Look, it's somewhere off in la-la land to imagine that Bruce Schneier is some sort of plutocratic/semitic manchurian candidate or Emmanuel Goldstein, but if you are willing to ignore contradictory evidence in order to maintain that opinion, I can't help you. All I can do is what I did: to point out that Schneier's magnificent reputation is not some kind of manufactured "put-on" by the media, it's hard-earned and entirely legitimate. You might have just begun hearing his name, but for good reason he's been regarded as an authority held in supremely high esteem by the cryptographic, information security, and digital liberties communities for decades.
You a jew too? You sound it, since money and gold = your God.
I stopped paying attention somewhere around there, although I was bored earlier.
Not a racist.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. If you actually believe what you just wrote, you are quite a racist. Your whole world-view is informed primarily by what race people are and how you imagine that it relates to their individual traits, pursuits, goals, and what twisted conspiracies they hold membership in.
What?! Schneier is the author of Applied Cryptography, the essential text in the field. He's the creator of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms. His information security firm, Counterpane Systems, was bought out in an eight figure deal by British Telecom. His blog, Schneier On Security, is one of the most closely followed by infosec professionals and digital liberties advocates. In short: Schneier's reputation in the information security industry as an expert par excellence is hard-earned and well-deserved, his credentials singularly impressive, and his ratio of positions staked to positions invalidated unusually high.
No, Schneier's impressive CVs don't validate arguments supported merely on invocation of his name, and certainly no one is superman or is incapable of error or omniscient even within a field of expertise. To label Schneier's reputation as "a built up by press figure only", however, is singularly ridiculous.
I want to like System76, but the one I had was overpriced junk.
Who builds a trackpad with an indistinct sensing area? Worse, even when you did manage purely by luck to have your finger on the pad's surface, the sensitivity was awful. And for that matter, who builds a modern laptop with multiple video outputs that can't drive an external display at 1080p simultaneously with the LCD? Ugh.
It's kind of brilliant of DARPA, really. If a bit evil. By setting their sights on missiles, they establish the idea of defensive technology, but ensure that any effective weapon will also make short work of a less durable and less agile target like a human being. In this way, the R&D team is spared the thought of building something that will burn a hole through some hapless person, even though the eventuality of their work will be exactly that.
Basically, the US would bump up against the edges of ALL OF EUROPE if laid over the top.
This excuse might make more sense if only rural connectivity was slow and expensive. But that's not the case: urban connectivity is just as expensive, and just as slow, even for areas with extremely high population densities.
In light of the importance of this project, the thing is cheap at 600 million -- if they can get it to work.
Nonsense. The political importance of the project doesn't suddenly reset market rates for the work. There are probably thousands of/. readers alone who could have accomplished this project in half the time for 1/50th the price.
If it was reasonable for a high-traffic, dynamic, interactive website design to cost 600 million dollars, we would have no internet startups. We certainly would not have Slashdot, Reddit, or anything like that. One reason that the internet is so awesome and disruptive to traditional business is precisely because the cost of entry is so low.
If you think that the "women, minorities, veterans preference" means anything at all in the real world, please give some examples. Good luck.
What, are you kidding? Look at the rules and regulations for awarding grants and contracts. SBIRs are a good place to start. There are quotas in place whose stated purpose is to incentivize the award of government money to businesses owned by women and minorities. Let me emphasize this: such an outcome is the declared aims of these rules. Government grants and contracts are intended to be based on factors other than merit.
These suggestions might be acceptable for someone under the radar, but for an organization like The Guardian which is no doubt being actively targeted by intelligence agencies, these suggestions are not very useful.
The NSA and its sister agencies are well equipped to monitor unintentional sources of EM emissions: keyboards, monitors, etc. all radiate EM that can allow an advanced attacker to see what you see and what you type in real time at a considerable distance, without any need to physically hack into systems or tap communications links. Faraday cages, physical security, and other surveillance countermeasures would be better suggestions than using GPG and Tor.
So they had hard-wired physical access to the car's data network and they were able to cause trouble? News at 11! (aka so what?)
So what? So I could bump key my way into your car, trojan one of the devices sitting on your car area network, and cause you to crash and burn on the highway with no meaningful evidence that anything was amiss.
As a security researcher who believes in the spirit of the open release of vulnerabilities, I feel that this is irresponsible behavior on the part of these security researchers.
Then you don't believe in the spirit of full disclosure at all. What drivers have now is security through obscurity, which as we all know is no security at all. Significant public awareness of the problem will create the kind of pressure on auto makers to issue recall notices and fixes for life-endangering safety issues. Full disclosure is essential here for precisely the reason that you say means it shouldn't happen: because lives are at stake.
The original FISA was quite different than the modern FISA, as a result of the PATRIOT and the FISA Amendments Act passed in 2008 and re-authorized in 2012, as well as the morphing of the FISA court (FISC) from a body that simply said "yes" or "no" to warrant requests against spies and foreign operatives, into a Star Chamber-esque court where secret legal precedents are set in ex parte hearings that lack any element of adversarialism such as the presentation of opposing arguments.
Blaming Carter for this is a bit like blaming Mendeleev for the existence of nuclear weapons because he created the periodic table of elements.
I like how you wildly exaggerate insults against others... for wild exaggerations. Very meta.
Show us some of these wild exaggerations Snowden has made by dumping pertinent documents sourced directly from the NSA. Tell us all how Edward R. Murrow was not a real journalist because he openly formed conclusions, rather than hiding his personal biases behind selectively-uncritical regurgitation of official talking points.
If the interest is in excluding commercial entities, couldn't we just... make a rule like that, instead? Same with preventing monopolization of the resources.
I'm all in favor of preserving HAM as an experimenter and hobbyist medium, I just don't think that's best accomplished by preventing some areas of experimentation that might be the most interesting and important for hobbyists.
As for being able to do the same things on the internet, the cell network, etc... that same argument applies to eliminating amateur radio altogether. Advocating to carve out a space for experimentation, then saying "but only the kind of experimentation we want you to do" is a bit hypocritical, or at least draconian, isn't it?
I think you should pull off a successful non-profit project like Codec2 for the good of all Amateur Radio (and lots of the world outside of Amateur Radio) before you question my motives.
Because people who pull off successful non-profit projects are forever proof against having their motives questioned...? I meant nothing personal, but I fail to see motivation, and after having asked repeatedly, it's not any clearer. Several reasons have been offered, but none of them actually hold water.
The motive is to keep it open.
That's sort of double-speak-ish, isn't it? You're actually closing the medium to uses you don't like. I know there's "free as in beer" and "free as in speech", but I've never heard of "free as in do what we say".
I continue to reject the premise that since there could be possible abuses that might not be handled by the rule or might not be caught, that we must allow all possible abuses.
Why is encryption equated to abuse at all? Why is privacy something that should be denied to amateurs and hobbyists? Why shouldn't I have the right to send encrypted communications via HAM? Wouldn't this make the medium a much more relevant and useful tool in the modern age, turning it away from the anachronistic and archaic medium for hobbyists to compare their signal strengths, exchange silly license numbers, and hold brief chats about exclusively about innocuous, useless stuff like the weather in their respective locations?
So, we're going to take an empty channel, filled with random noise, and replace it with a transmission filled with random noise!
Radio static is of course not altogether random, less in the modern era than ever, and as a source of entropy has many flaws. Now, that's not to say that a public entropy source is entirely the best idea ever, either... but that isn't the point... the point is that, when properly architected, such a system is a plausible defense against claims of encrypted transmission, and as such would render moot the proscription on encrypted transmissions via amateur radio. It is an example that shows that the rule you support does not achieve the intended aims which you have declared.
Now, perhaps you have ulterior motives, but if not, why continue to advocate for such rules? This is and has been my question from the very beginning. And if you do have ulterior motives, why not share those? Is there actually a good reason for these rules? As things stand now, it would not appear so, but perhaps I'm missing something.
Go on believing that steganography can't be detected.
Detecting steganography is not a solved problem. Of course, particular stego methods open the way to detection, but I think you know that it cannot be said that steganography generally can be reliably detected.
I'd rather be able to watch you, if necessary, than not.
I'll depart for the evening with a quote from Frederick Douglass, said originally in reference to chattel slavery but equally germane to the slavery of the panopticon. "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him." Put another way: you may wish to watch me, but I'm quite sure you wouldn't rather that I be able to watch you.
Good night and 73, sir. Hopefully I'll awake tomorrow and have the privilege of continuing this interesting discussion.
So, you're proposing that since we might not be able to detect steganography, that we allow all possible use of encryption.
I'm asking what purpose the ban on encryption actually serves, given that encryption cannot be reliably detected.
The second example would potentially lock lots of people out of many frequencies that would be in exclusive use for private communications.
But that's a bizarre argument. Many uses other than encryption might also do this (lets say, hypothetically, that it was indeed a Public Radio Entropy Source), but would not be addressed by this rule. So if the goal of the rule is to prevent monopolization of a scarce resource, the rule is ineffectual. You would need to enact some rules against monopolization, i.e. through rationing.
Also, don't assume that we can not detect steganography and intruders in general.
I do assume that stego cannot be reliably detected, because that is really the only rational assumption.
Your first example would not have violated any rules
Exactly, yet it most certainly could have been an encoded message carrying a hidden, non-obvious meaning. The rule is ineffectual even at preventing encoded/encrypted messages from flowing across the airwaves.
Your second example would have if it were an encrypted message rather than just rubbing your fingers over the top row of the keyboard.
Nonsense, that was my Public Radio Entropy Source in action. It's a public service. Anyone is free to listen to it!
Or... was it my Public Radio Encryption Stream, consisting mostly of entropic data except at regularly scheduled intervals, when it becomes an encrypted data stream? There's really no way to know.
All this rule really does is to ban obvious forms of encryption. What good is that? Honestly: what possible benefit does this bring to amateur radio? The really serious people who want to send encrypted messages via HAM certainly still can. The rule just acts as a way to punish amateurs, experimenters, and those who for whatever reason do not go to the trouble of hiding their coding mechanism behind some form of plausible deniability.
Bruce, you're a way smart dude. Why defend this gobbledegook? Do you really need an example of some material that is neither obscene, nor contributory to any conversation? Or which would pass legal muster, but actually constitutes coded communication?
These HAM radio regulations are farcical stupidity, and advocating for them makes you an advocate for a stupid farce. You can either admit that, or you can treat us all like we're dumb, but those are really the only two available choices.
My dog's health is satisfactory. His brown coat is shiny. He went for a walk at 10:53 PM. How is your dog tonight?
If that was HAM radio, I'd have just violated some stupid unenforceable regulations. Or would I have?
54875098472560943789871468748954514.
If I had broadcasted that over packet radio, I'd have just violated some stupid unenforceable regulations. Or would I have?
Far be it for me to discourage politeness or considerate behavior towards admins, but the last thing we need is more of fear-mongering of our profession. We should be ashamed of being feared and search out ways to combat that attitude, not gleefully celebrating it and looking for ways to leverage that fear to our personal advantage, becoming little e-terrorists.
The sort of traits that we sysadmins should be emphasizing and popularizing to employers and the public at large are our ethical grounding, our sense of duty and responsibility, the breadth and depth of our knowledge, and our ability to translate end user requests into clear and actionable technical goals. We should be the ultimate technical confidants and friends of those we work with and for, not the necessary evils that they tolerate at their own risk. We should recognize the great responsibility that comes with our roles' great power, and act accordingly.
This whole notion of "fear us, for we drive the bus" that permeates our culture is corrosive, immature, damaging, and actually quite disgusting. I recognize and appreciate the humor of Simon Travaglia's BOFH, but too many of us seem to take those works not as fantastic parody but instead as some sort of literal example, a self-help manual for geeks.
This leads to keyboard jockeys becoming quite like those police officers who lose sight of their roles as responsible civil servants, lost amidst the power of badges and guns and sirens and legal authority. As anyone who has ever had to deal with one of those bad apples knows well, just one such experience can tarnish the reputation of a whole profession, indeed a whole class of people, and make the road much harder for all the rest who are just trying to do their jobs faithfully and well.
I thought the role that dogs played in the movie was actually rather interesting. It's subtle, but there's definitely some subtext and allegory here, perhaps even theology. I also enjoyed the "trust versus verification" aspect - can we learn to co-exist with something or someone beyond our power to dominate and control, learning to accept demotion in the universe and a position of weakness?
The whole origin story was fantastic. This is probably the richest depiction of Krypton ever. Loved the examples of the evolution of Kryptonian technology. The scene where Supes is being given a retrospective on his world's history was simply top notch.
Most characters were likewise fantastic. Zod was believable, even a bit sympathetic. The pain he felt was palpable, and the conflict Superman felt when dealing with him, likewise. Fiora was superb, fierce and believable without being over the top or "grrrl". I wish she'd have gotten more screen time. Lois was great in the role of the intrepid reporter.
Cons included the lack of significant chemistry between Supes and Lois, an ending that was just too neatly wrapped up (huge city largely destroyed, tens of thousands presumably dead, but business-as-usual in the next scene? huh?), some cheesy dialog (Lois's first scene with the military made me cringe), and some two-dimensionality on the part of the secondary characters. I was happy to see the exploration of free will versus determinism, authoritarian control versus individuality, and exceeding the limitations imposed by society, but I thought more could have been made of this.
All in all, I'm hopeful for more Superman movies like this. There are "bugs" to work out, but finally we have a solid foundation upon which to present the original superhero tale to a new generation.
This has been absolutely done by the iPad and other tablets. People love to make the claim you can not create content on the iPad but its been proven time and again for the most part to be false beyond a few exceptions you can create just fine. People code on them, people write blogs or even books on them, people record and perform music on them etc.
I have to respectfully disagree with this to a significant degree. Coding natively on an iPad, for example, is just not feasible - there is no compiler, no debugger, no IDE available for any language. We can't even write shell scripts on un-jailbroken devices. I think that's a big part of what Kay is advocating for: a core focus on easily-developed applications, devices that encourage users to develop the technical skills necessary to create advanced content.
I think the notion of the tablet as a consumption-only device is overblown, but not totally unfounded. It is much more difficult than it "should be" to create many forms of content.
With that said, hopefully Kay will share more specifics on the fundamental choices OS developers could make to increase the security of their products without sacrificing usability.
This kind of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, is the only thing we as a species do that's of any value. Spending all of our effort trying to "fix[...] the current issues of the world" would just drag us down to the lowest common denominator.
What sort of reasoning is this? One which assumes that it is impossible to fix the current issues, it would seem. A big assumption.
Otherwise, fixing the current issues of the world would result in milestone progress towards a better world, where we're better enabled to push the frontiers of knowledge.
The difference is that in WW2, a German-American soldier on a battlefield wearing a uniform and holding a rifle left no question as to his purpose or allegiance. It was an unambiguous situation, akin to a police officer fatally shooting an armed suspect during a bank holdup. Sure, that suspect was never convicted of a crime, but they were *right there firing a weapon at officers*.
What we're talking about now with these assassinations is much more like the police showing up at someone's home, breaking the door down, and shooting them because the DA says they were responsible for a bank robbery earlier in the week. That's not really how it's supposed to be done, and the risks to innocent citiznes in such cases due to ignorance, mistakes, or malicious official acts is much higher. There need to be checks and balances around such enormous power to protect innocent people.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, it's somewhere off in la-la land to imagine that Bruce Schneier is some sort of plutocratic/semitic manchurian candidate or Emmanuel Goldstein, but if you are willing to ignore contradictory evidence in order to maintain that opinion, I can't help you. All I can do is what I did: to point out that Schneier's magnificent reputation is not some kind of manufactured "put-on" by the media, it's hard-earned and entirely legitimate. You might have just begun hearing his name, but for good reason he's been regarded as an authority held in supremely high esteem by the cryptographic, information security, and digital liberties communities for decades.
You a jew too? You sound it, since money and gold = your God.
I stopped paying attention somewhere around there, although I was bored earlier.
Not a racist.
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. If you actually believe what you just wrote, you are quite a racist. Your whole world-view is informed primarily by what race people are and how you imagine that it relates to their individual traits, pursuits, goals, and what twisted conspiracies they hold membership in.
Schneier = another built up by press figure only.
What?! Schneier is the author of Applied Cryptography, the essential text in the field. He's the creator of the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms. His information security firm, Counterpane Systems, was bought out in an eight figure deal by British Telecom. His blog, Schneier On Security, is one of the most closely followed by infosec professionals and digital liberties advocates. In short: Schneier's reputation in the information security industry as an expert par excellence is hard-earned and well-deserved, his credentials singularly impressive, and his ratio of positions staked to positions invalidated unusually high.
No, Schneier's impressive CVs don't validate arguments supported merely on invocation of his name, and certainly no one is superman or is incapable of error or omniscient even within a field of expertise. To label Schneier's reputation as "a built up by press figure only", however, is singularly ridiculous.
I want to like System76, but the one I had was overpriced junk.
Who builds a trackpad with an indistinct sensing area? Worse, even when you did manage purely by luck to have your finger on the pad's surface, the sensitivity was awful. And for that matter, who builds a modern laptop with multiple video outputs that can't drive an external display at 1080p simultaneously with the LCD? Ugh.
Well the article proves having 0% of a controlled substance is all that's required to be arrested.
I'm sure there were trace quantities of controlled substances on the money in his wallet, or something.
It's kind of brilliant of DARPA, really. If a bit evil. By setting their sights on missiles, they establish the idea of defensive technology, but ensure that any effective weapon will also make short work of a less durable and less agile target like a human being. In this way, the R&D team is spared the thought of building something that will burn a hole through some hapless person, even though the eventuality of their work will be exactly that.
Basically, the US would bump up against the edges of ALL OF EUROPE if laid over the top.
This excuse might make more sense if only rural connectivity was slow and expensive. But that's not the case: urban connectivity is just as expensive, and just as slow, even for areas with extremely high population densities.
In light of the importance of this project, the thing is cheap at 600 million -- if they can get it to work.
Nonsense. The political importance of the project doesn't suddenly reset market rates for the work. There are probably thousands of /. readers alone who could have accomplished this project in half the time for 1/50th the price.
If it was reasonable for a high-traffic, dynamic, interactive website design to cost 600 million dollars, we would have no internet startups. We certainly would not have Slashdot, Reddit, or anything like that. One reason that the internet is so awesome and disruptive to traditional business is precisely because the cost of entry is so low.
If you think that the "women, minorities, veterans preference" means anything at all in the real world, please give some examples. Good luck.
What, are you kidding? Look at the rules and regulations for awarding grants and contracts. SBIRs are a good place to start. There are quotas in place whose stated purpose is to incentivize the award of government money to businesses owned by women and minorities. Let me emphasize this: such an outcome is the declared aims of these rules. Government grants and contracts are intended to be based on factors other than merit.
These suggestions might be acceptable for someone under the radar, but for an organization like The Guardian which is no doubt being actively targeted by intelligence agencies, these suggestions are not very useful.
The NSA and its sister agencies are well equipped to monitor unintentional sources of EM emissions: keyboards, monitors, etc. all radiate EM that can allow an advanced attacker to see what you see and what you type in real time at a considerable distance, without any need to physically hack into systems or tap communications links. Faraday cages, physical security, and other surveillance countermeasures would be better suggestions than using GPG and Tor.
Why not just bring up Bavalit?
So they had hard-wired physical access to the car's data network and they were able to cause trouble? News at 11! (aka so what?)
So what? So I could bump key my way into your car, trojan one of the devices sitting on your car area network, and cause you to crash and burn on the highway with no meaningful evidence that anything was amiss.
(RIP Michael Hastings)
As a security researcher who believes in the spirit of the open release of vulnerabilities, I feel that this is irresponsible behavior on the part of these security researchers.
Then you don't believe in the spirit of full disclosure at all. What drivers have now is security through obscurity, which as we all know is no security at all. Significant public awareness of the problem will create the kind of pressure on auto makers to issue recall notices and fixes for life-endangering safety issues. Full disclosure is essential here for precisely the reason that you say means it shouldn't happen: because lives are at stake.
The original FISA was quite different than the modern FISA, as a result of the PATRIOT and the FISA Amendments Act passed in 2008 and re-authorized in 2012, as well as the morphing of the FISA court (FISC) from a body that simply said "yes" or "no" to warrant requests against spies and foreign operatives, into a Star Chamber-esque court where secret legal precedents are set in ex parte hearings that lack any element of adversarialism such as the presentation of opposing arguments.
Blaming Carter for this is a bit like blaming Mendeleev for the existence of nuclear weapons because he created the periodic table of elements.
I like how you wildly exaggerate insults against others... for wild exaggerations. Very meta.
Show us some of these wild exaggerations Snowden has made by dumping pertinent documents sourced directly from the NSA. Tell us all how Edward R. Murrow was not a real journalist because he openly formed conclusions, rather than hiding his personal biases behind selectively-uncritical regurgitation of official talking points.
If the interest is in excluding commercial entities, couldn't we just... make a rule like that, instead? Same with preventing monopolization of the resources.
I'm all in favor of preserving HAM as an experimenter and hobbyist medium, I just don't think that's best accomplished by preventing some areas of experimentation that might be the most interesting and important for hobbyists.
As for being able to do the same things on the internet, the cell network, etc... that same argument applies to eliminating amateur radio altogether. Advocating to carve out a space for experimentation, then saying "but only the kind of experimentation we want you to do" is a bit hypocritical, or at least draconian, isn't it?
I think you should pull off a successful non-profit project like Codec2 for the good of all Amateur Radio (and lots of the world outside of Amateur Radio) before you question my motives.
Because people who pull off successful non-profit projects are forever proof against having their motives questioned...? I meant nothing personal, but I fail to see motivation, and after having asked repeatedly, it's not any clearer. Several reasons have been offered, but none of them actually hold water.
The motive is to keep it open.
That's sort of double-speak-ish, isn't it? You're actually closing the medium to uses you don't like. I know there's "free as in beer" and "free as in speech", but I've never heard of "free as in do what we say".
I continue to reject the premise that since there could be possible abuses that might not be handled by the rule or might not be caught, that we must allow all possible abuses.
Why is encryption equated to abuse at all? Why is privacy something that should be denied to amateurs and hobbyists? Why shouldn't I have the right to send encrypted communications via HAM? Wouldn't this make the medium a much more relevant and useful tool in the modern age, turning it away from the anachronistic and archaic medium for hobbyists to compare their signal strengths, exchange silly license numbers, and hold brief chats about exclusively about innocuous, useless stuff like the weather in their respective locations?
So, we're going to take an empty channel, filled with random noise, and replace it with a transmission filled with random noise!
Radio static is of course not altogether random, less in the modern era than ever, and as a source of entropy has many flaws. Now, that's not to say that a public entropy source is entirely the best idea ever, either... but that isn't the point... the point is that, when properly architected, such a system is a plausible defense against claims of encrypted transmission, and as such would render moot the proscription on encrypted transmissions via amateur radio. It is an example that shows that the rule you support does not achieve the intended aims which you have declared.
Now, perhaps you have ulterior motives, but if not, why continue to advocate for such rules? This is and has been my question from the very beginning. And if you do have ulterior motives, why not share those? Is there actually a good reason for these rules? As things stand now, it would not appear so, but perhaps I'm missing something.
Go on believing that steganography can't be detected.
Detecting steganography is not a solved problem. Of course, particular stego methods open the way to detection, but I think you know that it cannot be said that steganography generally can be reliably detected.
I'd rather be able to watch you, if necessary, than not.
I'll depart for the evening with a quote from Frederick Douglass, said originally in reference to chattel slavery but equally germane to the slavery of the panopticon. "There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him." Put another way: you may wish to watch me, but I'm quite sure you wouldn't rather that I be able to watch you.
Good night and 73, sir. Hopefully I'll awake tomorrow and have the privilege of continuing this interesting discussion.
So, you're proposing that since we might not be able to detect steganography, that we allow all possible use of encryption.
I'm asking what purpose the ban on encryption actually serves, given that encryption cannot be reliably detected.
The second example would potentially lock lots of people out of many frequencies that would be in exclusive use for private communications.
But that's a bizarre argument. Many uses other than encryption might also do this (lets say, hypothetically, that it was indeed a Public Radio Entropy Source), but would not be addressed by this rule. So if the goal of the rule is to prevent monopolization of a scarce resource, the rule is ineffectual. You would need to enact some rules against monopolization, i.e. through rationing.
Also, don't assume that we can not detect steganography and intruders in general.
I do assume that stego cannot be reliably detected, because that is really the only rational assumption.
Your first example would not have violated any rules
Exactly, yet it most certainly could have been an encoded message carrying a hidden, non-obvious meaning. The rule is ineffectual even at preventing encoded/encrypted messages from flowing across the airwaves.
Your second example would have if it were an encrypted message rather than just rubbing your fingers over the top row of the keyboard.
Nonsense, that was my Public Radio Entropy Source in action. It's a public service. Anyone is free to listen to it!
Or... was it my Public Radio Encryption Stream, consisting mostly of entropic data except at regularly scheduled intervals, when it becomes an encrypted data stream? There's really no way to know.
All this rule really does is to ban obvious forms of encryption. What good is that? Honestly: what possible benefit does this bring to amateur radio? The really serious people who want to send encrypted messages via HAM certainly still can. The rule just acts as a way to punish amateurs, experimenters, and those who for whatever reason do not go to the trouble of hiding their coding mechanism behind some form of plausible deniability.
Bruce, you're a way smart dude. Why defend this gobbledegook? Do you really need an example of some material that is neither obscene, nor contributory to any conversation? Or which would pass legal muster, but actually constitutes coded communication?
These HAM radio regulations are farcical stupidity, and advocating for them makes you an advocate for a stupid farce. You can either admit that, or you can treat us all like we're dumb, but those are really the only two available choices.
My dog's health is satisfactory. His brown coat is shiny. He went for a walk at 10:53 PM. How is your dog tonight?
If that was HAM radio, I'd have just violated some stupid unenforceable regulations. Or would I have?
54875098472560943789871468748954514.
If I had broadcasted that over packet radio, I'd have just violated some stupid unenforceable regulations. Or would I have?
This is what you're defending...?
Far be it for me to discourage politeness or considerate behavior towards admins, but the last thing we need is more of fear-mongering of our profession. We should be ashamed of being feared and search out ways to combat that attitude, not gleefully celebrating it and looking for ways to leverage that fear to our personal advantage, becoming little e-terrorists.
The sort of traits that we sysadmins should be emphasizing and popularizing to employers and the public at large are our ethical grounding, our sense of duty and responsibility, the breadth and depth of our knowledge, and our ability to translate end user requests into clear and actionable technical goals. We should be the ultimate technical confidants and friends of those we work with and for, not the necessary evils that they tolerate at their own risk. We should recognize the great responsibility that comes with our roles' great power, and act accordingly.
This whole notion of "fear us, for we drive the bus" that permeates our culture is corrosive, immature, damaging, and actually quite disgusting. I recognize and appreciate the humor of Simon Travaglia's BOFH, but too many of us seem to take those works not as fantastic parody but instead as some sort of literal example, a self-help manual for geeks.
This leads to keyboard jockeys becoming quite like those police officers who lose sight of their roles as responsible civil servants, lost amidst the power of badges and guns and sirens and legal authority. As anyone who has ever had to deal with one of those bad apples knows well, just one such experience can tarnish the reputation of a whole profession, indeed a whole class of people, and make the road much harder for all the rest who are just trying to do their jobs faithfully and well.
I thought the role that dogs played in the movie was actually rather interesting. It's subtle, but there's definitely some subtext and allegory here, perhaps even theology. I also enjoyed the "trust versus verification" aspect - can we learn to co-exist with something or someone beyond our power to dominate and control, learning to accept demotion in the universe and a position of weakness?
The whole origin story was fantastic. This is probably the richest depiction of Krypton ever. Loved the examples of the evolution of Kryptonian technology. The scene where Supes is being given a retrospective on his world's history was simply top notch.
Most characters were likewise fantastic. Zod was believable, even a bit sympathetic. The pain he felt was palpable, and the conflict Superman felt when dealing with him, likewise. Fiora was superb, fierce and believable without being over the top or "grrrl". I wish she'd have gotten more screen time. Lois was great in the role of the intrepid reporter.
Cons included the lack of significant chemistry between Supes and Lois, an ending that was just too neatly wrapped up (huge city largely destroyed, tens of thousands presumably dead, but business-as-usual in the next scene? huh?), some cheesy dialog (Lois's first scene with the military made me cringe), and some two-dimensionality on the part of the secondary characters. I was happy to see the exploration of free will versus determinism, authoritarian control versus individuality, and exceeding the limitations imposed by society, but I thought more could have been made of this.
All in all, I'm hopeful for more Superman movies like this. There are "bugs" to work out, but finally we have a solid foundation upon which to present the original superhero tale to a new generation.
This has been absolutely done by the iPad and other tablets. People love to make the claim you can not create content on the iPad but its been proven time and again for the most part to be false beyond a few exceptions you can create just fine. People code on them, people write blogs or even books on them, people record and perform music on them etc.
I have to respectfully disagree with this to a significant degree. Coding natively on an iPad, for example, is just not feasible - there is no compiler, no debugger, no IDE available for any language. We can't even write shell scripts on un-jailbroken devices. I think that's a big part of what Kay is advocating for: a core focus on easily-developed applications, devices that encourage users to develop the technical skills necessary to create advanced content.
I think the notion of the tablet as a consumption-only device is overblown, but not totally unfounded. It is much more difficult than it "should be" to create many forms of content.
With that said, hopefully Kay will share more specifics on the fundamental choices OS developers could make to increase the security of their products without sacrificing usability.
(Posted from my iPad)
This kind of discovery, pushing the frontiers of knowledge, is the only thing we as a species do that's of any value. Spending all of our effort trying to "fix[...] the current issues of the world" would just drag us down to the lowest common denominator.
What sort of reasoning is this? One which assumes that it is impossible to fix the current issues, it would seem. A big assumption.
Otherwise, fixing the current issues of the world would result in milestone progress towards a better world, where we're better enabled to push the frontiers of knowledge.
The difference is that in WW2, a German-American soldier on a battlefield wearing a uniform and holding a rifle left no question as to his purpose or allegiance. It was an unambiguous situation, akin to a police officer fatally shooting an armed suspect during a bank holdup. Sure, that suspect was never convicted of a crime, but they were *right there firing a weapon at officers*.
What we're talking about now with these assassinations is much more like the police showing up at someone's home, breaking the door down, and shooting them because the DA says they were responsible for a bank robbery earlier in the week. That's not really how it's supposed to be done, and the risks to innocent citiznes in such cases due to ignorance, mistakes, or malicious official acts is much higher. There need to be checks and balances around such enormous power to protect innocent people.