No longer do the poor in America see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires but instead as deserving something for nothing./quote>
There's a difference between those two?
Or do millionaires literally "deserve" their wealth in some absolute sense?
I find it hard to understand that the country that declared "all men are born equal" should also have brought itself to believe - at the same time and while claiming to hold to the same political philosophy - that one person can be thousands to millions of times more valuable than another, and that this temporary disparity of financial standing should be considered a "right" as if it has some kind of absolute moral value. Like, every breath Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey takes somehow has hugely greater intrinsic moral worth than a random guy on the street in New York? Doesn't make sense to me that it should.
Yes, it takes hard work to make a million dollars, but it also takes hard work to rob a bank. Why is one way of getting rich considered more "good" than the other? They're both transferring money from many other people to one, consolidating power under one person's control. (When it comes to making millions in finance and banking, the difference between "productive captain of industry" and "white collar fraudster" becomes even harder to work out.)
If we're going to evaluate people's worth, shouldn't we do so based on how well they treat their family, how loving and caring they are, what ideas they contributed to the public good, and other absolute measures, rather than a game of figures that in the end, don't mean anything?
I used to think that William Gibson's Neuromancer was wildly unrealistic for portraying a future Net so riddled with vulnerabilities that any cowboy kid with a cyberspace console could hack their way into a bank and escape barely milliseconds ahead of the Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics.
Now I know that the unrealistic part is that there's any countermeasures at all.
I continue to be stunned by the fact that Word will attempt to launch an embedded Flash object... I'm completely baffled by the fact that you can put a.swf file at all. Why the hell would you need that?
And what happens if you print that?
Do you get a Youtube movie at 60 pages per second coming out of your laser printer?
What bugs me is that all the programmers who wrote these format decoders riddled with buffer overruns still have jobs. How can that be possible? Either they knew at the time that they were writing unsafe virus-holes - and went ahead anyway, thus committing gross negligence - or else, even worse, they had no way of telling if the code they were writing was safe or unsafe and yet went ahead and released it on a "who knows, what's the worst that could happen?" sort of policy.
Either way, it's bad.
If a civilisation which routinely tolerated the insane lack of safety that we tolerate in programming built, say, nuclear reactors, we'd expect to have them melt down the first time we got a magnitude 9 earthq -
Why does security-conscious storage prevent you from keeping backups?
Because backups, kind of by definition, to be useful have to exist in multiple platform-independent copies and those copies must be unsecured. They certainly have to be a lot less "secure" than the kind of rabid self-destroying hard drive in the article.
And to keep your backups safe from loss, you need to store them offsite. Usually in a third party company. So the smart thief/spy can always attack your unencrypted (or far less-encrypted) backup storage, not your "secure" primary hard drive.
The better you secure your data against loss, the harder it is to secure it against copying, and vice versa.
Rights cannot cost another human being their time, money, property or rights. You have no claim to the fruits of my labor. I may choose to share with you, but I'm a free person only if I'm not forced to share.
Hear hear! That's why I never attend jury duty, never pay rates or taxes to keep the roads and water mains running, use private security exclusively, and as for public health? Pfft. If people are so idiotic as to come down with flu or smallpox, they can just go have an epidemic. I'll be perfectly safe in my hand-dug fallout shelter stocked with the beans I planted, harvested and baked with the sweat of my own brow.
the uncontroversial 'people can't murder each other'
You might be surprised at how extremely controversial this one is in polite society.
Many people I know are so strongly in favour of people murdering each other, especially in large organised groups, that they consider it "treason" or "cowardice" to not be in favour of murdering, at least in principle. Perhaps there might be a little slack given as to just where and when we should murder, but if you're flat against murder itself, out of some misplaced sense of anti-murder idealism, then that's just downright un-patriotic. Of course we'd all like to live in a world where murder was against the law, but realistically, in the world we have, it's our duty to maintain a strong national murder capacity. If you look at it rationally, if you're anti-murder in general, you're actually objectively pro-murder.
A lot of murderers murdered a lot of other murderers to give us our freedom, you know. You do support our murderers, don't you?
where else is left that won't step all over your right to be left
Right on. The Left left the Right alone and now our rights are being given a right left-handed compliment. The Right Honourable Minister says it's all right, but I think right just left town, and we're just left with what's left, which is where the Left left off. Right?
You know, I'm not from "down there", but this "Green Party" you've got sounds like a bunch of jackoffs.
Yes, you're not from "down here".
I vote Green, but the Green Party in New Zealand is widely hated by many people in New Zealand for being too hippie and liberal and for opposing the government (both National and Labour) too stridently on issues like anti-war, women's rights and drug legislation. Most people who I talk to who dislike the Greens say it's because "they hold the government to ransom" and "don't compromise".
Exactly the opposite of what you're accusing them of, in other words.
The fundamental nature of politics isn't a modern invention. Look at politics throughout history. It's all pretty ugly stuff.
The fundamental nature of politics is that people want stuff, and other people want other stuff, and although they can't both have the same stuff, someone who can promise stuff to both people can temporarily convince both people to give them stuff.
Sometimes the stuff people want most of all is "not getting strung upside down in the scorpion pit", and a truly great regime is one that delivers on that electoral promise to at least some of its citizens.
Then you should try the U.S. We would rather bring the entire government to a standstill than compromise on any of our principles.
But that was wrong and bad because it was the Republican Party and they need to be forced to compromise because their principles are pure evil! If it were the Democratic Party who had brought the government to a standstill it would have been in the cause of pure shining good and they should never compromise on their principles!
When your party compromises their agenda and reaches across the aisle, it's because my tireless compaigning has reluctantly brought their supporters to see reason and engage in dialogue, and it's a great step forward for all humanity.
When my party compromises their agenda and reaches across the aisle, it's because they're a bunch of spineless backstabbing sell-out cowards who wouldn't know a principle if it punched them in the jaw, and it's the beginning of jackboots marching across the Rubicon, mark my words.
'It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water."
As someone who just lived through the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake of February 2011, I can attest that even if you don't have water, it's a whole lot easier to get some if you have the Web (in my case a Blackberry).
Street water was off. The City Council had water trucks making deliveries and trucks of bottled water, but their location kept varying. They posted the schedule to the Web. If you didn't have timely information on where the trucks were going to be...
It's possible to live without the Web, yes. But it's a whole lot easier to get your Maslow on with it.
"Nothing at all, except a motherboard failure now means you lost all your data."
If I'm too stupid to back up important data then I deserve to suffer.
But of course you'll be too smart to accidentally expose your backups in cleartext, and being illegal Blu-Rays they'll be too big to fit on tape anyway, so you'll want to store backups securely by copying them to an identical secure hard drive, so that when your motherboard dies you just plug in the new one and.... oops.
Absolutely secure hardware-backed encryption is a great solution for data for which the cost to your organisation if you lose that data is zero.
Slashdot Mirror
We can't simply 'give up' those three things and just 'live on less'.
Sure we can. We can all live in the Mad Max future if we decide not to do anything to change the trajectory we're on.
Failure is always an option. It's just an unpleasant one.
No longer do the poor in America see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires but instead as deserving something for nothing. /quote>
There's a difference between those two?
Or do millionaires literally "deserve" their wealth in some absolute sense?
I find it hard to understand that the country that declared "all men are born equal" should also have brought itself to believe - at the same time and while claiming to hold to the same political philosophy - that one person can be thousands to millions of times more valuable than another, and that this temporary disparity of financial standing should be considered a "right" as if it has some kind of absolute moral value. Like, every breath Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey takes somehow has hugely greater intrinsic moral worth than a random guy on the street in New York? Doesn't make sense to me that it should.
Yes, it takes hard work to make a million dollars, but it also takes hard work to rob a bank. Why is one way of getting rich considered more "good" than the other? They're both transferring money from many other people to one, consolidating power under one person's control. (When it comes to making millions in finance and banking, the difference between "productive captain of industry" and "white collar fraudster" becomes even harder to work out.)
If we're going to evaluate people's worth, shouldn't we do so based on how well they treat their family, how loving and caring they are, what ideas they contributed to the public good, and other absolute measures, rather than a game of figures that in the end, don't mean anything?
the days of cheap energy were coming to an end.
Nonsense! As the oil runs out we'll just transition neatly to clean-burning, perfectly safe atomic enerBOOOOOOM.
(Sorry about that. Spot of technical bother. Still perfectly safe. Just don't eat the spinach or shellfish within 20 kms for, say, 300 years.)
Nothing to worry about at all!
Rome if you want to
Rome around the world...
I used to think that William Gibson's Neuromancer was wildly unrealistic for portraying a future Net so riddled with vulnerabilities that any cowboy kid with a cyberspace console could hack their way into a bank and escape barely milliseconds ahead of the Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics.
Now I know that the unrealistic part is that there's any countermeasures at all.
I continue to be stunned by the fact that Word will attempt to launch an embedded Flash object ... I'm completely baffled by the fact that you can put a .swf file at all. Why the hell would you need that?
And what happens if you print that?
Do you get a Youtube movie at 60 pages per second coming out of your laser printer?
A million times this.
What bugs me is that all the programmers who wrote these format decoders riddled with buffer overruns still have jobs. How can that be possible? Either they knew at the time that they were writing unsafe virus-holes - and went ahead anyway, thus committing gross negligence - or else, even worse, they had no way of telling if the code they were writing was safe or unsafe and yet went ahead and released it on a "who knows, what's the worst that could happen?" sort of policy.
Either way, it's bad.
If a civilisation which routinely tolerated the insane lack of safety that we tolerate in programming built, say, nuclear reactors, we'd expect to have them melt down the first time we got a magnitude 9 earthq -
oops.
as soon as you find out that a 0-day exists, it ceases to exist.
The 0day that can be named is not the true 0day.
What is the sound of one buffer overflowing?
but I'm just going to take it to Fark.
Take it to this guy.
To be or not to be? (gunshots) Not to be.
If we invent a matter replicator and only use it for creating delicious topping for ice cream
I see you've been visiting Heston Blumenthal.
Sounds like something that would go down like a lead balloon.
Do people even think before smashing words together? We must contraincentivise such dysutilization of Engspeak.
I'm pretty sure this is a forensic investigators nightmare...
And a virus writer's dream.
Why does security-conscious storage prevent you from keeping backups?
Because backups, kind of by definition, to be useful have to exist in multiple platform-independent copies and those copies must be unsecured. They certainly have to be a lot less "secure" than the kind of rabid self-destroying hard drive in the article.
And to keep your backups safe from loss, you need to store them offsite. Usually in a third party company. So the smart thief/spy can always attack your unencrypted (or far less-encrypted) backup storage, not your "secure" primary hard drive.
The better you secure your data against loss, the harder it is to secure it against copying, and vice versa.
for which the cost to your organisation if you lose that data is less than the cost to your organisation if that data gets out.
Yes, quite.
It's useful for information that would be damaging if it were ever revealed to others, but that isn't really useful in itself, for you.
That seems like quite a small class of information to me.
Rights cannot cost another human being their time, money, property or rights. You have no claim to the fruits of my labor. I may choose to share with you, but I'm a free person only if I'm not forced to share.
Hear hear! That's why I never attend jury duty, never pay rates or taxes to keep the roads and water mains running, use private security exclusively, and as for public health? Pfft. If people are so idiotic as to come down with flu or smallpox, they can just go have an epidemic. I'll be perfectly safe in my hand-dug fallout shelter stocked with the beans I planted, harvested and baked with the sweat of my own brow.
And boy was that some sweat, but I'm free.
the uncontroversial 'people can't murder each other'
You might be surprised at how extremely controversial this one is in polite society.
Many people I know are so strongly in favour of people murdering each other, especially in large organised groups, that they consider it "treason" or "cowardice" to not be in favour of murdering, at least in principle. Perhaps there might be a little slack given as to just where and when we should murder, but if you're flat against murder itself, out of some misplaced sense of anti-murder idealism, then that's just downright un-patriotic. Of course we'd all like to live in a world where murder was against the law, but realistically, in the world we have, it's our duty to maintain a strong national murder capacity. If you look at it rationally, if you're anti-murder in general, you're actually objectively pro-murder.
A lot of murderers murdered a lot of other murderers to give us our freedom, you know. You do support our murderers, don't you?
where else is left that won't step all over your right to be left
Right on. The Left left the Right alone and now our rights are being given a right left-handed compliment. The Right Honourable Minister says it's all right, but I think right just left town, and we're just left with what's left, which is where the Left left off. Right?
You know, I'm not from "down there", but this "Green Party" you've got sounds like a bunch of jackoffs.
Yes, you're not from "down here".
I vote Green, but the Green Party in New Zealand is widely hated by many people in New Zealand for being too hippie and liberal and for opposing the government (both National and Labour) too stridently on issues like anti-war, women's rights and drug legislation. Most people who I talk to who dislike the Greens say it's because "they hold the government to ransom" and "don't compromise".
Exactly the opposite of what you're accusing them of, in other words.
The fundamental nature of politics isn't a modern invention. Look at politics throughout history. It's all pretty ugly stuff.
The fundamental nature of politics is that people want stuff, and other people want other stuff, and although they can't both have the same stuff, someone who can promise stuff to both people can temporarily convince both people to give them stuff.
Sometimes the stuff people want most of all is "not getting strung upside down in the scorpion pit", and a truly great regime is one that delivers on that electoral promise to at least some of its citizens.
They have almost literally zero integrity.
Literally? Like, they have a hole in their skin and internal liquids are leaking out?
Eww.
Then you should try the U.S. We would rather bring the entire government to a standstill than compromise on any of our principles.
But that was wrong and bad because it was the Republican Party and they need to be forced to compromise because their principles are pure evil! If it were the Democratic Party who had brought the government to a standstill it would have been in the cause of pure shining good and they should never compromise on their principles!
When your party compromises their agenda and reaches across the aisle, it's because my tireless compaigning has reluctantly brought their supporters to see reason and engage in dialogue, and it's a great step forward for all humanity.
When my party compromises their agenda and reaches across the aisle, it's because they're a bunch of spineless backstabbing sell-out cowards who wouldn't know a principle if it punched them in the jaw, and it's the beginning of jackboots marching across the Rubicon, mark my words.
'It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water."
As someone who just lived through the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake of February 2011, I can attest that even if you don't have water, it's a whole lot easier to get some if you have the Web (in my case a Blackberry).
Street water was off. The City Council had water trucks making deliveries and trucks of bottled water, but their location kept varying. They posted the schedule to the Web. If you didn't have timely information on where the trucks were going to be...
It's possible to live without the Web, yes. But it's a whole lot easier to get your Maslow on with it.
happily I also learned that I was as emotionally attached to my data as I thought I was
I'm so, so sorry for your loss.
I know the pain never goes away. But in time... you can learn to focus that pain into a white-hot laser of bitter revenge.
You would be looking for a RABID setup? Try selling that.
It interoperates well with a Write/Erase/Allocation/Search Enterprise Logistics Server.
"Nothing at all, except a motherboard failure now means you lost all your data."
If I'm too stupid to back up important data then I deserve to suffer.
But of course you'll be too smart to accidentally expose your backups in cleartext, and being illegal Blu-Rays they'll be too big to fit on tape anyway, so you'll want to store backups securely by copying them to an identical secure hard drive, so that when your motherboard dies you just plug in the new one and.... oops.
Absolutely secure hardware-backed encryption is a great solution for data for which the cost to your organisation if you lose that data is zero.