Here's an interesting question. If you used something more massive than heavy stable gases, could you achieve greater acceleration? This is probably a poor example, but water can be polarized by sliding the hydrogen atoms and paired electrons away from the oxygen atom. This creates a charge imbalance. Could such be exploited in a similar matter, thus shooting the water out the back and creating thrust?
I can't believe some of the hogwash in Microsoft's response to the Gartner report. Here's my favorite:
The attempt to rank vendors according to their security success rate is a risky business. The aim of most virus writers is usually for their worm to achieve its biggest impact, and so will target platforms that are widely used. "Microsoft is targetted as it is so popular, rather than the system being the least secure," said Cluley.
So, I guess use of Apache must not be too widespread, eh? Now I'm not going to try to make the uneducated claim that Apache is really more secure than IIS, but for some reason there are far fewer security breaches on Apache. Maybe it's because virus writers are more supportive of Apache. Who knows? Unless something has changed in the last year, Apache still has the largest install base out there, and based on Microsoft's reasoning it should have the largest number of exploits.
I read the entire Gartner release, and I thought it was very insightful. They didn't say, "Take down your IIS servers." Instead, they carefully qualified it, suggesting that "...enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache." Note the key word investigate. Also note that they only suggest this for people hit by both viruses.
Microsoft's rebuttal also fails to properly address a serious issue: "cost of ownership." They make the wonderous claim about how fast they release patches to fix these security holes. What they missed entirely was the fact that a company can't be paying for the resources and downtime to apply a patch WEEKLY, not to mention the need for somebody to constantly watch for a security update so that it can be installed before somebody exploits it.
What Microsoft *should* have done (IMHO) is kept their mouths shut and swing some resources into either rewriting IIS or truly removing security holes, and then have a surprise release to counter Gartner's arguments.
I think your suggestions are insightful. Since nobody modded them, I'm going to copy them here and add a couple other suggestions.
Is it time for a web site ranking employer desirability? It could include detailed reports with some of the following:
Percentage of the prevailing salary that they pay for various job descriptions (i.e., managers get 105% of the prevailing wage for managers, but engineers are paid around 93%)
Summary of benefits, including how much of the benefits package is paid for by the employee.
Hiring and layoff history. Include a summary of the severance package, if any.
Any pending or recently successful lawsuits against the company by employees.
Percentage of their workforce that is contract. Percentage of contractors converted to employees annually.
Average number of hours worked for each job description. Whether or not OT is paid.
Training provided: weeks/yr and lists of courses available for various job descriptions in the previous year.
Instead of just hiring and layoff history, I'd like to see annual attrition rate along with a breakdown of the reason for attrition, IE layoff, fired, left for other employment, etc. Although it's probably impossible, it would be nice to even get detail on *why* employees left. Maybe some standard categories like "poor working conditions", "pay too low", "conflict with management", "better offer", "spouse had new job in new location." Those kinds of things.
There are plenty of job web sites out there that have some summary information, but they get their income from the companies that find employees through them. Rather than be blunt, I'll leave the logical conclusion from that fact to the readers. Instead, I'd like to see an independent web site WITH A REASONABLE SUBSCRIPTION FEE that could be used to search for such information. If the information is truly accurate, I'd certainly pay $30 or so for a six month registration while searching for the "perfect employer."
Your statements would sound like a great argument, except for the following:
Companies are much more likely to deal dirty with the employee than the other way around.
Companies can do a much better job at choosing employees that will be loyal. If you have a resume where an employee has changed jobs something like 6 times in the last 7 years, you can be fairly certain they won't be loyal. Heck, you can even require this kind of information on their application. While company summaries are available to people seeking employment, they get nowhere near the details they need.
If employees who don't fall into the above category are leaving, it's probably not just because somebody made them a better offer. Chances are, employer practices of some sort are primarily to blame.
At least within the "white collar" arena, the general practice for employees twenty years ago was to sign on with one company and try to spend their entire working life there. All of this changed a little over a decade ago. It was the employers who changed it -- not the employees. If you want to see employee loyalty again, it'll take quite a bit to build back up that trust level.
Re:There already is such an organization
on
Slashdot in Politics?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The EFF is not a lobbying group, it is a fund set up to help people whose freedoms are attacked unjustly.
Perhaps this is not an EFF focus, but EFF should consider adding this type of lobbying to their list of activities, at least with regards to stupid laws like the DMCA and such. Since they are the ones busy trying to defend people who have been violated by these laws, they are probably also the ones with the most knowledge to lobby on them. Why invent a new group?
Re:Appologies to those who may think this insensit
on
Two Handfuls Of Handhelds
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· Score: 2, Informative
But if you paid $2000 for a laptop, or $300 for a PDA, wouldn't you take care of the damn thing?
I agree with you, but also remember that any device you wear or carry around with you constantly needs to be much more rugged than most of today's devices are. The laptop needs to be more rugged than a desktop, but since it's usually in a pretty well padded case, it doesn't need to be nearly as rugged as a cell phone. People take them everywhere they go, and expect them to be able to handle a fall once in a while. The same should be true for PDAs. If they are advertised as "pocket sized" or wearable, people will take that to heart.
what mobile professionals don't need is 300Mhz of super high color whiz-bang screen saver action that can dance along to their portable MP3 collection.
Mind if I disagree a tad and take the "middle ground?"
I think you're going to see the future mobile professionals divided into two or three different camps. There are those who will pretty much use their PDA as a glorified organizer. For these people, any functionality beyond that of an Apple ][ is a complete waste. These are the "Palm Pilot" crowd and they should absolutely stay with what they have.
But with some upcoming improvements in wireless connectivity, you're really going to see a different class of users. CDPD is almost worthless, but if it's every truly available, 3G wireless promises a lot of additional features, not the least of which is being able to browse the internet. This group of users is going to want color. They will need a faster processor and more memory for some of the internet apps they will run. This same group of people will probably be "married" to their PDA like a salesperson is to their cell phone. They will probably use them in meetings for taking notes.
However, I agree with you in that a PDA should probably never have all of the features that today's notebooks have. It's just not practical. I don't see the PDA as a replacement for a notebook computer -- I see it as a mobile accessory. I also believe that *right now* people should be buying PDA's more like the Palm. Wait for the next generation of wireless to rear its head before deciding on the future device.
Hell, I'm eating with my new 'palm compatible' spoon right now!
No, no no. Didn't your parents show you? You are not supposed to eat with your spoon in the palm of your hand. That requires that you grip it with a fist. You're supposed to hold it just in the fingers with the handle resting in the groove between your index and middle finger and the thumb firmly anchoring it against the index finger.
Sorry. Couldn't resist. I know. I'll get modded down into oblivion.
Asking a 75 year old senior citizen, who is just happy to read a few web pages and send mail to his grandkids to keep up an endless stream of patches because a bunch of hackers can disrupt the net is backwards.
Oh, that's just pathetic.... You would only use the "but what about the elderly and the children" argument to drum up emotion when you have no other logical argument. To respond in kind, what about the other 75 year old senior citizens who have a clean computer and can't read web pages or send mail to their grandkids because the network is so flooded that they can't get anything through. Do you think they'll understand why this "dang new-fangled contraption ain't workin'?"
I'm not a cold-hearted person, but you've got to look at the facts. Shutting down these connections is pretty much the only way to make sure people will clean up their machines. You can't forget that the Code Red II virus, and presumably nimda as well, opens up a nice little hole that can be used to turn your machine into a Zombie. If the zombies get used, an ISP will have machines on their network attacking corporate and government computer systems. That's an absolutely *massive* liability there, especially since it can be proved that the ISP was aware of the infected machines and did pretty much nothing to eliminate the problem.
The best idea I've seen yet is the one to set up a "private" network for the infecting machines and direct them there. For those ISP's that don't want that expense, maybe offering to send them a CD with the patches and instructions in the mail for a reasonable fee would be a better alternative.
blocking port 80 generally on the other side is really not acceptable. no german provider has done anything in this direction yet AFAIK.
Do the german providers have a "no running servers" clause in their contract? Most of the providers in the US do. They don't want you running a web server. If you want to do that, feel free to pay $250 / month.
Before those of you in the US who have had broadband for a long long time start flaming me, let me say that I know such things were not originally in the contract. You guys have a good reason to be upset if they block port 80.
And since port 80 is the one normally used by an http daemon, and you're (usually) not supposed to be operating a web server over residential broadband, it was a perfectly reasonable measure.
"indian giver" (note: not related to Native Americans)
OK, so I'm nitpicking. And by the way, I'm not trying to slam you. But people should know that anytime you use the phrase "indian giver", you are referring to Native Americans whether you want to or not. The term arises from "White Man's" total lack of understanding about how the Native American system of ownership worked. They thought they were buying land with worthless beads. When they occupied the land and wouldn't let any of the "indians" on it, they assumed that the natives were going back on the bargain. What they didn't realize is that Native Americans did not feel that the land could be owned by anyone (no concept of ownership). They interpreted the beads (and other goodies) as a gesture of peace and friendship. When they were no longer allowed to use they land, it was interpreted as an act of war. Native Americans were willing to share. White Man was not.
The vast majority of the population don't notice or care about Microsoft's abuses,....
And sheep don't care about the fact that they are eventually going to be slaughtered and eaten because they just don't know it's going to happen. They're perfectly content to munch on the nice green grass of today.
Re:Mozilla Project Success; Mozilla Browser Failur
on
Mozilla Relicensing
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· Score: 1
I could not BELIEVE how fast 0.9.4 rendered pages.
I thought it was just my imagination, or improved network throughput here at work. But it sounds like the performance improvements I noticed on 0.9.4 were real. I still think there are some serious improvements to be gained on the network side of things (vs the rendering), but 0.9.4 is definitely perceptibly faster than 0.9.3.
It doesn't have to. Take a look at this page of their website. It will connect to "leading brands." In other words, LEGO. So, you buy a Mindstorm kit, and you fasten the Atollo Brokits onto it to make even cooler stuff. It looks like they can ride on LEGO's back.
Um, the false positive rate in face recognition systems is huge when you're talking about any reasonably large database.
Just how big do you expect the database to be? I don't think it would need to be as large as many suppose.
You'd have hundreds, if not thousands, of false positives at every airport every day.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but please provide me with a source for these kind of numbers. Without some backup data, I'm not ready to buy this kind of false-positive rate on a database with less than 100,000 identities.
And the problem is that even if you do have a human, the resemblance would likely be enough that a human would trust the computer unless there is some obvious reason that it is incorrect...
If the resemblance is that close, you'd have humans making errors without the help of a computer, provided that they could even remember enough faces to make it worthwhile. It's still a situation where the technology is *helpful*, but can't be relied on to make a decision. I think it would be much easier to train security to make reasonable decisions on identification based on even a few hundred "candidates" than to try to make them memorize tons of faces.
Dude, if everytime a face recognition software mistakenly (ever heard of false positives?) or correctly (how many suspected terrorists are there?
Like I said, I wasn't trying to advocate face recognition technology. I was just pointing out some issues in the parent post. But if you going to cite figures, at least make them reasonable. Of course face recognition would yield some false positives, but I would suspect that a human would be involved in the decision to lock everything down. If the face-rec system finds a potential match, it shows its results to a human, who can (hopefully) perform a better comparison and decide what to do. The advantage of the machine is that it can store and search a vastly larger database than any human. The human would then be able to do a reasonable job at identifying a suspect by comparing the database picture with the "live" picture -- even if they'd never seen any information on the suspect before.
One of the real dangers in face recognition technology lies in depending on it. If you let it make the decisions, it'll eventually let you down in a big way. Also, it would be possible for a suspect to change his/her appearance enough to fool not only the face-rec system, but also humans. In these cases, there would have to be other detection methods to rely on. (Profiling, etc).
Please, again note that I'm not advocating any of this. But if we're going to discuss the pros and cons, we have to make sure we really critique everything we think we know.
From what I read in the german news (e.g. www.spiegel.de) some of the terrorists where not suspect at all.
But at least two of them were suspected -- by the CIA. The FBI was informed, and lost track of the suspects weeks ago. Without trying to argue in favor of machine face recognition, let me point out that with the correct policies in place, it would have worked in this case. At first sign of suspected terrorists attempting to board a plane (the machine part), all flights in the country could have been grounded (the policy part) until some checking on the situation could be done.
Is face recognition needed after they are in the database? Stolen ID's can be identified. Correct ID's will identify people in that database.
Not all of those involved had stolen ID's. You can bet that they all had FAKE ID's, but who's to say that if you had their ID in the database they wouldn't have managed to get a new one since it was entered? Identifying them by facial recognition is much more effective in this case. If you have a picture of the terrorist, you can program the scanners to recognize him/her.
I'm suprised at the number of "this is good" posts. Actually, I'm glad that they've resolved this dispute, but all of this "hubub" should have never happened in the first place. When I read the some of the background articles on this, I noticed that Yodaiken was initially very surprised at the community reaction to his license. Although the article was worded mildly, it sounded to me like he was insulted not only by the FSF accusation but also by many of the comments posted on our own loving Slashdot. It was an obvious case of "oops, we goofed" that should have been handled by FSF sending a nice letter saying something like "Please notice that you have altered the GPL language to impose conditions on this license that are contrary to the goals of the GPL and FSF. Assuming that your work does not contain the efforts of others which are already licensed under the GPL, please considering removing this restriction or use a different license." Instead, a rather inflammatory press relese about violations of the GPL was sent out, and lots of comments about "Who are these people?" were posted.
Yodaiken's company is a big contributor to Linux and OSS. I believe that, as such, they are due at least a modicum of respect and consideration. If polite attempts at correcting them are ineffective, you can always turn to the more heavy-handed approach later. People need to remember that if we want to be a community, we have to act like one. There will, as a matter of course, always be disagreements. Most of them can truly be solved without too much sword rattling by merely going to lunch together or something.
No, I believe this whole thing was just rotten. It's enough of an issue to make me very cautious about using GPL on any software I may contribute. I would hate to see what would happen if I accidentally did something contrary to the goals of the FSF.
A database I use has a table with 70 million records and another with 20 million.
I didn't think that Bugzilla was comparing itself to a database. In fact, if you want to make database comparisons, you would need to compare the database that Bugzilla uses against your database.
I believe the author's point is that Bugzilla has been successfully used through a lifetime of over 100,000 bug / issue reports. This would probaby be considered ample testing to prove that the system was capable of being used in large project environments.
If you want to make a case against scalability, you will need to point out another bug tracking system that has recently tracked more issues on a single project (or group of related projects). Something other than Microsoft's bug tracking software, please.;)
Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP.;-)
On the other hand, maybe if Bugzilla doesn't work so well, it will be incentive to keep the number of bugs at a minimum. Would that be a good method of improving the code quality during the first pass?:-)
Don't ban such activity! Encourage it, and then let the Feds also participate and infiltrate the groups, as they currently do with pedophile rings.
I agree with this. After all, exchange of information over public resources between people intent on performing evil only causes a problem if you aren't aware of the information. If you aren't aware, you wouldn't know what to ban anyway. No, you should instead use the information to your own advantage. If you know what they are going to do, you can stop them in their tracks.
I agree with some of the things you said, but lets think a little deeper....
Those people calling in were probably doing so because they disagree with some of the actions the government is taking. Those that agree probably didn't bother. I understand your concern about some of the decisions around military buildup, but try to understand that now is the time to ready the nation for action if a retaliatory response is deemed necessary. If, for example, there is another attack in a couple weeks and it has become abundantly clear that retaliation will be necessary to eliminate the problem, we would be in an awfully weak position to make that retaliation. It would be better to build up for military force now, and then back down later if we decide against it.
You can take comfort in one thing. There are many different people with different opinions considering what to do and how to do it. It's unlikely that nobody in the decision group has considered some of this. And once all of the data is gathered and the arguments are completed, the final decision will probably be better than any you or I could come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
And wouldn't signing a NDA prevent them from actually telling anybody if they found a (c) violation?
Here's an interesting question. If you used something more massive than heavy stable gases, could you achieve greater acceleration? This is probably a poor example, but water can be polarized by sliding the hydrogen atoms and paired electrons away from the oxygen atom. This creates a charge imbalance. Could such be exploited in a similar matter, thus shooting the water out the back and creating thrust?
So, I guess use of Apache must not be too widespread, eh? Now I'm not going to try to make the uneducated claim that Apache is really more secure than IIS, but for some reason there are far fewer security breaches on Apache. Maybe it's because virus writers are more supportive of Apache. Who knows? Unless something has changed in the last year, Apache still has the largest install base out there, and based on Microsoft's reasoning it should have the largest number of exploits.
I read the entire Gartner release, and I thought it was very insightful. They didn't say, "Take down your IIS servers." Instead, they carefully qualified it, suggesting that "...enterprises hit by both Code Red and Nimda immediately investigate alternatives to IIS, including moving Web applications to Web server software from other vendors, such as iPlanet and Apache." Note the key word investigate. Also note that they only suggest this for people hit by both viruses.
Microsoft's rebuttal also fails to properly address a serious issue: "cost of ownership." They make the wonderous claim about how fast they release patches to fix these security holes. What they missed entirely was the fact that a company can't be paying for the resources and downtime to apply a patch WEEKLY, not to mention the need for somebody to constantly watch for a security update so that it can be installed before somebody exploits it.
What Microsoft *should* have done (IMHO) is kept their mouths shut and swing some resources into either rewriting IIS or truly removing security holes, and then have a surprise release to counter Gartner's arguments.
There are plenty of job web sites out there that have some summary information, but they get their income from the companies that find employees through them. Rather than be blunt, I'll leave the logical conclusion from that fact to the readers. Instead, I'd like to see an independent web site WITH A REASONABLE SUBSCRIPTION FEE that could be used to search for such information. If the information is truly accurate, I'd certainly pay $30 or so for a six month registration while searching for the "perfect employer."
Perhaps this is not an EFF focus, but EFF should consider adding this type of lobbying to their list of activities, at least with regards to stupid laws like the DMCA and such. Since they are the ones busy trying to defend people who have been violated by these laws, they are probably also the ones with the most knowledge to lobby on them. Why invent a new group?
I agree with you, but also remember that any device you wear or carry around with you constantly needs to be much more rugged than most of today's devices are. The laptop needs to be more rugged than a desktop, but since it's usually in a pretty well padded case, it doesn't need to be nearly as rugged as a cell phone. People take them everywhere they go, and expect them to be able to handle a fall once in a while. The same should be true for PDAs. If they are advertised as "pocket sized" or wearable, people will take that to heart.
Mind if I disagree a tad and take the "middle ground?"
I think you're going to see the future mobile professionals divided into two or three different camps. There are those who will pretty much use their PDA as a glorified organizer. For these people, any functionality beyond that of an Apple ][ is a complete waste. These are the "Palm Pilot" crowd and they should absolutely stay with what they have.
But with some upcoming improvements in wireless connectivity, you're really going to see a different class of users. CDPD is almost worthless, but if it's every truly available, 3G wireless promises a lot of additional features, not the least of which is being able to browse the internet. This group of users is going to want color. They will need a faster processor and more memory for some of the internet apps they will run. This same group of people will probably be "married" to their PDA like a salesperson is to their cell phone. They will probably use them in meetings for taking notes.
However, I agree with you in that a PDA should probably never have all of the features that today's notebooks have. It's just not practical. I don't see the PDA as a replacement for a notebook computer -- I see it as a mobile accessory. I also believe that *right now* people should be buying PDA's more like the Palm. Wait for the next generation of wireless to rear its head before deciding on the future device.
Hell, I'm eating with my new 'palm compatible' spoon right now!
No, no no. Didn't your parents show you? You are not supposed to eat with your spoon in the palm of your hand. That requires that you grip it with a fist. You're supposed to hold it just in the fingers with the handle resting in the groove between your index and middle finger and the thumb firmly anchoring it against the index finger.
Sorry. Couldn't resist. I know. I'll get modded down into oblivion.
Then now is the time to upgrade to the latest Linux kernel. I'd say the timing was pretty perfect.
Oh, that's just pathetic.... You would only use the "but what about the elderly and the children" argument to drum up emotion when you have no other logical argument. To respond in kind, what about the other 75 year old senior citizens who have a clean computer and can't read web pages or send mail to their grandkids because the network is so flooded that they can't get anything through. Do you think they'll understand why this "dang new-fangled contraption ain't workin'?"
I'm not a cold-hearted person, but you've got to look at the facts. Shutting down these connections is pretty much the only way to make sure people will clean up their machines. You can't forget that the Code Red II virus, and presumably nimda as well, opens up a nice little hole that can be used to turn your machine into a Zombie. If the zombies get used, an ISP will have machines on their network attacking corporate and government computer systems. That's an absolutely *massive* liability there, especially since it can be proved that the ISP was aware of the infected machines and did pretty much nothing to eliminate the problem.
The best idea I've seen yet is the one to set up a "private" network for the infecting machines and direct them there. For those ISP's that don't want that expense, maybe offering to send them a CD with the patches and instructions in the mail for a reasonable fee would be a better alternative.
Do the german providers have a "no running servers" clause in their contract? Most of the providers in the US do. They don't want you running a web server. If you want to do that, feel free to pay $250 / month.
Before those of you in the US who have had broadband for a long long time start flaming me, let me say that I know such things were not originally in the contract. You guys have a good reason to be upset if they block port 80.
And since port 80 is the one normally used by an http daemon, and you're (usually) not supposed to be operating a web server over residential broadband, it was a perfectly reasonable measure.
"indian giver" (note: not related to Native Americans)
OK, so I'm nitpicking. And by the way, I'm not trying to slam you. But people should know that anytime you use the phrase "indian giver", you are referring to Native Americans whether you want to or not. The term arises from "White Man's" total lack of understanding about how the Native American system of ownership worked. They thought they were buying land with worthless beads. When they occupied the land and wouldn't let any of the "indians" on it, they assumed that the natives were going back on the bargain. What they didn't realize is that Native Americans did not feel that the land could be owned by anyone (no concept of ownership). They interpreted the beads (and other goodies) as a gesture of peace and friendship. When they were no longer allowed to use they land, it was interpreted as an act of war. Native Americans were willing to share. White Man was not.
-- Proud to be Cherokee
And sheep don't care about the fact that they are eventually going to be slaughtered and eaten because they just don't know it's going to happen. They're perfectly content to munch on the nice green grass of today.
I thought it was just my imagination, or improved network throughput here at work. But it sounds like the performance improvements I noticed on 0.9.4 were real. I still think there are some serious improvements to be gained on the network side of things (vs the rendering), but 0.9.4 is definitely perceptibly faster than 0.9.3.
It doesn't have to. Take a look at this page of their website. It will connect to "leading brands." In other words, LEGO. So, you buy a Mindstorm kit, and you fasten the Atollo Brokits onto it to make even cooler stuff. It looks like they can ride on LEGO's back.
Just how big do you expect the database to be? I don't think it would need to be as large as many suppose.
You'd have hundreds, if not thousands, of false positives at every airport every day.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but please provide me with a source for these kind of numbers. Without some backup data, I'm not ready to buy this kind of false-positive rate on a database with less than 100,000 identities.
And the problem is that even if you do have a human, the resemblance would likely be enough that a human would trust the computer unless there is some obvious reason that it is incorrect...
If the resemblance is that close, you'd have humans making errors without the help of a computer, provided that they could even remember enough faces to make it worthwhile. It's still a situation where the technology is *helpful*, but can't be relied on to make a decision. I think it would be much easier to train security to make reasonable decisions on identification based on even a few hundred "candidates" than to try to make them memorize tons of faces.
Like I said, I wasn't trying to advocate face recognition technology. I was just pointing out some issues in the parent post. But if you going to cite figures, at least make them reasonable. Of course face recognition would yield some false positives, but I would suspect that a human would be involved in the decision to lock everything down. If the face-rec system finds a potential match, it shows its results to a human, who can (hopefully) perform a better comparison and decide what to do. The advantage of the machine is that it can store and search a vastly larger database than any human. The human would then be able to do a reasonable job at identifying a suspect by comparing the database picture with the "live" picture -- even if they'd never seen any information on the suspect before.
One of the real dangers in face recognition technology lies in depending on it. If you let it make the decisions, it'll eventually let you down in a big way. Also, it would be possible for a suspect to change his/her appearance enough to fool not only the face-rec system, but also humans. In these cases, there would have to be other detection methods to rely on. (Profiling, etc).
Please, again note that I'm not advocating any of this. But if we're going to discuss the pros and cons, we have to make sure we really critique everything we think we know.
Personally, I'd be more concerned about people who seem to go out of their way to *avoid* using common phrases like that.
But at least two of them were suspected -- by the CIA. The FBI was informed, and lost track of the suspects weeks ago. Without trying to argue in favor of machine face recognition, let me point out that with the correct policies in place, it would have worked in this case. At first sign of suspected terrorists attempting to board a plane (the machine part), all flights in the country could have been grounded (the policy part) until some checking on the situation could be done.
Is face recognition needed after they are in the database? Stolen ID's can be identified. Correct ID's will identify people in that database.
Not all of those involved had stolen ID's. You can bet that they all had FAKE ID's, but who's to say that if you had their ID in the database they wouldn't have managed to get a new one since it was entered? Identifying them by facial recognition is much more effective in this case. If you have a picture of the terrorist, you can program the scanners to recognize him/her.
Yodaiken's company is a big contributor to Linux and OSS. I believe that, as such, they are due at least a modicum of respect and consideration. If polite attempts at correcting them are ineffective, you can always turn to the more heavy-handed approach later. People need to remember that if we want to be a community, we have to act like one. There will, as a matter of course, always be disagreements. Most of them can truly be solved without too much sword rattling by merely going to lunch together or something.
No, I believe this whole thing was just rotten. It's enough of an issue to make me very cautious about using GPL on any software I may contribute. I would hate to see what would happen if I accidentally did something contrary to the goals of the FSF.
I didn't think that Bugzilla was comparing itself to a database. In fact, if you want to make database comparisons, you would need to compare the database that Bugzilla uses against your database.
I believe the author's point is that Bugzilla has been successfully used through a lifetime of over 100,000 bug / issue reports. This would probaby be considered ample testing to prove that the system was capable of being used in large project environments.
If you want to make a case against scalability, you will need to point out another bug tracking system that has recently tracked more issues on a single project (or group of related projects). Something other than Microsoft's bug tracking software, please. ;)
Bugzilla will need to handle those kind of numbers if it is going to be used to track large software projects like Windows XP. ;-)
On the other hand, maybe if Bugzilla doesn't work so well, it will be incentive to keep the number of bugs at a minimum. Would that be a good method of improving the code quality during the first pass? :-)
I agree with this. After all, exchange of information over public resources between people intent on performing evil only causes a problem if you aren't aware of the information. If you aren't aware, you wouldn't know what to ban anyway. No, you should instead use the information to your own advantage. If you know what they are going to do, you can stop them in their tracks.
Those people calling in were probably doing so because they disagree with some of the actions the government is taking. Those that agree probably didn't bother. I understand your concern about some of the decisions around military buildup, but try to understand that now is the time to ready the nation for action if a retaliatory response is deemed necessary. If, for example, there is another attack in a couple weeks and it has become abundantly clear that retaliation will be necessary to eliminate the problem, we would be in an awfully weak position to make that retaliation. It would be better to build up for military force now, and then back down later if we decide against it.
You can take comfort in one thing. There are many different people with different opinions considering what to do and how to do it. It's unlikely that nobody in the decision group has considered some of this. And once all of the data is gathered and the arguments are completed, the final decision will probably be better than any you or I could come up with.