Congratulations, your post just broke the Slashdot anti-MS record!
Well, really, thanks! And that's not all ! I'm toying with some ideas based in MS as an evil plot created by the Prince of Darkness and guided from Hell, that I hope will break the record again. I'm getting help from the South Park film creators:o)
First they came for the office software companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't an office software company. Then they came for the internet browsing companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't an internet browsing company. Then they came for the media playing companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't a media playing company. Then they came for the security software companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't a security software company. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
I suppose some day the sofware companies that do bussiness with Microsoft and so help it consolidate its grip on the desktops of this world will take note and start thinking about alternative platforms.
Use FoxitReader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com), much lighter and faster than Adobe Reader, and probably with its own set of vulnerabilities, but unlikely to be much targeted.
Poker seems to be a much more useful game for this research than chess.
Not to mention the interest that a Deep-Blue level poker program can have to a remotely-wired real player playing for real money. I guess we'll have to bring back those old tar can and feathers.
Well, the shareholders are, that is, the owners of the company, if you had forgotten. Giving a stock option is fine, backdating it is plainly getting money out of the coffers of the company and into the hands of employees. That's also fine if the shareholders accept it, but they didn't.
About the witch hunt, it's based perhaps in the SEC being fed up with ever-more-ingenious schemes to divert money into the hands of the executives, said schemes devised by the executives themselves. Of course now there are not failing companies, like with Enron, because the economy is doing all right. But Enron crashed during a small recession. Let's see what the next recession bring. Then perhaps many of those back-datter companies will fail, the executives retire rich and the stockholders start asking questions, some of the to the SEC.
In a word, if they want to reward themselves, let them do it, but in an open way, that's all the shareholders and the SEC ask. And only fear of criminal prosecution will do it, because they'll certainly have no fear of money fines.
Primates' brains are wonderful at determining the ripeness of fruit. They've got the color perception evolved (err, I mean designed) practically just for that. That's like using a dog to help you climb trees.
"I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability."
The principles? They cannot even grasp the concept!
It seems like the GPS cones positions are stored in some database, and then the Golf will drive itself by comparing its position with the positions of the cones. That's nice of course, but hardly a big breakthrough. Still far away from real-life driving, and little to do with CMU, where the driving is more or less real.
Because most of it is unenforceable, and certainly doesn't cover the entirety of the problem. Let's check it point by point.
1. Encrypt all data on mobile computers/devices which carry agency data unless the data is determined to be non-sensitive, in writing, by your Deputy Secretary or an individual he/she may designate in writing;
So basically ALL data will be sensitive. We're not longer talking about CIA operatives or Pentagon generals with state secrets under the arm. It's the secretary of the editor of the "Golden Days" monthly that will access the name of one of the retirees it serves from her son-in-law's computer to see why Ms. Applewhite didn't receive her beloved issue last month. The secretary is not only not going to encrypt the data, she's blissfully unaware that her son-in-law hard disk is completely shared on eMule due to her son-in-law's imperfect grasp of eMule's share facility.
2. Allow remote access only with two-factor authentication where one of the factors is provided by a device separate from the computer gaining access;
Yeah, sure. I guess somebody is underestimating the ubiquity of data communications nowadays. Or thinking still about CIA operatives mainly.
3. Use a "time-out" function for remote access and mobile devices requiring user re- authentication after 30 minutes inactivity
Now this one is probably going to be widely enforced, it'll be simple to do.
4. Log all computer-readable data extracts from databases holding sensitive information and verify each extract including sensitive data has been erased within 90 days or its use is still required.
The logging will be made, usually. But how about the verification, I mean, in some places Harvest will really be plentiful, and the Laborers??? few, if any. Who's going to check all those accesses and what happened of the data? And even if they do, what about the son-in-law's shared hard drive? I mean, what about other copies that could have been done, printed, etc. from that original data. Printouts in the garbage are still one of the better ways of getting confidential data. What about flash memories in the workplace. Remember that story about the trojan-seeded flash drives scattered by the entrance of some goverment office building? Or Los Alamos missing hard drives ? The data security problem is certainly not going to be solved by a four-points note from the White House.
Basically this not is just a paper that says that a) The White House is trying hard to address this problem. b) Now you know who to blame (usually the overworked DBA) if anything important gets copied and hits the news.
In fact, if and when a robot can play football as good as a human, there is not much chance that the machine is going to be built like a T-34. We'll be talking about lightweight plastics, flexible composite materials, microstructures for muscles. The robot would probably not weight much more than a human and probably a lot less, since non-football functions can be removed. Of course some steel will be there, but for the purposes of the game it'll certainly be well padded.
The other problem noted before, that of the batteries, will of course have to be solved by 2050 too, but I'm confident. If we can run a whole afternoon on a rice bowl, the solid fuel for robots cannot be that far away:)
Who cares about the US economy? I'm not arguing that the US economy will benefit from sweatshops, but the chinese economy, and in due turn the economies of all its inhabitants.
Slavery was certainly not good for the economies of the tribes deprived of their young men and women. You cannot say the same of the sweatshops.
If you really think these women are using their new-found disposable income to send their kids to school...
Or the factory owner will make some kind of school to keep the children quiet and the women in check and happy, or the mayor will do it with part of the taxes/bribes the factory owner pays the city. The fact is, the means are there now. it's not going to happen neccessarily, but before it, it was just impossible. Not there is a chance as money flows to that group of people.
That's true, and no doubt in due time, when they are richer, the goverment of China will enact laws with the exact same purpose. Or enforce laws probably already in the books. They'll have to do it in the end. But as when that'll be their call, not ours to do. Regulation is worth nothing, as the Prohibition proved. Social repulse is everything, and will make the laws or enforce them even if they aren't there (think of divorce when it was allowed but frowned upon). The chinese (and others) society will reach that level in the future, but not if they starve.
It's all in the wording. As the great Heinlein put it: "Which would you rather have? A nice, thick, juicy, tender steak-or a segment of muscle tissue from the corpse of an immature castrated bull?":-)
One can say the same thing about slavery No, one couldn't. I did't understand the workers are raided by night with nets and forced to work and anything else the owner could desire.
Being better than the worst thing imaginable (death by starvation) does not make something good
It's a relative good, as all goods are.
And no one can "work their way out of poverty" on sweatshop wages I didn't mean individuals, but societies. Probably some of these dollars are paying for education for the children of those women. Many of the cheap labour of the industrial revolution in England didn't see better days, but their offspring could.
Sweatshops are GOOD. Of course it doesn't seem that way seen from our first-world perspective, but is better than hunger. It's usually the only way out from extreme poverty. We had an industrial revolution where childen worked in similar circumstances. It's not something to be proud of, the feelings are all against it, but you cannot jump from having nothing to having everyting. As Groucho Marx said "I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty". Poor countries need sweatshops, need free trade of agricultural products, and need less subsidies. That's the way out.
Just what the world needed. A faster, cheaper, simpler way of making atomic weapons.
Somebody please spread the word when the technology is fast, cheap and simple enough to fit in a garage and a hobbyist budget. So I can move to the mountains.
Well, that's not so different as the situation in physical security systems. Go and tell a bank manager that they have an unsecured entry point in the air ducts, and that their alarms can be blocked by a XT42 bypass (or whatever), and the guards always have lunch at the same time leaving the screens unattended for ten minutes.
You are probably making them a big favour, but the fact remains that they will be suspicious about you, and may call the police. How do you know about those things? What are your intentions? It's quite a natural reaction. We only perceive the situation to be different because we happen to be experts not in alarms but in computers.
What do you gain by typing in a complete method name of a library class and getting it slightly wrong and then hunting down the errors with api docs and compiler messages compared to the IDE telling you the difference or even helping you to get it right in the first place
Nothing. If you know what the IDE is doing. Similarly, you gain nothing by doing a multiplication by hand if you have a calculator ready and you know what you are doing. If you have never learnt to do the thing by hand, you introduce a factor of "magic" in the process. Like, you do this, you do this, and then something happens and you have the result. The teacher probably has explained what is the magic doing. But the likelyhood of you remembering is small. What's the use of remembering it if it's always done by magic?
I can see that in many programmers, both young and old. They program by some magic recipes, and the moment something fails, they don't know how the basic structure is (for example they don't really know about libraries and linking. They just know that when you need to access function X, you need to add Y to the code, and then an error can pop up in the magic linking process, and that means that you have done something wrong in your incantation to get X working, so you retrace your magic procedure to see where you angered the Gods by not following the prescribed ritual.
Also there are many that don't really know how the Internet works, they are at the same level with the user public. But they program Web apps! Only don't ask them if a feature is best done in server-side vs. client-side because you'll find the depth of their disinformation.
Hey, I'm a teacher in an elementary school. Next year I will be teaching adding and substracting to a bunch of kids. I was wondering what the prevailing wisdom is when it comes to teaching arithmetic- should students be taught with or without a pocket calculator? I am a bit old school and wouldn't mind having them all use pencil and paper, but using a good calculator does have some advantages as well. I should note that the students I will be teaching already manage to use both their hands to add to ten, and in summer, to twenty. In the end, after all, they'll be all using calculators to perform those operations, and there will be lots more of time to teach other things if the lesson for teaching to add consists simply in showing them the + key.
I undestand that. Scientific method. Eliminate all variables but one to undestand a part of the system. But they are not trying to understand evolution, the mechanism is rather stably described. They are trying to predict its likely result 'in real life' from a defined point. I don't think empirical methods are the best in this case, as the level of variation in the result will increase exponentially the more variables you add.
You can improve understanding of weather if you have a box where you can make rain by varying temperature and humidity. But you cannot use the box to predict the weather for tomorrow, as lots more of variables are added.
That environment is absolutely different to real life. Try at least to have different temperature zones with more food in the hotter ones, for example. Or repeat the experiment not two, but a thousand times, and see if the result is always the same. That will be a bit more similar to real life, and so have a bit more prediction value.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, your post just broke the Slashdot anti-MS record!
:o)
Well, really, thanks! And that's not all ! I'm toying with some ideas based in MS as an evil plot created by the Prince of Darkness and guided from Hell, that I hope will break the record again. I'm getting help from the South Park film creators
First they came for the office software companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't an office software company.
Then they came for the internet browsing companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't an internet browsing company.
Then they came for the media playing companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't a media playing company.
Then they came for the security software companies. But I said nothing because I wasn't a security software company.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
I suppose some day the sofware companies that do bussiness with Microsoft and so help it consolidate its grip on the desktops of this world will take note and start thinking about alternative platforms.
Use FoxitReader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com), much lighter and faster than Adobe Reader, and probably with its own set of vulnerabilities, but unlikely to be much targeted.
Poker seems to be a much more useful game for this research than chess.
Not to mention the interest that a Deep-Blue level poker program can have to a remotely-wired real player playing for real money. I guess we'll have to bring back those old tar can and feathers.
But I don't know who the injured party is here
Well, the shareholders are, that is, the owners of the company, if you had forgotten. Giving a stock option is fine, backdating it is plainly getting money out of the coffers of the company and into the hands of employees. That's also fine if the shareholders accept it, but they didn't.
About the witch hunt, it's based perhaps in the SEC being fed up with ever-more-ingenious schemes to divert money into the hands of the executives, said schemes devised by the executives themselves. Of course now there are not failing companies, like with Enron, because the economy is doing all right. But Enron crashed during a small recession. Let's see what the next recession bring. Then perhaps many of those back-datter companies will fail, the executives retire rich and the stockholders start asking questions, some of the to the SEC.
In a word, if they want to reward themselves, let them do it, but in an open way, that's all the shareholders and the SEC ask. And only fear of criminal prosecution will do it, because they'll certainly have no fear of money fines.
Primates' brains are wonderful at determining the ripeness of fruit. They've got the color perception evolved (err, I mean designed) practically just for that. That's like using a dog to help you climb trees.
"I must say that I find it difficult to imagine that a company like Microsoft does not understand the principles of how to document protocols in order to achieve interoperability."
The principles? They cannot even grasp the concept!
It seems like the GPS cones positions are stored in some database, and then the Golf will drive itself by comparing its position with the positions of the cones. That's nice of course, but hardly a big breakthrough. Still far away from real-life driving, and little to do with CMU, where the driving is more or less real.
Why wasn't all these measures mandatory before?
Because most of it is unenforceable, and certainly doesn't cover the entirety of the problem. Let's check it point by point.
1. Encrypt all data on mobile computers/devices which carry agency data unless the data
is determined to be non-sensitive, in writing, by your Deputy Secretary or an
individual he/she may designate in writing;
So basically ALL data will be sensitive. We're not longer talking about CIA operatives or Pentagon generals with state secrets under the arm. It's the secretary of the editor of the "Golden Days" monthly that will access the name of one of the retirees it serves from her son-in-law's computer to see why Ms. Applewhite didn't receive her beloved issue last month. The secretary is not only not going to encrypt the data, she's blissfully unaware that her son-in-law hard disk is completely shared on eMule due to her son-in-law's imperfect grasp of eMule's share facility.
2. Allow remote access only with two-factor authentication where one of the factors is
provided by a device separate from the computer gaining access;
Yeah, sure. I guess somebody is underestimating the ubiquity of data communications nowadays. Or thinking still about CIA operatives mainly.
3. Use a "time-out" function for remote access and mobile devices requiring user re-
authentication after 30 minutes inactivity
Now this one is probably going to be widely enforced, it'll be simple to do.
4. Log all computer-readable data extracts from databases holding sensitive information
and verify each extract including sensitive data has been erased within 90 days or its
use is still required.
The logging will be made, usually. But how about the verification, I mean, in some places Harvest will really be plentiful, and the Laborers??? few, if any. Who's going to check all those accesses and what happened of the data? And even if they do, what about the son-in-law's shared hard drive? I mean, what about other copies that could have been done, printed, etc. from that original data. Printouts in the garbage are still one of the better ways of getting confidential data. What about flash memories in the workplace. Remember that story about the trojan-seeded flash drives scattered by the entrance of some goverment office building? Or Los Alamos missing hard drives ? The data security problem is certainly not going to be solved by a four-points note from the White House.
Basically this not is just a paper that says that a) The White House is trying hard to address this problem. b) Now you know who to blame (usually the overworked DBA) if anything important gets copied and hits the news.
what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot
:)
In fact, if and when a robot can play football as good as a human, there is not much chance that the machine is going to be built like a T-34. We'll be talking about lightweight plastics, flexible composite materials, microstructures for muscles. The robot would probably not weight much more than a human and probably a lot less, since non-football functions can be removed. Of course some steel will be there, but for the purposes of the game it'll certainly be well padded.
The other problem noted before, that of the batteries, will of course have to be solved by 2050 too, but I'm confident. If we can run a whole afternoon on a rice bowl, the solid fuel for robots cannot be that far away
anything that is broadcast or webcast
:o)
Er... What if I speak about it ? Will I be covered. ? I mean could I sue anyone repeating what I said ?
Who cares about the US economy? I'm not arguing that the US economy will benefit from sweatshops, but the chinese economy, and in due turn the economies of all its inhabitants.
Slavery was certainly not good for the economies of the tribes deprived of their young men and women. You cannot say the same of the sweatshops.
If you really think these women are using their new-found disposable income to send their kids to school ...
Or the factory owner will make some kind of school to keep the children quiet and the women in check and happy, or the mayor will do it with part of the taxes/bribes the factory owner pays the city. The fact is, the means are there now. it's not going to happen neccessarily, but before it, it was just impossible. Not there is a chance as money flows to that group of people.
That's true, and no doubt in due time, when they are richer, the goverment of China will enact laws with the exact same purpose. Or enforce laws probably already in the books. They'll have to do it in the end. But as when that'll be their call, not ours to do. Regulation is worth nothing, as the Prohibition proved. Social repulse is everything, and will make the laws or enforce them even if they aren't there (think of divorce when it was allowed but frowned upon). The chinese (and others) society will reach that level in the future, but not if they starve.
I say the same thing and I get modded flamebait!
:-)
It's all in the wording. As the great Heinlein put it: "Which would you rather have? A nice, thick, juicy, tender steak-or a segment of muscle tissue from the corpse of an immature castrated bull?"
One can say the same thing about slavery
No, one couldn't. I did't understand the workers are raided by night with nets and forced to work and anything else the owner could desire.
Being better than the worst thing imaginable (death by starvation) does not make something good
It's a relative good, as all goods are.
And no one can "work their way out of poverty" on sweatshop wages
I didn't mean individuals, but societies. Probably some of these dollars are paying for education for the children of those women. Many of the cheap labour of the industrial revolution in England didn't see better days, but their offspring could.
Sweatshops are GOOD. Of course it doesn't seem that way seen from our first-world perspective, but is better than hunger. It's usually the only way out from extreme poverty. We had an industrial revolution where childen worked in similar circumstances. It's not something to be proud of, the feelings are all against it, but you cannot jump from having nothing to having everyting. As Groucho Marx said "I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty". Poor countries need sweatshops, need free trade of agricultural products, and need less subsidies. That's the way out.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Give a man a fish, he owes you a fish. Teach a man to fish, he'll sweep your lake clean of fish.
Just what the world needed. A faster, cheaper, simpler way of making atomic weapons.
Somebody please spread the word when the technology is fast, cheap and simple enough to fit in a garage and a hobbyist budget. So I can move to the mountains.
Well, that's not so different as the situation in physical security systems. Go and tell a bank manager that they have an unsecured entry point in the air ducts, and that their alarms can be blocked by a XT42 bypass (or whatever), and the guards always have lunch at the same time leaving the screens unattended for ten minutes.
You are probably making them a big favour, but the fact remains that they will be suspicious about you, and may call the police. How do you know about those things? What are your intentions? It's quite a natural reaction. We only perceive the situation to be different because we happen to be experts not in alarms but in computers.
What do you gain by typing in a complete method name of a library class and getting it slightly wrong and then hunting down the errors with api docs and compiler messages compared to the IDE telling you the difference or even helping you to get it right in the first place
Nothing. If you know what the IDE is doing. Similarly, you gain nothing by doing a multiplication by hand if you have a calculator ready and you know what you are doing. If you have never learnt to do the thing by hand, you introduce a factor of "magic" in the process. Like, you do this, you do this, and then something happens and you have the result. The teacher probably has explained what is the magic doing. But the likelyhood of you remembering is small. What's the use of remembering it if it's always done by magic?
I can see that in many programmers, both young and old. They program by some magic recipes, and the moment something fails, they don't know how the basic structure is (for example they don't really know about libraries and linking. They just know that when you need to access function X, you need to add Y to the code, and then an error can pop up in the magic linking process, and that means that you have done something wrong in your incantation to get X working, so you retrace your magic procedure to see where you angered the Gods by not following the prescribed ritual.
Also there are many that don't really know how the Internet works, they are at the same level with the user public. But they program Web apps! Only don't ask them if a feature is best done in server-side vs. client-side because you'll find the depth of their disinformation.
Hey, I'm a teacher in an elementary school. Next year I will be teaching adding and substracting to a bunch of kids. I was wondering what the prevailing wisdom is when it comes to teaching arithmetic- should students be taught with or without a pocket calculator? I am a bit old school and wouldn't mind having them all use pencil and paper, but using a good calculator does have some advantages as well. I should note that the students I will be teaching already manage to use both their hands to add to ten, and in summer, to twenty. In the end, after all, they'll be all using calculators to perform those operations, and there will be lots more of time to teach other things if the lesson for teaching to add consists simply in showing them the + key.
Your check is in the mail too.
I undestand that. Scientific method. Eliminate all variables but one to undestand a part of the system. But they are not trying to understand evolution, the mechanism is rather stably described. They are trying to predict its likely result 'in real life' from a defined point. I don't think empirical methods are the best in this case, as the level of variation in the result will increase exponentially the more variables you add.
You can improve understanding of weather if you have a box where you can make rain by varying temperature and humidity. But you cannot use the box to predict the weather for tomorrow, as lots more of variables are added.
That environment is absolutely different to real life. Try at least to have different temperature zones with more food in the hotter ones, for example. Or repeat the experiment not two, but a thousand times, and see if the result is always the same. That will be a bit more similar to real life, and so have a bit more prediction value.