Question: How to protect against DDoS attacks without regard to the availability of the target of the attack
Answer: If your carrier supports it, initiate an RTBH on the targeted IP. If not, contact the helpdesk and have them null route it.
NO. That is not a DDos protection strategy. That is a "white flag" strategy.
It is essentially surrender, because you are intentionally making the attack succeed against the target then.
You (the ISP customer) have no ability to control what packets are sent to you over your uplink circuits. You can control what you send, but you have no ability to control what you receive.
Yes you do have lots of potential control. It's just expensive to exercise.
Because you have to have multiple datacenters and multiple uplink circuits, to have any control (without intentionally breaking connectivity).
You buy transit and peer with major providers in different datacenters and anycast your server IP address space.
Apply appropriate BGP communities and prepending to manipulate which datacenter traffic from different
places around the world winds up at.
In this manner you can 'diffuse' DDoS attacks by having a distributed infrastructure.
DDoS is highly effective against one target with a single presence.
As soon as you have multiple points of presence though, you can divide and conquer
Each DoS attack node is only capable of sending traffic to one of your anycast nodes --
the selection depends on where the DoS attack node is located net-wise, e.g. which provider.
Something you can actually manipulate, once the infrastructure is in place.
Also, if the DDoS attack nodes are concentrated on a particular network, it is likely they will all impact
one target, leaving the vast majority of your presence unaffected.
TOS debuted in 1966, that's 46 years ago. It's as popular today as it ever was. At this point, it's safe to say it's a hallmark of science fiction. A life-sized replica would remain culturally relevant for much longer than 50 years.
Perhaps so... perhaps their response to the Enterprise rejection should have been to
construct a giant Death-Star or Imperial Star Destroyer instead:)
Apple has a software monopoly for their platform; iOS. They don't have
to be concerned about manufacturers or end users picking a different OS,
because they manufacture both the device and its software as one integrated,
inseparable unit.
Once an end user is sold on their platform; Apple gets both the hardware and software profits.
Google gets only some software profits from Android and possibly patent royalties.
If Google tried to raise prices on the OS too much, hardware vendors would likely switch
to a competitor such as Windows 7.
You can't really tell if something's a bomb. If it looks suspicious, the only 'safe' thing to do is to assume it is something evil.
In the 1800s it would be an evil product of witchcraft (satanic device), in the 20th century it would be a communist spying device, and in the 21st century... it must be a bomb.
In any case, whoever created such implement must certainly be arrested.
We must be ever vigilant in the hunt for ( Witches | Communists | Terrorists), otherwise, there is a great danger that lives will be lost.
If we don't know exactly what a device (or a person is), the only safe assumption is to assume the absolute worst
No, but there was Leonardo DaVinci, and other great innovators.
And without someone being educated about how to use a printing press, we never would have learned about Da Vinci either.
There were also technologies that Da Vinci used in constructing his work.
Had Da Vinci not been taught the use of the painting and sculpting tools, because
"students should use the old fashioned writing tools", none of what history remembers about Da Vinci would have happened.
Teach without technology first, then teach with technology once that's mattered. Then the child will be better prepared for the post-apocalyptic world that has no electricity or internet.
Well, Teach technology first, because getting an early start is important.
Teach survival skills for a post-apocalyptic world too, absolutely.
That would be more educational than the average P/E class.
All students should have experience defending themselves and surviving in
simulated post-apocalyptic scenarios, including but not limited to:
how to rebuild civilization from scratch.
For example: assuming all the technological infrastructure has been destroyed,
and all the records of technological knowhow have been lost due to inaccessibility
(e.g. EMP destroyed all the computers, and books long-obsoleted are nowhere to be found).
How to "bootstrap" or "reinitialize" society and re-acquire the past inventions.
e.g. Students should be required to be taught all the basic technical knowhow required to take a society from "cave man" / "hunter gatherer" status and construct all inventions required to bring back civilization, electricity, automobiles, and computers, to a sufficient extent that the old records become accessible again, before the available media has degraded to zero.
basic skills: building the simplest of shelters, scavenging for food,
how to repurpose junk for survival, how to get/find water after civilization has collapsed
and there is no municipal supply, navigating a large forested area or desserted city
without the benefit of GPS or electronic devices; how to avoid being eaten by
zombies; signalling for help without availability of a cell phone, how to make smoke signals, morse code;
how to build a simple raft; methods of hiding from enemies and predators; methods of avoiding
being eaten by large wild animals.
How do you positively validate the identity of a parent in a household where the student is the most computer literate
You require the parent to dial a phone number that is controlled by the school.
On a touch tone phone, they will dial a "Permission slip ID number" printed on the form,
they will type their "Secret Parent ID number", they will press 1 to grant permission, press 2 to deny permission. finally, they will be prompted to record a verbal granting of permission
IVR Voice: "After the tone, your voice will be recorded, to affirm your acceptance of the notice and permission to participate, please say the following: My name is (PARENTS NAME); I hereby grant my child Billy permission to attend this field trip."
*BEEP*
The voice recordings will be reviewed at a later date to ensure the response was affirmative,
and the voice matches the parent's voice on file.
Only the parent, parent(s), or other(s) who are authorized to grant permission
will have a Parent ID#
Each permission slip ID number is tied to a specific child, and only the parent ID numbers
authorized for that specific child are able to enter a response to the permission slip.
If an invalid parent ID is entered for a permission slip too many times,
a followup call with the staff will be required.
They may be prompted to enter some other random number that only the parent would know.
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
That's best. I could see students guessing their parents' "password" and falsifying a signature.
Actually I would suggest that a parent could OPT to require both an electronic signature and a written signature.
By default only a written one would be required.
The parent could then electronically say that permission was denied. If a student attempted to forge the written permission slip, they would be busted when it disagreed with the parent's electronic denial of permission.
Actually... I am in favor of electronic notices with the stipulation that an identical printed version will be sent of every electronic notice within 1 school day.
For parents that do have email its up to them to decide if they read the printed notices or not; the students will still be required to bring them home.
This makes the electronic notifications a tool of convenience rather than something essential, or something that will single out a student. It can also be made clear that "the written announcements" are the official definitive ones.
Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.
Are you sure? There were no Albert Einsteins back then.
We could manufacture goods too, thousands of years before factories or machinery.
That fact doesn't imply we did a good job at it or did it efficiently
It's not a question of what can be done. Schools could educate with zero technology, but it would be inefficient, and the outcome would be poor. Schools should be doing the best possible job at
educating students as efficiently as possible, so that students can better themselves, and so,
as a result, our country can better itself.
Technology and the ability to use technology is very important in our society and is becoming more important.
A lot of innovative things can be done with technology that would be of great benefit to the public and
of great benefit to students and all involved.
You cannot "learn technology" or "understand technology" solely by reading about its history, who
invented it, how it works, or reading about how its used.
There comes a point where practical exercise is absolutely necessary to obtain even a basic level of
of familiarity and skill.
"Book smart" only goes so far. You can read all the books about writing and literatuire that you want, if you never write anything, not even an essay, you will not be a good writer.
Certain technologies are so important to the world that students should be immersed in it, be required to use it daily and extensively, so that they master the technology.
Pen and paper and Books used to be in that category.
Nowadays I would say Laptop and Keyboard and World wide web fall in that category.
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it.... I went to school without breakfast most of the time, and I still skip breakfast most of the time. That's commonly a time thing, not a financial thing... no time to eat breakfast. It's a meal that is simply unnecessary; you aren't off any worse missing 1 meal a day.
If it's prohibitively expensive, it may be a reasonable compromise, as long as the kid isn't starving.
I would be far more concerned about students not getting a good dinner, getting grossly malnourished, or becoming obese. But this certainly isn't the school's responsibility or the school system's responsibility. Often Lunch will be part of the school day activities, if the school doesn't send students home for lunch, lunch the parents paid for -- and there the nutrition is the school's responsibility of the food they make available for that meal (if parents don't provide the food for students to take to school), but that's an exception.
Nurturing and providing adequately for the kids nutritional needs is a parental responsibility.
Nurturing and providing for their kids' educational needs is ultimately a parental responsibility as well.
Entering the kid into the school can do a lot towards achieving the parental responsibility for educational needs -- but
if a $10/month access fee as well is the minimum requirement to provide the kids what they need educationally, then yes, the parents are definitely responsible to provide it.
And honestly, the $10/month is worth it. In this day and age, it's almost more important to have internet connectivity than it is to have a home phone.
Fulfilling minimal parental responsibilities IS EXPENSIVE, and the expense goes far beyond matters
such as food costs, school supplies, and other education related costs.
For example, there are medical costs, to upkeep the health of children, sick visits to doctor, checkups, etc, there are transportation costs, besides trips to library and other places students frequently need to visit in order to complete school projects, shelter costs (last I checked, apartments were not free), clothing costs.
Poor people exist. And attend school. And there's an odd notion that we shouldn't make things even more unfair for them than they already are.
What, make things 'fair' by penalizing the vast majority that can afford basic technology?
Instead, try and pretend technology doesn't exist and don't encourage students to learn about it, so
the 'poor' students won't feel bad about it?
We live in a society where technology is pivotal.
Dialup internet exists, and it's typically about $10 a month.
Even poor people afford phone lines.
Computers can be had for less than $100.
Consider the high cost of school supplies and diverting all that money (average $100 per year per student) into funding electronic communications and digital devices, and none of that one time use paper + utensils.
Loaner laptops or tablets for students are common also.
You don't need either to do what the vast majority do with Flash, which is play videos
You the user don't really have control of whether the sites you want to visit
use Flash or not. Flash commonly gets used for splash screens, navigation, and video players.
The fact your browser supports HTML5 doesn't do you much good for sites that require flash.
But potentially the fact that Adobe is abandoning cross-platform status for Flash may be a big win for Microsoft Silverlight and Oracle Java; for interactive rich websites.....
It may be a consolidation thing. The Linux desktop has flopped in the general consumer market.... but Android has been amazingly successful.
Android OS is based on a Linux kernel.
Maybe it's time for an Linux-Based, Android-based desktop OS that can run the Android version of flash on a PC ,
using an ARMv7 emulator, or an additional coprocessor on the Desktop hardware that supports the ARM instruction set?
Time for Linux distributors to leverage the success of the Android mobile OS to make a successful desktop and cloud platform.
Say the billing server glitches and corrupts their copy of the CC... Poll the console, get the number, transaction approved. The alternative is pop up a CC entry screen
That doesn't make any sense at all. Microsoft's database framework: Microsoft SQL, Jet DB, SQL Azure... doesn't "corrupt" a copy of things in a database Microsoft's database system is a Tier1 application. If corruption was ever a significant issue they would have much larger problems on their hands, because they wouldn't be able to sell their
bulletproof reliable self-healing massively scalable database server infrastructure.
The far more likely scenario is they have "Accidentally cached" input of HTML forms containing a representation
of the CC number, through a standard browser function, that didn't avoid caching SSL session data;
or that they actually use HTTP and didn't think to use HTTPS when prompting the user with the form
to enter their CC details.
"When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased.
It's true though... when you reformat your computer you logically have a blank slate.
Everything IS erased, it's just that some of the old data might not be irrecoverably destroyed,
especially if you choose a quick format where you just get a clean filesystem w/clean volume metadata
without going through every disk sector and zeroing or even clearing out directory tables..
The message presented during format is a warning to be careful formatting, because you can lose data if you do it. They want to help make sure people don't accidentally format and become upset at Microsoft because they
didn't know what they were doing.
The warning is not a promise that if you do this, your personal data is totally purged from the hard
drive so that you can safely resell it.
I suppose there should be a warning about that too
before you can proceed with formatting.
"Warning: This operation will erase the volume's directory index and remove ordinary
means of access to all files, but formatting will not make sure that any sensitive information
on this volume is safely destroyed: to reduce the duration of the format operation and avoid
unnecessary mechanical wear on disk drives, format only makes changes to the disk
required to provide a clean filesystem; to ensure destruction of sensitive data, please use
a secure deletion tool."
A similar alert should be shown when moving an item to the recycle bin, emptying the
recycle bin, deleting items in browser history, clearing the cache, deleting cookies, and exiting
an application such as MS Word that utilizes temporary files but does not securely delete
its temporary files, or an application that stores sensitive data in registry, or an application that had documents elements which were cached in RAM page cache, or an
application that had document elements in RAM which were swapped to disk (pagefile).
Preferably the warning should be accompanied by an option in the application to accept a performance
penalty and delete the objects securely.
For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years.
Well, first of all, there's no reason to believe that the last 100 years are representative.
Human civilization has existed for over 20,000 years, and here you would be sampling 100 years,
less than 0.5% of that and less than 0.000001% of the time life existed on earth.
Going with last 100 year's data is essentially guessing that last year's minimum/maximum temperature won't be exceeded since a very small amount of time has passed, and things probably
don't usually change a whole lot year to year -- things plateau, and depend on recent temperatures around earth, and most of the temperature variation is attributed to the earth's rotation and orbits and small random variations.
Just because that worked on year 101 though, is not necessarily a reliable basis for expecting the same
will work for every day on year 102.
"Good bet" is very tenuous in this case.
It's like looking outside and recording daylight for the past 20000 seconds from 10 am to 4 pm, and assuming based on this recorded information, that the intensity of light visible every millisecond will fall within the minimum and the maximum seen in the last 20000 seconds.
The data for the past 100 years can't account for "falling off the cliff"; e.g. weather events where the conditions for a significant abberation to happen build up over many thousand years, and then suddenly, on one day, when a threshold has been reached, a series of cascading changes will invalidate any assumptions based on previous recent observations.
For example, the sun falls below the horizon, and then suddenly in less than 600 seconds, at some moment, the amount of visible light is way below the minimum seen over the last 20000 seconds; a remarkable and drastic change one could not really have anticipated, except having observed that longer term cycle.
Now if the average human life was 60 seconds, it might be many thousands of generations before this cycle was seen.
To go from "day/night" to "weather patterns" convert "seconds" to "decades"
and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable
It occurs that weather patterns on earth have not been that predictable, ever.... prediction of weather is inherently hard.
Scientists have done a good job explaining away weather phenomena in the past, such as ice ages. But the state of the art has never been any good at predicting changes in weather patterns like that.
We're far away from this future, knowing my Nokia 6310 already supported contactless payments ; which has never been possible to use in the EU. Also, our police officers do not ask for fingerprints; according Belgian law we need to keep our identity papers at all time with us in our pockets.
Well, it may be far in the future for YOU, but all the requisite technologies already exist, it's just a question of development of software and productization.
In free countries you don't have to carry identity papers with you.
Contactless payment methods exist and are implemented by stores; Visa Paywave, Mastercard paypass, for example.
Inclusion of the technology in a smart phone is a simple iteration.
As soon as there is customer demand for it, most stores will implement it rapidly.
Vehicles on the market are already opened remotely using a wireless remote or transponder,
and are started that way to, so its no stretch this capability can be extended to smart phones within the next couple years.
As far as houses being openable with a smart phone, biometric fingerprint locks and remote-operated deadbolts already exist. Again, extending this to smart phones is just an integration problem, which is easy to do with software devices, not a problem requiring development of new technology.
Of course other possibilities also eliminate the need for physical keys -- hand scanner deadbolt on the front door is just as good, if not better, than using a smart phone.
Any scenario where you don't need to carry around physical keys anymore suffices for eliminating that problem. RFID implanted in your body for making payments is just as equivalent; there are plenty of options resulting in you not needing to carry around anything other than a communications device.
Obviously there is consumer choice, and some consumers will choose to live in the way they learned in the past and was more familiar to them,
such people will continue to carry around physical tokens.
The existence of such people, even in a majority, doesn't deny the shift, however, to smart phone as everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Every company has a 'monopoly' on their branded products. Ford has a 'monopoly' on Mustangs.
Ford does not have a software monopoly on their hardware platform.
For example, you do not have to put Ford brand gas into your Mustang for the engine to work successfully.
The Engine does not contain a digital signature verification system to ensure that you only use Ford brand spark plugs.
On Apple's hardware platform, iOS is included, and it's the only operating system the security features in the hardware will permit to be loaded.
Question: How to protect against DDoS attacks without regard to the availability of the target of the attack Answer: If your carrier supports it, initiate an RTBH on the targeted IP. If not, contact the helpdesk and have them null route it.
NO. That is not a DDos protection strategy. That is a "white flag" strategy. It is essentially surrender, because you are intentionally making the attack succeed against the target then.
You (the ISP customer) have no ability to control what packets are sent to you over your uplink circuits. You can control what you send, but you have no ability to control what you receive.
Yes you do have lots of potential control. It's just expensive to exercise. Because you have to have multiple datacenters and multiple uplink circuits, to have any control (without intentionally breaking connectivity).
You buy transit and peer with major providers in different datacenters and anycast your server IP address space.
Apply appropriate BGP communities and prepending to manipulate which datacenter traffic from different places around the world winds up at.
In this manner you can 'diffuse' DDoS attacks by having a distributed infrastructure.
DDoS is highly effective against one target with a single presence. As soon as you have multiple points of presence though, you can divide and conquer
Each DoS attack node is only capable of sending traffic to one of your anycast nodes -- the selection depends on where the DoS attack node is located net-wise, e.g. which provider. Something you can actually manipulate, once the infrastructure is in place.
Also, if the DDoS attack nodes are concentrated on a particular network, it is likely they will all impact one target, leaving the vast majority of your presence unaffected.
TOS debuted in 1966, that's 46 years ago. It's as popular today as it ever was. At this point, it's safe to say it's a hallmark of science fiction. A life-sized replica would remain culturally relevant for much longer than 50 years.
Perhaps so... perhaps their response to the Enterprise rejection should have been to construct a giant Death-Star or Imperial Star Destroyer instead :)
If they built a giant Enterprise, it'd just sit there and become a giant eyesore.
If they built a giant Enterprise, they'd probably have trekkie fans all over the world visting downtown vegas. And moving to the city.
You know that would still be a big attraction today. But in 40 or 50 years, yeah, it would eventually become a giant eyesore.
Apple has a software monopoly for their platform; iOS. They don't have to be concerned about manufacturers or end users picking a different OS, because they manufacture both the device and its software as one integrated, inseparable unit.
Once an end user is sold on their platform; Apple gets both the hardware and software profits.
Google gets only some software profits from Android and possibly patent royalties. If Google tried to raise prices on the OS too much, hardware vendors would likely switch to a competitor such as Windows 7.
You can't really tell if something's a bomb. If it looks suspicious, the only 'safe' thing to do is to assume it is something evil.
In the 1800s it would be an evil product of witchcraft (satanic device), in the 20th century it would be a communist spying device, and in the 21st century... it must be a bomb.
In any case, whoever created such implement must certainly be arrested.
We must be ever vigilant in the hunt for ( Witches | Communists | Terrorists), otherwise, there is a great danger that lives will be lost.
If we don't know exactly what a device (or a person is), the only safe assumption is to assume the absolute worst
No, but there was Leonardo DaVinci, and other great innovators.
And without someone being educated about how to use a printing press, we never would have learned about Da Vinci either.
There were also technologies that Da Vinci used in constructing his work. Had Da Vinci not been taught the use of the painting and sculpting tools, because "students should use the old fashioned writing tools", none of what history remembers about Da Vinci would have happened.
Teach without technology first, then teach with technology once that's mattered. Then the child will be better prepared for the post-apocalyptic world that has no electricity or internet.
Well, Teach technology first, because getting an early start is important.
Teach survival skills for a post-apocalyptic world too, absolutely. That would be more educational than the average P/E class. All students should have experience defending themselves and surviving in simulated post-apocalyptic scenarios, including but not limited to: how to rebuild civilization from scratch.
For example: assuming all the technological infrastructure has been destroyed, and all the records of technological knowhow have been lost due to inaccessibility (e.g. EMP destroyed all the computers, and books long-obsoleted are nowhere to be found). How to "bootstrap" or "reinitialize" society and re-acquire the past inventions. e.g. Students should be required to be taught all the basic technical knowhow required to take a society from "cave man" / "hunter gatherer" status and construct all inventions required to bring back civilization, electricity, automobiles, and computers, to a sufficient extent that the old records become accessible again, before the available media has degraded to zero.
basic skills: building the simplest of shelters, scavenging for food, how to repurpose junk for survival, how to get/find water after civilization has collapsed and there is no municipal supply, navigating a large forested area or desserted city without the benefit of GPS or electronic devices; how to avoid being eaten by zombies; signalling for help without availability of a cell phone, how to make smoke signals, morse code; how to build a simple raft; methods of hiding from enemies and predators; methods of avoiding being eaten by large wild animals.
How do you positively validate the identity of a parent in a household where the student is the most computer literate
You require the parent to dial a phone number that is controlled by the school. On a touch tone phone, they will dial a "Permission slip ID number" printed on the form, they will type their "Secret Parent ID number", they will press 1 to grant permission, press 2 to deny permission. finally, they will be prompted to record a verbal granting of permission
IVR Voice: "After the tone, your voice will be recorded, to affirm your acceptance of the notice and permission to participate, please say the following: My name is (PARENTS NAME); I hereby grant my child Billy permission to attend this field trip."
*BEEP*
The voice recordings will be reviewed at a later date to ensure the response was affirmative, and the voice matches the parent's voice on file.
Only the parent, parent(s), or other(s) who are authorized to grant permission will have a Parent ID#
Each permission slip ID number is tied to a specific child, and only the parent ID numbers authorized for that specific child are able to enter a response to the permission slip.
If an invalid parent ID is entered for a permission slip too many times, a followup call with the staff will be required.
They may be prompted to enter some other random number that only the parent would know.
That, and if it is a notice that requires a signature of a parent (field trip authorization, etc.) it will have to be paper anyway.
That's best. I could see students guessing their parents' "password" and falsifying a signature. Actually I would suggest that a parent could OPT to require both an electronic signature and a written signature. By default only a written one would be required.
The parent could then electronically say that permission was denied. If a student attempted to forge the written permission slip, they would be busted when it disagreed with the parent's electronic denial of permission.
Actually... I am in favor of electronic notices with the stipulation that an identical printed version will be sent of every electronic notice within 1 school day.
For parents that do have email its up to them to decide if they read the printed notices or not; the students will still be required to bring them home.
This makes the electronic notifications a tool of convenience rather than something essential, or something that will single out a student. It can also be made clear that "the written announcements" are the official definitive ones.
Which obviously ignores the fact that people were capable of getting excellent educations for thousands of years without any of this electronic gadgetry.
Are you sure? There were no Albert Einsteins back then.
We could manufacture goods too, thousands of years before factories or machinery. That fact doesn't imply we did a good job at it or did it efficiently
It's not a question of what can be done. Schools could educate with zero technology, but it would be inefficient, and the outcome would be poor. Schools should be doing the best possible job at educating students as efficiently as possible, so that students can better themselves, and so, as a result, our country can better itself.
Technology and the ability to use technology is very important in our society and is becoming more important. A lot of innovative things can be done with technology that would be of great benefit to the public and of great benefit to students and all involved.
You cannot "learn technology" or "understand technology" solely by reading about its history, who invented it, how it works, or reading about how its used.
There comes a point where practical exercise is absolutely necessary to obtain even a basic level of of familiarity and skill. "Book smart" only goes so far. You can read all the books about writing and literatuire that you want, if you never write anything, not even an essay, you will not be a good writer.
Certain technologies are so important to the world that students should be immersed in it, be required to use it daily and extensively, so that they master the technology.
Pen and paper and Books used to be in that category. Nowadays I would say Laptop and Keyboard and World wide web fall in that category.
And access would cost another $20/month in a world where (gasp!) many kids are going to school without breakfast and are relying on the school district to provide them with lunch, since their parents simply can't afford it.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it.... I went to school without breakfast most of the time, and I still skip breakfast most of the time. That's commonly a time thing, not a financial thing... no time to eat breakfast. It's a meal that is simply unnecessary; you aren't off any worse missing 1 meal a day. If it's prohibitively expensive, it may be a reasonable compromise, as long as the kid isn't starving.
I would be far more concerned about students not getting a good dinner, getting grossly malnourished, or becoming obese. But this certainly isn't the school's responsibility or the school system's responsibility. Often Lunch will be part of the school day activities, if the school doesn't send students home for lunch, lunch the parents paid for -- and there the nutrition is the school's responsibility of the food they make available for that meal (if parents don't provide the food for students to take to school), but that's an exception.
Nurturing and providing adequately for the kids nutritional needs is a parental responsibility. Nurturing and providing for their kids' educational needs is ultimately a parental responsibility as well.
Entering the kid into the school can do a lot towards achieving the parental responsibility for educational needs -- but if a $10/month access fee as well is the minimum requirement to provide the kids what they need educationally, then yes, the parents are definitely responsible to provide it.
And honestly, the $10/month is worth it. In this day and age, it's almost more important to have internet connectivity than it is to have a home phone.
Fulfilling minimal parental responsibilities IS EXPENSIVE, and the expense goes far beyond matters such as food costs, school supplies, and other education related costs.
For example, there are medical costs, to upkeep the health of children, sick visits to doctor, checkups, etc, there are transportation costs, besides trips to library and other places students frequently need to visit in order to complete school projects, shelter costs (last I checked, apartments were not free), clothing costs.
Poor people exist. And attend school. And there's an odd notion that we shouldn't make things even more unfair for them than they already are.
What, make things 'fair' by penalizing the vast majority that can afford basic technology? Instead, try and pretend technology doesn't exist and don't encourage students to learn about it, so the 'poor' students won't feel bad about it?
We live in a society where technology is pivotal.
Dialup internet exists, and it's typically about $10 a month. Even poor people afford phone lines. Computers can be had for less than $100.
Consider the high cost of school supplies and diverting all that money (average $100 per year per student) into funding electronic communications and digital devices, and none of that one time use paper + utensils.
Loaner laptops or tablets for students are common also.
The problem will be solved when an abandoned Japanese sub washes up on the pacific shore, fully armed.
Upon release they are bound to be sued by Enix for patent infringement.
Operation looks too similar to Dragon Warrior for the NES. Heck, some of the graphics look like they could have been lifted verbatim :)
You don't need either to do what the vast majority do with Flash, which is play videos
You the user don't really have control of whether the sites you want to visit use Flash or not. Flash commonly gets used for splash screens, navigation, and video players.
The fact your browser supports HTML5 doesn't do you much good for sites that require flash.
But potentially the fact that Adobe is abandoning cross-platform status for Flash may be a big win for Microsoft Silverlight and Oracle Java; for interactive rich websites.....
It may be a consolidation thing. The Linux desktop has flopped in the general consumer market.... but Android has been amazingly successful.
Android OS is based on a Linux kernel.
Maybe it's time for an Linux-Based, Android-based desktop OS that can run the Android version of flash on a PC , using an ARMv7 emulator, or an additional coprocessor on the Desktop hardware that supports the ARM instruction set?
Time for Linux distributors to leverage the success of the Android mobile OS to make a successful desktop and cloud platform.
Why the hell would you even want to spend resources to reverse engineer a piece of shit such as Flash ?
Because the "POS" Flash is still better than the POS called "Java applets"
If that's true, then why did Adobe create Flash for Linux in the first place?
Say the billing server glitches and corrupts their copy of the CC... Poll the console, get the number, transaction approved. The alternative is pop up a CC entry screen
That doesn't make any sense at all. Microsoft's database framework: Microsoft SQL, Jet DB, SQL Azure... doesn't "corrupt" a copy of things in a database Microsoft's database system is a Tier1 application. If corruption was ever a significant issue they would have much larger problems on their hands, because they wouldn't be able to sell their bulletproof reliable self-healing massively scalable database server infrastructure.
The far more likely scenario is they have "Accidentally cached" input of HTML forms containing a representation of the CC number, through a standard browser function, that didn't avoid caching SSL session data; or that they actually use HTTP and didn't think to use HTTPS when prompting the user with the form to enter their CC details.
"When you go and reformat your computer, like a Windows system, it tells you that all of your data will be erased.
It's true though... when you reformat your computer you logically have a blank slate. Everything IS erased, it's just that some of the old data might not be irrecoverably destroyed, especially if you choose a quick format where you just get a clean filesystem w/clean volume metadata without going through every disk sector and zeroing or even clearing out directory tables..
The message presented during format is a warning to be careful formatting, because you can lose data if you do it. They want to help make sure people don't accidentally format and become upset at Microsoft because they didn't know what they were doing.
The warning is not a promise that if you do this, your personal data is totally purged from the hard drive so that you can safely resell it.
I suppose there should be a warning about that too before you can proceed with formatting.
"Warning: This operation will erase the volume's directory index and remove ordinary means of access to all files, but formatting will not make sure that any sensitive information on this volume is safely destroyed: to reduce the duration of the format operation and avoid unnecessary mechanical wear on disk drives, format only makes changes to the disk required to provide a clean filesystem; to ensure destruction of sensitive data, please use a secure deletion tool."
A similar alert should be shown when moving an item to the recycle bin, emptying the recycle bin, deleting items in browser history, clearing the cache, deleting cookies, and exiting an application such as MS Word that utilizes temporary files but does not securely delete its temporary files, or an application that stores sensitive data in registry, or an application that had documents elements which were cached in RAM page cache, or an application that had document elements in RAM which were swapped to disk (pagefile).
Preferably the warning should be accompanied by an option in the application to accept a performance penalty and delete the objects securely.
For example, it is a good bet that on any given day, the temperature that day will stay between the maximum and minimum temperatures observed that day in the last 100 years.
Well, first of all, there's no reason to believe that the last 100 years are representative. Human civilization has existed for over 20,000 years, and here you would be sampling 100 years, less than 0.5% of that and less than 0.000001% of the time life existed on earth.
Going with last 100 year's data is essentially guessing that last year's minimum/maximum temperature won't be exceeded since a very small amount of time has passed, and things probably don't usually change a whole lot year to year -- things plateau, and depend on recent temperatures around earth, and most of the temperature variation is attributed to the earth's rotation and orbits and small random variations.
Just because that worked on year 101 though, is not necessarily a reliable basis for expecting the same will work for every day on year 102.
"Good bet" is very tenuous in this case. It's like looking outside and recording daylight for the past 20000 seconds from 10 am to 4 pm, and assuming based on this recorded information, that the intensity of light visible every millisecond will fall within the minimum and the maximum seen in the last 20000 seconds.
The data for the past 100 years can't account for "falling off the cliff"; e.g. weather events where the conditions for a significant abberation to happen build up over many thousand years, and then suddenly, on one day, when a threshold has been reached, a series of cascading changes will invalidate any assumptions based on previous recent observations.
For example, the sun falls below the horizon, and then suddenly in less than 600 seconds, at some moment, the amount of visible light is way below the minimum seen over the last 20000 seconds; a remarkable and drastic change one could not really have anticipated, except having observed that longer term cycle.
Now if the average human life was 60 seconds, it might be many thousands of generations before this cycle was seen.
To go from "day/night" to "weather patterns" convert "seconds" to "decades"
and it's causing weather patterns to be unpredictable
It occurs that weather patterns on earth have not been that predictable, ever.... prediction of weather is inherently hard. Scientists have done a good job explaining away weather phenomena in the past, such as ice ages. But the state of the art has never been any good at predicting changes in weather patterns like that.
We're far away from this future, knowing my Nokia 6310 already supported contactless payments ; which has never been possible to use in the EU. Also, our police officers do not ask for fingerprints; according Belgian law we need to keep our identity papers at all time with us in our pockets.
Well, it may be far in the future for YOU, but all the requisite technologies already exist, it's just a question of development of software and productization. In free countries you don't have to carry identity papers with you.
Contactless payment methods exist and are implemented by stores; Visa Paywave, Mastercard paypass, for example. Inclusion of the technology in a smart phone is a simple iteration. As soon as there is customer demand for it, most stores will implement it rapidly.
Vehicles on the market are already opened remotely using a wireless remote or transponder, and are started that way to, so its no stretch this capability can be extended to smart phones within the next couple years.
As far as houses being openable with a smart phone, biometric fingerprint locks and remote-operated deadbolts already exist. Again, extending this to smart phones is just an integration problem, which is easy to do with software devices, not a problem requiring development of new technology.
Of course other possibilities also eliminate the need for physical keys -- hand scanner deadbolt on the front door is just as good, if not better, than using a smart phone.
Any scenario where you don't need to carry around physical keys anymore suffices for eliminating that problem. RFID implanted in your body for making payments is just as equivalent; there are plenty of options resulting in you not needing to carry around anything other than a communications device.
Obviously there is consumer choice, and some consumers will choose to live in the way they learned in the past and was more familiar to them, such people will continue to carry around physical tokens.
The existence of such people, even in a majority, doesn't deny the shift, however, to smart phone as everything.