There were a few who bought SCOSource licenses out of fear too, without actually thinking through whether or not there might be any validity to the claims. Kyocera has most likely just writ that large across their forehead.
Of course, it's always possible that Kyocera told them "We won't buy a license unless you show us the patents under NDA" and MSFT agreed, but I doubt it. Most likely they are just being extor^H^H^H paying protec^H^H^H buying insurance.
Good point. I'm also a Vonage customer, and it would cost me at least twice as much to get an equivalent calling plan on a POTS line. If Vonage has to raise their prices, I can accept that.
I don't know if the worse case in this situation would be that they go under, or that they be acquired by Verizon and sink into mediocrity, but if they go under, who would you go with? I used to be a Packet 8 customer before Vonage, and Vonage is far better than Packet 8 for both reliability and (especially) the quality of their website. I could go back to them if they are the next best after Vonage, but I hope there's somebody else better.
People are making something big out of this because it involves crypto, but honestly, is it so different from a case involving a physical key to a physical door?
For example, let's say the police suspect person X of murdering person Y. They have reason to believe that evidence of the crime is kept in a storage locker rented by person X. They go to court, present their evidence and get a search warrant, plus a court order requiring one or more of A) The storage locker company to open the locker rented by person X; B) Person X to turn over his own key to the police.
The storage locker company's nearest analog in the world of crypto would be key escrow, and it's no wonder people don't want it. For criminals, it would make it possible to decrypt evidence against them. For honest people, it would be a huge PITA and could also result in the revelation of confidential things totally unrelated to any crime of which they might be erroneously accused. I don't like the idea of key escrow, either. I think it would do more harm than good, overall.
What if person X has lost or destroyed his key, or lies and says he has done so? He might face jail time, since he can't prove that negative, but that probably beats the jail time for a murder conviction. What if, further, the storage company has lost its key, or person X has rendered the lock unusable by superglueing it or jamming in a key and snapping it off? A setback, but not a huge problem. Even the strongest door isn't that hard to brute-force. There are not likely to be many people complaining that person X was compelled to turn over his key and subsequently jailed for not doing so.
The only problem I have with this is that it's doesn't seem to be by court order; rather, RIPA appears to allow the police to tell a suspect "Give us the key or be prosecuted for it." I believe that decision should be made by a judge. However, apart from that, I don't see a huge problem with the overall concept of being compelled to turn over a crypto key as part of a criminal investigation. It's not different than being compelled to open a storage locker.
Passive sonar was better than that in WW II, so I think it's safe to assume he knew they were there. If you're close enough, you can even hear the prop turns right through the hull.
Diesel-electric boats are noisy only when running on diesel. On battery, they can be far quieter than a nuke boat. It's a pretty good bet he didn't *snorkel* into the formation, so his boat would have been pretty quiet. This is proof the Chinese have some pretty good diesel-electric technology.
I also think there's more to this than meets the eye, but not the same thing you do. Giving away the fact that he was in range for a firing solution on a carrier could be regarded as a serious tactical error by the Chinese captain. It would be far better to let the carrier group pass by, then slip off in silence and keep that knowledge secret. Letting the US Navy know they can do that will only make the US Navy work very hard to find a solution to that problem and negate that advantage.
However, maybe it wasn't so voluntary. Possible reasons for it include running out of battery, losing control of his submarine, an equipment failure on board, or being actively pinged and forced to acknowledge his presence. Granted, the first three of those still mean he got in undetected and the last means he may have done so before being hit with active sonar, but all of them put it in a different light than deliberately making his presence in the middle of the battle group known.
Depends on the Japanese company, I guess. I lived in Japan for 8 years and never experienced that (and I did leave a company to work for not only a direct competitor, but its top competitor in one of its market areas), nor did I ever hear of anyone - Japanese or not - who experienced it. I was actually hoping they would, since I didn't really want to serve out that last month, but no dice
Taking this report at it's face value, that makes sense to me. Anybody working for NASA could just as easily be working in the private sector and making more money, and getting the parties, etc. My employer is very selective in its hiring; even here in the Silicon Valley area, we find we have to turn away ~90% of applicants as not meeting out standards. We really emphasize skill, talent, and also personality fit. Besides having good pay and benefits, we have a weekly informal catered beer bash every Friday afternoon, and the best official company parties I've ever encountered anywhere. And we give away company T-shirts several times a year.
As a result, we have not only a very skilled work force, but a very dedicated one, and low turnover besides. I'm sure the cost of higher turnover would exceed what we spend on the beer bash and T-shirts, so I can totally understand why NASA would do this. Considering NASA's relatively high level of talent and relatively small waste compared to some parts of the government, I have problem with the parties.
I converted to Islam ten years ago to marry my wife, who was an Egyptian graduate student at the time and is now a US citizen. There is most certainly a war, and there is most certainly a threat, although it is certain that you (and maybe he, as well) do not properly understand it.
The United States is a target, yes, and there is a real threat against it, yes, but we are only a peripheral target. The real war is for the hearts and minds of Muslims, and the real target is not the west, at least not yet. The real target is the governments of the Islamic countries. Followers of radical Islam mean to turn them into strict Islamic states. Think of Wahabi in charge of the Islamic world. They have Iran (mostly; as bad as the Iranian government is, it could be far worse), they had Afghanistan and might well have it again. They have a shot at getting Iraq, something they didn't have five years ago. Saddam Hussein was a monster, it's true, but deposing him was a terrible mistake. He was a monster who knew how to keep his foot on the neck of an even worse monster, and with the full power and willingness to do so. Going in to Iraq was just plain stupid. The power vacuum it created is being filled by those far worse than Saddam Hussein.
In Europe, radical Muslims have established a number of Mosques, and have infiltrated a number of others so thoroughly as to be in charge of them. That is part of their plan for Europe, I believe. To take it over from within, a bit at a time, by colonizing it. If the Europeans had an sense, they'd stop admitting immigrants from Islamic countries. Even my wife's family says this, even though a couple of her cousins live in the U.K. and are British citizens.
It is only after they rule the part of the world that is already Islamic that the radicals will really turn their attention to the part of the world that is not. They really do believe in putting to the sword everyone who is an infidel and refuses to convert, and their definition of an Infidel is anyone who is not a Muslim. This is wrong, but it is what they believe. The Prophet's teaching is that Christians and Jews are not Infidels, but have their own versions of the Holy book. Jesus was considered a prophet by The Prophet, and the Jews are descendants of Abraham, just as the Muslims are. It is to those who follow neither Judaism nor Christianity that we must spread Islam, but not at the point of a gun.
The Wahabis and other radicals do not believe this, however. They believe in spreading not only Islam, but only their view of it, at the point of a gun, and this must not be allowed.
The United States needs to stand by the secular governments in the Islamic world. Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the fledgling governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. It even needs to make nice with Syria, and erred badly by toppling Saddam Hussein. No matter how far they may be from our ideals of democracy, they are far better than the alternative. At the same time, we need to really demonstrate to the Muslim man on the street that we are not anti-Islam, we are only anti-radical.
The United States needs to use whatever leverage it has in Saudi Arabia to get the government to stop playing both sides, and cut off the Wahabis instead of funding them. The Saudi government is too blind to see that their own heads will be the first ones to roll when the Wahabis take over the country.
And, the United States does need to stand on a war footing, and do whatever is necessary to support friendly secular government in Islamic countries. The west is not the primary target, not yet. Maybe not for a generation, or two, or three. The radicals have patience and long-term vision. More so than not just western governments, but more so than most mainstream Muslims. And, to the greatest extent possible, we should avoid becoming involved in further shooting wars on Islamic soil. All the good will of 9/11 was squandered in Iraq needlessly and foolishly.
Fair enough. I not only live in California, but in the Bay area, so that may somewhat skew my perspective on the pervasiveness of political correctness. Still, it seems pervasive in much of the news media, and of course, the mouths of politicians.
We might indeed agree on a good deal of things, since true liberals and true conservatives (what some call constructionists) are pretty closely aligned on many issues. As the saying goes, all you have to do to go from being a liberal to a conservative, without changing any of your ideas, is to wait about 20 years.
Still, I'll throw this out for discussion: while the founders of the United States were considered serious radicals in their day, there were nevertheless legal prohibitions on many of the things that social liberals (I am a social conservative) would advocate in favor of (where in favor of = not prohibited in any way) today: same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography, to name three, and these prohibitions were not considered to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court would have laughed at anyone who wanted such a case to be heard. OTOH, slavery wasn't considered unconstitutional in those days, either. There had to be many among the founders who opposed it, but not strongly enough to let it get in the way of forging the nation (or to put it in a kinder light, who knew that if they didn't forge the nation first, there would be no opportunity to get rid of slavery later).
I hear you about groups bigger than 5 people. I'm in the PTA at my daughter's elementary school, and the amount of politics that goes on even in and around such a small group is amazing.
Thanks, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one bugged by bogus use of the word "fascist." Wikipedia has a good, succinct definition of fascism:
"Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the interests of the state."
To which one could ask, "And this differs from Marxism, Leninism, Stalism, Maoism, how?"
The answer to that is, of course, that it differs only in the economic structure chosen by the totalitarian state. Saddam Hussein was a fascist. Pol Pot was a Communist. Hitler was a fascist. Mao and Stalin were communists. They all had secret police. They detained, imprisoned, and frequently executed those considered to be political opponents, or even politically unreliable. Without trial. Without benefit of evidence. Without recourse. Granted, Saddam Hussein was small potatoes compared to those other guys, who all killed million of their own citizens and (in Hitler's case) their neighbors' citizens too, but he fits the fascist mold.
Whenever someone throws the term "facisct" around indiscriminately, you've almost certainly identified a leftist, and they are typically more authoritarian than anyone, and just as anti-constitution as they accuse their ideological opponents of being. It was the left, not the right, that invented political correctness, and when they find a topic uncomfortable or out of step with their views of how the world ought to be, it's very discussion has to be prohibited. This is in contrast to (real) conservatives, who believe that everything should be debated (partly out of principle, partly because leftists usually make complete fools of themselves in debates).
That doesn't mean I'm not concerned about the excessive growth and authoritarianism of government. I am. We routinely accept a level of government involvement/nosiness today that would have inspired a second revolution 200 years ago, and I think it's more than high time the people get into the ballot box and inform the government that enough is enough. Alas, most of the people are the sheeple and they just want to line up and get their handouts, and no worries about who pays for it or what the government takes in return.
That said, at the moment, there's a *war* on, one that may well last beyond my lifetime, in case some hadn't noticed. The struggle against radical Islam is the world war of our time. We're still in the Chamberlain phase, but people need to wake up and notice in time to stop it while it's still small enough. Chamberlain didn't, and much of the whole world paid the price for it.
In every war - including the Revolution - some civil liberties have been curtailed. My concern in this case is that there has been an ongoing, slow curtailment of civil liberties in lockstep with the growth of government, and it is unlikely that the government will reverse any of that unless forced to do so by the ballot box. Certainly, there is no intention of doing so, and these things go back decades before the current administration.
I remember one day when I worked at Microsoft, the head of our division of our business unit (which was ~300 people) sent a mail with his registry hack tips and tricks to make Windows Mobile faster and more stable, and said he found his WM phone was much more usable since he did those things. My only thought was that if I needed another reason not to buy one, he'd just provided it. If you have to do that stuff to make it stable and usable, it should still be in beta. Or alpha. Or the design phase.
The first time I ever heard of Aldo Nova was a long time ago when he was opening for UFO at the San Diego Sports Arena. Not only was he great, not only did he blow UFO away, but a number of people left after his act, having only shown up to see Aldo Nova and not caring at all about UFO.
Jurisdiction and legality will work the same they do on Earth. The fact that it's in space doesn't make it special. It's all covered by two points:
1) Your country of citizenship *always* has jurisdiction over you, even when you're in another country. Thus, if a person does something in Japan that is legal there but illegal in his country of citizenship, his country can prosecute him.
2) When in a country other than your own, you are always subject to its jurisdiction. Thus, if someone is in Japan and does something that is legal in her country of citizenship but illegal in Japan, she can be prosecuted by the Japanese government.[1]
[1] As long as she is not covered by a status of forces agreement or diplomatic immunity. In the first case, her own government has to prosecute (or not). All the Japanese government could do is declare her persona non grata. In the case of a status of forces agreement, the government of the service member in question has the option of either prosecuting the case or allowing her to be charged and prosecuted by the government of the host country (this is the only part with real potential for diplomatic difficulties). I recall at least one case during the time I lived in Japan in which the US government chose to allow three service members accused of kidnapping and raping a 12 year old girl to stand trial in a Japanese court. One plead guilty and the other two were convicted. I remember that there was considerable public outrage that the longest sentence handed down was 7 years. And it wasn't only the Japanese public that was upset. I recall reading a newspaper article in which a Marine colonel (speaking off the record, IIRC) complained he would have rather seen them court-martialed because they probably would have gotten 20 years in Leavenworth.
You'd be surprised how many Microsoft employees use Linux, a Mac or both (I worked there for about a year and a half, and I remember my surprise one day when I walked into the office of one of our project managers and saw Pine on his desktop; when I commented, he said it was an SSH session to his Linux box at home. I thought it took balls to have that on a monitor facing the door). A number of people on my team - myself included - only used Windows at work. At home, most my team were completely Linux/Mac/BSD.
They do. Federal law-enforcement is always present at, and typically presents at, APWG meetings (I work for an APWG member), and they do track this stuff, and when possible, make arrests. Among the problems they face are volume (there's so much of this stuff, and LE does not have unlimited resources), time (doing the investigation and compiling evidence is by its nature very painstaking work), and the fact that the perps are most commonly in Russia and other eastern European countries, making apprehension and prosecution far more difficult.
They can't solve all the problems, or maybe even most of them, but they're doing what they can, and it's more than you'll read about on Slashdot. No matter how much resources the FBI and others throw at this problem, however, it will always remain mostly a problem of technology combined with user education.
At the last APWG meet, in Pittsburgh, some researchers fron Carnegie-Mellon presented there findings of an anti-phishing game they wrote, the idea being that you can more effectively train users to not be phished by having them play a video game, rather than read some boring instructions from the IT department or watch a similarly boring video. Their test subjects showed real improvement Vs. a control group, and there has been considerable interest in the game.
There's more to it than the summary states (gee, imagine that!).
First, these guys are not kids (the summary doesn't say they are, but you made that assumption based on its wording, I think). The primary perpetrator is 29 years old and was employed at the CSU Fresno help desk at the time the events took place. He is alleged to have stolen a supervisor's user ID and password, which he then leveraged to obtain the other user IDs and passwords he needed to break into the grades database and change his grades. The other guy charged is a friend of his, who is alleged to have paid him in cash to also give him better grades. The problem came to light during an audit to check the accuracy of the conversion from their old system to the PeopleSoft DB.
This was not just a case of a couple of 19 year olds exploiting a vulnerability in a system to inflate their grades. This is an alleged insider job carried out by an employee of the university, aggravated by the charge that he not only modified his own grades but also accepted payment from another person to do the same for him. Those actions, especially in light of the ages of the alleged perps, are well beyond the level of student hacking prank, falling clearly into the level of felony computer crime.
Certainly, there are cases where the law is (ab)used to go after legit computer researchers who are conducting honest vulnerability research, and there are certainly also cases where the book is heavily thrown at people who committed relatively minor offenses, but this isn't one of them. It was a serious and well thought out break-in, done at least partly for financial consideration, from a privileged position within the victimized organization.
WRT the number of people who are in jail and problems within society, there are certainly problems, but the number of people in jail is not the cause of the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is in part too many people committing crimes, and too many career criminals not being given life sentences. That problem, in turn stems at least in part from a breakdown of the moral fabric of society. In mostly throwing away public morality and social controls on behavior, we have also thrown away one of the things that helped keep people out of jail in the past.
Another issue is economic problems for people on the low end of the income scale. The link between crime and poverty is pretty well established, and the influx of illegal aliens influences this by driving down wages for the poor. Illegal aliens weren't much of a problem in the days when they were almost exclusively working in agricultural jobs. Those jobs - especially in places like the southwest - have been mostly held by illegals for decades, and there's not much demand for them by American poor. However, the lack of immigration enforcement led to such a huge flood of illegal aliens that they have moved out into all sorts of lines of work traditionally held by poor Americans, driving down wages and pushing out the people who used to hold those jobs. At some point, some of those people will start turning to crime, in whole or in part, to survive. Once they do that, there's no choice but to put them in jail for the safety of others.
How to fix the system, now that it's this broken? That's a tough question. One component has to be solving the illegal alien problem. That means preventing more from getting in, and removing most of the ones who are already in. Next, since it's cheaper to educate someone than it is to jail him, make sure that legitimate, valid educational opportunities are available to those that want them. These opportunities could be academic, vocational, or both, but they need to be there. Doing this without fraud and waste is tough, but it needs to be done. Third, in communities that are really hard-hit by crime, leaders need to step forth or be found who can help those communities decide for themselves that enough is enough, and start exerting some social control. Bill Cosby is straight-on right on this issue. IMO he's one of the sharp
Exactly. Jeff Gould sounds like he gets neither Red Hat, nor Linux in general. Of course, Red Hat has to tolerate Centos because of the GPL, but it's even more than that. There's nothing stopping Red Hat from putting a binary license on some bits of RHEL. They simply refuse to do so. Red Hat's philosophy is now, and has always been, that they will GPL all their stuff. Red Hat is one of the oldest names in the Linux world, and their "religion" has always been to GPL everything, on the basis that a rising tide lifts all boats. Contrary to what Gould may think, distros like Centos are not something Red Hat tolerates; they are something Red Hat tacitly encourages. What's going to do next, ask why Red Hat would put out Fedora, which must surely be robbing some business from RHEL? Wouldn't surprise me in the least if he did.
I was also an early TurboLinux user and did alpha testing on 1.9 (pre-release for 2.0). I even did some part-time work for them when they were still in a west Tokyo storefront office.
TurboLinux actually became quite popular in Japan, China, and (I'm told) Korea for a while, and around that time it attracted the notice of some VCs, who were pouring money into anything with "Linux" in its title in those days (the height of the.com bubble). TL then became very big, very fast, ballooning to over 80 employees and moving office twice, first to a larger place near Shinjuku, and then to a much larger and newer place in Shibuya. TurboLinux had one of the biggest, flashiest booths at Linux World Expo Tokyo around then.
The guy who'd worked on the early versions had already left, and their lead dev was someone I'd introduced to them (who now works for another Linux distributor). Around the time of this massive growth, the VCs also decided they wanted more direct control of the company. I don't know what the reasons or politics were behind that, but they pushed out the original founders and replaced them with a CEO of their choosing, a business guy who didn't really know or "get" Linux. It was like putting a Pepsi guy in charge of Apple, and the beginning of the end for TurboLinux. Red Hat ate their lunch in Japan over the next couple years, and there were massive staff cuts and even more massive losses of market. I'm actually amazed (and somewhat impressed, I must admit) that TL is still in business. A lot of other Linux companies from that era didn't survive.
All this long-windedness is just to point out the very corporate background that TurboLinux now has, which leaves me completely not surprised that they have done the IP deal with Microsoft.
I was in high school in San Diego when the crash happened, and word spread quickly around the campus. We could see the smoke rising across Mission Valley, and the gym of our rival school was used as a makeshift morgue.
There was no video of flaming bodies falling out of the plane, for a couple of reasons: first, there was no video of PSA 182 going down. A couple of still photos were captured by one person, but that's it (a news cameraman did happen to catch the Cessna going down, however), and second, the fuselage was not breached in the air. Everyone aboard PSA 182 rode it to the ground, which took less than 20 seconds from impact.
Recovery of body parts from the area did take some time, but that was because of the violence of the crash (nose down attitude and rolled 50 degrees right) into the ground, not the collision between the two aircraft.
It's worse than that, even. By taxing people who are already using legal download services to compensate artists (and I use the term "artist" pretty loosely, we're talking about RIAA music here) for piracy, it's likely to increase piracy and decrease legal downloads. Not because the 2 cents is an onerous fee, of course, but because of the basic unfairness of it.
By putting in such a tax, they'll telling people who are already in favor of legally purchasing downloaded music and are proving it with their purchases, "You're downloading music. Even though it's legal, you're somehow responsible for the fact that some other people are downloading illegal copies and not paying for it. Therefore, we're going to tax you honest people to make up for the losses by the dishonest people."
I can see some percentage of the honest people turning their backs on legal downloads after that, figuring "If they're going to make me pay for illegal activity, I might as go out and commit that illegal activity so that I can at least benefit from it."
Way to go.
Oooh, a nice partner analogy for yours just crossed my mind. Most everyplace has a hotel occupancy tax. I attend conferences several times a year, and since I'm local to the San Francisco area, I just drive there and don't have to stay at a hotel. Maybe they'll try and tax me for not using a hotel now:p
I work for one of the major spam filtering companies. We already have the MP3 spam problem solved, and I expect the others also already do, or will shortly. It's not that tough, and it doesn't take heavy-handed measures like blocking all MP3s. I expect this to be fairly short-lived. PDF spam and Excel spreadsheet spam didn't make much of a splash either, and have already mostly gone away.
Image spam is also mostly gone these days, but it had longevity because while some providers (such as my employer) very quickly solved it, some others took quite some time, and even after they solved it, some had relatively poor efficacy, even if they were catching most of it.
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There were a few who bought SCOSource licenses out of fear too, without actually thinking through whether or not there might be any validity to the claims. Kyocera has most likely just writ that large across their forehead.
Of course, it's always possible that Kyocera told them "We won't buy a license unless you show us the patents under NDA" and MSFT agreed, but I doubt it. Most likely they are just being extor^H^H^H paying protec^H^H^H buying insurance.
Good point. I'm also a Vonage customer, and it would cost me at least twice as much to get an equivalent calling plan on a POTS line. If Vonage has to raise their prices, I can accept that.
I don't know if the worse case in this situation would be that they go under, or that they be acquired by Verizon and sink into mediocrity, but if they go under, who would you go with? I used to be a Packet 8 customer before Vonage, and Vonage is far better than Packet 8 for both reliability and (especially) the quality of their website. I could go back to them if they are the next best after Vonage, but I hope there's somebody else better.
People are making something big out of this because it involves crypto, but honestly, is it so different from a case involving a physical key to a physical door?
For example, let's say the police suspect person X of murdering person Y. They have reason to believe that evidence of the crime is kept in a storage locker rented by person X. They go to court, present their evidence and get a search warrant, plus a court order requiring one or more of A) The storage locker company to open the locker rented by person X; B) Person X to turn over his own key to the police.
The storage locker company's nearest analog in the world of crypto would be key escrow, and it's no wonder people don't want it. For criminals, it would make it possible to decrypt evidence against them. For honest people, it would be a huge PITA and could also result in the revelation of confidential things totally unrelated to any crime of which they might be erroneously accused. I don't like the idea of key escrow, either. I think it would do more harm than good, overall.
What if person X has lost or destroyed his key, or lies and says he has done so? He might face jail time, since he can't prove that negative, but that probably beats the jail time for a murder conviction. What if, further, the storage company has lost its key, or person X has rendered the lock unusable by superglueing it or jamming in a key and snapping it off? A setback, but not a huge problem. Even the strongest door isn't that hard to brute-force. There are not likely to be many people complaining that person X was compelled to turn over his key and subsequently jailed for not doing so.
The only problem I have with this is that it's doesn't seem to be by court order; rather, RIPA appears to allow the police to tell a suspect "Give us the key or be prosecuted for it." I believe that decision should be made by a judge. However, apart from that, I don't see a huge problem with the overall concept of being compelled to turn over a crypto key as part of a criminal investigation. It's not different than being compelled to open a storage locker.
Passive sonar was better than that in WW II, so I think it's safe to assume he knew they were there. If you're close enough, you can even hear the prop turns right through the hull.
Diesel-electric boats are noisy only when running on diesel. On battery, they can be far quieter than a nuke boat. It's a pretty good bet he didn't *snorkel* into the formation, so his boat would have been pretty quiet. This is proof the Chinese have some pretty good diesel-electric technology.
I also think there's more to this than meets the eye, but not the same thing you do. Giving away the fact that he was in range for a firing solution on a carrier could be regarded as a serious tactical error by the Chinese captain. It would be far better to let the carrier group pass by, then slip off in silence and keep that knowledge secret. Letting the US Navy know they can do that will only make the US Navy work very hard to find a solution to that problem and negate that advantage.
However, maybe it wasn't so voluntary. Possible reasons for it include running out of battery, losing control of his submarine, an equipment failure on board, or being actively pinged and forced to acknowledge his presence. Granted, the first three of those still mean he got in undetected and the last means he may have done so before being hit with active sonar, but all of them put it in a different light than deliberately making his presence in the middle of the battle group known.
Depends on the Japanese company, I guess. I lived in Japan for 8 years and never experienced that (and I did leave a company to work for not only a direct competitor, but its top competitor in one of its market areas), nor did I ever hear of anyone - Japanese or not - who experienced it. I was actually hoping they would, since I didn't really want to serve out that last month, but no dice
Taking this report at it's face value, that makes sense to me. Anybody working for NASA could just as easily be working in the private sector and making more money, and getting the parties, etc. My employer is very selective in its hiring; even here in the Silicon Valley area, we find we have to turn away ~90% of applicants as not meeting out standards. We really emphasize skill, talent, and also personality fit. Besides having good pay and benefits, we have a weekly informal catered beer bash every Friday afternoon, and the best official company parties I've ever encountered anywhere. And we give away company T-shirts several times a year.
As a result, we have not only a very skilled work force, but a very dedicated one, and low turnover besides. I'm sure the cost of higher turnover would exceed what we spend on the beer bash and T-shirts, so I can totally understand why NASA would do this. Considering NASA's relatively high level of talent and relatively small waste compared to some parts of the government, I have problem with the parties.
I can't begin to tell you how wrong you are.
I converted to Islam ten years ago to marry my wife, who was an Egyptian graduate student at the time and is now a US citizen. There is most certainly a war, and there is most certainly a threat, although it is certain that you (and maybe he, as well) do not properly understand it.
The United States is a target, yes, and there is a real threat against it, yes, but we are only a peripheral target. The real war is for the hearts and minds of Muslims, and the real target is not the west, at least not yet. The real target is the governments of the Islamic countries. Followers of radical Islam mean to turn them into strict Islamic states. Think of Wahabi in charge of the Islamic world. They have Iran (mostly; as bad as the Iranian government is, it could be far worse), they had Afghanistan and might well have it again. They have a shot at getting Iraq, something they didn't have five years ago. Saddam Hussein was a monster, it's true, but deposing him was a terrible mistake. He was a monster who knew how to keep his foot on the neck of an even worse monster, and with the full power and willingness to do so. Going in to Iraq was just plain stupid. The power vacuum it created is being filled by those far worse than Saddam Hussein.
In Europe, radical Muslims have established a number of Mosques, and have infiltrated a number of others so thoroughly as to be in charge of them. That is part of their plan for Europe, I believe. To take it over from within, a bit at a time, by colonizing it. If the Europeans had an sense, they'd stop admitting immigrants from Islamic countries. Even my wife's family says this, even though a couple of her cousins live in the U.K. and are British citizens.
It is only after they rule the part of the world that is already Islamic that the radicals will really turn their attention to the part of the world that is not. They really do believe in putting to the sword everyone who is an infidel and refuses to convert, and their definition of an Infidel is anyone who is not a Muslim. This is wrong, but it is what they believe. The Prophet's teaching is that Christians and Jews are not Infidels, but have their own versions of the Holy book. Jesus was considered a prophet by The Prophet, and the Jews are descendants of Abraham, just as the Muslims are. It is to those who follow neither Judaism nor Christianity that we must spread Islam, but not at the point of a gun.
The Wahabis and other radicals do not believe this, however. They believe in spreading not only Islam, but only their view of it, at the point of a gun, and this must not be allowed.
The United States needs to stand by the secular governments in the Islamic world. Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the fledgling governments of Afghanistan and Iraq. It even needs to make nice with Syria, and erred badly by toppling Saddam Hussein. No matter how far they may be from our ideals of democracy, they are far better than the alternative. At the same time, we need to really demonstrate to the Muslim man on the street that we are not anti-Islam, we are only anti-radical.
The United States needs to use whatever leverage it has in Saudi Arabia to get the government to stop playing both sides, and cut off the Wahabis instead of funding them. The Saudi government is too blind to see that their own heads will be the first ones to roll when the Wahabis take over the country.
And, the United States does need to stand on a war footing, and do whatever is necessary to support friendly secular government in Islamic countries. The west is not the primary target, not yet. Maybe not for a generation, or two, or three. The radicals have patience and long-term vision. More so than not just western governments, but more so than most mainstream Muslims. And, to the greatest extent possible, we should avoid becoming involved in further shooting wars on Islamic soil. All the good will of 9/11 was squandered in Iraq needlessly and foolishly.
Fair enough. I not only live in California, but in the Bay area, so that may somewhat skew my perspective on the pervasiveness of political correctness. Still, it seems pervasive in much of the news media, and of course, the mouths of politicians.
We might indeed agree on a good deal of things, since true liberals and true conservatives (what some call constructionists) are pretty closely aligned on many issues. As the saying goes, all you have to do to go from being a liberal to a conservative, without changing any of your ideas, is to wait about 20 years.
Still, I'll throw this out for discussion: while the founders of the United States were considered serious radicals in their day, there were nevertheless legal prohibitions on many of the things that social liberals (I am a social conservative) would advocate in favor of (where in favor of = not prohibited in any way) today: same-sex marriage, abortion, pornography, to name three, and these prohibitions were not considered to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court would have laughed at anyone who wanted such a case to be heard. OTOH, slavery wasn't considered unconstitutional in those days, either. There had to be many among the founders who opposed it, but not strongly enough to let it get in the way of forging the nation (or to put it in a kinder light, who knew that if they didn't forge the nation first, there would be no opportunity to get rid of slavery later).
I hear you about groups bigger than 5 people. I'm in the PTA at my daughter's elementary school, and the amount of politics that goes on even in and around such a small group is amazing.
Thanks, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one bugged by bogus use of the word "fascist." Wikipedia has a good, succinct definition of fascism:
"Fascism is an authoritarian political ideology (generally tied to a mass movement) that considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the interests of the state."
To which one could ask, "And this differs from Marxism, Leninism, Stalism, Maoism, how?"
The answer to that is, of course, that it differs only in the economic structure chosen by the totalitarian state. Saddam Hussein was a fascist. Pol Pot was a Communist. Hitler was a fascist. Mao and Stalin were communists. They all had secret police. They detained, imprisoned, and frequently executed those considered to be political opponents, or even politically unreliable. Without trial. Without benefit of evidence. Without recourse. Granted, Saddam Hussein was small potatoes compared to those other guys, who all killed million of their own citizens and (in Hitler's case) their neighbors' citizens too, but he fits the fascist mold.
Whenever someone throws the term "facisct" around indiscriminately, you've almost certainly identified a leftist, and they are typically more authoritarian than anyone, and just as anti-constitution as they accuse their ideological opponents of being. It was the left, not the right, that invented political correctness, and when they find a topic uncomfortable or out of step with their views of how the world ought to be, it's very discussion has to be prohibited. This is in contrast to (real) conservatives, who believe that everything should be debated (partly out of principle, partly because leftists usually make complete fools of themselves in debates).
That doesn't mean I'm not concerned about the excessive growth and authoritarianism of government. I am. We routinely accept a level of government involvement/nosiness today that would have inspired a second revolution 200 years ago, and I think it's more than high time the people get into the ballot box and inform the government that enough is enough. Alas, most of the people are the sheeple and they just want to line up and get their handouts, and no worries about who pays for it or what the government takes in return.
That said, at the moment, there's a *war* on, one that may well last beyond my lifetime, in case some hadn't noticed. The struggle against radical Islam is the world war of our time. We're still in the Chamberlain phase, but people need to wake up and notice in time to stop it while it's still small enough. Chamberlain didn't, and much of the whole world paid the price for it.
In every war - including the Revolution - some civil liberties have been curtailed. My concern in this case is that there has been an ongoing, slow curtailment of civil liberties in lockstep with the growth of government, and it is unlikely that the government will reverse any of that unless forced to do so by the ballot box. Certainly, there is no intention of doing so, and these things go back decades before the current administration.
I remember one day when I worked at Microsoft, the head of our division of our business unit (which was ~300 people) sent a mail with his registry hack tips and tricks to make Windows Mobile faster and more stable, and said he found his WM phone was much more usable since he did those things. My only thought was that if I needed another reason not to buy one, he'd just provided it. If you have to do that stuff to make it stable and usable, it should still be in beta. Or alpha. Or the design phase.
OK, I'm going to take the OT mod risk, too.
The first time I ever heard of Aldo Nova was a long time ago when he was opening for UFO at the San Diego Sports Arena. Not only was he great, not only did he blow UFO away, but a number of people left after his act, having only shown up to see Aldo Nova and not caring at all about UFO.
I like it too, wish I had mod points. "Copyright protection or DRM. Pick one." Now *that* would be a copyright act I could live with!
Jurisdiction and legality will work the same they do on Earth. The fact that it's in space doesn't make it special. It's all covered by two points:
1) Your country of citizenship *always* has jurisdiction over you, even when you're in another country. Thus, if a person does something in Japan that is legal there but illegal in his country of citizenship, his country can prosecute him.
2) When in a country other than your own, you are always subject to its jurisdiction. Thus, if someone is in Japan and does something that is legal in her country of citizenship but illegal in Japan, she can be prosecuted by the Japanese government.[1]
[1] As long as she is not covered by a status of forces agreement or diplomatic immunity. In the first case, her own government has to prosecute (or not). All the Japanese government could do is declare her persona non grata. In the case of a status of forces agreement, the government of the service member in question has the option of either prosecuting the case or allowing her to be charged and prosecuted by the government of the host country (this is the only part with real potential for diplomatic difficulties). I recall at least one case during the time I lived in Japan in which the US government chose to allow three service members accused of kidnapping and raping a 12 year old girl to stand trial in a Japanese court. One plead guilty and the other two were convicted. I remember that there was considerable public outrage that the longest sentence handed down was 7 years. And it wasn't only the Japanese public that was upset. I recall reading a newspaper article in which a Marine colonel (speaking off the record, IIRC) complained he would have rather seen them court-martialed because they probably would have gotten 20 years in Leavenworth.
You'd be surprised how many Microsoft employees use Linux, a Mac or both (I worked there for about a year and a half, and I remember my surprise one day when I walked into the office of one of our project managers and saw Pine on his desktop; when I commented, he said it was an SSH session to his Linux box at home. I thought it took balls to have that on a monitor facing the door). A number of people on my team - myself included - only used Windows at work. At home, most my team were completely Linux/Mac/BSD.
As the saying goes, you get the government you deserve.
If the government doesn't care what is right, only what is legal, it's because many (most?) Americans don't care what is right anymore, either.
They do. Federal law-enforcement is always present at, and typically presents at, APWG meetings (I work for an APWG member), and they do track this stuff, and when possible, make arrests. Among the problems they face are volume (there's so much of this stuff, and LE does not have unlimited resources), time (doing the investigation and compiling evidence is by its nature very painstaking work), and the fact that the perps are most commonly in Russia and other eastern European countries, making apprehension and prosecution far more difficult.
They can't solve all the problems, or maybe even most of them, but they're doing what they can, and it's more than you'll read about on Slashdot. No matter how much resources the FBI and others throw at this problem, however, it will always remain mostly a problem of technology combined with user education.
At the last APWG meet, in Pittsburgh, some researchers fron Carnegie-Mellon presented there findings of an anti-phishing game they wrote, the idea being that you can more effectively train users to not be phished by having them play a video game, rather than read some boring instructions from the IT department or watch a similarly boring video. Their test subjects showed real improvement Vs. a control group, and there has been considerable interest in the game.
A preview version is here, for anyone interested:
http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/antiphishing_phil/
License is CC-attribution-non-commercial.
(I am not affiliated with CMU)
There's more to it than the summary states (gee, imagine that!).
First, these guys are not kids (the summary doesn't say they are, but you made that assumption based on its wording, I think). The primary perpetrator is 29 years old and was employed at the CSU Fresno help desk at the time the events took place. He is alleged to have stolen a supervisor's user ID and password, which he then leveraged to obtain the other user IDs and passwords he needed to break into the grades database and change his grades. The other guy charged is a friend of his, who is alleged to have paid him in cash to also give him better grades. The problem came to light during an audit to check the accuracy of the conversion from their old system to the PeopleSoft DB.
This was not just a case of a couple of 19 year olds exploiting a vulnerability in a system to inflate their grades. This is an alleged insider job carried out by an employee of the university, aggravated by the charge that he not only modified his own grades but also accepted payment from another person to do the same for him. Those actions, especially in light of the ages of the alleged perps, are well beyond the level of student hacking prank, falling clearly into the level of felony computer crime.
Certainly, there are cases where the law is (ab)used to go after legit computer researchers who are conducting honest vulnerability research, and there are certainly also cases where the book is heavily thrown at people who committed relatively minor offenses, but this isn't one of them. It was a serious and well thought out break-in, done at least partly for financial consideration, from a privileged position within the victimized organization.
WRT the number of people who are in jail and problems within society, there are certainly problems, but the number of people in jail is not the cause of the problem, it's a symptom. The problem is in part too many people committing crimes, and too many career criminals not being given life sentences. That problem, in turn stems at least in part from a breakdown of the moral fabric of society. In mostly throwing away public morality and social controls on behavior, we have also thrown away one of the things that helped keep people out of jail in the past.
Another issue is economic problems for people on the low end of the income scale. The link between crime and poverty is pretty well established, and the influx of illegal aliens influences this by driving down wages for the poor. Illegal aliens weren't much of a problem in the days when they were almost exclusively working in agricultural jobs. Those jobs - especially in places like the southwest - have been mostly held by illegals for decades, and there's not much demand for them by American poor. However, the lack of immigration enforcement led to such a huge flood of illegal aliens that they have moved out into all sorts of lines of work traditionally held by poor Americans, driving down wages and pushing out the people who used to hold those jobs. At some point, some of those people will start turning to crime, in whole or in part, to survive. Once they do that, there's no choice but to put them in jail for the safety of others.
How to fix the system, now that it's this broken? That's a tough question. One component has to be solving the illegal alien problem. That means preventing more from getting in, and removing most of the ones who are already in. Next, since it's cheaper to educate someone than it is to jail him, make sure that legitimate, valid educational opportunities are available to those that want them. These opportunities could be academic, vocational, or both, but they need to be there. Doing this without fraud and waste is tough, but it needs to be done. Third, in communities that are really hard-hit by crime, leaders need to step forth or be found who can help those communities decide for themselves that enough is enough, and start exerting some social control. Bill Cosby is straight-on right on this issue. IMO he's one of the sharp
Exactly. Jeff Gould sounds like he gets neither Red Hat, nor Linux in general. Of course, Red Hat has to tolerate Centos because of the GPL, but it's even more than that. There's nothing stopping Red Hat from putting a binary license on some bits of RHEL. They simply refuse to do so. Red Hat's philosophy is now, and has always been, that they will GPL all their stuff. Red Hat is one of the oldest names in the Linux world, and their "religion" has always been to GPL everything, on the basis that a rising tide lifts all boats. Contrary to what Gould may think, distros like Centos are not something Red Hat tolerates; they are something Red Hat tacitly encourages. What's going to do next, ask why Red Hat would put out Fedora, which must surely be robbing some business from RHEL? Wouldn't surprise me in the least if he did.
I was also an early TurboLinux user and did alpha testing on 1.9 (pre-release for 2.0). I even did some part-time work for them when they were still in a west Tokyo storefront office.
.com bubble). TL then became very big, very fast, ballooning to over 80 employees and moving office twice, first to a larger place near Shinjuku, and then to a much larger and newer place in Shibuya. TurboLinux had one of the biggest, flashiest booths at Linux World Expo Tokyo around then.
TurboLinux actually became quite popular in Japan, China, and (I'm told) Korea for a while, and around that time it attracted the notice of some VCs, who were pouring money into anything with "Linux" in its title in those days (the height of the
The guy who'd worked on the early versions had already left, and their lead dev was someone I'd introduced to them (who now works for another Linux distributor). Around the time of this massive growth, the VCs also decided they wanted more direct control of the company. I don't know what the reasons or politics were behind that, but they pushed out the original founders and replaced them with a CEO of their choosing, a business guy who didn't really know or "get" Linux. It was like putting a Pepsi guy in charge of Apple, and the beginning of the end for TurboLinux. Red Hat ate their lunch in Japan over the next couple years, and there were massive staff cuts and even more massive losses of market. I'm actually amazed (and somewhat impressed, I must admit) that TL is still in business. A lot of other Linux companies from that era didn't survive.
All this long-windedness is just to point out the very corporate background that TurboLinux now has, which leaves me completely not surprised that they have done the IP deal with Microsoft.
A little too vividly, I'd say.
I was in high school in San Diego when the crash happened, and word spread quickly around the campus. We could see the smoke rising across Mission Valley, and the gym of our rival school was used as a makeshift morgue.
There was no video of flaming bodies falling out of the plane, for a couple of reasons: first, there was no video of PSA 182 going down. A couple of still photos were captured by one person, but that's it (a news cameraman did happen to catch the Cessna going down, however), and second, the fuselage was not breached in the air. Everyone aboard PSA 182 rode it to the ground, which took less than 20 seconds from impact.
Recovery of body parts from the area did take some time, but that was because of the violence of the crash (nose down attitude and rolled 50 degrees right) into the ground, not the collision between the two aircraft.
It's worse than that, even. By taxing people who are already using legal download services to compensate artists (and I use the term "artist" pretty loosely, we're talking about RIAA music here) for piracy, it's likely to increase piracy and decrease legal downloads. Not because the 2 cents is an onerous fee, of course, but because of the basic unfairness of it.
:p
By putting in such a tax, they'll telling people who are already in favor of legally purchasing downloaded music and are proving it with their purchases, "You're downloading music. Even though it's legal, you're somehow responsible for the fact that some other people are downloading illegal copies and not paying for it. Therefore, we're going to tax you honest people to make up for the losses by the dishonest people."
I can see some percentage of the honest people turning their backs on legal downloads after that, figuring "If they're going to make me pay for illegal activity, I might as go out and commit that illegal activity so that I can at least benefit from it."
Way to go.
Oooh, a nice partner analogy for yours just crossed my mind. Most everyplace has a hotel occupancy tax. I attend conferences several times a year, and since I'm local to the San Francisco area, I just drive there and don't have to stay at a hotel. Maybe they'll try and tax me for not using a hotel now
Didn't I see this in Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
"I have a good friend in Rome named Biggus Dickus. And my friend has a wife. Do you know what her name is? Constantia. Constantia Buttocks."
I work for one of the major spam filtering companies. We already have the MP3 spam problem solved, and I expect the others also already do, or will shortly. It's not that tough, and it doesn't take heavy-handed measures like blocking all MP3s. I expect this to be fairly short-lived. PDF spam and Excel spreadsheet spam didn't make much of a splash either, and have already mostly gone away.
Image spam is also mostly gone these days, but it had longevity because while some providers (such as my employer) very quickly solved it, some others took quite some time, and even after they solved it, some had relatively poor efficacy, even if they were catching most of it.
I always save in open document format in OOO. I only convert to MS Office format or PDF if I have to send a doc to a non-OOO user.