Or do I just misunderstand what they actually need to do? I mean, shoot, let's just fire up a bunch of AWS instances and infect them! The whole war could take place in EC2 and it would only cost like $.14/GB transferred. . .
Hell of a lot cheaper than invading China by land.
Also, another good reason to stay on my mac: it's like buying conscientious objector status.
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel, work a twenty-hour day at the mill for tuppence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
The density of fud present in a sentence like this is staggering: "Yes, of course, because Ubuntu's web site promises that the distro 'will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.'"
OOOh Canonical might change their minds. What's so stupid about such speculation is that They don't get to change the past. So even if they immediately pulled the plug on giving away Ubuntu, the existence of earlier releases--and their accompanying GPL status--is not nullified. It can't be. So some ideologically passionate Ubuntu user group could (and I predict would) immediately open up a distribution spot giving away GNUbuntu or somesuch.
GNUbuntu (Gnubuntu's Not Ubuntu) would just be a repackaging of previously existing open sourced code with any non-GPL parts expunged. Problem solved.
Sorry if this derails the topic train, but do you have some evidence about this "part marks" claim you make? Like for example, do you actually have kids? I do. None of the teachers i've met are so blithering as to tell my child her math is "partially right" when it's not. Mine is not a universal case, obviously. But your statement is extraordinary. Wasn't there something about extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence in the overarching issue of this debate? Hm.
Yes, and I think that's what the parent post is saying: relying on what is effectively a consumer-grade WLAN for critical infrastructure is expecting too much. It's not a question of the reality of wireless being critical--we get that, it's a question of "how did Duke let it get this far this fast?" And that's why it's dumb.
What is the framework of the researchers in question? If a person is an academic studying the field of network security or whatnot, they can probably give a reasonable justification for doing this sort of snooping as research. If I were advising a person in that position, I'd suggest to them maybe asking permission first-- how hard is it to write a letter to another university and inform them that you are a student who is going to look for (but not break/exploit) security flaws, then report them in the course of reporting your research to your own university.
OTOH if you're a private security firm I think you absolutely must request permission from the owner of a potentially insecure network, otherwise you're just a squeegee guy at the stoplight, only you know, with data.
But if you're in the wild, and you're just "trying the locks" hoping they'll snap open, you're on your own. And God have mercy on your soul. How's that different from walking through your neighborhood jiggling doorknobs? It's very easy for a person to fix their neighbor's unlocked-door-problem, if they have an old fashioned door that can be hand locked and closed. Well in the neighbor's house analogy, the law doesn't give a crap if you lock the door behind you and don't touch anything, you're still technically guilty of B&E. Yes, you could get away with it because you can at least do the favor of locking it and choosing not to touch anything. But what if they have a deadbolt? The only way to fix that problem is to let them know so they can use the key or lock it from the inside, but the route to making the discovery that their house is unlocked is already covered by the B&E law.
Network security is all deadbolts, right? You can't quite lock the door behind you (fix their code) if you find an exploit. If you get in, even if you don't take anything, you're breaking and entering. In that case, if you publish the fact you got in by active means, you're taking a grave risk--maybe if you could somehow demonstrate that you "just found it," then maybe you can expect to get away with reporting it. But if the only way to find it is to be actively looking, the risk is yours as well, since if you know so dang much about network security, you probably should know they're not using the old knob-based locks anymore. Are they? I don't know from network security, but I know you can't wander around fiddling with locks on houses, many of which don't contain nearly half the sensitive info that computers do.
it also doesn't help if you fall asleep at the keyboard . those last two sentences:
I can't wait til I'm delayed sending a critical piece while searching for two hours for a missing TR tag or somesuch. The horror. The horror.
Sure great, it protects the user from "malware". It does nothing to make the user feel like he or she lives in the 21st Century and the sender feel like a backwards looking dillhole.
My title is not "email designer" but it is one of my job functions and this is Bad News. I know not everyone loves html email, and I respect that, but the emails we send to our thoroughly opted in existing customers are appreciated and get positive feedback. But without starting that fight, this is very serious news.
A big chunk of the stuff that's not supported looks like things that impact display behaviors, some of which might make users feel more secure. It's cover for MS, being able to point to properties like background (only when there is a URL), media ( screen | print | projection | braille | speech | all ), onblur, onchange, onclick, ondblclick, onfocus, onload, onmousedown, onmousemove, onmouseover and say "look, these cause behaviors that 3rd parties could use to exploit your computer or at the very least, cause something to happen that you weren't expecting" and then describe the worst case scenario of a user's computer being "forced to do something" without them clicking, such as "onmouseover." They can point to these things, some of which sound unnerving to the average person, and say, look we're making it impossible for spammers to make your computer do things you don't want it to do.
But then they go after background-position, background-repeat, clear, display, float, list-style-image, list-style-position, etc. Ugh. These things make it so easy to improve the look of my emails, while lightening the amount of code markedly. I can't imagine the weight of tables based emails! And the room for mistakes, the multiplication of errors...I can't wait til I'm delayed sending a critical piece while searching for two hours for a missing or somesuch. The horror. The horror.
Sure great, it protects the user from "malware". It does nothing to make the user feel like he or she lives in the 21st Ceut./p?
12. The shift from unmoderated newsgroups to web-pages run by a specific person/group
But the newsgroup model of user-contributed content came through the shift-- specific persons/groups got tools for moderation and editing that also allowed users to add and edit with some levels of control. The return of the newsgroup and BBS via forums, wikis, and the like and the persistence of moderators.
Duplication of its abrasive nature aside, perhaps they could collect tons of playa dust. Send NASA to Burning Man. Awesome. Surely those moon buggies and space suits would be welcomed!
In its price range, I think the Wii is a healthy addition to have along with a 360 or PS3, but not so much a direct competitor to them among the 18+ crowd.
Well yeah, exactly. With the Wii being sold at a price point that is already profitable, I don't think Nintendo is in a position that it has to give a crap if you buy a Wii in addition to something else. Whereas the big offsetting factor for consoles that lose money is that you'll buy the games, you'll buy the online services, and so on. In the world of XBox, for example, since they need the revenue from the ongoing purchase of games and services just to make back their losses and turn a profit, it has to matter to them if you also buy a Wii because that means you have less dollars to spend on their own add-on service(s) and games.
But if every Wii turns a profit, then those add-on services they sell are gravy, not vital tactics to "winning". From the point of view of Nintendo, I'd argue that the fact that you (or others) consider the Wii a "healthy addition" is wonderful for Nintendo because they'll still make a profit even if you only see it as an addition to the more...serious console purchase. But from the point of view of Sony and MS, buying that "additional system" is totally anathema.
Every dollar you spend on Wii is a dollar not spent on something they desperately need to sell you to make up the cash they're giving away with that loss leader HD system they sold you.
Intriguingly, in the Nintendo model, for all the fluffy marketing talk about gameplay and revolution, the business side doesn't care one tiny little bit what your heart feels about the Wii, as long as you buy one. Insofar as you love it and give them more gravy, they do not have to care. Other than whatever enjoyment they get in making more money.
Whereas for the other two--for all the talk about the game platforms as hardcore, better, more technically accomplished true blue and the perception of their philosophies as supposedly more mature, hard nosed, cutthroat and, let's be honest, American and masculine--the other two need you, yes you, to love them; need you to believe it in your heartso that you never hesitate to keep your dollars right there, with them, where they are more needed and rightfully belong.
Nintendo's little faerie machine liberates the more old-fashioned, hard-nosed business model from messy sticky feelings and gives it a very pretty black bottom line to look at. Is the Wii really a limp wristed sissybox for weirdo degenerates? Or the phalanx of a 21st century global corporate Captain Of Industry?
And let us not set aside that tone in which the Wii is described by detractors--throwing around terms that first degrade homosexuality and/or femininity, then apply those degraded conceptualizations to the Wii in contrast to the normative (generally, heterosexual male) features of the other platforms. There's a lot of masculine defensiveness tied up in the XBox and PS3.
Which one is a more healthy view? In the context of critiquing a game you also attack women and homosexuals in order to defend systems whose makers ultimately need you to fall in love with them? (or to be fair to the Joystiq article linked above, your roommate, who is not so much "critiquing" as standing in for a fairly wide swath of the gaming community) Or you make a game system that makes money and, by virtue of a neutrally functioning business model doesn't give a shit if you're straight, gay, male, female, young or old? Whose word of mouth representatives can depend less on diminishment of something or someone else.
If I owned stock in Sony and MS I'd be forced to ask, are you putting our money into a product that depends on how people feel in order for you to actually make money on it? And then are
Wait wait. Are you saying people are stupid? Or my mother's a whore? Or wait, is that your mom? Wait, apple's in somebody's...uh... (shudder)... "baby hole"?
AAPL out of my mother's uterus!
I am absolutely pro-paper ballot 100%, but Canada's not quite a fair comparison is it? I mean, there's almost 1/10 the number of people there and so doesn't it stand to reason that getting count results from all of canada in 24 hours is a little bit easier?
Welllll... you are talking about the Navy, right? Some CPO might "suggest" that since you've got them all pulled anyway, testing all of them would be a good idea.
Hells yes. People are in a twist because, what? Someone they know told them information about a subject can be found at Wikipedia.org? So because they're not complete a-holes, they go where their friend suggests. They don't like what they found (perhaps they were implicated in the Kennedy assassination, to cite a recent notorious example).
If your friend directs you to a thing that you know is bunk, you go back to your friend and tell him, hey man, that's bunk. That site you sent me to sucked and said I was in on the conspiracy to assassinate the president forty years ago! Maybe, just maybe, if you are so implicated, you complain to various listed personages in the contact pages (though with Wikipedia, you could just edit the inaccuracy out yourself, make a note on the talk page that says "hey I changed this article, because I'm the guy it mentions and I can pretty definitively state whether or not I killed JFK," save some time and do future readers a favor).
But a few people--dissatisfied with hearing from the outset that the information they're reading is 1) in flux; 2) created largely by knowledgeable amateurs as opposed to paid or otherwise credentialed experts; 3) under perpetual and nonscientific peer review; 4) that users are asked to participate in cleaning up inaccuracies; and 5) are then given the power to do so--use the national press, a widely-read website, or some other bully pulpit to complain basically that "Wikipedia is not only bunk, it is manifestly Evil Bunk(tm) and anyone who thinks otherwise is a naive puswad who deserves to eat broken leaded crystal in hell."
A sudden spasm of "journalistic" interest focused on the number of persons so dissatisfied, the growth in the number of complaints that information on Wikipedia is" too fluid", and the growth in the public handwringing that "irresponsible people" are messing around with information doesn't change the fact that the original intentions of the Wikipedia project do not include becoming an authoritative source on anything.
There are years of anecdotal evidence available from diverse sources such as churches, political movements, software programming, the organic reproductive process and even sea travel, to suggest that the absence of complicated hierarchical authorities and systems will not automatically kill people.
Information freedom may be a hoary cliche, particularly in the jaded confines of/., but it's a pretty accurate representation of what's happening with the structures and exchange of human knowledge and memory. Been happening for a long long time. Something something great power and great responsibility something something...
Okay, so why has the company steadfastly refused to acknowledge (to OWN) the fact that their browser and OS have functionally been a security risk for every person who has them in their possession? Instead of Owning responsibility, your organization (for whom you don't officially speak, I know) has ignored or derided sincere questions about their security. I guess it's "Own it... unless you can just ignore it."
Hey before we get too crazy here, I have to say that when administering a win/mac office and we'd run into some kind of problem with a server or a RAID array or a whatever, ANY time I called either a hardware manufacturer or software supplier I had to go through a lot of hoop jumping saying, "yes, we're running it as it was sold to us." "yes we've not installed [whatever thing we shouldn't ever install, evaR]." or the 'humbling' "Yes, I have [virus protection] [veritas] [non-Exchange mailserver] [any software that they've never heard of] installed on this machine. Yes, I know that means we've custom configured our box. Yes, I know you can't support THAT application, I'm asking you if you think YOUR crap is what's giving me crap today, please!!"
Windows and OEMs were, in my experience, especially bad about playing hot potato with my problem. "What you're gonna want to do is call the manufacturer..." "You're gonna wanna call the software company..." "You shouldn't install...almost anything..." So Linux snobbery isn't the only bugbear here, there's also a lot of blame-the-user mentality in the industry. Hell, I blamed our own users whenever I could while I was administering our system and performing support.
Southwest airlines does this very thing of "advertising customer second" in all kinds of articles. Maybe you've heard of them, they're the one that's making money.
That's asinine. Athletes train their bodies, reflexes and "game brains" to multitask just as much as a geek. Java might be really hard to learn, but so is executing a double play; running the triangle offense; or reading coverages while deciding between the called timing route, checking down to the crossing route, or going to the outlet receiver while evading a pack of 6-foot-seven, 360 pound men in plastic armor who are freaking nimble. And some of these athletes do multiple sports. This author does a disservice to geeks (many of whom are athletic and fit) AND to jocks (many of whom are brilliant both in their sports and "conventional" measures of intelligence).
But what happens when lots of relatively dumb drones have to share airspace with aircraft carrying passengers? A pilot's association is worried.
Jeezum crow! The pilots association is worried? What happens to the airspace? These are the wrong freaking concerns! These are the wrong freaking questions! Or at least they're questions about practical things which should be a little further down the list of priorities right now. Concerns that totally ignore the far far more disturbing fact that the government would like to spy upon and menace citizens and dissenters using any and all available means. Trees, meet forest!
Nothing comes of the president's revelations about illegal wiretapping. Nothing comes of revelations about external prisons and detention camps. Nothing comes of any of this crap! David Cross was right, what does this guy have to do, eat a Jewish baby on live tv or something? My fellow americans, I'd like ot talk with you about civil rights and the constitution... rrarrr...MMM...that's good Jew baby...
I guess this is what is meant by "We've earned political capital in this election and I intend to spend it." Spending political capital means running the whole bloody country straight into the bowels of hell, apparently. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
Slashdot Mirror
what's that "good reason" you mention?
Or do I just misunderstand what they actually need to do? I mean, shoot, let's just fire up a bunch of AWS instances and infect them! The whole war could take place in EC2 and it would only cost like $.14/GB transferred. . . Hell of a lot cheaper than invading China by land. Also, another good reason to stay on my mac: it's like buying conscientious objector status.
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel, work a twenty-hour day at the mill for tuppence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
The density of fud present in a sentence like this is staggering: "Yes, of course, because Ubuntu's web site promises that the distro 'will always be free of charge, including enterprise releases and security updates.'" OOOh Canonical might change their minds. What's so stupid about such speculation is that They don't get to change the past. So even if they immediately pulled the plug on giving away Ubuntu, the existence of earlier releases--and their accompanying GPL status--is not nullified. It can't be. So some ideologically passionate Ubuntu user group could (and I predict would) immediately open up a distribution spot giving away GNUbuntu or somesuch. GNUbuntu (Gnubuntu's Not Ubuntu) would just be a repackaging of previously existing open sourced code with any non-GPL parts expunged. Problem solved.
That's it? This is modern homo sapiens? No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Spies on people. Bigger than a dragonfly. Lame.
Sorry if this derails the topic train, but do you have some evidence about this "part marks" claim you make? Like for example, do you actually have kids? I do. None of the teachers i've met are so blithering as to tell my child her math is "partially right" when it's not. Mine is not a universal case, obviously. But your statement is extraordinary. Wasn't there something about extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence in the overarching issue of this debate? Hm.
Yes, and I think that's what the parent post is saying: relying on what is effectively a consumer-grade WLAN for critical infrastructure is expecting too much. It's not a question of the reality of wireless being critical--we get that, it's a question of "how did Duke let it get this far this fast?" And that's why it's dumb.
What is the framework of the researchers in question? If a person is an academic studying the field of network security or whatnot, they can probably give a reasonable justification for doing this sort of snooping as research. If I were advising a person in that position, I'd suggest to them maybe asking permission first-- how hard is it to write a letter to another university and inform them that you are a student who is going to look for (but not break/exploit) security flaws, then report them in the course of reporting your research to your own university.
OTOH if you're a private security firm I think you absolutely must request permission from the owner of a potentially insecure network, otherwise you're just a squeegee guy at the stoplight, only you know, with data.
But if you're in the wild, and you're just "trying the locks" hoping they'll snap open, you're on your own. And God have mercy on your soul. How's that different from walking through your neighborhood jiggling doorknobs? It's very easy for a person to fix their neighbor's unlocked-door-problem, if they have an old fashioned door that can be hand locked and closed. Well in the neighbor's house analogy, the law doesn't give a crap if you lock the door behind you and don't touch anything, you're still technically guilty of B&E. Yes, you could get away with it because you can at least do the favor of locking it and choosing not to touch anything. But what if they have a deadbolt? The only way to fix that problem is to let them know so they can use the key or lock it from the inside, but the route to making the discovery that their house is unlocked is already covered by the B&E law.
Network security is all deadbolts, right? You can't quite lock the door behind you (fix their code) if you find an exploit. If you get in, even if you don't take anything, you're breaking and entering. In that case, if you publish the fact you got in by active means, you're taking a grave risk--maybe if you could somehow demonstrate that you "just found it," then maybe you can expect to get away with reporting it. But if the only way to find it is to be actively looking, the risk is yours as well, since if you know so dang much about network security, you probably should know they're not using the old knob-based locks anymore. Are they? I don't know from network security, but I know you can't wander around fiddling with locks on houses, many of which don't contain nearly half the sensitive info that computers do.
it also doesn't help if you fall asleep at the keyboard . those last two sentences:
I can't wait til I'm delayed sending a critical piece while searching for two hours for a missing TR tag or somesuch. The horror. The horror.
Sure great, it protects the user from "malware". It does nothing to make the user feel like he or she lives in the 21st Century and the sender feel like a backwards looking dillhole.
My title is not "email designer" but it is one of my job functions and this is Bad News. I know not everyone loves html email, and I respect that, but the emails we send to our thoroughly opted in existing customers are appreciated and get positive feedback. But without starting that fight, this is very serious news.
A big chunk of the stuff that's not supported looks like things that impact display behaviors, some of which might make users feel more secure. It's cover for MS, being able to point to properties like background (only when there is a URL), media ( screen | print | projection | braille | speech | all ), onblur, onchange, onclick, ondblclick, onfocus, onload, onmousedown, onmousemove, onmouseover and say "look, these cause behaviors that 3rd parties could use to exploit your computer or at the very least, cause something to happen that you weren't expecting" and then describe the worst case scenario of a user's computer being "forced to do something" without them clicking, such as "onmouseover." They can point to these things, some of which sound unnerving to the average person, and say, look we're making it impossible for spammers to make your computer do things you don't want it to do.
But then they go after background-position, background-repeat, clear, display, float, list-style-image, list-style-position, etc. Ugh. These things make it so easy to improve the look of my emails, while lightening the amount of code markedly. I can't imagine the weight of tables based emails! And the room for mistakes, the multiplication of errors...I can't wait til I'm delayed sending a critical piece while searching for two hours for a missing or somesuch. The horror. The horror.
Sure great, it protects the user from "malware". It does nothing to make the user feel like he or she lives in the 21st Ceut. /p?
Cingular wireless. Less brown than a Zune. Lame.
But the newsgroup model of user-contributed content came through the shift-- specific persons/groups got tools for moderation and editing that also allowed users to add and edit with some levels of control. The return of the newsgroup and BBS via forums, wikis, and the like and the persistence of moderators.
Duplication of its abrasive nature aside, perhaps they could collect tons of playa dust. Send NASA to Burning Man. Awesome. Surely those moon buggies and space suits would be welcomed!
Well yeah, exactly. With the Wii being sold at a price point that is already profitable, I don't think Nintendo is in a position that it has to give a crap if you buy a Wii in addition to something else. Whereas the big offsetting factor for consoles that lose money is that you'll buy the games, you'll buy the online services, and so on. In the world of XBox, for example, since they need the revenue from the ongoing purchase of games and services just to make back their losses and turn a profit, it has to matter to them if you also buy a Wii because that means you have less dollars to spend on their own add-on service(s) and games.
But if every Wii turns a profit, then those add-on services they sell are gravy, not vital tactics to "winning". From the point of view of Nintendo, I'd argue that the fact that you (or others) consider the Wii a "healthy addition" is wonderful for Nintendo because they'll still make a profit even if you only see it as an addition to the more...serious console purchase. But from the point of view of Sony and MS, buying that "additional system" is totally anathema.
Every dollar you spend on Wii is a dollar not spent on something they desperately need to sell you to make up the cash they're giving away with that loss leader HD system they sold you.
Intriguingly, in the Nintendo model, for all the fluffy marketing talk about gameplay and revolution, the business side doesn't care one tiny little bit what your heart feels about the Wii, as long as you buy one. Insofar as you love it and give them more gravy, they do not have to care. Other than whatever enjoyment they get in making more money.
Whereas for the other two--for all the talk about the game platforms as hardcore, better, more technically accomplished true blue and the perception of their philosophies as supposedly more mature, hard nosed, cutthroat and, let's be honest, American and masculine--the other two need you, yes you, to love them; need you to believe it in your heartso that you never hesitate to keep your dollars right there, with them, where they are more needed and rightfully belong.
Nintendo's little faerie machine liberates the more old-fashioned, hard-nosed business model from messy sticky feelings and gives it a very pretty black bottom line to look at. Is the Wii really a limp wristed sissybox for weirdo degenerates? Or the phalanx of a 21st century global corporate Captain Of Industry?
And let us not set aside that tone in which the Wii is described by detractors--throwing around terms that first degrade homosexuality and/or femininity, then apply those degraded conceptualizations to the Wii in contrast to the normative (generally, heterosexual male) features of the other platforms. There's a lot of masculine defensiveness tied up in the XBox and PS3.
Which one is a more healthy view? In the context of critiquing a game you also attack women and homosexuals in order to defend systems whose makers ultimately need you to fall in love with them? (or to be fair to the Joystiq article linked above, your roommate, who is not so much "critiquing" as standing in for a fairly wide swath of the gaming community) Or you make a game system that makes money and, by virtue of a neutrally functioning business model doesn't give a shit if you're straight, gay, male, female, young or old? Whose word of mouth representatives can depend less on diminishment of something or someone else.
If I owned stock in Sony and MS I'd be forced to ask, are you putting our money into a product that depends on how people feel in order for you to actually make money on it? And then are
Wait wait. Are you saying people are stupid? Or my mother's a whore? Or wait, is that your mom? Wait, apple's in somebody's...uh ... (shudder)... "baby hole"?
AAPL out of my mother's uterus!
I am absolutely pro-paper ballot 100%, but Canada's not quite a fair comparison is it? I mean, there's almost 1/10 the number of people there and so doesn't it stand to reason that getting count results from all of canada in 24 hours is a little bit easier?
Welllll... you are talking about the Navy, right? Some CPO might "suggest" that since you've got them all pulled anyway, testing all of them would be a good idea.
Hells yes. People are in a twist because, what? Someone they know told them information about a subject can be found at Wikipedia.org? So because they're not complete a-holes, they go where their friend suggests. They don't like what they found (perhaps they were implicated in the Kennedy assassination, to cite a recent notorious example).
If your friend directs you to a thing that you know is bunk, you go back to your friend and tell him, hey man, that's bunk. That site you sent me to sucked and said I was in on the conspiracy to assassinate the president forty years ago! Maybe, just maybe, if you are so implicated, you complain to various listed personages in the contact pages (though with Wikipedia, you could just edit the inaccuracy out yourself, make a note on the talk page that says "hey I changed this article, because I'm the guy it mentions and I can pretty definitively state whether or not I killed JFK," save some time and do future readers a favor).
But a few people--dissatisfied with hearing from the outset that the information they're reading is 1) in flux; 2) created largely by knowledgeable amateurs as opposed to paid or otherwise credentialed experts; 3) under perpetual and nonscientific peer review; 4) that users are asked to participate in cleaning up inaccuracies; and 5) are then given the power to do so--use the national press, a widely-read website, or some other bully pulpit to complain basically that "Wikipedia is not only bunk, it is manifestly Evil Bunk(tm) and anyone who thinks otherwise is a naive puswad who deserves to eat broken leaded crystal in hell."
A sudden spasm of "journalistic" interest focused on the number of persons so dissatisfied, the growth in the number of complaints that information on Wikipedia is" too fluid", and the growth in the public handwringing that "irresponsible people" are messing around with information doesn't change the fact that the original intentions of the Wikipedia project do not include becoming an authoritative source on anything.
There are years of anecdotal evidence available from diverse sources such as churches, political movements, software programming, the organic reproductive process and even sea travel, to suggest that the absence of complicated hierarchical authorities and systems will not automatically kill people.
Information freedom may be a hoary cliche, particularly in the jaded confines of /., but it's a pretty accurate representation of what's happening with the structures and exchange of human knowledge and memory. Been happening for a long long time. Something something great power and great responsibility something something...
Okay, so why has the company steadfastly refused to acknowledge (to OWN) the fact that their browser and OS have functionally been a security risk for every person who has them in their possession? Instead of Owning responsibility, your organization (for whom you don't officially speak, I know) has ignored or derided sincere questions about their security. I guess it's "Own it... unless you can just ignore it."
Hey before we get too crazy here, I have to say that when administering a win/mac office and we'd run into some kind of problem with a server or a RAID array or a whatever, ANY time I called either a hardware manufacturer or software supplier I had to go through a lot of hoop jumping saying, "yes, we're running it as it was sold to us." "yes we've not installed [whatever thing we shouldn't ever install, evaR]." or the 'humbling' "Yes, I have [virus protection] [veritas] [non-Exchange mailserver] [any software that they've never heard of] installed on this machine. Yes, I know that means we've custom configured our box. Yes, I know you can't support THAT application, I'm asking you if you think YOUR crap is what's giving me crap today, please!!"
Windows and OEMs were, in my experience, especially bad about playing hot potato with my problem. "What you're gonna want to do is call the manufacturer..." "You're gonna wanna call the software company..." "You shouldn't install ...almost anything..." So Linux snobbery isn't the only bugbear here, there's also a lot of blame-the-user mentality in the industry. Hell, I blamed our own users whenever I could while I was administering our system and performing support.
I wish we could get off this crazy train.
Southwest airlines does this very thing of "advertising customer second" in all kinds of articles. Maybe you've heard of them, they're the one that's making money.
What is Canada's population? ~32,000,000?
What is the US population? ~295,000,000?
Is each Canadian consuming/producing 9.2 times what each US person is?
I wonder if those might be simple enough questions, also.
That's asinine. Athletes train their bodies, reflexes and "game brains" to multitask just as much as a geek. Java might be really hard to learn, but so is executing a double play; running the triangle offense; or reading coverages while deciding between the called timing route, checking down to the crossing route, or going to the outlet receiver while evading a pack of 6-foot-seven, 360 pound men in plastic armor who are freaking nimble. And some of these athletes do multiple sports. This author does a disservice to geeks (many of whom are athletic and fit) AND to jocks (many of whom are brilliant both in their sports and "conventional" measures of intelligence).
Jeezum crow! The pilots association is worried? What happens to the airspace? These are the wrong freaking concerns! These are the wrong freaking questions! Or at least they're questions about practical things which should be a little further down the list of priorities right now. Concerns that totally ignore the far far more disturbing fact that the government would like to spy upon and menace citizens and dissenters using any and all available means. Trees, meet forest!
Nothing comes of the president's revelations about illegal wiretapping. Nothing comes of revelations about external prisons and detention camps. Nothing comes of any of this crap! David Cross was right, what does this guy have to do, eat a Jewish baby on live tv or something? My fellow americans, I'd like ot talk with you about civil rights and the constitution... rrarrr...MMM...that's good Jew baby...
I guess this is what is meant by "We've earned political capital in this election and I intend to spend it." Spending political capital means running the whole bloody country straight into the bowels of hell, apparently. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!