There are plenty of reasons to believe that slavery, legally-enforced inequality, state-sponsored religions and so on are not beneficial to a state or its citizens, without having to rely on a theological argument. Mill's utilitarianism, for example, provides such a framework. There have been many refinements to that philosophical framework since then. Kant's categorical imperative is another. I think it would be a mistake to think that only a religion can provide a solid moral grounding for law. In fact, I think it is a mistake to believe that religion is even a good grounding for law.
I suspect that few of the Founding Fathers truly believed that "all men are created equal". As a pragmatic matter, do we even believe that now? You'd have to be quite the idealist. In the 18th century, this must have been just as apparent as it is now. However, the phrase serves as an important legal principle, and I think that if you expand that phrase to mean "all men are created equal before the law", then you really have a useful touchstone. Unfortunately, the "inalienable rights" that the Constitution speaks of have never been regarded inalienable, even in theory. The United States has a long legal history of narrowing those rights. For example-- you have the right to assemble, but you cannot do so in front of a place like an abortion clinic throughout much of the U.S. You have the right to bear arms, but only certain kinds, and in certain places, and doing so is highly regulated. Rarely has the legal scope of the "rights" enumerated in either the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights been expanded.
Look, I'm not saying that the phrases aren't important, and I'm not saying that the legal concepts themselves aren't important, either. I quite like my country, and I think that our government has many advantages over many other governments. But it certainly has room for improvement, and I can recognize rhetoric when I see it. There's a lot of rhetoric in our founding documents. I'm certain that there was a lot of legal idealism at the time of our country's founding, but we need to keep in mind that these founders were also people, and more importantly politicians and members of the empowered class. They did a marvelous job at balancing their future government, but modern people have forgotten that many of had an interest in maintaining the status quo (e.g., legal slavery). The legal progress that has happened since then is the result of the hard work of many concerned Americans throughout the years-- NOT as a direct result of some fabulous, supposedly "God-given" right. In almost every case, the overturning of those legally-enforced wrongs resulted in profound legal, religious, and social crises, but in many, many cases, for the better. You don't need God to tell you that.
There are no "inherent rights". Sure, there was a lot of hand-waving by people like Hobbes and the Founding Fathers and others about there being "God-given" rights and so forth; but I'm sure it was just a bit of rhetoric since the theological argument had so much more weight back then. If you take the idea of a secular state to it's logical extreme-- we trade for those rights. We trade in responsibility, duty, and cash. Every one of those "God-given" rights that we now enjoy was paid for in suffering, either in war, or protest, or court battle, or legislation-- by somebody. Over the years we've "chopped out" what the state cannot do, because people in power almost always want total control. If these rights are indeed God-given, well, God didn't help us very much, did he?
Sure, roads have been around for a long time. But is that really a good counter argument? I mean, the parent poster pointed out that this is not even an implict contract-- you pay tax on your vehicle, you license it and yourself for travel on the road. Those documents mean something whether you choose to believe it or not. If you want to walk down the sidewalk, unlicensed, go right ahead. No one will stop you. But if you want to drive on a road that must be maintained and patrolled by safety officers, you need to accept some tradeoffs, because it ain't your road.
An acquaintance of mine who works at AMD said that the reason was to enable tighter integration between graphics and processors. He knows a hell of a lot more about computer design than I do, so I'm going to leave it at that.
Funny story about that. A coworker of mine married a Vietnamese woman, and seeing as how they both love durian, they decided to have a durian wedding cake. Now, since the wedding was held in the US, most of the guests were, shall we say, unfamiliar with the fruit. The highlight of the evening was a small child who took a bite of the cake, and who burst into tears crying, "I can't make the taste go away!". My first experience with durian (in bubble tea) caused my colleagues at the table to start to complain that the restaurant must have seated them next to a trash can-- until they realized the smell was coming from my drink. Ahh, there really is nothing like durian in the West.
"When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before." -- John D. Rockefeller Hey, I didn't live through it. But Rockefeller did. And my grandmother did as well, whom I asked about this recently. She was very interested in my beer-making hobby, and during our chat, I discovered that she used to make "beer" for my great-grandfather when she was a teenager, during Prohibition. I don't think you'd want to drink the beer she made-- table sugar, a yeast cake, and water-- but after our chat, she left me with the impression that, yeah, drinking really was common during Prohibition. I'm not saying that violenece wasn't part of the reason Prohibition was repealed-- I'm sure it was. But it was the money of regular, drinking people that fueled that black market, so Prohibition was clearly unpopular en masse. I think the biggest reason Prohibition was repealed was that politicians realized that the public's erosion of respect for the government undermined their authority, and that threatened their ability to maintain power.
True, but no one who actually uses one of these would make that mistake. This is pretty cool. Our visual systems are keyed into color differentiation (well, most of us, anyway)-- so it only makes sense to take advantage of that additional visual processing ability to convey more information to the microscopist.
Not only that, but, the UK has a total population of about 60 million people. So 10% of the population is engaging in piracy. Within the age bracket you mention, that's probably pretty much everybody. I have a feeling this is going to turn out like Prohibition did. Despite the fact that it gets banned, everybody still does it, the authorities are powerless to stop it, and in the end, the authorities who puts those laws in place get moved aside by those who want those laws repealed.
I was just starting to play with things like LOGO at her age, and believe me, kids can learn things amazingly fast. I don't think I was exceptional in my computer ability-- I was just exceptional in that I had early access to computers (Wally Feurzig, one of the co-inventors of LOGO, was a coworker of my father's). Just give kids access, and plenty of it, and they're pick up from there. Computers are just so darn cool.
For example, on our TI computer, I would frequently run across "SYNTAX ERROR". This initially shared the shit out of me. I clearly remember feeling like I had made some kind of dreadful mistake. I knew what ERROR meant, but SYNTAX? Sounds bad. So I asked my father. "Oh, so it just means I spelled something wrong?" Once I knew that SYNTAX ERRORs weren't going to kill me, I got a lot more adventurous.
But one of the biggest things for me early on was using the printer. The PDP-11 at my father's lab was hooked up to this great, big daisywheel teletype machine, a DECWriter. Putting that thing in motion (it's like a machine gun!) was pure joy for a young kid. I was inspired by a picture of a dog (yep, ASCII art) that a grad student had printed and left hanging on the wall (the lab was the Astronomical Research Facility at UMass Amherst, ARF, for short. Get it? "Arf!"). I was consumed by the idea of making banners. But also of the idea of making books (they had this three-hole punch that could punch through, like 100 sheets of paper no problem). I was playing then, but those 1337 skillz are still with me today. Ok, maybe not the banners part, but I do work for a book publisher.
Anyhow, show a kid what they can do with a computer, and they'll be off on their own. Passwords? No problem. Make it a game. She needs to copy this sentence out this book. It's a secret. She'll love it.
Tell her anything is possible with a computer. That'll get her imagination fired up enough to get her through the hard parts. It's what's kept me going after all these years.
Not to mention, Newton's theory of gravitation doesn't work in all cases. Works pretty well, for most things, on Earth. But in other cases, like satellites whizzing around the Earth, the error when calculating using Newton's "laws" become significant.
One unfortunate fact of disease-fighting is that bureaucracy often stands in the way. You see it over and over again: the early battle against typhoid (the history of Typhoid Mary is fascinating), the WHO's battle against smallpox in the 60's and 70's, the initial response to the Four Corners hantavirus, and even the response to the Ebola Reston incident in the 1990's. Similar themes come up in Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains. In every case, problems were solved because smart people made their bureaucratic superiors realize that the continued relevance of the organization depended on new ways of thinking. It sounds to me like Dr. Kochi is attuned to this particular problem, and he isn't afraid to talk about it.
Roman Verostko and others have been doing something he calls algorithmic art for awhile. E.g., put a paintbrush in a pen plotter and then write an algorithm to paint on canvas. Although sometimes I feel like artists like Verostko (who call themselves algorists) are tremendously arrogant sometimes (which I suppose makes them like many other artists), a lot of their stuff seems really beautiful to me. In particular, Verostko's pseudo-calligraphy is just mesmerizing to me-- it looks sort of like a written language, but it's not.
And of course, you can't forget the grandmaster of algorithmic art: Bach. Bach was a master of counterpoint, and the mathematical beauty of some of his works (e.g., The Art of Fugue) is readily apparent. If he indeed did not generate his works in an algorithmic way, well, that's surprising to me. Listen to Glenn Could play Bach, Partitas 1,2, and 3 being my favorite...
On the other hand, this bill really does happen to concern itself with Internet freedom preservation. Unlike, say, the USA PATRIOT Act, which has real patriots spinning in their graves.
Before you knock the bill based on the name, go have a read. Ed Markey has been consistently on the side of technological freedom, and he's a very bright guy. I'd say he's one of the very few politicians who really understand technology. I might not have noticed myself (I admittedly don't pay as much attention to my Congresscritters as I should), but after walking past his office for the nth time on my way home, I looked him up.
There are other reasons to have explosives on spacecraft. For instance, whether the space shuttle's explosives were detonated or not was determined by the Range Safety Officer. Apparently, it was common for astronauts to joke about the RSO's mother, etc, since the RSO could monitor the shuttle's communications, but not respond. Of course, you don't want to antagonize him too much.
Anyway, self-destruct is at least useful for killing Klingons;^)
Actually, Von Holtzbrinck Publishers US changed their name to Macmillan US sometime last year, and moved the head of Macmillan UK onto the Holtzbrinck board. But, yes, they are privately-held.
The Holtzbrinck family is unique in giving its subsidiaries a lot of freedom. The thinking is: if they make a lot of money, they're doing something right. Of course, the onus is on that subsidiary to keep performing. IIRC, Tor made some changes in their business model last year that started bringing in a lot more profit; this has given them the freedom to try some new things. Anyway, everybody is all worked up about "going digital", so I'm not surprised to see that Tor is pursuing that option, although I have to say I am a little surprised to see them offering DRM-free downloads. But it scores big points with their audience, and maybe they know that.
Before you call IT people idiots, you might want to try walking in our shoes a bit. Some of us have hundreds or thousands of users, and oversee even more devices than that.
Now, obviously, I can't speak for all IT people. There are the BOFHs out there-- I work with a couple. There are also a fair number of real idiots out there. But in general, of course we understand that computers are a tool for performing work. What happens more often, however, is that users cannot userstand that they are not the only important people in an organization. I have had more than my fair share of ire directed at me for my choices, but I've found that once people have gotten all of the anger out of their systems, I can sit down with them and educate them. Yes, long passwords suck. No, you should not write them on Post-It notes. Here's why. Think of a simple game to help you remember your passwords. In virtually every case, I've been able to bring them over to see the issue from my side.
Now, it sounds to me like you've been burned by an IT department. Hey, I don't blame you. Before I was in charge of our network, in fact, before I was an IT worker, I used to rail against these "IT assholes". My picture was probably printed on the urinal cakes near the Help Desk. But working in IT was a real revelation for me. It turns out, people are less trustworthy than you think. You need to protect other people and the company from these untrustworthy ones. That's basically how the thought process gets started. I suggest you try to have some dialogue with your IT staff. Chances are they know other ways to solve your problems, and that way might even be better.
Long passwords are trivial to enforce. In Active Directory, for instance, you simply set a policy. Done. Sure, whining users-- get used to it. It's your job to make sure the company has the resources it needs, and if they go down, it's your head on the chopping block.
The more common scenario that he does not mention is that people who are trying to gain access are trying to brute force a login through a network protocol. NOT running something like rainbowcrack on your password hashes. If they've gotten to that point your passwords are essentially worthless already.
BUT this is where defense-in-depth comes in. Security is NOT A PRODUCT. It is a mindset. So if your user accounts aren't all administrators and someone finally manages to brute force a network login, at the worst, that person now can do as much damage as one employee. You do have access controls on your employees, right? Not to mention, most "secure" network protocols nowadays make brute-forcing much harder. SSH, for instance, will timeout the connection after X failed login attempts. They now have to work a lot longer. The login prompt in Windows does the same thing.
So you apply this thinking to everything. Stop using a VPN. Make only the services you want available through your firewall. Do egress filtering. Use a DMZ. Prevent LAN clients from talking to any hosts other than the gateway and servers. When I started, my company originally used VPN to check email on an Exchange server. BAD! Passwords were usually the same as the username. Someone could trivially walk in and have access to the entire WAN. I pointed this out to them and got "But we're using a VPN. Checkpoint says it's secure!" If you have Exchange, take advantage of RPC-over-HTTPS, and then proxy that! There are lots of things you can do. As this guy points out, none of them are perfect, but you never know-- one of those little things might save your ass.
Do you have this problem? When the wireless is on, the palmrest gets uncomfortably hot. Since I use this machine mainly for doing long stretches of programming when I'm away from my desk, the hot palmrest problem really bugs me. So much so that I'm considering swapping the X60 for an X41 that someone just handed in, which doesn't generate quite as much heat.
But other than that-- the machine is indeed great, like you say. Small size and battery life were my main criteria, and it excels on both these points. And every detail on this machine is well-thought out. Love the keyboard light.
I think it's likely that 'gay' behavior is a mix of both inherited traits and learned behavior. This makes sense when you consider the sheer number of 'gay' people, all of whom act very differently. You have homosexual men and women, transgendered people, transvestites, and I'm sure a whole spectrum of people in between with different conceptions of gender and sexual preference.
One of the reasons I am skeptical of claims that a genetic basis is 'almost certain' is that we know now that genetic expression is far more dynamic that we originally thought. What if someone has a 'gay' gene but isn't?-- due to their particular circumstances, that gene was never expressed. Are they still gay? Are they a gay-carrier? What if they pass this 'gay' gene down, but, like them, their children never express it either? The fact is, mapping the human genome was only the first step-- now we have to decode the epigenome! The epigenome is somewhat like software-- it can change. But it is hertiable, too! And in my mind, the realization that our epigenome-- i.e., how our genes are expressed-- can change over the course of our lives, it makes me doubt a lot of the 'accepted wisdom' in the field of genetics when it comes to sexuality and a lot of other things, too.
But even with a better knowledge of human inheritance, I personally do not think that we will necessarily have a better idea of human sexuality. That's not to say we won't learn something about where it comes from. But for reasons mentioned above, I suspect that we'll find that we are lumping too many behaviors into the category we call being 'gay'.
I'm no Romney fan (and that's saying something-- I live in MA), but come on-- this article seems to be mostly speculation. Where did Time get this information? Did they find the dog excrement themselves and then deduce the rest of the story? It's such an obvious smear piece (no pun intended) that I am skeptical. They couldn't even goad the MSPCA officer into saying much.
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There are plenty of reasons to believe that slavery, legally-enforced inequality, state-sponsored religions and so on are not beneficial to a state or its citizens, without having to rely on a theological argument. Mill's utilitarianism, for example, provides such a framework. There have been many refinements to that philosophical framework since then. Kant's categorical imperative is another. I think it would be a mistake to think that only a religion can provide a solid moral grounding for law. In fact, I think it is a mistake to believe that religion is even a good grounding for law.
I suspect that few of the Founding Fathers truly believed that "all men are created equal". As a pragmatic matter, do we even believe that now? You'd have to be quite the idealist. In the 18th century, this must have been just as apparent as it is now. However, the phrase serves as an important legal principle, and I think that if you expand that phrase to mean "all men are created equal before the law", then you really have a useful touchstone. Unfortunately, the "inalienable rights" that the Constitution speaks of have never been regarded inalienable, even in theory. The United States has a long legal history of narrowing those rights. For example-- you have the right to assemble, but you cannot do so in front of a place like an abortion clinic throughout much of the U.S. You have the right to bear arms, but only certain kinds, and in certain places, and doing so is highly regulated. Rarely has the legal scope of the "rights" enumerated in either the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights been expanded.
Look, I'm not saying that the phrases aren't important, and I'm not saying that the legal concepts themselves aren't important, either. I quite like my country, and I think that our government has many advantages over many other governments. But it certainly has room for improvement, and I can recognize rhetoric when I see it. There's a lot of rhetoric in our founding documents. I'm certain that there was a lot of legal idealism at the time of our country's founding, but we need to keep in mind that these founders were also people, and more importantly politicians and members of the empowered class. They did a marvelous job at balancing their future government, but modern people have forgotten that many of had an interest in maintaining the status quo (e.g., legal slavery). The legal progress that has happened since then is the result of the hard work of many concerned Americans throughout the years-- NOT as a direct result of some fabulous, supposedly "God-given" right. In almost every case, the overturning of those legally-enforced wrongs resulted in profound legal, religious, and social crises, but in many, many cases, for the better. You don't need God to tell you that.
There are no "inherent rights". Sure, there was a lot of hand-waving by people like Hobbes and the Founding Fathers and others about there being "God-given" rights and so forth; but I'm sure it was just a bit of rhetoric since the theological argument had so much more weight back then. If you take the idea of a secular state to it's logical extreme-- we trade for those rights. We trade in responsibility, duty, and cash. Every one of those "God-given" rights that we now enjoy was paid for in suffering, either in war, or protest, or court battle, or legislation-- by somebody. Over the years we've "chopped out" what the state cannot do, because people in power almost always want total control. If these rights are indeed God-given, well, God didn't help us very much, did he?
Sure, roads have been around for a long time. But is that really a good counter argument? I mean, the parent poster pointed out that this is not even an implict contract-- you pay tax on your vehicle, you license it and yourself for travel on the road. Those documents mean something whether you choose to believe it or not. If you want to walk down the sidewalk, unlicensed, go right ahead. No one will stop you. But if you want to drive on a road that must be maintained and patrolled by safety officers, you need to accept some tradeoffs, because it ain't your road.
An acquaintance of mine who works at AMD said that the reason was to enable tighter integration between graphics and processors. He knows a hell of a lot more about computer design than I do, so I'm going to leave it at that.
Funny story about that. A coworker of mine married a Vietnamese woman, and seeing as how they both love durian, they decided to have a durian wedding cake. Now, since the wedding was held in the US, most of the guests were, shall we say, unfamiliar with the fruit. The highlight of the evening was a small child who took a bite of the cake, and who burst into tears crying, "I can't make the taste go away!". My first experience with durian (in bubble tea) caused my colleagues at the table to start to complain that the restaurant must have seated them next to a trash can-- until they realized the smell was coming from my drink. Ahh, there really is nothing like durian in the West.
True, but no one who actually uses one of these would make that mistake. This is pretty cool. Our visual systems are keyed into color differentiation (well, most of us, anyway)-- so it only makes sense to take advantage of that additional visual processing ability to convey more information to the microscopist.
Not only that, but, the UK has a total population of about 60 million people. So 10% of the population is engaging in piracy. Within the age bracket you mention, that's probably pretty much everybody. I have a feeling this is going to turn out like Prohibition did. Despite the fact that it gets banned, everybody still does it, the authorities are powerless to stop it, and in the end, the authorities who puts those laws in place get moved aside by those who want those laws repealed.
I was just starting to play with things like LOGO at her age, and believe me, kids can learn things amazingly fast. I don't think I was exceptional in my computer ability-- I was just exceptional in that I had early access to computers (Wally Feurzig, one of the co-inventors of LOGO, was a coworker of my father's). Just give kids access, and plenty of it, and they're pick up from there. Computers are just so darn cool.
For example, on our TI computer, I would frequently run across "SYNTAX ERROR". This initially shared the shit out of me. I clearly remember feeling like I had made some kind of dreadful mistake. I knew what ERROR meant, but SYNTAX? Sounds bad. So I asked my father. "Oh, so it just means I spelled something wrong?" Once I knew that SYNTAX ERRORs weren't going to kill me, I got a lot more adventurous.
But one of the biggest things for me early on was using the printer. The PDP-11 at my father's lab was hooked up to this great, big daisywheel teletype machine, a DECWriter. Putting that thing in motion (it's like a machine gun!) was pure joy for a young kid. I was inspired by a picture of a dog (yep, ASCII art) that a grad student had printed and left hanging on the wall (the lab was the Astronomical Research Facility at UMass Amherst, ARF, for short. Get it? "Arf!"). I was consumed by the idea of making banners. But also of the idea of making books (they had this three-hole punch that could punch through, like 100 sheets of paper no problem). I was playing then, but those 1337 skillz are still with me today. Ok, maybe not the banners part, but I do work for a book publisher.
Anyhow, show a kid what they can do with a computer, and they'll be off on their own. Passwords? No problem. Make it a game. She needs to copy this sentence out this book. It's a secret. She'll love it.
Tell her anything is possible with a computer. That'll get her imagination fired up enough to get her through the hard parts. It's what's kept me going after all these years.
Not to mention, Newton's theory of gravitation doesn't work in all cases. Works pretty well, for most things, on Earth. But in other cases, like satellites whizzing around the Earth, the error when calculating using Newton's "laws" become significant.
One unfortunate fact of disease-fighting is that bureaucracy often stands in the way. You see it over and over again: the early battle against typhoid (the history of Typhoid Mary is fascinating), the WHO's battle against smallpox in the 60's and 70's, the initial response to the Four Corners hantavirus, and even the response to the Ebola Reston incident in the 1990's. Similar themes come up in Tracy Kidder's book Mountains Beyond Mountains. In every case, problems were solved because smart people made their bureaucratic superiors realize that the continued relevance of the organization depended on new ways of thinking. It sounds to me like Dr. Kochi is attuned to this particular problem, and he isn't afraid to talk about it.
Roman Verostko and others have been doing something he calls algorithmic art for awhile. E.g., put a paintbrush in a pen plotter and then write an algorithm to paint on canvas. Although sometimes I feel like artists like Verostko (who call themselves algorists) are tremendously arrogant sometimes (which I suppose makes them like many other artists), a lot of their stuff seems really beautiful to me. In particular, Verostko's pseudo-calligraphy is just mesmerizing to me-- it looks sort of like a written language, but it's not.
And of course, you can't forget the grandmaster of algorithmic art: Bach. Bach was a master of counterpoint, and the mathematical beauty of some of his works (e.g., The Art of Fugue) is readily apparent. If he indeed did not generate his works in an algorithmic way, well, that's surprising to me. Listen to Glenn Could play Bach, Partitas 1,2, and 3 being my favorite...
On the other hand, this bill really does happen to concern itself with Internet freedom preservation. Unlike, say, the USA PATRIOT Act, which has real patriots spinning in their graves.
Before you knock the bill based on the name, go have a read. Ed Markey has been consistently on the side of technological freedom, and he's a very bright guy. I'd say he's one of the very few politicians who really understand technology. I might not have noticed myself (I admittedly don't pay as much attention to my Congresscritters as I should), but after walking past his office for the nth time on my way home, I looked him up.
How exactly do you determine that likelihood? Have you created any new life forms recently? Quality time with the wife doesn't count.
For all we know, life adapted to the extreme conditions of what we call normal.
Wait, what task is Microsoft Word best suited for? Separating me from my money?
Man, I remember buying a Gravis Analog joystick just to play F19 Stealth Fighter on my 286. That thing was awesome.
There are other reasons to have explosives on spacecraft. For instance, whether the space shuttle's explosives were detonated or not was determined by the Range Safety Officer. Apparently, it was common for astronauts to joke about the RSO's mother, etc, since the RSO could monitor the shuttle's communications, but not respond. Of course, you don't want to antagonize him too much.
;^)
Anyway, self-destruct is at least useful for killing Klingons
Actually, Von Holtzbrinck Publishers US changed their name to Macmillan US sometime last year, and moved the head of Macmillan UK onto the Holtzbrinck board. But, yes, they are privately-held.
The Holtzbrinck family is unique in giving its subsidiaries a lot of freedom. The thinking is: if they make a lot of money, they're doing something right. Of course, the onus is on that subsidiary to keep performing. IIRC, Tor made some changes in their business model last year that started bringing in a lot more profit; this has given them the freedom to try some new things. Anyway, everybody is all worked up about "going digital", so I'm not surprised to see that Tor is pursuing that option, although I have to say I am a little surprised to see them offering DRM-free downloads. But it scores big points with their audience, and maybe they know that.
Disclaimer: I work for a Macmillan imprint.
Before you call IT people idiots, you might want to try walking in our shoes a bit. Some of us have hundreds or thousands of users, and oversee even more devices than that.
Now, obviously, I can't speak for all IT people. There are the BOFHs out there-- I work with a couple. There are also a fair number of real idiots out there. But in general, of course we understand that computers are a tool for performing work. What happens more often, however, is that users cannot userstand that they are not the only important people in an organization. I have had more than my fair share of ire directed at me for my choices, but I've found that once people have gotten all of the anger out of their systems, I can sit down with them and educate them. Yes, long passwords suck. No, you should not write them on Post-It notes. Here's why. Think of a simple game to help you remember your passwords. In virtually every case, I've been able to bring them over to see the issue from my side.
Now, it sounds to me like you've been burned by an IT department. Hey, I don't blame you. Before I was in charge of our network, in fact, before I was an IT worker, I used to rail against these "IT assholes". My picture was probably printed on the urinal cakes near the Help Desk. But working in IT was a real revelation for me. It turns out, people are less trustworthy than you think. You need to protect other people and the company from these untrustworthy ones. That's basically how the thought process gets started. I suggest you try to have some dialogue with your IT staff. Chances are they know other ways to solve your problems, and that way might even be better.
Long passwords are trivial to enforce. In Active Directory, for instance, you simply set a policy. Done. Sure, whining users-- get used to it. It's your job to make sure the company has the resources it needs, and if they go down, it's your head on the chopping block.
The more common scenario that he does not mention is that people who are trying to gain access are trying to brute force a login through a network protocol. NOT running something like rainbowcrack on your password hashes. If they've gotten to that point your passwords are essentially worthless already.
BUT this is where defense-in-depth comes in. Security is NOT A PRODUCT. It is a mindset. So if your user accounts aren't all administrators and someone finally manages to brute force a network login, at the worst, that person now can do as much damage as one employee. You do have access controls on your employees, right? Not to mention, most "secure" network protocols nowadays make brute-forcing much harder. SSH, for instance, will timeout the connection after X failed login attempts. They now have to work a lot longer. The login prompt in Windows does the same thing.
So you apply this thinking to everything. Stop using a VPN. Make only the services you want available through your firewall. Do egress filtering. Use a DMZ. Prevent LAN clients from talking to any hosts other than the gateway and servers. When I started, my company originally used VPN to check email on an Exchange server. BAD! Passwords were usually the same as the username. Someone could trivially walk in and have access to the entire WAN. I pointed this out to them and got "But we're using a VPN. Checkpoint says it's secure!" If you have Exchange, take advantage of RPC-over-HTTPS, and then proxy that! There are lots of things you can do. As this guy points out, none of them are perfect, but you never know-- one of those little things might save your ass.
Do you have this problem? When the wireless is on, the palmrest gets uncomfortably hot. Since I use this machine mainly for doing long stretches of programming when I'm away from my desk, the hot palmrest problem really bugs me. So much so that I'm considering swapping the X60 for an X41 that someone just handed in, which doesn't generate quite as much heat.
But other than that-- the machine is indeed great, like you say. Small size and battery life were my main criteria, and it excels on both these points. And every detail on this machine is well-thought out. Love the keyboard light.
I think it's likely that 'gay' behavior is a mix of both inherited traits and learned behavior. This makes sense when you consider the sheer number of 'gay' people, all of whom act very differently. You have homosexual men and women, transgendered people, transvestites, and I'm sure a whole spectrum of people in between with different conceptions of gender and sexual preference.
One of the reasons I am skeptical of claims that a genetic basis is 'almost certain' is that we know now that genetic expression is far more dynamic that we originally thought. What if someone has a 'gay' gene but isn't?-- due to their particular circumstances, that gene was never expressed. Are they still gay? Are they a gay-carrier? What if they pass this 'gay' gene down, but, like them, their children never express it either? The fact is, mapping the human genome was only the first step-- now we have to decode the epigenome! The epigenome is somewhat like software-- it can change. But it is hertiable, too! And in my mind, the realization that our epigenome-- i.e., how our genes are expressed-- can change over the course of our lives, it makes me doubt a lot of the 'accepted wisdom' in the field of genetics when it comes to sexuality and a lot of other things, too.
But even with a better knowledge of human inheritance, I personally do not think that we will necessarily have a better idea of human sexuality. That's not to say we won't learn something about where it comes from. But for reasons mentioned above, I suspect that we'll find that we are lumping too many behaviors into the category we call being 'gay'.
Now that I gotta see!
Oymygod. He hurtses teh puppies?!?!
I'm no Romney fan (and that's saying something-- I live in MA), but come on-- this article seems to be mostly speculation. Where did Time get this information? Did they find the dog excrement themselves and then deduce the rest of the story? It's such an obvious smear piece (no pun intended) that I am skeptical. They couldn't even goad the MSPCA officer into saying much.
Jesus. Talk about "line noise". AWK is pure SETI@home fodder. I'll stick with Perl's line noise any day.
What are they? Caching proxies?