Funny we actually had all that before patents and copyrights. They were called doctors, art, math and made money just fine.
Before patents and copyrights, the system was called "patronage". You found a wealthy person who liked your art or supported the sciences (or did science himself) and he paid for it. And he got the benefits. That sculpture you made for him wasn't easily copied and sold in enough copies to make the money back. It went into your patron's house or garden, or he loaned it to a museum and got the prestige and respect for supporting it. A well stocked library was the sign of wealth and accomplishment, because those were the people who could afford the books.
And the wealthy pay as little as they can get away with too.
Of course they do. So do you. Or do you simply refuse to take every deduction that you are allowed because you feel some greater good in handing your money over to the government to spend for you?
The wealthy own more so they should pay...
Difference between weath and income. Tax the rich until they aren't anymore, they deserve it, those rat bastards! Then we'll all be rich... no, we'll all be poor together. Dog in the manger.
If 5% of the wealthy contain 97% of the wealth, they should be paying 97% of the taxes (hint: that number is wrong, its less).
Nothing like using known incorrect numbers to make an argument.
You need to learn the difference between "wealth" and "income". What you want to do is tax someone on their income (it is "wealth in the first year of ownership"), and then on whatever part of that income they've been able to save or invest (true wealth) over and over again until it is gone.
That's called "wealth redistribution." It's also called "from those according to their means to those according to their wants".
The people that get the most out of government money are the ones that own businesses.
Not always. Some businesses don't make a profit. Some make marginal profits. Just "owning a business" isn't a sign of wealth.
Even so, they pay business taxes on what they do profit. And taxes on their employees even when they don't profit.
Those roads your trucks go down
Gasoline and other road taxes. Since very few of those trucks are electric, very few of them are avoiding gas taxes by not using gas, which many other people are doing, or by using newer high MPG cars.
Those police that keep your riches safe
And keep YOUR property safe, and keep your poor neighbors from stealing what little you have. Do you imagine that a rich person being mugged and losing his watch and wallet is as big a deal as a poor one being mugged for the same?
And police typically come from property taxes, not income. State police, yes. Local police, no. So, again, business owners (except the ones who have managed a development district deal) are paying substantially more for police than you are, because their commercial property is considerably more valuable.
When you can print a lower for $5 in materials, and you can save half a pound off the weight of, say, a typical 1911, you've got a potentially marketable product.
Be honest. Price and weight are not the driving force behind printing a gun on a 3D printer. It's the desire to bypass the registration requirements and background checks that buying a gun these days entails. And perhaps making it out of a material that won't show up (as well) in X-rays or metal detectors.
Even the "plastic" glocks have large parts made of metal, and while the guvmint says they don't keep records of who has bought a gun, you'd be a fool to think that every gun background check wasn't recorded in perpetuity somewhere.
One can point out that name calling in a news summary is patent flamebait without being either a supporter of or an opponent to the person being insulted. Just as one could discuss whether it is appropriate to use inflammatory hehaviour in a summary without themselves becoming insulting and assuming straw men for their own amusement and importance.
But the foaming at the mouth crowd takes them both seriously.
Yes, they do. And then they jump up and down and rant and rave about how awful and hateful Rush is, and call Beck a clown (flamebait from the summary). Some of them then go as far as to call both of them official or unofficial spokesmen for "the party", and then attach all kinds of insulting stuff to "the party" as a result.
Can I suggest to the management at/. that if the summaries of articles are going to be such patent flamebait, that the moderation status of "flamebait" be changed from negative to positive? After all, flaming in the comments simply enhances the flame in the summary.
You misunderstood my stance on the matter. I think even the founders would agree that the WBC stands on the unfortunate side of free speech. They are protected, when clearly no one wants them to be,
No, it seems I understood your stance on the matter very well.
It is not "unfortunate" that these people have free speech rights, nor is it entirely clear that "no one wants them" to have such rights. (Clearly, they, themselves, want themselves to have such rights; just as clearly, many many service members have fought and died to protect that right for others, even those they do not agree with.) The First Amendment was created specifically to protect such speech. Not the specific content, but most assuredly the kind of speech.
This is the problem with someone saying 'I don't think THEY ought to have that right' whilst enjoying that right themselves. "I don't think people who form a corporation should have the right to free speech" (paraphrashed), wrote a local nonprofit corporation board member in a corporate publication. The very epitome of "I want mine but you can go screw yourself". Our city council appears to be speaking in support of "Move To Amend", which seeks to remove the right of free speech from "artificial entities" (and a local city government is just as artificial as a corporation formed to promote the production and presentation of a political movie.)
If you think that the First Amendment is "unfortunate" because it protects speech you don't like, then rest assured that there is someone who will not like what you say and your right is enshrined in the same amendment that theirs is. If you are willing to be silent when others don't like what you say, then you may seek that from others.
And what got us into the mess? Deregulation of banking.
Just the opposite. The CRA forced banks to make bad loans. Did you think those bad loans would just dissappear as if by magic? They had to go somewhere. Couple that with politicians pushing the "dream" of "owning your own home" to everyone, even those who couldn't afford it, and disaster was the obvious outcome. "A car in every garage and a chicken in every pot" isn't a new political slogan.
And wait until the credit house of cards collapses. "Buy it now, no interest for 120 days", or 300 days, or a year... It's not money, it's plastic! "Your prequalified for a new VISA credit card...". "Call us now for your equity home loan..." "Don't bother waiting until you've saved up the money to pay for it, you can have it now." "Lay it away, make small payments and get it for Christmas!" People who think that they should just buy what they want with their credit cards instead of thinking about how much it will cost and how they will pay it off are going to do the same thing to the economy eventually that those who signed up for ARMs at 2% and forgot to think about the balloon coming at them in five years did.
Economics is not a faith based religion.
Except to those who didn't want to believe, and still don't believe, that forcing banks to make bad loans would have a negative effect on the economy. That feeding people the line "it's your right to own a home" would backfire when they wound up not being able to afford what they bought. And those who could afford a mortgage payment when the interest was only 2%, but could never afford it when the rate went up and a balloon was due -- as outlined ahead of time in the loan agreement they signed.
And to those legislators in charge of the banking committees in congress who opposed attempts at tighter regulations because "fannie mae and freddie mac are sound" and no changes are needed.
Regarding your comment upthread about "quality of life" of New Jersey residents: if you base your quality of life on whether there is a tunnel between New Jersey and New York, you need to get out more. Yes, there are valid reasons not to build expensive construction projects, and a lot of them have to do with how much it will cost. Governments are not bottomless pits of money, and pretending they are is going to be worse than just bad loans coming due.
They can get away with it it because it's not threatening anybody, and that's why it is the unfortunate side of acceptable Free Speech.
It is sad that the reason the founders created the First Amendment is now seen as an "unfortunate side" of the issue.
Freedom of speech exists to protect speech that is not popular. It exists so that people can have their say, and that everyone else can hear them saying it.
You may find it unfortunate that the Westboro Baptists have the right to say what they do, but that very freedom gives you the ability to counter whatever claims you wish to, and better yet, to know ahead of time whether or not you wish to associate with those people.
It gives you, and everyone else, the opportunity to know what they think and to argue against it. Yes, they may be idiots, you may disagree with them, you may think they are scum. But would you rather not know that this opinion they hold is out there and active, or have them silenced and let whatever resentments or biases they have fester until it is uncontrollable? And, pray tell, just which speech would you censor in that way and which speech would you allow, and what happens when someone else disagrees with you?
Not only this, but IEEE recently change from a system where you had an arbitrary username to go with your password, to a system where you are required to use an email address as your username.
This was done, according to them, to be more secure. Even before I found out about this nonsense, I told them that tieing a password to a specific identifiable person, using a tag that was nearly publicly accessible, was absolutely less secure than letting someone pick a username that appeared noplace except in the login database. I pointed out that everyone in IEEE now knows my username, because IEEE uses it to send out email notices and deal with customer support requests.
I also made a comment about how I would not be surprised to find out that they were storing this information in the clear. That was yesterday. Today I read/. and find out that not only is it kept in the clear, it's kept on a publicly accessible FTP site.
Gawd. If you tried, you just couldn't make this stuff up.
It's nice to argue about the purpose of a college education, but sadly most colleges have had to start offering classes in how to learn and how to do classwork just so the students they enroll have a fighting chance of succeeding. They aren't teaching this class (just) to be a vocational school, they're probably teaching it because they found out a lot of their incoming students were deficient in skills that would allow them to write papers or lab reports for other classes they need to take.
That's the reason many colleges offer remedial math and remedial english classes, too. I was dumbstruck to wander through the college bookstore here and see a PICTURE DICTIONARY on the shelves as a mandatory book for a low level class. It wasn't a class intended for foreign students, either.
Intro classes are almost always intended for many colleges, not just the one where it is offered. It is almost certain that a University curriculum committee of some kind has determined there is a need for this kind of instruction, and changing it will be a lot harder than getting different classes at a more advanced level created.
That said, yes, if you have a BA already, then there should be some way to get credit for the class.
This is a 100 level course. As such, it is probably required by many different colleges/departments. It has probably been designed to serve the need of those other colleges/departments just as much, if not more than, for the computer science department. It's probably set at that level to prepare general students who have no or little computer backgound so they can do their homework.
It's a computer science class because, well, it's computers.
Trying to make it into a more advanced networking or whatever class would make it less usefull to the general student body, who just needs something so they can do their homework. Most people don't need to know how to set up a FIOS router (I certainly don't) or a TIVO, so those people would be the ones complaining about having to learn useless stuff if you forced it into an introduction class.
yes, I pulled a number out of my arse, but you get the point I was trying to make (such as evidenced by your complete lack of an attempt to argue against the rest of my post. Thank you).
Yes, I failed to argue against the rest of your post because I recognized a number pulled out of your ass and knew that you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. The fact you missed was that your number was a factor of about 24 million too small, which you then used to argue that it could be done in a very short amount of time. Wow, you can do 268 million in two seconds. Now try the real number, which would be done, using your super fast, l33t hardware, in 286 days.
As I said, if you have hardware that can brute force an 8 character password in two seconds, the NSA would love to talk to you. Whether that hardware might someday exist is irrelevant, we're talking about today. Present tense.
Me: "Users are reporting that we are silently dropping punctuation characters from this text field."... now try this, go back and re-read the conversation in that light, and notice how that one line changes everything.
The fact that you think it changes everything shows that you aren't really aware of what it takes to write specifications. If you didn't tell him the first time what you wanted, then you got what he wanted. That you continued the "specification" by expecting him to guess what you wanted again, knowing that it failed the first time, is fascinating.
In fact, the fact that you were already having a discussion about a failure to specify fully what you wanted and were making him fix what you call "his bug" clarifies why he was telling you he wanted it in writing. Your 'facepalm' should have been "you're right, I didn't tell you exactly what I wanted the first time, here is a list."
Having been recently a developer (I'm only just now starting to grow my pointy hair), I definitely have mixed feelings about the "Must have complete 5000 page requirements document in order to write any code" mentality.
Excessive use of hyperbole noted. It doesn't take 5000 pages to give a specific list of what characters you want to accept in a text field. It takes more than "all of them, at least the printing ones", however. For example: you seem to be saying that he can exclude tabs. And linefeeds/CR. Would you go back to him a third time and complain that some of your users were complaining to you that they were trying to enter something in nicely formatted columns and the tabs didn't work? You did say "at least".
And being asked to clarify one piece of the unwritten specification after it becomes clear that you didn't get what you wanted doesn't mean you have to go back and write a 5000 page spec for the entire project.
If you care to browse the RFCs sometimes, you will find that they are able to define character lists in about ten or fifteen lines. Given that you could have referred to any RFC, as in "RFC5322 atext and specials" and been precise... no "at least" that leaves things open to interpretation. No "at least" that leaves the developer wondering just what must be there and when you'll be back wanting something he didn't think you wanted.
It's extremely important to have clear, unambiguous requirements for the major software features, important business logic, etc.
And your discussion shows that it is also important to have clear, unambiguous requirements for features that have already been programmed in a way that you didn't want and you were expecting to be fixed to meet your ambiguous exacting standards.
I'd probably do the same thing your developer did, given a lack of a clear definition of what was wanted the first time, and a customer that came back wanting me to fix what I'd done based on the lack of specification, who couldn't be bothered to be specific the second time.
There is no confirmation, the mod is applied immediately.
Only if you have your settings set to do it that way.
If you don't like the way your account is set to do this, then change it. For the couple of people who modded my first comment down, telling people I don't understand why they don't change the setting they can to fix what they are admitting is a problem is not flamebait. It's common sense.
If you don't care that you have to post to undo a moderation that you didn't want to make and didn't feel like changing the settings for your own account so it wouldn't be a problem anymore, and thus lose all your other moderations in that discussion and waste what you had, fine. This "instant setting" happened to me exactly once. Then I changed the setting. I didn't even consider leaving it set that way and then complaining in public every time I made a mistake in moderating later.
As I recall, it is under "Discussions", "Classic Discussion System (D1)". Yeah, there's probably a lot of combined settings there, but you can fix the problem of having to post an inane comment just to undo an errant moderation if you want to.
that's only 268 million tries (assuming 28-bit entropy).
There are 26 characters a-z, 26 more A-Z. My 108 key standard keyboard has another 42 characters (0-9 and symbols). That's 94 total. 94^8 is 6,095,689,385,410,816. (I think that's something like 12 BILLION times the number you gave.)
You can make assumptions about what a password is likely to contain, and if you run into morons who enforce rules about what you must have and cannot have in your passwords, you can save some tries, but a generic brute-force password cracker will require the use of all available characters. Oops, I forgot "space". That's 95^8.
Ahhh, so the specification has an unstated requirement for "ASCII" encoding.
Yes, I know what 'ASCII nonprinting" characters are, so thanks for your condescending lecture. I've been doing this for more than thirty years now. I know that you can get nitpicky and talk character coding and glyphs and several levels of abstraction that are irrelevant to the point being made. You can throw about terms like UTF-8 and UTF-16 and ISO and Unicode and whatever, and the point is that none of that was specified. Just saying "all of them, at least the printing ones" is an ambiguous, incomplete specification, and you're making the developer guess what you want.
A poor developer will he happy using his own standards when you don't care enough to tell him what you want, or don't know enough to know you need to tell him. A good developer will ask, just to avoid surprises and possibly costly code fixes later on.
A poor developer will ignore the existing standards and provide code to "validate" an email address (or password, or whatever) that excludes many of the valid characters, because he's never seen them used and the boss didn't tell him he needed to do it right. That was my example of this problem.
The fact that the person who was supposed to be providing the specification did a "facepalm" when asked for a more formal definition than just "all of them, at least the printing ones" shows that there is a bit of ignorance floating about, and it wasn't the developer's.
And at 100 billion guesses a second, using multiple GPU cards in a custom setup, you can test all those password in about 0.3 seconds.
It's remarkable when anyone has 100Mbps network to the world, you've got a large multiple of 100 Gbps, and the server actually responds with "invalid password" pages that fast?
Gosh, I am a human, give me an option to remoderate my miskates, you silly slashdot!
I never understand this kind of post. If you don't want to moderate an article, don't select anything other than "normal" in the menu for it, and then don't click the "moderate" link at the bottom of the page. It can't be just a "finger slip".
Oh, wait, I'll bet there's some option you've set so that your moderation actions take effect immediately. Perhaps you ought to change those so you can't mis-moderate with just a finger slip.
The math is clear, if a 8 character alphanumeric password takes a second to break
If you have software/hardware that can brute force an 8 character alphanumeric password in one second, the NSA would love to talk to you. Probably already is. It was nice knowing you, hope it turns out well.
Him: "You need to specify a list of every character that is allowed in the text field, otherwise I cannot program it."
Me: [Facepalm]
The developer is right. You are trying to enforce an ambiguous requirement. "All of them, at least the printable ones" is not specific. "Printable" assumes a font. In the symbol font (as found on Winders) there are a lot of "printable" characters that don't show up on a keyboard. Since they are mapped into the same binary values, how do you differentiate?
"My password has a an "upside down A" but you are accepting a double quote and letting me log in. It's broke!"
This is not a trivial issue. It appears that someone has had the same kind of conversation with some web developers regarding proper email addresses.
Him: "What characters should be allowed in an email address?"
Boss: "Anything that is in an email address."
Him: "Hmmm, ok, all I've ever seen are A-Za-z0-9.- and one '@'. That's what I'll code.
Me: "Hey, your website it broken, it doesn't accept valid email addresses! Don't you idiots bother to read the RFC for internet messaging when you program this stuff?"
Him: "It works fine with my address."
Me: "It's broken AND HERE IS HOW TO CHANGE THE JAVASCRIPT CODE TO FIX IT."
Him: "How did you get ahold of our proprietary javascript code?"
There is nothing you can do with someone who has sworn to kill you & tear up your home other than to stop them.
And yet you want "us" to apologize to them for preventing them from developing nuclear weapons? I'd say that preventing them from having a means of creating nuclear weapons is a pretty nice way of "stop[ping] them", compared to killing them all and tearing up their homes.
If Windows is your primary OS and you want to use Linux, VirtualBox is a better solution than dual-booting today.
Unless your reason for running Linux is to do processing and not just run some arbitrary piece of Linux-only software. Then you want to run as close to bare metal as possible.
A deterrent means that the threat of the punishment prevents crime from happening in the first place
No, it doesn't. A deterrent is a "negative influence". A deterrent means that it reduces the likelyhood of that crime being committed. Nothing can prevent a murder if the murderer is persistent and capable and either ignores the deterrents or considers the punishment worth the crime.
A locked door is a deterrent to crime. The death penalty is a deterrent to murder. You do not argue that nobody should have doors on their houses, or that nobody should lock them because they don't prevent burglaries, do you? (The only burglary I've been victim of took place through a locked door. Tell me how a deterrent prevents a crime, please.)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny we actually had all that before patents and copyrights. They were called doctors, art, math and made money just fine.
Before patents and copyrights, the system was called "patronage". You found a wealthy person who liked your art or supported the sciences (or did science himself) and he paid for it. And he got the benefits. That sculpture you made for him wasn't easily copied and sold in enough copies to make the money back. It went into your patron's house or garden, or he loaned it to a museum and got the prestige and respect for supporting it. A well stocked library was the sign of wealth and accomplishment, because those were the people who could afford the books.
And the wealthy pay as little as they can get away with too.
Of course they do. So do you. Or do you simply refuse to take every deduction that you are allowed because you feel some greater good in handing your money over to the government to spend for you?
The wealthy own more so they should pay ...
Difference between weath and income. Tax the rich until they aren't anymore, they deserve it, those rat bastards! Then we'll all be rich ... no, we'll all be poor together. Dog in the manger.
If 5% of the wealthy contain 97% of the wealth, they should be paying 97% of the taxes (hint: that number is wrong, its less).
Nothing like using known incorrect numbers to make an argument.
You need to learn the difference between "wealth" and "income". What you want to do is tax someone on their income (it is "wealth in the first year of ownership"), and then on whatever part of that income they've been able to save or invest (true wealth) over and over again until it is gone.
That's called "wealth redistribution." It's also called "from those according to their means to those according to their wants".
The people that get the most out of government money are the ones that own businesses.
Not always. Some businesses don't make a profit. Some make marginal profits. Just "owning a business" isn't a sign of wealth. Even so, they pay business taxes on what they do profit. And taxes on their employees even when they don't profit.
Those roads your trucks go down
Gasoline and other road taxes. Since very few of those trucks are electric, very few of them are avoiding gas taxes by not using gas, which many other people are doing, or by using newer high MPG cars.
Those police that keep your riches safe
And keep YOUR property safe, and keep your poor neighbors from stealing what little you have. Do you imagine that a rich person being mugged and losing his watch and wallet is as big a deal as a poor one being mugged for the same?
And police typically come from property taxes, not income. State police, yes. Local police, no. So, again, business owners (except the ones who have managed a development district deal) are paying substantially more for police than you are, because their commercial property is considerably more valuable.
When you can print a lower for $5 in materials, and you can save half a pound off the weight of, say, a typical 1911, you've got a potentially marketable product.
Be honest. Price and weight are not the driving force behind printing a gun on a 3D printer. It's the desire to bypass the registration requirements and background checks that buying a gun these days entails. And perhaps making it out of a material that won't show up (as well) in X-rays or metal detectors.
Even the "plastic" glocks have large parts made of metal, and while the guvmint says they don't keep records of who has bought a gun, you'd be a fool to think that every gun background check wasn't recorded in perpetuity somewhere.
One can point out that name calling in a news summary is patent flamebait without being either a supporter of or an opponent to the person being insulted. Just as one could discuss whether it is appropriate to use inflammatory hehaviour in a summary without themselves becoming insulting and assuming straw men for their own amusement and importance.
And the wrong side has been despondent.
But the foaming at the mouth crowd takes them both seriously.
Yes, they do. And then they jump up and down and rant and rave about how awful and hateful Rush is, and call Beck a clown (flamebait from the summary). Some of them then go as far as to call both of them official or unofficial spokesmen for "the party", and then attach all kinds of insulting stuff to "the party" as a result.
Can I suggest to the management at /. that if the summaries of articles are going to be such patent flamebait, that the moderation status of "flamebait" be changed from negative to positive? After all, flaming in the comments simply enhances the flame in the summary.
You misunderstood my stance on the matter. I think even the founders would agree that the WBC stands on the unfortunate side of free speech. They are protected, when clearly no one wants them to be,
No, it seems I understood your stance on the matter very well. It is not "unfortunate" that these people have free speech rights, nor is it entirely clear that "no one wants them" to have such rights. (Clearly, they, themselves, want themselves to have such rights; just as clearly, many many service members have fought and died to protect that right for others, even those they do not agree with.) The First Amendment was created specifically to protect such speech. Not the specific content, but most assuredly the kind of speech.
This is the problem with someone saying 'I don't think THEY ought to have that right' whilst enjoying that right themselves. "I don't think people who form a corporation should have the right to free speech" (paraphrashed), wrote a local nonprofit corporation board member in a corporate publication. The very epitome of "I want mine but you can go screw yourself". Our city council appears to be speaking in support of "Move To Amend", which seeks to remove the right of free speech from "artificial entities" (and a local city government is just as artificial as a corporation formed to promote the production and presentation of a political movie.)
If you think that the First Amendment is "unfortunate" because it protects speech you don't like, then rest assured that there is someone who will not like what you say and your right is enshrined in the same amendment that theirs is. If you are willing to be silent when others don't like what you say, then you may seek that from others.
And what got us into the mess? Deregulation of banking.
Just the opposite. The CRA forced banks to make bad loans. Did you think those bad loans would just dissappear as if by magic? They had to go somewhere. Couple that with politicians pushing the "dream" of "owning your own home" to everyone, even those who couldn't afford it, and disaster was the obvious outcome. "A car in every garage and a chicken in every pot" isn't a new political slogan.
And wait until the credit house of cards collapses. "Buy it now, no interest for 120 days", or 300 days, or a year ... It's not money, it's plastic! "Your prequalified for a new VISA credit card ...". "Call us now for your equity home loan..." "Don't bother waiting until you've saved up the money to pay for it, you can have it now." "Lay it away, make small payments and get it for Christmas!" People who think that they should just buy what they want with their credit cards instead of thinking about how much it will cost and how they will pay it off are going to do the same thing to the economy eventually that those who signed up for ARMs at 2% and forgot to think about the balloon coming at them in five years did.
Economics is not a faith based religion.
Except to those who didn't want to believe, and still don't believe, that forcing banks to make bad loans would have a negative effect on the economy. That feeding people the line "it's your right to own a home" would backfire when they wound up not being able to afford what they bought. And those who could afford a mortgage payment when the interest was only 2%, but could never afford it when the rate went up and a balloon was due -- as outlined ahead of time in the loan agreement they signed.
And to those legislators in charge of the banking committees in congress who opposed attempts at tighter regulations because "fannie mae and freddie mac are sound" and no changes are needed.
Regarding your comment upthread about "quality of life" of New Jersey residents: if you base your quality of life on whether there is a tunnel between New Jersey and New York, you need to get out more. Yes, there are valid reasons not to build expensive construction projects, and a lot of them have to do with how much it will cost. Governments are not bottomless pits of money, and pretending they are is going to be worse than just bad loans coming due.
They can get away with it it because it's not threatening anybody, and that's why it is the unfortunate side of acceptable Free Speech.
It is sad that the reason the founders created the First Amendment is now seen as an "unfortunate side" of the issue.
Freedom of speech exists to protect speech that is not popular. It exists so that people can have their say, and that everyone else can hear them saying it.
You may find it unfortunate that the Westboro Baptists have the right to say what they do, but that very freedom gives you the ability to counter whatever claims you wish to, and better yet, to know ahead of time whether or not you wish to associate with those people.
It gives you, and everyone else, the opportunity to know what they think and to argue against it. Yes, they may be idiots, you may disagree with them, you may think they are scum. But would you rather not know that this opinion they hold is out there and active, or have them silenced and let whatever resentments or biases they have fester until it is uncontrollable? And, pray tell, just which speech would you censor in that way and which speech would you allow, and what happens when someone else disagrees with you?
This was done, according to them, to be more secure. Even before I found out about this nonsense, I told them that tieing a password to a specific identifiable person, using a tag that was nearly publicly accessible, was absolutely less secure than letting someone pick a username that appeared noplace except in the login database. I pointed out that everyone in IEEE now knows my username, because IEEE uses it to send out email notices and deal with customer support requests.
I also made a comment about how I would not be surprised to find out that they were storing this information in the clear. That was yesterday. Today I read /. and find out that not only is it kept in the clear, it's kept on a publicly accessible FTP site.
Gawd. If you tried, you just couldn't make this stuff up.
Pretty sure the requirement for CFLs/LEDs etc trumps the requirement for the dimmer.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't. It's government. Every baliwick is its own baliwick and every baliwick has regulations.
Teaching MS Office is not intro to computers.
For people who haven't used them before, it is.
It's nice to argue about the purpose of a college education, but sadly most colleges have had to start offering classes in how to learn and how to do classwork just so the students they enroll have a fighting chance of succeeding. They aren't teaching this class (just) to be a vocational school, they're probably teaching it because they found out a lot of their incoming students were deficient in skills that would allow them to write papers or lab reports for other classes they need to take.
That's the reason many colleges offer remedial math and remedial english classes, too. I was dumbstruck to wander through the college bookstore here and see a PICTURE DICTIONARY on the shelves as a mandatory book for a low level class. It wasn't a class intended for foreign students, either.
Intro classes are almost always intended for many colleges, not just the one where it is offered. It is almost certain that a University curriculum committee of some kind has determined there is a need for this kind of instruction, and changing it will be a lot harder than getting different classes at a more advanced level created.
That said, yes, if you have a BA already, then there should be some way to get credit for the class.
It's a computer science class because, well, it's computers.
Trying to make it into a more advanced networking or whatever class would make it less usefull to the general student body, who just needs something so they can do their homework. Most people don't need to know how to set up a FIOS router (I certainly don't) or a TIVO, so those people would be the ones complaining about having to learn useless stuff if you forced it into an introduction class.
yes, I pulled a number out of my arse, but you get the point I was trying to make (such as evidenced by your complete lack of an attempt to argue against the rest of my post. Thank you).
Yes, I failed to argue against the rest of your post because I recognized a number pulled out of your ass and knew that you weren't trying to have a serious discussion. The fact you missed was that your number was a factor of about 24 million too small, which you then used to argue that it could be done in a very short amount of time. Wow, you can do 268 million in two seconds. Now try the real number, which would be done, using your super fast, l33t hardware, in 286 days.
As I said, if you have hardware that can brute force an 8 character password in two seconds, the NSA would love to talk to you. Whether that hardware might someday exist is irrelevant, we're talking about today. Present tense.
Me: "Users are reporting that we are silently dropping punctuation characters from this text field." ... now try this, go back and re-read the conversation in that light, and notice how that one line changes everything.
The fact that you think it changes everything shows that you aren't really aware of what it takes to write specifications. If you didn't tell him the first time what you wanted, then you got what he wanted. That you continued the "specification" by expecting him to guess what you wanted again, knowing that it failed the first time, is fascinating.
In fact, the fact that you were already having a discussion about a failure to specify fully what you wanted and were making him fix what you call "his bug" clarifies why he was telling you he wanted it in writing. Your 'facepalm' should have been "you're right, I didn't tell you exactly what I wanted the first time, here is a list."
Having been recently a developer (I'm only just now starting to grow my pointy hair), I definitely have mixed feelings about the "Must have complete 5000 page requirements document in order to write any code" mentality.
Excessive use of hyperbole noted. It doesn't take 5000 pages to give a specific list of what characters you want to accept in a text field. It takes more than "all of them, at least the printing ones", however. For example: you seem to be saying that he can exclude tabs. And linefeeds/CR. Would you go back to him a third time and complain that some of your users were complaining to you that they were trying to enter something in nicely formatted columns and the tabs didn't work? You did say "at least".
And being asked to clarify one piece of the unwritten specification after it becomes clear that you didn't get what you wanted doesn't mean you have to go back and write a 5000 page spec for the entire project.
If you care to browse the RFCs sometimes, you will find that they are able to define character lists in about ten or fifteen lines. Given that you could have referred to any RFC, as in "RFC5322 atext and specials" and been precise... no "at least" that leaves things open to interpretation. No "at least" that leaves the developer wondering just what must be there and when you'll be back wanting something he didn't think you wanted.
It's extremely important to have clear, unambiguous requirements for the major software features, important business logic, etc.
And your discussion shows that it is also important to have clear, unambiguous requirements for features that have already been programmed in a way that you didn't want and you were expecting to be fixed to meet your ambiguous exacting standards.
I'd probably do the same thing your developer did, given a lack of a clear definition of what was wanted the first time, and a customer that came back wanting me to fix what I'd done based on the lack of specification, who couldn't be bothered to be specific the second time.
There is no confirmation, the mod is applied immediately.
Only if you have your settings set to do it that way.
If you don't like the way your account is set to do this, then change it. For the couple of people who modded my first comment down, telling people I don't understand why they don't change the setting they can to fix what they are admitting is a problem is not flamebait. It's common sense.
If you don't care that you have to post to undo a moderation that you didn't want to make and didn't feel like changing the settings for your own account so it wouldn't be a problem anymore, and thus lose all your other moderations in that discussion and waste what you had, fine. This "instant setting" happened to me exactly once. Then I changed the setting. I didn't even consider leaving it set that way and then complaining in public every time I made a mistake in moderating later.
As I recall, it is under "Discussions", "Classic Discussion System (D1)". Yeah, there's probably a lot of combined settings there, but you can fix the problem of having to post an inane comment just to undo an errant moderation if you want to.
that's only 268 million tries (assuming 28-bit entropy).
There are 26 characters a-z, 26 more A-Z. My 108 key standard keyboard has another 42 characters (0-9 and symbols). That's 94 total. 94^8 is 6,095,689,385,410,816. (I think that's something like 12 BILLION times the number you gave.)
You can make assumptions about what a password is likely to contain, and if you run into morons who enforce rules about what you must have and cannot have in your passwords, you can save some tries, but a generic brute-force password cracker will require the use of all available characters. Oops, I forgot "space". That's 95^8.
Look at an ASCII table sometime.
Ahhh, so the specification has an unstated requirement for "ASCII" encoding.
Yes, I know what 'ASCII nonprinting" characters are, so thanks for your condescending lecture. I've been doing this for more than thirty years now. I know that you can get nitpicky and talk character coding and glyphs and several levels of abstraction that are irrelevant to the point being made. You can throw about terms like UTF-8 and UTF-16 and ISO and Unicode and whatever, and the point is that none of that was specified. Just saying "all of them, at least the printing ones" is an ambiguous, incomplete specification, and you're making the developer guess what you want.
A poor developer will he happy using his own standards when you don't care enough to tell him what you want, or don't know enough to know you need to tell him. A good developer will ask, just to avoid surprises and possibly costly code fixes later on.
A poor developer will ignore the existing standards and provide code to "validate" an email address (or password, or whatever) that excludes many of the valid characters, because he's never seen them used and the boss didn't tell him he needed to do it right. That was my example of this problem.
The fact that the person who was supposed to be providing the specification did a "facepalm" when asked for a more formal definition than just "all of them, at least the printing ones" shows that there is a bit of ignorance floating about, and it wasn't the developer's.
And at 100 billion guesses a second, using multiple GPU cards in a custom setup, you can test all those password in about 0.3 seconds.
It's remarkable when anyone has 100Mbps network to the world, you've got a large multiple of 100 Gbps, and the server actually responds with "invalid password" pages that fast?
Gosh, I am a human, give me an option to remoderate my miskates, you silly slashdot!
I never understand this kind of post. If you don't want to moderate an article, don't select anything other than "normal" in the menu for it, and then don't click the "moderate" link at the bottom of the page. It can't be just a "finger slip".
Oh, wait, I'll bet there's some option you've set so that your moderation actions take effect immediately. Perhaps you ought to change those so you can't mis-moderate with just a finger slip.
The math is clear, if a 8 character alphanumeric password takes a second to break
If you have software/hardware that can brute force an 8 character alphanumeric password in one second, the NSA would love to talk to you. Probably already is. It was nice knowing you, hope it turns out well.
Him: "You need to specify a list of every character that is allowed in the text field, otherwise I cannot program it." Me: [Facepalm]
The developer is right. You are trying to enforce an ambiguous requirement. "All of them, at least the printable ones" is not specific. "Printable" assumes a font. In the symbol font (as found on Winders) there are a lot of "printable" characters that don't show up on a keyboard. Since they are mapped into the same binary values, how do you differentiate?
"My password has a an "upside down A" but you are accepting a double quote and letting me log in. It's broke!"
This is not a trivial issue. It appears that someone has had the same kind of conversation with some web developers regarding proper email addresses.
Him: "What characters should be allowed in an email address?"
Boss: "Anything that is in an email address."
Him: "Hmmm, ok, all I've ever seen are A-Za-z0-9.- and one '@'. That's what I'll code.
Me: "Hey, your website it broken, it doesn't accept valid email addresses! Don't you idiots bother to read the RFC for internet messaging when you program this stuff?"
Him: "It works fine with my address."
Me: "It's broken AND HERE IS HOW TO CHANGE THE JAVASCRIPT CODE TO FIX IT."
Him: "How did you get ahold of our proprietary javascript code?"
Do you see the problem?
There is nothing you can do with someone who has sworn to kill you & tear up your home other than to stop them.
And yet you want "us" to apologize to them for preventing them from developing nuclear weapons? I'd say that preventing them from having a means of creating nuclear weapons is a pretty nice way of "stop[ping] them", compared to killing them all and tearing up their homes.
If Windows is your primary OS and you want to use Linux, VirtualBox is a better solution than dual-booting today.
Unless your reason for running Linux is to do processing and not just run some arbitrary piece of Linux-only software. Then you want to run as close to bare metal as possible.
A deterrent means that the threat of the punishment prevents crime from happening in the first place
No, it doesn't. A deterrent is a "negative influence". A deterrent means that it reduces the likelyhood of that crime being committed. Nothing can prevent a murder if the murderer is persistent and capable and either ignores the deterrents or considers the punishment worth the crime.
A locked door is a deterrent to crime. The death penalty is a deterrent to murder. You do not argue that nobody should have doors on their houses, or that nobody should lock them because they don't prevent burglaries, do you? (The only burglary I've been victim of took place through a locked door. Tell me how a deterrent prevents a crime, please.)