have a human check some board on a periodic basis to confirm the age of the data. It may be that as long as an operator did this job once an hour there would be no problem. Some group decided that additional indication would not do any good because the data was so often "not live" that the operators would suffer blindness to the alarm.
Of course we do not know this for sure, but it could happen. But it is a consideration. As another example my check engine light has been on for a long time, and yet the mechanic says that nothing is significantly wrong with the engine. How will I ever trust the light again?
To be fair, there are few things that could withstand the force of twenty volumes...
However, we have also seen the signs of failure. Asia seems to be putting money into *nix and open standards. This makes sense because no sane country is going to standardize on foreign technology, especially technology that costs multiples of the median income. The west must do business with the east, so anything that impedes that business will not be tolerated. Since the MS monopoly is standard base this could be spell the beginning of open standards and the end of MS.
And, of course, the most cost effective developers are in India which puts MS at an economic disadvantage.
None of this means that MS will die, just that it will have to honestly compete. This may mean OS pricing more in line with the rest of the industry.
These are cheap enough to use with a picture phone. And with the inverting bracket, we can now have upskirt shots without the blur!