Sure, but if the system is live and has the EFS mounted, the key must be held in memory, otherwise the OS couldn't decrypt the EFS partition. With the key in memory, and Firewire having Direct Memory Access, the bad guy has the EFS (or PGP, or TrueCrypt, or whatever) key. That, plus passwords, web pages being viewed, engineering documents being edited, etc.
Well, that shouldn't be a problem here. After all, most/.ers probably had to do a quick Wikipedia lookup on "friends" in order to understand your post!
You may be right, and since I'm not even studying to be a lawyer, I'll presume you are, but this still illustrates how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. Producing study guides on major works has been a staple of literary study for a really long time. Many, many original authors (i.e. Rowling) would never produce such a guide themselves, since writing a guide is significantly different from writing a novel. Where in the hell do they get off believing that they should get a cut off of the labor of someone else? This is just as stupid as that condo association in Chicago that is trying to prevent people from taking pictures of the building that they live in.
Rowling became filthy rich from the Potter world. Good for her. Just because she was successful there shouldn't mean that she (and her children, and her grandchildren) should be guaranteed profit from the labor of anyone else in the world that does something related to that world. It takes a serious amount of work to produce a lexicon such as this; it isn't just a matter of "their minimal contribution in reassembling work". It takes several passes through a work, first recording the names of people, places, etc and on what pages the references occur. Then, go back through each of the terms listed and attempt to pull out a short, meaningful description of them. Next, go back through and try to make sure that you've dealt with all of the various ways that a given thing is referred to, such as He Who Must Not Be Named as an alias for Voldemort. Finally, put everything in some order (typically alphabetical) and do the formal typesetting, etc. I know a guy that wrote a reference guide to the works of James Joyce, and it took him YEARS of work to complete.
Should Rowling be able to make money from her own labor? Sure. Should she have a say in whether some other author can use the characters in new stories or in other products (i.e. the Hitachi Harry Potter Magic Wand, the Hermione G-String Bikini, etc.)? Definitely. Should she be able to prevent people from producing literary criticism, study guides, and scholarly works that are ABOUT the Potter world? Absofuckinglutely not!
I am a mastering engineer, software engineer and have worked on audio software. And in all of my experience there are only a couple of things left to improve upon with current digital audio technology, but for a very small amount of return. Ok, pop quiz. Can you detect any difference between this quote and these?
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (chapter 5, IIRC) to the subject of whether morality has its roots in religion. He provides many, many examples how, while the basics of Christianity haven't changed significantly in the past 200 years, morality has changed drastically. Look, in particular, at the concepts of equality (sexual, racial, etc.) today vs. just 100 years ago, when women couldn't vote, or just a bit farther back, at such embarrassments as the Three-fifths Compromise. If religion is the basis for morality, Christianity is based on the Bible, and the Bible's message hasn't been altered significantly in hundreds of years, then none of those changes should have occurred.
I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.
By modern morals, most Americans cringe just reading that, regardless of who said it, but for the time, if Lincoln said it in a public forum, it must have been not just a common belief, but probably a mild form of what most people thought.
Finally, if religion is the basis for morality and the Bible, supposedly God's words without interpretation, they why don't most modern Christians follow all of the laws set forth in Leviticus? Why don't they condemn the twisted story of Lot and his daughters? By modern morals, a father that offered his "two daughters which have not known man" to do "to them as is good in your eyes" (Genesis 19: 7-8), and then later impregnated not one but both of them (Genesis 19: 31-6) would be thrown in jail and most likely killed inside by other prisoners.
If there is a genetic factor, and if persons with this genetic factor are successfully breeding, why is the atypical attention span a disorder? Why isn't it an evolutionary measure that the species is developing to deal with the rapid pace of change that has developed?
My personal (albeit admittedly paranoid) view is that our society still believes that different==sick. Couple that attitude with the other factors mentioned elsewhere (both parents working outside home, the ease of using the TV as a babysitter, the chronic desire in the United States to separate ones actions from the responsibility to deal with the consequences of those actions, and the profit-driven nature of the modern pharmaceutical corporations), and I see a fairly clear reason why atypical attention spans are being treated as a disease rather than an adaptation.
Ok, take away the conspiracy theory. Perhaps the problem isn't that there are more people with concentration problems than before but that our current environment makes such problems more noticeable. Perhaps there is the same ratio of "normal" to "atypical", it is just that with population increasing over the past 50 years ago, the absolute numbers have increased to noticeable levels. Perhaps there isn't an increase, either in ratio or in absolute value, but the for-profit press is making us more aware of the issue in an attempt to gain readership (West Nile Virus crisis anyone?)
The simple fact is that people are hugely complex entities. Regardless of what Merck/CNN tell us, the odds that watching TV is the sole cause of ADD are extremely low. There are some medical events for which a strong causal relationship can be shown (i.e. preventing oxygen from reaching the brain causes death), the rest of medicine is murky at best. The press loves to simplify medical findings, and with the litigious nature of our society, being able to say asbestos or saccharin causes cancer is easy and profitable, but by no means 100% accurate. Mental health is even more fraught with problems, as rigorous scientific study of behavior is an exceedingly recent practice. Combine that with the short age of television and the rapid rate of change in the past 100 years, and it becomes very, very difficult to be able to point at two events and say that A conclusively, exclusively causes B.
Could there be a relationship between watching television and concentration problems? Sure. Will I be limiting the amount of television my children watch? Probably, although it will be because I believe that most television is unmitigated crap and not that I believe it will rot my kids' brains.
Sure, that must be it. More flawed genetic material. Couldn't possibly be that drug corporations are allowed to advertise individual products directly the consumers of the drugs, and have figured out that they get a much better revenue stream if, instead of curing diseases, they develop drugs that are a) "prescribed" by grade school counselors, b) taken daily, and c) have to be taken continuously for the life of the customer.
There are certainly some people who suffer from an inability to maintain concentration, so much so that their livelihood is severely affected, but the sharp rise is much more likely due to the pervasive attitude that anyone who doesn't conform must be sick, and therefore in need of life-long doping.
There is a big difference between SaaS, and simply service. Your examples (repair contracts on appliances, choosing a mechanic for your car) are pure services. You own your car, you own your stove, you pay someone to repair them or upgrade them. Those would be more analogous to buying a computer and paying someone to replace the failed hard drive, or perhaps buying a copy of Photoshop and hiring someone to edit your pictures with it.
Software as a service is closer, analogy-wise, to leasing your car. You don't own the car, you use it for a predetermined period of time. The analogy breaks down, of course, in that you don't lose the ability to drive to work if Ford's lease management software is offline for maintenance. That is the big problem with SaaS: I may have a contract that says I can use Online Office, but if their network is down, or the servers are broken, or there are sunspots, or whatever, I CAN'T DO MY JOB. Furthermore, while the SaaS provider may own the software, to use it, you have to put your work output (i.e. your Word document, your Photoshopped picture of Dubya's head on Paris Hilton's body, etc.) is on the provider's server. You no longer control your own data. If the provider goes belly-up, you've lost your data. If the provider is hit by a hurricane, you've lost your data. If the provider has a disgruntled employee, you've lost your data. If the provider raises their rates and you no longer can afford to use them, you've lost your data. On, and on, and on.
SaaS makes accounting/legal sense for Microsoft, but then again, Microsoft has a long, illustrious career built on screwing it's customers.
True, the de Menezes incident was not typical, even for the police in the United States. However, whenever deciding about new weapons for the police arsenal, the fact that atypical incidents do occur means that you have to take edge cases into account in the decision process. If, for example, the police officers were not issued guns, shooting de Menezes would not have even been an option.
Now, before flaming me on this, keep in mind that I'm not saying we should take guns away from the cops. What I'm saying is we must keep in mind that the police will use the weapons they have, and they won't always stop to think about the "reasonableness" of their actions, so we must consider this before giving them more.
Conversely, since words are merely oral/written representations for things, thoughts, feelings, or concepts, is saying "Oh gosh and golly gee" to convey the feelings of annoyance any different than saying "Shit" to accomplish the same thing? I hear people all over the place use swear word substitution (crap for shit, gosh for god, fudge for fuck, etc.), and it's easy to tell that they did a translation of the word in their head. How is that any better than using the most relevant word? Is the sin the symbol or the thought?
I understand the arguments about lazy language and word use to make a point (i.e. saying "fuck" five times in a single sentence), but when it comes to expressing what I really feel when I've just gotten pwned 5 times in a row by the same undead rogue in WSG, fuck seems an awfully appropriate exclamation. Fudge doesn't seem to cut it.
The datacenter I work in has shrouds on the BRB... now. They didn't get installed until after someone leaned up against one, causing a Halon dump. Between the evacuation, the expense of the Halon, and the costs of replacing the Halon with the new, tree-hugger-friendly stuff, the plastic shrouds over the BRBs were cheap!
Sounds like a nut job? To me, he sounds like a teen following the directions of the assignment and trying to determine where the limits lie. While not as well executed, Lee's essay has elements that are similar to sections of T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland, the drug advocacy of Alan Ginsberg, the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Literature is filled with dead people we now refer to as artists and legends who became thus because they explored the dark edges of humanity. Oedipus Rex is all about incest and patricide, the works of Shakespeare are filled with violence, sex, and death. So, take this background, a bright student, and an assignment that instructs the students not to censor themselves, and just what did you expect to come out? No poets get recognized for writing about happy puppies and cute kittens.
Add to that, the only text from the essay I've seen has been excerpted out of context. If I just give you this text "And ate the fellow, raw.", what would you think the poem was about? Perhaps a bit from Silence of the Lambs? A quote from Penthouse Letters? A story about eating octopus? Nope. That's from Emily Dickinson's "In the garden". Context is key to meaning.
Should the teacher have done something? Probably. Should someone have talked with Lee to find out if he really had violent tendencies? Sure. Should they have charged the kid with a crime for following, perhaps to the logical extreme, the explicit instructions on the assignment? Definitely not.
Paper checks for 10,000 employees: $1000
Pens to write on said checks: $ 50
Envelopes in which to stuff checks:$ 100
Not having to worry about that 3rd party company being a single point of failure for your payroll system: Priceless
People like to think that you can't run a company any more without these whiz-bang technologies. I wonder how stuff got made and people got paid before the Interweb was created?
Maybe there are people who plan all their purchases days or weeks in advance, but for a large number of people most small to medium purchases are done on impulse or at short notice.
I am one of those people. I hate shopping in bricks-n-mortar stores. These days, I only buy either perishable items (fruit, meat, eggs, milk, etc.) or emergency items (band-aids, toilet flanges, etc.) Nearly everything else I buy, I order online after spending hours at best, and sometimes weeks, researching what product to get. I get more useful information that way, and can select from a much broader selection of products.
Take, for example, my quest for a digital camera. If I went to the local shop, I could select from a dozen or so models. I could hold it in my hands, maybe look through the lens. Then I'd have to chose from whatever models are available from the local vendor community, which is 2 small shops, and the Big Box stores. I'd know how heavy it was, but that's about it. By comparison, online I can read reviews by people who have the various cameras, view images shot by them, go to sites like http://dpreview.com/ and see detailed analysis of the capabilities of the sensor, lens, software, outputs along with direct comparisons of static images for color reproduction, noise at the various ISO levels, resolution of detail, clarity, etc., plus all the data I'd get from the camera shop. Once I selected a camera, I would then be able to find the best price from all of the vendors everywhere in the world, even taking into account shipping costs, support after the purchase, and customer-based reviews of vendor reliability.
I use this model a bunch. Buying tools? Go online. Choosing a printer for my computer? Go online. Deciding which wine to serve to my sweetie this weekend? Go online. The prices are better, the information richer and more reliable, and I don't have to interact in meat-space with sweaty-palmed, pushy, clueless sales people. In cases like buying DVDs, resources like IMDB have enough input that they reduce the impact of one moron's opinion, so I know that I will probably like a move that got more than 7 stars. The opinion of the guy at Best Buy is spotty, at best. If there was an online grocer that serviced my area in the middle of nowhere, I would use them, too.
Of course, the strengths of the online world may help reduce/eliminate the effects of either potential SCOTUS decision. If the manufacturers restrict stuff too much in the states, I'll buy from Hong Kong, or Japan, or whatever.
No, this isn't the moral of the story. The moral is that many companies, and certainly nearly all Fortune 500 companies, have dedicated security staff that is responsible for doing security testing. If security testing isn't your job and you have a concern about something, contact the security staff and voice your concern. DON'T TEST IT YOURSELF WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM YOUR MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY.
A non-security person testing the security of an application is somewhat analogous to a factory floor worker doing safety testing on one of the production machines on the shop floor. Or an office worker accessing the company books to review for accounting irregularities. Certainly, people may have the ability to do it, but they can cause harm to themselves, to other employees, or to the company, even if their analysis is done correctly.
We are techies, we should make this stuff work. It is our job. While an admirable sentiment, it misses the point completely. The problem here isn't really whether passwords are good or bad. The problem really isn't even whether users are stupid or not. The problem is that the vast majority of the population do not know, nor do they care, about computer security (or physical security, for that matter).
Users have been conditioned to know that their money is protected when dealing with big banks. My savings deposits are insured by FDIC. Credit card companies cover most, if not all, of the expenses from credit card fraud. If a user has no personal risk, then any amount of effort is too much to protect the asset. There is no technical solution to this problem: I cannot write a program to make all the users care, and I cannot compensate for blatant stupidity.
The best that techies can do is what SiteKey does: decrease the risk to the people who care. With relatively low up-front costs, it would appear that SiteKey has decreased BoA's loss potential by 3%. Not perfect, sure, but better than not doing it.
When dealing with employees, rather than customers, making the users care is simple: If you're too stupid to pass this test, you're too stupid to remain employed.
If my license got a stamp that said I was a smoker and couldn't take part in any state funded healthcare... If it meant I didn't have to pay for anyone else to get it either? I'd start smoking.
Get rid of the state sponsored crap, let people choose their own insurance providers, let people deal with the consequences of their choices, and let people live their own lives.
Even better, I'd love it if I could sign something stating that I have no children and that my wife and I will not acquire any (i.e. give birth, adopt, etc.) so that I could stop paying for public education. Bad enough I'm funding everyone else's kids to go to school, but the system is so broken, it doesn't really help the kids much anyway.
Really a stupid question, but how did you go about finding said person? I know my home leaks like a sieve, but I haven't found the right keywords for the yellow pages, and the local power company is so fond of my high bills that they won't tell me who does energy audits for them two miles away (where the company is forced to provide the audits by the state laws there).
From a semantics point of view, you are correct. The problem is that Bush uses "war" both in the semantics context (i.e. we are shooting them, they are shooting us) and in the legal context (i.e. Commander in Chief, broad war powers, etc.) Without that formal declaration, the legal context doesn't exist, and therefore the derivative powers don't exist.
True, but the point I was trying to make is that, while there IS some reason to be concerned about terrorists, the War on Moisture IS NOT actually making us safer. It removes comfort and convenience from the travel experience, it provides another way that the airlines can start direct charging for a service that had been "complimentary" in the past (just you wait, in a month or two, one of the airlines'll be charging for water on flights), and it helps the government in their goal to monitor our movements. The arrests in London were not the result of ANY of the security measures introduced to combat terrorists, they were the result of traditional policework and a neighbor tipping off the cops.
When compared with the whole slew of false alarms (nine seperate incidents between 8/15 and 8/24), the War on Moisture has only served to threaten, intimidate, and coerce innocent people, and has done nothing to actually deal with the terrorist threat. I mean, let's be honest. If a terrorist is prepared to blow up a plane, and give their own life in the process, do you think they'll have any qualms about taking a baby along and even feeding the baby some "breast milk"? Do you think that they'd have any problems at all getting enough people on the plane, each with 4 oz of cough syrup, to put together the hypothetical bomb? The War on Moisture is security theater, whose only point is to instill terror in law-abiding citizens in an effort to consolidate power and make everybody that much easier to control.
You've got to be kidding! In theory, the readers, and by extension the posters, of/. are better educated than the run-of-the-mill sheep in this country, but I really doubt that now. Does anyone actually read stories like this,this, or this.
People, let's start using that grey matter for once. Yes, there are definitely people who would want to blow up planes, and yes, there are ways that it could be done. The War on Moisture isn't going to make anyone safer. Beyond the huge inconvenience and expense factor (read Schneier's Wired essay (I posted the link to his blog rather than the Wired article due to updates), a simple question of proportion should come in here. According to the US government's own statistics, fewer than 2,000 people were killed WORLDWIDE in 2004 by terrorists. Even if you add in the thousands of people killed on 9/11, you're still talking about 10,000 people, tops. Compare that to the number of people killed each year in car crashes (38,000 US fatalities in 2004), malaria (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 per year worldwide, mostly in Africa), or heart disease (276 out of ever 100,000 people in the US in 1996, or 22,800 in New York City alone). In fact, if the statistics are right, more people are hit by lightning each year (1 person out of every 600,000 per year, or 10,000 worldwide) than are killed by terrorists.
So, are you going to stop driving your car? Stop smoking/drinking? Stop taking romantic walks in the rain? (ok, so maybe not a good one on/.) Think of all the lives that would be saved if the billions of dollars that are being spent protecting us from push-up bras and shampoo were spent on finding a cure for malaria, or tuburculosis, or lung cancer, or AIDS.
It isn't a question of paying enough that espionage isn't a temptation. It can't be. Companies can pay what a given position is worth, but there are so many other factors that are completely out of the company's control. For example, say my employee is a gambling adict. Should I give the guy a raise every time he has a bad night and loses his kid's college fund? Should I do that even if he's not doing better than average work?
How about companies that operate in less stable countries? Giving a pay raise to an employee isn't likely to change their mind if their only child is kidnapped and the ransom is access to my database, nor is it likely to disuade a plant from a foreign government whose REAL job is stealing from me.
What about an employee who's just not very good at their job? If pay was the only consideration, then paying him more would protect me from him becoming disgruntled and stealing from me as revenge, right?
Come on, people. Let's attempt to use that grey matter between our ears. The world isn't nearly as simple as they make you believe in college.
...hire people you think you can trust. If you're proven wrong, fire them.
I've seen statements like this several times here. The problem with this is that there aren't many good ways to determine who you can trust. Sure, the interview process is supposed to take care of that, but we know that there are people with really good social engineering skills that would be able to lie consistently enough to be "trusted". You could do manditory background checks, including credit checks, to look for people who either have demonstrated untrustworthiness or have personal/financial situations that could lead to problems, but then all the bleeding-hearts here cry "Foul!" because you're treating the employees like criminals or you're denying the possibility of reform, or you can't get the info you need from prior employers due to fears of libel lawsuits, or whatever.
I guess you could hire everyone into the rock-bottom of the hierarchy and only allow people access to important data after years of trustworthy employment, but we all know that'll never work. With people changing jobs every few years, we'd never get anyone to stay in one place long enough to get access to the critical resources.
So, what are we left with? We have some small level of trust, but we put systems in place to a) monitor for malfeasance and b) limit the amount of damage that one person can do. Looking through the headings in TFA, that looks to be what was proposed. Where's the problem?
I can't help but think that most of the "Why can't we all just get along" crowd here simply have no real-world experience. Could be kids not out of school yet, could be people who've only ever worked in small companies, but it clearly shows a complete lack of understanding of what is involved in running any decent-sized business. The company I work for has 40k+ employees, and that's not counting contract labor. 40,000 people. That's the size of a small city. How in the hell does anyone establish trust across that number of people? You don't. The only thing you can do is limit how much damage you're likely to take and hope it never happens to you.
There was a long discussion of pano tools, both free and commercial, over at dpchallenge.com a while back. That link is to the first page where the discussion starts, way down at the bottom. From that thread, it would appear that, while a major PITA to install and learn to use, Hugin produces results that are typically at least as good as most of the major commercial tools and are far better than many of them.
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Sure, but if the system is live and has the EFS mounted, the key must be held in memory, otherwise the OS couldn't decrypt the EFS partition. With the key in memory, and Firewire having Direct Memory Access, the bad guy has the EFS (or PGP, or TrueCrypt, or whatever) key. That, plus passwords, web pages being viewed, engineering documents being edited, etc.
Well, that shouldn't be a problem here. After all, most /.ers probably had to do a quick Wikipedia lookup on "friends" in order to understand your post!
You may be right, and since I'm not even studying to be a lawyer, I'll presume you are, but this still illustrates how fundamentally broken the copyright system is. Producing study guides on major works has been a staple of literary study for a really long time. Many, many original authors (i.e. Rowling) would never produce such a guide themselves, since writing a guide is significantly different from writing a novel. Where in the hell do they get off believing that they should get a cut off of the labor of someone else? This is just as stupid as that condo association in Chicago that is trying to prevent people from taking pictures of the building that they live in.
Rowling became filthy rich from the Potter world. Good for her. Just because she was successful there shouldn't mean that she (and her children, and her grandchildren) should be guaranteed profit from the labor of anyone else in the world that does something related to that world. It takes a serious amount of work to produce a lexicon such as this; it isn't just a matter of "their minimal contribution in reassembling work". It takes several passes through a work, first recording the names of people, places, etc and on what pages the references occur. Then, go back through each of the terms listed and attempt to pull out a short, meaningful description of them. Next, go back through and try to make sure that you've dealt with all of the various ways that a given thing is referred to, such as He Who Must Not Be Named as an alias for Voldemort. Finally, put everything in some order (typically alphabetical) and do the formal typesetting, etc. I know a guy that wrote a reference guide to the works of James Joyce, and it took him YEARS of work to complete.
Should Rowling be able to make money from her own labor? Sure. Should she have a say in whether some other author can use the characters in new stories or in other products (i.e. the Hitachi Harry Potter Magic Wand, the Hermione G-String Bikini, etc.)? Definitely. Should she be able to prevent people from producing literary criticism, study guides, and scholarly works that are ABOUT the Potter world? Absofuckinglutely not!
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter (chapter 5, IIRC) to the subject of whether morality has its roots in religion. He provides many, many examples how, while the basics of Christianity haven't changed significantly in the past 200 years, morality has changed drastically. Look, in particular, at the concepts of equality (sexual, racial, etc.) today vs. just 100 years ago, when women couldn't vote, or just a bit farther back, at such embarrassments as the Three-fifths Compromise. If religion is the basis for morality, Christianity is based on the Bible, and the Bible's message hasn't been altered significantly in hundreds of years, then none of those changes should have occurred.
As an example, I present this quote from the first Lincoln-Douglas Debate:
I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.By modern morals, most Americans cringe just reading that, regardless of who said it, but for the time, if Lincoln said it in a public forum, it must have been not just a common belief, but probably a mild form of what most people thought.
Finally, if religion is the basis for morality and the Bible, supposedly God's words without interpretation, they why don't most modern Christians follow all of the laws set forth in Leviticus? Why don't they condemn the twisted story of Lot and his daughters? By modern morals, a father that offered his "two daughters which have not known man" to do "to them as is good in your eyes" (Genesis 19: 7-8), and then later impregnated not one but both of them (Genesis 19: 31-6) would be thrown in jail and most likely killed inside by other prisoners.
If there is a genetic factor, and if persons with this genetic factor are successfully breeding, why is the atypical attention span a disorder? Why isn't it an evolutionary measure that the species is developing to deal with the rapid pace of change that has developed?
My personal (albeit admittedly paranoid) view is that our society still believes that different==sick. Couple that attitude with the other factors mentioned elsewhere (both parents working outside home, the ease of using the TV as a babysitter, the chronic desire in the United States to separate ones actions from the responsibility to deal with the consequences of those actions, and the profit-driven nature of the modern pharmaceutical corporations), and I see a fairly clear reason why atypical attention spans are being treated as a disease rather than an adaptation.
Ok, take away the conspiracy theory. Perhaps the problem isn't that there are more people with concentration problems than before but that our current environment makes such problems more noticeable. Perhaps there is the same ratio of "normal" to "atypical", it is just that with population increasing over the past 50 years ago, the absolute numbers have increased to noticeable levels. Perhaps there isn't an increase, either in ratio or in absolute value, but the for-profit press is making us more aware of the issue in an attempt to gain readership (West Nile Virus crisis anyone?)
The simple fact is that people are hugely complex entities. Regardless of what Merck/CNN tell us, the odds that watching TV is the sole cause of ADD are extremely low. There are some medical events for which a strong causal relationship can be shown (i.e. preventing oxygen from reaching the brain causes death), the rest of medicine is murky at best. The press loves to simplify medical findings, and with the litigious nature of our society, being able to say asbestos or saccharin causes cancer is easy and profitable, but by no means 100% accurate. Mental health is even more fraught with problems, as rigorous scientific study of behavior is an exceedingly recent practice. Combine that with the short age of television and the rapid rate of change in the past 100 years, and it becomes very, very difficult to be able to point at two events and say that A conclusively, exclusively causes B.
Could there be a relationship between watching television and concentration problems? Sure. Will I be limiting the amount of television my children watch? Probably, although it will be because I believe that most television is unmitigated crap and not that I believe it will rot my kids' brains.
Sure, that must be it. More flawed genetic material. Couldn't possibly be that drug corporations are allowed to advertise individual products directly the consumers of the drugs, and have figured out that they get a much better revenue stream if, instead of curing diseases, they develop drugs that are a) "prescribed" by grade school counselors, b) taken daily, and c) have to be taken continuously for the life of the customer.
There are certainly some people who suffer from an inability to maintain concentration, so much so that their livelihood is severely affected, but the sharp rise is much more likely due to the pervasive attitude that anyone who doesn't conform must be sick, and therefore in need of life-long doping.
There is a big difference between SaaS, and simply service. Your examples (repair contracts on appliances, choosing a mechanic for your car) are pure services. You own your car, you own your stove, you pay someone to repair them or upgrade them. Those would be more analogous to buying a computer and paying someone to replace the failed hard drive, or perhaps buying a copy of Photoshop and hiring someone to edit your pictures with it.
Software as a service is closer, analogy-wise, to leasing your car. You don't own the car, you use it for a predetermined period of time. The analogy breaks down, of course, in that you don't lose the ability to drive to work if Ford's lease management software is offline for maintenance. That is the big problem with SaaS: I may have a contract that says I can use Online Office, but if their network is down, or the servers are broken, or there are sunspots, or whatever, I CAN'T DO MY JOB. Furthermore, while the SaaS provider may own the software, to use it, you have to put your work output (i.e. your Word document, your Photoshopped picture of Dubya's head on Paris Hilton's body, etc.) is on the provider's server. You no longer control your own data. If the provider goes belly-up, you've lost your data. If the provider is hit by a hurricane, you've lost your data. If the provider has a disgruntled employee, you've lost your data. If the provider raises their rates and you no longer can afford to use them, you've lost your data. On, and on, and on.
SaaS makes accounting/legal sense for Microsoft, but then again, Microsoft has a long, illustrious career built on screwing it's customers.
True, the de Menezes incident was not typical, even for the police in the United States. However, whenever deciding about new weapons for the police arsenal, the fact that atypical incidents do occur means that you have to take edge cases into account in the decision process. If, for example, the police officers were not issued guns, shooting de Menezes would not have even been an option.
Now, before flaming me on this, keep in mind that I'm not saying we should take guns away from the cops. What I'm saying is we must keep in mind that the police will use the weapons they have, and they won't always stop to think about the "reasonableness" of their actions, so we must consider this before giving them more.
Conversely, since words are merely oral/written representations for things, thoughts, feelings, or concepts, is saying "Oh gosh and golly gee" to convey the feelings of annoyance any different than saying "Shit" to accomplish the same thing? I hear people all over the place use swear word substitution (crap for shit, gosh for god, fudge for fuck, etc.), and it's easy to tell that they did a translation of the word in their head. How is that any better than using the most relevant word? Is the sin the symbol or the thought?
I understand the arguments about lazy language and word use to make a point (i.e. saying "fuck" five times in a single sentence), but when it comes to expressing what I really feel when I've just gotten pwned 5 times in a row by the same undead rogue in WSG, fuck seems an awfully appropriate exclamation. Fudge doesn't seem to cut it.
The datacenter I work in has shrouds on the BRB... now. They didn't get installed until after someone leaned up against one, causing a Halon dump. Between the evacuation, the expense of the Halon, and the costs of replacing the Halon with the new, tree-hugger-friendly stuff, the plastic shrouds over the BRBs were cheap!
Sounds like a nut job? To me, he sounds like a teen following the directions of the assignment and trying to determine where the limits lie. While not as well executed, Lee's essay has elements that are similar to sections of T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland, the drug advocacy of Alan Ginsberg, the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Literature is filled with dead people we now refer to as artists and legends who became thus because they explored the dark edges of humanity. Oedipus Rex is all about incest and patricide, the works of Shakespeare are filled with violence, sex, and death. So, take this background, a bright student, and an assignment that instructs the students not to censor themselves, and just what did you expect to come out? No poets get recognized for writing about happy puppies and cute kittens.
Add to that, the only text from the essay I've seen has been excerpted out of context. If I just give you this text "And ate the fellow, raw.", what would you think the poem was about? Perhaps a bit from Silence of the Lambs? A quote from Penthouse Letters? A story about eating octopus? Nope. That's from Emily Dickinson's "In the garden". Context is key to meaning.
Should the teacher have done something? Probably. Should someone have talked with Lee to find out if he really had violent tendencies? Sure. Should they have charged the kid with a crime for following, perhaps to the logical extreme, the explicit instructions on the assignment? Definitely not.
Paper checks for 10,000 employees: $1000
Pens to write on said checks: $ 50
Envelopes in which to stuff checks:$ 100
Not having to worry about that 3rd party company being a single point of failure for your payroll system: Priceless
People like to think that you can't run a company any more without these whiz-bang technologies. I wonder how stuff got made and people got paid before the Interweb was created?
Maybe there are people who plan all their purchases days or weeks in advance, but for a large number of people most small to medium purchases are done on impulse or at short notice.
I am one of those people. I hate shopping in bricks-n-mortar stores. These days, I only buy either perishable items (fruit, meat, eggs, milk, etc.) or emergency items (band-aids, toilet flanges, etc.) Nearly everything else I buy, I order online after spending hours at best, and sometimes weeks, researching what product to get. I get more useful information that way, and can select from a much broader selection of products.
Take, for example, my quest for a digital camera. If I went to the local shop, I could select from a dozen or so models. I could hold it in my hands, maybe look through the lens. Then I'd have to chose from whatever models are available from the local vendor community, which is 2 small shops, and the Big Box stores. I'd know how heavy it was, but that's about it. By comparison, online I can read reviews by people who have the various cameras, view images shot by them, go to sites like http://dpreview.com/ and see detailed analysis of the capabilities of the sensor, lens, software, outputs along with direct comparisons of static images for color reproduction, noise at the various ISO levels, resolution of detail, clarity, etc., plus all the data I'd get from the camera shop. Once I selected a camera, I would then be able to find the best price from all of the vendors everywhere in the world, even taking into account shipping costs, support after the purchase, and customer-based reviews of vendor reliability.
I use this model a bunch. Buying tools? Go online. Choosing a printer for my computer? Go online. Deciding which wine to serve to my sweetie this weekend? Go online. The prices are better, the information richer and more reliable, and I don't have to interact in meat-space with sweaty-palmed, pushy, clueless sales people. In cases like buying DVDs, resources like IMDB have enough input that they reduce the impact of one moron's opinion, so I know that I will probably like a move that got more than 7 stars. The opinion of the guy at Best Buy is spotty, at best. If there was an online grocer that serviced my area in the middle of nowhere, I would use them, too.
Of course, the strengths of the online world may help reduce/eliminate the effects of either potential SCOTUS decision. If the manufacturers restrict stuff too much in the states, I'll buy from Hong Kong, or Japan, or whatever.
No, this isn't the moral of the story. The moral is that many companies, and certainly nearly all Fortune 500 companies, have dedicated security staff that is responsible for doing security testing. If security testing isn't your job and you have a concern about something, contact the security staff and voice your concern. DON'T TEST IT YOURSELF WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM YOUR MANAGEMENT AND SECURITY.
A non-security person testing the security of an application is somewhat analogous to a factory floor worker doing safety testing on one of the production machines on the shop floor. Or an office worker accessing the company books to review for accounting irregularities. Certainly, people may have the ability to do it, but they can cause harm to themselves, to other employees, or to the company, even if their analysis is done correctly.
If my license got a stamp that said I was a smoker and couldn't take part in any state funded healthcare... If it meant I didn't have to pay for anyone else to get it either? I'd start smoking.
Get rid of the state sponsored crap, let people choose their own insurance providers, let people deal with the consequences of their choices, and let people live their own lives.
Even better, I'd love it if I could sign something stating that I have no children and that my wife and I will not acquire any (i.e. give birth, adopt, etc.) so that I could stop paying for public education. Bad enough I'm funding everyone else's kids to go to school, but the system is so broken, it doesn't really help the kids much anyway.Really a stupid question, but how did you go about finding said person? I know my home leaks like a sieve, but I haven't found the right keywords for the yellow pages, and the local power company is so fond of my high bills that they won't tell me who does energy audits for them two miles away (where the company is forced to provide the audits by the state laws there).
From a semantics point of view, you are correct. The problem is that Bush uses "war" both in the semantics context (i.e. we are shooting them, they are shooting us) and in the legal context (i.e. Commander in Chief, broad war powers, etc.) Without that formal declaration, the legal context doesn't exist, and therefore the derivative powers don't exist.
True, but the point I was trying to make is that, while there IS some reason to be concerned about terrorists, the War on Moisture IS NOT actually making us safer. It removes comfort and convenience from the travel experience, it provides another way that the airlines can start direct charging for a service that had been "complimentary" in the past (just you wait, in a month or two, one of the airlines'll be charging for water on flights), and it helps the government in their goal to monitor our movements. The arrests in London were not the result of ANY of the security measures introduced to combat terrorists, they were the result of traditional policework and a neighbor tipping off the cops.
When compared with the whole slew of false alarms (nine seperate incidents between 8/15 and 8/24), the War on Moisture has only served to threaten, intimidate, and coerce innocent people, and has done nothing to actually deal with the terrorist threat. I mean, let's be honest. If a terrorist is prepared to blow up a plane, and give their own life in the process, do you think they'll have any qualms about taking a baby along and even feeding the baby some "breast milk"? Do you think that they'd have any problems at all getting enough people on the plane, each with 4 oz of cough syrup, to put together the hypothetical bomb? The War on Moisture is security theater, whose only point is to instill terror in law-abiding citizens in an effort to consolidate power and make everybody that much easier to control.
You've got to be kidding! In theory, the readers, and by extension the posters, of /. are better educated than the run-of-the-mill sheep in this country, but I really doubt that now. Does anyone actually read stories like this, this, or this.
People, let's start using that grey matter for once. Yes, there are definitely people who would want to blow up planes, and yes, there are ways that it could be done. The War on Moisture isn't going to make anyone safer. Beyond the huge inconvenience and expense factor (read Schneier's Wired essay (I posted the link to his blog rather than the Wired article due to updates), a simple question of proportion should come in here. According to the US government's own statistics, fewer than 2,000 people were killed WORLDWIDE in 2004 by terrorists. Even if you add in the thousands of people killed on 9/11, you're still talking about 10,000 people, tops. Compare that to the number of people killed each year in car crashes (38,000 US fatalities in 2004), malaria (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 per year worldwide, mostly in Africa), or heart disease (276 out of ever 100,000 people in the US in 1996, or 22,800 in New York City alone). In fact, if the statistics are right, more people are hit by lightning each year (1 person out of every 600,000 per year, or 10,000 worldwide) than are killed by terrorists.
So, are you going to stop driving your car? Stop smoking/drinking? Stop taking romantic walks in the rain? (ok, so maybe not a good one on /.) Think of all the lives that would be saved if the billions of dollars that are being spent protecting us from push-up bras and shampoo were spent on finding a cure for malaria, or tuburculosis, or lung cancer, or AIDS.
Bah, the world is filled with nothing but sheep.
It isn't a question of paying enough that espionage isn't a temptation. It can't be. Companies can pay what a given position is worth, but there are so many other factors that are completely out of the company's control. For example, say my employee is a gambling adict. Should I give the guy a raise every time he has a bad night and loses his kid's college fund? Should I do that even if he's not doing better than average work?
How about companies that operate in less stable countries? Giving a pay raise to an employee isn't likely to change their mind if their only child is kidnapped and the ransom is access to my database, nor is it likely to disuade a plant from a foreign government whose REAL job is stealing from me.
What about an employee who's just not very good at their job? If pay was the only consideration, then paying him more would protect me from him becoming disgruntled and stealing from me as revenge, right?
Come on, people. Let's attempt to use that grey matter between our ears. The world isn't nearly as simple as they make you believe in college.
I've seen statements like this several times here. The problem with this is that there aren't many good ways to determine who you can trust. Sure, the interview process is supposed to take care of that, but we know that there are people with really good social engineering skills that would be able to lie consistently enough to be "trusted". You could do manditory background checks, including credit checks, to look for people who either have demonstrated untrustworthiness or have personal/financial situations that could lead to problems, but then all the bleeding-hearts here cry "Foul!" because you're treating the employees like criminals or you're denying the possibility of reform, or you can't get the info you need from prior employers due to fears of libel lawsuits, or whatever.
I guess you could hire everyone into the rock-bottom of the hierarchy and only allow people access to important data after years of trustworthy employment, but we all know that'll never work. With people changing jobs every few years, we'd never get anyone to stay in one place long enough to get access to the critical resources.
So, what are we left with? We have some small level of trust, but we put systems in place to a) monitor for malfeasance and b) limit the amount of damage that one person can do. Looking through the headings in TFA, that looks to be what was proposed. Where's the problem?
I can't help but think that most of the "Why can't we all just get along" crowd here simply have no real-world experience. Could be kids not out of school yet, could be people who've only ever worked in small companies, but it clearly shows a complete lack of understanding of what is involved in running any decent-sized business. The company I work for has 40k+ employees, and that's not counting contract labor. 40,000 people. That's the size of a small city. How in the hell does anyone establish trust across that number of people? You don't. The only thing you can do is limit how much damage you're likely to take and hope it never happens to you.
There was a long discussion of pano tools, both free and commercial, over at dpchallenge.com a while back. That link is to the first page where the discussion starts, way down at the bottom. From that thread, it would appear that, while a major PITA to install and learn to use, Hugin produces results that are typically at least as good as most of the major commercial tools and are far better than many of them.