Outside the building where I used to work in the 1980s, a transformer on a pole exploded, fell off the pole, and and went through the back window of a co-worker's car. She had just arrived at work and parked there a few minutes beforehand. She was a freaked-out mess, and the car was in even worse shape. The building entire building was plunged into complete darkness, the UPS failed to trip on, and the diesel generator didn't start, either. As this building was (and AFAIK still is) the primary data center for a major regional bank, that was, uh, bad.
So transformers do explode. As for the cause, I'll leave that to those who know more about them.
Business reasons make far more sense than conspiracy theory. The relationship between Big Auto and Big Oil is kind of like the relationship between Microsoft and PC hardware vendors: they cooperate out of necessity, but each wants to commoditize the other's product as much as possible. Just as hardware vendors favor cheap software, car companies favor cheap gas (whether it's really cheap or because they can make it cheap by having high mileage). That gives their cars lower TCO, which translates to a sales advantage. Of course, oil companies would prefer cars burn more fuel* but they really don't have much leverage on car companies to get them to do that.
The main thing that makes car companies move slowly in this area is the enormous cost of tooling up for a new technology, combined with the even larger cost of being wrong. For example, suppose a car company decides to make the leap into hydrogen-fueled vehicles with both feet, and starts building not only the vehicles, but equipping filling stations with hydrogen, and 5 years later that bet proves to have been wrong and hydrogen cars just aren't selling and some other technology is. That company not only loses a huge amount of money, marketshare, and mindshare, but stands a real chance of going out of business. Well, used to. Now they'll just take taxpayer money and use it to reward the bad business decisions of the execs.
So, while there are a few hybrids out there, and even fewer all-electric cars, the auto makers are all moving cautiously because they want to be very sure of what technologies are going to be the best investments before they commit to them. Like many people, I with they were moving faster (had to buy a mini-van this year and would be thrilled if Honda or Toyota had a hybrid version).
*To some extent. If all the cars on the road today got the same kind of mileage as cars got in the 1960s, the oil companies would be looking at running out of oil in the ground a lot sooner than they'd care to. Plus, the refinery investments they'd have to make would be huge. The US, for example, is usually running pretty close to refinery capacity as it is. If vehicle mileage went down by 1/2 or 2/3, the oil companies couldn't even come close to meeting demand. Rising fuel economy of cars has allowed them to avoid building new refineries for decades.
At $LARGE_COMPANY where I work, most workstations get an IP address from a DHCP server (doesn't usually change, in the form of dhcp-ddd-ddd-ddd-ddd.example.com, where ddd = dotted quads of IP addresses and example.com is replaced with our actual domain. Since most of our staff have notebooks, this is useful for (among other things) figuring out where a machine is located. It also scales well.
For desktop workstations with a static IP (most of them are DHCP, but if you have a plausible reason why you need a static IP, you can get one), you can pick your own hostname.
All info about the machines is kept in a database, presumably by asset tag number. It would be nuts to try and overload all that into the hostname.
Before my part of $LARGE_COMPANY joined said large company via acquisition, our naming convention was userid-desktop or userid-laptop. That was not a bad system, but maybe not really a good one, either. The current system scales a lot better.
I just got mod points, I wish I could use one to mod you up. Oh, well.
Interesting take on displaying leadership, and a point I hadn't considered. Obama might well be better off telling Congress, "This is what I want, and this is how I want it done." Although I'm pretty far from sure that universal healthcare insurance is great; I lived for 8 years in a country that has it, and while everyone has coverage, the quality of that coverage is much, much lower than what I have now in the US, and the co-pays were higher. I once spent some time in a hospital there, and I had to share a room with 5 other people b/c a 6-person room is what the national system will pay for. You can get a private or semi-private room if you have the cash. I'm sure that sharing a room with 5 other people, all of whom were sicker than me, lengthened my own recovery time.
And then there's the quality of the gear: if I needed to move around, I had to *carry* my IV tree to the bathroom (20 meters away, those 6-person rooms don't have bathrooms) to use the toilet, and I had to sign up for a time to use the communal shower (and carry my IV tree there, too).
And for all that, the system is insolvent, or nearly so. And it's not cheap, either. Expensive, insolvent, less-than-great care. And that system is one of the success stories in national healthcare. I'm not talking about Canada or the UK, here, I'm talking about a system that's much, much better.
It may be impossible to implement a national health insurance scheme that provides good care to everyone, is affordable, and solvent. If not, it's going to be very hard. Many readers of/. will be familiar with this problem in the form of "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two."
If it's not impossible, it's very, very difficult, and I have no faith at all in Congress' ability to successfully implement such a system. I have little faith in President Obama's ability to do it, either, but at least if he designed a system and told Congress "This is what I want. Get it done" and they did it like he said, it might have a better chance of working than what Congress will spew forth on its own.
Actually, that's horrible, especially at such a low catch rate. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and if our FP rate was that high, the only thing that would stop our customers from killing us is the fact that they would all be former customers. People get called in the middle of the night for an FP rate much, much lower than that. And our catch rate is way, way north of 99%.
At a catch rate of only 70%, we could guarantee zero false positives. Ever. Anyone who gets an FP rate that high at a catch rate of only 70% has nothing to brag about. I'd be ashamed to show my face in public, let alone publish my results.
That's exactly why I said "nothing to see here." A bunch of scientific implication but no practical application. I'd love a fishing boat with a transparent aluminum hull, for example. The fact that you can hit a tiny piece of aluminum with a huge amount of power and making it turn transparent to high-energy UV for 40 femtoseconds. Sure, that's a neat trick and all, but it any real-world application stemming from it will not come in my lifetime, and maybe not in the lifetimes of my children, if ever. I'm not into theory for the sake of theory, I'm into how it can be used to solve real-world problems today.
Not just in politics, either. While I like my company's products pretty well (especially those I work on ), even if I didn't like them, it would behoove me to keep my mouth shut about that in public if I wanted to keep my job. Or, for that matter, if I were to set up a Facebook page trashing our compeitors' products and using insulting language, I suppose that would put my employment at risk as well. We compete hard, as do other vendors in this space, but we don't go around publicly insulting each other. My observation of our marketing materials is that generally, they talk about what our strengths are, and don't even mention competitors.
I think that even the most vociferous political opponents of Obama would strongly reign in (or just fire) any staffer who wrote about Obama in that way. I don't care for Obama's policies either and if he turns out to be a one-term-and-out president, I won't be disappointed. However, making fun of his name or raising bogus attacks on his citizenship are not good ways to go about opposition. There is a certain amount of respect for the Office that is required no matter what you think of the person holding it. I don't want to attack the man. I'm sure President Obama is very personable and likable, and even his opponents admit he's an intelligent very well-spoken individual, and he seems to have higher ethical standards than Bill Clinton (or if he doesn't, he's at least far more skilled at concealing it).
To dogpile on the wabbit, the/. summary also fails to mention that the aluminum that it only stayed transparent for about 40 femtoseconds, and the focal point was about 1/20 the width of a human hair (implies the piece of aluminum turned transparent was that small, although that's unclear from TFA). Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
By curtailing the Raptor program, they *are* planning for the war we'll be fighting tomorrow. We've seen this before, so it ought to sound familiar.
When the F-16 came out, it proved to be a very versatile platform and was way cheaper, so it led to fewer F-15s being produced. The F-16 was a resounding success and it didn't get airmen killed.
It's not that we don't have some use for a top-notch air superiority fighter, but the judgment has been made that we have enough of those and will have a greater need for a general-purpose aircraft more like the F-16. Thus, no more F-22s.
Is it possible that we will someday get into a regional shooting war with Russia? Yes, but unlikely. With China? A little more likely. Do either of them have anything that's a match for the F-22? No, nor will they anytime soon. Heck, they're still not doing all that well competing with older aircraft like the F-18, F-15, F-16, and (now retired) F-14.
It's kind of like the B-52 program. Sure, there was a place for the B-1 and the B-2, but they kept updating the B-52 with new technology long after the end of its production, and it's still a relevant platform for delivering a whole lotta bombs in one place or for a non-missile nuclear strike should that be necessary. Plus, aircraft mechanics say that because of its great size, it's easier to work on than the newer and smaller B-1 and B-2, FWIW. Even today, if you needed a cheap, capable heavy bomber, an easy way to get there would be to build a bunch of new B-52s with the best modern engines, avionics, and stealth technology we have, at least if the production equipment for them still exists (which it probably doesn't).
It's not illegal to possess PII about doctors, lawyers, and police officers, either. All the credit bureaus have it, as do numerous other companies. You can bet your bippy they sell it, too. If anything, info about doctors and lawyers is more available than info about most people. Check out health provider websites some time.
It's also not illegal to publicly identify people as doctors, lawyers, or police officers. Whether it's illegal to publish their addresses along with that depends on the jurisdiction; in the US, it's probably not, unless in some areas it might be for police officers. Even then, that might not withstand a constitutional challenge. In Europe, things might be different/better. Europe tends to have better privacy laws than the US.
You still don't seem to get the idea that possession of that information is not illegal, so you can't charge him with that. It is possible to illegally *obtain* PII, but it's pretty hard to illegally possess it if you aren't the one who illegally obtained it. AFAICT from reading TFA, he did not illegally obtain the info. If he didn't break the law in getting the info, the fact that he has it is not illegal. It might be illegal for me to trick you into giving me your ATM PIN, but it's not illegal for me to know it, even if someone who did trick you told it to me.
How long before his database gets pwned? I wouldn't be surprised if it already has been:p I hope he hires some very good pen testers.
Would I pay to see what it knows about me? Maybe, if the price isn't too high. I'm in the security industry myself - antiphishing is my area of specialty - so I'm more careful than most. It would be really, really, really hard to directly compromise my financial information. However, that doesn't mean businesses who have it wouldn't be/aren't lax about security practices.
Of course, it's also possible that the whole thing is a sham aimed at drawing in criminals.
Trouble is, unless it's a crim in the UK to possess that information (it's not one in the United States and at least most countries), charging him with possession with intent to distribute wouldn't stick; distribution of that information is likewise not a crime in the United States or most countries, so that wouldn't stick either. As for intent, well, it has to be proven, is difficult to prove, and the burden of that proof is on the prosecution.
There are a great many companies that have a great deal of PII on a lot of people, and they sell and trade it all the time? Legal? Yes. Should it be? Well, that's another question entirely.
Unless he uses that information to commit a crime, he's not doing anything illegal by having it, nor is he doing anything illegal to charge you a fee for telling you if he has info on your or not, and if so, what he has.
I don't see how the GPL will help you with corporations dude. They'll avoid paying you cashola by providing the updates (if any) that they make to the code per the terms of the GPL.
Not necessarily. For example, I work for a company that has made extensive use of BSD-licensed code in some products. No GPL-licensed code is used because we're prohibited from using it. I trust you can imagine why. If there were ever some GPL-licensed code that we really, really, really wanted to use in a product, the only way to make that happen would be to get approval for funds to license the code under a proprietary license, then approach the author and hope for a positive response. Not all - probably not even most - GPL-using authors would agree, I suspect.
It has also been, well, less than unusual for companies who do use GPL-licensed code to try and keep it a secret, and not release any source, or to release it in a not-terribly-useful way, while fulfilling the letter of the law.
So while you are mostly right in saying that the GPL won't help him with corporations - it probably won't, in most cases - it's more likely to do so than any other [Ff]ree license. Under BSD or PD style licenses, there's no need to give anything back, so almost no one will. If he uses the GPL, most companies will just steer clear of using his code in their products. A few may license it. That's the part of his post that you miss while at the same time stating, "Commercial is for people who want to make a lving. Enjoy Life." He's perfectly willing to give a proprietary/commercial license to anyone who wants to use his code in a commercial product and not release anything. No problem. That may sound familiar, since Trolltech dual-licensed Qt that way and it was actually pretty successful.
There's no reason why you can't grant commercial licenses and enjoy life, and still give back by releasing code under the GPL. That's a formula that won't work with a BSD-style license because if your code is available under a BSD license, no one has any reason to get a proprietary license from you.
I work for an email security company. One of our researchers actually bought some of that stuff and sent it to labs to have it analyzed. Some of it contained some of the Viagra ingredient but wasn't actual Viagra; most of it was simply fake.
It might be theoretically possible (although highly unlikely) to get counterfeit drugs at a pharmacy in the United States, but it's odd-on that you will not get what you think you're getting if you buy drugs from a spammer.
Stop and think about it: spammers are fundamentally dishonest in every other way: they usually send through a botnet (theft of service, etc.), they are sending UCE/UBE, and they launder the money they make. Why on earth would you trust the purported meds they're selling?
The A/C below wasn't me, but yes, I am. That does happen to people, and I'm not taking any chances. If you think it doesn't, you're the kook here, not me.
Do I think they look for people saying critical things about their country in online fora? Yes, I'm certain they do. Could they discover my identity? Maybe. I'm obviously not going to discuss ways to put together pieces of the puzzle, but a person who worked hard and was smart would have a shot at discovering who I am by starting with my/. ID, yes. You'd probably be surprised at how many people could have their/. IDs linked to their real identities if someone with time and resources cared to do it.
More than you might think. I lived for a period of time in a communist country in Asia, and not only did I find there were a number of people who thought that the United States did not land people on the moon, but that those people also typically believed that the Soviet Union had.
Why did they think so? They "learned" it in school:p
We already have a per-mile tax now, and we even have to pay it in advance, it's just not usually thought of that way.
Take your 18.5 cent/gallon fuel tax. Take your mileage. Let's say you drive a huge SUV and get 10 MPG city. Your fuel tax during city driving is 1.85 cents/mile.
If you have a Prius and get, say, 40 MPG city, it's a quarter of that, so the current tax is variable depending on your mileage, but it's still effectively a per mile tax. If your (and others') rant was that most people are likely to pay a higher per-mile tax after they start calling it that, I expect you'd be right - politicians will rob you whenever and however they can - but ranting that switching from per-gallon to per-mile is automatically a disaster is just misguided.
There will be a lot of challenges to solve with a per-mile tax, of course. The SUV Vs. Prius thing is one: the way it works now, the tax tends to motivate towards buying more fuel-efficient vehicles, since a Prius owner pays something like 1/4 the per-mile tax that a Hummer own pays. Under a flat per-mile tax, the Prius owner, the Hummer owner, and the owner of an all-electric car would pay the same per-mile tax. One way to make it encourage buying fuel-efficient cars is to have a graduated tax in which drivers of low-mileage vehicles pay a higher per-mile tax than drivers of high-mileage vehicles. This would keep the system basically the same as it is now.
In any case, they are correct that something like a per-mile tax needs to replace the per-gallon tax we have now. As gasoline-burning vehicles become more and more efficient and more non-gasoline vehicles become available (how are you going to put a per-anything tax on an all-electric car?) - a per-mile tax is probably the only thing that makes sense.
I'm an 8-year veteran of night shifts myself, too, but it didn't hurt my health. I actually *like* working third shift, unlike many of those doing it. I did it on a regular shift - 8-ish hours * 5 days, unlike the OP, which helps, and I also lived only 20 minutes from the worksite. But you're spot-on about not switching back to days on days off. I pretty much lived a third-shift schedule all the time, so it didn't impact my health.
That divorce thing, I hear that. When I worked third shift, there were pretty much two kinds of people: single ones, most of whom liked being on third shift and wanted to stay there, and married ones who didn't. Well, it wasn't whether or not they liked it, it was the constant hassle from their wives - many of whom would call them at work to do it - about "When are you going to get off that damn shift?"
Funny how none of the married women on third shift ever seemed to get any hassle from their husbands about it. The married people who got hassled by their spouses were all guys, FWIW.
While I pretty much agree with what you say, OTOH there *is* a real threat there. The Soviet Union had a lot of smoke and mirrors, but they also had the capacity to really screw Europe in a ground war or pretty well wipe out the United States and Europe if a nuclear war had started. Combine that capacity with a stated goal of bringing the world to communism and their demonstrated willingness to use force to do so, and you have pretty well-grounded fear of what they might do.
I'm in the email security business, and I do see a good parallel to the cold war. Right now, the bot herders are, generally, using their bots for profit - spamming and spreading malware. However, what if, instead of compromising PCs and using them as bots, bot herders instead decided to use them as weapons? They could cause some deaths through disruption of 911 services, and could probably cause more economic damage than 9/11. You'd have to look long and hard to find a company of any size that didn't have at least a few infected PCs inside the firewall, and often even a few infected servers. Those machines have trusted access to other machines, and could be used to attack not only those machines, but the networks to which they are connected. Take down banking networks. Take down the power grid. Take banks and financial websites offline. Take other company websites offline. Take down government systems. Sure, all (well, probably just most) of that stuff can be restored from backup, and power grids can be restarted, but that's an awful lot of disruption and an awful lot of economic recovery cost. Do that at the onset of a shooting war and it could make the difference between winning and losing for the side that does it most effectively.
Critical infrastructure of any kind should not be connected to the Internet at all. Leased lines or frame relay are best. At the very least, if the Internet has to be involved in some way, it should go through a hardware-based VPN that talks to nothing but the other endpoint(s) of the VPN. However, that's not nearly as good as a leased line or frame relay. If it connects to the Internet at all, it can be taken down, or at least made unavailable via DDOS. A leased line or frame relay isn't perfect, either, of course. It's not impossible to penetrate telco or ISP systems to the level necessary to disrupt that, but it's much, much harder. The closest you can get to perfect security of a network is to own the infrastructure that connects the end points, and have none of it ever touch the Internet (think: your own fiber in the ground). I've heard of that sort of thing being around in D.C, together with Men in Black who show up if you accidentally cut said fiber, but nobody except the government is likely to have either the deep pockets or the permits to do that sort of thing.
George Carlin had a lot of insight into bogosity, and phrased it in memorable ways.
While I'm not particularly in favor of prostitution, the court long ago ruled that sex acts between consenting adults are legal.
That being the case, it seems - at least to this layman - that the law is on shaky ground in dictating how said consent may be achieved. Whether it's by flowers, dinner, and clever small talk, or whatever the going rate in cash is, consent is consent.
To make matters even cloudier, the court has also ruled that porn is protected under the first amendment. No matter how much sophistry they want to wrap around it, at the core of porn is the fact that people are being paid to have sex with someone that (in many cases) they just met for the first time a few minutes before the scene. Not that elapsed time between meeting and the act matters to prostitution laws. If it's legal for a third party to pay two (or more) people to engage in sex and film it, then it seems contradictory to say that it's illegal for one party to pay the other to engage in sex.
That discrepancy may also provide a way for people to beat the rap on prostitution charges: don't solicit someone for sex, tell them you're making a porno flick and you want them to be in it.
Ironic that (AFAIK) the first time this well-known/. meme/troll is actually true, it still gets modded flamebait. I only have one mod point left, or I'd mod you up Informative lol.
You might be , le to shoulder surf someone's password in a public place, or even at their desk, but that doesn't mean all physical security is gone. Unlike shoulder surfing, which is relatively easy to do without being noticed/caught, those other things all require far more intrusive/obvious steps such as: physically touching the computer, and putting something on it, placing audio equipment near the computer, or removing the RAM from the computer. Good luck on not being caught doing that.
Moreover, even if you could somehow do some or all of those things without being caught, they require a far higher level of expertise than does shoulder surfing. Even picking up the password by watching keystrokes is harder than getting it by shoulder surfing if it appears on the screen; there aren't very many people who could watch me type most of my passwords and have any decent clue what they were, unless they watched me type them a lot.
Another point which you choose to ignore is that password shoulder surfing would most easily be done in a public place, which implies a notebook computer rather than a desktop. That takes tapping cables out of play (there aren't any, usually), as well as hardware keyloggers (even if you could open the notebook and put it back together without being caught, installing the keylogger would be a lot harder or impossible). Good luck with the audio analysis over the background noise, too.
Yes, masking passwords isn't necessary under most circumstances, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary, because in some circumstances you definitely want it. The furthest in that direction that any login screen should go is to have a check box for "Show my password as I type" and that box should be unchecked by default.
I, for one, would not use any site that showed my password in clear text as I typed and did not allow me to mask it. Despite the fact that my passwords are usually long and complex, I rarely mistype them and on those occasions when I do, it's not a big deal to re-type.
The argument that the author of TFA is making - and that he tricked you into going along with - is that because this security feature is superfluous in some (perhaps most) circumstances, we should therefore do away with it entirely, even though it is very valuable in some circumstances, AKA "It's imperfect, therefore it must be destroyed." As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Of course, he also fails to promote a more perfect solution to shoulder surfing, so his position is basically "Good isn't good enough, junk it. Better to have nothing."
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Outside the building where I used to work in the 1980s, a transformer on a pole exploded, fell off the pole, and and went through the back window of a co-worker's car. She had just arrived at work and parked there a few minutes beforehand. She was a freaked-out mess, and the car was in even worse shape. The building entire building was plunged into complete darkness, the UPS failed to trip on, and the diesel generator didn't start, either. As this building was (and AFAIK still is) the primary data center for a major regional bank, that was, uh, bad.
So transformers do explode. As for the cause, I'll leave that to those who know more about them.
Business reasons make far more sense than conspiracy theory. The relationship between Big Auto and Big Oil is kind of like the relationship between Microsoft and PC hardware vendors: they cooperate out of necessity, but each wants to commoditize the other's product as much as possible. Just as hardware vendors favor cheap software, car companies favor cheap gas (whether it's really cheap or because they can make it cheap by having high mileage). That gives their cars lower TCO, which translates to a sales advantage. Of course, oil companies would prefer cars burn more fuel* but they really don't have much leverage on car companies to get them to do that.
The main thing that makes car companies move slowly in this area is the enormous cost of tooling up for a new technology, combined with the even larger cost of being wrong. For example, suppose a car company decides to make the leap into hydrogen-fueled vehicles with both feet, and starts building not only the vehicles, but equipping filling stations with hydrogen, and 5 years later that bet proves to have been wrong and hydrogen cars just aren't selling and some other technology is. That company not only loses a huge amount of money, marketshare, and mindshare, but stands a real chance of going out of business. Well, used to. Now they'll just take taxpayer money and use it to reward the bad business decisions of the execs.
So, while there are a few hybrids out there, and even fewer all-electric cars, the auto makers are all moving cautiously because they want to be very sure of what technologies are going to be the best investments before they commit to them. Like many people, I with they were moving faster (had to buy a mini-van this year and would be thrilled if Honda or Toyota had a hybrid version).
*To some extent. If all the cars on the road today got the same kind of mileage as cars got in the 1960s, the oil companies would be looking at running out of oil in the ground a lot sooner than they'd care to. Plus, the refinery investments they'd have to make would be huge. The US, for example, is usually running pretty close to refinery capacity as it is. If vehicle mileage went down by 1/2 or 2/3, the oil companies couldn't even come close to meeting demand. Rising fuel economy of cars has allowed them to avoid building new refineries for decades.
At $LARGE_COMPANY where I work, most workstations get an IP address from a DHCP server (doesn't usually change, in the form of dhcp-ddd-ddd-ddd-ddd.example.com, where ddd = dotted quads of IP addresses and example.com is replaced with our actual domain. Since most of our staff have notebooks, this is useful for (among other things) figuring out where a machine is located. It also scales well.
For desktop workstations with a static IP (most of them are DHCP, but if you have a plausible reason why you need a static IP, you can get one), you can pick your own hostname.
All info about the machines is kept in a database, presumably by asset tag number. It would be nuts to try and overload all that into the hostname.
Before my part of $LARGE_COMPANY joined said large company via acquisition, our naming convention was userid-desktop or userid-laptop. That was not a bad system, but maybe not really a good one, either. The current system scales a lot better.
I just got mod points, I wish I could use one to mod you up. Oh, well.
Interesting take on displaying leadership, and a point I hadn't considered. Obama might well be better off telling Congress, "This is what I want, and this is how I want it done." Although I'm pretty far from sure that universal healthcare insurance is great; I lived for 8 years in a country that has it, and while everyone has coverage, the quality of that coverage is much, much lower than what I have now in the US, and the co-pays were higher. I once spent some time in a hospital there, and I had to share a room with 5 other people b/c a 6-person room is what the national system will pay for. You can get a private or semi-private room if you have the cash. I'm sure that sharing a room with 5 other people, all of whom were sicker than me, lengthened my own recovery time.
And then there's the quality of the gear: if I needed to move around, I had to *carry* my IV tree to the bathroom (20 meters away, those 6-person rooms don't have bathrooms) to use the toilet, and I had to sign up for a time to use the communal shower (and carry my IV tree there, too).
And for all that, the system is insolvent, or nearly so. And it's not cheap, either. Expensive, insolvent, less-than-great care. And that system is one of the success stories in national healthcare. I'm not talking about Canada or the UK, here, I'm talking about a system that's much, much better.
It may be impossible to implement a national health insurance scheme that provides good care to everyone, is affordable, and solvent. If not, it's going to be very hard. Many readers of /. will be familiar with this problem in the form of "Good, fast, cheap. Pick two."
If it's not impossible, it's very, very difficult, and I have no faith at all in Congress' ability to successfully implement such a system. I have little faith in President Obama's ability to do it, either, but at least if he designed a system and told Congress "This is what I want. Get it done" and they did it like he said, it might have a better chance of working than what Congress will spew forth on its own.
Nice examples from the software world, too.
Actually, that's horrible, especially at such a low catch rate. I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and if our FP rate was that high, the only thing that would stop our customers from killing us is the fact that they would all be former customers. People get called in the middle of the night for an FP rate much, much lower than that. And our catch rate is way, way north of 99%.
At a catch rate of only 70%, we could guarantee zero false positives. Ever. Anyone who gets an FP rate that high at a catch rate of only 70% has nothing to brag about. I'd be ashamed to show my face in public, let alone publish my results.
That's exactly why I said "nothing to see here." A bunch of scientific implication but no practical application. I'd love a fishing boat with a transparent aluminum hull, for example. The fact that you can hit a tiny piece of aluminum with a huge amount of power and making it turn transparent to high-energy UV for 40 femtoseconds. Sure, that's a neat trick and all, but it any real-world application stemming from it will not come in my lifetime, and maybe not in the lifetimes of my children, if ever. I'm not into theory for the sake of theory, I'm into how it can be used to solve real-world problems today.
Not just in politics, either. While I like my company's products pretty well (especially those I work on ), even if I didn't like them, it would behoove me to keep my mouth shut about that in public if I wanted to keep my job. Or, for that matter, if I were to set up a Facebook page trashing our compeitors' products and using insulting language, I suppose that would put my employment at risk as well. We compete hard, as do other vendors in this space, but we don't go around publicly insulting each other. My observation of our marketing materials is that generally, they talk about what our strengths are, and don't even mention competitors.
I think that even the most vociferous political opponents of Obama would strongly reign in (or just fire) any staffer who wrote about Obama in that way. I don't care for Obama's policies either and if he turns out to be a one-term-and-out president, I won't be disappointed. However, making fun of his name or raising bogus attacks on his citizenship are not good ways to go about opposition. There is a certain amount of respect for the Office that is required no matter what you think of the person holding it. I don't want to attack the man. I'm sure President Obama is very personable and likable, and even his opponents admit he's an intelligent very well-spoken individual, and he seems to have higher ethical standards than Bill Clinton (or if he doesn't, he's at least far more skilled at concealing it).
To dogpile on the wabbit, the /. summary also fails to mention that the aluminum that it only stayed transparent for about 40 femtoseconds, and the focal point was about 1/20 the width of a human hair (implies the piece of aluminum turned transparent was that small, although that's unclear from TFA). Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
By curtailing the Raptor program, they *are* planning for the war we'll be fighting tomorrow. We've seen this before, so it ought to sound familiar.
When the F-16 came out, it proved to be a very versatile platform and was way cheaper, so it led to fewer F-15s being produced. The F-16 was a resounding success and it didn't get airmen killed.
It's not that we don't have some use for a top-notch air superiority fighter, but the judgment has been made that we have enough of those and will have a greater need for a general-purpose aircraft more like the F-16. Thus, no more F-22s.
Is it possible that we will someday get into a regional shooting war with Russia? Yes, but unlikely. With China? A little more likely. Do either of them have anything that's a match for the F-22? No, nor will they anytime soon. Heck, they're still not doing all that well competing with older aircraft like the F-18, F-15, F-16, and (now retired) F-14.
It's kind of like the B-52 program. Sure, there was a place for the B-1 and the B-2, but they kept updating the B-52 with new technology long after the end of its production, and it's still a relevant platform for delivering a whole lotta bombs in one place or for a non-missile nuclear strike should that be necessary. Plus, aircraft mechanics say that because of its great size, it's easier to work on than the newer and smaller B-1 and B-2, FWIW. Even today, if you needed a cheap, capable heavy bomber, an easy way to get there would be to build a bunch of new B-52s with the best modern engines, avionics, and stealth technology we have, at least if the production equipment for them still exists (which it probably doesn't).
Carbon monoxide is not CO2...
Hey, I saw some Members Only jackets in Burlington Coat Factory a few months ago. Made me look around for an oddly equipped Delorean.
Carbon monoxide is a product of all combustion, not just car engines.
It's not illegal to possess PII about doctors, lawyers, and police officers, either. All the credit bureaus have it, as do numerous other companies. You can bet your bippy they sell it, too. If anything, info about doctors and lawyers is more available than info about most people. Check out health provider websites some time.
It's also not illegal to publicly identify people as doctors, lawyers, or police officers. Whether it's illegal to publish their addresses along with that depends on the jurisdiction; in the US, it's probably not, unless in some areas it might be for police officers. Even then, that might not withstand a constitutional challenge. In Europe, things might be different/better. Europe tends to have better privacy laws than the US.
You still don't seem to get the idea that possession of that information is not illegal, so you can't charge him with that. It is possible to illegally *obtain* PII, but it's pretty hard to illegally possess it if you aren't the one who illegally obtained it. AFAICT from reading TFA, he did not illegally obtain the info. If he didn't break the law in getting the info, the fact that he has it is not illegal. It might be illegal for me to trick you into giving me your ATM PIN, but it's not illegal for me to know it, even if someone who did trick you told it to me.
How long before his database gets pwned? I wouldn't be surprised if it already has been :p I hope he hires some very good pen testers.
Would I pay to see what it knows about me? Maybe, if the price isn't too high. I'm in the security industry myself - antiphishing is my area of specialty - so I'm more careful than most. It would be really, really, really hard to directly compromise my financial information. However, that doesn't mean businesses who have it wouldn't be/aren't lax about security practices.
Of course, it's also possible that the whole thing is a sham aimed at drawing in criminals.
Trouble is, unless it's a crim in the UK to possess that information (it's not one in the United States and at least most countries), charging him with possession with intent to distribute wouldn't stick; distribution of that information is likewise not a crime in the United States or most countries, so that wouldn't stick either. As for intent, well, it has to be proven, is difficult to prove, and the burden of that proof is on the prosecution.
There are a great many companies that have a great deal of PII on a lot of people, and they sell and trade it all the time? Legal? Yes. Should it be? Well, that's another question entirely.
Unless he uses that information to commit a crime, he's not doing anything illegal by having it, nor is he doing anything illegal to charge you a fee for telling you if he has info on your or not, and if so, what he has.
Not necessarily. For example, I work for a company that has made extensive use of BSD-licensed code in some products. No GPL-licensed code is used because we're prohibited from using it. I trust you can imagine why. If there were ever some GPL-licensed code that we really, really, really wanted to use in a product, the only way to make that happen would be to get approval for funds to license the code under a proprietary license, then approach the author and hope for a positive response. Not all - probably not even most - GPL-using authors would agree, I suspect.
It has also been, well, less than unusual for companies who do use GPL-licensed code to try and keep it a secret, and not release any source, or to release it in a not-terribly-useful way, while fulfilling the letter of the law.
So while you are mostly right in saying that the GPL won't help him with corporations - it probably won't, in most cases - it's more likely to do so than any other [Ff]ree license. Under BSD or PD style licenses, there's no need to give anything back, so almost no one will. If he uses the GPL, most companies will just steer clear of using his code in their products. A few may license it. That's the part of his post that you miss while at the same time stating, "Commercial is for people who want to make a lving. Enjoy Life." He's perfectly willing to give a proprietary/commercial license to anyone who wants to use his code in a commercial product and not release anything. No problem. That may sound familiar, since Trolltech dual-licensed Qt that way and it was actually pretty successful.
There's no reason why you can't grant commercial licenses and enjoy life, and still give back by releasing code under the GPL. That's a formula that won't work with a BSD-style license because if your code is available under a BSD license, no one has any reason to get a proprietary license from you.
I work for an email security company. One of our researchers actually bought some of that stuff and sent it to labs to have it analyzed. Some of it contained some of the Viagra ingredient but wasn't actual Viagra; most of it was simply fake.
It might be theoretically possible (although highly unlikely) to get counterfeit drugs at a pharmacy in the United States, but it's odd-on that you will not get what you think you're getting if you buy drugs from a spammer.
Stop and think about it: spammers are fundamentally dishonest in every other way: they usually send through a botnet (theft of service, etc.), they are sending UCE/UBE, and they launder the money they make. Why on earth would you trust the purported meds they're selling?
The A/C below wasn't me, but yes, I am. That does happen to people, and I'm not taking any chances. If you think it doesn't, you're the kook here, not me.
Do I think they look for people saying critical things about their country in online fora? Yes, I'm certain they do. Could they discover my identity? Maybe. I'm obviously not going to discuss ways to put together pieces of the puzzle, but a person who worked hard and was smart would have a shot at discovering who I am by starting with my /. ID, yes. You'd probably be surprised at how many people could have their /. IDs linked to their real identities if someone with time and resources cared to do it.
I have family there. You figure it out.
More than you might think. I lived for a period of time in a communist country in Asia, and not only did I find there were a number of people who thought that the United States did not land people on the moon, but that those people also typically believed that the Soviet Union had.
Why did they think so? They "learned" it in school :p
We already have a per-mile tax now, and we even have to pay it in advance, it's just not usually thought of that way.
Take your 18.5 cent/gallon fuel tax. Take your mileage. Let's say you drive a huge SUV and get 10 MPG city. Your fuel tax during city driving is 1.85 cents/mile.
If you have a Prius and get, say, 40 MPG city, it's a quarter of that, so the current tax is variable depending on your mileage, but it's still effectively a per mile tax. If your (and others') rant was that most people are likely to pay a higher per-mile tax after they start calling it that, I expect you'd be right - politicians will rob you whenever and however they can - but ranting that switching from per-gallon to per-mile is automatically a disaster is just misguided.
There will be a lot of challenges to solve with a per-mile tax, of course. The SUV Vs. Prius thing is one: the way it works now, the tax tends to motivate towards buying more fuel-efficient vehicles, since a Prius owner pays something like 1/4 the per-mile tax that a Hummer own pays. Under a flat per-mile tax, the Prius owner, the Hummer owner, and the owner of an all-electric car would pay the same per-mile tax. One way to make it encourage buying fuel-efficient cars is to have a graduated tax in which drivers of low-mileage vehicles pay a higher per-mile tax than drivers of high-mileage vehicles. This would keep the system basically the same as it is now.
In any case, they are correct that something like a per-mile tax needs to replace the per-gallon tax we have now. As gasoline-burning vehicles become more and more efficient and more non-gasoline vehicles become available (how are you going to put a per-anything tax on an all-electric car?) - a per-mile tax is probably the only thing that makes sense.
I'm an 8-year veteran of night shifts myself, too, but it didn't hurt my health. I actually *like* working third shift, unlike many of those doing it. I did it on a regular shift - 8-ish hours * 5 days, unlike the OP, which helps, and I also lived only 20 minutes from the worksite. But you're spot-on about not switching back to days on days off. I pretty much lived a third-shift schedule all the time, so it didn't impact my health.
That divorce thing, I hear that. When I worked third shift, there were pretty much two kinds of people: single ones, most of whom liked being on third shift and wanted to stay there, and married ones who didn't. Well, it wasn't whether or not they liked it, it was the constant hassle from their wives - many of whom would call them at work to do it - about "When are you going to get off that damn shift?"
Funny how none of the married women on third shift ever seemed to get any hassle from their husbands about it. The married people who got hassled by their spouses were all guys, FWIW.
While I pretty much agree with what you say, OTOH there *is* a real threat there. The Soviet Union had a lot of smoke and mirrors, but they also had the capacity to really screw Europe in a ground war or pretty well wipe out the United States and Europe if a nuclear war had started. Combine that capacity with a stated goal of bringing the world to communism and their demonstrated willingness to use force to do so, and you have pretty well-grounded fear of what they might do.
I'm in the email security business, and I do see a good parallel to the cold war. Right now, the bot herders are, generally, using their bots for profit - spamming and spreading malware. However, what if, instead of compromising PCs and using them as bots, bot herders instead decided to use them as weapons? They could cause some deaths through disruption of 911 services, and could probably cause more economic damage than 9/11. You'd have to look long and hard to find a company of any size that didn't have at least a few infected PCs inside the firewall, and often even a few infected servers. Those machines have trusted access to other machines, and could be used to attack not only those machines, but the networks to which they are connected. Take down banking networks. Take down the power grid. Take banks and financial websites offline. Take other company websites offline. Take down government systems. Sure, all (well, probably just most) of that stuff can be restored from backup, and power grids can be restarted, but that's an awful lot of disruption and an awful lot of economic recovery cost. Do that at the onset of a shooting war and it could make the difference between winning and losing for the side that does it most effectively.
Critical infrastructure of any kind should not be connected to the Internet at all. Leased lines or frame relay are best. At the very least, if the Internet has to be involved in some way, it should go through a hardware-based VPN that talks to nothing but the other endpoint(s) of the VPN. However, that's not nearly as good as a leased line or frame relay. If it connects to the Internet at all, it can be taken down, or at least made unavailable via DDOS.
A leased line or frame relay isn't perfect, either, of course. It's not impossible to penetrate telco or ISP systems to the level necessary to disrupt that, but it's much, much harder. The closest you can get to perfect security of a network is to own the infrastructure that connects the end points, and have none of it ever touch the Internet (think: your own fiber in the ground). I've heard of that sort of thing being around in D.C, together with Men in Black who show up if you accidentally cut said fiber, but nobody except the government is likely to have either the deep pockets or the permits to do that sort of thing.
George Carlin had a lot of insight into bogosity, and phrased it in memorable ways.
While I'm not particularly in favor of prostitution, the court long ago ruled that sex acts between consenting adults are legal.
That being the case, it seems - at least to this layman - that the law is on shaky ground in dictating how said consent may be achieved. Whether it's by flowers, dinner, and clever small talk, or whatever the going rate in cash is, consent is consent.
To make matters even cloudier, the court has also ruled that porn is protected under the first amendment. No matter how much sophistry they want to wrap around it, at the core of porn is the fact that people are being paid to have sex with someone that (in many cases) they just met for the first time a few minutes before the scene. Not that elapsed time between meeting and the act matters to prostitution laws. If it's legal for a third party to pay two (or more) people to engage in sex and film it, then it seems contradictory to say that it's illegal for one party to pay the other to engage in sex.
That discrepancy may also provide a way for people to beat the rap on prostitution charges: don't solicit someone for sex, tell them you're making a porno flick and you want them to be in it.
Ironic that (AFAIK) the first time this well-known /. meme/troll is actually true, it still gets modded flamebait. I only have one mod point left, or I'd mod you up Informative lol.
You might be , le to shoulder surf someone's password in a public place, or even at their desk, but that doesn't mean all physical security is gone. Unlike shoulder surfing, which is relatively easy to do without being noticed/caught, those other things all require far more intrusive/obvious steps such as: physically touching the computer, and putting something on it, placing audio equipment near the computer, or removing the RAM from the computer. Good luck on not being caught doing that.
Moreover, even if you could somehow do some or all of those things without being caught, they require a far higher level of expertise than does shoulder surfing. Even picking up the password by watching keystrokes is harder than getting it by shoulder surfing if it appears on the screen; there aren't very many people who could watch me type most of my passwords and have any decent clue what they were, unless they watched me type them a lot.
Another point which you choose to ignore is that password shoulder surfing would most easily be done in a public place, which implies a notebook computer rather than a desktop. That takes tapping cables out of play (there aren't any, usually), as well as hardware keyloggers (even if you could open the notebook and put it back together without being caught, installing the keylogger would be a lot harder or impossible). Good luck with the audio analysis over the background noise, too.
Yes, masking passwords isn't necessary under most circumstances, but that doesn't mean it isn't necessary, because in some circumstances you definitely want it. The furthest in that direction that any login screen should go is to have a check box for "Show my password as I type" and that box should be unchecked by default.
I, for one, would not use any site that showed my password in clear text as I typed and did not allow me to mask it. Despite the fact that my passwords are usually long and complex, I rarely mistype them and on those occasions when I do, it's not a big deal to re-type.
The argument that the author of TFA is making - and that he tricked you into going along with - is that because this security feature is superfluous in some (perhaps most) circumstances, we should therefore do away with it entirely, even though it is very valuable in some circumstances, AKA "It's imperfect, therefore it must be destroyed." As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Of course, he also fails to promote a more perfect solution to shoulder surfing, so his position is basically "Good isn't good enough, junk it. Better to have nothing."