Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.
If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...
It seams that a notebook using a conventional 200GB hard drive with a 16GB flash cache would be pretty much indistinquisable in terms of battery life and performance. Cost and software complexity can be further lowered by using flash with fast read speed but slow writes. The operating system and some applications can then be installed on the flash partition while user data can go on the regular hard drive.
It seems better to put up with an occasional disk access than not to have an option to store your stuff at all.
What happens when the kite falls into water and the wind is not enough to lift it up wet? Or worse, what if it falls on top of the ship and hurts sailors, breaks things or rips? It seems we are too hasty to discard centuries of experience in designing sails, masts and lines. Even a spinnaker is at least tied to the top of the mast to keep it from falling and main sails are still useful in head and side winds.
So now you do not have to smuggle a nuclear bomb in a vending machine. Instead, just detonate a small conventional explosive next to this bath tub and you will probably render all 27000 homes powered by this thing unlivable. You can even set a second charge to fashion a kind of thermobaric bomb that detonates hydrogen from the reactor to ensure proper dispersal of radioactive waste.
What do you make of the self-described "shock and awe" campaign? How about use of vacuum bombs that are specifically design to terrify the enemy by killing victims in a particular slow and painful manner?
Do you mean that US military does not drop bombs on strategic targets in urban areas? How have we managed to kill 84 thousand civilians in Iraq if we "take pains to avoid that stuff"? Why have we been bombing foreign embassies and weddings? Do we or do we not impose economic sanctions on countries that are not an imminent threat in full knowledge that hundreds of thousands of children will starve to death or die in need of the most basic medical care?
Granted, if we want soldiers to act more like police officers we must send many times more troops, institute draft and suffer far greater casualties from our side. Death of people forced into military can also be considered civilians deaths, so perhaps it's better them than us. But lets not sugarcoat the very ugly reality or let real police officers act like soldiers in foreign land.
The law actually requires you to follow directions of a police officer and even help him in his duties when deputized. However, once detained you are entitled to have your charges explained to you and be released from custody once it's determined that you broke no laws.
A police officer's goal is to make sure nobody, including crime suspects, gets hurt on the scene. They are even supposed to risk their lives to a significant degree to ensure that, for example try to talk down the guy with a gun. Knowing what kind of hurt they are going to inflict on civilians is vital to help them choose an appropriate means of restraint for adversaries that do not appear very dangerous, like college students in a protest.
Soldiers, apart from possibly UN peacekeepers, do not have such a mandate and on the contrary are routinely commanded to kill a large number of small children and other innocent bystanders by dropping bombs. I would love to have this changed, but since US soldiers are not allowed to use chemical weapons, I wouldn't make them experience effects of tear gas.
Well, in United States I am protected against self incrimination in criminal cases. So if my life and freedom is at stake, I can refuse to give out the password. And if the police doesn't follow laws, I am screwed anyway. They can just plant the evidence rather than having me decrypt it.
Regardless, on my own computer I can at least delete files. With any sensitive information that could land me in trouble with government or significant others I would certainly use an encrypted filesystem and do a secure delete as soon as I am done with the file/e-mail message and probably before there is a court order requiring me to preserve evidence. The chances of the data been recovered after that are much slimmer than investigators pulling it out of Google backups or caches.
All right, put your info where you mouth is. Please post in the following as a reply:
1. Your physical address and phone number as well as those of your friends 2. Where do your children go to school and the route they usually take while walking home? 3. Full history of your love life (so that we can inform all your romantic partners of each other's existence, especially at convenient times like wedding anniversaries or birth of your kids) 4. Photos of yourself smoking pot, shitfaced drunk and making out with barely familar persons of opposite (or same) gender. Wouldn't it be great if everyone giving you job interviews knew what a great guy/gal you are on a personal level?
Now tell me how difficult would it be for someone to get all this information from your e-mail, photos and documents?
When I connected an external hard drive, my computer asked me if I want to use it for backups and has done so since. My last backup was half an hour below and I can conveniently restore my files, folder or the entire computer to the state it was in a couple of month ago. My platform is not known for widespread malware infestations.
Now, when did Google last backup their e-mail? I accidentally deleted an important interview invitation a couple of months ago and would like them to restore it for me. Why do I get that sinking feeling...
What do you think is the probability that someone is going to dive into a can of used cat litter from my garbage on the particular day when I throw away my hard drive?
Did we really progress from naked MySpace photos to such a disregard to our own privacy that we do not mind putting ALL of our stuff online. Besides server compromises and XSS exploits, the data can be easily disclosed in even a simple civil or divorce court case. At least with your own computer you can delete the files, use encryption or simply throw the hard drive away in the dumpster. Besides, what happens if the provider decides to suddenly discontinue the service or start charging $50/month?
You are extremely naive if you think the state did this level of testing. Most probably the boss just cast 5 ballots, verified the results manually and declared that the machine works correctly. Even if they did honest testing at the usual government's level of sophistication, it was not anything that would be changed by rearranging boards.
It's not necessarily the raw Internet capacity that has to increase. New video and audio compression algorithms could dramatically reduce the bandwidth necessary for carrying the same. Protocols like BitTorrent naturally transfer most of the data through currently uncongested connections. Development and even implementation of such standards does not necessarily cost billions of dollars.
Now it's granted that we'll probably come up with some new and creative ways to use up the bandwidth such as realtime 3D video-conferencing.
Yes, but who knows if the chicken and the egg came first. Futuristic and somewhat risky innovations from Apple often influenced the rest of computer industry. Besides USB, Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet and flash drives+recordable CDs as floppy replacements, think about how the very first Macintosh did away with command line interface when it was not entirely practical on hardware of those days. The first systems were so memory-constrained that you had to switch floppies a dozen times to make a copy. But should Apple have released another command line-based OS instead of coming up with something that took Microsoft more than 10 years to catch up with?
My Mac doesn't have a VGA connector for analog monitors. Just like you could buy a USB floppy, I can buy a little dongle to connect to my DVI port if needed (actually I am using an ADC adapter for my older monitor). I don't see a big deal either way.
Sure, the copyright holder can do whatever he wants. However, by not making his work available in US, he can not claim limited time exclusive rights to his work under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US constitution. He clearly does not intent to promote "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in US if nobody gets to see his work and I don't think our law should care about his activities abroad.
I don't know about your level of craziness, but there sure are crazy people who would love to travel as you without showing ID, commit crimes and have you serve their time in jail.
And what is exactly a big deal? How will CIA/whomever will use fingerprint evidence on US citizens from Japan? Unlike RFID, fingerprints can not be automatically scanned en masse from remote. You have to first detect a suspicious activity at a particular small, private location and only then it can be dusted for fingerprints. The activity at the location has to be unquestionably illegal. One can not deduce the content of your conversation with a decedent just by presence of your fingerprint in his apartment. On the other hand, a dead body is a valid cause to question all recent visitors.
I am more worried about California fasttrack lane and red light cameras than about this law. Unlike fingerprints, images of license plates can be easily OCRed and establish a very detailed profile of everyone's hour-by-hour whereabouts.
With modern technology and many billions of dollars in development costs, you would think someone would figure out to save an image of a just booted system and only rebuild it when configuration changes. Granted, the restored image will need to reopen files, restore network connections and deal with changed removable devices. But that's where those billions of dollars come in...
Proprietary math software is not a problem as long as the end result can be exported into a fully documented format and can be then verified by open software, including human mathematicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Students should run their own e-mail systems, period. Otherwise, how can IT students prepare for their real life work in future in a realistic environment? Sure the security will not be as tight as an offsite system. But, it is educational by itself to learn how to telnet to port 25 and send a hoax e-mail from Jesus Christ or from your professor. So is catching the hoaxer by looking at the message paths or catching a student admin reading others e-mails and putting him/her to public shame. Most of all, it's a critical part of education to realize that just because you can look at other people's files does not mean you should.
If we remove the educational value of students interacting with each other and learning both skills and morals they will need to function in the outside world for the rest of their lives, we might as well outsource the whole university instead of just the e-mail system. Why not just have some good professors from India read the lecture and answer questions through online chat? Will certainly save students some money...
It seams that a notebook using a conventional 200GB hard drive with a 16GB flash cache would be pretty much indistinquisable in terms of battery life and performance. Cost and software complexity can be further lowered by using flash with fast read speed but slow writes. The operating system and some applications can then be installed on the flash partition while user data can go on the regular hard drive.
It seems better to put up with an occasional disk access than not to have an option to store your stuff at all.
That's because the other 50% of the time the wind is blowing in the wrong direction
What happens when the kite falls into water and the wind is not enough to lift it up wet? Or worse, what if it falls on top of the ship and hurts sailors, breaks things or rips? It seems we are too hasty to discard centuries of experience in designing sails, masts and lines. Even a spinnaker is at least tied to the top of the mast to keep it from falling and main sails are still useful in head and side winds.
So now you do not have to smuggle a nuclear bomb in a vending machine. Instead, just detonate a small conventional explosive next to this bath tub and you will probably render all 27000 homes powered by this thing unlivable. You can even set a second charge to fashion a kind of thermobaric bomb that detonates hydrogen from the reactor to ensure proper dispersal of radioactive waste.
What do you make of the self-described "shock and awe" campaign? How about use of vacuum bombs that are specifically design to terrify the enemy by killing victims in a particular slow and painful manner?
Do you mean that US military does not drop bombs on strategic targets in urban areas? How have we managed to kill 84 thousand civilians in Iraq if we "take pains to avoid that stuff"? Why have we been bombing foreign embassies and weddings? Do we or do we not impose economic sanctions on countries that are not an imminent threat in full knowledge that hundreds of thousands of children will starve to death or die in need of the most basic medical care?
Granted, if we want soldiers to act more like police officers we must send many times more troops, institute draft and suffer far greater casualties from our side. Death of people forced into military can also be considered civilians deaths, so perhaps it's better them than us. But lets not sugarcoat the very ugly reality or let real police officers act like soldiers in foreign land.
The law actually requires you to follow directions of a police officer and even help him in his duties when deputized. However, once detained you are entitled to have your charges explained to you and be released from custody once it's determined that you broke no laws.
A police officer's goal is to make sure nobody, including crime suspects, gets hurt on the scene. They are even supposed to risk their lives to a significant degree to ensure that, for example try to talk down the guy with a gun. Knowing what kind of hurt they are going to inflict on civilians is vital to help them choose an appropriate means of restraint for adversaries that do not appear very dangerous, like college students in a protest.
Soldiers, apart from possibly UN peacekeepers, do not have such a mandate and on the contrary are routinely commanded to kill a large number of small children and other innocent bystanders by dropping bombs. I would love to have this changed, but since US soldiers are not allowed to use chemical weapons, I wouldn't make them experience effects of tear gas.
Well, in United States I am protected against self incrimination in criminal cases. So if my life and freedom is at stake, I can refuse to give out the password. And if the police doesn't follow laws, I am screwed anyway. They can just plant the evidence rather than having me decrypt it.
Regardless, on my own computer I can at least delete files. With any sensitive information that could land me in trouble with government or significant others I would certainly use an encrypted filesystem and do a secure delete as soon as I am done with the file/e-mail message and probably before there is a court order requiring me to preserve evidence. The chances of the data been recovered after that are much slimmer than investigators pulling it out of Google backups or caches.
All right, put your info where you mouth is. Please post in the following as a reply:
1. Your physical address and phone number as well as those of your friends
2. Where do your children go to school and the route they usually take while walking home?
3. Full history of your love life (so that we can inform all your romantic partners of each other's existence, especially at convenient times like wedding anniversaries or birth of your kids)
4. Photos of yourself smoking pot, shitfaced drunk and making out with barely familar persons of opposite (or same) gender. Wouldn't it be great if everyone giving you job interviews knew what a great guy/gal you are on a personal level?
Now tell me how difficult would it be for someone to get all this information from your e-mail, photos and documents?
When I connected an external hard drive, my computer asked me if I want to use it for backups and has done so since. My last backup was half an hour below and I can conveniently restore my files, folder or the entire computer to the state it was in a couple of month ago. My platform is not known for widespread malware infestations.
Now, when did Google last backup their e-mail? I accidentally deleted an important interview invitation a couple of months ago and would like them to restore it for me. Why do I get that sinking feeling...
What do you think is the probability that someone is going to dive into a can of used cat litter from my garbage on the particular day when I throw away my hard drive?
Did we really progress from naked MySpace photos to such a disregard to our own privacy that we do not mind putting ALL of our stuff online. Besides server compromises and XSS exploits, the data can be easily disclosed in even a simple civil or divorce court case. At least with your own computer you can delete the files, use encryption or simply throw the hard drive away in the dumpster. Besides, what happens if the provider decides to suddenly discontinue the service or start charging $50/month?
However, illegally, they would get away with it.
You are extremely naive if you think the state did this level of testing. Most probably the boss just cast 5 ballots, verified the results manually and declared that the machine works correctly. Even if they did honest testing at the usual government's level of sophistication, it was not anything that would be changed by rearranging boards.
It's not necessarily the raw Internet capacity that has to increase. New video and audio compression algorithms could dramatically reduce the bandwidth necessary for carrying the same. Protocols like BitTorrent naturally transfer most of the data through currently uncongested connections. Development and even implementation of such standards does not necessarily cost billions of dollars.
Now it's granted that we'll probably come up with some new and creative ways to use up the bandwidth such as realtime 3D video-conferencing.
Email for communications is as outdated as sex is for reproduction!
Why, didn't people communicate or have sex long before the first e-mail was ever sent?
Email for communications is as outdated as arranged marriages are for reproduction
Yes, but who knows if the chicken and the egg came first. Futuristic and somewhat risky innovations from Apple often influenced the rest of computer industry. Besides USB, Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet and flash drives+recordable CDs as floppy replacements, think about how the very first Macintosh did away with command line interface when it was not entirely practical on hardware of those days. The first systems were so memory-constrained that you had to switch floppies a dozen times to make a copy. But should Apple have released another command line-based OS instead of coming up with something that took Microsoft more than 10 years to catch up with?
My Mac doesn't have a VGA connector for analog monitors. Just like you could buy a USB floppy, I can buy a little dongle to connect to my DVI port if needed (actually I am using an ADC adapter for my older monitor). I don't see a big deal either way.
Sure, the copyright holder can do whatever he wants. However, by not making his work available in US, he can not claim limited time exclusive rights to his work under Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US constitution. He clearly does not intent to promote "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in US if nobody gets to see his work and I don't think our law should care about his activities abroad.
I don't know about your level of craziness, but there sure are crazy people who would love to travel as you without showing ID, commit crimes and have you serve their time in jail.
And what is exactly a big deal? How will CIA/whomever will use fingerprint evidence on US citizens from Japan? Unlike RFID, fingerprints can not be automatically scanned en masse from remote. You have to first detect a suspicious activity at a particular small, private location and only then it can be dusted for fingerprints. The activity at the location has to be unquestionably illegal. One can not deduce the content of your conversation with a decedent just by presence of your fingerprint in his apartment. On the other hand, a dead body is a valid cause to question all recent visitors.
I am more worried about California fasttrack lane and red light cameras than about this law. Unlike fingerprints, images of license plates can be easily OCRed and establish a very detailed profile of everyone's hour-by-hour whereabouts.
Prodigious creation of derivative works?
With modern technology and many billions of dollars in development costs, you would think someone would figure out to save an image of a just booted system and only rebuild it when configuration changes. Granted, the restored image will need to reopen files, restore network connections and deal with changed removable devices. But that's where those billions of dollars come in...
Proprietary math software is not a problem as long as the end result can be exported into a fully documented format and can be then verified by open software, including human mathematicians.