Actually, what that link says is that if you count all conceivable votes, Bush wins, but if you only count clear votes, Gore wins. It says nothing about local-vs-statewide.
The results are irrelevant, if you want to be considered a legitimate President you can't go to the courts to stop the votes being counted.
After three and a half years what is important now is the fact that Bush is utterly incompetent, as are a clear majority of his appointees.
Oh really? That's fantastic, especially since it's something - by the article's own timeline - that won't be here for another four years.
Well you have been able to download and run SFU for XP for over a year. I might find them useful if I was writing code for both Windows and Unix, its a bit tedious having to edit code on one platform, go through the whole cross platform build thing. I have yet to find a development environment on UNIX that is on a par with VMS/LSE, let alone Visual studio.
If Bush gets re-elected then fire and brimstone will rain from the sky! Thus rendering all small businesses destroyed.
For Bush to be re-elected he must first be elected, which would by necesity mean that he be elected in 2004 and then get the constitution changed to allow him to run a third time in 2008.
I don't think that is going to happen, if the election is held Bush will lose.
The only question is whether Al Qaeda attempt to prevent the election with another attack. The idea that Bush would cancel the election may be tin foil hat brigade stuff but Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri are clearly tin foil hatters.
You seem to believe a prosecutor taking someone to trial equals that person being convicted.
I believe that when someone is convicted of a crime they have been convicted. Mitnick was convicted, he admitted a whole series of charges in the plea bargain, he got sentenced for four.
No credible evidence exists to support the exorbitant claims of damage you and others attempt to make to support your unfounded criticisms of Mitnick.
Other than the fact that he admitted the crimes himeself and pled guilty to them.
The good part: when you register a new domain, you can publish it immediately and people can start using it right away.
More importantly, if someone makes a mistake in the configuration it takes far less time to debug if you only have 5 minutes to wait for the info to propagate.
The fact the info might have been cached is not relevant when you are testing a config, you just flush your cache out.
Galileo was a felon too... i had not finished reading ur post.. why am i bothering to reply.
Ah right, five hundred years ago the Catholic church imprisoned Gallileo unjustly, therefore Kevin was imprisoned unjustly.
The only thing that Gallileo and Mitnick have in common is that both were guilty of the crimes they were charged with.
Gallileo was actually guilty of heresy. But four hundred years later the Catholic church still does not understand that things like peadohilia are bad so its hardly a great moral authority.
Mitnick was guilty of breaking into computer systems and causing serious damage.
Kevin was held in prison for about 5 years the second time around on bogus charges. It never went to trial, he was merely incarcerated. The white equivalent of Brown Equals Terrorist.
The second time around he was being held on the grounds that he absconded while on parole from his first criminal sentence (first as an adult).
If you commit a crime while on parole you go back to jail, if you abscond you go back to jail. The sentence does not 'time out' just because you absconded.
The feds did not need a charge because they already had a conviction.
From the DOJ:Kevin Mitnick, who pleaded guilty to a series of federal offenses related to a 2½-year computer hacking spree, was sentenced today to 46 months in federal prison, United States Attorney Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced.
Mitnick, 37, pleaded guilty in March to four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting a wire communication. Mitnick's prolific and damaging hacking career, which made him the most wanted computer criminal in United States history, was ended when he was arrested in North Carolina in February 1995.
Kevin made a plea agreement. He admitted he was guilty to much more than the four specimen charges he was sentenced for. He has never claimed that he was innocent. If the DoJ had gone to trial on the original charges Kevin would still be in jail and would not be getting out for another 5-15 years.
Exactly how is a 46 month sentence for a second offense unfair? Kevin caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage by all accounts
Did he suffer a misjustice? Maybe (I'm not a lawyer), but he put himself in that position. Play with fire and someday you'll get burned, it's just that simple.
Kevin committed a string of crimes, he went to jail, how is that unjust?
Its not like Kevin didn't know he was doing something wrong, when he got busted last time it was not his first run in with the law, it was not even his second. He got chance after chance as a juvenile. Now he wants people to believe he has gone straight.
I don't beleive him, I think he is still using his social engineering skills and the rubes who think he got treated unfairly are only one of his targets.
Remember, its innocent until proven guilty, Kevin has been proven guilty - repeatedly. If you want to feel bad about people who got treated baddly by the US justice system there are plenty of examples of people who went to jail for much longer for doing far, far less.
What got him into trouble, however, was the al-Hussein project. While some try and cast it into doubt, there is generally little doubt that his assasination was carried out by the Mossad.
Oh there were lots of people who had it in for Bull, the issue was pretty much overconstrained. The Iranians may have had a hand in it. MI6 were royaly pissed at Saddam for many reasons, including the murder of one of their agents.
Another theory is that the Iraqis might have decided they were better off without Bull. What would you do if you were working on the supergun project and you started to suspect Bull was a charlatan? Do you tell Saddam he's been had? I don't think so, but if you continue and the scheme fails there is probably going to be a lot of people heading for the firing squad.
Selling against a competitor's security issues is a very risky strategy. It is particularly risky when your competitor is conspicuously making a significant effort in this area and you are not.
The attacks we are seeing lately come from professional crooks. They tend to focus on two platforms, Windows and Linux. They do this for a very simple reason, no other platform has a worthwhile market share. As the article points out only 252,000 iMacs were sold last quarter, a hacker would have to work really hard to build a 100,000 machine botnet if the iMac was the least secure platform in history.
We run into compromised linux systems all the time. They are much more likely to have a high bandwidth net connection. They are much more likely to be doing something risky like running a web, mail or ftp server than a windows box. If you are looking for a host for a botnet these are the protocols you want to attack first because attacking a server protocol gives you instant gratification. Sending trojans through spam is a waiting game, you have to wait for victims to respond.
The windows and Linux worlds are both sensistive to security issues. OK there is a difference in the assignment of blame, a compromised Linux box is the fault of the sysop, a compromised Windows box is the personal fault of Bill Gates.
Start trying to sell apples on security as a differentiator and there will be professional crooks out there looking to prove you wrong.
It doesn't have a real 30 second skip? Crap! I'm so depressed, I've been hitting the 30 second skip button for the past 3 months like a sucker!
You can program one in, but they deliberately don't make it default.
As for the remote, I just scheduled a program using this. I agree that remote-only systems have their drawbacks.
Ah yes another TiVo 'razor and blades' scheme. I don't buy stuff that ties me in to an unnecessary service commitment. My Dishplayer does everything a Tivo does but does not require an additional monthly fee.
FWIW, I'd say what you want instead of a serial port is an ethernet port, with some kind of standard interface so the components can interact to a master console, which handles the magic.
I don't care whether the bits are etched onto tablets to be carried by pixies. RS232 has the advantage of being something like a standard in the industry already. But Ethernet, firewire, USB, even WiFi or bluetooth would be ok so long as they all agree on the same thing.
The key is that there has to be a standard and it has to be stateless. The problem is not the remote, I have a $200 Sony remote that can control pretty much anything, the problem is that you cannot write a reliable macro sequence because remote commands are statefull. You press the same button to turn devices on and off, to toggle between modes.
My point is that technology has to put the consumer first, not the shareholder, not the networks, not the geek with a degree in nuclear physics.
If any VAXs admins are reading this and are preparing to send their machines to the landfill, why not check to see if your hardware is on OpenBSD's wanted hardware list? They actively maintain a native VAX port (and it's damn good geek karma!)
Because we care about our machines enough to not want them to have to run a low grade O/S like UNIX.
Seriously, if someone has a Vax that they are decomissioning the chances that there is much worth salvaging are slim. The Vax line was EOL back in 1991 when the Alpha systems came out.
These are not fast systems, the alpha line is the fast stuff and even that is now EOL. So the Vax is now two generations back.
AFAIK, all of the text that the quote from the submitter is regarding not Akamai, but BIND in criticism of Akamai. He's saying that they would have performed better had they used a more diversified network
Paul should shut up about this topic. Companies should not go commenting about attacks made against their competitors - period.
His statement about the root servers is way off base. Only four of the 13 servers stayed up and the software running on them did not affect the outcome in any way. Most of the servers that went down were running a version of BIND as were two of the servers that stayed up. The other two roots were running ATLAS which is the ultimate in closed source proprietary systems, nobody outside VeriSign has seen the executable, let alone the source code.
I don't see how anyone could draw any conclusions either way on the basis of this sample. The distinguishing feature was the bandwidth available to the systems, not the software they run.
Paul should think more and speak to journalists less.
It may work fine for me, but if the whole family has to use it, it had better work perfectly 99.95% of the time. Features are wonderful, but if it doesn't work when you wife presses the "do this" button on the remote twice in a three month period, you may as well have purchased a rock with flashing lights on it.
Or for that matter if they keep comming back to you with demands for customer service.
I used to have a Siemens gigaset telephone system in the house. It worked pretty good at first, problem was that most people who visited could not figure out the fact that there were two phone lines and that the system did not work exactly the way that a legacy phone did. As a result when the Siemens system died prematurely from shoddy components and manufacture I bought two single line systems even though that was much less convenient for me to use. Not having to fix other users problems made it worth the loss of convenience.
The thing I do not like about tivo is the attitide, if I wanted to join a cult I would try Amway or the scientologists. It is very clear that the only reason Tivo does not have a real 30 second skip button is that Tivo Inc. is more interested in not upsetting the networks.
I have a DishPlayer system that works fine for me. The only problem I have with it is that the only way to do offline storage is to go analogue. Even that would not be a problem if it supported removable drives. A 160Gb disk costs $1 a Gb or less which works out at about $1 an hour of recording time. Why would I want to bother wasting my time with CD-R or VHS if I had enough secondary storage backup?
I don't think the MediaPC scheme is the right architecture. What is really needed here is an appliance model where the appliance is responsive to commands from the PC. This would allow me to do things like program the system to record via email or the Web.
Most of the current problems with consumer electronics comes from the fact that perfectly adequate components have no way of receiving commands from the user execept via a pretty unreliable remote control system where the dialogues are human centered. If you think this is OK just try the following, program your remote with a macro to turn on the TV and the home theatre amplifier and switch both to take data from the DVD player as the source with a single button press. It sounds easy until you realize that the remote control commands are all context sensitive. There is no command set that will work regardless of whether the TV starts in the state on or off. Even worse, the input selection scheme on Sony Wega models cycles between the inputs...
I think that Tivo and MediaPC are both the wrong model. What I want is an old fashioned RS232 interface on each component and a standard interface that allows me to program the components from a central hub.
OK High end home theatre systems can do this for a mere $200,000 per component after a six year consulting engagement. What I want is a consumer level box that costs me no more than $100.
>1. DVDs have one key for the disc, which is encrypted about 400 different times. One of the basic rules of cryptography is that you NEVER encrypt the same thing with different keys.
Funny, this is exactly how PGP works when you encrypt for multiple destinations..
Actually, thats not what PGP does. The message body is encrypted once under a single key that is shared by all the recipients, then the session key is encrypted for each recipient under their public key.
Back before we had computer generated ciphers it was a bad idea to re-encrypt the same data under different keys. The Enigma codes were broken in part because there were cribs, a message encoded in a weak cipher previously broken would be re-encrypted under stronger ciphers. But even with DES there is not much of an advantage to knowing you have two messages encrypting the same data under different keys.
The academy scheme is likely to be effective enough for their purposes. The only practical way to break the scheme is to recover a key from one of the players. With only 6000 players it would be perfectly practical to have a unique key per player. There are already schemes that make it possible to create a watermark that can detect defection by three parties.
>use a proxy located somewhere else
Brilliant. That's mentioned in the article, of course. But what the outcome is that any fraudsters can continue (though no evidence was offered of such), but the average home user will be stymied.
The online payment mechanisms trace many factors that might indicate fraud. Country of origin is one, use of a known proxy is another. And no, they do not rely on ORBS. There are addresses inside the US that are blacklisted, prisons for example.
There is a big difference between refusing credit cards and cutting a country off the Internet.
The problem that payment countries face is that there are some countries where the government is not effectively prosecuting fraud. In a few of these, Nigeria being the best known, the problem is that the government has no intention of dealling with the problem.
Nigeria would probably have been subject to sanctions by this time if it wasn't for the fact that it is generally thought better to have criminals running the Nigerian government than the loony mullahs wanting to return to the middle ages, stone women to death, etc. in the north. And of course the fact that the central government is utterly corrupt only causes support for the radical islamic parties to grow.
If a country wants to be part of the international payments system they have to meet certain standards. The countries being blocked for failling to police fraud do not meet those standards.
I doubt it since IBM ended it's sponsorship of the Olympic games after Sydney in 2000.
IBM pays 10 million to provide the IT support for a sports event an you guys think that the vendor choice is relevant?
Hey does this mean that its time to buy a Rolex watch?
Even though the scoreboard has the Rolex brand on it, it is well known that it was actually made by a division of Timex that specializes in scoreboards.
You know, this is exactly what we need more of on slashdot...political armchair quarterbacking from socially-disenfranchised geeks that have never done anything that had the slightest effect, positive OR negative, on the political direction their country has taken.
Korea is another matter.Iraq is next if you havent read between the lines.
Seems like you would be the 'inept moron'. First Iraq is unlikely to be next as well as being first. I think you mean Iran.
You might think that the US should lay off screwing up Iran, if the CIA coup had not replaced the democratic government with a dicatorship under the Shah as unpleasant as Sadam's Iraq the whole mid-east might not be the complete disaster it is today.
But leaving that question aside, exactly how is the US going to maintain an occupation of a country three times larger than Iraq at this point? That is assuming that invasion is practical given that Russia and China depend on access to gulf oil.
The true outcome of Iraq is that there is no way the US will use that scale of force again for a generation. Dufus would be impeached if he tried it - and the Republicans would convict. They were lied to once, they will not trust him again.
Far from asserting US hegemony, Bush has rendered the US impotent.
Take Dufus in the Whitehouse for example. Few people would claim that he is an original thinker or highly knowledgable.
>I guess that Harvard gives out MBAs by correspondence course, then. When you get your MBA from Harvard, be sure and let everyone know. Until then, enjoy a nice tall glass of STFU.
Since when was a Harvard MBA the crowning peak of academic achievement? It is far from the highest degree Harvard has to offer. I have a doctorate from a much older university that is at least as prestigeous.
You do not need to be an original thinker to get an MBA, you certainly do not need to be highly knowledgable. All you need to do to pass is scrape through some exams which by all accounts is what Dufus did.
The quality of Dufus's degree is pretty much demonstrated by his mediocre business performance. His businesses all failed until he met a group of guys looking for someone to front for their scheme to milk a fortune in subsidies from the Texas taxpayers through buying the Texas Rangers.
I am sure there are some things Dufus excells at. Original thinking is not one of them.
Thats right it was unprovoked.They flew into the world trade center.
The guy responsible for that attack is Osama Bin Forgotten.
Currently the Western country putting most effort looking for Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri is actually France. They have the most troops in Afghanistan out there looking for him.
Gore would've traded with them till they had nukes.
Since the arms inspectors reported that there was no program and it is clear that it would have taken Saddam at least eight more years to build a bomb there Gore would be out of office before Saddam had got nukes, if indeed he managed to restart the program without detection.
Meanwhile North Korea has acquired nuclear capability and Iran looks set to do so in the next 12 months or so.
One thing is sure, Gore would not have gone to war on the basis of misinformation from Chalabai who has now been proven to have passed key intelligence to Iran. Gore heeded the warning of the CIA and state depts who both considered Chalabai to be an Iranian agent back in 1996.
Also it is highly unlikely that Gore would have abandoned the anti-terrorist programs of the Clinton administration as Richard Clarke reports the Bush administration having done. There is no way we can tell wether this would have averted 9/11 as the Al Qaeda millenial polt in LA was foiled. But it sure would not have hurt to have actually tried.
I guess ignoring the constitution before he took office was just a sign of things to come.
I thought the fact that executions clearly gave him considerable pleasure when he was Texas governor revealled an unpleasant character. It seemed to be something of a power trip for him. The other cause for concern was the fact that Bush was completely untroubled by the idea that an innocent person might be executed. Perhaps these were also signs of things to come.
There seems to be a lot of denial about Bush. After 9/11 people wanted to believe in the President. But now we see the torture pictures from Iraq, and now we know that three distinct parts of the administration were writing memos to justify torture it is time to start asking some questions.
As soon as the torture pictures surfaced the administration stepped in with a categorical statement that they were entirely the work of a few enlisted soldiers. Why would they do that unless they knew that an investigation would threaten administration and why would that be so unless the orders came straight from the top?
Another factor that seems to give Bush little concern is the fact that almost a thousand allied troops have been killed during the occupation of Iraq so far. Bush has time for premature victory parades but has not attended a single funeral of an Iraqi serviceman.
The term sadist tends to be cheapened through over-use. But there are certainly people who get pleasure from causing others to suffer. I think we have to judge Bush by his record in Texas and admit that he is one of these people.
By silencing anyone who talks about the flaws, of course! Do what I'm gonna do, bet money on bush being reelected. That way, if he is, at least it wasn't a total disaster.
How can he be RE-elected when he wasn't elected the first time?
The real thing you need to do is get over yourself. You're not special. There's lots of people in this world that are just as smart as you. Once you get over yourself, the world is your oyster. "unusually but non-traditionally 'bright' "...jesus...Kill me. Get over yourself.
Smart is not always what succeeds. There are plenty of stupid people that get far. Take Dufus in the Whitehouse for example. Few people would claim that he is an original thinker or highly knowledgable. On the other hand there are people with blistering high IQs and degrees in Nuclear Physics who can't find a job better than part time computer class instructor.
Being intelligent does not count for very much, not unless you are actually prepared to do some work and learn something that is useful. Its like having the worlds fastest computer and no software.
The worst thing that can happen is if you get the idea that you are so smart you don't need to bother knowing anything. There are plenty of people like that in the world. And even if by luck or family connections you happen to get a great job, you are even worse off because that attitude usually leads to failure.
That said, there is plenty of stuff that schools teach that is entirely useless. I never saw the point of learning French, the effort required was vastly disproportionate to the benefit, and I have lived in the country for two years. But it is highly unlikely that you are 'differently smart' if you are getting straight Ds and Es in all your courses.
If you really are gifted you don't have to ask slashdot for career advice, you know what you are best at. I have always excelled at tasks that require analytical reasoning and interpretation of data. Subjects that require rote memorization have rarely interested me. I can write a pretty good history essay with access to reference materials, but remembering the date of the Tolpuddle Martyrs is utterly pointless as far as I am concerned.
If all you are good at is memorization then you are definitely having to do a lot of work to get anywhere.
You still have to do work if you are good at analysis, but it is more likely that it won't appear to be work. I tend to think I am pretty lazy, I use the fact that ideas seem to come to me effortlessly to avoid having to work as hard as I should. But most people arround me think I am a workaholic who never stops because I am always doing stuff - the stuff that does not appear to me to be work.
The brain is like any other muscle, you have to exercise it to keep it fit. I may not spend all my time thinking on work, but I spend almost all my time thinking about some problem.
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The results are irrelevant, if you want to be considered a legitimate President you can't go to the courts to stop the votes being counted.
After three and a half years what is important now is the fact that Bush is utterly incompetent, as are a clear majority of his appointees.
Well you have been able to download and run SFU for XP for over a year. I might find them useful if I was writing code for both Windows and Unix, its a bit tedious having to edit code on one platform, go through the whole cross platform build thing. I have yet to find a development environment on UNIX that is on a par with VMS/LSE, let alone Visual studio.
For Bush to be re-elected he must first be elected, which would by necesity mean that he be elected in 2004 and then get the constitution changed to allow him to run a third time in 2008.
I don't think that is going to happen, if the election is held Bush will lose.
The only question is whether Al Qaeda attempt to prevent the election with another attack. The idea that Bush would cancel the election may be tin foil hat brigade stuff but Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri are clearly tin foil hatters.
I believe that when someone is convicted of a crime they have been convicted. Mitnick was convicted, he admitted a whole series of charges in the plea bargain, he got sentenced for four.
No credible evidence exists to support the exorbitant claims of damage you and others attempt to make to support your unfounded criticisms of Mitnick.
Other than the fact that he admitted the crimes himeself and pled guilty to them.
Mitnick committed numerous crimes - which he admits.
In addition to the Solaris source code he was found to have 10,000 stolen credit card numbers.
Perhaps he was just curious, perhaps he was looking to sell them. Does not matter much, he still go to the big house.
More importantly, if someone makes a mistake in the configuration it takes far less time to debug if you only have 5 minutes to wait for the info to propagate.
The fact the info might have been cached is not relevant when you are testing a config, you just flush your cache out.
Ah right, five hundred years ago the Catholic church imprisoned Gallileo unjustly, therefore Kevin was imprisoned unjustly.
The only thing that Gallileo and Mitnick have in common is that both were guilty of the crimes they were charged with.
Gallileo was actually guilty of heresy. But four hundred years later the Catholic church still does not understand that things like peadohilia are bad so its hardly a great moral authority.
Mitnick was guilty of breaking into computer systems and causing serious damage.
The second time around he was being held on the grounds that he absconded while on parole from his first criminal sentence (first as an adult).
If you commit a crime while on parole you go back to jail, if you abscond you go back to jail. The sentence does not 'time out' just because you absconded.
The feds did not need a charge because they already had a conviction.
From the DOJ: Kevin Mitnick, who pleaded guilty to a series of federal offenses related to a 2½-year computer hacking spree, was sentenced today to 46 months in federal prison, United States Attorney Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced.
Mitnick, 37, pleaded guilty in March to four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting a wire communication. Mitnick's prolific and damaging hacking career, which made him the most wanted computer criminal in United States history, was ended when he was arrested in North Carolina in February 1995.
Kevin made a plea agreement. He admitted he was guilty to much more than the four specimen charges he was sentenced for. He has never claimed that he was innocent. If the DoJ had gone to trial on the original charges Kevin would still be in jail and would not be getting out for another 5-15 years.
Exactly how is a 46 month sentence for a second offense unfair? Kevin caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage by all accounts
Kevin committed a string of crimes, he went to jail, how is that unjust?
Its not like Kevin didn't know he was doing something wrong, when he got busted last time it was not his first run in with the law, it was not even his second. He got chance after chance as a juvenile. Now he wants people to believe he has gone straight.
I don't beleive him, I think he is still using his social engineering skills and the rubes who think he got treated unfairly are only one of his targets.
Remember, its innocent until proven guilty, Kevin has been proven guilty - repeatedly. If you want to feel bad about people who got treated baddly by the US justice system there are plenty of examples of people who went to jail for much longer for doing far, far less.
Oh there were lots of people who had it in for Bull, the issue was pretty much overconstrained. The Iranians may have had a hand in it. MI6 were royaly pissed at Saddam for many reasons, including the murder of one of their agents.
Another theory is that the Iraqis might have decided they were better off without Bull. What would you do if you were working on the supergun project and you started to suspect Bull was a charlatan? Do you tell Saddam he's been had? I don't think so, but if you continue and the scheme fails there is probably going to be a lot of people heading for the firing squad.
Selling against a competitor's security issues is a very risky strategy. It is particularly risky when your competitor is conspicuously making a significant effort in this area and you are not.
The attacks we are seeing lately come from professional crooks. They tend to focus on two platforms, Windows and Linux. They do this for a very simple reason, no other platform has a worthwhile market share. As the article points out only 252,000 iMacs were sold last quarter, a hacker would have to work really hard to build a 100,000 machine botnet if the iMac was the least secure platform in history.
We run into compromised linux systems all the time. They are much more likely to have a high bandwidth net connection. They are much more likely to be doing something risky like running a web, mail or ftp server than a windows box. If you are looking for a host for a botnet these are the protocols you want to attack first because attacking a server protocol gives you instant gratification. Sending trojans through spam is a waiting game, you have to wait for victims to respond.
The windows and Linux worlds are both sensistive to security issues. OK there is a difference in the assignment of blame, a compromised Linux box is the fault of the sysop, a compromised Windows box is the personal fault of Bill Gates.
Start trying to sell apples on security as a differentiator and there will be professional crooks out there looking to prove you wrong.
You can program one in, but they deliberately don't make it default.
As for the remote, I just scheduled a program using this. I agree that remote-only systems have their drawbacks.
Ah yes another TiVo 'razor and blades' scheme. I don't buy stuff that ties me in to an unnecessary service commitment. My Dishplayer does everything a Tivo does but does not require an additional monthly fee.
FWIW, I'd say what you want instead of a serial port is an ethernet port, with some kind of standard interface so the components can interact to a master console, which handles the magic.
I don't care whether the bits are etched onto tablets to be carried by pixies. RS232 has the advantage of being something like a standard in the industry already. But Ethernet, firewire, USB, even WiFi or bluetooth would be ok so long as they all agree on the same thing.
The key is that there has to be a standard and it has to be stateless. The problem is not the remote, I have a $200 Sony remote that can control pretty much anything, the problem is that you cannot write a reliable macro sequence because remote commands are statefull. You press the same button to turn devices on and off, to toggle between modes.
My point is that technology has to put the consumer first, not the shareholder, not the networks, not the geek with a degree in nuclear physics.
Because we care about our machines enough to not want them to have to run a low grade O/S like UNIX.
Seriously, if someone has a Vax that they are decomissioning the chances that there is much worth salvaging are slim. The Vax line was EOL back in 1991 when the Alpha systems came out.
These are not fast systems, the alpha line is the fast stuff and even that is now EOL. So the Vax is now two generations back.
Paul should shut up about this topic. Companies should not go commenting about attacks made against their competitors - period.
His statement about the root servers is way off base. Only four of the 13 servers stayed up and the software running on them did not affect the outcome in any way. Most of the servers that went down were running a version of BIND as were two of the servers that stayed up. The other two roots were running ATLAS which is the ultimate in closed source proprietary systems, nobody outside VeriSign has seen the executable, let alone the source code.
I don't see how anyone could draw any conclusions either way on the basis of this sample. The distinguishing feature was the bandwidth available to the systems, not the software they run.
Paul should think more and speak to journalists less.
Or for that matter if they keep comming back to you with demands for customer service.
I used to have a Siemens gigaset telephone system in the house. It worked pretty good at first, problem was that most people who visited could not figure out the fact that there were two phone lines and that the system did not work exactly the way that a legacy phone did. As a result when the Siemens system died prematurely from shoddy components and manufacture I bought two single line systems even though that was much less convenient for me to use. Not having to fix other users problems made it worth the loss of convenience.
The thing I do not like about tivo is the attitide, if I wanted to join a cult I would try Amway or the scientologists. It is very clear that the only reason Tivo does not have a real 30 second skip button is that Tivo Inc. is more interested in not upsetting the networks.
I have a DishPlayer system that works fine for me. The only problem I have with it is that the only way to do offline storage is to go analogue. Even that would not be a problem if it supported removable drives. A 160Gb disk costs $1 a Gb or less which works out at about $1 an hour of recording time. Why would I want to bother wasting my time with CD-R or VHS if I had enough secondary storage backup?
I don't think the MediaPC scheme is the right architecture. What is really needed here is an appliance model where the appliance is responsive to commands from the PC. This would allow me to do things like program the system to record via email or the Web.
Most of the current problems with consumer electronics comes from the fact that perfectly adequate components have no way of receiving commands from the user execept via a pretty unreliable remote control system where the dialogues are human centered. If you think this is OK just try the following, program your remote with a macro to turn on the TV and the home theatre amplifier and switch both to take data from the DVD player as the source with a single button press. It sounds easy until you realize that the remote control commands are all context sensitive. There is no command set that will work regardless of whether the TV starts in the state on or off. Even worse, the input selection scheme on Sony Wega models cycles between the inputs...
I think that Tivo and MediaPC are both the wrong model. What I want is an old fashioned RS232 interface on each component and a standard interface that allows me to program the components from a central hub.
OK High end home theatre systems can do this for a mere $200,000 per component after a six year consulting engagement. What I want is a consumer level box that costs me no more than $100.
Funny, this is exactly how PGP works when you encrypt for multiple destinations..
Actually, thats not what PGP does. The message body is encrypted once under a single key that is shared by all the recipients, then the session key is encrypted for each recipient under their public key.
Back before we had computer generated ciphers it was a bad idea to re-encrypt the same data under different keys. The Enigma codes were broken in part because there were cribs, a message encoded in a weak cipher previously broken would be re-encrypted under stronger ciphers. But even with DES there is not much of an advantage to knowing you have two messages encrypting the same data under different keys.
The academy scheme is likely to be effective enough for their purposes. The only practical way to break the scheme is to recover a key from one of the players. With only 6000 players it would be perfectly practical to have a unique key per player. There are already schemes that make it possible to create a watermark that can detect defection by three parties.
Brilliant. That's mentioned in the article, of course. But what the outcome is that any fraudsters can continue (though no evidence was offered of such), but the average home user will be stymied.
The online payment mechanisms trace many factors that might indicate fraud. Country of origin is one, use of a known proxy is another. And no, they do not rely on ORBS. There are addresses inside the US that are blacklisted, prisons for example.
There is a big difference between refusing credit cards and cutting a country off the Internet.
The problem that payment countries face is that there are some countries where the government is not effectively prosecuting fraud. In a few of these, Nigeria being the best known, the problem is that the government has no intention of dealling with the problem.
Nigeria would probably have been subject to sanctions by this time if it wasn't for the fact that it is generally thought better to have criminals running the Nigerian government than the loony mullahs wanting to return to the middle ages, stone women to death, etc. in the north. And of course the fact that the central government is utterly corrupt only causes support for the radical islamic parties to grow.
If a country wants to be part of the international payments system they have to meet certain standards. The countries being blocked for failling to police fraud do not meet those standards.
IBM pays 10 million to provide the IT support for a sports event an you guys think that the vendor choice is relevant?
Hey does this mean that its time to buy a Rolex watch?
Even though the scoreboard has the Rolex brand on it, it is well known that it was actually made by a division of Timex that specializes in scoreboards.
I was the first to propose www.whitehouse.gov.
What have you done?
Seems like you would be the 'inept moron'. First Iraq is unlikely to be next as well as being first. I think you mean Iran.
You might think that the US should lay off screwing up Iran, if the CIA coup had not replaced the democratic government with a dicatorship under the Shah as unpleasant as Sadam's Iraq the whole mid-east might not be the complete disaster it is today.
But leaving that question aside, exactly how is the US going to maintain an occupation of a country three times larger than Iraq at this point? That is assuming that invasion is practical given that Russia and China depend on access to gulf oil.
The true outcome of Iraq is that there is no way the US will use that scale of force again for a generation. Dufus would be impeached if he tried it - and the Republicans would convict. They were lied to once, they will not trust him again.
Far from asserting US hegemony, Bush has rendered the US impotent.
>I guess that Harvard gives out MBAs by correspondence course, then. When you get your MBA from Harvard, be sure and let everyone know. Until then, enjoy a nice tall glass of STFU.
Since when was a Harvard MBA the crowning peak of academic achievement? It is far from the highest degree Harvard has to offer. I have a doctorate from a much older university that is at least as prestigeous.
You do not need to be an original thinker to get an MBA, you certainly do not need to be highly knowledgable. All you need to do to pass is scrape through some exams which by all accounts is what Dufus did.
The quality of Dufus's degree is pretty much demonstrated by his mediocre business performance. His businesses all failed until he met a group of guys looking for someone to front for their scheme to milk a fortune in subsidies from the Texas taxpayers through buying the Texas Rangers.
I am sure there are some things Dufus excells at. Original thinking is not one of them.
The guy responsible for that attack is Osama Bin Forgotten.
Currently the Western country putting most effort looking for Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri is actually France. They have the most troops in Afghanistan out there looking for him.
Gore would've traded with them till they had nukes.
Since the arms inspectors reported that there was no program and it is clear that it would have taken Saddam at least eight more years to build a bomb there Gore would be out of office before Saddam had got nukes, if indeed he managed to restart the program without detection.
Meanwhile North Korea has acquired nuclear capability and Iran looks set to do so in the next 12 months or so.
One thing is sure, Gore would not have gone to war on the basis of misinformation from Chalabai who has now been proven to have passed key intelligence to Iran. Gore heeded the warning of the CIA and state depts who both considered Chalabai to be an Iranian agent back in 1996.
Also it is highly unlikely that Gore would have abandoned the anti-terrorist programs of the Clinton administration as Richard Clarke reports the Bush administration having done. There is no way we can tell wether this would have averted 9/11 as the Al Qaeda millenial polt in LA was foiled. But it sure would not have hurt to have actually tried.
I thought the fact that executions clearly gave him considerable pleasure when he was Texas governor revealled an unpleasant character. It seemed to be something of a power trip for him. The other cause for concern was the fact that Bush was completely untroubled by the idea that an innocent person might be executed. Perhaps these were also signs of things to come.
There seems to be a lot of denial about Bush. After 9/11 people wanted to believe in the President. But now we see the torture pictures from Iraq, and now we know that three distinct parts of the administration were writing memos to justify torture it is time to start asking some questions.
As soon as the torture pictures surfaced the administration stepped in with a categorical statement that they were entirely the work of a few enlisted soldiers. Why would they do that unless they knew that an investigation would threaten administration and why would that be so unless the orders came straight from the top?
Another factor that seems to give Bush little concern is the fact that almost a thousand allied troops have been killed during the occupation of Iraq so far. Bush has time for premature victory parades but has not attended a single funeral of an Iraqi serviceman.
The term sadist tends to be cheapened through over-use. But there are certainly people who get pleasure from causing others to suffer. I think we have to judge Bush by his record in Texas and admit that he is one of these people.
How can he be RE-elected when he wasn't elected the first time?
Smart is not always what succeeds. There are plenty of stupid people that get far. Take Dufus in the Whitehouse for example. Few people would claim that he is an original thinker or highly knowledgable. On the other hand there are people with blistering high IQs and degrees in Nuclear Physics who can't find a job better than part time computer class instructor.
Being intelligent does not count for very much, not unless you are actually prepared to do some work and learn something that is useful. Its like having the worlds fastest computer and no software.
The worst thing that can happen is if you get the idea that you are so smart you don't need to bother knowing anything. There are plenty of people like that in the world. And even if by luck or family connections you happen to get a great job, you are even worse off because that attitude usually leads to failure.
That said, there is plenty of stuff that schools teach that is entirely useless. I never saw the point of learning French, the effort required was vastly disproportionate to the benefit, and I have lived in the country for two years. But it is highly unlikely that you are 'differently smart' if you are getting straight Ds and Es in all your courses.
If you really are gifted you don't have to ask slashdot for career advice, you know what you are best at. I have always excelled at tasks that require analytical reasoning and interpretation of data. Subjects that require rote memorization have rarely interested me. I can write a pretty good history essay with access to reference materials, but remembering the date of the Tolpuddle Martyrs is utterly pointless as far as I am concerned.
If all you are good at is memorization then you are definitely having to do a lot of work to get anywhere.
You still have to do work if you are good at analysis, but it is more likely that it won't appear to be work. I tend to think I am pretty lazy, I use the fact that ideas seem to come to me effortlessly to avoid having to work as hard as I should. But most people arround me think I am a workaholic who never stops because I am always doing stuff - the stuff that does not appear to me to be work.
The brain is like any other muscle, you have to exercise it to keep it fit. I may not spend all my time thinking on work, but I spend almost all my time thinking about some problem.