While crop seed companies definitely want to keep selling new seeds each year, it's not exactly some evil plan. The high-yield, high-resilience hybrids typically lose many of their benefits in the second generation, and not particularly by design (it's a nice side effect, but it wasn't something seed companies engineered).
Not to mention that many domesticated annuals don't reproduce well in the first place. For example, corn would likely die out in a decade or so if we didn't spend lots of time and effort getting to to seed. And that's not some recent change due to big agribusiness, it's the result of thousands of years of genetic manipulation.
I'm not saying big agribusiness doesn't do some nasty things, but the fact that they sell annual, domesticated crops that don't breed well is not the thing I'd use to point out their harm.
Or you're seen as the guy who switched us to these terrible new "green" toners that don't print decently and make our external communications look second-rate.
You're assuming that his managers will take responsibility if their project fails; while that's certainly possible I wouldn't count on it, particularly if your goal is to ingratiate yourself with those managers.
The Macallan 25 tastes more or less like liking the barrel directly. It's not bad per se -- I rather liked it -- but it's not something you'd drink every night, even if you were made of money. I think the lesson is not that whiskey is necessarily better with more age, but that after sufficient aging it's really a matter of taste than absolutely quality.
But taste is only important if you're drinking whiskey because you like whiskey, rather than for status or other such reasons. It's particularly unimportant for people looking to collect rare bottles -- which may or may not have been aged long in the barrel -- because they're looking for rarity not quality.
And yes, whiskey only ages in the barrel. It doesn't go bad in the bottle or anything, baring terrible storage circumstances, but it doesn't change much either.
Blended scotch isn't necessarily bad. It gets the reputation because it's much easier to hide cheap scotch by blending it. But if you start out with good scotch you can make very nice blended scotch, and you can make blends with attributes that are all but impossible to obtain in a single-malt. I prefer The Macallan myself, but to dismiss all blended scotch as second-rate is pure snobbery.
Also note that many single-malt distilleries are now selling their stock to other labels, and are intentionally "blending" it by adding a trivial amount of some other stock for no reason other than to prevent labeling of the end product as single-malt -- the perception of the single-malt label is much more valuable than any pragmatic product difference.
It's of know accuracy, and the accuracy is poor, so no one using it wants to talk about it. Even assuming the device functions exactly as designed it's not very good at determining your BAC because it can only measure the absolute count of methyl-group molecules in the sample chamber, not the amount of alcohol in your blood, or even the sort of things you'd need to make a reasonable estimate given the amount of alcohol in your exhaled breath (subject weight would be a good place to start).
Or they could go with a detection method that's actually accurate and verifiable, rather than one that makes a whole slew of assumptions about your body and leaves no sample for third-party testing. If we're supposed to be measuring BAC, couldn't we just sample your blood?
But that's contrary to the prohibitionist agenda that defines "drunk" using arbitrarily low readings from a breathalyzer, so it's unlikely to occur.
It would be difficult (not necessarily impossible, but hard) to allow verification of ID through government-controlled systems without either also allowing the government to tell when and where you are authenticating or being very difficult to revoke the card.
"Completely unnecessary" is a stretch at best -- contact-less interfaces have real benefits. The most obvious is a lack of contamination and corrosion, both on the card and the reader. Another is decreased read times, which allows you to use the cards in more places without increasing the level of annoyance.
Not to mention the "new attack scenarios" do not include simple copying of the card UUID, so radio-based attacks would need to be interactive: 1. Attacker camps out at door with radio equipment 2. Attacker points antenna at employee coming towards door 3. Attacker is able to authenticate to the door as approaching employee
While that's certainly a technically feasible attack it's not terribly practical in execution, even if you setup an out-of-band comm system to isolate the card under attack from the person entering the building.
Plus you really could just issue a foil-lined holder if you were worried about such attacks. Or make authentication two-factor and require the entry of a PIN or somesuch in addition to the card scan.
I don't know what your optical drive does, but mine still reads bits serially -- given the physical encoding on typical disks it's really not possible to do anything else. Now it does read whole blocks or even series of blocks in one logical pass, but each bit is read in sequence.
Really less and less things are happening in parallel in modern computers, because as speeds increase it becomes more difficult to synchronize all the signals -- take a look at PCIe, SATA, SAS, etc.
From what I've seen they're reluctant to give out the schema because they don't have decent documentation and they're embarrassed by the DB. I support several companies that do claims processing using a system that uses fixed-record-length ASCII tables as the DB. The schema is defined only by an ordered list of column types -- you have to calculate the offset for each bit of data. And the column types aren't enforced -- you can put any type of data you want in any field -- the types just specify a field width. And don't even get me started on the lack of foreign key checking.
The fact the the government is selling services "at-cost" does not preclude the possibility of a private organization offering the same services and making money. First, they could simply charge more and try to be enough better/different that people are willing to pay. Second, they could operate more efficiently than the government so that they have a profit margin at the same retail costs.
I'm not saying either thing would be easy, but the only way that the a government-run organization prevent private competition is through regulation. If there are no laws protecting the government-run company then there's no fundamental reason that private businesses couldn't compete; the government's lack of profit motives if no different than having access to lower-priced source material -- it's a competitive advantage, but it's not a guarantee against all competitors.
On a system where only one user needs root access sudo isn't terribly useful. Some people like to avoid opening root shells -- while it's certainly harder to muck things up without a root shell it's also harder to get work done. Personally I use sudo to open root shells when I need them.
But sudo is much more useful on multiuser systems -- you can grant several people root access without sharing a password, which has obvious benefits. You can also grant users access to the root (or any other) account only for certain commands, as an alternative to setuid for situations where setuid is dangerous, infeasible, or does not provide enough control.
You *may* start intuitively use the right technique. Or you may start to use a terrible technique that will lead to injury. Just like you would with shoes.
And if you actually have less-than-perfect feet -- flat feet, for example -- the technique that comes intuitively will almost certainly be wrong, while the technique that comes while wearing corrective shoes is much more likely to be correct. Certainly you can use improper technique with corrective shoes or visa versa, and you can learn to overcome flaws in your structure with or without external aids, but to say that proper technique will just happen intuitively is ridiculous.
Not really. Telecom lines are a natural monopoly -- if you believe in any form of market regulation at all "telecom lines" is probably on the list of things you think should be regulated.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be regulated, I'm just saying state-owned telecom lines is not a particularly strong example of socialism in action.
Modern ventilators are all positive-pressure systems. The only negative-pressure option is the iron lung. Presumably these lungs are hooked up to a pretty standard modern ventilator.
I can't speak as to what they'd use to fill it, though air seems like a more obvious choice than liquid helium. And even if the gas was lighter-than-air the entire assembly is not necessary light enough to be buoyant, particularly at high altitudes.
Regardless, even if the ballute were buoyant and durable enough to stay high in the atmosphere for significant periods there is a trivial solution -- open the gas chamber when the ballute is released.
Secrets aren't the only way to do security. In fact if you only use secrets you can only do "something you know" -- anything that might qualify as "something you have" is unlikely to be a secret. Traditional keys fall squarely into the non-secret category, but I think most people would accept that they provide some amount of security.
Likewise your username is necessary public information, but I doubt most people would prefer a system that takes a secret, checks it against every entry in the passwd DB, and allows access to whichever account(s) match -- requiring the correct information pair is more secure than requiring only the secret information.
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You're also missing the benefit of varying interfaces. Let's say I come up with a hack to the PIN keypad that lets me hook up a computer and try every possible PIN in 90 seconds. If the PIN is the only information required for access I've now broken the system. But if I need a PIN and an access card -- even if all the access card has on it is my employee ID number -- an attacker would need to know my ID number, create a card AND execute the PIN attack. Certainly it's possible to create a suitable fake/cloned access card, but the vulnerabilities in the two systems are non-overlapping and therefore the combination of the two is more secure than either system independently.
If you are driving the front wheels independently it's not really rear-steering, at least not any more than the two-wheel design -- it doesn't rotate around one of the front tires in a tight turn, it rotates around the center of the front axle.
And some people might call you a cynic for dismissing personal experience with human suffering with some set of statistics selected to push your predefined agenda.
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While crop seed companies definitely want to keep selling new seeds each year, it's not exactly some evil plan. The high-yield, high-resilience hybrids typically lose many of their benefits in the second generation, and not particularly by design (it's a nice side effect, but it wasn't something seed companies engineered).
Not to mention that many domesticated annuals don't reproduce well in the first place. For example, corn would likely die out in a decade or so if we didn't spend lots of time and effort getting to to seed. And that's not some recent change due to big agribusiness, it's the result of thousands of years of genetic manipulation.
I'm not saying big agribusiness doesn't do some nasty things, but the fact that they sell annual, domesticated crops that don't breed well is not the thing I'd use to point out their harm.
Or you're seen as the guy who switched us to these terrible new "green" toners that don't print decently and make our external communications look second-rate.
You're assuming that his managers will take responsibility if their project fails; while that's certainly possible I wouldn't count on it, particularly if your goal is to ingratiate yourself with those managers.
The Macallan 25 tastes more or less like liking the barrel directly. It's not bad per se -- I rather liked it -- but it's not something you'd drink every night, even if you were made of money. I think the lesson is not that whiskey is necessarily better with more age, but that after sufficient aging it's really a matter of taste than absolutely quality.
But taste is only important if you're drinking whiskey because you like whiskey, rather than for status or other such reasons. It's particularly unimportant for people looking to collect rare bottles -- which may or may not have been aged long in the barrel -- because they're looking for rarity not quality.
And yes, whiskey only ages in the barrel. It doesn't go bad in the bottle or anything, baring terrible storage circumstances, but it doesn't change much either.
Blended scotch isn't necessarily bad. It gets the reputation because it's much easier to hide cheap scotch by blending it. But if you start out with good scotch you can make very nice blended scotch, and you can make blends with attributes that are all but impossible to obtain in a single-malt. I prefer The Macallan myself, but to dismiss all blended scotch as second-rate is pure snobbery.
Also note that many single-malt distilleries are now selling their stock to other labels, and are intentionally "blending" it by adding a trivial amount of some other stock for no reason other than to prevent labeling of the end product as single-malt -- the perception of the single-malt label is much more valuable than any pragmatic product difference.
It's of know accuracy, and the accuracy is poor, so no one using it wants to talk about it. Even assuming the device functions exactly as designed it's not very good at determining your BAC because it can only measure the absolute count of methyl-group molecules in the sample chamber, not the amount of alcohol in your blood, or even the sort of things you'd need to make a reasonable estimate given the amount of alcohol in your exhaled breath (subject weight would be a good place to start).
Or they could go with a detection method that's actually accurate and verifiable, rather than one that makes a whole slew of assumptions about your body and leaves no sample for third-party testing. If we're supposed to be measuring BAC, couldn't we just sample your blood?
But that's contrary to the prohibitionist agenda that defines "drunk" using arbitrarily low readings from a breathalyzer, so it's unlikely to occur.
It would be difficult (not necessarily impossible, but hard) to allow verification of ID through government-controlled systems without either also allowing the government to tell when and where you are authenticating or being very difficult to revoke the card.
The government never issued SSN with the intent of being a universal identifier.
"Completely unnecessary" is a stretch at best -- contact-less interfaces have real benefits. The most obvious is a lack of contamination and corrosion, both on the card and the reader. Another is decreased read times, which allows you to use the cards in more places without increasing the level of annoyance.
Not to mention the "new attack scenarios" do not include simple copying of the card UUID, so radio-based attacks would need to be interactive:
1. Attacker camps out at door with radio equipment
2. Attacker points antenna at employee coming towards door
3. Attacker is able to authenticate to the door as approaching employee
While that's certainly a technically feasible attack it's not terribly practical in execution, even if you setup an out-of-band comm system to isolate the card under attack from the person entering the building.
Plus you really could just issue a foil-lined holder if you were worried about such attacks. Or make authentication two-factor and require the entry of a PIN or somesuch in addition to the card scan.
Don't you want the grid to be built as cheaply as possible? Isn't that the point of the standards -- to define the lower bound on function?
I'd pay twice as much just for the better menu system and subtitles on BR -- it makes DVDs look like some 80s computer video hack.
I don't know what your optical drive does, but mine still reads bits serially -- given the physical encoding on typical disks it's really not possible to do anything else. Now it does read whole blocks or even series of blocks in one logical pass, but each bit is read in sequence.
Really less and less things are happening in parallel in modern computers, because as speeds increase it becomes more difficult to synchronize all the signals -- take a look at PCIe, SATA, SAS, etc.
From what I've seen they're reluctant to give out the schema because they don't have decent documentation and they're embarrassed by the DB. I support several companies that do claims processing using a system that uses fixed-record-length ASCII tables as the DB. The schema is defined only by an ordered list of column types -- you have to calculate the offset for each bit of data. And the column types aren't enforced -- you can put any type of data you want in any field -- the types just specify a field width. And don't even get me started on the lack of foreign key checking.
The fact the the government is selling services "at-cost" does not preclude the possibility of a private organization offering the same services and making money. First, they could simply charge more and try to be enough better/different that people are willing to pay. Second, they could operate more efficiently than the government so that they have a profit margin at the same retail costs.
I'm not saying either thing would be easy, but the only way that the a government-run organization prevent private competition is through regulation. If there are no laws protecting the government-run company then there's no fundamental reason that private businesses couldn't compete; the government's lack of profit motives if no different than having access to lower-priced source material -- it's a competitive advantage, but it's not a guarantee against all competitors.
On a system where only one user needs root access sudo isn't terribly useful. Some people like to avoid opening root shells -- while it's certainly harder to muck things up without a root shell it's also harder to get work done. Personally I use sudo to open root shells when I need them.
But sudo is much more useful on multiuser systems -- you can grant several people root access without sharing a password, which has obvious benefits. You can also grant users access to the root (or any other) account only for certain commands, as an alternative to setuid for situations where setuid is dangerous, infeasible, or does not provide enough control.
You *may* start intuitively use the right technique. Or you may start to use a terrible technique that will lead to injury. Just like you would with shoes.
And if you actually have less-than-perfect feet -- flat feet, for example -- the technique that comes intuitively will almost certainly be wrong, while the technique that comes while wearing corrective shoes is much more likely to be correct. Certainly you can use improper technique with corrective shoes or visa versa, and you can learn to overcome flaws in your structure with or without external aids, but to say that proper technique will just happen intuitively is ridiculous.
Not really. Telecom lines are a natural monopoly -- if you believe in any form of market regulation at all "telecom lines" is probably on the list of things you think should be regulated.
I'm not saying they should or shouldn't be regulated, I'm just saying state-owned telecom lines is not a particularly strong example of socialism in action.
Modern ventilators are all positive-pressure systems. The only negative-pressure option is the iron lung. Presumably these lungs are hooked up to a pretty standard modern ventilator.
I can't speak as to what they'd use to fill it, though air seems like a more obvious choice than liquid helium. And even if the gas was lighter-than-air the entire assembly is not necessary light enough to be buoyant, particularly at high altitudes.
Regardless, even if the ballute were buoyant and durable enough to stay high in the atmosphere for significant periods there is a trivial solution -- open the gas chamber when the ballute is released.
Verisgn says SSL accelerators don't count anyway -- you still need to license for each connected server.
Or you could buy from a more reasonable authority that doesn't impose such restrictions.
Secrets aren't the only way to do security. In fact if you only use secrets you can only do "something you know" -- anything that might qualify as "something you have" is unlikely to be a secret. Traditional keys fall squarely into the non-secret category, but I think most people would accept that they provide some amount of security.
Likewise your username is necessary public information, but I doubt most people would prefer a system that takes a secret, checks it against every entry in the passwd DB, and allows access to whichever account(s) match -- requiring the correct information pair is more secure than requiring only the secret information.
--
You're also missing the benefit of varying interfaces. Let's say I come up with a hack to the PIN keypad that lets me hook up a computer and try every possible PIN in 90 seconds. If the PIN is the only information required for access I've now broken the system. But if I need a PIN and an access card -- even if all the access card has on it is my employee ID number -- an attacker would need to know my ID number, create a card AND execute the PIN attack. Certainly it's possible to create a suitable fake/cloned access card, but the vulnerabilities in the two systems are non-overlapping and therefore the combination of the two is more secure than either system independently.
Economically inefficient maybe. But from a power in->heat out standpoint it's 100% efficient.
If you are driving the front wheels independently it's not really rear-steering, at least not any more than the two-wheel design -- it doesn't rotate around one of the front tires in a tight turn, it rotates around the center of the front axle.
And some people might call you a cynic for dismissing personal experience with human suffering with some set of statistics selected to push your predefined agenda.
Perl's type system is very strict -- it just only has three types.