I usually recommend the opposite. There are cases where encryption is necessary because confidential data is being handled. The flip side is that full disk encryption makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recover data from corrupt file systems or failing hard drives.
I recommend instead making regular backups to a separate disk, also encrypted.
If someone steals you computer (home or laptop) your password is useless to protect it; all they have to do is put your drive in their system and presto, they have access to everything on your disk(s).
And you might be surprised at how many logins are saved on your disk (web pages, mail servers, etc.), and how many are unencrypted or only very weakly encrypted. (For that matter, they can just run the same application using your configuration files, and never have to bother with decrypting anything.)
You should encrypt the disks on every computer. Your boss should require it for computers used for work, and the law should require it for computers that are used by public employees, or even for private-sector companies if they contain personal information about their clients.
How many times have we heard of confidential information on a lost, stolen, or recycled laptop?
And if you're paranoid (you should be), use an open-source encryption tool, to reduce the risk of a back door.
Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
How so? It seems like it would do the opposite by allowing good science without fear of political reprisal.
That's what it's supposed to sound like. But people never introduce these bills anywhere except where there is extreme public pressure to teach anti-science. So the net effect is, it gives cover to people who want to teach anti-science.
What is funny, is that people really believe that evolution is a sole indicator of intelligence.
I don't believe that. I believe that almost all evolution deniers are so because they've been misled by cranks and haven't had any reason to seek out a second opinion, not because they're unintelligent.
The problem is public education in the first place. Allow people to create schools however they want (without being crowded out by public education) and let the fittest survive.
And without public money? I'm all for it.
But if you want to give people public money to teach myths as facts and other sorts of kookery, I'm all against it.
The J and E thread reverse which comes first, animals or man. That's my favorite part about creationists - their own book gets it wrong almost immediately.
But "literalists" are always happy to argue that it doesn't actually mean what it says.
You vote for merit-based teacher pay and school vouchers, and the entire problem is solved.
Yeah, like NCLB's rules for merit-based school funding made the problem go away.
In reality it has led to a nationwide practice of teaching kids to take a standardized test rather than trying to educate them, and of course massive fraud in reporting.
As for vouchers, see my opinion elsewhere in this thread.
I want the government to force religious education into private schools. Private schools still can apply for government grants, and its the business of the state and the feds to decide how many grants they want to have available to private religious schools, but government is supposed to be secular so they should only be allowed to fully fund secular education.
The voucher program is just a scam to use public money for religious education. (And to put public money into private pockets.)
Please. Biology and Physics are both full of theory. They still do not know how life even got started so there Evolution as the origin of life is still a theory.
And always will be, because theories are what science produces.
(FYI, I didn't bother reading any more of your rant.)
By swapping out "including, but not limited to," for "namely" you've made it seem like those specific items are protected - when they are not.
Yeah, we all know that when they say "including, but not limited to", it actually means they're being very broad minded, and not just trying to cover their asses for wanting to peddle contrafactual views on the specific topics they listed.
but what is true is to say that scientists are human beings, and are therefore prone to the same psychological short cuts, the same hubristic fallacies of faith that any human being is prone to
for example: string theory. untestable nonsense, building castles in the sky. a mathematician's fantasy life, of no use whatsover to the real pursuit of science. why so much time and energy is spent wasted on this in academia is a story of faith, not of science
but perhaps the best example i can think of academic scientists acting with the same blindness, arrogance, shortsightedness, and folly as a bunch churchgoers in a pew, is the story of the resistance to two australian's path to the nobel prize:
these guys were laughed at and heckled. because their hypothesis and data, that a bacterium can cause ulcers, counteracted existing dogma that it was just stress. yes, there is dogma amongst scientists... but not science. what is agreed upon, is not to be questioned, is dogma. even though, of course, in real science, anything can be questioned. science is not dogmatic. scientists are. because scientists are human beings, and we have our weaknesses and our psychological shortcuts
No one with a clue denies that science is done by humans, and therefor subject to all the ordinary human follies - blind prejudice, outright fraud, and all the other things our species is prone to.
But the rule of the game is that evidence wins the argument, and we like to think that's how things turn out in the long run. And guess what? Your heckled heroes won the lowly Nobel Prize. Sounds like science works like it's supposed to.
Also, I'm skeptical about how much they were laughed at. Did people laugh when they presented papers at conferences? Did they never get a chance to get laughed at at conferences, because reviewers returned their papers stamped "Please don't waste our time with jokes"?
There's a difference between not having everyone immediately accept your claims vs. being persecuted and ridiculed.
Well, when you use your sarcasm wand to paint the topic of spiritual belief like that I am totally won over to your side of thinking. Obviously anyone who believes in God believes in a "big bearded man in the sky" how silly of us not to have realized how silly that is. Thanks for your insight!/see what I did there?
So what do religious people believe in? The same thing, stated less sarcastically?
Enlil, who wears a crown of horns, is known for being a kind but also cruel god who sends forth disasters, including a great flood that wiped out humanity.
When you meet one of them, you've met them all. A bunch of jerks, if you ask me.
Be serious. Look at everything he has done to prosecute war criminals, to prosecute the people and censure the corporations who collaborated in illegal wiretapping, to close the Guantanamo Bay gulag, to end US adventurism in the Middle East, to stop the undeclared Drone Wars against the people of Pakistan, to ensure that we consistently intervene in humanitarian crises without regard to the presence of oil or the color of said humans' skin, - well, the list just goes on and on!
Slashdot Mirror
If you watched the movies you'd know it's always the megalomaniac villain that gets sucked out of the airplane, not the hero.
I usually recommend the opposite. There are cases where encryption is necessary because confidential data is being handled. The flip side is that full disk encryption makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recover data from corrupt file systems or failing hard drives.
I recommend instead making regular backups to a separate disk, also encrypted.
For most of you this will be obvious, but -
If someone steals you computer (home or laptop) your password is useless to protect it; all they have to do is put your drive in their system and presto, they have access to everything on your disk(s).
And you might be surprised at how many logins are saved on your disk (web pages, mail servers, etc.), and how many are unencrypted or only very weakly encrypted. (For that matter, they can just run the same application using your configuration files, and never have to bother with decrypting anything.)
You should encrypt the disks on every computer. Your boss should require it for computers used for work, and the law should require it for computers that are used by public employees, or even for private-sector companies if they contain personal information about their clients.
How many times have we heard of confidential information on a lost, stolen, or recycled laptop?
And if you're paranoid (you should be), use an open-source encryption tool, to reduce the risk of a back door.
Inexplicably, no witty comment comes to mind.
It's Friday; save your wit for Monday when everyone's reading.
Critics say the measure will enable K-12 teachers to present intelligent design and creationism as acceptable alternatives to evolution in the classroom.
How so? It seems like it would do the opposite by allowing good science without fear of political reprisal.
That's what it's supposed to sound like. But people never introduce these bills anywhere except where there is extreme public pressure to teach anti-science. So the net effect is, it gives cover to people who want to teach anti-science.
I don't even understand why anyone's so excited about this.
Politicians are excited about it because they know it's an easy way to draw in votes from a demographic that's prevalent in their precinct.
Evaluate this bill on the basis of what it actually says.
Yeah, because we know that creationist con artists and their political enablers would never try to obfuscate their actual purpose.
What is funny, is that people really believe that evolution is a sole indicator of intelligence.
I don't believe that. I believe that almost all evolution deniers are so because they've been misled by cranks and haven't had any reason to seek out a second opinion, not because they're unintelligent.
The problem is public education in the first place. Allow people to create schools however they want (without being crowded out by public education) and let the fittest survive.
And without public money? I'm all for it.
But if you want to give people public money to teach myths as facts and other sorts of kookery, I'm all against it.
The J and E thread reverse which comes first, animals or man. That's my favorite part about creationists - their own book gets it wrong almost immediately.
But "literalists" are always happy to argue that it doesn't actually mean what it says.
You vote for merit-based teacher pay and school vouchers, and the entire problem is solved.
Yeah, like NCLB's rules for merit-based school funding made the problem go away.
In reality it has led to a nationwide practice of teaching kids to take a standardized test rather than trying to educate them, and of course massive fraud in reporting.
As for vouchers, see my opinion elsewhere in this thread.
I want the government to force religious education into private schools. Private schools still can apply for government grants, and its the business of the state and the feds to decide how many grants they want to have available to private religious schools, but government is supposed to be secular so they should only be allowed to fully fund secular education.
The voucher program is just a scam to use public money for religious education. (And to put public money into private pockets.)
Please. Biology and Physics are both full of theory. They still do not know how life even got started so there Evolution as the origin of life is still a theory.
And always will be, because theories are what science produces.
(FYI, I didn't bother reading any more of your rant.)
Why on earth is the government responsible for teaching that to children?
Why on earth is the government (or anyone else) responsible for teaching *anything* to children?
Hint: It has something to do with what kind of society we'd like to have.
By swapping out "including, but not limited to," for "namely" you've made it seem like those specific items are protected - when they are not.
Yeah, we all know that when they say "including, but not limited to", it actually means they're being very broad minded, and not just trying to cover their asses for wanting to peddle contrafactual views on the specific topics they listed.
Many rational ID proponents
Tee hee.
ID is manifestly a con game intended to slip teaching creationism in public schools past a specific high-profile court case that forbade it.
Do a little research on "cdesign proponentists" if you doubt that.
There are no ID proponents who are simultaneously rational, informed, and honest.
Theology is the study of the nature of God, or alternatively what God says about God.
Rather, what *people* say about God (or gods), sometimes (but not always) passing themselves off as messengers from Teh Man Himself.
but what is true is to say that scientists are human beings, and are therefore prone to the same psychological short cuts, the same hubristic fallacies of faith that any human being is prone to
for example: string theory. untestable nonsense, building castles in the sky. a mathematician's fantasy life, of no use whatsover to the real pursuit of science. why so much time and energy is spent wasted on this in academia is a story of faith, not of science
but perhaps the best example i can think of academic scientists acting with the same blindness, arrogance, shortsightedness, and folly as a bunch churchgoers in a pew, is the story of the resistance to two australian's path to the nobel prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Warren
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
these guys were laughed at and heckled. because their hypothesis and data, that a bacterium can cause ulcers, counteracted existing dogma that it was just stress. yes, there is dogma amongst scientists... but not science. what is agreed upon, is not to be questioned, is dogma. even though, of course, in real science, anything can be questioned. science is not dogmatic. scientists are. because scientists are human beings, and we have our weaknesses and our psychological shortcuts
No one with a clue denies that science is done by humans, and therefor subject to all the ordinary human follies - blind prejudice, outright fraud, and all the other things our species is prone to.
But the rule of the game is that evidence wins the argument, and we like to think that's how things turn out in the long run. And guess what? Your heckled heroes won the lowly Nobel Prize. Sounds like science works like it's supposed to.
Also, I'm skeptical about how much they were laughed at. Did people laugh when they presented papers at conferences? Did they never get a chance to get laughed at at conferences, because reviewers returned their papers stamped "Please don't waste our time with jokes"?
There's a difference between not having everyone immediately accept your claims vs. being persecuted and ridiculed.
It sounded too much like an attempt to equate science as a religion.
That's a very common tactic for religionists and other kooks who can't compete on the evidence: try to bring the opposition down to their own level.
Aren't there bigger teams of people looking for the second coming; and more money invested in controlling holy lands in the mid-east.
Not sure that teams is solid evidence in which field is more disciplined.
They're not "looking for it" in the same sense at all. They're passively waiting for some miracle they've been told to expect.
Whereas the scientists are looking for *evidence* that the HB exists.
Well, when you use your sarcasm wand to paint the topic of spiritual belief like that I am totally won over to your side of thinking. Obviously anyone who believes in God believes in a "big bearded man in the sky" how silly of us not to have realized how silly that is. Thanks for your insight! /see what I did there?
So what do religious people believe in? The same thing, stated less sarcastically?
Apart from the knowledge we obtain from these vehicles...can we justify these expensive ventures in these recession times?
Launched in the good ol' days of 2004, according to Wikipedia. Already made it's first flyby before the economic collapse.
The only way you could save money on it now is to shut down the ground team, effectively throwing away your investment and many years' work.
Enlil, who wears a crown of horns, is known for being a kind but also cruel god who sends forth disasters, including a great flood that wiped out humanity.
When you meet one of them, you've met them all. A bunch of jerks, if you ask me.
We find a new species of dinosaur about once a month.
Maybe we should have a dinosaurs.slashdot.org.
but Obama is Dubya-level bad.
Be serious. Look at everything he has done to prosecute war criminals, to prosecute the people and censure the corporations who collaborated in illegal wiretapping, to close the Guantanamo Bay gulag, to end US adventurism in the Middle East, to stop the undeclared Drone Wars against the people of Pakistan, to ensure that we consistently intervene in humanitarian crises without regard to the presence of oil or the color of said humans' skin, - well, the list just goes on and on!