If there's a group of people who are willing to consistently do plumbing for free, and the quality is just as good as commercial plumbers, then I expect the government to use the free plumbers.
Why do people keep implying that the quality of the free and open source software alternatives is equivalent to the mainstream commercial applications? With a few exceptions, it simply isn't true for any of the big name apps that matter. (Not coincidentally, those exceptions are the ones making serious inroads into the marketplace.)
In terms of features, the freebies are still mostly playing catch-up to the established commerical players. It's true that some are pretty much there now; I gather Gnumeric is very good these days. Very few are ahead, however, and those that are ahead in places usually lag behind in other areas.
In terms of usability -- and please understand that usability is everything outside of GeekWorld(TM) -- free software isn't even on the planet where Microsoft, Apple et al live. This was exemplified right here on Slashdot a few days ago, when an article slammed the GIMP for its non-standard interface amongst other things, and a zillion slashbots collectively put their heads in the sand and missed the point. The Mozilla project's continued stubborn insistence that W3C standards are more important than being compatible with the browser used by 90+% of surfers, to the extent that their product does not work with a significant number of major web sites, is another fine example.
On the plus side, in terms of portability, open standards compliance and sometimes even technical merit, several of the freebies are ahead of the game, though rarely by as far as they think they are. However, you have to realise that these things are mostly implementation details, and come in a distant third place in the "what matters" race.
As my previous posts will tell you, I'm no apologist for megacorps, but you have to keep these things in perspective. $300 to an individual is a lot of money. $300 to a business is merely the cost of employing somebody useful for a few hours, and the associated overheads. If an alternative software product with poor usability or a missing feature cost those few hours, you've already justified buying the $300 product instead. If the freebie wastes that time twice, it just became a liability.
So, yes, when the free kit is just as good as commercial in every way and the cost of switching is small, I would expect government to move to it. But that's not going to happen for a while yet, and in the meantime I have no problem with government spending some of my tax money on a more productive alternative.
For over almost 30 years, a byte is 8 bits... A word contains four nibbles or two bytes. Insisting otherwise is anal retentive at best.
That sort of attitude is what caused the millenium bug fiasco, not to mention thousands of silly errors as we moved from a predominantly 16-bit to a predominantly 32-bit world.
Thanks for the tip, but I wasn't annoyed because the charges surprised me. I knew they were coming, and decided I still wanted my itemized bill. I'm not committed in any long-term contract anyway, so if they do something I find sufficiently offensive I'll simply walk away.
What annoyed me was that for several of the previous months, the company had made errors that would only have showed up on an itemized bill (and which added up to much more than the one pound per month the latter costs). T-Mobile's actions here stink of an attempt to cover such errors up, and thus to defraud their customers by a little bit every month as well as making an extra quid in a rather pathetic manner.
BTW, on-line billing is fine if you trust it, but in cases like this, I'd still rather have paper to fall back on. Also, only proper paper bills are acceptable for things like identifying yourself to a bank when you open a new account (as they're required to check your identity as part of the anti-laundering regulations these days). I think the trend towards asking people to have their bills on-line and not sending out paper is a bit pathetic on the part of utilities companies. It's a cheap cost-saving measure at the expense of the consumer, and given how often they screw-up, I think they should be legally required to provide written documentation of where their charges come from...
You laugh, but T-Mobile UK just started charging one pound per month just to send you an itemized paper bill.
That would seem less serious if I hadn't just caught them double-charging me for text messages supposedly included in my monthly allowance, based on the itemized records from previous months' bills.
A quick job search reveals that there are around 85+ jobs requiring mathematics skills, with only one or two requiring Ph.D's. The other positions are for junior accounting assistants, admins and teachers.
My experience is based on a dozen real people who took a real maths course and then got real jobs.
Your information is based on a search on monster.com.
Which of these do you think is the more accurate representation?
(Friendly hint: people with PhDs in maths probably aren't searching for jobs on monster.com; they're doing it through connections they established while doing their research.)
(Friendly hint #2: people with degrees in maths from any respectable university probably aren't searching for jobs on monster.com either; they're seeking them via their university careers services and related events, via direct contact with potential employers loking to recruit individuals with that sort of expertise, or simply by word of mouth.)
Someone who spent those 8 years actually working is likely better qualified to actually get a real job done.
The fact that you think an undergraduate degree followed by a postgraduate diploma takes eight years demonstrates pretty clearly how much you'd know about that, I guess.
Using a credit card for on-line purchases is a smart move in many places, but how smart depends on your local law.
In the UK, AAIU, consumer credit law basically says that the credit card company is jointly and severally liable with the seller if things go wrong (if the seller goes under, for example). Hence you can take the same legal action against the credit card company as you can against the seller to recover your losses.
NB: There are certain restrictions on this UK situation, which you'd have to check if you're thinking of using this. I think the purchase has to be in the 100-30,000 pounds range for this to apply, for example.
Also, be prepared to fight for this, as some CC companies are much better than others. When I cancelled an order from an on-line dealer that was unreasonably late, and my credit card was later charged anyway, the card company's first reaction was a stonewall claiming that this wasn't fraud as I'd given my card details to the company voluntarily. Legally speaking that may have been true (I never sought advice on this) but nevertheless I had explicitly withdrawn my consent and the card had been charged anyway, which would be against the rules on some other count. The card company just referred me back to the seller (Jungle.com, BTW) who had no answer. It was only when I went back to the card company a few weeks later, by which time they'd obviously received lots of complaints about the same company with the same computer glitch, that my money was refunded.
So Baystar is unlikely to be out of cash if SCO is forced to re-imburse it. In fact Baystar will be up $8 million dollars on their holding of 40,000 Series A shares.
That assumes, of course, that SCO has the necessary assets to meet that obligation. What are they worth at present? Perhaps more significantly, what will they be worth if they file for protection under whichever clever financial ruse their lawyers come up with?
I wouldn't be feeling too smug right now if I were Baystar, that's for sure. They may have taken a calculated risk, but AFAICS it's far from a certain profit.
If you follow the logic that pro-outsourcing folks use that "people are going to move up the job ladder" eventually everyone will have to have a Phd and 20 years of experience to get a job in any field.
On the contrary, some of the best paid people around these parts (and I work in a heavy tech city) are now the people with solid practical skills in timeless industries: plumbers, electricians, craftsmen...
Too many people have gone chasing a dream that a degree will guarantee a good income. Anyone stupid enough to believe that when the UK government target is 50% degree educated where it used to be 5-10% doesn't deserve a degree in the first place. No, as always it's the people who've worked hard to gain skills that are in demand who will benefit. Right now, the future is pretty bright for the practical workers, and why shouldn't it be?
However, following the advice of an mathematics teacher who had a "pure mathematics" degree, was on a low salary and couldn't find employment anywhere else, I chose to study Computer Science instead.
I was given the opposite advice, by a mathematics teacher about to retire who knew me well. She recommended I take my maths as high as I could, and then transfer it into whatever field I wanted to work in. That turned out to be some of the best advice I've ever received: an undergraduate degree in maths and a post-grad CS diploma later, and I'm more qualified than most of my peers. More importantly, I understand maths and can apply it in new contexts, as well as having easily enough CS to work in software development specifically (where a lot of people don't have any formal CS background anyway).
I'm also curious about this idea that mathematics opens no career paths. My peers now work in finance, IT, bio-tech, engineering R&D, and numerous other interesting and/or well paid fields. A few did go on to do PhDs, but certainly not the majority.
I don't think you were allowed to tell us that. Please report to your local prison camp for summary execution. And don't tell anyone you're going there, either. Thank you.
Your grammar seems a bit questionable for a professional editor.
The grandparent post used both a colon and a semi-colon correctly, and correctly included apostrophes in the contractions "it's" and "you're". That can't be a slashtroll, surely!;-)
There are numerous articles around debunking the "many eyes" myth, but here's an executive summary:
Almost no-one who uses OSS, even those who download the source and compile it themselves, actually reads the source in any detail first.
Most OSS projects are small, with a small number of contributors, and little or no formal review process.
On larger OSS projects -- Linux, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, etc. -- there are more people but also more code, and it's still unlikely than any individual piece of code is reviewed signficantly more often than in a good CSS development group.
Of course it's easier to fix bugs after they happen, in the sense that anyone with the necessary background knowledge can do it. Of course, very few people have that background knowledge, and in practice most bugs in OSS projects are fixed by the original developers and/or specialist professional developers.
Finally, the real security problem is how many bugs are there in the first place -- if you fix a bug but only after an exploit has taken down half the servers in the world, that's a bit late. OSS software -- even the big names like Linux and the popular networking tools -- consistently gets a similar number of critical bugs reported as CSS.
As for your Windows patches problems, I can only say that having used Windows for years, and been a sysadmin for several Windows-based and cross-platform systems, I've rarely if ever seen this terrible problem you describe. And if you think it's unique to Windows, hop over to the Red Hat support forum and look at the thread about RPM database corruption, where someone's insisting that it's "not a bug" if running an update on a perfectly valid system set-up shafts your package database.
Certainly you would agree that we need to defend the country against militants of any sort, yes?
As much as is possible, of course. But it's a game of dimishing returns. And notice that a lot of the most successful crime-reducing measures in recent times haven't involved more policemen with bigger guns. They've involved getting into the communities, finding out what the real motivations are and addressing them. Often, that's as simple as providing a worthwhile education for the children and teenagers so they actually bother going to school, or adding some sort of recreation facilities so they're not hanging around with nothing better to do all evening.
I don't believe that the best use of our security resources would be best spent elsewhere, building hospitals.
OK, here's a real and contemporary example from here in the UK. Our Home Secretary wants to introduce biometric identity cards. These are supposed to clamp down on lots of the politically unfortunate realities of our situation today: illegal immigrants, benefit fraudsters, and of course the T word. The reality is that not a single idea coming out of the Home Secretary's office has shown us how any of these things will be better addressed by having a biometric ID than using the ways and means we already have.
What is clear, however, is that billions will be required to implement and maintain such a scheme (and even that's only the initial estimate, which will inevitably double or treble before we get close to finishing the set-up, based on past experience). It will take a vast amount of human resources to get it working and keep it working. And it will anger a significant part of the population in the process. The most compelling argument against ID cards is no longer a civil liberties one (though that's still a pretty good argument) but rather the vast implications for wasted resources and excessive beaurocracy.
Now, in the UK, health and education provision aren't private. They're all run by the state, though there are private alternatives, which rich or nervous people like to use because they don't trust the state provision or simply can't get the treatment they need from it. The amount of money and other resources we're talking about throwing into ID cards could make a world of difference to either education or health, or to fighting real crimes, supporting our overstretched military, reducing the Council Taxes that are going up faster than our pensioners can afford, or a million other more deserving purposes.
The point of this post isn't to discredit ID cards -- I think that's been done pretty well already -- but to show what a difference a large amount of money and resources can make, and how much is being thrown away in the name of "fighting terrorism" for little or no real benefit.
I agree that any additional resources we can afford to use on schools, hospitals and the would be most welcome and well-used, but while we still have enemies in the world, we must protect ourselves from them.
Of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean throwing ever larger amounts of money into ever bigger guns and stronger armour. I'm assuming from context that you're from the US. In that case, you already have something like ten times the military budget of the next most "militant" country, no? If you want to protect yourselves from enemies, you might start by asking where those enemies came from. Is having more military weight than anyone else -- and being belligerent with it -- really helping, or is it actually doing more harm?
1974 was a long time ago. India and Pakistan both claim to have conducted underground nuclear tests much more recently than that. Strangely, none of my friends in the world-class geophysics lab down the road detected the side effects their instruments would show on an unmissable scale had such an event really occurred, however.
It wouldn't surprise me if India did have significant quantities of weapons-grade materials, or indeed if they had weapons ready to fire, but you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, particularly when its only source is a sabre-rattling government.
And of course, the point of the original post was the risk of that material falling into the wrong hands. India's a pretty stable place -- and hardly the only nation in the world with a long-standing but pretty cold war going on -- and the chances of them firing the nukes themselves don't seem particularly high.
Countries like, but not neccesarily limited to Pakistan, Iran, former USSR, India and so on are far more of a risk in this respect than the US.
You think India -- the world's largest democracy (in terms of population) and a generally civilised and well-educated society -- is a security risk because they (may) have nuclear weapons? Would it be inappropriate at this point to remind you which is the only country in the world ever to have dropped one for real, and also the country that supplied a rather large proportion of the serious firepower so-called rogue states now possess?
No matter how much you do, some fraction of your vital infrastructure will always be vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful and well-organised attack. If you protected every critical piece of infrastructure in a country -- all the power stations, water supplies, transport routes, government hubs, etc. -- then you'd expend far more resources than are practical on security, and having so many people in the system would cause weak links anyway.
Ultimately, you can't prevent an unknown enemy from committing an unknown act forever. All you can do is your best to stop it (and that's better done starting from intelligence rather than raw defensive power at every vulnerable point) and your best to clean up the mess (e.g., by having back-up generators in key places like hospitals in case the power does go out).
A more serious question that I'd pose, given the above harsh-but-true assessment, is how much could quality of life in general be improved if all the resources being diverted in the name of "fighting terrorism" were invested in hospitals, schools, etc. in the first place.
Anyway, the Unix user and permissions model is far more stable and secure than the one Windows has.
I'm not sure I buy that. It's certainly true that a WinXP Home box isn't 100% secure by default (though the forthcoming SP2 should do a lot to fix the more glaring holes) and that it does effectively give root access to anyone. OTOH, Linux home distributions don't exactly have a glowing history of disabling any services likely to pose a security risk by default, either.
In the serious game, however, recent incarnations of Windows (since 2000) have provided for some fairly powerful permission control if the admins care to take advantage of it. Certainly they go far beyond the crude user/group/everyone access of UNIX file systems, so if you're thinking of things like POSIX ACLs instead, it's only fair to compare against proper directory services on contemporary Windows installations.
The biggest threat to Linux is social engineering. That is why we must address these issues now, before the masses use Linux in force.
On that, we agree entirely. All the user- and system-level security in the world won't stop a muppet running an executable attachment called "see_busty_models".
It's one thing to click on a VB attachment in Outlook. It's another to follow install instructions that involve first logging in as root.
I think the problem is that you don't need to be logged in as root for the most common types of virus to do their damage. You just have to run an attachment that deletes anything it can get at, for example, and you can do that just as easily when logged in as joeuser. After all, the valuable stuff is the data (which Joe User won't have backed up recently), not the applications and configuration information that might be protected to non-root users.
I'm not for an instant suggesting that the *nix model where root access is the exception isn't superior to the Windows one where most people have full access to everything by default. I'm just observing that it doesn't solve all (or even, in this context, most) of the problems.
But the newer or newest distributions generally have most things turned off by default now.
And indeed WinXP SP2 will have a much beefed up software firewall, which will also use solid default settings. Of course, that's Microsoft, so we shouldn't give them any credit for it.
And this would only infect people running Linux as root all the time who use email clients that execute scripts sent from complete strangers without telling them.
I don't know where to start discrediting your post.
The "running as root" argument is garbage. Any privilege escalation vulnerability in Linux history (or any other history, for that matter) is an existence proof.
The "without telling them" argument is garbage. The vast majority of viruses transmitted by e-mail are done so because the user did something dumb, not because of some long-fixed auto-execute vulnerability in a popular mail client. You wouldn't need root access to fall for something like that, by the way.
You think a major Linux worm would have a minimal effect? Do you have any idea how many critical systems run on Linux these days? Hit Windows, hit the desktops. Hit Linux, hit the servers. Put your sysadmin hat on and tell me which is worse.
Linux is not immune to security issues, and any claim that many eyes make for few bugs and thus OSS is fundamentally safer than Windows-based equivalents can be discredited with the slightest thought about reality rather than theory. Linux remains relatively safe because of the culture surrounding it, not because it's inherently flawless.
If you write clear and simple code the compiler or interpreter does all the other work.
That will never be completely true, for the simple reason that the programmer will usually know more about the problem than will be expressed completely in the clear and simple code.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people keep implying that the quality of the free and open source software alternatives is equivalent to the mainstream commercial applications? With a few exceptions, it simply isn't true for any of the big name apps that matter. (Not coincidentally, those exceptions are the ones making serious inroads into the marketplace.)
In terms of features, the freebies are still mostly playing catch-up to the established commerical players. It's true that some are pretty much there now; I gather Gnumeric is very good these days. Very few are ahead, however, and those that are ahead in places usually lag behind in other areas.
In terms of usability -- and please understand that usability is everything outside of GeekWorld(TM) -- free software isn't even on the planet where Microsoft, Apple et al live. This was exemplified right here on Slashdot a few days ago, when an article slammed the GIMP for its non-standard interface amongst other things, and a zillion slashbots collectively put their heads in the sand and missed the point. The Mozilla project's continued stubborn insistence that W3C standards are more important than being compatible with the browser used by 90+% of surfers, to the extent that their product does not work with a significant number of major web sites, is another fine example.
On the plus side, in terms of portability, open standards compliance and sometimes even technical merit, several of the freebies are ahead of the game, though rarely by as far as they think they are. However, you have to realise that these things are mostly implementation details, and come in a distant third place in the "what matters" race.
As my previous posts will tell you, I'm no apologist for megacorps, but you have to keep these things in perspective. $300 to an individual is a lot of money. $300 to a business is merely the cost of employing somebody useful for a few hours, and the associated overheads. If an alternative software product with poor usability or a missing feature cost those few hours, you've already justified buying the $300 product instead. If the freebie wastes that time twice, it just became a liability.
So, yes, when the free kit is just as good as commercial in every way and the cost of switching is small, I would expect government to move to it. But that's not going to happen for a while yet, and in the meantime I have no problem with government spending some of my tax money on a more productive alternative.
<Duke> I don't have time to play with myself... </Duke>
That sort of attitude is what caused the millenium bug fiasco, not to mention thousands of silly errors as we moved from a predominantly 16-bit to a predominantly 32-bit world.
Thanks for the tip, but I wasn't annoyed because the charges surprised me. I knew they were coming, and decided I still wanted my itemized bill. I'm not committed in any long-term contract anyway, so if they do something I find sufficiently offensive I'll simply walk away.
What annoyed me was that for several of the previous months, the company had made errors that would only have showed up on an itemized bill (and which added up to much more than the one pound per month the latter costs). T-Mobile's actions here stink of an attempt to cover such errors up, and thus to defraud their customers by a little bit every month as well as making an extra quid in a rather pathetic manner.
BTW, on-line billing is fine if you trust it, but in cases like this, I'd still rather have paper to fall back on. Also, only proper paper bills are acceptable for things like identifying yourself to a bank when you open a new account (as they're required to check your identity as part of the anti-laundering regulations these days). I think the trend towards asking people to have their bills on-line and not sending out paper is a bit pathetic on the part of utilities companies. It's a cheap cost-saving measure at the expense of the consumer, and given how often they screw-up, I think they should be legally required to provide written documentation of where their charges come from...
You laugh, but T-Mobile UK just started charging one pound per month just to send you an itemized paper bill.
That would seem less serious if I hadn't just caught them double-charging me for text messages supposedly included in my monthly allowance, based on the itemized records from previous months' bills.
My experience is based on a dozen real people who took a real maths course and then got real jobs.
Your information is based on a search on monster.com.
Which of these do you think is the more accurate representation?
(Friendly hint: people with PhDs in maths probably aren't searching for jobs on monster.com; they're doing it through connections they established while doing their research.)
(Friendly hint #2: people with degrees in maths from any respectable university probably aren't searching for jobs on monster.com either; they're seeking them via their university careers services and related events, via direct contact with potential employers loking to recruit individuals with that sort of expertise, or simply by word of mouth.)
The fact that you think an undergraduate degree followed by a postgraduate diploma takes eight years demonstrates pretty clearly how much you'd know about that, I guess.
Damn, I hate slashbots.
Using a credit card for on-line purchases is a smart move in many places, but how smart depends on your local law.
In the UK, AAIU, consumer credit law basically says that the credit card company is jointly and severally liable with the seller if things go wrong (if the seller goes under, for example). Hence you can take the same legal action against the credit card company as you can against the seller to recover your losses.
NB: There are certain restrictions on this UK situation, which you'd have to check if you're thinking of using this. I think the purchase has to be in the 100-30,000 pounds range for this to apply, for example.
Also, be prepared to fight for this, as some CC companies are much better than others. When I cancelled an order from an on-line dealer that was unreasonably late, and my credit card was later charged anyway, the card company's first reaction was a stonewall claiming that this wasn't fraud as I'd given my card details to the company voluntarily. Legally speaking that may have been true (I never sought advice on this) but nevertheless I had explicitly withdrawn my consent and the card had been charged anyway, which would be against the rules on some other count. The card company just referred me back to the seller (Jungle.com, BTW) who had no answer. It was only when I went back to the card company a few weeks later, by which time they'd obviously received lots of complaints about the same company with the same computer glitch, that my money was refunded.
That assumes, of course, that SCO has the necessary assets to meet that obligation. What are they worth at present? Perhaps more significantly, what will they be worth if they file for protection under whichever clever financial ruse their lawyers come up with?
I wouldn't be feeling too smug right now if I were Baystar, that's for sure. They may have taken a calculated risk, but AFAICS it's far from a certain profit.
On the contrary, some of the best paid people around these parts (and I work in a heavy tech city) are now the people with solid practical skills in timeless industries: plumbers, electricians, craftsmen...
Too many people have gone chasing a dream that a degree will guarantee a good income. Anyone stupid enough to believe that when the UK government target is 50% degree educated where it used to be 5-10% doesn't deserve a degree in the first place. No, as always it's the people who've worked hard to gain skills that are in demand who will benefit. Right now, the future is pretty bright for the practical workers, and why shouldn't it be?
I was given the opposite advice, by a mathematics teacher about to retire who knew me well. She recommended I take my maths as high as I could, and then transfer it into whatever field I wanted to work in. That turned out to be some of the best advice I've ever received: an undergraduate degree in maths and a post-grad CS diploma later, and I'm more qualified than most of my peers. More importantly, I understand maths and can apply it in new contexts, as well as having easily enough CS to work in software development specifically (where a lot of people don't have any formal CS background anyway).
I'm also curious about this idea that mathematics opens no career paths. My peers now work in finance, IT, bio-tech, engineering R&D, and numerous other interesting and/or well paid fields. A few did go on to do PhDs, but certainly not the majority.
If you're feeling philosophical, try this one:
Or maybe this:
Someone ought to send a book of these things to G. W. Bush, David Blunkett, John Ashcroft and a few other choice "representatives" in the US and UK.
I don't think you were allowed to tell us that. Please report to your local prison camp for summary execution. And don't tell anyone you're going there, either. Thank you.
The grandparent post used both a colon and a semi-colon correctly, and correctly included apostrophes in the contractions "it's" and "you're". That can't be a slashtroll, surely! ;-)
There are numerous articles around debunking the "many eyes" myth, but here's an executive summary:
As for your Windows patches problems, I can only say that having used Windows for years, and been a sysadmin for several Windows-based and cross-platform systems, I've rarely if ever seen this terrible problem you describe. And if you think it's unique to Windows, hop over to the Red Hat support forum and look at the thread about RPM database corruption, where someone's insisting that it's "not a bug" if running an update on a perfectly valid system set-up shafts your package database.
As much as is possible, of course. But it's a game of dimishing returns. And notice that a lot of the most successful crime-reducing measures in recent times haven't involved more policemen with bigger guns. They've involved getting into the communities, finding out what the real motivations are and addressing them. Often, that's as simple as providing a worthwhile education for the children and teenagers so they actually bother going to school, or adding some sort of recreation facilities so they're not hanging around with nothing better to do all evening.
OK, here's a real and contemporary example from here in the UK. Our Home Secretary wants to introduce biometric identity cards. These are supposed to clamp down on lots of the politically unfortunate realities of our situation today: illegal immigrants, benefit fraudsters, and of course the T word. The reality is that not a single idea coming out of the Home Secretary's office has shown us how any of these things will be better addressed by having a biometric ID than using the ways and means we already have.
What is clear, however, is that billions will be required to implement and maintain such a scheme (and even that's only the initial estimate, which will inevitably double or treble before we get close to finishing the set-up, based on past experience). It will take a vast amount of human resources to get it working and keep it working. And it will anger a significant part of the population in the process. The most compelling argument against ID cards is no longer a civil liberties one (though that's still a pretty good argument) but rather the vast implications for wasted resources and excessive beaurocracy.
Now, in the UK, health and education provision aren't private. They're all run by the state, though there are private alternatives, which rich or nervous people like to use because they don't trust the state provision or simply can't get the treatment they need from it. The amount of money and other resources we're talking about throwing into ID cards could make a world of difference to either education or health, or to fighting real crimes, supporting our overstretched military, reducing the Council Taxes that are going up faster than our pensioners can afford, or a million other more deserving purposes.
The point of this post isn't to discredit ID cards -- I think that's been done pretty well already -- but to show what a difference a large amount of money and resources can make, and how much is being thrown away in the name of "fighting terrorism" for little or no real benefit.
Of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean throwing ever larger amounts of money into ever bigger guns and stronger armour. I'm assuming from context that you're from the US. In that case, you already have something like ten times the military budget of the next most "militant" country, no? If you want to protect yourselves from enemies, you might start by asking where those enemies came from. Is having more military weight than anyone else -- and being belligerent with it -- really helping, or is it actually doing more harm?
1974 was a long time ago. India and Pakistan both claim to have conducted underground nuclear tests much more recently than that. Strangely, none of my friends in the world-class geophysics lab down the road detected the side effects their instruments would show on an unmissable scale had such an event really occurred, however.
It wouldn't surprise me if India did have significant quantities of weapons-grade materials, or indeed if they had weapons ready to fire, but you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers, particularly when its only source is a sabre-rattling government.
And of course, the point of the original post was the risk of that material falling into the wrong hands. India's a pretty stable place -- and hardly the only nation in the world with a long-standing but pretty cold war going on -- and the chances of them firing the nukes themselves don't seem particularly high.
I doubt it, since the last one died quite a while ago...
You think India -- the world's largest democracy (in terms of population) and a generally civilised and well-educated society -- is a security risk because they (may) have nuclear weapons? Would it be inappropriate at this point to remind you which is the only country in the world ever to have dropped one for real, and also the country that supplied a rather large proportion of the serious firepower so-called rogue states now possess?
No matter how much you do, some fraction of your vital infrastructure will always be vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful and well-organised attack. If you protected every critical piece of infrastructure in a country -- all the power stations, water supplies, transport routes, government hubs, etc. -- then you'd expend far more resources than are practical on security, and having so many people in the system would cause weak links anyway.
Ultimately, you can't prevent an unknown enemy from committing an unknown act forever. All you can do is your best to stop it (and that's better done starting from intelligence rather than raw defensive power at every vulnerable point) and your best to clean up the mess (e.g., by having back-up generators in key places like hospitals in case the power does go out).
A more serious question that I'd pose, given the above harsh-but-true assessment, is how much could quality of life in general be improved if all the resources being diverted in the name of "fighting terrorism" were invested in hospitals, schools, etc. in the first place.
I'm not sure I buy that. It's certainly true that a WinXP Home box isn't 100% secure by default (though the forthcoming SP2 should do a lot to fix the more glaring holes) and that it does effectively give root access to anyone. OTOH, Linux home distributions don't exactly have a glowing history of disabling any services likely to pose a security risk by default, either.
In the serious game, however, recent incarnations of Windows (since 2000) have provided for some fairly powerful permission control if the admins care to take advantage of it. Certainly they go far beyond the crude user/group/everyone access of UNIX file systems, so if you're thinking of things like POSIX ACLs instead, it's only fair to compare against proper directory services on contemporary Windows installations.
On that, we agree entirely. All the user- and system-level security in the world won't stop a muppet running an executable attachment called "see_busty_models".
I think the problem is that you don't need to be logged in as root for the most common types of virus to do their damage. You just have to run an attachment that deletes anything it can get at, for example, and you can do that just as easily when logged in as joeuser. After all, the valuable stuff is the data (which Joe User won't have backed up recently), not the applications and configuration information that might be protected to non-root users.
I'm not for an instant suggesting that the *nix model where root access is the exception isn't superior to the Windows one where most people have full access to everything by default. I'm just observing that it doesn't solve all (or even, in this context, most) of the problems.
And indeed WinXP SP2 will have a much beefed up software firewall, which will also use solid default settings. Of course, that's Microsoft, so we shouldn't give them any credit for it.
I don't know where to start discrediting your post.
The "running as root" argument is garbage. Any privilege escalation vulnerability in Linux history (or any other history, for that matter) is an existence proof.
The "without telling them" argument is garbage. The vast majority of viruses transmitted by e-mail are done so because the user did something dumb, not because of some long-fixed auto-execute vulnerability in a popular mail client. You wouldn't need root access to fall for something like that, by the way.
You think a major Linux worm would have a minimal effect? Do you have any idea how many critical systems run on Linux these days? Hit Windows, hit the desktops. Hit Linux, hit the servers. Put your sysadmin hat on and tell me which is worse.
Linux is not immune to security issues, and any claim that many eyes make for few bugs and thus OSS is fundamentally safer than Windows-based equivalents can be discredited with the slightest thought about reality rather than theory. Linux remains relatively safe because of the culture surrounding it, not because it's inherently flawless.
That will never be completely true, for the simple reason that the programmer will usually know more about the problem than will be expressed completely in the clear and simple code.