Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
That's a rational and coherent statement, if you also believe that governments should be weaker than individuals.
One could argue that this isn't so much a belief as a trivially observable fact. A government isn't an intelligent being; it's a collection of individuals who may or may not act together. No government can do anything itself; it can only act through the individuals that are its component parts. Those individuals act according to their own wishes, which may well be at odds with the government's wishes (if the government can be said to have wishes).
It's well understood in some circles that the people running the government often do things that are at odds with the publicly-stated government policies and goals, usually in ways that are very profitable for the individuals themselves. All too often, those people are immune to punishment for their actions, which are considered the government's actions by the legal system (i.e., by the people who make up the legal system) and by much of the general public. But to understand what's happening, you need to understand that it was individuals who carried out the actions, not the government.
Of course, there is the general concept of emergence that applies here. Governments (and other human organizations) do have emergent behaviors and emergent properties. But we should be careful not to assume that these are intelligent or purposeful. The intelligence and purpose belongs to the individuals, and there's little evidence of either at the organizational level. An organization's activity is just the sum of the activity of all of its members.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
Hey, what are you, some sort of hacker or computer programmer or something?
Since when did they start allowing people who understand all this computer code stuff to make comments on slashdot? I'll bet you're even using the "classical" setting to read the summary (and maybe even TFA).
Heh. Is there really a biblical passage implying that those goatherds 3000 to 2000 years ago had a concept of negative numbers? I don't recall reading of evidence that even the Greek merchants of 2000 years ago had such a concept, though they had addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Also, I haven't read of anyone in the Middle East treating zero as a number before they learned the trick from India.
But I'd be interested in reading about such things, if there's reliable evidence of them. Preferable in classical Greek or Aramaic or some such; a 17th-century translation to English isn't very convincing (especially considered the known translation errors;-).
? So a student programmer works on something apple are allegedly already working on, but this student actually finishes it a full year before the combined might of Apple. Yeah that seems likely.
Actually, it seems quite likely. There's are several conventional sayings in the software development biz to the effect that the time to produce anything (and the quality of the result) is an inverse function of the number of people involved in producing it. One form of this is the old comment that adding people to a late software project makes it even later.
Big companies like Apple (or MS or IBM before them) typically take years to develop what one person can write in a week or a month. This is because inter-communication between a set of people is much more difficult that inter-communication within one brain. And the team's result is often bloated and buggy, due to the same communication problems among the developers. It's a problem that every software development manager is quite familiar with.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if a development team at Apple (who are probably all working on N other projects at the same time) should take a year or more to do something that a "student programmer" might develop in a few weeks. That's the nature of programming. We're good at building things whose details can be held in a single brain. We're not very good at building things whose details are distributed across multiple brains.
in the "rules" for the App submission. Apple has the right to reject if it's already a planned development.
Ah, so if if I come up with a good idea for a new iPhone app and submit it, all Apple's reviewer(s) need do is send a note over to the appropriate manager, who copies my description to their list of planned apps. My proposal is then rejected because it's now "already a planned development" (as of when the rejection is typed), and I've lost all rights to my idea.
Remind me again why anyone would invest their own time developing new iPhone apps? Yeah, they might not realize that a new proposed app is a good idea, and allow you to do the work. But even then, they can and do pull apps after they've been in the app store for a while. And then a similar app comes out later, with no acknowledgement (or royalties) to the original designer.
It's the music industry's model all over again. They pick a few successes to support and hold up before the rest of us as an incentive, and stick us with one-sided "take it or leave it" contracts that give most of the profits to the distributor, with only pennies per sale to the actual innovator.
On a semi-serious note what's up with attractive equaling super skinny? I like my women to actually look like women and not kids.
The conventional explanation is that this is the standard in the fashion and advertising industries, and it's well known that those are dominated by gay men, who of course prefer women who look like boys.;-)
On a more serious note, if you look at any of the "men's" magazines -- Playboy, Hustler, etc. -- you'll see that their standard of female beauty is pretty much the average-size woman, neither skinny nor fat. They don't even select for especially large breasts, just for "full" breasts.
And we can also go into the "scientific trivia" aspect: A number of studies have found that the most attractive image of either sex is very close to the average (in whatever society is polled). The most interesting is the surveys done by presenting a lot of photos of real people, mixed with computer-generated "average" images derived from N of the real-people photos, for varying values of N. The winners have been generally the images where N is large, i.e., a true "average" person among the set of photos.
So if you reject both skinny and fat women, and prefer an average-looking woman, you're just a normal guy. Similarly for women's choices of attractive men.
The issue here is civil vs. criminal law. No laws that can put you into prison were violated, hence the employees can't be prosecuted.
Are we sure of that? This happened in the US, under the jurisdiction of the US Constitution, whose Fourth Amendment states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and Warrants shall not be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
These "spy cams" were installed by government agencies in the homes of the students. Unless the school board had explicit warrants from the appropriate court explicitly listing the students' names and addresses, it looks very much to this non-expert in Constitutional Law that the above law really should apply.
If not, what's to stop any other government agency from secretly installing cameras without warrants in all our homes (bedrooms, bathrooms, etc) and monitoring our behavior there?
(Though, come to think of it, maybe they intend to invoke the Patriot Act to justify this unwarranted spying?;-)
They certainly can. It may not be legal, and they're supposed to be encrypted, and all that. But it's certainly possible to send any sort of text document, classified or not, and encrypted or not, via email.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that some dummy with a clearance did so, and then arranged for the victim (i.e., the recipient) to be charged with the offense. And they might not have been a dummy. There are quite a few countries in which you can be charged with the crime of receiving documents without a proper clearance. That's a fairly standard way of framing your victim. Just arrange for the document to be sent to them "by accident", and tip off the security police that the victim's residence should be searched for illegal documents.
And in a separate filing, the RIAA has brought similar charges against 57,823 stags. They're all downloading songs they can learn to impress the does during the next rutting season.
Believe it or not, when someone tells you that your nose isn't working right and that that's flowers, not shit, it's not that they're "blind" it's that they have a working nose;).
Heh. One problem with this metaphor is the flower/shit is a false dichotomy. There are quite a lot of plants whose flowers smell like shit, rotting meat, and other things that are disgusting to us. It's because they're polinated by flies and other pollinators that find such scents attractive. We're descended from fruit-eating primates that were attracted to sweet smells, and luckily for us, most common flowers are pollinated by bees and other pollinators that like sweet smells. But this is somewhat an accident of the evolutionary process. If the development of insects had gone slightly differently, shit-scented flowers would be the norm, and the sweet-scented flowers would be the rare ones adapted to unusual pollinators.
But metaphors are hard. People can almost always find a way of picking any metaphor apart and explaining why it's not really accurate, including the one I started this paragraph with.
The only reason why Y2K/wasn't/ a disaster was because people worked their asses off for it to not happen.
Where "people" is defined as "Cobol programmers".;-)
There were any number of analyses (before and after 2000-1-1) that concluded that around 99.5% of the actual Y2K problems were in vintage Cobol code. There were any number of jokes created based on this curious fact. But in other languages, date handling was long-since packaged in library routines, so a single upgrade could fix all their potential problems without the developers even being aware that there had been a problem. I work in several languages, and I was unable to find any Y2K problems in any of the code I was working with.
Cobol, on the other hand... I recall reading one "study" of one company's code, in which the writer said that when his count of different date formats in the database passed 180, he decided he understood why there was a problem. And he understood why no centralized solution was possible; he and his buddies just had to hunt down every single date manipulation, figure out what sort of hokey calculations it was doing, and in most cases, fix it. In many cases, there weren't enough spare bytes in the fixed-field-width DB records to fix it without finding and rewriting every line of code in every program that accessed such fields.
And many people pointed out that the Cobol language wasn't the problem. The problem was the Cobol programmer community, which has long had such practices that should qualify them for a diagnosis of legal insanity and institutionalization at the expense of their employers that encouraged and rewarded such behavior. Nobody seems to have found any other programming community that did things this insane. There is a conjecture that this is because Cobol was almost strictly a "business" programming language, and in a business setting, dealing with anything that's more than a year in the future is generally considered irresponsible and grounds for firing. But anything that will produce a short-term saving, such as saving a byte of disk space per record by using a compact date/time format is strongly approved. And this is the main thought process that led to Y2K problems.
Oddly enough combining Christianity with science resulted in a science book that'll leave kids thinking that Jesus is busy each night towing the Moon in to the sky so we'll have a nice bit of light.
Oh, dunno about that. I remember when, as a kid send to Sunday School where they gave this sort of "explanation" of the moon, my immediate thought was to ask why God had put the moon in an orbit that was only visible on average for half the night time, and spent half its time in the day sky where it's not needed. You'd think that, if God is all-powerful, He'd have arranged to have the moon stay exactly opposite the sun in the sky, so that it was always full and always shining at night. Doesn't that seem like rather sloppy design (or implementation if you prefer)?
Somehow, the Sunday-School teacher(s) didn't seem to think this was an interesting question, and didn't even try to answer it. But I eventually learned that astronomers had good explanations of how the Earth-moon-sun system worked, and were honest enough to admit that they didn't know why it's all set up that way. So I went with their explanation rather than the Sunday-School teachers'.
I did like the suggestion that, when they were created, the sun and moon had orbits that were exact multiples of each other, but over the eons (millennia?) the solar system has gotten badly out of alignment. God is too busy with other things to do any maintenance, giving us the incommensurable orbital periods that we see today. It seems that God just can't be bothered with our part of His creation any more...
Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption.
Huh???? SSL is an openly-published standard with many free sources for various versions, as can be verified in seconds by googling "SSL specification" and "SSL source code". You'll get back thousands of links that include lots of versions of the source. There's no way the US government could be blocking all of them; the code is easily available anywhere there's IP access. And since you can download the spec, you can have your staff hackers do as much checking of the code as you're willing to pay them for.
(Actually, it would probably be good advice to do a bit of checking on the nature of the source repositories. It doesn't take a lot of brains to guess that there are likely some "doctored" versions out there with, uh, "interesting" undocumented features. So if you're building a product that includes SSL, even if you're in the US, you might want to observe the usual sort of due diligence to verify that you've got a good SSL package. And you DO want the source; otherwise whoever sent you the link library should be assumed to have access to the innards of everything you're building.;-)
Any bank that has "standardized" on ActiveX has done so for internal reasons; there's no external reason to make such a decision (and many good reasons to ban ActiveX instead).
Here's what everyone needs to do... do what you rarely ever do -- go to any wikipedia page on a subject in which you are expert or very knowledgeable. In all likelihood, you will then realize that this page is riddled with errors, bad writing, glaring omissions, bias and probably other things too.
Actually, I've done that a number of times. What I found was more complex than that.
When I've looked at pages on highly technical topics, I've generally found that the information was quite accurate, and often fairly detailed. On the other hand, when I look up non-technical topics, I've usually found sketchier information, and a lot of opinion passing for fact.
Of course, in both cases, the information has usually been fairly basic. It's ok for a quick introduction, but for the real story, you have to start following links. That's about what I'd expect wikipedia to be: A useful first stop for topics that I know little about, with useful links if I want to learn more.
Actually, I tend to go to google first. This is because you have to guess the title fairly accurately for wikipedia, but for google, you only need to guess the keywords. Then you hope that something in the first few pages of ghits will actually be on the topic you want.
And if google shows a wikipedia link, I usually read it first.
(One of my favorite examples for wiki-skeptics is to suggest that they read the "Evolution" page. It has long been a very reasonable introduction to that tendentious topic, summarizing the scientific history, and giving links to both technical articles and religious pages that are relevant. I do wonder how often that page is vandalized, but the editors do a reasonably good job of keeping it stable.;-)
Think how much richer each entry would be if all that time and energy was concentrated into the one or maybe two languages. That always makes me sad.
Nah; that would make most of the world a lot poorer. It would only mean shutting down the wikipedia sites for all the "minor" languages. It would probably add nothing at all to the English wikipedia, and very little to the French or Chinese versions (whichever was allowed to continue alongside English). This would be a major loss of knowledge to most of the world's population.
The minor-language editions have probably added more value for their speakers than the English-language edition has for us English speakers. After all, we had encyclopedias before any of us were born, and we (mostly) developed the Internet in English. With google and the other search sites, we would be ok without wikipedia, though it wouldn't be nearly as convenient.
But the minor-language editions of wikipedia have added a valuable resource for much of the world, in the form of access to information that simply wasn't available to them at all without first learning a difficult foreign language. And all it took was the time of a few hundred volunteers to do the translating.
If you are reasonably fluent in a minor language, one of the most valuable contributions you can make to the world right now is expanding that language's wikipedia.
Now if we could find a way to pay people for doing this job...
What I like to point out is that one of the nicest home pages in the industry is at google.com. This page, of course, violates pretty much all the "design principles" of the industry. It's simple, to the point, and works everywhere.
Of course, there's nothing at all flashy (pun intended) there, so it's utterly unacceptable to the crowd of "designers" that have brought these problems on us.
It's probably worth pointing out that this was not just intentional, but it has been an ongoing violation of the original design of HTML and web browsers.
In any number of history of the development of the Web, it has been emphasized that HTML was primarily designed as a solution to an old problem: Documents were usually designed for a specific screen size, and generally wouldn't work well on a different size screen. But the screens of displays had a very wide variety of heights and widths, both in cm (or inches if you prefer) and pixels. So nothing that's formatted for a particular width can be expected to be easy to read on most screens. HTML was explicitly designed so that a document can be "agnostic" to screen shape, because the document contains hints that can be used to format it for the viewer's screen. The first browsers were built to take advantage of this, and display properly HTMLized text so that it's easy to read in a specific window on the current screen, whatever its size and shape may be.
If this doesn't work for a given site, it's because that site was explicitly designed to defeat the most important design features of HTML, and force the text to be displayed incorrectly on your screen (or in your browser's window).
This should be surprising to anyone at all familiar with how web sites are typically designed. I've worked on any number of sites where I had explicit orders to "design" the site for one specific window size. (This was usually a size that worked well on the boss's screen.;-) In some cases, when I made the site work on smaller screens, I've been reprimanded for this and ordered to make the site NOT work on screens under a certain size. Yes, management is often that obstructionist.
So now we're facing massive site redesign, as managers learn that the top-selling computers are on those silly little "smart phones", and they're losing customers to competitors who've learned to grudgingly accomodate the people who carry such devices.
If they'd honored the original design 20 years ago, we wouldn't be having this problem now. And 15 years ago, when cell phones started to take off, the writing should have been on the wall for everyone. Digital phones have always been small computers, and the simple application of Moore's Law and other industry statistics said that in a decade or so, those little "palm top" computers would have significant processing power. The digital cell-phone system has been a computer network from the start, and simple calculations told industry insiders that by now we'd have "cell phones" more powerful than the desktop machines of a decade or two back.
But it wouldn't be surprising if the "designers" continue to work on ways to prevent their creations from working properly on the newer gadgets that we're buying. They've gotten away with it for a couple of decades, and now they'll get paid even more to "design" for the new small screens. So their lesson may be that if you provide a limited, restricted product, you can profit even more when your clients have to redesign for a hot new platform. And if it's limited to just that platform, you can be paid again when yet another screen layout comes along.
(Myself, I've found it fairly easy to make web pages that work nearly everywhere. I just leave out all the attributes that specify an explicit size, and that pretty much prevents problems by giving the browser permission to format it for its screen. Except on the iPhone, of course, where the standard Safari browser formats the text for a much larger window, and then shrinks it to fit, making the text unreadable. Anyone know of an easy fix for this, aside from recommending Opera?;-)
If you follow what the grandparent poster said about giving yourself and regular users LIMITED ACCOUNTS and leave the administration separate you won't run into so many of these problems.
Well, yeah; I've done that, when I was working inside corporate networks. But note that I was talking about the large number of personally-owned Mac and linux systems, whose "admins" are their individual owners. How do you propose we go about forcing them to use limited accounts on their own personal machines? With the exception of a very few owned by knowledgeable geeks, those machines will continue to default to a single login that has admin access, and that login's password will continue to allow the software to automatically escalate to root permissions.
(It's also my experience that companies that allow non-MS machines at work usually also allow this default setup. The IT drones that handle such things usually can't be bothered to learn how to handle unix-like security setups. They all have their MSCE certificates, and they know all they need to know about security. If a real problem comes up, they simply ban the non-MS systems.;-)
No, I don't think so. I did it again, typed "id -r -u" and "id -r -g" command, and both gave me 0. My real and effective uids and gids are all 0; I have full root permissions. And I didn't need to type the root password, just my login's password.
Granted, I did this as an admin user. That's also the default setup for OSX, and very few Mac users (and not many more linux users) would have any idea how to correctly set up an account that can't be escalated to root this way.
Yup. Now you might be able to also guess the names of my two nearby linux boxes, one of them the gateway to the outside world.;-)
Actually, there are lots of other usable names in those two novels. Niven seems to have decided to make up names that aren't quite the same as any in use by the major cultures on our planet right now, and not many geeks have noticed this. So we get lots of machines named after HHGttG, Star Wars and Dune characters, but none from The Integral Trees.
OTOH, there are also lots of other works of fiction that are rich sources of machine names. I've been surprised that there are so few Tolkien-Ring-themed (Token Ring?) sites around. We've all read that series, right? For that matter, where are all the Harry Potter groups of machines?
If you give our your root password to a random program, well, you're stupid.
Actually, you no longer have to give out the root password. The unix security model has long since been replaced on linux and OSX systems with a scheme that accepts your personal password, and "escalates" it to root permission. If you use the sudo(8) command, you may have noticed that it now asks for your password rather than root's, and that suffices to get root permission. This means that if you've given your own password to any of those popup windows that request it, you have given them "root" access to everything on your machine. Unless you have the source code and have compiled it yourself, you don't know what that program did with your password. You also don't know how many databases scattered around the Net also now contain your login id and password, allowing their owners to do the same any time they like.
Yes, this capability can be disabled. But this privilege escalation is enabled by default. Do you know how to disable it? (Without looking it up; be honest now.;-) I've found that hardly any linux or OSX users can answer this when I ask them.
Really, the only remaining vestige of actual security on linux or OSX is the local custom of asking your permission to do something, rather than just using its cached copy of your password that you don't know about. But we can expect that software is being developed that, once it's tricked you into divulging your password, never asks for it again, but just uses it to get root permission thereafter. And note that none of this requires knowing your root password.
Of course, this is still somewhat more secure than the Windows scheme of doing "system" updates without asking permission, even if you've disabled automatic updates. MS has admitted that this feature has been in Windows since XP. So all it takes is greasing the right palms at MS to get access to this, and you can "upgrade" any part of a Windows box's "system" to include your code any time you can reach it from the Net.
Anyway, lest someone thing I'm kidding, I just opened my handy Macbook Pro, fired up a Terminal window, and typed:
gavving:/Users/jc: id
uid=501(jc) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),98(_lpadmin),81(_appserveradm),79(_appserverusr),80(admin),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1) gavving:/Users/jc: sudo csh
Password: gavving:/Users/jc: id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel),1(daemon),2(kmem),8(procview),29(certusers),3(sys),9(procmod),4(tty),5(operator),80(admin),20(staff),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)
gavving:/Users/jc:
I typed my own password to the Password: prompt, not root's (and they're different). Note that I became root when I did this. This also works on my two linux boxes.
(Bonus points if you can name the SF novel that the machine's name came from;-)
They're keeping the samples so they can use them to make vaccines if there is an outbreak.
This claim is only effective with people who haven't read any of the textbook histories of smallpox. Actually, smallpox vaccines have never been made from smallpox virus. They've been made from closely-related viruses that usually cause only a mild, temporary disease. The most common is the vaccinia (cowpox) virus.
Before the 18th century, there were occasional attempts to immunize people against smallpox by infecting them with a small sample of smallpox from a victim of the disease. But this was fairly dangerous, since the result was very often a full-blown case of smallpox. When it was discovered that cowpox did the job a lot better, people stopped trying to use the smallpox virus.
People also try to argue that we need smallpox samples for testing vaccines if smallpox reappears. But we actually don't;samples of the current virus are much better for testing. After all, we won't want to know whether a vaccine immunized against the historical disease; we'll want to know how effective it is against the current strain of the disease.
The arguments that we "need" the smallpox samples for such reason are basically PR from people who don't want to mention their actual motive. The samples give us nothing useful in fighting a new outbreak of a similar disease. Knowing whether the new disease is the same as the preserved samples is perhaps of interest to historians (and a few researchers), but it's not particularly useful in fighting the new disease. Our techniques of the past couple of centuries have been much more effective against smallpox than any of the earlier attempts at prevention or treatment. The newer techniques haven't actually used the smallpox virus itself; they've used related viruses (for the vaccines) and current patients (for testing).
I have heard it called keystroke dynamics, and as others have said it isn't too feasible for just straight-up identify verification. However, you can do a lot of cool things with KD software. Hasn't this concept been around for quite awhile?
Yup, it has. I worked on a mainframe system back in the early 1970s whose OS provided keystroke timings to apps that wanted the info. The first use was in the login code, which used the character-pair timings to verify the user. It was actually fairly successful, and didn't have the rampant failures that many people here describe. In fact, it pretty quickly made login ids unnecessary, since the "system" could identify each user fairly quickly when they typed anything at all.
There was a funny follow-on gimmick implemented by some guys in the organization (a university computer center): They got access to the schedule of the operators and others who worked there, and wrote a routine that compared the people typing with the schedule. One day, a fellow (call him Joe) called in sick, and another (Bill) took his slot. Soon after Bill started typing (without identifying himself), the computer came back with a comment like "Hey, Bill, you're not Joe. Joe was scheduled now, not you. What happened? Is Joe sick or something?" The staff freaked out, and some of them were afraid to type to the computer until the programmers came in and explained what they'd done.
But most current OS's hide the timing info from user-level software, so it's not surprising that people nowadays would find that the idea doesn't work very well. To work, the code has to have access to fairly precise timing of keyboard events, and that just isn't possible with most current (commercial) computer systems. You'd have to have a Real-Time kernel for it to work at all, and any software layer that munges with the timings would kill the idea entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
That's a rational and coherent statement, if you also believe that governments should be weaker than individuals.
One could argue that this isn't so much a belief as a trivially observable fact. A government isn't an intelligent being; it's a collection of individuals who may or may not act together. No government can do anything itself; it can only act through the individuals that are its component parts. Those individuals act according to their own wishes, which may well be at odds with the government's wishes (if the government can be said to have wishes).
It's well understood in some circles that the people running the government often do things that are at odds with the publicly-stated government policies and goals, usually in ways that are very profitable for the individuals themselves. All too often, those people are immune to punishment for their actions, which are considered the government's actions by the legal system (i.e., by the people who make up the legal system) and by much of the general public. But to understand what's happening, you need to understand that it was individuals who carried out the actions, not the government.
Of course, there is the general concept of emergence that applies here. Governments (and other human organizations) do have emergent behaviors and emergent properties. But we should be careful not to assume that these are intelligent or purposeful. The intelligence and purpose belongs to the individuals, and there's little evidence of either at the organizational level. An organization's activity is just the sum of the activity of all of its members.
Funny, I seem to be able to download the open source compiler for Flash directly from Adobe.
Hey, what are you, some sort of hacker or computer programmer or something?
Since when did they start allowing people who understand all this computer code stuff to make comments on slashdot? I'll bet you're even using the "classical" setting to read the summary (and maybe even TFA).
Heh. Is there really a biblical passage implying that those goatherds 3000 to 2000 years ago had a concept of negative numbers? I don't recall reading of evidence that even the Greek merchants of 2000 years ago had such a concept, though they had addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Also, I haven't read of anyone in the Middle East treating zero as a number before they learned the trick from India.
But I'd be interested in reading about such things, if there's reliable evidence of them. Preferable in classical Greek or Aramaic or some such; a 17th-century translation to English isn't very convincing (especially considered the known translation errors ;-).
Some joker says "Let there be light.", and I end up having to wade through vector calculus and Maxwell's equations.
Or, as the t-shirt that I have says:
God said ...
... and there was light.
<Maxwell's equations>
? So a student programmer works on something apple are allegedly already working on, but this student actually finishes it a full year before the combined might of Apple. Yeah that seems likely.
Actually, it seems quite likely. There's are several conventional sayings in the software development biz to the effect that the time to produce anything (and the quality of the result) is an inverse function of the number of people involved in producing it. One form of this is the old comment that adding people to a late software project makes it even later.
Big companies like Apple (or MS or IBM before them) typically take years to develop what one person can write in a week or a month. This is because inter-communication between a set of people is much more difficult that inter-communication within one brain. And the team's result is often bloated and buggy, due to the same communication problems among the developers. It's a problem that every software development manager is quite familiar with.
So it wouldn't surprise me at all if a development team at Apple (who are probably all working on N other projects at the same time) should take a year or more to do something that a "student programmer" might develop in a few weeks. That's the nature of programming. We're good at building things whose details can be held in a single brain. We're not very good at building things whose details are distributed across multiple brains.
in the "rules" for the App submission. Apple has the right to reject if it's already a planned development.
Ah, so if if I come up with a good idea for a new iPhone app and submit it, all Apple's reviewer(s) need do is send a note over to the appropriate manager, who copies my description to their list of planned apps. My proposal is then rejected because it's now "already a planned development" (as of when the rejection is typed), and I've lost all rights to my idea.
Remind me again why anyone would invest their own time developing new iPhone apps? Yeah, they might not realize that a new proposed app is a good idea, and allow you to do the work. But even then, they can and do pull apps after they've been in the app store for a while. And then a similar app comes out later, with no acknowledgement (or royalties) to the original designer.
It's the music industry's model all over again. They pick a few successes to support and hold up before the rest of us as an incentive, and stick us with one-sided "take it or leave it" contracts that give most of the profits to the distributor, with only pennies per sale to the actual innovator.
On a semi-serious note what's up with attractive equaling super skinny? I like my women to actually look like women and not kids.
The conventional explanation is that this is the standard in the fashion and advertising industries, and it's well known that those are dominated by gay men, who of course prefer women who look like boys. ;-)
On a more serious note, if you look at any of the "men's" magazines -- Playboy, Hustler, etc. -- you'll see that their standard of female beauty is pretty much the average-size woman, neither skinny nor fat. They don't even select for especially large breasts, just for "full" breasts.
And we can also go into the "scientific trivia" aspect: A number of studies have found that the most attractive image of either sex is very close to the average (in whatever society is polled). The most interesting is the surveys done by presenting a lot of photos of real people, mixed with computer-generated "average" images derived from N of the real-people photos, for varying values of N. The winners have been generally the images where N is large, i.e., a true "average" person among the set of photos.
So if you reject both skinny and fat women, and prefer an average-looking woman, you're just a normal guy. Similarly for women's choices of attractive men.
The issue here is civil vs. criminal law. No laws that can put you into prison were violated, hence the employees can't be prosecuted.
Are we sure of that? This happened in the US, under the jurisdiction of the US Constitution, whose Fourth Amendment states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and Warrants shall not be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
These "spy cams" were installed by government agencies in the homes of the students. Unless the school board had explicit warrants from the appropriate court explicitly listing the students' names and addresses, it looks very much to this non-expert in Constitutional Law that the above law really should apply.
If not, what's to stop any other government agency from secretly installing cameras without warrants in all our homes (bedrooms, bathrooms, etc) and monitoring our behavior there?
(Though, come to think of it, maybe they intend to invoke the Patriot Act to justify this unwarranted spying? ;-)
Um, Top Secret documents can't be sent via email!
They certainly can. It may not be legal, and they're supposed to be encrypted, and all that. But it's certainly possible to send any sort of text document, classified or not, and encrypted or not, via email.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that some dummy with a clearance did so, and then arranged for the victim (i.e., the recipient) to be charged with the offense. And they might not have been a dummy. There are quite a few countries in which you can be charged with the crime of receiving documents without a proper clearance. That's a fairly standard way of framing your victim. Just arrange for the document to be sent to them "by accident", and tip off the security police that the victim's residence should be searched for illegal documents.
And in a separate filing, the RIAA has brought similar charges against 57,823 stags. They're all downloading songs they can learn to impress the does during the next rutting season.
Believe it or not, when someone tells you that your nose isn't working right and that that's flowers, not shit, it's not that they're "blind" it's that they have a working nose ;).
Heh. One problem with this metaphor is the flower/shit is a false dichotomy. There are quite a lot of plants whose flowers smell like shit, rotting meat, and other things that are disgusting to us. It's because they're polinated by flies and other pollinators that find such scents attractive. We're descended from fruit-eating primates that were attracted to sweet smells, and luckily for us, most common flowers are pollinated by bees and other pollinators that like sweet smells. But this is somewhat an accident of the evolutionary process. If the development of insects had gone slightly differently, shit-scented flowers would be the norm, and the sweet-scented flowers would be the rare ones adapted to unusual pollinators.
But metaphors are hard. People can almost always find a way of picking any metaphor apart and explaining why it's not really accurate, including the one I started this paragraph with.
The only reason why Y2K /wasn't/ a disaster was because people worked their asses off for it to not happen.
Where "people" is defined as "Cobol programmers". ;-)
There were any number of analyses (before and after 2000-1-1) that concluded that around 99.5% of the actual Y2K problems were in vintage Cobol code. There were any number of jokes created based on this curious fact. But in other languages, date handling was long-since packaged in library routines, so a single upgrade could fix all their potential problems without the developers even being aware that there had been a problem. I work in several languages, and I was unable to find any Y2K problems in any of the code I was working with.
Cobol, on the other hand ... I recall reading one "study" of one company's code, in which the writer said that when his count of different date formats in the database passed 180, he decided he understood why there was a problem. And he understood why no centralized solution was possible; he and his buddies just had to hunt down every single date manipulation, figure out what sort of hokey calculations it was doing, and in most cases, fix it. In many cases, there weren't enough spare bytes in the fixed-field-width DB records to fix it without finding and rewriting every line of code in every program that accessed such fields.
And many people pointed out that the Cobol language wasn't the problem. The problem was the Cobol programmer community, which has long had such practices that should qualify them for a diagnosis of legal insanity and institutionalization at the expense of their employers that encouraged and rewarded such behavior. Nobody seems to have found any other programming community that did things this insane. There is a conjecture that this is because Cobol was almost strictly a "business" programming language, and in a business setting, dealing with anything that's more than a year in the future is generally considered irresponsible and grounds for firing. But anything that will produce a short-term saving, such as saving a byte of disk space per record by using a compact date/time format is strongly approved. And this is the main thought process that led to Y2K problems.
Slashdot can't even deploy Ajax correctly.
Hey, nobody can deploy Ajax correctly. ;-)
Oddly enough combining Christianity with science resulted in a science book that'll leave kids thinking that Jesus is busy each night towing the Moon in to the sky so we'll have a nice bit of light.
Oh, dunno about that. I remember when, as a kid send to Sunday School where they gave this sort of "explanation" of the moon, my immediate thought was to ask why God had put the moon in an orbit that was only visible on average for half the night time, and spent half its time in the day sky where it's not needed. You'd think that, if God is all-powerful, He'd have arranged to have the moon stay exactly opposite the sun in the sky, so that it was always full and always shining at night. Doesn't that seem like rather sloppy design (or implementation if you prefer)?
Somehow, the Sunday-School teacher(s) didn't seem to think this was an interesting question, and didn't even try to answer it. But I eventually learned that astronomers had good explanations of how the Earth-moon-sun system worked, and were honest enough to admit that they didn't know why it's all set up that way. So I went with their explanation rather than the Sunday-School teachers'.
I did like the suggestion that, when they were created, the sun and moon had orbits that were exact multiples of each other, but over the eons (millennia?) the solar system has gotten badly out of alignment. God is too busy with other things to do any maintenance, giving us the incommensurable orbital periods that we see today. It seems that God just can't be bothered with our part of His creation any more ...
Korea is IE because all banks and e-commerce sites force users to use activeX controls due to the lack of SSL thanks to US export controls with encryption.
Huh???? SSL is an openly-published standard with many free sources for various versions, as can be verified in seconds by googling "SSL specification" and "SSL source code". You'll get back thousands of links that include lots of versions of the source. There's no way the US government could be blocking all of them; the code is easily available anywhere there's IP access. And since you can download the spec, you can have your staff hackers do as much checking of the code as you're willing to pay them for.
(Actually, it would probably be good advice to do a bit of checking on the nature of the source repositories. It doesn't take a lot of brains to guess that there are likely some "doctored" versions out there with, uh, "interesting" undocumented features. So if you're building a product that includes SSL, even if you're in the US, you might want to observe the usual sort of due diligence to verify that you've got a good SSL package. And you DO want the source; otherwise whoever sent you the link library should be assumed to have access to the innards of everything you're building. ;-)
Any bank that has "standardized" on ActiveX has done so for internal reasons; there's no external reason to make such a decision (and many good reasons to ban ActiveX instead).
Here's what everyone needs to do... do what you rarely ever do -- go to any wikipedia page on a subject in which you are expert or very knowledgeable. In all likelihood, you will then realize that this page is riddled with errors, bad writing, glaring omissions, bias and probably other things too.
Actually, I've done that a number of times. What I found was more complex than that.
When I've looked at pages on highly technical topics, I've generally found that the information was quite accurate, and often fairly detailed. On the other hand, when I look up non-technical topics, I've usually found sketchier information, and a lot of opinion passing for fact.
Of course, in both cases, the information has usually been fairly basic. It's ok for a quick introduction, but for the real story, you have to start following links. That's about what I'd expect wikipedia to be: A useful first stop for topics that I know little about, with useful links if I want to learn more.
Actually, I tend to go to google first. This is because you have to guess the title fairly accurately for wikipedia, but for google, you only need to guess the keywords. Then you hope that something in the first few pages of ghits will actually be on the topic you want.
And if google shows a wikipedia link, I usually read it first.
(One of my favorite examples for wiki-skeptics is to suggest that they read the "Evolution" page. It has long been a very reasonable introduction to that tendentious topic, summarizing the scientific history, and giving links to both technical articles and religious pages that are relevant. I do wonder how often that page is vandalized, but the editors do a reasonably good job of keeping it stable. ;-)
Think how much richer each entry would be if all that time and energy was concentrated into the one or maybe two languages. That always makes me sad.
Nah; that would make most of the world a lot poorer. It would only mean shutting down the wikipedia sites for all the "minor" languages. It would probably add nothing at all to the English wikipedia, and very little to the French or Chinese versions (whichever was allowed to continue alongside English). This would be a major loss of knowledge to most of the world's population.
The minor-language editions have probably added more value for their speakers than the English-language edition has for us English speakers. After all, we had encyclopedias before any of us were born, and we (mostly) developed the Internet in English. With google and the other search sites, we would be ok without wikipedia, though it wouldn't be nearly as convenient.
But the minor-language editions of wikipedia have added a valuable resource for much of the world, in the form of access to information that simply wasn't available to them at all without first learning a difficult foreign language. And all it took was the time of a few hundred volunteers to do the translating.
If you are reasonably fluent in a minor language, one of the most valuable contributions you can make to the world right now is expanding that language's wikipedia.
Now if we could find a way to pay people for doing this job ...
What I like to point out is that one of the nicest home pages in the industry is at google.com. This page, of course, violates pretty much all the "design principles" of the industry. It's simple, to the point, and works everywhere.
Of course, there's nothing at all flashy (pun intended) there, so it's utterly unacceptable to the crowd of "designers" that have brought these problems on us.
It's probably worth pointing out that this was not just intentional, but it has been an ongoing violation of the original design of HTML and web browsers.
In any number of history of the development of the Web, it has been emphasized that HTML was primarily designed as a solution to an old problem: Documents were usually designed for a specific screen size, and generally wouldn't work well on a different size screen. But the screens of displays had a very wide variety of heights and widths, both in cm (or inches if you prefer) and pixels. So nothing that's formatted for a particular width can be expected to be easy to read on most screens. HTML was explicitly designed so that a document can be "agnostic" to screen shape, because the document contains hints that can be used to format it for the viewer's screen. The first browsers were built to take advantage of this, and display properly HTMLized text so that it's easy to read in a specific window on the current screen, whatever its size and shape may be.
If this doesn't work for a given site, it's because that site was explicitly designed to defeat the most important design features of HTML, and force the text to be displayed incorrectly on your screen (or in your browser's window).
This should be surprising to anyone at all familiar with how web sites are typically designed. I've worked on any number of sites where I had explicit orders to "design" the site for one specific window size. (This was usually a size that worked well on the boss's screen. ;-) In some cases, when I made the site work on smaller screens, I've been reprimanded for this and ordered to make the site NOT work on screens under a certain size. Yes, management is often that obstructionist.
So now we're facing massive site redesign, as managers learn that the top-selling computers are on those silly little "smart phones", and they're losing customers to competitors who've learned to grudgingly accomodate the people who carry such devices.
If they'd honored the original design 20 years ago, we wouldn't be having this problem now. And 15 years ago, when cell phones started to take off, the writing should have been on the wall for everyone. Digital phones have always been small computers, and the simple application of Moore's Law and other industry statistics said that in a decade or so, those little "palm top" computers would have significant processing power. The digital cell-phone system has been a computer network from the start, and simple calculations told industry insiders that by now we'd have "cell phones" more powerful than the desktop machines of a decade or two back.
But it wouldn't be surprising if the "designers" continue to work on ways to prevent their creations from working properly on the newer gadgets that we're buying. They've gotten away with it for a couple of decades, and now they'll get paid even more to "design" for the new small screens. So their lesson may be that if you provide a limited, restricted product, you can profit even more when your clients have to redesign for a hot new platform. And if it's limited to just that platform, you can be paid again when yet another screen layout comes along.
(Myself, I've found it fairly easy to make web pages that work nearly everywhere. I just leave out all the attributes that specify an explicit size, and that pretty much prevents problems by giving the browser permission to format it for its screen. Except on the iPhone, of course, where the standard Safari browser formats the text for a much larger window, and then shrinks it to fit, making the text unreadable. Anyone know of an easy fix for this, aside from recommending Opera? ;-)
If you follow what the grandparent poster said about giving yourself and regular users LIMITED ACCOUNTS and leave the administration separate you won't run into so many of these problems.
Well, yeah; I've done that, when I was working inside corporate networks. But note that I was talking about the large number of personally-owned Mac and linux systems, whose "admins" are their individual owners. How do you propose we go about forcing them to use limited accounts on their own personal machines? With the exception of a very few owned by knowledgeable geeks, those machines will continue to default to a single login that has admin access, and that login's password will continue to allow the software to automatically escalate to root permissions.
(It's also my experience that companies that allow non-MS machines at work usually also allow this default setup. The IT drones that handle such things usually can't be bothered to learn how to handle unix-like security setups. They all have their MSCE certificates, and they know all they need to know about security. If a real problem comes up, they simply ban the non-MS systems. ;-)
No, I don't think so. I did it again, typed "id -r -u" and "id -r -g" command, and both gave me 0. My real and effective uids and gids are all 0; I have full root permissions. And I didn't need to type the root password, just my login's password.
Granted, I did this as an admin user. That's also the default setup for OSX, and very few Mac users (and not many more linux users) would have any idea how to correctly set up an account that can't be escalated to root this way.
Yup. Now you might be able to also guess the names of my two nearby linux boxes, one of them the gateway to the outside world. ;-)
Actually, there are lots of other usable names in those two novels. Niven seems to have decided to make up names that aren't quite the same as any in use by the major cultures on our planet right now, and not many geeks have noticed this. So we get lots of machines named after HHGttG, Star Wars and Dune characters, but none from The Integral Trees.
OTOH, there are also lots of other works of fiction that are rich sources of machine names. I've been surprised that there are so few Tolkien-Ring-themed (Token Ring?) sites around. We've all read that series, right? For that matter, where are all the Harry Potter groups of machines?
But this is sorta OT ...
If you give our your root password to a random program, well, you're stupid.
Actually, you no longer have to give out the root password. The unix security model has long since been replaced on linux and OSX systems with a scheme that accepts your personal password, and "escalates" it to root permission. If you use the sudo(8) command, you may have noticed that it now asks for your password rather than root's, and that suffices to get root permission. This means that if you've given your own password to any of those popup windows that request it, you have given them "root" access to everything on your machine. Unless you have the source code and have compiled it yourself, you don't know what that program did with your password. You also don't know how many databases scattered around the Net also now contain your login id and password, allowing their owners to do the same any time they like.
Yes, this capability can be disabled. But this privilege escalation is enabled by default. Do you know how to disable it? (Without looking it up; be honest now. ;-) I've found that hardly any linux or OSX users can answer this when I ask them.
Really, the only remaining vestige of actual security on linux or OSX is the local custom of asking your permission to do something, rather than just using its cached copy of your password that you don't know about. But we can expect that software is being developed that, once it's tricked you into divulging your password, never asks for it again, but just uses it to get root permission thereafter. And note that none of this requires knowing your root password.
Of course, this is still somewhat more secure than the Windows scheme of doing "system" updates without asking permission, even if you've disabled automatic updates. MS has admitted that this feature has been in Windows since XP. So all it takes is greasing the right palms at MS to get access to this, and you can "upgrade" any part of a Windows box's "system" to include your code any time you can reach it from the Net.
Anyway, lest someone thing I'm kidding, I just opened my handy Macbook Pro, fired up a Terminal window, and typed:
gavving:/Users/jc: id
uid=501(jc) gid=20(staff) groups=20(staff),98(_lpadmin),81(_appserveradm),79(_appserverusr),80(admin),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1)
gavving:/Users/jc: sudo csh
Password:
gavving:/Users/jc: id
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel),1(daemon),2(kmem),8(procview),29(certusers),3(sys),9(procmod),4(tty),5(operator),80(admin),20(staff),101(com.apple.sharepoint.group.1) gavving:/Users/jc:
I typed my own password to the Password: prompt, not root's (and they're different). Note that I became root when I did this. This also works on my two linux boxes.
(Bonus points if you can name the SF novel that the machine's name came from ;-)
They're keeping the samples so they can use them to make vaccines if there is an outbreak.
This claim is only effective with people who haven't read any of the textbook histories of smallpox. Actually, smallpox vaccines have never been made from smallpox virus. They've been made from closely-related viruses that usually cause only a mild, temporary disease. The most common is the vaccinia (cowpox) virus.
Before the 18th century, there were occasional attempts to immunize people against smallpox by infecting them with a small sample of smallpox from a victim of the disease. But this was fairly dangerous, since the result was very often a full-blown case of smallpox. When it was discovered that cowpox did the job a lot better, people stopped trying to use the smallpox virus.
People also try to argue that we need smallpox samples for testing vaccines if smallpox reappears. But we actually don't;samples of the current virus are much better for testing. After all, we won't want to know whether a vaccine immunized against the historical disease; we'll want to know how effective it is against the current strain of the disease.
The arguments that we "need" the smallpox samples for such reason are basically PR from people who don't want to mention their actual motive. The samples give us nothing useful in fighting a new outbreak of a similar disease. Knowing whether the new disease is the same as the preserved samples is perhaps of interest to historians (and a few researchers), but it's not particularly useful in fighting the new disease. Our techniques of the past couple of centuries have been much more effective against smallpox than any of the earlier attempts at prevention or treatment. The newer techniques haven't actually used the smallpox virus itself; they've used related viruses (for the vaccines) and current patients (for testing).
I have heard it called keystroke dynamics, and as others have said it isn't too feasible for just straight-up identify verification. However, you can do a lot of cool things with KD software. Hasn't this concept been around for quite awhile?
Yup, it has. I worked on a mainframe system back in the early 1970s whose OS provided keystroke timings to apps that wanted the info. The first use was in the login code, which used the character-pair timings to verify the user. It was actually fairly successful, and didn't have the rampant failures that many people here describe. In fact, it pretty quickly made login ids unnecessary, since the "system" could identify each user fairly quickly when they typed anything at all.
There was a funny follow-on gimmick implemented by some guys in the organization (a university computer center): They got access to the schedule of the operators and others who worked there, and wrote a routine that compared the people typing with the schedule. One day, a fellow (call him Joe) called in sick, and another (Bill) took his slot. Soon after Bill started typing (without identifying himself), the computer came back with a comment like "Hey, Bill, you're not Joe. Joe was scheduled now, not you. What happened? Is Joe sick or something?" The staff freaked out, and some of them were afraid to type to the computer until the programmers came in and explained what they'd done.
But most current OS's hide the timing info from user-level software, so it's not surprising that people nowadays would find that the idea doesn't work very well. To work, the code has to have access to fairly precise timing of keyboard events, and that just isn't possible with most current (commercial) computer systems. You'd have to have a Real-Time kernel for it to work at all, and any software layer that munges with the timings would kill the idea entirely.