...that Win XP and to a lesser but still significant extent Win 2k are real, solid OSs.
I disagree. I would say that Win2k and to a lesser, but still significant extent WinXP are running on solid OS kernels.
Too bad that the layers of code on top of the kernel aren't so good.
Why is it fair to compare Linux from 1998 to Windows 2000? You don't think that Windows 2000 came out in 1998, do you?
The problem with security and Windows is that it can only come from Microsoft, updates are few and far between, and in order to get them you have to accept Microsoft Genuine Spyware(TM).
Your comment reminds me of a scene in Bill & Ted's 2. Right at the beginning, Rufus is teaching a class. "Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. That's what they used to listen to tunes before even CDs!"
Pitfall and Boulderdash were not first generation games. That's getting into the third or fourth iteration by the time you see those. I was too old to really appreciate anything older, but I know that there were games made before I was born that were much more primitive.
Actually, while fingerprints are unique, the comparisons used to match them aren't perfect, and for people with nearly-identical fingerprints, it takes an incredibly sharp eye to note the differences. Computers can't tell entirely.
Fingerprints just don't contain a lot of information.
DNA, on the other hand contains a lot more information.
The problem is that the comparisons can't yet be made with a granularity to make the tests well, not that it's difficult to make the tests accurately. The appeal of this is precisely why it's so compelling.
Still, mostly people consider the fingerprint test as proof-positive, so I can see that the DNA test would be considered proof.
Rather than saying, "ours is cheaper, works as well, and is also capable of playing everything that an iPod can play" they're saying "Why are you buying that? Because somebody told you it's cool. Ours is the same, but CHEAPER and equally technically capable! Only a mindless follower would buy an iPod with reasons like that to buy a Samsung instead!"
Seems like a pretty good idea to me. It's working for Vonage, which is ironic considering that they're one of the worst VOIP sellers out there (they're swaying sheeple who don't do their homework before choosing a VOIP service).
Ridiculous! In what universe would they make things whose purpose is making noise!
I can see how this would strain the credibility. Next you'll be saying that the main character shoots the arrows using a bow rather than with telekinesis.
Sounds kind of like that idea from Coneheads. Remember?
The head INS agent/bad guy in the movie thought that they should make the mexican border an invisible fence.
Every time the catch an illegal immigrant, they put a coller on him and send him back home. Then when he tries to cross over again, he gets fried as the invisible fence causes the collar to electrocute him.
I don't think that's true at all. The reason you couldn't get those things back in the day was that there was no internet.
Now when the distribution network issued a price, *EVERBODY* knows what that price is. It forces them to set the price to something reasonable or be considered price-gouging.
People would gouge where they could. If group X likes movie Y, but movie Y is from "foreign," then group Z can force X to donate their kidneys to get it unless there's someone else that X can buy from.
It's the local monopoly concept. Today there are no local monopolies because international commerce is so easy.
And where are you from? If you live in the US, them I assume that by "only certain movies" you mean "every movie I have ever seen in a theatre or on TV, and a lot more besides."
You couldn't get random indie films or foreign flicks from the usual places. The same would be true of DVD as well, but now we have the internet to sell things that are too unpopular or esoteric to sell otherwise.
It seems as though you've examined a purely functional programming language (Lisp), and a system-based procedural language (C) and assumed that all language are somewhere between those two rather than, for example, actually trying other types.
Programming languages don't fall on a single axis between functional and procedural. That's ridiculous.
If I was going to design a diagram like that, I'd have one point that's purely procedural and put Fortran (NOT C since it has a super-stupendous entirely functional macro processor that can do anything) at the far end, and Lisp at the other. HOWEVER, I'd also have an axis for environment versus compiled.
Fortran and C would be at the far end of that, but Lisp would *not* because it uses an environment to do its stuff less than, for example, javascript does (there is not even such thing as a javascript native interface). So now we're talking about a more realistic two dimensional system with programming languages that vary in how dynamic they are and how functional they are.
Then there's a *third* axis for orthogonality (this is important to note because in highly orthogonal languages, there's usually only one way to a specific atomic operation). I'd probably put SQL (the standard, not the one implemented by a specific DB), xpath and RISC assembly as the most orthogonal, with LISP and XSLT as close seconds. I'm not entirely sure what I'd put as the least. Probably perl, VB, and Cobol.
To go further, though, some programming languages have special characteristics that are completely missing (as opposed to the other things which have degrees of usage) from others, such as single inheritance, multiple inheritance, interfaces, closures, do...while loops, operator overloading, string concatenation operator, and the ability to describe hardware (which is pretty much exclusively the domain of hardware description languages).
I'm sure there are others, but those are the things I can come up with off the top of my head.
No, it matters! There's no way anybody could design a markup language that doesn't take any shortcuts in separating content from logic and still be worth it.
Oh wait...it has been done. By Microsoft too, in fact. IE, Mozilla, and Opera are all capable of much more than ODF and at ridiculously high speeds.
If you add to that the fact that the MS version actually has more useless features in it (which add to the parse time), I guess this is entirely a lie.
Well, we're talking about images, so what do you think? It follows logically that it's whatever represents an image before it's converted to frequency space is what it is when it's been converted to frequency space.
Images are represented by intensity values - one for each color band. There are three color bands. They might be red, green, blue, or hue, saturation, value, or something else.
Usually each band is converted separately into a band in frequency space.
All of this is hand-holding, high level explainations. Its a very complicated process starting from not even knowing how uncompressed images are stored, and/. isn't really the place to learn it.
Range of frequencies of the wavelets, or the discrete cosines - both of which are frequency spaces. One of the first things you do to store an image is to convert it into a frequency representation. The most commonly known frequency space outside of E&M is the fourier space, which you reach by doing a fourier transform.
If they are rights, then would there be any confusion about it? I love the philosophy presented in the constitution, but it's just that - a philosophy.
The first bit strikes me as a bit of a stretch - inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What exactly does "liberty" mean there? Liberty to do what? We can assume that that means "to take up space," because, as beings made of matter, we all get that right, and there's no way to take it away.
As to the inalienable right to life...that's quite clearly wrong. If I shoot someone in the head, they're going to be dead. I have taken their unalienable right. Clearly, then, it is not an unalienable right. Pursuit of happiness is exactly the same unless we assume that it's about as empty as the liberty one - i.e. if you're happy just existing then there's nothing anyone can do to take that away from you.
All of these simplifications are ridiculous, though. The plain truth is that the unalienable rights aren't unalienable. They are a good idea, though, aren't they?
In summary, the constitution enumerates "rights" that they believe everyone should be allowed to have - with which I agree. But it is not an example of natural law made legal law. I can't help but thinking that maybe there should have been something more basic than the "rights" listed, though - like food, shelter, and clothing. These things I think every human on the planet should have regardless of the state their liberty or quality of life (on onset of death, as the case may be).
I don't know if you'd prefer it, but I found a solution for this, and for another problem - storage in a small space. I've got a Palm Tungsten E, which has 32 MB of memory built-in. I've had as many as 20 books on it at once - some of which were over half a meg compressed - and never been able to break the 2MB barrier in terms of book size. Before I used compressed ones, this was a bit of a problem.
The answer is that you can convert from all of those formats to HTML. In fact, HTML can look like any of those. So what you really want is something that can display HTML in from a perspective of an e-book reader. Just convert to HTML and tell your e-book reader what the root file of your book is (or do like I do and make a nice presentation front page from which you can select whichever book you want).
I use plucker for my actual reader, and convert most every format using Open Office. Open Office can read RTF, DOC, HTML (if you get very nonstandard HTML from somewhere, as is usually the case) and convert them into compliant HTML. The one exception to this is PDF.
Since PDF is an exact layout format, it's very difficult to remove text from it programmatically. You can do it with ghostscript, but it doesn't look good. I mostly use Acroread for palm for those - which still doesn't look very good.
Lit files actually involve an unpacking step which unfortunately breaks DRM. Your other alternative is to pay for a crappy e-book reader, though. Lit files are actually compressed, encrypted collections of HTML files, so you generally lose almost nothing in the conversion in terms of display.
C.S. Lewis - the guy who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia wrote a book that addresses this idea in the beginning of his book, The Great Divorce, which is an allegory for Heaven and Hell...sort of.
Anyway, his description of hell before judgement day is a place where people can make absolutely anything they want just by imagining it. People are imperfect, though, so their imaginings are also - and so nothing works great. Also, with no economic forces holding people together, bickering with neighbors drives people further and further away from each other (since they can always find a strech of land and think up a new house for it).
Yeah, but really, the problem with energy is in moving it from place to place.
If we can replicate, then presumably we've cracked the problem of turning energy to matter and back. If we start running out of energy, we convert some more matter into energy.
If we start to run out of matter, we go get some from any of the many celestial bodies nearby. It's not like Jupiter is doing anything terribly important with it's extra matter (I'm assuming that if we can do all that other stuff, why not space travel as well)?
Scaling this can get a bit tricky, but that has really already been solved by all current major search engines.
And here is the premise with which we disagree.
Google does a good job, but it's difficult to find what you're looking for in any of the other major search engines.
And I'm positive you can't get results like theirs with simple bayesian filtering.
What you don't seem to be grasping is that search is artificial intelligence. It's saying "given these search parameters, what am I REALLY looking to find?"
Here's a really good example I just thought up. Try looking for "explosive materials."
That's a very general subject - I could be looking for where to buy them, or what they are, or the definition, or... What I would probably like to get back with such a general subject on that are authoritative pages that can point me to information about them so that I can narrow down my interest. This would be the logical thing to get back if your search engine is smart enough not to just search for the words "explosive" and "materials."
So take a look at the difference in results between MSN and Google. The top pages on Google are what I would want - references that talk about explosives in general. MSN's look suspiciously like someone went through and found all the places that the words "explosive" and "materials" exist.
This level of specificity thing is just one area that shows how Google is winning. Search is the greatest attempt at artificial intelligence currently in existence, and a problem that is currently so open-ended and complex that it makes rocket science look like lego assembly.
But don't take my word for it. Go pick up a few books on AI. There are many, many problems related to search still unsolved.
That's probably true. But I can't help but thinking that unlike every other problem Microsoft has dealt with, search is different.
Search is hard.
Look at every other product that Microsoft made. It doesn't really require any genius-level intuition to solve or anything like that. It's ordinary, straightforward implementations that are being done. Back in the day it would have taken a genius, but Microsoft got to borrow ideas that have been published by other people. Further, they don't even do it well. Their primary concern is getting it done and filling it with lots of features. That's not going to work for search.
I would put it to you that it is very difficult to come up with a way of doing something that works well when the thing you want to do is hard, and that, in general, throwing money at it doesn't help.
If you are to prove to me that Microsoft's giagantinormous size is going to do it for them, then tell me about their track-record of genius.
Not at schools. The government has decided that anybody is basically allowed to do anything they like to students.
You have no protection against search&seizure, no accused rights, and no first - and absolutely definitely no second ammendment rights.
The logic is that until your old enough those rights really belong to your parents - which is why most of the initial punishments in school involve sending the kid home. If someone does something to you at school it is assumed that your parents sanction it because they go there and have access to the school board.
Along the same lines, however, parents are generally allowed to say that they don't want a particular book to be in a school library (like "Heather Has Two Mommies") or do want it despite a librarian's insistence that it's inappropriate (as I've actually seen come up with "Harry Potter").
I don't see how they're justifying general public libraries, though.
You have to take a security test to be a consultant? So...if I'm going to be designing a webpage for a washing machine company I have to take a security test?
Very silly.
Having to take a test for actual security people are as well.
The fundamental principals of security aren't that hard. Not hard enough to require a test: 1) Validate all inputs coming from insecure ports. Assume that all data from them is untrustworthy. Don't allow any kind of write access to your data on insecure ports. Don't allow password validation at all on insecure channels. 2) Store all authentication information in a salted one-way hash. Don't write the algorithm that does this yourself. Use one that's already had a hundred thousand eyeballs look at it and no one who found its flaw (so not MD5). 3) Know and inform everyone that any time you do public key passing via an unsecure channel (i.e. http) you're creating a point of entry for man-in-the-middle attack so that you need to use switches rather than hubs. Other than that its up to the internet service providers to keep that sort of thing from happening.
Those are the "be a good sysadmin" rules. Then there's the programmer rules: 1) Same as rule #1 above, but replace "insecure ports" with "anywhere outside the program." Also included in this - most especially - is making sure that the length of null terminated data can not exceed its available space. Nearly all exploits begin as buffer overflows. 2) Don't make up any algorithms of your own to handle security. Don't bolt security things on to an existing security algorithm. You'll get it wrong like WEP did. Use existing algorithms exactly the way that they were intended to be used with no creativity on your part. Preferably by using someone else's code that has already been inspected highly. Invented things aren't secure until they've had a few hundred thousand eyes look at 'em.
The rules to security are simple. Having a certificate is not going to do much to increase the likelihood that you follow the simple rules. The problem is that all it sometimes takes is one moment of weakness to cause a huge problem - not that people don't know the rules.
At least I hope this is true, and tend to think that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
...that Win XP and to a lesser but still significant extent Win 2k are real, solid OSs.
I disagree. I would say that Win2k and to a lesser, but still significant extent WinXP are running on solid OS kernels.
Too bad that the layers of code on top of the kernel aren't so good.
Why is it fair to compare Linux from 1998 to Windows 2000? You don't think that Windows 2000 came out in 1998, do you?
The problem with security and Windows is that it can only come from Microsoft, updates are few and far between, and in order to get them you have to accept Microsoft Genuine Spyware(TM).
Your comment reminds me of a scene in Bill & Ted's 2. Right at the beginning, Rufus is teaching a class.
"Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. That's what they used to listen to tunes before even CDs!"
Pitfall and Boulderdash were not first generation games. That's getting into the third or fourth iteration by the time you see those. I was too old to really appreciate anything older, but I know that there were games made before I was born that were much more primitive.
Actually, I was sort of wondering why the military was using a rather unpolished .net runtime to run their Wing.
I mean, wouldn't it be better to write it in C? Or maybe even use Java?
What's a wing, anyway? Is that a new framework with which I'm unfamiliar, or is it some new DoD language? Is Wing Ada.net?
Actually, while fingerprints are unique, the comparisons used to match them aren't perfect, and for people with nearly-identical fingerprints, it takes an incredibly sharp eye to note the differences. Computers can't tell entirely.
Fingerprints just don't contain a lot of information.
DNA, on the other hand contains a lot more information.
The problem is that the comparisons can't yet be made with a granularity to make the tests well, not that it's difficult to make the tests accurately. The appeal of this is precisely why it's so compelling.
Still, mostly people consider the fingerprint test as proof-positive, so I can see that the DNA test would be considered proof.
It's more a way of going about the other thing.
Rather than saying, "ours is cheaper, works as well, and is also capable of playing everything that an iPod can play" they're saying
"Why are you buying that? Because somebody told you it's cool. Ours is the same, but CHEAPER and equally technically capable! Only a mindless follower would buy an iPod with reasons like that to buy a Samsung instead!"
Seems like a pretty good idea to me. It's working for Vonage, which is ironic considering that they're one of the worst VOIP sellers out there (they're swaying sheeple who don't do their homework before choosing a VOIP service).
...there's also a noisemaker and...
Ridiculous! In what universe would they make things whose purpose is making noise!
I can see how this would strain the credibility. Next you'll be saying that the main character shoots the arrows using a bow rather than with telekinesis.
...of course, that game he played was run by an AI smarter than any human who ever lived that had god-like abilities and nearly infinite intelligence.
Where are we going to get that?
Sounds kind of like that idea from Coneheads. Remember?
The head INS agent/bad guy in the movie thought that they should make the mexican border an invisible fence.
Every time the catch an illegal immigrant, they put a coller on him and send him back home. Then when he tries to cross over again, he gets fried as the invisible fence causes the collar to electrocute him.
Funny stuff. This seems about as possible.
I don't think that's true at all. The reason you couldn't get those things back in the day was that there was no internet.
Now when the distribution network issued a price, *EVERBODY* knows what that price is. It forces them to set the price to something reasonable or be considered price-gouging.
People would gouge where they could. If group X likes movie Y, but movie Y is from "foreign," then group Z can force X to donate their kidneys to get it unless there's someone else that X can buy from.
It's the local monopoly concept. Today there are no local monopolies because international commerce is so easy.
only certain movies
And where are you from? If you live in the US, them I assume that by "only certain movies" you mean "every movie I have ever seen in a theatre or on TV, and a lot more besides."
You couldn't get random indie films or foreign flicks from the usual places. The same would be true of DVD as well, but now we have the internet to sell things that are too unpopular or esoteric to sell otherwise.
This has nothing to do with VHS.
It seems as though you've examined a purely functional programming language (Lisp), and a system-based procedural language (C) and assumed that all language are somewhere between those two rather than, for example, actually trying other types.
Programming languages don't fall on a single axis between functional and procedural. That's ridiculous.
If I was going to design a diagram like that, I'd have one point that's purely procedural and put Fortran (NOT C since it has a super-stupendous entirely functional macro processor that can do anything) at the far end, and Lisp at the other. HOWEVER, I'd also have an axis for environment versus compiled.
Fortran and C would be at the far end of that, but Lisp would *not* because it uses an environment to do its stuff less than, for example, javascript does (there is not even such thing as a javascript native interface). So now we're talking about a more realistic two dimensional system with programming languages that vary in how dynamic they are and how functional they are.
Then there's a *third* axis for orthogonality (this is important to note because in highly orthogonal languages, there's usually only one way to a specific atomic operation). I'd probably put SQL (the standard, not the one implemented by a specific DB), xpath and RISC assembly as the most orthogonal, with LISP and XSLT as close seconds. I'm not entirely sure what I'd put as the least. Probably perl, VB, and Cobol.
To go further, though, some programming languages have special characteristics that are completely missing (as opposed to the other things which have degrees of usage) from others, such as single inheritance, multiple inheritance, interfaces, closures, do...while loops, operator overloading, string concatenation operator, and the ability to describe hardware (which is pretty much exclusively the domain of hardware description languages).
I'm sure there are others, but those are the things I can come up with off the top of my head.
Yes there is. It's hard to do it otherwise.
Perhaps we need an extension to the format to include diffs.
No, it matters! There's no way anybody could design a markup language that doesn't take any shortcuts in separating content from logic and still be worth it.
Oh wait...it has been done. By Microsoft too, in fact. IE, Mozilla, and Opera are all capable of much more than ODF and at ridiculously high speeds.
If you add to that the fact that the MS version actually has more useless features in it (which add to the parse time), I guess this is entirely a lie.
Well, we're talking about images, so what do you think? It follows logically that it's whatever represents an image before it's converted to frequency space is what it is when it's been converted to frequency space.
/. isn't really the place to learn it.
Images are represented by intensity values - one for each color band. There are three color bands. They might be red, green, blue, or hue, saturation, value, or something else.
Usually each band is converted separately into a band in frequency space.
All of this is hand-holding, high level explainations. Its a very complicated process starting from not even knowing how uncompressed images are stored, and
Google is indeed your friend.
You're not a math person, I take it.
Range of frequencies of the wavelets, or the discrete cosines - both of which are frequency spaces. One of the first things you do to store an image is to convert it into a frequency representation.
The most commonly known frequency space outside of E&M is the fourier space, which you reach by doing a fourier transform.
Ring a bell?
If they are rights, then would there be any confusion about it? I love the philosophy presented in the constitution, but it's just that - a philosophy.
The first bit strikes me as a bit of a stretch - inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What exactly does "liberty" mean there? Liberty to do what? We can assume that that means "to take up space," because, as beings made of matter, we all get that right, and there's no way to take it away.
As to the inalienable right to life...that's quite clearly wrong. If I shoot someone in the head, they're going to be dead. I have taken their unalienable right. Clearly, then, it is not an unalienable right. Pursuit of happiness is exactly the same unless we assume that it's about as empty as the liberty one - i.e. if you're happy just existing then there's nothing anyone can do to take that away from you.
All of these simplifications are ridiculous, though. The plain truth is that the unalienable rights aren't unalienable. They are a good idea, though, aren't they?
In summary, the constitution enumerates "rights" that they believe everyone should be allowed to have - with which I agree. But it is not an example of natural law made legal law. I can't help but thinking that maybe there should have been something more basic than the "rights" listed, though - like food, shelter, and clothing. These things I think every human on the planet should have regardless of the state their liberty or quality of life (on onset of death, as the case may be).
Okay...why does this guy have enough bandwidth to support Slashdot?
And why do the editors find this hilarious enough to put on the front page?
I feel like the brunt of an in-joke played on us by this Henry guy and the Slashdot editors.
Maybe Henry's made of money and this is a bizarre form of Slashvertisement.
He can afford the bandwidth, after all.
I don't know if you'd prefer it, but I found a solution for this, and for another problem - storage in a small space. I've got a Palm Tungsten E, which has 32 MB of memory built-in. I've had as many as 20 books on it at once - some of which were over half a meg compressed - and never been able to break the 2MB barrier in terms of book size. Before I used compressed ones, this was a bit of a problem.
The answer is that you can convert from all of those formats to HTML. In fact, HTML can look like any of those. So what you really want is something that can display HTML in from a perspective of an e-book reader. Just convert to HTML and tell your e-book reader what the root file of your book is (or do like I do and make a nice presentation front page from which you can select whichever book you want).
I use plucker for my actual reader, and convert most every format using Open Office. Open Office can read RTF, DOC, HTML (if you get very nonstandard HTML from somewhere, as is usually the case) and convert them into compliant HTML. The one exception to this is PDF.
Since PDF is an exact layout format, it's very difficult to remove text from it programmatically. You can do it with ghostscript, but it doesn't look good. I mostly use Acroread for palm for those - which still doesn't look very good.
Lit files actually involve an unpacking step which unfortunately breaks DRM. Your other alternative is to pay for a crappy e-book reader, though. Lit files are actually compressed, encrypted collections of HTML files, so you generally lose almost nothing in the conversion in terms of display.
C.S. Lewis - the guy who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia wrote a book that addresses this idea in the beginning of his book, The Great Divorce, which is an allegory for Heaven and Hell...sort of.
Anyway, his description of hell before judgement day is a place where people can make absolutely anything they want just by imagining it. People are imperfect, though, so their imaginings are also - and so nothing works great. Also, with no economic forces holding people together, bickering with neighbors drives people further and further away from each other (since they can always find a strech of land and think up a new house for it).
It's an interesting notion.
Yeah, but really, the problem with energy is in moving it from place to place.
If we can replicate, then presumably we've cracked the problem of turning energy to matter and back. If we start running out of energy, we convert some more matter into energy.
If we start to run out of matter, we go get some from any of the many celestial bodies nearby. It's not like Jupiter is doing anything terribly important with it's extra matter (I'm assuming that if we can do all that other stuff, why not space travel as well)?
Scaling this can get a bit tricky, but that has really already been solved by all current major search engines.
And here is the premise with which we disagree.
Google does a good job, but it's difficult to find what you're looking for in any of the other major search engines.
And I'm positive you can't get results like theirs with simple bayesian filtering.
What you don't seem to be grasping is that search is artificial intelligence. It's saying "given these search parameters, what am I REALLY looking to find?"
Here's a really good example I just thought up. Try looking for "explosive materials."
That's a very general subject - I could be looking for where to buy them, or what they are, or the definition, or... What I would probably like to get back with such a general subject on that are authoritative pages that can point me to information about them so that I can narrow down my interest. This would be the logical thing to get back if your search engine is smart enough not to just search for the words "explosive" and "materials."
So take a look at the difference in results between MSN and Google. The top pages on Google are what I would want - references that talk about explosives in general. MSN's look suspiciously like someone went through and found all the places that the words "explosive" and "materials" exist.
This level of specificity thing is just one area that shows how Google is winning. Search is the greatest attempt at artificial intelligence currently in existence, and a problem that is currently so open-ended and complex that it makes rocket science look like lego assembly.
But don't take my word for it. Go pick up a few books on AI. There are many, many problems related to search still unsolved.
Read my comment. Third paragraph, third sentence.
Back in the day it would have taken a genius, but Microsoft got to borrow ideas that have been published by other people.
No one's published how Google is doing search. It's a trade secret. It won't be hard the moment that they do.
That's probably true. But I can't help but thinking that unlike every other problem Microsoft has dealt with, search is different.
Search is hard.
Look at every other product that Microsoft made. It doesn't really require any genius-level intuition to solve or anything like that. It's ordinary, straightforward implementations that are being done. Back in the day it would have taken a genius, but Microsoft got to borrow ideas that have been published by other people. Further, they don't even do it well. Their primary concern is getting it done and filling it with lots of features. That's not going to work for search.
I would put it to you that it is very difficult to come up with a way of doing something that works well when the thing you want to do is hard, and that, in general, throwing money at it doesn't help.
If you are to prove to me that Microsoft's giagantinormous size is going to do it for them, then tell me about their track-record of genius.
Not at schools. The government has decided that anybody is basically allowed to do anything they like to students.
You have no protection against search&seizure, no accused rights, and no first - and absolutely definitely no second ammendment rights.
The logic is that until your old enough those rights really belong to your parents - which is why most of the initial punishments in school involve sending the kid home. If someone does something to you at school it is assumed that your parents sanction it because they go there and have access to the school board.
Along the same lines, however, parents are generally allowed to say that they don't want a particular book to be in a school library (like "Heather Has Two Mommies") or do want it despite a librarian's insistence that it's inappropriate (as I've actually seen come up with "Harry Potter").
I don't see how they're justifying general public libraries, though.
You have to take a security test to be a consultant? So...if I'm going to be designing a webpage for a washing machine company I have to take a security test?
Very silly.
Having to take a test for actual security people are as well.
The fundamental principals of security aren't that hard. Not hard enough to require a test:
1) Validate all inputs coming from insecure ports. Assume that all data from them is untrustworthy. Don't allow any kind of write access to your data on insecure ports. Don't allow password validation at all on insecure channels.
2) Store all authentication information in a salted one-way hash. Don't write the algorithm that does this yourself. Use one that's already had a hundred thousand eyeballs look at it and no one who found its flaw (so not MD5).
3) Know and inform everyone that any time you do public key passing via an unsecure channel (i.e. http) you're creating a point of entry for man-in-the-middle attack so that you need to use switches rather than hubs. Other than that its up to the internet service providers to keep that sort of thing from happening.
Those are the "be a good sysadmin" rules. Then there's the programmer rules:
1) Same as rule #1 above, but replace "insecure ports" with "anywhere outside the program." Also included in this - most especially - is making sure that the length of null terminated data can not exceed its available space. Nearly all exploits begin as buffer overflows.
2) Don't make up any algorithms of your own to handle security. Don't bolt security things on to an existing security algorithm. You'll get it wrong like WEP did. Use existing algorithms exactly the way that they were intended to be used with no creativity on your part. Preferably by using someone else's code that has already been inspected highly. Invented things aren't secure until they've had a few hundred thousand eyes look at 'em.
The rules to security are simple. Having a certificate is not going to do much to increase the likelihood that you follow the simple rules. The problem is that all it sometimes takes is one moment of weakness to cause a huge problem - not that people don't know the rules.
At least I hope this is true, and tend to think that it is.