Because it's convenient to allow creative interpretation instead of actually amending the Constitution, we've lost much of the point of it all!
Pssstt.. I've got a secret for you. The founding fathers didn't know how to interpret the damn thing either. They couldn't agree, so they just made the bill of rights rather vague and put in place the power of the courts to interpret the law. So "creative interpretting" as you put it was always the intent.
If your idea is to amend the constitution to be clear about everything, you're going to have to do a LOT of amending. How many Supreme court decisions are there every year? That's gives you a very small idea of the role of the supreme court. You really want to amend the constitution that much? Think it's hard to interpret now.. think about if we amended it ever month.
Remeber, the constitution was intentionally made to be rather difficult to amend. I sure as hell don't want to make it easier.
Yup. Dr. Bronners is really a great soap product, and it's sold by a company that's not a bunch of greedy bastards. There's even a documentary on the soap and the company called Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox. The founder is a little nutty, but his message is largely just one of unity among people.
I'm not religious, and I don't believe in anything most people would say is a god, but I like the company and the soap.
About a year ago I was traveling home, and the TSA had set up a security checkpoint at the gate in Amsterdam. The screener (A Dutchman, oddly) kept asking me question after question, surely suspicious of something. This only thing even remotely suspicious was that I had gone through Switzerland, and my flight was cancelled so I had been re-routed through Amsterdam.
Do you have any idea why the gate agent gave me the third degree, asking me all these questions about where I had been, etc? I've traveled quite a bit internationally, and this was the hardest time I've had getting back in the US. Is it just TSA being extra-paranoid about anyone coming through Switzerland due to the super-rich trying to take money out of Swiss banks after the banks agreed to turn over records? Or is it just the Dutch TSA agents are dicks?
No, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad design, but when you hear a chorus of people complaining about the same thing, it's highly suggestive that it is. Both Windows and Ubuntu tried the crazy menu thing and elimating the start menu. Both had to relent and go back. That's a pretty shitty design, and shows both of them weren't thinking.
IMO the UI architects have become too radical for desktop UIs. Many complain the deskop UI hasn't changed in 20 years.... as if that's a bad thing. The UI to my car hasn't changed either. Steering wheel, brake, accelerator, ignition, gearshift all in standard locations. Headlight switches move around, which seems to serve little purpose, but it's a relatively minor complaint. A stable UI isn't necesarily a bad thing, but if you look at how much UIs have changed in MS products, you'd think they change it more often than hairstyles.
Meanwhile 20 years ago I learned shell programming and some simple unix piping output between standard programs, and I've gotten quite good at manipuating the command line. I don't have to re-learn it all every 5 years because someone thought of a "better" way to do it. At the same time I don't really want to go back to manipulating endless system config files with a text editor, or using freaking tar/zip as a package management tool. If a UI improvement solves an actual problem I'm all for it, it's just the stuff MS has done lately doesn't seem to solve any problems, only create them.
To me moving around the UI components is sort of like re-arranging furniture. It might help a bit, but if you want a happier user there's better ways to go about that. If you want to keep the system up to date... instead of forcing the damn machine to restart, why not just re-engineer your system so you don't have to restart? Email really stinks.. mostly because it's a big box with different time requirements for different emails. Why not address that problem instead of putting a fancy ribbon on everything?
Yes, exactly. Windows 8 is highly hated. Take away the user paradign for the last 30 years and what do you expect?
I occasionally have to use Windows, and I'm amazed that the user experience has actually gotten much worse from about 10 years ago. I can't figure out how to use the damn thing anymore! Office was perfected about 10 years ago, but yet MS just keeps changing the UI around and re-selling the thing over and over, then tying it into other MS products so you have to buy the damn thing again.
What would happen if the basic way to drive a car changed radically and people had to re-learn how to drive when they bought a new car? Chaos. But yet that's what happens, and massive productivity is lost every year. Outlook and Exchange are probbably the worst MS products ever created. But businesses are somehow addicted to them like heroin. Email itself is a pretty shitty experience these days, but MS manages to make it even worse.
I sure don't think about the anti-trust case from 20 years ago. I think about how the MS monopoly has created bad products that dominated the landscape as MS slowly but surely becomes irrelvent and fades from prominance. I know a lot of non-technical people. Nobody really loves them, some detest them, and almost everyone at least finds them distatesful. We're in the middle of a massive MS decline in power and influence, but the erosion process hasn't been etched away enough quite yet to become irrelevent.
Please make this list. I'd like to know what the equivalent is in the US of jailing a rock band for free speech is, jailing people protesting the president, and making talking about homosexuality in a positive light illegal.
Please, post the list. The US isn't perfect, but I seriously challenge you to post a list of freedom of expression opression that's anywhere near what's going on in Russia.
And are you really so certain Snowden won't be treated like a pawn in international relations? He's a chess piece to Putin and Russia. A propaganda vehicle to show how Putin is a hero for freedom. Also something to potentially negotiate with Washington about. In a couple years.. maybe his asylum doesn't get renewed, and he's expelled from Russia for some minor offense.
Umm.. So I looked up Snowdens family background. His father was an officer in the Coast Guard, his mother was a clerk in the district court of Maryland. I'm not sure where you're getting the "white trash" label, but normally "white trash" doesn't consist of clerks in district court, or Coast Guard officers.
You need to read up on what's going on in Russia. It's increasingly become an oppressive regime. The US isn't really an option for him at this time, though I suspect at some point he'll be given a pardon. (Though that may be decades from now).
So far Putin's government has arrested and jailed members of the band pussy riot, banned "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors (which bans speech about supporting gay rights), had his political rivals charged with fraud, expelled a US agency that provides poverty and disaster relief (USAID), instituted internet censorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R..., banned the adoption of Russian children by US parents, arrested an activist who planned protests against Putin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S..., started back up the tradition of using the psychiatric machinery to punish political protesters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P..., and countless other acts.
Snowden is a smart guy, and I'm sure he realizes this. But he needs to get the hell out of Russia. Hopefully he's working on establishing asylum somewhere else, but Russia is becoming more and more politically oppressive, and isn't the right place for someone who values freedom.
No, I think marijuana posesssion is a good example. It's just that we care far less about marijuana, and far more about copyright now.
And yes, I do believe that the FBI is about larger and more specialized crimes since the FBI has less resources to spread around than police departments. The FBI has only about 13,000 agents in the whole country. NYC alone has 36,000 officers. Nearly 3 times the amount of NYC cops as FBI agents! So simply by numbers alone they're far more specialized than your average cop. FBI agents also have to have a 4 year college degree.
Now, if this were a federal building or agency, I might agree that calling in the FBI is just a normal procedure. Years ago I worked for a small local federal agency that had some laptops stolen in a breakin. Very minor crime that involved maybe a few hundred dollars of stolen property, but they had to call in the FBI because it was a federal government agency that was robbed. They came and interviewed some people like they were required. Nothing ever came of it of course because they had better things to do than investigate a small time burglar.
88 dates means all his silly math failed. I'll guarantee you the average person doesn't go on 88 dates to find someone to date more than 3 times. It's wonderful he found someone, but the process sounds like it had a negative impact rather than a positive one.
I did the online dating thing. The one thing it made me realize is that most people don't know how to describe themselves in a profile. There's also something completely ineffable about dating. OkCupid probably sorts out some really bad matches between political opposites, but that's about it.
As I said in another post, pot posession is also against federal law. Try calling the FBI if you smell pot smoke. I kinda doubt they'll send over agents right away as if a bank was robbed.
I've noticed over the years there's this idea with some people on Slashdot to think the world works with these sort of overly simplistic rules. Like "if you violate federal law, then federal agents get involved". Or "Corporations are required to do whatever is best for shareholders". As if there's no judgement, reasonable accomodations, or real people operating in the world, just machines who follow orders. Computers follow simple rules. People are way more complex.
You know what else is a federal crime? Marijuana posession. Any amount. It's punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a fine of $1000. So if I smell my neighbor smoking pot, should I call the FBI since it's against federal law? What do you think they'd do? Frankly I think they'd do jack squat because it's a minor offense and not worth the time of the FBI.
So no, I don't believe merely violating federal law justifes the FBI coming out on a monents notice to interrogate some guy in a movie theatre. Laws always have been, and always will be selectively enforced. So we're fully justified in questioning the wisdom of the FBI in devoting resources to this.
I'm not sure about the rest of it, but I HATE the caps lock key. I NEVER use it. I'm glad someone has thought about how it's mostly a nuisance these days for typing in passwords, especially on a crowded laptop keyboard where it's easy to miss-type and hit a key without knowing it. Seriously, who uses freaking caps-lock?
(Oh, and why yes, I am a software developer and use all kinds of strange keys, but certainly not caps lock). ~ occasionally, but not enough to get me cranked off. I also certainly don't expect a hardware maker to cater to the needs of the 1 person in several thousand that writes software for a living. I run linux too, but I rarely use the function keys. I really have rather a rare need to go to a text console.
Frankly I think it's people like this guy that hold back any sort of innovation. The standard keyboard layout is archaic, and has needed to change for years. People that use computers these days are everyday people who don't need a freaking scroll lock key. The laptop I'm currently using has home and end on the top right, and doesn't have a scroll lock key at all. I didn't even notice that until just now and have had the laptop for a year. My only real complaint is it's too tight, and not comfortable. But it's a very small laptop that's light and really portable (perfect for travel, or just having a spare machine I can grab in my bedroom when I need it).
Secondly, the parties are immutable -- the notion that you can change them from within is belied by all the evidence that you can't.
If you think the parties haven't changed drastically over the last 20 or 30 years, you haven't been paying attetion. The Republican party has become far, far, far more radical. Good god.. Palin was questioning whether the great god Ronald Reagan was conservative enough just recently! And it's not as if she's not correct. Reagan was a freaking liberal compared to where the tea party wants the Republicans to go.
Now we could have an interesting discussion on exactly WHAT causes the parties to change. But if you don't even acknowledge they've changed drastically, there's not much point in a further discussion.
Flash forward 7 years - now it's the "liberal" guy in office, and suddenly all those horrible policies aren't considered so horrible after all
Huh? Obama has been a huge mixed bag. I severly fault him for the NSA spying, not closing Gitmo, not ending the Iraq war any sooner, continued drone strikes, continued nutso flying policies (can I PLEASE stop taking off my damn shoes!), not cleaning up the financial mess, not putting anyone in jail for the financial mess, and the renewal of the patriot act. Sadly these issues are largely bi-partisan. You're going to tell me that McCain and Romney would have been any different with any of these?
The two parties don't differ a lot on foreign policy. The Democrats want to play ball with other countries more than the Republicans do. But on the whole there's a huge similarity between them. There's certainly areas where the parties differ enormously (largely where money should be spent, and the role of government in society). Those I've been more happy with. But to say that Obama has enjoyed some kind of liberal love fest where we're all just super happy with him, or we've all just bent over and decided we really love oppression is just completely wrong.
"If the NIST curves really are broken (as has been suggested for years), then most SSL connections might be too, amirite?" No. SSL doesn't specify the method to produce random numbers. Why would it? The NIST method is very very slow, so I'd be surprised if any browsers or servers used it as the random number source.
Anyone being able to review code is NOT the same thing as an audit. An audit is a more formalized process where there's a more defined process and some form of assurance of quality is provided by the group. A formalized audit should cover all, or at the least "critical areas" of the code. An audit also might entail more than just the code, but who has access to it, what the commit procedures are, etc.
What you're describing is more ad-hoc. Individuals going in and making sure there's no glaring errors or design flaws, or even more subtle things if they're so inclined. I'm sure that's happened, but how do we know to what extent?
Audits are more about providing more formalized public assurance of code quality. Both the ad-hoc code inspections, and audits are useful, and mutually beneficial. But they aren't the same thing.
I don't mean to challenge whatever white-hat work that Kevin Mitnick is doing, but the phrase does indeed strike me as something a lobbyist (or well, tout) would tell me. Perhaps I'm just cynical.
It's cynical at all. Ecuador isn't really known for being terribly trustworthy.
My feel is that Mitnick was just brought in as window dressing. I wouldn't even suspect that Mitnick would have to hide anything he finds. It's only the tabulating equipment that he's "securing", not the entire election. There's FAR more to securing elections than some silly computer system that counts things. Election fixing happens out in the polling places where few people are looking, not in some big centralised location where the counting happens.
To actually ensure a fair election requires people monitoring polling places, not a couple guys making sure nobody hax0r3d the machine that does the counting. Mitnick is smart enough to know this, but yet is lending his name to make money. I really have no idea if elections are fair in Ecuador, but you're quite right to be skeptical of Mitnick's role in the whole thing.
Given enough information, it will always be easy to identify specific individuals with relative certainty.
The situation is avoidable because the research data included too much identifying information. How relevant is the persons age for instance? How relevant is the specific place of birth (City for instance vs region).
There's a way to publish the data with enough uncertainty about who the individual is to make identification impossible, or extremely unlikely. I don't know if that makes it anyone's "fault", but I will say that it's obvious that changes in what data gets associated with the genome record will fix the problem.
Tomcat is an Aparche Software Foundation project, but it really shares about zero code with Apache httpd. Tomcat is a pure Java implementation of a Java Application Server, and thus has no C code embedded in it. There's some kind of native connector for windows, but I wouldn't bet that has anything to do with apache httpd.
Sorry, but I don't take press releases by companies accused of bribery very seriously. Why should I? Do you just automatically believe the guy that said "I didn't do it?". If the police announced the same thing that might be something worth considering as a real source of information.
No, the headline offers a different perspective than you do. One that from the looks of it is more accurate than yours. A few high levels officials taking bribes, and the words "long established practice" more than add up to this being a systemic problem (and thus something part of Foxconn) rather than some isolated incidents. Neither article mentions anything about Foxconn calling the police about the bribes.
Later reports suggested that the police investigation was looking at several examples of this long-established practice, and that Foxconn had cancelled a contract with a supplier which was suspected of offering bribes.
The flash point is 143 degrees Fahrenheit. So you'd need to get a portion of it near something that produces a lot of heat... like say a generator, or a server.
In total darkness, up 17 flights of stairs, with a flooded basement? Sounds like a recipe for a potentially fatal fire. People's lives are more important than a freaking data center. Sorry, but I don't see this as a heroic story about people trying to keep critical infrastructure running, but as a desperate failure that could easily have turned into a disaster. They never should have gotten to the point where they're continually carrying fuel up stairs. It also sounds like they then decided to pump fuel up a pipe they installed in the stairwell. That doesn't sound terribly safe either, especially when done in a mad rush like I'm sure it was.
Gee.. couldn't have someone planned for this contingency rather than this sort of haphazard, dangerous sounding plan that was thrown together?
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's convenient to allow creative interpretation instead of actually amending the Constitution, we've lost much of the point of it all!
Pssstt.. I've got a secret for you. The founding fathers didn't know how to interpret the damn thing either. They couldn't agree, so they just made the bill of rights rather vague and put in place the power of the courts to interpret the law. So "creative interpretting" as you put it was always the intent.
If your idea is to amend the constitution to be clear about everything, you're going to have to do a LOT of amending. How many Supreme court decisions are there every year? That's gives you a very small idea of the role of the supreme court. You really want to amend the constitution that much? Think it's hard to interpret now.. think about if we amended it ever month.
Remeber, the constitution was intentionally made to be rather difficult to amend. I sure as hell don't want to make it easier.
Yup. Dr. Bronners is really a great soap product, and it's sold by a company that's not a bunch of greedy bastards. There's even a documentary on the soap and the company called Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox. The founder is a little nutty, but his message is largely just one of unity among people.
I'm not religious, and I don't believe in anything most people would say is a god, but I like the company and the soap.
About a year ago I was traveling home, and the TSA had set up a security checkpoint at the gate in Amsterdam. The screener (A Dutchman, oddly) kept asking me question after question, surely suspicious of something. This only thing even remotely suspicious was that I had gone through Switzerland, and my flight was cancelled so I had been re-routed through Amsterdam.
Do you have any idea why the gate agent gave me the third degree, asking me all these questions about where I had been, etc? I've traveled quite a bit internationally, and this was the hardest time I've had getting back in the US. Is it just TSA being extra-paranoid about anyone coming through Switzerland due to the super-rich trying to take money out of Swiss banks after the banks agreed to turn over records? Or is it just the Dutch TSA agents are dicks?
No, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad design, but when you hear a chorus of people complaining about the same thing, it's highly suggestive that it is. Both Windows and Ubuntu tried the crazy menu thing and elimating the start menu. Both had to relent and go back. That's a pretty shitty design, and shows both of them weren't thinking.
IMO the UI architects have become too radical for desktop UIs. Many complain the deskop UI hasn't changed in 20 years.... as if that's a bad thing. The UI to my car hasn't changed either. Steering wheel, brake, accelerator, ignition, gearshift all in standard locations. Headlight switches move around, which seems to serve little purpose, but it's a relatively minor complaint. A stable UI isn't necesarily a bad thing, but if you look at how much UIs have changed in MS products, you'd think they change it more often than hairstyles.
Meanwhile 20 years ago I learned shell programming and some simple unix piping output between standard programs, and I've gotten quite good at manipuating the command line. I don't have to re-learn it all every 5 years because someone thought of a "better" way to do it. At the same time I don't really want to go back to manipulating endless system config files with a text editor, or using freaking tar/zip as a package management tool. If a UI improvement solves an actual problem I'm all for it, it's just the stuff MS has done lately doesn't seem to solve any problems, only create them.
To me moving around the UI components is sort of like re-arranging furniture. It might help a bit, but if you want a happier user there's better ways to go about that. If you want to keep the system up to date... instead of forcing the damn machine to restart, why not just re-engineer your system so you don't have to restart? Email really stinks.. mostly because it's a big box with different time requirements for different emails. Why not address that problem instead of putting a fancy ribbon on everything?
Yes, exactly. Windows 8 is highly hated. Take away the user paradign for the last 30 years and what do you expect?
I occasionally have to use Windows, and I'm amazed that the user experience has actually gotten much worse from about 10 years ago. I can't figure out how to use the damn thing anymore! Office was perfected about 10 years ago, but yet MS just keeps changing the UI around and re-selling the thing over and over, then tying it into other MS products so you have to buy the damn thing again.
What would happen if the basic way to drive a car changed radically and people had to re-learn how to drive when they bought a new car? Chaos. But yet that's what happens, and massive productivity is lost every year. Outlook and Exchange are probbably the worst MS products ever created. But businesses are somehow addicted to them like heroin. Email itself is a pretty shitty experience these days, but MS manages to make it even worse.
I sure don't think about the anti-trust case from 20 years ago. I think about how the MS monopoly has created bad products that dominated the landscape as MS slowly but surely becomes irrelvent and fades from prominance. I know a lot of non-technical people. Nobody really loves them, some detest them, and almost everyone at least finds them distatesful. We're in the middle of a massive MS decline in power and influence, but the erosion process hasn't been etched away enough quite yet to become irrelevent.
?????
Please make this list. I'd like to know what the equivalent is in the US of jailing a rock band for free speech is, jailing people protesting the president, and making talking about homosexuality in a positive light illegal.
Please, post the list. The US isn't perfect, but I seriously challenge you to post a list of freedom of expression opression that's anywhere near what's going on in Russia.
And are you really so certain Snowden won't be treated like a pawn in international relations? He's a chess piece to Putin and Russia. A propaganda vehicle to show how Putin is a hero for freedom. Also something to potentially negotiate with Washington about. In a couple years.. maybe his asylum doesn't get renewed, and he's expelled from Russia for some minor offense.
Umm.. So I looked up Snowdens family background. His father was an officer in the Coast Guard, his mother was a clerk in the district court of Maryland. I'm not sure where you're getting the "white trash" label, but normally "white trash" doesn't consist of clerks in district court, or Coast Guard officers.
You need to read up on what's going on in Russia. It's increasingly become an oppressive regime. The US isn't really an option for him at this time, though I suspect at some point he'll be given a pardon. (Though that may be decades from now).
So far Putin's government has arrested and jailed members of the band pussy riot, banned "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors (which bans speech about supporting gay rights), had his political rivals charged with fraud, expelled a US agency that provides poverty and disaster relief (USAID), instituted internet censorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R..., banned the adoption of Russian children by US parents, arrested an activist who planned protests against Putin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S..., started back up the tradition of using the psychiatric machinery to punish political protesters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P..., and countless other acts.
Snowden is a smart guy, and I'm sure he realizes this. But he needs to get the hell out of Russia. Hopefully he's working on establishing asylum somewhere else, but Russia is becoming more and more politically oppressive, and isn't the right place for someone who values freedom.
No, I think marijuana posesssion is a good example. It's just that we care far less about marijuana, and far more about copyright now.
And yes, I do believe that the FBI is about larger and more specialized crimes since the FBI has less resources to spread around than police departments. The FBI has only about 13,000 agents in the whole country. NYC alone has 36,000 officers. Nearly 3 times the amount of NYC cops as FBI agents! So simply by numbers alone they're far more specialized than your average cop. FBI agents also have to have a 4 year college degree.
Now, if this were a federal building or agency, I might agree that calling in the FBI is just a normal procedure. Years ago I worked for a small local federal agency that had some laptops stolen in a breakin. Very minor crime that involved maybe a few hundred dollars of stolen property, but they had to call in the FBI because it was a federal government agency that was robbed. They came and interviewed some people like they were required. Nothing ever came of it of course because they had better things to do than investigate a small time burglar.
88 dates means all his silly math failed. I'll guarantee you the average person doesn't go on 88 dates to find someone to date more than 3 times. It's wonderful he found someone, but the process sounds like it had a negative impact rather than a positive one.
I did the online dating thing. The one thing it made me realize is that most people don't know how to describe themselves in a profile. There's also something completely ineffable about dating. OkCupid probably sorts out some really bad matches between political opposites, but that's about it.
As I said in another post, pot posession is also against federal law. Try calling the FBI if you smell pot smoke. I kinda doubt they'll send over agents right away as if a bank was robbed.
I've noticed over the years there's this idea with some people on Slashdot to think the world works with these sort of overly simplistic rules. Like "if you violate federal law, then federal agents get involved". Or "Corporations are required to do whatever is best for shareholders". As if there's no judgement, reasonable accomodations, or real people operating in the world, just machines who follow orders. Computers follow simple rules. People are way more complex.
You know what else is a federal crime? Marijuana posession. Any amount. It's punishable by up to 1 year in prison and a fine of $1000. So if I smell my neighbor smoking pot, should I call the FBI since it's against federal law? What do you think they'd do? Frankly I think they'd do jack squat because it's a minor offense and not worth the time of the FBI.
So no, I don't believe merely violating federal law justifes the FBI coming out on a monents notice to interrogate some guy in a movie theatre. Laws always have been, and always will be selectively enforced. So we're fully justified in questioning the wisdom of the FBI in devoting resources to this.
I'm not sure about the rest of it, but I HATE the caps lock key. I NEVER use it. I'm glad someone has thought about how it's mostly a nuisance these days for typing in passwords, especially on a crowded laptop keyboard where it's easy to miss-type and hit a key without knowing it. Seriously, who uses freaking caps-lock?
(Oh, and why yes, I am a software developer and use all kinds of strange keys, but certainly not caps lock). ~ occasionally, but not enough to get me cranked off. I also certainly don't expect a hardware maker to cater to the needs of the 1 person in several thousand that writes software for a living. I run linux too, but I rarely use the function keys. I really have rather a rare need to go to a text console.
Frankly I think it's people like this guy that hold back any sort of innovation. The standard keyboard layout is archaic, and has needed to change for years. People that use computers these days are everyday people who don't need a freaking scroll lock key. The laptop I'm currently using has home and end on the top right, and doesn't have a scroll lock key at all. I didn't even notice that until just now and have had the laptop for a year. My only real complaint is it's too tight, and not comfortable. But it's a very small laptop that's light and really portable (perfect for travel, or just having a spare machine I can grab in my bedroom when I need it).
Secondly, the parties are immutable -- the notion that you can change them from within is belied by all the evidence that you can't.
If you think the parties haven't changed drastically over the last 20 or 30 years, you haven't been paying attetion. The Republican party has become far, far, far more radical. Good god.. Palin was questioning whether the great god Ronald Reagan was conservative enough just recently! And it's not as if she's not correct. Reagan was a freaking liberal compared to where the tea party wants the Republicans to go.
Now we could have an interesting discussion on exactly WHAT causes the parties to change. But if you don't even acknowledge they've changed drastically, there's not much point in a further discussion.
Flash forward 7 years - now it's the "liberal" guy in office, and suddenly all those horrible policies aren't considered so horrible after all
Huh? Obama has been a huge mixed bag. I severly fault him for the NSA spying, not closing Gitmo, not ending the Iraq war any sooner, continued drone strikes, continued nutso flying policies (can I PLEASE stop taking off my damn shoes!), not cleaning up the financial mess, not putting anyone in jail for the financial mess, and the renewal of the patriot act. Sadly these issues are largely bi-partisan. You're going to tell me that McCain and Romney would have been any different with any of these?
The two parties don't differ a lot on foreign policy. The Democrats want to play ball with other countries more than the Republicans do. But on the whole there's a huge similarity between them. There's certainly areas where the parties differ enormously (largely where money should be spent, and the role of government in society). Those I've been more happy with. But to say that Obama has enjoyed some kind of liberal love fest where we're all just super happy with him, or we've all just bent over and decided we really love oppression is just completely wrong.
"If the NIST curves really are broken (as has been suggested for years), then most SSL connections might be too, amirite?"
No. SSL doesn't specify the method to produce random numbers. Why would it? The NIST method is very very slow, so I'd be surprised if any browsers or servers used it as the random number source.
Anyone being able to review code is NOT the same thing as an audit. An audit is a more formalized process where there's a more defined process and some form of assurance of quality is provided by the group. A formalized audit should cover all, or at the least "critical areas" of the code. An audit also might entail more than just the code, but who has access to it, what the commit procedures are, etc.
What you're describing is more ad-hoc. Individuals going in and making sure there's no glaring errors or design flaws, or even more subtle things if they're so inclined. I'm sure that's happened, but how do we know to what extent?
Audits are more about providing more formalized public assurance of code quality. Both the ad-hoc code inspections, and audits are useful, and mutually beneficial. But they aren't the same thing.
I don't mean to challenge whatever white-hat work that Kevin Mitnick is doing, but the phrase does indeed strike me as something a lobbyist (or well, tout) would tell me. Perhaps I'm just cynical.
It's cynical at all. Ecuador isn't really known for being terribly trustworthy.
http://report.globalintegrity.org/Ecuador/2008
My feel is that Mitnick was just brought in as window dressing. I wouldn't even suspect that Mitnick would have to hide anything he finds. It's only the tabulating equipment that he's "securing", not the entire election. There's FAR more to securing elections than some silly computer system that counts things. Election fixing happens out in the polling places where few people are looking, not in some big centralised location where the counting happens.
To actually ensure a fair election requires people monitoring polling places, not a couple guys making sure nobody hax0r3d the machine that does the counting. Mitnick is smart enough to know this, but yet is lending his name to make money. I really have no idea if elections are fair in Ecuador, but you're quite right to be skeptical of Mitnick's role in the whole thing.
It isn't the fault of anyone....
Given enough information, it will always be easy to identify specific individuals with relative certainty.
The situation is avoidable because the research data included too much identifying information. How relevant is the persons age for instance? How relevant is the specific place of birth (City for instance vs region).
There's a way to publish the data with enough uncertainty about who the individual is to make identification impossible, or extremely unlikely. I don't know if that makes it anyone's "fault", but I will say that it's obvious that changes in what data gets associated with the genome record will fix the problem.
(IIRC TomCat is built on Apache).
Tomcat is an Aparche Software Foundation project, but it really shares about zero code with Apache httpd. Tomcat is a pure Java implementation of a Java Application Server, and thus has no C code embedded in it. There's some kind of native connector for windows, but I wouldn't bet that has anything to do with apache httpd.
Sorry, but I don't take press releases by companies accused of bribery very seriously. Why should I? Do you just automatically believe the guy that said "I didn't do it?". If the police announced the same thing that might be something worth considering as a real source of information.
This headline is really badly written.
No, the headline offers a different perspective than you do. One that from the looks of it is more accurate than yours. A few high levels officials taking bribes, and the words "long established practice" more than add up to this being a systemic problem (and thus something part of Foxconn) rather than some isolated incidents. Neither article mentions anything about Foxconn calling the police about the bribes.
The flash point is 143 degrees Fahrenheit. So you'd need to get a portion of it near something that produces a lot of heat... like say a generator, or a server.
In total darkness, up 17 flights of stairs, with a flooded basement? Sounds like a recipe for a potentially fatal fire. People's lives are more important than a freaking data center. Sorry, but I don't see this as a heroic story about people trying to keep critical infrastructure running, but as a desperate failure that could easily have turned into a disaster. They never should have gotten to the point where they're continually carrying fuel up stairs. It also sounds like they then decided to pump fuel up a pipe they installed in the stairwell. That doesn't sound terribly safe either, especially when done in a mad rush like I'm sure it was.
Gee.. couldn't have someone planned for this contingency rather than this sort of haphazard, dangerous sounding plan that was thrown together?