Think your analogies through a little better. They stink.
That would be because they're not analogies, dumbass. They're examples of other cases wherein one party exercises its first amendment rights in way that has negative consequences for another group exercising their first amemndment rights.
Actually, there are at least 100 law firms fitting that description, that I'm familiar with/have done business with, anyway. It's kind of a happening practice area, these days.
I'm tempted to post a link to the blog and let you give a second opinion, but I'd rather not put Slashdot up to the task en masse. Because I'm sure that she CAN be found out, given time and effort, by an interested-enough party.
I disagree with you about how easy it would be--I just scanned the last 10 postings or so, and there's nothing in the blog details that are particularly specific. She's quite careful about anonymizing, with names and places and such.
There's a huge gap though between grading an essay -- written in natural language -- and a math assignment where you could just check each equality to see if it holds then if the answer is right.
True, dat. But "more complicated problem" doesn't mean "impossible problem". Natural langauge still obeys rules, hard as they may be to describe in software. And there's a lot of highly successful work done in this area in recent years, with results that may surprise you.
Consider the always-useful ETS example that grades GRE essays: every essay gets a human reader's score AND an machine reader's score, and the results agree 98% of the time. Assuming that ETS isn't bullshitting us all in their press, that's pretty effective software.
I think of this a lot like the enemy soldiers in the first Half Life game. When they started working in teams and using grenades effectively to flush me out, I was amazed that the AI was using sophisticated tactics. Computers do more and more, all the time. Try not to feel too bad when they start winning Nobel prizes for literature.
Hey, that doesn't mean it CAN'T be done right. That just means y'all didn't DO it right.
I mean, think about Yahoo's shitty-ass search page from three or four years ago, all faggoted-up like a sixth-grade schoolgirl's notebook, with ad banners and stupid links and whatnot. Then Google came along and did it right.
Really, there probably aren't too many automated math grading programs because there's not a perceived need, and so nobody's putting a whole hell of a lot of effort into it. In practice, I think that hand-grading is fast enough to be just fine, and it allows the students to work with a pencil and paper--it's more flexible. I'm just using the automation concept as an example.
No, you're right--they are two very different types of machines. But they operate on the same underlying mechanism of information flow, and they have the same relationship between input and output.
I should probably reveal a hidden assumption I'm making: human thought and action, including problem-solving, is an essentially mechanical task at some level, down at the physical and chemical interactions of a brain.
Of course, you might disagree with me if you believe in things like "souls" or whatever, but that's one of the debates that I don't think we can productively have.
Hey, if it was an undergrad math class, like Calculus 1, how would you feel about automated grading? It's possible, trivial even, to write a program and have a way for students to solve problems (showing their work, of course!) in a machine-readable format. Then you can have a computer grade the homework and report a summary to the TA, who looks at what students are missing and deals with it. This isn't that different from the way things currently operate, because the TA manually grading homework is just using a mechanical process to check the students' work, anyway.
What's the point of the class? In Calculus 1, the point is to learn concepts and methods that allow you to perform basic operations, as proven by your ability to work out problems on homework and tests. You're not asked to be creative or anything--that comes later, in 300 or 400 level classes or graduate work. First, you have to learn the basics.
I imagine sociology isn't that much different--at least, it wasn't in Poli Sci when I was in college. First, you have to learn a bunch of basic facts and rules and concepts, and demonstrate that you have a know them. You should be able to talk about them, define them, and answer questions about them. Anybody who's being creative in a freshman sociology class is ahead of the game.
And don't give me no shit about "I spent hours making it, you should spend hours reading it". That's like the.sig that says "I don't use comments--if it was hard to code, it should be hard to read." The fact that an 18-year old punk takes hours to craft an essay (that the professor could do in his sleep) doesn't make the effort more valuable.
I mean, shit--it took me DAYS to write my first couple of C programs in CS 101. Does that mean that the professor is shorting my education if he takes 10 seconds to grade it?
This is a common misconception about algorithms. Effective methods don't have be consciously engineered in every step by a human designer, even when applied to extremely complex questions that traditionally require human judgement.
It's possible to train computer programs to translate text between languages by feeding examples of good and bad translations to pattern-recognition algorithms, which start with simple rules. Most of these models are similar to neural-net machines, which is in turn based on the fundamental theory of how animal brains (including human brains) operate. You don't design and code an algorithm, you train the machine by example, with some human-assisted trail-and-error.
This often works because that's how human judgement works: we learn just about everything by example and trial-and-error, and we're VERY good at it (look at what millions of years of evolution can accomplish!). This isn't to say that a trained neural net machine is "intelligent" or "conscious", just that solves problems by the same mechanism that a human brain does, albeit in a much more limited fashion.
Of course, the effectiveness of a trained machine is limited by how big a computer you have, and how well you train it. Re-creating the complexity of the human brain in software with present-day techniques and equipment would be impossible (neural net software is VERY memory intensive when it gets complex). This may change in the future, but that's another debate that I won't get into.
I'm not saying that this professor's software actually works or not--he could easily be full of shit. I'm also not saying that you can't game one of these machines the same way spammers game Bayesian anti-spam filters: use trial-and-error to figure out how to trick the machine consistently.
In fact, I'm assuming that a canny student could steal the software and do exactly that. After all, the human brain is a much more powerful learning machine than the program, and could probably outsmart it in the same way that people can outsmart rats.
But then again, this is a socialogy course, so his students probably won't think of it on their own.
I think it's possible for anonymous people to write entertaining things about their own offices precisely BECAUSE so many offices are similar. Readers will relate to the funny, frustrating, and uplifting events that the blogger relates.
Consider how popular office-related sitcoms can be, even if they're pretty generic: "The Drew Carey Show" and "The Office" come to mind, and there are tons more. The point of the humor in these shows isn't anything about that particular office, but about offices in general, bosses in general, and coworkers in general.
One of my ex-girlfriends pens a hilarious, utterly anonymous blog about life as a paralegal at a midtown NYC white-collar criminal defense firm. She does about 2-3 posts a week, on average. Reading the blog, though, you can't even tell it's a law office, because she has to be careful (partly the legal issues, but mostly office politics). And yet, she has more than 100 regular unique readers, and gets dozens of comments on most posts.
It helps that she's an incredibly funny writer, with more than a little training and talent for prose, but that makes sense, right?
And seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY: Isn't "Office Space" one of the goddamned funnist movies you've ever seen?
"Free speech" is a nice little term that gets bandied far too often in a nonsensical way, by people who don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way.
If an employer's decision to censure or fire an employee based on work-related blogging is an infringement of free speech, then what about a person/group who decides to boycott a company because they disagree with that company's decisions? Or how about when there's a demonstration outside my window and I shut the window because I don't agree with them and don't want to hear it?
"Free speech" becomes an *abusive* concept when you deprive people of their rights to avoid associating with people they don't like, or to take otherwise legal actions (like not shopping at a particular store) based on their opinons about an entity. After all, isn't the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association embedded in the exact same amendment as the right to free speech?
"Free speech" cannot mean "speech without consequences from anyone". That would just be silly. I'll say what I want, and you'll decide whether you want to associate with me based on how you feel about it.
1) EVERY card has a VGA output. Most onboard video solutions ONLY have a VGA output. Customers like flexibility.
2) Hardware costs in an LCD monitor are almost entirely in the LCD screen itself. The rest of the hardware is pennies in comparison. So even leaving out some extra electronics is a tiny, tiny cost savings.
3) The cost of hardware manufacturing has only so much to do with how something is built. More important, especially in the long run, is how many of something you can sell. Large volumes bring costs down, sometimes by a huge amount. VGA analog hardware has been on the market for more than 15 years, with gazillions of parts sold.
Take serial/parallel ports as an example. Despite the introduction of "legacy free" products in the last couple of years, almost every motherboard sold today still has these ancient devices, including the on-board logic to make them work. They'll disappear eventually, but it doesn't make enough of a cost difference right now to remove them.
(I wasn't clear whether you're using WEP or WPA, so here goes nothing...)
IF YOU'RE USING WEP
Whoa... are you saying that you use 152-bit WEP with random keys? Because this ISN'T secure. The newer WEP attacks work reasonably well against WEP at all key sizes. Since WEP attacks aren't brute force, the average attack length isn't directly proportional to the size of the key space.
And when you think of "attack length", here, remember that the amount of computing time is trivial. The thing that usually takes a while is collecting the packets to examine. 104-bit WEP will usually (much more than half the time, in my experience) break with less than a half-million encrypted packets collected--about a day or less on any busy network. BUT, once you've collected the traffic (with tcpdump or ethereal), it only takes minutes to run the crack. Seriously--less than 10 minutes, almost guaranteed, on a Pentium-M 1.5 GHz.
So yes, cracking 104-bit keys takes longer than cracking 40-bit keys, and cracking 152-bit keys takes longer still, but it just doesn't matter if you're using WEP: you're still fucked. Use 512-bit WEP for all a cracker cares. He'll still break it in a reasonable amoun of time.
IF YOU'RE USING WPA
Forget everything I just said. The only current attack on WPA is a brute force attack on the passphrase/key, meaning that the attack length (in terms of time and packets needed) is proportional to the key space size. 152 bits is, what, like 19 bytes? Brute-force password cracking on hashed/etc/passwd files suggests that random alphanumeric+symbol passwords of more than about 12 characters are basically unbreakable by a single modern desktop machine.
So you should be fine, but keep an eye out for news on WPA security. Oh, and keep in mind that you're still vulnerable to DoS attacks, since the frame headers aren't encrypted. You'll have to wait for that one.
Okay, I've read my share of Milton Friedman and Hayek and Mises and all that, and I won't argue the damn philosophy or economics like the other reply poster. I WILL, however, point out a couple of things for your edification that are pretty simple facts:
1) There are tens of thousands of incorporated companies in the USA. If you include sole-proprietor LLCs, which share certain liability features of corporations but not the management structre (they're essentially traditional small business with a liability shield), the number is probably in the hundreds of thousands.
2) Some of these corporations do bad things. Some are caught and some get away. But the Enrons, KBRs, and Worldcoms are the exception, not the rule. There were a few dozen high-profile dot-com related corporate malfeasance cases, and every year there are at least a dozen or so SEC efforts on other random corporations that Do Bad Things. So, NOT the majority--a small proportion.
3) FBI crime statistics suggest that the rate of violent and property crime perps, nationwide, is greater than 1 in 10,000, but probably less than 1 in 1000. So the rates for corporations and individuals are roughly the same order of magnitude.
4) One could conclude that corporations an individuals commit crimes in about the same proportion. Not equal, but close enough.
5) Many of the high-profile dot-com criminal cases were against individuals (i.e., Frank Quattrone) or partnership-style companies (Arthur Anderson).
6) One could conclude that whether an entity is a corporation or not is a pretty shitty way to predict whether it will engage in criminal behavior, because the correlation is so weak.
"Am I the only one who thinks that government should be requiring companies to move the *other* way?"
Um, have you ever heard of a little piece of legislation called Sarbanes-Oxley? Yeah, you might want to check that out before you start assuming you're on a one-man crusade. Corporate ecords retention requirements have only increased over the past 10 years.
"Ie, retain, *everything*... absolutely *everything*, why should email/*doc* be an acceptable domain, where, one can simply erase data under dubious circumstances ?"
This would be fine... except for the fact that you'd have to remove the "delete" function from every application on every desktop. If I'm composing emails, and I decide not to send something I halfway finished, do I have to save it? How about drafts from 10-year-old memos? And what happens when you just have too much shit for your hard drives? Preserving EVERYTHING is a pretty goddamned big burden on businesses.
"Corporations are too powerful now. Increasingly, law is coming to reflect the interests of Corporations, instead of the interests of countries citizens."
Go back and RTFA. These standards have NOTHING TO DO with corporate versus non-corporate entities. We're talking about a rule that applies equally to all parties in civil litigation, whether they're incorporated or not. If you run a small business as a sole proprietor, and you get involved in a lawsuit, this applies to you, too.
Is slashdot so easy that any pseudo-Marxist anticorporate ranting passes for "informative"?
"Eventually, when the little guy gets done taking enough crap from those on top... the little guy gives the other the boot."
Not quite entirely correct. If they wanted to comply with the GPL, they would have to offer the source code of what they actually shipped, INCLUDING the source code that they modified.
This is because the modified source code is a "derived work", and the GPL states that all copies AND works derived from the original GPL'd work must also be GPL-licensed.
So unless you totally re-implement it from scratch (which I've done before with massively simpler projects), your own modifications must be GPL. This doesn't mean you don't own the copyright--you still own what you wrote yourself--but you agreed in advance that if you did modify anything and release it, you would GPL it.
"C) NYC is probably THE most difficult place to even possess a gun. More importantly, almost NO ONE in NYC can get a carry permit, other than diamond dealers. (All those Hasidic guys around 47th street? They are all armed.) Armored car dealers or anyone who handles large sums of money, too, but even then, the restrictions are loony. I always wondered...when they made the NYC gun laws... why are diamonds worth more than human lives?"
It's a good observation. Me, I'd love to get a gun for sport shooting. Maybe a shotgun for trap, or a.22 to plink with. It's possible to own a gun (unloaded, secured carry to/from the range only) if you're willing to deal with 3-4 months of waiting and a couple hundred dollars in permit fees. That just isn't worth it to me, for a hobby.
"d) I admit, that when I have had to go to particularly bad areas of the city, I have a few times "mistakenly" dropped a Seecamp.32 in my laptop bag. (they are smaller than a deck of cards, and hold 6.32 hollowpoints.) It bothers me to skirt the law that way, but at least I'll see my kids that night."
THIS is the part that I have a problem with: NYC is not particularly dangerous, and it hasn't been for a LONG time. I consider this to be a pretty nasty stereotype that's outlived the truth that created it.
I live in Brooklyn, and hang out everywhere--Midtown, SoHo, Lower Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, the Village, the LES, the UES, the triple-US, Harlem, the Bronx, Sunnyside, Forest Hills, Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Brownsville, East NY, Willamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, Bensonhurst... You get the point. I used the stick to the Village and downtown, but my friends have scattered everywhere in the last couple of years. I think I have a better-than-average taste for what city is like, day and night.
I'm a white boy, not particularly big, with no martial arts training or weightlifting habits. I dress middle-class casual or suit-and-tie, pretty normal for the city. In all the years I've been here, and on all the streets I've prowled, I've never once felt threatened or in real danger of street crime. I know people who have been mugged (mostly years back, but some recently) or assaulted on the street, but only a tiny number of them were injured or seriously threatened (e.g., a gun in the face).
Street crime in NYC is at a low not seen since the 60s. For all the major violent crime categories except sexual assult, it's the safest city in America with more than 1 million people. The whole goddamned town in on a massive gentrification kick, so even the places that were spooky 5 years ago are full of married homos and college kids, now.
I can think of maybe 3 neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs where I would worry about an adult male traveling alone: the Marcy Projects, Brighton Beach, and... well, I was gonna say the South Bronx, but since all those art galleries moved in, it hasn't been the same. Outside of those two spots, you have little to fear if you don't start trouble for yourself. If you're a girl, you have to be more careful, but that's true anywhere to about the same degree. Same for kids and the elderly.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that NYC is generally safe enough these days that it won't be worth getting caught with an unlicensed concealed weapon. 10 or 15 years ago, I could see you weighing the risks and reasonably deciding to carry, permit or no. But not today--that's some serious time for too little additional protection, even if you're otherwise within the law and don't have a record--and Albany's talking about raising the minimum penalties, too.
Why not try carrying a boxcutter or something like that, instead? It was always an effective deterrent when I was a kid in LA (now THAT'S a place I'd carry a gun!), and you won't go to jail for carrying one. Technically, I guess it's a concealed weapon, but it's not a firearm and you can plausibly tell the officer/judge that you just forgot that you had it when you left the house. Or, if you're into that shit, some Mace could help.
Just when I thought I'd never be able to buy a $4,000+ laptop again, they come out with this baby! Way to drive the high-end market, Sharp!
Seriously, though--I just finally bought an LCD desktop monitor last October, when a 19" got below $400 with shipping (thank you, NewEgg!). I bought an MP3 player for $50 in December that accepts CF card media, which is about $60/GB (thanks AGAIN, NewEgg!). Now THAT's some cool shit.
time getting excited about it until they're selling enough volume to bring the price down to commodity levels.
Once more we play our deadly game (of semantics!)...
1) When you say "heatsink", you're just talking about a type of radiator. Usually, we restrict the term "heatsink" to a local radiator, an object in direct contact with the CPU core (or whatever your heat source is), as opposed to a remote radiator that uses fluid exchange to transfer heat from the core to the radiator.
2) ANY cooling system, be it passive/active, air/water, local/remote, is going to incorporate a radiator somewhere. Even with phase change systems or Peltiers, you eventually have to dump heat passively. Meaning that any cooling system will have a radiator of some kind.
SO: If you refer to a cooling setup as a just a heatsink, when it incorporates some kind of phase-change or other active cooling method, you're being ambiguous and misleading with your language. The real distinction is that active cooling systems can chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of 0K, whereas passive cooling systems can only chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of the ambient temperature of the radiator's environment.
I think it's best not to confuse the issue by referring to active cooling systems as "heatsink" setups, because they HAVE to have a radiator of some kind. It's like calling a submarine a "boat"--while technically correct, the term doesn't describe the subject in a way that adequetely distinguishes its important characteristics.
I actually like your analogy, but I take issue with your point.
Is customization and differentiation a really good thing? It means more effort to software authors and maintainers, which means less software gets to less desktops. It fucks with the learning curve, because you have to learn diferent tools and idiosyncrasies for each system, meaning less people will learn the OS.
On the other hand, if someone did impose a comprehensive set of standards for Linux systems, assuming that there was some kind of enforcement of standards (how, I can't begin to guess...), introducing new features and changes would be so difficult... I've heard kernel design changes referred to as "turning a battleship", so I would imagine that changing overall UI, system layout, etc. specs would be "turning an iceberg". Look at MS and how little they change from major version to major version--the registry is pretty much the same since WinNT.
So if you want more users and wider adoption, you have to standardize some things, but you'll lose innovation and adaptability. If a large userbase is more important than technical superiority, standardize, but if not, don't.
The real question isn't "standardize or not". It's "userbase size versus technicals."
Bear with me, here. They're comparing the amount of time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the release of the fix, right? But many vulnerabilities exist underground before they're publicly announced. A lot of them are discovered by security people because they're seen in use in the wild.
So why is the announcement date for a vuln used to start the clock on the time spent vulnerable? The REAL value you need is "when was this actually discovered by the cracker community". Does their study look at that?
But it's even more complicated than that--if three black hats in the whole world know about a bug, it's less dangerous than if thousands know about it. So the rate at which the underground becomes aware of a vuln is an important part of this, too. And I'm not sure how this study can figure that out, or find an acceptable proxy on which to estimate it.
Just counting days between vuln announcement and patch announcement is crap. Sure, there's a grain of truth in there, somewhere, but the lack of any data on the rest of these factors is potentially a huge difference in the conclusion.
Put differently, you can usefully estimate a quantity if you know enough about the factors to be sure that you're with 5% of the correct answer. Maybe even 10%, or 20%. But your estimate is useless and misleading if you can't get within 90%. And even worse, if you don't know how far off your estimate is going to be (because you don't know enough about your factors to even establish an error range), your estimate is pretty fucking close to a lie.
I can think of a couple more, too. The methodology seems kind of, well, pre-scientific. I don't want to say "barbaric", exactly, but...
You DO have a point about how much it would suck if employers started imposing all those kinds of conditions on employees, but you're missing the bigger point, yourself. Because the obvious answer to your question is "The company decides what's too big of a risk."
Business management practices can be unpleasant to deal with, at times. They can also be dreamy and spoil you with niceness. It depends on the employer and the people setting policies. Just as you think it's silly for a boss to micromanage your private life, isn't it kind of silly for an outsider (the government?) to micromanage a business's internal HR practices? It's one thing to set a couple of big rules:
government-to-business: no sexual harassment, no racist hiring policies.
business-to-employee: we fire you if you get convicted of a felony or bad-mouth the company in public.
But beyond the basic rules, there are serious problems with further meddling. Business that try to hyper-regulate their employees' private lives will probably notice a lot of people complaining more, being less satisfied, and leaving to work at other companies if they can. It will be harder to compete in hiring good candidates because the meddling is a perceived cost to many employees. Sure, they may stay in business, but after a while the accumulating costs and lost opportunities will diminish gains made by reducing employee health care costs, or whatever motivated the invasive policies.
And if it's you, the little employee, who gets caught up in this busybody workplace? You were apparantly alive BEFORE you got that job, so I'm sure you can figure something out after you leave it. Even in a down market, people have options.
I'll admit, if a lot of companies started engaging in these kinds of practices, things would be much worse for workers. Then, there might be a rationale for the government stepping in to set guidelines about how companies can and can't regulate private employee life. But there just aren't many companies at all that do this stuff, probably for the reasons that I outlined above.
But on the other hand, if a fuck-ton of companies started doing this, I think we might want to look harder at WHY they all thought it was a good idea. There might actually be a need for it, and that's not something we can just ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
Think your analogies through a little better. They stink.
That would be because they're not analogies, dumbass. They're examples of other cases wherein one party exercises its first amendment rights in way that has negative consequences for another group exercising their first amemndment rights.
Actually, there are at least 100 law firms fitting that description, that I'm familiar with/have done business with, anyway. It's kind of a happening practice area, these days.
I'm tempted to post a link to the blog and let you give a second opinion, but I'd rather not put Slashdot up to the task en masse. Because I'm sure that she CAN be found out, given time and effort, by an interested-enough party.
I disagree with you about how easy it would be--I just scanned the last 10 postings or so, and there's nothing in the blog details that are particularly specific. She's quite careful about anonymizing, with names and places and such.
There's a huge gap though between grading an essay -- written in natural language -- and a math assignment where you could just check each equality to see if it holds then if the answer is right.
True, dat. But "more complicated problem" doesn't mean "impossible problem". Natural langauge still obeys rules, hard as they may be to describe in software. And there's a lot of highly successful work done in this area in recent years, with results that may surprise you.
Consider the always-useful ETS example that grades GRE essays: every essay gets a human reader's score AND an machine reader's score, and the results agree 98% of the time. Assuming that ETS isn't bullshitting us all in their press, that's pretty effective software.
I think of this a lot like the enemy soldiers in the first Half Life game. When they started working in teams and using grenades effectively to flush me out, I was amazed that the AI was using sophisticated tactics. Computers do more and more, all the time. Try not to feel too bad when they start winning Nobel prizes for literature.
Sorry about that little soul digression. You're right, totally, about real neurons.
Hey, that doesn't mean it CAN'T be done right. That just means y'all didn't DO it right.
I mean, think about Yahoo's shitty-ass search page from three or four years ago, all faggoted-up like a sixth-grade schoolgirl's notebook, with ad banners and stupid links and whatnot. Then Google came along and did it right.
Really, there probably aren't too many automated math grading programs because there's not a perceived need, and so nobody's putting a whole hell of a lot of effort into it. In practice, I think that hand-grading is fast enough to be just fine, and it allows the students to work with a pencil and paper--it's more flexible. I'm just using the automation concept as an example.
No, you're right--they are two very different types of machines. But they operate on the same underlying mechanism of information flow, and they have the same relationship between input and output.
I should probably reveal a hidden assumption I'm making: human thought and action, including problem-solving, is an essentially mechanical task at some level, down at the physical and chemical interactions of a brain.
Of course, you might disagree with me if you believe in things like "souls" or whatever, but that's one of the debates that I don't think we can productively have.
Hey, if it was an undergrad math class, like Calculus 1, how would you feel about automated grading? It's possible, trivial even, to write a program and have a way for students to solve problems (showing their work, of course!) in a machine-readable format. Then you can have a computer grade the homework and report a summary to the TA, who looks at what students are missing and deals with it. This isn't that different from the way things currently operate, because the TA manually grading homework is just using a mechanical process to check the students' work, anyway.
.sig that says "I don't use comments--if it was hard to code, it should be hard to read." The fact that an 18-year old punk takes hours to craft an essay (that the professor could do in his sleep) doesn't make the effort more valuable.
What's the point of the class? In Calculus 1, the point is to learn concepts and methods that allow you to perform basic operations, as proven by your ability to work out problems on homework and tests. You're not asked to be creative or anything--that comes later, in 300 or 400 level classes or graduate work. First, you have to learn the basics.
I imagine sociology isn't that much different--at least, it wasn't in Poli Sci when I was in college. First, you have to learn a bunch of basic facts and rules and concepts, and demonstrate that you have a know them. You should be able to talk about them, define them, and answer questions about them. Anybody who's being creative in a freshman sociology class is ahead of the game.
And don't give me no shit about "I spent hours making it, you should spend hours reading it". That's like the
I mean, shit--it took me DAYS to write my first couple of C programs in CS 101. Does that mean that the professor is shorting my education if he takes 10 seconds to grade it?
This is a common misconception about algorithms. Effective methods don't have be consciously engineered in every step by a human designer, even when applied to extremely complex questions that traditionally require human judgement.
It's possible to train computer programs to translate text between languages by feeding examples of good and bad translations to pattern-recognition algorithms, which start with simple rules. Most of these models are similar to neural-net machines, which is in turn based on the fundamental theory of how animal brains (including human brains) operate. You don't design and code an algorithm, you train the machine by example, with some human-assisted trail-and-error.
This often works because that's how human judgement works: we learn just about everything by example and trial-and-error, and we're VERY good at it (look at what millions of years of evolution can accomplish!). This isn't to say that a trained neural net machine is "intelligent" or "conscious", just that solves problems by the same mechanism that a human brain does, albeit in a much more limited fashion.
Of course, the effectiveness of a trained machine is limited by how big a computer you have, and how well you train it. Re-creating the complexity of the human brain in software with present-day techniques and equipment would be impossible (neural net software is VERY memory intensive when it gets complex). This may change in the future, but that's another debate that I won't get into.
I'm not saying that this professor's software actually works or not--he could easily be full of shit. I'm also not saying that you can't game one of these machines the same way spammers game Bayesian anti-spam filters: use trial-and-error to figure out how to trick the machine consistently.
In fact, I'm assuming that a canny student could steal the software and do exactly that. After all, the human brain is a much more powerful learning machine than the program, and could probably outsmart it in the same way that people can outsmart rats.
But then again, this is a socialogy course, so his students probably won't think of it on their own.
I think it's possible for anonymous people to write entertaining things about their own offices precisely BECAUSE so many offices are similar. Readers will relate to the funny, frustrating, and uplifting events that the blogger relates.
Consider how popular office-related sitcoms can be, even if they're pretty generic: "The Drew Carey Show" and "The Office" come to mind, and there are tons more. The point of the humor in these shows isn't anything about that particular office, but about offices in general, bosses in general, and coworkers in general.
One of my ex-girlfriends pens a hilarious, utterly anonymous blog about life as a paralegal at a midtown NYC white-collar criminal defense firm. She does about 2-3 posts a week, on average. Reading the blog, though, you can't even tell it's a law office, because she has to be careful (partly the legal issues, but mostly office politics). And yet, she has more than 100 regular unique readers, and gets dozens of comments on most posts.
It helps that she's an incredibly funny writer, with more than a little training and talent for prose, but that makes sense, right?
And seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY: Isn't "Office Space" one of the goddamned funnist movies you've ever seen?
"Free speech" is a nice little term that gets bandied far too often in a nonsensical way, by people who don't think about rights concepts in a particularly rigorous way.
If an employer's decision to censure or fire an employee based on work-related blogging is an infringement of free speech, then what about a person/group who decides to boycott a company because they disagree with that company's decisions? Or how about when there's a demonstration outside my window and I shut the window because I don't agree with them and don't want to hear it?
"Free speech" becomes an *abusive* concept when you deprive people of their rights to avoid associating with people they don't like, or to take otherwise legal actions (like not shopping at a particular store) based on their opinons about an entity. After all, isn't the constitutional guarantee of freedom of association embedded in the exact same amendment as the right to free speech?
"Free speech" cannot mean "speech without consequences from anyone". That would just be silly. I'll say what I want, and you'll decide whether you want to associate with me based on how you feel about it.
1) EVERY card has a VGA output. Most onboard video solutions ONLY have a VGA output. Customers like flexibility.
2) Hardware costs in an LCD monitor are almost entirely in the LCD screen itself. The rest of the hardware is pennies in comparison. So even leaving out some extra electronics is a tiny, tiny cost savings.
3) The cost of hardware manufacturing has only so much to do with how something is built. More important, especially in the long run, is how many of something you can sell. Large volumes bring costs down, sometimes by a huge amount. VGA analog hardware has been on the market for more than 15 years, with gazillions of parts sold.
Take serial/parallel ports as an example. Despite the introduction of "legacy free" products in the last couple of years, almost every motherboard sold today still has these ancient devices, including the on-board logic to make them work. They'll disappear eventually, but it doesn't make enough of a cost difference right now to remove them.
(I wasn't clear whether you're using WEP or WPA, so here goes nothing...)
/etc/passwd files suggests that random alphanumeric+symbol passwords of more than about 12 characters are basically unbreakable by a single modern desktop machine.
IF YOU'RE USING WEP
Whoa... are you saying that you use 152-bit WEP with random keys? Because this ISN'T secure. The newer WEP attacks work reasonably well against WEP at all key sizes. Since WEP attacks aren't brute force, the average attack length isn't directly proportional to the size of the key space.
And when you think of "attack length", here, remember that the amount of computing time is trivial. The thing that usually takes a while is collecting the packets to examine. 104-bit WEP will usually (much more than half the time, in my experience) break with less than a half-million encrypted packets collected--about a day or less on any busy network. BUT, once you've collected the traffic (with tcpdump or ethereal), it only takes minutes to run the crack. Seriously--less than 10 minutes, almost guaranteed, on a Pentium-M 1.5 GHz.
So yes, cracking 104-bit keys takes longer than cracking 40-bit keys, and cracking 152-bit keys takes longer still, but it just doesn't matter if you're using WEP: you're still fucked. Use 512-bit WEP for all a cracker cares. He'll still break it in a reasonable amoun of time.
IF YOU'RE USING WPA
Forget everything I just said. The only current attack on WPA is a brute force attack on the passphrase/key, meaning that the attack length (in terms of time and packets needed) is proportional to the key space size. 152 bits is, what, like 19 bytes? Brute-force password cracking on hashed
So you should be fine, but keep an eye out for news on WPA security. Oh, and keep in mind that you're still vulnerable to DoS attacks, since the frame headers aren't encrypted. You'll have to wait for that one.
Okay, I've read my share of Milton Friedman and Hayek and Mises and all that, and I won't argue the damn philosophy or economics like the other reply poster. I WILL, however, point out a couple of things for your edification that are pretty simple facts:
1) There are tens of thousands of incorporated companies in the USA. If you include sole-proprietor LLCs, which share certain liability features of corporations but not the management structre (they're essentially traditional small business with a liability shield), the number is probably in the hundreds of thousands.
2) Some of these corporations do bad things. Some are caught and some get away. But the Enrons, KBRs, and Worldcoms are the exception, not the rule. There were a few dozen high-profile dot-com related corporate malfeasance cases, and every year there are at least a dozen or so SEC efforts on other random corporations that Do Bad Things. So, NOT the majority--a small proportion.
3) FBI crime statistics suggest that the rate of violent and property crime perps, nationwide, is greater than 1 in 10,000, but probably less than 1 in 1000. So the rates for corporations and individuals are roughly the same order of magnitude.
4) One could conclude that corporations an individuals commit crimes in about the same proportion. Not equal, but close enough.
5) Many of the high-profile dot-com criminal cases were against individuals (i.e., Frank Quattrone) or partnership-style companies (Arthur Anderson).
6) One could conclude that whether an entity is a corporation or not is a pretty shitty way to predict whether it will engage in criminal behavior, because the correlation is so weak.
"Am I the only one who thinks that government should be requiring companies to move the *other* way?"
Um, have you ever heard of a little piece of legislation called Sarbanes-Oxley? Yeah, you might want to check that out before you start assuming you're on a one-man crusade. Corporate ecords retention requirements have only increased over the past 10 years.
"Ie, retain, *everything*... absolutely *everything*, why should email/*doc* be an acceptable domain, where, one can simply erase data under dubious circumstances ?"
This would be fine... except for the fact that you'd have to remove the "delete" function from every application on every desktop. If I'm composing emails, and I decide not to send something I halfway finished, do I have to save it? How about drafts from 10-year-old memos? And what happens when you just have too much shit for your hard drives? Preserving EVERYTHING is a pretty goddamned big burden on businesses.
"Corporations are too powerful now.
Increasingly, law is coming to reflect the interests of Corporations, instead of the interests of countries citizens."
Go back and RTFA. These standards have NOTHING TO DO with corporate versus non-corporate entities. We're talking about a rule that applies equally to all parties in civil litigation, whether they're incorporated or not. If you run a small business as a sole proprietor, and you get involved in a lawsuit, this applies to you, too.
Is slashdot so easy that any pseudo-Marxist anticorporate ranting passes for "informative"?
"Eventually, when the little guy gets done taking enough crap from those on top... the little guy gives the other the boot."
Yeah, whatever.
Not quite entirely correct. If they wanted to comply with the GPL, they would have to offer the source code of what they actually shipped, INCLUDING the source code that they modified.
This is because the modified source code is a "derived work", and the GPL states that all copies AND works derived from the original GPL'd work must also be GPL-licensed.
So unless you totally re-implement it from scratch (which I've done before with massively simpler projects), your own modifications must be GPL. This doesn't mean you don't own the copyright--you still own what you wrote yourself--but you agreed in advance that if you did modify anything and release it, you would GPL it.
One NYC resident to another...
.22 to plink with. It's possible to own a gun (unloaded, secured carry to/from the range only) if you're willing to deal with 3-4 months of waiting and a couple hundred dollars in permit fees. That just isn't worth it to me, for a hobby.
.32 in my laptop bag. (they are smaller than a deck of cards, and hold 6 .32 hollowpoints.) It bothers me to skirt the law that way, but at least I'll see my kids that night."
"C) NYC is probably THE most difficult place to even possess a gun. More importantly, almost NO ONE in NYC can get a carry permit, other than diamond dealers. (All those Hasidic guys around 47th street? They are all armed.) Armored car dealers or anyone who handles large sums of money, too, but even then, the restrictions are loony. I always wondered...when they made the NYC gun laws... why are diamonds worth more than human lives?"
It's a good observation. Me, I'd love to get a gun for sport shooting. Maybe a shotgun for trap, or a
"d) I admit, that when I have had to go to particularly bad areas of the city, I have a few times "mistakenly" dropped a Seecamp
THIS is the part that I have a problem with: NYC is not particularly dangerous, and it hasn't been for a LONG time. I consider this to be a pretty nasty stereotype that's outlived the truth that created it.
I live in Brooklyn, and hang out everywhere--Midtown, SoHo, Lower Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen, the Village, the LES, the UES, the triple-US, Harlem, the Bronx, Sunnyside, Forest Hills, Park Slope, Ft. Greene, Brownsville, East NY, Willamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, Bensonhurst... You get the point. I used the stick to the Village and downtown, but my friends have scattered everywhere in the last couple of years. I think I have a better-than-average taste for what city is like, day and night.
I'm a white boy, not particularly big, with no martial arts training or weightlifting habits. I dress middle-class casual or suit-and-tie, pretty normal for the city. In all the years I've been here, and on all the streets I've prowled, I've never once felt threatened or in real danger of street crime. I know people who have been mugged (mostly years back, but some recently) or assaulted on the street, but only a tiny number of them were injured or seriously threatened (e.g., a gun in the face).
Street crime in NYC is at a low not seen since the 60s. For all the major violent crime categories except sexual assult, it's the safest city in America with more than 1 million people. The whole goddamned town in on a massive gentrification kick, so even the places that were spooky 5 years ago are full of married homos and college kids, now.
I can think of maybe 3 neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs where I would worry about an adult male traveling alone: the Marcy Projects, Brighton Beach, and... well, I was gonna say the South Bronx, but since all those art galleries moved in, it hasn't been the same. Outside of those two spots, you have little to fear if you don't start trouble for yourself. If you're a girl, you have to be more careful, but that's true anywhere to about the same degree. Same for kids and the elderly.
Anyway, all I'm saying is that NYC is generally safe enough these days that it won't be worth getting caught with an unlicensed concealed weapon. 10 or 15 years ago, I could see you weighing the risks and reasonably deciding to carry, permit or no. But not today--that's some serious time for too little additional protection, even if you're otherwise within the law and don't have a record--and Albany's talking about raising the minimum penalties, too.
Why not try carrying a boxcutter or something like that, instead? It was always an effective deterrent when I was a kid in LA (now THAT'S a place I'd carry a gun!), and you won't go to jail for carrying one. Technically, I guess it's a concealed weapon, but it's not a firearm and you can plausibly tell the officer/judge that you just forgot that you had it when you left the house. Or, if you're into that shit, some Mace could help.
"f) NYC pizza rocks."
Of course it does.
What. The. Fuck?
How did this get modded "Interesting"? Oh, wait... there's not "Incoherent" option.
Thank you. Thank you ever so much. You are far too kind.
"can anyone detail software optmized to take advantage of the 3D display technology?"
I'm gonna go with "Jack Shit", at least at the moment. I mean, this is literally the first consumer product the bring this technology to market.
Although JackShit 2.1 (the development fork) has limited support for the technology right now. You can grab a CVS snapshot from Sourceforge.
Just when I thought I'd never be able to buy a $4,000+ laptop again, they come out with this baby! Way to drive the high-end market, Sharp!
Seriously, though--I just finally bought an LCD desktop monitor last October, when a 19" got below $400 with shipping (thank you, NewEgg!). I bought an MP3 player for $50 in December that accepts CF card media, which is about $60/GB (thanks AGAIN, NewEgg!). Now THAT's some cool shit.
time getting excited about it until they're selling enough volume to bring the price down to commodity levels.
Once more we play our deadly game (of semantics!)...
1) When you say "heatsink", you're just talking about a type of radiator. Usually, we restrict the term "heatsink" to a local radiator, an object in direct contact with the CPU core (or whatever your heat source is), as opposed to a remote radiator that uses fluid exchange to transfer heat from the core to the radiator.
2) ANY cooling system, be it passive/active, air/water, local/remote, is going to incorporate a radiator somewhere. Even with phase change systems or Peltiers, you eventually have to dump heat passively. Meaning that any cooling system will have a radiator of some kind.
SO: If you refer to a cooling setup as a just a heatsink, when it incorporates some kind of phase-change or other active cooling method, you're being ambiguous and misleading with your language. The real distinction is that active cooling systems can chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of 0K, whereas passive cooling systems can only chill the CPU to an arbitrarily low temperature approaching the limit of the ambient temperature of the radiator's environment.
I think it's best not to confuse the issue by referring to active cooling systems as "heatsink" setups, because they HAVE to have a radiator of some kind. It's like calling a submarine a "boat"--while technically correct, the term doesn't describe the subject in a way that adequetely distinguishes its important characteristics.
I actually like your analogy, but I take issue with your point.
Is customization and differentiation a really good thing? It means more effort to software authors and maintainers, which means less software gets to less desktops. It fucks with the learning curve, because you have to learn diferent tools and idiosyncrasies for each system, meaning less people will learn the OS.
On the other hand, if someone did impose a comprehensive set of standards for Linux systems, assuming that there was some kind of enforcement of standards (how, I can't begin to guess...), introducing new features and changes would be so difficult... I've heard kernel design changes referred to as "turning a battleship", so I would imagine that changing overall UI, system layout, etc. specs would be "turning an iceberg". Look at MS and how little they change from major version to major version--the registry is pretty much the same since WinNT.
So if you want more users and wider adoption, you have to standardize some things, but you'll lose innovation and adaptability. If a large userbase is more important than technical superiority, standardize, but if not, don't.
The real question isn't "standardize or not". It's "userbase size versus technicals."
I'm absolutely sure that no one is reading new comments on this story anymore, but you get 'props anyway, for the phrase "Islamic scape goat".
Cuz it's ironic, see? Scape goat is a Hebrew thing...
Bear with me, here. They're comparing the amount of time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the release of the fix, right? But many vulnerabilities exist underground before they're publicly announced. A lot of them are discovered by security people because they're seen in use in the wild.
So why is the announcement date for a vuln used to start the clock on the time spent vulnerable? The REAL value you need is "when was this actually discovered by the cracker community". Does their study look at that?
But it's even more complicated than that--if three black hats in the whole world know about a bug, it's less dangerous than if thousands know about it. So the rate at which the underground becomes aware of a vuln is an important part of this, too. And I'm not sure how this study can figure that out, or find an acceptable proxy on which to estimate it.
Just counting days between vuln announcement and patch announcement is crap. Sure, there's a grain of truth in there, somewhere, but the lack of any data on the rest of these factors is potentially a huge difference in the conclusion.
Put differently, you can usefully estimate a quantity if you know enough about the factors to be sure that you're with 5% of the correct answer. Maybe even 10%, or 20%. But your estimate is useless and misleading if you can't get within 90%. And even worse, if you don't know how far off your estimate is going to be (because you don't know enough about your factors to even establish an error range), your estimate is pretty fucking close to a lie.
I can think of a couple more, too. The methodology seems kind of, well, pre-scientific. I don't want to say "barbaric", exactly, but...
...but who determines what is major?
You DO have a point about how much it would suck if employers started imposing all those kinds of conditions on employees, but you're missing the bigger point, yourself. Because the obvious answer to your question is "The company decides what's too big of a risk."
Business management practices can be unpleasant to deal with, at times. They can also be dreamy and spoil you with niceness. It depends on the employer and the people setting policies. Just as you think it's silly for a boss to micromanage your private life, isn't it kind of silly for an outsider (the government?) to micromanage a business's internal HR practices? It's one thing to set a couple of big rules:
government-to-business: no sexual harassment, no racist hiring policies.
business-to-employee: we fire you if you get convicted of a felony or bad-mouth the company in public.
But beyond the basic rules, there are serious problems with further meddling. Business that try to hyper-regulate their employees' private lives will probably notice a lot of people complaining more, being less satisfied, and leaving to work at other companies if they can. It will be harder to compete in hiring good candidates because the meddling is a perceived cost to many employees. Sure, they may stay in business, but after a while the accumulating costs and lost opportunities will diminish gains made by reducing employee health care costs, or whatever motivated the invasive policies.
And if it's you, the little employee, who gets caught up in this busybody workplace? You were apparantly alive BEFORE you got that job, so I'm sure you can figure something out after you leave it. Even in a down market, people have options.
I'll admit, if a lot of companies started engaging in these kinds of practices, things would be much worse for workers. Then, there might be a rationale for the government stepping in to set guidelines about how companies can and can't regulate private employee life. But there just aren't many companies at all that do this stuff, probably for the reasons that I outlined above.
But on the other hand, if a fuck-ton of companies started doing this, I think we might want to look harder at WHY they all thought it was a good idea. There might actually be a need for it, and that's not something we can just ignore.