Or how about we come up with a technology which actually proves who the person on the other end is, as opposed to proving that someone has a credit card and we stop treating certs as proof of identity.
The only difference between a self signed certificate and one that is signed by a CA is that someone wrote a check for the CA signed cert. No CA does any verification that the person writing that check is who they say they are, has any rights to that domain, or anything else, they only check to see if they already have a signed certificate. I've personally bought Verisign certificates for other people, without any proof that I'm in any way authorized to do so, let alone proving who I actually am. They mean absolutely nothing.
The only kind of certificate warning is one which indicates that a certificate is not what it's supposed to be. However, since there's still no central way to check a certificate(even a signed one) the only way to do that is to compare it with what you had before, which means the only viable certificate warning is one indicating a certificate has changed.
When browsers panic over things that aren't worth panicking over (most folks will have encountered a perfectly legitimate self signed cert at some point in their time on the web, is it any wonder they just bypass the error.
Certs never guarantee who you're talking to, they only provide encrypted communication.
I don't use cursive, haven't used cursive since I was 10. I learned the old cursive, then I went to a new school and it had a different variation of cursive which I learned, then I changed schools again and yet again cursive changed. At this point I wasn't in one of those years where they forced you to learn it so I just said bugger it and refused to learn it yet again. Since my teachers couldn't actually read my cursive, I printed, no one ever cared. Add to that the fact that so many of the things we write in these days are forms with limited available space and that cursive, at least in my experience takes up more space, and you've got yet another reason to print.
Being able to write legibly is of course necessary, even if you have to take some extra time to do it, but who the hell cares about cursive anymore and why should they? It's an anachronism. It was once necessary, if you've ever tried to write with a nib pen or a fountain pen you'll understand why, keeping the pen on the paper and moving is kind of vital to that kind of writing. No one uses those things anymore though, or at least they only use them by choice.
When and if the day comes that people can't actually write at all anymore then we have a problem. Kid's not being able to use cursive. I really don't give a damn.
I admit the feature I hacked into one of our products doesn't work quite right in Opera. I also admit that it's an internal website and aside from me testing no one has ever logged into any of our internal systems using Opera. I also admit that officially, I'm not actually allowed to spend any serious time getting stuff to work in anything but our corporate standard(IE 6). I do as much as I can, my sites work correctly in gecko, trident, and webkit. I lose no internal business because no one internally is supposed to be using anything but IE(even if they do), and I, like everyone else, have to prioritize my time. I'd like to rewrite that code, but it's about three years down my list, and Opera isn't enough to bring it to the top.
The whole point of my comment was to say that just following standards doesn't always guarantee you the same behavior, even in the supposedly standards compliant systems, and that every browser you develop for and test is an additional expense. Sometimes that expense is worth it, sometimes it's not. Opera, in my experience, is a lot more finicky, and always has been, than any other browser, and it's market share is barely measurable.
Opera is finicky, it always has been and it always will be, it's broken more pages for me than any other browser I've ever used. It's fairly anal, even where it doesn't have to be. Sometimes the best way to deal with a problem, when you know there is a problem, is to admit it and move on. As much as people make a big deal about this story. If they'd loaded it up in Opera and it had been horribly broken, they still would have lost the sale, someone, somewhere made a decision that it wasn't worth the expense to support Opera. That decision lost them a sale. That's part of doing business, you measure costs vs rewards. Quite possibly in this case they got that measurement wrong, but we don't know that without knowing why they made that decision and how much Opera were going to pay.
I put them together because they both have the ability to write programs which have access to the bare metal and the guts of memory, which is the primary strength of the language class.
Can someone explain how Oracle doesn't have a monopoly to protect? Aside from the fact that when they bought sun they bought up a lot of their own competition, the only database of any real consequence that is a competitor to Oracle is MS SQL, ffs Oracle owns MySQL now.
It is a viral license. I can never understand why people dispute that, it's designed to be. Use GPL code in all but a few specific circumstances and you are required to release your product under the GPL. The license is viral because it spreads. The people who wrote it designed it specifically for that purpose, and that's just fine. Microsoft pointed that out because it's true.
There's no war between Microsoft and the GPL, I doubt Microsoft really cares one way or another about open source in and of itself. They care about open source products which are competitors to their own, and like everyone else they are trying to win, but from a philosophical point of view, well I really doubt Microsoft has any real philosophical points of view on anything much. The linux community is far more interested in the destruction of Microsoft than the other way round.
The advantages of C and C++ have always been the speed of execution, and it's ability to get really close to the hardware. The problem now is that the speed of execution advantage is fading. Interpreted byte code languages like Java and C# are getting faster and faster, and they byte code has always made them more portable. Add to that that the extra complexity of C++ is often unnecessary, and you start reaching a point where more and more applications which would once have been written in C++ are now being written in C# or Java, this trend is only likely to continue with more and more applications moving onto the web, and continued improvements in the byte code languages themselves.
There is certainly still a need for C and C++, they are really the only viable languages for writing device drivers and certain core OS components, not to mention all the interpreters necessary for running all these byte code languages. The problem, as I see it, and I'm by no means an expert, is that C++ is continually trying to compete with languages like Java, which it will never be able to functionally do without giving up all of the things which make it powerful and which java can't do. Java is powerful because you don't have to worry about all the things you don't really care about, and C++ is powerful because when you do need to care about them you have the level of control you need(C# tried to allow both, but it doesn't really work that way). The more libraries and features you add to C++ to make it like java, the more complex and bloated you make it, and you're still chasing an unachievable goal because you can't make C++ into Java and you wouldn't really want to.
I'm not sure why the language is going in this direction, but it seems to me better to use C and C++ where they're appropriate and use Java/C# where they're appropriate and to stop trying to create some jack of all trades language which can't exist.
to be able to tell whether your idea is any good, it probably isn't.
If you need to check with a subject matter expert to determine whether your idea is any good, then you don't know enough about what you're talking about to have an idea that's worth anything. People who come up with really valuable ideas, ARE subject matter experts, at least for the narrow band of subject which covers their idea. If you don't know enough about the field to at least build a simulation of your idea and see if it works then you're never going to make any money out of it. No one ever gets rich off of "what if engines were 100% more efficient" they get rich of ideas like "if you put this thing into an engine here it will be 100% more efficient", if you know how to build "this" and how to put it "here" you don't need a subject matter expert, if you don't then your idea will never make you rich no matter how good it is, because the money will, quite rightfully, go to the person who worked that out.
Then they can quit. Employers certainly have an obligation to their employees. To treat them well and not screw them over if it's possible to avoid. No employee has the right to expect that their boss will run the company forever anymore than an employer has the right to expect that an employee will work for them forever. Not to mention that if we're talking about companies based on ideas, a lot of the employees are stock holders.
In actual fact, his idea was still worthless, to a certain extent his patent was worthless. What made his idea and his patent worth money was the fact that it got implemented. If no car manufacturer had ever put a burp tank on a radiator, his idea would be worth exactly nothing because he couldn't build a car.
If he hadn't gone to all those companies, he would have had a whole lot of nothing because he couldn't turn his idea into a product. The lesson is that you do sometimes need to protect your idea, but without implementation it's still worthless.
As has been said many times. Divorce settlements aren't pulled out of thin air. His ex-wife would have had to prove that he had enough money that 2.5 million was her fair share of it at least at some point close to the time of the divorce. She would likely have had bank statements and all of that sort of thing proving the money existed. If she hadn't, then their wouldn't have been an order to refuse.
After having proved definitively that he "had" the money, it is then his burden of proof to show he doesn't anymore, we're talking about probably at least 5 million dollars, that doesn't just disappear into thin air. He failed to prove it(most likely because in all reality he did still have it), and so was in contempt. However much Slashdot seems to hate divorce and alimony in particular(not that I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some changes to that), the judge didn't just magically say "give her 2.5 million dollars".
Generally those systems aren't actually all that well scaled, they just treat companies as individuals and key them as such. Sharing key pairs between a few thousand individuals who aren't all managed by one IT entity, isn't anywhere near as easy.
Almost certainly true. The point is that saying this is pointless because we've already solved the problem is fundamentally untrue, both because the research for this project has some interesting implications and because the problem is far from solved.
The 14 years and the 2.5 million dollars(of his wife's money from a legal standpoint not his) are totally unrelated. It doesn't matter if it's a trillion dollars or 5 cents.
He went to jail for 14 years because he refused to comply with the court order for 14 years. If he'd turned over the 2.5 million dollars he'd have been set free that instant. He wasn't sentenced to anything. Every time he refused to pay the money he owed he committed contempt again.
No one seems to understand that if you say "the longest you can be held for contempt is 6 months" that no one will ever comply with any court order that is more of a penalty than 6 months in jail. You can't have that or everything falls apart.
I never said it was a correct decision, or that you had to obey.
I said that if you choose not to obey you have to face the consequences of not doing so. If you refuse to turn over your keys and go to jail for doing so, I salute you.
Doing the right thing is hard, it's hard because a lot of times you pay for it. That's what makes doing it worthwhile, and far too many people in this world think that there are no consequences to their actions.
You are free to take any moral stand you want to, as am I. I try to do so, and I encourage you to do so. I however humbly suggest that when you do so you should expect to pay the price and not come crying afterward about the fact that life isn't fair. The most fundamental and irrevocable human right is the right to refuse. They cannot take it away from you, even by killing you, but it doesn't come free and it doesn't come easy.
Penalties like this are necessary to enforce lawful orders, and if you believe that an order against you is unlawful you should expect to suffer those penalties for your refusal to follow it.
I don't think any of us knows enough about the case to say whether he did or didn't actually have that money. Hiding money from your wife is sort of an international rich man hobby, and there was likely fairly good evidence during the divorce itself that the guy had the assets, and he quite obviously failed to adequately prove he didn't have them.
Confiscatory orders are pretty much exactly why we need contempt of court jail terms, because without them, you may as well not bother with them. Why on earth would you pay if they can't force you to do so? That's why this sort of thing is important for justice, not because it "does something" but because without it there would really be no way to enforce any order that can't be physically enforced.
If this guy really didn't have the money, then I feel bad for the guy, but generally speaking you don't usually go from having 5 million dollars to having nothing without a fair amount of documentation proving that this happened. The 2.5 million dollars didn't just get plucked out of the air, at some point prior to the order he had that money(most likely at least twice that much), he failed to prove over the course of 14 years that this was no longer the case.
The moral of the story is pay your damned child support/alimony no matter how much it sucks, and if you can't, be prepared to prove why you can't.
As for the whole "China" BS, every government in the world will do exactly the same thing because if you don't punish people for not doing what the court ordered them to then you may as well not have a court or for that matter a government.
True, however, in the many years between the invention of Public Key Crypto and today, no one has come close to being able to come up with a way to easily and automatically distribute the keys that doesn't rely on some third party having all of them on file.
There's a reason that encrypted e-mail is pretty non-existent and it's because key management remains unsolved. Manually passing your self generated keys back and forth is all well and good, but it's not all that scalable, and most folks don't know how to do it. I don't know if this works any better mind you, it's probably really more of a nifty trick/experiment, but pretending that Public Key Encryption has solved the secure communication problem is at best naive.
though it all really depends on what was on that error page.
I've seen Opera do some funny things with some RIA's I've written, the same code works on webkit, trident, and gecko with no problems, but Opera does some funny things. My code is probably wrong(it's a hack job on some badly designed pre-existing code, not a clean rewrite), but nevertheless it works fine on everything else.
Seeing that I basically have 3 options.
Spend a few weeks I don't have debugging/rewriting the code.
Leave it as it is, and let the page render incorrectly, as I know for a fact it does.
Create a redirect on the page which sends the user to an error page explaining that their browser is unsupported and asking them to please use another one.
Any of these three options can be correct, depending on the needs of the business and the severity of the problem. In all reality, no matter how big this guy thinks there server order was, it was probably only a drop in the bucket overall, and in all reality no one was fired and nothing really happened, they lost a sale. They lost it on something stupid, but it's only one sale no matter how big it is(and it likely wasn't really all that big).
Opera is not infallible, they've come up with a few fairly innovative design ideas, but they've always been crippled to a certain extent by ideology. Part of why Opera was and is so fast, and so light is that it is basically incredibly anal about exactly correct HTML syntax. In theory this is a good idea, but in practice it means that Opera has been plagued by pages which don't render correctly for it's entire lifespan. A lot of the web is sort of kludged together because the standards defining how to do things properly are always 2-3 years behind what people are actually doing, a lot of WYSIWYG editors spit out bad code, hand coders make mistakes. All these things happen, and Opera has never been even the remotest bit forgiving(oddly enough firefox is by far the most forgiving, substantially more so than IE) of any of it, which is one of the prime reasons IMO why it never really gets much market penetration despite generally speaking having most of the innovative web ideas before the competition. The fact that until fairly recently it was ad driven or cost money, isn't open source, and doesn't come installed on anyone's PC are of course others. There's really no need to switch to another browser which results in more broken pages, isn't free as in speech, and until very recently wasn't even free as in beer, no mater how innovative it is.
If a judge says you must turn over your SSH/PGP private keys, then you are legally obligated to do so.
You are free to appeal, that's what appeals are for. You're free to fight it, again that's how the system is supposed to work, but if in the end you are ordered to turn over the keys, you are legally obligated to do so.
If you believe that having to turn over those keys is something you cannot live with, you are free to take a stand and refuse to turn them over, that's your right as a human being and one of those rights that no one can take away. You can always refuse to comply or cooperate. Doing so would however be showing contempt for the order of the court, and would be illegal. The government can, would, and should jail you for doing so.
Taking a moral stand is about doing what you believe is the right thing and paying the consequences, not about doing what you want and getting away with it. Too many people in our society forget that.
There's nothing wrong with jailing people for contempt, in this case, or in your hypothetical. The issue in your hypothetical is the judge being able to order that, and it's perfectly justifiable for you to argue that this is not the case and change it, but you're fighting the order, not your punishment for contempt. Personally I think that being forced to turn over your passkeys is probably a violation of your 5th amendment right not to incriminate yourself, and I take issue with any order from a judge forcing anyone to do so, even if that person is obviously guilty of some terrible crime and the only evidence is in those files. I do not however have any problem at all with people being tossed in jail for however long for failing to comply with a court order. If we didn't allow that we'd have far less justice than we have now.
Sometimes shit like this is necessary. I can't say whether it was in this case, because I don't know the details, but sometimes it is necessary. Personally, from what I've seen in the vast majority of cases where some millionaire divorces his wife and then claims poor, he sure as hell does still have the money and knows damned sure where it is.
There can't be a cap on contempt of court, because if there was, there wouldn't be any court. If I can get sued, lose, and basically say "fuck you, I'm not turning over that money" and just wait three weeks in jail, then what's the motivation for ever paying that money. You'd just wait three weeks and walk away free and clear without having to pay a cent. That's what contempt of court means,
This isn't an issue of trial or no trial, there was a court case, the divorce was a court case, he had ample opportunity within that case to prove he didn't have 5 million dollars(presuming a 50/50 split), he obviously failed to do so. Then the court case was decided, all nice and legal like, and he seemingly cried poor and said he couldn't pay. He again couldn't prove that, so they tossed his ass in jail. Contempt isn't something magical with no trial, and it's not generally the stuff you see on tv where someone just acts a bit like an ass in a court. This is failure to comply with a court order contempt, which is breaking the law. There doesn't need to be a trial on the contempt charge because quite obviously he is in contempt, he's been ordered by a court to do something, and he hasn't done it. It's a bit like being found guilty of murder and then saying, well I don't feel like going to prison. Only difference is they can drag your ass down to jail whereas they can't get back the money you hid offshore, so they do what they can to try and make you do what you should.
Realistically the only reason this old geezer got freed was because he was 74 and the judge reckoned if he'd put up with 14 years he'd put up with another 20 and they got sick of feeding him, not because he was innocent or anything, he's still presumably failing to comply with a legal court order and is so still guilty of contempt of court(since he won this great game of chicken, he presumably has even more contempt for the court.
FFS people, I know slashdot is largely male and largely single and full of contempt and bitterness for women and marriage, but whether or not you feel that a wife getting a portion of the families assets is right or wrong, if you let people refuse to follow the orders of the court you may as well scrap the whole system.
When people say that raid is not a backup, they mean that simply putting raid on your existing storage will not give you backup, not that something using raid cannot be a backup. Anything which results in two or ideally more independent copies of something is a perfectly valid backup mechanism, regardless of whether the two copies are both on raid devices or neither is. The biggest question with any backup mechanism is what disasters will wipe out your backup and your original, and whether you can live with them. A copy of a file on the same physical medium will protect against accidental deletion and small scale disk corruption, but it won't protect against a failure of the medium. A copy on an external drive constantly connected to the PC will protect you against drive failure, but may or may not protect you against a power surge(depending on what causes the surge and a certain element of luck). A copy on a NAS device in the same building will protect you against the destruction of your computer, and some surges, but may or may not protect you against damage from a lightening strike, fire or other natural disaster. A copy in another building offers additional levels of protection.
Of course as you move out along that scale, cost increases sometimes dramatically. An external copy is more expensive than a NAS device is substantially more expensive than an external hard drive, offsite backup is generally substantially more expensive than a NAS device, etc. It all really depends on how important the data you're trying to back up is to you, and how difficult/expensive it would be to replace. For regular home users, most stuff isn't really all that important and any archived copy will probably do. There are some exceptions of course, family photos, wedding videos, a lot of the things which actually don't get seriously considered in backup routines, but most stuff really just isn't all that important. Even for those things though, it's probably enough to keep multiple dvd copies with a few stored at another location, and reasonably frequent new copies to prevent bitrot.
Because complex passwords piss off the users and are hard to remember.
Passwords that are hard to remember, get written down, or it you're really lucky stuck in a password vault.
Password vaults are stupid because one password gives you access to every password, along with where it goes and probably what the user name is for most people. This password vault needs to either be moved/copied around electronically or physically which makes it fairly easy to steal and its password has to be something you can remember. Passwords on post it notes are a problem because it means that your coworkers can get your access. In a lot of places your coworkers are really your most likely security threat.
Having ultra strong passwords obviously has a downside. It also has an upside, but with appropriate additional security policies, this upside is fairly minimal. It provides a level of redundancy in security at the cost of real security and a number of other things. If having a hugely complex every changing password only provides redundancy and has downsides, why bother?
In the short term, a language focused course is better. It will help you get a job(so long as the language you want doesn't go out of style before you're done. If your goal is to get your foot in the door, then a language based course will probably help you do that(depending on where you live and what kind of jobs you're looking for). That's not an unworthy goal, and a lot of people go down that route, if you have a good course, one which actually teaches you how to use the language as opposed to just how to pass the certification, you'll probably get a lot out of it.
The problem with this approach is that it really binds you to a certain track in your career. You'll essentially be an expert in a certain language, which may or may not be the language you want to be in at any given time, and the skills from that language may or may not be easily transferable to another kind of job or another language, and it may or may not be easy for you to break out of the patterns which you have learned and do something else.
In the long term, knowing a bit about the theory is somewhat helpful. That's not to say that you should be going for a pure computer science degree or anything, personally I don't think that pure computer science should even exist at the undergraduate level. Leave all the largely pointless stuff to people who actually want to do research, there are very few jobs for that sort of thing, the competition is fairly fierce, and perhaps most importantly, most of those jobs are a lifestyle in and of themselves and require you to spend so much of your life at work that you probably won't have much time for anything else like a family. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be something you select fully knowing what it is, not something you ended up in because you didn't want a Business degree.
Personally I went through a degree program a lot like your new one(UW-Madison if you're interested), and while I don't use a lot of what I learned directly, the ways of thinking and the theory I learned have been quite invaluable as part of my career. I can also say that, while I use Java as part of my job these days, it has very little resemblance to the java I learned back in university. In those days, servlets, JSP, and all that sort of thing didn't really exist in the Java language, let alone beans or anything more advanced like that. You can take that however you like. That said, I graduated when things were still pretty bad after the dot com crash and I had to go halfway around the world and work in support for a couple of years to get where I am today, so there's pluses and minuses to any option you might take.
IE has had it(well a version of it) for the better part of a decade. Every time you launch IE 6, unlike Firefox and Chrome, it spins up a new process, and pretty much has for quite some time.
True they mostly did that because it was necessary for the file explorer since for a while the browser and file explorer were the same thing, as opposed to because it was a good idea for the browser, but they still did it a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about we come up with a technology which actually proves who the person on the other end is, as opposed to proving that someone has a credit card and we stop treating certs as proof of identity.
The only difference between a self signed certificate and one that is signed by a CA is that someone wrote a check for the CA signed cert. No CA does any verification that the person writing that check is who they say they are, has any rights to that domain, or anything else, they only check to see if they already have a signed certificate. I've personally bought Verisign certificates for other people, without any proof that I'm in any way authorized to do so, let alone proving who I actually am. They mean absolutely nothing.
The only kind of certificate warning is one which indicates that a certificate is not what it's supposed to be. However, since there's still no central way to check a certificate(even a signed one) the only way to do that is to compare it with what you had before, which means the only viable certificate warning is one indicating a certificate has changed.
When browsers panic over things that aren't worth panicking over (most folks will have encountered a perfectly legitimate self signed cert at some point in their time on the web, is it any wonder they just bypass the error.
Certs never guarantee who you're talking to, they only provide encrypted communication.
I don't use cursive, haven't used cursive since I was 10. I learned the old cursive, then I went to a new school and it had a different variation of cursive which I learned, then I changed schools again and yet again cursive changed. At this point I wasn't in one of those years where they forced you to learn it so I just said bugger it and refused to learn it yet again. Since my teachers couldn't actually read my cursive, I printed, no one ever cared. Add to that the fact that so many of the things we write in these days are forms with limited available space and that cursive, at least in my experience takes up more space, and you've got yet another reason to print.
Being able to write legibly is of course necessary, even if you have to take some extra time to do it, but who the hell cares about cursive anymore and why should they? It's an anachronism. It was once necessary, if you've ever tried to write with a nib pen or a fountain pen you'll understand why, keeping the pen on the paper and moving is kind of vital to that kind of writing. No one uses those things anymore though, or at least they only use them by choice.
When and if the day comes that people can't actually write at all anymore then we have a problem. Kid's not being able to use cursive. I really don't give a damn.
I admit the feature I hacked into one of our products doesn't work quite right in Opera. I also admit that it's an internal website and aside from me testing no one has ever logged into any of our internal systems using Opera. I also admit that officially, I'm not actually allowed to spend any serious time getting stuff to work in anything but our corporate standard(IE 6). I do as much as I can, my sites work correctly in gecko, trident, and webkit. I lose no internal business because no one internally is supposed to be using anything but IE(even if they do), and I, like everyone else, have to prioritize my time. I'd like to rewrite that code, but it's about three years down my list, and Opera isn't enough to bring it to the top.
The whole point of my comment was to say that just following standards doesn't always guarantee you the same behavior, even in the supposedly standards compliant systems, and that every browser you develop for and test is an additional expense. Sometimes that expense is worth it, sometimes it's not. Opera, in my experience, is a lot more finicky, and always has been, than any other browser, and it's market share is barely measurable.
Opera is finicky, it always has been and it always will be, it's broken more pages for me than any other browser I've ever used. It's fairly anal, even where it doesn't have to be. Sometimes the best way to deal with a problem, when you know there is a problem, is to admit it and move on. As much as people make a big deal about this story. If they'd loaded it up in Opera and it had been horribly broken, they still would have lost the sale, someone, somewhere made a decision that it wasn't worth the expense to support Opera. That decision lost them a sale. That's part of doing business, you measure costs vs rewards. Quite possibly in this case they got that measurement wrong, but we don't know that without knowing why they made that decision and how much Opera were going to pay.
I put them together because they both have the ability to write programs which have access to the bare metal and the guts of memory, which is the primary strength of the language class.
Can someone explain how Oracle doesn't have a monopoly to protect? Aside from the fact that when they bought sun they bought up a lot of their own competition, the only database of any real consequence that is a competitor to Oracle is MS SQL, ffs Oracle owns MySQL now.
It is a viral license. I can never understand why people dispute that, it's designed to be. Use GPL code in all but a few specific circumstances and you are required to release your product under the GPL. The license is viral because it spreads. The people who wrote it designed it specifically for that purpose, and that's just fine. Microsoft pointed that out because it's true.
There's no war between Microsoft and the GPL, I doubt Microsoft really cares one way or another about open source in and of itself. They care about open source products which are competitors to their own, and like everyone else they are trying to win, but from a philosophical point of view, well I really doubt Microsoft has any real philosophical points of view on anything much. The linux community is far more interested in the destruction of Microsoft than the other way round.
The advantages of C and C++ have always been the speed of execution, and it's ability to get really close to the hardware. The problem now is that the speed of execution advantage is fading. Interpreted byte code languages like Java and C# are getting faster and faster, and they byte code has always made them more portable. Add to that that the extra complexity of C++ is often unnecessary, and you start reaching a point where more and more applications which would once have been written in C++ are now being written in C# or Java, this trend is only likely to continue with more and more applications moving onto the web, and continued improvements in the byte code languages themselves.
There is certainly still a need for C and C++, they are really the only viable languages for writing device drivers and certain core OS components, not to mention all the interpreters necessary for running all these byte code languages. The problem, as I see it, and I'm by no means an expert, is that C++ is continually trying to compete with languages like Java, which it will never be able to functionally do without giving up all of the things which make it powerful and which java can't do. Java is powerful because you don't have to worry about all the things you don't really care about, and C++ is powerful because when you do need to care about them you have the level of control you need(C# tried to allow both, but it doesn't really work that way). The more libraries and features you add to C++ to make it like java, the more complex and bloated you make it, and you're still chasing an unachievable goal because you can't make C++ into Java and you wouldn't really want to.
I'm not sure why the language is going in this direction, but it seems to me better to use C and C++ where they're appropriate and use Java/C# where they're appropriate and to stop trying to create some jack of all trades language which can't exist.
If you need to check with a subject matter expert to determine whether your idea is any good, then you don't know enough about what you're talking about to have an idea that's worth anything. People who come up with really valuable ideas, ARE subject matter experts, at least for the narrow band of subject which covers their idea. If you don't know enough about the field to at least build a simulation of your idea and see if it works then you're never going to make any money out of it. No one ever gets rich off of "what if engines were 100% more efficient" they get rich of ideas like "if you put this thing into an engine here it will be 100% more efficient", if you know how to build "this" and how to put it "here" you don't need a subject matter expert, if you don't then your idea will never make you rich no matter how good it is, because the money will, quite rightfully, go to the person who worked that out.
Then they can quit. Employers certainly have an obligation to their employees. To treat them well and not screw them over if it's possible to avoid. No employee has the right to expect that their boss will run the company forever anymore than an employer has the right to expect that an employee will work for them forever. Not to mention that if we're talking about companies based on ideas, a lot of the employees are stock holders.
In actual fact, his idea was still worthless, to a certain extent his patent was worthless. What made his idea and his patent worth money was the fact that it got implemented. If no car manufacturer had ever put a burp tank on a radiator, his idea would be worth exactly nothing because he couldn't build a car.
If he hadn't gone to all those companies, he would have had a whole lot of nothing because he couldn't turn his idea into a product. The lesson is that you do sometimes need to protect your idea, but without implementation it's still worthless.
As has been said many times. Divorce settlements aren't pulled out of thin air. His ex-wife would have had to prove that he had enough money that 2.5 million was her fair share of it at least at some point close to the time of the divorce. She would likely have had bank statements and all of that sort of thing proving the money existed. If she hadn't, then their wouldn't have been an order to refuse.
After having proved definitively that he "had" the money, it is then his burden of proof to show he doesn't anymore, we're talking about probably at least 5 million dollars, that doesn't just disappear into thin air. He failed to prove it(most likely because in all reality he did still have it), and so was in contempt. However much Slashdot seems to hate divorce and alimony in particular(not that I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some changes to that), the judge didn't just magically say "give her 2.5 million dollars".
Generally those systems aren't actually all that well scaled, they just treat companies as individuals and key them as such. Sharing key pairs between a few thousand individuals who aren't all managed by one IT entity, isn't anywhere near as easy.
Almost certainly true. The point is that saying this is pointless because we've already solved the problem is fundamentally untrue, both because the research for this project has some interesting implications and because the problem is far from solved.
The 14 years and the 2.5 million dollars(of his wife's money from a legal standpoint not his) are totally unrelated. It doesn't matter if it's a trillion dollars or 5 cents.
He went to jail for 14 years because he refused to comply with the court order for 14 years. If he'd turned over the 2.5 million dollars he'd have been set free that instant. He wasn't sentenced to anything. Every time he refused to pay the money he owed he committed contempt again.
No one seems to understand that if you say "the longest you can be held for contempt is 6 months" that no one will ever comply with any court order that is more of a penalty than 6 months in jail. You can't have that or everything falls apart.
I never said it was a correct decision, or that you had to obey.
I said that if you choose not to obey you have to face the consequences of not doing so. If you refuse to turn over your keys and go to jail for doing so, I salute you.
Doing the right thing is hard, it's hard because a lot of times you pay for it. That's what makes doing it worthwhile, and far too many people in this world think that there are no consequences to their actions.
You are free to take any moral stand you want to, as am I. I try to do so, and I encourage you to do so. I however humbly suggest that when you do so you should expect to pay the price and not come crying afterward about the fact that life isn't fair. The most fundamental and irrevocable human right is the right to refuse. They cannot take it away from you, even by killing you, but it doesn't come free and it doesn't come easy.
Penalties like this are necessary to enforce lawful orders, and if you believe that an order against you is unlawful you should expect to suffer those penalties for your refusal to follow it.
I don't think any of us knows enough about the case to say whether he did or didn't actually have that money. Hiding money from your wife is sort of an international rich man hobby, and there was likely fairly good evidence during the divorce itself that the guy had the assets, and he quite obviously failed to adequately prove he didn't have them.
Confiscatory orders are pretty much exactly why we need contempt of court jail terms, because without them, you may as well not bother with them. Why on earth would you pay if they can't force you to do so? That's why this sort of thing is important for justice, not because it "does something" but because without it there would really be no way to enforce any order that can't be physically enforced.
If this guy really didn't have the money, then I feel bad for the guy, but generally speaking you don't usually go from having 5 million dollars to having nothing without a fair amount of documentation proving that this happened. The 2.5 million dollars didn't just get plucked out of the air, at some point prior to the order he had that money(most likely at least twice that much), he failed to prove over the course of 14 years that this was no longer the case.
The moral of the story is pay your damned child support/alimony no matter how much it sucks, and if you can't, be prepared to prove why you can't.
As for the whole "China" BS, every government in the world will do exactly the same thing because if you don't punish people for not doing what the court ordered them to then you may as well not have a court or for that matter a government.
True, however, in the many years between the invention of Public Key Crypto and today, no one has come close to being able to come up with a way to easily and automatically distribute the keys that doesn't rely on some third party having all of them on file.
There's a reason that encrypted e-mail is pretty non-existent and it's because key management remains unsolved. Manually passing your self generated keys back and forth is all well and good, but it's not all that scalable, and most folks don't know how to do it. I don't know if this works any better mind you, it's probably really more of a nifty trick/experiment, but pretending that Public Key Encryption has solved the secure communication problem is at best naive.
I've seen Opera do some funny things with some RIA's I've written, the same code works on webkit, trident, and gecko with no problems, but Opera does some funny things. My code is probably wrong(it's a hack job on some badly designed pre-existing code, not a clean rewrite), but nevertheless it works fine on everything else.
Seeing that I basically have 3 options.
Any of these three options can be correct, depending on the needs of the business and the severity of the problem. In all reality, no matter how big this guy thinks there server order was, it was probably only a drop in the bucket overall, and in all reality no one was fired and nothing really happened, they lost a sale. They lost it on something stupid, but it's only one sale no matter how big it is(and it likely wasn't really all that big).
Opera is not infallible, they've come up with a few fairly innovative design ideas, but they've always been crippled to a certain extent by ideology. Part of why Opera was and is so fast, and so light is that it is basically incredibly anal about exactly correct HTML syntax. In theory this is a good idea, but in practice it means that Opera has been plagued by pages which don't render correctly for it's entire lifespan. A lot of the web is sort of kludged together because the standards defining how to do things properly are always 2-3 years behind what people are actually doing, a lot of WYSIWYG editors spit out bad code, hand coders make mistakes. All these things happen, and Opera has never been even the remotest bit forgiving(oddly enough firefox is by far the most forgiving, substantially more so than IE) of any of it, which is one of the prime reasons IMO why it never really gets much market penetration despite generally speaking having most of the innovative web ideas before the competition. The fact that until fairly recently it was ad driven or cost money, isn't open source, and doesn't come installed on anyone's PC are of course others. There's really no need to switch to another browser which results in more broken pages, isn't free as in speech, and until very recently wasn't even free as in beer, no mater how innovative it is.
If a judge says you must turn over your SSH/PGP private keys, then you are legally obligated to do so.
You are free to appeal, that's what appeals are for. You're free to fight it, again that's how the system is supposed to work, but if in the end you are ordered to turn over the keys, you are legally obligated to do so.
If you believe that having to turn over those keys is something you cannot live with, you are free to take a stand and refuse to turn them over, that's your right as a human being and one of those rights that no one can take away. You can always refuse to comply or cooperate. Doing so would however be showing contempt for the order of the court, and would be illegal. The government can, would, and should jail you for doing so.
Taking a moral stand is about doing what you believe is the right thing and paying the consequences, not about doing what you want and getting away with it. Too many people in our society forget that.
There's nothing wrong with jailing people for contempt, in this case, or in your hypothetical. The issue in your hypothetical is the judge being able to order that, and it's perfectly justifiable for you to argue that this is not the case and change it, but you're fighting the order, not your punishment for contempt. Personally I think that being forced to turn over your passkeys is probably a violation of your 5th amendment right not to incriminate yourself, and I take issue with any order from a judge forcing anyone to do so, even if that person is obviously guilty of some terrible crime and the only evidence is in those files. I do not however have any problem at all with people being tossed in jail for however long for failing to comply with a court order. If we didn't allow that we'd have far less justice than we have now.
Sometimes shit like this is necessary. I can't say whether it was in this case, because I don't know the details, but sometimes it is necessary. Personally, from what I've seen in the vast majority of cases where some millionaire divorces his wife and then claims poor, he sure as hell does still have the money and knows damned sure where it is.
There can't be a cap on contempt of court, because if there was, there wouldn't be any court. If I can get sued, lose, and basically say "fuck you, I'm not turning over that money" and just wait three weeks in jail, then what's the motivation for ever paying that money. You'd just wait three weeks and walk away free and clear without having to pay a cent. That's what contempt of court means,
This isn't an issue of trial or no trial, there was a court case, the divorce was a court case, he had ample opportunity within that case to prove he didn't have 5 million dollars(presuming a 50/50 split), he obviously failed to do so. Then the court case was decided, all nice and legal like, and he seemingly cried poor and said he couldn't pay. He again couldn't prove that, so they tossed his ass in jail. Contempt isn't something magical with no trial, and it's not generally the stuff you see on tv where someone just acts a bit like an ass in a court. This is failure to comply with a court order contempt, which is breaking the law. There doesn't need to be a trial on the contempt charge because quite obviously he is in contempt, he's been ordered by a court to do something, and he hasn't done it. It's a bit like being found guilty of murder and then saying, well I don't feel like going to prison. Only difference is they can drag your ass down to jail whereas they can't get back the money you hid offshore, so they do what they can to try and make you do what you should.
Realistically the only reason this old geezer got freed was because he was 74 and the judge reckoned if he'd put up with 14 years he'd put up with another 20 and they got sick of feeding him, not because he was innocent or anything, he's still presumably failing to comply with a legal court order and is so still guilty of contempt of court(since he won this great game of chicken, he presumably has even more contempt for the court.
FFS people, I know slashdot is largely male and largely single and full of contempt and bitterness for women and marriage, but whether or not you feel that a wife getting a portion of the families assets is right or wrong, if you let people refuse to follow the orders of the court you may as well scrap the whole system.
When people say that raid is not a backup, they mean that simply putting raid on your existing storage will not give you backup, not that something using raid cannot be a backup. Anything which results in two or ideally more independent copies of something is a perfectly valid backup mechanism, regardless of whether the two copies are both on raid devices or neither is. The biggest question with any backup mechanism is what disasters will wipe out your backup and your original, and whether you can live with them. A copy of a file on the same physical medium will protect against accidental deletion and small scale disk corruption, but it won't protect against a failure of the medium. A copy on an external drive constantly connected to the PC will protect you against drive failure, but may or may not protect you against a power surge(depending on what causes the surge and a certain element of luck). A copy on a NAS device in the same building will protect you against the destruction of your computer, and some surges, but may or may not protect you against damage from a lightening strike, fire or other natural disaster. A copy in another building offers additional levels of protection.
Of course as you move out along that scale, cost increases sometimes dramatically. An external copy is more expensive than a NAS device is substantially more expensive than an external hard drive, offsite backup is generally substantially more expensive than a NAS device, etc. It all really depends on how important the data you're trying to back up is to you, and how difficult/expensive it would be to replace. For regular home users, most stuff isn't really all that important and any archived copy will probably do. There are some exceptions of course, family photos, wedding videos, a lot of the things which actually don't get seriously considered in backup routines, but most stuff really just isn't all that important. Even for those things though, it's probably enough to keep multiple dvd copies with a few stored at another location, and reasonably frequent new copies to prevent bitrot.
Because complex passwords piss off the users and are hard to remember.
Passwords that are hard to remember, get written down, or it you're really lucky stuck in a password vault.
Password vaults are stupid because one password gives you access to every password, along with where it goes and probably what the user name is for most people. This password vault needs to either be moved/copied around electronically or physically which makes it fairly easy to steal and its password has to be something you can remember. Passwords on post it notes are a problem because it means that your coworkers can get your access. In a lot of places your coworkers are really your most likely security threat.
Having ultra strong passwords obviously has a downside. It also has an upside, but with appropriate additional security policies, this upside is fairly minimal. It provides a level of redundancy in security at the cost of real security and a number of other things. If having a hugely complex every changing password only provides redundancy and has downsides, why bother?
In the short term, a language focused course is better. It will help you get a job(so long as the language you want doesn't go out of style before you're done. If your goal is to get your foot in the door, then a language based course will probably help you do that(depending on where you live and what kind of jobs you're looking for). That's not an unworthy goal, and a lot of people go down that route, if you have a good course, one which actually teaches you how to use the language as opposed to just how to pass the certification, you'll probably get a lot out of it.
The problem with this approach is that it really binds you to a certain track in your career. You'll essentially be an expert in a certain language, which may or may not be the language you want to be in at any given time, and the skills from that language may or may not be easily transferable to another kind of job or another language, and it may or may not be easy for you to break out of the patterns which you have learned and do something else.
In the long term, knowing a bit about the theory is somewhat helpful. That's not to say that you should be going for a pure computer science degree or anything, personally I don't think that pure computer science should even exist at the undergraduate level. Leave all the largely pointless stuff to people who actually want to do research, there are very few jobs for that sort of thing, the competition is fairly fierce, and perhaps most importantly, most of those jobs are a lifestyle in and of themselves and require you to spend so much of your life at work that you probably won't have much time for anything else like a family. Nothing wrong with that, but it should be something you select fully knowing what it is, not something you ended up in because you didn't want a Business degree.
Personally I went through a degree program a lot like your new one(UW-Madison if you're interested), and while I don't use a lot of what I learned directly, the ways of thinking and the theory I learned have been quite invaluable as part of my career. I can also say that, while I use Java as part of my job these days, it has very little resemblance to the java I learned back in university. In those days, servlets, JSP, and all that sort of thing didn't really exist in the Java language, let alone beans or anything more advanced like that. You can take that however you like. That said, I graduated when things were still pretty bad after the dot com crash and I had to go halfway around the world and work in support for a couple of years to get where I am today, so there's pluses and minuses to any option you might take.
IE has had it(well a version of it) for the better part of a decade. Every time you launch IE 6, unlike Firefox and Chrome, it spins up a new process, and pretty much has for quite some time.
True they mostly did that because it was necessary for the file explorer since for a while the browser and file explorer were the same thing, as opposed to because it was a good idea for the browser, but they still did it a long time ago.