I think sockets and web/internet protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP and other standardized protocols) as well as various other standard and widely used algorithms like zlib/deflate would be more useful in C++ than 2D drawing primitives.
I grew up back when Pascal was still used as teaching language (in fact, it was the first language I learned how to program in) and am a great C/C++ programmer.
Problem is, no-one around here will give me a job because they all want C#/.NET/J2EE/Oracle/SQL Server/etc code monkeys (generally with "at least 3 years commercial experience in xyz" or whatever meaning I cant just go and get some sort of certification or qualification in the technology and get a job that way)
Liars and Outliers - Bruce Schneier (even more relavent with the whole NSA thing and the fact that every new Snowden revelation gives us another reason not to put our trust in computer security or the people who created it)
There was an excellent book by Leo Laporte that was perfect reading for anyone who doesn't know a lot about computers (or thinks they know a lot more than they actually do) but I cant remember the title and its likely out-of-date anyway.
In terms of fiction, Cryptonomicon is a great read, as are the William Gibson cyberspace novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive)
Its not a book but if there was a book along the lines of the film Elysium it would be worth a read as it seems to be very much where earth is headed (a bunch of rich people with everything handed to them and access to the best of everything including medical care and a much larger bunch of poor people with little access to medical care and working as wage slaves for "the man"). Recommendations of any books along those lines very much appreciated:)
Thanks to the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on fireworks, the war on common sense and various other wars, its becoming harder and harder for amateurs who want to do chemistry (either generic experiments or genuine research) in their own home/shed/backyard.
Chemical suppliers wont sell to amateurs and hobbyists. Basic chemicals are restricted from sale because they happen to be used in drugs/fireworks/explosives as well as the 100 other uses those chemicals happen to be used for. Some US states require licenses or registration for even basic lab equipment. Hobby chemists who have done nothing illegal are being raided by the police and having their gear seized because it "could be used to make bombs/drugs/fireworks/etc"
1.Why are these things so weak and easily broken 2.Why don't the companies that make them invest a bit more money in making them harder to break (instead of on lawyers to sue people who break them) and 3.If the companies that make them wont fix them, why isn't someone else offering systems with stronger encryption?
If the amount of traffic passing through the stores I visited today is any indication, I dont know if anyone is saying "The MYER website is down, I will go to MYER and buy it", they are probably saying "The MYER website is down, who else online can sell me one":)
There is no reason you cant build a system such that it will not feed power into the grid if the grid goes down (blackout etc) but will continue to supply local power if the solar panels (or wind turbines or backup batteries or whatever you have) can supply the juice. Obviously you still need disconnect switches that completly shut off those sources in the event you need to work on the wires for some reason (or if there is a fire or other emergency and the fire fighters need to turn off the power before they put the fire out).
People on the land have been using local generation for ages (e.g. in one example I know of they had/have a big diesel generator, a small wind turbine and batteries), its logical that people in that situation will simply throw some solar panels on the roof of the house (or the shed) and save money on diesel.
Many of the peak generation plants I know of (at least in Australia and probably elsewhere too) are basically scaled up jet engines modified to generate electric power instead of forward movement and running on (usually) natural gas.
It should be outright illegal for any company to supply goods to a downstream company and then tell that company what price they are going to charge to consumers.
Apple should have NO right to set prices, it should be up to phone carriers and to retailers what price is charged for iDevices. If I am a retailer and want to sell iPads for $50 (maybe as a loss leader to get people into the store), I should be allowed to do that with Apple being prohibited from penalizing me from doing so.
The whole pricing model for US phone carriers is totally broken, they need to look at carriers here in Australia and copy their models (not necessarily Tel$tra though)
The problem with that is that every time someone does try to effect real change, they get beaten down by "the man" or painted as bad guys (see Occupy for example)
Not only that, most people have been brainwashed by the massive corporate propaganda machine masquerading as "news" into thinking that unless the government is allowed to do all the crap it has been doing, we will have a wave of terror and crime that makes 9/11, Boston etc look tiny by comparison.
Maybe if the government spent less money on intelligence, data collection, spying, law enforcement (war on drugs, war on "illegal" fireworks, war on "terrorists" etc), fancy expensive military hardware, bailouts/handouts/subsidies/etc for the big end of town etc and either spent less in total (shoring up the budget) or spent that money on things designed to stimulate the economy and produce stable long term economic growth, the US wouldn't be in so much trouble.
One other important thing going forward is to mandate forward secrecy (via a unique difffe-helman negotiation or similar for each secure link) so that its not possible to use a recording of the network traffic and a copy of the private key to decrypt the data (done properly it would prevent an adversary like the NSA from obtaining the SSL private key and then passively collecting data, they would need to either MITM the DH negotiation somehow or gain direct access to the box and to the DH parameters it generates)
Because the people behind CryptoLocker (who are probably from Russia or China or some other country that isn't exactly best buddies with the US) are likely smart enough not to trust US-made off-the-shelf cryptography.
The downside for Cyanogenmod is that there are now features they cant support in the mod without their new partners getting upset. And instances where they will have to include features in some part of the OS where they then cant publish the code for it or where they have to restrict it to specific hardware.
Better yet, just go and source one of those old IBM keyboards (the ones people here always rave about that can be run through a dishwasher and continue to work afterwards). Those are old enough that they wouldn't be hiding any spy gear (back then spy gear small enough to fit into a keyboard didn't exist)
If its opt-out, its much easier to just remove the opt-out in the future and make it mandatory. Or to record the details of those who opt-out in some government database and give them extra scrutiny (i.e. if this person is opting-out they must be up to something)
As someone living in a democratic country (one with a conservative government, the Queen as head of state and some level of filtering going on although exactly how much no-one here in Oz will say) I do not support ANY kind of mandatory (or even on-by-default) censorship or filtering.
If there are things that are genuinely bad/harmful (rape, child porn, sexual violence, sites advocating terrorism etc etc) the government should be working with other governments to get the content taken down and the scumbags who produced it thrown in whatever passes for "federal pound me in the ass prison" in the relavent country rather than being blocked.
If the sites in question are not harmful to most people (regular porn, torrent sites, opposing political views etc) then they should not be blocked by default. Those people who DO want them blocked (e.g. parents wanting to stop their kids getting to it, schools wanting to stop their students getting to it etc) then yes the ISPs can offer an opt-in service for those customers.
But it has to be opt-in with customers having to specifically say "yes I want the filtering".
+1 to this, anyone who wants to make voice calls (of any kind including VoIP) can pay extra to sit in the "voice calls allowed" section. Businesspeople and such who will gain advantage by being able to make calls in flight can just expense the extra cost to the company along with their ticket. (after all, people these days already expense things like in-flight WiFi if they get benefit from having internet access on the plane)
How many people only support it because they have been force-fed FUD and propaganda by the media along the lines of "if we dont spy on everyone, the terrorists win"? (and all attempts by sane people to convince them otherwise are ignored because they believe the talking head on the idiot box more than their close friends)
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I have used various on-screen keyboards and still think the keyboard on my Nokia N900 beats the lot of em.
I think sockets and web/internet protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP and other standardized protocols) as well as various other standard and widely used algorithms like zlib/deflate would be more useful in C++ than 2D drawing primitives.
I grew up back when Pascal was still used as teaching language (in fact, it was the first language I learned how to program in) and am a great C/C++ programmer.
Problem is, no-one around here will give me a job because they all want C#/.NET/J2EE/Oracle/SQL Server/etc code monkeys (generally with "at least 3 years commercial experience in xyz" or whatever meaning I cant just go and get some sort of certification or qualification in the technology and get a job that way)
Liars and Outliers - Bruce Schneier (even more relavent with the whole NSA thing and the fact that every new Snowden revelation gives us another reason not to put our trust in computer security or the people who created it)
There was an excellent book by Leo Laporte that was perfect reading for anyone who doesn't know a lot about computers (or thinks they know a lot more than they actually do) but I cant remember the title and its likely out-of-date anyway.
In terms of fiction, Cryptonomicon is a great read, as are the William Gibson cyberspace novels (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive)
Its not a book but if there was a book along the lines of the film Elysium it would be worth a read as it seems to be very much where earth is headed (a bunch of rich people with everything handed to them and access to the best of everything including medical care and a much larger bunch of poor people with little access to medical care and working as wage slaves for "the man"). Recommendations of any books along those lines very much appreciated :)
Thanks to the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on fireworks, the war on common sense and various other wars, its becoming harder and harder for amateurs who want to do chemistry (either generic experiments or genuine research) in their own home/shed/backyard.
Chemical suppliers wont sell to amateurs and hobbyists. Basic chemicals are restricted from sale because they happen to be used in drugs/fireworks/explosives as well as the 100 other uses those chemicals happen to be used for. Some US states require licenses or registration for even basic lab equipment. Hobby chemists who have done nothing illegal are being raided by the police and having their gear seized because it "could be used to make bombs/drugs/fireworks/etc"
1.Why are these things so weak and easily broken
2.Why don't the companies that make them invest a bit more money in making them harder to break (instead of on lawyers to sue people who break them)
and 3.If the companies that make them wont fix them, why isn't someone else offering systems with stronger encryption?
If the amount of traffic passing through the stores I visited today is any indication, I dont know if anyone is saying "The MYER website is down, I will go to MYER and buy it", they are probably saying "The MYER website is down, who else online can sell me one" :)
Yeah hold the "Sydney Beer Party" as a way to protest the latest increase in the excise duty on alcohol :)
There is no reason you cant build a system such that it will not feed power into the grid if the grid goes down (blackout etc) but will continue to supply local power if the solar panels (or wind turbines or backup batteries or whatever you have) can supply the juice. Obviously you still need disconnect switches that completly shut off those sources in the event you need to work on the wires for some reason (or if there is a fire or other emergency and the fire fighters need to turn off the power before they put the fire out).
People on the land have been using local generation for ages (e.g. in one example I know of they had/have a big diesel generator, a small wind turbine and batteries), its logical that people in that situation will simply throw some solar panels on the roof of the house (or the shed) and save money on diesel.
Many of the peak generation plants I know of (at least in Australia and probably elsewhere too) are basically scaled up jet engines modified to generate electric power instead of forward movement and running on (usually) natural gas.
It should be outright illegal for any company to supply goods to a downstream company and then tell that company what price they are going to charge to consumers.
Apple should have NO right to set prices, it should be up to phone carriers and to retailers what price is charged for iDevices. If I am a retailer and want to sell iPads for $50 (maybe as a loss leader to get people into the store), I should be allowed to do that with Apple being prohibited from penalizing me from doing so.
The whole pricing model for US phone carriers is totally broken, they need to look at carriers here in Australia and copy their models (not necessarily Tel$tra though)
In my view there is NO threat, no matter how big that in any way justifies wholesale surveillance.
The problem with that is that every time someone does try to effect real change, they get beaten down by "the man" or painted as bad guys (see Occupy for example)
Not only that, most people have been brainwashed by the massive corporate propaganda machine masquerading as "news" into thinking that unless the government is allowed to do all the crap it has been doing, we will have a wave of terror and crime that makes 9/11, Boston etc look tiny by comparison.
Maybe if the government spent less money on intelligence, data collection, spying, law enforcement (war on drugs, war on "illegal" fireworks, war on "terrorists" etc), fancy expensive military hardware, bailouts/handouts/subsidies/etc for the big end of town etc and either spent less in total (shoring up the budget) or spent that money on things designed to stimulate the economy and produce stable long term economic growth, the US wouldn't be in so much trouble.
One other important thing going forward is to mandate forward secrecy (via a unique difffe-helman negotiation or similar for each secure link) so that its not possible to use a recording of the network traffic and a copy of the private key to decrypt the data (done properly it would prevent an adversary like the NSA from obtaining the SSL private key and then passively collecting data, they would need to either MITM the DH negotiation somehow or gain direct access to the box and to the DH parameters it generates)
Because the people behind CryptoLocker (who are probably from Russia or China or some other country that isn't exactly best buddies with the US) are likely smart enough not to trust US-made off-the-shelf cryptography.
The downside for Cyanogenmod is that there are now features they cant support in the mod without their new partners getting upset. And instances where they will have to include features in some part of the OS where they then cant publish the code for it or where they have to restrict it to specific hardware.
Better yet, just go and source one of those old IBM keyboards (the ones people here always rave about that can be run through a dishwasher and continue to work afterwards).
Those are old enough that they wouldn't be hiding any spy gear (back then spy gear small enough to fit into a keyboard didn't exist)
If its opt-out, its much easier to just remove the opt-out in the future and make it mandatory. Or to record the details of those who opt-out in some government database and give them extra scrutiny (i.e. if this person is opting-out they must be up to something)
As someone living in a democratic country (one with a conservative government, the Queen as head of state and some level of filtering going on although exactly how much no-one here in Oz will say) I do not support ANY kind of mandatory (or even on-by-default) censorship or filtering.
If there are things that are genuinely bad/harmful (rape, child porn, sexual violence, sites advocating terrorism etc etc) the government should be working with other governments to get the content taken down and the scumbags who produced it thrown in whatever passes for "federal pound me in the ass prison" in the relavent country rather than being blocked.
If the sites in question are not harmful to most people (regular porn, torrent sites, opposing political views etc) then they should not be blocked by default. Those people who DO want them blocked (e.g. parents wanting to stop their kids getting to it, schools wanting to stop their students getting to it etc) then yes the ISPs can offer an opt-in service for those customers.
But it has to be opt-in with customers having to specifically say "yes I want the filtering".
+1 to this, anyone who wants to make voice calls (of any kind including VoIP) can pay extra to sit in the "voice calls allowed" section. Businesspeople and such who will gain advantage by being able to make calls in flight can just expense the extra cost to the company along with their ticket. (after all, people these days already expense things like in-flight WiFi if they get benefit from having internet access on the plane)
They should be locked up for a long time in whatever the UK version of "federal pound me in the ass prison" is these days.
How many people only support it because they have been force-fed FUD and propaganda by the media along the lines of "if we dont spy on everyone, the terrorists win"? (and all attempts by sane people to convince them otherwise are ignored because they believe the talking head on the idiot box more than their close friends)