S/MIME has a single point of failure - the CA. They can be presented with a warrant, or worse still, a National Security Letter, and your privacy is all gone.
The CA maintains a copy of your private key? Are you 100% certain of this?
My understanding of the way it worked was that the CA *generated* the private key, and, more importantly, signed the certificate and keypair for you, but that only you (and anyone you're dumb enough, or trusting enough, to give it to) actually has a copy of the private key...
Not that that's really a practical issue in my case, because, as I mentioned in another reply, the CA is us, so if we get served with a subpoena or what have you, we can fight it to whatever degree we deem appropriate.
Who controls the certificate authority that issues the certificates?
In our case, me:-)
We're just using Microsoft's PKI (yeah, I'd rather use something OSS, but requirement #1 is that it work well with Outlook, and I wasn't able, with my limited experience, to get anything else set up to do so...), so the certificate authority is one of our servers. Naturally, it means that anyone who wants to be able to use & trust our user certificates is going to have to install our CA certificate, but that's the price of getting it all for free...
What is it with the Slashdot crowd and PGP? What's wrong with S/MIME?
I can say with some authority, having been evaluating and testing it for my company for some months now, that it is natively supported by current versions of the 3 major email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail), and that their implementations are, by and large, compatible.
So...are there any particular issues with S/MIME that make PGP a significantly more desirable solution?
Sounds like it's worth a try. Unfortunately, it apparently does not currently work under Wine. In fact, there is a specific bug for exactly that...not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least it appears to be a) known, and b) on the list of bugs to fix for 1.0:-)
Apologies; I should have said "not PC- or PC-and-XBox-only", which cuts out all of those but KotOR, and I'm not that big a Star Wars geek...though I may have to try it eventually if it really does have a nonlinear storyline, just to support Mac gaming;-)
What would it take to get some real branching storylines in games for us ordinary mortals?
That's always been one of my major gripes with most games that have a story: none of your decisions can affect it aside from "Whoops! You failed! Now the world ends!"
...and if someone knows of some such games that do exist, I'd appreciate knowing about them, especially if they're not PC-only;-)
Mmm, not exactly wrong—not in a quantifiable sense, anyway. However, Objective-C was around long before Apple took it up as the language of choice for Cocoa, and is also used for GNUstep and other OpenStep-derived environments. Apple didn't develop Objective-C and doesn't control it in the same way that Microsoft developed and controls VB and the.NET languages. I don't know enough about Object Pascal to comment on the comparison to it, I'm afraid.
But, as I said, it is not a "proprietary language", and it is certainly not "Apple Objective-C".
Objective-C is most certainly not a "proprietary language". It is not as popular and widely known as C/C++ or Java, to be sure, but it is, as far as I understand it, completely open.
Cocoa, Apple's Objective-C based API, is, I believe, not completely closed, either, but it's probably what you're actually thinking about. And it's an API, just like the Carbon API, or the Win32 APIs.
If you are always thinking about the worst-case scenario, you will most likely come to the conclusion that we need to watch (or listen to) everyone, all the time, because who knows who may be coming up with a plot? And if it stops the terrorists from setting off a nuke in NYC, isn't that worth it??
This is the logic of fear, and it will always lead you to destroy all civil liberties, all freedoms, and all privacy, and far too often the people will agree with it, because when it is put to them that way, of course it's worth a little inconvenience to prevent someone from blowing up New York.
But the problem is that the odds that someone is plotting to blow up NYC who isn't already on their list of people that they can get at least a FISA warrant for are very, very slim. In fact, I'd say vanishingly so. Frankly, I'd be more worried about the earth getting hit by a stray asteroid that our astronomer friends haven't seen yet than that.
The government already has the power they need to keep an eye on 99.9999% of the people who are in any way likely to cause any degree of trouble in this vein. This is strongly suggestive that what they really want is something else, whether it be to spy on political opponents or just to not have to admit that they need anyone's permission to do something, cowboy-style.
Actually, 100% of the current debt is W's. Clinton, for all that the Republicans hated him (and I still can't tell why) did such a great job balancing the budget that he paid off not only Reagan and George I's debts, but built the largest surplus reserve in U.S. history.
Much as I dislike W, that's not quite true. What Clinton erased was the deficit—the amount we have to borrow year-to-year to actually pay for everything—not the debt—the total amount we owe.
One of the proposals for what to do with the surplus (and one of the ones that I would have wholeheartedly supported, had I been of voting age at the time) was to pay down the debt. But Clinton didn't have time to do that before his term was up, even if he had chosen to do so.
No, it's not an issue of interpretation. Dithering does not make a new unique color from it's component colors. It's two different colors next to each other, or one pixel flashing between two colors. It's not a new color just like 1080i is not 1080p. And if you claim your display can show "millions of colors" it has to have more than 6-bits per color channel. Period.
See, that's your interpretation: the interpretation of "colour displayed."
As I understand it, the other interpretation is "colour perceived." If the monitor uses temporal dithering to approximate the colours it can't otherwise produce, your eyes won't be able to tell the difference. Thus, you can perceive millions of colours from the screen, even if it's not actually displaying them.
Clearly, you subscribe to the former interpretation—but that doesn't mean that the latter doesn't exist.
They didn't explicitly say it was either. All they said was "millions of colours"--which, depending on one's interpretation, could be either true or false.
...Except that if you had a croaky voice, a) I would almost certainly know it already, through the office grapevine, and b) I would very easily be able to verify that it was, in fact, you. At the very worst, I could go up the 2 flights of stairs to your desk and *see* you, taking approximately 2 minutes.
"I won't be loyal to a company because it won't be loyal to me." or restated as "Me first."
That could be much better restated as "you get what you give." "Me first" would be "I won't be loyal to the company, but I still expect it to be loyal to me."
They're job hopping because they assume the company will dump them.
There isn't much assuming required. There has been very little company loyalty to employees over the past 20 years. I've heard it from people of all ages, and seen the hard evidence of it. It's certainly not universally true (very little is), but it's true of a great many large companies.
A good company will be loyal to you, especially for specialized skilled workers.
As I said, the evidence does not bear you out, with companies outsourcing many technical functions to India and other countries where the cost of living, and thus the price of an employee's wage, is a small fraction of what it is in the US.
Look at people like Andrew Koenig, Barbara E. Moo, Bjarne Stroustrup, and John Carmack. They've been loyal to their companies and the companies have rewarded them handsomely for it, allowing them to work with virtually any technology they want to.
I don't immediately recognize all those names, but the ones I do are people you would have to be clinically insane to fire unless they had actually broken the law, for the bad PR alone. You can't name luminaries in their fields, and say, "Look, these people kept their jobs because they were loyal!" No; they kept their jobs because they were good at them. They may also have been loyal, but that's not why they weren't fired.
Once Generation Y has been running things for a while civilisation will break down. Here (from) TFA is the proof
So you quote one young hotshot who thinks he's God's gift, and generalizes from his own feelings to assume that everyone in my generation feels the same way, and use that as "proof" that civilization will collapse when we've been running things for a while?
Well, as a member of this generation of doom, I'll tell you this; at least I know how to avoid ridiculous logical fallacies like that. Yes, there may be a higher percentage of people in my generation that need to be coddled, that have the attention span of a gnat on speed, and that think they're entitled to be handed the world on a silver platter, but you know what? I bet it's a) not high enough to cause "civilisation to break down", and b) probably not that significantly higher than the percentage of such children of privilege in most previous generations.
I don't expect anyone to hand me anything; I work for what I get. I like variety in my job, but I've been working in the same position, for the same company, for going on 4 years (since right after I graduated college, basically), and I still rather enjoy it. I don't "want to be a leader;" I just want to be taken seriously (and, because I pretty obviously know what I'm talking about, and shut up when I don't, I am).
And my high school and college friends that I keep in touch with seem, by and large, to have similar attitudes. Of course, this is a suburban/rural public school, not some ridiculously high-priced private school in Westchester, so maybe we're not cool enough for Mr. Healy.
First of all, you certainly seem to be in the minority, judging from the figures I've seen over the past few years.
Second of all, I have to ask what you consider your "fair share", because if it's more than 300x what I made that year, I can tell you for certain it's not "fair".
Third, unless you're running a very small company (which is, of course, entirely possible), you are not personally responsible for procuring 100% of the business.
Now, don't get me wrong: unlike many slashdotters, I believe that someone with really good management skills can make a *huge* difference to a company or whatever fraction thereof he is given charge of. But you can't pretend that executive compensation in America, in general, is anything short of insane right now. Executives get brought in, proceed to take the company boldly into completely the wrong direction, lose it billions of dollars, and are sent packing with a "golden parachute" worth more money than my gross income combined over my entire lifespan.
You may very well be different. And, in all honesty, that might be the exception, and not the rule: I haven't done exhaustive research to come up with statistics on it. But I do know that the average executive salary is more than the average worker's salary by a greater percentage than (I believe) it ever has been in the past—including during the Gilded Age before there were any labour laws.
Don't even try to claim that this is the way it should be.
...OK, so when did the Preview button start killing the topic you put in? I put this one in for my last post, previewed, and it put back the "Re:" topic in the subject box...grrr....
/me takes Slashcode and twists it into little pretzel shapes
Seen it happen in three companies in the last 5 years. Each company with more than 2000 employees...
Which just shows one of the advantages of small companies. There are less than 75 users where I work, and I know them all by voice, and most of them (the ones in the main office where I work, which is where all but a dozen are) by face.
Anyone who asks me for a new password had better be asking for theirs, 'cause if you ask for someone else's, I'll know real quick.
I'm already very happily married, and would quite likely be somewhat less well-dressed without her. However, she did not marry me for my shoes, I assure you.
Well, I will have to make sure I wear my brown belt more often (I only own one pair of office-quality shoes, and they're black).
I don't want to be management. I like being a programmer and sysadmin, and I'm good at it. I don't think I'd be that good at management.
And since I have the ear of the person who is, for all intents and purposes, the IT Manager, I have a good amount of say in what goes on (when I want to) anyway;-)
Slashdot Mirror
The CA maintains a copy of your private key? Are you 100% certain of this?
My understanding of the way it worked was that the CA *generated* the private key, and, more importantly, signed the certificate and keypair for you, but that only you (and anyone you're dumb enough, or trusting enough, to give it to) actually has a copy of the private key...
Not that that's really a practical issue in my case, because, as I mentioned in another reply, the CA is us, so if we get served with a subpoena or what have you, we can fight it to whatever degree we deem appropriate.
Dan Aris
In our case, me :-)
We're just using Microsoft's PKI (yeah, I'd rather use something OSS, but requirement #1 is that it work well with Outlook, and I wasn't able, with my limited experience, to get anything else set up to do so...), so the certificate authority is one of our servers. Naturally, it means that anyone who wants to be able to use & trust our user certificates is going to have to install our CA certificate, but that's the price of getting it all for free...
Dan Aris
What is it with the Slashdot crowd and PGP? What's wrong with S/MIME?
I can say with some authority, having been evaluating and testing it for my company for some months now, that it is natively supported by current versions of the 3 major email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail), and that their implementations are, by and large, compatible.
So...are there any particular issues with S/MIME that make PGP a significantly more desirable solution?
Dan Aris
Sounds like it's worth a try. Unfortunately, it apparently does not currently work under Wine. In fact, there is a specific bug for exactly that...not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but at least it appears to be a) known, and b) on the list of bugs to fix for 1.0 :-)
Dan Aris
Apologies; I should have said "not PC- or PC-and-XBox-only", which cuts out all of those but KotOR, and I'm not that big a Star Wars geek...though I may have to try it eventually if it really does have a nonlinear storyline, just to support Mac gaming ;-)
Dan Aris
What would it take to get some real branching storylines in games for us ordinary mortals?
That's always been one of my major gripes with most games that have a story: none of your decisions can affect it aside from "Whoops! You failed! Now the world ends!"
...and if someone knows of some such games that do exist, I'd appreciate knowing about them, especially if they're not PC-only ;-)
Dan Aris
Mmm, not exactly wrong—not in a quantifiable sense, anyway. However, Objective-C was around long before Apple took it up as the language of choice for Cocoa, and is also used for GNUstep and other OpenStep-derived environments. Apple didn't develop Objective-C and doesn't control it in the same way that Microsoft developed and controls VB and the .NET languages. I don't know enough about Object Pascal to comment on the comparison to it, I'm afraid.
But, as I said, it is not a "proprietary language", and it is certainly not "Apple Objective-C".
Dan Aris
Objective-C is most certainly not a "proprietary language". It is not as popular and widely known as C/C++ or Java, to be sure, but it is, as far as I understand it, completely open.
Cocoa, Apple's Objective-C based API, is, I believe, not completely closed, either, but it's probably what you're actually thinking about. And it's an API, just like the Carbon API, or the Win32 APIs.
Dan Aris
If you are always thinking about the worst-case scenario, you will most likely come to the conclusion that we need to watch (or listen to) everyone, all the time, because who knows who may be coming up with a plot? And if it stops the terrorists from setting off a nuke in NYC, isn't that worth it??
This is the logic of fear, and it will always lead you to destroy all civil liberties, all freedoms, and all privacy, and far too often the people will agree with it, because when it is put to them that way, of course it's worth a little inconvenience to prevent someone from blowing up New York.
But the problem is that the odds that someone is plotting to blow up NYC who isn't already on their list of people that they can get at least a FISA warrant for are very, very slim. In fact, I'd say vanishingly so. Frankly, I'd be more worried about the earth getting hit by a stray asteroid that our astronomer friends haven't seen yet than that.
The government already has the power they need to keep an eye on 99.9999% of the people who are in any way likely to cause any degree of trouble in this vein. This is strongly suggestive that what they really want is something else, whether it be to spy on political opponents or just to not have to admit that they need anyone's permission to do something, cowboy-style.
Dan Aris
Much as I dislike W, that's not quite true. What Clinton erased was the deficit—the amount we have to borrow year-to-year to actually pay for everything—not the debt—the total amount we owe.
One of the proposals for what to do with the surplus (and one of the ones that I would have wholeheartedly supported, had I been of voting age at the time) was to pay down the debt. But Clinton didn't have time to do that before his term was up, even if he had chosen to do so.
Dan Aris
Then please find me in the source document where it says that it "shows" millions of colours.
Hint: it doesn't. There's just a bullet that says "millions of colours at all resolutions".
Dan Aris
See, that's your interpretation: the interpretation of "colour displayed."
As I understand it, the other interpretation is "colour perceived." If the monitor uses temporal dithering to approximate the colours it can't otherwise produce, your eyes won't be able to tell the difference. Thus, you can perceive millions of colours from the screen, even if it's not actually displaying them.
Clearly, you subscribe to the former interpretation—but that doesn't mean that the latter doesn't exist.
Dan Aris
They didn't explicitly say it was either. All they said was "millions of colours"--which, depending on one's interpretation, could be either true or false.
Dan Aris
No, they don't. Please read the article. (And no, I'm not new here. I just dislike inaccuracy.)
What Apple has claimed is that the screen can display millions of colours. Depending on which interpretation you use, this may or may not be true.
Dan Aris
So...how much does it cost compared to an incandescent? Or an LED?
Dan Aris
...Except that if you had a croaky voice, a) I would almost certainly know it already, through the office grapevine, and b) I would very easily be able to verify that it was, in fact, you. At the very worst, I could go up the 2 flights of stairs to your desk and *see* you, taking approximately 2 minutes.
Dan Aris
That could be much better restated as "you get what you give." "Me first" would be "I won't be loyal to the company, but I still expect it to be loyal to me."
There isn't much assuming required. There has been very little company loyalty to employees over the past 20 years. I've heard it from people of all ages, and seen the hard evidence of it. It's certainly not universally true (very little is), but it's true of a great many large companies.
As I said, the evidence does not bear you out, with companies outsourcing many technical functions to India and other countries where the cost of living, and thus the price of an employee's wage, is a small fraction of what it is in the US.
I don't immediately recognize all those names, but the ones I do are people you would have to be clinically insane to fire unless they had actually broken the law, for the bad PR alone. You can't name luminaries in their fields, and say, "Look, these people kept their jobs because they were loyal!" No; they kept their jobs because they were good at them. They may also have been loyal, but that's not why they weren't fired.
I know, I know; IHBT. IHL. IWHAND.
Dan Aris
So you quote one young hotshot who thinks he's God's gift, and generalizes from his own feelings to assume that everyone in my generation feels the same way, and use that as "proof" that civilization will collapse when we've been running things for a while?
Well, as a member of this generation of doom, I'll tell you this; at least I know how to avoid ridiculous logical fallacies like that. Yes, there may be a higher percentage of people in my generation that need to be coddled, that have the attention span of a gnat on speed, and that think they're entitled to be handed the world on a silver platter, but you know what? I bet it's a) not high enough to cause "civilisation to break down", and b) probably not that significantly higher than the percentage of such children of privilege in most previous generations.
I don't expect anyone to hand me anything; I work for what I get. I like variety in my job, but I've been working in the same position, for the same company, for going on 4 years (since right after I graduated college, basically), and I still rather enjoy it. I don't "want to be a leader;" I just want to be taken seriously (and, because I pretty obviously know what I'm talking about, and shut up when I don't, I am).
And my high school and college friends that I keep in touch with seem, by and large, to have similar attitudes. Of course, this is a suburban/rural public school, not some ridiculously high-priced private school in Westchester, so maybe we're not cool enough for Mr. Healy.
Dan Aris
First of all, you certainly seem to be in the minority, judging from the figures I've seen over the past few years.
Second of all, I have to ask what you consider your "fair share", because if it's more than 300x what I made that year, I can tell you for certain it's not "fair".
Third, unless you're running a very small company (which is, of course, entirely possible), you are not personally responsible for procuring 100% of the business.
Now, don't get me wrong: unlike many slashdotters, I believe that someone with really good management skills can make a *huge* difference to a company or whatever fraction thereof he is given charge of. But you can't pretend that executive compensation in America, in general, is anything short of insane right now. Executives get brought in, proceed to take the company boldly into completely the wrong direction, lose it billions of dollars, and are sent packing with a "golden parachute" worth more money than my gross income combined over my entire lifespan.
You may very well be different. And, in all honesty, that might be the exception, and not the rule: I haven't done exhaustive research to come up with statistics on it. But I do know that the average executive salary is more than the average worker's salary by a greater percentage than (I believe) it ever has been in the past—including during the Gilded Age before there were any labour laws.
Don't even try to claim that this is the way it should be.
Dan Aris
...OK, so when did the Preview button start killing the topic you put in? I put this one in for my last post, previewed, and it put back the "Re:" topic in the subject box...grrr....
/me takes Slashcode and twists it into little pretzel shapes
Dan Aris
Ale, man; ale's the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think!
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not
Etc. Ah, Housman :-)
Dan Aris
Out of curiosity, what's the dropoff and flatline near the end of both Firefox lines on the graph? Anyone know?
Dan Aris
Which just shows one of the advantages of small companies. There are less than 75 users where I work, and I know them all by voice, and most of them (the ones in the main office where I work, which is where all but a dozen are) by face.
Anyone who asks me for a new password had better be asking for theirs, 'cause if you ask for someone else's, I'll know real quick.
Dan Aris
I'm already very happily married, and would quite likely be somewhat less well-dressed without her. However, she did not marry me for my shoes, I assure you.
Dan Aris
Well, I will have to make sure I wear my brown belt more often (I only own one pair of office-quality shoes, and they're black).
I don't want to be management. I like being a programmer and sysadmin, and I'm good at it. I don't think I'd be that good at management.
And since I have the ear of the person who is, for all intents and purposes, the IT Manager, I have a good amount of say in what goes on (when I want to) anyway ;-)
Dan Aris