My wife is Argentinan, as well as all of her family, and a great deal of our friends. We live in Mexico, and travel to Argentina at least once a year.
The Argentinian exchange rate has dropped in the last year, although not as much as it happened 15 years ago — nor, by far, how it happened 30 years ago. And the local economy is far, far from hopeless— The standards of living in Argentina are quite high, most middle-class people travel outside the country regularly. As a Mexican travelling regularly to Argentina for the last five years, I have seen their life costs go from slightly cheaper to slightly more expensive — and today again slightly cheaper than ours.
My family has their savings partly in pesos, in local banks, and partly in US dollars, in the safe deposits in the bank — AFAICT, they don't have a dollarised bank account. And they have a very decent level of life. My in-laws, as an example, travelled last year one month in Europe, and came to visit for a month in Mexico, without compromising their finances.
This is the second post badmouthing Argentina in Slashdot in the past few weeks. I know I am answering with some (few) personal data points, but that's in the end how reality is: A huge collection of individual stories. And they are far from as dire as you portrait them.
Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
You know... There were great hopes raised in my parents' day, when the hippies threatened the anachronic values of a dying, obsolete social construct.
Young people are always more likely to embrace change, difference, to agree that the risk to be different is worth it, that the old corrupt system is not worth pursuing anymore. Then they grow up. Then, the old hippies become the dwellers of old age care homes, and are as reactionary as their grandparents were.
Man, I got to use a PDP11 at my father's institute. I can assure you that lifting the machine would require industrial machinery. Also, the machine was rack-mounted with its disk... So that advice would not be very welcome:)
I often quote in this context a nice 1999 article, Why Johnny can't encrypt: a usability evaluation of PGP 5.0.Yes, it's old, but still interesting: What kind of shortcomings do crypto interfaces have in order to be used by a random Johnny?
There are over 8,000Km of America (how many miles would that be?) South of your border. The name "United States of America" means that, among the existing States in America, some decided to unite and become a nation — but that nation does not necessarily span all of America.
Having so many publishing venues available right now, with (thankfully) every day more of them available under open access licensing schemes, we can get to much more research in our field.
That, however, means that when I start reading on a subject related to my area of study, there are too many documents fighting for my attention. And I will undoubtedly miss many among them, just because of sheer probability.
Of course, the same will happen to my published works: They will no longer be _so_ unique, they will also depend on my luck for you to read them.
I recently posted a non-consensual photo of my newborn daughter, taken as she was brought out of the womb. Everybody congratulated us (for the baby, and for the photo, which was a great shot;-) ).
I somehow doubt Twitter would have an issue with her image.
If your family has had a mezcal for 4 generations, it just means they don't drink alcohol, or have it really well hidden. Maybe they have had a temazcal (similar to a sauna, but with far more associated rituals to it);-)
Universidad Politécnico does not exist, in fact. There is a long-standing rivalry between "la universidad" (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and "el poli" (Instituto Politécnico Nacional). Nowadays, I teach at UNAM and am a student at IPN:-)
Huichol is spoken in the West. Náhuatl is the dominant indigenous language in the center of the country, the different types of Mayan in the East. But there are over 60 distinct indigenous languages throughout the country.
I am Mexican, living in Mexico City. My wife is an Argentinian, from a mid-sized province capital. She often finds it laughable how this city lacks any logic. Of course, until it becomes clear that most quirks come from agricultural, old villages that got slurped into the Blob. Then its shape is explainable... Not that it makes much sense, of course.
It is 2015. If you've got a single password (your private key) with root access to that many machines, something is terribly wrong over at Debian.
Others have replied, but I think I should do so as well: Yes, we don't use a PGP key to log in to thousands of machines, but we use it to validate package uploads that enter the archive. If I sign+upload a malicious binary package, it's just a matter of time until it reaches users.
Of course, there are some caveats: First, I must convince users to use my package. This is, my malicious code should not go in a very uninteresting package, it would go to one that I know that has many users. But, second, it should not attract too much attention, as others would likely find my backdoor. Say, if I wanted to reach maximum number of machines, I could update an "Essential" package, such as base-files. But first, the package is not mine (so my friend Santiago, the package maintainer, would jump at the unexpected upload). And it does not get updates often, so others would probably debdiff it and uncover my betrayal. And third, that would make my malicious package enter the unstable distribution. Were I looking for a real foothold on a large amount of computers, I'd have to wait probably around two years until it reaches a stable release.
That's why I said "thousands" and not "millions":-)
Interesting thing you mention. Well, our migration was prompted by some theoretical advances; if you look at our slides at DebConf14 you will see some references to papers presented at the EuroCrypt 2012 conference talking about the relative strengths of different keys.
I don't contest that Zimmerman and Koch know how to communicate securely and what it takes, but maybe we are talking about a different threat model. One thing is identity assurance just for the sake of identity assurance, but in Debian we use it as a core infrastructural part: Get hold of my GPG key, and you have potential root access to thousands of computers. Of course, there are human checks in place, and it's quite unlikely you'd get away with yours... But it's possible.
I am absolutely not surprised by this: A well-known kernel hacker has enough systemwide understanding for the ocassional glitch to become obvious. He also uses most probably a very specific subset of programs for his day-to-day activities — I (a very far cry from his skill levels) haven't changed my main tools in over ten years. I mean, a tiling window manager, Emacs, a browser... Specific little tools can vary, but they won't jeopardize my system's overall behaviour — This means, it won't mean me spending time head-scratching to keep working.
Now, a developer is a far cry from a systems administrator. A sysadmin values stability over all things. I don't want a random upgrade to become a lost hour understanding the new configuration format of foobard.
And of course, casual users... If my wife desktop had changed from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without me preparing her, I'm sure she would not have appreciated it.
America is swamped already by illegal migrants. Some of them started arriving in the XVII-XVIII century. We failed to protect the borders of our great, glorious nation — And yes, they overthrew us and reducted us. Nowadays, the USA is flooded with all those dirty white do-no-goodies. They walk and drive around what used to be our forests and plains, as if they were the lords of the land. And they now don't want to allow any further migration After teaching us that migration was just a natural phenomenon, after telling us that Europe is overcrowded and they needed to pursuit the Great American Dream... They want to deny that same dream to newer migrants...
Language and literature are not directly marketable. Highschool-level algebra is not directly marketable. Biology, physics and chemistry are not directly marketable. Same goes for geography, phylosophy, history, and basically every other subject we learnt at high school.
Still, it would be absolutely foolish to get rid of all that.
We don't send kids to school to make them marketable — We send them to get a general culture, to get a baseline of education in all major areas of knowledge. And, of course, I will argue over and over that nowadays the basic workings of a computer are as central to understanding our world as algebra.
So, yes, forget about marketability. Think about getting enoug foundations to understand the world and society they will have to develop in.
Back in 2009, I was at the Debian Conference (DebConf) in Cáceres, Spain. We had the presence of two blind Debian Developers, Sam Hartman and Mario Lang, both of which have continued to attend the conference at later editions, and are today very active project members.
They gave this talk on how they use their computer — Completely different ways, both very interesting to appreciate:
I don't live in a communist state (I live in Mexico), but you will find some of the line you quote applying here — Sadly, every time less. The national government is the sole owner of strategic areas, such as petroleum, electricity generation and distribution, water extraction and distribution. some other areas, such as mining, are operated by concessions: The State is the sole owner, but specific companies can bid for the right to exploit it for a given amount of time.
And yes, the current trend in government goes quite against this. Our last decades' governments have excluded or dilluted many areas from this monopolic aspects.
You will find, however, this line is not clearly defined among different countries. There are many countries in Europe and Latin America where the areas I mention are under different government-owned and/or government-operated schemes. And the ideologic moments do shift from time to time: Ten years ago, Bolivia was privatising everything. That even led to what they called the "war for water", a revolution that outed a president. Today, they are again nationalizing resources. And while still a strongly underdeveloped country, they are faring much better and much stabler than in their past many decades.
You are no historian, right:) 1. The revolution got to the power in 1959, not in 1953. 2. The businesses were expropiated, not stolen (that means, their owners were offered an indemnization... Maybe they didn't find it to be enough, but it was determined by the authorities to be the right value). 3. The US wasn't quite peaceful on its attack on the Cuban way. There was a large-scale invasion (Playa Girón / Bay of Pigs), and many paramilitary operations. 4. If you measure something one way, it should be measurable the other way around. Please go ask people in every country that has been militarily intervened by the USA in the last 50 years how were they restituted for stolen or destroyed property.
Cubans *do* have access to Internet. I (Mexican) have been there several times. In 1998, I became a close friend with a Cuban university teacher, and in 2000 I travelled to Cuba with tens of Linux and Free Software books, hundreds of CDs with distros of the day. I was quite in close contact with the Linux user groups in Santiago and La Habana, and less so but still met some people from Pinar del Río and Baracoa. My friend later moved to Spain. Yes, he didn't go out the most legal way there is — But he kept in touch with his family. I kept in touch with his family as well (Internet access is not restricted to the university). His mother and his sister both travelled to Spain to visit him, and went back to Cuba. I went again to Cuba in 2010; I stayed at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, ~10Km from the capital. The university is in a decomissioned soviet naval base; it is a huge university city, with hundreds of student dorm apartments. Every apartment has a computer connected to Internet. They do have strict quotas, but they all have network access. The embargo, as you mention really harms Cuba. The country is clearly among the materially poorest I have visited. Hopefully things will now improve. No, it's not (only?) a communist regime that has kept them from developing.
It is tricky, yes. I also have a friend in a similar situation, as well as an uncle.
There is a clear line (to me) on this: If the student is enrolled with the teacher then they start developing a relationship, it's wrong. It's a conflict of interests, the teacher cannot judge the student on the same grounds as other people in the group. Where I teach, that would be grounds for contractual job termination.
As soon as the grades are set, I find no objection. If it's just a random student in the same school as the teacher, if it's a consenting relationship between two independent adults with no power hierarchy between them, it is OK.
Of course, *after* having been sentimentaly involved (successfully or not), a student should not seek to be part of a teacher's group. It's not always possible to avoid it (i.e. only teacher for a mandatory subject), but it's very recommended.
Maybe because they are a surrogate state lacking full self-determination, and belonging colonially to a country with a culture so different to theirs, they will never be granted full citizenship of any real country ever?
...How can you qualify the NSA as "unamerican"? They do reside in America. So do I (although my country's language is not English, this is as much America as the USA).
Yes, there are a lot of foundational myths to your country. One of them is that it is the "Land of the Free". Most countries that have been born in the last 200 years or so have similar origins and claims. But, if the country stands for freedom, it should not impose a credo to its citizens.
Hence, labeling something as "unamerican" is an oxymoron. Saying it's unamerican because it goes against personal privacy... Is more akin to saying it's un-soviet because it fosters private investment and therefore deprives society of its full economic benefits.
And do note, please, I said "un-soviet", not "un-russian".
Slashdot Mirror
My wife is Argentinan, as well as all of her family, and a great deal of our friends. We live in Mexico, and travel to Argentina at least once a year.
The Argentinian exchange rate has dropped in the last year, although not as much as it happened 15 years ago — nor, by far, how it happened 30 years ago. And the local economy is far, far from hopeless— The standards of living in Argentina are quite high, most middle-class people travel outside the country regularly. As a Mexican travelling regularly to Argentina for the last five years, I have seen their life costs go from slightly cheaper to slightly more expensive — and today again slightly cheaper than ours.
My family has their savings partly in pesos, in local banks, and partly in US dollars, in the safe deposits in the bank — AFAICT, they don't have a dollarised bank account. And they have a very decent level of life. My in-laws, as an example, travelled last year one month in Europe, and came to visit for a month in Mexico, without compromising their finances.
This is the second post badmouthing Argentina in Slashdot in the past few weeks. I know I am answering with some (few) personal data points, but that's in the end how reality is: A huge collection of individual stories. And they are far from as dire as you portrait them.
The real test for computability is to demonstrate that a Turing machine is Emacs-complete.
Sadly, it still requires a chord-enabled keyboard, which the traditional tape-based Turing machine does not implement.
Ugh, quick, messy fingers. I wanted to mod this "Insightful". Clicked on "redundant".
So, posting to undo my bad deed. I could just comment "yeah, you're right" and be less publicly embarassed... But I deserve the shame :-P
Real change and progress in politics comes only as the old people die off and are replaced by the young. It's a slow process!
You know... There were great hopes raised in my parents' day, when the hippies threatened the anachronic values of a dying, obsolete social construct.
Young people are always more likely to embrace change, difference, to agree that the risk to be different is worth it, that the old corrupt system is not worth pursuing anymore. Then they grow up. Then, the old hippies become the dwellers of old age care homes, and are as reactionary as their grandparents were.
Man, I got to use a PDP11 at my father's institute. I can assure you that lifting the machine would require industrial machinery. Also, the machine was rack-mounted with its disk... So that advice would not be very welcome :)
I often quote in this context a nice 1999 article, Why Johnny can't encrypt: a usability evaluation of PGP 5.0.Yes, it's old, but still interesting: What kind of shortcomings do crypto interfaces have in order to be used by a random Johnny?
There are over 8,000Km of America (how many miles would that be?) South of your border. The name "United States of America" means that, among the existing States in America, some decided to unite and become a nation — but that nation does not necessarily span all of America.
Having so many publishing venues available right now, with (thankfully) every day more of them available under open access licensing schemes, we can get to much more research in our field.
That, however, means that when I start reading on a subject related to my area of study, there are too many documents fighting for my attention. And I will undoubtedly miss many among them, just because of sheer probability.
Of course, the same will happen to my published works: They will no longer be _so_ unique, they will also depend on my luck for you to read them.
I recently posted a non-consensual photo of my newborn daughter, taken as she was brought out of the womb. Everybody congratulated us (for the baby, and for the photo, which was a great shot ;-) ).
I somehow doubt Twitter would have an issue with her image.
If your family has had a mezcal for 4 generations, it just means they don't drink alcohol, or have it really well hidden. Maybe they have had a temazcal (similar to a sauna, but with far more associated rituals to it) ;-)
Universidad Politécnico does not exist, in fact. There is a long-standing rivalry between "la universidad" (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and "el poli" (Instituto Politécnico Nacional). Nowadays, I teach at UNAM and am a student at IPN :-)
Huichol is spoken in the West. Náhuatl is the dominant indigenous language in the center of the country, the different types of Mayan in the East. But there are over 60 distinct indigenous languages throughout the country.
Just like... Mexico City!
I am Mexican, living in Mexico City. My wife is an Argentinian, from a mid-sized province capital. She often finds it laughable how this city lacks any logic. Of course, until it becomes clear that most quirks come from agricultural, old villages that got slurped into the Blob. Then its shape is explainable... Not that it makes much sense, of course.
Holy Hell, I hope you mistyped something!
It is 2015. If you've got a single password (your private key) with root access to that many machines, something is terribly wrong over at Debian.
Others have replied, but I think I should do so as well: Yes, we don't use a PGP key to log in to thousands of machines, but we use it to validate package uploads that enter the archive. If I sign+upload a malicious binary package, it's just a matter of time until it reaches users.
Of course, there are some caveats: First, I must convince users to use my package. This is, my malicious code should not go in a very uninteresting package, it would go to one that I know that has many users. But, second, it should not attract too much attention, as others would likely find my backdoor. Say, if I wanted to reach maximum number of machines, I could update an "Essential" package, such as base-files. But first, the package is not mine (so my friend Santiago, the package maintainer, would jump at the unexpected upload). And it does not get updates often, so others would probably debdiff it and uncover my betrayal. And third, that would make my malicious package enter the unstable distribution. Were I looking for a real foothold on a large amount of computers, I'd have to wait probably around two years until it reaches a stable release.
That's why I said "thousands" and not "millions" :-)
Interesting thing you mention. Well, our migration was prompted by some theoretical advances; if you look at our slides at DebConf14 you will see some references to papers presented at the EuroCrypt 2012 conference talking about the relative strengths of different keys.
I don't contest that Zimmerman and Koch know how to communicate securely and what it takes, but maybe we are talking about a different threat model. One thing is identity assurance just for the sake of identity assurance, but in Debian we use it as a core infrastructural part: Get hold of my GPG key, and you have potential root access to thousands of computers. Of course, there are human checks in place, and it's quite unlikely you'd get away with yours... But it's possible.
You should really update your key. A 1024D key with a SHA1 primary signing algorithm is no longer considered safe.
(Data point: We did quite a work in Debian to migrate to 2048R with SHA256)
I am absolutely not surprised by this: A well-known kernel hacker has enough systemwide understanding for the ocassional glitch to become obvious. He also uses most probably a very specific subset of programs for his day-to-day activities — I (a very far cry from his skill levels) haven't changed my main tools in over ten years. I mean, a tiling window manager, Emacs, a browser... Specific little tools can vary, but they won't jeopardize my system's overall behaviour — This means, it won't mean me spending time head-scratching to keep working.
Now, a developer is a far cry from a systems administrator. A sysadmin values stability over all things. I don't want a random upgrade to become a lost hour understanding the new configuration format of foobard.
And of course, casual users... If my wife desktop had changed from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 without me preparing her, I'm sure she would not have appreciated it.
America is swamped already by illegal migrants. Some of them started arriving in the XVII-XVIII century. We failed to protect the borders of our great, glorious nation — And yes, they overthrew us and reducted us. Nowadays, the USA is flooded with all those dirty white do-no-goodies. They walk and drive around what used to be our forests and plains, as if they were the lords of the land. And they now don't want to allow any further migration After teaching us that migration was just a natural phenomenon, after telling us that Europe is overcrowded and they needed to pursuit the Great American Dream... They want to deny that same dream to newer migrants...
YES. YES, completely with you.
Language and literature are not directly marketable. Highschool-level algebra is not directly marketable. Biology, physics and chemistry are not directly marketable. Same goes for geography, phylosophy, history, and basically every other subject we learnt at high school.
Still, it would be absolutely foolish to get rid of all that.
We don't send kids to school to make them marketable — We send them to get a general culture, to get a baseline of education in all major areas of knowledge. And, of course, I will argue over and over that nowadays the basic workings of a computer are as central to understanding our world as algebra.
So, yes, forget about marketability. Think about getting enoug foundations to understand the world and society they will have to develop in.
Back in 2009, I was at the Debian Conference (DebConf) in Cáceres, Spain. We had the presence of two blind Debian Developers, Sam Hartman and Mario Lang, both of which have continued to attend the conference at later editions, and are today very active project members.
They gave this talk on how they use their computer — Completely different ways, both very interesting to appreciate:
Accessibility and Debian (OGV video)
I don't live in a communist state (I live in Mexico), but you will find some of the line you quote applying here — Sadly, every time less. The national government is the sole owner of strategic areas, such as petroleum, electricity generation and distribution, water extraction and distribution. some other areas, such as mining, are operated by concessions: The State is the sole owner, but specific companies can bid for the right to exploit it for a given amount of time.
And yes, the current trend in government goes quite against this. Our last decades' governments have excluded or dilluted many areas from this monopolic aspects.
You will find, however, this line is not clearly defined among different countries. There are many countries in Europe and Latin America where the areas I mention are under different government-owned and/or government-operated schemes. And the ideologic moments do shift from time to time: Ten years ago, Bolivia was privatising everything. That even led to what they called the "war for water", a revolution that outed a president. Today, they are again nationalizing resources. And while still a strongly underdeveloped country, they are faring much better and much stabler than in their past many decades.
You are no historian, right :)
1. The revolution got to the power in 1959, not in 1953.
2. The businesses were expropiated, not stolen (that means, their owners were offered an indemnization... Maybe they didn't find it to be enough, but it was determined by the authorities to be the right value).
3. The US wasn't quite peaceful on its attack on the Cuban way. There was a large-scale invasion (Playa Girón / Bay of Pigs), and many paramilitary operations.
4. If you measure something one way, it should be measurable the other way around. Please go ask people in every country that has been militarily intervened by the USA in the last 50 years how were they restituted for stolen or destroyed property.
Cubans *do* have access to Internet. I (Mexican) have been there several times. In 1998, I became a close friend with a Cuban university teacher, and in 2000 I travelled to Cuba with tens of Linux and Free Software books, hundreds of CDs with distros of the day. I was quite in close contact with the Linux user groups in Santiago and La Habana, and less so but still met some people from Pinar del Río and Baracoa.
My friend later moved to Spain. Yes, he didn't go out the most legal way there is — But he kept in touch with his family. I kept in touch with his family as well (Internet access is not restricted to the university). His mother and his sister both travelled to Spain to visit him, and went back to Cuba.
I went again to Cuba in 2010; I stayed at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas, ~10Km from the capital. The university is in a decomissioned soviet naval base; it is a huge university city, with hundreds of student dorm apartments. Every apartment has a computer connected to Internet. They do have strict quotas, but they all have network access.
The embargo, as you mention really harms Cuba. The country is clearly among the materially poorest I have visited. Hopefully things will now improve. No, it's not (only?) a communist regime that has kept them from developing.
It is tricky, yes. I also have a friend in a similar situation, as well as an uncle.
There is a clear line (to me) on this: If the student is enrolled with the teacher then they start developing a relationship, it's wrong. It's a conflict of interests, the teacher cannot judge the student on the same grounds as other people in the group. Where I teach, that would be grounds for contractual job termination.
As soon as the grades are set, I find no objection. If it's just a random student in the same school as the teacher, if it's a consenting relationship between two independent adults with no power hierarchy between them, it is OK.
Of course, *after* having been sentimentaly involved (successfully or not), a student should not seek to be part of a teacher's group. It's not always possible to avoid it (i.e. only teacher for a mandatory subject), but it's very recommended.
Maybe because they are a surrogate state lacking full self-determination, and belonging colonially to a country with a culture so different to theirs, they will never be granted full citizenship of any real country ever?
I was born in Mexico. So is my wife — A proud Argentinian. We are as Americans as Puerto Ricans, as Cubans, and as nationals from tens of countries.
...How can you qualify the NSA as "unamerican"? They do reside in America. So do I (although my country's language is not English, this is as much America as the USA).
Yes, there are a lot of foundational myths to your country. One of them is that it is the "Land of the Free". Most countries that have been born in the last 200 years or so have similar origins and claims. But, if the country stands for freedom, it should not impose a credo to its citizens.
Hence, labeling something as "unamerican" is an oxymoron. Saying it's unamerican because it goes against personal privacy... Is more akin to saying it's un-soviet because it fosters private investment and therefore deprives society of its full economic benefits.
And do note, please, I said "un-soviet", not "un-russian".