Still, it boils down to media company vs. insurance company vs. lawyers, and I think it's pretty obvious the only winner out of that triumvirate is going to be lawyers. Oh well, I guess two out of three will just have to do.
You're forgetting the rule that nobody out-evils an insurance company. After all, someone had to teach it to the lawyers...
There's a fair chunk of randomness in moderation due to the fact that people are really rather variable. "Groupthink" is really not the truth of it; "average out over many people" is closer to the truth.
Write well enough to not embarrass yourself, and don't sweat what some random ass thinks.
Actually during the creation of NT Microsoft licensed a network stack from Spyder Systems, which was based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. Microsoft replaced this with it's own stack for NT 3.5, which was the second version, and I believe that was the one that went in to Windows 95.
More to the point, you can still see the heritage in the C API; it's recognizably similar throughout despite many other parts (e.g., file descriptors) being wildly different between Win and Unix. That's OK too. It means that Microsoft have a properly road-tested API in use. (The code itself may have gone, but that would be No Big Deal. While some C code really does survive for multiple decades, it's not really to be expected in any OS. APIs are much longer-lived.)
Yeah, no one can think for themselves at all, right?
Some people surely can, but that doesn't mean that you are one of them. Dismissing other people's thoughts and desires as the bleating of sheeple is not a good thing at all, as it is a very short step from there to not treating them like people at all. Instead, the right thing to do is to consider whether what you think they should want is actually a good thing for them to want after all. (Unless you're going to high-handedly get rid of all Reality TV, in which case I'm all for it!)
The problem isn't creating theoretical models, the problem is working out which ones correspond to the real world. To do that, you need to measure reality, and that usually costs quite a bit. If correspondence to reality wasn't required, science would be so easy.
If the greedy hypercapitalist swine who support the patent system aren't willing to abolish it, then we should at least require that the patents be written in such a way that a novice can understand it.
Not a novice. Someone with 5 years experience in the field, so that they count as someone "with ordinary skill in the art". That has always been the whole point of a patent, in any field, and it's desperately wrong that some patents are issued which do not make things clear enough; such patents should be struck from the record and the cost of any related proceedings pushed back on the (ex-)patent holder.
I'm not saying there should never be patents on software — sometimes you see something that is a genuine massive innovation, such as some of the compression or security codes where there have been times when the state of the art has advanced hugely when others thought it impossible — but they're issued too often for too little and are too unclear. I suppose it would help if software patents had to include all relevant source code as part of the patent (with all claim to copyright ceded) so that when the patent expires the exact protected method would be free to use for anyone; that would be much like patents in other fields.
Of course it is; it's a basic plotline, and they're all done to death. Have been for centuries. But you don't deal with stories (or plays, or musicals, or movies, or...) for the basic plot, you're there for the details. "It's not what you do, but the way that you do it."
Pretty much all of the legitimate use cases for Usenet -- and most of the illegitimate ones as well! -- have already been supplanted by other technologies.
I do not know or care about the illegal uses, but legal uses are still out there. (I'm thinking of a very specific one, but its identity is really immaterial to this discussion.) Though it would be technically possible to use some other method (e.g., a web forum) that's not where the community is; they're using USENET in the way it was intended, and it works superbly now that the bandwidth problems that used to plague it have been resolved. I admit that for a while I was using Google Groups as the interface, but I don't any more; their interface was poor (by comparison with a specialist client like Moz Thunderbird) and their service wasn't too hot either, especially when it came to spam. That's what you get for trying to "web forum"-ize USENET.
You can't blame people for only subscribing to the groups they find interesting.
I don't blame them for their interests; that would invite people to blame me for mine. I blame them for not defending against spammers and other scum. I blame them for going off to other venues (e.g., blogs with promotion by tweet). I blame them for not caring enough to make the world a better place.
And anyway, I was merely reporting that the traditions of USENET continue strongly in some communities.
If people still had useful discussions, I would feel differently but all that's left is the pirated materials.
You were subscribed to the wrong groups. There are still useful ones out there, with ordinary discussions happening just as they used to a decade or more ago.
I would LOVE to give them Android devices and iPads, if that's what they want, but my hands are tied. I need to show the guys who control the cell doors that I'm protecting the company's assets as best as I can. If that means the guy at the top needs a Blackberry and a Windows laptop, that's what he will get. If he wants something else, he can sign a waiver stating that he accepts responsibility for the data stored on those devices as per the Data Protection Act, or he can expect a lawsuit for constructive dismissal after I resign.
The problem is, if you spend your time preventing the bigwigs from doing what they want to do — people who are authorized to tell you what to do — then you'll be shown the door, even with all that stuff you mentioned. They'll just say that you weren't a team player and rationalize you out of your job and without a reference worth the name. If they need a replacement, they'll find one; in this economy, it won't be hard. (Irritate people enough and they'll act; it's just a matter of the activation threshold. Assuming you remember your high-school chemistry.)
You can't just protect the company's assets, you've got to also enable everyone else to do their jobs. That might well mean accepting things that you don't really like, but that's how life goes. Obstructions are there to get routed around.
Um... just brainstorming here... Jar, lid w/spring, tether, done.
You've still got to get the stuff into the jar in the first place. That's where a tractor beam would be very helpful, as the lack of gravity (well, it's there but you're in freefall) makes some things much more difficult. Being able to reel stuff in without having to get anything physical out to it in the first place would be useful. (Better yet would be if it could bring larger items in without damaging them, but even small robust stuff would be Pretty Neat.)
What happened is a majority of these 6-figure loans are PRIVATE loans, not backed by the federal government and not discharged in bankruptcy.
That suggests a possible solution: remove government protection for those private loans (i.e., the exemption clause in the bankruptcy laws). That makes them just as risky as a normal private loan of such a size and the weird market problems go away. What's more, it would also be possible to argue in that case that there would be no additional costs on the government; it's just reducing the burden of unnecessary regulation.
It would probably prick the bubble of crappy private universities too, as their main funding mechanism would evaporate overnight. Like I'm going to cry myself to sleep over that. I'm willing to bet that the good places — the ones worth the name "university" — will actually survive anyway. Guess my snobbishness is showing through.
Yes, and there's well-entrenched incumbents in that market too. Why go into a bruising fight with a company that is already dominating a market when you don't have to? Going streaming-only lets you (try to) end-run around them instead.
The article quite clearly states that the government wants *its own* computers to have TPM installed, it doesn't mention anything about home users.
Not yet.
But the government most certainly is allowed to secure the systems that it owns and uses. It's even good practice! Same for anyone else, of course. The problem comes at the point when one person tries to take control away from another, and that's without regard for whether the oppressor is government, corporate, or anything/one else. The only true distinguishing feature of a government in this regard is its size; evil is as evil does.
In any case, I propose to worry about other things first. Like the economy...
Or add proxying to your local server for the JS content that would otherwise come from another server. Or use something else that doesn't insist on using unsafe security practices. How hard could it be?
It's obviously a choice, and a popular one at that. Good luck if your needs are somehow non-standard.
How many people have non-standard email needs? (Other than spammers, of course.) Well, actually there's a number of cases where there is a need for non-standard email. A classic example is having a mailing list. OTOH, those also work very well as hosted services.
IMO, as long as you can get proper backups of your emails, you're just fine with having them done as a hosted or cloud service. Backups to media that you own and control are important. The schedule for maintaining the backups is going to be a matter of balancing cost and risk. (As usual.)
So I'd say that their 6,000 year old earth theory is complete bunk.
Either that or their "theory of creation" is true, and God's telling everyone a vastly elaborate lie with all those sneaky isotopic ratios and photon distributions in the CMB.
Till today I did not even know there *was* an encryption standard for XML docs and I still don't know *where* to use it. Is it built in to PHP? Is it part of the standard parsers out there?
It's certainly not in a majority of them.
My biggest question is why was the standard even developed in the first place and who actually uses it?
It was developed to allow a document to be handed round with parts of it shrouded so that only one individual (or service) can read it while still allowing other parts of the document to be read by anyone. AIUI, it's relevant in complex uses of SOAP where you've got a complex message bus in use and where the endpoints don't particularly trust the conveying services. Some of the B2B stuff is a bit that way inclined. I've never needed it myself though (unlike XML Signature, which is closely related and much more relevant since guaranteeing document integrity makes a lot of sense for things like invoices).
I bet IBM has a full implementation of this. It's exactly the heavyweight thing that's right up their street.
Dead simple on one level. Higher average global temperature. More energy in the atmosphere and eventually the oceans. (We can probably ignore the effect on rocks.) This is a direct consequence of a higher CO2 concentration in the air, by simple physics. (Some other gases too.) Given that CO2 diffuses pretty well, it's not too hard to measure the increase. The problem is in the detail.
It does not necessarily mean warmer weather where you are located. Climate and weather are very complex, and very non-linear. It probably means things are stormier, but we really don't know that for sure. (It might well make things drier in your area.) The effect on sea levels is easier to calculate, or it would be except for the effects of melting permafrost and ice, which are seriously complex monkey wrenches in the sums. What we do know is that it changes the loading on the climate dice, and we don't know all the game rules yet. Alas, what we also know for sure is that this is a game we can't really afford to lose because of the stake we have in it; that's why climate scientists are so insistent, that along with the fact that by the time it's clear to absolutely everyone, it'll definitely be too late to do anything about except die by the million. (You might like playing russian roulette where you don't know how many chambers have live rounds, but many people have less appetite for risk.) I hate it when a green fanatic points at a big storm and says "evidence of global warming"; it's not. The longer term frequency of these things, the size of the peaks, the total energy across the whole world, that's the evidence. Maybe it's not as immediate and easy to see, but it's far more dangerous because of its sheer scale.
And is it anthropogenic? Well, that's certainly the #1 theory (combined with a whole mess of complicated feedback effects) as the alternatives are all rather more far fetched. Humanity as a whole has been very busy over the past century or so burning fossil fuels, and many of the natural buffers are now believed to be used up. (Deciding this beyond all doubt is a long-term project; the real question is whether the evidence is good enough to act, and again, a lot of people think it is.)
Just to be clear, if there really was a truly cheap believable technical fix for all this — a "magic wand", if you will — then the climate scientists would be proposing that we wave it. Right away. But nobody seriously thinks such a thing exists, so they're trying the cheapest and most humane option that could work: changing the economic system. I think the alternatives are worse, much much worse.
So a lot of pubs have either bought a domestic subscription and hoped nobody notices - or a subscription from a satellite broadcaster based in continental Europe (who don't charge absurdly expensive prices). Surprise surprise, Sky went ballistic. They had an exclusive license to be the only broadcaster in the UK which this sort of thing undermines; they've been using every bullying tactic in the book to force pubs to buy the UK commercial subscription and now they can't.
The FA have two basic options at this point: they must either persuade satellite broadcasters outside the UK to not sell to the UK market despite the law permitting them to do so, or not sell to them at all. The second option is most certainly permitted, but will cause quite a hit to their income (as UK Premiership soccer is mysteriously very popular) and the first option is going to be a very difficult set of negotiating as the broadcasters in other states will not be willing to give up the right to cross-sell that they've now got.
Some people can multitask to the point where they can talk on the phone and drive.
But I bet you're not one of them. Not and drive safely. (Drive like a drunken homicidal maniac, that I'd accept.)
Driving safely requires attention. Really. For everyone, everywhere, because it's always possible for something random to happen that's not your fault. Doesn't matter. Pay attention and you'll (usually) have enough time to deal with it. Distracted, and you lose that opportunity.
If you're not giving it your full attention as a driver, you're not safe for yourself, for your passengers (if you've got any) or for everyone else on and around the road. Yes, there are other kinds of distractions (though phones are particularly bad for some reason) and many people are idiots, but that doesn't give you any kind of excuse. What's more, in this case the law is just telling you to obey proper common sense. It's a shame that common sense is so damn rare, but there you go. Don't be a stupid ass. Don't text while driving. THAT MEANS YOU.
Indeed. The symbol indicating the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference (pi) means something totally different in math when upper-cased. There it's used to express the product of the terms of a series. Given that, upper-casing it (except when it's the start of a sentence) really would change the meaning hugely.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, it boils down to media company vs. insurance company vs. lawyers, and I think it's pretty obvious the only winner out of that triumvirate is going to be lawyers. Oh well, I guess two out of three will just have to do.
You're forgetting the rule that nobody out-evils an insurance company. After all, someone had to teach it to the lawyers...
Oh, so the above comment is 'redundant'?
There's a fair chunk of randomness in moderation due to the fact that people are really rather variable. "Groupthink" is really not the truth of it; "average out over many people" is closer to the truth.
Write well enough to not embarrass yourself, and don't sweat what some random ass thinks.
Actually during the creation of NT Microsoft licensed a network stack from Spyder Systems, which was based on the BSD TCP/IP stack. Microsoft replaced this with it's own stack for NT 3.5, which was the second version, and I believe that was the one that went in to Windows 95.
More to the point, you can still see the heritage in the C API; it's recognizably similar throughout despite many other parts (e.g., file descriptors) being wildly different between Win and Unix. That's OK too. It means that Microsoft have a properly road-tested API in use. (The code itself may have gone, but that would be No Big Deal. While some C code really does survive for multiple decades, it's not really to be expected in any OS. APIs are much longer-lived.)
Yeah, no one can think for themselves at all, right?
Some people surely can, but that doesn't mean that you are one of them. Dismissing other people's thoughts and desires as the bleating of sheeple is not a good thing at all, as it is a very short step from there to not treating them like people at all. Instead, the right thing to do is to consider whether what you think they should want is actually a good thing for them to want after all. (Unless you're going to high-handedly get rid of all Reality TV, in which case I'm all for it!)
The problem isn't creating theoretical models, the problem is working out which ones correspond to the real world. To do that, you need to measure reality, and that usually costs quite a bit. If correspondence to reality wasn't required, science would be so easy.
If the greedy hypercapitalist swine who support the patent system aren't willing to abolish it, then we should at least require that the patents be written in such a way that a novice can understand it.
Not a novice. Someone with 5 years experience in the field, so that they count as someone "with ordinary skill in the art". That has always been the whole point of a patent, in any field, and it's desperately wrong that some patents are issued which do not make things clear enough; such patents should be struck from the record and the cost of any related proceedings pushed back on the (ex-)patent holder.
I'm not saying there should never be patents on software — sometimes you see something that is a genuine massive innovation, such as some of the compression or security codes where there have been times when the state of the art has advanced hugely when others thought it impossible — but they're issued too often for too little and are too unclear. I suppose it would help if software patents had to include all relevant source code as part of the patent (with all claim to copyright ceded) so that when the patent expires the exact protected method would be free to use for anyone; that would be much like patents in other fields.
I will admit it is overused
Of course it is; it's a basic plotline, and they're all done to death. Have been for centuries. But you don't deal with stories (or plays, or musicals, or movies, or ...) for the basic plot, you're there for the details. "It's not what you do, but the way that you do it."
Pretty much all of the legitimate use cases for Usenet -- and most of the illegitimate ones as well! -- have already been supplanted by other technologies.
I do not know or care about the illegal uses, but legal uses are still out there. (I'm thinking of a very specific one, but its identity is really immaterial to this discussion.) Though it would be technically possible to use some other method (e.g., a web forum) that's not where the community is; they're using USENET in the way it was intended, and it works superbly now that the bandwidth problems that used to plague it have been resolved. I admit that for a while I was using Google Groups as the interface, but I don't any more; their interface was poor (by comparison with a specialist client like Moz Thunderbird) and their service wasn't too hot either, especially when it came to spam. That's what you get for trying to "web forum"-ize USENET.
You can't blame people for only subscribing to the groups they find interesting.
I don't blame them for their interests; that would invite people to blame me for mine. I blame them for not defending against spammers and other scum. I blame them for going off to other venues (e.g., blogs with promotion by tweet). I blame them for not caring enough to make the world a better place.
And anyway, I was merely reporting that the traditions of USENET continue strongly in some communities.
If people still had useful discussions, I would feel differently but all that's left is the pirated materials.
You were subscribed to the wrong groups. There are still useful ones out there, with ordinary discussions happening just as they used to a decade or more ago.
I would LOVE to give them Android devices and iPads, if that's what they want, but my hands are tied. I need to show the guys who control the cell doors that I'm protecting the company's assets as best as I can. If that means the guy at the top needs a Blackberry and a Windows laptop, that's what he will get. If he wants something else, he can sign a waiver stating that he accepts responsibility for the data stored on those devices as per the Data Protection Act, or he can expect a lawsuit for constructive dismissal after I resign.
The problem is, if you spend your time preventing the bigwigs from doing what they want to do — people who are authorized to tell you what to do — then you'll be shown the door, even with all that stuff you mentioned. They'll just say that you weren't a team player and rationalize you out of your job and without a reference worth the name. If they need a replacement, they'll find one; in this economy, it won't be hard. (Irritate people enough and they'll act; it's just a matter of the activation threshold. Assuming you remember your high-school chemistry.)
You can't just protect the company's assets, you've got to also enable everyone else to do their jobs. That might well mean accepting things that you don't really like, but that's how life goes. Obstructions are there to get routed around.
Um... just brainstorming here ... Jar, lid w/spring, tether, done.
You've still got to get the stuff into the jar in the first place. That's where a tractor beam would be very helpful, as the lack of gravity (well, it's there but you're in freefall) makes some things much more difficult. Being able to reel stuff in without having to get anything physical out to it in the first place would be useful. (Better yet would be if it could bring larger items in without damaging them, but even small robust stuff would be Pretty Neat.)
What happened is a majority of these 6-figure loans are PRIVATE loans, not backed by the federal government and not discharged in bankruptcy.
That suggests a possible solution: remove government protection for those private loans (i.e., the exemption clause in the bankruptcy laws). That makes them just as risky as a normal private loan of such a size and the weird market problems go away. What's more, it would also be possible to argue in that case that there would be no additional costs on the government; it's just reducing the burden of unnecessary regulation.
It would probably prick the bubble of crappy private universities too, as their main funding mechanism would evaporate overnight. Like I'm going to cry myself to sleep over that. I'm willing to bet that the good places — the ones worth the name "university" — will actually survive anyway. Guess my snobbishness is showing through.
(No DVDs by mail, though. That's so 'Oughts.')
Yes, and there's well-entrenched incumbents in that market too. Why go into a bruising fight with a company that is already dominating a market when you don't have to? Going streaming-only lets you (try to) end-run around them instead.
The article quite clearly states that the government wants *its own* computers to have TPM installed, it doesn't mention anything about home users.
Not yet.
But the government most certainly is allowed to secure the systems that it owns and uses. It's even good practice! Same for anyone else, of course. The problem comes at the point when one person tries to take control away from another, and that's without regard for whether the oppressor is government, corporate, or anything/one else. The only true distinguishing feature of a government in this regard is its size; evil is as evil does.
In any case, I propose to worry about other things first. Like the economy...
Fix NoScript then... since its obviously broken.
Or add proxying to your local server for the JS content that would otherwise come from another server. Or use something else that doesn't insist on using unsafe security practices. How hard could it be?
The US military is buying half a billion dollars worth of kit from them... Or rather through Northrop Grumman.
So that would be $500k's worth if bought direct?
"Something like... Gmail?"
It's obviously a choice, and a popular one at that. Good luck if your needs are somehow non-standard.
How many people have non-standard email needs? (Other than spammers, of course.) Well, actually there's a number of cases where there is a need for non-standard email. A classic example is having a mailing list. OTOH, those also work very well as hosted services.
IMO, as long as you can get proper backups of your emails, you're just fine with having them done as a hosted or cloud service. Backups to media that you own and control are important. The schedule for maintaining the backups is going to be a matter of balancing cost and risk. (As usual.)
So I'd say that their 6,000 year old earth theory is complete bunk.
Either that or their "theory of creation" is true, and God's telling everyone a vastly elaborate lie with all those sneaky isotopic ratios and photon distributions in the CMB.
Till today I did not even know there *was* an encryption standard for XML docs and I still don't know *where* to use it. Is it built in to PHP? Is it part of the standard parsers out there?
It's certainly not in a majority of them.
My biggest question is why was the standard even developed in the first place and who actually uses it?
It was developed to allow a document to be handed round with parts of it shrouded so that only one individual (or service) can read it while still allowing other parts of the document to be read by anyone. AIUI, it's relevant in complex uses of SOAP where you've got a complex message bus in use and where the endpoints don't particularly trust the conveying services. Some of the B2B stuff is a bit that way inclined. I've never needed it myself though (unlike XML Signature, which is closely related and much more relevant since guaranteeing document integrity makes a lot of sense for things like invoices).
I bet IBM has a full implementation of this. It's exactly the heavyweight thing that's right up their street.
Even really easy and cheep would be good
Twitter is good now?
As for the "what does global warming mean?"
Dead simple on one level. Higher average global temperature. More energy in the atmosphere and eventually the oceans. (We can probably ignore the effect on rocks.) This is a direct consequence of a higher CO2 concentration in the air, by simple physics. (Some other gases too.) Given that CO2 diffuses pretty well, it's not too hard to measure the increase. The problem is in the detail.
It does not necessarily mean warmer weather where you are located. Climate and weather are very complex, and very non-linear. It probably means things are stormier, but we really don't know that for sure. (It might well make things drier in your area.) The effect on sea levels is easier to calculate, or it would be except for the effects of melting permafrost and ice, which are seriously complex monkey wrenches in the sums. What we do know is that it changes the loading on the climate dice, and we don't know all the game rules yet. Alas, what we also know for sure is that this is a game we can't really afford to lose because of the stake we have in it; that's why climate scientists are so insistent, that along with the fact that by the time it's clear to absolutely everyone, it'll definitely be too late to do anything about except die by the million. (You might like playing russian roulette where you don't know how many chambers have live rounds, but many people have less appetite for risk.) I hate it when a green fanatic points at a big storm and says "evidence of global warming"; it's not. The longer term frequency of these things, the size of the peaks, the total energy across the whole world, that's the evidence. Maybe it's not as immediate and easy to see, but it's far more dangerous because of its sheer scale.
And is it anthropogenic? Well, that's certainly the #1 theory (combined with a whole mess of complicated feedback effects) as the alternatives are all rather more far fetched. Humanity as a whole has been very busy over the past century or so burning fossil fuels, and many of the natural buffers are now believed to be used up. (Deciding this beyond all doubt is a long-term project; the real question is whether the evidence is good enough to act, and again, a lot of people think it is.)
Just to be clear, if there really was a truly cheap believable technical fix for all this — a "magic wand", if you will — then the climate scientists would be proposing that we wave it. Right away. But nobody seriously thinks such a thing exists, so they're trying the cheapest and most humane option that could work: changing the economic system. I think the alternatives are worse, much much worse.
So a lot of pubs have either bought a domestic subscription and hoped nobody notices - or a subscription from a satellite broadcaster based in continental Europe (who don't charge absurdly expensive prices). Surprise surprise, Sky went ballistic. They had an exclusive license to be the only broadcaster in the UK which this sort of thing undermines; they've been using every bullying tactic in the book to force pubs to buy the UK commercial subscription and now they can't.
The FA have two basic options at this point: they must either persuade satellite broadcasters outside the UK to not sell to the UK market despite the law permitting them to do so, or not sell to them at all. The second option is most certainly permitted, but will cause quite a hit to their income (as UK Premiership soccer is mysteriously very popular) and the first option is going to be a very difficult set of negotiating as the broadcasters in other states will not be willing to give up the right to cross-sell that they've now got.
It's all very amusing to me.
Some people can multitask to the point where they can talk on the phone and drive.
But I bet you're not one of them. Not and drive safely. (Drive like a drunken homicidal maniac, that I'd accept.)
Driving safely requires attention. Really. For everyone, everywhere, because it's always possible for something random to happen that's not your fault. Doesn't matter. Pay attention and you'll (usually) have enough time to deal with it. Distracted, and you lose that opportunity.
If you're not giving it your full attention as a driver, you're not safe for yourself, for your passengers (if you've got any) or for everyone else on and around the road. Yes, there are other kinds of distractions (though phones are particularly bad for some reason) and many people are idiots, but that doesn't give you any kind of excuse. What's more, in this case the law is just telling you to obey proper common sense. It's a shame that common sense is so damn rare, but there you go. Don't be a stupid ass. Don't text while driving. THAT MEANS YOU.
Indeed. The symbol indicating the ratio between a circle's diameter and its circumference (pi) means something totally different in math when upper-cased. There it's used to express the product of the terms of a series. Given that, upper-casing it (except when it's the start of a sentence) really would change the meaning hugely.