Although incredibly risky, this method would collectively work for everybody involved except one - like playing a single round of Russian roulette.
This seems to be similar to what happened with Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) when subsequent analysis by experts likened these risky short term debt practices to running in front of a slow moving steam roller to snatch pennies before the roller rolls over them, but every one in a while the steam roller accelerates uncontrollably for a short distance and crushes any penny snatcher unlucky enough to be caught standing in the way at that moment.
The psychological ripple effect of this sobering event just made the stakes higher and increased the speed at which the game was played, rather than putting the brakes on.
One gets the impression of the tune pop goes the weasel accelerating in tempo as the handle is cranked ever faster just prior to the jack popping out of the box.
Each time Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac cut the rates, the banks took it as a sign to play another short term round of the game.
In sort of a perverse way they were almost forced to play because institutional investors were demanding high rates of return on invested capital and if your bank wasn't delivering the goods then they would quickly move their money somewhere else that was. Also, each round of the game created more money than the last round, so refusing to play was the same as losing a small part of your existing cash holdings to inflation (i.e. refusing to play resulted in a small loss each round with 100% certainty).
Investors still have the power to effect or at least punish corporate boards, Carl Ichan specializes in reigning in out of control boards for example, but I agree that it can be difficult. As a small investor, without the sort of bankroll that would catch the attention of the board, I can only try to eek out the best return that I can and hope for the best. I do vote my proxies even though I suspect that it makes little difference, except perhaps when someone like Carl Ichan organizes an army of small investors to vote as a block with him at the shareholder meeting as Roy Disney did in an ultimately successful bid to force Michael Eisner to step down as CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation for example. If shareholders were better organized and took more responsibility for their investments then we wouldn't have so many problems without out of control boards and over the top executive compensation. The situation often gets out of control because the shareholders let it, not because the board can ultimately trump the shareholders.
Then don't bail them out and see what happens. I would be the first one to argue that our current debt based fiat money system is flawed in that it relies ultimately, for its security and stability, upon the competence and good will of men which history has shown to be in perpetual short supply. Unless you are advocating a replay of the Great Depression or worse then a bailout is inevitable as a consequence of the way that we have structured our present financial system. I understand your anger, truly I do, and I believe that much of the anger that you and our fellow Americans feels is due to incomplete understanding about how fiat money and debt actually works (it seems grossly unfair at first glance until one considers the alternatives which can be even more perverse and even less fair). Perhaps you disagree completely with founding principles of the present financial system and that is a legitimate, if minority, position in finance and economics, but blaming me and my friends for all your financial troubles misses the larger point that all men are imperfect and every financial system constructed by man is also by definition imperfect because it involves the men who created it. We didn't invent the game, but we are forced to play it along with everyone else. It is either that our we all pull out the swords again and settle it like our ancestors did, but I don't think that anyone really wants that.
Far fewer folks would have been legally allowed to purchase these products if the ratings had reflected the actual risk inherent in them
The risk was probably, in the final analysis, simply not quantifiable to within an acceptable margin of error. The risks of the underlying mortgages which were bound up in the aggregate of individual everyday risks taken by thousands and tens of thousands of Americans, whether or not they lose their job, run up their credit cards, take a vacation, fix the car, or do any number of other things with are in turn connected to larger economic events, made the final aggregate risk impossible to accurately predict. There are simply to many variables in real world economies and when you add thousands of individuals of various financial means and abilities all behaving simultaneously and stochastically what you basically have is chaos and chaos is not a good thing when we seek to invest our money.
The income which allows them to do those things comes from private sources or at least it should, although that is sadly not always the case for reasons which cannot be blamed entirely on the free market, so if you don't like the salary arrangements or those policies then don't invest in those companies and don't buy their products. Vote with your wallet if you must, be beware of the seductive promises of politicians to "punish" those in the private sector whom the public perceives as "evil doers" (i.e. class warfare). The first step towards tyranny is granting the government arbitrary power to "punish" those individuals who are unpopular amongst "the people". Today it might be the "right" person (the CEO who presided over the failing company), but tomorrow it might be you or someone you know who made a politically powerful enemy.
I have visions in my head of hundreds of programmers chained to their desks with taskmasters standing above them with whips shouting "Faster, code faster".
In a private company the owners or the stock holders decide, directly or indirectly via the board of directors, how much the CEO is paid and it is not just a matter of how much more the CEO is paid than the workers but rather what is best for the company. Someone has to be in charge or lead and you don't want that person to make bad decisions that loose value. So if the corporation has revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars per year what is 20 million to ensure that the most talented CEO available makes the best decisions possible? The difference between a good CEO and a bad one is many times the CEO's salary in revenue to the company. Now I agree that bad performance should not be rewarded, but as a shareholder I want the best possible return and if that means that the CEO has to be paid 20 or even 50 million, dependent upon revenue and performance, then so be it.
that is expected to serve as a textual modeling language that will let business managers and non-technical stakeholders manipulate digital assets.
Worst Idea Ever...the last thing that we need in the software profession is more dabblers manipulating things which they have no real understanding of using powerful new "tools" to muck around in a live system. Would you hand your 5-year old a bazooka and tell him to just "have fun"? These are the same people who end up with a workstation full of downloader trojans, bot servers, adware and other assorted junk and this qualifies them to make technical judgments and "manipulate digital assets" how exactly? Microsoft should concentrate on creating better quality software so that non-technical users can concentrate on their real jobs instead of becoming dabblers and part time pseudo-developers in projects that are best left to the professional software developers.
I use generics and reflection together all of the time, what do you mean that we don't have generics for reflection? The Activator class includes generics support for CreateInstance and there is a MakeGenericType method for making generic types among other things. Could it be better? I don't know maybe possibly, it depends upon what you want and how you define better in context. As for data-tables who actually uses raw data-tables straight up in a serious production application? If you need data persistence then get yourself an ORM like NHibernate or else use LINQ to SQL if you need something quick and dirty.
There is nothing stopping you or anyone else from starting their own competing professional football league. In fact, it has been tried several times before, XFL being the most recent attempt, without too much success. However, there is no law against trying and good or at least decent football players are still available at regular working man prices if you can figure out ways to compete successfully for viewers and attendance.
In the TrueCrypt documentation see the sections on "plausible deniability" and "hidden operating system". They have already assumed that you have been taken into the back room and coerced into giving up your "password" and made allowance for this situation. You can give them the password to the decoy and there is no way to prove that a hidden partition exists. If they still want to detain or beat you after that then I submit that you are probably not going to convince them otherwise no matter what you do or say.
I believe for many reasons that there isn't such a thing as an unbreakable cypher.
Theoretically that is true, but the computational complexity (i.e. the number of operations required to solve the math problem) of modern crypto systems is such that rarely will an informed and determined adversary attempt to brute force the crypto system. In fact the number of operations and computing power required render the entire attempt hopeless, since the data cannot be recovered in this way within a single human lifetime (i.e. 120 years) even when the resources available to first world governments are taken into account. It is more likely, assuming that they have no qualms and are determined to get your data, that black bag or rubber hose techniques will employed instead. Basically, if the computer leaves your sight and possession (i.e. it is taken into the back room before being returned to you) then that particular computer can never be trusted again, which is why you should have a backup of your data somewhere else, preferably on a secure off-site server, before you begin your travels and regularly update it during your trip. As far as I know, from my background in Computer Science, modern cryptography provides security that it at least as good as any alternative method and most probably substantially superior to those alternatives. The mathematical and theoretical foundation of modern crypto is well understood and proven (the government also uses these same or similar crypto systems for their own data, so draw your own conclusions about the effectiveness of modern crypto systems).
Don't think for a second that encryption isn't a red flag
So what if it is? Do we surrender our rights under the Constitution because authoritarian elements within our government are treating us all as criminals and terrorists with something to hide? Shall we surrender to fear and give up our rights in response to terrorism or criminal activity and in exchange for what? The promise of those some government agents to protect us against the bad guys? No thanks, I will take my chances with my rights intact. A right not exercised is a right that does not exist except on paper. We should all encrypt all of our data in order to more effectively assert our collective rights against unwarranted search and seizure.
And if they could decrypt...your data, why are you angry? Would they steal it? Put it up on a flickr site?
It is the principle of the thing. The government in the US exists because of the consent of the people. Here in the United States, at least according to the Constitution, the individual citizen is sovereign and any powers not specifically granted to the government by the consent of the people are reserved to us the people. I would rather that everyone walk around armed to the teeth and encrypt all of their data then live in an authoritarian nanny state where big brother is watching.
If you have important data, drop it to a DVD. Put that in a separate place. Carry lots of them.
There are many ways around their schemes (some better than others) and that is one of them. The fact that determined and knowledgeable adversaries can slip through undetected makes this whole piece of security theater even worse. It only inconveniences and compromises those citizens and people who are not able to, by reason of ignorance or incompetence, protect their data (which almost certainly would not include anyone intent on doing real harm).
They could confiscate the laptop, but as for decrypting it? Doubtful. A brute force attack on Rijndael (which is the default for TrueCrypt) is just not worth the effort assuming that it can even be done. As far as is publicly known Rijndael has not been broken via brute force attack and if the laptop is not in the "on" state when they confiscate it then they are looking at either brute force attack, rubber hose cryptanalysis, or forget it (i.e. you don't have your laptop anymore and they don't have your data). Probably the best solution that I have heard is to have a hidden partition (a feature of TrueCrypt) with the secure operating system and an main unencrypted partition for the public operating system whereby the secure operating system is only booted if a "key" (typically a USB memory module or other USB device) is inserted during the boot process AND then the corresponding password entered at the prompt. That way when the laptop is presented for inspection the public OS is booted automatically (as expected) while there is no indication that a hidden secure OS even exists. The border police on duty likely have no knowledge of TrueCrypt and its various technical modes (that information is above their pay grade) so they won't suspect that there is anything more than meets the eye with regard to your laptop and will simply waive you by.
Have you ever seen Lt Cmdr Data use a computer console? In First Contact, he wrote a crypto program to lock out the entire LCARS operating system from the borg in under six seconds. I mean how are we supposed to even compete with that?
The following white paper was written by Andrew D. Birrell of Microsoft Research and it is free. If you are looking for an introduction to multithreaded programming in general OR especially if you are using C# then it will probably be worth your while.
instead of improving new programmers' understanding of existing technology, they re-warp the programmers' heads around their idea of how the technology should be implemented.
While I agree with this sentiment in general, I think that LINQ really does stand well on its own as an important and useful language feature. In fact, many other well respected platforms, Hibernate and its derivatives for example, implement the idea of a common query language (although not generally integrated as well into the hosting programming language as LINQ is). However, LINQ and selected other ideas notwithstanding, Microsoft is guilty as you charged with over-wrapping things or selling well known ideas with new labels and marketing.
LINQ is a great addition to the language to be sure, but the Microsoft's present implementation of it with regard to ORM functionality still leaves some things to be desired when compared against a more robust data access framework like Hibernate (in Java or NHibernate for.NET). Many of the LINQ to SQL examples also continue to perpetuate mixing of the UI and data access layers along with many other OO design and style faux pas which encourage and perpetuate bad programming practices. LINQ is useful in some cases, but the Query objects with Repositories that generally follow from a proper separation of concerns between data access and business objects tend to encapsulate the LINQ anyway so really it becomes a matter of what syntax would you prefer to use in your data access layer and not how clients be calling into that layer. Of course, Microsoft implies with their examples that there is nothing wrong with using LINQ to SQL directly in your code behinds or UI control event handlers...sigh. I really like.NET and I think that Scott Guthrie and the.NET division are really doing a great job with the platform, but I also wish that Microsoft would stop promoting the "everyone can be a developer" concept with McDonalds style programming examples that ignore quality and good design while simply asking, "would you like fries with that?" as the code wizard steps you through the creation of a poorly designed unscalable pre-packaged app. At the very least the could include the caveat with their examples that the sample code is for instructional purposes only and not meant for use, at least not as-is, in non-trivial or serious application development.
One gets the feeling that the Ford Focus is not likely to be very popular in rural Texas anyway where large ranches and unpaved roads tend to favor the large 4 wheel drive pickup truck or the Canyonero style SUV.
People who design targets -- I mean aircraft carriers and destroyers -- must be worrying about this.
It is a threat, but unless the torpedo is fired from the shore (as it could be in Iran if the carrier battle group approached the shore too closely), then it is likely that any submarine (and certainly most ships or aircraft) would be detected by the escorts and the combat air patrol long before they got close enough to deploy the weapon. It is also not likely to sink a large ship, such as an aircraft carrier, with a single hit unless the warhead is nuclear. The aircraft carrier has always been most vulnerable to air attacks because of the large amount of planes (with spinning props and jet intakes) taking off and landing with pressurized steam and high tension wires, aviation fuel and ordinance being moved around the flight deck, and more ordinace and fuel stored below deck in the hanger bay waiting to be moved onto the flight deck. In fact, the flight deck is a very dangerous place to work even when the ship is NOT under attack (accidents are not uncommon and generally involve loss of life or limb). A hit below the waterline would probably not be as bad as bomb or missle which pierced the deck and exploded in the hanger bay.
Supercavitation would allow submarines to move at supersonic (with reference to water) speeds while submerged, and dogfight underwater like WWI aircraft did in the air.
The last I heard any vehicle making use of supercavitation is not able to turn (or at least not very quickly) at supercavitating speeds while underwater. It would be like a car turning suddenly in a long, narrow, and straight tunnel through solid rock (with similar results). The Skvahl torpedo, for example, is said to have this limitation (i.e. it is a straight shot weapon with no ability to correct course once it has been fired and is up to speed).
From TFLA: Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
IMHO, the article is wrong to assume that the CRA had little nothing to do with it (it was at the start of the whole process even though it wasn't wholly responsible...it was the second step on the road to where we are now if you will with the Great Depression and the New Deal creation of Fannie Mae being the first) and the correct answer is really both. The banks made the loans both to comply with the provisions of the CRA and also with subsequent laws and pressure from community organizers (lawsuits and political pressure cost money too you know, just like bad loans) AND they also wanted to make money of course (since if you are not earning interest then you are losing money because of inflation).
Ask yourself this question: Would the deposit banks in the United States (and elsewhere), which have a long history of mortgage lending and experience in that business, have loaned to the subprime borrowers if THEY had to hold the loan paper and suffer the loss if the marginal borrower defaulted? Perhaps more personally, would you loan $1000 to your coke-head do-nothing uncle (or other irresponsible family relation) given what you know about his lifestyle, financial history, and credit worthiness (or lack thereof)? Of course not and it is the same situation with these banks. Now, what if the government said that they would take that loan to your uncle off your hands for face value (i.e. they assume the risk and pay you your profits up front) or let you resell the loan as AAA debt without having to disclose the details? Well then it is a whole different ballgame.
If lending standards had not been lowered by the government (they very arguably encouraged bad loans with CRA by signaling that the Fed would not deny the banks access to overnight loans for making irresponsible loans to subprime borrowers who met CRA requirements) AND the government had not made things even worse by having Fannie and Freddie buy up and guarantee a large part of the bad loans themselves, then the subprime mess would never have become large because banks and investors would not have loaned to people, at least not on a large scale, that they KNEW were not going to repay and THEY (the banks) were going to be left holding the bag.
Remember that it is the government (and to a lesser extent those banks which can borrow from the Federal Reserve) that creates money in the fiat money system here in the United States so if the government tells the banks that it is OK to lend to marginal borrowers AND then agrees to take the loans off the bank's hands OR allows them to sell them into the securities market as AAA packages then of course they are going to do it (As long as the banks aren't forced to hold the bad loans themselves). They cannot afford NOT to participate in what is essentially an expansion of the money supply with lots of NEW credit (if they did sit it out then their competitors would increase their share of the money supply while their own pre-expansion holdings would decline in value because of all the new money being created).
If the government had not interfered in the housing market, beginning in the 1930s and continuing until today, for essentially political reasons then we would NOT now be having the financial crises that we are having today because private investors don't generally lend money at low rates to bad risk borrowers. The present situation is the inescapable result of decades of poor government financial policies made for political reasons. Does this mean that we should have zero regulation? Of course not, but there is a big difference between having the government regulate and mandate full disclosure of relevant information and directly supplying the capital and altering the lending s
Irresponsible behavior on Wall Street has exacerbated the mess
Wall Street took advantage of the way that the government altered the rules of the mortgage game in the only sensible way that they could in an attempt to protect their investments and savings from inflation. They invested in the best thing going (erroneously as it turns out) which was the super hot housing market. The whole thing began in the last decade of the twentieth century (1990s) with the Community Reinvestment Act, which essentially required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to extend credit to borrowers who would NEVER have gotten loans according to any strict financial analysis of their credit worthiness (i.e. their ability and willingness to repay the debt) for POLITICAL reasons. This was exacerbated by community organizers such as ACORN who successfully agitated for even more expansion of loans to marginal borrowers (i.e. they threatened banks with discrimination litigation under the Community Reinvestment Act and other laws if they didn't start lending to these marginal people). The banks finally relented when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when ordered to by the government, began buying these loans which the banks were then happy to make as long as they didn't have to hold them privately because they knew that these new borrowers were a terrible credit risk (i.e. the banks were happy to pass the buck). The investment banks on Wall Street were irresponsible for not seeing through this ruse (i.e. they assumed that Fannie and Freddie backed loans rated AAA by the rating agencies were gold and didn't dig any deeper before they invested their capital). The situation is complex and it will take time to work through the details, but the essential truth is this:
The irrational expansion of credit, which is at the root of our current economic crisis, would NEVER have happened if the government hadn't FORCED the banks to loan to marginal borrowers which the banks KNEW were TERRIBLE credit risks and would probably default on their loans. How did the government force them you ask? They made it illegal to deny credit to marginal borrowers by making it easier to sue for loan discrimination and then the banks, fearing these government mandated bad borrowers, forced the government to buy up the loans (i.e. the banks said: Fine, we will loan to these people, but only if YOU the government agree to buy up the loans). There are additional layers and details in the process of course (which amplified the effects), but that is essentially what happened.
The only way that this will eventually be resolved in a way that all parties can grudgingly accept will be policies that inflate the currency enough to make the bad debts go away in the long run (i.e. they will solve this through the back door tax of inflation). Then every side can claim a victory without making it obvious that everyone lost because of the resulting inflationary policies that were used to fix the problem.
the Oregon AG and the University of Oregon did a great thing.
If only other institutions which now roll over would follow the lead of Oregon institutions instead then perhaps the RIAA would be obliged to quit or at least change tactics and stop pursuing those who aren't really worth going after when the full rules of legal procecure apply. I have been pondering those rules myself in some of my spare moments and I think that these types of lawsuits (the extorted small settlement) will become ever more common, and perhaps not just in the entertainment industry, unless the laws are changed to alter the financial calculus in favor of legitimate and worthy cases and against spamigation campaigns and nuisance lawsuits which clog our courts and make a mockery of our legal system. In any case, the point is well taken that the University of Oregon and the Oregon Attorney General did go to bat for their students and for that they are to be commended.
The tenor of the motion was that they were looking out for the University's interests rather than those of the students.
Unfortunate, but not surprising given the relatively low value that many universities place upon their undergraduates in general these days (and especially individual undergraduates...just another brick in the wall to them when they have 20K+ attending their school). They may care about undergraduates in the aggregate, as in what percentage of the brightest and most promising freshmen they are attracting, but undergraduates don't generally donate large sums of money to the university endowment or help research professors secure grant money or publish lots of peer reviewed academic papers (how can they? they are only undergraduates). Individual undergraduates might get better treatment depending upon how wealthy or famous their family is and whether or not they are members of the corporate elite or the political class, but if you are not the scion of a wealthy or powerful family then forget about the university going out of its way to assist you (particularly in legal matters that might cost the university lots of money). They would rather throw you to the wolves than pony up money and resources to protect you from litigation. At least, this is how it seems these days. Everyone is so afraid of getting sued that if it doesn't protect their own skin they just roll over and do what the opposing attorneys want in exchange for not getting sued...its the lawsuit society and seems like it is only getting worse. I suppose that will end this rant for now, but surely I cannot be alone here and other people have experienced similar things or drawn similar conclusions based upon what we read in the news.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
They have already been trying to crack Go for decades now, but Go has not yielded as easily to the game tree search methods and position value functions as Chess did. The number of possible boards that can occur in Chess is thought to be around 10^40, with substantial reductions possible by applying chess specific knowledge and taking advantage of the properties of the game of Chess, whereas the number of boards that could occur in Go is orders of magnitude more, perhaps 1.74×10^172, and tends to stay constant throughout the game (the number of available moves does not generally decrease much as play progresses as it tends to do in Chess) which is many more boards than there are atoms in the universe (for a more complete discussion of the computational complexity of Go the wiki article, Go and mathematics is actually quite good). No, Go will not be beaten in the same way that Chess was no matter how powerful computers get. If we want to crack Go then we will need some new advancements in AI (which would probably be useful in their own right even if you don't care about Go) and game playing methods that go beyond game trees and search.
Slashdot Mirror
Although incredibly risky, this method would collectively work for everybody involved except one - like playing a single round of Russian roulette.
This seems to be similar to what happened with Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) when subsequent analysis by experts likened these risky short term debt practices to running in front of a slow moving steam roller to snatch pennies before the roller rolls over them, but every one in a while the steam roller accelerates uncontrollably for a short distance and crushes any penny snatcher unlucky enough to be caught standing in the way at that moment.
The psychological ripple effect of this sobering event just made the stakes higher and increased the speed at which the game was played, rather than putting the brakes on.
One gets the impression of the tune pop goes the weasel accelerating in tempo as the handle is cranked ever faster just prior to the jack popping out of the box.
Each time Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac cut the rates, the banks took it as a sign to play another short term round of the game.
In sort of a perverse way they were almost forced to play because institutional investors were demanding high rates of return on invested capital and if your bank wasn't delivering the goods then they would quickly move their money somewhere else that was. Also, each round of the game created more money than the last round, so refusing to play was the same as losing a small part of your existing cash holdings to inflation (i.e. refusing to play resulted in a small loss each round with 100% certainty).
Investors still have the power to effect or at least punish corporate boards, Carl Ichan specializes in reigning in out of control boards for example, but I agree that it can be difficult. As a small investor, without the sort of bankroll that would catch the attention of the board, I can only try to eek out the best return that I can and hope for the best. I do vote my proxies even though I suspect that it makes little difference, except perhaps when someone like Carl Ichan organizes an army of small investors to vote as a block with him at the shareholder meeting as Roy Disney did in an ultimately successful bid to force Michael Eisner to step down as CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation for example. If shareholders were better organized and took more responsibility for their investments then we wouldn't have so many problems without out of control boards and over the top executive compensation. The situation often gets out of control because the shareholders let it, not because the board can ultimately trump the shareholders.
Then don't bail them out and see what happens. I would be the first one to argue that our current debt based fiat money system is flawed in that it relies ultimately, for its security and stability, upon the competence and good will of men which history has shown to be in perpetual short supply. Unless you are advocating a replay of the Great Depression or worse then a bailout is inevitable as a consequence of the way that we have structured our present financial system. I understand your anger, truly I do, and I believe that much of the anger that you and our fellow Americans feels is due to incomplete understanding about how fiat money and debt actually works (it seems grossly unfair at first glance until one considers the alternatives which can be even more perverse and even less fair). Perhaps you disagree completely with founding principles of the present financial system and that is a legitimate, if minority, position in finance and economics, but blaming me and my friends for all your financial troubles misses the larger point that all men are imperfect and every financial system constructed by man is also by definition imperfect because it involves the men who created it. We didn't invent the game, but we are forced to play it along with everyone else. It is either that our we all pull out the swords again and settle it like our ancestors did, but I don't think that anyone really wants that.
Far fewer folks would have been legally allowed to purchase these products if the ratings had reflected the actual risk inherent in them
The risk was probably, in the final analysis, simply not quantifiable to within an acceptable margin of error. The risks of the underlying mortgages which were bound up in the aggregate of individual everyday risks taken by thousands and tens of thousands of Americans, whether or not they lose their job, run up their credit cards, take a vacation, fix the car, or do any number of other things with are in turn connected to larger economic events, made the final aggregate risk impossible to accurately predict. There are simply to many variables in real world economies and when you add thousands of individuals of various financial means and abilities all behaving simultaneously and stochastically what you basically have is chaos and chaos is not a good thing when we seek to invest our money.
The income which allows them to do those things comes from private sources or at least it should, although that is sadly not always the case for reasons which cannot be blamed entirely on the free market, so if you don't like the salary arrangements or those policies then don't invest in those companies and don't buy their products. Vote with your wallet if you must, be beware of the seductive promises of politicians to "punish" those in the private sector whom the public perceives as "evil doers" (i.e. class warfare). The first step towards tyranny is granting the government arbitrary power to "punish" those individuals who are unpopular amongst "the people". Today it might be the "right" person (the CEO who presided over the failing company), but tomorrow it might be you or someone you know who made a politically powerful enemy.
I have visions in my head of hundreds of programmers chained to their desks with taskmasters standing above them with whips shouting "Faster, code faster".
The galley scene in Ben-Hur comes to mind...
In a private company the owners or the stock holders decide, directly or indirectly via the board of directors, how much the CEO is paid and it is not just a matter of how much more the CEO is paid than the workers but rather what is best for the company. Someone has to be in charge or lead and you don't want that person to make bad decisions that loose value. So if the corporation has revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars per year what is 20 million to ensure that the most talented CEO available makes the best decisions possible? The difference between a good CEO and a bad one is many times the CEO's salary in revenue to the company. Now I agree that bad performance should not be rewarded, but as a shareholder I want the best possible return and if that means that the CEO has to be paid 20 or even 50 million, dependent upon revenue and performance, then so be it.
that is expected to serve as a textual modeling language that will let business managers and non-technical stakeholders manipulate digital assets.
Worst Idea Ever...the last thing that we need in the software profession is more dabblers manipulating things which they have no real understanding of using powerful new "tools" to muck around in a live system. Would you hand your 5-year old a bazooka and tell him to just "have fun"? These are the same people who end up with a workstation full of downloader trojans, bot servers, adware and other assorted junk and this qualifies them to make technical judgments and "manipulate digital assets" how exactly? Microsoft should concentrate on creating better quality software so that non-technical users can concentrate on their real jobs instead of becoming dabblers and part time pseudo-developers in projects that are best left to the professional software developers.
we STILL do not have generics for reflection
I use generics and reflection together all of the time, what do you mean that we don't have generics for reflection? The Activator class includes generics support for CreateInstance and there is a MakeGenericType method for making generic types among other things. Could it be better? I don't know maybe possibly, it depends upon what you want and how you define better in context. As for data-tables who actually uses raw data-tables straight up in a serious production application? If you need data persistence then get yourself an ORM like NHibernate or else use LINQ to SQL if you need something quick and dirty.
There is nothing stopping you or anyone else from starting their own competing professional football league. In fact, it has been tried several times before, XFL being the most recent attempt, without too much success. However, there is no law against trying and good or at least decent football players are still available at regular working man prices if you can figure out ways to compete successfully for viewers and attendance.
In the TrueCrypt documentation see the sections on "plausible deniability" and "hidden operating system". They have already assumed that you have been taken into the back room and coerced into giving up your "password" and made allowance for this situation. You can give them the password to the decoy and there is no way to prove that a hidden partition exists. If they still want to detain or beat you after that then I submit that you are probably not going to convince them otherwise no matter what you do or say.
I believe for many reasons that there isn't such a thing as an unbreakable cypher.
Theoretically that is true, but the computational complexity (i.e. the number of operations required to solve the math problem) of modern crypto systems is such that rarely will an informed and determined adversary attempt to brute force the crypto system. In fact the number of operations and computing power required render the entire attempt hopeless, since the data cannot be recovered in this way within a single human lifetime (i.e. 120 years) even when the resources available to first world governments are taken into account. It is more likely, assuming that they have no qualms and are determined to get your data, that black bag or rubber hose techniques will employed instead. Basically, if the computer leaves your sight and possession (i.e. it is taken into the back room before being returned to you) then that particular computer can never be trusted again, which is why you should have a backup of your data somewhere else, preferably on a secure off-site server, before you begin your travels and regularly update it during your trip. As far as I know, from my background in Computer Science, modern cryptography provides security that it at least as good as any alternative method and most probably substantially superior to those alternatives. The mathematical and theoretical foundation of modern crypto is well understood and proven (the government also uses these same or similar crypto systems for their own data, so draw your own conclusions about the effectiveness of modern crypto systems).
Don't think for a second that encryption isn't a red flag
So what if it is? Do we surrender our rights under the Constitution because authoritarian elements within our government are treating us all as criminals and terrorists with something to hide? Shall we surrender to fear and give up our rights in response to terrorism or criminal activity and in exchange for what? The promise of those some government agents to protect us against the bad guys? No thanks, I will take my chances with my rights intact. A right not exercised is a right that does not exist except on paper. We should all encrypt all of our data in order to more effectively assert our collective rights against unwarranted search and seizure.
And if they could decrypt...your data, why are you angry? Would they steal it? Put it up on a flickr site?
It is the principle of the thing. The government in the US exists because of the consent of the people. Here in the United States, at least according to the Constitution, the individual citizen is sovereign and any powers not specifically granted to the government by the consent of the people are reserved to us the people. I would rather that everyone walk around armed to the teeth and encrypt all of their data then live in an authoritarian nanny state where big brother is watching.
If you have important data, drop it to a DVD. Put that in a separate place. Carry lots of them.
There are many ways around their schemes (some better than others) and that is one of them. The fact that determined and knowledgeable adversaries can slip through undetected makes this whole piece of security theater even worse. It only inconveniences and compromises those citizens and people who are not able to, by reason of ignorance or incompetence, protect their data (which almost certainly would not include anyone intent on doing real harm).
confiscate your laptop and decrypt it themselves.
They could confiscate the laptop, but as for decrypting it? Doubtful. A brute force attack on Rijndael (which is the default for TrueCrypt) is just not worth the effort assuming that it can even be done. As far as is publicly known Rijndael has not been broken via brute force attack and if the laptop is not in the "on" state when they confiscate it then they are looking at either brute force attack, rubber hose cryptanalysis, or forget it (i.e. you don't have your laptop anymore and they don't have your data). Probably the best solution that I have heard is to have a hidden partition (a feature of TrueCrypt) with the secure operating system and an main unencrypted partition for the public operating system whereby the secure operating system is only booted if a "key" (typically a USB memory module or other USB device) is inserted during the boot process AND then the corresponding password entered at the prompt. That way when the laptop is presented for inspection the public OS is booted automatically (as expected) while there is no indication that a hidden secure OS even exists. The border police on duty likely have no knowledge of TrueCrypt and its various technical modes (that information is above their pay grade) so they won't suspect that there is anything more than meets the eye with regard to your laptop and will simply waive you by.
Have you ever seen Lt Cmdr Data use a computer console? In First Contact, he wrote a crypto program to lock out the entire LCARS operating system from the borg in under six seconds. I mean how are we supposed to even compete with that?
The following white paper was written by Andrew D. Birrell of Microsoft Research and it is free. If you are looking for an introduction to multithreaded programming in general OR especially if you are using C# then it will probably be worth your while.
An Introduction to Programming with C# Threads (PDF)
instead of improving new programmers' understanding of existing technology, they re-warp the programmers' heads around their idea of how the technology should be implemented.
While I agree with this sentiment in general, I think that LINQ really does stand well on its own as an important and useful language feature. In fact, many other well respected platforms, Hibernate and its derivatives for example, implement the idea of a common query language (although not generally integrated as well into the hosting programming language as LINQ is). However, LINQ and selected other ideas notwithstanding, Microsoft is guilty as you charged with over-wrapping things or selling well known ideas with new labels and marketing.
LINQ is a great addition to the language to be sure, but the Microsoft's present implementation of it with regard to ORM functionality still leaves some things to be desired when compared against a more robust data access framework like Hibernate (in Java or NHibernate for .NET). Many of the LINQ to SQL examples also continue to perpetuate mixing of the UI and data access layers along with many other OO design and style faux pas which encourage and perpetuate bad programming practices. LINQ is useful in some cases, but the Query objects with Repositories that generally follow from a proper separation of concerns between data access and business objects tend to encapsulate the LINQ anyway so really it becomes a matter of what syntax would you prefer to use in your data access layer and not how clients be calling into that layer. Of course, Microsoft implies with their examples that there is nothing wrong with using LINQ to SQL directly in your code behinds or UI control event handlers...sigh. I really like .NET and I think that Scott Guthrie and the .NET division are really doing a great job with the platform, but I also wish that Microsoft would stop promoting the "everyone can be a developer" concept with McDonalds style programming examples that ignore quality and good design while simply asking, "would you like fries with that?" as the code wizard steps you through the creation of a poorly designed unscalable pre-packaged app. At the very least the could include the caveat with their examples that the sample code is for instructional purposes only and not meant for use, at least not as-is, in non-trivial or serious application development.
One gets the feeling that the Ford Focus is not likely to be very popular in rural Texas anyway where large ranches and unpaved roads tend to favor the large 4 wheel drive pickup truck or the Canyonero style SUV.
People who design targets -- I mean aircraft carriers and destroyers -- must be worrying about this.
It is a threat, but unless the torpedo is fired from the shore (as it could be in Iran if the carrier battle group approached the shore too closely), then it is likely that any submarine (and certainly most ships or aircraft) would be detected by the escorts and the combat air patrol long before they got close enough to deploy the weapon. It is also not likely to sink a large ship, such as an aircraft carrier, with a single hit unless the warhead is nuclear. The aircraft carrier has always been most vulnerable to air attacks because of the large amount of planes (with spinning props and jet intakes) taking off and landing with pressurized steam and high tension wires, aviation fuel and ordinance being moved around the flight deck, and more ordinace and fuel stored below deck in the hanger bay waiting to be moved onto the flight deck. In fact, the flight deck is a very dangerous place to work even when the ship is NOT under attack (accidents are not uncommon and generally involve loss of life or limb). A hit below the waterline would probably not be as bad as bomb or missle which pierced the deck and exploded in the hanger bay.
Supercavitation would allow submarines to move at supersonic (with reference to water) speeds while submerged, and dogfight underwater like WWI aircraft did in the air.
The last I heard any vehicle making use of supercavitation is not able to turn (or at least not very quickly) at supercavitating speeds while underwater. It would be like a car turning suddenly in a long, narrow, and straight tunnel through solid rock (with similar results). The Skvahl torpedo, for example, is said to have this limitation (i.e. it is a straight shot weapon with no ability to correct course once it has been fired and is up to speed).
From TFLA: Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply with CRA, or to make money?
IMHO, the article is wrong to assume that the CRA had little nothing to do with it (it was at the start of the whole process even though it wasn't wholly responsible...it was the second step on the road to where we are now if you will with the Great Depression and the New Deal creation of Fannie Mae being the first) and the correct answer is really both. The banks made the loans both to comply with the provisions of the CRA and also with subsequent laws and pressure from community organizers (lawsuits and political pressure cost money too you know, just like bad loans) AND they also wanted to make money of course (since if you are not earning interest then you are losing money because of inflation).
Ask yourself this question: Would the deposit banks in the United States (and elsewhere), which have a long history of mortgage lending and experience in that business, have loaned to the subprime borrowers if THEY had to hold the loan paper and suffer the loss if the marginal borrower defaulted? Perhaps more personally, would you loan $1000 to your coke-head do-nothing uncle (or other irresponsible family relation) given what you know about his lifestyle, financial history, and credit worthiness (or lack thereof)? Of course not and it is the same situation with these banks. Now, what if the government said that they would take that loan to your uncle off your hands for face value (i.e. they assume the risk and pay you your profits up front) or let you resell the loan as AAA debt without having to disclose the details? Well then it is a whole different ballgame.
If lending standards had not been lowered by the government (they very arguably encouraged bad loans with CRA by signaling that the Fed would not deny the banks access to overnight loans for making irresponsible loans to subprime borrowers who met CRA requirements) AND the government had not made things even worse by having Fannie and Freddie buy up and guarantee a large part of the bad loans themselves, then the subprime mess would never have become large because banks and investors would not have loaned to people, at least not on a large scale, that they KNEW were not going to repay and THEY (the banks) were going to be left holding the bag.
Remember that it is the government (and to a lesser extent those banks which can borrow from the Federal Reserve) that creates money in the fiat money system here in the United States so if the government tells the banks that it is OK to lend to marginal borrowers AND then agrees to take the loans off the bank's hands OR allows them to sell them into the securities market as AAA packages then of course they are going to do it (As long as the banks aren't forced to hold the bad loans themselves). They cannot afford NOT to participate in what is essentially an expansion of the money supply with lots of NEW credit (if they did sit it out then their competitors would increase their share of the money supply while their own pre-expansion holdings would decline in value because of all the new money being created).
If the government had not interfered in the housing market, beginning in the 1930s and continuing until today, for essentially political reasons then we would NOT now be having the financial crises that we are having today because private investors don't generally lend money at low rates to bad risk borrowers. The present situation is the inescapable result of decades of poor government financial policies made for political reasons. Does this mean that we should have zero regulation? Of course not, but there is a big difference between having the government regulate and mandate full disclosure of relevant information and directly supplying the capital and altering the lending s
Irresponsible behavior on Wall Street has exacerbated the mess
Wall Street took advantage of the way that the government altered the rules of the mortgage game in the only sensible way that they could in an attempt to protect their investments and savings from inflation. They invested in the best thing going (erroneously as it turns out) which was the super hot housing market. The whole thing began in the last decade of the twentieth century (1990s) with the Community Reinvestment Act, which essentially required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to extend credit to borrowers who would NEVER have gotten loans according to any strict financial analysis of their credit worthiness (i.e. their ability and willingness to repay the debt) for POLITICAL reasons. This was exacerbated by community organizers such as ACORN who successfully agitated for even more expansion of loans to marginal borrowers (i.e. they threatened banks with discrimination litigation under the Community Reinvestment Act and other laws if they didn't start lending to these marginal people). The banks finally relented when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when ordered to by the government, began buying these loans which the banks were then happy to make as long as they didn't have to hold them privately because they knew that these new borrowers were a terrible credit risk (i.e. the banks were happy to pass the buck). The investment banks on Wall Street were irresponsible for not seeing through this ruse (i.e. they assumed that Fannie and Freddie backed loans rated AAA by the rating agencies were gold and didn't dig any deeper before they invested their capital). The situation is complex and it will take time to work through the details, but the essential truth is this:
The irrational expansion of credit, which is at the root of our current economic crisis, would NEVER have happened if the government hadn't FORCED the banks to loan to marginal borrowers which the banks KNEW were TERRIBLE credit risks and would probably default on their loans. How did the government force them you ask? They made it illegal to deny credit to marginal borrowers by making it easier to sue for loan discrimination and then the banks, fearing these government mandated bad borrowers, forced the government to buy up the loans (i.e. the banks said: Fine, we will loan to these people, but only if YOU the government agree to buy up the loans). There are additional layers and details in the process of course (which amplified the effects), but that is essentially what happened.
The only way that this will eventually be resolved in a way that all parties can grudgingly accept will be policies that inflate the currency enough to make the bad debts go away in the long run (i.e. they will solve this through the back door tax of inflation). Then every side can claim a victory without making it obvious that everyone lost because of the resulting inflationary policies that were used to fix the problem.
the Oregon AG and the University of Oregon did a great thing.
If only other institutions which now roll over would follow the lead of Oregon institutions instead then perhaps the RIAA would be obliged to quit or at least change tactics and stop pursuing those who aren't really worth going after when the full rules of legal procecure apply. I have been pondering those rules myself in some of my spare moments and I think that these types of lawsuits (the extorted small settlement) will become ever more common, and perhaps not just in the entertainment industry, unless the laws are changed to alter the financial calculus in favor of legitimate and worthy cases and against spamigation campaigns and nuisance lawsuits which clog our courts and make a mockery of our legal system. In any case, the point is well taken that the University of Oregon and the Oregon Attorney General did go to bat for their students and for that they are to be commended.
The tenor of the motion was that they were looking out for the University's interests rather than those of the students.
Unfortunate, but not surprising given the relatively low value that many universities place upon their undergraduates in general these days (and especially individual undergraduates...just another brick in the wall to them when they have 20K+ attending their school). They may care about undergraduates in the aggregate, as in what percentage of the brightest and most promising freshmen they are attracting, but undergraduates don't generally donate large sums of money to the university endowment or help research professors secure grant money or publish lots of peer reviewed academic papers (how can they? they are only undergraduates). Individual undergraduates might get better treatment depending upon how wealthy or famous their family is and whether or not they are members of the corporate elite or the political class, but if you are not the scion of a wealthy or powerful family then forget about the university going out of its way to assist you (particularly in legal matters that might cost the university lots of money). They would rather throw you to the wolves than pony up money and resources to protect you from litigation. At least, this is how it seems these days. Everyone is so afraid of getting sued that if it doesn't protect their own skin they just roll over and do what the opposing attorneys want in exchange for not getting sued...its the lawsuit society and seems like it is only getting worse. I suppose that will end this rant for now, but surely I cannot be alone here and other people have experienced similar things or drawn similar conclusions based upon what we read in the news.
P.S. You arrogant fans of Go can frak yourselves. Where do you think the scientists will go once they're done with chess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
They have already been trying to crack Go for decades now, but Go has not yielded as easily to the game tree search methods and position value functions as Chess did. The number of possible boards that can occur in Chess is thought to be around 10^40, with substantial reductions possible by applying chess specific knowledge and taking advantage of the properties of the game of Chess, whereas the number of boards that could occur in Go is orders of magnitude more, perhaps 1.74×10^172, and tends to stay constant throughout the game (the number of available moves does not generally decrease much as play progresses as it tends to do in Chess) which is many more boards than there are atoms in the universe (for a more complete discussion of the computational complexity of Go the wiki article, Go and mathematics is actually quite good). No, Go will not be beaten in the same way that Chess was no matter how powerful computers get. If we want to crack Go then we will need some new advancements in AI (which would probably be useful in their own right even if you don't care about Go) and game playing methods that go beyond game trees and search.