IMHO, the only legitimate points in this gentleman's post are: (1) a compromised browser defeats OAuth, and (2) OAuth isn't mobile-friendly because it requires browser interaction to gain user consent to grant access.
While both of these are true, Web browsers are ubiquitous; OAuth is a Web standard. You can abuse it slightly to make it work with mobile devices (see "access code grant") but really, it not was intended to be a be-all end-all authorization mechanism.
Likewise, claims that the protocol isn't "enterprise-friendly" are somewhat silly. OAuth was not intended for fine-grained authorization within an authentication or trust domain. It's for cross-domain (cross-application) grants, between unrelated apps, under the assumption that all three parties in the transaction are basically unrelated.
If an executive wants to delegate calendar permissions to his secretary, he should *just do it* by clicking a checkbox on Microsoft Outlook or whatever product they use for scheduling, which no doubt has its own rich permissions system and obviously has its own authentication mechanism. There's no need for a Web standard to facilitate this use case!
As for claims that "there is no standard" -- that's entirely true. There is a draft standard, which presumably will eventually be ratified by IETF once we have all had a chance to play with the technology and suggest improvements. Standards are not an item of worship; they're just a way to ensure that a protocol has had a reasonable degree of scrutiny, has no undisclosed patent encumbrances, etc. I've heard people accuse OAuth of being complex or flawed, but never fundametnally insecure.
Frankly, anyone who thinks the OAuth draft RFC is complex, should choose a dozen or so documents from the SAML protocol suite, relax in a hot bath, and read through several hundred pages of THAT claptrap. Then we can talk about complexity.
(Disclaimer: yes, I do read security standards in the bath, and I create toy implementations of security protocols and algorithms for fun. That probably makes me mentally ill.)
Cops are public servants working in public spaces; given that the justification for speeding cameras and CCTV has always been that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for someone in a public space, why should the public-spaces rights of policemen be any different from those of the general public?
If you are in public, regardless whether you're on the job, you must accept the notion that you could be observed, by people or recording devices. Bear in mind that most COPS have recording equipment in their squad cars and frequently videotape traffic stops.
If the concern were merely about videotaping police work, police departments would be worrying about their own recordings. It seems to me that their concern is about OTHER people recording police work, when said recordings are outside of the police department's control.
No doubt, cloud is a huge buzzword at the moment. No reason you can't use that to your advantage, however.
"Cloud computing" in common parlance means at least three things at the moment:
* A marginal-cost pricing model for compute resources (pay for only what you use) * Making use of virtualization in one's app architecture * Pervasive use of automation in the architecture and throughout the software lifecycle (dev/test/deploy)
#1 is a bit of a fad; some workloads can be shoved out into a public cloud with no risk to security or availability, but many workloads will never be suited for that.
However, #2 and #3 are here to stay for the next decade -- and even if computer architecture makes another massive swing (e.g. massive parallelism or quantum computing or some hooey) and virtualization is no longer as sexy as it is right now, automation always has been, and will always continue to be, a key component of successful IT operations. Automation = productivity!
Even a large part of what we call the "virtualization benefit" is actually due to automation-related productivity. The fact that I can take my pre-built OS + app stack and deploy it on whichever hardware I wish -- and in some cases even migrate it between two differently-capable host systems WHILE my guest is running! -- is all a flavor of automation. We've always been able to migrate servers, but it used to require a screwdriver and lots of patience.
So -- my advice is, don't look down your nose at the sudden cloudiness! Take advantage of this buzzword-laden atmosphere to justify your sound technical decisions to the businessfolk, in terms that their feeble minds can understand.;-)
The quote, actually, is "information wants to be free."
There's no _should_ about it. It's not a value judgement; it's an expression of one of the natural properties of information: that it tends to replicate itself in any way it's able, subject only to the constraints of the underlying medium (and of course to any artificial constraints placed on it, though those have a track record of working badly).
Even "information wants to be free" is a bit imprecise because it anthropomorphizes the information. Data has no intent, there's no "want" there; it just seems that the natural state of information is to propagate, and to mutate as it propagate.
Also, keep in mind that "free software" doesn't necessarily mean free as in beer. If you have heard someone saying "software should be free," they may have been referring to the fact that the source code to the software that runs your life should not be a trade secret locked away in someone's corporate vault.
As numerous generations of software pirates, malware authors and hackers have shown us, to someone of sufficient skill, the machine code to a piece of software yields enough information to mutate or copy that software. Protecting source code is an attempt to create artificial scarcity -- or security through obscurity, if you prefer -- and it doesn't work very well.
Maybe my argument convinces you; maybe it doesn't. It's not really my concern. I'm employed by an open-source software company whose business is growing tremendously year-over-year -- in the middle of a recession, no less! -- and one of the main reasons for our success is that our products are _open_.
Our customers are free to inspect, modify, ask questions regarding, and contribute improvements to the tools we sell them. Because we try whenever possible to leverage open-source dev tools, we enjoy the same openness in our infrastructure and development toolset. We are able to adapt our tools to work well for us, and contribute the improvements back to the community when we're done.
"Free as in beer" is not "free as in freedom." If your industry ignores this fact, it does so at its own peril. Don't be surprised if a lightning-fast innovator comes along and disrupts everyone. And if they do, look for open source to be greasing the wheels of their productivity.
That's not the point of open source. The point is this:
- I'm an entrepreneur, or I'm being paid by an entrepreneur or a massive corporate entity, to create software that makes money.
- It is my duty as a professional to implement the most reliable, beneficial solution I can, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.
- With this goal in mind, I look around the ecosystem for existing tools, frameworks and applications that will help me achieve my goal. I will generally find any number of open-source products as well as some closed-source products.
-I choose the product (or most frequently, combination of products) that will best help me achieve my business goal. I make my choice irrespective of how the products are licensed.
And THAT, my friends, is the value proposition of open source. Day after day, software developers everywhere are awakening to the fact that the most reliable, most efficient, quickest-growing tools in the business are free of cost, community-supported, and ripe for the picking.
A very small fraction (perhaps 1%) of the people who adopt a given free software product will find that it doesn't quite suit their needs. Funded by their employer or themselves, they will tweak the product until it does what they want -- they then contributed their tweaks back to the community so others can benefit.
Can it ever be a disadvantage, being forced to contribute one's valuable IP back to the community? Of course it can! If your tweaking represents a key competitive differentiator, then by all means, buy a closed-source (or a dual-source) solution.
But, speaking as a software developer with more than a decade of experience and three patents pending, VERY FEW of the changes we make to our tools and frameworks are original or valuable in the business sense.
It is in our "business logic" where money is made -- the bits of code that sit on top of the frameworks and implement the user-relevant part of your application. And THOSE bits of the application are very seldom open source, nor should they be.
Actually, jerry-rigging comes from the closing days of WWII when the Allies were advancing through western Europe. They would often find vehicles, structures and equipment that had been hastily repaired or assembled, or used in a way that differed from its original purpose. "Jerry" was a very common nickname for the collective German forces, hence any equipment found in this condition was "jerry-rigged."
To be fair, we have a Cambridge on this side of the pond, in Massachusetts, and it's home to a rather prestigious institution of higher learning. If one were unfamiliar with the work or background Stephen Hawking, it would be an innocent mistake to confuse our Cambridge (town) with your Cambridge (university).
I absolutely love the shower of eager excuses that the administration, the bureaucracy and the military have been vomiting into the public arena. It's not our fault -- it's the tech! It's not our fault -- it's the foreign fighters! It's not our fault -- it's the funding!
Saying that misapplication of technology caused our failure in Iraq is like blaming hydrogen gas for the Hindenberg disaster -- it may be technically true, but it's misleading because it fails to address the root cause of the problem.
I'm not old enough to remember the Vietnam war, but I wonder what excuses were made at the tale end of that debacle. Did the military apply similar rhetoric? Were we always "winning by a large margin" until the day we withdrew? Was there constant talk of "just beginning to make progress" and "just starting to see changes" from the President, even as the casualties mounted?
One thing I DO know is that, during the closing days of Vietnam, many fingers were pointed at the troops themselves. To the left, they were incompetent, mind-controlled baby killers; the right painted them as lazy, incompetent doped-up slobs.
Wanna know what bugs me? The class of Americans who drive around town with a yellow ribbon "support our troops" bumper sticker stuck proudly to their SUVs, when in fact the message they are trying to send is "support our war."
When we announce our withdrawal from Iraq, I wonder how long it will take before these fair-weather patriots wipe their bumpers clean and begin pointing the finger of blame at the troops they once supported.
It wasn't Rumsfeld's fault -- it was Lynndie England's! It wasn't Blackwater's fault for shooting civilians -- it was the Marines' fault for getting themselves into a jam!
I guess, in some ways, the finger-pointing has already begun.
Wait... so, you've been on the Mac platform since the days when it consisted of drastically overpriced hardware, a proprietary, marginally stable cooperative-multitasking OS and a very expensive developer's toolkit? I'm guessing you weren't a geek at the time -- if you were, you'd've thrown up your hands in disgust, as I did, and moved to platform that at least offered a command line interface.
Congratulations on not being a geek, I guess... do you want a cookie or a prize?
Thank you for the more accurate information; as you may have surmised, I'm very interested in the issues but I'm definitely not a climatologist.
However, I would still argue that global warming is a misleading and harmful term, because it provokes precisely the sort of gut reaction that you and I see so frequently: "if the Earth is getting warmer, then how come it's cooler every year where I live, in Peoria?"
Keep in mind that we live in a nation of sound bite addicts with no critical thinking skills and positively atrocious judgement. As long as we use ambiguous or confusing language, people will be able to ignore the problem. This is one bit of language we can steal back from the neocons: the trick is to emphasize that weather is going nonlinear and random everywhere. For Ma and Pa in Peoria, the cause (humanity) and the mechanism (increase in global average temperature) are secondary to the effect -- which to them, might not be "warming."
IMHO, "chaotic global climate change" captures the awfulness of what can (and almost certainly will) happen in a way that, while requiring a bit more explanation, is far harder to ignore.
The first problem with the global warming debate is one of language. The term "global warming" is itself a misnomer, based on a disproven, 25-year-old hypothesis of what's happening to the Earth's climate (the alleged "greenhouse effect"). Contemporary science suggests that mankind's presence on the Earth may be contributing to global climate change which is not the same as global warming.
Mankind pumps a lot of nasty shit into the atmosphere; even by the most conservative measurements, atmospheric CO2 levels are thousands of times greater than they have been at any point in the Earth's history that we can measure. The hypothesis is that changing the composition of the atmosphere will not necessarily warm the Earth, but rather it will cause chaotic global climate change Some areas will get warmer; some will get cooler; some will be submerged under the ocean; some will be exposed to withering draught. The Earth is a complex system, and its climate is nonlinear, and possibly chaotic, in nature. This is a proven fact, and it's not been debated by anyone for the past 50 years. By using the term "global warming," environmentalists weaken their own position.
The second problem with the global warming debate is that virtually nobody is impartial, and people constantly invoke bad science and bad math to justify their gut feelings (at best, or politically-motivated feelings, at worst). How often have you seen a media pundit or a half-credentialed scientist take the merest scrap of evidence, the most tenuous result of a study, and declare without a scrap of uncertainty that "this proves global warming isn't happening," or "this proves global warming is happening?"
Case in point: just a few weeks ago, Digg ran an item about the surface temperature of Mars showing a steady upward trend over the past 50 years, due most likely to increased solar output. The submitter's observation was basically "the Earth and Mars are both heating up; therefore, global warming is a natural effect of the sun and not due to mankind's impact on the Earth." Guess what? Correlation does not imply causation -- just because Earth and Mars are both warming, doesn't mean they are warming due to the same cause! Furthermore, climate change on Earth is not limited to increasing temperature, and it's happening much more rapidly than the climate change on Mars. There may some solar effects, but based on experimental data, it's very likely (and few legitimate scientists can offer any evidence to the contrary) that mankind is also having a noticeable effect on the Earth's climate.
I didn't claim to offer any sort of proof that there is no gender disparity in engineering talent. Nor did I offer proof of the counter, for that matter. I simply made the (true) observation that the number of female engineers has been increasing linearly since women have entered the workforce, which suggests perhaps that it's too early to conclude that women are unsuitable for the engineering trade based solely on empirical evidence. We need to wait until the effects of centuries-long cultural bias against technical women have been flushed out of the system, which could take several more generations.
Observation is not proof. Only a mathematician would mistake it for such.;-)
Good point. I lack the time to track down the numbers on women in the workforce, but the "woman engineer" numbers should be controlled for variances in "women worker."
That's quite a well-reasoned argument in favor of a potential gender disparity in the field of engineering. Indeed, I wouldn't expect the "natural" female/male ratio of engineers to be 50% -- but I suspect it is somewhat higher than 10%.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful post.
Alas, we cannot hold up those female "computing pioneers" as examples of women engineers because number crunching is only a small part of the discipline of engineering. It is a tool used by engineers, but it is not "engineering."
If 19th-century computers had been doing their own problem-solving, applying critical thinking, or designing systems of some sort (buildings, bridges, machinery), then I could agree that they were engineers. Unfortunately they were doing none of those things; they were simply processing information at the behest of an engineer boss who was almost invariably a male.
Early computers were no more engineers than the data entry clerk at the police station is a detective.
So, what to make of 19th-century female computers? They're a fabulous example that women are, and always have been, capable of using the "mental tools" that are common to every engineer's toolbox. Furthermore, I have no doubts that over time, many computers acquired a working knowledge of the field for which they were crunching numbers. After a few years working in the field, many of them would have been able to assume an engineering rule with a bit more training.
No doubt, if you pore over the historical records, you will find cases of female computers who *did* make the leap into engineering -- but not very frequently. These would be the "rare, anomalous cases" I mentioned in a prior post.
Based on my interactions with women engineers, I think "bitchiness" of women in technical fields is largely a social phenomenon. I've known three engineer-girls who seemed unnecessarily defensive of their ideas; ultimately, two of those three became less defensive over time as I worked closely with them and proved that I was capable of treating them with respect. After all, these are women whose opinions have been dismissed or overlooked throughout their careers simply because they're not "one of the guys."
OTOH, you've got a good point -- it seems women are naturally more inclined than men to incorporate their emotions into the decision-making process, and it seems from the evidence at hand that this is a biological phenomenon. So, it may be that women engineers have a slight handicap to the decision-making process, which they must train themselves to overcome.
Of course, as a male engineer who too frequently makes technical decisions based on "a gut feeling" and only seeks rational justification after the fact, I am hardly one to cast blame!
Hmm. Can you think of anything about engineering that makes it undemocratic?
I follow your premise that childbirth isn't democratic -- it's a biological reality that only women bear children, and all women are affected by the biological and chemical side-effects of their ability to bear children.
However -- try as I might, I can't think of a single sex-specific talent or skill in the field of engineering. Are you claiming that males are biologically better at math, logic, spatial relationships, that sort of thing? I admit it's a tempting explanation for the lack of women in engineering fields. But I humbly invite you to consider that the ratio of of woman/man engineers is 5% greater today than it was 20 years ago; 10% greater than 40 years ago; and 100 years ago, women basically didn't engage in technical pursuits (except for rare, anomalous cases) and most technical schools didn't admit women.
(source for recent data)
So: if "engineering ability" is sex-linked, what is the explanation for the recent, dramatic rise in technical women? Is there some kind of genetic mutation occurring? One possible explanation is that women have some latent "engineering ability," though not enough to compete with men; in this case, we should expect the ratio of women/man engineers to converge on an equilibrium point somewhere below 50%.
Is there such an equilibrium point? Are women really less technically-oriented than men? As a rational person, I must admit it's a possibility. However, given that the proportion of women engineers has been trending steadily upward for the past 100 years, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to stabilize anytime soon. Personally, I think that in the 100-year timeframe, as old cultures and mores adapt to changing circumstances, we will see it approach 50%.
Malware authors will just throttle the rate at which their software sends spam (or exploit payloads or whatever dirty work it happens to be doing).
Deploying this kind of detection will mitigate the spam problem somewhat by slowing down the propagation of spam -- but this isn't a silver bullet to stop malware.
Notice that the friend in question didn't quit and keep receiving his paycheck. He gave three months' notice, and his employer decided that they didn't want him working on projects if he was going to leave, but they wanted to avoid the risk of terminating his employment and being at risk of a lawsuit. So, they paid him three months' wages for being employed but not doing anything.
Surprise, surprise! HR departments are rational, and they will gladly part with 3 months of an employee's salary simply to avoid exposing themselves to potential legal action. Even if the employee swears she won't sue, the company would rather pay her off than trust her.
1) TOE THE PARTY LINE if you absolutely must. The positions of both major parties have varied wildly across the decades; however, they are generally good about trumpeting the talking points of the day. Every election day, take five minutes to familiarize yourself with the CURRENT core positions of each party. Then, take the easy way out and vote for a party instead of for individual candidates.
2) ACT LOCAL. Even if you ignore national and state offices, the least you can do is vote for your county and city legislature and judiciary. The local government has a far bigger impact on your life than the US or state government. Furthermore, it's generally much easier to determine where local candidates stand on local issues. Am I the only person in the world whose mailbox gets bombarded on a daily basis with leaflets, pamphlets, fliers and postcards from would-be city council members?
3) TRUST YOUR FRIENDS. I have many friends of similar viewpoints to me. We like the same foods, listen to the same music, and have convergent political views. Just as I trust my friends to recommend new foods or music, I trust them to recommend candidates or ballot props for my consideration. Of course, they need to back up their opinions, but they are rational and intelligent people, and come election day we've often informed each other's opinions.
4) PROTEST VOTING is perfectly acceptable. You say you hate Democrats and Republicans? Fine -- choose the candidate who most appeals to you, regardless whether he's Green or Libertarian or Nutbagalicious. Cast your vote for the person you believe in, and they will get more campaign funding in future elections! Hell, write in yourself for all I care! At the very least, you are swelling the ranks of the "independent" voters and showing the pollsters and bean-counters that some people in this country are still capable of thinking for themselves.
Since you've demonstrated neither means nor motivation, those are nothing but words. If you'd said the same thing to some guy in a bar, you *might* be guilty of assault (but that's a big "might.")
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the only legitimate points in this gentleman's post are: (1) a compromised browser defeats OAuth, and (2) OAuth isn't mobile-friendly because it requires browser interaction to gain user consent to grant access.
While both of these are true, Web browsers are ubiquitous; OAuth is a Web standard. You can abuse it slightly to make it work with mobile devices (see "access code grant") but really, it not was intended to be a be-all end-all authorization mechanism.
Likewise, claims that the protocol isn't "enterprise-friendly" are somewhat silly. OAuth was not intended for fine-grained authorization within an authentication or trust domain. It's for cross-domain (cross-application) grants, between unrelated apps, under the assumption that all three parties in the transaction are basically unrelated.
If an executive wants to delegate calendar permissions to his secretary, he should *just do it* by clicking a checkbox on Microsoft Outlook or whatever product they use for scheduling, which no doubt has its own rich permissions system and obviously has its own authentication mechanism. There's no need for a Web standard to facilitate this use case!
As for claims that "there is no standard" -- that's entirely true. There is a draft standard, which presumably will eventually be ratified by IETF once we have all had a chance to play with the technology and suggest improvements. Standards are not an item of worship; they're just a way to ensure that a protocol has had a reasonable degree of scrutiny, has no undisclosed patent encumbrances, etc. I've heard people accuse OAuth of being complex or flawed, but never fundametnally insecure.
Frankly, anyone who thinks the OAuth draft RFC is complex, should choose a dozen or so documents from the SAML protocol suite, relax in a hot bath, and read through several hundred pages of THAT claptrap. Then we can talk about complexity.
(Disclaimer: yes, I do read security standards in the bath, and I create toy implementations of security protocols and algorithms for fun. That probably makes me mentally ill.)
A separate password for each application, is exactly what an OAuth refresh token is. The user is free to revoke the corresponding grant at any time.
Rather unfortunate timing for the headline of this article, considering today's news item about a literal bulldozer that did not fall short...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-israel-corrie-verdict-20120829,0,4476903.story
Cops are public servants working in public spaces; given that the justification for speeding cameras and CCTV has always been that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for someone in a public space, why should the public-spaces rights of policemen be any different from those of the general public?
If you are in public, regardless whether you're on the job, you must accept the notion that you could be observed, by people or recording devices. Bear in mind that most COPS have recording equipment in their squad cars and frequently videotape traffic stops.
If the concern were merely about videotaping police work, police departments would be worrying about their own recordings. It seems to me that their concern is about OTHER people recording police work, when said recordings are outside of the police department's control.
No doubt, cloud is a huge buzzword at the moment. No reason you can't use that to your advantage, however.
"Cloud computing" in common parlance means at least three things at the moment:
* A marginal-cost pricing model for compute resources (pay for only what you use)
* Making use of virtualization in one's app architecture
* Pervasive use of automation in the architecture and throughout the software lifecycle (dev/test/deploy)
#1 is a bit of a fad; some workloads can be shoved out into a public cloud with no risk to security or availability, but many workloads will never be suited for that.
However, #2 and #3 are here to stay for the next decade -- and even if computer architecture makes another massive swing (e.g. massive parallelism or quantum computing or some hooey) and virtualization is no longer as sexy as it is right now, automation always has been, and will always continue to be, a key component of successful IT operations. Automation = productivity!
Even a large part of what we call the "virtualization benefit" is actually due to automation-related productivity. The fact that I can take my pre-built OS + app stack and deploy it on whichever hardware I wish -- and in some cases even migrate it between two differently-capable host systems WHILE my guest is running! -- is all a flavor of automation. We've always been able to migrate servers, but it used to require a screwdriver and lots of patience.
So -- my advice is, don't look down your nose at the sudden cloudiness! Take advantage of this buzzword-laden atmosphere to justify your sound technical decisions to the businessfolk, in terms that their feeble minds can understand. ;-)
The quote, actually, is "information wants to be free."
There's no _should_ about it. It's not a value judgement; it's an expression of one of the natural properties of information: that it tends to replicate itself in any way it's able, subject only to the constraints of the underlying medium (and of course to any artificial constraints placed on it, though those have a track record of working badly).
Even "information wants to be free" is a bit imprecise because it anthropomorphizes the information. Data has no intent, there's no "want" there; it just seems that the natural state of information is to propagate, and to mutate as it propagate.
Also, keep in mind that "free software" doesn't necessarily mean free as in beer. If you have heard someone saying "software should be free," they may have been referring to the fact that the source code to the software that runs your life should not be a trade secret locked away in someone's corporate vault.
As numerous generations of software pirates, malware authors and hackers have shown us, to someone of sufficient skill, the machine code to a piece of software yields enough information to mutate or copy that software. Protecting source code is an attempt to create artificial scarcity -- or security through obscurity, if you prefer -- and it doesn't work very well.
Maybe my argument convinces you; maybe it doesn't. It's not really my concern. I'm employed by an open-source software company whose business is growing tremendously year-over-year -- in the middle of a recession, no less! -- and one of the main reasons for our success is that our products are _open_.
Our customers are free to inspect, modify, ask questions regarding, and contribute improvements to the tools we sell them. Because we try whenever possible to leverage open-source dev tools, we enjoy the same openness in our infrastructure and development toolset. We are able to adapt our tools to work well for us, and contribute the improvements back to the community when we're done.
"Free as in beer" is not "free as in freedom." If your industry ignores this fact, it does so at its own peril. Don't be surprised if a lightning-fast innovator comes along and disrupts everyone. And if they do, look for open source to be greasing the wheels of their productivity.
That's not the point of open source. The point is this:
- I'm an entrepreneur, or I'm being paid by an entrepreneur or a massive corporate entity, to create software that makes money.
- It is my duty as a professional to implement the most reliable, beneficial solution I can, and to do so at the lowest possible cost.
- With this goal in mind, I look around the ecosystem for existing tools, frameworks and applications that will help me achieve my goal. I will generally find any number of open-source products as well as some closed-source products.
-I choose the product (or most frequently, combination of products) that will best help me achieve my business goal. I make my choice irrespective of how the products are licensed.
And THAT, my friends, is the value proposition of open source. Day after day, software developers everywhere are awakening to the fact that the most reliable, most efficient, quickest-growing tools in the business are free of cost, community-supported, and ripe for the picking.
A very small fraction (perhaps 1%) of the people who adopt a given free software product will find that it doesn't quite suit their needs. Funded by their employer or themselves, they will tweak the product until it does what they want -- they then contributed their tweaks back to the community so others can benefit.
Can it ever be a disadvantage, being forced to contribute one's valuable IP back to the community? Of course it can! If your tweaking represents a key competitive differentiator, then by all means, buy a closed-source (or a dual-source) solution.
But, speaking as a software developer with more than a decade of experience and three patents pending, VERY FEW of the changes we make to our tools and frameworks are original or valuable in the business sense.
It is in our "business logic" where money is made -- the bits of code that sit on top of the frameworks and implement the user-relevant part of your application. And THOSE bits of the application are very seldom open source, nor should they be.
Corporate welfare and protectionism FTW!
All you libertarians out there will agree: welfare is wrong no matter WHO the recipient.
Ahh, a statutory wormhole -- a fine achievement that Mr. Hawking is no doubt very proud of.
Actually, jerry-rigging comes from the closing days of WWII when the Allies were advancing through western Europe. They would often find vehicles, structures and equipment that had been hastily repaired or assembled, or used in a way that differed from its original purpose. "Jerry" was a very common nickname for the collective German forces, hence any equipment found in this condition was "jerry-rigged."
To be fair, we have a Cambridge on this side of the pond, in Massachusetts, and it's home to a rather prestigious institution of higher learning. If one were unfamiliar with the work or background Stephen Hawking, it would be an innocent mistake to confuse our Cambridge (town) with your Cambridge (university).
I absolutely love the shower of eager excuses that the administration, the bureaucracy and the military have been vomiting into the public arena. It's not our fault -- it's the tech! It's not our fault -- it's the foreign fighters! It's not our fault -- it's the funding!
Saying that misapplication of technology caused our failure in Iraq is like blaming hydrogen gas for the Hindenberg disaster -- it may be technically true, but it's misleading because it fails to address the root cause of the problem.
I'm not old enough to remember the Vietnam war, but I wonder what excuses were made at the tale end of that debacle. Did the military apply similar rhetoric? Were we always "winning by a large margin" until the day we withdrew? Was there constant talk of "just beginning to make progress" and "just starting to see changes" from the President, even as the casualties mounted?
One thing I DO know is that, during the closing days of Vietnam, many fingers were pointed at the troops themselves. To the left, they were incompetent, mind-controlled baby killers; the right painted them as lazy, incompetent doped-up slobs.
Wanna know what bugs me? The class of Americans who drive around town with a yellow ribbon "support our troops" bumper sticker stuck proudly to their SUVs, when in fact the message they are trying to send is "support our war."
When we announce our withdrawal from Iraq, I wonder how long it will take before these fair-weather patriots wipe their bumpers clean and begin pointing the finger of blame at the troops they once supported.
It wasn't Rumsfeld's fault -- it was Lynndie England's! It wasn't Blackwater's fault for shooting civilians -- it was the Marines' fault for getting themselves into a jam!
I guess, in some ways, the finger-pointing has already begun.
Wait ... so, you've been on the Mac platform since the days when it consisted of drastically overpriced hardware, a proprietary, marginally stable cooperative-multitasking OS and a very expensive developer's toolkit? I'm guessing you weren't a geek at the time -- if you were, you'd've thrown up your hands in disgust, as I did, and moved to platform that at least offered a command line interface.
... do you want a cookie or a prize?
Congratulations on not being a geek, I guess
Thank you for the more accurate information; as you may have surmised, I'm very interested in the issues but I'm definitely not a climatologist.
However, I would still argue that global warming is a misleading and harmful term, because it provokes precisely the sort of gut reaction that you and I see so frequently: "if the Earth is getting warmer, then how come it's cooler every year where I live, in Peoria?"
Keep in mind that we live in a nation of sound bite addicts with no critical thinking skills and positively atrocious judgement. As long as we use ambiguous or confusing language, people will be able to ignore the problem. This is one bit of language we can steal back from the neocons: the trick is to emphasize that weather is going nonlinear and random everywhere. For Ma and Pa in Peoria, the cause (humanity) and the mechanism (increase in global average temperature) are secondary to the effect -- which to them, might not be "warming."
IMHO, "chaotic global climate change" captures the awfulness of what can (and almost certainly will) happen in a way that, while requiring a bit more explanation, is far harder to ignore.
The first problem with the global warming debate is one of language. The term "global warming" is itself a misnomer, based on a disproven, 25-year-old hypothesis of what's happening to the Earth's climate (the alleged "greenhouse effect"). Contemporary science suggests that mankind's presence on the Earth may be contributing to global climate change which is not the same as global warming.
Mankind pumps a lot of nasty shit into the atmosphere; even by the most conservative measurements, atmospheric CO2 levels are thousands of times greater than they have been at any point in the Earth's history that we can measure. The hypothesis is that changing the composition of the atmosphere will not necessarily warm the Earth, but rather it will cause chaotic global climate change Some areas will get warmer; some will get cooler; some will be submerged under the ocean; some will be exposed to withering draught. The Earth is a complex system, and its climate is nonlinear, and possibly chaotic, in nature. This is a proven fact, and it's not been debated by anyone for the past 50 years. By using the term "global warming," environmentalists weaken their own position.
The second problem with the global warming debate is that virtually nobody is impartial, and people constantly invoke bad science and bad math to justify their gut feelings (at best, or politically-motivated feelings, at worst). How often have you seen a media pundit or a half-credentialed scientist take the merest scrap of evidence, the most tenuous result of a study, and declare without a scrap of uncertainty that "this proves global warming isn't happening," or "this proves global warming is happening?"
Case in point: just a few weeks ago, Digg ran an item about the surface temperature of Mars showing a steady upward trend over the past 50 years, due most likely to increased solar output. The submitter's observation was basically "the Earth and Mars are both heating up; therefore, global warming is a natural effect of the sun and not due to mankind's impact on the Earth." Guess what? Correlation does not imply causation -- just because Earth and Mars are both warming, doesn't mean they are warming due to the same cause! Furthermore, climate change on Earth is not limited to increasing temperature, and it's happening much more rapidly than the climate change on Mars. There may some solar effects, but based on experimental data, it's very likely (and few legitimate scientists can offer any evidence to the contrary) that mankind is also having a noticeable effect on the Earth's climate.
I didn't claim to offer any sort of proof that there is no gender disparity in engineering talent. Nor did I offer proof of the counter, for that matter. I simply made the (true) observation that the number of female engineers has been increasing linearly since women have entered the workforce, which suggests perhaps that it's too early to conclude that women are unsuitable for the engineering trade based solely on empirical evidence. We need to wait until the effects of centuries-long cultural bias against technical women have been flushed out of the system, which could take several more generations.
;-)
Observation is not proof. Only a mathematician would mistake it for such.
Good point. I lack the time to track down the numbers on women in the workforce, but the "woman engineer" numbers should be controlled for variances in "women worker."
That's quite a well-reasoned argument in favor of a potential gender disparity in the field of engineering. Indeed, I wouldn't expect the "natural" female/male ratio of engineers to be 50% -- but I suspect it is somewhat higher than 10%.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful post.
Alas, we cannot hold up those female "computing pioneers" as examples of women engineers because number crunching is only a small part of the discipline of engineering. It is a tool used by engineers, but it is not "engineering."
If 19th-century computers had been doing their own problem-solving, applying critical thinking, or designing systems of some sort (buildings, bridges, machinery), then I could agree that they were engineers. Unfortunately they were doing none of those things; they were simply processing information at the behest of an engineer boss who was almost invariably a male.
Early computers were no more engineers than the data entry clerk at the police station is a detective.
So, what to make of 19th-century female computers? They're a fabulous example that women are, and always have been, capable of using the "mental tools" that are common to every engineer's toolbox. Furthermore, I have no doubts that over time, many computers acquired a working knowledge of the field for which they were crunching numbers. After a few years working in the field, many of them would have been able to assume an engineering rule with a bit more training.
No doubt, if you pore over the historical records, you will find cases of female computers who *did* make the leap into engineering -- but not very frequently. These would be the "rare, anomalous cases" I mentioned in a prior post.
Based on my interactions with women engineers, I think "bitchiness" of women in technical fields is largely a social phenomenon. I've known three engineer-girls who seemed unnecessarily defensive of their ideas; ultimately, two of those three became less defensive over time as I worked closely with them and proved that I was capable of treating them with respect. After all, these are women whose opinions have been dismissed or overlooked throughout their careers simply because they're not "one of the guys."
OTOH, you've got a good point -- it seems women are naturally more inclined than men to incorporate their emotions into the decision-making process, and it seems from the evidence at hand that this is a biological phenomenon. So, it may be that women engineers have a slight handicap to the decision-making process, which they must train themselves to overcome.
Of course, as a male engineer who too frequently makes technical decisions based on "a gut feeling" and only seeks rational justification after the fact, I am hardly one to cast blame!
Hmm. Can you think of anything about engineering that makes it undemocratic?
I follow your premise that childbirth isn't democratic -- it's a biological reality that only women bear children, and all women are affected by the biological and chemical side-effects of their ability to bear children.
However -- try as I might, I can't think of a single sex-specific talent or skill in the field of engineering. Are you claiming that males are biologically better at math, logic, spatial relationships, that sort of thing? I admit it's a tempting explanation for the lack of women in engineering fields. But I humbly invite you to consider that the ratio of of woman/man engineers is 5% greater today than it was 20 years ago; 10% greater than 40 years ago; and 100 years ago, women basically didn't engage in technical pursuits (except for rare, anomalous cases) and most technical schools didn't admit women.
(source for recent data)
So: if "engineering ability" is sex-linked, what is the explanation for the recent, dramatic rise in technical women? Is there some kind of genetic mutation occurring? One possible explanation is that women have some latent "engineering ability," though not enough to compete with men; in this case, we should expect the ratio of women/man engineers to converge on an equilibrium point somewhere below 50%.
Is there such an equilibrium point? Are women really less technically-oriented than men? As a rational person, I must admit it's a possibility. However, given that the proportion of women engineers has been trending steadily upward for the past 100 years, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to stabilize anytime soon. Personally, I think that in the 100-year timeframe, as old cultures and mores adapt to changing circumstances, we will see it approach 50%.
Malware authors will just throttle the rate at which their software sends spam (or exploit payloads or whatever dirty work it happens to be doing).
Deploying this kind of detection will mitigate the spam problem somewhat by slowing down the propagation of spam -- but this isn't a silver bullet to stop malware.
Notice that the friend in question didn't quit and keep receiving his paycheck. He gave three months' notice, and his employer decided that they didn't want him working on projects if he was going to leave, but they wanted to avoid the risk of terminating his employment and being at risk of a lawsuit. So, they paid him three months' wages for being employed but not doing anything.
Surprise, surprise! HR departments are rational, and they will gladly part with 3 months of an employee's salary simply to avoid exposing themselves to potential legal action. Even if the employee swears she won't sue, the company would rather pay her off than trust her.
1) TOE THE PARTY LINE if you absolutely must. The positions of both major parties have varied wildly across the decades; however, they are generally good about trumpeting the talking points of the day. Every election day, take five minutes to familiarize yourself with the CURRENT core positions of each party. Then, take the easy way out and vote for a party instead of for individual candidates.
2) ACT LOCAL. Even if you ignore national and state offices, the least you can do is vote for your county and city legislature and judiciary. The local government has a far bigger impact on your life than the US or state government. Furthermore, it's generally much easier to determine where local candidates stand on local issues. Am I the only person in the world whose mailbox gets bombarded on a daily basis with leaflets, pamphlets, fliers and postcards from would-be city council members?
3) TRUST YOUR FRIENDS. I have many friends of similar viewpoints to me. We like the same foods, listen to the same music, and have convergent political views. Just as I trust my friends to recommend new foods or music, I trust them to recommend candidates or ballot props for my consideration. Of course, they need to back up their opinions, but they are rational and intelligent people, and come election day we've often informed each other's opinions.
4) PROTEST VOTING is perfectly acceptable. You say you hate Democrats and Republicans? Fine -- choose the candidate who most appeals to you, regardless whether he's Green or Libertarian or Nutbagalicious. Cast your vote for the person you believe in, and they will get more campaign funding in future elections! Hell, write in yourself for all I care! At the very least, you are swelling the ranks of the "independent" voters and showing the pollsters and bean-counters that some people in this country are still capable of thinking for themselves.
Since you've demonstrated neither means nor motivation, those are nothing but words. If you'd said the same thing to some guy in a bar, you *might* be guilty of assault (but that's a big "might.")