I was wondering if anyone else had read that story in Analog. My co workers put my name on that CD, and then that story came out, and I wondered if they'd really done me a favor.
If the aliens from the comet come and start killing the folks named on that CD, I'll just have to hope that my cow orkers mispelled my name, as usual.
a security flaw becomes a lot harder to exploit if the general public does not know it is there.
I don't really see what difference the general public makes. The general public isn't interested in exploiting security flaws, even if there is a pre-rolled application which makes it easy, because the general public isn't script kiddies.
If one bad guy who can write a script for the script kiddies finds out about this, then the general public is at risk, even if he never releases that script. The general public is never going to find security flaws on their own, because they aren't looking. The bad guys, on the other hand, are definitely going to be looking.
If some good guy finds out about this kind of thing, I'd say that means that the bad guys either already found out, or will soon. I think that the best thing that hypothetical good guy can do for me is publish the details fast, so the google people have to get cracking and fix it, and so I know that my messages are not private.
How would waiting until the bad guys to release an exploit to the script kiddies before you tell the world help me? It wouldn't!
Of the things on your list, I do:
1) mostly because I forget where I left the cursor,
2) because it's comfortable (I hold it between thumb and little finger),
4) see (1).
My mother has a terrible time with a mouse, and does 3 and 5. I've found that a trackball deals nicely with 5, and 3 responds to nothing but more practice time than she's willing to give.
She's a touch typist, though getting rusty, and it's still quite painless for her to type mozilla &. Remembering that you finish up commands with an apersand so you can do this AND something else seems pretty painless, too. Finding the little icon with the lizard head, and clicking on it, is difficult, even with a trackball. A big part of that is that the name of the program is mozilla, not lizardheadicon.
The cli needs just as much training as the gui, but the basic skills for the cli are more likely to be present in seniors. The fast-twitch-to-double-click requirement of the typical gui is a real problem for old farts, too.
If you're going to have to train folks to use a mouse, consider training them to get by without, using their keyboard and tab, alt-tab, et cetera.
I went back to school after 11 years. I had gotten my BSEE in '85, then in '96 I decided to go back to school and get a Ph.D in economics.
I didn't know anyone who could give recommendations (all my professors had either moved on or retired), so I went back to my old school as a master's student for 1 year, impressed the profs, and got recommendations which (together with decent SATs) got me into Purdue.
I found that living on a small income was hard, but the studying was actually easier than it had been the first time through. In particular, math was easier to learn. That was a good thing, since econ and stats take more and different math than undergraduate EE.
I never finished my Ph.D (I'm ABD), but I did get an MS in Statistics along the way, and I'm working as an economist. Finishing would have been do-able, but didn't seem worth the cost in student loan debt and time.
If you can get accepted at a school, you can do it, if you can fund it. If they aren't offering you an assistantship with free tuition and a stipend of more than $10,000 per year, keep looking. Schools recruit undergrads, they hire graduate students.
Not failed a bit. Castration is cutting off a lot, circumcision is cutting off a little, from a nearby spot. So, if you're circumcised, you're not castrated, but you came close.
Therefore, ``UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised! '' would mean that they don't even come close. It's funny because of the implied misunderstanding of a pair of homophones.
I got it, and now you got it, but since I had to explain it, you probably didn't enjoy it as much as I did.
It's certainly a good move from the perspective of the Japanese economy; not outsourcing keeps the money from flowing out of the country, after all.
It keeps the money from flowing out of the economy, and it keeps an equal amount from flowing into the economy!
You can't buy from Japan unless you first sell to Japan. Trade has to be a two-way street.
That's why the U.S. has such a huge trade deficit: foreigners desparately want to invest here. Therefore, to get U.S. dollars to invest in the U.S. (you wouldn't take Yen for your farm, after all), they have to sell us more goods than we sell to them. The difference they take in Treasury bonds, stocks and other U.S. properties. To get us to buy so much, they have to sell it cheap. The U.S. gets cheap goods, cheap capital, and all for the low, low price of being a safe, stable country.
Japan's population is aging fast. They're getting older at the rate of one year per year, of course, but they aren't breeding fast enough to replace themselves. That's going to have lots of effects on Japan, most of them bad. One of those bad effects will be a labor shortage. You see, the number of people who are both willing and physically able to work is going to fall off as the current generation of workers gets too old to work.
Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.
How is a firearm supposed to deter a suicide bomber...
Good question.
I suppose that if we saw somebody looking suspicious, and suspiciously bulky around the middle, we could shoot first and ask questions later. I predict that skin-tight clothes would be in style, especially for fat people. Yuk. Let's don't.
Outside the big cities, though, the ``bomb strapped around your belly'' approach that's so popular among the young and trendy Palestinians just wouldn't work. There just aren't enough big, anonymous clusters of people. I'm not sure just how much the guns have to do with it, but I think that Muslim terrorists would find that a whole lot of necessary conditions are lacking here.
I have an NT4 disk which will install on Alpha, MIPS and IA86. After that version, Intel dropped support for Alpha and MIPS, and look what happened to them.
I don't think this is a good sign for the Itanic, but I don't think anyone will be surprised. This may not be the end of the line for it, though. MS has only dropped their workstation version, not their server version.
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Would the US stand by and do nothing if Canada were invaded? How about England or Spain? I doubt that the only reason Canadian or European companies are successful is just because the US would defend their countries.
The U.S. spends about 5% of GDP on military (including pizza delivery in places like the Indian Ocean), while Canada and Europe spend far less (<2%?).
Europe and Canada have high tax burdens compared to the U.S. Think how much higher those tax burdens would be if those countries were spending 5%+ of their GDP on their militaries. That might not cause many of their compaies to fail, but it surely wouldn't help any of them succede!
One way to look at this is that the U.S. taxpayer is subsidising the socialist economies of the West by providing their defense. It's an open question whether those countries could maintain their social programs and provide for their own defense if we didn't keep them dry under our umbrella. The fact that they are right now having to cut back their social programs and taxes to save their economies suggests that they would be forced to choose between guns or butter if we left them on their own.
So, we pay for the Canadians and the Europeans to have a fancy ``social safety net'', then they laugh at us because we don't have one, and insult us because we have a big military. Maybe we should let those sleazeballs on the Continent deal with the Balkans and the Middle East and Russia and China on their own dime, and just take care of ourselves for a while? I bet we'd be laughing a lot longer than they would....
You don't need to know Morse code to get a Technician license.
I know that's true now, but it wasn't true when I was seriously considering getting a ham license.
I don't remember what the limitations on the Technician license are, but I remember they were set with the intention of giving serious motivation to upgrade to a code-required license.
It really doesn't matter now; I've gotten too many other interests over the years, so even if the licensing went to CB-style pure mail order, I probably wouldn't bother. Especially since the last time I heard some DXers on my shortwave, I was reminded of one of the big reasons I got turned off to hamming: the wonderful personalities and scintillating conversations (that's sarcasm, for those who aren't familiar with hams).
This is all nice and stuff but let's face it - Ham Radio is dead.
Moderators, this may have been intended as a troll. It certainly isn't entirely true. But it's true enough that we shouldn't moderate it out of sight.
My father was a ham, and I'm not. Even in the '70s and '80s the old fogies were making it unattractive. My father, who was an old fogie himself, lost interest in everything but VHF and repeaters, in part because of the old fogies. I never could get excited enough to learn Morse, so never got a ham license. I did get a BSEE with an emphasis in communications, but never a ham license. There were just too many other fascinating things to do.
It's the code requirement which is keeping the masses out of ham radio, and that's kept in place by the old fogies who want to keep the CB riff-raff out. Unfortunately, if you aren't a fellow old fogie (sometimes even if you are!) they're ruder and nastier than the CB riff-raff.
Today, there are more technically interesting ways to communicate, and there are more practical ways to communicate, than DX over CW. Except for the old fogies, DX over CW is dead. The old fogies who advocate that as the only acceptable way to do ham radio are doing their best to ensure that all the many exciting, practical things that ham radio could be are dead, too.
Was he trying to blind pilots? Is there any reason to think that was his intent? Is there any reason to think that this could have succeeded, had he gotten the pilot and copilot to stare at the beam for several minutes?
I think that just hauling him in for questioning is serious over-reaction, unless we have some good reason to believe that the answer is a definite ``yes'' to several of those questions.
If you were to fire a SAM at an airliner, the police might reasonably assume that the answers to the equivalent set of questions were all yes: that you were able to do harm and that you intended to do harm. In this case, I don't think that the assumption of ability or intent to do harm is plausible.
1) Laser pointers over 15 miles away - or even nearly 2 miles away - lose a lot of their energy and are no brighter than dim LED bulbs at those distances.
2) It is virtually impossible to track a laser on a cockpit from 15 miles way, or even from 2 miles away.
So what's going on?
From TFA:
Justice Department officials said they do not suspect terrorism in any of the cases, but said Banach's arrest shows how seriously they take the matter.
"We need to send a clear message to the public that there is no harmless mischief when it comes to airplanes," said Christopher Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
They've found some guy who was playing with his laser pointer and they're going to fry him. Doesn't matter whether he was the one they were looking for, doesn't matter whether the guy they were looking for could have done any harm this way if he'd been trying.
Christie is going to ``do something about terrorism'', and he doesn't care how many of us he has to kill or imprison to make the rest of us feel safer by advancing his career.
If we're going to start sending people to jail for shining lights at airplanes, maybe we'd be better off without the airplanes. Thanks to these same ``public servants'', it's getting too dangerous to travel by air anymore, anyway.
Seems to me you have to try pretty hard to laser an airplane cockpit from the ground.
I think you'd have to try pretty hard to do it on purpose, but if you wave a laser around from the right spot on the ground (maybe a mile or two off the approach to a big airport?), I think you'd have to try pretty hard to not do it by accident.
I don't think that anyone has suggested that these laser-pointer-illuminations have the potential to do physical harm, and we've let little kids buy them and play with them for years now. If these laser pointers were likely to do any harm, we would already be seeing many thousands of blind kids.
My take on this is that a Federal prosecutor in New Jersey needs to get a life.
my Linux migration ends at the point where I have to pick gnome or KDE... .
Pick either one, for whatever reason you like. Both work, both are different from Windows, both should probably be installed on any modern hardware, and there is really no better reason than personal preference to choose which one you actually see.
If you really want someone to give you a rationalization for choosing one over the other, how about this: KDE is slightly more like Windows, so it will be slightly less off-putting to someone switching from Windows.
Or, try this one: Gnome is slightly less like Windows, so someone switching from Windows will be slightly less likely to be tripped up by his Windows experience.
No money was pumped "in" to the US economy. Money was merely moved from one use to another.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
This is true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out some details.
Money that did go to fix Y2K bugs and do the related paperwork would have been spent elsewhere. Since it went into IT-related industries, it caused over-production (several years worth of upgrades in 1999), over-investment in the IT-related industries, leading to over-capacity, high demand for IT workers, leading to higer wages, which lured workers who really didn't belong in the industry to get paper qualifications which they didn't have the experience to back up.
The result was that there was a big hi-tech boom, followed by a painful hi-tech bust, with high unemployment for programmers. By 2001, the economy probably wasn't any bigger because of the Y2K spending; it was probably smaller, because of the mis-investment, than it would otherwise have been. I say probably because I'm not sure what the increased velocity of money may have done. Certainly, we would have all been better off without the mis-investment.
Yes, there was an effect on the economy, no, it wasn't good, and the effect has nothing to do with the broken window fallacy.
2038 is years away - we'll all have new systems by then!
Yes, that's funny now, but it wasn't funny when I first heard it. We were serious, and seriously wrong.
I first heard this in 1981, when we were talking about the Y2K problem in college. We knew about it, and the consensus was: ``In 19 years, they will have replaced all those old systems with the two digit dates.'' We all know how that turned out!
Today, in 2005, I know someone who's running a small business on an Osborne computer (24 years old, CPM, 5 inch green screen). Don't expect a business to toss anything that works, ever.
The anti-intellectualism here on Slashdot is extraordinary. I must admit to being rather surprised whenever I see comments like "PhD's dont know nothin" (sic), or a recent post saying I hate college with poor grammar and spelling. Responses to it basically stated that a college degree was worthless.
Knowlege and education will always be valuable, in many ways. What does that have to do with college?
Seriously, for too many students, college is a four year waiting period: waiting to get their tickets punched for that good job. Some party full time, some work full time, but none of this group of bad students are trying to learn at all, except in the ``pass the test'' sense.
People who hate college, and say that it's worthless, tend to be in this know-nothing group. There are people who find that college gets in the way of learning, because they have to take time out from learning to pass tests. Still, if that's your problem, you should find the test passing relatively easy, or you should change your major to match your interests.
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If the aliens from the comet come and start killing the folks named on that CD, I'll just have to hope that my cow orkers mispelled my name, as usual.
I thought they meant something like this or like this when they said N-gauge.
I don't really see what difference the general public makes. The general public isn't interested in exploiting security flaws, even if there is a pre-rolled application which makes it easy, because the general public isn't script kiddies.
If one bad guy who can write a script for the script kiddies finds out about this, then the general public is at risk, even if he never releases that script. The general public is never going to find security flaws on their own, because they aren't looking. The bad guys, on the other hand, are definitely going to be looking.
If some good guy finds out about this kind of thing, I'd say that means that the bad guys either already found out, or will soon. I think that the best thing that hypothetical good guy can do for me is publish the details fast, so the google people have to get cracking and fix it, and so I know that my messages are not private.
How would waiting until the bad guys to release an exploit to the script kiddies before you tell the world help me? It wouldn't!
1) mostly because I forget where I left the cursor,
2) because it's comfortable (I hold it between thumb and little finger),
4) see (1).
My mother has a terrible time with a mouse, and does 3 and 5. I've found that a trackball deals nicely with 5, and 3 responds to nothing but more practice time than she's willing to give.
She's a touch typist, though getting rusty, and it's still quite painless for her to type mozilla &. Remembering that you finish up commands with an apersand so you can do this AND something else seems pretty painless, too. Finding the little icon with the lizard head, and clicking on it, is difficult, even with a trackball. A big part of that is that the name of the program is mozilla, not lizardheadicon.
The cli needs just as much training as the gui, but the basic skills for the cli are more likely to be present in seniors. The fast-twitch-to-double-click requirement of the typical gui is a real problem for old farts, too.
If you're going to have to train folks to use a mouse, consider training them to get by without, using their keyboard and tab, alt-tab, et cetera.
I didn't know anyone who could give recommendations (all my professors had either moved on or retired), so I went back to my old school as a master's student for 1 year, impressed the profs, and got recommendations which (together with decent SATs) got me into Purdue.
I found that living on a small income was hard, but the studying was actually easier than it had been the first time through. In particular, math was easier to learn. That was a good thing, since econ and stats take more and different math than undergraduate EE.
I never finished my Ph.D (I'm ABD), but I did get an MS in Statistics along the way, and I'm working as an economist. Finishing would have been do-able, but didn't seem worth the cost in student loan debt and time.
If you can get accepted at a school, you can do it, if you can fund it. If they aren't offering you an assistantship with free tuition and a stipend of more than $10,000 per year, keep looking. Schools recruit undergrads, they hire graduate students.
Absence of evidence == Evidence of absence, then?
Prove to us, oh wise one, that there is no creator of the universe who is outside the universe. I'll use the same arguments to prove the opposite.
Better minds than yours or mine have struggled with this for thousands of years. I don't think you're going to offer up a useful proof.
Not failed a bit. Castration is cutting off a lot, circumcision is cutting off a little, from a nearby spot. So, if you're circumcised, you're not castrated, but you came close.
Therefore, ``UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised! '' would mean that they don't even come close. It's funny because of the implied misunderstanding of a pair of homophones.
I got it, and now you got it, but since I had to explain it, you probably didn't enjoy it as much as I did.
It keeps the money from flowing out of the economy, and it keeps an equal amount from flowing into the economy!
You can't buy from Japan unless you first sell to Japan. Trade has to be a two-way street.
That's why the U.S. has such a huge trade deficit: foreigners desparately want to invest here. Therefore, to get U.S. dollars to invest in the U.S. (you wouldn't take Yen for your farm, after all), they have to sell us more goods than we sell to them. The difference they take in Treasury bonds, stocks and other U.S. properties. To get us to buy so much, they have to sell it cheap. The U.S. gets cheap goods, cheap capital, and all for the low, low price of being a safe, stable country.
I think that ``looming labor shortage'' refers to their looming demographic crisis.
Japan's population is aging fast. They're getting older at the rate of one year per year, of course, but they aren't breeding fast enough to replace themselves. That's going to have lots of effects on Japan, most of them bad. One of those bad effects will be a labor shortage. You see, the number of people who are both willing and physically able to work is going to fall off as the current generation of workers gets too old to work.
Europe is facing the same problem, and they're dealing with it via gastarbeiters. Apparently, Japan is going to deal with it using robots.
When I read the article, I wasn't thinking berserker, I was thinking Skynet
Yeah, stupid typo. Thanks for catching it.
Good question.
I suppose that if we saw somebody looking suspicious, and suspiciously bulky around the middle, we could shoot first and ask questions later. I predict that skin-tight clothes would be in style, especially for fat people. Yuk. Let's don't.
Outside the big cities, though, the ``bomb strapped around your belly'' approach that's so popular among the young and trendy Palestinians just wouldn't work. There just aren't enough big, anonymous clusters of people. I'm not sure just how much the guns have to do with it, but I think that Muslim terrorists would find that a whole lot of necessary conditions are lacking here.
I don't think this is a good sign for the Itanic, but I don't think anyone will be surprised. This may not be the end of the line for it, though. MS has only dropped their workstation version, not their server version.
The really interesting question is: will Linux be able to carry Itanic, now that MS is starting to leave it behind?
The U.S. spends about 5% of GDP on military (including pizza delivery in places like the Indian Ocean), while Canada and Europe spend far less (<2%?).
Europe and Canada have high tax burdens compared to the U.S. Think how much higher those tax burdens would be if those countries were spending 5%+ of their GDP on their militaries. That might not cause many of their compaies to fail, but it surely wouldn't help any of them succede!
One way to look at this is that the U.S. taxpayer is subsidising the socialist economies of the West by providing their defense. It's an open question whether those countries could maintain their social programs and provide for their own defense if we didn't keep them dry under our umbrella. The fact that they are right now having to cut back their social programs and taxes to save their economies suggests that they would be forced to choose between guns or butter if we left them on their own.
So, we pay for the Canadians and the Europeans to have a fancy ``social safety net'', then they laugh at us because we don't have one, and insult us because we have a big military. Maybe we should let those sleazeballs on the Continent deal with the Balkans and the Middle East and Russia and China on their own dime, and just take care of ourselves for a while? I bet we'd be laughing a lot longer than they would ....
In my house, it's the dryer, and it eats socks. I guess that reality just doesn't measure up to the Sims.
I know that's true now, but it wasn't true when I was seriously considering getting a ham license.
I don't remember what the limitations on the Technician license are, but I remember they were set with the intention of giving serious motivation to upgrade to a code-required license.
It really doesn't matter now; I've gotten too many other interests over the years, so even if the licensing went to CB-style pure mail order, I probably wouldn't bother. Especially since the last time I heard some DXers on my shortwave, I was reminded of one of the big reasons I got turned off to hamming: the wonderful personalities and scintillating conversations (that's sarcasm, for those who aren't familiar with hams).
Moderators, this may have been intended as a troll. It certainly isn't entirely true. But it's true enough that we shouldn't moderate it out of sight.
My father was a ham, and I'm not. Even in the '70s and '80s the old fogies were making it unattractive. My father, who was an old fogie himself, lost interest in everything but VHF and repeaters, in part because of the old fogies. I never could get excited enough to learn Morse, so never got a ham license. I did get a BSEE with an emphasis in communications, but never a ham license. There were just too many other fascinating things to do.
It's the code requirement which is keeping the masses out of ham radio, and that's kept in place by the old fogies who want to keep the CB riff-raff out. Unfortunately, if you aren't a fellow old fogie (sometimes even if you are!) they're ruder and nastier than the CB riff-raff.
Today, there are more technically interesting ways to communicate, and there are more practical ways to communicate, than DX over CW. Except for the old fogies, DX over CW is dead. The old fogies who advocate that as the only acceptable way to do ham radio are doing their best to ensure that all the many exciting, practical things that ham radio could be are dead, too.
The boards can all be trouble-shot at the component level, and he has several spare systems. It's probably more servicable than any of today's PCs.
The nifty thing is that, so far as I know, CPM doesn't have anything like a 2038 problem.
I think that just hauling him in for questioning is serious over-reaction, unless we have some good reason to believe that the answer is a definite ``yes'' to several of those questions.
If you were to fire a SAM at an airliner, the police might reasonably assume that the answers to the equivalent set of questions were all yes: that you were able to do harm and that you intended to do harm. In this case, I don't think that the assumption of ability or intent to do harm is plausible.
2) It is virtually impossible to track a laser on a cockpit from 15 miles way, or even from 2 miles away.
So what's going on?
From TFA:
They've found some guy who was playing with his laser pointer and they're going to fry him. Doesn't matter whether he was the one they were looking for, doesn't matter whether the guy they were looking for could have done any harm this way if he'd been trying.Christie is going to ``do something about terrorism'', and he doesn't care how many of us he has to kill or imprison to make the rest of us feel safer by advancing his career.
If we're going to start sending people to jail for shining lights at airplanes, maybe we'd be better off without the airplanes. Thanks to these same ``public servants'', it's getting too dangerous to travel by air anymore, anyway.
I think you'd have to try pretty hard to do it on purpose, but if you wave a laser around from the right spot on the ground (maybe a mile or two off the approach to a big airport?), I think you'd have to try pretty hard to not do it by accident.
I don't think that anyone has suggested that these laser-pointer-illuminations have the potential to do physical harm, and we've let little kids buy them and play with them for years now. If these laser pointers were likely to do any harm, we would already be seeing many thousands of blind kids.
My take on this is that a Federal prosecutor in New Jersey needs to get a life.
Pick either one, for whatever reason you like. Both work, both are different from Windows, both should probably be installed on any modern hardware, and there is really no better reason than personal preference to choose which one you actually see.
If you really want someone to give you a rationalization for choosing one over the other, how about this: KDE is slightly more like Windows, so it will be slightly less off-putting to someone switching from Windows.
Or, try this one: Gnome is slightly less like Windows, so someone switching from Windows will be slightly less likely to be tripped up by his Windows experience.
While the economy gained from the new spending, it lost from the lack of the default spending.
This is true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out some details.
Money that did go to fix Y2K bugs and do the related paperwork would have been spent elsewhere. Since it went into IT-related industries, it caused over-production (several years worth of upgrades in 1999), over-investment in the IT-related industries, leading to over-capacity, high demand for IT workers, leading to higer wages, which lured workers who really didn't belong in the industry to get paper qualifications which they didn't have the experience to back up.
The result was that there was a big hi-tech boom, followed by a painful hi-tech bust, with high unemployment for programmers. By 2001, the economy probably wasn't any bigger because of the Y2K spending; it was probably smaller, because of the mis-investment, than it would otherwise have been. I say probably because I'm not sure what the increased velocity of money may have done. Certainly, we would have all been better off without the mis-investment.
Yes, there was an effect on the economy, no, it wasn't good, and the effect has nothing to do with the broken window fallacy.
Yes, that's funny now, but it wasn't funny when I first heard it. We were serious, and seriously wrong.
I first heard this in 1981, when we were talking about the Y2K problem in college. We knew about it, and the consensus was: ``In 19 years, they will have replaced all those old systems with the two digit dates.'' We all know how that turned out!
Today, in 2005, I know someone who's running a small business on an Osborne computer (24 years old, CPM, 5 inch green screen). Don't expect a business to toss anything that works, ever.
Knowlege and education will always be valuable, in many ways. What does that have to do with college?
Seriously, for too many students, college is a four year waiting period: waiting to get their tickets punched for that good job. Some party full time, some work full time, but none of this group of bad students are trying to learn at all, except in the ``pass the test'' sense.
People who hate college, and say that it's worthless, tend to be in this know-nothing group. There are people who find that college gets in the way of learning, because they have to take time out from learning to pass tests. Still, if that's your problem, you should find the test passing relatively easy, or you should change your major to match your interests.