Not to be too cynical about this, but I wonder how much processing time you end up giving to the companies who refuse to lower their drug prices for third world countries because they think that profit is more important than the lives of people suffering the AIDS pandemic
Happily, the US government's recent public patent-busting hard-on for Cipro has taken the wind out of their sails in this regard. Look for a whole lot less stubbornness from Washington on the drug patent issue in the near future.
Re:Does this really help the oppressed?
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 1
So what I do is find several of these proxies and begin logging their activity.
The proxies are presumably not located in your country, so you'll be unable to trace their onward traffic. And the communication was encrypted, so you'll have to break that to figure out what they were doing. Which is an entirely different issue.
Re:Good for some, nightmare for others
on
Peek-a-Boo(ty)
·
· Score: 2
First, such an employee becomes a possible blackmail target. In the case of porn, a network admin must bar porn on a professional network because of the possibility of a sexual harassment suit being filed against the company.
This often-repeated argument will make sense to me once there are other "security" personnel going through people's desks and briefcases looking for porn. Until then, it's just a silly rationalization for cheap power trips.
Second, though, any user who is actively subverting procedures put in place to prevent such abuse must believe that he or she "knows better than you do".
Sounds like a thought crime to me.
Although the user's right in the vast bulk of cases, the cost in those rare cases where they're wrong is disastrous. What if the site is malicious? If they can get around your barriers, then what else are they downloading? Do they necessarily even know? How tight are the barriers around their machines?
Those are problems for the security people to solve. Telling people "You can't bring your own food in for lunch because we don't know that you won't jam peanut butter in the locks" just makes me think you need to hire a better locksmith.
Would you be willing to bet the company on their care?
If the computer systems you provide are so easily compromised that any random input source spells doom for your company, then you clearly have selected the wrong computer systems.
Couldn't this same logic be used to prove that nothing can move faster than the speed of sound? Say I hop in my supersonic jet, shout "I'm leaving", fly from Boston to San Francisco, and then say "I'm here". Somebody standing in San Francisco will hear me say "I'm here" before they hear "I'm leaving".
Why? You may have traveled faster than the speed of sound, but it still took you a lot longer to reach Boston than your "I'm leaving" took to travel within San Francisco.
According to me time machines will never be invented. Why? When you use a time machine to travel into the past you keep changing things slightly, and these changes only stop when you make a change that UN-invents the time machine! no time machine, no changes.
it would be a step up if the pay for working in a sweatshop allowed a similar standard of life as subsistence farming. It is not.
Then why do people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming?
the workers are payed less than they need to live
So they die?
I could go on, but I'd ramble.
That, and eventually you'd run out of third-hand sound bites and need some actual facts. Hell, I'm totally opposed to exploitative labor practices and even I think your arguments are idiotic.
Seriously, a lot of these predictions seem a bit off-the-wall.
Off-the-wall? His sequencing is downright wacky. He's got pie-in-the-sky stuff that nobody knows how to even think of approaching, happening later in the week. And then he mis-extrapolates mundane trends way off into the declining years of the universe.
2002 - Intranasal nanobots turn snot into gold
2003 - Time travel becomes affordable for recreational consumer use
2006 - AI androids declare New Jersey an independent nation dedicated to the production of lyric poetry
2009 - Schoolchild working on a science fair project develops a magnetic-bottle device that traps God
2035 - Internet usage in the UK reaches 43% of households
Making the assumption that the only way technology ever advances is with government assistance. Intel, IBM, 3M and General Electric, to name a few might disagree with you on this. Granted, government assistance certainly helps, particularly for projects that are farther off, but the above statement doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
Your examples don't make much sense either. Intel was built on government contracts (the space program). General Electric is first and foremost a defense contractor. IBM and 3M depend on Federal spending for huge shares of their order books.
Uh... I wouldn't trust that test. I think reloads pass something in the header that says, "I don't want to read from cache." I know my local squid (which isn't transparent, but I don't think that matters) intentionally cache-misses when I reload.
Is anyone else floored at the thought that someone savvy enough to perform this test would actually confound the results by using their web browser to send the GET request?
The only reason tapping phones is illegal [at least in most countries] is because of the explicit right and expectation of privacy.
If you shouted in public something you can hardly feel violated when others learn about it.
The internet is inherently non-private.
This is absurd. Internet traffic is no more "non-private" than a telephone call. The fact that means exist for people along the traffic path to intercept communications doesn't mean that they're allowed to. If that were the case, all laws governing phone tapping would be moot since the tapping would not be technically possible.
Alternately, use dnscache [cr.yp.to] from the djbdns [cr.yp.to] package. It will go straight to the root servers in order to resolve domains, and keep a local cache for good performance. It also protects you from cache poisoning.
Also, with many ISPs that have overloaded DNS servers, you'll get much better performance this way.
And you can override annoying domains (doubleclick.net, etc.) with the records of your choice.
Well, For linux on mac vs linux on x86, x86 is cheaper and faster. If you check out pricewatch [pricewatch.com] you can good hardware at very affordable prices. I bought many 350+ dollar 1ghz pc's.
News flash: There is in fact more to hardware quality, features and performance than the clock speed of the CPU.
Re: only incompetents are out of work... nope
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 2
Sadly, that's how most people in the field are reacting right now. College graduates simply aren't useful enough to hire. Therefore, they don't deserve jobs.
It's not that they don't deserve jobs, more that I don't feel I personally should have to hire them. I'd far rather pay twice as much for someone who isn't going to waste all my time or my other managers' time.
We recently posted some positions requiring a fairly specific skill set. If I get one more resume that suggests some dumb one-semester course project that was turned in and immediately forgotten is a viable substitute for years of experience in the relevant areas, I'm going to go over and smack someone.
* What does it take to break into the field, then? Is it only when companies are spending money ridiculously and irresponsibly that newbies, no matter how competent or promising they are, can get jobs and make a living?
Plenty of careers require lengthy periods of "getting up to speed" before the gravy starts pouring. Consider the long and painful residency periods that doctors go through. Or apprenticeships in many crafts.
The problem, I think, is that the last few years of crazy spending have left people with a sense that they deserve to get paid all sorts of money for poking at a computer, just because they were so incredibly smart and far-sighted to choose to study computer science.
The fact is, in the real world, in normal conditions, you have to grow into your success, fighting for opportunities to prove yourself, and then actually being better than some other people. No reason it should be any different for computer folks. Even during the boom times I suspect we all would have been a lot better off if random idiots weren't able to get paid mad ducats for performing minimally useful services to the IT department.
Universities have tuition paying students that print enough crap to destroy several hundred square miles of trees without having your out of work ass print up RFC's and other huge documents.
I'd mod you up if I could. Actually I'd start three new accounts and write brilliant poetry from each of them so I could use them all to mod you to 5. If I had the time.
Few things sicken me so much as the resource-entitlement mentality that shows up around the printers at university campuses. I was happy to see that most have finally begun aggressive charging for the paper students use. When I was in school in the 80s it was really a disgrace. Everyone had an allotment well beyond what they'd ever need. So at the end of the semester people would work out their academic frustrations by printing off reams of crap just to get their "money's worth." Really piggishly shockingly disturbingly destructive behavior.
Re: only incompetents are out of work... nope
on
The Laid-off Techie
·
· Score: 1
I would have to disagree with you on that one, and have to say your comment was fairly pompous.
Having just graduated with a CS degree last May, I found it *incredibly* tough to get my first "real" job.
Having just graduated with a CS degree last May, you don't know what you're talking about.
Of course people with no experience (or "3+ years", or 2 weeks, or whatever junior level) are having trouble finding work in the midst of economic slowdown and lass layoffs. What does that have to do with the context, which was "people who are actually useful"?
Well, I don't know the guy, but I've read a lot of what he has written (see here [photo.net]). It appears to me that his manner is a bit rough around the edges (I've wanted to send him flame mail myself on some occasions), but he hardly seems to be a bastard or a jerk.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. My first exposure to him was through an old professor, who had worked with him, and suggested I read Greenspun's stuff and pay attention to what he was up to. This professor was a bit of an interesting character himself, so perhaps I should have taken his endorsement with a grain of salt.
But in any case, it was precisely his conduct and attitude on photo.net that led me to the conclusion that Phil is indeed a bastard, dead dog notwithstanding. He strikes me as wilfully uninformed (outside of the handful of topics where he maintains an opinionated flavor of domain expertise), grossly insensitive to others, and xenophobic.
It means that the people living in your house are, on average, several times more wealthy than those in the richest country in the world.
No kidding.
When comparing economies, that is a meaningful description.
But comparing households to national economies, or comparing video game players to national economies, is meaningless.
Households are tiny specks adrift in a sea of externalities absorbed into the national economy that surrounds them. They don't have to worry about, say, national defense, funding justice systems, or issuing currency.
The problem with PINE isn't in its ability to push around attachments. It's that (from reports from friends who use it on a daily basis), it appears to be unable to handle multipart/alternative entities in any kind of intelligent (or standards-compliant) fashion. So you get garbage when you read an HTML-encoded email, even if it provides an alternate, plain-text encoded message entity for downlevel clients.
(1) Pine does a decent job with HTML-encoded email.
(2) You can look at any of the parts by using the > key.
UUencoding is obsolete, by the way. MIME should be used instead. But hey, they have to keep it for interoperability with people who don't have MIME compliant browsers, don't they?
That'd be PINE users, for a start.
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
But if I want to be a part of his list, I am forced to use something else. This is not what free software is about. Free software is about choice.
If you can get your high horse to slow down long enough to step off it for a minute or two, you could install any of a zillion open source tools to modify your headers as messages pass in/out of your network, solving the problem and allowing you to use any MUA you please.
His point was that he wanted people to have to do a little work before they could be a part of the list. Ways of assessing that are imperfect, and his is just one. You can demonstrate you've done it by installing a non-default OS and/or MUA on your machine, or you can do as I've suggested above. Either way, you then pass, and are free to play.
First of all, it's the per cap (and not absolute) GNP that was claimed to put Everquest right around Russia. That's pretty meaningless, as it's a self-selected group of people from the richest countries in the world who have a lot of time on their hands. I mean, the per cap GNP of my house is several times higher than that of the richest country in the world. So what?
Secondly, France's GDP in 2000 was $1,448,000,000,000, which is a thousand times greater than the number you posted.
The difference between GNP and GDP in a nutshell is that GNP includes income generated by multinationals based in that country. For instance, Microsoft's worldwide income accrues to the US GNP but only its US income is counted for the GDP.
Spyware (and other trojan-type activities, such as the backdoor in Borland Interbase) are often discovered quickly in Open Source software. If memory serves me correctly, the backdoor in Interbase was discovered almost immediately after the source was released. Don't you think that suggests something?
While I appreciate your sentiment, your logic is somewhat lacking.
The only thing the Interbase episode tells us is that a backdoor in Interbase was quickly discovered. That doesn't mean that all backdoors are quickly discovered, or even that all the backdoors in Interbase have been discovered.
Slashdot Mirror
You could use the same morally bankrupt logic just as easily to justify being a hit-man.
Anyone else think it's interesting that one university campus has more bandwidth than 90% of the world's nations?
Happily, the US government's recent public patent-busting hard-on for Cipro has taken the wind out of their sails in this regard. Look for a whole lot less stubbornness from Washington on the drug patent issue in the near future.
The proxies are presumably not located in your country, so you'll be unable to trace their onward traffic. And the communication was encrypted, so you'll have to break that to figure out what they were doing. Which is an entirely different issue.
This often-repeated argument will make sense to me once there are other "security" personnel going through people's desks and briefcases looking for porn. Until then, it's just a silly rationalization for cheap power trips.
Sounds like a thought crime to me.
Those are problems for the security people to solve. Telling people "You can't bring your own food in for lunch because we don't know that you won't jam peanut butter in the locks" just makes me think you need to hire a better locksmith.
If the computer systems you provide are so easily compromised that any random input source spells doom for your company, then you clearly have selected the wrong computer systems.
Why? You may have traveled faster than the speed of sound, but it still took you a lot longer to reach Boston than your "I'm leaving" took to travel within San Francisco.
I like that! Is it yours?
Then why do people choose sweatshop labor over subsistence farming?
So they die?
That, and eventually you'd run out of third-hand sound bites and need some actual facts. Hell, I'm totally opposed to exploitative labor practices and even I think your arguments are idiotic.
Off-the-wall? His sequencing is downright wacky. He's got pie-in-the-sky stuff that nobody knows how to even think of approaching, happening later in the week. And then he mis-extrapolates mundane trends way off into the declining years of the universe.
You have got to be kidding me. In 2000 India spent 2.5% of GDP on the military.
Your examples don't make much sense either. Intel was built on government contracts (the space program). General Electric is first and foremost a defense contractor. IBM and 3M depend on Federal spending for huge shares of their order books.
Is anyone else floored at the thought that someone savvy enough to perform this test would actually confound the results by using their web browser to send the GET request?
This is absurd. Internet traffic is no more "non-private" than a telephone call. The fact that means exist for people along the traffic path to intercept communications doesn't mean that they're allowed to. If that were the case, all laws governing phone tapping would be moot since the tapping would not be technically possible.
Also, with many ISPs that have overloaded DNS servers, you'll get much better performance this way.
And you can override annoying domains (doubleclick.net, etc.) with the records of your choice.
News flash: There is in fact more to hardware quality, features and performance than the clock speed of the CPU.
It's not that they don't deserve jobs, more that I don't feel I personally should have to hire them. I'd far rather pay twice as much for someone who isn't going to waste all my time or my other managers' time.
We recently posted some positions requiring a fairly specific skill set. If I get one more resume that suggests some dumb one-semester course project that was turned in and immediately forgotten is a viable substitute for years of experience in the relevant areas, I'm going to go over and smack someone.
Plenty of careers require lengthy periods of "getting up to speed" before the gravy starts pouring. Consider the long and painful residency periods that doctors go through. Or apprenticeships in many crafts.
The problem, I think, is that the last few years of crazy spending have left people with a sense that they deserve to get paid all sorts of money for poking at a computer, just because they were so incredibly smart and far-sighted to choose to study computer science.
The fact is, in the real world, in normal conditions, you have to grow into your success, fighting for opportunities to prove yourself, and then actually being better than some other people. No reason it should be any different for computer folks. Even during the boom times I suspect we all would have been a lot better off if random idiots weren't able to get paid mad ducats for performing minimally useful services to the IT department.
I'd mod you up if I could. Actually I'd start three new accounts and write brilliant poetry from each of them so I could use them all to mod you to 5. If I had the time.
Few things sicken me so much as the resource-entitlement mentality that shows up around the printers at university campuses. I was happy to see that most have finally begun aggressive charging for the paper students use. When I was in school in the 80s it was really a disgrace. Everyone had an allotment well beyond what they'd ever need. So at the end of the semester people would work out their academic frustrations by printing off reams of crap just to get their "money's worth." Really piggishly shockingly disturbingly destructive behavior.
Having just graduated with a CS degree last May, you don't know what you're talking about.
Of course people with no experience (or "3+ years", or 2 weeks, or whatever junior level) are having trouble finding work in the midst of economic slowdown and lass layoffs. What does that have to do with the context, which was "people who are actually useful"?
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. My first exposure to him was through an old professor, who had worked with him, and suggested I read Greenspun's stuff and pay attention to what he was up to. This professor was a bit of an interesting character himself, so perhaps I should have taken his endorsement with a grain of salt.
But in any case, it was precisely his conduct and attitude on photo.net that led me to the conclusion that Phil is indeed a bastard, dead dog notwithstanding. He strikes me as wilfully uninformed (outside of the handful of topics where he maintains an opinionated flavor of domain expertise), grossly insensitive to others, and xenophobic.
No kidding.
But comparing households to national economies, or comparing video game players to national economies, is meaningless.
Households are tiny specks adrift in a sea of externalities absorbed into the national economy that surrounds them. They don't have to worry about, say, national defense, funding justice systems, or issuing currency.
(1) Pine does a decent job with HTML-encoded email.
(2) You can look at any of the parts by using the > key.
Hmm? Pine has featured MIME compliance for years. I use it as my primary mailer and I can sling attachments with the best of 'em.
If you can get your high horse to slow down long enough to step off it for a minute or two, you could install any of a zillion open source tools to modify your headers as messages pass in/out of your network, solving the problem and allowing you to use any MUA you please.
His point was that he wanted people to have to do a little work before they could be a part of the list. Ways of assessing that are imperfect, and his is just one. You can demonstrate you've done it by installing a non-default OS and/or MUA on your machine, or you can do as I've suggested above. Either way, you then pass, and are free to play.
First of all, it's the per cap (and not absolute) GNP that was claimed to put Everquest right around Russia. That's pretty meaningless, as it's a self-selected group of people from the richest countries in the world who have a lot of time on their hands. I mean, the per cap GNP of my house is several times higher than that of the richest country in the world. So what?
Secondly, France's GDP in 2000 was $1,448,000,000,000, which is a thousand times greater than the number you posted.
The difference between GNP and GDP in a nutshell is that GNP includes income generated by multinationals based in that country. For instance, Microsoft's worldwide income accrues to the US GNP but only its US income is counted for the GDP.
While I appreciate your sentiment, your logic is somewhat lacking.
The only thing the Interbase episode tells us is that a backdoor in Interbase was quickly discovered. That doesn't mean that all backdoors are quickly discovered, or even that all the backdoors in Interbase have been discovered.