Last year I had SBC increase my 1.5Mbps DSL to 3Mbps.
Then I checked - I was only getting about ten percent more speed than I was before.
I called SBC, they referred me to their provisioner.
The tech there said I was 12,000 feet from the DSLAM, therefore I could NOT GET 3Mbps - you have to be within 10,000 feet to get it. They could set my line for that, but they said my line would begin to drop more and more and eventually go down and stay down. They were quite emphatic that 3Mbps was not an option for me.
So I negotiated with SBC to go back to 1.5 - for less money than I had been paying for the 1.5 (I got that some years ago at the $49.95 rate), but more than the deal they were offering for the 3Mbps.
SBC is clearly setting itself up for a class-action lawsuit, regardless of the legal language about "best effort speeds." They are offering services they KNOW they can't deliver to a specific customer.
The SBC sales rep even told me they were going to TWENTY megabit speeds this year. How the hell are they going to deliver 20Mbps when they can't deliver 3?
Didn't know that because it would be insane to think that a word processor NEEDS a "safe mode". A quick Google shows that it turns off Word loading the registry data key, the Normal.dot template, and any other add-ins or templates located in the Office startup folder.
According to the MS Knowledgebase, it also does this:
No templates can be saved.
The Office Assistant is not automatically displayed.
Toolbar or command bar customizations are not loaded and customizations cannot be saved.
The AutoCorrect list is not loaded and changes are not saved.
Recovered documents are not automatically opened.
Smart tags are not loaded and new tags cannot be saved.
All command line options are ignored except "/a" and "/n".
Files cannot be saved to the Alternate Startup Directory.
Preferences cannot be saved.
Additional features and programs are not automatically loaded.
Additionally, in Word 2003, documents with restricted permission cannot be created or opened.
I don't know how that necessarily stops the malware, but it still seems like an inconvenience to millions of office workers for the next couple weeks while Microsoft muddles through a fix.
At least it's better than rebooting every time you need to use Word...
You use SQL to withdraw data that matches certain characteristics.
Then you pass that data to a tool that does statistics.
It's that simple.
And I've seen corporate spreadsheets - back in the mid EIGHTIES, I supported spreadsheets - up to 57 LINKED spreadsheets in one system - for Fortune 1000 Treasury customers for BofA. That's WHEN I learned you shouldn't do this crap.
If you're plotting a million data points, pretty much by definition you're not that interested in any given data point, right? Plus how many variables are involved in each of those data points? 16,000 columns worth? Kinda doubt it. It's probably one or a few numbers, right?
But one hundred thousand rows of customer contact data, yeah, you're interested in specific rows.
Manipulating THAT sort of thing in a spreadsheet is braindead.
Using a spreadsheet as a complicated stats calculator with a lot of rows is okay. Like I said, I'm not in favor of arbitrary limits on software.
But that's not the same thing as incorrectly using a spreadsheet as a database.
It's not the row count we're objecting to, per se, it's the type of data people are putting in them.
"A lot of the time it just does not make sense to setup a database or write an application for a one time use."
Except it never turns out to be "one time". That's the excuse. It always turns out to be annually, then monthly, then weekly, then daily, then hourly - but the system never changes.
The first time the boss says it's "one time". The next time, it's "remember that one time thing? Well...we gotta do it again." The third time, he's "aren't we doing this...?"
If you do something more than TWICE, automate it - because if you do it more than twice, you're going to do it forever.
If the data has any recognizable structure at all, a relational database can handle it.
The SQL queries admittedly CAN get VERY hairy. I had a SQL instructor show us the query for a database system for engine testing data - it was ridiculous - had to be a full page of nested functions, nested SELECTS, etc. A nightmare to debug and maintain. She should have been shot for writing it.
That sort of thing should really be decomposed into an application - and that's not a problem for any database, as almost any programming system today can access almost any database.
Now, for playing "what if" with test data, that's another story. Still, there are tools for that purpose that work with databases.
I agree that software should generally not have arbitrary limits.
Not relevant to the issue of putting really stupid amounts of data into an analysis medium which is not designed for it.
Whatever analysis you're doing, odds are there is a better way to do it than using spreadsheets for that volume of data.
The problem is: nobody ever told you, or provided you one, so you never learned to use it.
I suppose in some cases the data being analyzed is so weird nothing but a very ad hoc method of analyzing will work with it, and in such cases perhaps a spreadsheet can be used. I find it hard to visualize this case, however.
"the data can't be moved around as easily (it's a lot easier for the average user to copy/paste an excel file from the network to his/her laptop than it is to copy from one db to another)"
Horsehockey. The only reason that is even remotely true is that the end user learned Excel instead of a database because MOST of his work CAN be done in a spreadsheet.
It also means their IT department, if they have one at all, is not training anybody OR automating the end user environment the way they should be.
No one should ever put 65,000 rows of data in a spreadsheet. It's braindead. Anything over ten thousand is a database problem - in some cases, less than ten thousand is a database problem.
If you need to be having multiple components on one page, use other worksheets - that's what they're for, compartmentalizing. linking and summarizing.
People need to remember how spreadsheets were first used - with paper and pencil. Going massively beyond that metaphor is a recipe for trouble.
The problem is that small business - and department users in larger businesses - can't get their IT people to produce databsses and reports fast enough, so they try to do mission-critical tasks with crippled tools.
This is a recipe for future disaster, not to mention vendor lock-in.
Stop using the wrong tools.
If you don't have an IT department, hire a consultant to tell you how to do it right using existing tools, or if necessary, to design your applications properly.
Granted, finding a consultant who won't take you to the cleaners or do a piss-poor job is another problem...
I've got a client now that I'm having fun with their lame little Access database application, because as usual the person who set it up had no knowledge of relational database theory, no knowledge of an appropriate GUI interface for the end user, no automated backup/compaction/recovery options, etc., ad nauseum.
"Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet"
Anybody who puts that much data in a spreadsheet is a complete fucking moron.
There's a time to give up spreadsheets and go to databases and that's about when the spreadsheet needs to be scrolled more than a few times in any direction...
A spreadsheet is nothing more than a crippled visual database with the ability to automatically calculate calculated values. Duh...
This is merely an example of adding "features" just to have a marketing bulletpoint.
While I agree that going back to paper and pencil is not a solution, there are problems with your ideas as well.
1) Make sure all attachments are virus scanned - the case in point is that it was and it passed because it was a zero-day exploit.
2) Use secure products not part of a monoculture - unfortunately ALL products have security issues. Again, this was a zero-day exploit - which could happen to ANY product, monoculture or not.
3) Avoiding monoculture products - as everybody likes to babble about the problems of switching to Linux, the issue is that most corporations are (or think they are) locked into a monoculture for reasons of convenience and avoiding document translation costs and consistent employee training. While this is bad for security, the assumption is that fragmenting into a multiculture would increase costs for document translation, training, etc. It then becomes an issue whether the costs for that exceeds the security risk costs.
While WE know that the use of open document formats and open source software would alleviate this issue to some degree, the problem is that if the program creators are competing with each other on features, they will be extending the so-called open document format in incompatible ways. The only answer to this, of course, is everybody using open source AND all open source developers agreeing to never add a document format feature without passing it through the committee controlling the format.
Another thing that would be useful - nobody acquires software unless it has been checked for security flaws by an independent security code checking group - a sort of "security Consumer Reports". How you would get the massive amount of software being developed checked in less than a century would be a feat, however.
The only answer to that is automated code analysis and security analysis tools.
Also Microsoft either has to redesign its systems from the ground up - a total and complete rewrite - while somehow maintaining compatibility with the existing monoculture - an impossible task at least for those companies using such Microsoft features as OLE and ActiveX - which means those corporations would resist conversion - or Microsoft has to go.
The REAL answer to security is: there IS NO security. The industry could certainly do better, but it would have to use very high level conceptual processing methods and secure system design methods from the ground up to reduce the sort of thing we're seeing today to more reasonable levels. As far as I know, NOBODY in the industry - including open source producers - are doing this. The closest anybody has come is the fairly secure BSD OS's.
Without security being intelligently engineered in from the beginning, and the basic issues of bugs and coding flaws addressed by high-level code generation and analysis systems - which don't exist yet - I don't see how the basic problems of security in multi-million-line programs can be addressed. Humans simply aren't good enough at detecting mistakes in their own work.
It's that simple.
It's also not that surprising.
Banks have been around for several hundred years and they use all sorts of security from human guards to automated security systems to procedures designed to minimize theft.
They still get robbed - and frequently.
We have the US government running around installing all sorts of security measures both inside and outside of its facilities. And years ago, Dick Marcinko broke through just about every one of them with his Red Cell SEAL Team.
There IS NO security.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't TRY, of course - just don't expect to succeed. It's an issue of the "Bell Curve" - if all I have to worry about is Dick's SEAL Team, my security would be pretty good.
But how many ordinary citizens at home or in corporations are really going to accept what it takes to keep out a top level hacker? Again, we're back to costs and convenience vs security.
Oh, yeah, our Constitution has been working really WELL lately...
Now if we could get our President to read it once in a while...
Face it, folks, the US will go the way Britain is going - it's only a matter of time. ALL states end up in the same place - fascist dictatorships. As long as the public are gutless wimps - like this fool I've been arguing with over the NSA wiretaps yesterday - it is inevitable.
You've haven't proved anything but what a sucker you are.
I don't need "evidence", as you put it - I need only look at what IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
You can't see anything because you don't want to see it.
It's that simple.
It's pointless discussing it with you for the simple reason that you're a sucker.
As more and more of the facts come out, eventually it will be clear what really happened. It may take another ten years, but eventually someone like Bamford will write a book about it and you'll look like an idiot for believing the press releases and corporate spin.
Stupid gutless/. punks on this site rate my post as "Troll" because they don't have the balls to stand up to the government which is wholesale spying on them. Why the EFF is trying to defend you ballless wonders is beyond me. Anything the government and Bill Gates does - in fact, anybody who has more money or power than you - is just fine by you lames.
Let the government do what it wants to you. You're not Americans, you're punks. Brainless, ballless, juvenile punks. You bent over for Gates, you bent over for Bush, and you probably bend over for Oprah.
1) It's not a "modified" version of anything. They built it for the specific purpose of traffic analysis which also happens to be what you use for wiretapping. Read their description of the product.
2) I'm perfectly well aware that Israel has a high-tech industry. If you would look up the issue via Google, you will find that the Israeli military - including the Mossad - directly supports and cultivates that industry. They have a specific program to do that which has a specific name and is run by a specific member of the Israeli military. They do this because it has become obvious to them that the best way to spy on everybody is to make the hardware and software that every country uses to spy on everybody. I am basing this on the KNOWN FACT that an Israeli company formerly in charge of the DoJ's wiretapping efforts was CAUGHT providing wiretapping information to drug dealers in Los Angeles, and that the FBI was seriously concerned over how much access to wiretap info the company - and by extension, Israel - actually had.
3) So the fact that an NSA man is running the company doesn't impress you? And to compare that with the ordinary fact that people from various tech companies serve on each other's board is disinguous at best. An NSA man is on that board NOT because of his technical expertise but because the NSA knows how valuable that hardware is for spying on people, Anybody who can't figure that out is a moron.
4) I repeat, this device was built and sold for one purpose only - spying. Any additional revenue the company gets from using it for other purposes is a perk and a cover for its real purpose.
5) You think it's being misused, but you don't think it's a "conspiracy". Gee, I guess you figure they just "misused" it by ACCIDENT?
You're just another fool that bends over and takes it from the government because you don't have the balls to call them on it.
First, the morons want everybody to believe that just because the Narus device can be used for traffic analysis - which is fundamentally a benign activity, unless it's used to deny somebody's traffic - which the telcos now want to do - that therefore the device is "harmless."
Horseshit.
This device as designed and built for spying, and was placed into telcos everywhere on the PRETEXT of being useful for traffic analysis. Then the NSA came calling and bulldozed the telcos into giving them everything that goes through it.
The fact of the matters is that Narus the company is run by an "Israeli immigrant" and is financed by, among others, an Israeli investment company, one of the partners of whom happens to have worked for the Israeli government, including a stint developing optical devices for the Israeli military.
And one of the directors on the board happens to be an "ex-" NSA guy (or as General Golgo said in the James Bond movie, "Nobody ever leaves the KGB!")
The reality is that this device was designed and built for spying by the Mossad, in collaboration with the NSA, and then sold to the telcos under a pretext, which was then altered by arm-twisting or payment to the telcos to sell out the US Constitution.
It's that simple.
And every gutless moron posting here who says, "So what?" is a traitor to the United States and deserves to have his Internet porn recorded by the morons at NSA.
Stupid suckers won't care until they're locking your ass up for even POSTING on/. - which they WILL get around to someday - after they have locked up all the anti-war protesters and the rest of the people who ARE patriots in this country instead of the "fake patriots" who are for a fascist state in this country.
But then, since most of posters are/. are fake patriots, maybe they won't lock them up, after all. Most of the posters on./ will do anything to bend over and take it from Bill Gates, so why not George Bush, too?
1) Iran only needs a nuke development program in order to put Israel and the US off the regime change program. While they COULD buy a nuclear weapon from somebody on the black market, that really isn't a solution. They would be much more secure having the ability to build their own. As for how long that takes, the estimates are five to ten years IF they started now - and there's no evidence they have.
2) The UN is irrelevant only if you believe international law is irrelevant. That Constitution you talk about happens to require the US to obey all international treaties which it has signed - they have the force of US law. Look it up. Attacking Iran unilaterally - in fact, even threatening to do so - is illegal under the UN Charter which the US has signed.
3) I am well aware of the Constitutional requirement that Congress declare war. Representative Peter DeFazio is pushing a resolution specifically to remind Bush of that and prevent him initiating a war with Iran on his own hook. That resolution has almost no support in the Congress. Bush can and will do exactly as he pleases and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress won't stop him and neither will the Democrats. As for impeachment, Nancy Pelosi has just said that even if the Dems regain the House in the fall, there will be NO impeachment proceedings.
4) Forget conscripting 10 million Americans - even 9/11 didn't generate that level of anxiety and Iran is not capable of doing so, either. Even if Iran exports terrorism directly to the US, which I expect it may do, that will not be enough to justify that level of conscription. And if the US tried that, China and Russia would nuke this country in a heartbeat, because they would know the US was literally trying to conquer the world. China is the only country whose population can support a military of that size.
From a Google search:
"By 1943, the Army staff knew that the manpower barrel had a bottom. The pool of reserve manpower represented by millions of unemployed workers had been absorbed labor was becoming scarce, and Roosevelt set a ceiling of 8.2 million on the strength of the armed forces. Mobilization was essentially over, having evolved from its gradual beginnings in 1940, speeding up in 1941, expanding dramatically in 1942, and reaching its peak in production in 1943. For the rest of the way, it was essential for General Marshall and his staff to balance strategy and manpower with sustained high production.
Manpower shortages did cause problems late in the war. By 1944, the scarcity was felt nationwide. The Army curtailed some specialized training programs to provide troops where they were most urgently needed and expanded the use of limited service personnel and women for noncombat duty. Despite the problems, the number of soldiers in the Army did not actually peak until May 1945, the month during which the war against Germany ended. By then, the Army's strength was over 8 million."
In other words, the only reason they got that many was because of the previous Depression - and it started causing labor shortages. Project that to today, where most people are employed, and you couldn't possibly get ten million men and women - unless you were facing nuclear war with Russia and China.
5) I have yet to see ANY Congressional opposition to an attack on Iran - with the sole exception of Lugar stating that diplomacy would be better, and a few Democratic Congressmen such as DeFazio. Sy Hersh reported that several Senators had already been brief on the attack plan - including one Democrat, which was undoubtedly the "Senator from Israel" Joe Lieberman - and the only question they had about it was whether the nuclear bunker busters would go deep enough to take out the Iranian facilities. They were all on board.
You are correct that this will turn into a ground war, but incorrect if you think the US will try to occupy all of Iran. All Bush wants is the oil in Khuzestan. He's not going to get it any more than he
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to click on 40 freakin' Web pages just to read their review - and their ads - they're out of their goddamn minds.
Learn to put stuff that big in a PDF and make it available for download - or at least one big HTML page.
Idiots.
Time to terrorize the public again.
Last year I had SBC increase my 1.5Mbps DSL to 3Mbps.
Then I checked - I was only getting about ten percent more speed than I was before.
I called SBC, they referred me to their provisioner.
The tech there said I was 12,000 feet from the DSLAM, therefore I could NOT GET 3Mbps - you have to be within 10,000 feet to get it. They could set my line for that, but they said my line would begin to drop more and more and eventually go down and stay down. They were quite emphatic that 3Mbps was not an option for me.
So I negotiated with SBC to go back to 1.5 - for less money than I had been paying for the 1.5 (I got that some years ago at the $49.95 rate), but more than the deal they were offering for the 3Mbps.
SBC is clearly setting itself up for a class-action lawsuit, regardless of the legal language about "best effort speeds." They are offering services they KNOW they can't deliver to a specific customer.
The SBC sales rep even told me they were going to TWENTY megabit speeds this year. How the hell are they going to deliver 20Mbps when they can't deliver 3?
I knew there was a way not to load the normal.dot, but not what it was called.
I really don't use Word much, I use Linux and OpenOffice, although I dual boot Windows XP and have Microsoft Offce 2003.
Didn't know that because it would be insane to think that a word processor NEEDS a "safe mode". A quick Google shows that it turns off Word loading the registry data key, the Normal.dot template, and any other add-ins or templates located in the Office startup folder.
According to the MS Knowledgebase, it also does this:
No templates can be saved.
The Office Assistant is not automatically displayed.
Toolbar or command bar customizations are not loaded and customizations cannot be saved.
The AutoCorrect list is not loaded and changes are not saved.
Recovered documents are not automatically opened.
Smart tags are not loaded and new tags cannot be saved.
All command line options are ignored except "/a" and "/n".
Files cannot be saved to the Alternate Startup Directory.
Preferences cannot be saved.
Additional features and programs are not automatically loaded.
Additionally, in Word 2003, documents with restricted permission cannot be created or opened.
I don't know how that necessarily stops the malware, but it still seems like an inconvenience to millions of office workers for the next couple weeks while Microsoft muddles through a fix.
At least it's better than rebooting every time you need to use Word...
Use Word in SAFE MODE!
I'm not kidding...TechTarget reported that this morning in one of my security emails...
Microsoft expects scores of millions of office workers to reboot their systems into Safe Mode to write a document until they offer a fix next month...
Nobody said use SQL for statistics.
You use SQL to withdraw data that matches certain characteristics.
Then you pass that data to a tool that does statistics.
It's that simple.
And I've seen corporate spreadsheets - back in the mid EIGHTIES, I supported spreadsheets - up to 57 LINKED spreadsheets in one system - for Fortune 1000 Treasury customers for BofA. That's WHEN I learned you shouldn't do this crap.
"They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think it was worth it."
MOD THIS POST "+5 FUNNY"!!!
"Worth it" to Bill Gates means more pointless features to fool the customer into giving him their money...
It's that simple.
That's the point - you were never told that there's a better tool, so you end up using a crippled tool.
This is why people do what they do - their IT support (and general managerial support) is so weak they end up using crippled tools to do their jobs.
If you're plotting a million data points, pretty much by definition you're not that interested in any given data point, right? Plus how many variables are involved in each of those data points? 16,000 columns worth? Kinda doubt it. It's probably one or a few numbers, right?
But one hundred thousand rows of customer contact data, yeah, you're interested in specific rows.
Manipulating THAT sort of thing in a spreadsheet is braindead.
Using a spreadsheet as a complicated stats calculator with a lot of rows is okay. Like I said, I'm not in favor of arbitrary limits on software.
But that's not the same thing as incorrectly using a spreadsheet as a database.
It's not the row count we're objecting to, per se, it's the type of data people are putting in them.
"A lot of the time it just does not make sense to setup a database or write an application for a one time use."
Except it never turns out to be "one time". That's the excuse. It always turns out to be annually, then monthly, then weekly, then daily, then hourly - but the system never changes.
The first time the boss says it's "one time". The next time, it's "remember that one time thing? Well...we gotta do it again." The third time, he's "aren't we doing this...?"
If you do something more than TWICE, automate it - because if you do it more than twice, you're going to do it forever.
Heh, heh, at which point I would have said, "Well, you for one should welcome your eight-minute-opening spreadsheet overlords!"
Working with idiots is never a pleasure.
If the data has any recognizable structure at all, a relational database can handle it.
The SQL queries admittedly CAN get VERY hairy. I had a SQL instructor show us the query for a database system for engine testing data - it was ridiculous - had to be a full page of nested functions, nested SELECTS, etc. A nightmare to debug and maintain. She should have been shot for writing it.
That sort of thing should really be decomposed into an application - and that's not a problem for any database, as almost any programming system today can access almost any database.
Now, for playing "what if" with test data, that's another story. Still, there are tools for that purpose that work with databases.
I agree that software should generally not have arbitrary limits.
Not relevant to the issue of putting really stupid amounts of data into an analysis medium which is not designed for it.
Whatever analysis you're doing, odds are there is a better way to do it than using spreadsheets for that volume of data.
The problem is: nobody ever told you, or provided you one, so you never learned to use it.
I suppose in some cases the data being analyzed is so weird nothing but a very ad hoc method of analyzing will work with it, and in such cases perhaps a spreadsheet can be used. I find it hard to visualize this case, however.
"the data can't be moved around as easily (it's a lot easier for the average user to copy/paste an excel file from the network to his/her laptop than it is to copy from one db to another)"
Horsehockey. The only reason that is even remotely true is that the end user learned Excel instead of a database because MOST of his work CAN be done in a spreadsheet.
It also means their IT department, if they have one at all, is not training anybody OR automating the end user environment the way they should be.
Yes, it is, if you're not a moron.
No one should ever put 65,000 rows of data in a spreadsheet. It's braindead. Anything over ten thousand is a database problem - in some cases, less than ten thousand is a database problem.
If you need to be having multiple components on one page, use other worksheets - that's what they're for, compartmentalizing. linking and summarizing.
People need to remember how spreadsheets were first used - with paper and pencil. Going massively beyond that metaphor is a recipe for trouble.
The problem is that small business - and department users in larger businesses - can't get their IT people to produce databsses and reports fast enough, so they try to do mission-critical tasks with crippled tools.
This is a recipe for future disaster, not to mention vendor lock-in.
Stop using the wrong tools.
If you don't have an IT department, hire a consultant to tell you how to do it right using existing tools, or if necessary, to design your applications properly.
Granted, finding a consultant who won't take you to the cleaners or do a piss-poor job is another problem...
I've got a client now that I'm having fun with their lame little Access database application, because as usual the person who set it up had no knowledge of relational database theory, no knowledge of an appropriate GUI interface for the end user, no automated backup/compaction/recovery options, etc., ad nauseum.
"Bigger spreadsheets are available in Excel -- over 1 million rows and over 16,000 columns per worksheet"
Anybody who puts that much data in a spreadsheet is a complete fucking moron.
There's a time to give up spreadsheets and go to databases and that's about when the spreadsheet needs to be scrolled more than a few times in any direction...
A spreadsheet is nothing more than a crippled visual database with the ability to automatically calculate calculated values. Duh...
This is merely an example of adding "features" just to have a marketing bulletpoint.
While I agree that going back to paper and pencil is not a solution, there are problems with your ideas as well.
1) Make sure all attachments are virus scanned - the case in point is that it was and it passed because it was a zero-day exploit.
2) Use secure products not part of a monoculture - unfortunately ALL products have security issues. Again, this was a zero-day exploit - which could happen to ANY product, monoculture or not.
3) Avoiding monoculture products - as everybody likes to babble about the problems of switching to Linux, the issue is that most corporations are (or think they are) locked into a monoculture for reasons of convenience and avoiding document translation costs and consistent employee training. While this is bad for security, the assumption is that fragmenting into a multiculture would increase costs for document translation, training, etc. It then becomes an issue whether the costs for that exceeds the security risk costs.
While WE know that the use of open document formats and open source software would alleviate this issue to some degree, the problem is that if the program creators are competing with each other on features, they will be extending the so-called open document format in incompatible ways. The only answer to this, of course, is everybody using open source AND all open source developers agreeing to never add a document format feature without passing it through the committee controlling the format.
Another thing that would be useful - nobody acquires software unless it has been checked for security flaws by an independent security code checking group - a sort of "security Consumer Reports". How you would get the massive amount of software being developed checked in less than a century would be a feat, however.
The only answer to that is automated code analysis and security analysis tools.
Also Microsoft either has to redesign its systems from the ground up - a total and complete rewrite - while somehow maintaining compatibility with the existing monoculture - an impossible task at least for those companies using such Microsoft features as OLE and ActiveX - which means those corporations would resist conversion - or Microsoft has to go.
The REAL answer to security is: there IS NO security. The industry could certainly do better, but it would have to use very high level conceptual processing methods and secure system design methods from the ground up to reduce the sort of thing we're seeing today to more reasonable levels. As far as I know, NOBODY in the industry - including open source producers - are doing this. The closest anybody has come is the fairly secure BSD OS's.
Without security being intelligently engineered in from the beginning, and the basic issues of bugs and coding flaws addressed by high-level code generation and analysis systems - which don't exist yet - I don't see how the basic problems of security in multi-million-line programs can be addressed. Humans simply aren't good enough at detecting mistakes in their own work.
It's that simple.
It's also not that surprising.
Banks have been around for several hundred years and they use all sorts of security from human guards to automated security systems to procedures designed to minimize theft.
They still get robbed - and frequently.
We have the US government running around installing all sorts of security measures both inside and outside of its facilities. And years ago, Dick Marcinko broke through just about every one of them with his Red Cell SEAL Team.
There IS NO security.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't TRY, of course - just don't expect to succeed. It's an issue of the "Bell Curve" - if all I have to worry about is Dick's SEAL Team, my security would be pretty good.
But how many ordinary citizens at home or in corporations are really going to accept what it takes to keep out a top level hacker? Again, we're back to costs and convenience vs security.
There's no easy answer.
Oh, yeah, our Constitution has been working really WELL lately...
Now if we could get our President to read it once in a while...
Face it, folks, the US will go the way Britain is going - it's only a matter of time. ALL states end up in the same place - fascist dictatorships. As long as the public are gutless wimps - like this fool I've been arguing with over the NSA wiretaps yesterday - it is inevitable.
You've haven't proved anything but what a sucker you are.
I don't need "evidence", as you put it - I need only look at what IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
You can't see anything because you don't want to see it.
It's that simple.
It's pointless discussing it with you for the simple reason that you're a sucker.
As more and more of the facts come out, eventually it will be clear what really happened. It may take another ten years, but eventually someone like Bamford will write a book about it and you'll look like an idiot for believing the press releases and corporate spin.
You're STILL interbreeding with humans...
Just look at Bush.
Okay, rate THIS as Troll, morons! Then go back to eating your bananas...
Stupid gutless
Let the government do what it wants to you. You're not Americans, you're punks. Brainless, ballless, juvenile punks. You bent over for Gates, you bent over for Bush, and you probably bend over for Oprah.
Now rate THIS Troll, morons.
1) It's not a "modified" version of anything. They built it for the specific purpose of traffic analysis which also happens to be what you use for wiretapping. Read their description of the product.
2) I'm perfectly well aware that Israel has a high-tech industry. If you would look up the issue via Google, you will find that the Israeli military - including the Mossad - directly supports and cultivates that industry. They have a specific program to do that which has a specific name and is run by a specific member of the Israeli military. They do this because it has become obvious to them that the best way to spy on everybody is to make the hardware and software that every country uses to spy on everybody. I am basing this on the KNOWN FACT that an Israeli company formerly in charge of the DoJ's wiretapping efforts was CAUGHT providing wiretapping information to drug dealers in Los Angeles, and that the FBI was seriously concerned over how much access to wiretap info the company - and by extension, Israel - actually had.
3) So the fact that an NSA man is running the company doesn't impress you? And to compare that with the ordinary fact that people from various tech companies serve on each other's board is disinguous at best. An NSA man is on that board NOT because of his technical expertise but because the NSA knows how valuable that hardware is for spying on people, Anybody who can't figure that out is a moron.
4) I repeat, this device was built and sold for one purpose only - spying. Any additional revenue the company gets from using it for other purposes is a perk and a cover for its real purpose.
5) You think it's being misused, but you don't think it's a "conspiracy". Gee, I guess you figure they just "misused" it by ACCIDENT?
You're just another fool that bends over and takes it from the government because you don't have the balls to call them on it.
First, the morons want everybody to believe that just because the Narus device can be used for traffic analysis - which is fundamentally a benign activity, unless it's used to deny somebody's traffic - which the telcos now want to do - that therefore the device is "harmless."
Horseshit.
This device as designed and built for spying, and was placed into telcos everywhere on the PRETEXT of being useful for traffic analysis. Then the NSA came calling and bulldozed the telcos into giving them everything that goes through it.
The fact of the matters is that Narus the company is run by an "Israeli immigrant" and is financed by, among others, an Israeli investment company, one of the partners of whom happens to have worked for the Israeli government, including a stint developing optical devices for the Israeli military.
And one of the directors on the board happens to be an "ex-" NSA guy (or as General Golgo said in the James Bond movie, "Nobody ever leaves the KGB!")
The reality is that this device was designed and built for spying by the Mossad, in collaboration with the NSA, and then sold to the telcos under a pretext, which was then altered by arm-twisting or payment to the telcos to sell out the US Constitution.
It's that simple.
And every gutless moron posting here who says, "So what?" is a traitor to the United States and deserves to have his Internet porn recorded by the morons at NSA.
Stupid suckers won't care until they're locking your ass up for even POSTING on
But then, since most of posters are
You really are ignorant of the realities.
1) Iran only needs a nuke development program in order to put Israel and the US off the regime change program. While they COULD buy a nuclear weapon from somebody on the black market, that really isn't a solution. They would be much more secure having the ability to build their own. As for how long that takes, the estimates are five to ten years IF they started now - and there's no evidence they have.
2) The UN is irrelevant only if you believe international law is irrelevant. That Constitution you talk about happens to require the US to obey all international treaties which it has signed - they have the force of US law. Look it up. Attacking Iran unilaterally - in fact, even threatening to do so - is illegal under the UN Charter which the US has signed.
3) I am well aware of the Constitutional requirement that Congress declare war. Representative Peter DeFazio is pushing a resolution specifically to remind Bush of that and prevent him initiating a war with Iran on his own hook. That resolution has almost no support in the Congress. Bush can and will do exactly as he pleases and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress won't stop him and neither will the Democrats. As for impeachment, Nancy Pelosi has just said that even if the Dems regain the House in the fall, there will be NO impeachment proceedings.
4) Forget conscripting 10 million Americans - even 9/11 didn't generate that level of anxiety and Iran is not capable of doing so, either. Even if Iran exports terrorism directly to the US, which I expect it may do, that will not be enough to justify that level of conscription. And if the US tried that, China and Russia would nuke this country in a heartbeat, because they would know the US was literally trying to conquer the world. China is the only country whose population can support a military of that size.
From a Google search:
"By 1943, the Army staff knew that the manpower barrel had a bottom. The pool of reserve manpower represented by millions of unemployed workers had been absorbed labor was becoming scarce, and Roosevelt set a ceiling of 8.2 million on the strength of the armed forces. Mobilization was essentially over, having evolved from its gradual beginnings in 1940, speeding up in 1941, expanding dramatically in 1942, and reaching its peak in production in 1943. For the rest of the way, it was essential for General Marshall and his staff to balance strategy and manpower with sustained high production.
Manpower shortages did cause problems late in the war. By 1944, the scarcity was felt nationwide. The Army curtailed some specialized training programs to provide troops where they were most urgently needed and expanded the use of limited service personnel and women for noncombat duty. Despite the problems, the number of soldiers in the Army did not actually peak until May 1945, the month during which the war against Germany ended. By then, the Army's strength was over 8 million."
In other words, the only reason they got that many was because of the previous Depression - and it started causing labor shortages. Project that to today, where most people are employed, and you couldn't possibly get ten million men and women - unless you were facing nuclear war with Russia and China.
5) I have yet to see ANY Congressional opposition to an attack on Iran - with the sole exception of Lugar stating that diplomacy would be better, and a few Democratic Congressmen such as DeFazio. Sy Hersh reported that several Senators had already been brief on the attack plan - including one Democrat, which was undoubtedly the "Senator from Israel" Joe Lieberman - and the only question they had about it was whether the nuclear bunker busters would go deep enough to take out the Iranian facilities. They were all on board.
You are correct that this will turn into a ground war, but incorrect if you think the US will try to occupy all of Iran. All Bush wants is the oil in Khuzestan. He's not going to get it any more than he