did you miss the "devalued" part? Which would mean "losing value it once had?"
We're not talking about rejecting some new-fangled shiny toy or something, dolt. We're talking about something that once had value (if even just from its ideals) which no longer does.
we all have high ideals when we're children. WMF is becoming a teen now (developmentally), and is putting a lot of those ideals to the side...for some of the same reasons regular people do in their teens.
The questions then are: 1) can WMF regain those ideals? 2) were the lost ideals crucial to WMF's survivability?
it takes years before tech is put into the shuttle. The collection of tech was at one point very advanced, but the components themselves are tested for years.
umm...ok, I have a healthy platter on my desk. The shuttle platter varies in colors - half the platter is black. None of it is shiny. Metallic spray? Looks more like ashes to me; probably from the little black sheet that often rests under the cover and acts as a gasket.
Were you responding to someone other than me? I didn't speak to pollution. I don't really need to; I live a substantially lower pollution lifestyle than even the average "green" person.
Lets see then, what did I say...ah yes. before you take the "nobody lives there, nobody farms there, and very little wildlife is there" approach...
ANWR would involve 2,000 acres, versus covering 8,646 square miles with solar panels. I personally feel it is rather silly to argue that the southwest is barren and uninhabited; size-for-size, ANWR is only barely less barren but we're not talking size-for-size here. 8,646sq miles is 5,533,440 acres, or roughly 2,766 times the amount of area proposed in ANWR.
Therefore, since I have to spell it out for you, it shouldn't be so dismissively stated that the southwest could just be covered with solar panels. Are you aware of any studies that have been done to see what the affects would be on regional (or maybe even national) weather to do such a thing? Or simple things, like whether it will make it impossible to fly anywhere near the area? It's not just a casually suggested thing to cover 92x92 miles of area with panels.
We're still not serious about solving problems, so this won't fly anyway. How about a $1k tax per mpg a car gets less than 40, for starters? or making utility bills public info, so we can get a bit of old-fashioned little-people-upset-at-the-hypocritical-rich going on? Or any number of things that are substantially less damaging (and more realistic) than covering 8,646 square miles with solar panels.
before you take the "nobody lives there, nobody farms there, and very little wildlife is there" approach, think about whether your argument could be used to justify exponentially less invasive drilling in ANWAR.
"Actually, I'm not ignoring the fact that the subscription money is where the cash is at. However... If the account is banned, and the person gets 2 new boxes, then starts paying a monthly fee again, that's what? 29.99 x2 plus the monthly fee of 14.99 (last I remembered)?"
minus $14.95 (or whatever) x [however many people the bot is the final straw for] x [how many more months they would have otherwise played]
I, nor anyone else, cares if Blizzard sues someone. Most players won't even know they have. What we'll care about is not seeing substantial percentages of the battleground population being bots.
I forgot to finish an important point - the people that work at that bar, knowing that people that aren't even there are gaining benefit from their work (and making their own benefit be less) - those people aren't likely to want to continue working at that bar.
The issue is retaining disenfranchised players that aren't bots, not freeing up the resources the bots are using. You want the good people to stay, and the good people are upset because the bad people are there. Sure, you want the bad people to go too, but the REAL reason you do something, as the owner of the bar, is to get the good people to stay.
its not the XP; a lvl70 is already lvl70. Its the honor from the kill. A lvl70 isn't going to get any honor from a kill on a lvl20 anyway.
And the real problem, the one that causes PR issues, is bots in battlegrounds - large instances where the pure intent is pvp, with no (or almost no) PvE component.
Imagine any capture the flag game in HALO, except - instead of throw-away characters, you have a character that you actually keep. Your character, at the end of the fight, will gain rewards from the fight - considerable rewards for winning, but some reward still for losing (why there is diminishing reward for losing is another topic, but suffice to say there is a good reason for it).
So a group of 20 lvl70 (ie - characters that are no longer gaining XP) characters, versus a group of 20 lvl70 characters - all pvp. If 5 of the players on one team are actually bots, and only 2 of the players on the other team are bots, then now the numbers are 15 versus 18. In a capture-the-flag game, one where a single player can occupy another single player's time, the gains are from those players that are better than others, and *win* the pvp 1v1 contests, and can go help other pvp contests, freeing up time for someone to actually meet the objectives of the battleground itself (be it capture the flag, etc).
In a 15v18 situation though, the extra 3 people become a HUGE advantage to the one team, who now off-the-bat have 3 extra bodies to go accomplish the objectives, regardless of skill level. Worse is when the battleground is only 10v10, and you're unlucky enough to get 2 or 3 afk or bot players, and the other team has none or only 1...now you're 7v9, or 7v10, a huge disadvantage.
This then creates the REAL problem, which isn't the extra resources that the bots are using, but the NON-bot players that are now rightfully upset that they lost not due to lack of skill, but due to someone who was on their own team, freeloading, cheating.
Imagine you worked at a bar that split tips (this is actually quite common). Now, imagine that if you showed up for work, you got a base pay plus tip split, but if you *didn't* show up for work, you still got to be part of the split in tips. So, you could make $150 in a night by showing up to work and working your ass off, $125 for showing up to work and being lazy (because ostensibly, people would tip less in general if you were actually there and providing poor service), and $50 for the night for not even being there. Now...if not being there is $50 of gain, and working your ass off is $150...and you can get a dozen jobs you don't go to, each giving you $50 for not showing up...suddenly, with about the effort as the actual players, you're making $600 a night to their $150.
Problem is, it's difficult to determine automatically, in a battleground, who is and isn't there. A tanking paladin isn't going to be doing much damage or healing, but he'll still be providing a lot of bonus...and a bot mage could probably out-damage him in the final tally, but have provided very little actual benefit (explaining this would take too long). So you can't make the determination based on healing and damage done alone. Further, the more complex a bot, the more difficult it is to distinguish between it and a poor player. And when you're playing other players, especially other players that are good, you don't have time to type responses to questions - you're too busy pressing buttons and moving the mouse and doing things related to staying alive, and maybe even winning, which will take all you can give. PvP can be lots of fun...when it isn't 7v10.
maybe people who play WoW should be getting the "insightful" comments instead of people who aren't.
The problem isn't in the grinding. The problem is in battlegrounds, where it is player versus player. Any bot usage in PvE is pointless; the real issue, the thing that annoys the crap out of players, is bots in battlegrounds.
you're ignoring Blizzard's business model, and their argument. The money from the box/cd that you buy in the store is negligible compared to the monthly fees that are paid.
Blizzard has the highest profits by having a large subscriber base that doesn't play often. BOTs use much more resources on the servers at Blizzard; they use up more bandwidth, more computational and data resources, etc, than the normal user.
There is also the extraordinary dissatisfaction the non-bot players have with the experience when, in a battleground, they know that if they fight their asses off for 20 minutes to win Alterac Valley, anyone that is a bot or afk is going to get the same bonus honor and same daily bonuses as they are. Would you like to see a coworker get paid almost as much as you for literally not even being there at all? That is a serious PR issue for Blizzard. To keep the normal player base (the ones that aren't using as much resources - ie, the ones that are more profitable) happy, they get rid of the few folk that aren't as profitable anyway. Blizzard doesn't care if the BOT user buys a new CD; they'd actually prefer that person not ever play again, most likely.
You're also forgetting that many people find enjoyment by having more power, control, etc. If I can make a bot that gets me 75k honor in a week or two with no work from me, then I can use that honor to buy high-end items, and then come back and actually play the game at that point, with the benefit that the afk activity provided. Your character actually gains quite a bit while you're not there, if no one reports it. Even the losing team gets some honor.
"Hey, enjoying the game? Could you just confirm your not a bot by answering this question, please..."
Nope. The biggest bot problem is in battlegrounds, and those that are actually there, at their keyboards, fighting - the real, non-bot players - don't have the time to respond to a message. hell, they probably won't even *see* the message; lots of folks I know direct all chat text to its own dialog box, then hide that box:)
To explain - while what you're saying could potentially work in PvE play (player versus environment), where a player can just press a few buttons now and then and the fight goes on, the real problem is in PvP play (player versus player) in what are called "battlegrounds" - a large group of horde players versus a large group of alliance players. So what the bots do is have a character run around in stupid ways, dying, casting spells at random, whatever - but if their team (alliance/horde) wins, they get a tremendous amount of benefit from that. So the active, real players end up carrying the extra load of those that are afk or bots.
The 2.4 patch (which went live yesterday) seems to have improved this some though - I actually saw bots getting booted in battlegrounds.
Right now in battlegrounds, there is an option for reporting someone as afk. There should also be an option for reporting someone as potentially a bot, so that GMs could check those particular characters with more diligence for suspicious activity, if they are flagged often enough.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates
Err...really? When was that? Were some sort of user opinion polls taken at the time?
I've got a copy of DOS 4 sitting around here somewhere, and remember using debug to partition old ESDI drives, so certainly I'm one of those folks that should have been in love with that scrappy fellow back in the day...right?
Bill started out under the radar, where the general population didn't really understand what an OS was. IBM was like Borg; they certainly seemed to be evil, but there didn't seem to be any evil purpose, or evil leader, one could pinpoint. Microsoft coasted through until the 90s with few really caring he was there. BG wasn't "loved" by any sort of fanbase until relatively recently, well after his dominance was established. Meanwhile, there were people philosophically disagreeing with that model long before then.
So just when was all this love taking place? I call troll. But eh, sensationalism is all they teach in journalism schools these days.
I don't know what they're talking about. The average height in the IT department here is approx 5'10" (guessing by looking around) - 2 slightly below average folks, a few people above 6', and then me in the middle at 5'11". Bah.
Should we expect reports of the sky being blue, unless it's cloudy? Water wet, rocks hard, that sort of thing?
IT systems are increasingly complex, security is still an after-thought on products (instead of a core design consideration), and there's also the simple economies of scale; what was tens of thousands of targets, became millions of targets, and is now probably billions. A simple crack that works on 0.001% of the systems will still be cost-effective for whatever the net result is, most likely.
Genesis 1, 1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
There are some people who, unfortunately, think the Earth was created 6k years ago. But even if you're going to go that crazy route, the 7 days story says nothing about the creation of the Universe, just the Earth. And not even creation of the mass of the Earth, just forming it to what it is today.
Sure, I personally think of the story as just, well, a story. But even if you take the story literally, that doesn't have any relevance to the creation of the universe itself.
for nearly 20 years I've used a method that allows me to make complex passwords, but is easy.
First letter of each word of a sentence.
Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies"
IE - Ratr,pfop
As she ages, she can mix it up. A naked "a" in a sentence becomes an @, the word "to" becomes a 2, the word "tree" becomes a 3, etc...add extra rules as she can handle them. But to start, she merely needs something that isn't just her name. Set it to allow for multiple letters, not need 1 each of 4 types of characters. Just mixed case should be enough, as long as the password isn't dictionary based.
"Mary had a little lamb" => "Mhall" is actually quite complex enough (assuming she doesn't have ssh running...) to sufficiently protect against a console-based attack by PARENTS. Have a timeout between password attempts. Have the timeout increase with numerous failed attempts. So on, so forth.
Something like a2d1eTH^Ji#o%ll! (which is the result of the newer scheme I've used the last few years, and is likewise easy to remember) is completely, totally, silly and unnecessary for a child's PC. Just disable any inbound connections, and deal with login failures on the console intelligently.
I know what the "official" motto is - I didn't claim it as "the" official motto. The article I used was "a," an article that implies a single instance out of many. Simply look up "improvise, adapt, and overcome" online. Why are you making this point, if you were prior yourself? If you were, I know you heard that additional motto a million times as well.
yeah, that's why a big motto in the Marines was "improvise, adapt, and overcome."
Do you really think wars are fought with your "SOP?" Only football games are that organized. There are methods of communication between members of a fire team/squad/platoon, and clear authority lines, that allow them to behave during combat in a way that looks organized...but the fact is, the military is far far more clear than the civilian world on the fact that the enemy (whatever form he takes) is not following procedures, and thus you can't either. The system is very much tolerant of people making spot decisions, shifting to what is occurring, and etc. Are there guidelines? Certainly - none which would hamper a hacker, however.
Somehow, I get the feeling your idea of the US military has either limited scope because you were only exposed to very-low-ranking members of the military. Keep in mind that if someone is highly skilled in an industry, they generally come in as either Warrant Officers, or fully commissioned officers. Alternatively, you just flat out think wars are fought like they were in the 1700s - people standing in nice neat little lines, moving along like pieces on a chess board. That never flied here; we tore apart the British when they did that, and we didn't. Catch up.
Will there be junior positions associated with the group? Certainly. But the meat of the folks - the folks that are now being actively sought out - are those that will fill officer and warrant officer ranks.
//was just a lowly 0311 grunt when I was a kid, myself...now, not so much
"if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention."
Sorry that you're confused on the issue CNet and ScuttleMonkey - lemme explain it to you.
See, Linux is a kernel. Want beauty? Install a nice gui on top of the kernel to give you beauty. Want intuition (and can't find it in the kernel source code)? Then install tools on top of the kernel that give you that intuition.
The engine of a car isn't supposed to give the car beauty or intuition. It is supposed to give function. The controls of the car should be intuitive, and the exterior/interior of a car might be beautiful, but very, very little effort should be made in making the engine either.
Mayhaps CNet and ScuttleMonkey need to figure out what it is Linux has been doing all these years. He isn't the lead guy for xorg, nor Firefox, nor whatever else it is they're confused about.
Slashdot Mirror
did you miss the "devalued" part? Which would mean "losing value it once had?"
We're not talking about rejecting some new-fangled shiny toy or something, dolt. We're talking about something that once had value (if even just from its ideals) which no longer does.
we all have high ideals when we're children. WMF is becoming a teen now (developmentally), and is putting a lot of those ideals to the side...for some of the same reasons regular people do in their teens.
The questions then are:
1) can WMF regain those ideals?
2) were the lost ideals crucial to WMF's survivability?
it takes years before tech is put into the shuttle. The collection of tech was at one point very advanced, but the components themselves are tested for years.
did you...look at the same picture?
(looks at it again)
umm...ok, I have a healthy platter on my desk. The shuttle platter varies in colors - half the platter is black. None of it is shiny. Metallic spray? Looks more like ashes to me; probably from the little black sheet that often rests under the cover and acts as a gasket.
nothing happened to the platters...with the exception of the violent crash (head-to-platter damage) and, more importantly, the extreme heat.
Short of that though, yeah - platters were just peachy.
Were you responding to someone other than me? I didn't speak to pollution. I don't really need to; I live a substantially lower pollution lifestyle than even the average "green" person.
Lets see then, what did I say...ah yes. before you take the "nobody lives there, nobody farms there, and very little wildlife is there" approach...
ANWR would involve 2,000 acres, versus covering 8,646 square miles with solar panels. I personally feel it is rather silly to argue that the southwest is barren and uninhabited; size-for-size, ANWR is only barely less barren but we're not talking size-for-size here. 8,646sq miles is 5,533,440 acres, or roughly 2,766 times the amount of area proposed in ANWR.
Therefore, since I have to spell it out for you, it shouldn't be so dismissively stated that the southwest could just be covered with solar panels. Are you aware of any studies that have been done to see what the affects would be on regional (or maybe even national) weather to do such a thing? Or simple things, like whether it will make it impossible to fly anywhere near the area? It's not just a casually suggested thing to cover 92x92 miles of area with panels.
We're still not serious about solving problems, so this won't fly anyway. How about a $1k tax per mpg a car gets less than 40, for starters? or making utility bills public info, so we can get a bit of old-fashioned little-people-upset-at-the-hypocritical-rich going on? Or any number of things that are substantially less damaging (and more realistic) than covering 8,646 square miles with solar panels.
before you take the "nobody lives there, nobody farms there, and very little wildlife is there" approach, think about whether your argument could be used to justify exponentially less invasive drilling in ANWAR.
"neither I, nor anyone else, cares..."
;)
forgot a word
"Actually, I'm not ignoring the fact that the subscription money is where the cash is at. However... If the account is banned, and the person gets 2 new boxes, then starts paying a monthly fee again, that's what? 29.99 x2 plus the monthly fee of 14.99 (last I remembered)?"
minus $14.95 (or whatever) x [however many people the bot is the final straw for] x [how many more months they would have otherwise played]
I, nor anyone else, cares if Blizzard sues someone. Most players won't even know they have. What we'll care about is not seeing substantial percentages of the battleground population being bots.
and what does that have to do with bots? Were we not discussing bots?
I forgot to finish an important point - the people that work at that bar, knowing that people that aren't even there are gaining benefit from their work (and making their own benefit be less) - those people aren't likely to want to continue working at that bar.
The issue is retaining disenfranchised players that aren't bots, not freeing up the resources the bots are using. You want the good people to stay, and the good people are upset because the bad people are there. Sure, you want the bad people to go too, but the REAL reason you do something, as the owner of the bar, is to get the good people to stay.
its not the XP; a lvl70 is already lvl70. Its the honor from the kill. A lvl70 isn't going to get any honor from a kill on a lvl20 anyway.
And the real problem, the one that causes PR issues, is bots in battlegrounds - large instances where the pure intent is pvp, with no (or almost no) PvE component.
Imagine any capture the flag game in HALO, except - instead of throw-away characters, you have a character that you actually keep. Your character, at the end of the fight, will gain rewards from the fight - considerable rewards for winning, but some reward still for losing (why there is diminishing reward for losing is another topic, but suffice to say there is a good reason for it).
So a group of 20 lvl70 (ie - characters that are no longer gaining XP) characters, versus a group of 20 lvl70 characters - all pvp. If 5 of the players on one team are actually bots, and only 2 of the players on the other team are bots, then now the numbers are 15 versus 18. In a capture-the-flag game, one where a single player can occupy another single player's time, the gains are from those players that are better than others, and *win* the pvp 1v1 contests, and can go help other pvp contests, freeing up time for someone to actually meet the objectives of the battleground itself (be it capture the flag, etc).
In a 15v18 situation though, the extra 3 people become a HUGE advantage to the one team, who now off-the-bat have 3 extra bodies to go accomplish the objectives, regardless of skill level. Worse is when the battleground is only 10v10, and you're unlucky enough to get 2 or 3 afk or bot players, and the other team has none or only 1...now you're 7v9, or 7v10, a huge disadvantage.
This then creates the REAL problem, which isn't the extra resources that the bots are using, but the NON-bot players that are now rightfully upset that they lost not due to lack of skill, but due to someone who was on their own team, freeloading, cheating.
Imagine you worked at a bar that split tips (this is actually quite common). Now, imagine that if you showed up for work, you got a base pay plus tip split, but if you *didn't* show up for work, you still got to be part of the split in tips. So, you could make $150 in a night by showing up to work and working your ass off, $125 for showing up to work and being lazy (because ostensibly, people would tip less in general if you were actually there and providing poor service), and $50 for the night for not even being there. Now...if not being there is $50 of gain, and working your ass off is $150...and you can get a dozen jobs you don't go to, each giving you $50 for not showing up...suddenly, with about the effort as the actual players, you're making $600 a night to their $150.
Problem is, it's difficult to determine automatically, in a battleground, who is and isn't there. A tanking paladin isn't going to be doing much damage or healing, but he'll still be providing a lot of bonus...and a bot mage could probably out-damage him in the final tally, but have provided very little actual benefit (explaining this would take too long). So you can't make the determination based on healing and damage done alone. Further, the more complex a bot, the more difficult it is to distinguish between it and a poor player. And when you're playing other players, especially other players that are good, you don't have time to type responses to questions - you're too busy pressing buttons and moving the mouse and doing things related to staying alive, and maybe even winning, which will take all you can give. PvP can be lots of fun...when it isn't 7v10.
maybe people who play WoW should be getting the "insightful" comments instead of people who aren't.
The problem isn't in the grinding. The problem is in battlegrounds, where it is player versus player. Any bot usage in PvE is pointless; the real issue, the thing that annoys the crap out of players, is bots in battlegrounds.
you're ignoring Blizzard's business model, and their argument. The money from the box/cd that you buy in the store is negligible compared to the monthly fees that are paid.
Blizzard has the highest profits by having a large subscriber base that doesn't play often. BOTs use much more resources on the servers at Blizzard; they use up more bandwidth, more computational and data resources, etc, than the normal user.
There is also the extraordinary dissatisfaction the non-bot players have with the experience when, in a battleground, they know that if they fight their asses off for 20 minutes to win Alterac Valley, anyone that is a bot or afk is going to get the same bonus honor and same daily bonuses as they are. Would you like to see a coworker get paid almost as much as you for literally not even being there at all? That is a serious PR issue for Blizzard. To keep the normal player base (the ones that aren't using as much resources - ie, the ones that are more profitable) happy, they get rid of the few folk that aren't as profitable anyway. Blizzard doesn't care if the BOT user buys a new CD; they'd actually prefer that person not ever play again, most likely.
You're also forgetting that many people find enjoyment by having more power, control, etc. If I can make a bot that gets me 75k honor in a week or two with no work from me, then I can use that honor to buy high-end items, and then come back and actually play the game at that point, with the benefit that the afk activity provided. Your character actually gains quite a bit while you're not there, if no one reports it. Even the losing team gets some honor.
"Hey, enjoying the game? Could you just confirm your not a bot by answering this question, please..."
:)
Nope. The biggest bot problem is in battlegrounds, and those that are actually there, at their keyboards, fighting - the real, non-bot players - don't have the time to respond to a message. hell, they probably won't even *see* the message; lots of folks I know direct all chat text to its own dialog box, then hide that box
To explain - while what you're saying could potentially work in PvE play (player versus environment), where a player can just press a few buttons now and then and the fight goes on, the real problem is in PvP play (player versus player) in what are called "battlegrounds" - a large group of horde players versus a large group of alliance players. So what the bots do is have a character run around in stupid ways, dying, casting spells at random, whatever - but if their team (alliance/horde) wins, they get a tremendous amount of benefit from that. So the active, real players end up carrying the extra load of those that are afk or bots.
The 2.4 patch (which went live yesterday) seems to have improved this some though - I actually saw bots getting booted in battlegrounds.
Right now in battlegrounds, there is an option for reporting someone as afk. There should also be an option for reporting someone as potentially a bot, so that GMs could check those particular characters with more diligence for suspicious activity, if they are flagged often enough.
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates
Err...really? When was that? Were some sort of user opinion polls taken at the time?
I've got a copy of DOS 4 sitting around here somewhere, and remember using debug to partition old ESDI drives, so certainly I'm one of those folks that should have been in love with that scrappy fellow back in the day...right?
Bill started out under the radar, where the general population didn't really understand what an OS was. IBM was like Borg; they certainly seemed to be evil, but there didn't seem to be any evil purpose, or evil leader, one could pinpoint. Microsoft coasted through until the 90s with few really caring he was there. BG wasn't "loved" by any sort of fanbase until relatively recently, well after his dominance was established. Meanwhile, there were people philosophically disagreeing with that model long before then.
So just when was all this love taking place? I call troll. But eh, sensationalism is all they teach in journalism schools these days.
I don't know what they're talking about. The average height in the IT department here is approx 5'10" (guessing by looking around) - 2 slightly below average folks, a few people above 6', and then me in the middle at 5'11". Bah.
Should we expect reports of the sky being blue, unless it's cloudy? Water wet, rocks hard, that sort of thing?
IT systems are increasingly complex, security is still an after-thought on products (instead of a core design consideration), and there's also the simple economies of scale; what was tens of thousands of targets, became millions of targets, and is now probably billions. A simple crack that works on 0.001% of the systems will still be cost-effective for whatever the net result is, most likely.
And? Their point?
Genesis 1, 1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
There are some people who, unfortunately, think the Earth was created 6k years ago. But even if you're going to go that crazy route, the 7 days story says nothing about the creation of the Universe, just the Earth. And not even creation of the mass of the Earth, just forming it to what it is today.
Sure, I personally think of the story as just, well, a story. But even if you take the story literally, that doesn't have any relevance to the creation of the universe itself.
hasn't wanted journaling filesystems for years? Methinks you speak for a community you don't know as well as you think.
That's like saying they didn't wantsmp support for all that time they didn't have it...
Why is it that /.'ers are so high strung?
Was waiting on something stressful at the moment. 5 minutes later, if I could have deleted my post, I would have. You have my apologies.
for nearly 20 years I've used a method that allows me to make complex passwords, but is easy.
First letter of each word of a sentence.
Ring around the rosies, pocket full of posies"
IE - Ratr,pfop
As she ages, she can mix it up. A naked "a" in a sentence becomes an @, the word "to" becomes a 2, the word "tree" becomes a 3, etc...add extra rules as she can handle them. But to start, she merely needs something that isn't just her name. Set it to allow for multiple letters, not need 1 each of 4 types of characters. Just mixed case should be enough, as long as the password isn't dictionary based.
"Mary had a little lamb" => "Mhall" is actually quite complex enough (assuming she doesn't have ssh running...) to sufficiently protect against a console-based attack by PARENTS. Have a timeout between password attempts. Have the timeout increase with numerous failed attempts. So on, so forth.
Something like a2d1eTH^Ji#o%ll! (which is the result of the newer scheme I've used the last few years, and is likewise easy to remember) is completely, totally, silly and unnecessary for a child's PC. Just disable any inbound connections, and deal with login failures on the console intelligently.
I know what the "official" motto is - I didn't claim it as "the" official motto. The article I used was "a," an article that implies a single instance out of many. Simply look up "improvise, adapt, and overcome" online. Why are you making this point, if you were prior yourself? If you were, I know you heard that additional motto a million times as well.
Do you really think wars are fought with your "SOP?" Only football games are that organized. There are methods of communication between members of a fire team/squad/platoon, and clear authority lines, that allow them to behave during combat in a way that looks organized...but the fact is, the military is far far more clear than the civilian world on the fact that the enemy (whatever form he takes) is not following procedures, and thus you can't either. The system is very much tolerant of people making spot decisions, shifting to what is occurring, and etc. Are there guidelines? Certainly - none which would hamper a hacker, however.
Somehow, I get the feeling your idea of the US military has either limited scope because you were only exposed to very-low-ranking members of the military. Keep in mind that if someone is highly skilled in an industry, they generally come in as either Warrant Officers, or fully commissioned officers. Alternatively, you just flat out think wars are fought like they were in the 1700s - people standing in nice neat little lines, moving along like pieces on a chess board. That never flied here; we tore apart the British when they did that, and we didn't. Catch up.
Will there be junior positions associated with the group? Certainly. But the meat of the folks - the folks that are now being actively sought out - are those that will fill officer and warrant officer ranks.
//was just a lowly 0311 grunt when I was a kid, myself...now, not so much
"if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention."
Sorry that you're confused on the issue CNet and ScuttleMonkey - lemme explain it to you.
See, Linux is a kernel. Want beauty? Install a nice gui on top of the kernel to give you beauty. Want intuition (and can't find it in the kernel source code)? Then install tools on top of the kernel that give you that intuition.
The engine of a car isn't supposed to give the car beauty or intuition. It is supposed to give function. The controls of the car should be intuitive, and the exterior/interior of a car might be beautiful, but very, very little effort should be made in making the engine either.
Mayhaps CNet and ScuttleMonkey need to figure out what it is Linux has been doing all these years. He isn't the lead guy for xorg, nor Firefox, nor whatever else it is they're confused about.