Besides raising revenue through tax hikes, another option is to reduce discretionary spending.
Yup, that's why I mentioned it.
Further, within tax policy the revenue mix from various income types can be tailored (translation: soak the rich!)
Yup, which is another reason to scrap the current system (soak the poor to pay for the general fund) in favor of one that just tries to cover costs.
It constrains the government to spend its tax revenues in different ways in different eras.
Do you believe in the tooth fairy and the easter bunny along with noble politicians? Bonds do nothing to constrain the government, because a simple vote tosses out the promises you thought you had. The only thing you can be sure of is the money you have in your pocket today. Once the government has your money any promise to repay it in a certain way isn't worth the paper it's printed on. (If you're the one holding the bond you're somewhat better off, but look to argentina as an example of how that can go bad also.) What we have now is simply a regressive tax that has no bearing on what future social security benefits will be. When the time comes that social security no longer runs a surplus the politicians will look at the numbers and do something--but we have no idea what. The odds that they'll double the income tax to pay out exactly the benefits that todays politicians promised seem low, however. Likewise the possibility that they'll double the deficit for 20 years is, while more likely, somewhat scary. One of the things you missed in your lecture on gov't debt is the difference between long-term and short-term debt. The former tends to be bad because it encourages congress to systemically outspend its means. The latter tends to be a good thing (if repayed rather than reissued) because it is a way for the government to get past a soft patch in the economy without getting into a bottomless hole. The pay-as-you-go model I suggested earlier in the thread assumes short-term debt if there's an unexpected blip in the economy; the current model uses long-term debt with no plan to pay that off. That is what needs to change.
That would be one possible course of action. Whether it is "proper" or even desirable is another matter. Without the the Trust Fund buffer, SS financing beomes tightly coupled to current economic performance. Maintaining SS's commitments during periods of very modest economic performance would then be impossible, orat least very painful.
What option is there? Any pool of money is going to be tightly coupled to current economic performance. Under the current system the only way to get money out of the trust fund is to, well, raise taxes so that the general fund can cover the social security debt. If your tax revenues are down (probably due to a recession or somesuch) the value of a stock fund is also likey to be down--and dumping stocks from of a market-based trust fund while the economy is in recession isn't exactly going to have a stimulant effect. I guess you could just print some extra money, but that sort of inflationary trend is usually best avoided...
So tell me: how the government does store a huge quantity of money in such a way that it is available on demand without regard for the country's economy? I think the answer is that it can't--in which case it would be better to just not collect the money at all and let people keep and spend it as they wish. When things get tight the government issues short term bonds and/or cuts back on some discretionary items to get over the rough spot; it doesn't go looking for a pot of gold that doesn't (and can't) exist.
Why not? Sure a few trillion dollars at once is a LOT of money (even for the government). But we are not talking about that. We are talking billions. At most a couple hundred billion. Every year over decades. The government spends over a TRILLION a year. The market can handle this. Hell, it would probably help our economy (or maybe impose some fiscal restraint on government).
Every year over decades is the key. At some point the surplus flips to a deficit and for years there is a net drain on the market. The market depends on money going in, not money going out; it's not like the market is a magical money machine. You can't sell a stock unless someone wants to buy it. If the major single investor is pulling money out for the foreseeable future that is going to have a negative effect on the market. I do also worry about the effect of all those 401k deposits turning into retirement withdrawals--but that's all the more reason to decouple the safety net from the market.
HUH? And how is this different than privatizing social security? The same amount of money is still going to flow in and out. Instead of one person moving the money you will have millions.... Just use index funds and the problem goes away (in theory).
We're currently spending about $500 billion per year on social security. Average daily trade volume on the market today is about $70 billion dollars. The SSA would be a huge player, and the potential for manipulation of the market is huge. What happens if the SSA decides that it needs a couple billion dollars and tries to liquidate its holdings in a big Dow stock? Unless people are lined up to buy that stock the price is going to fall--a lot. Private accounts try to avoid that problem by spreading control over a larger number of people but still rests a lot of power in the managers of the default fund choices and raises the new problem of paying for the safety net for the people who pick bad stocks. Yeah, the current indexes have this problem to some degree, but their effect is diluted by the fact that there are a lot of index funds which handle index changes differently, the fact that they're subject to government oversight rather than being a quasi-government program, and by the fact that they're not intended to be a public safety net.
Social Security isn't an investment into a retirement fund, it's a TAX! Just like the rest of the taxes you pay, the money gets tossed into a big bag, then spent any way Congress deems desirable to ensure their re-election goes off without a hitch.
You've got the sentiment right, but it's even more insidious--it's a tax on people who aren't rich because there's a cap on how much you have to pay. Imagine the firestorm if the politicians actually admitted "hey, this is just another tax we're using to fund pork barrel projects and we're effectively not going to tax the richest 5% of americans at all."
That said, killing Social Security would be a bad thing. I'm in favour of the private investment accounts, but want to see current beneficiaries, and near-future beneficiaries, get their full current entitlement.
This is where you go wrong. Forget about this notion of "entitlement". The country does have an obligation to take of the retired destitute--but people are not "entitled" to get a certain amount of money from the government based on how much money they made while they were working. SS needs to be treated more like a welfare program--if you need the help you can get the help, but I'm not paying for your vacation to cancun while you're living off your 401k. Change social security so it's a need-based program that only collects the amount of money required to support it each year. (Rather than collecting a huge surplus to make congresscritters salivate.)
If they ARE bullied into passing this, just as soon as the Dems get back in power, they will repeal the "reform" (right after they pass laws to guarantee that Republicans never get elected to any Federal office again).
Both the major parties are equally guilty here. Neither has what it takes to fix things, and either would screw things up just to win a couple of seats in the next election. Vote third party (whatever that third party is) because nothing will change as long as the republicans and democrats are interchangable.
Those seniors have a reasonable expectation that the system they pay into is going to provide for them when they need it; they would not have contributed had it been suggested that they would be no benefits.
Wow! Where can I sign up to not contribute! I thought they'd arrest me or something...
Notice that prior to the present time that there was a surplus? Where is that money? Why wasn't that set aside to pay for future SS needs?
Because the government can't "put money aside" in that kind of quantity. They've sorta done that now--the social security surplus turns into T-bills which are put aside for the government to repay (from future revenue). The other option that people talk about is putting the money into stocks--but nobody talks about what happens to the economy when the government tries to cash out trillions of dollars from market. If the government really put the money aside (as in, drops a giant sack of money into a hole) it's effectively the same as the government destroying the money and printing more later. We could skip the collection and counting phase and just print money when we need it to get the same result. (Note: the result is not good.)
SS could be put on a sound basis by not borrowing money from it for other portions of the goverment. The IOU's to SS are nearly as large the national public debt.
This whole practice of borrowing money that can't be paid back because it doesn't look like a tax increase is horrific.
Correct. The proper course of action would be to cut social security witholdings so that they only cover current expenses and raise the witholding when expenses rise. Anything else is just a way to play games with the budget.
Itanium was not designed for the desktop, or even the standard server market. It was designed for number crunching, which it works quite well at.
[snip] In fact Itanium was designed to compete with the likes of Cray. It was never, ever, designed with desktop in mind.
Bull. Intel spent 2 billion dollars on R&D for itanium. That's more money than cray made in profit in its entire history. There is no chance whatsoever that intel would dump that kind of money into exploiting a niche market which could never return their investment. When intel designed itanium they wanted to win the whole enchilada (commodity desktops & servers, where the money is) not just high-end cluster computers.
Really? Are you kidding? Architecture and construction are NOT standardized. Parts of it are standardized, but people are using different materials, designs, etc all the time. Not everyone lives in row houses, mcmansions or big apartments.
Of course, the geodesic domes, buildings covered with titanium, donut-shaped garages, skyscrapers with whimsical fairy-tale spires or exposed piping, etc., tend to be the projects that are horribly over budget, leaky, and otherwise defective on delivery. The anonymous square box is the thing the construction industry can deliver on time, on budget, and in a working condition. Unfortunately, the software industry hasn't advanced to the anonymous square box stage yet.
The players in that part of the world are interdependant now. NK's biggest (and maybe only) friend is China. China's biggest market is the US. SK's biggest friend is of course the US and economically we're tied tightly to China. Nothing is going to happen and if anyone should be hard at work keeping a lid on Kim Il it's China, not the United States.
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that wars begin for rational reasons. Do you know who Germany's largest trade partner was prior to WWI? France--and their economic "interdependency" did nothing to avert that war. Both countries burned themselves out and the conflict pretty much ended European dominance in world affairs. Was that war rational? Wars start because some leader is too stupid, scared or short-sighted to not attack somebody. The reality of the situation is that if someone decides for some stupid reason to launch an attack on, e.g., South Korea, it will be too late after the fact to say "gee, we should have had some troops there".
I know at work, because of the design of our cubes and user habits, we'd be better off having them feed from the back and blow out towards the front instead of the other way around.
Of course, that would mean that the intake is coming from the nasty dust pile behind the system...could lead to a major buildup inside the case.
Feel free to disagree with these choices, but dismissing them out-of-hand doesn't give anyone much to think about, and gives the impression that you didn't bother to consider the other side of the story.
What other side of the story? LOTR was written to the classic heroic epic model. The characters are bigger than life, and the heroes aren't like ordinary people. Trying to eliminate that to fit a 20th/21st century idea of a novel turns LOTR into something else. The "iconic approach" is essential to what makes LOTR the story that it is. If I wanted yet another book about "character transformation" I'd check out the latest literary award winner--I wouldn't rewrite a perfectly good story from a different genre.
1. by separating Aragorn from the larger refugees party, he is able to encounter the Uruk-Hai army before Theoden does - this sets up the conflict between him and Theoden, as Aragorn (apparently) sees a greater threat than Theoden does.
Yes, another of Jackson's mistakes. Theoden isn't supposed to be incompetant. Aragorn is the greater hero, but Theoden should have been portrayed much stronger than he was.
2. Eowyn's belief in his death dramatizes her feelings for Aragorn (something that's much harder to accomplish in cinema than in text).
Hmm. For me it was less dramatic than sappy and irrelevant. Eowyn should join Faramir's character-assassination lawsuit.
3. provides an opportunity to shift away from the Rohan story and reflect on what happening with the elves (otherwise the appearance of the elves would not have made as much sense/had as dramatic an impact.
Ah, of course. You need one useless scene to set up another pointless addition to the story. Legolas should have been the only elf at helm's deep--that's the way the book was written, and it was essential to the plot that the elves were no longer going to play a pivotal role in the events of middle earth.
I can't be certain for sure, but I know a *big* limitation of older IDE/ATA drives was that the controller could only talk to one device at a time (per channel maybe?)
SCSI can also only talk to one drive at a time per channel. The difference between SCSI and IDE is that SCSI can have multiple outstanding commands at the same time via TCQ. SATA has similar functionality. In practice, IDE is so much cheaper than SCSI that you can give each drive its own channel, so this isn't a big deal.
Ever since I had my new 2gb drive die (yes, that long ago) I wanted nothing to do with IDE anymore and gradually phased it out of my system entirely to all SCSI.
I used to do SCSI in my desktop. I went through 3 drives in 5 years. No data loss, since it was all RAIDed, but a PITA. After the last failure I switched to IDE. No real speed difference. (It's a friggin' desktop, not a database server, and I can't justify 15k RPM drives on a cost or a noise basis.) Also a hell of a lot cheaper & more capacity. Haven't had a disk failure since I switched.
For starters, while it is possible to use client certificates without any further security, in practice the minimum security on the private key for a client certificate is a password, which because it never leaves you machine is much less susceptable to interception than a password sent over the internet.
But does nothing against a client-side compromise. Look at the stats on the number of home PC's with cable modems that are being bought and sold as zombies. In practical terms, the odds of having your password stolen via a local compromise are probably higher than having your password stolen on the internet over an ssl connection.
There are also hardware devices that can either hold your client certificate, or do the authentication needed to use it, which protect you against locally installed keyloggers.
Yes, and these have their own problems. First, you need a hardware device and an interface to the system--which makes them no less "klunky" than the securid's the OP was complaining about. Second, the interface is a hard problem to solve for the home user. Do you force the user to do something at the hardware device for each use of a client certificate? (Good luck getting that adopted, and good luck teaching the user to distiguish "good" requests from "bad" requests.) Or do you authenticate once per session, which once again leaves you open to attacks if you have a compromised workstation?
Something I've waited for years and it never come--maybe someone can explain why: client-side SSL.
Because client-side security sucks. The push for personal certificates is to provide non-repudiatable authentication. Think about that for a moment--do you want your identity tied to something sitting on your home computer? Something that, once taken, could provide access to your bank accounts, credit, medical history, etc.? Something that, legally, you'd have an uphill battle to prove wasn't used by you? Something that would be a prime target of the next worm? I find it's a lot harder to compromise a "klunky" device that's not connected to the computer than to compromise a certificate that is on a computer. Client SSL is snake oil--it's theoretically great, but just can't be implemented securely with current technology.
An even more interesting questions is why our schools aren't adequately funded...
No, the interesting question is why people think that spending $$$ buying new computers every couple of years in the k12 system is good use of public education dollars. The funding is adequate, it's just poorly managed.
I've got to disagree with you on the whole C/R thing.
Probably since I employ it (ASK, http://www.paganini.net/ask/) behind some bayesian filters (ASSP, http://assp.sourceforge.net/). Considering that my domain receives thousands of UCE/UBE each day, I have no choice but to take militant actions.
You can do whatever you want with your mail, but I agree with the grandparent--you won't ever see a reply from me. (Or a lot of other people who deal with a lot of email and don't appreciate having their time wasted by people who want to push their own burdens on to others.)
In theory, you're right. In practice, that isn't necessarily the way it is. Many small-time domain owners have no actual control over their DNS records, and therefore no way to implement SPF. My own situation[1] is that if I wanted to use SPF, I'd have to set up my own DNS.
So the real problem is that the people you pay to provide dns service give you crappy service, right? This isn't an indictment of spf, it's an indictment of your provider. There are providers who provide web-based gui thingys for setting txt records. Give your money to someone who provides good service.
more importantly who was the idiot that decided to put a space station in the hurricane state
That idiot probably knew that the best location for a space launch is the equator, since you get the most assistence from the earth's rotation. The idiot probably thought about what parts of the US mainland were closest to the equator and had the least amount of land in the flight path (so spacecraft won't fall on people if they have a malfunction). The parts of the US that work best are the east coast of florida and the texas gulf coast. Both, unfortunately, get hurricanes.
All of the known WEP attacks are based on receiving weak IV frames (usually after sifting through gigabytes of data). Modern WiFi chipsets (i.e., those made within the last 2 years or so) do not send weak IV frames all that often, if at all.
That's actually not true. There were certain attacks that relied on weak IV's. So manufacturers stopped sending out the weak IV's--which means the keyspace is reduced and now other attacks are more feasible. I don't know of a script kiddie tool to do this, but there have been papers published.
Fair enough regarding tiles, but it doesn't really address the point.
I think it addresses the point very well, which is that you don't know what you are talking about but do like to spout off on/.
The offending tile which fell hit a wing, which is designed to put up with massive sheer forces.
Did you just learn that word or something? You seem to really like saying "sheer forces". It's still unclear why you think the forces of a wing moving through air are the same as those involved in an impact.
Boeing made the thing, for goodness sake. I'd be very surprised if they didn't use material sciences and design philosophies garnered from their existing knowledge pool.
Yeah, they should have made use of the knowledge gained from all their other space shuttles. You are obviously a looney or a troll.
Why would they deliberately invent a new and weaker wing design when all the technology and knowledge for standard designs was pre-existing?
It couldn't possibly be because all the existing wings would melt during reentry, could it? No, of course not--it must be because they just didn't think of that. It's too bad they didn't solicit your input.
You seem to be under the impression that space shuttle wings were not built to withstand massive sheer forces, (like atmospheric re-entry), and object impacts, (ice pellets, rain drops, birds, etc.,),
Correct. When they fly the shuttle back from its alternate landing location they have to avoid rain clouds because raindrop impacts really screw up the tiles. The heat resistent tiles are designed to withstand high temperatures, not impacts.
I have been both a developer and an administrator. I hate your type.;-) The whole point of your job is to provide service. When you lock down a machine you are withholding service.
This is a common misconception. The sysadmin's job is not to provide service to the user, it is to maximize the availibility of his employer's resources. The sysadmin's scope is much larger than a single user, and involves protecting all of the systems under his control from any single user. If a machine is down because the "clever" user toasted it and can't put it back together, that is a failing of the sysadmin. If the user is wasting his time installing software rather than doing whatever it is he is paid to do, that is a failing of the sysadmin. If the user really needs to do that sort of thing, he should be the sysadmin--with all that entails, and with full responsibility for exposing his employer to additional risks (e.g., unpatched internet host) if he doesn't know what he is doing.
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Yup, that's why I mentioned it.
Yup, which is another reason to scrap the current system (soak the poor to pay for the general fund) in favor of one that just tries to cover costs.
Do you believe in the tooth fairy and the easter bunny along with noble politicians? Bonds do nothing to constrain the government, because a simple vote tosses out the promises you thought you had. The only thing you can be sure of is the money you have in your pocket today. Once the government has your money any promise to repay it in a certain way isn't worth the paper it's printed on. (If you're the one holding the bond you're somewhat better off, but look to argentina as an example of how that can go bad also.) What we have now is simply a regressive tax that has no bearing on what future social security benefits will be. When the time comes that social security no longer runs a surplus the politicians will look at the numbers and do something--but we have no idea what. The odds that they'll double the income tax to pay out exactly the benefits that todays politicians promised seem low, however. Likewise the possibility that they'll double the deficit for 20 years is, while more likely, somewhat scary. One of the things you missed in your lecture on gov't debt is the difference between long-term and short-term debt. The former tends to be bad because it encourages congress to systemically outspend its means. The latter tends to be a good thing (if repayed rather than reissued) because it is a way for the government to get past a soft patch in the economy without getting into a bottomless hole. The pay-as-you-go model I suggested earlier in the thread assumes short-term debt if there's an unexpected blip in the economy; the current model uses long-term debt with no plan to pay that off. That is what needs to change.
What option is there? Any pool of money is going to be tightly coupled to current economic performance. Under the current system the only way to get money out of the trust fund is to, well, raise taxes so that the general fund can cover the social security debt. If your tax revenues are down (probably due to a recession or somesuch) the value of a stock fund is also likey to be down--and dumping stocks from of a market-based trust fund while the economy is in recession isn't exactly going to have a stimulant effect. I guess you could just print some extra money, but that sort of inflationary trend is usually best avoided...
So tell me: how the government does store a huge quantity of money in such a way that it is available on demand without regard for the country's economy? I think the answer is that it can't--in which case it would be better to just not collect the money at all and let people keep and spend it as they wish. When things get tight the government issues short term bonds and/or cuts back on some discretionary items to get over the rough spot; it doesn't go looking for a pot of gold that doesn't (and can't) exist.
Every year over decades is the key. At some point the surplus flips to a deficit and for years there is a net drain on the market. The market depends on money going in, not money going out; it's not like the market is a magical money machine. You can't sell a stock unless someone wants to buy it. If the major single investor is pulling money out for the
foreseeable future that is going to have a negative effect on the market. I do also worry about the effect of all those 401k deposits turning into retirement withdrawals--but that's all the more reason to decouple the safety net from the market.
We're currently spending about $500 billion per year on social security. Average daily trade volume on the market today is about $70 billion dollars. The SSA would be a huge player, and the potential for manipulation of the market is huge. What happens if the SSA decides that it needs a couple billion dollars and tries to liquidate its holdings in a big Dow stock? Unless people are lined up to buy that stock the price is going to fall--a lot. Private accounts try to avoid that problem by spreading control over a larger number of people but still rests a lot of power in the managers of the default fund choices and raises the new problem of paying for the safety net for the people who pick bad stocks. Yeah, the current indexes have this problem to some degree, but their effect is diluted by the fact that there are a lot of index funds which handle index changes differently, the fact that they're subject to government oversight rather than being a quasi-government program, and by the fact that they're not intended to be a public safety net.
You've got the sentiment right, but it's even more insidious--it's a tax on people who aren't rich because there's a cap on how much you have to pay. Imagine the firestorm if the politicians actually admitted "hey, this is just another tax we're using to fund pork barrel projects and we're effectively not going to tax the richest 5% of americans at all."
This is where you go wrong. Forget about this notion of "entitlement". The country does have an obligation to take of the retired destitute--but people are not "entitled" to get a certain amount of money from the government based on how much money they made while they were working. SS needs to be treated more like a welfare program--if you need the help you can get the help, but I'm not paying for your vacation to cancun while you're living off your 401k. Change social security so it's a need-based program that only collects the amount of money required to support it each year. (Rather than collecting a huge surplus to make congresscritters salivate.)
Both the major parties are equally guilty here. Neither has what it takes to fix things, and either would screw things up just to win a couple of seats in the next election. Vote third party (whatever that third party is) because nothing will change as long as the republicans and democrats are interchangable.
Wow! Where can I sign up to not contribute! I thought they'd arrest me or something...
Because the government can't "put money aside" in that kind of quantity. They've sorta done that now--the social security surplus turns into T-bills which are put aside for the government to repay (from future revenue). The other option that people talk about is putting the money into stocks--but nobody talks about what happens to the economy when the government tries to cash out trillions of dollars from market. If the government really put the money aside (as in, drops a giant sack of money into a hole) it's effectively the same as the government destroying the money and printing more later. We could skip the collection and counting phase and just print money when we need it to get the same result. (Note: the result is not good.)
Correct. The proper course of action would be to cut social security witholdings so that they only cover current expenses and raise the witholding when expenses rise. Anything else is just a way to play games with the budget.
Bull. Intel spent 2 billion dollars on R&D for itanium. That's more money than cray made in profit in its entire history. There is no chance whatsoever that intel would dump that kind of money into exploiting a niche market which could never return their investment. When intel designed itanium they wanted to win the whole enchilada (commodity desktops & servers, where the money is) not just high-end cluster computers.
Of course, the geodesic domes, buildings covered with titanium, donut-shaped garages, skyscrapers with whimsical fairy-tale spires or exposed piping, etc., tend to be the projects that are horribly over budget, leaky, and otherwise defective on delivery. The anonymous square box is the thing the construction industry can deliver on time, on budget, and in a working condition. Unfortunately, the software industry hasn't advanced to the anonymous square box stage yet.
haha, you're one of those wackos who think that pretty yellow metal has some mystical intrinsic value! talk about herd-following...
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that wars begin for rational reasons. Do you know who Germany's largest trade partner was prior to WWI? France--and their economic "interdependency" did nothing to avert that war. Both countries burned themselves out and the conflict pretty much ended European dominance in world affairs. Was that war rational? Wars start because some leader is too stupid, scared or short-sighted to not attack somebody. The reality of the situation is that if someone decides for some stupid reason to launch an attack on, e.g., South Korea, it will be too late after the fact to say "gee, we should have had some troops there".
Of course, that would mean that the intake is coming from the nasty dust pile behind the system...could lead to a major buildup inside the case.
What other side of the story? LOTR was written to the classic heroic epic model. The characters are bigger than life, and the heroes aren't like ordinary people. Trying to eliminate that to fit a 20th/21st century idea of a novel turns LOTR into something else. The "iconic approach" is essential to what makes LOTR the story that it is. If I wanted yet another book about "character transformation" I'd check out the latest literary award winner--I wouldn't rewrite a perfectly good story from a different genre.
Yes, another of Jackson's mistakes. Theoden isn't supposed to be incompetant. Aragorn is the greater hero, but Theoden should have been portrayed much stronger than he was.
Hmm. For me it was less dramatic than sappy and irrelevant. Eowyn should join Faramir's character-assassination lawsuit.
Ah, of course. You need one useless scene to set up another pointless addition to the story. Legolas should have been the only elf at helm's deep--that's the way the book was written, and it was essential to the plot that the elves were no longer going to play a pivotal role in the events of middle earth.
SCSI can also only talk to one drive at a time per channel. The difference between SCSI and IDE is that SCSI can have multiple outstanding commands at the same time via TCQ. SATA has similar functionality. In practice, IDE is so much cheaper than SCSI that you can give each drive its own channel, so this isn't a big deal.
I used to do SCSI in my desktop. I went through 3 drives in 5 years. No data loss, since it was all RAIDed, but a PITA. After the last failure I switched to IDE. No real speed difference. (It's a friggin' desktop, not a database server, and I can't justify 15k RPM drives on a cost or a noise basis.) Also a hell of a lot cheaper & more capacity. Haven't had a disk failure since I switched.
But does nothing against a client-side compromise. Look at the stats on the number of home PC's with cable modems that are being bought and sold as zombies. In practical terms, the odds of having your password stolen via a local compromise are probably higher than having your password stolen on the internet over an ssl connection.
Yes, and these have their own problems. First, you need a hardware device and an interface to the system--which makes them no less "klunky" than the securid's the OP was complaining about. Second, the interface is a hard problem to solve for the home user. Do you force the user to do something at the hardware device for each use of a client certificate? (Good luck getting that adopted, and good luck teaching the user to distiguish "good" requests from "bad" requests.) Or do you authenticate once per session, which once again leaves you open to attacks if you have a compromised workstation?
Because client-side security sucks. The push for personal certificates is to provide non-repudiatable authentication. Think about that for a moment--do you want your identity tied to something sitting on your home computer? Something that, once taken, could provide access to your bank accounts, credit, medical history, etc.? Something that, legally, you'd have an uphill battle to prove wasn't used by you? Something that would be a prime target of the next worm? I find it's a lot harder to compromise a "klunky" device that's not connected to the computer than to compromise a certificate that is on a computer. Client SSL is snake oil--it's theoretically great, but just can't be implemented securely with current technology.
No, the interesting question is why people think that spending $$$ buying new computers every couple of years in the k12 system is good use of public education dollars. The funding is adequate, it's just poorly managed.
You can do whatever you want with your mail, but I agree with the grandparent--you won't ever see a reply from me. (Or a lot of other people who deal with a lot of email and don't appreciate having their time wasted by people who want to push their own burdens on to others.)
So the real problem is that the people you pay to provide dns service give you crappy service, right? This isn't an indictment of spf, it's an indictment of your provider. There are providers who provide web-based gui thingys for setting txt records. Give your money to someone who provides good service.
That idiot probably knew that the best location for a space launch is the equator, since you get the most assistence from the earth's rotation. The idiot probably thought about what parts of the US mainland were closest to the equator and had the least amount of land in the flight path (so spacecraft won't fall on people if they have a malfunction). The parts of the US that work best are the east coast of florida and the texas gulf coast. Both, unfortunately, get hurricanes.
That's actually not true. There were certain attacks that relied on weak IV's. So manufacturers stopped sending out the weak IV's--which means the keyspace is reduced and now other attacks are more feasible. I don't know of a script kiddie tool to do this, but there have been papers published.
I think it addresses the point very well, which is that you don't know what you are talking about but do like to spout off on
Did you just learn that word or something? You seem to really like saying "sheer forces". It's still unclear why you think the forces of a wing moving through air are the same as those involved in an impact.
Yeah, they should have made use of the knowledge gained from all their other space shuttles. You are obviously a looney or a troll.
It couldn't possibly be because all the existing wings would melt during reentry, could it? No, of course not--it must be because they just didn't think of that. It's too bad they didn't solicit your input.
Correct. When they fly the shuttle back from its alternate landing location they have to avoid rain clouds because raindrop impacts really screw up the tiles. The heat resistent tiles are designed to withstand high temperatures, not impacts.
This is a common misconception. The sysadmin's job is not to provide service to the user, it is to maximize the availibility of his employer's resources. The sysadmin's scope is much larger than a single user, and involves protecting all of the systems under his control from any single user. If a machine is down because the "clever" user toasted it and can't put it back together, that is a failing of the sysadmin. If the user is wasting his time installing software rather than doing whatever it is he is paid to do, that is a failing of the sysadmin. If the user really needs to do that sort of thing, he should be the sysadmin--with all that entails, and with full responsibility for exposing his employer to additional risks (e.g., unpatched internet host) if he doesn't know what he is doing.