For such a long comment it is astounding how you don't know how email works in 2013.
I think he knows how modern e-mail works and was explaining how Blackberry works.
What you are talking about was neat in 1995, today is redundant and a security nightmare. Today we have ActiveSync and IMAP idle. Both of these provide push email without handing your password over to RIM or putting you at risk of no email when they have one of their famous outages.
Look, we've had IMAP IDLE since 1997, the first RIM pager was introduced in 1998 and the first Blackberry smartphone was introduced in 2000. It's never been about the available technology (I was using IMAP IDLE on my Treo 650 in 2004) but about, at the time, enforcing a business model using Blackberry Enterprise Servers. They were about $28K when the phones were about $300. They were rolling in the dough, because CxO's were demanding Blackberries as fashion accessories. The iPhone replaced it as the must-have fashion accessory. There is one great thing to say about the Blackberry - it had lots of hardware buttons to make message navigation very usable and most other smartphones missed and continue to miss this.
But I've been advising companies who deal in secrets (R&D trade secrets mostly) to avoid Blackberry for the entire time I've been doing security consulting (since before I got a Treo) because it was never a secret how Blackberry works.
Seriously, why do people still run acrobat? PDF is a standard format, there are countless programs which support it and the only reason such files are a target is because adobe reader is basically a monoculture and represents a very large and attractive target.
Because people produce PDF documents with Acrobat and you can't do anything about that. Show me how to handle and XDF form or view a bank statement that uses javascript-based authentication on linux without Acrobat and I'll be very interested.
It should be confined to a narrow execution context that is limited to being able to do only the things that enhance the experience of that ONE information resource
I think we just don't quite have the technology for secure computing yet.
SELinux can do some of that isolation you're looking for, but we don't have the technology to make SELinux work well over a software ecosystem yet. We also don't have any security isolation between X11 resources, so that buggy PDF reader can conceivably deploy an exploit to steal the root password from your terminal window.
Sadly, Windows Vista pulled ahead of FreeDesktop in the latter regard, and even Wayland doesn't treat this kind of isolation as a fundamental tenet (it's on the TODO list, so bolted on). Maybe the next generation will use signed comms between the display manager and the windows...
I wonder what would be more challenging, making the AIDS virus into a vector for gene therapy or trying to talk people into taking the new "therapy" itself.
Actually the challenging part is getting it through the FDA, especially when the target population is small and unprofitable (relative to the billion-dollar cost of clinical trials). I posted the other day about a friend who worked in a lab where they cured Multiple Sclerosis in mice using an HIV vector to deliver the gene therapy. If you've ever met a person with advanced MS (I know a woman who has tracks mounted on her ceiling so she can ride a sling from the bed to the toilet), convincing them to participate in a trial before their crippling death would not be much of a challenge. The FDA sees this as taking advantage of the sick and would rather force the non-choice of no cure on this population.
The near future for US people will probably involve medical researchers migrating to friendlier jurisdictions and medical-tourism cruise ship vacations to route around the FDA damage.
The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.
Since we already know that dung fires are more polluting than industrial power plants, per capita, what does this really mean? It means bringing technology to the masses, and then building clean, distributed power plants to power that technology.
We have the technology to do this, and clean up previous generations' left-behind pollution (i.e. nuclear waste) but governments are preventing industry from providing the solution that everybody wants, because they are protecting the monied power interests.
So, on the net, you need to fundamentally reform or abolish the extant government structures if you want to get to a pollution-free world. I don't see the CIA funding this research.
. . . if it's not real, the CIA will now be able to make it real for us . ..
Naw, we just learned that it's the CIA who blackened the skies in the war against the machines. Totally foolish, incites blowback, and works against the national interest. Makes perfect sense in retrospect, really.
as long as they open their standard. If I can choose an open-source implementation written by someone else, I'm much more interested and inclined to really use the service.
It will be interesting to see if they document the protocol when it comes out of beta. If they don't I doubt very many people will trust that it does what they say it does, all the time.
What ever happened to the claim that Lanza was on fanapt? Others said he was on other psychoactive drugs with potentially violent side effects.
I read that the autopsy only screened for illegal drugs & alcohol. If he was on drugs with known violent side effects, it seems like quite a leap to ignore those and go looking for inherent biomarkers. Has the list of his prescribed meds ever come out?
So, if we get another one like these in our lifetime, what then? NASA just says oops and people keep pretending like there isn't climate change happening?
One supposes that with new data the NASA scientists would revise their theories. If NASA's models are broken, then attack the models. Short of that, data-less speculation is just that.
There is a difference between IRL and surfing activity.
Perhaps. But the null hypothesis should be that older people are not different than younger people. Evidence could be presented that older people don't enjoy online porn.
Ask somebody who does tech support and system recovery how 'clean' the retirees' hard drives are.
Can somebody point to (or write) an open source license chooser?
Heck, back in 1998, I got a dog and Excite had a dog breed chooser at the time that was useful. There are also useful ones for cell phones. I'm guessing that if it existed already GitHub would have used it, but if that's not so, they should know about it.
Right. Giving an oldster an XP machine today is equivalent to giving them a car with some bearings that are starting to go.
Mint requires a 600MHz CPU and half a gig of RAM. That would be more kind. If they can afford to buy software they can afford a new cheap laptop, so that's not the issue here.
I actually just made a note to myself to yell at him to check his code before he checks it in - there was a SQL file with an *obvious* syntax error, one that our standard IDE (which he uses) highlights...
never blame the person for his mistake, but always blame him for not following the process. Also, automate the process so you have to do neither.
We can produce more and healthier food by avoiding not just monocultures, but also synthetic pesticides and fertilizers which are part and parcel of so-called "Green Revolution" farming methods.
Do you mean organic? There's not enough nitrogen in the organic cycle to feed the Earth's population on the currently arable land. And I say this as an organic* farmer myself.
Can you find me someone on there whose actions don't constitute engaging in politics?
Just quickly skimming, Norman Borlaug, for saving a billion people from starvation. His work was in agriculture.
But there are two aspects to the general question. The first is, as you mention, the activists who receive the peace prize, who are most often are engaged in politics.
The second is how the Committee operates. One way is, after the fact, the Nobel Committee can recognize the work that they did, and how its effect positively benefited humanity. This was the original purpose of the Committee. Just to pull one example from the list, the men who worked to bring about the WWI Armistice in 1918 were recognized for their work in 1926. The second way is for the Committee to chose individuals whose ideas it wants to promote proactively, by conferring on them the title of 'Nobel Peace Prize Laureate', intending to raise their stature and influence. Obama would be the ultimate example of this. Gore and Arafat would be examples with some non-absurd justification, but still quite questionable. There have been other examples where a persecuted dissident received the award as a way to put pressure on the persecuting government. This appears to be the new normal for the Nobel Committee.
When I hear about the biology, medicine, or chemistry awards, they are marking significant achievements, that, in retrospect, have shown to be major contributions to the body of human knowledge. It's very hard to be accurate with such pronouncements in the present, but with the view of a couple decades, it's often very clear. The science prizes (a sibling post says physics is an exception) avoid looking foolish in retrospect this way.
If a statute goes against the Constitution, then it is the statute that is illegal, because the Constitution is the only thing that authorizes those statutes in the first place.
With that first-day-of-civics lesson behind us, there are so many statutes that fit that bill, and a complicit Supreme Court, that it might as well not matter. We've gone back to, essentially, "but I've got a bigger stick", this time with a stack of papers describing that sick, to placate the populous.
Yeah, the Nobel Committee went political at least 20 years ago, insofar as the Peace Prize, anyway. The science prizes are still fairly plausible, at least.
The risks are privatized as well. The investor can lose what they put in.
And that's it. So they have very little incentive to vote their shares in any way other than that which will maximize financial return.
The directors and executives of the company are directly in the line of fire, if something illegal happens.
In theory, but how many corporate actors do you see facing the music, personally, for say any of the recent financial scandals? Yeah, Bernie Madoff, because he ripped off rich folk, but most corporate actors skate for the most egregious of crimes and violations. Check out how many small-time crooks are in prison for money laundering vs. how many HSBC executives are for laundering trillions of dollars for the drug cartels. Corporate money buys corruption too.
That has nothing to do with limited liability. It's been kicking around for centuries.
It came into being post-Civil War at the behest (bribes) of John D. Rockefeller, for the benefit of Standard Oil. Before that, corporations were only granted for limited times, and for public purposes. The Founders had learned the lessons of Mercantalism under the British Empire.
Why would such an assumption be made? You were saying limited liability was the problem. Now you're saying that a relatively unreasonable liability is the problem. Sure, they could both be true, but I'd like a little more clarity about what you think the actual problem is here?
There's not just a single problem - it's a culmination of a hundred fifty years of increasing corruption, regulation, criminalization, and market fixing that all works together to make it so that people effectively can't do business without forming a corporation first, without substantial risk of losing everything if they roll unlucky dice in a court (even having committed no wrongdoing). The big corporations can afford to pay the lawyers to play these games, so they actively lobby for more of it, to crowd out their competition. Back to Rockefeller - he wrote the break-up plan for Standard Oil, and most new corporate regulation is still written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists today.
One problem is that the current system does not have an effective mechanism to unwind itself. There's more positive feedback than negative feedback in the system, which means it will inevitably halt as the system collapses under its own strain. I wish that weren't so, but so far nobody has figured a way out.
Slashdot Mirror
For such a long comment it is astounding how you don't know how email works in 2013.
I think he knows how modern e-mail works and was explaining how Blackberry works.
What you are talking about was neat in 1995, today is redundant and a security nightmare. Today we have ActiveSync and IMAP idle. Both of these provide push email without handing your password over to RIM or putting you at risk of no email when they have one of their famous outages.
Look, we've had IMAP IDLE since 1997, the first RIM pager was introduced in 1998 and the first Blackberry smartphone was introduced in 2000. It's never been about the available technology (I was using IMAP IDLE on my Treo 650 in 2004) but about, at the time, enforcing a business model using Blackberry Enterprise Servers. They were about $28K when the phones were about $300. They were rolling in the dough, because CxO's were demanding Blackberries as fashion accessories. The iPhone replaced it as the must-have fashion accessory. There is one great thing to say about the Blackberry - it had lots of hardware buttons to make message navigation very usable and most other smartphones missed and continue to miss this.
But I've been advising companies who deal in secrets (R&D trade secrets mostly) to avoid Blackberry for the entire time I've been doing security consulting (since before I got a Treo) because it was never a secret how Blackberry works.
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=new.pdf old.pdf
And does that actually strip malicious javascript from the document? Most sources say it just copies them, and does nothing for libpng attacks.
Seriously, why do people still run acrobat? PDF is a standard format, there are countless programs which support it and the only reason such files are a target is because adobe reader is basically a monoculture and represents a very large and attractive target.
Because people produce PDF documents with Acrobat and you can't do anything about that. Show me how to handle and XDF form or view a bank statement that uses javascript-based authentication on linux without Acrobat and I'll be very interested.
It should be confined to a narrow execution context that is limited to being able to do only the things that enhance the experience of that ONE information resource
I think we just don't quite have the technology for secure computing yet.
SELinux can do some of that isolation you're looking for, but we don't have the technology to make SELinux work well over a software ecosystem yet. We also don't have any security isolation between X11 resources, so that buggy PDF reader can conceivably deploy an exploit to steal the root password from your terminal window.
Sadly, Windows Vista pulled ahead of FreeDesktop in the latter regard, and even Wayland doesn't treat this kind of isolation as a fundamental tenet (it's on the TODO list, so bolted on). Maybe the next generation will use signed comms between the display manager and the windows...
I wonder what would be more challenging, making the AIDS virus into a vector for gene therapy or trying to talk people into taking the new "therapy" itself.
Actually the challenging part is getting it through the FDA, especially when the target population is small and unprofitable (relative to the billion-dollar cost of clinical trials). I posted the other day about a friend who worked in a lab where they cured Multiple Sclerosis in mice using an HIV vector to deliver the gene therapy. If you've ever met a person with advanced MS (I know a woman who has tracks mounted on her ceiling so she can ride a sling from the bed to the toilet), convincing them to participate in a trial before their crippling death would not be much of a challenge. The FDA sees this as taking advantage of the sick and would rather force the non-choice of no cure on this population.
The near future for US people will probably involve medical researchers migrating to friendlier jurisdictions and medical-tourism cruise ship vacations to route around the FDA damage.
The most obvious answer is always the one (almost) never thought of or mentioned: stop polluting the planet.
Since we already know that dung fires are more polluting than industrial power plants, per capita, what does this really mean? It means bringing technology to the masses, and then building clean, distributed power plants to power that technology.
We have the technology to do this, and clean up previous generations' left-behind pollution (i.e. nuclear waste) but governments are preventing industry from providing the solution that everybody wants, because they are protecting the monied power interests.
So, on the net, you need to fundamentally reform or abolish the extant government structures if you want to get to a pollution-free world. I don't see the CIA funding this research.
. . . if it's not real, the CIA will now be able to make it real for us . . .
Naw, we just learned that it's the CIA who blackened the skies in the war against the machines. Totally foolish, incites blowback, and works against the national interest. Makes perfect sense in retrospect, really.
as long as they open their standard. If I can choose an open-source implementation written by someone else, I'm much more interested and inclined to really use the service.
It will be interesting to see if they document the protocol when it comes out of beta. If they don't I doubt very many people will trust that it does what they say it does, all the time.
What ever happened to the claim that Lanza was on fanapt? Others said he was on other psychoactive drugs with potentially violent side effects.
I read that the autopsy only screened for illegal drugs & alcohol. If he was on drugs with known violent side effects, it seems like quite a leap to ignore those and go looking for inherent biomarkers. Has the list of his prescribed meds ever come out?
So, if we get another one like these in our lifetime, what then? NASA just says oops and people keep pretending like there isn't climate change happening?
One supposes that with new data the NASA scientists would revise their theories. If NASA's models are broken, then attack the models. Short of that, data-less speculation is just that.
Yes, implemented in such a half-assed way that it's almost unusable.
eh? I've been using it for years without issue. I wish it would die too, but in the meantime, I run the Adobe repo.
There is a difference between IRL and surfing activity.
Perhaps. But the null hypothesis should be that older people are not different than younger people. Evidence could be presented that older people don't enjoy online porn.
Ask somebody who does tech support and system recovery how 'clean' the retirees' hard drives are.
And the lack of Adobe Flash will surely go down very well with them!
Don't be silly, Flash has been available for linux for years.
There are and rather severe ones.
Yes, but HBO is a corporation. Probably one with lobbyists too, so justice applies differently.
Can somebody point to (or write) an open source license chooser?
Heck, back in 1998, I got a dog and Excite had a dog breed chooser at the time that was useful. There are also useful ones for cell phones. I'm guessing that if it existed already GitHub would have used it, but if that's not so, they should know about it.
i found it more interesting that somehow panama has a say
See, nobody ever reads the ToS for the Panama Canal either.
Remember, next time you want to ship drugs and guns across the globe, GO AROUND THE HORN.
Don't be daring and cheap at the same time.
Right. Giving an oldster an XP machine today is equivalent to giving them a car with some bearings that are starting to go.
Mint requires a 600MHz CPU and half a gig of RAM. That would be more kind. If they can afford to buy software they can afford a new cheap laptop, so that's not the issue here.
The rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) has more than doubled among middle-aged adults and the elderly over the last decade....
It's actually a growing* problem in retirement homes.
*n.p.i.
I actually just made a note to myself to yell at him to check his code before he checks it in - there was a SQL file with an *obvious* syntax error, one that our standard IDE (which he uses) highlights...
never blame the person for his mistake, but always blame him for not following the process. Also, automate the process so you have to do neither.
We can produce more and healthier food by avoiding not just monocultures, but also synthetic pesticides and fertilizers which are part and parcel of so-called "Green Revolution" farming methods.
Do you mean organic? There's not enough nitrogen in the organic cycle to feed the Earth's population on the currently arable land. And I say this as an organic* farmer myself.
* not government-certified.
Aren't all viruses work by chaning genetic structure of a cell?
HIV is really good at its job. Check here.
Can you find me someone on there whose actions don't constitute engaging in politics?
Just quickly skimming, Norman Borlaug, for saving a billion people from starvation. His work was in agriculture.
But there are two aspects to the general question. The first is, as you mention, the activists who receive the peace prize, who are most often are engaged in politics.
The second is how the Committee operates.
One way is, after the fact, the Nobel Committee can recognize the work that they did, and how its effect positively benefited humanity. This was the original purpose of the Committee. Just to pull one example from the list, the men who worked to bring about the WWI Armistice in 1918 were recognized for their work in 1926.
The second way is for the Committee to chose individuals whose ideas it wants to promote proactively, by conferring on them the title of 'Nobel Peace Prize Laureate', intending to raise their stature and influence. Obama would be the ultimate example of this. Gore and Arafat would be examples with some non-absurd justification, but still quite questionable. There have been other examples where a persecuted dissident received the award as a way to put pressure on the persecuting government. This appears to be the new normal for the Nobel Committee.
When I hear about the biology, medicine, or chemistry awards, they are marking significant achievements, that, in retrospect, have shown to be major contributions to the body of human knowledge. It's very hard to be accurate with such pronouncements in the present, but with the view of a couple decades, it's often very clear. The science prizes (a sibling post says physics is an exception) avoid looking foolish in retrospect this way.
If a statute goes against the Constitution, then it is the statute that is illegal, because the Constitution is the only thing that authorizes those statutes in the first place.
With that first-day-of-civics lesson behind us, there are so many statutes that fit that bill, and a complicit Supreme Court, that it might as well not matter. We've gone back to, essentially, "but I've got a bigger stick", this time with a stack of papers describing that sick, to placate the populous.
Yeah, the Nobel Committee went political at least 20 years ago, insofar as the Peace Prize, anyway. The science prizes are still fairly plausible, at least.
The risks are privatized as well. The investor can lose what they put in.
And that's it. So they have very little incentive to vote their shares in any way other than that which will maximize financial return.
The directors and executives of the company are directly in the line of fire, if something illegal happens.
In theory, but how many corporate actors do you see facing the music, personally, for say any of the recent financial scandals? Yeah, Bernie Madoff, because he ripped off rich folk, but most corporate actors skate for the most egregious of crimes and violations. Check out how many small-time crooks are in prison for money laundering vs. how many HSBC executives are for laundering trillions of dollars for the drug cartels. Corporate money buys corruption too.
That has nothing to do with limited liability. It's been kicking around for centuries.
It came into being post-Civil War at the behest (bribes) of John D. Rockefeller, for the benefit of Standard Oil. Before that, corporations were only granted for limited times, and for public purposes. The Founders had learned the lessons of Mercantalism under the British Empire.
Why would such an assumption be made? You were saying limited liability was the problem. Now you're saying that a relatively unreasonable liability is the problem. Sure, they could both be true, but I'd like a little more clarity about what you think the actual problem is here?
There's not just a single problem - it's a culmination of a hundred fifty years of increasing corruption, regulation, criminalization, and market fixing that all works together to make it so that people effectively can't do business without forming a corporation first, without substantial risk of losing everything if they roll unlucky dice in a court (even having committed no wrongdoing). The big corporations can afford to pay the lawyers to play these games, so they actively lobby for more of it, to crowd out their competition. Back to Rockefeller - he wrote the break-up plan for Standard Oil, and most new corporate regulation is still written by corporate lawyers and lobbyists today.
One problem is that the current system does not have an effective mechanism to unwind itself. There's more positive feedback than negative feedback in the system, which means it will inevitably halt as the system collapses under its own strain. I wish that weren't so, but so far nobody has figured a way out.