And here I was thinking that Firefox (as such) was less than three years old. I would have thought Debian would ship something more stable, from a more mature code branch, such as Mozilla 1.7.x or possibly even Mozilla 1.4.x. What are they trying to do, keep up with the rest of the world all of a sudden?
On the other hand, why shouldn't they change the name of Firefox? Mozilla.org has certainly changed the product's name enough times...
> help business owners find the best places to locate their stores
Um, we already know how to find the optimal location for a store. You look for where there's a McDonald's, and you locate the store right next to it. Couldn't be simpler. _How_ McD's always manages to find exactly the perfect spot, I'm not sure, but I've yet to see one suboptimally located, so plopping down next to them should be a pretty reliable way to find a really good spot.
> IAMNA-Rocket Scientist, but my understanding was that the explosion > happened in a tube, one end open, the other closed.
So far so good.
> Thrust was generated not by the escaping gas out the back but by the pushing > effect on the closed end.
A common misconception is that it works because the gas coming out the backside of the rocket "pushes" against the atmosphere and so pushes the rocket along. However, rockets actually work _better_ in a much thinner medium such as interplanetary space (because there's less resistance from friction).
The reason a rocket works is because of the law of reaction. Let's say you're skydiving, and another person is skydiving with you, and you jump out of the plane together holding hands. Now, the other person turns his back on you, and you give him a shove. Does he move forward, or do you move backward? Both? At what ratio?
Assuming you are identical twins and have vanishingly close to the same mass, you move away from one another (him forward, you backward) at the same rate. However, if the other person is your skinny kid sister and has only half your mass, she's going to move forward more than you move backward. On the other hand, if you jump out of a plane with a sumo wrestler and give him a shove, *you're* the one who's going to do most of the moving.
It's the same with a rocket. The gas going out the back has rather less mass than the rocket, so it goes rather faster than the rocket, but the rocket does move.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, as there are a number of other factors besides the mass of the gas that can have significant performance impact. (For instance, the shape of the nozel is more important than you might guess.) But fundamentally the rocket moves forward because the gas is moving backward, and the relative speed of the rocket versus the gas is determined mostly by the relative mass of the gas versus the rocket.
> If he can come up with a way to "recapture" those things in the very same > tube and have that result in additional thrust, why not?
From a perspective of Newtonian physics, that absolutely won't work, and the article would never even have been written if that's what he was claiming. What he's claiming is that the law of reaction does not apply to subatomic particles in the same way that it applies to larger objects. (That's an oversimplification of what he's claiming, but that's the gist of it.)
> What is regenerative breaking in hybrid cars but an attempt to capture some > of the work performed by the engine to generate electricity
There you're recapturing kinetic energy as you slow down. At most you can use it to speed yourself back up to the speed you were going in the first place, somewhat less if the conversion is imperfect (in the real world, for instance). That's not the same thing as using it multiple times to speed yourself up to several times your forward speed. If regenerative brakes could do that, your car wouldn't need an engine, just a very small push to get started and away you go -- but it doesn't work that way.
> Speaking of which, why haven't we ever tried to use the heat generated by > our internal combustion engines to push a turbine? Or the heat generated by > our a/c units? There has to be some way there to reclaim some of that lost power.
Heat is one of the most difficult forms of energy to harness with any degree of efficiency. If there's a whole *lot* of heat (or, rather, a whole lot of *difference* in temperature between one place and another not very far away; if the heat is spread out evenly we don't know how to do anything useful with it at all) you can accomplish stuff despite the inefficiency, because you only need to capture a small percentage of the heat energy. That's how geothermal power works. But a car engine doesn't get anything like hot enough to power your air conditioner, not at the level of efficiency of current geothermal power technology.
> Unfortunately it doesn't explain how Perl 6 will respond to those challenges; > just that Perl 6 will be WOP (whatever oriented programming), which is more > than a little vague.
Ah. What you've missed is that this is Larry's State of the Onion speech. If you want to see details such as how Perl6 will respond to certain challenges, what paradigms the language supports and how it supports them, and so on, you subscribe to the mailing lists or at least read the Synopses. If you just want to be entertained for a few minutes, you listen to the annual State of the Onion.
> I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told.
Mmmm. In chemistry we were told at one point that electrons orbit atoms like planets orbiting a star, going round and round in more-or-less circular paths. This is, of course, a load of hooey. In the first place, electrons are attracted by electromagnetic force, not by gravity, and in the second place, electrons are subatomic particles, which do not, in fact, behave like miniature charged marbles.
As for the appendix, it *does* in fact serve a physiological purpose, just not one that is as easy to understand or quantify as a lot of organs. The same is true of the tonsils.
In short, the world is more complicated than undergraduate-level textbooks like to explain. You'll do well to remember that. It applies to more subjects than just science.
Contextual presentation *can* be good if done right, but there still needs to be a relatively painless way to reach all the tools, including the ones normally presented in other contexts.
One way to do this is to put _everything_ in the pulldown menus (and the dialog boxes available fromm the pulldown menus) and then only make the toolbar shortcuts contextual. Since I'm a pretty big fan of pulldown menus, I'd tend to like that way of doing things.
However, there are other ways. For instance, you can place a list of available toolbars under a Show item on the context menu for all the toolbars, so that the user can right click any toolbar and choose to show a different toolbar in its place. (This would usually be temporary, until a context shift changes what toolbar is shown there, or until the user changes it, whichever happens first.)
One imagines that as contextual presentation becomes more common, other ways of handling this will be developed. Hopefully someone will come up with a really *good* way. Anyway, my point is that context should only determine which tools are front-and-center; the other ones should still be available if you go reaching for them.
> the bigger joke is that we technically could have had flying cars already. > You know what the problem is? the general public couldn't be trusted not > to crash the things
Actually, while that's true, there is another problem as well. Yes, we have the technology to build flying cars, but they would be *substantially* more expensive to operate than standard cars, because they would use a good deal more fuel.
Two things strike me about this article. First, the claim that this new drive will make cars and jets obsolete is just hype. Second, if the thing actually _works_ as advertised, it _would_ revolutionise the satellite industry, because satellites that don't need reaction mass would be able to maneuver much more freely, without fear that every little shift in position or orientation tangibly shortens the satellite's useful life as is currently the case. So you could point them this way and that freely and even alter their orbit a little, any time you wanted.
That's if it works as advertised. The notion that captured things in a tube (however shaped) can yield a substantial _net_ thrust by bouncing back and forth seems wrong on the face of it, and while I realize that photons do not behave quite like macroscopic things or strictly adhere to Newtonian physics, I'm still just a bit skeptical. The explanation for why it works, at least as the article presents it, seems to be little more than "it works because of relativity". Pardon me if I say that sounds a little bit like vague handwaving.
The thrust he measured from his prototype is sufficiently small that I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could be a result of some other effect, such as a few mollecules of the device being ejected by the microwave radiation and creating a reaction thrust, or some other more conventionally known phenomenon.
I'm not saying the device *doesn't* work, but I'm saying I'm not yet *convinced* that it does work, either. Stronger evidence is needed.
> Translation: "We're 100% confident the system is completely secure - so confident, that we won't even > put a penny on own reliability! We'll let you spend tens of thousands of dollars at your own risk!"
Indeed.
> Of course since he's retired, your former boss probably isn't liable, either. Maybe he was a little > smarter than he seemed.
I'm pretty sure she just trusted the vendor. When the salesperson said, "That's just there because we had some problems with customers not wanting to keep their anti-virus software up to date", she bought it, writing off my objection as paranoid. (Granted, my objection _was_ paranoid, but as the systems administrator, I consider it to be my _job_ to be paranoid about such things.)
Phillip Morris is part of the same conglomerate that also produces Teddy Grahams, Kool-Aid, Cheez Whiz, Fig Newtons, and a lot of other stuff. It's a big company, in the same general category as AOL Time Warner. Does the article give any reasoning or evidence to the effect that this lobbying was funded for reasons having to do with the tobacco-related portion of their business, or explain what global warming might have to do with tobacco?
> I'd imagine that's why fuckyou is up there so high. I sort of assume > that's a message to the phisher rather than a real password.
Actually, it's a _very_ common password (right up there with "asdfgh" and "mickey") on systems that expire the user's password and require it to be changed periodically. (I have no idea whether the service in question does that, though.) Also "stupid", for the same reason.
All sites by default are untrusted sites. The system administrator can add specific sites (e.g., the corporate intranet) as trusted, and then those sites can use ActiveX, but you should NOT have ActiveX enabled for random sites on the internet. That would be very unsafe.
Eh. MI _stands_ for "Military Intelligence", so at the very least they like to think of themselves as military-ish. In any case, changing the words "military personnel" to "intelligence officers" does not change the previous poster's point, as far as I can tell. I don't think CIA employees should be able to publish just any information they want, that they've obtained in the course of their job, so why would MI6 officers be different in that regard?
We're not talking here about what "state secrets" a member of the general public (e.g., a journalist) is allowed to publish if he find it out somehow; we're talking about what state secrets the secret agents themselves are supposed to be deliberately leaking to the public. Those people have access to information that not only isn't public, but shouldn't become public if it can be avoided.
Imagine, for instance, that MI6 for some reason had _you_ under surveillance for a few weeks. (Perhaps your cousin applied for a job with a company that has military contracts for the development of intelligence or weapons technology, so they check out all his family and friends as part of the vetting process, to determine whether he's safe to trust with security clearance.) Do you want any random MI6 officer to be allowed to _publish_ any of that information that seems interesting?
Now, I haven't gone and read the blog, so I don't know what information was published, and most likely it's harmless. But in order to make _sure_ it's harmless, it should have been checked by at least a second and probably a third person within MI6 (not necessarily a centralised review board, but at least a couple of the dude's coworkers or something should have to sign off on it), before being released to the public. One MI6 employee acting on his own should not be allowed to unilaterally publish just any information he wants. At minimum, his boss should severely reprimand him for this and explain the importance of carefully vetting information for sensitivity before releasing it to the public. The same goes for any service that has special privileged access to information and ways of gathering information that are forbidden or illegal to the general public. MI6, MI5, the CIA, some departments within the FBI, and so on and so forth. Indeed, even the local DMV does not and should not allow its employees to unilaterally publish the information they obtain through the course of doing their jobs.
For you as a consumer, that's probably still true, but the article's target audience is concerned about preventing the kind of situation that gets your organisation a lot of negative publicity because a large number of your customers' data have been stolen.
Some vendors who develop industry-specific software actively encourage this.
When I mentioned to a trainer who works for our vendor that I would of course be changing all the passwords away from the (incredibly insecure) defaults, the response I got was, "Why? What are you afraid of?" Later, _a technician_ working for the vendor asked, "You didn't change the Administrator password, did you?" I wanted to say, "Of course, what kind of fool do you take me for," but all I said was, "Yes, I did." They didn't make me change it back, but they also didn't seem to understand why I considered it important to change it.
Worse, when I asked what ports I needed to open on the firewall between the staff workstations and the mission-critical production server, I was told that we _cannot_ put a firewall there; they must be directly on the same subnet.
This was all _after_ we bought the software, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Before we bought it, the official line was that the only thing that could possibly make the system vulnerable would be if we neglected to keep up-to-date antivirus software. My boss (at the time, now retired) actually signed (against my advice) a contract agreeing that if there's any security incident, it's automatically our fault and _we_ pay the _vendor_ for any time required to fix it.
Needless to say I am personally rather at odds with this vendor's view of security. Their name is Polaris Library Systems.
Two reasons. First, it makes very simple examples (along the lines of Hello, World) superficially resemble Perl and Python. Second, it makes interpolation syntax straightforward.
I'm not a big fan of PHP, but the sigil _is_ worthwhile.
This is where Perl's taint checking comes in really handy. It does not solve all problems, but, used properly, it can sure help catch some common ones.
> But with PHP and MySQL, you can hammer screws much faster!
I prefer Perl. With DBI, I can hammer the fasteners in a portable way, so that it doesn't matter whether they're nails, screws, pegs, rivets, brads, or what. If I decide to port my code from MySQL to PostgreSQL (or vice versa), I only have to change a couple of lines and it's done. Want to port to SQLite? Change those couple of lines again. Oracle? Same deal. And so forth.
This is much more valuable than the ability to replace database functionality with application-layer code.
> Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline
Care to add yahoo.com to that list? Oh, wait...
A year ago, I would have thought it a safe bet that Yahoo would not have availability problems. Now I am tempted to post big signs next to all the internet workstations announcing "Yahoo is down, sorry for the inconvenience". True, Yahoo isn't actually down most of the time, but their domains fail to resolve with sufficient frequency that I am *constantly* bombarded with questions about it, and it has become my #1 support issue, _even though_ none of our services rely on it in any way -- to us, it's just a website, albeit one that is apparently used by roughly seven out of every five users.
If we had actually implemented infrastructure that relied on Yahoo's availability, we'd be in real trouble.
> Gandalf is certainly hundreds of years old. He's older than Elrond
No. Elrond had been in Middle Earth since the First Age if I'm not mistaken, several thousand years longer than Gandalf, who arrived during the Third Age.
The oldest major characters in LOTR are (in no particular order) Treebeard, Galadriel, Sauron, the Balrog, and Tom Bombadil. Of these, Treebeard is generally believed to have been continuously in Middle Earth for the longest amount of time, although Tom had also been around for quite some little while. Galadriel was born in Valinor during the years of the trees, and the other two came into Middle Earth very early but did not necessarily remain there continuously (e.g., Sauron was to Valinor as recently as the First Age).
> As far as I'm aware the US doesn't usually force sites to shut down > unless they're participating in something actively illegal (child > porn, gambling).
Fraud (of which phishing is just one variety) is the most common reason.
It would be difficult for the US government to censor Hezbollah in general, since they mostly operate out of (wait for it) Lebanon, and the US has less political pull there than practically anywhere else in the world. Our relationship with *Columbia* is better, for crying out loud.
On the other hand, if Hezbollah for some reason attempted to maintain a site on US soil, and if that site were doing illegal stuff (e.g., advocating the violent overthrow of the US government is still illegal here last I checked), then they certainly could shut *that* down.
> Say, a small special-order retailer with over 10,000 items. Sure, most of the raw product data is coming > from a database (prices, etc), but so is the hand-written HTML that carefully describes every item... > often including images that serve as backgrounds behind other design elements, or multiple roll-over > images with complex scripting, etc.
If the product-describing HTML is coming from a supplied database (provided by e.g., the manufacturer), then the provider of said database must have someone creating or maintaining all that product-describing HTML, surely. In such a case, the reseller (who merely plugs that HTML into their online order catalog or what-have-you) is a red herring, and the provider of the HTML is responsible -- or so I would hope.
If there are multiple rollover images per product, then we're talking about a staff large enough to have dedicated graphic designers, probably, with 2+ years (most likely at least 4) of college or art school each, so somebody who knows a little HTML and CSS is not going to be a costly addition.
Once again, if HTML is so large and complex that a redesign is a really big job, then creating the HTML in the first place is a really big job, and there are enough people on staff to handle it.
> Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a > total site re-design out of their profits
That just isn't a credible claim. If the business is so small it can't afford to hire a web developer, then it does not have any need for the kind of gargantuan nightmarishly-hard-to-maintain corporate website you imply, either. A normal website for a typical small business can be redesigned completely from scratch in a week by a part-time employee of medium intelligence who taught himself HTML and CSS in a couple of shifts. It just isn't a big deal.
Target's website is larger and more complex, but they're a larger and more complex business too, and redesigning it is easily within their means.
Whether litigation is the right way to address this is another matter, but site redesigns are not nearly so burdensome as you imply. The difficulty is strictly proportional to the size and complexity of the website in the first place.
That's the source, but *why* are the statue's toes partly iron and partly baked clay (i.e., what are the implications of building something out of that combination and what does that detail from Daniel's vision symbolize about the kingdom in question), and what does that imply in the context of a Microsoft codebase?
Tie one end of a twenty-foot heavy chain to a tree in your backyard, and make a mess of everything within reach of the other end: kill all the grass, pack down the dirt, dig holes, and so forth. Arrange the chain so that the loose end of it is up by the house, not far from the back door.
Get on ebay and look for the biggest, oldest, nastiest used dogfood dish you can find, preferably something sturdy made of metal with large dents, or at least a large sturdy plastic dish with some worn toothmarks in it. Decorate your back steps with this.
Build a doghouse big enough that you can crawl inside of it. Paint with flat (non-gloss) paint, and paint a goofy-sounding dog name (e.g., "Snoockums") over the door in a faded color. Now spend the better part of a weekend beating the doghouse with a crowbar, chipping the paint, scuffing the floor, splashing mud all over it, and just generally making it look well-used. Haul this out back and set it up near the tree.
The problem with all of this is that the neighborhood punks (probably accounting for about a third of all small-time break-ins) will know it's a sham. Perhaps you'd better actually get the dog. I recommend a _black_ dog, perhaps a lab: people will be a little scared of it even if it's friendly. I don't know why, but it works. Or get a husky and feed it raw cuts of red meat outdoors in plain view of the neighbors.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I was thinking that Firefox (as such) was less than three years old. I would have thought Debian would ship something more stable, from a more mature code branch, such as Mozilla 1.7.x or possibly even Mozilla 1.4.x. What are they trying to do, keep up with the rest of the world all of a sudden?
On the other hand, why shouldn't they change the name of Firefox? Mozilla.org has certainly changed the product's name enough times...
> help business owners find the best places to locate their stores
Um, we already know how to find the optimal location for a store. You look for where there's a McDonald's, and you locate the store right next to it. Couldn't be simpler. _How_ McD's always manages to find exactly the perfect spot, I'm not sure, but I've yet to see one suboptimally located, so plopping down next to them should be a pretty reliable way to find a really good spot.
> IAMNA-Rocket Scientist, but my understanding was that the explosion
> happened in a tube, one end open, the other closed.
So far so good.
> Thrust was generated not by the escaping gas out the back but by the pushing
> effect on the closed end.
A common misconception is that it works because the gas coming out the backside of the rocket "pushes" against the atmosphere and so pushes the rocket along. However, rockets actually work _better_ in a much thinner medium such as interplanetary space (because there's less resistance from friction).
The reason a rocket works is because of the law of reaction. Let's say you're skydiving, and another person is skydiving with you, and you jump out of the plane together holding hands. Now, the other person turns his back on you, and you give him a shove. Does he move forward, or do you move backward? Both? At what ratio?
Assuming you are identical twins and have vanishingly close to the same mass, you move away from one another (him forward, you backward) at the same rate. However, if the other person is your skinny kid sister and has only half your mass, she's going to move forward more than you move backward. On the other hand, if you jump out of a plane with a sumo wrestler and give him a shove, *you're* the one who's going to do most of the moving.
It's the same with a rocket. The gas going out the back has rather less mass than the rocket, so it goes rather faster than the rocket, but the rocket does move.
This is a bit of an oversimplification, as there are a number of other factors besides the mass of the gas that can have significant performance impact. (For instance, the shape of the nozel is more important than you might guess.) But fundamentally the rocket moves forward because the gas is moving backward, and the relative speed of the rocket versus the gas is determined mostly by the relative mass of the gas versus the rocket.
> If he can come up with a way to "recapture" those things in the very same
> tube and have that result in additional thrust, why not?
From a perspective of Newtonian physics, that absolutely won't work, and the article would never even have been written if that's what he was claiming. What he's claiming is that the law of reaction does not apply to subatomic particles in the same way that it applies to larger objects. (That's an oversimplification of what he's claiming, but that's the gist of it.)
> What is regenerative breaking in hybrid cars but an attempt to capture some
> of the work performed by the engine to generate electricity
There you're recapturing kinetic energy as you slow down. At most you can use it to speed yourself back up to the speed you were going in the first place, somewhat less if the conversion is imperfect (in the real world, for instance). That's not the same thing as using it multiple times to speed yourself up to several times your forward speed. If regenerative brakes could do that, your car wouldn't need an engine, just a very small push to get started and away you go -- but it doesn't work that way.
> Speaking of which, why haven't we ever tried to use the heat generated by
> our internal combustion engines to push a turbine? Or the heat generated by
> our a/c units? There has to be some way there to reclaim some of that lost power.
Heat is one of the most difficult forms of energy to harness with any degree of efficiency. If there's a whole *lot* of heat (or, rather, a whole lot of *difference* in temperature between one place and another not very far away; if the heat is spread out evenly we don't know how to do anything useful with it at all) you can accomplish stuff despite the inefficiency, because you only need to capture a small percentage of the heat energy. That's how geothermal power works. But a car engine doesn't get anything like hot enough to power your air conditioner, not at the level of efficiency of current geothermal power technology.
> Unfortunately it doesn't explain how Perl 6 will respond to those challenges;
> just that Perl 6 will be WOP (whatever oriented programming), which is more
> than a little vague.
Ah. What you've missed is that this is Larry's State of the Onion speech. If you want to see details such as how Perl6 will respond to certain challenges, what paradigms the language supports and how it supports them, and so on, you subscribe to the mailing lists or at least read the Synopses. If you just want to be entertained for a few minutes, you listen to the annual State of the Onion.
> I haven't done much (any?) biology since high school, and that's what we were always told.
Mmmm. In chemistry we were told at one point that electrons orbit atoms like planets orbiting a star, going round and round in more-or-less circular paths. This is, of course, a load of hooey. In the first place, electrons are attracted by electromagnetic force, not by gravity, and in the second place, electrons are subatomic particles, which do not, in fact, behave like miniature charged marbles.
As for the appendix, it *does* in fact serve a physiological purpose, just not one that is as easy to understand or quantify as a lot of organs. The same is true of the tonsils.
In short, the world is more complicated than undergraduate-level textbooks like to explain. You'll do well to remember that. It applies to more subjects than just science.
Agreed.
Contextual presentation *can* be good if done right, but there still needs to be a relatively painless way to reach all the tools, including the ones normally presented in other contexts.
One way to do this is to put _everything_ in the pulldown menus (and the dialog boxes available fromm the pulldown menus) and then only make the toolbar shortcuts contextual. Since I'm a pretty big fan of pulldown menus, I'd tend to like that way of doing things.
However, there are other ways. For instance, you can place a list of available toolbars under a Show item on the context menu for all the toolbars, so that the user can right click any toolbar and choose to show a different toolbar in its place. (This would usually be temporary, until a context shift changes what toolbar is shown there, or until the user changes it, whichever happens first.)
One imagines that as contextual presentation becomes more common, other ways of handling this will be developed. Hopefully someone will come up with a really *good* way. Anyway, my point is that context should only determine which tools are front-and-center; the other ones should still be available if you go reaching for them.
> the bigger joke is that we technically could have had flying cars already.
> You know what the problem is? the general public couldn't be trusted not
> to crash the things
Actually, while that's true, there is another problem as well. Yes, we have the technology to build flying cars, but they would be *substantially* more expensive to operate than standard cars, because they would use a good deal more fuel.
Two things strike me about this article. First, the claim that this new drive will make cars and jets obsolete is just hype. Second, if the thing actually _works_ as advertised, it _would_ revolutionise the satellite industry, because satellites that don't need reaction mass would be able to maneuver much more freely, without fear that every little shift in position or orientation tangibly shortens the satellite's useful life as is currently the case. So you could point them this way and that freely and even alter their orbit a little, any time you wanted.
That's if it works as advertised. The notion that captured things in a tube (however shaped) can yield a substantial _net_ thrust by bouncing back and forth seems wrong on the face of it, and while I realize that photons do not behave quite like macroscopic things or strictly adhere to Newtonian physics, I'm still just a bit skeptical. The explanation for why it works, at least as the article presents it, seems to be little more than "it works because of relativity". Pardon me if I say that sounds a little bit like vague handwaving.
The thrust he measured from his prototype is sufficiently small that I'm willing to entertain the notion that it could be a result of some other effect, such as a few mollecules of the device being ejected by the microwave radiation and creating a reaction thrust, or some other more conventionally known phenomenon.
I'm not saying the device *doesn't* work, but I'm saying I'm not yet *convinced* that it does work, either. Stronger evidence is needed.
> Translation: "We're 100% confident the system is completely secure - so confident, that we won't even
> put a penny on own reliability! We'll let you spend tens of thousands of dollars at your own risk!"
Indeed.
> Of course since he's retired, your former boss probably isn't liable, either. Maybe he was a little
> smarter than he seemed.
I'm pretty sure she just trusted the vendor. When the salesperson said, "That's just there because we had some problems with customers not wanting to keep their anti-virus software up to date", she bought it, writing off my objection as paranoid. (Granted, my objection _was_ paranoid, but as the systems administrator, I consider it to be my _job_ to be paranoid about such things.)
Phillip Morris is part of the same conglomerate that also produces Teddy Grahams, Kool-Aid, Cheez Whiz, Fig Newtons, and a lot of other stuff. It's a big company, in the same general category as AOL Time Warner. Does the article give any reasoning or evidence to the effect that this lobbying was funded for reasons having to do with the tobacco-related portion of their business, or explain what global warming might have to do with tobacco?
> I'd imagine that's why fuckyou is up there so high. I sort of assume
> that's a message to the phisher rather than a real password.
Actually, it's a _very_ common password (right up there with "asdfgh" and "mickey") on systems that expire the user's password and require it to be changed periodically. (I have no idea whether the service in question does that, though.) Also "stupid", for the same reason.
All sites by default are untrusted sites. The system administrator can add specific sites (e.g., the corporate intranet) as trusted, and then those sites can use ActiveX, but you should NOT have ActiveX enabled for random sites on the internet. That would be very unsafe.
> This person isn't in the military per se
Eh. MI _stands_ for "Military Intelligence", so at the very least they like to think of themselves as military-ish. In any case, changing the words "military personnel" to "intelligence officers" does not change the previous poster's point, as far as I can tell. I don't think CIA employees should be able to publish just any information they want, that they've obtained in the course of their job, so why would MI6 officers be different in that regard?
We're not talking here about what "state secrets" a member of the general public (e.g., a journalist) is allowed to publish if he find it out somehow; we're talking about what state secrets the secret agents themselves are supposed to be deliberately leaking to the public. Those people have access to information that not only isn't public, but shouldn't become public if it can be avoided.
Imagine, for instance, that MI6 for some reason had _you_ under surveillance for a few weeks. (Perhaps your cousin applied for a job with a company that has military contracts for the development of intelligence or weapons technology, so they check out all his family and friends as part of the vetting process, to determine whether he's safe to trust with security clearance.) Do you want any random MI6 officer to be allowed to _publish_ any of that information that seems interesting?
Now, I haven't gone and read the blog, so I don't know what information was published, and most likely it's harmless. But in order to make _sure_ it's harmless, it should have been checked by at least a second and probably a third person within MI6 (not necessarily a centralised review board, but at least a couple of the dude's coworkers or something should have to sign off on it), before being released to the public. One MI6 employee acting on his own should not be allowed to unilaterally publish just any information he wants. At minimum, his boss should severely reprimand him for this and explain the importance of carefully vetting information for sensitivity before releasing it to the public. The same goes for any service that has special privileged access to information and ways of gathering information that are forbidden or illegal to the general public. MI6, MI5, the CIA, some departments within the FBI, and so on and so forth. Indeed, even the local DMV does not and should not allow its employees to unilaterally publish the information they obtain through the course of doing their jobs.
For you as a consumer, that's probably still true, but the article's target audience is concerned about preventing the kind of situation that gets your organisation a lot of negative publicity because a large number of your customers' data have been stolen.
Some vendors who develop industry-specific software actively encourage this.
When I mentioned to a trainer who works for our vendor that I would of course be changing all the passwords away from the (incredibly insecure) defaults, the response I got was, "Why? What are you afraid of?" Later, _a technician_ working for the vendor asked, "You didn't change the Administrator password, did you?" I wanted to say, "Of course, what kind of fool do you take me for," but all I said was, "Yes, I did." They didn't make me change it back, but they also didn't seem to understand why I considered it important to change it.
Worse, when I asked what ports I needed to open on the firewall between the staff workstations and the mission-critical production server, I was told that we _cannot_ put a firewall there; they must be directly on the same subnet.
This was all _after_ we bought the software, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Before we bought it, the official line was that the only thing that could possibly make the system vulnerable would be if we neglected to keep up-to-date antivirus software. My boss (at the time, now retired) actually signed (against my advice) a contract agreeing that if there's any security incident, it's automatically our fault and _we_ pay the _vendor_ for any time required to fix it.
Needless to say I am personally rather at odds with this vendor's view of security. Their name is Polaris Library Systems.
> does ANYONE know why PHP uses $prefixed names?
Two reasons. First, it makes very simple examples (along the lines of Hello, World) superficially resemble Perl and Python. Second, it makes interpolation syntax straightforward.
I'm not a big fan of PHP, but the sigil _is_ worthwhile.
This is where Perl's taint checking comes in really handy. It does not solve all problems, but, used properly, it can sure help catch some common ones.
> But with PHP and MySQL, you can hammer screws much faster!
I prefer Perl. With DBI, I can hammer the fasteners in a portable way, so that it doesn't matter whether they're nails, screws, pegs, rivets, brads, or what. If I decide to port my code from MySQL to PostgreSQL (or vice versa), I only have to change a couple of lines and it's done. Want to port to SQLite? Change those couple of lines again. Oracle? Same deal. And so forth.
This is much more valuable than the ability to replace database functionality with application-layer code.
> Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline
Care to add yahoo.com to that list? Oh, wait...
A year ago, I would have thought it a safe bet that Yahoo would not have availability problems. Now I am tempted to post big signs next to all the internet workstations announcing "Yahoo is down, sorry for the inconvenience". True, Yahoo isn't actually down most of the time, but their domains fail to resolve with sufficient frequency that I am *constantly* bombarded with questions about it, and it has become my #1 support issue, _even though_ none of our services rely on it in any way -- to us, it's just a website, albeit one that is apparently used by roughly seven out of every five users.
If we had actually implemented infrastructure that relied on Yahoo's availability, we'd be in real trouble.
> Gandalf is certainly hundreds of years old. He's older than Elrond
No. Elrond had been in Middle Earth since the First Age if I'm not mistaken, several thousand years longer than Gandalf, who arrived during the Third Age.
The oldest major characters in LOTR are (in no particular order) Treebeard, Galadriel, Sauron, the Balrog, and Tom Bombadil. Of these, Treebeard is generally believed to have been continuously in Middle Earth for the longest amount of time, although Tom had also been around for quite some little while. Galadriel was born in Valinor during the years of the trees, and the other two came into Middle Earth very early but did not necessarily remain there continuously (e.g., Sauron was to Valinor as recently as the First Age).
> As far as I'm aware the US doesn't usually force sites to shut down
> unless they're participating in something actively illegal (child
> porn, gambling).
Fraud (of which phishing is just one variety) is the most common reason.
It would be difficult for the US government to censor Hezbollah in general, since they mostly operate out of (wait for it) Lebanon, and the US has less political pull there than practically anywhere else in the world. Our relationship with *Columbia* is better, for crying out loud.
On the other hand, if Hezbollah for some reason attempted to maintain a site on US soil, and if that site were doing illegal stuff (e.g., advocating the violent overthrow of the US government is still illegal here last I checked), then they certainly could shut *that* down.
> Say, a small special-order retailer with over 10,000 items. Sure, most of the raw product data is coming
> from a database (prices, etc), but so is the hand-written HTML that carefully describes every item...
> often including images that serve as backgrounds behind other design elements, or multiple roll-over
> images with complex scripting, etc.
If the product-describing HTML is coming from a supplied database (provided by e.g., the manufacturer), then the provider of said database must have someone creating or maintaining all that product-describing HTML, surely. In such a case, the reseller (who merely plugs that HTML into their online order catalog or what-have-you) is a red herring, and the provider of the HTML is responsible -- or so I would hope.
If there are multiple rollover images per product, then we're talking about a staff large enough to have dedicated graphic designers, probably, with 2+ years (most likely at least 4) of college or art school each, so somebody who knows a little HTML and CSS is not going to be a costly addition.
Once again, if HTML is so large and complex that a redesign is a really big job, then creating the HTML in the first place is a really big job, and there are enough people on staff to handle it.
> Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a
> total site re-design out of their profits
That just isn't a credible claim. If the business is so small it can't afford to hire a web developer, then it does not have any need for the kind of gargantuan nightmarishly-hard-to-maintain corporate website you imply, either. A normal website for a typical small business can be redesigned completely from scratch in a week by a part-time employee of medium intelligence who taught himself HTML and CSS in a couple of shifts. It just isn't a big deal.
Target's website is larger and more complex, but they're a larger and more complex business too, and redesigning it is easily within their means.
Whether litigation is the right way to address this is another matter, but site redesigns are not nearly so burdensome as you imply. The difficulty is strictly proportional to the size and complexity of the website in the first place.
That's the source, but *why* are the statue's toes partly iron and partly baked clay (i.e., what are the implications of building something out of that combination and what does that detail from Daniel's vision symbolize about the kingdom in question), and what does that imply in the context of a Microsoft codebase?
Yeah, but as a slogan, "Save a tree!" has more emotional appeal to it than "Help the county landfill last longer!"
Along these same lines...
Tie one end of a twenty-foot heavy chain to a tree in your backyard, and make a mess of everything within reach of the other end: kill all the grass, pack down the dirt, dig holes, and so forth. Arrange the chain so that the loose end of it is up by the house, not far from the back door.
Get on ebay and look for the biggest, oldest, nastiest used dogfood dish you can find, preferably something sturdy made of metal with large dents, or at least a large sturdy plastic dish with some worn toothmarks in it. Decorate your back steps with this.
Build a doghouse big enough that you can crawl inside of it. Paint with flat (non-gloss) paint, and paint a goofy-sounding dog name (e.g., "Snoockums") over the door in a faded color. Now spend the better part of a weekend beating the doghouse with a crowbar, chipping the paint, scuffing the floor, splashing mud all over it, and just generally making it look well-used. Haul this out back and set it up near the tree.
The problem with all of this is that the neighborhood punks (probably accounting for about a third of all small-time break-ins) will know it's a sham. Perhaps you'd better actually get the dog. I recommend a _black_ dog, perhaps a lab: people will be a little scared of it even if it's friendly. I don't know why, but it works. Or get a husky and feed it raw cuts of red meat outdoors in plain view of the neighbors.