Perhaps it's because IT departments actually know how complicated, messy, potentially insecure and how awful support of such "projects" are going to be. As a general rule of thumb, tech-types don't usually give into the hype about things like Web 2.0 that columnists, marketers and your usual assortment of weirdos do. On the other hand, we got the dictum from the central IT group the other day that we were going to start filtering websites across a wide variety of categories. Among the obvious candidates (porn, spyware sites, online gambling, etc) they decided to include Skype, Facebook, GMail, Victoria's Secret (WTF? Are people really getting off on this?), iTunes Music Store, streaming-anything, and a number of sites that our competitors run (college textbook publishing)-- regardless of whether these services make business sense to keep around. E.g., Skype saves us TONS of money, and that, for some reason, is public enemy #1 with them.
Anyway, the [ostensible] reason? To save on bandwidth. This argument is obvious bullshit. In our local office, we have roughly 25% utilization of a 100Mbps fiber line. This was 50% cheaper than the ISDN connection we were contractually locked into for years! Having some familiarity with our budget, I can say that bandwidth is a very small cost for us.
So my opinion is: yeah, it's not surprising that IT departments are blocking web innovation. In my experience, they're generally lazy, worthless cretins. They're probably doing it to save themselves work, or having to think. At least the BOFH enjoyed his job. These guys are... just worthless.
And, FWIW, I, too am an IT worker. With some rare exceptions, most IT workers I have worked with have proven themselves to be a rather uninspiring lot. Those exceptional people, though, are what keep me around.
Precisely. The decision came down the chain today that we were going to install some Blue Coat web-blocking appliances. The "productivity" argument goes right out the window for starters-- we're the most profitable division of the company, by far.
I am opposed to this, of course, not just for the reasons you outlined, but that it seems like the decision happened for another reason: the "cover our asses" legal argument. I don't really see the rationale here, since anyone can sue anyone for anything. Someone who is easily offended is going to be easily offended regardless of filtering. Maybe they just want to show that they made an "effort", even if it doesn't work. But there are also important costs to consider: we publish textbooks on things like political science, gender studies, and so on. Will our employees suffer because they cannot access the information they need? And what about the added technological and bureaucratic layer this adds to everything? Not to mention: we're all adults! If your head explodes every time you see a little skin, the internet ain't your problem, buddy.
Sorry, I guess I'm just in rant mode since I heard about this...
I think the heavy compression in radio is due to the fact that most people listening to the radio are doing so in noisy environments: the car, a worksite, a kitchen, and so on. I did not appreciate the processing that went into sound before I worked in radio, but after, I can say that, were it not for heavy dynamic compression and EQ that broadcasters apply to the audio signal, your listeners would mostly just be annoyed at the perceived [low] quality of your station.
Case in point-- my favorite movie makers (Kubrick, Ridley Scott) tend to have made films that have very quiet parts and very loud parts (also very bright scenes and very dark ones). This is a constant source of annoyance for my girlfriend, who hates "having to turn the volume up and down". I consider it to be artfully done most of the time, and so I see this as one mark of a high-fidelity recording. But as you can see, you and I are in the minority here.
No, it's more like, "WTF? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" when you step on a stray piece, barefoot, first thing in the morning. My parents must have been angels to have given my brother and I so many tiny, sharp toys.
Case in point: I rediscovered Scott Adams' text adventure stuff a few years ago. I grew up playing those games on my TI99/4A. I fondly remember playing Strange Odyssey and Pirate Adventure, thinking that games couldn't have gotten better than this. Anyway, games I spent weeks chugging through when I was a kid, I plowed through in about a half-hour. Fun, but not quite the same thing anymore. Another one, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though hilarious to me when I was a kid, is now mostly annoying (still love the books, though).
Squats and leg presses (deadlift is another) are, biomechanically, whole-body exercises. They are the so-called "core strength" exercises. Since they activate such large swaths of your musculature, your physiological response to strength training is maximised. If you combine this kind of "core strength" training (where you try to maximise hypertrophy across your body instead of isolate) with endurance work (which promotes mitochondrial density), you essentially turn into a calorie-burning machine. This has been my exercise philosophy for the last three years, and despite having been a 4:26 miler in high school, I can say without a doubt, I am a much more fit person now. Add a balanced diet on top of that, and you're basically doing all that you are capable of doing to ensure your health.
Obviously, the above training regimen won't give you, say, "huge biceps", or an Schwarzenegger-esque chest; for that, you need isolation, calories, and a lot of time set aside to workout and sleep. But this will undoubtably make you strong and healthy.
Maybe. But if you can't say that we're capable of good things-- whatever that means-- what's the point of living? As cheesy as it may sound sometimes, the "greatness of mankind" blather is one of the reasons I enjoy science fiction. I am pessimistic by nature, and science fiction tends to be optimistic. It cheers me up.
It may be painful to listen to a bunch of Slashdot nerds publically airing their dreams for the world, but at least it's honest. I suspect that's why it's cringeworthy.
"The Earth doesn't have a particular prejudice against plastic. Plastic
came out of the earth. Perhaps she sees it as one of her many children.
It could be the reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned here in the
first place. She wanted plastic, but didn't know how to get it!
"Philosophers say, 'Why are we here?' The planet says, 'Plastic, asshole!'"
-- George Carlin
Kristaps Dzonsons. And I'm not sure if he ever really intended for it to be for production use. I saw his talk at NYCBSDCon last year, and my impression was "here's a neat tool I'm working on guys, I'm still working out a lot of things, come play if you want". Not that this isn't an important vulnerability to address-- but I'd be surprised if anyone was currently using sysjail in an important production role.
Of course. My favorite dishes are usually more along the French lines-- they are often weirdly counterintuitive.
But my favorite subjects for food preparation are beer and bread. Yeast is such an amazing and versatile organism. Think-- beer and bread are quite similar: the basic ingredients for beer are grain (usually barley, but also wheat), water, yeast, and hops. Bread is grain (usually wheat), water, yeast, and salt. But they are so different! With beer, you utilize the alcohol-producing phase of the yeast organism's lifecycle; with bread, you utilize the gas-producing phase. And there's so much to know-- in fact, this article reminded me of another brewer/cook: George Fix, who was a professional mathematician, but whose hobby, brewing chemistry, probably contributed more to the knowledge of brewing science than any other single person. He was a frequent poster to many of the brewing listservs during the 1990's.
Anyway, cooking really makes me wish I had studied chemistry. Of course, it's never too late to open a book.
Calling gasoline a luxury is naive. It ignores the fact that gasoline plays a crucial role in our food and goods distribution networks. Assuming that you live in a "modernized" country (and I think that's safe to assume considering that you're posting on Slashdot), the removal of gasoline from your life would have a catastrophic effect on the quality of your life.
That said, yes, there are whiners out there who can do without their beloved wheels. My typical commute to work, which is slightly over 6 miles, I do on foot, running, every morning. (BTW, anyone who is interested in doing this kind of thing, this is the best running pack I've found for the job). I am fortunate enough that I have public transportation available to me for the commute back home. 6 miles a day isn't so bad when you work yourself up to it. I consider anyone who is physically able to walk but who drives to work-- when that distance is less than a mile-- to simply be lazy, or uninformed, or both.
But I've also lived in and visited more rural locations, and this is not practical for a large number of people. For them, cars are a necessity. A car is needed to get to work, to get to the grocery store, and to get to those events that add meaning to our lives-- because life isn't simply the process of fullfilling our needs. Calling people greedy whose needs are different than yours is simply ignorant. There are a lot of things that we can do to make our neighbors more energy-conscious, but name-calling isn't one of them.
That just means you don't get it. RFC 2119 defines these terms very specifically within the context of a proposed standard. The keywords "MUST", "SHOULD", "MAY", and so on are technical terms that are used to inform internet software engineers as to how policy should shape their software and practices. A proposed plan for switching to IPv6 would be useless without these terms. Besides, who has ever enforced a standard? The IETF operates on the principle that the best solution wins-- if someone has a better proposal, this one will go away. Simple as that.
I don't buy it. From my vantage point, music is more vibrant than ever. But if you're getting your music from the traditional channels, i.e., radio and TV, it looks like teh suck-- you don't see it. The reason is that the big players in the music industry have lost their traction with artists-- they don't have good bargaining chips anymore. Why lock yourself into a contract that is more likely to land you in bankruptcy hearings than provide you with a way of writing and playing music for a living, especially when you can now self-publish and self-publicize your own music for a fraction of what used to be the cost? Artists who don't "fit the mold" aren't put on the radio, and few of the new artists fit the mold. This is why the industry is in desperate straits.
So what's "the mold"? It's whatever genre the stations are playing. This goes back to what you were saying about the 60's being about rock, the 70's hippes, 80's bad hair day and so on-- since the music industry has lost their lock on creativity, they cannot dictate what music is "about". All of those supposed music "movements" were just mass-manufactured fads. I'm not saying that many of those artists didn't have legitimacy, but come on-- I hated pop music in the 80's, and it was very hard to find things that I did like from the mainstream. The 90's was a relief to me, because the music I loved became widely available, but I have friends who missed the 80's music and hated the 90's stuff! Now, why exactly did one style have to disappear? It's because the music execs realized that there was this huge market in people who hated the 80's shit. But they made the same mistake again, and threw out one style for another.
But the Internet changes all that. Your fanbase isn't limited to your geographic area. You can actually make money on record sales. The Internet allows distributors to make money on fringe items. So the people who make these claims about "creativity drying up", they're the old school. Elton John is completely in the dark here. It's like your grocer switching to a model where they deliver food to everybody's door, but you keep going to the supermarket... but it's closed down. And you're screaming "I'm starving!", but there's such an obvious wealth of food if you bother to look in the right places...
So my conclusion is that Elton John really is a grumpy old man. He's part of the establishment. He sees his record sales drying up (yeah, probably because of piracy on the Internet), and he doesn't see anything original coming down the pipeline. But if he would really bother to get "out there", he would see things differently.
BTW, on the subject of kids being outdoorsy. Growing up, I could hike for days without seeing people; I have to go out of my way now to do that. Places like the White Mountains are having to come up with new wilderness management strategies to deal with the impact. I can't say what kids themselves are doing, but there are definitely more people "out there" than there were before...
You know, I've always wondered about top-opening freezers. They make sense, and I see why many supermarkets use them. But I've also wondered about why they don't have lids on the top. My hypothesis is that the constant opening and closing of the lids would set up air currents that would displace the cold air, thus making them less efficient, but for home use (where you would need to open a freezer less frequently), you'd want the lid. Anyway...
Yes, but you know-- there's actually no reason not to allow you to plug a mouse into a keyboard's PS/2 port and vice-versa, except that it allows motherboard manufacturers to cut some costs on the second controller for the mouse. That's why the color-coding was introduced-- so that people wouldn't try plugging one into the other. Before AC'97, I had several computers (including my beloved ThinkPad 365CD) that didn't care which one you plugged it into, because the controller was the same on both ports. It's basically just a fancy serial port.
Yes, but no matter how good your sample is, you're still talking about epidemiology. Correlation can help you know where to look, but as so many/.'ers are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation. You still need to show a mechanism. There is no known mechanism for illness caused by the kind and magnitude of the radiation we're talking about here.
FWIW, there are LOTS of kinds of radiation. Not all of it is bad for us. I love it when people ask me if their monitors (LCDs, mind you) are blasting them with radiation. "Of course," I say, as their eyes widen with fear, "that's the whole point!"
Without knowing the specifics of the system, I'd guess it's probably used as some part of an authentication token. You want to make sure that you can verify that the printed paper receipts correspond to a vote, but you don't want to give away the voter's identity, right? Random numbers are frequently used where you need a shared secret or seed for an encryption algorithm to work on, and encrypted secrets or seeds are often a part of an authentication system. Numbers that are "random enough" are difficult to achieve, even for people who know what they're doing, so it's not surprising that the US-Canada team looked there first.
I'm not so sure. Social networking software seems to be taking off in some work-related contexts. My cow-orkers, for instance, are particularly enthralled with a site called LinkedIn. I have yet to see how useful it is, but if it really serves as a repository and tool for maintaining business contacts, why wouldn't it be useful? I think it's too early to write this stuff off.
Case in point, I was a cynic of Skype and IM for work. I'm not any longer. Many of our software contractors are located in India and Europe. Skype and IM save us time and money because it circumvents the costly POTS system and is very convenient. By those standards alone, they are successful. I can't say that social networking software would be any different.
Sure, if social networks are just full of "dumbass teenagers", it probably won't be of any value. But I don't think they're headed that way. Just because they're trendy doesn't mean they're not useful.
I've thought about this quite a bit. I have a B.A. in Philosophy, and I am currently working full-time (in IT) and earning a B.S. in Computer Science part-time. I love the meat of my computer science studies, but there's nothing in the course material that I could not have learned myself. By contrast, I personally find my philosophy education to be highly valuable-- I could not have sharpened my analytical skills without the contact I had with some very bright people. These skills are widely applicable, particularly to my current computer-related job and CS studies. But there's nothing about those useful analytical skills that I can put on paper-- I need to have something else to get my foot in the door. That's where the computer science degree comes in.
So, I find that there's a big difference between a useful education and a valuable education. Not that there aren't some very intelligent people in CS, but the motivation is quite different when you pursue a degree that you know does very little to help your future earnings potential... Anyway, this useful/valuable split is one of those things that has changed in the last fifty years. How many "John Backus"es and "Edsgar Dijkstra"s are we turning away from jobs now because they don't have Computer Science degrees? It used to be enough that you were generally smart.
As a side note, I feel like I really need to squeeze information on classical CS out of my teachers. They seem really to want to cater to the "give me a skill so I can get a job" crowd. My CS dept appears to be suffering from a lack of identity-- they expanded to accomodate the flood of CS students in the late 90's, and now that enrollment has shrunk, they're wondering: where to do the cutbacks? Cutback on [insert programming language of the week] courses or on language theory courses? I hope to God that it is the former and not the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the [ostensible] reason? To save on bandwidth. This argument is obvious bullshit. In our local office, we have roughly 25% utilization of a 100Mbps fiber line. This was 50% cheaper than the ISDN connection we were contractually locked into for years! Having some familiarity with our budget, I can say that bandwidth is a very small cost for us.
So my opinion is: yeah, it's not surprising that IT departments are blocking web innovation. In my experience, they're generally lazy, worthless cretins. They're probably doing it to save themselves work, or having to think. At least the BOFH enjoyed his job. These guys are... just worthless.
And, FWIW, I, too am an IT worker. With some rare exceptions, most IT workers I have worked with have proven themselves to be a rather uninspiring lot. Those exceptional people, though, are what keep me around.
Dude, Windows XP doesn't even run itself smoothly with 256 MB of memory. Pop another 256 in there and you'll see a world of difference.
BSD is not dying. It is not!!!
foo (lameness).
Precisely. The decision came down the chain today that we were going to install some Blue Coat web-blocking appliances. The "productivity" argument goes right out the window for starters-- we're the most profitable division of the company, by far.
I am opposed to this, of course, not just for the reasons you outlined, but that it seems like the decision happened for another reason: the "cover our asses" legal argument. I don't really see the rationale here, since anyone can sue anyone for anything. Someone who is easily offended is going to be easily offended regardless of filtering. Maybe they just want to show that they made an "effort", even if it doesn't work. But there are also important costs to consider: we publish textbooks on things like political science, gender studies, and so on. Will our employees suffer because they cannot access the information they need? And what about the added technological and bureaucratic layer this adds to everything? Not to mention: we're all adults! If your head explodes every time you see a little skin, the internet ain't your problem, buddy.
Sorry, I guess I'm just in rant mode since I heard about this...
I think the heavy compression in radio is due to the fact that most people listening to the radio are doing so in noisy environments: the car, a worksite, a kitchen, and so on. I did not appreciate the processing that went into sound before I worked in radio, but after, I can say that, were it not for heavy dynamic compression and EQ that broadcasters apply to the audio signal, your listeners would mostly just be annoyed at the perceived [low] quality of your station.
Case in point-- my favorite movie makers (Kubrick, Ridley Scott) tend to have made films that have very quiet parts and very loud parts (also very bright scenes and very dark ones). This is a constant source of annoyance for my girlfriend, who hates "having to turn the volume up and down". I consider it to be artfully done most of the time, and so I see this as one mark of a high-fidelity recording. But as you can see, you and I are in the minority here.
No, it's more like, "WTF? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" when you step on a stray piece, barefoot, first thing in the morning. My parents must have been angels to have given my brother and I so many tiny, sharp toys.
Case in point: I rediscovered Scott Adams' text adventure stuff a few years ago. I grew up playing those games on my TI99/4A. I fondly remember playing Strange Odyssey and Pirate Adventure, thinking that games couldn't have gotten better than this. Anyway, games I spent weeks chugging through when I was a kid, I plowed through in about a half-hour. Fun, but not quite the same thing anymore. Another one, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though hilarious to me when I was a kid, is now mostly annoying (still love the books, though).
Squats and leg presses (deadlift is another) are, biomechanically, whole-body exercises. They are the so-called "core strength" exercises. Since they activate such large swaths of your musculature, your physiological response to strength training is maximised. If you combine this kind of "core strength" training (where you try to maximise hypertrophy across your body instead of isolate) with endurance work (which promotes mitochondrial density), you essentially turn into a calorie-burning machine. This has been my exercise philosophy for the last three years, and despite having been a 4:26 miler in high school, I can say without a doubt, I am a much more fit person now. Add a balanced diet on top of that, and you're basically doing all that you are capable of doing to ensure your health.
Obviously, the above training regimen won't give you, say, "huge biceps", or an Schwarzenegger-esque chest; for that, you need isolation, calories, and a lot of time set aside to workout and sleep. But this will undoubtably make you strong and healthy.
Maybe. But if you can't say that we're capable of good things-- whatever that means-- what's the point of living? As cheesy as it may sound sometimes, the "greatness of mankind" blather is one of the reasons I enjoy science fiction. I am pessimistic by nature, and science fiction tends to be optimistic. It cheers me up.
It may be painful to listen to a bunch of Slashdot nerds publically airing their dreams for the world, but at least it's honest. I suspect that's why it's cringeworthy.
Kristaps Dzonsons. And I'm not sure if he ever really intended for it to be for production use. I saw his talk at NYCBSDCon last year, and my impression was "here's a neat tool I'm working on guys, I'm still working out a lot of things, come play if you want". Not that this isn't an important vulnerability to address-- but I'd be surprised if anyone was currently using sysjail in an important production role.
Of course. My favorite dishes are usually more along the French lines-- they are often weirdly counterintuitive.
But my favorite subjects for food preparation are beer and bread. Yeast is such an amazing and versatile organism. Think-- beer and bread are quite similar: the basic ingredients for beer are grain (usually barley, but also wheat), water, yeast, and hops. Bread is grain (usually wheat), water, yeast, and salt. But they are so different! With beer, you utilize the alcohol-producing phase of the yeast organism's lifecycle; with bread, you utilize the gas-producing phase. And there's so much to know-- in fact, this article reminded me of another brewer/cook: George Fix, who was a professional mathematician, but whose hobby, brewing chemistry, probably contributed more to the knowledge of brewing science than any other single person. He was a frequent poster to many of the brewing listservs during the 1990's.
Anyway, cooking really makes me wish I had studied chemistry. Of course, it's never too late to open a book.
Calling gasoline a luxury is naive. It ignores the fact that gasoline plays a crucial role in our food and goods distribution networks. Assuming that you live in a "modernized" country (and I think that's safe to assume considering that you're posting on Slashdot), the removal of gasoline from your life would have a catastrophic effect on the quality of your life.
That said, yes, there are whiners out there who can do without their beloved wheels. My typical commute to work, which is slightly over 6 miles, I do on foot, running, every morning. (BTW, anyone who is interested in doing this kind of thing, this is the best running pack I've found for the job). I am fortunate enough that I have public transportation available to me for the commute back home. 6 miles a day isn't so bad when you work yourself up to it. I consider anyone who is physically able to walk but who drives to work-- when that distance is less than a mile-- to simply be lazy, or uninformed, or both.
But I've also lived in and visited more rural locations, and this is not practical for a large number of people. For them, cars are a necessity. A car is needed to get to work, to get to the grocery store, and to get to those events that add meaning to our lives-- because life isn't simply the process of fullfilling our needs. Calling people greedy whose needs are different than yours is simply ignorant. There are a lot of things that we can do to make our neighbors more energy-conscious, but name-calling isn't one of them.
That just means you don't get it. RFC 2119 defines these terms very specifically within the context of a proposed standard. The keywords "MUST", "SHOULD", "MAY", and so on are technical terms that are used to inform internet software engineers as to how policy should shape their software and practices. A proposed plan for switching to IPv6 would be useless without these terms. Besides, who has ever enforced a standard? The IETF operates on the principle that the best solution wins-- if someone has a better proposal, this one will go away. Simple as that.
I don't buy it. From my vantage point, music is more vibrant than ever. But if you're getting your music from the traditional channels, i.e., radio and TV, it looks like teh suck-- you don't see it. The reason is that the big players in the music industry have lost their traction with artists-- they don't have good bargaining chips anymore. Why lock yourself into a contract that is more likely to land you in bankruptcy hearings than provide you with a way of writing and playing music for a living, especially when you can now self-publish and self-publicize your own music for a fraction of what used to be the cost? Artists who don't "fit the mold" aren't put on the radio, and few of the new artists fit the mold. This is why the industry is in desperate straits.
So what's "the mold"? It's whatever genre the stations are playing. This goes back to what you were saying about the 60's being about rock, the 70's hippes, 80's bad hair day and so on-- since the music industry has lost their lock on creativity, they cannot dictate what music is "about". All of those supposed music "movements" were just mass-manufactured fads. I'm not saying that many of those artists didn't have legitimacy, but come on-- I hated pop music in the 80's, and it was very hard to find things that I did like from the mainstream. The 90's was a relief to me, because the music I loved became widely available, but I have friends who missed the 80's music and hated the 90's stuff! Now, why exactly did one style have to disappear? It's because the music execs realized that there was this huge market in people who hated the 80's shit. But they made the same mistake again, and threw out one style for another.
But the Internet changes all that. Your fanbase isn't limited to your geographic area. You can actually make money on record sales. The Internet allows distributors to make money on fringe items. So the people who make these claims about "creativity drying up", they're the old school. Elton John is completely in the dark here. It's like your grocer switching to a model where they deliver food to everybody's door, but you keep going to the supermarket... but it's closed down. And you're screaming "I'm starving!", but there's such an obvious wealth of food if you bother to look in the right places...
So my conclusion is that Elton John really is a grumpy old man. He's part of the establishment. He sees his record sales drying up (yeah, probably because of piracy on the Internet), and he doesn't see anything original coming down the pipeline. But if he would really bother to get "out there", he would see things differently.
BTW, on the subject of kids being outdoorsy. Growing up, I could hike for days without seeing people; I have to go out of my way now to do that. Places like the White Mountains are having to come up with new wilderness management strategies to deal with the impact. I can't say what kids themselves are doing, but there are definitely more people "out there" than there were before...
You know, I've always wondered about top-opening freezers. They make sense, and I see why many supermarkets use them. But I've also wondered about why they don't have lids on the top. My hypothesis is that the constant opening and closing of the lids would set up air currents that would displace the cold air, thus making them less efficient, but for home use (where you would need to open a freezer less frequently), you'd want the lid. Anyway...
Causation implies correlation. Your sig has it backwards. Correlation implies causation. Causation must correlate, by definition.
Wow. Easily the most fucked up thing I've read on Slashdot. Just... wow.
Yes, but you know-- there's actually no reason not to allow you to plug a mouse into a keyboard's PS/2 port and vice-versa, except that it allows motherboard manufacturers to cut some costs on the second controller for the mouse. That's why the color-coding was introduced-- so that people wouldn't try plugging one into the other. Before AC'97, I had several computers (including my beloved ThinkPad 365CD) that didn't care which one you plugged it into, because the controller was the same on both ports. It's basically just a fancy serial port.
Yes, but no matter how good your sample is, you're still talking about epidemiology. Correlation can help you know where to look, but as so many /.'ers are fond of pointing out, correlation is not causation. You still need to show a mechanism. There is no known mechanism for illness caused by the kind and magnitude of the radiation we're talking about here.
FWIW, there are LOTS of kinds of radiation. Not all of it is bad for us. I love it when people ask me if their monitors (LCDs, mind you) are blasting them with radiation. "Of course," I say, as their eyes widen with fear, "that's the whole point!"
Without knowing the specifics of the system, I'd guess it's probably used as some part of an authentication token. You want to make sure that you can verify that the printed paper receipts correspond to a vote, but you don't want to give away the voter's identity, right? Random numbers are frequently used where you need a shared secret or seed for an encryption algorithm to work on, and encrypted secrets or seeds are often a part of an authentication system. Numbers that are "random enough" are difficult to achieve, even for people who know what they're doing, so it's not surprising that the US-Canada team looked there first.
I'm not so sure. Social networking software seems to be taking off in some work-related contexts. My cow-orkers, for instance, are particularly enthralled with a site called LinkedIn. I have yet to see how useful it is, but if it really serves as a repository and tool for maintaining business contacts, why wouldn't it be useful? I think it's too early to write this stuff off.
Case in point, I was a cynic of Skype and IM for work. I'm not any longer. Many of our software contractors are located in India and Europe. Skype and IM save us time and money because it circumvents the costly POTS system and is very convenient. By those standards alone, they are successful. I can't say that social networking software would be any different.
Sure, if social networks are just full of "dumbass teenagers", it probably won't be of any value. But I don't think they're headed that way. Just because they're trendy doesn't mean they're not useful.
Yeah, I was thinking-- hmm, maybe that's why Sylpheed is so hard to configure sometimes. It's actually a video game!
I've thought about this quite a bit. I have a B.A. in Philosophy, and I am currently working full-time (in IT) and earning a B.S. in Computer Science part-time. I love the meat of my computer science studies, but there's nothing in the course material that I could not have learned myself. By contrast, I personally find my philosophy education to be highly valuable-- I could not have sharpened my analytical skills without the contact I had with some very bright people. These skills are widely applicable, particularly to my current computer-related job and CS studies. But there's nothing about those useful analytical skills that I can put on paper-- I need to have something else to get my foot in the door. That's where the computer science degree comes in.
So, I find that there's a big difference between a useful education and a valuable education. Not that there aren't some very intelligent people in CS, but the motivation is quite different when you pursue a degree that you know does very little to help your future earnings potential... Anyway, this useful/valuable split is one of those things that has changed in the last fifty years. How many "John Backus"es and "Edsgar Dijkstra"s are we turning away from jobs now because they don't have Computer Science degrees? It used to be enough that you were generally smart.
As a side note, I feel like I really need to squeeze information on classical CS out of my teachers. They seem really to want to cater to the "give me a skill so I can get a job" crowd. My CS dept appears to be suffering from a lack of identity-- they expanded to accomodate the flood of CS students in the late 90's, and now that enrollment has shrunk, they're wondering: where to do the cutbacks? Cutback on [insert programming language of the week] courses or on language theory courses? I hope to God that it is the former and not the latter.