Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality."
In the mathematical sense (if A then {always} B) that's true.
In the common meaning of imply ("If A is correlated with B and B follows A then A MAY cause B.") it sure does.
A strong correlation hints that there's a causative mechanism - either the later-appearing item occurring as fallout of the observed earlier-appearing item by some chain of influences, or both of them being the result of such chains from some other common precursor.
I agree! Especially since the male ALWAYS determines the sex of the child.
Not strictly true.
For starters, X and Y bearing sperm are affected differently by envrionmental factors (such as pH) which has been used in vitro to strongly bias fertilization toward one sex or the other. The female provides the environment (including pH) in which the sperm swim.
There are plenty of other ways a woman's body COULD bias the outcome. Anitbodies - leading to reduced sperm mobility or higher likelyhood of spontaneous abortion for one sex or the other, cytoplasmic factors in the egg, selection-restriction systems on the genes, etc. (Selection-restriction systems may be the reason Y chromosomes are so small - to prevent one from arising there.)
There is at least one species of lizard that takes this to an extreme - it's all-female and actually reproduces by cloning, but requires fertilization by a related species to trigger the start of the egg's conversion to a clone (after which the male's DNA is rejected).
I'm unaware of any such mechanisms that have been proven, so far, to exist in humans. But the jury is still out.
If such a thing IS found it will likely be either a bias or (if a near-100% thing) a recent mutation. A total or near-total bias toward one sex is likely to lead quickly to species extinction if not countered by some other factor.
But it's still shockingly cavalier to describe the technology as "just a bar code".
As he states - it is a one-way algorithm. If I have your barcode off your library card, I cannot reconstruct your name, SSN, birthdate, and all that without going into the library's database.
But if you have a digital hash of my fingerprint, and access to, say, the DMV database (my state collects fingerprints in digital form for driver's licenses), you can trivially mount a dictionary attack.
Run all the fingerprints in the driver's license database through the same hashing-and-matching algorithm as the scanner uses. If the print is in the database you get a hit. Then you have the DMV record - with the name, address, SS #, driver's license number, and digitized picture suitable for wanted posters.
Similarly for the FBI / NCIC fingerprint databases (FBI has mine from the old security clearance unless they lost it). Similarly for the one from the department of state for passport and visa holders (where you get both citizens and foreigners). Similarly Interpol. Also several other databases - some of them commercial.
Even law-abiding citizens' fingerprints end up in lots of places, of in machine-usable form.
They collected the data but then jumped to a very wrong conclusion and issued a prescription that, IMHO, will cause MORE harm to companies than it will prevent.
The "geek" who has been a major player in running the show will be able to break in and do harm if he wants to. If he's of a criminal or revenge-prone he may already have installed a bunch of stuff - and if he's just doing his job he probably has emergency backdoors and the like in case the normal paths break.
And while ordinary users may not have this sort of access, many of them WILL have been able to accumulate other users' passwords and the like. They too can get in and do damage.
IF you motivate them.
The decision is between giving them notice and an opportunity to gracefully disengage from the company, versus pulling the plug and THEN telling them they're fired. The gentle departure versus the knife in the back.
As someone who has been in the business for decades, I have been laid off from time to time. The usuall procedure has been to give notice and allow the soon-to-be-ex employee to gracefully shut down or redirect his correspondence, clean out his virtual desk, and take advantage of the company email for the first phase of his job hunt. Doing this creates warm fuzzies all around - the social net is intact, mutual recommendations will be forthcoming at all opportunites, if the company ever had need for me again (eventually it did) I'd hire on with no qualms.
Exactly ONCE I've had the no-notice shutdown. By a PHB who did it that way "because that's how it's done". (No doubt he'd seen trade journal articles like the one above.)
I was furious.
I COULD have done major damage to the company's IT infrastructure - but for my scrupulous honesty in business dealings (even with scumbags).
As it was, when the PHB in question later did a startup and found himself in need of my talents, I didn't even bother to reply to his offer. How can you trust someone like that? You can imagine how I advised anyone considering hiring him or going to work for him.
Now imagine doing that to someone who is not just able, but willing, to take revenge for any slight. These people are NOT rare - if you have a hundred employees, chances are you have at LEAST one.
As a friend who was a union organizer once said to me: "The workers will give you what you ask them for. Ask for quantity and you get quantity. Ask for quality and you get quality. Ask for trouble and you get trouble."
I note that (if I'm not confused or out of date) Compaq is noted for coming out with proprietary hardware that isn't well supported by Linux, while Dell's stuff is more open and supported well.
If that's (still) true, increasing acceptance of Linux in the marketplace gives Dell an increased competitive advantage over Compaq.
(Then again, maybe Dell is just being a nice guy. B-) )
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security.
Yeah, that's some REAL good insight.
The prohibition on issuing drivers licenses isn't about driving. It's about identity fraud - including election fraud.
In some states (when you can challenge a voter's identity at all) a driver's license is adequate proof of identity to respond to the challenge.
California (for instance), where a LOT of illegals vote (often multiply), recently almost passed a law explicitly granting illegals the right to be issued a driver's license with no special markings to indicate that they were anything other than a full citizen and resident at the indicated address.
There are a lot of security implications to issuing official identity cards to illegals and deliberately looking the other way about their status.
IMHO the way to spike this bill is to add a rider that:
- requires voters in federal elections to show the card as ID at the polls and give the number when registering to vote and when asking for an absentee ballot, and
- tie the state registration databases into a national system to insure that no vote is cast without a valid ID number and each ID number only votes once in a given election, and that each ID represents a real person who is still alive and has no other ID nuber.
That (combined with the security-related federal checks on the database) would effectively spike a number of forms of voting fraud. Current legislators were elected under a system WITH the fraud. So even the honest ones will worry about how much fraud their party machines might have used to get them their seats, and whether they'd be voting themselves out. B-)
What I'd expect of such a rider:
- The Rs would be for it. (They believe the Ds are the major beneficiaries of such fraud and thus the Rs would benefit from the cleanout of the voter rolls.) But many of them are against other personal-info probing aspects of a National ID system. So they'd push for including the rider (and given their majority in congress might succeed). But many would vote against the bill even with the rider.
- Successfully adding the rider would convince a lot of Ds to vote against the bill containing it, because they too believe they are the beneficiaries of machine politics.
Together these two effects might raise enough nays to kill the bill.
Sounds like it's too late for this go-around. But if the ID bill does pass, and the system is deployed, it will be hard for a congresscritter to justify voting against a new every-voter-counts-ONCE act to use it to reduce election fraud. So the spectre of such use can be brought up when calling your congresscritter (if you think he's corrupt) and it might work as well as if the rider WERE present.
Of course you'll have to couch such arguments as using the card to harass minorities and such at the voting booth. B-)
When my wife had a similar experience at a chip company.
The chip was flakey - but fast. The company wanted to ship it anyhow rather than fix it. Management argued that customers would buy it because nothing could beat its speed. She pointed out that a shorter mean time to crash was a bug, not a feature.
Management won. Of course.
And the company went down. Of course.
Yet another corporate corpse in the rubish heaps of Silicon Valley.
What drives me NUTS is that management KEEPS DOING THAT out here. They get focused on staying ahead of the curve and let quality slide. Then the company dies. Then they get a higher-paid position at another one and do it again. (Venture capaitalists apparently value experience over ability. Perhaps they believe that "expertese is directly proportional to value of equipment destroyed while learning" applies to corporate management.)
And when called on it they point to Microsoft, which has its customers so locked in that they keep getting away with it.
My hope is that Microsoft's continued existence is just a matter of dinosaurs (like other large reptiles) taking a long time to die. B-)
A) The abysmal security of Microsoft software has led, first to the development of a host of malware, then to multibillion dollar business models built on it.
When it was just malicious it created internet storms that affected traffic even for non-Microsoft users - something akin to allergy season, as a host of plants try to pollenate your nose. Now that it's a lucrative business model it's more akin to the evolution of peredators on the herds of computer users.
In both forms it's also analogous to the evolution of plagues. Microsoftware is the software equivalent of a third-world pesthole where the likes of dengue fever, ebola, and bubonic plague are endemic, just waiting for some mutation to let them spread to those currently immune.
Had it not been for Microsoft's low security the development of this bane would have been much slower and might have been nipped in the bud, or stamped out as it emerged. But because of the persistence of Microsoft's vulnerabilities and its ubiquity, malware has become an industry. And industrial malware has been modularized and had functionality combined, until quite complex and powerful systems have evolved. The bulk of the function of these can now be ported to even our more protected environments, if even a single vulnerability remains to let the malware take hold.
Spam (sent through an army of Microsoft zombies) has made email virtually useless except for large organizations (where it's merely much more expensive). Spyware threatens personal information wherever it might be entered - including at institutions (such as banks and hospitals) which are not under control of the persons whose information is at risk. Vulnerabilities open the possiblity of a low-budget infowar against developed countries' infrastructure - a war that is easily within reach of the means of even the current crop of terrorists. I could go on.
From this standpoint I really don't care whether Microsoft suddenly fixed its security or everybody abandoned it: Either would reduce the overall threat - and suck the non-Microsoft community into the war with the malware authors on a much bigger scale than now, possibly leading to their decimation.
B) One of the boons of modern times is the proliferation of a small number of languages among a large part of the world population. The downside is a reduction of cultural diversity. The upside is greatly enhanced communication. The benefits of the latter, IMHO, far outweigh the problems of the former.
Microsoft's policy of carefully ignoring (or deliberatly sabotaging) compatibility standards (in order to lock users into their products) leads to a "language barrier" among computer users. This is exactly the reverse of that beneficial trend.
It also puts information itself at risk - as when governments and/or other institutions standardize on Microsoft solutions and end up with their data locked in and locked away from users of other systems.
(But point B) is covered in more detail by other posters so I'll stop now.)
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.... I'm voting for it being feigned bias for humor value.
Re:You say array access, I say function invocation
on
The Best of Verity Stob
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· Score: 3, Informative
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.
The original language (Fortran) used parens for both subscription and function arguments, as did most of the languages of the time.
If I recall correctly, there were no square brackets on the 026 keypunch keyboard (though there might have been an overstrike code assigned for them).
EBCDIC and ASCII had square brackets. But terminals and keypunches using them weren't widely deployed until the late '60s or early '70s.
replace the keyboards when a new patient is brought into a room
What a great idea, especially given today's abundant supply of cheap petroleum.
We're talking hospitals here, not the entire world. And we're talking saving lives.
Even if lives come beneath resource depletion in your value system, replacing all the keyboards in all the hospitals in the world has negligible impact on the petroleum utilization compared to, say, and hour's flight of a blackbird spycraft. Or the fuel consumed in the extra trips to the hospital for the extra vicitms of the superbugs that you need if you DON'T do something about it.
When bacteria begin to resist dying when exposed to things like Triclosan, sodium hypochlorite, then we should start to worry.
Don't forget encysting bacteria. And viruses. And prions. And mycoplasmas. And fungal spores. And yeasts. I could go on.
For starters, anything that would reliably denature prions would likely completely disolve the rubber and plastic parts before they were reliably sterilized - or (if it's enzymatic) the soft tissues of the users' hands if any trace remained on the keyboards and mice after cleanup....the real problem is frequent overprescription and patient misuse of antibiotics.
Again we're talking hospitals here. Even if antibiotics were underprescribed in such a miserly fashion that people were dropping like flies, the best and strongest ones would STILL get used in a hospital - and the people with infections of the toughest bugs would be taken there to get things started. That's why "superbugs" - starting with "hospital staph" - have been a problem in hospitals since the deveopment of the germ theory of disease and countermeasures against it.
Meanwhile, it does little good to try applying 20-20 hindsight to evolving superbugs. They're ALREADY HERE. The operators of hospitals now have to deal with them.
Periodically replacing the keyboards (if laundering them proves inadequate) is a tiny price to pay.
Keyboards are super-cheap these days: 10 to 20 bux in singles.
At that price a hospital can afford to replace the keyboards when a new patient is brought into a room, or periodically for things like lab and nurse station equipment.
Some hospitals already do this with telephones. At ten bucks or less for a cheap desk set the hospital includes one with the patient phone service - and lets the patient take it home when they leave (if they didn't have something that would be major-league hazardous to their family.)
The main problem with hospital germs is that they are constantly exposed to cleaning and sterilizing solutions and antibiotics. So hospital surfaces that stick around for years tend to accumulate "superbugs" that are immune to nearly everything. Hospitals fight this by using disposable stuff wherever possible - replacing them before they have a chance to accumulate much or get something growing. Due to their low cost, computer keyboards (and mice) are candidates for this.
I knew of a guy - a Libertarian - who'd do a similar thing.
He'd buy bunches of new two-dollar notes to get fresh ones with consecutive serial numbers. Then he'd take a piece of cardboard the same size as a bill, put a stack of bills on it, and stick one edge together with "padding compound" - the kind of glue used to stick together notepads (and stacks of food stamps).
He'd go out to a restaurant or what have you and, after the meal, would whip out the pad of fresh bills and ask "Do you take Federal Reserve Notes?".
Of course the typical response would be "Is that money?". To this he'd reply "No, but the government says you HAVE to take it."
(What he was alluding to was that, since the switch from Silver Certificates to Federal Reserve Notes, US currency is now unbacked. It is no longer "money" - actual precious metal or a certificate redemable for some - but now "fiat currency" - a promise by the government to use force to make people accept it for payment of debts as if it actually WAS money.)
(As I understand the federal law, if you have a debt and offer Fed notes for payment, if they refuse to take them as payment, your debt is paid AND you get to keep the notes - and you can enforce this in federal court, even if a state court then tries to make you pay again, pay with something else, or sieze your property to pay the debt. {There is a limit, however, on how big a debt you can pay with coins - so don't bring in a barrel of pennies.} But IANAL so don't take that as gospel.)
He's trying to get a "funny" mod for alluding to the claim that Gore beat Dubbya in the first election.
(I think what's funny is that, after trying for months to steal the election and failing, Gore's fans still turn around and claim that Bush stole it from THEM. B-) )
Daylight Saving(s) Time already killed one industry: Drive in theatres.
In the summer the sun is ALREADY going down later (as well as coming up earlier) than in winter. Daylight saving(s) time pushed sundown still further back. Result: People who had to get up for work or whatever were on such an early schedule that they couldn't stay awake to watch a movie or two after sundown. Goodbye drive-ins, hello indoor multiplex theatres (and flea markets on the defunct drive-ins' lots).
In the summer there is ALREADY no shortage of daylight. What is short is night.
So IMHO what we REALLY need is (drumroll please):
Nightlife Saving Time!
Move the clocks BACK an hour in the summer!
With the sun going down at a reasonable time we'll all be able to party properly again. Think of the boost to the economy from THAT.
How is Apple's own DRM method (i.e., the thing that allows iTunes Music Store to exist) like the patent for CDs? Not at all, that's how. It's not a standard. No one is required to use it.
Combining DRM with copyright enables an anticompetitive practice: Leveraging monopoly power in one sector (downloadable digital audio content) to acquire unfair competitive advantage in another (digital audio players).
In another pair of fields (OS, applications software) this is EXACTLY what Microsoft did that caused them to lose antitrust suits.
When Apple now does the same thing using its proprietary content protection system, the DMCA (another creature of congress) actively supports their efforts using government power to block commercial products based on reverse-engineering of their format, in the same way a patent would.
The creation of secondary monopolies was NOT congress' intent when it passed the DMCA. Thus the scrutiny now: to see if it needs to patch the laws to debug this unintended consequence.
We've been breathing buckyballs, nanotubes, an other nanoscopic carbon structures since the domestication of fire. It's called "soot", and is where buckyballs were first discovered.
Harmfull stuff, too. Humans have evolved to be MUCH less damaged by such things as a result of long use of fire in enclosed places. (To the point that some dioxins amount to deadly poisons for EVERY animal but people, for whom they're just a medium-grade carcinogen/teratogen at exposure levels high enough to overwhelm the detoxification enzymes.)
Granted industrial production of nanoscopic materials means more exposure to a wider variety of stuff. But biochemical/nanomechanical warfare has been in progress since the advent of single-celled life. Most nanotechnological hazards are likely to be a matter of degree, not something totally new - even if particluar materials ARE totally new.
[...] there was never any requirement to provide a prototype [...]
I was under the impression that:
- In the US, when the patent office was first set up, there WAS a working prototype requirement (for inventions where that was applicable).
- The patent office very quickly ran out of space, so
- the prototype requirement was dropped in rather short order,
- except for perpetual motion machines (to keep THOSE out of the patent officials' hair), and
- when the Smithsonian Institution was founded the patent office donated the prototype collection to it.
(But I just HEARD that. It might just be a shaggy dog story I was told.)
He has "virus" as "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail", completely missing that the defining characteristic is self-replication and that some viruses are reasonably benign (or very occasionally attempt to be helpful).
He has "spyware" as simply monitoring your surfing habits, rather than the catch-all for all malware that records your activities (keyloggers, audio/video bugs, registry sniffers, etc.) or otherwise automatically extracts sensitive info from your machine.
As is typical for a mainstream media outlet, they got the facts wrong, and trumpted their errors as well-researched truth. With this as the general public's main source for information on computer security (or nearly anything else), is it any wonder that the the bulk of the public is under- and mis-informed?
And is it any wonder that they're turning off mainstream media news and switching to the net as the primary source for their important time-critical infomation?
Unfortunately (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets), they went on to try to make their users feel more educated - by giving them the definitions of a bunch of security-related jargon terms.
And (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets) they got several of them wrong.
(I'm reminded of the way "hacker" got corrupted when a self-proclaimed security expert used it in a presentation to some executives and the media got hold of it from there. Of course this article continues the misuse.)
With misinformation like this from the main sources of information for the non-specialists, it is no surprise that the general public is clueless about these issues.
Note that even if WEP is trivial to crack it serves a purpose: The same purpose as a lock on a screen door or window.
It doesn't keep out a burglar.
It DOES make it clear that your INTENT was to keep him out, and that if he breaks in his INTENT was to break in.
This is a very important legal point if/when you, or law enforcement, bring action against him.
Similarly, the computing community has generally interpreted permission settings (on files and the like) as an expression of intent, generally honoring them even if they have the ability to bypass them.
This transfers directly to wireless access points: Some people deliberately leave their APs open, to let others use them as a community resource. Generally this is done by leaving them at the default settings. While there may be confusion about it if an AP is in this state, there is NO confusion about the intent if WEP is enabled.
So what this is telling us is the Feds are really just script kiddies?
No.
What this tells us is that the Feds are showing people just how TRIVIAL and FAST it is for script kiddies and crooks to break into WLANs. And give you pointers on keeping the petty crooks out (and drastically cut crime and reduce the load on the FBI).
Surely you didn't expect them to give you a demo of how THEY do it and how to keep THEM out, did you? B-)
It really is a shame when the prevailing "geek" attitude towards agencies like the FBI is mistrust and fear, not confidence and respect.
I find it refreshing.
The founders of our government were quite aware that the greatest threat to freedom was the very government intended to secure and maintain it. That governments are run by people, that people are fallible, and that the power of government tempts them to sieze still more power- to simplify their jobs, to enhance thier own lives, or just for the fun of it.
They knew that some people and some institutions would be corrupted, did their best to put roadblocks in the way of corruption to slow the process down, and to warn their successors (us) to be on watch, so we could catch the inevatable slippages and correct them.
An attitude of healthy suspicion combined with grudging respect and occasional heartfelt praise is precicely right, when it comes to agencies such as the FBI. Healthy suspicion because agents - singly, in groups, or institutionally - have gotten out-of-hand repeatedly. Grudging respect (which must be earned but is honest when it is), because the government and its agencies houseclean from time to time, the agency mostly stays on track, and many of its agents are honest, hard-working, and often heroic, doing their best to identify, protect us from, and bring to justice some truly evil people. Occasional heartfelt praise - when they earn it (which they often do), spending their sweat, smarts, and blood to make the rest of us safer.
The reason I find "the 'geek' attitude" refreshing is that it show that a new generation - no, a large social group that crosses several generations - have "gotten it". Like most powerful tools, law-enforcement and investigative agencies can do significant when used properly, and even greater harm when misused or broken. Eternal vigilance is needed to keep them in good repair and on the right job. Now we have yet another generation that understands the need for this vigilance and is standing guard.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: "Correlation does not imply causality."
In the mathematical sense (if A then {always} B) that's true.
In the common meaning of imply ("If A is correlated with B and B follows A then A MAY cause B.") it sure does.
A strong correlation hints that there's a causative mechanism - either the later-appearing item occurring as fallout of the observed earlier-appearing item by some chain of influences, or both of them being the result of such chains from some other common precursor.
Doesn't PROVE it. But raises alarm bells.
I agree! Especially since the male ALWAYS determines the sex of the child.
Not strictly true.
For starters, X and Y bearing sperm are affected differently by envrionmental factors (such as pH) which has been used in vitro to strongly bias fertilization toward one sex or the other. The female provides the environment (including pH) in which the sperm swim.
There are plenty of other ways a woman's body COULD bias the outcome. Anitbodies - leading to reduced sperm mobility or higher likelyhood of spontaneous abortion for one sex or the other, cytoplasmic factors in the egg, selection-restriction systems on the genes, etc. (Selection-restriction systems may be the reason Y chromosomes are so small - to prevent one from arising there.)
There is at least one species of lizard that takes this to an extreme - it's all-female and actually reproduces by cloning, but requires fertilization by a related species to trigger the start of the egg's conversion to a clone (after which the male's DNA is rejected).
I'm unaware of any such mechanisms that have been proven, so far, to exist in humans. But the jury is still out.
If such a thing IS found it will likely be either a bias or (if a near-100% thing) a recent mutation. A total or near-total bias toward one sex is likely to lead quickly to species extinction if not countered by some other factor.
But it's still shockingly cavalier to describe the technology as "just a bar code".
As he states - it is a one-way algorithm. If I have your barcode off your library card, I cannot reconstruct your name, SSN, birthdate, and all that without going into the library's database.
But if you have a digital hash of my fingerprint, and access to, say, the DMV database (my state collects fingerprints in digital form for driver's licenses), you can trivially mount a dictionary attack.
Run all the fingerprints in the driver's license database through the same hashing-and-matching algorithm as the scanner uses. If the print is in the database you get a hit. Then you have the DMV record - with the name, address, SS #, driver's license number, and digitized picture suitable for wanted posters.
Similarly for the FBI / NCIC fingerprint databases (FBI has mine from the old security clearance unless they lost it). Similarly for the one from the department of state for passport and visa holders (where you get both citizens and foreigners). Similarly Interpol. Also several other databases - some of them commercial.
Even law-abiding citizens' fingerprints end up in lots of places, of in machine-usable form.
They collected the data but then jumped to a very wrong conclusion and issued a prescription that, IMHO, will cause MORE harm to companies than it will prevent.
The "geek" who has been a major player in running the show will be able to break in and do harm if he wants to. If he's of a criminal or revenge-prone he may already have installed a bunch of stuff - and if he's just doing his job he probably has emergency backdoors and the like in case the normal paths break.
And while ordinary users may not have this sort of access, many of them WILL have been able to accumulate other users' passwords and the like. They too can get in and do damage.
IF you motivate them.
The decision is between giving them notice and an opportunity to gracefully disengage from the company, versus pulling the plug and THEN telling them they're fired. The gentle departure versus the knife in the back.
As someone who has been in the business for decades, I have been laid off from time to time. The usuall procedure has been to give notice and allow the soon-to-be-ex employee to gracefully shut down or redirect his correspondence, clean out his virtual desk, and take advantage of the company email for the first phase of his job hunt. Doing this creates warm fuzzies all around - the social net is intact, mutual recommendations will be forthcoming at all opportunites, if the company ever had need for me again (eventually it did) I'd hire on with no qualms.
Exactly ONCE I've had the no-notice shutdown. By a PHB who did it that way "because that's how it's done". (No doubt he'd seen trade journal articles like the one above.)
I was furious.
I COULD have done major damage to the company's IT infrastructure - but for my scrupulous honesty in business dealings (even with scumbags).
As it was, when the PHB in question later did a startup and found himself in need of my talents, I didn't even bother to reply to his offer. How can you trust someone like that? You can imagine how I advised anyone considering hiring him or going to work for him.
Now imagine doing that to someone who is not just able, but willing, to take revenge for any slight. These people are NOT rare - if you have a hundred employees, chances are you have at LEAST one.
As a friend who was a union organizer once said to me: "The workers will give you what you ask them for. Ask for quantity and you get quantity. Ask for quality and you get quality. Ask for trouble and you get trouble."
The surprise plug-pull is asking for trouble.
I note that (if I'm not confused or out of date) Compaq is noted for coming out with proprietary hardware that isn't well supported by Linux, while Dell's stuff is more open and supported well.
If that's (still) true, increasing acceptance of Linux in the marketplace gives Dell an increased competitive advantage over Compaq.
(Then again, maybe Dell is just being a nice guy. B-) )
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security.
Yeah, that's some REAL good insight.
The prohibition on issuing drivers licenses isn't about driving. It's about identity fraud - including election fraud.
In some states (when you can challenge a voter's identity at all) a driver's license is adequate proof of identity to respond to the challenge.
California (for instance), where a LOT of illegals vote (often multiply), recently almost passed a law explicitly granting illegals the right to be issued a driver's license with no special markings to indicate that they were anything other than a full citizen and resident at the indicated address.
There are a lot of security implications to issuing official identity cards to illegals and deliberately looking the other way about their status.
IMHO the way to spike this bill is to add a rider that:
- requires voters in federal elections to show the card as ID at the polls and give the number when registering to vote and when asking for an absentee ballot, and
- tie the state registration databases into a national system to insure that no vote is cast without a valid ID number and each ID number only votes once in a given election, and that each ID represents a real person who is still alive and has no other ID nuber.
That (combined with the security-related federal checks on the database) would effectively spike a number of forms of voting fraud. Current legislators were elected under a system WITH the fraud. So even the honest ones will worry about how much fraud their party machines might have used to get them their seats, and whether they'd be voting themselves out. B-)
What I'd expect of such a rider:
- The Rs would be for it. (They believe the Ds are the major beneficiaries of such fraud and thus the Rs would benefit from the cleanout of the voter rolls.) But many of them are against other personal-info probing aspects of a National ID system. So they'd push for including the rider (and given their majority in congress might succeed). But many would vote against the bill even with the rider.
- Successfully adding the rider would convince a lot of Ds to vote against the bill containing it, because they too believe they are the beneficiaries of machine politics.
Together these two effects might raise enough nays to kill the bill.
Sounds like it's too late for this go-around. But if the ID bill does pass, and the system is deployed, it will be hard for a congresscritter to justify voting against a new every-voter-counts-ONCE act to use it to reduce election fraud. So the spectre of such use can be brought up when calling your congresscritter (if you think he's corrupt) and it might work as well as if the rider WERE present.
Of course you'll have to couch such arguments as using the card to harass minorities and such at the voting booth. B-)
When my wife had a similar experience at a chip company.
The chip was flakey - but fast. The company wanted to ship it anyhow rather than fix it. Management argued that customers would buy it because nothing could beat its speed. She pointed out that a shorter mean time to crash was a bug, not a feature.
Management won. Of course.
And the company went down. Of course.
Yet another corporate corpse in the rubish heaps of Silicon Valley.
What drives me NUTS is that management KEEPS DOING THAT out here. They get focused on staying ahead of the curve and let quality slide. Then the company dies. Then they get a higher-paid position at another one and do it again. (Venture capaitalists apparently value experience over ability. Perhaps they believe that "expertese is directly proportional to value of equipment destroyed while learning" applies to corporate management.)
And when called on it they point to Microsoft, which has its customers so locked in that they keep getting away with it.
My hope is that Microsoft's continued existence is just a matter of dinosaurs (like other large reptiles) taking a long time to die. B-)
Maybe this will help them along.
I love that analogy between Microsoft products and 3rd world pestholes. I'm going to use it myself if you don't mind.
Feel free.
Spread the meme.
A) The abysmal security of Microsoft software has led, first to the development of a host of malware, then to multibillion dollar business models built on it.
When it was just malicious it created internet storms that affected traffic even for non-Microsoft users - something akin to allergy season, as a host of plants try to pollenate your nose. Now that it's a lucrative business model it's more akin to the evolution of peredators on the herds of computer users.
In both forms it's also analogous to the evolution of plagues. Microsoftware is the software equivalent of a third-world pesthole where the likes of dengue fever, ebola, and bubonic plague are endemic, just waiting for some mutation to let them spread to those currently immune.
Had it not been for Microsoft's low security the development of this bane would have been much slower and might have been nipped in the bud, or stamped out as it emerged. But because of the persistence of Microsoft's vulnerabilities and its ubiquity, malware has become an industry. And industrial malware has been modularized and had functionality combined, until quite complex and powerful systems have evolved. The bulk of the function of these can now be ported to even our more protected environments, if even a single vulnerability remains to let the malware take hold.
Spam (sent through an army of Microsoft zombies) has made email virtually useless except for large organizations (where it's merely much more expensive). Spyware threatens personal information wherever it might be entered - including at institutions (such as banks and hospitals) which are not under control of the persons whose information is at risk. Vulnerabilities open the possiblity of a low-budget infowar against developed countries' infrastructure - a war that is easily within reach of the means of even the current crop of terrorists. I could go on.
From this standpoint I really don't care whether Microsoft suddenly fixed its security or everybody abandoned it: Either would reduce the overall threat - and suck the non-Microsoft community into the war with the malware authors on a much bigger scale than now, possibly leading to their decimation.
B) One of the boons of modern times is the proliferation of a small number of languages among a large part of the world population. The downside is a reduction of cultural diversity. The upside is greatly enhanced communication. The benefits of the latter, IMHO, far outweigh the problems of the former.
Microsoft's policy of carefully ignoring (or deliberatly sabotaging) compatibility standards (in order to lock users into their products) leads to a "language barrier" among computer users. This is exactly the reverse of that beneficial trend.
It also puts information itself at risk - as when governments and/or other institutions standardize on Microsoft solutions and end up with their data locked in and locked away from users of other systems.
(But point B) is covered in more detail by other posters so I'll stop now.)
Oops, left off the end of the sentence.
... I'm voting for it being feigned bias for humor value.
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.
The reviewer quotes a passage where the author complains about array accesses and function invocations in VB. Now, as a former VB wonk, I hate it as much as anyone outside of the FSF, but I'm not sure I agree with this.
The author is showing either bias (real or feigned for humor value) or ignorance. Given the context (computer humor) and the medium-old-hand status of someone who has been writing it for (only) 17 years.
The original language (Fortran) used parens for both subscription and function arguments, as did most of the languages of the time.
If I recall correctly, there were no square brackets on the 026 keypunch keyboard (though there might have been an overstrike code assigned for them).
EBCDIC and ASCII had square brackets. But terminals and keypunches using them weren't widely deployed until the late '60s or early '70s.
The plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
replace the keyboards when a new patient is brought into a room
...the real problem is frequent overprescription and patient misuse of antibiotics.
What a great idea, especially given today's abundant supply of cheap petroleum.
We're talking hospitals here, not the entire world. And we're talking saving lives.
Even if lives come beneath resource depletion in your value system, replacing all the keyboards in all the hospitals in the world has negligible impact on the petroleum utilization compared to, say, and hour's flight of a blackbird spycraft. Or the fuel consumed in the extra trips to the hospital for the extra vicitms of the superbugs that you need if you DON'T do something about it.
When bacteria begin to resist dying when exposed to things like Triclosan, sodium hypochlorite, then we should start to worry.
Don't forget encysting bacteria. And viruses. And prions. And mycoplasmas. And fungal spores. And yeasts. I could go on.
For starters, anything that would reliably denature prions would likely completely disolve the rubber and plastic parts before they were reliably sterilized - or (if it's enzymatic) the soft tissues of the users' hands if any trace remained on the keyboards and mice after cleanup.
Again we're talking hospitals here. Even if antibiotics were underprescribed in such a miserly fashion that people were dropping like flies, the best and strongest ones would STILL get used in a hospital - and the people with infections of the toughest bugs would be taken there to get things started. That's why "superbugs" - starting with "hospital staph" - have been a problem in hospitals since the deveopment of the germ theory of disease and countermeasures against it.
Meanwhile, it does little good to try applying 20-20 hindsight to evolving superbugs. They're ALREADY HERE. The operators of hospitals now have to deal with them.
Periodically replacing the keyboards (if laundering them proves inadequate) is a tiny price to pay.
Keyboards are super-cheap these days: 10 to 20 bux in singles.
At that price a hospital can afford to replace the keyboards when a new patient is brought into a room, or periodically for things like lab and nurse station equipment.
Some hospitals already do this with telephones. At ten bucks or less for a cheap desk set the hospital includes one with the patient phone service - and lets the patient take it home when they leave (if they didn't have something that would be major-league hazardous to their family.)
The main problem with hospital germs is that they are constantly exposed to cleaning and sterilizing solutions and antibiotics. So hospital surfaces that stick around for years tend to accumulate "superbugs" that are immune to nearly everything. Hospitals fight this by using disposable stuff wherever possible - replacing them before they have a chance to accumulate much or get something growing. Due to their low cost, computer keyboards (and mice) are candidates for this.
I knew of a guy - a Libertarian - who'd do a similar thing.
He'd buy bunches of new two-dollar notes to get fresh ones with consecutive serial numbers. Then he'd take a piece of cardboard the same size as a bill, put a stack of bills on it, and stick one edge together with "padding compound" - the kind of glue used to stick together notepads (and stacks of food stamps).
He'd go out to a restaurant or what have you and, after the meal, would whip out the pad of fresh bills and ask "Do you take Federal Reserve Notes?".
Of course the typical response would be "Is that money?". To this he'd reply "No, but the government says you HAVE to take it."
(What he was alluding to was that, since the switch from Silver Certificates to Federal Reserve Notes, US currency is now unbacked. It is no longer "money" - actual precious metal or a certificate redemable for some - but now "fiat currency" - a promise by the government to use force to make people accept it for payment of debts as if it actually WAS money.)
(As I understand the federal law, if you have a debt and offer Fed notes for payment, if they refuse to take them as payment, your debt is paid AND you get to keep the notes - and you can enforce this in federal court, even if a state court then tries to make you pay again, pay with something else, or sieze your property to pay the debt. {There is a limit, however, on how big a debt you can pay with coins - so don't bring in a barrel of pennies.} But IANAL so don't take that as gospel.)
He's trying to get a "funny" mod for alluding to the claim that Gore beat Dubbya in the first election.
(I think what's funny is that, after trying for months to steal the election and failing, Gore's fans still turn around and claim that Bush stole it from THEM. B-) )
Daylight Saving(s) Time already killed one industry: Drive in theatres.
In the summer the sun is ALREADY going down later (as well as coming up earlier) than in winter. Daylight saving(s) time pushed sundown still further back. Result: People who had to get up for work or whatever were on such an early schedule that they couldn't stay awake to watch a movie or two after sundown. Goodbye drive-ins, hello indoor multiplex theatres (and flea markets on the defunct drive-ins' lots).
In the summer there is ALREADY no shortage of daylight. What is short is night.
So IMHO what we REALLY need is (drumroll please):
Nightlife Saving Time!
Move the clocks BACK an hour in the summer!
With the sun going down at a reasonable time we'll all be able to party properly again. Think of the boost to the economy from THAT.
How is Apple's own DRM method (i.e., the thing that allows iTunes Music Store to exist) like the patent for CDs? Not at all, that's how. It's not a standard. No one is required to use it.
Combining DRM with copyright enables an anticompetitive practice: Leveraging monopoly power in one sector (downloadable digital audio content) to acquire unfair competitive advantage in another (digital audio players).
In another pair of fields (OS, applications software) this is EXACTLY what Microsoft did that caused them to lose antitrust suits.
When Apple now does the same thing using its proprietary content protection system, the DMCA (another creature of congress) actively supports their efforts using government power to block commercial products based on reverse-engineering of their format, in the same way a patent would.
The creation of secondary monopolies was NOT congress' intent when it passed the DMCA. Thus the scrutiny now: to see if it needs to patch the laws to debug this unintended consequence.
We've been breathing buckyballs, nanotubes, an other nanoscopic carbon structures since the domestication of fire. It's called "soot", and is where buckyballs were first discovered.
Harmfull stuff, too. Humans have evolved to be MUCH less damaged by such things as a result of long use of fire in enclosed places. (To the point that some dioxins amount to deadly poisons for EVERY animal but people, for whom they're just a medium-grade carcinogen/teratogen at exposure levels high enough to overwhelm the detoxification enzymes.)
Granted industrial production of nanoscopic materials means more exposure to a wider variety of stuff. But biochemical/nanomechanical warfare has been in progress since the advent of single-celled life. Most nanotechnological hazards are likely to be a matter of degree, not something totally new - even if particluar materials ARE totally new.
Marvy summary. But...
[...] there was never any requirement to provide a prototype [...]
I was under the impression that:
- In the US, when the patent office was first set up, there WAS a working prototype requirement (for inventions where that was applicable).
- The patent office very quickly ran out of space, so
- the prototype requirement was dropped in rather short order,
- except for perpetual motion machines (to keep THOSE out of the patent officials' hair), and
- when the Smithsonian Institution was founded the patent office donated the prototype collection to it.
(But I just HEARD that. It might just be a shaggy dog story I was told.)
He has "virus" as "Malicious program designed to damage data; usually spread via infected e-mail", completely missing that the defining characteristic is self-replication and that some viruses are reasonably benign (or very occasionally attempt to be helpful).
He has "spyware" as simply monitoring your surfing habits, rather than the catch-all for all malware that records your activities (keyloggers, audio/video bugs, registry sniffers, etc.) or otherwise automatically extracts sensitive info from your machine.
As is typical for a mainstream media outlet, they got the facts wrong, and trumpted their errors as well-researched truth. With this as the general public's main source for information on computer security (or nearly anything else), is it any wonder that the the bulk of the public is under- and mis-informed?
And is it any wonder that they're turning off mainstream media news and switching to the net as the primary source for their important time-critical infomation?
Thank goodness the Beeb finally clued us in!
Unfortunately (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets), they went on to try to make their users feel more educated - by giving them the definitions of a bunch of security-related jargon terms.
And (as is typical for mainstream news media outlets) they got several of them wrong.
(I'm reminded of the way "hacker" got corrupted when a self-proclaimed security expert used it in a presentation to some executives and the media got hold of it from there. Of course this article continues the misuse.)
With misinformation like this from the main sources of information for the non-specialists, it is no surprise that the general public is clueless about these issues.
Articles like this one are self-fulfilling.
Note that even if WEP is trivial to crack it serves a purpose: The same purpose as a lock on a screen door or window.
It doesn't keep out a burglar.
It DOES make it clear that your INTENT was to keep him out, and that if he breaks in his INTENT was to break in.
This is a very important legal point if/when you, or law enforcement, bring action against him.
Similarly, the computing community has generally interpreted permission settings (on files and the like) as an expression of intent, generally honoring them even if they have the ability to bypass them.
This transfers directly to wireless access points: Some people deliberately leave their APs open, to let others use them as a community resource. Generally this is done by leaving them at the default settings. While there may be confusion about it if an AP is in this state, there is NO confusion about the intent if WEP is enabled.
So what this is telling us is the Feds are really just script kiddies?
No.
What this tells us is that the Feds are showing people just how TRIVIAL and FAST it is for script kiddies and crooks to break into WLANs. And give you pointers on keeping the petty crooks out (and drastically cut crime and reduce the load on the FBI).
Surely you didn't expect them to give you a demo of how THEY do it and how to keep THEM out, did you? B-)
Then I felt dismayed.
It really is a shame when the prevailing "geek" attitude towards agencies like the FBI is mistrust and fear, not confidence and respect.
I find it refreshing.
The founders of our government were quite aware that the greatest threat to freedom was the very government intended to secure and maintain it. That governments are run by people, that people are fallible, and that the power of government tempts them to sieze still more power- to simplify their jobs, to enhance thier own lives, or just for the fun of it.
They knew that some people and some institutions would be corrupted, did their best to put roadblocks in the way of corruption to slow the process down, and to warn their successors (us) to be on watch, so we could catch the inevatable slippages and correct them.
An attitude of healthy suspicion combined with grudging respect and occasional heartfelt praise is precicely right, when it comes to agencies such as the FBI. Healthy suspicion because agents - singly, in groups, or institutionally - have gotten out-of-hand repeatedly. Grudging respect (which must be earned but is honest when it is), because the government and its agencies houseclean from time to time, the agency mostly stays on track, and many of its agents are honest, hard-working, and often heroic, doing their best to identify, protect us from, and bring to justice some truly evil people. Occasional heartfelt praise - when they earn it (which they often do), spending their sweat, smarts, and blood to make the rest of us safer.
The reason I find "the 'geek' attitude" refreshing is that it show that a new generation - no, a large social group that crosses several generations - have "gotten it". Like most powerful tools, law-enforcement and investigative agencies can do significant when used properly, and even greater harm when misused or broken. Eternal vigilance is needed to keep them in good repair and on the right job. Now we have yet another generation that understands the need for this vigilance and is standing guard.