He's not exactly wrong, he's just deliberately misinterpreting the law to further his own agenda.
In this case, he's deliberately ignoring the part that says that such circumvention is legitimate for classroom purposes iff it's no longer readily available to acquire through legitimate channels, or only a small exerpt is actually required. In other words, you can photocopy a page from a textbook to use as a handout as an alternative to students forking over $150 for just that one page, or you can provide photocopies of books that are no longer in print, but you cannot hand out copies of software that people are still selling.
*theoretically* before a car gets crushed for scrap it's already stripped of everything useful. glass can be recycled, they'd be mad to not take out the catalytic converter (the platinum in a catalytic converter can fetch more money than the rest of the steel in the car is worth)...
crushing for scrap is so that the parts can be melted down and recycled, which is a lot faster than digging the iron up out of the ground and smelting it into steel... unless you were thinking that the cylinder head from a 1962 Ford Fairlaine can be used on a 2009 model?
Nobody should use MD5 for authentication and whatnot... and even as a 'checksum' of sorts you have to be careful (i.e. make sure that the source of the MD5 text/file isn't the very same source as the file it was generated for, as a compromised file probably means the MD5 string would be equally compromised).
If you're using MD5 as a way to verify that the file isn't festooned with viruses. I don't think that was the intention of MD5 from the beginning, though, as it's a pretty useless way of going about it... all it really tests is whether the file you've got on your hard drive is (roughly) the same as the file on the source computer. That still doesn't prevent the person who uploaded it in the first place from putting in malicious code or the like. If you want to ensure that it's got no viruses or malicious code in it, then invest in a proper antivirus, keep it up to date, and scan everything you download. If you're *really* paranoid, download it into a jail, wait a couple of weeks, and *then* scan it with your antivirus before opening it.
The main reason I have used MD5 in the past, however, is to verify that a CD I'm downloading is a good download... good thing to know before you burn a coaster with the ISO. Not so much an issue now that I have a fat pipe that's reasonably reliable and blanks are cheap, but years ago, when I was on a slower connection that dropped packets at random, I burned several coasters. When blank CD's were $1 each, that got to be very expensive. Enter MD5 and other redundancy checks that could be done on the image before you wasted a CD. In that case, it doesn't matter that the MD5 is on the same host as the file you're downloading... you're not checking whether the file is compromised, you're checking whether you have the same file as the host.
These days, I don't bother with MD5, for the simple reason that all of the large downloads I do come with software that does it automatically. It's built into the BitTorrent protocol, just as it's built into Microsoft's Intelligent Downloader service, World of Warcraft's built-in updater (which is itself based on BitTorrent), Apple Updates, most Linux-based package management tools, and most of what else the audience of Slashdot would use to download. There's even a few FTP and HTTP direct download clients that automatically handle the MD5 checking for you.
Anyone over a thousand light years away hasn't even seen any signs of life in our galaxy yet,
I'm assuming you meant our solar system, since our galaxy is 100,000 LY in diameter. 1000LY wouldn't even get you outside of our galaxy, so anybody a thousand light years away is probably well aware of life within our galaxy.
Even so, your numbers make no sense... We've been building artificial structures for a lot longer than 1000 years, so if they're able to detect stuff like that, then they could be as much as 10,000 LY away. If they're able to detect things like cooking fires, and tell them from natural fire, then they could be anywhere within our own galaxy and then some. Either of those could easily be lost in the background radiation/light in the universe, so let's talk about something that's not as easy to lose (but still pretty easily lost): We are transmitting EM radiation at the speed of light. Assuming you're talking just about the artificial stuff, like radio, it can't possibly have gotten more than about 110 LY away from us. It would take an enormously powerful transmitter to still be readable at that distance, and honestly, Marconi wasn't that good.... Still, assuming that the aliens have the technology to pick up a signal that weak, and that they're listening, they wouldn't have had a chance to hear anything we've produced if they're not within 110 Light years.
Now, there's probably well over 100,000 stars within that distance from us, but that's the barest fraction of what's actually in our galaxy, which is itself one of countless billions of galaxies out there. The Universe is probably teeming with life... it's just so big, that the chances that there's nothing else but us is insignificant. The thing is... how many objects are there in our solar system? 8 planets, hundreds of moons, billions of asteroids. One of them has produced life (that we know of). How many billions of species are there on this planet? How many of those ever developped beyond single-celled organisms? How many of those multi-cellular organisms died out due to environmental changes? Of the remaining, how many are intelligent enough to be sentient? And of those handful that're sentient, how many are tool-makers and technological?
The Universe is big. Absolutely ginormous. So big that even with that miniscule chance of a technological civilization developping, there's probably billions of technological civilizations out there right now. But the Universe is also a whole lot of empty space, and the chances of finding such a technological civilization in our back yard are virtually nil. You've got a better chance of winning three separate lotteries on the same day you're struck by lightning twice. We should still look for it, just in case, but don't hold your breath.
The case for colonization and space exploration isn't the search for extra-terrestrial life. We're pretty much certain that it exists, just as we're pretty much certain we'll never encounter it. The case is made by the realization that our time is limited. We know that about 3 billion years from now, the Earth will not be able to support human life, and that about 5 billion years from now our sun will nova. That's assuming that we aren't wiped out by a meteor impact, or that we haven't killed ourselves off by that time. We want to explore and colonize space because if we don't then we will cease to exist, which is a thought that scares the hell out of most of us.
I'm just waiting for the genetic fix that takes care of unwanted traits in humans - like body hair, obesity and depression.
Of those you listed, body hair is really the only one that could be treated genetically... obesity is largely a result of your lifestyle in most cases. Yes, there's some who don't have a choice, but most who are obese are that way because they eat too much of the wrong kind of food, and don't get enough exercise.
Similarly, while there's a genetic predisposition towards depression, a lot of people who suffer from it don't have that marker. Depression is largely due to circumstances and lack of a support network... a person is suffering from a life crisis and hasn't been equipped with the tools they need to deal with the emotions surrounding it.
Personally, I'm leery about when they start tinkering with our DNA to remove unwanted traits. What happens when they decide to apply it to something other than genetic diseases, and start applying it to things like a genetic predisposition towards homosexuality, or curly hair, or being short? When we lose our genetic diversity, we become significantly more vulnerable to outside influences, and the human race is already very shy on genetic diversity... the average colony of bonobos has more genetic diversity in 200 individuals than the human race has in 6 billion.
So... you're saying that the intelligent designer used copy/paste for some parts of his code, making small changes here and there to produce a product that was better suited to its environment?
It wasn't harmless, it was retarded. Further more, the value of oil isn't in burning it, it's in what you can make with it, e.g. plastic. Good luck finding replacements for that.
*shrugs* there's still gold farmers in wow, as well as organizations trying to sell powerlevelling and such. My guess is that the Chinese government hasn't blocked the game as well as they think they have.
Heck HP even employs quite a few key people in the Linux community which AFAIK Dell does not do.
Dell has in-house Linux developpers to produce drivers and linux-specific software for their hardware, most of which has been released to the community at large, and some of which has made it into the Linux kernel. (drivers for my laptop's sound card, for example, came from Dell).
It could have been either of them. It could have been neither of them. We really don't know. I've seen both companies pull some seriously boneheaded moves before, and wouldn't put this above either of them.
Picture VW Polo next to Rolls Royce Phantom. Polo will fit nicely out the front of your local 7-11 / Tesco store; Good luck getting the Phantom in anything smaller than the Disabled spaces.
Though to be fair, if you're the kind of person who a) ows a Rolls Royce Phantom (or a Bugatti Veyron, or a Mercedes-MacLaren F1, or...) and b) shops at 7-11, you probably qualify for the Disabled spaces... Mentally.
If you're going to the trouble of setting up a squid proxy, I'm surprised you haven't thought of using a DNS blackhole... Just use a list from a site like http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/, with a cron job set to automatically update the list. It's doubly trivial if you're running a squid proxy, since you could simply update it as a hosts file.
My Linux netbook only activates wireless AFTER I've logged in (any reason for this?)
Probably that your wireless network manager is something like wicd and is running in userland. Most modern distros use a userland wireless manager so that users can switch to a different wireless net without having to log in as root or provide root credentials.
You could do some poking around in the BIOS and see what you can find... Dell laptops have an option in the BIOS, for example, to set a hard drive password. This encrypts the mbr on the drive, preventing it from being read without supplying the password, and works across different operating systems. The hard drive can't be removed and put into a different computer, nor can it be put into a USB caddy to try to read the data from a different operating system: it'll still ask for the password. While it's possible to read the geometry from the drive and build an unencrypted MBR that'd let you recover the data, it's more trouble than it's worth, and virtually guarantees that the system will be wiped to start fresh.
Couple a hard drive password with a power-on password in the BIOS, and you've got a completely useless netbook to anybody who doesn't have the passwords.
"inflammable" means that the substance in question can inflame. "inflame" is the verb which means "to begin to burn". It is *exactly* the same verb that's the source of the word "inflammation", which in medical terms refers to the heat that's given off by the extra blood flow to the affected area.
It's not a question of "in" being a prefix. In this word it's not a prefix. It's part of the root of the word.
But they happen to be a vendor that's just up the street from my home. And I can assure you it works with Linux. It's not 64-bit, but it works fine with 32-bit Linux.:)
Pretty much *any* Via C7-based mobo will work with Linux. The C7 is an x86 chip, and supports the full x86 instruction set, as well as some very nice enhancements and optimizations for things like crypto that other chips don't have.
My network fileserver is a Via C7 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM, running Linux. It's connected directly to the router via gigabit ethernet (the router shares with the network via 802.11a/b/g/n). The fileserver has a 500GB hard drive on which the operating system itself is installed, and a 1TB drive connected via eSata. Its contents are served up to the network via Samba and FTP. Anything important gets put on the network hard drive, as well as on the computer that generated the content. As all of the workstations are laptops, they're easy to grab in the event that I need to get out, and they're usually already with their user if they're not home to grab it. Anything *really* important also gets shared around the family, so that there's always at least 2 or 3 people who have stuff like family photos and important documents.
There's really no point in spending large amounts of money setting up a network fileserver, or a mirroring/striping RAID, or having two external hard drives where you keep one onsite, one offsite. Save yourself the trouble. The total cost for my network file server was about $200, including the case, and under full load it uses less electricity than a compact fluorescent light bulb. Adding extra storage to it is as simple as buying a new hard drive to connect.
Exactly what I was going to say... I have never had a problem remembering passwords myself (I usually take a phrase, translate it into another language, transliterate it back into English, and then replace a couple of characters with numbers... so if I were to pick "everything's alright", in Japanese that's "ii desu", I could make it more casual and make it "ii desu ne"... remove the spaces, add some numbers, and it becomes "iid3sune".. strong enough to get past the filters, and it's got no meaning in English, so it's hard to guess....
But others don't have the luxury. By having arcane and obtuse password security rules, all you end up doing is obfuscating things. People aren't going to remember hard passwords, and so they end up either picking something that's completely insecure, or they end up writing down their passwords. I worked at one place where almost everybody in the building had a password that was (name of the company) + (sequential number). so if it was your first password, it'd be "sparklies01" (changing the name of course), you change your password after 30 days and it becomes "sparklies02".... what the heck is the point in even having a password if it's set up like that?
I think it's more secure to allow people to set weak passwords. They aren't going to be easily brute forced with a dictionary attack, especially not with policies that lock the account after 3 failed attempts, but they're also not going to be something that's so hard to remember that it ends up getting written down, or following a sequence that's laughably insecure.
Did you read the sentence that came after the bit you quoted?
Sometimes that's done by a representative in government, sometimes it's done by somebody volunteering to go to the slaughter in order to force the courts to rethink the legitimacy of the law.
I doubt things are different in the US from Canada in that respect...
The judge doesn't change the law. The judge sets precedent saying that the law is unjust or illegal. The judge then directs the government to change the laws to suit, and refuses to hear any cases under the law that has been struck down until the laws have been changed.
A perfect example would be gay marriage... in Canada, we've got it. And the reason we have it is not because it was changed in parliament, the reason we have it is that some people decided to sue the government, arguing that paragraph 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees equal treatment of all citizens regardless of race, colour, religion, country of origin, or sexual orientation, guarantees that homosexual couples have the same rights to marriage under law as heterosexual couples.The supreme court agreed, and directed the government to make changes to the law to reflect this.
Now, a civil suit that argues damages for copyright infringement is a different playing field, but the consequences are the same. Somebody has to challenge the law in order to get it changed. Sometimes that's done by a representative in government, sometimes it's done by somebody volunteering to go to the slaughter in order to force the courts to rethink the legitimacy of the law. This is the latter. Perhaps not as important to many of us, but in the same league as the Scopes Monkey Trial.
So....your argument is that employees have too much power over companies, because companies have too much power over employees?
No, my argument is that companies cannot be trusted to treat their employees properly when enlightened self-interest is their prime limiting factor. There are companies that will treat their employees well... I've had *very* good experiences working for both Compaq and Dell, where they provided benefits and compensation well above the minimum required by law without a unionized workforce, but there's also a whackload of companies which do the bare minimum as dictated by law, and who try to get away with stuff like mandatory overtime, and firing you for refusing to work an 80h week... which is legal in the US, but decidedly illegal in Canada and most of Europe. Without labour laws to protect the employees, the employees need to exert more collective power.
Or as joss put it:
in US, unions act like dicks, because companies act like dicks. Where laws prevent companies acting like total dicks, unions act less like dicks.
the reason unions have so much power in the US is because the labour laws are so lax. in countries with strong labour protection laws, like most of Europe, Canada, Australia, etc., the government has been set up to protect the workers. Unions aren't needed as much, and so they do not exert their power... truth be told, I have never worked at a company that was unionized, because unions are dying a slow death in this country (Canada). Outside of the federal government and manufacturing sectors, most people are not unionized any more. who needs collective bargaining when we have public health care benefits, labour laws that say you can't be fired without cause and that you're entitled to severance if you've worked there more than 90 days, and a wealth of other fundamental rights that have traditionally been fought for by unions?
In the US, though, things are different. Employers have much more power that they can exert, and as a result, the employees need to exert more collective power. It's protectionism. For starters, look up what it means to live in an "at will" state: you can be fired at any time, with no notice, no severance, and without cause. they need unions in the US, and so the unions exist, and they exert power.
I think it's more likely that they pulled themselves from trading while they updated their code/algorithms.
If a malicious trader had their algorithms, he could know how the software would react in real time to his actions. It'd be fairly easy, from that point, to design a bot that could buy the right number of the right stock to trick GS' software into thinking that the stock is hot and buying large amounts of it. Buying large amounts of the stock would cause the price to rise, and then the bot can dump their stock at a profit.
In other words... having their source code out there made it possible to pump&dump them. That's fraudulent at best, and doesn't *really* hurt people when you're talking about a few hundred dollars worth of penny stock (never play stocks with money you can't afford to lose), but when you're talking about one of the biggest trading houses in the world, with a trading volume in the billions of dollars... that's a very bad thing.
If you're going to MacGyver an exposure suit to keep the rabbit alive, you'll probably need some duck tape. Wetsuits don't form a watertight seal, let alone an airtight seal, so you need some way to prevent the air from escaping from the fishbowl.
Slashdot Mirror
good job reading the sentence that came right after the one you quoted. :)
He's not exactly wrong, he's just deliberately misinterpreting the law to further his own agenda.
In this case, he's deliberately ignoring the part that says that such circumvention is legitimate for classroom purposes iff it's no longer readily available to acquire through legitimate channels, or only a small exerpt is actually required. In other words, you can photocopy a page from a textbook to use as a handout as an alternative to students forking over $150 for just that one page, or you can provide photocopies of books that are no longer in print, but you cannot hand out copies of software that people are still selling.
*theoretically* before a car gets crushed for scrap it's already stripped of everything useful. glass can be recycled, they'd be mad to not take out the catalytic converter (the platinum in a catalytic converter can fetch more money than the rest of the steel in the car is worth)...
crushing for scrap is so that the parts can be melted down and recycled, which is a lot faster than digging the iron up out of the ground and smelting it into steel... unless you were thinking that the cylinder head from a 1962 Ford Fairlaine can be used on a 2009 model?
If you're using MD5 as a way to verify that the file isn't festooned with viruses. I don't think that was the intention of MD5 from the beginning, though, as it's a pretty useless way of going about it... all it really tests is whether the file you've got on your hard drive is (roughly) the same as the file on the source computer. That still doesn't prevent the person who uploaded it in the first place from putting in malicious code or the like. If you want to ensure that it's got no viruses or malicious code in it, then invest in a proper antivirus, keep it up to date, and scan everything you download. If you're *really* paranoid, download it into a jail, wait a couple of weeks, and *then* scan it with your antivirus before opening it.
The main reason I have used MD5 in the past, however, is to verify that a CD I'm downloading is a good download... good thing to know before you burn a coaster with the ISO. Not so much an issue now that I have a fat pipe that's reasonably reliable and blanks are cheap, but years ago, when I was on a slower connection that dropped packets at random, I burned several coasters. When blank CD's were $1 each, that got to be very expensive. Enter MD5 and other redundancy checks that could be done on the image before you wasted a CD. In that case, it doesn't matter that the MD5 is on the same host as the file you're downloading... you're not checking whether the file is compromised, you're checking whether you have the same file as the host.
These days, I don't bother with MD5, for the simple reason that all of the large downloads I do come with software that does it automatically. It's built into the BitTorrent protocol, just as it's built into Microsoft's Intelligent Downloader service, World of Warcraft's built-in updater (which is itself based on BitTorrent), Apple Updates, most Linux-based package management tools, and most of what else the audience of Slashdot would use to download. There's even a few FTP and HTTP direct download clients that automatically handle the MD5 checking for you.
I'm assuming you meant our solar system, since our galaxy is 100,000 LY in diameter. 1000LY wouldn't even get you outside of our galaxy, so anybody a thousand light years away is probably well aware of life within our galaxy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way
Even so, your numbers make no sense... We've been building artificial structures for a lot longer than 1000 years, so if they're able to detect stuff like that, then they could be as much as 10,000 LY away. If they're able to detect things like cooking fires, and tell them from natural fire, then they could be anywhere within our own galaxy and then some. Either of those could easily be lost in the background radiation/light in the universe, so let's talk about something that's not as easy to lose (but still pretty easily lost): We are transmitting EM radiation at the speed of light. Assuming you're talking just about the artificial stuff, like radio, it can't possibly have gotten more than about 110 LY away from us. It would take an enormously powerful transmitter to still be readable at that distance, and honestly, Marconi wasn't that good.... Still, assuming that the aliens have the technology to pick up a signal that weak, and that they're listening, they wouldn't have had a chance to hear anything we've produced if they're not within 110 Light years.
Now, there's probably well over 100,000 stars within that distance from us, but that's the barest fraction of what's actually in our galaxy, which is itself one of countless billions of galaxies out there. The Universe is probably teeming with life... it's just so big, that the chances that there's nothing else but us is insignificant. The thing is... how many objects are there in our solar system? 8 planets, hundreds of moons, billions of asteroids. One of them has produced life (that we know of). How many billions of species are there on this planet? How many of those ever developped beyond single-celled organisms? How many of those multi-cellular organisms died out due to environmental changes? Of the remaining, how many are intelligent enough to be sentient? And of those handful that're sentient, how many are tool-makers and technological?
The Universe is big. Absolutely ginormous. So big that even with that miniscule chance of a technological civilization developping, there's probably billions of technological civilizations out there right now. But the Universe is also a whole lot of empty space, and the chances of finding such a technological civilization in our back yard are virtually nil. You've got a better chance of winning three separate lotteries on the same day you're struck by lightning twice. We should still look for it, just in case, but don't hold your breath.
The case for colonization and space exploration isn't the search for extra-terrestrial life. We're pretty much certain that it exists, just as we're pretty much certain we'll never encounter it. The case is made by the realization that our time is limited. We know that about 3 billion years from now, the Earth will not be able to support human life, and that about 5 billion years from now our sun will nova. That's assuming that we aren't wiped out by a meteor impact, or that we haven't killed ourselves off by that time. We want to explore and colonize space because if we don't then we will cease to exist, which is a thought that scares the hell out of most of us.
Of those you listed, body hair is really the only one that could be treated genetically... obesity is largely a result of your lifestyle in most cases. Yes, there's some who don't have a choice, but most who are obese are that way because they eat too much of the wrong kind of food, and don't get enough exercise.
Similarly, while there's a genetic predisposition towards depression, a lot of people who suffer from it don't have that marker. Depression is largely due to circumstances and lack of a support network... a person is suffering from a life crisis and hasn't been equipped with the tools they need to deal with the emotions surrounding it.
Personally, I'm leery about when they start tinkering with our DNA to remove unwanted traits. What happens when they decide to apply it to something other than genetic diseases, and start applying it to things like a genetic predisposition towards homosexuality, or curly hair, or being short? When we lose our genetic diversity, we become significantly more vulnerable to outside influences, and the human race is already very shy on genetic diversity... the average colony of bonobos has more genetic diversity in 200 individuals than the human race has in 6 billion.
The Romans and Greeks had gods who were lecherous alcoholic serial rapists... they're perfect?
So... you're saying that the intelligent designer used copy/paste for some parts of his code, making small changes here and there to produce a product that was better suited to its environment?
Here you go
Can I have a cookie now?
What are you talking about?
*shrugs* there's still gold farmers in wow, as well as organizations trying to sell powerlevelling and such. My guess is that the Chinese government hasn't blocked the game as well as they think they have.
Dell has in-house Linux developpers to produce drivers and linux-specific software for their hardware, most of which has been released to the community at large, and some of which has made it into the Linux kernel. (drivers for my laptop's sound card, for example, came from Dell).
It could have been either of them. It could have been neither of them. We really don't know. I've seen both companies pull some seriously boneheaded moves before, and wouldn't put this above either of them.
Though to be fair, if you're the kind of person who a) ows a Rolls Royce Phantom (or a Bugatti Veyron, or a Mercedes-MacLaren F1, or...) and b) shops at 7-11, you probably qualify for the Disabled spaces... Mentally.
If you're going to the trouble of setting up a squid proxy, I'm surprised you haven't thought of using a DNS blackhole... Just use a list from a site like http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/, with a cron job set to automatically update the list. It's doubly trivial if you're running a squid proxy, since you could simply update it as a hosts file.
Probably that your wireless network manager is something like wicd and is running in userland. Most modern distros use a userland wireless manager so that users can switch to a different wireless net without having to log in as root or provide root credentials.
You could do some poking around in the BIOS and see what you can find... Dell laptops have an option in the BIOS, for example, to set a hard drive password. This encrypts the mbr on the drive, preventing it from being read without supplying the password, and works across different operating systems. The hard drive can't be removed and put into a different computer, nor can it be put into a USB caddy to try to read the data from a different operating system: it'll still ask for the password. While it's possible to read the geometry from the drive and build an unencrypted MBR that'd let you recover the data, it's more trouble than it's worth, and virtually guarantees that the system will be wiped to start fresh.
Couple a hard drive password with a power-on password in the BIOS, and you've got a completely useless netbook to anybody who doesn't have the passwords.
"inflammable" means that the substance in question can inflame. "inflame" is the verb which means "to begin to burn". It is *exactly* the same verb that's the source of the word "inflammation", which in medical terms refers to the heat that's given off by the extra blood flow to the affected area.
It's not a question of "in" being a prefix. In this word it's not a prefix. It's part of the root of the word.
I got mine here:
http://pccyber.com/?v=product&i=MB-VIA-PC2500E
But they happen to be a vendor that's just up the street from my home. And I can assure you it works with Linux. It's not 64-bit, but it works fine with 32-bit Linux. :)
Pretty much *any* Via C7-based mobo will work with Linux. The C7 is an x86 chip, and supports the full x86 instruction set, as well as some very nice enhancements and optimizations for things like crypto that other chips don't have.
Intel Atom? Geez. You're spending too much...
My network fileserver is a Via C7 1.5GHz with 1GB of RAM, running Linux. It's connected directly to the router via gigabit ethernet (the router shares with the network via 802.11a/b/g/n). The fileserver has a 500GB hard drive on which the operating system itself is installed, and a 1TB drive connected via eSata. Its contents are served up to the network via Samba and FTP. Anything important gets put on the network hard drive, as well as on the computer that generated the content. As all of the workstations are laptops, they're easy to grab in the event that I need to get out, and they're usually already with their user if they're not home to grab it. Anything *really* important also gets shared around the family, so that there's always at least 2 or 3 people who have stuff like family photos and important documents.
There's really no point in spending large amounts of money setting up a network fileserver, or a mirroring/striping RAID, or having two external hard drives where you keep one onsite, one offsite. Save yourself the trouble. The total cost for my network file server was about $200, including the case, and under full load it uses less electricity than a compact fluorescent light bulb. Adding extra storage to it is as simple as buying a new hard drive to connect.
Exactly what I was going to say... I have never had a problem remembering passwords myself (I usually take a phrase, translate it into another language, transliterate it back into English, and then replace a couple of characters with numbers... so if I were to pick "everything's alright", in Japanese that's "ii desu", I could make it more casual and make it "ii desu ne"... remove the spaces, add some numbers, and it becomes "iid3sune".. strong enough to get past the filters, and it's got no meaning in English, so it's hard to guess....
But others don't have the luxury. By having arcane and obtuse password security rules, all you end up doing is obfuscating things. People aren't going to remember hard passwords, and so they end up either picking something that's completely insecure, or they end up writing down their passwords. I worked at one place where almost everybody in the building had a password that was (name of the company) + (sequential number). so if it was your first password, it'd be "sparklies01" (changing the name of course), you change your password after 30 days and it becomes "sparklies02".... what the heck is the point in even having a password if it's set up like that?
I think it's more secure to allow people to set weak passwords. They aren't going to be easily brute forced with a dictionary attack, especially not with policies that lock the account after 3 failed attempts, but they're also not going to be something that's so hard to remember that it ends up getting written down, or following a sequence that's laughably insecure.
Did you read the sentence that came after the bit you quoted?
I doubt things are different in the US from Canada in that respect...
The judge doesn't change the law. The judge sets precedent saying that the law is unjust or illegal. The judge then directs the government to change the laws to suit, and refuses to hear any cases under the law that has been struck down until the laws have been changed.
A perfect example would be gay marriage... in Canada, we've got it. And the reason we have it is not because it was changed in parliament, the reason we have it is that some people decided to sue the government, arguing that paragraph 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees equal treatment of all citizens regardless of race, colour, religion, country of origin, or sexual orientation, guarantees that homosexual couples have the same rights to marriage under law as heterosexual couples.The supreme court agreed, and directed the government to make changes to the law to reflect this.
Now, a civil suit that argues damages for copyright infringement is a different playing field, but the consequences are the same. Somebody has to challenge the law in order to get it changed. Sometimes that's done by a representative in government, sometimes it's done by somebody volunteering to go to the slaughter in order to force the courts to rethink the legitimacy of the law. This is the latter. Perhaps not as important to many of us, but in the same league as the Scopes Monkey Trial.
No, my argument is that companies cannot be trusted to treat their employees properly when enlightened self-interest is their prime limiting factor. There are companies that will treat their employees well... I've had *very* good experiences working for both Compaq and Dell, where they provided benefits and compensation well above the minimum required by law without a unionized workforce, but there's also a whackload of companies which do the bare minimum as dictated by law, and who try to get away with stuff like mandatory overtime, and firing you for refusing to work an 80h week... which is legal in the US, but decidedly illegal in Canada and most of Europe. Without labour laws to protect the employees, the employees need to exert more collective power.
Or as joss put it:
the reason unions have so much power in the US is because the labour laws are so lax. in countries with strong labour protection laws, like most of Europe, Canada, Australia, etc., the government has been set up to protect the workers. Unions aren't needed as much, and so they do not exert their power... truth be told, I have never worked at a company that was unionized, because unions are dying a slow death in this country (Canada). Outside of the federal government and manufacturing sectors, most people are not unionized any more. who needs collective bargaining when we have public health care benefits, labour laws that say you can't be fired without cause and that you're entitled to severance if you've worked there more than 90 days, and a wealth of other fundamental rights that have traditionally been fought for by unions?
In the US, though, things are different. Employers have much more power that they can exert, and as a result, the employees need to exert more collective power. It's protectionism. For starters, look up what it means to live in an "at will" state: you can be fired at any time, with no notice, no severance, and without cause. they need unions in the US, and so the unions exist, and they exert power.
I think it's more likely that they pulled themselves from trading while they updated their code/algorithms.
If a malicious trader had their algorithms, he could know how the software would react in real time to his actions. It'd be fairly easy, from that point, to design a bot that could buy the right number of the right stock to trick GS' software into thinking that the stock is hot and buying large amounts of it. Buying large amounts of the stock would cause the price to rise, and then the bot can dump their stock at a profit.
In other words... having their source code out there made it possible to pump&dump them. That's fraudulent at best, and doesn't *really* hurt people when you're talking about a few hundred dollars worth of penny stock (never play stocks with money you can't afford to lose), but when you're talking about one of the biggest trading houses in the world, with a trading volume in the billions of dollars... that's a very bad thing.
If you're going to MacGyver an exposure suit to keep the rabbit alive, you'll probably need some duck tape. Wetsuits don't form a watertight seal, let alone an airtight seal, so you need some way to prevent the air from escaping from the fishbowl.