Your wife probably isn't much into gaming because twitch games require such an investment of effort any more.
The Wii, on the other hand, appeals to people that aren't much into gaming any more. Like your wife. Dollars to donuts, she'll be addicted to Zelda like it is crack cocaine because she'll think the character's adorable and she likes flailing around and seeing her motions translated into swordplay.
Slashdot. Nerd. Date's dad was a VP at NASA. Excited to meet him.
Seems patently clear and logical to me.
I am an erstwhile fan of good chefs and brilliant engineering, but couldn't care less about actors and politicians and the society page types. The something wrong isn't with us. It's with the rest of the world.
You're right about this being extensively tested. Two colleagues of mine did a sizeable amount of this sort of testing. An 8' square shack mounted on a hoist, filled with racks and gear to where there was barely room for 2 people, incredibly long damn days being moved up/down/left/right outside of a stationary jet, bombarding the aircraft with all sorts of RF from every possible angle on an airfield in Arizona. Their tone when they talk about that project always brought to mind the last Death March coding project I endured.
Admittedly, I *don't* know which aircraft these two friends tested. But, what you referred to as 'front-door' risks were found, they can be reproduced in-cabin by a handheld HAM-license transciever and they're capable of altering instrument readings enough to be devastating at times, including during landing. Frankly, the reason I don't know more is because they didn't *talk* about specifics here, in a way that mirrored how they didn't talk about specifics whenever they weren't allowed due to nondisclosure contracts or government classification. (Please, don't swerve into this side topic; I don't honestly know if any of this was classified or not).
So, and I apologize if this is rude, but have you been hired to do this specific sort of extensive testing by Boeing, the US government, or whoever?
Because these friend of mine have. And they didn't walk away *SURE* that this sort of thing was impossible. They walked away knowing that interference was profoundly difficult, rare, had narrow frequencies that affected the specific plane... and possible. They had complete confidence that cellphone use wasn't likely to hit all those at once, but they didn't think it was technically feasible/possible to test all the scenarios to guarantee that a stray harmonic out of some personal device wasn't going to cause trouble. They both would routinely insist that they agreed with cellphones being turned off, since that incredibly thin chance still existed.
Yeah, I think uninformed nontechs are the bane of all science policy rhetoric in the world today. But saying NEVER-NEVER like you do is itself a bad thing. And I believe airlines will always seek to exploit this financially. But I also recognize the great senator from WTF, the honorable Mr. Murphy. Stray RF from laptops, cellphones, and PDA's introduce a tiny risk, but that turning these devices off during high-risk times (esp. when landing) is an acceptable amount of discomfort to avoid the problem.
At some point, in-flight cellular might be allowed, and my nontech opinion is that a picocell helps because it'll dial back the adaptive transmitters in cell phones to minimize their ability to punch thru and cause problems. But I wager it'll be as restricted as smoking and laptops. Risk Management (which *is* my day job) is entirely about balancing the small inconvenience of turning off a few hundred RF emitters for twenty minutes at each end of a flight against the fiery, screamin' deaths of a couple hundred people.
(there, I think I've edited out all the always's and nevers and such. And I'm out of time)
Rhino may have accidentally created a straw man, but GGP did artificially create the bogus Corporations-->US linkage.
It's unfair to blame Americans here. Multinational corporations are involved. Which means there's nothing to stop a Free Market response to China in every country.
Caveat: Personally, I think the day China embraced capitalism, they lost the great revolution. Capitalism is improving people's lives substantially and one day the chinese citizenry will 'wake up' and decide that human life is valuable. Trial reform, environmental protection minimums, civil rights, etc... they'll just tell the government that they need them. And if it doesn't happen quickly, nature will conjure up another cultural seismic shift like happened in the US in response to the social constraints of the US's 1950's. (a generational shift in values akin to what we saw with the Beatniks, then Rock, then Woodstock). It'll be different, but it'll involve youthful rebellion so subtle that the Chinese government won't be able to stop it.
And there was me thinking it was leetspeek for 'exploiter'
I translated it into exploder. Thanks.
BTW, what d'ya think of this thread's nimroddery and faux stupidity (I hope) on the presenter's nick being referenced in the first place. At first, it's funny, then it gets more and more strained and lame. Sort of like watching nerds struggling at chitchat... (lightbulb comes on)... um, nevermind!
If someone had modded you up as funny, I'd let this pass. Hopefully, you were at least a bit tongue in cheek with your remark. If not...
From what I've seen over the years, research/scientific use sticks with whatever platform they need (unix flavors, linux flavors, windows or even a couple VMS'y critters). They've got good technical and legal reasons for keeping things unchanged. Most of these users either use a windows box for reporting, or generate their reports their own way and more or less ignore that they're causing other people any friction.
Everyone else is a supply chain feeding documentation to the secretary level, or interacting with the rest of the world for acquisitions. An army's only as strong as it's supply chain, or whatever cliche goes here. Further, it is staffed by people that came from jobs where they used windows. SO... all the way up the chain of command or out on the supply chain, win and office keep things simple. Shifting to OpenOffice or another mechanism occasionally doesn't work. And even a tiny amount of friction costs more than buying windows and MSOffice.
Three-letter acronyms and government employment don't change things a lickspittle: windows is ubiquitous because of inertia (both in what file formats people expect to receive and in what applications they know from non-governmental jobs).
As for Vista vs. XP, new machines will come with Vista, which will start the inertial build-up all over again.
Let me put this into a personal role. I have worked in small government groups that have tried to shift away from Windows and MSOffice. We'd have been happy accomplishing either part of that separation (OS or office suite). The OS part became a problem because I kept getting os-specific work. If I'm adding a few features to a windows app, I have to do it in Visual Studio. There's just no money or time in the allocation to unwind the app (whose documentation is stored in some vast Washington WRITE-ONLY facility, I'm told) and convert it to something platform-agnostic. Luckily, there's a lot of java coding going on. I dislike java for other reasons, but at least it is not created on windows by windows for windows... so that part gives me hope.
Next, on noncode: my other work tended to be infosec (Cybersecurity) documentation and user guides and the likes. I'll get handed a word doc, and have to revise it, edit it, or whatever. Most times, it is rife with clever formatting that improves some aspect of readability at the expense of portability. Inset textboxes of text that summarize whole pages for people too busy to read the whole document. Formatting and layout done six different ways when six other people made revisions. Dynamically-linked content. Contradictory mechanisms for indexing or page numbering or creating a TOC. Frankly, the more important documents that bring together material from multiple sources or writers or editors are as brittle as a house of cards. When we'd make the attempt to do even trivial editing in Open Office 1.x (haven't had opportunity since 2.0), stuff'd break. So, we were forced back to MSOffice. And attempts to generate the stuff we originated in Open Office hit the 'what the heck is this filetype' questions from our recipients.
We made inroads. And I install open office 2.0 on each machine I use. I use it. And so far, I'm ok... but I'm not using it in circumstances that test the limits like I mentioned above, so YMMV.
There are some efforts being made to push the federal government into high-level mandates that push the market where they need, rather than enduring what the vendors want. Out of the box security has a high priority. I'm sure there are other priorities above crushing the windows lock-in, but this idea is at least getting attention. This will help immensely. And I really believe it is inevitable.
Uncool, even to make your point. I can identify with your situation -- I'm a progressive living near a town recently deemed the most conservative town in the US. So I'm used to quiet indignities, but...
um, seriously...
Did you just indirectly call Bruce S stupid (and say 'Who cares, Bruce?') and then execute this poor of a logical fallacy?
The subject was perceived vs. real risk, not responses to that risk (policy or otherwise). As much as your situation sucks, that's like ranting at your mechanic because you own a Yugo. He's not an expert on countering radical islam. He's an expert on encryption and risk (identifying and quantifying it). If Bruce started talking about response to your radical islamic problem, I'd really hope you'd shrug him off as uninformed and inexpert.
And I'm sure you realize that Holland could be exhibit 'C' in Schneier's case. Despots, tyrants and thugs have always used murdering prominent foes as an effective way to oppress dissent. This is the archtype of leveraging of perceived risk vs. actual risk. The fear of *also* being murdered outweighs the quiet, gentle indignation of losing some tiny bit of freedom or control. This chilling effect happens despite the actual risk being a zillion times less than the perceived risk (after all, if the goons you're up against started killing scores of people, your job of identifying and punishing them would be much easier).
Good luck, and it's good to remember that quiet, gentle indignation is harnessable. The next tough part is coming up with a plan and a safe fulcrum to leverage that sentiment. After all, Gandhi found one fulcrum, Hitler found another. Seems to me that that's the really tough part.
If anything, Wikipedia's constant change (particularly on the fringe topics) means it is useless as some sort of "set in stone" archive of any time period.
For sale next week on eBay: slashdot UID 3104.
Current owner ruined it when he popped off with some smelly, nasty ol' people-magazine-mindset shizzit about Wikipedia that trashed his I/T cred permanently.
----
Really. People that don't understand the change-tracking mechanism beneath wikipedia really shouldn't spout off like you just did. You end up lookin' like an idiot. Sorry if that's harsh, but there you have it. Even a low UID can't save your ass from that glaring of a dumbass remark.
Now, if you'd just cranked off some insane remarks about conspiracy theories, NASA, politics, explosives or the weather, us slashdotters wouldn't all be staring at you like you just farted in church. But that ship's sailed... good luck on the auction, dude.
(attention, moderators: I disabled my own karma and subscriber bonuses before posting, and I didn't take the easy way out with A/C, either. Troll-rate me if you must, but this sort of stupidity needs to be called out in plain terms).
Thanks for taking the time to shoot down this myth. Nicely put.
Anyone that spouts ill-informed CW about why Wikipedia won't allow cites, misses your attempt to clarify completely, doesn't grasp the idea of versioning, and yet somehow seems comfortable with generic URL links is demonstrably beyond help.
Which is when I mutter "don't feed the trolls" and move along.
Similarly, the argument of having passwords coresident with in-use data sounds a lot like... hmmm... oh, yes: the/etc/passwd file twenty years ago. And now unix uses a shadow file.
Sorry, as a computer security expert (but admittedly not a cryptologist), I ain't buyin' any of these arguments.
Look at the power of a metapassword (master key) for taking a simple, generic, trusted symmetric encryption algorithm (twofish, for example), plus data needing encrypted, plus a master key, and generating considerably more hardness than Gaim's planned design. And you'll note that no argument against 1 is given!!!
Security by obscurity is not by itself adequate, but it can be a valid component of a security plan: an algorithmically generated OTP or other machine-unique password CAN be used to 'keep honest people honest'. Weak encryption plus obscurity plus permissions would be better than the just relying on permissions.
Limited access to the file should be ONE SMALL PIECE of a larger security plan. But it is insufficient. It presumes the Gaim user is also the system admin. Sys admins for academic systems or other large-organization unix installations are NOT infallibly honest, and telling people that 'if you don't know who has access to your password file, you've got other problems' presumes that all systems look like the developer's home system (where (s)he is sys-admin and owner. I understand that is the predominant case now, but it ain't the only case and it is lazy to presume all other use cases are invalid. Futher (and more frighteningly, in many ways), OS/User file permissions do nothing to protect a user from a trojan or spyware that grabs and exploits/forwards a keyfile. This one worries me more because I can readily envision a trojan designed to use an insecure Gaim password file as a propagation vector. Get in via whatever means, steal that user's keys, use that knowledge to spread. Given most users' password reuse, GAIM itself doesn't even need to be the application used for spreading: the vector can just use this cache of passwords for suggestions of the user's OTHER passwords (local system, domain/network, email, ISP account, etc). Damn it, we're supposed to be smarter than this!
default: don't store passwords. The only secure mechanism offered, and an unmitigated pain in the ass. It is the equivalent of admitting defeat or incompetence.
Lastly, "don't stay logged into AIM" needs no response. That's like telling people to unplug their phone between uses: Abso-frickin-lutely ludicrous... a straw man in dire need of some lighter fluid and a match.
The correct mechanism is to get the passwords the fsck OUT of a working file into a file used for that ONE purpose so it can be better-managed both on-disk and in-memory, build a master key mechanism as the linked article mentioned in part 1, and allow that as a nearly-secure alternative to option 4. Given that 4 and 1 share the keylogger-plus-trojan-forwarder vulnerability, I'm leaning toward saying they're equally secure. But it's late and implementation details matter a lot on security designs like this. I could be wrong.
A last comment: I *LOVE* GAIM. I USE IT CONSTANTLY. And this issue notwithstanding, I have deep respect for GAIM and other open-source developers. I'm sorry that I come across as pretty hard on the developers here (let me just apologize right now for callin' y'all lazy. I know you're NOT). But I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for GAIM. NO way. There must be people dependent enough on GAIM that know crypto well enough to help the developers through the development and rough 'proving' out of a better algorithm than this set of excuses. All they'd have to do is sugar-coat the call-for-help.
Sorry to hear your story. I'm not generally a fan of litigation, but after reading your msg, I'd agree Aladdin deserved to be sued into oblivion.
Of course, perhaps we'll get to watch Sony or some other megacorp buy this insanity. I can't see how it will end differently than Divx. Maybe that'll give you some consolation: it won't be the same as a juicy court settlement, but schadenfreude can be damn theraputic.
Well, first of all, in 1000 years, humans won't evolve to be a foot taller. Even if we were to evolve to those average heights, it'd take a lot longer than 1000 years.
Mean height between 6' and 7' isn't necessarily a foot of additional height. A few inches would do it, since the mean was at 5'8" when I was 18, IIR. And 4" in a thousand years seems easy... I'm 6' tall and 40 yrs old, and where I live there are obviously a lot more 5'10"+ women in the current generation than there were in mine. Girls within a couple inches of my height have gone from startlingly uncommon to ubiquitous mall-rats in 20 years.
I'd always believed it was progress in nutrition that made the obvious height increases in my own family over the last two generations, but aside from a few thousand cheap pizzas, I ate pretty well as a kid... so there may be other (genetic?) factors still in play. It isn't unthinkable for genetics and nutrition to push heights up a few more inches in *30* generations.
That said, I agree that TFA is BS. My wife is 5'2", for example. How'll this sort of 'mixing of subspecies' be stopped? I honestly CANNOT IMAGINE any physical or societal change capable of segregating people based on some superficial characteristic like height. It'd be like defying entropy in physics.
Um, even searching on minWidth or tabMinWidth, I don't find a browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting in the doc page you linked to. Thanks 1e6 for the link itself though... always cool to see how deeply configurable something is, even if I never find the time to do more customizing.
Back in the day, slashdot used to be a relatively effective part of this sort of a peer-managed geek filtering system. Generic crap in, only the good stuff as headlines.
Nowadays, they're up to their eyeballs in the BS. Heck, I'm not a conspiracy theorist type, but it does seem like they've changed at a pretty fundamental level. Granted, content often comes wrapped in these paragraph per page of ads schmears, but if slashdot as a group doesn't try to exert some influence, what good are they!?
You do realize that each box must be visited one or two times a day to *EMPTY* it, right? And if you open a mailbox daily only to find it either empty (most days) or nearly-empty(others)... wouldn't that seem like a good time to consolidate a few mailboxes!?
Nostalgic as I am, I don't mind a bit of common sense being used to thin out glaring inefficiencies.
First, a snark: Your second sentence isn't even a question, let alone rhetorical.
Your first sentence is either mocking slashdot or a submitter or popular press for misstating something (thus earning a monumental 'Well, DUH!'), or is foolishly thinking that you're the first to realize maybe nature's been-there, done-that. Which earns a fat raspberry. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_na me and you'll see most researchers talk about synthesis of TRU elements. The word 'create' is like 'discover'... it creeps in unintentionally because most of humanity doesn't give a rat's ass about these nuances. Including me.
Personally, I'm a bit annoyed that you got into high dudgeon about grammar when something this profoundly cool was available. After all, these researchers have just managed to accomplish something so damn hard that they're the first despite EVERY PHYSICIST ON THE PLANET understanding the ground rules:
Bang big atoms together, create a fatty, win bragging rights forever.
Like the Nobel, this is possibly as cool as nerd-cool ever gets. Heck, it can even get you *LAID!* Who the hell cares about lame slashdot editing in the face of THAT!?
I see where you're coming from on this, but you'd probably agree that punish/reward aspects to games are a bit more complicated.
A gamer doesn't think of another quarter* as simply as you describe it. Another quarter can be used for a different game, without anyone feeling punished for success. Heck, I've *NEVER* played an arcade game that let me change tracks or cars or player personalities without putting in another quarter.
And if they're uncoordinated wonks like I am, another quarter has nothing to do with rewards/return: I often move on to another game or a different car or a different field because the previous one was handing me my ass and I want to see if maybe I can do a bit better if I shift things around. And if/when I found a game I could consistently beat, I didn't feel gypped... the other scenarios or games were just a quarter away.
Last of all, because of familiarity and sweet-spots and what seemed fun, I can tell you that nearly every option-rich game I have owned in ~30 years has seen a WICKED bell-curve on how I played the options. There were half a dozen *favorite* cartridges for the Atari, and on those just a few favorite settings. On MK, I had a favorite persona, and another that I never quite could master. Ditto for customizations/weapons/scenarios/mods for Wizardry, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Quake 3, Halo, Halo 2, GT, Evercrack, and on games my kids and I play now. If I got a default half-dozen racers, and then bought several classic roadsters, a new 'vette, a 911 and a Lotus, that'd be enough for me. And when my wife says she wants a hybrid car, I'd think it was great if I could say 'hmmm... let's try out the Prius and the Escape on.... the shure-kill (Schuylkill) express simulator'. Esp. if my net out of pocket by the time I'm done is five or ten bucks more than the game.
Come to think of it, tell me car companies wouldn't *SPONSOR* physics-accurate demos (and prepaid downloads) of their cars to enable virtual test-drives for approved customers.
*quarter = 5c, 10c, 25c, 50c, 75c, $1... whatever. Another payment. By the way, anything more than a few cents DOESN'T feel very micropaymenty to me.
Then let's just toss that shiny POS word aside and call this what it was:
Private investigators pretended to have police or governmental authority when requesting these records. That is impersonating an officer, forgery, or any of a dozen century-old laws being violated.
Given that the word pretexting is being used to embellish manifestly-illegal actions (nobody lies about who they are if they have legal grounds for obtaining records) into a less damaging name, it seems to me that pretexting is like GNU... it's recursive.
Star Trek and the like are at least Science Fiction: not based upon the supernatural, but instead upon testable, and currently tested theories and ideas.
Heh, I've waited 20+ years to repeat this old saw...
We were seniors in high school and the US Air Force recruiter came to visit. Part-way through his presentation, Recruiter-dude said 'Everything from Star Trek, we're doing in today's Air Force'. Three of us nerds sitting together bust into laughter and riffed (at the same time):
"Warp Factor Six, Mr. Sulu"
"Set phasors on Stun"
"Beam me Up, Scotty"
Dilithium, tribbles, vulcan everything, photon torpedos, ship-caliber phaser-blasts putting a whole town to sleep, alien technology that was never capitalized on (turning people into cubes, romulan cloaking) and blue beer. Q, the boundlessness of the holodeck. Interstellar gateways, time paradoxes and spacetime rifts, planet-eating drones, energy beings.
Star Trek was SF. It was ASTOUNDINGLY speculative, often at levels that tax even MY optimism on our ability to advance even in a million years (The Transporter, specifically). But at least it portrayed science and discovery in a positive light. Let's just agree it did yeoman's work in true-SF habit of using fictional/future science to awaken questions, explore ethical challenges... and stop there.
(thanks for the best laugh in a week... I put up with a lot of useless crap readin' slashdot just for this sort of wanderin' humor. From robots with one ball to piers anthony's wierd sexual proclivities to GP to your comment... priceless)
I've worked with the 3LA crowd a fair amount, and I have yet to meet one that wasn't a bit mental. Half of them have a creepy elevated-charisma thing going. The other half? Well, to be blunt, they almost *always* leave me the impression of that wierd guy arguing with his elbow and asking you to pick sides while you're waiting in queue.
And then there's the oppenheimer moments: Doin' cool stuff that is given a usage scenario that seems noble/harmless enough, but losing sleep as you consider all the ways your work could be abused.
So, I guess I'm saying 1: don't take it personally, and 2: count your blessings.
My father worked 29 years for the state. He didn't get profit-sharing, or 401k's, or an income that'd give him money to invest. He got a pension. A meager one. By choosing to retire *EARLY* after 29 years and at the age of 63, he took a HUGE cut in per-month payout. And his paltry little pension came with his reduced salary, which was routinely 20% LOWER than the industry norm. And now, he watches as legislators routinely deny even a 3% cost-of-inflation adustment.
Ironically, even the 3% increase annually wouldn't keep pace with his insurance premium payments. Each year for the last 10 (he's 73 now), his pension has shrunk, after those premiums. Adjusted for 10 years of inflation, he's hovering above poverty.
Pretty much everything else you've hit on rate as either disingenuous or trollish or 'DUH!'.
As for your wife, have her move to a union-buster state like Idaho, even as a gedanken-experiment: I bet HARD cash that she makes a helluva-lot more wherever you live under union-negotiated contracts than she'd see here.
Unions and management are a tug-of-war. The fact that either side has greedy self-serving bastards in charge cancels out. What is left is overall greatest benefit, and while it might seem easy to shriek 'low prices low prices' as you complain about those lazy union fucks that gave us a 5-day 40-hour work-week, occupational safety laws that make it unthinkable for americans to be cavalierly KILLED by their jobs, and so many other benefits, you're so wrong that words escape me.
Oh, and I'm not a pro-union troll (my only time in a union job was boxin' groceries when I was 17 or 18), or a nafta-hater. Life's complicated and greatest overall net benefit, in my opinion, comes from people banding together. That's what pro-union people believe in. Commonwealth. As opposed to trickle-down voodoo.
Slashdot Mirror
Your wife probably isn't much into gaming because twitch games require such an investment of effort any more.
The Wii, on the other hand, appeals to people that aren't much into gaming any more. Like your wife. Dollars to
donuts, she'll be addicted to Zelda like it is crack cocaine because she'll think the character's adorable and
she likes flailing around and seeing her motions translated into swordplay.
's fun. Really.
Slashdot. Nerd. Date's dad was a VP at NASA. Excited to meet him.
Seems patently clear and logical to me.
I am an erstwhile fan of good chefs and brilliant engineering, but couldn't care less about actors and politicians and the society page types. The something wrong isn't with us. It's with the rest of the world.
BananaEndian:
You're right about this being extensively tested. Two colleagues of mine did a sizeable amount of this sort of testing. An 8' square shack mounted on a hoist, filled with racks and gear to where there was barely room for 2 people, incredibly long damn days being moved up/down/left/right outside of a stationary jet, bombarding the aircraft with all sorts of RF from every possible angle on an airfield in Arizona. Their tone when they talk about that project always brought to mind the last Death March coding project I endured.
Admittedly, I *don't* know which aircraft these two friends tested. But, what you referred to as 'front-door' risks were found, they can be reproduced in-cabin by a handheld HAM-license transciever and they're capable of altering instrument readings enough to be devastating at times, including during landing. Frankly, the reason I don't know more is because they didn't *talk* about specifics here, in a way that mirrored how they didn't talk about specifics whenever they weren't allowed due to nondisclosure contracts or government classification. (Please, don't swerve into this side topic; I don't honestly know if any of this was classified or not).
So, and I apologize if this is rude, but have you been hired to do this specific sort of extensive testing by Boeing, the US government, or whoever?
Because these friend of mine have. And they didn't walk away *SURE* that this sort of thing was impossible. They walked away knowing that interference was profoundly difficult, rare, had narrow frequencies that affected the specific plane... and possible. They had complete confidence that cellphone use wasn't likely to hit all those at once, but they didn't think it was technically feasible/possible to test all the scenarios to guarantee that a stray harmonic out of some personal device wasn't going to cause trouble. They both would routinely insist that they agreed with cellphones being turned off, since that incredibly thin chance still existed.
Yeah, I think uninformed nontechs are the bane of all science policy rhetoric in the world today. But saying NEVER-NEVER like you do is itself a bad thing. And I believe airlines will always seek to exploit this financially. But I also recognize the great senator from WTF, the honorable Mr. Murphy. Stray RF from laptops, cellphones, and PDA's introduce a tiny risk, but that turning these devices off during high-risk times (esp. when landing) is an acceptable amount of discomfort to avoid the problem.
At some point, in-flight cellular might be allowed, and my nontech opinion is that a picocell helps because it'll dial back the adaptive transmitters in cell phones to minimize their ability to punch thru and cause problems. But I wager it'll be as restricted as smoking and laptops. Risk Management (which *is* my day job) is entirely about balancing the small inconvenience of turning off a few hundred RF emitters for twenty minutes at each end of a flight against the fiery, screamin' deaths of a couple hundred people.
(there, I think I've edited out all the always's and nevers and such. And I'm out of time)
Rhino may have accidentally created a straw man, but GGP did artificially create the bogus Corporations-->US linkage.
It's unfair to blame Americans here. Multinational corporations are involved. Which means there's nothing to stop a Free Market response to China in every country.
Caveat: Personally, I think the day China embraced capitalism, they lost the great revolution. Capitalism is improving people's lives substantially and one day the chinese citizenry will 'wake up' and decide that human life is valuable. Trial reform, environmental protection minimums, civil rights, etc... they'll just tell the government that they need them. And if it doesn't happen quickly, nature will conjure up another cultural seismic shift like happened in the US in response to the social constraints of the US's 1950's. (a generational shift in values akin to what we saw with the Beatniks, then Rock, then Woodstock). It'll be different, but it'll involve youthful rebellion so subtle that the Chinese government won't be able to stop it.
BTW, what d'ya think of this thread's nimroddery and faux stupidity (I hope) on the presenter's nick being referenced in the first place. At first, it's funny, then it gets more and more strained and lame. Sort of like watching nerds struggling at chitchat
If someone had modded you up as funny, I'd let this pass. Hopefully, you were at least a bit tongue in cheek with your remark. If not...
From what I've seen over the years, research/scientific use sticks with whatever platform they need (unix flavors, linux flavors, windows or even a couple VMS'y critters). They've got good technical and legal reasons for keeping things unchanged. Most of these users either use a windows box for reporting, or generate their reports their own way and more or less ignore that they're causing other people any friction.
Everyone else is a supply chain feeding documentation to the secretary level, or interacting with the rest of the world for acquisitions. An army's only as strong as it's supply chain, or whatever cliche goes here. Further, it is staffed by people that came from jobs where they used windows. SO... all the way up the chain of command or out on the supply chain, win and office keep things simple. Shifting to OpenOffice or another mechanism occasionally doesn't work. And even a tiny amount of friction costs more than buying windows and MSOffice.
Three-letter acronyms and government employment don't change things a lickspittle: windows is ubiquitous because of inertia (both in what file formats people expect to receive and in what applications they know from non-governmental jobs).
As for Vista vs. XP, new machines will come with Vista, which will start the inertial build-up all over again.
Let me put this into a personal role. I have worked in small government groups that have tried to shift away from Windows and MSOffice. We'd have been happy accomplishing either part of that separation (OS or office suite). The OS part became a problem because I kept getting os-specific work. If I'm adding a few features to a windows app, I have to do it in Visual Studio. There's just no money or time in the allocation to unwind the app (whose documentation is stored in some vast Washington WRITE-ONLY facility, I'm told) and convert it to something platform-agnostic. Luckily, there's a lot of java coding going on. I dislike java for other reasons, but at least it is not created on windows by windows for windows... so that part gives me hope.
Next, on noncode: my other work tended to be infosec (Cybersecurity) documentation and user guides and the likes. I'll get handed a word doc, and have to revise it, edit it, or whatever. Most times, it is rife with clever formatting that improves some aspect of readability at the expense of portability. Inset textboxes of text that summarize whole pages for people too busy to read the whole document. Formatting and layout done six different ways when six other people made revisions. Dynamically-linked content. Contradictory mechanisms for indexing or page numbering or creating a TOC. Frankly, the more important documents that bring together material from multiple sources or writers or editors are as brittle as a house of cards. When we'd make the attempt to do even trivial editing in Open Office 1.x (haven't had opportunity since 2.0), stuff'd break. So, we were forced back to MSOffice. And attempts to generate the stuff we originated in Open Office hit the 'what the heck is this filetype' questions from our recipients.
We made inroads. And I install open office 2.0 on each machine I use. I use it. And so far, I'm ok... but I'm not using it in circumstances that test the limits like I mentioned above, so YMMV.
There are some efforts being made to push the federal government into high-level mandates that push the market where they need, rather than enduring what the vendors want. Out of the box security has a high priority. I'm sure there are other priorities above crushing the windows lock-in, but this idea is at least getting attention. This will help immensely. And I really believe it is inevitable.
Uncool, even to make your point. I can identify with your situation -- I'm a progressive living near a town recently deemed the most conservative town in the US. So I'm used to quiet indignities, but...
um, seriously...
Did you just indirectly call Bruce S stupid (and say 'Who cares, Bruce?') and then execute this poor of a logical fallacy?
The subject was perceived vs. real risk, not responses to that risk (policy or otherwise). As much as your situation sucks, that's like ranting at your mechanic because you own a Yugo. He's not an expert on countering radical islam. He's an expert on encryption and risk (identifying and quantifying it). If Bruce started talking about response to your radical islamic problem, I'd really hope you'd shrug him off as uninformed and inexpert.
And I'm sure you realize that Holland could be exhibit 'C' in Schneier's case. Despots, tyrants and thugs have always used murdering prominent foes as an effective way to oppress dissent. This is the archtype of leveraging of perceived risk vs. actual risk. The fear of *also* being murdered outweighs the quiet, gentle indignation of losing some tiny bit of freedom or control. This chilling effect happens despite the actual risk being a zillion times less than the perceived risk (after all, if the goons you're up against started killing scores of people, your job of identifying and punishing them would be much easier).
Good luck, and it's good to remember that quiet, gentle indignation is harnessable. The next tough part is coming up with a plan and a safe fulcrum to leverage that sentiment. After all, Gandhi found one fulcrum, Hitler found another. Seems to me that that's the really tough part.
For sale next week on eBay: slashdot UID 3104.
Current owner ruined it when he popped off with some smelly, nasty ol' people-magazine-mindset shizzit about Wikipedia that trashed his I/T cred permanently.
----
Really. People that don't understand the change-tracking mechanism beneath wikipedia really shouldn't spout off like you just did. You end up lookin' like an idiot. Sorry if that's harsh, but there you have it. Even a low UID can't save your ass from that glaring of a dumbass remark.
Now, if you'd just cranked off some insane remarks about conspiracy theories, NASA, politics, explosives or the weather, us slashdotters wouldn't all be staring at you like you just farted in church. But that ship's sailed... good luck on the auction, dude. (attention, moderators: I disabled my own karma and subscriber bonuses before posting, and I didn't take the easy way out with A/C, either. Troll-rate me if you must, but this sort of stupidity needs to be called out in plain terms).
Thanks for taking the time to shoot down this myth. Nicely put.
Anyone that spouts ill-informed CW about why Wikipedia won't allow cites, misses your attempt to clarify completely, doesn't grasp the idea of versioning, and yet somehow seems comfortable with generic URL links is demonstrably beyond help.
Which is when I mutter "don't feed the trolls" and move along.
Wire Magazine?... Oh, Wired. Stupid Slashdot.
Sorry, as a computer security expert (but admittedly not a cryptologist), I ain't buyin' any of these arguments.
Lastly, "don't stay logged into AIM" needs no response. That's like telling people to unplug their phone between uses: Abso-frickin-lutely ludicrous... a straw man in dire need of some lighter fluid and a match.
The correct mechanism is to get the passwords the fsck OUT of a working file into a file used for that ONE purpose so it can be better-managed both on-disk and in-memory, build a master key mechanism as the linked article mentioned in part 1, and allow that as a nearly-secure alternative to option 4. Given that 4 and 1 share the keylogger-plus-trojan-forwarder vulnerability, I'm leaning toward saying they're equally secure. But it's late and implementation details matter a lot on security designs like this. I could be wrong.
A last comment: I *LOVE* GAIM. I USE IT CONSTANTLY. And this issue notwithstanding, I have deep respect for GAIM and other open-source developers. I'm sorry that I come across as pretty hard on the developers here (let me just apologize right now for callin' y'all lazy. I know you're NOT). But I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for GAIM. NO way. There must be people dependent enough on GAIM that know crypto well enough to help the developers through the development and rough 'proving' out of a better algorithm than this set of excuses. All they'd have to do is sugar-coat the call-for-help.
GoGo0 strokin' his wii. What the HELL is goin' on with usernames on this site today.
Sheesh.
Sorry to hear your story. I'm not generally a fan of litigation, but after reading your msg, I'd agree Aladdin deserved to be sued into oblivion.
Of course, perhaps we'll get to watch Sony or some other megacorp buy this insanity. I can't see how it will end differently than Divx. Maybe that'll give you some consolation: it won't be the same as a juicy court settlement, but schadenfreude can be damn theraputic.
I'd always believed it was progress in nutrition that made the obvious height increases in my own family over the last two generations, but aside from a few thousand cheap pizzas, I ate pretty well as a kid... so there may be other (genetic?) factors still in play. It isn't unthinkable for genetics and nutrition to push heights up a few more inches in *30* generations.
That said, I agree that TFA is BS. My wife is 5'2", for example. How'll this sort of 'mixing of subspecies' be stopped? I honestly CANNOT IMAGINE any physical or societal change capable of segregating people based on some superficial characteristic like height. It'd be like defying entropy in physics.
Um, even searching on minWidth or tabMinWidth, I don't find a browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting in the doc page you linked to. Thanks 1e6 for the link itself though... always cool to see how deeply configurable something is, even if I never find the time to do more customizing.
Back in the day, slashdot used to be a relatively effective part of this sort of a peer-managed geek filtering system. Generic crap in, only the good stuff as headlines.
Nowadays, they're up to their eyeballs in the BS. Heck, I'm not a conspiracy theorist type, but it does seem like they've changed at a pretty fundamental level. Granted, content often comes wrapped in these paragraph per page of ads schmears, but if slashdot as a group doesn't try to exert some influence, what good are they!?
You do realize that each box must be visited one or two times a day to *EMPTY* it, right? And if you open a mailbox daily only to find it either empty (most days) or nearly-empty(others)... wouldn't that seem like a good time to consolidate a few mailboxes!?
Nostalgic as I am, I don't mind a bit of common sense being used to thin out glaring inefficiencies.
First, a snark: Your second sentence isn't even a question, let alone rhetorical.
a me and you'll see most researchers talk about synthesis of TRU elements. The word 'create' is like 'discover'... it creeps in unintentionally because most of humanity doesn't give a rat's ass about these nuances. Including me.
Your first sentence is either mocking slashdot or a submitter or popular press for misstating something (thus earning a monumental 'Well, DUH!'), or is foolishly thinking that you're the first to realize maybe nature's been-there, done-that. Which earns a fat raspberry. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_n
Personally, I'm a bit annoyed that you got into high dudgeon about grammar when something this profoundly cool was available. After all, these researchers have just managed to accomplish something so damn hard that they're the first despite EVERY PHYSICIST ON THE PLANET understanding the ground rules:
Bang big atoms together, create a fatty, win bragging rights forever.
Like the Nobel, this is possibly as cool as nerd-cool ever gets. Heck, it can even get you *LAID!* Who the hell cares about lame slashdot editing in the face of THAT!?
So... am I being rhetorical now?!
I see where you're coming from on this, but you'd probably agree that punish/reward aspects to games are a bit more complicated.
A gamer doesn't think of another quarter* as simply as you describe it. Another quarter can be used for a different game, without anyone feeling punished for success. Heck, I've *NEVER* played an arcade game that let me change tracks or cars or player personalities without putting in another quarter.
And if they're uncoordinated wonks like I am, another quarter has nothing to do with rewards/return: I often move on to another game or a different car or a different field because the previous one was handing me my ass and I want to see if maybe I can do a bit better if I shift things around. And if/when I found a game I could consistently beat, I didn't feel gypped... the other scenarios or games were just a quarter away.
Last of all, because of familiarity and sweet-spots and what seemed fun, I can tell you that nearly every option-rich game I have owned in ~30 years has seen a WICKED bell-curve on how I played the options. There were half a dozen *favorite* cartridges for the Atari, and on those just a few favorite settings. On MK, I had a favorite persona, and another that I never quite could master. Ditto for customizations/weapons/scenarios/mods for Wizardry, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Quake 3, Halo, Halo 2, GT, Evercrack, and on games my kids and I play now. If I got a default half-dozen racers, and then bought several classic roadsters, a new 'vette, a 911 and a Lotus, that'd be enough for me. And when my wife says she wants a hybrid car, I'd think it was great if I could say 'hmmm... let's try out the Prius and the Escape on.... the shure-kill (Schuylkill) express simulator'. Esp. if my net out of pocket by the time I'm done is five or ten bucks more than the game.
Come to think of it, tell me car companies wouldn't *SPONSOR* physics-accurate demos (and prepaid downloads) of their cars to enable virtual test-drives for approved customers.
*quarter = 5c, 10c, 25c, 50c, 75c, $1... whatever. Another payment. By the way, anything more than a few cents DOESN'T feel very micropaymenty to me.
Then let's just toss that shiny POS word aside and call this what it was:
Private investigators pretended to have police or governmental authority when
requesting these records. That is impersonating an officer, forgery,
or any of a dozen century-old laws being violated.
Given that the word pretexting is being used to embellish manifestly-illegal
actions (nobody lies about who they are if they have legal grounds for obtaining
records) into a less damaging name, it seems to me that pretexting is like GNU...
it's recursive.
- "Warp Factor Six, Mr. Sulu"
- "Set phasors on Stun"
- "Beam me Up, Scotty"
Dilithium, tribbles, vulcan everything, photon torpedos, ship-caliber phaser-blasts putting a whole town to sleep, alien technology that was never capitalized on (turning people into cubes, romulan cloaking) and blue beer. Q, the boundlessness of the holodeck. Interstellar gateways, time paradoxes and spacetime rifts, planet-eating drones, energy beings.Star Trek was SF. It was ASTOUNDINGLY speculative, often at levels that tax even MY optimism on our ability to advance even in a million years (The Transporter, specifically). But at least it portrayed science and discovery in a positive light. Let's just agree it did yeoman's work in true-SF habit of using fictional/future science to awaken questions, explore ethical challenges... and stop there.
(thanks for the best laugh in a week... I put up with a lot of useless crap readin' slashdot just for this sort of wanderin' humor. From robots with one ball to piers anthony's wierd sexual proclivities to GP to your comment... priceless)
I've worked with the 3LA crowd a fair amount, and I have yet to meet one that wasn't a bit mental. Half of them have a creepy elevated-charisma thing going. The other half? Well, to be blunt, they almost *always* leave me the impression of that wierd guy arguing with his elbow and asking you to pick sides while you're waiting in queue.
And then there's the oppenheimer moments: Doin' cool stuff that is given a usage scenario that seems noble/harmless enough, but losing sleep as you consider all the ways your work could be abused.
So, I guess I'm saying 1: don't take it personally, and 2: count your blessings.
Don't feed the trolls.
My father worked 29 years for the state. He didn't get profit-sharing, or 401k's, or an income that'd give him money to invest. He got a pension. A meager one. By choosing to retire *EARLY* after 29 years and at the age of 63, he took a HUGE cut in per-month payout. And his paltry little pension came with his reduced salary, which was routinely 20% LOWER than the industry norm. And now, he watches as legislators routinely deny even a 3% cost-of-inflation adustment.
Ironically, even the 3% increase annually wouldn't keep pace with his insurance premium payments. Each year for the last 10 (he's 73 now), his pension has shrunk, after those premiums. Adjusted for 10 years of inflation, he's hovering above poverty.
Pretty much everything else you've hit on rate as either disingenuous or trollish or 'DUH!'.
As for your wife, have her move to a union-buster state like Idaho, even as a gedanken-experiment: I bet HARD cash that she makes a helluva-lot more wherever you live under union-negotiated contracts than she'd see here.
Unions and management are a tug-of-war. The fact that either side has greedy self-serving bastards in charge cancels out. What is left is overall greatest benefit, and while it might seem easy to shriek 'low prices low prices' as you complain about those lazy union fucks that gave us a 5-day 40-hour work-week, occupational safety laws that make it unthinkable for americans to be cavalierly KILLED by their jobs, and so many other benefits, you're so wrong that words escape me.
Oh, and I'm not a pro-union troll (my only time in a union job was boxin' groceries when I was 17 or 18), or a nafta-hater. Life's complicated and greatest overall net benefit, in my opinion, comes from people banding together. That's what pro-union people believe in. Commonwealth. As opposed to trickle-down voodoo.
That'd either be insane or CLASSIC!
For them to kill iPod, watching Microsoft having to turn away from DRM and embrace the Ogg family (Vorbis, speex, flac).
(pauses, lets drugs wear off):
Nah, that's a triple not-a-chance (no DRM, embracing OSS, and killing ipod).