Presumably, then, by "openness" Ms. Clinton means "subject only to regulation by big media," because until the Obama administration makes material strides to back the FCC in regulating real net neutrality, that's what we get. Our internet speech may not be impeded by the red-herring "kill switch," but it surely will by the Verizons and Comcasts and AT&Ts that control the packets.
Good question. It seems to me that a "firewall" in the normal sense of the thing that allows connections only on particular ports using particular protocols will not protect against such infections, but I got the impression from the article that the author was using the term more loosely than that. His example of the SQL Slammer suggests this, because presumably it arrives through acceptable firewall (in the strict sense) doors...
"An idea sketched out by a [HP] research team?" At least the reporter corrected HP's claim to innovation. In fact, here in VT, CVPS has been doing this for years...
I can agree with all of this except the "backed by a major vendor" part, which seems superfluous... Design is all about maintaining a coherent vision of the end product, whereas hammering a tin shed on the side of the Taj Mahal is always a bad idea, particularly for maintainability and robustness. What isn't clear to me is why I need a vendor to supply my vision when I've already had years of education and experience...
The "Russian tradition of building secret towns?" Towns like Oak Ridge, TN, or Los Alamos, NM, or Hanford, WA, maybe? Explain again how this project is doomed to fail as a government effort to make a technological leap. On the contrary, our own experience is great success doing this sort of thing. Nor is this an American peculiarity--the Germans very successfully built an entire town at Peenemunde to develop and construct V-2 rockets. In fact, here in America we capitalized on this success by moving its authors, notably Werner von Braun, to Huntsville, AL where we created yet another failed government experiment to land men on the moon...
I'm thinking that people should read a bit less Ayn Rand science fiction and a bit more actual history.
You don't need carpentry skills to build a chair, either, just the tools. It will, however, be a piece of junk. It will be wobbly, ugly, dangerous, and short-lived.
Yes, of course I went from private school library to municipality, that is my whole point. Censorship is not always infringing upon peoples' right to free speech, yet it is still censorship, i.e. the suppression of anything considered objectionable. When practiced by a minority it is simply annoying, but when it's institutionalized it's damaging, because *then* it detracts from free speech.
Once censorship becomes an infringement, though, it's a bit late to address the problem. Instead, we need to keep our eyes open and avoid it while it's still just annoying, particularly when the writing is on the wall, as it were...
You have a point, ceoyoyo, but I don't think it's a very good one. Your point is that the cloud's servers are private, so the owners are free to use them any way they please. Certainly that is true, but this doesn't exclude the fact that they are censoring content if they disallow the sharing of material that they have, alone, whimsically determined to be "offensive." The building metaphor is persuasive, but misleading--a building is not an information medium. Graffiti is offensive, indeed a crime, not because of its semantic content but because of the paint. A more apt metaphor would be that of a private school library refusing to shelve Salinger's "Catcher in The Rye" because it offends the librarian. He has every right to exclude anything from his library that he likes, but it's still censorship.
The argument that I can share my material elsewhere, like here at Slashdot for example, doesn't change the fact that the cloud owners are censoring content, it only changes the *effect* of the censorship. A sophomore in the private school can always get "Catcher in The Rye" in a public library, or buy it himself. If, however, municipalities ban the book from their library shelves, and then private bookstores prefer not to stock it for fear of offending their customer base, then we have a problem. A bunch of yahoos burning books in a parking lot is pretty harmless, but if the yahoos are the majority or the authority then it becomes frightening. Somewhere in between "harmless" and "frightening" is cause for alarm--the question is, where?
I raised the point (hardly a rant), because I believe that there is some cause for concern here. First, the very private companies that market their clouds have, in the past, colluded with governments in order to censor content. Clearly, for the people of China, this is bad--the equivalent of the "frightening" scenario above. One may argue who cares, we don't live in China, but our own federal government and some states have moved or are planning to shift their information services to privately owned clouds. So ultimately, even here in the USA, a private cloud can actually be public.
That is why we should all be wary of censorship on private cloud computing platforms.
"Censorship" is the proper word to describe this. The notion that I cannot express myself except in some "inoffensive" manner, for whatever values of "inoffensive" are acceptable to the owner of the cloud. I can see the "great wall cloud of China" already. Haven't big search companies already kowtowed to the Chinese government in order to access their markets? Is it inconceivable that Google would agree to Chinese government review of shared documents in order to serve the Chinese "cloud computing" market? I don't think it is.
Even here, imagine trying to write almost any kind of literary critique of Henry Miller, Ferdinand Celine or Vladimir Nabakov...
I agree that there will be such bugs. Reviewing the code may or may not reveal them. It seems to me that if the question is one of whether or not the device works properly, then submitting to testing by an independent laboratory is a much better way to find out, and one that doesn't compromise the company. In my experience, we prove that we meet software requirements by testing, not by peer review.
If you want to learn about something complex and nuanced, then your television is the wrong place to look. It has been argued by sociologists like Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and even by admen themselves, like Jerry Mander in his Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television, that the medium of television is a poor conduit for complex ideas.
Even the networks which have not arguably been "dumbed down," like the History Channel mentioned here, are a pretty poor provider of accurate detail, although they are certainly entertaining. For example, the "Engineering an Empire" program covering they Byzantines suggested that the Emperor Justinian was a brilliant leader, whereas in fact he was not a visionary at all, but an easily manipulated tool whose military victories in Europe, vaunted by the program, were provided by his general Belisarius (cf. Lord Mahon's The Life of Belisarius).
Personally, I recommend books for the fundamentals and periodicals from the IEEE or ACM for the leading edge. Television is only good for a broad overview of the current buzz, not for diving deep into anything.
Doesn't anyone notice that the EU's "official statement" was released as a.DOC file? So, if I'm a citizen of the EU, I have to pay money to Microsoft to participate in my government?
What's worse is that we're so inured to this sort of thing, nobody even noticed!
Oops, darn, my geography is almost as bad as your spelling. I'm confusing Guantanamo with Abu Ghraib, where we have piles of evidence that the inmates were tortured in this way, and others besides. Now, I'm sure that you'll counter with the lame argument that this behavior was perpetrated by a few "rogue soldiers." Hmm. The last time I looked, the military was a hierarchically structured organization with a well-defined chain of command, run by a bunch of grown ups, who, being adults, are directly responsible for their inferiors' behavior. So even if these were "isolated incidents," the blame lies squarely on the heads of perpetrators' officers. Further, as we both know, a private soldier can't have a wank without his officer's permission, much less his awareness, particularly in a war zone. Let's not forget, either, that this administration has not only repeatedly refused to rule out the use of torture in these camps, but has actively promoted its use as an expedient, arguing that the captives are not protected by the Geneva Convention. On top of all that, Dick Cheney himself has confirmed our government's use of waterboarding on these inmates. A technique which, even its US government practitioners claim is most definitely torture.
So there's plenty of evidence out there that we're treating these people like animals, regardless of how you and other children like you close your eyes, plug your ears, and shout "lalalalalalalalala," in a disingenuous effort to claim ignorance. If you want facts, just open your eyes.
I do agree with you about the press, though. Once it was alleged in the press that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it certainly did become "fact" to all the booboisie out there. The administration and its shills were not complaining about the press then, were they?
Oh, aren't we great? Welcome to Guantanamo--here is your Koran, Mecca is that way. Excuse me a moment while I put a bag over your head and connect this car battery to your testicles...
It's scary enough that in this country we have soldiers who seem to believe that political propaganda (or politics in general) belong to their job descriptions. What's even more frightening is that some of this discussion is about whether or not it's appropriate for Wikipedia to throw stones, entirely missing the point. Is our misunderstanding of our own birth as a nation so broken that we cannot recall that George Washington himself refused the presidency until he resigned his command on the very principle that the military should have no part in politics? What is this, Stalinist Russia?
Nobody has pointed out that what used to be the Harvard Coop is now owned by Barnes and Noble. Is it still a coop? Is this policy one of the Harvard store, or a general Barnes and Noble thing?
Has nobody noticed that the numbers indicate virtually no change between the MacOS and Windows markets, except for a small increase in the MacOS share? From December, Vista is up 4.36%, but entirely at the expense of XP and 2000, collectively down exactly 4.36%. In contrast, the combination of MacOS and MacIntel are up 0.33%.
So, basically this illuminates the fact that XP and 2000 users are switching to Vista.
This is depressing. I read Slashdot to get a sense of the zeitgeist of the software profession--what's new, what's important, what are people thinking? Evidently one of us thought some dopey article in "Popular Mechanics" was important enough to bring to the editors' attention, and the editors concurred and rewarded us all with the shocking revelation of "the end of broadcast television!" I can only conclude that either Slashdot is losing touch with the reality of the software profession, or else the "profession" has been abandoned by the educated and rational, and left to credulous, the hacks, the repairmen. Those who, armed with associates' degrees and the latest bogus Microsoft certifications, believe that their ability to copy a "hello world" program from "Learn C++ in 7 Days!" qualifies them to be software engineers or even programmers. How sad.
The next time I read about an alien invasion or Paris Hilton in the "Weekly World News" I'll be sure to post the article here.
...and we can spell nuclear, "newkewlar" for all the idiots who think this is a good idea. It isn't spelling that needs simplifying, it's simpletons who need to learn spelling.
First, you used the wrong figure for total employed workers in the sector. The footnote on the document you quoted explains that this number is probably low because it doesn't even include self-employed people. Instead, we should use number from Table 9, Employed Persons By Occupation, Sex, and Age, derived from the Current Population Survey. That number is 3,117,000 for FY 2002. The unemployment number I cited came from the same Survey, Table 25, Unemployed Persons by Occupation and Sex. So, make sure you read the fine print.
"So," you say, "that only makes my point more clearly because now the employed number is even greater!" True, a larger number of employed people makes the unemployment rate smaller. This leads to my second point: how to compute a ratio. Clearly you calculated 5.8% using 160000/2772620. This is wrong. The unemployment rate is unemployed/total_employable. Using the proper numbers, calculating properly, we get 4.9%; which, in fact, is the rate shown by Table 25. So, make sure you do your math properly.
"Well," you say, "yet again that only proves my point since you have lowered the rate further to 4.9%!" Not so fast. Yes, all of us who have taken basic EC 101 and 102 know that for a labor market to function properly there must be *some* level of unemployment, otherwise the employers get snookered. There is, however, a great deal of argument about exactly what is a healthy number. Sure, this is less than the average, 5.8%, but that's not relevant. So I'll just cede the point for a moment and accept your 3-4% as "generally good," although I have no idea where it came from. By your own measure, then, the unemployment rate of this class of workers is 0.9% outside the upper bound of good. You may suggest that 0.9% is a small number, but don't forget that it's more than a 25% diversion from the median of the acceptable 3-4%. That *is* serious, even by the proper computation. By yours, it's worse--a 43% deviation! So, when you're making a point, try to be consistent with your own arguments.
Fourth, these guys are not immigrants as you suggest, but *guest workers*, invited here through industry lobbying for more workers during the bubble years because it was desperate for more programmers, and the government caved to their threats that the country couldn't compete in the global marketplace with then current staffing levels. Well, the bubble's burst, and citizens are losing jobs they needn't lose. Why? Because they're cheap. According to the Immigration Bureau again, these guys in computer-related occupations in FY 2002 made a median income of $60,000. According to your BLS source, the mean annual wage for this sector in general was $61,630 in 2002. So, they're here becuase the IT industry can get them cheaper than citizens. Even for those of us *with* jobs, that pressure depresses our wage. So, try to have a handle on the basic facts when you're making a point.
In conclusion, you seem to have constructed an argument based upon slipshod research, erroneous sixth-grade arithmetic, a lack of rhetorical consistency, and little understanding of the basic facts. "Elite Hacker" indeed! I should have your job.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably, then, by "openness" Ms. Clinton means "subject only to regulation by big media," because until the Obama administration makes material strides to back the FCC in regulating real net neutrality, that's what we get. Our internet speech may not be impeded by the red-herring "kill switch," but it surely will by the Verizons and Comcasts and AT&Ts that control the packets.
It would rock if they programmed it in Lisp...
Good question. It seems to me that a "firewall" in the normal sense of the thing that allows connections only on particular ports using particular protocols will not protect against such infections, but I got the impression from the article that the author was using the term more loosely than that. His example of the SQL Slammer suggests this, because presumably it arrives through acceptable firewall (in the strict sense) doors...
So how does this protect users against infected flash drives, downloaded tarballs, &c.?
This is absurd. Dr. Weiner published his seminal book "Cybernetics" in 1948...
"An idea sketched out by a [HP] research team?" At least the reporter corrected HP's claim to innovation. In fact, here in VT, CVPS has been doing this for years...
I can agree with all of this except the "backed by a major vendor" part, which seems superfluous... Design is all about maintaining a coherent vision of the end product, whereas hammering a tin shed on the side of the Taj Mahal is always a bad idea, particularly for maintainability and robustness. What isn't clear to me is why I need a vendor to supply my vision when I've already had years of education and experience...
With apologies to Isaac Asimov, "Google, is there any way to reverse entropy?"
The "Russian tradition of building secret towns?" Towns like Oak Ridge, TN, or Los Alamos, NM, or Hanford, WA, maybe? Explain again how this project is doomed to fail as a government effort to make a technological leap. On the contrary, our own experience is great success doing this sort of thing. Nor is this an American peculiarity--the Germans very successfully built an entire town at Peenemunde to develop and construct V-2 rockets. In fact, here in America we capitalized on this success by moving its authors, notably Werner von Braun, to Huntsville, AL where we created yet another failed government experiment to land men on the moon...
I'm thinking that people should read a bit less Ayn Rand science fiction and a bit more actual history.
You don't need carpentry skills to build a chair, either, just the tools. It will, however, be a piece of junk. It will be wobbly, ugly, dangerous, and short-lived.
...perhaps they can harvest some of that cheese from the moon again?
Yes, of course I went from private school library to municipality, that is my whole point. Censorship is not always infringing upon peoples' right to free speech, yet it is still censorship, i.e. the suppression of anything considered objectionable. When practiced by a minority it is simply annoying, but when it's institutionalized it's damaging, because *then* it detracts from free speech.
Once censorship becomes an infringement, though, it's a bit late to address the problem. Instead, we need to keep our eyes open and avoid it while it's still just annoying, particularly when the writing is on the wall, as it were...
You have a point, ceoyoyo, but I don't think it's a very good one. Your point is that the cloud's servers are private, so the owners are free to use them any way they please. Certainly that is true, but this doesn't exclude the fact that they are censoring content if they disallow the sharing of material that they have, alone, whimsically determined to be "offensive." The building metaphor is persuasive, but misleading--a building is not an information medium. Graffiti is offensive, indeed a crime, not because of its semantic content but because of the paint. A more apt metaphor would be that of a private school library refusing to shelve Salinger's "Catcher in The Rye" because it offends the librarian. He has every right to exclude anything from his library that he likes, but it's still censorship.
The argument that I can share my material elsewhere, like here at Slashdot for example, doesn't change the fact that the cloud owners are censoring content, it only changes the *effect* of the censorship. A sophomore in the private school can always get "Catcher in The Rye" in a public library, or buy it himself. If, however, municipalities ban the book from their library shelves, and then private bookstores prefer not to stock it for fear of offending their customer base, then we have a problem. A bunch of yahoos burning books in a parking lot is pretty harmless, but if the yahoos are the majority or the authority then it becomes frightening. Somewhere in between "harmless" and "frightening" is cause for alarm--the question is, where?
I raised the point (hardly a rant), because I believe that there is some cause for concern here. First, the very private companies that market their clouds have, in the past, colluded with governments in order to censor content. Clearly, for the people of China, this is bad--the equivalent of the "frightening" scenario above. One may argue who cares, we don't live in China, but our own federal government and some states have moved or are planning to shift their information services to privately owned clouds. So ultimately, even here in the USA, a private cloud can actually be public.
That is why we should all be wary of censorship on private cloud computing platforms.
"Censorship" is the proper word to describe this. The notion that I cannot express myself except in some "inoffensive" manner, for whatever values of "inoffensive" are acceptable to the owner of the cloud. I can see the "great wall cloud of China" already. Haven't big search companies already kowtowed to the Chinese government in order to access their markets? Is it inconceivable that Google would agree to Chinese government review of shared documents in order to serve the Chinese "cloud computing" market? I don't think it is.
Even here, imagine trying to write almost any kind of literary critique of Henry Miller, Ferdinand Celine or Vladimir Nabakov...
I agree that there will be such bugs. Reviewing the code may or may not reveal them. It seems to me that if the question is one of whether or not the device works properly, then submitting to testing by an independent laboratory is a much better way to find out, and one that doesn't compromise the company. In my experience, we prove that we meet software requirements by testing, not by peer review.
If you want to learn about something complex and nuanced, then your television is the wrong place to look. It has been argued by sociologists like Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and even by admen themselves, like Jerry Mander in his Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television, that the medium of television is a poor conduit for complex ideas.
Even the networks which have not arguably been "dumbed down," like the History Channel mentioned here, are a pretty poor provider of accurate detail, although they are certainly entertaining. For example, the "Engineering an Empire" program covering they Byzantines suggested that the Emperor Justinian was a brilliant leader, whereas in fact he was not a visionary at all, but an easily manipulated tool whose military victories in Europe, vaunted by the program, were provided by his general Belisarius (cf. Lord Mahon's The Life of Belisarius).
Personally, I recommend books for the fundamentals and periodicals from the IEEE or ACM for the leading edge. Television is only good for a broad overview of the current buzz, not for diving deep into anything.
Doesn't anyone notice that the EU's "official statement" was released as a .DOC file? So, if I'm a citizen of the EU, I have to pay money to Microsoft to participate in my government?
What's worse is that we're so inured to this sort of thing, nobody even noticed!
Fenestrae delendae sunt.
Oops, darn, my geography is almost as bad as your spelling. I'm confusing Guantanamo with Abu Ghraib, where we have piles of evidence that the inmates were tortured in this way, and others besides. Now, I'm sure that you'll counter with the lame argument that this behavior was perpetrated by a few "rogue soldiers." Hmm. The last time I looked, the military was a hierarchically structured organization with a well-defined chain of command, run by a bunch of grown ups, who, being adults, are directly responsible for their inferiors' behavior. So even if these were "isolated incidents," the blame lies squarely on the heads of perpetrators' officers. Further, as we both know, a private soldier can't have a wank without his officer's permission, much less his awareness, particularly in a war zone. Let's not forget, either, that this administration has not only repeatedly refused to rule out the use of torture in these camps, but has actively promoted its use as an expedient, arguing that the captives are not protected by the Geneva Convention. On top of all that, Dick Cheney himself has confirmed our government's use of waterboarding on these inmates. A technique which, even its US government practitioners claim is most definitely torture.
So there's plenty of evidence out there that we're treating these people like animals, regardless of how you and other children like you close your eyes, plug your ears, and shout "lalalalalalalalala," in a disingenuous effort to claim ignorance. If you want facts, just open your eyes.
I do agree with you about the press, though. Once it was alleged in the press that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it certainly did become "fact" to all the booboisie out there. The administration and its shills were not complaining about the press then, were they?
Oh, aren't we great? Welcome to Guantanamo--here is your Koran, Mecca is that way. Excuse me a moment while I put a bag over your head and connect this car battery to your testicles...
It's scary enough that in this country we have soldiers who seem to believe that political propaganda (or politics in general) belong to their job descriptions. What's even more frightening is that some of this discussion is about whether or not it's appropriate for Wikipedia to throw stones, entirely missing the point. Is our misunderstanding of our own birth as a nation so broken that we cannot recall that George Washington himself refused the presidency until he resigned his command on the very principle that the military should have no part in politics? What is this, Stalinist Russia?
Nobody has pointed out that what used to be the Harvard Coop is now owned by Barnes and Noble. Is it still a coop? Is this policy one of the Harvard store, or a general Barnes and Noble thing?
Has nobody noticed that the numbers indicate virtually no change between the MacOS and Windows markets, except for a small increase in the MacOS share? From December, Vista is up 4.36%, but entirely at the expense of XP and 2000, collectively down exactly 4.36%. In contrast, the combination of MacOS and MacIntel are up 0.33%.
So, basically this illuminates the fact that XP and 2000 users are switching to Vista.
This is depressing. I read Slashdot to get a sense of the zeitgeist of the software profession--what's new, what's important, what are people thinking? Evidently one of us thought some dopey article in "Popular Mechanics" was important enough to bring to the editors' attention, and the editors concurred and rewarded us all with the shocking revelation of "the end of broadcast television!" I can only conclude that either Slashdot is losing touch with the reality of the software profession, or else the "profession" has been abandoned by the educated and rational, and left to credulous, the hacks, the repairmen. Those who, armed with associates' degrees and the latest bogus Microsoft certifications, believe that their ability to copy a "hello world" program from "Learn C++ in 7 Days!" qualifies them to be software engineers or even programmers. How sad.
The next time I read about an alien invasion or Paris Hilton in the "Weekly World News" I'll be sure to post the article here.
...and we can spell nuclear, "newkewlar" for all the idiots who think this is a good idea. It isn't spelling that needs simplifying, it's simpletons who need to learn spelling.
"So," you say, "that only makes my point more clearly because now the employed number is even greater!" True, a larger number of employed people makes the unemployment rate smaller. This leads to my second point: how to compute a ratio. Clearly you calculated 5.8% using 160000/2772620. This is wrong. The unemployment rate is unemployed/total_employable. Using the proper numbers, calculating properly, we get 4.9%; which, in fact, is the rate shown by Table 25. So, make sure you do your math properly.
"Well," you say, "yet again that only proves my point since you have lowered the rate further to 4.9%!" Not so fast. Yes, all of us who have taken basic EC 101 and 102 know that for a labor market to function properly there must be *some* level of unemployment, otherwise the employers get snookered. There is, however, a great deal of argument about exactly what is a healthy number. Sure, this is less than the average, 5.8%, but that's not relevant. So I'll just cede the point for a moment and accept your 3-4% as "generally good," although I have no idea where it came from. By your own measure, then, the unemployment rate of this class of workers is 0.9% outside the upper bound of good. You may suggest that 0.9% is a small number, but don't forget that it's more than a 25% diversion from the median of the acceptable 3-4%. That *is* serious, even by the proper computation. By yours, it's worse--a 43% deviation! So, when you're making a point, try to be consistent with your own arguments.
Fourth, these guys are not immigrants as you suggest, but *guest workers*, invited here through industry lobbying for more workers during the bubble years because it was desperate for more programmers, and the government caved to their threats that the country couldn't compete in the global marketplace with then current staffing levels. Well, the bubble's burst, and citizens are losing jobs they needn't lose. Why? Because they're cheap. According to the Immigration Bureau again, these guys in computer-related occupations in FY 2002 made a median income of $60,000. According to your BLS source, the mean annual wage for this sector in general was $61,630 in 2002. So, they're here becuase the IT industry can get them cheaper than citizens. Even for those of us *with* jobs, that pressure depresses our wage. So, try to have a handle on the basic facts when you're making a point.
In conclusion, you seem to have constructed an argument based upon slipshod research, erroneous sixth-grade arithmetic, a lack of rhetorical consistency, and little understanding of the basic facts. "Elite Hacker" indeed! I should have your job.