If sellers can price discriminate based on region more power to them but they should have no right to control secondary markets in anyway. If that means people re-import stuff and undercut the seller in the local market place TO FUCKING BAD.
however there will be more CO2 produced as people go back to heating with coal and heavy oils, so it may be a wash.
You have really nailed it with that last part. I would not be so quick to blame coal for carbon emissions though (another discussion). The truth is poverty not affluence leads to environmental crisis. Affluence is why the USA has more forest now than it did 100 years ago. Affluence brings choice and when people have choice they do choose to protect the world around them.
I think we don't see the drop in emissions we might expect because even though the total ecnomic activity is decreased or at least the rate of growth is, the improvements and investments in clean technology are not being made. If I am a manufacturing business doing well, maybe I upgrade to new higher efficiency ovens; on the hope that the fuel savings will make me more profitable in the future and if nothing else less exhaust gases will be better for me, my employees and my family today. If I am struggling I am going to keep what I got, conserve capital and try to get through the hard times.
Autos are a good data point. By some estimates we have as many as 9 times the number of cars on the road in the USA today as we did in 1970, yet the total pollution from all those cars is about the same. There we a number of boom years in there were people bought new more efficient cleaner cars. During the big dip orders for autos fell to lows not seen in decades, as people kept their aging fleets.
Poverty is what forces people into destroying the environment, that is why you see a deforested Hatti, that is why you see so much disease in parts of India and China, they haven't the affluence to treat waste water.
First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell
Really? After stuxnet, flame, you think that?
Fact is most of that network hardware gets a great deal less scrutiny than desktop software gets. A much smaller number of people use it directly, far fewer security folks get access to it.
Even if backdoors are not deliberately inserted its beyond reason to think exploits don't exist somewhere. Now what would the Chinese government's security arm do if they discovered a useful reliable exploit? Probably exactly what our own did/does and create things like stuxnet. Oh and if you could work something like that into the network layer it would be way way harder to spot than at the application layer.
Right usually the cost of doing anything other than complying or ignoring (if you are absolutely certain you are in the right) and DMCA take down request will be far lower than the cost of legally challenging it less the damages you *might* recover. Generally speaking the mercenary thing to do is roll over.
Google though is a different matter. They already have a legal department with salaried IP attorneys. They have business that is highly dependent on eyeballs and the ability to show how content brings those eyeballs, so they can at least start to quantify losses in a manor a court will consider.
Given Youtube, Google News, and others you'd think they'd have a sufficiently compelling reason to try and create a little chilling effect on sending take downs. If they managed to collect even a few million from someone like Microsoft ( who is probably just bumbling in this case rather than trying to be a bad actor ), it would scare the pants of many of the organizations who really are deliberately abusing the law.
As much as I am against IP as a general concept and as unpopular as this might be to say on Slashdot, the DMCA has really not been the armageddon we all though it was going to be discussing in 1998. The fact is so long as we are stuck with the basic IP law framework we have today, its actually not been a bad compromise, certainly better than the proposals like SOPA and ACTA that have come recently.
The DMCA's interoperability provisions and the take down / safe harbor provisions have enable life, and legitimate secondary markets to go on (much to the industries chagrin I think), and at the same time it has created at least a minor hurtle and some basic tools to curb casual infringement.
Its done little against organized efforts but than no legislative act that does not create an army of socially maladjusted folks with guns will. The mob really could care less how many different felonies their actions constitute; unless someone is raiding their estate and hand cuffing them at gun point its kinda academic for them. We already have laws against large scale infringement more of them won't really help anybody. It would be wrong to go to the sorts of extremes that would have real impact because the cost would far outweigh the benefits to society as a whole. Remember the Constitutions sets out the goal of promoting the "General Welfare", unless that was amended to read "Content Industry" when I was not looking.
So until such a time when we can successfully push for more radical reforms, I think its to everyone interest to make DMCA work. That means compliance with reasonable and correct take downs, and it also means not letting the content industry use that system as DOS attack without reprisal. Google needs to step up and break some noses; not because the owe it to the community or anything like that but because it seems clearly in their own interest to do so.
First off the idea that income inequity increasing is the lie. In take home dollars it might but in total compensation (at least from the cost side) the delta between what the CEO gets and what you get is actually shrinking.
Second I don't think necessity or adversity lead to the sort of "invention" that elevates society as a whole. "Or Die" type motivation does not enhance our understanding of physics or increase our ability to produce as a society at large. What it mostly does is enable one individual to come up with some third rate hack of solution that gets them by but has other undesirable side effects for them or worse to be born by others.
Which has always been a marvel to me. Even in the 1930's there was enough known about genetics and an established theory of speciation and natural selection that should have enable people to recognize that if anything purity is no virtue at all.
Its not good for our dogs and its not good for us. Mutations are one way to gain improved forms but the direct mixing of existing genetic material followed by the selection process is a much faster way. Blood lines that were mixed before the neolithic era, probably would have the surviving individuals expressing the most robust genetic material, from all the pre-modern man and related species.
Because the US system is geared toward the EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) practice. EFT works really well between pretty much any US Financial entity, fast and usually free. Unless it is great deal of money or being deposited someone place like a brokerage, most institutions will make the funds immediate available, if you have any kind of existing relationship with them. Otherwise anything taking longer than 4 days to settle is pretty unusual.
The output from the "compiler" is bog standard javascript
I have admittedly not looked at the typescript language or any compiler output. Maybe you have if so I'll take your word for it, if not here is my initial reaction.
That is a bit like saying one vendors C compiler with language extensions won't tie you to the vendor because it outputs bog standard ASM. We all know how that worked out for everyone. I have met very few language translators in my IT travels that ever produce output from higher level languages that is particularly readable, maintainable, or in many cases understandable by mortals.
I have seen many attempts to make COBOL to C, C to Pascal, C++ to C, LISP to some other LISP variant, BASIC to other BASIC variant, BASIC to Java, etc stuff. It all typically outputs something that you can compile/execute/run. The best implementations result in something you can live with after lots of manual clean up, but most produce drek that can never replace your original sources going forward or a by hand port thereof.
So just because you get something that is technically javascript out does not mean your large typescript project would have much life in it, if typescript is abandon.
I don't buy your argument. India is full of smart people but they have such a huge infrastructure deficit coupled with such a large population I don't seem them every being competitive. You could say the same thing about China but compared to India their major economic centers are well equipped, there are two Chinas urban China and everywhere else. India pretty much a mess everywhere you go save a couple bright spots.
India being a more open society does not have the option of just sitting by and letting the less productive regions starve and the people their die, at least not as an "official" policy anyway.
Russia, on the other hand has some rotten infrastructure as well but their rapid depopulation has left them with some head room in that. The situation is probably not all that impaired compared with our own. I would also hazard that Russia's political problems and impediments are more easily solved than the coming tsunami of population related issues India is facing (global warming is going to destroy their food supply). Russia also has as an accident of history at this point a pretty vertically integrated market place. A Russian firm can likely build a car dealing with only other Russian firms for the most part. That lack of interdependence while in normal times less efficient and productive economically speaking, might prove to offer them lots more flexibility during a major geopolitical dislocation, a substantive trade war with the Chinese for example. Oh and the Russians have huge energy reserves too, lets not forget that.
I would hardly count Russia out. Will they be top dog not likely, but that is because USA, China, and possibly Brazil lead them. India won't be factor, nor will the middle East, or any of Southern Asia.
Check your math, it is most certainly an entitlement.
Based on current life expectancies and medical cost structures odds you only paid in a tiny fraction of what you will take out, even if you consider the time value of money.
Lets be honest about how Wall Street sees the GSEs. The point of them is to reduce risk to the private sector. Be Fanny, Freddie, or Sally. The idea being that it creates an effective subsidy for less qualified borrows to get access to capital. That is how the policy makers look at it. Personally I am not sure as noble as all that sounds even that is ethical but, that is what my idiot country men voted for so...
This is how Wall Street sees it:
He they government will buy any high risk paper we ask them to buy! That means we can sell bundles high margin loans. If we don't think to hard about the real risks associated we can over state the net present value! Then pawn them off on the government for a slight discount on that over stated value, raking in huge profits. Government gets the paper and it might work out for them, we get hard cash so are covered no matter what, and hey even if we do decide to hold some the paper and it goes tits up we will probably get a bailout anyway.
This is precisely why Government should get OUT OF THE BANKING MARKETS. No DEPOSIT INSURANCE, NO MORTGAGE LENDING ETC. Anytime you socialize risk, its going to be exploited. After all I might as well bet big and possibly strike it rich, if you are going to just cover my losses when it does not work.
I was not really the banks it was the brokers (who were often poorly monitored subsidiaries or departments within the banks; I realize).
Those guys sold loans with crazy interest and repayment schedules, and those guys failed in large part to do the customer vetting and do diligence they claimed to do. They then resold the loans to banks and the GSEs.
Now mind you the banks and the GSEs rather than going, "wait a moment the volume is way to big our models don't indicate there are this many well qualified borrowers even out there", chose to take the brokers at their word, pay them their commissions and report these high margin and yet completely safe loans on their financial statements, and collect their own bonus payments.
What I am about to describe is certainly a well know whole but when it happens to a big popular vendor it makes the problem a whole lot more significant.
We now have all these systems out there that make us safe:-P by only running signed code. We have all these policy mechanisms like Microsoft's Applocker that encourage admins to start white listing applications not by secure hash but by x.509 properties on a certificate. Its less work after all I want users to be able to run acrobat and flash, I don't want to have to update my GPOs every five hours when adobe releases a patch.
Guess what most of these devices don't do? Revocation checks, or at least its default permit when they can't do a revocation check. Leaks and other PKI fails like this are a very real threat to environments we otherwise think of as hardened.
That is the problem with Aero is "its just eye candy" Translucent window boarders are almost entirely useless. Now on limited screen real estate translucent (real translucency not show you a static snapshot of whats behind) inactive windows are very helpful.
Microsoft was rightly afraid that doing any translucency on the client area of legacy application windows might create some usability issues, at least for apps that deviate for the behavioral norms, but by shying away entirely they turned a tool into a useless gimmick.
Oh somebody understands what to do with it. Identifying the terrorists is a plausible use to sell some bleeding heart politicians and the public on it. In reality there is not algorithm heuristic or otherwise that is:
A) Efficient enough to go through a large enough portion of the data to correlate enough information on today's computing and storage platforms
B) Accurate enough to really spot the difference between a terrorist and teenager having a bad day. They might be good enough to flag 10's of 1000's of people for an army of human intelligence analysts to look at but that is as near as it gets.
C) Has a good enough command of enough languages to start to A or B for the portion of the population that has to this point been the frequent source of terrorist activity.
While the EU intelligence organizations and the NSA likely have some thing slightly better or at least bigger IBM's Watson demonstrations last year were probably fairly representative of "the state of the art" as large natural language unstructured data correlation engines go. I think we can see its not good enough for terror spotting.
No what this is really for is to ensure that when someone does something otherwise legal that causes grief to the wrong parties they will be able to find something on that person. Its been the way of tyrants to solve the problem of civil rights since democracy began, just pass enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, than you have as much control as under any autocracy. They problem was being able to be sure you had the evidence to paint that individual as guilty when the time came.
Sift thru the data store for any possible illegal action by $person is exactly something that we can do with this technology and that is how its going to get used.
Things have changed and are changing rapidly. Dev opps means that on a well run large network (at least one under central control, like a corporate one) it should be possible to put a patch on 200 servers, and probably 80%+ of those desktops in as much time. Actually you should be do the deployment work in about the 4-6 hours it takes to test patch, and patch process on the representative test machines, the rest of the 48 hours should be waiting for clients to check in and servers to hit reboot schedules.
You should maybe read the Bible before quoting it.
"judge not" has a great deal of context around it and does not mean "judge not" at all. It means you will be held to whatever standards you hold others. Its really more about our tenancy to rationalize our own ill behavior and to remind us to be "open minded" about the acts of others as they may very well have a reason for what they do. Don't demand the head of a man for stealing a loaf of bread, he might be desperately poor with starving child at home. Someday you might be in the same situation and you would want a little forgiveness and understanding.
If there is something you believe is so wrong that you yourself would never ever do it no matter what, hope to die (and its otherwise consistent with the new testament), than its completely okay as a Christian for you to judge another for it, even harshly.
There is a way to do it securely (well as secure are max 16 char passwords are).
1. Collect plaintext from the user 2. hash the plaintext and validate against the old password db 3. If success, then truncate the plain text and store the new hash. 4. overwrite the old hash with some flag value, like say all NULLs 5. Wait until the old password database is all NULL and dump it.
Which is exactly why early voting an pushing up voter turn out is a bad thing for democracy. The fact is society would be better off if people were made to wait until all the debates were concluded and only the folks interested enough to study the issues were encouraged to vote.
Finally there should definitely be some ballot validation questions. They should be questions anyone will be able to ambiguously answer correctly if they are reading and understand how the ballot form works. Ballots with incorrect responses should be rejects. A sample question would be like "Is our Sun: " A) Bigger than a bread box, B) Smaller than a bread box, C) The same size as a bread box.
Its not controversial, and something anyone qualified to vote ought to know. yea yea I know some smart ass is going to ask if what if some aliens built an intergalactic bread box? To which I answer: ballot rejected, you dipshit.
There are people who have physiological addiction but not a psychological one. Those people can quit smoking or quit heroin on a whim and never have a relapse or craving.
If you can "quit on a whim and never relapse" you were never addicted. Addiction is all about having some need that would not present in an otherwise healthy individuals, which is so acute you would engage in behaviors that have an outsized detrimental effect on your quality of life to satisfy it. The smoker who always drempt of travel for example, but never does because they need the $1500 for cigarettes.
I know you were going for funny but, well "I am shocked."
Microsoft has taken IE security pretty seriously and has established a pretty darn good track record with IE7->9 so far, at least on ASLR enabled platforms. I am surprised to see a reliable exploit that can be implemented as a drive-by on otherwise current platforms. This going to be a big deal and likely force an off cycle patch.
Implicit in the question is the idea the programing is programing is programing.
I don't think this is case. I would say just about anyone, baring those individuals with some moderate to severe mental impairment can do some programing. Integration programing is usually nothing more than outlining the corrected steps and gluing that outline onto the required boiler plate. Application programing might get a bit more complex but even that should be attainable for anyone able to read and follow documentation.
Oh sure it can get very complicated when you get into ETL on big data sets and such certainly may require a specialist who makes it business to do it well but I do think its something *anyone* could learn. In the same way anyone can learn to be an accountant or an attorney. Getting past some of the hurdles can be tough but with enough time and resources most normally abled people should be able to get there.
When you get into lower level stuff its a different game. I am not so sure just anyone could be taught compiler design for example at least with the outcome they will be proficient and successful working in the field. As you move from programing for high level applications into programing for 'Computer Science', 'Computer Engineering' or 'Systems Programing' than there is a certain group that is able to follow the math, and think about problems with and without abstractions at the same time and other things not everyone has a facility for.
Except that public school teachers most places are paid well. Its largely private school teachers that work for next to nothing. If you take the typical public schools teach salary and divide it out to a per month number over 9 not 12 because they don't work summers, most of them are compensated better than they would be in another field with the same credentials.
This dispute is not really even about 'compensation' per say, its about the accountability and the tenure system. Essentially this about teachers want to keep their seniority system and the tenure system, rather than a new one which would attempt to measure than reward or punish performance.
Virtual not other profession enjoys such a lack of accountability for the results employees achieve.
Unions are nothing more than collusion and price fixing and should be outlawed. They may have served a social service in the lax regulatory environment of the nineteenth century, but have no place today. If its not okay of widget makers to get together and agree on a minimal price to sell widgets, it should not be okay for labor to collude for compensation requirements either.
Additionally the Unions hate the citizen United decision because they think it gives some corporate interests undue influence. This is funny because in most cases their own membership is no less compulsory than anyone who has a job an organization whose management they might not feel represents them politically. Often the Unions' political agenda is as far removed from an individual members political views. If there are any restrictions corporate participation in the political process (in the name of freedom to exercise property there should not be) basic justice demands Unions face those same restrictions.
The real source of the problem is government. FDIC has taken the reputation out of banking. As a depositor I don't care if the bank gets knocked over because I know its insured at no cost to me anyway. Well it does cost me actually as the insurance fees are passed on in the form of lower rates.
Now if it were not for government intervention banks competing for depositors would be strongly incentive to protect their reputation for not losing customers money, EVER, as it would be the major sell point. This is why banks chose names like Bank of Granite, in the first place. The wanted to sound and look like immoveable impermeable objects.
If you want more smaller banks, people would want to spread their money around more places rather than risk it for the convenience of on big nation wide chain, and one provider.
And Or if you want banks to be more conservative and take security (of all kinds) seriously, you get rid of government backed deposit insurance.
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If sellers can price discriminate based on region more power to them but they should have no right to control secondary markets in anyway. If that means people re-import stuff and undercut the seller in the local market place TO FUCKING BAD.
however there will be more CO2 produced as people go back to heating with coal and heavy oils, so it may be a wash.
You have really nailed it with that last part. I would not be so quick to blame coal for carbon emissions though (another discussion). The truth is poverty not affluence leads to environmental crisis. Affluence is why the USA has more forest now than it did 100 years ago. Affluence brings choice and when people have choice they do choose to protect the world around them.
I think we don't see the drop in emissions we might expect because even though the total ecnomic activity is decreased or at least the rate of growth is, the improvements and investments in clean technology are not being made. If I am a manufacturing business doing well, maybe I upgrade to new higher efficiency ovens; on the hope that the fuel savings will make me more profitable in the future and if nothing else less exhaust gases will be better for me, my employees and my family today. If I am struggling I am going to keep what I got, conserve capital and try to get through the hard times.
Autos are a good data point. By some estimates we have as many as 9 times the number of cars on the road in the USA today as we did in 1970, yet the total pollution from all those cars is about the same. There we a number of boom years in there were people bought new more efficient cleaner cars. During the big dip orders for autos fell to lows not seen in decades, as people kept their aging fleets.
Poverty is what forces people into destroying the environment, that is why you see a deforested Hatti, that is why you see so much disease in parts of India and China, they haven't the affluence to treat waste water.
First off i have a very hard time believing backdoors are built in the large networks they sell
Really? After stuxnet, flame, you think that?
Fact is most of that network hardware gets a great deal less scrutiny than desktop software gets. A much smaller number of people use it directly, far fewer security folks get access to it.
Even if backdoors are not deliberately inserted its beyond reason to think exploits don't exist somewhere. Now what would the Chinese government's security arm do if they discovered a useful reliable exploit? Probably exactly what our own did/does and create things like stuxnet. Oh and if you could work something like that into the network layer it would be way way harder to spot than at the application layer.
Right usually the cost of doing anything other than complying or ignoring (if you are absolutely certain you are in the right) and DMCA take down request will be far lower than the cost of legally challenging it less the damages you *might* recover. Generally speaking the mercenary thing to do is roll over.
Google though is a different matter. They already have a legal department with salaried IP attorneys. They have business that is highly dependent on eyeballs and the ability to show how content brings those eyeballs, so they can at least start to quantify losses in a manor a court will consider.
Given Youtube, Google News, and others you'd think they'd have a sufficiently compelling reason to try and create a little chilling effect on sending take downs. If they managed to collect even a few million from someone like Microsoft ( who is probably just bumbling in this case rather than trying to be a bad actor ), it would scare the pants of many of the organizations who really are deliberately abusing the law.
As much as I am against IP as a general concept and as unpopular as this might be to say on Slashdot, the DMCA has really not been the armageddon we all though it was going to be discussing in 1998. The fact is so long as we are stuck with the basic IP law framework we have today, its actually not been a bad compromise, certainly better than the proposals like SOPA and ACTA that have come recently.
The DMCA's interoperability provisions and the take down / safe harbor provisions have enable life, and legitimate secondary markets to go on (much to the industries chagrin I think), and at the same time it has created at least a minor hurtle and some basic tools to curb casual infringement.
Its done little against organized efforts but than no legislative act that does not create an army of socially maladjusted folks with guns will. The mob really could care less how many different felonies their actions constitute; unless someone is raiding their estate and hand cuffing them at gun point its kinda academic for them. We already have laws against large scale infringement more of them won't really help anybody. It would be wrong to go to the sorts of extremes that would have real impact because the cost would far outweigh the benefits to society as a whole. Remember the Constitutions sets out the goal of promoting the "General Welfare", unless that was amended to read "Content Industry" when I was not looking.
So until such a time when we can successfully push for more radical reforms, I think its to everyone interest to make DMCA work. That means compliance with reasonable and correct take downs, and it also means not letting the content industry use that system as DOS attack without reprisal. Google needs to step up and break some noses; not because the owe it to the community or anything like that but because it seems clearly in their own interest to do so.
First off the idea that income inequity increasing is the lie. In take home dollars it might but in total compensation (at least from the cost side) the delta between what the CEO gets and what you get is actually shrinking.
Take it from someone who has made it her career to understand these things:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-keep-the-young-unemployed-2012-08-01
Second I don't think necessity or adversity lead to the sort of "invention" that elevates society as a whole. "Or Die" type motivation does not enhance our understanding of physics or increase our ability to produce as a society at large. What it mostly does is enable one individual to come up with some third rate hack of solution that gets them by but has other undesirable side effects for them or worse to be born by others.
Which has always been a marvel to me. Even in the 1930's there was enough known about genetics and an established theory of speciation and natural selection that should have enable people to recognize that if anything purity is no virtue at all.
Its not good for our dogs and its not good for us. Mutations are one way to gain improved forms but the direct mixing of existing genetic material followed by the selection process is a much faster way. Blood lines that were mixed before the neolithic era, probably would have the surviving individuals expressing the most robust genetic material, from all the pre-modern man and related species.
Because the US system is geared toward the EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) practice. EFT works really well between pretty much any US Financial entity, fast and usually free. Unless it is great deal of money or being deposited someone place like a brokerage, most institutions will make the funds immediate available, if you have any kind of existing relationship with them. Otherwise anything taking longer than 4 days to settle is pretty unusual.
The output from the "compiler" is bog standard javascript
I have admittedly not looked at the typescript language or any compiler output. Maybe you have if so I'll take your word for it, if not here is my initial reaction.
That is a bit like saying one vendors C compiler with language extensions won't tie you to the vendor because it outputs bog standard ASM. We all know how that worked out for everyone. I have met very few language translators in my IT travels that ever produce output from higher level languages that is particularly readable, maintainable, or in many cases understandable by mortals.
I have seen many attempts to make COBOL to C, C to Pascal, C++ to C, LISP to some other LISP variant, BASIC to other BASIC variant, BASIC to Java, etc stuff. It all typically outputs something that you can compile/execute/run. The best implementations result in something you can live with after lots of manual clean up, but most produce drek that can never replace your original sources going forward or a by hand port thereof.
So just because you get something that is technically javascript out does not mean your large typescript project would have much life in it, if typescript is abandon.
I don't buy your argument. India is full of smart people but they have such a huge infrastructure deficit coupled with such a large population I don't seem them every being competitive. You could say the same thing about China but compared to India their major economic centers are well equipped, there are two Chinas urban China and everywhere else. India pretty much a mess everywhere you go save a couple bright spots.
India being a more open society does not have the option of just sitting by and letting the less productive regions starve and the people their die, at least not as an "official" policy anyway.
Russia, on the other hand has some rotten infrastructure as well but their rapid depopulation has left them with some head room in that. The situation is probably not all that impaired compared with our own. I would also hazard that Russia's political problems and impediments are more easily solved than the coming tsunami of population related issues India is facing (global warming is going to destroy their food supply). Russia also has as an accident of history at this point a pretty vertically integrated market place. A Russian firm can likely build a car dealing with only other Russian firms for the most part. That lack of interdependence while in normal times less efficient and productive economically speaking, might prove to offer them lots more flexibility during a major geopolitical dislocation, a substantive trade war with the Chinese for example. Oh and the Russians have huge energy reserves too, lets not forget that.
I would hardly count Russia out. Will they be top dog not likely, but that is because USA, China, and possibly Brazil lead them. India won't be factor, nor will the middle East, or any of Southern Asia.
Check your math, it is most certainly an entitlement.
Based on current life expectancies and medical cost structures odds you only paid in a tiny fraction of what you will take out, even if you consider the time value of money.
Lets be honest about how Wall Street sees the GSEs. The point of them is to reduce risk to the private sector. Be Fanny, Freddie, or Sally. The idea being that it creates an effective subsidy for less qualified borrows to get access to capital. That is how the policy makers look at it. Personally I am not sure as noble as all that sounds even that is ethical but, that is what my idiot country men voted for so...
This is how Wall Street sees it:
He they government will buy any high risk paper we ask them to buy! That means we can sell bundles high margin loans. If we don't think to hard about the real risks associated we can over state the net present value! Then pawn them off on the government for a slight discount on that over stated value, raking in huge profits. Government gets the paper and it might work out for them, we get hard cash so are covered no matter what, and hey even if we do decide to hold some the paper and it goes tits up we will probably get a bailout anyway.
This is precisely why Government should get OUT OF THE BANKING MARKETS. No DEPOSIT INSURANCE, NO MORTGAGE LENDING ETC. Anytime you socialize risk, its going to be exploited. After all I might as well bet big and possibly strike it rich, if you are going to just cover my losses when it does not work.
I was not really the banks it was the brokers (who were often poorly monitored subsidiaries or departments within the banks; I realize).
Those guys sold loans with crazy interest and repayment schedules, and those guys failed in large part to do the customer vetting and do diligence they claimed to do. They then resold the loans to banks and the GSEs.
Now mind you the banks and the GSEs rather than going, "wait a moment the volume is way to big our models don't indicate there are this many well qualified borrowers even out there", chose to take the brokers at their word, pay them their commissions and report these high margin and yet completely safe loans on their financial statements, and collect their own bonus payments.
What I am about to describe is certainly a well know whole but when it happens to a big popular vendor it makes the problem a whole lot more significant.
We now have all these systems out there that make us safe :-P by only running signed code. We have all these policy mechanisms like Microsoft's Applocker that encourage admins to start white listing applications not by secure hash but by x.509 properties on a certificate. Its less work after all I want users to be able to run acrobat and flash, I don't want to have to update my GPOs every five hours when adobe releases a patch.
Guess what most of these devices don't do? Revocation checks, or at least its default permit when they can't do a revocation check. Leaks and other PKI fails like this are a very real threat to environments we otherwise think of as hardened.
That is the problem with Aero is "its just eye candy" Translucent window boarders are almost entirely useless. Now on limited screen real estate translucent (real translucency not show you a static snapshot of whats behind) inactive windows are very helpful.
Microsoft was rightly afraid that doing any translucency on the client area of legacy application windows might create some usability issues, at least for apps that deviate for the behavioral norms, but by shying away entirely they turned a tool into a useless gimmick.
Oh somebody understands what to do with it. Identifying the terrorists is a plausible use to sell some bleeding heart politicians and the public on it. In reality there is not algorithm heuristic or otherwise that is:
A) Efficient enough to go through a large enough portion of the data to correlate enough information on today's computing and storage platforms
B) Accurate enough to really spot the difference between a terrorist and teenager having a bad day. They might be good enough to flag 10's of 1000's of people for an army of human intelligence analysts to look at but that is as near as it gets.
C) Has a good enough command of enough languages to start to A or B for the portion of the population that has to this point been the frequent source of terrorist activity.
While the EU intelligence organizations and the NSA likely have some thing slightly better or at least bigger IBM's Watson demonstrations last year were probably fairly representative of "the state of the art" as large natural language unstructured data correlation engines go. I think we can see its not good enough for terror spotting.
No what this is really for is to ensure that when someone does something otherwise legal that causes grief to the wrong parties they will be able to find something on that person. Its been the way of tyrants to solve the problem of civil rights since democracy began, just pass enough laws such that everyone is guilty of something, than you have as much control as under any autocracy. They problem was being able to be sure you had the evidence to paint that individual as guilty when the time came.
Sift thru the data store for any possible illegal action by $person is exactly something that we can do with this technology and that is how its going to get used.
I used to run a large network
Things have changed and are changing rapidly. Dev opps means that on a well run large network (at least one under central control, like a corporate one) it should be possible to put a patch on 200 servers, and probably 80%+ of those desktops in as much time. Actually you should be do the deployment work in about the 4-6 hours it takes to test patch, and patch process on the representative test machines, the rest of the 48 hours should be waiting for clients to check in and servers to hit reboot schedules.
You should maybe read the Bible before quoting it.
"judge not" has a great deal of context around it and does not mean "judge not" at all. It means you will be held to whatever standards you hold others. Its really more about our tenancy to rationalize our own ill behavior and to remind us to be "open minded" about the acts of others as they may very well have a reason for what they do. Don't demand the head of a man for stealing a loaf of bread, he might be desperately poor with starving child at home. Someday you might be in the same situation and you would want a little forgiveness and understanding.
If there is something you believe is so wrong that you yourself would never ever do it no matter what, hope to die (and its otherwise consistent with the new testament), than its completely okay as a Christian for you to judge another for it, even harshly.
There is a way to do it securely (well as secure are max 16 char passwords are).
1. Collect plaintext from the user
2. hash the plaintext and validate against the old password db
3. If success, then truncate the plain text and store the new hash.
4. overwrite the old hash with some flag value, like say all NULLs
5. Wait until the old password database is all NULL and dump it.
Which is exactly why early voting an pushing up voter turn out is a bad thing for democracy. The fact is society would be better off if people were made to wait until all the debates were concluded and only the folks interested enough to study the issues were encouraged to vote.
Finally there should definitely be some ballot validation questions. They should be questions anyone will be able to ambiguously answer correctly if they are reading and understand how the ballot form works. Ballots with incorrect responses should be rejects. A sample question would be like "Is our Sun: " A) Bigger than a bread box, B) Smaller than a bread box, C) The same size as a bread box.
Its not controversial, and something anyone qualified to vote ought to know. yea yea I know some smart ass is going to ask if what if some aliens built an intergalactic bread box? To which I answer: ballot rejected, you dipshit.
There are people who have physiological addiction but not a psychological one.
Those people can quit smoking or quit heroin on a whim and never have a relapse or craving.
If you can "quit on a whim and never relapse" you were never addicted. Addiction is all about having some need that would not present in an otherwise healthy individuals, which is so acute you would engage in behaviors that have an outsized detrimental effect on your quality of life to satisfy it. The smoker who always drempt of travel for example, but never does because they need the $1500 for cigarettes.
I know you were going for funny but, well "I am shocked."
Microsoft has taken IE security pretty seriously and has established a pretty darn good track record with IE7->9 so far, at least on ASLR enabled platforms. I am surprised to see a reliable exploit that can be implemented as a drive-by on otherwise current platforms. This going to be a big deal and likely force an off cycle patch.
Implicit in the question is the idea the programing is programing is programing.
I don't think this is case. I would say just about anyone, baring those individuals with some moderate to severe mental impairment can do some programing. Integration programing is usually nothing more than outlining the corrected steps and gluing that outline onto the required boiler plate. Application programing might get a bit more complex but even that should be attainable for anyone able to read and follow documentation.
Oh sure it can get very complicated when you get into ETL on big data sets and such certainly may require a specialist who makes it business to do it well but I do think its something *anyone* could learn. In the same way anyone can learn to be an accountant or an attorney. Getting past some of the hurdles can be tough but with enough time and resources most normally abled people should be able to get there.
When you get into lower level stuff its a different game. I am not so sure just anyone could be taught compiler design for example at least with the outcome they will be proficient and successful working in the field. As you move from programing for high level applications into programing for 'Computer Science', 'Computer Engineering' or 'Systems Programing' than there is a certain group that is able to follow the math, and think about problems with and without abstractions at the same time and other things not everyone has a facility for.
Except that public school teachers most places are paid well. Its largely private school teachers that work for next to nothing. If you take the typical public schools teach salary and divide it out to a per month number over 9 not 12 because they don't work summers, most of them are compensated better than they would be in another field with the same credentials.
This dispute is not really even about 'compensation' per say, its about the accountability and the tenure system. Essentially this about teachers want to keep their seniority system and the tenure system, rather than a new one which would attempt to measure than reward or punish performance.
Virtual not other profession enjoys such a lack of accountability for the results employees achieve.
Unions are nothing more than collusion and price fixing and should be outlawed. They may have served a social service in the lax regulatory environment of the nineteenth century, but have no place today. If its not okay of widget makers to get together and agree on a minimal price to sell widgets, it should not be okay for labor to collude for compensation requirements either.
Additionally the Unions hate the citizen United decision because they think it gives some corporate interests undue influence. This is funny because in most cases their own membership is no less compulsory than anyone who has a job an organization whose management they might not feel represents them politically. Often the Unions' political agenda is as far removed from an individual members political views. If there are any restrictions corporate participation in the political process (in the name of freedom to exercise property there should not be) basic justice demands Unions face those same restrictions.
The real source of the problem is government. FDIC has taken the reputation out of banking. As a depositor I don't care if the bank gets knocked over because I know its insured at no cost to me anyway. Well it does cost me actually as the insurance fees are passed on in the form of lower rates.
Now if it were not for government intervention banks competing for depositors would be strongly incentive to protect their reputation for not losing customers money, EVER, as it would be the major sell point. This is why banks chose names like Bank of Granite, in the first place. The wanted to sound and look like immoveable impermeable objects.
If you want more smaller banks, people would want to spread their money around more places rather than risk it for the convenience of on big nation wide chain, and one provider.
And Or if you want banks to be more conservative and take security (of all kinds) seriously, you get rid of government backed deposit insurance.