> Sure, keep the water pistols out of the elementary > schools, whatever. But there can't possibly be ANY > justification for banning nerf guns. NONE
Actually, in elementary school you would ban them for sure, at least from class, because they'd be a terrible distraction. If you've got a place where the kids can store things out of the way during class (e.g., lockers), you could allow them for recess only, but otherwise it's not worth the hassle, just tell the kids to leave them home. It's not like they don't have several hours of daylight left to play in after school lets out.
(Note that I'm not saying you'd never let the kids play. But something like a Nerf gun, just by being present, actively prevents anyone from paying attention in class, ever. You can make them stop shooting and put it down, but everyone in the room is still going to be looking at and thinking about the stupid thing. This is what I mean by "terrible distraction".)
Of course that reasoning doesn't apply to banning something from an entire college campus.
> Anyone who has had a childhood knows that nerfguns are BIG, NEON and shoot 3 inch long bright SPONGES.
Actually, I think that's only if you've had a childhood very *recently*.
In the eighties Nerf made sponge footballs, and except for being made of foam they looked a lot like regular footballs. (Well, they did come in different colors.) I think they made soccer balls too. There were various kinds of toy guns, some of which looked more like real guns than others. The ones that shot suction-cup darts were the most realistic ones I saw as a kid, because they were made of _black_ plastic, as opposed to translucent red and green and orange and whatnot like water pistols. (Super Soakers, or other water guns larger than your hand, are another toy that did not exist in the eighties. I kid you not. So naturally we punched holes in the lids of milk jugs and plastic orange juice bottles and whatnot, or made water balloons, or used the garden hose.) We also had those guns that launch ping-pong balls, but they don't look *anything* like firearms, no matter what color you make them.
> I say this being close to a number of cops who average drawing > their weapons once per 25~30years... but i'm in Canada so
It's about the same in rural areas in the US.
All that nonsense you see on TV about police drawing their weapons multiple times per hour and actually shooting people with them? That's pretty much Hollywood stuff, though the big cities are MUCH closer to it than rural areas. In the case of the poster who described his friend nearly being shot over a water gun, either the cop was deliberately exaggerating to scare the boys into compliance, or he lives in a city of over a million people, or both. Nobody would actually get shot for using a water gun anywhere I've ever lived (mostly medium-sized cities, in the range of six to twelve thousand people). In fact, almost all cases of people getting shot with firearms in the places I've lived have been hunting accidents of one sort or another.
Bowling Green is in the general vicinity of Toledo, but I don't think it's in the actual urban part of the city (in fact, I thing Bowling Green is pretty much a small city of its own, not really a suburb), so I'm pretty sure what's going on here is just a bunch of "what if a parent sues us" thinking.
Not in writing. But every employer I've worked for, in both the private and public sector, blue collar and white, has indicated that they are legally required to have employees off the clock for a break at least once for every five hours in a shift.
I suppose it's possible that it's state law (I'm in Ohio). But that would be kind of odd, because *most* of these sorts of requirements are federal, possibly with state a state law that says, in effect, "Oh, the same applies even if the employer doesn't do interstate commerce" (e.g., Ohio state minimum wage law is like that, last I checked).
> I always thought it was based on when the Hebrew calendar said the week of Passover was.
It was, originally, and _sort of_ still is.
But over the centuries, as the Jews and Christians codified the rules for their calendars differently, some differences have arisen.
At the time when the Western formula for Easter was set, the Jews tried pretty hard to keep the spring equinox in the first half of the first month (Nisan), so the Easter formula that was established assumes that to be the case -- but the modern Jewish calendar doesn't do that. Arguably, this is a deviation on the Jewish side that takes their calendar out of sync with where it should be.
Additionally, the Western formula for Easter assumes that the Gregorian calendar is always perfectly in sync with the astronomical solar year, and that isn't always necessarily true. (Over long numbers of years it tracks very closely, but in any given year it can be off by a little.) Arguably this is a deviation on the Christian side that takes our calendar out of sync with where it should be -- but in a different way from what the Jewish deviation does.
If we got rid of both deviations and reckoned both calendars in a way that kept them strictly in alignment with the astronomical solar year, then Easter Sunday would always be, if I understand correctly, the Sunday after the Passover Seder.
But the important thing, to my way of thinking, is not the exact date on which the events are celebrated, but the fact that they *are* celebrated. Though the date calculations are interesting. (Then again, I majored in math, so I may define "interesting" differently from some people.)
> These sort of articles... also explain when to expect such mechandise in your local stores.
I believe the general rule for that is "as soon as the bulk of the leftover marked-down Valentine's Day stuff is sold off", though some stores my codify this, e.g., the second Tuesday after the first Saturday after February 14. (That allows at least one full week after the advertisements with the marked-down prices for the Valentine's stuff go out in the weekly newspaper supplement, and guarantees that the shelf-stocking can be done on a Tuesday, the slowest business day for most retailers.) HTH.HAND.
There is no specific mandated figure in the US. It varies. It varies quite a bit.
Hourly employees, especially in unskilled positions, don't necessarily get paid time off. But they get paid at least 1.5 times their normal hourly rate if they go over 40 hours in any given week, and that _is_ mandated. And they get (unpaid) breaks every 4-5 hours (also mandated). And they often get more, depending on the employer and other factors (demand for labor, closed-shop unions, and so forth). For instance it is extremely common for an employer to also pay overtime (1.5 times the normal hourly rate) if you go over eight hours in a shift, though this is not mandated nationally. And some entire professions follow their own rules, e.g., medical workers do get paid time off even if they are hourly. I don't know if that's exactly mandated by law, but it may just about as well be, because nobody's ever heard of a hospital that doesn't provide the nurses with sick leave and paid vacation. The number of days or hours of it that you get typically increases over the years if you keep the same job.
Salaried employees typically get at least a week of paid vacation, but I don't think that's mandated by law. And some people get a lot more. It is not unusual to run into somebody that gets four weeks, and six is not unheard-of, and of course that doesn't count sick time.
Then there are teachers. They get almost all the time off that the students get, *plus* personal days, so that's somewhere in the neighborhood, if you add it all up, of almost four months, counting snow days and everything. Plus sick days. Plus, sometimes, professional development days for going to conferences and things. But they take most of it when the school district says they take it, so they can't for instance, just decide to take a week off in March. And sometimes there are rules about when they can take sick days and personal days, e.g., they may not be permitted to take off the Monday after a holiday just because "I don't feel well this morning".
Believe it or not, most of the really good scholarships come from the school itself. This is in general -- I don't know for sure about MIT or CalTech in particular -- but as a rule if the school decides they want you to attend their school, they will find a way to make it possible for you.
Of course, getting a high-profile school like MIT to decide they want you bad enough to offer you scholarships could take some doing.
> If I open my wireless network, I know it's open. I can secure the computers > behind with the knowledge that the wireless system is wide open.
You're thinking like an engineer: "How is this supposed to work?"
Try thinking like an enemy: "How could this be exploited to harm Bruce Schneier?"
The most obvious thing is to get a rental car, drive it through some mud until the plates aren't legible, and sit across the street from the guy's house and use his wireless network for... nefarious purposes. Sending spam via his ISP's mail server? Peer-to-peer child porn? Attacking government networks in a way that's likely to get noticed? So many possibilities.
And sitting across the street in a car for a while is only the really obvious attack. There are much more interesting things that can be done over the long term.
Not in numbers, but what it did say is that labs have been working on the idea for decades, but hydrogen compounds are hard to compress and they only just now finally managed to get it to work. I think it's reasonable to assume, therefore, that the pressures we're talking about are "laboratory-grade" pressures.
> it just isn't a full office suite without [Outlook]
To each his own, I guess. Where I come from, malware installation is *usually* not considered an important office activity, so a lot of us can really live without that. Besides, OO.o is supposed to be cross platform, and I'm really not sure how that sort of thing would really be implemented in a cross-platform way. It seems inherently platform-specific to me.
> not to say that thunderbird isn't bad or anything
Thunderbird pretty much just does email (albeit, not really very well). There are *lots* of programs available that do email, some much better than others, and I really don't see the need for OO.o to do that either. I mean, if email, then why not also web browsing -- but we already have good open-source web browsers. A really _good_ open-source email program, something along the lines of Pegasus, would be nice to have, but there's no particular reason for it to be part of OO.o really.
As far as Publisher, it does not as far as I'm aware really do anything that OO.o doesn't do better, unless you count limiting the user's options with a bunch of badly-designed and rigidly inflexible wizards as a feature.
There are some major improvements I'd like to see in OO.o, but they're more along the lines of stuff that would actually be useful in the context of the tasks that OO.o is designed for, like a decently usable UI for defining and applying styles (that would make it much easier to maintain some kinds of word processing documents), the ability to rotate objects to arbitrary angles, the ability to flow text from the end of one frame into the beginning of another, the ability to embed vector graphics (SVG, eps, and maybe even wmf if possible) the ability to have different page formats for different sections in a long document (which Word could do back in the days of Windows 3.1), something analogous to MS WordArt (only, hopefully, more flexible), a simpler setup wizard for connecting to backends in Base, the ability to force a pagebreak after certain rows or columns in Calc,... and, getting into the geekier, more power-user features... a straightforwardly usable recordable/editable macro system, a more complete spelling dictionary, incremental search, regular-expression support for search and replace, and so on and so forth.
Adding whole *kinds* of tasks to what it's intended to do seems much less useful and also much more likely to lead to unacceptable levels of bloat. I mean, if it's going to do email, why not also fifteen different IM and VOIP protocols, and videoconferencing, and... Ugh. Let communications software handle communications features, and let the office software handle document creation.
> It's been said businesses have been waiting for SP1 to make the move.
I believe what I heard was that businesses were waiting on the service packs before making the move.
So that could mean SP1, SP2, or SP3, depending on how adventuresome, cautious, or outright resistant to change the business in question is.
Which is pretty much the same as with previous Windows versions. Some people moved to XP as soon as SP1 came out, others waited for SP2, and there are a few that still haven't made the move.
> You're wrong about world perfect- MS Office has always been the premiere office suite.
Umm, MS Office hasn't always existed.
When WordPerfect was the leading word processing software, the only component of what is now Office that actually existed was Word, but it was nowhere near as well-known and popular as Word Perfect. There were also still people who swore by WordStar, in a get-off-my-lawn sort of way. The major spreadsheet was Lotus 123, and the major database (on microcomputers) was dbase. Microsoft Works existed, but it was... not very featureful.
We're about the eighties here, though, when people were still using DOS 5, and *all* of the above-mentioned software ran in text mode, so it didn't matter what kind of graphics adaptor you had. (MDA would even work if you didn't need color.) You also didn't need a 386 to run any of this -- it would run just fine on an 8086, and run pretty well if you had a full 640K of RAM.
The other poster seems to imply (though he does not directly state) that WP was still superior in 1996 when Windows 95 came out. This is not the case. His post is sufficiently disorganized that I'm not certain if it's something he *meant* to imply, or a symptom of poor communication, but in either case that's off by several years.
Anyway, when Windows 3.x came out, Word was updated to support it much faster than WordPerfect was, and furthermore the Windows version of Word actually fit in the GUI environment and looked like it belonged and adhered to the standard conventions; whereas, WordPerfect, like always, did everything Its Own Way. This doesn't necessarily mean it was a worse word processing suite objectively, but it looked and felt worse, *especially* to people who had never used DOS, and due to the exponential growth of the popularity of PCs during those years such people rapidly became the majority.
WP has since conformed to industry standards rather better, but the first for-Windows version of WordPerfect was pretty much just WordPerfect for DOS with basic WYSIWYG support for fonts and such. By the time Windows 95 came out, WordPerfect had pretty well been relegated to a few niche markets and was fading in popularity pretty fast. The only people who wanted to use it were people who had previously used and liked WordPerfect for DOS.
I flew one round trip in the post-9/11 world, in September 2005, from Cleveland Hopkins to Syracuse NY, and back a week later. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. To me the major difference between that flight and the pre-9/11 flight from Cinci to Phoenix that I took in the nineties, was that the 2005 flight was on a smaller plane with only three seats per row, compared to the four seats per row of the one I flew on in the nineties. Also the Syracuse airport is much smaller than the one in Phoenix.
Okay, so I had to take off my shoes and put them through the conveyor in a little plastic bin, which is probably pointless, but it also took approximately fifteen seconds, so it wasn't exactly a big hairy deal. The whole process of going through the line didn't take more than fifteen minutes, a tiny fraction of the time I subsequently spent trekking across the astonishing endless vastness of the airport (which I swear is at least ten times larger on the inside than on the outside) to reach the gate my flight was leaving from.
In order to give all the people who whine endlessly about the TSA the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume that my experience was *extremely* atypical. Admittedly, it was just one trip, so definitely not a statistically significant sample. Still, there's this nagging doubt in the back of my mind that says maybe, just maybe, the people doing most of the complaining are just a bunch of pathetic whiners making a big fuss over nothing.
I suppose the truth is probably somewhere in between. Probably my experience *was* atypically smooth, but also probably a lot of the complaining *is* coming from pathetic whiners.
Of course, I don't have a laptop, much less a laptop bag. I don't travel often enough to make me want to put up with a miniaturized keyboard with no tactile feedback, a severely inferior pointing device, a small display that does not cope well with different resolutions, a case that doesn't have room for extra drives, and so on and so forth. So I have a desktop computer, which I did not attempt to take with me on my plane flight.
It isn't in the President's job description to make the US popular overseas. In fact, if the President were pandering to Europe, I would view that as an inappropriate neglect of his duties to the nation that elected him.
Not that I agree with everything the current administration has done. I don't, at least, not entirely. Nonetheless, Europeans have no business whatsoever thinking that their opinions out to influence the actions of the US President. We don't tell *your* elected officials what to do. Go jump in a lake.
> The UK [...] is made up of 4 constituent countries.
Yeah...
> Not states like the US, but separate nations (and not everyone is too chuffed about that, either).
Semantic games. In fairness, the US played approximately the same semantic games for the first roughly century and a half of its existence, and settled the matter via a bloody civil war, with an ugly "reconstruction" period afterward that left some unfortunate marks on our culture. So perhaps the British way of dealing with the matter, i.e., continuing to play the semantic games, is better.
I find it odd that some of your "constituent countries" can't even raise taxes independently of your federal/national/whatever government. I find it even odder, decidedly undemocratic, and a bit anacronistic, that they do not have equal standing. (The word "reserved" is also used in a way that's approximately backwards to how it's used in the US, where a "reserved power" is something that the federal government is not supposed to be able to do anything about, though in practice they sometimes get around that by offering money with strings attached to the states out of federal taxes, which *ought* to have been unconstitutional but the founding fathers probably just weren't devious enough and/or jaded enough to think of it.)
> Scotland was a completely independent nation until quite recently, falling in bed with England in 1707
"The difference between the US and the UK is, the English think a hundred miles is a long ways, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time."
Seriously, world political geography looked a *LOT* different in 1707. Almost every nation on the planet had different borders then in one place or another, and many (including Germany, Italy, and the United States) did not exist. And yet, somehow, we must get over that and accept the way things are now if we are to ever move forward. Otherwise we'll be glaring at one another and making fools of ourselves with laughably ridiculous assertions, like China with its preposterous One China Policy, which has about the same relationship with reality that hexane has with water.
> Right now there's a big hooha about powers for Holyrood; most of the major parties agree the > parliament should have more powers, but they range from the Labour party who want to give over > as few as possible (they're also in charge of the current UK government and very pro-union, > anti-scots-independence) to the SNP, who of course want independence...
In the US we called this debate "states' rights", and we (mostly) settled it via a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century. There are even people in the South who are still bitter about it. But not very many these days, as a percentage. (There's historically always been a fair bit of state-to-state population shift within the US, and a lot of us had ancestors on both sides... I know I did. I live in north-central Ohio, and there are a *lot* of people around here whose grandparents were from Kentucky, for instance, not to mention all the people whose ancestors immigrated from Europe in the twentieth century...)
> One of the smaller parties in the last Scots parliament was the Scottish Socialist Party... > put it this way, they have a red flag and read a lot of Russian literature, ja?
Da, we have a Communist Party in the US as well, but it never gets any electoral votes (heck, it never even gets close enough to smell them), and w
Actually, I'm on one mailing list where Dublin would normally refer to the suburb of Columbus. However, that's a local usergroup mailing list, albeit for a fairly large region. Normally if I saw a reference to Dublin on the internet I would assume the one in Ireland. Rome and Paris, likewise, I would assume to be the ones in Italy and France respectively. Similarly, it isn't necessary to spell out "Baghdad, Iraq" or "Rio de Janiero, Brasil" in full every time. (In fact, I've seen the latter abbreviated to just "Rio".)
But that's *not* true for all city names, not even all names of fairly well-known cities. Lexington, for instance, is quite thoroughly ambiguous. For an Old World example, try Antioch. For an example that crosses the water, try Toledo or Memphis. I've also seen unqualified references to Cambridge, in an international context, that in the larger context of what was being said were very obviously referring to the one in Massachussetts. (In fairness, this was in the context of organic chemistry, an industry with a major presence in that city.)
As far as states, most countries of any significant size do have them. They just don't always call them "states". Japan for instance calls them "prefectures". (Well, actually, they call them something in Japanese, but "prefectures" is the usual English translation.) Canada calls them "provinces". The UK, just to be completely contrary to all normal logic, calls them "countries". Whatever, it's the same thing. Getting upset over what exactly they're called is, in a word, silly, particularly if you know very well what is meant. (Of course, I've seen sites with a drop-down list of states and fifty choices, which is a bit of a gaffe...)
> vouchers deemed valid only for the sell-off. This should avoid inflationary effects.
I'd be interested in hearing an explanation for *why* that would avoid the problems normally associated with populist redistribution-of-property measures. Because my instincts tell me that it is the sudden redistribution of property itself that is the problem, not the method by which it is redistributed.
Macroeconomics is a bit complicated, so I could be missing something, but as I understand it this is what happens: the sudden redistribution of property creates a situation where most of the people with the property (whether we're talking land, capital goods, whatever, the principle is the same) are relatively new owners with little experience, and so they have a lot of warm fuzzy ideas in their heads but little practical knowledge about how to harness the property in question as a means of production. Consequently, the tax base contracts markedly. The government then finds itself with inadequate revenue to pay for the services the people are demanding, so they either just print all the money they need (which directly expands the money supply, the most obvious, direct, and well-understood way to create inflation that there is) or else finance everything with large amounts of foreign debt, eroding international public confidence in the nation's government and currency and driving exchange rates into a nasty tailspin that leads to hyperinflation. Or the government can drastically reduce the public services it provides, but that can be politically very hard to do and can lead to a revolution or, in the case of an elected government, it generally gets someone elected next term who promises to bring back the services by whatever means necessary, and that puts you back in your hyperinflationary spiral.
Also, sudden redistribution of property risks eroding public confidence (both nationally and internationally) in the security of property rights in your country. Foreign private-sector investment in anything and everything in your country can dry up real fast. The risk of this is rather smaller when the property being redistributed was formerly state-owned than when it was privately owned, but it's still something you want to be careful about. International public opinion can jump to conclusions and you have to deal with the consequences.
As I said, giving the stuff to the people sounds nice on the surface, but it's not advisable, at least not without a great deal of study and caution, because sudden redistribution like that can have some quite nasty unpleasant economic side effects.
> *but* US should say out of Cuban politics for *many* reasons that have nothing to do with policeman of the world.
I agree with some of your reasons, but not others.
> 1. Cold War is over > 2. Communism is not a "threat" - it is a political/economic system that doesn't work
Indeed. This is basically the same reason, two ways of saying the same thing. Nonetheless, it's a *good* reason. With the curtain down, the communist government of Cuba is not a problem for the US like it was during the cold war, and Cuba is not a large enough economy to matter very much one way or the other as a trading partner. The main impact of Cuba on the US is in the form of a steady trickle of immigrants, which on the whole is mostly a good thing.
> 3. Cuba's communism is not as bad as many gov'ts that US has put in place because the countries in > question had *democratically* *elected* socialist governments. Peru is an example. Panama. Nicaragua.
Panama wouldn't matter if they didn't have the canal, which they wouldn't have if the US hadn't done what we did. (I'm not saying what we did was right, but I am saying that if the current Panamanian government is a problem for the US it's only because we care about having access to the canal.)
Anyway, your main point here seems to be that you believe the result, if the US were to intervene in Cuban politics, would be a worse government than what Cuba has now. I'll concede that's a possibility, but this is a much weaker argument than the first one, because, fundamentally, in terms of US interests, the government of Cuba doesn't matter, one way or the other. A worse government, quite frankly, wouldn't be a particularly worrisome outcome.
> 4. China? China's communism and nationalism is a much larger threat than Cuba ever was
I don't consider China a threat, but for very different reasons from Cuba.
The Chinese have their own (decidedly Eastern) way of looking at the world, but they are looking at the same world we are looking at. They have their own (decidedly Eastern) way of refining their approach, but they _do_ refine it. When something they've been doing clearly doesn't work, they find a way to do it differently.
China's form of communism is different from and more viable than Soviet communism precisely because it embraces things that were not part of the original plan, most notably property rights and market capitalism. (They don't have to _call_ them property rights and market capitalism. Indeed, didn't Deng Xiaoping call it "socialism with Chinese characteristics"? Whatever, it still works.)
It is taking time, but China is, by experimentation, figuring out what they need to do, and doing it, just as the major Western economic powerhouses have done and are doing. That's not Soviet communism. Soviet communism stuck doggedly to Marxist central planning until the economy of Eastern Europe had completely collapsed, and only then they started looking at alternatives. China's approach is different, and, quite frankly, more intelligent: rather than running with a non-working system until it runs into the ground, they are reinventing the system piece by piece so that it works. Indeed, by the time they have finished reinventing it, I am convinced that Chinese communism won't really be recognizeable as communism (in the traditional sense of that word) at all.
Of course, I do not now consider Soviet communism a threat either, because the world knows that it did not work. That's a very different reason. Cuba's irrelevance is due to that failure as well.
Whereas, China's not being a threat is due to their ability to _succeed_, and to become a part of the global economy.
> 5. Don't bring up the "Cuban Missile Crises"
Irrelevant. The cold war is over.
> 6. Batista was a corrupt ass and US in fifties were bunch of racists - Cuba's > revolution was the natural outcome of US's corrupt influence there at the time. > 7. Castro wasn't a
> The US should push for Cuban property to be given (or sold) to the Cuban population.
Sold, maybe. Not given. I know, giving the stuff to the people sounds good on the surface, but economically speaking, in terms of the actual results, populism is even worse than communism. Yes, really. Communism creates surplusses and shortages, which is not good, but populism invariably creates multi-digit inflation, which is worse. This scenario has played out numerous times in other Latin American countries, and Cuba would not be wise to follow in their footsteps. Look at what happened in Zimbabwe when the government redistributed land to more of the population. Look at what happened in Argentina each time property was redistributed. Look at what happened in Brazil. Spreading the wealth out to the poor _sounds_ real nice, but the results are consistently not good.
According to Adam Smith and Alan Greenspan, the most important thing (in economic terms) that the government needs to do is to protect personal property rights, i.e., to make sure that people and companies can keep the money that they earn (and the assets that they build) or spend it as they see fit. (Obviously there are things that the government needs to do for other, non-ecomonic reasons, but this is the economists' perspective on what needs to be done.) When property rights are secure, the markets function.
If there's a second economic thing the government needs to do, in my opinion, it is to provide a stable currency.
The article summary sounds for all the world like a description of a burstable connection, which is widely considered a selling point. I'm not sure how _valuable_ a feature it is, but a lot of ISPs advertise it, along the lines of "768 KBPS downstream bandwidth, burstable to 1.5MBPS" or similar. This has been around for a long time. In fact, I am almost certain burstable connections were around before DSL.
> But if a hardware vendor doesn't make vista drivers, it's their problem not microsoft's.
You mean it's the hardware vendor's _fault_, not Microsoft's.
It's the _customer's_ problem to figure out what's compatible with what before they buy, and if they don't bother then it's their problem to figure out how to deal with the results. If they aren't sufficiently educated about the relevant issues to actually know what the problem is, then they're generally going to blame the thing they just got, since what they already had worked fine before. That means if they buy new hardware that doesn't work with their existing software, they're usually going to blame the hardware, but if they buy new software that doesn't work with their existing hardware, they're usually going to blame the software.
And that makes it Microsoft's problem, even if it's not their fault. Hence, the question on the quiz. I doubt that's an effective means to deal with the problem, of course, since small-time system builders like the quiz targets have no significant influence on what hardware drivers do or do not get written.
What they should be doing is offering the hardware vendors concessions or deals or something to support Vista more completely, e.g., after such-and-such a date you can only get the cheapest OEM price for Vista if you have working Vista drivers for all of the hardware you've sold in the last five years.
Or they could write the drivers themselves. Other OS makers have been known to take that approach. It would require significant resources, but Microsoft has significant resources. But I tend to think they could get better results faster and cheaper by incentivising the hardware vendors.
> From what I recall, the general sentiment was pretty much the same when XP was released
Yeah, it was.
You want to remember why? Get yourself an early copy of XP (before they started including the service packs on the CD), install it, and then try to use the computer like that, without any of the updates. Go ahead, try it. You'll be amazed at what you've forgotten about how bad XP was when it was new. Oh, yeah, don't forget to try to install some contemporary third-party software that was clearly designed for Windows 98 and rush-certified as theoretically able to be run under XP. Also don't forget to try to set up the peer-to-peer networking to share printers with a Windows 98 system. Haha.
Here's the thing: you can beta test up to a point, but there are whole categories of bugs you never find until you turn the real users loose on it. It takes a while to get those pinned down.
Windows 95 was pretty bad until OSR2 came out, and even then its compatibility with DOS-based software left a lot to be desired, so it wasn't until pretty much all third-party software had been updated for Windows 95 that it really came into its own. Windows XP, initially, was a real pain, but by the time you get all the updates installed now, you've actually got something more-or-less usable. It's not what _I_ want to use... but then neither was any other version of Windows. If you compare an XP install that's current with all its updates up against other Windows versions, then XP doesn't look so bad.
Same with Vista. It's a new product. Therefore, it's not a mature product. Duh. Give it time.
> Here's an easy test to see if you're dealing with a "shared secret" as the term is used in the context > of secure system: If every detail of your security system - including your shared secret - is discovered > by an attacker, you can easily generate a new shared secret and have all the security you had before.
I'm not totally convinced that's entirely valid, even with a traditional password. Once a system has been compromised, you don't know what the attacker may have done that you don't know about. You can create a new password, sure, but maybe the attacker finds out what it is the first time you log in. Even if you can keep the new password secret to the same degree as the old one (and that's a pretty big "if"), what stops the attacker from repeating the original, successful, attack?
When an attacker compromises your security, I think it's important to try to understand how and why your security failed, and adjust the design of your security to (at least try to) prevent the same thing from happening again. That way the attacker will at least have to come up with a different approach next time.
> PRNG algorithms (or any other sort of algorithm) are generally not designed to be frequently and easily changed,
That's true, but it's also true (and, in my opinion, at least as relevant) that algorithms have been historically proven to be reliably impossible to keep secret.
However, the two concepts are somewhat related. The reason you change passwords periodically is precisely because that improves the odds of keeping them secret. If a given password has a complexity level such that you suspect it could be brute forced on average in ten years, and you only change it once a month, the odds that any given attacker can brute force it are still on the order of 1%, each month, which is way too high when there may be multiple attackers. So you either pick a much stronger password or you change it rather more often.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been known to browse the web using Arachne on DOS 5.
> Sure, keep the water pistols out of the elementary
> schools, whatever. But there can't possibly be ANY
> justification for banning nerf guns. NONE
Actually, in elementary school you would ban them for sure, at least from class, because they'd be a terrible distraction. If you've got a place where the kids can store things out of the way during class (e.g., lockers), you could allow them for recess only, but otherwise it's not worth the hassle, just tell the kids to leave them home. It's not like they don't have several hours of daylight left to play in after school lets out.
(Note that I'm not saying you'd never let the kids play. But something like a Nerf gun, just by being present, actively prevents anyone from paying attention in class, ever. You can make them stop shooting and put it down, but everyone in the room is still going to be looking at and thinking about the stupid thing. This is what I mean by "terrible distraction".)
Of course that reasoning doesn't apply to banning something from an entire college campus.
> What business have parents complaining about 18 year old adults?
In the US, most 18-year-olds are still financially dependent on their parents. He who pays the bills gets to make rules.
I'm not sure why the parents are complaining about Nerf of all things, but that's another matter.
> Anyone who has had a childhood knows that nerfguns are BIG, NEON and shoot 3 inch long bright SPONGES.
Actually, I think that's only if you've had a childhood very *recently*.
In the eighties Nerf made sponge footballs, and except for being made of foam they looked a lot like regular footballs. (Well, they did come in different colors.) I think they made soccer balls too. There were various kinds of toy guns, some of which looked more like real guns than others. The ones that shot suction-cup darts were the most realistic ones I saw as a kid, because they were made of _black_ plastic, as opposed to translucent red and green and orange and whatnot like water pistols. (Super Soakers, or other water guns larger than your hand, are another toy that did not exist in the eighties. I kid you not. So naturally we punched holes in the lids of milk jugs and plastic orange juice bottles and whatnot, or made water balloons, or used the garden hose.) We also had those guns that launch ping-pong balls, but they don't look *anything* like firearms, no matter what color you make them.
> I say this being close to a number of cops who average drawing ... but i'm in Canada so
> their weapons once per 25~30years
It's about the same in rural areas in the US.
All that nonsense you see on TV about police drawing their weapons multiple times per hour and actually shooting people with them? That's pretty much Hollywood stuff, though the big cities are MUCH closer to it than rural areas. In the case of the poster who described his friend nearly being shot over a water gun, either the cop was deliberately exaggerating to scare the boys into compliance, or he lives in a city of over a million people, or both. Nobody would actually get shot for using a water gun anywhere I've ever lived (mostly medium-sized cities, in the range of six to twelve thousand people). In fact, almost all cases of people getting shot with firearms in the places I've lived have been hunting accidents of one sort or another.
Bowling Green is in the general vicinity of Toledo, but I don't think it's in the actual urban part of the city (in fact, I thing Bowling Green is pretty much a small city of its own, not really a suburb), so I'm pretty sure what's going on here is just a bunch of "what if a parent sues us" thinking.
> Got any reference to cite for this?
Not in writing. But every employer I've worked for, in both the private and public sector, blue collar and white, has indicated that they are legally required to have employees off the clock for a break at least once for every five hours in a shift.
I suppose it's possible that it's state law (I'm in Ohio). But that would be kind of odd, because *most* of these sorts of requirements are federal, possibly with state a state law that says, in effect, "Oh, the same applies even if the employer doesn't do interstate commerce" (e.g., Ohio state minimum wage law is like that, last I checked).
> I always thought it was based on when the Hebrew calendar said the week of Passover was.
It was, originally, and _sort of_ still is.
But over the centuries, as the Jews and Christians codified the rules for their calendars differently, some differences have arisen.
At the time when the Western formula for Easter was set, the Jews tried pretty hard to keep the spring equinox in the first half of the first month (Nisan), so the Easter formula that was established assumes that to be the case -- but the modern Jewish calendar doesn't do that. Arguably, this is a deviation on the Jewish side that takes their calendar out of sync with where it should be.
Additionally, the Western formula for Easter assumes that the Gregorian calendar is always perfectly in sync with the astronomical solar year, and that isn't always necessarily true. (Over long numbers of years it tracks very closely, but in any given year it can be off by a little.) Arguably this is a deviation on the Christian side that takes our calendar out of sync with where it should be -- but in a different way from what the Jewish deviation does.
If we got rid of both deviations and reckoned both calendars in a way that kept them strictly in alignment with the astronomical solar year, then Easter Sunday would always be, if I understand correctly, the Sunday after the Passover Seder.
But the important thing, to my way of thinking, is not the exact date on which the events are celebrated, but the fact that they *are* celebrated. Though the date calculations are interesting. (Then again, I majored in math, so I may define "interesting" differently from some people.)
> These sort of articles ... also explain when to expect such mechandise in your local stores.
I believe the general rule for that is "as soon as the bulk of the leftover marked-down Valentine's Day stuff is sold off", though some stores my codify this, e.g., the second Tuesday after the first Saturday after February 14. (That allows at least one full week after the advertisements with the marked-down prices for the Valentine's stuff go out in the weekly newspaper supplement, and guarantees that the shelf-stocking can be done on a Tuesday, the slowest business day for most retailers.) HTH.HAND.
> Which seems a lot compared to the US 11 or 12
There is no specific mandated figure in the US. It varies. It varies quite a bit.
Hourly employees, especially in unskilled positions, don't necessarily get paid time off. But they get paid at least 1.5 times their normal hourly rate if they go over 40 hours in any given week, and that _is_ mandated. And they get (unpaid) breaks every 4-5 hours (also mandated). And they often get more, depending on the employer and other factors (demand for labor, closed-shop unions, and so forth). For instance it is extremely common for an employer to also pay overtime (1.5 times the normal hourly rate) if you go over eight hours in a shift, though this is not mandated nationally. And some entire professions follow their own rules, e.g., medical workers do get paid time off even if they are hourly. I don't know if that's exactly mandated by law, but it may just about as well be, because nobody's ever heard of a hospital that doesn't provide the nurses with sick leave and paid vacation. The number of days or hours of it that you get typically increases over the years if you keep the same job.
Salaried employees typically get at least a week of paid vacation, but I don't think that's mandated by law. And some people get a lot more. It is not unusual to run into somebody that gets four weeks, and six is not unheard-of, and of course that doesn't count sick time.
Then there are teachers. They get almost all the time off that the students get, *plus* personal days, so that's somewhere in the neighborhood, if you add it all up, of almost four months, counting snow days and everything. Plus sick days. Plus, sometimes, professional development days for going to conferences and things. But they take most of it when the school district says they take it, so they can't for instance, just decide to take a week off in March. And sometimes there are rules about when they can take sick days and personal days, e.g., they may not be permitted to take off the Monday after a holiday just because "I don't feel well this morning".
Believe it or not, most of the really good scholarships come from the school itself. This is in general -- I don't know for sure about MIT or CalTech in particular -- but as a rule if the school decides they want you to attend their school, they will find a way to make it possible for you.
Of course, getting a high-profile school like MIT to decide they want you bad enough to offer you scholarships could take some doing.
> If I open my wireless network, I know it's open. I can secure the computers
> behind with the knowledge that the wireless system is wide open.
You're thinking like an engineer: "How is this supposed to work?"
Try thinking like an enemy: "How could this be exploited to harm Bruce Schneier?"
The most obvious thing is to get a rental car, drive it through some mud until the plates aren't legible, and sit across the street from the guy's house and use his wireless network for... nefarious purposes. Sending spam via his ISP's mail server? Peer-to-peer child porn? Attacking government networks in a way that's likely to get noticed? So many possibilities.
And sitting across the street in a car for a while is only the really obvious attack. There are much more interesting things that can be done over the long term.
> It doesn't say how much "super pressure" is.
Not in numbers, but what it did say is that labs have been working on the idea for decades, but hydrogen compounds are hard to compress and they only just now finally managed to get it to work. I think it's reasonable to assume, therefore, that the pressures we're talking about are "laboratory-grade" pressures.
> it just isn't a full office suite without [Outlook]
... and, getting into the geekier, more power-user features... a straightforwardly usable recordable/editable macro system, a more complete spelling dictionary, incremental search, regular-expression support for search and replace, and so on and so forth.
To each his own, I guess. Where I come from, malware installation is *usually* not considered an important office activity, so a lot of us can really live without that. Besides, OO.o is supposed to be cross platform, and I'm really not sure how that sort of thing would really be implemented in a cross-platform way. It seems inherently platform-specific to me.
> not to say that thunderbird isn't bad or anything
Thunderbird pretty much just does email (albeit, not really very well). There are *lots* of programs available that do email, some much better than others, and I really don't see the need for OO.o to do that either. I mean, if email, then why not also web browsing -- but we already have good open-source web browsers. A really _good_ open-source email program, something along the lines of Pegasus, would be nice to have, but there's no particular reason for it to be part of OO.o really.
As far as Publisher, it does not as far as I'm aware really do anything that OO.o doesn't do better, unless you count limiting the user's options with a bunch of badly-designed and rigidly inflexible wizards as a feature.
There are some major improvements I'd like to see in OO.o, but they're more along the lines of stuff that would actually be useful in the context of the tasks that OO.o is designed for, like a decently usable UI for defining and applying styles (that would make it much easier to maintain some kinds of word processing documents), the ability to rotate objects to arbitrary angles, the ability to flow text from the end of one frame into the beginning of another, the ability to embed vector graphics (SVG, eps, and maybe even wmf if possible) the ability to have different page formats for different sections in a long document (which Word could do back in the days of Windows 3.1), something analogous to MS WordArt (only, hopefully, more flexible), a simpler setup wizard for connecting to backends in Base, the ability to force a pagebreak after certain rows or columns in Calc,
Adding whole *kinds* of tasks to what it's intended to do seems much less useful and also much more likely to lead to unacceptable levels of bloat. I mean, if it's going to do email, why not also fifteen different IM and VOIP protocols, and videoconferencing, and... Ugh. Let communications software handle communications features, and let the office software handle document creation.
> It's been said businesses have been waiting for SP1 to make the move.
I believe what I heard was that businesses were waiting on the service packs before making the move.
So that could mean SP1, SP2, or SP3, depending on how adventuresome, cautious, or outright resistant to change the business in question is.
Which is pretty much the same as with previous Windows versions. Some people moved to XP as soon as SP1 came out, others waited for SP2, and there are a few that still haven't made the move.
> You're wrong about world perfect- MS Office has always been the premiere office suite.
Umm, MS Office hasn't always existed.
When WordPerfect was the leading word processing software, the only component of what is now Office that actually existed was Word, but it was nowhere near as well-known and popular as Word Perfect. There were also still people who swore by WordStar, in a get-off-my-lawn sort of way. The major spreadsheet was Lotus 123, and the major database (on microcomputers) was dbase. Microsoft Works existed, but it was... not very featureful.
We're about the eighties here, though, when people were still using DOS 5, and *all* of the above-mentioned software ran in text mode, so it didn't matter what kind of graphics adaptor you had. (MDA would even work if you didn't need color.) You also didn't need a 386 to run any of this -- it would run just fine on an 8086, and run pretty well if you had a full 640K of RAM.
The other poster seems to imply (though he does not directly state) that WP was still superior in 1996 when Windows 95 came out. This is not the case. His post is sufficiently disorganized that I'm not certain if it's something he *meant* to imply, or a symptom of poor communication, but in either case that's off by several years.
Anyway, when Windows 3.x came out, Word was updated to support it much faster than WordPerfect was, and furthermore the Windows version of Word actually fit in the GUI environment and looked like it belonged and adhered to the standard conventions; whereas, WordPerfect, like always, did everything Its Own Way. This doesn't necessarily mean it was a worse word processing suite objectively, but it looked and felt worse, *especially* to people who had never used DOS, and due to the exponential growth of the popularity of PCs during those years such people rapidly became the majority.
WP has since conformed to industry standards rather better, but the first for-Windows version of WordPerfect was pretty much just WordPerfect for DOS with basic WYSIWYG support for fonts and such. By the time Windows 95 came out, WordPerfect had pretty well been relegated to a few niche markets and was fading in popularity pretty fast. The only people who wanted to use it were people who had previously used and liked WordPerfect for DOS.
I flew one round trip in the post-9/11 world, in September 2005, from Cleveland Hopkins to Syracuse NY, and back a week later. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. To me the major difference between that flight and the pre-9/11 flight from Cinci to Phoenix that I took in the nineties, was that the 2005 flight was on a smaller plane with only three seats per row, compared to the four seats per row of the one I flew on in the nineties. Also the Syracuse airport is much smaller than the one in Phoenix.
Okay, so I had to take off my shoes and put them through the conveyor in a little plastic bin, which is probably pointless, but it also took approximately fifteen seconds, so it wasn't exactly a big hairy deal. The whole process of going through the line didn't take more than fifteen minutes, a tiny fraction of the time I subsequently spent trekking across the astonishing endless vastness of the airport (which I swear is at least ten times larger on the inside than on the outside) to reach the gate my flight was leaving from.
In order to give all the people who whine endlessly about the TSA the benefit of the doubt, I have to assume that my experience was *extremely* atypical. Admittedly, it was just one trip, so definitely not a statistically significant sample. Still, there's this nagging doubt in the back of my mind that says maybe, just maybe, the people doing most of the complaining are just a bunch of pathetic whiners making a big fuss over nothing.
I suppose the truth is probably somewhere in between. Probably my experience *was* atypically smooth, but also probably a lot of the complaining *is* coming from pathetic whiners.
Of course, I don't have a laptop, much less a laptop bag. I don't travel often enough to make me want to put up with a miniaturized keyboard with no tactile feedback, a severely inferior pointing device, a small display that does not cope well with different resolutions, a case that doesn't have room for extra drives, and so on and so forth. So I have a desktop computer, which I did not attempt to take with me on my plane flight.
It isn't in the President's job description to make the US popular overseas. In fact, if the President were pandering to Europe, I would view that as an inappropriate neglect of his duties to the nation that elected him.
Not that I agree with everything the current administration has done. I don't, at least, not entirely. Nonetheless, Europeans have no business whatsoever thinking that their opinions out to influence the actions of the US President. We don't tell *your* elected officials what to do. Go jump in a lake.
> The UK [...] is made up of 4 constituent countries.
Yeah...
> Not states like the US, but separate nations (and not everyone is too chuffed about that, either).
Semantic games. In fairness, the US played approximately the same semantic games for the first roughly century and a half of its existence, and settled the matter via a bloody civil war, with an ugly "reconstruction" period afterward that left some unfortunate marks on our culture. So perhaps the British way of dealing with the matter, i.e., continuing to play the semantic games, is better.
I find it odd that some of your "constituent countries" can't even raise taxes independently of your federal/national/whatever government. I find it even odder, decidedly undemocratic, and a bit anacronistic, that they do not have equal standing. (The word "reserved" is also used in a way that's approximately backwards to how it's used in the US, where a "reserved power" is something that the federal government is not supposed to be able to do anything about, though in practice they sometimes get around that by offering money with strings attached to the states out of federal taxes, which *ought* to have been unconstitutional but the founding fathers probably just weren't devious enough and/or jaded enough to think of it.)
> Scotland was a completely independent nation until quite recently, falling in bed with England in 1707
"The difference between the US and the UK is, the English think a hundred miles is a long ways, and Americans think a hundred years is a long time."
Seriously, world political geography looked a *LOT* different in 1707. Almost every nation on the planet had different borders then in one place or another, and many (including Germany, Italy, and the United States) did not exist. And yet, somehow, we must get over that and accept the way things are now if we are to ever move forward. Otherwise we'll be glaring at one another and making fools of ourselves with laughably ridiculous assertions, like China with its preposterous One China Policy, which has about the same relationship with reality that hexane has with water.
> Right now there's a big hooha about powers for Holyrood; most of the major parties agree the
> parliament should have more powers, but they range from the Labour party who want to give over
> as few as possible (they're also in charge of the current UK government and very pro-union,
> anti-scots-independence) to the SNP, who of course want independence...
In the US we called this debate "states' rights", and we (mostly) settled it via a bloody civil war in the nineteenth century. There are even people in the South who are still bitter about it. But not very many these days, as a percentage. (There's historically always been a fair bit of state-to-state population shift within the US, and a lot of us had ancestors on both sides... I know I did. I live in north-central Ohio, and there are a *lot* of people around here whose grandparents were from Kentucky, for instance, not to mention all the people whose ancestors immigrated from Europe in the twentieth century...)
> One of the smaller parties in the last Scots parliament was the Scottish Socialist Party...
> put it this way, they have a red flag and read a lot of Russian literature, ja?
Da, we have a Communist Party in the US as well, but it never gets any electoral votes (heck, it never even gets close enough to smell them), and w
Actually, I'm on one mailing list where Dublin would normally refer to the suburb of Columbus. However, that's a local usergroup mailing list, albeit for a fairly large region. Normally if I saw a reference to Dublin on the internet I would assume the one in Ireland. Rome and Paris, likewise, I would assume to be the ones in Italy and France respectively. Similarly, it isn't necessary to spell out "Baghdad, Iraq" or "Rio de Janiero, Brasil" in full every time. (In fact, I've seen the latter abbreviated to just "Rio".)
But that's *not* true for all city names, not even all names of fairly well-known cities. Lexington, for instance, is quite thoroughly ambiguous. For an Old World example, try Antioch. For an example that crosses the water, try Toledo or Memphis. I've also seen unqualified references to Cambridge, in an international context, that in the larger context of what was being said were very obviously referring to the one in Massachussetts. (In fairness, this was in the context of organic chemistry, an industry with a major presence in that city.)
As far as states, most countries of any significant size do have them. They just don't always call them "states". Japan for instance calls them "prefectures". (Well, actually, they call them something in Japanese, but "prefectures" is the usual English translation.) Canada calls them "provinces". The UK, just to be completely contrary to all normal logic, calls them "countries". Whatever, it's the same thing. Getting upset over what exactly they're called is, in a word, silly, particularly if you know very well what is meant. (Of course, I've seen sites with a drop-down list of states and fifty choices, which is a bit of a gaffe...)
> vouchers deemed valid only for the sell-off. This should avoid inflationary effects.
I'd be interested in hearing an explanation for *why* that would avoid the problems normally associated with populist redistribution-of-property measures. Because my instincts tell me that it is the sudden redistribution of property itself that is the problem, not the method by which it is redistributed.
Macroeconomics is a bit complicated, so I could be missing something, but as I understand it this is what happens: the sudden redistribution of property creates a situation where most of the people with the property (whether we're talking land, capital goods, whatever, the principle is the same) are relatively new owners with little experience, and so they have a lot of warm fuzzy ideas in their heads but little practical knowledge about how to harness the property in question as a means of production. Consequently, the tax base contracts markedly. The government then finds itself with inadequate revenue to pay for the services the people are demanding, so they either just print all the money they need (which directly expands the money supply, the most obvious, direct, and well-understood way to create inflation that there is) or else finance everything with large amounts of foreign debt, eroding international public confidence in the nation's government and currency and driving exchange rates into a nasty tailspin that leads to hyperinflation. Or the government can drastically reduce the public services it provides, but that can be politically very hard to do and can lead to a revolution or, in the case of an elected government, it generally gets someone elected next term who promises to bring back the services by whatever means necessary, and that puts you back in your hyperinflationary spiral.
Also, sudden redistribution of property risks eroding public confidence (both nationally and internationally) in the security of property rights in your country. Foreign private-sector investment in anything and everything in your country can dry up real fast. The risk of this is rather smaller when the property being redistributed was formerly state-owned than when it was privately owned, but it's still something you want to be careful about. International public opinion can jump to conclusions and you have to deal with the consequences.
As I said, giving the stuff to the people sounds nice on the surface, but it's not advisable, at least not without a great deal of study and caution, because sudden redistribution like that can have some quite nasty unpleasant economic side effects.
> *but* US should say out of Cuban politics for *many* reasons that have nothing to do with policeman of the world.
I agree with some of your reasons, but not others.
> 1. Cold War is over
> 2. Communism is not a "threat" - it is a political/economic system that doesn't work
Indeed. This is basically the same reason, two ways of saying the same thing. Nonetheless, it's a *good* reason. With the curtain down, the communist government of Cuba is not a problem for the US like it was during the cold war, and Cuba is not a large enough economy to matter very much one way or the other as a trading partner. The main impact of Cuba on the US is in the form of a steady trickle of immigrants, which on the whole is mostly a good thing.
> 3. Cuba's communism is not as bad as many gov'ts that US has put in place because the countries in
> question had *democratically* *elected* socialist governments. Peru is an example. Panama. Nicaragua.
Panama wouldn't matter if they didn't have the canal, which they wouldn't have if the US hadn't done what we did. (I'm not saying what we did was right, but I am saying that if the current Panamanian government is a problem for the US it's only because we care about having access to the canal.)
Anyway, your main point here seems to be that you believe the result, if the US were to intervene in Cuban politics, would be a worse government than what Cuba has now. I'll concede that's a possibility, but this is a much weaker argument than the first one, because, fundamentally, in terms of US interests, the government of Cuba doesn't matter, one way or the other. A worse government, quite frankly, wouldn't be a particularly worrisome outcome.
> 4. China? China's communism and nationalism is a much larger threat than Cuba ever was
I don't consider China a threat, but for very different reasons from Cuba.
The Chinese have their own (decidedly Eastern) way of looking at the world, but they are looking at the same world we are looking at. They have their own (decidedly Eastern) way of refining their approach, but they _do_ refine it. When something they've been doing clearly doesn't work, they find a way to do it differently.
China's form of communism is different from and more viable than Soviet communism precisely because it embraces things that were not part of the original plan, most notably property rights and market capitalism. (They don't have to _call_ them property rights and market capitalism. Indeed, didn't Deng Xiaoping call it "socialism with Chinese characteristics"? Whatever, it still works.)
It is taking time, but China is, by experimentation, figuring out what they need to do, and doing it, just as the major Western economic powerhouses have done and are doing. That's not Soviet communism. Soviet communism stuck doggedly to Marxist central planning until the economy of Eastern Europe had completely collapsed, and only then they started looking at alternatives. China's approach is different, and, quite frankly, more intelligent: rather than running with a non-working system until it runs into the ground, they are reinventing the system piece by piece so that it works. Indeed, by the time they have finished reinventing it, I am convinced that Chinese communism won't really be recognizeable as communism (in the traditional sense of that word) at all.
Of course, I do not now consider Soviet communism a threat either, because the world knows that it did not work. That's a very different reason. Cuba's irrelevance is due to that failure as well.
Whereas, China's not being a threat is due to their ability to _succeed_, and to become a part of the global economy.
> 5. Don't bring up the "Cuban Missile Crises"
Irrelevant. The cold war is over.
> 6. Batista was a corrupt ass and US in fifties were bunch of racists - Cuba's
> revolution was the natural outcome of US's corrupt influence there at the time.
> 7. Castro wasn't a
> The US should push for Cuban property to be given (or sold) to the Cuban population.
Sold, maybe. Not given. I know, giving the stuff to the people sounds good on the surface, but economically speaking, in terms of the actual results, populism is even worse than communism. Yes, really. Communism creates surplusses and shortages, which is not good, but populism invariably creates multi-digit inflation, which is worse. This scenario has played out numerous times in other Latin American countries, and Cuba would not be wise to follow in their footsteps. Look at what happened in Zimbabwe when the government redistributed land to more of the population. Look at what happened in Argentina each time property was redistributed. Look at what happened in Brazil. Spreading the wealth out to the poor _sounds_ real nice, but the results are consistently not good.
According to Adam Smith and Alan Greenspan, the most important thing (in economic terms) that the government needs to do is to protect personal property rights, i.e., to make sure that people and companies can keep the money that they earn (and the assets that they build) or spend it as they see fit. (Obviously there are things that the government needs to do for other, non-ecomonic reasons, but this is the economists' perspective on what needs to be done.) When property rights are secure, the markets function.
If there's a second economic thing the government needs to do, in my opinion, it is to provide a stable currency.
The article summary sounds for all the world like a description of a burstable connection, which is widely considered a selling point. I'm not sure how _valuable_ a feature it is, but a lot of ISPs advertise it, along the lines of "768 KBPS downstream bandwidth, burstable to 1.5MBPS" or similar. This has been around for a long time. In fact, I am almost certain burstable connections were around before DSL.
> But if a hardware vendor doesn't make vista drivers, it's their problem not microsoft's.
You mean it's the hardware vendor's _fault_, not Microsoft's.
It's the _customer's_ problem to figure out what's compatible with what before they buy, and if they don't bother then it's their problem to figure out how to deal with the results. If they aren't sufficiently educated about the relevant issues to actually know what the problem is, then they're generally going to blame the thing they just got, since what they already had worked fine before. That means if they buy new hardware that doesn't work with their existing software, they're usually going to blame the hardware, but if they buy new software that doesn't work with their existing hardware, they're usually going to blame the software.
And that makes it Microsoft's problem, even if it's not their fault. Hence, the question on the quiz. I doubt that's an effective means to deal with the problem, of course, since small-time system builders like the quiz targets have no significant influence on what hardware drivers do or do not get written.
What they should be doing is offering the hardware vendors concessions or deals or something to support Vista more completely, e.g., after such-and-such a date you can only get the cheapest OEM price for Vista if you have working Vista drivers for all of the hardware you've sold in the last five years.
Or they could write the drivers themselves. Other OS makers have been known to take that approach. It would require significant resources, but Microsoft has significant resources. But I tend to think they could get better results faster and cheaper by incentivising the hardware vendors.
> From what I recall, the general sentiment was pretty much the same when XP was released
Yeah, it was.
You want to remember why? Get yourself an early copy of XP (before they started including the service packs on the CD), install it, and then try to use the computer like that, without any of the updates. Go ahead, try it. You'll be amazed at what you've forgotten about how bad XP was when it was new. Oh, yeah, don't forget to try to install some contemporary third-party software that was clearly designed for Windows 98 and rush-certified as theoretically able to be run under XP. Also don't forget to try to set up the peer-to-peer networking to share printers with a Windows 98 system. Haha.
Here's the thing: you can beta test up to a point, but there are whole categories of bugs you never find until you turn the real users loose on it. It takes a while to get those pinned down.
Windows 95 was pretty bad until OSR2 came out, and even then its compatibility with DOS-based software left a lot to be desired, so it wasn't until pretty much all third-party software had been updated for Windows 95 that it really came into its own. Windows XP, initially, was a real pain, but by the time you get all the updates installed now, you've actually got something more-or-less usable. It's not what _I_ want to use... but then neither was any other version of Windows. If you compare an XP install that's current with all its updates up against other Windows versions, then XP doesn't look so bad.
Same with Vista. It's a new product. Therefore, it's not a mature product. Duh. Give it time.
> Here's an easy test to see if you're dealing with a "shared secret" as the term is used in the context
> of secure system: If every detail of your security system - including your shared secret - is discovered
> by an attacker, you can easily generate a new shared secret and have all the security you had before.
I'm not totally convinced that's entirely valid, even with a traditional password. Once a system has been compromised, you don't know what the attacker may have done that you don't know about. You can create a new password, sure, but maybe the attacker finds out what it is the first time you log in. Even if you can keep the new password secret to the same degree as the old one (and that's a pretty big "if"), what stops the attacker from repeating the original, successful, attack?
When an attacker compromises your security, I think it's important to try to understand how and why your security failed, and adjust the design of your security to (at least try to) prevent the same thing from happening again. That way the attacker will at least have to come up with a different approach next time.
> PRNG algorithms (or any other sort of algorithm) are generally not designed to be frequently and easily changed,
That's true, but it's also true (and, in my opinion, at least as relevant) that algorithms have been historically proven to be reliably impossible to keep secret.
However, the two concepts are somewhat related. The reason you change passwords periodically is precisely because that improves the odds of keeping them secret. If a given password has a complexity level such that you suspect it could be brute forced on average in ten years, and you only change it once a month, the odds that any given attacker can brute force it are still on the order of 1%, each month, which is way too high when there may be multiple attackers. So you either pick a much stronger password or you change it rather more often.