And I thought nobody would be so techno-centric that they would miss the point.... (Yes, I did debate making this explicit but thought it would just confuse most people.)
I was referring to somebody shoulder surfing, not somebody sneaking around in/dev/kmem. If you're in a commercial for a 'privacy filter' it could even be somebody at the next table or beside you on a flight. Literally anyone able to read the words could memorize them and share them with others even if you never put the words on disk or paper.
Before people snicker too loudly, remember that copyright law (as I recall) applies to any document once it hits tangible media... and RAM is considered tangible. It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system. It can be read by anyone sent the message via IM. Are you prepared to argue that the author has no rights until she hits 'print' or 'save'?
In that context, demanding the RAM still sounds technically naive but not nearly as silly.
(I haven't RTFA, but the comments suggesting that the judge was merely saying that one party can't disable logging and then claim that the information is unavailable is unacceptable. They can log so they must log, and then turn the logs over to the other party.)
Everyone is overlooking the rather large elephant in the room. What is time, anyway?
It's a far deeper question than most people realize. Unlike the other dimensions, we can't step back and look at a temporal span from outside. Okay, we don't step out of the three dimensions, but we can step away from a meter stick and look at it from different angles. We aren't ants constrained to always remain on that meter stick. We aren't droplets of water always dripping down the stick, never climbing back up it.
I think a NIST scientist (running the atomic clocks behind US civil time) put it best. The clocks don't measure time, they -define- time within the US. Who knows what really happens during any nanosecond period. We can never know since we occupy the same 'time', whatever that is, as the clock, so we could never know if the Flying Spaghetti Monster it the giant snooze button in the sky for awhile.
Does this mean I'm eager to drop time's arrow and relativity? No, but it means that I'm open to the possibility that things are a lot grayer at the quantum level.
IANAL, but I read one discussing the "I plead the Fifth" approach a while back.
In a nutshell, he said that case law says that the Fifth only applies to statements that directly incriminate you, e.g., asking about your whereabouts on the night of the 17th. Everything else is fair game unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. You can be forced to turn over all papers, and even to give blood or saliva samples, but not to undergo surgery to remove a bullet that may tie you to the scene of the crime.
You might think that encrypted disks are too new for case law, but remember that the situation is analogous to having a safe-deposit box. They are fair game with a proper search warrant and refusing to cooperate is itself a criminal act.
Personally, I disagree to an extent since I think an individuals thoughts should be protected whether they remain unsaid or written in a private journal, but the courts have held that anything written down (on paper or on disk) is not covered by the Fifth.
You're right, nobody has a right to a MySpace account and it's not provided or vetted by the government.
But.
There's an alarming trend in this country to "outsource" legitimate government functions and then deny lawful access under the color of claiming "it's just a private company". Courts will often rule against them -- if it's done on behalf of the government then it's subject to the same restrictions as if it were done by the government itself -- but that takes time and money to pursue. And it's definitely not a given -- it's clear that some government agencies are collecting massive dossiers on law-abiding citizens via private company data aggregators specifically because they can't do it themselves.
So nobody has a right to a myspace account. But what about companies doing outsourced government work? What about companies that have become critical parts of the public space, e.g., google. I find it hard to say that a private company will always be clear of any legitimate oversight guaranteeing due process.
P.S., I don't know the specifics in this case, but MySpace must still respect laws such as slander and libel. Ideally they will handle these issues quietly, but it's not hard to imagine some ill-informed do-gooder trying to contact all of a person's 'friends' and letting them know that the person 'is' a sexual offender. IMHO that definitely crosses the line even if the person isn't identified by name on their page. (You probably still have pictures, area of residence, etc.)
(or at least I think it's them.) I work late on my home system, planning to come back to the task first thing the next morning. Only it's gone because Windows has received a Very Important Update and rather than wait for me to say 'reboot', it apparently decided that it's okay to proceed on its own.
It's not like anyone ever walks away from their system without saving everything first.
(Okay, maybe people don't in the Windows world. But I've used Linux exclusively for many years and have only had the WinXP system for a few months. Yet this has already happened at least three times.)
P.S., 1% doesn't sound like much. Think of it as the power required by the homes and businesses in a city of 3 million people. A city the size of Denver or Seattle, perhaps. All wasted on blinky lights.
There's probably a connection with how integrated the technology is into our lives. You want them when they're new and unfamiliar, and after a while you curse the lack of darkness.
At least there's a smidgeon of hope. Appliances used to include LED lights to appear "modern", but it's a real PITA when you have a clock on your stove, microwave oven, vcr, set-top box, and who knows what else all visible at the same time (or at most by only taking a few steps). Now they either gone (set-top boxes, DVD players) or optional (microwave). Too bad my stove still thinks I need a really bright nightlight in the kitchen.
Maybe routers (which seem to be the worst offenders) will take the hint. We might know how to read the indicators, but very few broadband customers know or care. They'll just call customer support, and customer support will just tell them to make sure the cables are connected and cycle the power. A single tri-color LED should work for that and be a lot less annoying. (Power? Upstream connection present but disabled? Upstream connection enabled?) Let people connect to an embedded webserver if they need more information.
P.S., I agree that it would be best to turn the devices off. I don't need my broadband connection and wireless router running all night even if I leave my computers up. (Perhaps especially since I leave my computers up.) But there are no power switches any more -- even "off" is usually pulling power. A lot of power -- I seem to recall reading that a full 1% of the US power grid is used by devices that have been "turned off". Even the powerstrip you use as a power switch will have its own indicator light.
According to a recent pop quiz by my girlfriend, the type who named her cat 'Tiberius' for some bizarre reason, that's the proper response to "live long and prosper." They go in a pair.
I agree that 99% of the "I'm a sysadmin 'cause I run linux at home" crowd have gross delusions of competency.
But that final 1%....
The bottom line is somebody with a bit of skill and motivation can learn things at home that they could never dream of at work, precisely because nobody gives a damn if the network is down for a week. I would be laughed out of the office if I suggested a pilot project on the main network with Kerberos authentication and applications, or switching apps to use LDAP authentication, or running a VPN on the internal network as a precaution against internal compromise. But I've done all of them at home and learned a lot of the pros and cons. It's not the same as anyone who's used these tools at work, but there are a lot of well-experienced sysadmins with even less experience out there. And even the work-seasoned sysadmins might have only used one or two tools instead of trying every server supported by their distro.
Hopefully a lawyer can provide a complete answer, but when it's come up locally (Boulder) I understood it to be that EVERYONE has police powers in limited circumstances. More precisely, everyone has police powers but sworn LEOs have a few additional powers, e.g., the right to arrest somebody even if they didn't personally witness the alleged criminal act. The classic example is probably detaining a thief. You can't hold him indefinitely (false imprisonment) and you can't hold him without good cause (false arrest), but if you found somebody sneaking around your place at 2 am you're entitled to hold him at gunpoint until the police arrive to take him into custody.
(In Colorado and many other states your rights go far beyond that. Residents can (and have) used lethal force against intruders, and the way the law is written the DA has to prove that you knew that the intruder meant you no harm, not the other way around.)
As I recall the newspaper article many years ago, if you're a bouncer at the bar and you get a fake ID you're not only authorized to seize it(*), you're authorized to detain that person until the police arrive to make an arrest. Nobody wants the hassle so the kids are told to get lost, but if a moron pushes it the bar can lock them up in a storage room until the cops can swing by... and the cops will be ticked off enough that the guy's spending the rest of the weekend in jail until arraignment.
(*) it should go without saying that the fake ids are being held for the police. But it's such a low priority (unless you're dealing with a moron) that they may only pick them up once a year.
(P.S., the newspaper article in question was in the autonomous campus newspaper and clearly a police-sanctioned warning to the incoming students.)
The schools weren't "inviting" the kids in, they're required to open their arms to students unless the school district can demonstrate a compelling reason why the student's right to a free public education must be denied.
The students aren't "choosing" to go to school because they think it's a bunch of fun, they're compelled to go to school (public, private, or home) until the age when they can legally drop out.
Many times the students aren't on the computers because they're having fun, they're on them because of assigned tasks by students. These are often tasks that can't be performed at home, due to either specialized educational software or because the kids simply don't have computers at their home.
Am I defending the students? No.
Am I blaming the schools for overreaching? Damn straight! Students shouldn't scribble in their textbooks or dog-ear books from the library, but you never hear about students getting expelled because they were the last person to check out a book with dog-eared pages. But if they do something equally innoculous on the computer they are getting expelled.
The kid setting up drug deals online shouldn't be expelled because he's using the computer for an unauthorized purpose, he should be expelled because he's dealing drugs.
The kid checking his myspace page via an illicit proxy shouldn't be expelled for using that proxy, at most he should get detention beside the person who was talking on a cellphone during class.
That's different since the physicists knew what black-body radiation looked like and knew that their theory gave them non-physical solutions involving (infinite?) energy flux at extremely short wavelengths. Nobody thought reality was going to suddenly shift and everyone goes *poof* in a burst of hard X-rays.
Bill Maher had a good rant on this a few weeks ago. (I saw it on salon.com, if you don't have HBO.) Basically the characterization of opponents as "New York|East Coast|West Coast|Jewish|whatever elites" as out of touch with the "common man" has morphed into a general celebration of ignorance and incompetence and vilification of education and skill. N.B., I'm not saying the "non-elites" are ignorant or incompetent! Far from it! But the "I don't know that either, and I don't care!" routine went too far.
We've now reached the obscene nadir where people who have been proved wrong on every. single. thing. they said about Iraq are the considered (by everyone inside the beltway) to be the only ones with the gravitis to get us out of the cluster**** they got us into, while the people who have been proven right are flyweights who don't understand how things work in the real world.
Others have said that the origin may rest with the lazy reporters being manipulated by people exploiting their desire to present a "balanced" view, instead of critically analyzing the information and presenting it to the readers/viewers. Now most seem to think it's what they're supposed to do, so they have to find "balance" instead of admitting the obvious fact that Bush was way out of his league and shouldn't be president of the local school board, much less the US.
(P.S., the network that 'presents the fact and lets you decide'? A few months ago the results of an interesting survey hit the blogs. IIRC, 84% of registered Republicans voted for Bush in 2004. (Among those who voted, etc.) Among Fox viewers, that statistic hit 89%! It was the only group more likely to vote for Bush than registered Republicans! Earlier surveys showed Fox-only viewers were still far more uninformed about basic facts, e.g., whether there was any connection between ObL and Saddam Hussein or whether WMD were found in Iraq, than any other group. This was -after- Bush admitted these facts! Ignore what the critics say -- how 'balanced' could that network be with these results?)
Damn it, this is why the republicans are driving this country into the ground!
The Secretary of State's office is NOT a partisan position. The Secretary swears to protect and defend the constitution (or whatever the equivalent is for Ohio state positions), not to protect the elephant. There should be a clear and unambiguous wall between the office holder's official actions and individual partisan actions, and should never, under any circumstances, use official resources for partisan purposes. When it's inevitable (the classic example being the president flying to events during the election season), the office holder is required to provide appropriate compensation for this use. E.g., equivalent first-class airfare for everyone on AF1, IIRC.
With most secretaries of state, I would agree with you that it's probably nothing more than temporary hosting during a period of high use.
But the outgoing Secretary of State, Blackwell (iirc), was extraordinarily partisan in his official acts. He's the reason why Ohio is usually the center of stolen election allegations. Given his amply documented bad behavior in the past, e.g., attempting to have his gubernatoral opponent disqualified on bogus grounds shortly before the election, a rational person would have no choice but to assume the worst and require proof that it truly was an innocent and unbiased decision.
Even that is generous. If you want to use a database as a simple store (and if they've fixed the tendency to hiccup and corrupt the database), MySQL may be acceptable.
If you want a DATABASE it's not even on the table, no pun intended. The whole point of a RDBMS is that it isn't a simple store, it's a mechanism for ensuring that your collection of data is always in a sane state even if you've brought in some clueless interns for the summer or you have a disgruntled employee. Or even if you just have two developers (or one developer with a poor memory).
ACID and referential integrity are two items that are absolute requirements. Calling something without these features a 'relational database' puts you in the same pointy-hair territory as Dilbert's boss saying that he heard the 'mauve' databases were best.
Attribute constraints, triggers and stored procedures aren't as necessary, but they're still extremely powerful ways of ensuring the sanity of your data. Use a trigger to update a 'updated_on' field, don't just trust the developer to always update it. Use an attribute constraint to ensure that you color field is always 'R', 'G' or 'B' (or just use referential integrity to point to a color table).
Finally, to address a question asked elsewhere stored procedures are extremely powerful security tools. By now everyone should know that using string concatenation to prepare queries is a Very Bad Idea. A potentially "don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out" Bad Idea. Prepared statements are better, but how can you enforce it?
Stored procedures give you an alternative. Drop INSERT and UPDATE rights and force everything to go through a corresponding stored procedure. It's a little more work but it should eliminate any risk of SQL exploits. (It's not a 100% guarantee since you can't eliminate the risk that the database itself can be compromised by carefully selected parameters.)
As others have pointed out, languages don't really matter, esp. after you've learned more than siblings (C and C++, C++ and Java, you get the idea).
Standard libraries and the correct way to 'think' in each language, e.g., when to use anonymous inner classes instead of standalone classes in java, that's where you can start writing real applications that won't make other maintainers winch... and that takes time. Minimum 6 months so you don't trip on your own feet, and you may not really know how to use the language and standard libraries well for several years.
How to get from here to there? Look for 'cookbooks' and the discussion forums that seem to have good reputations. (For instance, 'javaranch' for java.) Look at lots of sample code, try different things. Unfortunately a lot of people have found one thing that solved a relatively simple problem and now try to apply it everywhere, and they're the most vocal in knowing THE way to program in that language.
The US would just be the start. Some huge fraction of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border so she would be in a world of hurt as well. Europe wouldn't get the same ash burden, but it would still get hit by plunging temperatures and acidic rain.
I'm not sure what 'overdue' means. This isn't a stable system like the periodic ice ages over the last few million years. The earth's crust has been moving over that hot spot and some experts think that the crust is thicker than during the previous eruptions and it may be enough to cork it. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but we can't simply look at three prior eruptions and make any predictions other than "we should keep an eye on this."
Finally, addressing another followup, of course the -continent- will be unscathed. You can't say the same thing about the human population or the United States as a political entity. All political entities eventually die, often due to natural disasters or a weakened military due to them.
The Linksys consumer-level network storage controller, NSLU2, is embedded linux + samba. This box looks like a Windows shared drive and has to interoperate with different flavors of windows without configuration. (The web interface just allows you to create and name volumes, add users, etc.)
It's weird to compare a $100 box with enterprise-scale problems, but embedded software has to be 100% reliable since you can't issue patches or administer the box later if there's a problem.
(BTW the box is also linux friendly, both flashed applications and booting to a HD-based Debian system. I have one at home.)
Certifications usually show breadth of knowledge, at least in my experience with the Sun Java and J2EE certifications. You can learn stuff on your own or on the job, but that tends to be much more focused than you might realize. Certifications force you to broaden your knowledge base.
That's why even "rote memorization" can be very important. Who is faster, the experienced code jockey who can whip out a set of classes within a few days, or the noob who knows that the problem has already been solved in a standard library? (As an aside, this is why I laugh at the "learn X in 7 days!" mindset. Learning a language is trivial. Learning the standard libraries -- and how to properly use them! -- will take at least 6 months, and several times that to learn the common third-party libraries.)
Would I hire anyone on the basis of certifications alone? Of course not. But I would probably go with a slightly less experienced person with certification than a slightly more experienced person without certification, all other things being equal.
The job of the accounting department (like any end user) is to write the specification. "We need GL, A/P, A/R, payroll, federal and state taxes, etc.", with additional constraints as required. Must support million+ records. Must support multiple concurrent users. All of the fun domain stuff.
And that's it. If they say "we need package XYZ", they're as off-base as a technical person saying that they must us the Simpson-Barr deprecation schedule for domestic exotic livestock.
The tech people must consult with the accounting department, of course, since both groups need to keep training and maintenance costs in mind, but the final word has to be the CIO/IT department since they understand the cost of integrating the application into their existing shop. The cost of the software itself is usually trivial compare to the human costs and there could be a 100% markup on one package over a nearly identical one if one requires staff obtain and manage hardware outside of their usual expertise.
You're assuming that all universes have the same amount of ordering.
There's (at least) two other possibilities. First, it's totally random and we only noticed a well-ordered start since you only get observers if the universe starts out well-ordered.
Second, there could be subtle deviation from the parent universe and our universe is one in a series that's been getting more ordered.
For all we know there could be a selection effect where well-ordered universes last longer and produce more child universes than less-ordered universes. Eventually most universes are well-ordered.
I live in Boulder, on a fairly busy street where there's a ped crosswalk maybe 100ft from the major road. The crosswalk is shielded by trees or buildings, so drivers can see and stop for pedestrians and runners. And if you forget, there's large signs that remind you that pedestrians have right of way.
Unfortunately there are also idiot who think that cyclists have right of way (they don't, in Colorado bicycles are considered bicycles and bike paths considered tertiary roads so they must always yield at such intersections), and that in any case drivers have x-ray vision that can see through buildings and the heavy tree growth in the adjacent creek. I've had several near misses with cyclists going far too fast for any driver to see, and I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a major injury or even death.
Some people have begun stopping every single time and checking the path, but where do you stop that madness? I've had more near-misses from cars blowing into traffic from shopping center parking lots. Should we stop in traffic until we're sure nobody is going to break that law as well?
P.S., my townhouse is adjacent to one of these paths and I've seen foot traffic raise from an occasional pedestrian or cyclist to seeing at least one person whenever I go out on my deck. Is it any wonder the city plows those paths more frequently than the nearby feeder streets?
You're right that the pedophile rings that have been caught have usually been technologically challenged. We have no idea what the guys who haven't been caught are doing.
This is normally a bullshit argument since we could use it to make literally any claim, but this is a unique situation since some of the malware out there is quite sophisticated (e.g., using private digital certificates on control channels) and the idea of a combination VPN/P2P network to host illegal material is fairly obvious to anyone with a technical background. Sufficiently motivated people (e.g., people facing decades in prison) will make the effort to contact the malware producers who can provide secure channels.
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And I thought nobody would be so techno-centric that they would miss the point.... (Yes, I did debate making this explicit but thought it would just confuse most people.)
/dev/kmem. If you're in a commercial for a 'privacy filter' it could even be somebody at the next table or beside you on a flight. Literally anyone able to read the words could memorize them and share them with others even if you never put the words on disk or paper.
I was referring to somebody shoulder surfing, not somebody sneaking around in
Before people snicker too loudly, remember that copyright law (as I recall) applies to any document once it hits tangible media... and RAM is considered tangible. It goes away when the power goes out, but it can be read -- and memorized -- by anyone on that system. It can be read by anyone sent the message via IM. Are you prepared to argue that the author has no rights until she hits 'print' or 'save'?
In that context, demanding the RAM still sounds technically naive but not nearly as silly.
(I haven't RTFA, but the comments suggesting that the judge was merely saying that one party can't disable logging and then claim that the information is unavailable is unacceptable. They can log so they must log, and then turn the logs over to the other party.)
Everyone is overlooking the rather large elephant in the room. What is time, anyway?
It's a far deeper question than most people realize. Unlike the other dimensions, we can't step back and look at a temporal span from outside. Okay, we don't step out of the three dimensions, but we can step away from a meter stick and look at it from different angles. We aren't ants constrained to always remain on that meter stick. We aren't droplets of water always dripping down the stick, never climbing back up it.
I think a NIST scientist (running the atomic clocks behind US civil time) put it best. The clocks don't measure time, they -define- time within the US. Who knows what really happens during any nanosecond period. We can never know since we occupy the same 'time', whatever that is, as the clock, so we could never know if the Flying Spaghetti Monster it the giant snooze button in the sky for awhile.
Does this mean I'm eager to drop time's arrow and relativity? No, but it means that I'm open to the possibility that things are a lot grayer at the quantum level.
IANAL, but I read one discussing the "I plead the Fifth" approach a while back.
In a nutshell, he said that case law says that the Fifth only applies to statements that directly incriminate you, e.g., asking about your whereabouts on the night of the 17th. Everything else is fair game unless there's a compelling reason otherwise. You can be forced to turn over all papers, and even to give blood or saliva samples, but not to undergo surgery to remove a bullet that may tie you to the scene of the crime.
You might think that encrypted disks are too new for case law, but remember that the situation is analogous to having a safe-deposit box. They are fair game with a proper search warrant and refusing to cooperate is itself a criminal act.
Personally, I disagree to an extent since I think an individuals thoughts should be protected whether they remain unsaid or written in a private journal, but the courts have held that anything written down (on paper or on disk) is not covered by the Fifth.
You're right, nobody has a right to a MySpace account and it's not provided or vetted by the government.
But.
There's an alarming trend in this country to "outsource" legitimate government functions and then deny lawful access under the color of claiming "it's just a private company". Courts will often rule against them -- if it's done on behalf of the government then it's subject to the same restrictions as if it were done by the government itself -- but that takes time and money to pursue. And it's definitely not a given -- it's clear that some government agencies are collecting massive dossiers on law-abiding citizens via private company data aggregators specifically because they can't do it themselves.
So nobody has a right to a myspace account. But what about companies doing outsourced government work? What about companies that have become critical parts of the public space, e.g., google. I find it hard to say that a private company will always be clear of any legitimate oversight guaranteeing due process.
P.S., I don't know the specifics in this case, but MySpace must still respect laws such as slander and libel. Ideally they will handle these issues quietly, but it's not hard to imagine some ill-informed do-gooder trying to contact all of a person's 'friends' and letting them know that the person 'is' a sexual offender. IMHO that definitely crosses the line even if the person isn't identified by name on their page. (You probably still have pictures, area of residence, etc.)
(or at least I think it's them.) I work late on my home system, planning to come back to the task first thing the next morning. Only it's gone because Windows has received a Very Important Update and rather than wait for me to say 'reboot', it apparently decided that it's okay to proceed on its own.
It's not like anyone ever walks away from their system without saving everything first.
(Okay, maybe people don't in the Windows world. But I've used Linux exclusively for many years and have only had the WinXP system for a few months. Yet this has already happened at least three times.)
P.S., 1% doesn't sound like much. Think of it as the power required by the homes and businesses in a city of 3 million people. A city the size of Denver or Seattle, perhaps. All wasted on blinky lights.
There's probably a connection with how integrated the technology is into our lives. You want them when they're new and unfamiliar, and after a while you curse the lack of darkness.
At least there's a smidgeon of hope. Appliances used to include LED lights to appear "modern", but it's a real PITA when you have a clock on your stove, microwave oven, vcr, set-top box, and who knows what else all visible at the same time (or at most by only taking a few steps). Now they either gone (set-top boxes, DVD players) or optional (microwave). Too bad my stove still thinks I need a really bright nightlight in the kitchen.
Maybe routers (which seem to be the worst offenders) will take the hint. We might know how to read the indicators, but very few broadband customers know or care. They'll just call customer support, and customer support will just tell them to make sure the cables are connected and cycle the power. A single tri-color LED should work for that and be a lot less annoying. (Power? Upstream connection present but disabled? Upstream connection enabled?) Let people connect to an embedded webserver if they need more information.
P.S., I agree that it would be best to turn the devices off. I don't need my broadband connection and wireless router running all night even if I leave my computers up. (Perhaps especially since I leave my computers up.) But there are no power switches any more -- even "off" is usually pulling power. A lot of power -- I seem to recall reading that a full 1% of the US power grid is used by devices that have been "turned off". Even the powerstrip you use as a power switch will have its own indicator light.
According to a recent pop quiz by my girlfriend, the type who named her cat 'Tiberius' for some bizarre reason, that's the proper response to "live long and prosper." They go in a pair.
I agree that 99% of the "I'm a sysadmin 'cause I run linux at home" crowd have gross delusions of competency.
But that final 1%....
The bottom line is somebody with a bit of skill and motivation can learn things at home that they could never dream of at work, precisely because nobody gives a damn if the network is down for a week. I would be laughed out of the office if I suggested a pilot project on the main network with Kerberos authentication and applications, or switching apps to use LDAP authentication, or running a VPN on the internal network as a precaution against internal compromise. But I've done all of them at home and learned a lot of the pros and cons. It's not the same as anyone who's used these tools at work, but there are a lot of well-experienced sysadmins with even less experience out there. And even the work-seasoned sysadmins might have only used one or two tools instead of trying every server supported by their distro.
Hopefully a lawyer can provide a complete answer, but when it's come up locally (Boulder) I understood it to be that EVERYONE has police powers in limited circumstances. More precisely, everyone has police powers but sworn LEOs have a few additional powers, e.g., the right to arrest somebody even if they didn't personally witness the alleged criminal act. The classic example is probably detaining a thief. You can't hold him indefinitely (false imprisonment) and you can't hold him without good cause (false arrest), but if you found somebody sneaking around your place at 2 am you're entitled to hold him at gunpoint until the police arrive to take him into custody.
(In Colorado and many other states your rights go far beyond that. Residents can (and have) used lethal force against intruders, and the way the law is written the DA has to prove that you knew that the intruder meant you no harm, not the other way around.)
As I recall the newspaper article many years ago, if you're a bouncer at the bar and you get a fake ID you're not only authorized to seize it(*), you're authorized to detain that person until the police arrive to make an arrest. Nobody wants the hassle so the kids are told to get lost, but if a moron pushes it the bar can lock them up in a storage room until the cops can swing by... and the cops will be ticked off enough that the guy's spending the rest of the weekend in jail until arraignment.
(*) it should go without saying that the fake ids are being held for the police. But it's such a low priority (unless you're dealing with a moron) that they may only pick them up once a year.
(P.S., the newspaper article in question was in the autonomous campus newspaper and clearly a police-sanctioned warning to the incoming students.)
That's a totally bogus analogy.
The schools weren't "inviting" the kids in, they're required to open their arms to students unless the school district can demonstrate a compelling reason why the student's right to a free public education must be denied.
The students aren't "choosing" to go to school because they think it's a bunch of fun, they're compelled to go to school (public, private, or home) until the age when they can legally drop out.
Many times the students aren't on the computers because they're having fun, they're on them because of assigned tasks by students. These are often tasks that can't be performed at home, due to either specialized educational software or because the kids simply don't have computers at their home.
Am I defending the students? No.
Am I blaming the schools for overreaching? Damn straight! Students shouldn't scribble in their textbooks or dog-ear books from the library, but you never hear about students getting expelled because they were the last person to check out a book with dog-eared pages. But if they do something equally innoculous on the computer they are getting expelled.
The kid setting up drug deals online shouldn't be expelled because he's using the computer for an unauthorized purpose, he should be expelled because he's dealing drugs.
The kid checking his myspace page via an illicit proxy shouldn't be expelled for using that proxy, at most he should get detention beside the person who was talking on a cellphone during class.
That's different since the physicists knew what black-body radiation looked like and knew that their theory gave them non-physical solutions involving (infinite?) energy flux at extremely short wavelengths. Nobody thought reality was going to suddenly shift and everyone goes *poof* in a burst of hard X-rays.
Bill Maher had a good rant on this a few weeks ago. (I saw it on salon.com, if you don't have HBO.) Basically the characterization of opponents as "New York|East Coast|West Coast|Jewish|whatever elites" as out of touch with the "common man" has morphed into a general celebration of ignorance and incompetence and vilification of education and skill. N.B., I'm not saying the "non-elites" are ignorant or incompetent! Far from it! But the "I don't know that either, and I don't care!" routine went too far.
We've now reached the obscene nadir where people who have been proved wrong on every. single. thing. they said about Iraq are the considered (by everyone inside the beltway) to be the only ones with the gravitis to get us out of the cluster**** they got us into, while the people who have been proven right are flyweights who don't understand how things work in the real world.
Others have said that the origin may rest with the lazy reporters being manipulated by people exploiting their desire to present a "balanced" view, instead of critically analyzing the information and presenting it to the readers/viewers. Now most seem to think it's what they're supposed to do, so they have to find "balance" instead of admitting the obvious fact that Bush was way out of his league and shouldn't be president of the local school board, much less the US.
(P.S., the network that 'presents the fact and lets you decide'? A few months ago the results of an interesting survey hit the blogs. IIRC, 84% of registered Republicans voted for Bush in 2004. (Among those who voted, etc.) Among Fox viewers, that statistic hit 89%! It was the only group more likely to vote for Bush than registered Republicans! Earlier surveys showed Fox-only viewers were still far more uninformed about basic facts, e.g., whether there was any connection between ObL and Saddam Hussein or whether WMD were found in Iraq, than any other group. This was -after- Bush admitted these facts! Ignore what the critics say -- how 'balanced' could that network be with these results?)
Damn it, this is why the republicans are driving this country into the ground!
The Secretary of State's office is NOT a partisan position. The Secretary swears to protect and defend the constitution (or whatever the equivalent is for Ohio state positions), not to protect the elephant. There should be a clear and unambiguous wall between the office holder's official actions and individual partisan actions, and should never, under any circumstances, use official resources for partisan purposes. When it's inevitable (the classic example being the president flying to events during the election season), the office holder is required to provide appropriate compensation for this use. E.g., equivalent first-class airfare for everyone on AF1, IIRC.
With most secretaries of state, I would agree with you that it's probably nothing more than temporary hosting during a period of high use.
But the outgoing Secretary of State, Blackwell (iirc), was extraordinarily partisan in his official acts. He's the reason why Ohio is usually the center of stolen election allegations. Given his amply documented bad behavior in the past, e.g., attempting to have his gubernatoral opponent disqualified on bogus grounds shortly before the election, a rational person would have no choice but to assume the worst and require proof that it truly was an innocent and unbiased decision.
Even that is generous. If you want to use a database as a simple store (and if they've fixed the tendency to hiccup and corrupt the database), MySQL may be acceptable.
If you want a DATABASE it's not even on the table, no pun intended. The whole point of a RDBMS is that it isn't a simple store, it's a mechanism for ensuring that your collection of data is always in a sane state even if you've brought in some clueless interns for the summer or you have a disgruntled employee. Or even if you just have two developers (or one developer with a poor memory).
ACID and referential integrity are two items that are absolute requirements. Calling something without these features a 'relational database' puts you in the same pointy-hair territory as Dilbert's boss saying that he heard the 'mauve' databases were best.
Attribute constraints, triggers and stored procedures aren't as necessary, but they're still extremely powerful ways of ensuring the sanity of your data. Use a trigger to update a 'updated_on' field, don't just trust the developer to always update it. Use an attribute constraint to ensure that you color field is always 'R', 'G' or 'B' (or just use referential integrity to point to a color table).
Finally, to address a question asked elsewhere stored procedures are extremely powerful security tools. By now everyone should know that using string concatenation to prepare queries is a Very Bad Idea. A potentially "don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out" Bad Idea. Prepared statements are better, but how can you enforce it?
Stored procedures give you an alternative. Drop INSERT and UPDATE rights and force everything to go through a corresponding stored procedure. It's a little more work but it should eliminate any risk of SQL exploits. (It's not a 100% guarantee since you can't eliminate the risk that the database itself can be compromised by carefully selected parameters.)
I've had a virtual box on Tummy.com for several years now, iirc. It's hard to be sure since it's been so trouble-free. $25/month.
It's very Linux friendly -- it's the source of Linux Weekly News (lwn) and highly knowledgable if you have questions.
As others have pointed out, languages don't really matter, esp. after you've learned more than siblings (C and C++, C++ and Java, you get the idea).
Standard libraries and the correct way to 'think' in each language, e.g., when to use anonymous inner classes instead of standalone classes in java, that's where you can start writing real applications that won't make other maintainers winch... and that takes time. Minimum 6 months so you don't trip on your own feet, and you may not really know how to use the language and standard libraries well for several years.
How to get from here to there? Look for 'cookbooks' and the discussion forums that seem to have good reputations. (For instance, 'javaranch' for java.) Look at lots of sample code, try different things. Unfortunately a lot of people have found one thing that solved a relatively simple problem and now try to apply it everywhere, and they're the most vocal in knowing THE way to program in that language.
The US would just be the start. Some huge fraction of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border so she would be in a world of hurt as well. Europe wouldn't get the same ash burden, but it would still get hit by plunging temperatures and acidic rain.
I'm not sure what 'overdue' means. This isn't a stable system like the periodic ice ages over the last few million years. The earth's crust has been moving over that hot spot and some experts think that the crust is thicker than during the previous eruptions and it may be enough to cork it. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, but we can't simply look at three prior eruptions and make any predictions other than "we should keep an eye on this."
Finally, addressing another followup, of course the -continent- will be unscathed. You can't say the same thing about the human population or the United States as a political entity. All political entities eventually die, often due to natural disasters or a weakened military due to them.
The Linksys consumer-level network storage controller, NSLU2, is embedded linux + samba. This box looks like a Windows shared drive and has to interoperate with different flavors of windows without configuration. (The web interface just allows you to create and name volumes, add users, etc.)
It's weird to compare a $100 box with enterprise-scale problems, but embedded software has to be 100% reliable since you can't issue patches or administer the box later if there's a problem.
(BTW the box is also linux friendly, both flashed applications and booting to a HD-based Debian system. I have one at home.)
Certifications usually show breadth of knowledge, at least in my experience with the Sun Java and J2EE certifications. You can learn stuff on your own or on the job, but that tends to be much more focused than you might realize. Certifications force you to broaden your knowledge base.
That's why even "rote memorization" can be very important. Who is faster, the experienced code jockey who can whip out a set of classes within a few days, or the noob who knows that the problem has already been solved in a standard library? (As an aside, this is why I laugh at the "learn X in 7 days!" mindset. Learning a language is trivial. Learning the standard libraries -- and how to properly use them! -- will take at least 6 months, and several times that to learn the common third-party libraries.)
Would I hire anyone on the basis of certifications alone? Of course not. But I would probably go with a slightly less experienced person with certification than a slightly more experienced person without certification, all other things being equal.
The job of the accounting department (like any end user) is to write the specification. "We need GL, A/P, A/R, payroll, federal and state taxes, etc.", with additional constraints as required. Must support million+ records. Must support multiple concurrent users. All of the fun domain stuff.
And that's it. If they say "we need package XYZ", they're as off-base as a technical person saying that they must us the Simpson-Barr deprecation schedule for domestic exotic livestock.
The tech people must consult with the accounting department, of course, since both groups need to keep training and maintenance costs in mind, but the final word has to be the CIO/IT department since they understand the cost of integrating the application into their existing shop. The cost of the software itself is usually trivial compare to the human costs and there could be a 100% markup on one package over a nearly identical one if one requires staff obtain and manage hardware outside of their usual expertise.
You're assuming that all universes have the same amount of ordering.
There's (at least) two other possibilities. First, it's totally random and we only noticed a well-ordered start since you only get observers if the universe starts out well-ordered.
Second, there could be subtle deviation from the parent universe and our universe is one in a series that's been getting more ordered.
For all we know there could be a selection effect where well-ordered universes last longer and produce more child universes than less-ordered universes. Eventually most universes are well-ordered.
I live in Boulder, on a fairly busy street where there's a ped crosswalk maybe 100ft from the major road. The crosswalk is shielded by trees or buildings, so drivers can see and stop for pedestrians and runners. And if you forget, there's large signs that remind you that pedestrians have right of way.
Unfortunately there are also idiot who think that cyclists have right of way (they don't, in Colorado bicycles are considered bicycles and bike paths considered tertiary roads so they must always yield at such intersections), and that in any case drivers have x-ray vision that can see through buildings and the heavy tree growth in the adjacent creek. I've had several near misses with cyclists going far too fast for any driver to see, and I'm honestly surprised there hasn't been a major injury or even death.
Some people have begun stopping every single time and checking the path, but where do you stop that madness? I've had more near-misses from cars blowing into traffic from shopping center parking lots. Should we stop in traffic until we're sure nobody is going to break that law as well?
P.S., my townhouse is adjacent to one of these paths and I've seen foot traffic raise from an occasional pedestrian or cyclist to seeing at least one person whenever I go out on my deck. Is it any wonder the city plows those paths more frequently than the nearby feeder streets?
This is normally a bullshit argument since we could use it to make literally any claim, but this is a unique situation since some of the malware out there is quite sophisticated (e.g., using private digital certificates on control channels) and the idea of a combination VPN/P2P network to host illegal material is fairly obvious to anyone with a technical background. Sufficiently motivated people (e.g., people facing decades in prison) will make the effort to contact the malware producers who can provide secure channels.