Uh... So? If you don't have a connection, you can't send anything, including SMS and iOS messages. If anything the iOS messages are more flexible because they work over WiFi too.
Memory management is a red herring; even managed application require it. Garbage collection will just hide poor application design and the inefficiencies that make it difficult. You can still crash on null pointers, leak references and most certainly leak external resources quite easily.
C++ just actually makes you actually have to think about these things. You actually have to pay attention to your allocations, scratch space, ownership, etc, and quite frankly applications are often better for it. Well.... were. These days you have devs that never learned how to actually design an app for a computer (basically read 'C') shoehorning their ill-advised classes and designs that worked so OK in Java, etc. into C++ and find that it doesn't work. I just love stuff like "new int[10]"...
That's not particularly true. Actually, C++ makes life, perhaps, slightly easier because you can do: class X; class Y { X * var; };
vs. C where you'd have to write (note the repetition of naming the the word "struct"): struct _X; typedef struct _Y { struct _X *var; } Y;
In either language, you only need to include the typedef where you're actually using it (i.e. not just a pointer), and so only have to rebuild those parts if you set up your headers sanely. Sure, in C you can throw a function prototype in a.c and not the header, but that's more pathological than helpful. C++ is really about as competent as C (esp. considering it's a superset of the latter), but most developers don't really have the knowledge / background / inclination to actually use it that way.
K&R C? Like the one where parameter types are listed after the function declaration? I'll take C99, please.
Otherwise, I agree. C++ and object oriented programming in general are a backwards way of programming that introduces a lot of mess and anti-patterns for the platform you're actually programming. Allocating global memory for local scratch space and string operations, for example, blows my mind.
That said, there are nice points to C++. Templates offer some capabilities and a lot of readability one doesn't get with macros (and vice versa!). Operator overloads are often nice for 3D / scientific programming. And like it or not, inheritance is quite helpful when it comes to GUIs. I just wish people would approach these things as tool rather than necessities.
Gossiping in a way _designed_ to be harmful is illegal.
Regardless, the point of court is to facilitate a functioning society. If we were to make it legal, acceptable and even profitable to harass others, than the court system would be more trouble than it's worth, and civil law ought to be abolished in its entirety under the philosophy that a system deliberately designed to facilitate unchecked harmful behavior is worse than no system at all.
In short stealing is illegal. Extortion is illegal. Yay.
But why not? It seems quite reasonable for parties to be allowed to come to an agreement without having to be involved in a court case. After all, it's pretty much fact that court cases (vs fair agreements) only benefit lawyers. What they could strike down is the ability to offer settlements prior to filing a case and proper judicial review to determine if the case has merit. _That_ would be a big step forward and really eliminate all of the 'extortion' aspects. Beyond that though, you're really only tying up the courts, with, I'm supposing, the expectation that it would decrease the rate at which these sort of cases occur. Would that really be better though? Perhaps, but I think that's trowing out the baby with the bath water... Settlements are still useful for non-extortion type cases.
Because a gay half-black, half-Latino teen is much more "reflective of our culture and diversity". I mean, there's probably more than 100 people like that! I for one feel that it's great that elitist whites controlling the media have finally awoken to such a significant and previously ignored demographic.
... and if you're close to the television transmitter you'll catch on fire.
If such a transmitter was located on you house, unless you had an antenna that ensured the radiation was not directed inward the building would be quite uninhabitable. Now, there's no way such a power level would be required for this, but something around 10s of watts would be quite possible. That will still expose you to a great many orders of magnitude higher RF power levels than you are presently receiving (depending on the antenna of course). It's the same with cell phones: sure the power output is modest, but put it an inch away from you brain and the power matters a lot more than the tower some miles away.
I don't expect there to be any significant risk, but let's at least understand the issue here.
From the GP: > There are health codes, environmental regulations, tax and accounting standards to be met.
The fact the China lacks is almost completely unregulated is why they're so cheap, even when importing nearly doubles the price. We've got nearly 10% unemployment but we can't hire those people because of any combination of taxes, minimum wage, health care, and disability/unemployment insurance, which only get worse if the workers unionize. On top of that, the factory will have to overcome environmentalists just to get built, and then have to meet EPA regulations and bay all kinds of taxes on fuels.
I'm not saying _all_ these are bad, but I am surprised they can make cups for that cheap in the US.
Free trade has it issues, but what you're saying isn't one of them. People still learn engineering... hell, people _come_ here to learn engineering.
The major reason that grass roots innovation is dead is because technology has just gotten more difficult to keep up with. In electronics you've got to use tiny pitch SMD's and most high end chips require BGA packages which are almost impossible for the hobbyist to work with. Mechanics have fared a bit better, but material prices have gone up and so have machining costs. Sure you can buy a MakerBot for $1200 or an old mill for $2000, but then you need a someplace to put them. Finally chemistry has basically become illegal because of the anti-drug craze.
While all that was happening, other things got better. Software because cheap, 'easy', and extremely relevant. You could just use the equipment and knowledge you'd have anyway, and quite possibly create something that many people use and care about. On the other side, entertainment got a lot better. Rather than sticking with blinking boxes direct drawn to a CRT, you can play immersive long stories or infinite online multiplayer. Or you could just dick around online.
So really it's just that traditional fields of innovation are moving beyond hobbyist capabilities. And even if they try and produce something, they won't be able to compete with large companies and Chinese production, but that's a capital/patent/IP issue, not a free trade thing. So they've moved foreword or moved on...
What's interesting about these systems is that they're being developed for backup purpose by the computer industry, and not by the movie industry. That means that hardware will be in production and quite probably in place before the media groups start to even think about their next DRM / license encrusted format. Sure, they'll probably still try to compete, but given the initial cost of Bluray and the rather long time it's taken to come down they may well not be able to if even a few major studios start releasing on one of these holographic formats. Time will tell, but at the least, it'll be nice to be able to actually make a backup that doesn't require swapping out media all day (it's starting to feel like using floppies again!)
Exactly. Super heroes stories are the modern mythology; they never die they just keep being told and retold just like people have been doing for thousands of years before. And, despite all the haters hating the lack of "originality", I personally think that's pretty cool.
Sure the popularity will fade a bit and the more B+/A- movies (e.g. Green Hornet) will probably segue into B+/A- spy thrillers or whatever the next genre of the decade is (sci-fi please? hahaha), but I do expect that super hero movies are here to stay.
Not only does working instead of being in school earn you experience that makes you more valuable, but it also get you something else: money. Even if the MS gets you a few more peanuts as year (which, as you rightly point out, isn't at all likely), it'll take a log time to make up for all the wages you "lost" going to school for two years. This is even more true for Ph.D.s.
Quite frankly, the M.S. is becoming the new B.S.: people don't really care about it. As the higher education bubble bursts and employers realize that degrees mean very little, they start looking for ability, experience and proof of being an effective worker. That you get by being in the workforce for two years, not school. I'd personally look at an M.S. wearily. They could have expanded their knowledge, but they also could have just been putting off working (not positive). Given the way many C.S. programs and students are, I think in this case if more often the latter.
Isn't it about time that Slashdot critics came up with something original rather than rehashing this "originality" crap again? Originally is as much of a gimmick as anything else... Sometimes it enhances a story and sometimes it takes it away. For example, I'd consider most of M Night Shyamalan's movies to be fairly original, and yet, somehow they often end up lame.
Oh, you say, they weren't "original". Well, you can say District-9 (oft considered fairly original IIRC) is just aliens in apartheid and Firfly is just a standard western in space. Reduced to archetypes, no stories are "original". The only original thing about a story is it's telling (e.g. using aliens in the apartheid). For thousands of years, humanity has enjoyed hearing old stories retold with a new twist because that was the heart of the story, not whatever framing of characters and plot was present. For some reason people these days want something original, but quickly dismiss all the original elements. If you want an original movie, then look forward to The Amazing Spiderman. Sure it has similar characters and settings to another, but it has a whole new _story_....supposing you want something original and not something to complain about, of course.
P.S. In this regard, Captain America does fail, as it feels much more like a "here's a recap of C.A.'s origin so you have a movie-based context for him when you see Avengers" than a story. Probably thanks in no small part to the action montage, causing the cadence to be like "this guy did some action stuff (we focus on these couple missions) and beat the Nazis or whatever" and sandwiching it between 'present day' scenes for a "we found this guy in the ice, but, just so you know, he was cool before that".
P.P.S. I dunno why you put heroes in quotes there... Captain America may be somewhat obscure and second rate, but I'd have to say that by most definitions he's probably (in part because of those reasons) more heroic than most.
The trouble is, of course, that this 'future' is now, and we've been watching and waiting for it to get to this point for, well, all of history. And it hasn't lived up to it's hype. The tech that was X years away arrived, evaporated, or came in as expected but never actually lived up to the dream. The 'problems' we solved are replaced by new, even more threatening ones. Etc, etc. The present will always be a day late and dollar short of future, but at least it's motivating.
Rather than a separate browser, you can use Firefox's profiles. It's easy to do: just set you firefox shortcut to "firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager" (works on Windows and Linux). Separate profiles are, as best as I can tell, completely independent. They have separate caches, extensions, and of course cookies, bookmarks history, etc.
Keep in mind that plugins (Flash!, Java, etc) have permissions outside the browser, so absent of disabling them or using something flashblock the profiles can still be linked. If you want to be super paranoid, then, run Linux and create multiple user accounts. Then run firefox as a secondary user (via su) and you should be good.
You're approaching this from the wrong perspective by assuming that security is actually required. This happens all the time: Someone (usually a government) starts managing (usually poorly) something that was working fine before. When it turns out to be a completely unmanageable mess because they're taking over all the responsibility of individuals then scream for more money and more people. Finally, they manage to make something that works about as OK as it did before they stepped in, and then justify their existence by thinking just how bad everything would be if they weren't managing the situation. After all, they're putting so much effort into just holding it together surely it must completely fall apart if they didn't. But of course the reality is that people, when left alone, generally manage to do OK on their own.
There's no security stopping me from bombing a train or bus or bringing a gun into a mall or whatever. There seems to be this idea that if you put a perfectly reasonable person on a plane they're going to grab the nearest weapon and start killing people. That's idiotic. The simple security we had pre 9/11 started because in the free market it was worth it to prevent the occasional hijacking and even more rare bomb. Planes are expensive, the PR is bad, and people didn't care that much about having their bag simply x-rayed and walking through a metal detection. You may say that 9/11 taught us that wasn't enough, but that's not it at all. It taught us that not everyone that hijacks a plane just wants to fly to Cuba, and that we should no longer just listen to their demands. Now that we know the situation, hijacks will not longer be tolerated as they were; there are worse things than having all the passengers die.
tl;dr The free market invented airline security and it worked just fine. The only problem was that some crazy people were even more crazy than anticipated. So we learned. But that doesn't mean the government needs to step in and forcibly micromanage everything for billions and billions of dollars while trampling the constitution and having no positive results. Given that every post 9/11 attack made it past the TSA as was stopped by the people I'm quite willing to take my chances.
There are these total chumps that ask me to come by most days of the week and let me use their computer in their air conditioning. Not only does it not cost me a dime, but they actually give me money! My employers are total chumps...
(Woosh prevention: it costs you _time_. Facebook also has the additional to you of, well, you. The information about you they sell. Money is only an occasionally useful abstraction of true cost and value.)
Simply put though, just because tax money hasn't "left" the economy doesn't mean that it's being put to good use. I could buy a gallon of gas and burn it in my back yard rather than in my car and the same amount of energy would be released, but in the former case it wouldn't be doing anything. Similarly, there are all kinds of ways that you can circulate money without doing anything useful. Hell, you can use it do just plain destroy value overall. I could hire a wrecking crew to level my house and the money would still be in the economy, but the economy would have lost the value of a house (materials, labor, etc).
That's the problem. Yes, there are things that the government can do well (like roads). But there are a lot of instances where allowing people to use their own money will optimize the usage of resources. These times are usually when the resource usage is strictly individual (unlike prisons). Consider if the government decided that they want everyone to be able to afford heating their house in the winter: they take our heating money (+ extra from the 'rich') and then pay the gas companies for the winter. What reason would anyone have to keep their houses under 72F? None. And this is why my house is kept at 64, while the people who don't work and live in government housing have nice toasty places. If they were paying for it themselves you can bet they'd learn quite quickly how to work a blanket, and then the world would be burning less natural gas.
P.S. More than half of the problem with health care is that it _already_ works like that. You go to the doctor show them a card and everything is magically free or like $10. People don't even realize that they're losing $5,000+++/yr for the magic because most if not all is rolled into their employer's overhead. As a result they go to the doctor every time they get a little virus, taxing our medical resources and wasting a significant portion of 'their' medical budget on billing and overhead without even knowing how much it cost. Having the government manage it will bring the same fundamental issues (as we can clearly see from countries that do it), they just look a teeny bit different.
Let's not confuse the small town rumor mill with systematic and comprehensive collection of _evidence_ by the police. At the most superficial level, the former has almost no authority while the latter can and will be used in court.
More importantly, the rumor mill has a lay perspective on the law; the only criminal behavior it's concerned with is that which actually affects the others in the town. Police, OTOH, are more than happy to enforce any violation, no matter how obscure or trivial. For example, how may times in your small town did you get mailed a ticket because the lady across the street noticed your car's registration expired last week?
So, in a small town you may not be anonymous, but there "if you are innocent you should have nothing to hide" actually holds rather well, for the moral and socially useful meaning of innocent. The local pharmacist will know that you and your child are taking allergy medication, and that you're not actually cooking meth. In the police monitored city however, you end up in prison.
You've hit the nail on the head: security isn't easy. It requires some effort, knowledge, and concern to implement correctly. For security minded individuals, all this has, in many ways, been solved for a while now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust The problem is that establishing and maintaining trust requires a basic understanding of what's happening and some effort. It's not hard, but Joe Sixpack doesn't doesn't want to learn anything. It's hard enough to ask them to make sure there's a little lock icon before they enter their credit card number or password...
So I think all this discussion it moot... All that's going to come of it is replacing one authority with another, and all the same basic vulnerabilities will remain with only a few minor alterations. I am, however, cautiously hoping that these discussions will yield the ability for power users to better manage security rather than be forced to either use the weak, easy model or do it totally manually (which is theoretically possible today I believe, but terribly impractical). In particular I'd like to see untrusted encrypted sessions (they exist, but every time you use one your browser kills a kitten) and a built in web of trust.
I agree about the safari nonsense. Still, GoDaddy is a sleazy company that often seems to cater more to scammers and spammers than it does people that just want a domain name.
The domain takedowns bit is basically referring to the fact that ICANN is not untouchable. Practically, this isn't _too_ much different than the DHS having a trusted root certificate (as they're _probably_ the only ones that can manipulate ICANN). However, it does mean that you can't un-trust the DHS (and maybe Chinese) root certificates because the manipulation will be happening in the background. (Which isn't to say they can't/don't manipulate Verisign at the moment, but I hope you get the point.)
"Forever" is a relative term. As far as I'm concerned, it means long enough to exploit a vulnerability. Say... a month? Certificates don't expire that fast, and protocols are glacial by comparison. We're still using SSL, after all, how long do you think it'll be until we replace its replacement? Forever. Maybe even literally.
Those points made, I do agree that DNSSEC probably wouldn't hurt; the more independent sources of trust the better. Augmenting it further with a traditional web of trust would be even better too.
I'd probably count a license plate as a "paper", though what exactly the writers intended by "paper" isn't clear. Here I'd be interpreting it as "official document" or "record".
That aside, one could better look at the case law surrounding “Stop and Identify” statutes, which are laws requiring people to produce identification upon police request. (The penalty for non compliance may be specified by the statute, or covered by some sort of obstruction charge.) Here's the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes
The case law on these are mixed, and certainly recording license plants isn't as intrusive as requiring ID, but there are some interesting parallels. Consider a SCOTUS case shooting it one down: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolender_v._Lawson While it was an appeal to reverse the circuit ruling that such laws violate the 4th amendment (where I'm presuming they interpreted "papers" as I have above), they ultimately based their decision on vagueness and left the 4th amendment issue open. They did, however, mention that it was problematic because it took otherwise non-criminal behavior and allowed the police to make a record of it for future investigations. (This, of course, being against the spirit of the 4th amendment, which requires probably cause (e.g. a crime) before the police can collect information.)
It worth noting that a more recent case (2004, instead of 1983) explicitly states that the police may demand you name, on the basis that doing so requires turning over no documents. (They also stipulated that if there is reasonable belief that revealing one's name is incriminating than they don't have to comply.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_District_Court_of_Nevada
So, given that SCOTUS holds that providing the police documentation without reasonable suspicion violates the 4th amendment, it's hardly unreasonable to claim that their blanket recoding of license plates does as well. Of course, it'll have to be tested, but there is a leg to stand on.
I'm sorry that I was confused by your mixing of morality and legality, which you've continued to do in your response here. _I_ was talking about the morality (though mostly mechanics) of theft, not the legality of scavenging. Moreover, my position is not based on my "cushy western lifestyle" but rather direct experience working in one 2nd/3rd world country and indirectly from others. _Theft_ is destructive in these places and makes it difficult for them to ever progress.
Scavenging I'm fine with. It's legal there, which is great. Guess what: it's legal here to. How wonderful. But that has nothing to do with moral standards, that's the law. And while scavenging is legal, there a fine line between that and theft. This woman clearly had done no research to determine what cable was in use. So am I to believe that, had the patrol not reached her immediately, she would have somehow figured it out and not taken anything? Because, while 'accidentally' stealing wire may not be _morally_ wrong, it's still every bit as illegal and destructive as intentional theft.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Thieves cause an enormous amount of economic damage not just because they devalue the stolen goods (used with unknown history and maybe damaged during the theft), and destroy installations (e.g. your laptop's data) and adjoining property (e.g. locks). Often what they take is even just thrown away because it's too application specific, identifiable, etc. (e.g. computer data)
So this lady just caused hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of enconomic damage for what? $20 of copper? That has to stripped of insulation, melted down, refined, shipped, and reformed into wire so they can repair the damage? I can sympathize with theft of things like food and money (and perhaps jewelry) to survive. Copper though? Such theives should be shot on sight.
P.S. Quite frankly, this sort of destructive behavior by the poor is why they stay poor. Now the government(s) and businesses affected have to deal with fixing this damage rather than improving the lives of their people.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... So? If you don't have a connection, you can't send anything, including SMS and iOS messages. If anything the iOS messages are more flexible because they work over WiFi too.
Memory management is a red herring; even managed application require it. Garbage collection will just hide poor application design and the inefficiencies that make it difficult. You can still crash on null pointers, leak references and most certainly leak external resources quite easily.
C++ just actually makes you actually have to think about these things. You actually have to pay attention to your allocations, scratch space, ownership, etc, and quite frankly applications are often better for it. Well.... were. These days you have devs that never learned how to actually design an app for a computer (basically read 'C') shoehorning their ill-advised classes and designs that worked so OK in Java, etc. into C++ and find that it doesn't work. I just love stuff like "new int[10]"...
That's not particularly true. Actually, C++ makes life, perhaps, slightly easier because you can do:
class X;
class Y { X * var; };
vs. C where you'd have to write (note the repetition of naming the the word "struct"):
struct _X;
typedef struct _Y { struct _X *var; } Y;
In either language, you only need to include the typedef where you're actually using it (i.e. not just a pointer), and so only have to rebuild those parts if you set up your headers sanely. Sure, in C you can throw a function prototype in a .c and not the header, but that's more pathological than helpful. C++ is really about as competent as C (esp. considering it's a superset of the latter), but most developers don't really have the knowledge / background / inclination to actually use it that way.
K&R C? Like the one where parameter types are listed after the function declaration? I'll take C99, please.
Otherwise, I agree. C++ and object oriented programming in general are a backwards way of programming that introduces a lot of mess and anti-patterns for the platform you're actually programming. Allocating global memory for local scratch space and string operations, for example, blows my mind.
That said, there are nice points to C++. Templates offer some capabilities and a lot of readability one doesn't get with macros (and vice versa!). Operator overloads are often nice for 3D / scientific programming. And like it or not, inheritance is quite helpful when it comes to GUIs. I just wish people would approach these things as tool rather than necessities.
Gossiping in a way _designed_ to be harmful is illegal.
Regardless, the point of court is to facilitate a functioning society. If we were to make it legal, acceptable and even profitable to harass others, than the court system would be more trouble than it's worth, and civil law ought to be abolished in its entirety under the philosophy that a system deliberately designed to facilitate unchecked harmful behavior is worse than no system at all.
In short stealing is illegal. Extortion is illegal. Yay.
> But it shouldn't.
But why not? It seems quite reasonable for parties to be allowed to come to an agreement without having to be involved in a court case. After all, it's pretty much fact that court cases (vs fair agreements) only benefit lawyers. What they could strike down is the ability to offer settlements prior to filing a case and proper judicial review to determine if the case has merit. _That_ would be a big step forward and really eliminate all of the 'extortion' aspects. Beyond that though, you're really only tying up the courts, with, I'm supposing, the expectation that it would decrease the rate at which these sort of cases occur. Would that really be better though? Perhaps, but I think that's trowing out the baby with the bath water... Settlements are still useful for non-extortion type cases.
Because a gay half-black, half-Latino teen is much more "reflective of our culture and diversity". I mean, there's probably more than 100 people like that! I for one feel that it's great that elitist whites controlling the media have finally awoken to such a significant and previously ignored demographic.
... and if you're close to the television transmitter you'll catch on fire.
If such a transmitter was located on you house, unless you had an antenna that ensured the radiation was not directed inward the building would be quite uninhabitable. Now, there's no way such a power level would be required for this, but something around 10s of watts would be quite possible. That will still expose you to a great many orders of magnitude higher RF power levels than you are presently receiving (depending on the antenna of course). It's the same with cell phones: sure the power output is modest, but put it an inch away from you brain and the power matters a lot more than the tower some miles away.
I don't expect there to be any significant risk, but let's at least understand the issue here.
But why do you think that is?
From the GP:
> There are health codes, environmental regulations, tax and accounting standards to be met.
The fact the China lacks is almost completely unregulated is why they're so cheap, even when importing nearly doubles the price. We've got nearly 10% unemployment but we can't hire those people because of any combination of taxes, minimum wage, health care, and disability/unemployment insurance, which only get worse if the workers unionize. On top of that, the factory will have to overcome environmentalists just to get built, and then have to meet EPA regulations and bay all kinds of taxes on fuels.
I'm not saying _all_ these are bad, but I am surprised they can make cups for that cheap in the US.
Free trade has it issues, but what you're saying isn't one of them. People still learn engineering... hell, people _come_ here to learn engineering.
The major reason that grass roots innovation is dead is because technology has just gotten more difficult to keep up with. In electronics you've got to use tiny pitch SMD's and most high end chips require BGA packages which are almost impossible for the hobbyist to work with. Mechanics have fared a bit better, but material prices have gone up and so have machining costs. Sure you can buy a MakerBot for $1200 or an old mill for $2000, but then you need a someplace to put them. Finally chemistry has basically become illegal because of the anti-drug craze.
While all that was happening, other things got better. Software because cheap, 'easy', and extremely relevant. You could just use the equipment and knowledge you'd have anyway, and quite possibly create something that many people use and care about. On the other side, entertainment got a lot better. Rather than sticking with blinking boxes direct drawn to a CRT, you can play immersive long stories or infinite online multiplayer. Or you could just dick around online.
So really it's just that traditional fields of innovation are moving beyond hobbyist capabilities. And even if they try and produce something, they won't be able to compete with large companies and Chinese production, but that's a capital/patent/IP issue, not a free trade thing. So they've moved foreword or moved on...
What's interesting about these systems is that they're being developed for backup purpose by the computer industry, and not by the movie industry. That means that hardware will be in production and quite probably in place before the media groups start to even think about their next DRM / license encrusted format. Sure, they'll probably still try to compete, but given the initial cost of Bluray and the rather long time it's taken to come down they may well not be able to if even a few major studios start releasing on one of these holographic formats.
Time will tell, but at the least, it'll be nice to be able to actually make a backup that doesn't require swapping out media all day (it's starting to feel like using floppies again!)
Exactly. Super heroes stories are the modern mythology; they never die they just keep being told and retold just like people have been doing for thousands of years before. And, despite all the haters hating the lack of "originality", I personally think that's pretty cool.
Sure the popularity will fade a bit and the more B+/A- movies (e.g. Green Hornet) will probably segue into B+/A- spy thrillers or whatever the next genre of the decade is (sci-fi please? hahaha), but I do expect that super hero movies are here to stay.
Not only does working instead of being in school earn you experience that makes you more valuable, but it also get you something else: money. Even if the MS gets you a few more peanuts as year (which, as you rightly point out, isn't at all likely), it'll take a log time to make up for all the wages you "lost" going to school for two years. This is even more true for Ph.D.s.
Quite frankly, the M.S. is becoming the new B.S.: people don't really care about it. As the higher education bubble bursts and employers realize that degrees mean very little, they start looking for ability, experience and proof of being an effective worker. That you get by being in the workforce for two years, not school. I'd personally look at an M.S. wearily. They could have expanded their knowledge, but they also could have just been putting off working (not positive). Given the way many C.S. programs and students are, I think in this case if more often the latter.
Isn't it about time that Slashdot critics came up with something original rather than rehashing this "originality" crap again? Originally is as much of a gimmick as anything else... Sometimes it enhances a story and sometimes it takes it away. For example, I'd consider most of M Night Shyamalan's movies to be fairly original, and yet, somehow they often end up lame.
Oh, you say, they weren't "original". Well, you can say District-9 (oft considered fairly original IIRC) is just aliens in apartheid and Firfly is just a standard western in space. Reduced to archetypes, no stories are "original". The only original thing about a story is it's telling (e.g. using aliens in the apartheid). For thousands of years, humanity has enjoyed hearing old stories retold with a new twist because that was the heart of the story, not whatever framing of characters and plot was present. For some reason people these days want something original, but quickly dismiss all the original elements. If you want an original movie, then look forward to The Amazing Spiderman. Sure it has similar characters and settings to another, but it has a whole new _story_. ...supposing you want something original and not something to complain about, of course.
P.S. In this regard, Captain America does fail, as it feels much more like a "here's a recap of C.A.'s origin so you have a movie-based context for him when you see Avengers" than a story. Probably thanks in no small part to the action montage, causing the cadence to be like "this guy did some action stuff (we focus on these couple missions) and beat the Nazis or whatever" and sandwiching it between 'present day' scenes for a "we found this guy in the ice, but, just so you know, he was cool before that".
P.P.S. I dunno why you put heroes in quotes there... Captain America may be somewhat obscure and second rate, but I'd have to say that by most definitions he's probably (in part because of those reasons) more heroic than most.
The trouble is, of course, that this 'future' is now, and we've been watching and waiting for it to get to this point for, well, all of history. And it hasn't lived up to it's hype. The tech that was X years away arrived, evaporated, or came in as expected but never actually lived up to the dream. The 'problems' we solved are replaced by new, even more threatening ones. Etc, etc.
The present will always be a day late and dollar short of future, but at least it's motivating.
Rather than a separate browser, you can use Firefox's profiles. It's easy to do: just set you firefox shortcut to "firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager" (works on Windows and Linux). Separate profiles are, as best as I can tell, completely independent. They have separate caches, extensions, and of course cookies, bookmarks history, etc.
Keep in mind that plugins (Flash!, Java, etc) have permissions outside the browser, so absent of disabling them or using something flashblock the profiles can still be linked. If you want to be super paranoid, then, run Linux and create multiple user accounts. Then run firefox as a secondary user (via su) and you should be good.
You're approaching this from the wrong perspective by assuming that security is actually required. This happens all the time: Someone (usually a government) starts managing (usually poorly) something that was working fine before. When it turns out to be a completely unmanageable mess because they're taking over all the responsibility of individuals then scream for more money and more people. Finally, they manage to make something that works about as OK as it did before they stepped in, and then justify their existence by thinking just how bad everything would be if they weren't managing the situation. After all, they're putting so much effort into just holding it together surely it must completely fall apart if they didn't. But of course the reality is that people, when left alone, generally manage to do OK on their own.
There's no security stopping me from bombing a train or bus or bringing a gun into a mall or whatever. There seems to be this idea that if you put a perfectly reasonable person on a plane they're going to grab the nearest weapon and start killing people. That's idiotic. The simple security we had pre 9/11 started because in the free market it was worth it to prevent the occasional hijacking and even more rare bomb. Planes are expensive, the PR is bad, and people didn't care that much about having their bag simply x-rayed and walking through a metal detection. You may say that 9/11 taught us that wasn't enough, but that's not it at all. It taught us that not everyone that hijacks a plane just wants to fly to Cuba, and that we should no longer just listen to their demands. Now that we know the situation, hijacks will not longer be tolerated as they were; there are worse things than having all the passengers die.
tl;dr The free market invented airline security and it worked just fine. The only problem was that some crazy people were even more crazy than anticipated. So we learned. But that doesn't mean the government needs to step in and forcibly micromanage everything for billions and billions of dollars while trampling the constitution and having no positive results. Given that every post 9/11 attack made it past the TSA as was stopped by the people I'm quite willing to take my chances.
There are these total chumps that ask me to come by most days of the week and let me use their computer in their air conditioning. Not only does it not cost me a dime, but they actually give me money! My employers are total chumps...
(Woosh prevention: it costs you _time_. Facebook also has the additional to you of, well, you. The information about you they sell. Money is only an occasionally useful abstraction of true cost and value.)
You could read part of the story here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
Simply put though, just because tax money hasn't "left" the economy doesn't mean that it's being put to good use. I could buy a gallon of gas and burn it in my back yard rather than in my car and the same amount of energy would be released, but in the former case it wouldn't be doing anything. Similarly, there are all kinds of ways that you can circulate money without doing anything useful. Hell, you can use it do just plain destroy value overall. I could hire a wrecking crew to level my house and the money would still be in the economy, but the economy would have lost the value of a house (materials, labor, etc).
That's the problem. Yes, there are things that the government can do well (like roads). But there are a lot of instances where allowing people to use their own money will optimize the usage of resources. These times are usually when the resource usage is strictly individual (unlike prisons). Consider if the government decided that they want everyone to be able to afford heating their house in the winter: they take our heating money (+ extra from the 'rich') and then pay the gas companies for the winter. What reason would anyone have to keep their houses under 72F? None. And this is why my house is kept at 64, while the people who don't work and live in government housing have nice toasty places. If they were paying for it themselves you can bet they'd learn quite quickly how to work a blanket, and then the world would be burning less natural gas.
P.S. More than half of the problem with health care is that it _already_ works like that. You go to the doctor show them a card and everything is magically free or like $10. People don't even realize that they're losing $5,000+++/yr for the magic because most if not all is rolled into their employer's overhead. As a result they go to the doctor every time they get a little virus, taxing our medical resources and wasting a significant portion of 'their' medical budget on billing and overhead without even knowing how much it cost. Having the government manage it will bring the same fundamental issues (as we can clearly see from countries that do it), they just look a teeny bit different.
Let's not confuse the small town rumor mill with systematic and comprehensive collection of _evidence_ by the police. At the most superficial level, the former has almost no authority while the latter can and will be used in court.
More importantly, the rumor mill has a lay perspective on the law; the only criminal behavior it's concerned with is that which actually affects the others in the town. Police, OTOH, are more than happy to enforce any violation, no matter how obscure or trivial. For example, how may times in your small town did you get mailed a ticket because the lady across the street noticed your car's registration expired last week?
So, in a small town you may not be anonymous, but there "if you are innocent you should have nothing to hide" actually holds rather well, for the moral and socially useful meaning of innocent. The local pharmacist will know that you and your child are taking allergy medication, and that you're not actually cooking meth. In the police monitored city however, you end up in prison.
See the difference?
You've hit the nail on the head: security isn't easy. It requires some effort, knowledge, and concern to implement correctly. For security minded individuals, all this has, in many ways, been solved for a while now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
The problem is that establishing and maintaining trust requires a basic understanding of what's happening and some effort. It's not hard, but Joe Sixpack doesn't doesn't want to learn anything. It's hard enough to ask them to make sure there's a little lock icon before they enter their credit card number or password...
So I think all this discussion it moot... All that's going to come of it is replacing one authority with another, and all the same basic vulnerabilities will remain with only a few minor alterations. I am, however, cautiously hoping that these discussions will yield the ability for power users to better manage security rather than be forced to either use the weak, easy model or do it totally manually (which is theoretically possible today I believe, but terribly impractical). In particular I'd like to see untrusted encrypted sessions (they exist, but every time you use one your browser kills a kitten) and a built in web of trust.
I agree about the safari nonsense. Still, GoDaddy is a sleazy company that often seems to cater more to scammers and spammers than it does people that just want a domain name.
The domain takedowns bit is basically referring to the fact that ICANN is not untouchable. Practically, this isn't _too_ much different than the DHS having a trusted root certificate (as they're _probably_ the only ones that can manipulate ICANN). However, it does mean that you can't un-trust the DHS (and maybe Chinese) root certificates because the manipulation will be happening in the background. (Which isn't to say they can't/don't manipulate Verisign at the moment, but I hope you get the point.)
"Forever" is a relative term. As far as I'm concerned, it means long enough to exploit a vulnerability. Say... a month? Certificates don't expire that fast, and protocols are glacial by comparison. We're still using SSL, after all, how long do you think it'll be until we replace its replacement? Forever. Maybe even literally.
Those points made, I do agree that DNSSEC probably wouldn't hurt; the more independent sources of trust the better. Augmenting it further with a traditional web of trust would be even better too.
I'd probably count a license plate as a "paper", though what exactly the writers intended by "paper" isn't clear. Here I'd be interpreting it as "official document" or "record".
That aside, one could better look at the case law surrounding “Stop and Identify” statutes, which are laws requiring people to produce identification upon police request. (The penalty for non compliance may be specified by the statute, or covered by some sort of obstruction charge.) Here's the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes
The case law on these are mixed, and certainly recording license plants isn't as intrusive as requiring ID, but there are some interesting parallels. Consider a SCOTUS case shooting it one down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolender_v._Lawson
While it was an appeal to reverse the circuit ruling that such laws violate the 4th amendment (where I'm presuming they interpreted "papers" as I have above), they ultimately based their decision on vagueness and left the 4th amendment issue open. They did, however, mention that it was problematic because it took otherwise non-criminal behavior and allowed the police to make a record of it for future investigations. (This, of course, being against the spirit of the 4th amendment, which requires probably cause (e.g. a crime) before the police can collect information.)
It worth noting that a more recent case (2004, instead of 1983) explicitly states that the police may demand you name, on the basis that doing so requires turning over no documents. (They also stipulated that if there is reasonable belief that revealing one's name is incriminating than they don't have to comply.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_District_Court_of_Nevada
So, given that SCOTUS holds that providing the police documentation without reasonable suspicion violates the 4th amendment, it's hardly unreasonable to claim that their blanket recoding of license plates does as well. Of course, it'll have to be tested, but there is a leg to stand on.
I'm sorry that I was confused by your mixing of morality and legality, which you've continued to do in your response here. _I_ was talking about the morality (though mostly mechanics) of theft, not the legality of scavenging. Moreover, my position is not based on my "cushy western lifestyle" but rather direct experience working in one 2nd/3rd world country and indirectly from others. _Theft_ is destructive in these places and makes it difficult for them to ever progress.
Scavenging I'm fine with. It's legal there, which is great. Guess what: it's legal here to. How wonderful. But that has nothing to do with moral standards, that's the law. And while scavenging is legal, there a fine line between that and theft. This woman clearly had done no research to determine what cable was in use. So am I to believe that, had the patrol not reached her immediately, she would have somehow figured it out and not taken anything? Because, while 'accidentally' stealing wire may not be _morally_ wrong, it's still every bit as illegal and destructive as intentional theft.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Thieves cause an enormous amount of economic damage not just because they devalue the stolen goods (used with unknown history and maybe damaged during the theft), and destroy installations (e.g. your laptop's data) and adjoining property (e.g. locks). Often what they take is even just thrown away because it's too application specific, identifiable, etc. (e.g. computer data)
So this lady just caused hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars of enconomic damage for what? $20 of copper? That has to stripped of insulation, melted down, refined, shipped, and reformed into wire so they can repair the damage? I can sympathize with theft of things like food and money (and perhaps jewelry) to survive. Copper though? Such theives should be shot on sight.
P.S. Quite frankly, this sort of destructive behavior by the poor is why they stay poor. Now the government(s) and businesses affected have to deal with fixing this damage rather than improving the lives of their people.