This is ironic. Today, I was listening to NPR and they stated that last year, 8 billion Dollars US were spend searching for oil. However, only an estimated $4 billion in oil reserves were located. We may not run out, but at this rate, we will have to do something like a doubling the price of oil to make oil exploration profitable. This is not a 'green' arguement, this is raw capitalism.
Here is a prediction that I do recall..."I believe the Great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell.....As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which are God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."
--George Washington Carver
This has almost nothing to do with it. The voting eligability of a voter is up to the state in which the felony occured. Each state can determine if a felon can vote after serving his/her term. The Constitution stipulates that other states must accept the decision of the state in which the crime occured. Therefore, states that prohibit felons from voting send lists of felons to the other states.
Since felons tend to be from 'lower' classes and are disproporionatly from minority communities, they tend to vote for Democrats (they also tend to have low turnouts). Several reporters have observed that several Repulican governors have produced lists with significant errors. A list sent from Texas to Florida in 2000 contained people 'convicted' of felonies in 2007 as well as people convicted of misdeminors. These lists were used with the less care that Homeland Security lists that held up Sen. Kennedy and caused Cat Stephens (aka Yuseph Islam) to be deported, only four months after he met with White House staff members; so there are recorded incidents where a legitimate voter with the same name as someone on the no-vote list was turned away. In short, there are plenty of irregularities and there is evidence that they are systematic.
Tell them what they are doing in immoral. It is not acceptable to user MS Office without obeying its license.
Remind that that it is not only immoral, but it is also illegal. They have almost certainly given Microsoft permission to look at the contents of thier hard drive (in order to get patches), so Microsoft can figure out who has legal and illegal copies of thier software. As the record companies have shown, large corporations can find it in their interest to 'make examples' of a few individuals who pirate software.
Remind your friends that illegal copying costs Microsoft much more than Linux. Microsoft is quite willing to play hardball with Linux. So, it seems like they could also start to play hardball with users that illegally copy software. This is especially the case if Microsoft starts to have a hard time meeting revenue projections. Microsoft must keep growing if they are to meet Wall Street expectations. This may well force Microsoft to go after piracy as hard as they go after Linux.
Then remind them that OpenOffice is functional and that they are encouraged to use it for free. The developers want them to use it for free. In short, remind them that being immoral has its own costs even if you don't get caught. Then give them a moral high road; most of us want to do the right thing.
This may have been funny about 5 years ago. Come on, why must we see this comment on any Slashdot article with the word 'standard' appearing in the text. Perhaps I should write a Slashbot to automates the process.
Not to state the obvious, but the dominant player in a market gains an (imperfect, but still useful) ability to increase prices after then have established a near monopoly. So loosing a little money today in exchange for the promise of a cach cow like Windows and Office is a great way to make money in the long run, even if you don't maximize profit in the short run.
Do you suppose MS make bloated software because the the programmers thought that the managers wanted a cache cow?
I guess I would consider MyDoom to be an application. If so, then this version is a job application. What are the odds that the real virus write went to the top of is enemy list rather than putting his own name on the app? If the person on the application can face extradition, I'm betting that the name is phony.
Good heavens.. thunking was what Windows programmers had to worry about when the Wintel world went from 16 to 32 bit operating systems. So, Windows programmers don't thunk anymore, and Linux programs never have to thunk at all.
Yup, I was thinking that too. I never really understood why Bucky was so concerned about the weight of a house. For compressive loads, a good cheap concrete seems quite reasonable. If you are talking about an aircraft, then cost is a function of weight. But I don't buy that arguement for a house. You can already drive a mobile home to a lot and install it an afternoon, but mobile homes are not considered 'premium' because of their mobility. Can any Slashdotter explain why lightweight is an asset in a house?
I can understand the 'money as function of weight' argument for an Antartic station that is air lifted, but that is rather exceptional. I'm wanting to understand why Bucky's design never took off (pun intented.)
Sure I darem, I have a throw-away box at home. I would be interested in seeing how to do this. I take it that this was a script that didn't do something intentially evil like a buffer overflow. One was or another, this will be a learning experience for me.
All sorts of groups support UN CEFACT and ebXML. OASIS is a major supporter of ebXML. The Oasis membership list is impressive, see http://www.oasis-open.org/about/ I have looked at some of the CEFACT reports and they have long lists of members (people) that come from a wide range of financial insititutions, manufacturers, governments, standard organizations from industrial nations (like ISO, ANSI and ECMA) as well as representatives of poorer nations that want to make sure that the standards will help them to advance economically. In short, this organization really does represent many members of the global economy.
There is a rather campy discussion of the role of these standards at http://www.unece.org/unecedaily/english/mercier.ht m This report has a decidedly European perspective, but it does demonstrate the utility of international standards on things as mundane as identifying hazardous materials in a globally consistent way. This value of this should be self-evident in a post 9/11 world, but you still need to have global standards bodies in order to pull it off. This is drudge work on behalf of global commerce, and I feel that CEFACT members are to be applauded for their efforts. They are working hard to define standards to support global electronic business.
There appears to have been a process in place. However, the process was ignored by the marketing staff. There was a process failure, but it was not a failure of Microsoft developers or the processes that they used to develop software.
How about something like a Soekris 1411 card? (http://www.soekris.com/ ) . This gives you hardware based random number generator (for about $70). I still think that you could use that to fill a CD/DVD with bits and use that to encypt (compressed) messages; perhaps the numbers are not perfectly random, but as long as the entropy of the stream is high enough, the NSA will have very little data to use. With software to handle the painful parts, I don't see that this would be a major problem for the users. I would think that it wouldn't be too hard to reduce the rate of useful data transmission to the level where cracking the messages would be extremely difficult.
Still, the difference between 'impossible' and 'trivial' is very much a function of the tools at your disposal. With respect to the NSA, the toolset they use is almost impossible (for me, at any rate) to guess. Underestimating the NSA could (hopefully) be fatal for the terrorist. Likewise the NSA cannot violate theromdynamics, so there are limits to what they can do. At least with respect to people like bin Laden, it is also dangerous to underestimate them; they can certainly find smart people to work on these sorts of issues. It seems likely to me that we COULD be at a point in time where the encypters have the upper hand over the code breakers.
I don't think Al Qaida gives a rats *ss about our freedoms. They want us to leave Saudi Arabia and they want to have the Palistinians 'free' of Israel. If we hadn't used Saudi Arabia as a base for the first Gulf War, and if we expected Israel to follow UN resolutions (rather than becoming the new 'Dr No', using UN vetos to prevent the resolutions) then I don't think that Osama would have attacked us.
I do see the value of supporting Israel, and I do the the value of the first Gulf War. I do not think that we should accept Saudis calling Jews 'monkeys' or worse. I don't agree with Al Qaida's reasoning, but if we don't try to understand their reasoning, we will never be able to counter this sort of enemy.
I also think that we gave Al Qaida a perfect present by occupying an Islamic nation. This will only fuel the hatred of the US. We really f*cked up this time, this will be a bigger quagmire than Vietnam.
Lets starts developing alternatives to Middle East oil. Alaskan oil is a local example. Russian oil and Venizualan oil are sources if we are willing to talk with socialists and ex-communists. Look how France uses nuclear for electricity. We can also examine wind generators on the high plains. Energy can be found in many places. If we can develop some of these,o we can decouple our economies from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East. Until then, they have us by the balls. As Churchill noted, "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." We need to get 'em out of the ringer, and that means energy alternates.
Where did I say "use PGP"? I was thinking abut leveraging the existing code to save money. One you get the phone working, you can replace the PGP with a simple XOR that takes a arbitary stream of random bits. Write some one time pads that you put on matching CDs, flash sticks, etc. You then agree to use CD N before the call. After the call, you burn the CD. Even Cray-acres don't help against a one time pad that is used correctly.
My concern with this line of reasoning is this: Why do we think that by paying the fee we will be safer? This will probably work for the petty criminal, who doesn't worry about wiretaps. But for terrorist organizations, I would think that they would use something like the PGP Phone (I assume that any mulitmillionare Zealot can afford to turn PHPfone source code into a working product.) We don't need many of these Zealots to do a great deal of damage.
So, we will end up paying for a wire tap system that gives us a false sense of security. We will be sold the VOIP wiretaps as a tool against terrorists, but the 'serious' terorist will be able to 1) go to any keosk, 2) make an HTTPS connection to www.we-are-not-terrorists.com and download a secure telehony peer, 3) connect and talk with other peers in a peer2peer network, 4) eraise the client and leave. This may not be perfect, but I would hate to defent against this.
Paying for security is ok. Paying for the illusion of secuirty is questionable. The combination of public internet and hard encryption is like Pandora's box, it cannot be undone.
I agree with you on this one. Blaming the Microsoft programmers is especially off base for the example where the Koran was chanted in the background of a game. This was done by Japanese subcontractors and discovered when Microsoft did some tests. Their process found the flaws - this is a success for Microsoft's process management. The marketing people seemed to have then made a deliberate decision to ship anyway. Sohow does this show the insensitivity and ignorance of US developers?
I was shocked that a search fo Mozilla came up empty. Simply switching to Firefox and making some descent security choices prevents all sorts of spyware. This is something that our reporter can actually do proactively, if only she gets the word. The other useful tool is the Thunderbird Email client. Remove MSIE and Outlook (Express or regular) and you stop all sorts of spyware and virii. Thow in a cheap router with firewall (as others have stated) and some antivirus software and you will have a reasonable chance of being able to use high speed Internet with a Win98 box.
Mod this up. The Trojan horse only worked because the Trojan's didn't bother to look inside. If you are running critical infrastructure, you have an obligation to look inside. With open source, you are encouraged to do so; this is more than you can say for closed source. In the words of Reagan, "Trust, and verify." We may trust open source developers, but it is prudent to verify the source code if you have critical infrastructure that depends upon it.
I agree completely. I am currently working on a web site with CSS driven menus. To get IE to work, we have to override event handlers in Javascript to get IE to behave properly. If MS would just get CSS1 and CSS2 to work correctly, it would improve the productivity of web developers around the world.
I'm sick of 'Best Viewed with Internet Explorer' logos, I want to see more of the 'Made with Cascading Style Sheets'. I would never drive on a road that says 'Best Ridden with a Ford Taurus', so why should infrastruture like the WWW be hostage to one vendor.
Microsoft says they want to be good corporate citizens. I say they should prove it by cleanly implmenting recognized standards. For starters, they can get CSS1 and CSS2 to work. They can always lift code from Mozilla or Konquorer if cost is an issue. After all, Billy needs his cash to buy the rest of di Vinci's works.
The fact is Microsoft software requires more maintenance. At least on servers, The Robert Francis group found that Linux requires far less admin time. This is discussed at zdnet . For a 'server unit' (defined in the report), the admin costs for Linux was $12,010 annually. The cost to administer Windows was $52,060 annually.
Microsoft likes to say "Linux is free like a puppy". I say, yes and Microsoft is like the purebred (add the 'b' word here if you wish) that costs a lot upfront and has congenital defects from generations of inbreeding. Sure, she is pretty, but shie is high strung you will spend way too mutch time and money fighting infections. Give me a mutt anyday; the mutt is not only cheap to aquirer, but more robust and better tempered. Saving money up front is only the start of your savings, the real savings is found in the maintenance costs.
I lived for a while in Gif sur Yvette, France. The mayor actually make a point of building road obstructions and posting that this is a domain for pedistrians. Against my assumptions that this was nuts, it actually seemed to work. Cars were fewer and slower and walking was more pleasant. The downtown was much more vital than the virutal ghostowns of many city centers in 'Walmark America'. The local drivers said that it didn't really slow them down much, since there was less traffic to fight.
Intuition can be misleading, its better to have observations and attempts to model the data. Even though this paper is completely counter-intuitve to many of us, we should gather better data and build better models. Making analogies is a useful first step, but only tht the extend that you can use the analogy to build a better model. Then you can prove that the insights you gain by analogy are valid.
Don't be rediculous, Microsoft is writing Longhorn and Stallman is writing HURD, how could we ever have a Longhorn/Hurd? How would it be licensed? What would it run?
That estimate is complete bullshit. The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated 38,000 causalities. The 'million' number was from revisionists wanting to justify Truman's decision.
We demanded 'unconditional' surrender. The Japanese had one condition: Let us keep our Emperor. We said no to that condition. After the Japanese had refused to surrender, Russia joined the Pacific war. We also decided that we were willing to allow the Emperor to remain as a 'figurehead'. If we had told the Japanese these two facts, they probably would have surrendered without the bombs. Even after we dropped the bombs, we accepted Japan's single condition in an 'unconditional surrender.' George Orwell must have been thinking about this sort of double speak when he wrote 1984 (in 1948).
Eisnehower said we didn't need to drop the bomb. McAuther said we didn't need the bomb. Both men were warriors who contemplated using atomic bombs under different conditions. But we did not need to use the bobms to end WWII. The decision to level two cities (that had not even been attacked previously, after thousands of sorties by B-29's) will be remembered as the US's blackest moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Your last name isn't Cratchet by chance?
This is ironic. Today, I was listening to NPR and they stated that last year, 8 billion Dollars US were spend searching for oil. However, only an estimated $4 billion in oil reserves were located. We may not run out, but at this rate, we will have to do something like a doubling the price of oil to make oil exploration profitable. This is not a 'green' arguement, this is raw capitalism.
Here is a prediction that I do recall..."I believe the Great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell.....As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which are God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."
--George Washington Carver
Since felons tend to be from 'lower' classes and are disproporionatly from minority communities, they tend to vote for Democrats (they also tend to have low turnouts). Several reporters have observed that several Repulican governors have produced lists with significant errors. A list sent from Texas to Florida in 2000 contained people 'convicted' of felonies in 2007 as well as people convicted of misdeminors. These lists were used with the less care that Homeland Security lists that held up Sen. Kennedy and caused Cat Stephens (aka Yuseph Islam) to be deported, only four months after he met with White House staff members; so there are recorded incidents where a legitimate voter with the same name as someone on the no-vote list was turned away. In short, there are plenty of irregularities and there is evidence that they are systematic.
Remind that that it is not only immoral, but it is also illegal. They have almost certainly given Microsoft permission to look at the contents of thier hard drive (in order to get patches), so Microsoft can figure out who has legal and illegal copies of thier software. As the record companies have shown, large corporations can find it in their interest to 'make examples' of a few individuals who pirate software.
Remind your friends that illegal copying costs Microsoft much more than Linux. Microsoft is quite willing to play hardball with Linux. So, it seems like they could also start to play hardball with users that illegally copy software. This is especially the case if Microsoft starts to have a hard time meeting revenue projections. Microsoft must keep growing if they are to meet Wall Street expectations. This may well force Microsoft to go after piracy as hard as they go after Linux.
Then remind them that OpenOffice is functional and that they are encouraged to use it for free. The developers want them to use it for free. In short, remind them that being immoral has its own costs even if you don't get caught. Then give them a moral high road; most of us want to do the right thing.
This may have been funny about 5 years ago. Come on, why must we see this comment on any Slashdot article with the word 'standard' appearing in the text. Perhaps I should write a Slashbot to automates the process.
Do you suppose MS make bloated software because the the programmers thought that the managers wanted a cache cow?
I guess I would consider MyDoom to be an application. If so, then this version is a job application. What are the odds that the real virus write went to the top of is enemy list rather than putting his own name on the app? If the person on the application can face extradition, I'm betting that the name is phony.
Good heavens .. thunking was what Windows programmers had to worry about when the Wintel world went from 16 to 32 bit operating systems. So, Windows programmers don't thunk anymore, and Linux programs never have to thunk at all.
Complacency is just apathy in action ... no wait, it is apathy in inaction
I can understand the 'money as function of weight' argument for an Antartic station that is air lifted, but that is rather exceptional. I'm wanting to understand why Bucky's design never took off (pun intented.)
Sure I darem, I have a throw-away box at home. I would be interested in seeing how to do this. I take it that this was a script that didn't do something intentially evil like a buffer overflow. One was or another, this will be a learning experience for me.
There is a rather campy discussion of the role of these standards at http://www.unece.org/unecedaily/english/mercier.ht m This report has a decidedly European perspective, but it does demonstrate the utility of international standards on things as mundane as identifying hazardous materials in a globally consistent way. This value of this should be self-evident in a post 9/11 world, but you still need to have global standards bodies in order to pull it off. This is drudge work on behalf of global commerce, and I feel that CEFACT members are to be applauded for their efforts. They are working hard to define standards to support global electronic business.
There appears to have been a process in place. However, the process was ignored by the marketing staff. There was a process failure, but it was not a failure of Microsoft developers or the processes that they used to develop software.
Still, the difference between 'impossible' and 'trivial' is very much a function of the tools at your disposal. With respect to the NSA, the toolset they use is almost impossible (for me, at any rate) to guess. Underestimating the NSA could (hopefully) be fatal for the terrorist. Likewise the NSA cannot violate theromdynamics, so there are limits to what they can do. At least with respect to people like bin Laden, it is also dangerous to underestimate them; they can certainly find smart people to work on these sorts of issues. It seems likely to me that we COULD be at a point in time where the encypters have the upper hand over the code breakers.
I do see the value of supporting Israel, and I do the the value of the first Gulf War. I do not think that we should accept Saudis calling Jews 'monkeys' or worse. I don't agree with Al Qaida's reasoning, but if we don't try to understand their reasoning, we will never be able to counter this sort of enemy.
I also think that we gave Al Qaida a perfect present by occupying an Islamic nation. This will only fuel the hatred of the US. We really f*cked up this time, this will be a bigger quagmire than Vietnam.
Lets starts developing alternatives to Middle East oil. Alaskan oil is a local example. Russian oil and Venizualan oil are sources if we are willing to talk with socialists and ex-communists. Look how France uses nuclear for electricity. We can also examine wind generators on the high plains. Energy can be found in many places. If we can develop some of these,o we can decouple our economies from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East. Until then, they have us by the balls. As Churchill noted, "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow." We need to get 'em out of the ringer, and that means energy alternates.
Where did I say "use PGP"? I was thinking abut leveraging the existing code to save money. One you get the phone working, you can replace the PGP with a simple XOR that takes a arbitary stream of random bits. Write some one time pads that you put on matching CDs, flash sticks, etc. You then agree to use CD N before the call. After the call, you burn the CD. Even Cray-acres don't help against a one time pad that is used correctly.
So, we will end up paying for a wire tap system that gives us a false sense of security. We will be sold the VOIP wiretaps as a tool against terrorists, but the 'serious' terorist will be able to 1) go to any keosk, 2) make an HTTPS connection to www.we-are-not-terrorists.com and download a secure telehony peer, 3) connect and talk with other peers in a peer2peer network, 4) eraise the client and leave. This may not be perfect, but I would hate to defent against this.
Paying for security is ok. Paying for the illusion of secuirty is questionable. The combination of public internet and hard encryption is like Pandora's box, it cannot be undone.
I agree with you on this one. Blaming the Microsoft programmers is especially off base for the example where the Koran was chanted in the background of a game. This was done by Japanese subcontractors and discovered when Microsoft did some tests. Their process found the flaws - this is a success for Microsoft's process management. The marketing people seemed to have then made a deliberate decision to ship anyway. Sohow does this show the insensitivity and ignorance of US developers?
I was shocked that a search fo Mozilla came up empty. Simply switching to Firefox and making some descent security choices prevents all sorts of spyware. This is something that our reporter can actually do proactively, if only she gets the word. The other useful tool is the Thunderbird Email client. Remove MSIE and Outlook (Express or regular) and you stop all sorts of spyware and virii. Thow in a cheap router with firewall (as others have stated) and some antivirus software and you will have a reasonable chance of being able to use high speed Internet with a Win98 box.
Mod this up. The Trojan horse only worked because the Trojan's didn't bother to look inside. If you are running critical infrastructure, you have an obligation to look inside. With open source, you are encouraged to do so; this is more than you can say for closed source. In the words of Reagan, "Trust, and verify." We may trust open source developers, but it is prudent to verify the source code if you have critical infrastructure that depends upon it.
I'm sick of 'Best Viewed with Internet Explorer' logos, I want to see more of the 'Made with Cascading Style Sheets'. I would never drive on a road that says 'Best Ridden with a Ford Taurus', so why should infrastruture like the WWW be hostage to one vendor.
Microsoft says they want to be good corporate citizens. I say they should prove it by cleanly implmenting recognized standards. For starters, they can get CSS1 and CSS2 to work. They can always lift code from Mozilla or Konquorer if cost is an issue. After all, Billy needs his cash to buy the rest of di Vinci's works.
Microsoft likes to say "Linux is free like a puppy". I say, yes and Microsoft is like the purebred (add the 'b' word here if you wish) that costs a lot upfront and has congenital defects from generations of inbreeding. Sure, she is pretty, but shie is high strung you will spend way too mutch time and money fighting infections. Give me a mutt anyday; the mutt is not only cheap to aquirer, but more robust and better tempered. Saving money up front is only the start of your savings, the real savings is found in the maintenance costs.
Intuition can be misleading, its better to have observations and attempts to model the data. Even though this paper is completely counter-intuitve to many of us, we should gather better data and build better models. Making analogies is a useful first step, but only tht the extend that you can use the analogy to build a better model. Then you can prove that the insights you gain by analogy are valid.
Sure! I've heard of Longhorns
No, no, no! A Longhorn herd
Don't be rediculous, Microsoft is writing Longhorn and Stallman is writing HURD, how could we ever have a Longhorn/Hurd? How would it be licensed? What would it run?
Perhaps mono really is a Communist plot!
We demanded 'unconditional' surrender. The Japanese had one condition: Let us keep our Emperor. We said no to that condition. After the Japanese had refused to surrender, Russia joined the Pacific war. We also decided that we were willing to allow the Emperor to remain as a 'figurehead'. If we had told the Japanese these two facts, they probably would have surrendered without the bombs. Even after we dropped the bombs, we accepted Japan's single condition in an 'unconditional surrender.' George Orwell must have been thinking about this sort of double speak when he wrote 1984 (in 1948).
Eisnehower said we didn't need to drop the bomb. McAuther said we didn't need the bomb. Both men were warriors who contemplated using atomic bombs under different conditions. But we did not need to use the bobms to end WWII. The decision to level two cities (that had not even been attacked previously, after thousands of sorties by B-29's) will be remembered as the US's blackest moment.