Re:Let 'em hire the young minds
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
Yeah, if we hire a kid and don't tell him a problem is NP Complete he'll have that problem licked within a few weeks.
This is one of my pet peeves, as some of my other comments will attest! In the real world, you really do need somebody with experience to warn you where the dragons are -- we've all seen brilliant ideas that never worked out in practice. Or somebody who found a decent solution to one small task (or a very limited test case) and thinks that that means they can solve the more general case, not realizing it's not possible with Turing-machine class computers. (DNA or quantum computers are a very different situation.)
This doesn't mean that all "impossible" problems are truly impossible. Technology changes, and we take for granted libraries that would have required dozens or hundreds of developer-years a decade ago. But these are the cases where the experienced developers will be excited to solve these problems, not immediately dismissive of it.
True costs
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Any manager who focuses solely on the salary of his programming staff is an incompetent fool who should be fired immediately.
Ask any experienced programmer where the biggest costs lies, and they'll tell you it's fixing (or worst, working around) the crap left from rushed or ill-informed decisions made earlier. This isn't just the cost of paying programmers to maintain the broken infrastructure, it's the lost opportunities as the people who know your code are prevented from working on new functionality, the delays in responding to changing demands, etc.
We all know that the marketplace often doesn't give us enough time to do things right... but a lot of mistakes can be avoided if you just have somebody on the team who has already done something similiar at an earlier job. Or arguably more importantly, somebody who has seen the same brilliant idea fail because the nasty problems don't appear until you're committed to this approach.
But I guess that's why we're told we have a "negative attitude." I've actually heard some people say that they'll never hire somebody who says something "can't be done." They make no distinction between professional knowledge (e.g., recognizing a problem as NP-complete with no known "good enough" approximations), professional experience (e.g., having worked at three other sites where the same approach was unsuccessfully attempted), or just a bad attitude.
The other cost that's often overlooked is that specialization is dangerous. You don't want to hire one person to fill a half-dozen separate positions, but having people on your staff who can cover others can be a godsend when your regular sysadmins are all away (e.g., one on vacation, the other home sick), or the DBA is on vacation, etc.
I'm pretty sure that usage follows earlier usage to describe stealing a rig and cargo from a trucker, and is entirely appropriate in this case since it involves the unauthorized redirection of a transportation mechanism from one purpose to another without permission by the owner(s).
Java.jar files are basically.zip files with a few mandatory fields, and it's not hard to imagine uses for a classloader that can handle encrypted entries. Whether they're really that useful is another thing, but PHBs aren't known for understanding the more subtle aspects of data security.
The existing encryption is rather weak, but it's good enough for "proof of concept" work and is widely implemented. (Not that it matters with your own classloader, of course, but much of the value of this approach is that you can use WinZip or the like to figure out why things are broken, if you know the encryption password.)
That was bullshit, but like most things people learn in Third Grade it is absolutely impossible to convince people that they're mistaken.
Under the model Uniform Commercial Code a signature is ANY mark indicating assent. It can be your legal name in cursive. It can be your nickname in block letters.
It can even be the rest of your "unsigned" check, one you forgot to sign... or "forgot" to sign because you were running low on cash and thought this would give you a week of breathing room. Courts have ruled that the other handwriting legally constituted a signature.
But hey, what do I know? I only "signed" checks with a (somewhat distinctive) printed form of my usename for a number of years. "Usenames" are "nicknames" on steroids - I had an alias on my checks, credit cards, etc. This is a situation where you're forced to learn the law very well - you occasionally run into a legal scholar working a second job as night manager at the store... at least they seem to think they're experts in the law. I eventually changed my name legally because I realized that few of my friends would recognize my name if I were in an accident and the police called with my legal name.
Cursive and joined-up handwriting are not synonyms
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Why Johnny Can't Handwrite
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This looks like as good a place as any to make a really braindead observation that everyone else seems to have missed.
"Cursive" handwriting is not the only form of "joined up" handwriting. 100 years ago everyone learned a different type of script, and I had to struggle to understand anything written by my late grandmother. Once educators get a clue, our current cursive will be just as alien to our kids.
The key issue with "hand printing" is that young children are taught to write letters with only downstrokes. They don't have the fine motor control for making well-controlled motions in both directions, and pushing kids into "cursive" too soon will result in a lifetime of poor penmanship.
But there's absolutely no reason why teens and adults can't do "hand printing" in both directions. That means an "A" is two strokes, not three. More importantly, you can start a lot of letters with either an up or downstroke - "B," "n," "m," "r," etc. You'll lose the small serifs, but the letters are still easily recognized.
It doesn't take long for letters to flow together - they're still "printed," but the pen either never leaves the paper or is briefly lifted just off the surface. With practice you can print just as fast as another person can write cursively... and it's a hell of a lot easier to mix in equations, foreign and mathematical symbols, chemical notations, etc.
If the mirror is cracked, an attacker could upload a new MD5 with the compromised tarball. And you can't trust vendor-supplied MD5 sums when you're dealing with new versions downloaded for bug fixes or critical features.
That's why you're now seeing PGP-signed checksums, but again there's the bootstrapping problem. But in this case you can have a fair amount of confidence that vendor-provided keys and the like are valid.
This isn't the forum for a discussion of these points in depth - I added the editorial comments to show how many people interpret each item, not as something that everyone would immediately agree with.
That said, I'll briefly respond to your points.
Family values: you're right that nobody but a few extremists are trying to abolish divorce. But this item had three clauses - and there's no doubt that this administration is firmly anti-abortion and anti-homosexuals. It also paints itself as protectors of the American family whenever possible.
Anti-intellectualism: I am well aware of our history of anti-intellectualism, but what we're seeing today - especially in the "favored media outlets" that act where the administration itself can't - is far worse than I've seen in my lifetime. I know several people who compare it to the 1950s. At least it hasn't, yet, reached the levels of the KKK-dominated politics in the 1930s when the University of Colorado had all state funding cut off when it refused to teach the intrinsic superiority of the Caucasian race over all others.
Controlled media: I don't care so much about what's being said as the ability of people to be heard. With media consolidation, unpopular voices will find it impossible to be heard. As for this administration - it is notorious in some circles for cutting off access to reporters who don't play ball. No administration has been happy with these reporters, but none have gone to the same extent to cut them off.
Elections: elections are not exercises in accounting to determine which jar has the most beans, they are political events where the most important element is their credibility in expressing the will of the people. If too many people have serious doubts about the process, whether it be butterfly ballots, disenfrancised minority voters who were wrongly dropped from the voting rolls, or undisclosed last-second revisions to the machine's software then the numbers won't matter.
You may find it offensive, but there's not much doubt that this administration is acting in a way consistent with fascist states. Read Hitler's speech after Krystalnacht and compare it to Bush & Ashcroft today - the country is threatened by religious terrorists outside our borders, we must surrender rights to ensure domestic safety, etc.
This doesn't mean all Republicans are closet fascists, much less closet Nazi fascists, and I agree that you should find the description offensive.
At the same time, you can't skirt the fact that "fascism" is a technical term of art to describe certain forms of government... and that it has also been described as "corporatism" since the milder forms view the primary role of government as supporting business interests. There is absolutely no doubt that our country has become corporatist, and it increasingly satifies all of the characteristics of fully fascist states.
If you don't like this - then speak up! I, and many others, do not believe that the Republican Party as a whole is fascist... but that it has become dominated by a fringe element that is. If you don't like what is being done in your name, take back your party!
One final note. You said you were offended by the "Nazi" reference. How would you feel if you served with honor in Vietnam, you earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for your actions in Vietnam, and some punk who had family connections to "serve" stateside in the National Guard but who was grounded for years because he couldn't be bothered to get a flight physical called you a "coward" for speaking against a mad rush into war?
I wish the comments made to John Kerry were an exception, but they aren't. Him, Sen. Zeller of Georgia,... the list goes on and on.
There's another reason for this approach, even in an era when the military issues arms to all soldiers.
I was in the Boy Scouts in the early 1970s - I remember leaving for our weekly meetings as Walter Cronkite recited the latest DoD lies on enemy body counts, etc.
My scout master was a retired Marine Drill Instructor. We never trained with arms, but we did practice close quarter drills, followed paramilitary practices on camping trips, etc. We were too young to complain, but we also knew that few troops have Eagle scouts (including myself, eventually) as a full quarter of their active troops, or routinely walk all over all other troops in local competitions.
The reason I mentioned this is that years later I learned that the military cut back on the amount of time spent in basic training in order to get more troops to the field in Vietnam sooner. My Scout Master undoubtably knew this, and knew that he was sending kids to their death because some assholes in the Pentagon decided that a few extra weeks of training wouldn't make any difference in the field.
Sergeant Berhow knew this, and after he left the service he spent much of his spare time giving hundreds of local kids the early training that could save their lives. Probably literally - I'm sure many of the boys he trained served in Vietnam.
So what does this have to do with private possession of guns? Easy - I own a Beretta 9mm precisely because it is the standard sidearm in the military, and if I though there was any change that I would be called to duty I would not hesitate to pick up an AR-15 as well. Not because I'm going into combat with my personal weapons, but because it will give me a chance to learn these tools.
This really shouldn't be surprising - I have this attitude <i>everywhere</i>. For a while I thought it was common to all geeks, but it's not. I now believe it all comes back to a certain former Marine DI, one who taught me you can never be too prepared when lives are at risk.
Powerful and continuing nationalism. Hitler had the Nuremberg Rallies, we will have the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City just blocks from "ground zero," and just 10 days before the third anniversity. This is the latest nominating convention in history. (Hopefully it will not also be the "last" one.)
Distain for the recognition of human rights.
Forget Guatmo, look at who's on the "no fly" list. When was the last time you heard of a Quaker activist committing violent acts?
Identication of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. All Muslims are terrorists. All "liberals" and "moderates" support terrorism.
Supremacy of the military. This is a weird split - this administration has treated soldiers, ex-soldiers, and their families contemptously. But at the same time, there's no question that these are rich years to be a preferred military contractor.
Rampant sexism. "Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution." No comment necessary.
Controlled mass media. "Sometimes directly controlled by the government, sometimes indirectly controlled by government media, sympathetic media and executives." FCC decision last week, Fox News. No comment necessary.
Obsession with national security. Post 9/11, a lot of this is justified. But the actions don't match the words - Bush talks national security, but has repeatedly ignored pressing matters to focus on things of relatively little importance. The Afghanistan countryside is important. North Korea, with an active nuclear program and proven missiles and located so close to the industrial centers of South Korea and Japan (and potentially able to reach the US within a few years) is important. Iraq, as the professional intelligence corp knew and events have proven, was not.
Religion and government are intertwined. "Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders." Besides the language, Bush always drops into a "Hellfire sermon" cadence when he's trying to emphasize a point.
Corporate power is protected. No comment necessary.
Labor power is suppressed. No comment necessary.
Distain for intellectuals and the arts. Besides the historic contempt for "liberal professors" and any artist willing to speak her mind (Dixie Chicks), I see a lot of anti-intellectualism in anti-tech attitudes. Are so many jobs going overseas (or to H1B workers) here because of economics alone, or because we tend to be highly curious and open to discussing ideas?
Obsession with Crime and Punishment. Ashcroft. No other comment necessary.
Rampant cronyism and corruption. Halliburton and Vice President Cheney. Michael Powell (FCC) and Colin Powell (Sec. of State). The Bush crowd - a group with a history that makes the Kennedys look like choir boys (if you can find any media gutsy enough to cover the story).
Fradulent elections. Florida - governored by the brother of one of the candidates (see above). The strange obsession with replacing paper ballots with unauditable electronic voting machines. The connection between those manufacturers and key Republican backers... and the Russian Mafia.
If you accept the premise of the article, I don't think there's any doubt that we're close to fascism today. It's still early and we could reverse course in less than 18 months. But I think there's little doubt that history will observe that the US came close to losing WW-II 60 years after the fact.
I'm also sure that many of these people have no idea that they're fascist. Hitler was not Satan incarnate, Nazi Germany did not come into existence overnight, and we must always be on guard against history repeating.
As for the OP's uninformed comments, the proper description for the countries he described as "socialist" is "authoritarian" -- and there's no doubt that this country is shifting towards authoritarism in addition to fascism.
Why would anyone follow these guidelines? It might piss off these companies, but anyone who really cares about security would realize that giving the vendors the exclusive right to disclose flaws (regardless how much time has passed or how many systems have been compromised) prevents people from making an informed decision to yank these programs until a solution is identified.
Mapped to the real world, it's like some idiotic Police Chief knowing damn good and well that several pizza delivery drivers are mugged every night when they go into a four-block area... but refusing to say anything - not even warning these drivers to avoid the area for a while - until after the muggers have been convicted, sentenced, and in prison for a month.
Even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist, the black holes created will still make atomic nuclii look huge. To it, the earth will appear to be a harder vacuum than space does to us and once it balances its electrostatic charge meals will be few and far between.
But even if it aborbs a neutron or proton + electron a million times/second - so what? How long until it weighs even a gram? As a rough estimate, I seem to recall that Avogandro's number is something over 10e23, and if a gram is maybe 10e20 particles and the consumption rate is around 10e6/s, it will take 10e14 seconds - over 3 million years. And it will still be far, far smaller than the subatomic particle it consumes.
But that assumes that the blackhole even stays in our neighborhood. Escape velocity from earth - from the solar system! - is nothing compared to the velocity of these particles before the collisions... or most of the particle sprays coming from them. There's basically no chance that the black hole would emerge at essentially no velocity.
Since you handle is "proud American," I assume you're in the US. Things are rapidly changing here, but at the moment before the cops can act there either needs to be facts in plain sight (e.g., the kiddie porn is available through a website) or they'll need to get a search warrant. To get a search warrant they'll need to have some credible reason to believe that a crime has been committed - and anonymous complaints rarely cut it.
Furthermore, an anonymous complaint makes the job of the investigator much harder. The first defense of someone caught with real kiddie porn is that they were framed. Obviously whoever made the anonymous report framed them! This may be bullshit, but the detective has to disprove it and it's a lot harder to do when the person reporting it is anonymous.
(Before somebody asks, I'm contrasting real kiddie porn with, oh, the stuff Traci Lords made when she was using fradulent IDs to prove she was over 18. In that case the first defense is that the viewer had no clue the model was 17 instead of 18 or 19.)
So while you might think you're doing something useful, you really just wasting everyone's time. They can't even track the number of anonymous reports since there's no way to ensure that a dozen anonymous reports aren't all from a single person.
You're overlooking the way the government works, especially the FTC.
First they officially notice that there's a problem. They bring it to the attention of the parties involved.
If they take the hint, the government backs off and leaves it to the parties involved to find a way to regulate themselves.
But if there's widespread indifference, the government starts to dig deeper. Is the problem that the MTA software doesn't work as advertised? Are these relays not the innocent bystanders they appear to be? Do these non-technical system owners consider this an insignificant problem?
Finally, never underestimate the value of an official letter to light a fire under unresponsive ISPs. A few years ago I was joe-jobbed and contacted about a dozen of the open relays identified in bounce messages. A few were honestly trying to secure their site, but never scanned their non-mail servers for open relays. But most were small businesses that bought a website from the Qworst sales rep and had no clue that the latter's indifference would harm their business reputation. I don't think there's much doubt that Qworst would blow off complaints from small domain owners... but customers complaining about letters from the FTC are a very different thing.
Re:The quarter is hard enough
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Making Change
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· Score: 1
I've gotten used to the strange looks. I've even gotten used to the occasional pile of change because the clerk claims I was a penny short and they're too busy to ask me for another penny but not too busy to count out 99 cents in change.
But I've seen the same exploded head when the bill came to something like $15.37 and I hand over $21.
Yeah, the lawyers and HR would love that but anyone worth their pay would run the instant yuo suggested it.
"Intentional security breaches," for instance. Okay, no problem, none of us want intentional security breaches and since Outlook and MSIE are both responsible for a large number of breaches they're history. What, I can't do that - you're telling me that you're holding my feet to the fire yet denying me the authority to do anything about it? See ya!
Ditto all of your other suggestions. Of course any code written for the job, at work, for pay, etc., belongs to the company. It may or may not be proprietary, in the sense that I may extend GPL code to fix a problem. It's perfectly legal unless the company wants to distribute the code to others (which doesn't sound like the case here), in which case you need to say so upfront so I can budget about 10x as much resources to duplicate the prior work. But the stuff I do at home, on my own time, is mine.
I could go on, but it shouldn't be necessary. Anyone with real experience has been burned by somebody with such a list, or had a friend burned, and no matter how bad the economy is they know that unemployment is better than being the target of a lawyer trying to prove that their client's incompetence is really your fault.
've never heard this claim from anyone but Eric Raymond, and wannabe hackers having read too much in that "dictionary" of his.
I remember the white hat definition of "hacker" being in use - exclusively at my university - 20 years ago. I remember it because it was a joke that I was the resident hacker on the grad CS computers even though I wasn't a grad CS student. (I was a grad math student nominally playing around with symbolic math.)
The black hat definition was also in use at the time, but the correct sense was normally clear in context even if we sometimes had the same effect. You were also much more likely to see the white hat definition in an academic environment, the black hat definition in a business environment. The black hat definition only began to dominate after some mainstream items appeared. The black hat definition is much easier for the average person to understand than the white hat one.
I'm a bit older - I remember watching an hour of Bugs Bunny, plus a number of other classics. Give me the Pink Panther over Garfield any day!
Was this time wasted? Probably. But it's not like I had a lot of options. When I was older and in scouts I would often be hiking on Saturdays, but at that age I was stuck in lower-middle-class suburban hell. Small back yard, no neighborhood park, parents caught up in their own crap. Maybe the Beav could grab his mitt and head out to a pickup baseball game, but that was the mythical 1950s.
(And let's be real - how many people got interested in engineering or physics because of the Road Runner & Coyote shorts?!)
If you read some of the first-hand reports discussing why they switched from Microsoft to Linux, you'll see that many are reporting that internal audits were shoing that they were spending a full 20% of their time redoing work lost when the systems crashed, repairing files corrupted in those crashses, removing viruses and other malware, etc.
That's one full day/week for every employee.
That's a full person, in a small department of 1 boss and 4 workers.
That is a huge hit, and it can be enough to make the difference between a company that survives rough times and one that goes under.
Maybe Office has more bells & whistles than some of the other tools out there, but how often do you really need them? Especially if they come with such a steep cost?
The point of these ideas isn't to hide the fact that the material is sensitive, it's to remind the legitimate user to protect it. The best safe in the world is worthless if you forget to put your valuables in it.
The ability to associate extra methods with each element means that you can eliminate many of the situations where you would normally use a switch statement.
E.g., let's say I want to look up the UPS shipping zone by a state enumeration. I could use:
switch(state) { case 'AL': zone = 1; break; case 'AK': zone = 8; break; ...
or I could use a "fat enumerator" (or whatever it would be called) and just use
state.getZone();
Obviously this starts to blur the distinction between beans and enumerations, especially if you allow some of these attributes to be modifiable. But in practice I've found that to actually be a benefit, not a problem, since it simplifies the process of adding enumeration values when necessary. I've run into this situation when extending an existing application, and it can be a real pain with classic enumerators.
This isn't the forum for a detailed discussion, but I actually prefer enumeration classes now over simple enumerations. The basic idea is to write a class something like:
final class Color { String c;
private Color (String color) { c = color; } String toString() { return c; }
static final Color RED = new Color("red"); static final Color BLUE = new Color("blue"); static final Color GREEN = new Color("green"); }
You can then treat this class like a type-safe enumeration. It doesn't have all of the nifty features that you'll see in languages like Ada, but it has the nice property of allowing you to attach whatever information you want to the enumeration class.
You can also use this approach to create self-initializing classes, e.g., a list of states (including full name, postal abbreviations, shipping zone, etc.) from a database. You can access the enumerated values through a collection class, a "lookup" method, or even reflection.
It sounds like C# uses a lot of stuff from Ada (and I'm sure countless other languages), but forgot to honor prior work.:-)
Seriously, the "C# copied from Java/Java copied from C#" argument misses the point. There's a lot of prior work, and finding the right balance between usability and clutter is difficult. As much as I loved writing stuff like "for (value'range) do..." I would rather see a conservative approach to features since it's always easier to add stuff than remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if we hire a kid and don't tell him a problem is NP Complete he'll have that problem licked within a few weeks.
This is one of my pet peeves, as some of my other comments will attest! In the real world, you really do need somebody with experience to warn you where the dragons are -- we've all seen brilliant ideas that never worked out in practice. Or somebody who found a decent solution to one small task (or a very limited test case) and thinks that that means they can solve the more general case, not realizing it's not possible with Turing-machine class computers. (DNA or quantum computers are a very different situation.)
This doesn't mean that all "impossible" problems are truly impossible. Technology changes, and we take for granted libraries that would have required dozens or hundreds of developer-years a decade ago. But these are the cases where the experienced developers will be excited to solve these problems, not immediately dismissive of it.
Any manager who focuses solely on the salary of his programming staff is an incompetent fool who should be fired immediately.
Ask any experienced programmer where the biggest costs lies, and they'll tell you it's fixing (or worst, working around) the crap left from rushed or ill-informed decisions made earlier. This isn't just the cost of paying programmers to maintain the broken infrastructure, it's the lost opportunities as the people who know your code are prevented from working on new functionality, the delays in responding to changing demands, etc.
We all know that the marketplace often doesn't give us enough time to do things right... but a lot of mistakes can be avoided if you just have somebody on the team who has already done something similiar at an earlier job. Or arguably more importantly, somebody who has seen the same brilliant idea fail because the nasty problems don't appear until you're committed to this approach.
But I guess that's why we're told we have a "negative attitude." I've actually heard some people say that they'll never hire somebody who says something "can't be done." They make no distinction between professional knowledge (e.g., recognizing a problem as NP-complete with no known "good enough" approximations), professional experience (e.g., having worked at three other sites where the same approach was unsuccessfully attempted), or just a bad attitude.
The other cost that's often overlooked is that specialization is dangerous. You don't want to hire one person to fill a half-dozen separate positions, but having people on your staff who can cover others can be a godsend when your regular sysadmins are all away (e.g., one on vacation, the other home sick), or the DBA is on vacation, etc.
I'm pretty sure that usage follows earlier usage to describe stealing a rig and cargo from a trucker, and is entirely appropriate in this case since it involves the unauthorized redirection of a transportation mechanism from one purpose to another without permission by the owner(s).
This isn't quite as stupid as it first sounds.
.jar files are basically .zip files with a few mandatory fields, and it's not hard to imagine uses for a classloader that can handle encrypted entries. Whether they're really that useful is another thing, but PHBs aren't known for understanding the more subtle aspects of data security.
Java
The existing encryption is rather weak, but it's good enough for "proof of concept" work and is widely implemented. (Not that it matters with your own classloader, of course, but much of the value of this approach is that you can use WinZip or the like to figure out why things are broken, if you know the encryption password.)
That was bullshit, but like most things people learn in Third Grade it is absolutely impossible to convince people that they're mistaken.
Under the model Uniform Commercial Code a signature is ANY mark indicating assent. It can be your legal name in cursive. It can be your nickname in block letters.
It can even be the rest of your "unsigned" check, one you forgot to sign... or "forgot" to sign because you were running low on cash and thought this would give you a week of breathing room. Courts have ruled that the other handwriting legally constituted a signature.
But hey, what do I know? I only "signed" checks with a (somewhat distinctive) printed form of my usename for a number of years. "Usenames" are "nicknames" on steroids - I had an alias on my checks, credit cards, etc. This is a situation where you're forced to learn the law very well - you occasionally run into a legal scholar working a second job as night manager at the store... at least they seem to think they're experts in the law. I eventually changed my name legally because I realized that few of my friends would recognize my name if I were in an accident and the police called with my legal name.
This looks like as good a place as any to make a really braindead observation that everyone else seems to have missed.
"Cursive" handwriting is not the only form of "joined up" handwriting. 100 years ago everyone learned a different type of script, and I had to struggle to understand anything written by my late grandmother. Once educators get a clue, our current cursive will be just as alien to our kids.
The key issue with "hand printing" is that young children are taught to write letters with only downstrokes. They don't have the fine motor control for making well-controlled motions in both directions, and pushing kids into "cursive" too soon will result in a lifetime of poor penmanship.
But there's absolutely no reason why teens and adults can't do "hand printing" in both directions. That means an "A" is two strokes, not three. More importantly, you can start a lot of letters with either an up or downstroke - "B," "n," "m," "r," etc. You'll lose the small serifs, but the letters are still easily recognized.
It doesn't take long for letters to flow together - they're still "printed," but the pen either never leaves the paper or is briefly lifted just off the surface. With practice you can print just as fast as another person can write cursively... and it's a hell of a lot easier to mix in equations, foreign and mathematical symbols, chemical notations, etc.
If the mirror is cracked, an attacker could upload a new MD5 with the compromised tarball. And you can't trust vendor-supplied MD5 sums when you're dealing with new versions downloaded for bug fixes or critical features.
That's why you're now seeing PGP-signed checksums, but again there's the bootstrapping problem. But in this case you can have a fair amount of confidence that vendor-provided keys and the like are valid.
This isn't the forum for a discussion of these points in depth - I added the editorial comments to show how many people interpret each item, not as something that everyone would immediately agree with.
That said, I'll briefly respond to your points.
Family values: you're right that nobody but a few extremists are trying to abolish divorce. But this item had three clauses - and there's no doubt that this administration is firmly anti-abortion and anti-homosexuals. It also paints itself as protectors of the American family whenever possible.
Anti-intellectualism: I am well aware of our history of anti-intellectualism, but what we're seeing today - especially in the "favored media outlets" that act where the administration itself can't - is far worse than I've seen in my lifetime. I know several people who compare it to the 1950s. At least it hasn't, yet, reached the levels of the KKK-dominated politics in the 1930s when the University of Colorado had all state funding cut off when it refused to teach the intrinsic superiority of the Caucasian race over all others.
Controlled media: I don't care so much about what's being said as the ability of people to be heard. With media consolidation, unpopular voices will find it impossible to be heard. As for this administration - it is notorious in some circles for cutting off access to reporters who don't play ball. No administration has been happy with these reporters, but none have gone to the same extent to cut them off.
Elections: elections are not exercises in accounting to determine which jar has the most beans, they are political events where the most important element is their credibility in expressing the will of the people. If too many people have serious doubts about the process, whether it be butterfly ballots, disenfrancised minority voters who were wrongly dropped from the voting rolls, or undisclosed last-second revisions to the machine's software then the numbers won't matter.
You may find it offensive, but there's not much doubt that this administration is acting in a way consistent with fascist states. Read Hitler's speech after Krystalnacht and compare it to Bush & Ashcroft today - the country is threatened by religious terrorists outside our borders, we must surrender rights to ensure domestic safety, etc.
This doesn't mean all Republicans are closet fascists, much less closet Nazi fascists, and I agree that you should find the description offensive.
At the same time, you can't skirt the fact that "fascism" is a technical term of art to describe certain forms of government... and that it has also been described as "corporatism" since the milder forms view the primary role of government as supporting business interests. There is absolutely no doubt that our country has become corporatist, and it increasingly satifies all of the characteristics of fully fascist states.
If you don't like this - then speak up! I, and many others, do not believe that the Republican Party as a whole is fascist... but that it has become dominated by a fringe element that is. If you don't like what is being done in your name, take back your party!
One final note. You said you were offended by the "Nazi" reference. How would you feel if you served with honor in Vietnam, you earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for your actions in Vietnam, and some punk who had family connections to "serve" stateside in the National Guard but who was grounded for years because he couldn't be bothered to get a flight physical called you a "coward" for speaking against a mad rush into war?
I wish the comments made to John Kerry were an exception, but they aren't. Him, Sen. Zeller of Georgia,... the list goes on and on.
There's another reason for this approach, even in an era when the military issues arms to all soldiers.
I was in the Boy Scouts in the early 1970s - I remember leaving for our weekly meetings as Walter Cronkite recited the latest DoD lies on enemy body counts, etc.
My scout master was a retired Marine Drill Instructor. We never trained with arms, but we did practice close quarter drills, followed paramilitary practices on camping trips, etc. We were too young to complain, but we also knew that few troops have Eagle scouts (including myself, eventually) as a full quarter of their active troops, or routinely walk all over all other troops in local competitions.
The reason I mentioned this is that years later I learned that the military cut back on the amount of time spent in basic training in order to get more troops to the field in Vietnam sooner. My Scout Master undoubtably knew this, and knew that he was sending kids to their death because some assholes in the Pentagon decided that a few extra weeks of training wouldn't make any difference in the field.
Sergeant Berhow knew this, and after he left the service he spent much of his spare time giving hundreds of local kids the early training that could save their lives. Probably literally - I'm sure many of the boys he trained served in Vietnam.
So what does this have to do with private possession of guns? Easy - I own a Beretta 9mm precisely because it is the standard sidearm in the military, and if I though there was any change that I would be called to duty I would not hesitate to pick up an AR-15 as well. Not because I'm going into combat with my personal weapons, but because it will give me a chance to learn these tools.
This really shouldn't be surprising - I have this attitude <i>everywhere</i>. For a while I thought it was common to all geeks, but it's not. I now believe it all comes back to a certain former Marine DI, one who taught me you can never be too prepared when lives are at risk.
If you accept the premise of the article, I don't think there's any doubt that we're close to fascism today. It's still early and we could reverse course in less than 18 months. But I think there's little doubt that history will observe that the US came close to losing WW-II 60 years after the fact.
I'm also sure that many of these people have no idea that they're fascist. Hitler was not Satan incarnate, Nazi Germany did not come into existence overnight, and we must always be on guard against history repeating.
As for the OP's uninformed comments, the proper description for the countries he described as "socialist" is "authoritarian" -- and there's no doubt that this country is shifting towards authoritarism in addition to fascism.
Why would anyone follow these guidelines? It might piss off these companies, but anyone who really cares about security would realize that giving the vendors the exclusive right to disclose flaws (regardless how much time has passed or how many systems have been compromised) prevents people from making an informed decision to yank these programs until a solution is identified.
Mapped to the real world, it's like some idiotic Police Chief knowing damn good and well that several pizza delivery drivers are mugged every night when they go into a four-block area... but refusing to say anything - not even warning these drivers to avoid the area for a while - until after the muggers have been convicted, sentenced, and in prison for a month.
Even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist, the black holes created will still make atomic nuclii look huge. To it, the earth will appear to be a harder vacuum than space does to us and once it balances its electrostatic charge meals will be few and far between.
But even if it aborbs a neutron or proton + electron a million times/second - so what? How long until it weighs even a gram? As a rough estimate, I seem to recall that Avogandro's number is something over 10e23, and if a gram is maybe 10e20 particles and the consumption rate is around 10e6/s, it will take 10e14 seconds - over 3 million years. And it will still be far, far smaller than the subatomic particle it consumes.
But that assumes that the blackhole even stays in our neighborhood. Escape velocity from earth - from the solar system! - is nothing compared to the velocity of these particles before the collisions... or most of the particle sprays coming from them. There's basically no chance that the black hole would emerge at essentially no velocity.
Since you handle is "proud American," I assume you're in the US. Things are rapidly changing here, but at the moment before the cops can act there either needs to be facts in plain sight (e.g., the kiddie porn is available through a website) or they'll need to get a search warrant. To get a search warrant they'll need to have some credible reason to believe that a crime has been committed - and anonymous complaints rarely cut it.
Furthermore, an anonymous complaint makes the job of the investigator much harder. The first defense of someone caught with real kiddie porn is that they were framed. Obviously whoever made the anonymous report framed them! This may be bullshit, but the detective has to disprove it and it's a lot harder to do when the person reporting it is anonymous.
(Before somebody asks, I'm contrasting real kiddie porn with, oh, the stuff Traci Lords made when she was using fradulent IDs to prove she was over 18. In that case the first defense is that the viewer had no clue the model was 17 instead of 18 or 19.)
So while you might think you're doing something useful, you really just wasting everyone's time. They can't even track the number of anonymous reports since there's no way to ensure that a dozen anonymous reports aren't all from a single person.
You're overlooking the way the government works, especially the FTC.
First they officially notice that there's a problem. They bring it to the attention of the parties involved.
If they take the hint, the government backs off and leaves it to the parties involved to find a way to regulate themselves.
But if there's widespread indifference, the government starts to dig deeper. Is the problem that the MTA software doesn't work as advertised? Are these relays not the innocent bystanders they appear to be? Do these non-technical system owners consider this an insignificant problem?
Finally, never underestimate the value of an official letter to light a fire under unresponsive ISPs. A few years ago I was joe-jobbed and contacted about a dozen of the open relays identified in bounce messages. A few were honestly trying to secure their site, but never scanned their non-mail servers for open relays. But most were small businesses that bought a website from the Qworst sales rep and had no clue that the latter's indifference would harm their business reputation. I don't think there's much doubt that Qworst would blow off complaints from small domain owners... but customers complaining about letters from the FTC are a very different thing.
I've gotten used to the strange looks. I've even gotten used to the occasional pile of change because the clerk claims I was a penny short and they're too busy to ask me for another penny but not too busy to count out 99 cents in change.
But I've seen the same exploded head when the bill came to something like $15.37 and I hand over $21.
Yeah, the lawyers and HR would love that but anyone worth their pay would run the instant yuo suggested it.
"Intentional security breaches," for instance. Okay, no problem, none of us want intentional security breaches and since Outlook and MSIE are both responsible for a large number of breaches they're history. What, I can't do that - you're telling me that you're holding my feet to the fire yet denying me the authority to do anything about it? See ya!
Ditto all of your other suggestions. Of course any code written for the job, at work, for pay, etc., belongs to the company. It may or may not be proprietary, in the sense that I may extend GPL code to fix a problem. It's perfectly legal unless the company wants to distribute the code to others (which doesn't sound like the case here), in which case you need to say so upfront so I can budget about 10x as much resources to duplicate the prior work. But the stuff I do at home, on my own time, is mine.
I could go on, but it shouldn't be necessary. Anyone with real experience has been burned by somebody with such a list, or had a friend burned, and no matter how bad the economy is they know that unemployment is better than being the target of a lawyer trying to prove that their client's incompetence is really your fault.
... and about 15 Karma points once the moderators are done with you.
've never heard this claim from anyone but Eric Raymond, and wannabe hackers having read too much in that "dictionary" of his.
I remember the white hat definition of "hacker" being in use - exclusively at my university - 20 years ago. I remember it because it was a joke that I was the resident hacker on the grad CS computers even though I wasn't a grad CS student. (I was a grad math student nominally playing around with symbolic math.)
The black hat definition was also in use at the time, but the correct sense was normally clear in context even if we sometimes had the same effect. You were also much more likely to see the white hat definition in an academic environment, the black hat definition in a business environment. The black hat definition only began to dominate after some mainstream items appeared. The black hat definition is much easier for the average person to understand than the white hat one.
I'm a bit older - I remember watching an hour of Bugs Bunny, plus a number of other classics. Give me the Pink Panther over Garfield any day!
Was this time wasted? Probably. But it's not like I had a lot of options. When I was older and in scouts I would often be hiking on Saturdays, but at that age I was stuck in lower-middle-class suburban hell. Small back yard, no neighborhood park, parents caught up in their own crap. Maybe the Beav could grab his mitt and head out to a pickup baseball game, but that was the mythical 1950s.
(And let's be real - how many people got interested in engineering or physics because of the Road Runner & Coyote shorts?!)
If you read some of the first-hand reports discussing why they switched from Microsoft to Linux, you'll see that many are reporting that internal audits were shoing that they were spending a full 20% of their time redoing work lost when the systems crashed, repairing files corrupted in those crashses, removing viruses and other malware, etc.
That's one full day/week for every employee.
That's a full person, in a small department of 1 boss and 4 workers.
That is a huge hit, and it can be enough to make the difference between a company that survives rough times and one that goes under.
Maybe Office has more bells & whistles than some of the other tools out there, but how often do you really need them? Especially if they come with such a steep cost?
The point of these ideas isn't to hide the fact that the material is sensitive, it's to remind the legitimate user to protect it. The best safe in the world is worthless if you forget to put your valuables in it.
The ability to associate extra methods with each element means that you can eliminate many of the situations where you would normally use a switch statement.
...
E.g., let's say I want to look up the UPS shipping zone by a state enumeration. I could use:
switch(state) {
case 'AL': zone = 1; break;
case 'AK': zone = 8; break;
or I could use a "fat enumerator" (or whatever it would be called) and just use
state.getZone();
Obviously this starts to blur the distinction between beans and enumerations, especially if you allow some of these attributes to be modifiable. But in practice I've found that to actually be a benefit, not a problem, since it simplifies the process of adding enumeration values when necessary. I've run into this situation when extending an existing application, and it can be a real pain with classic enumerators.
This isn't the forum for a detailed discussion, but I actually prefer enumeration classes now over simple enumerations. The basic idea is to write a class something like:
final class Color {
String c;
private Color (String color) { c = color; }
String toString() { return c; }
static final Color RED = new Color("red");
static final Color BLUE = new Color("blue");
static final Color GREEN = new Color("green");
}
You can then treat this class like a type-safe enumeration. It doesn't have all of the nifty features that you'll see in languages like Ada, but it has the nice property of allowing you to attach whatever information you want to the enumeration class.
You can also use this approach to create self-initializing classes, e.g., a list of states (including full name, postal abbreviations, shipping zone, etc.) from a database. You can access the enumerated values through a collection class, a "lookup" method, or even reflection.
It sounds like C# uses a lot of stuff from Ada (and I'm sure countless other languages), but forgot to honor prior work. :-)
Seriously, the "C# copied from Java/Java copied from C#" argument misses the point. There's a lot of prior work, and finding the right balance between usability and clutter is difficult. As much as I loved writing stuff like "for (value'range) do..." I would rather see a conservative approach to features since it's always easier to add stuff than remove it.