This is off-topic since I agree the bill is foolish. But here are a few facts for you:
they only work 9 months out of the year, with 3 months vacation. given a starting salary of at least $23k, thats like 23/0.75 = 30k a year?
Because of course they place them in hibernation tanks for the remaining three months of the year. When I was in high school, I worked summers in a book packaging factory - menial labor with 9 hour days - right alongside the "respected professionals" who taught me how to differentiate and conjugate spanish the rest of the year. These teachers were so underpaid that they had to perform grunt labor to support their families during the summer. Please tell me whether you expect this sort of job incentive to attract the bright bulbs or the dim bulbs to the respected profession of producing the next generation of little Anonymous Cowards.
And don't even get started on the old saw that teachers only work 9-5 nine months a year. IIRC, school generally involves such details as homework, exams, labs, and lessons. All of these must be planned beforehand and assessed afterward. How do you think this gets done? Teachers work long hours both before and after punching off the clock. If you think it's time consuming to do fifty statics calculations, imagine how much fun it is to grade thirty of those submissions.
-any dumbass can get a elementary edu degree. in fact take a look at the people who are in the curriculum. it is a known fact that graduates with an eled degree scored in the lowest rankings of ACT and SAT tests before coming to college of any graduating college students.
My sister is currently pursuing a masters in education (BTW, I'd be happy to sponsor a brain wrestling match between her and yourself any day) for the reason that schools do not hire "just any dumbass" with an elementary education degree.
Additionally, you forget that teaching is far more than the brains-in-cubicles model that you and I are familiar with. They must be humane, compassionate, patient, and interact well with children. Just to look at the average tenor of discourse on/. demonstrates that most technical types fail miserably on these considerations.
every single one of the people I knew in those curriculums spent far more time partying and screwing off while still earning good (B and higher) grades.
If you couldn't earn high marks in CS without abstaining from partying and screwing off, then I don't think its the teachers' brain capacity at fault here.
It strikes me that the only reliable means of enforcement for a bill of this kind is to bring government into the loop on every transaction. But consider that commerce over the internet is at least supposed to be conducted over SSL. So... unless the gummint is prepared to accept the receipts of electronic businesses and take on faith that they are accurate, the only way that a bill like this could be enforced would be to require the IRS to snoop on secure transactions.
If a bill of this kind ever makes it out, the IRS might mandate that every secure sale also be encrypted to their published key and sent to a massive Audit-bot hub. Imagine the incentive to crack that key! But even if no third party gains control of the information, the blow to personal privacy would be immense. Not only will they know what you're buying, but also when, with what credit card, to what address, etc etc.
Another means of enforcement (and I'm sure this sends guilty erotic shivers up and down some spook's spine) is to require that secure transactions be performed using a key-escrowed or otherwise governmentally-crackable protocol. Then they could perform random audits. Of course, this capability would never be abused...
Note that this is only a bill, and has not passed committee. There is nothing at this point to distinguish this bill from any of the other hundreds of proposals submitted by "our" representatives every year. No need to panic just yet, unless you are from South Carolina. Here is the contact info for Senator Hollings:
And here is the webpage for the Finance Committee so you can see whether your senator might be influential in this process. If so, please contact him or her!
Productivity absolutely has increased! The fallacy that Solow and Moody both accept is that if I can get my old job done in half the time, my boss will let me go home at noon every day. Bullshit! Clearly my boss will take that extra time and set me to work on features that are desireable but that previously couldn't be budgeted. I'll still spend the same number of hours working, but the resulting product will be spiffier than had I worked at my old pace.
The trouble with Solow's "Paradox" (I thought that word was reserved for logical impossibilities, not just quirky statistics) and with this column is that nobody is thinking outside the box. The obvious question to ask here is not "Why do I still work 8 (or 12 or 23:) hours a day" but "How does my definition of 'productive' differ from the definition of 30 years ago?"
I'm sure we've all wished to ourselves at one time or another that sleep weren't necessary and that we could spend our nights working. Elysium dreams of endless freetime spring into our minds. But this is nonsense, because you know that if nobody had to sleep, our economy would gobble up the slack and the PHB's would have us all working 20 hours a day.
The obvious parallel is the electric light. I wonder whether people deluded themselves into thinking at the turn of the century that their bosses would still release them at dusk and that they could spend the rest of their day before bed on their own pursuits. Hah! A quick look around any server farm at 3am quickly illustrates the defectiveness of that reasoning.
Sure it takes the same number of work-hours to produce a 1999 car as it did a 1950 car. But look at the difference in complexity between the cars!
Now hold on, I don't think the military had anything to do with planning this competition, but if you don't think they're interested then I'm not the one who's deluded.
What better way to counteract ground troops than a phalanx of flame-throwing, machine-gun mounted, automated tanklets?
And unless NASA is interested in a way to "flip" or roast chunks of inoffensive sandstone, I don't think they'll be getting much out of this.
...is thinking about who might be lurking in the audience at competitions like these. Recruiters from the military looking for the next genius of mass destruction?
This sort of competition has always thrilled me with its glitzy hardware and clever ideas, but I hope we can all keep in mind the fact that the military has no scruples about funneling that sort of exuberant enthusiasm into their war programs. This competition provides them with free research and publicity - they don't have to spend a single dime to turn hundreds, perhaps thousands of fertile minds onto the old problem: How to kill.
I very much agree with you about Rushmore. My girlfriend didn't especially like it, but I was entranced. And also surprised that Peter Venkman:) would take on such a meaningful role.
The posts I'm reading here are mostly lambasting Katz for pulling a Katz, which is reasonable and endorsed by yours truly. On the other hand, I think he may be right in the short term, where "short" is defined as "next years' blockbuster season".
TBWP certainly did not reinvent the genre, and it pulled no stunts that aren't at least as old as the spooky campfire horror-story, but it did manage to accomplish something rarely (dare I say never) seen on the indie landscape: it pulled millions of plaid-wearing college kids into independent theaters. Without question there have been fiscally successful independent films shot in black and white with a wobbly lens, but none that so clearly appeal to the demographic hollywood desperately wants to please.
My prediction is that we will be seeing quite a few cinema verité productions from large studios next summer. The majority of them will be wretched and highly regrettable, a few will be quite good. But after the box offices close and the season rolls back to winter, the market for this sort of "novelty" will have dwindled.
I'm sure we've all noticed that the major studios attempt to dilute each other by producing movies with similar themes. E.g Armageddon/Deep Impact, Deep Blue Sea/Lake Placid, etc. This will be a similar phenomenon. But, contrary to what Katz apparently believes, it will enjoy only a brief season of fruitfullness before the Powers That Be decide we are no longer sufficiently enthusiastic.
Not to defend Windows2000, which I know by experience to be pretty crashy and unreliable, but citing this as proof that Linux is more stable than NT5 is far from reasonable.
To begin with, as several other Northwesterners have mentioned, the weather on the day of the Win2k crash test was incredible. My girlfriend was practically struck by a lightning bolt on her way across the 520 bridge and when I made it home my cats were shivering in a dark corner, terrified of the incessant thunder. Very odd weather. Perhaps the Almighty was displeased with Microsoft.
And secondly, do not even try to suggest that the tidal wave of 3l337 d000dz breaking themselves bodily against the walls of that Win2k box were in any way duplicated in the case of the LinuxPPC. Judging from the volume of vitriolic comments on/., just a single ping from each of the would-be crackers would have been enough to constitute a DoS attack. Everybody hates Microsoft. Very few people hate LinuxPPC. The savagery of the attacks bear no comparison to one another. -konstant
I know that many of you are enthusiastic about your Rios and will regret losing Diamond to the Forces of Evil(tm), but aren't there a number of other significant hardware players moving into the MP3 market? I recall Bose (or was it Grundig?) recently released an MP3 player, and they are well respected as a producer of personal music systems. Not to mention the fact that they are german (I think) and thus somewhat outside the American capital/political scene.
Isn't this really worse news for Diamond than for lovers of MP3's?
You appear to have a somewhat wild impression of me, friend. Regardless, please don't flock to Katz simply because you loathe me. The man enjoys a power none of us enjoy - namely the power to dictate what is news on Slashdot - and he seems to have done very little to merit it. He is using us, plain and simple. Of course I'm upset.
I believe the post hasn't been moderated down because, unlike the Japan post which apparently you misinterpreted (it was tongue-in-cheek), this one has a point people can agree with.
Of course Katz won't try to orchestrate a boycott. He'd have to announce it to the broader media for it to be effective, but nobody would pay the least attention to him. He'd be revealed as ineffective the nation over.
God, here he goes, flogging the "oppressed children" horse into the ground again.
KATZ - WHY DON'T YOU SEE WHAT A HYPOCRITE YOU ARE?
More importantly, why doesn't Slashdot? The people Katz purportedly despises, the cynical politicians who use "our children" as an excuse to pass their pet legislation, don't have a thing on Jonathan Katz.
This man has the power to POST his OWN messages on Slashdot indiscriminately. This is a power almost none of the loyal and enthusiastic readers of Slashdot possess. And how does he use this power? Why, to whip us all into a frenzy over the children of course!
I've said it before: Jon Katz clearly is using Slashdot for credibility. He sees what all of us see: that Slashdot is going to break into the big time very very soon now. And what would gratify his ego more than to be "Slashdot's JonKatz", spokesman for geeks everywhere, widely sought after for his sage opinions.
If I read another post whimpering about the poor children from Katz, I will filter him. But damn, I do wish that Slashdot had a more equitable means of deciding which posts are worthy of making it onto the board. Slashdot space is a valuable and limited resource. I for one do not want it wasted on self-aggradizement in the name of "the children".
This is not flamebait. I want to hear why I'm wrong, but please don't flame me about it.
From the article referenced above...
Most contests don't disclose the algorithm. And since most cryptanalysts don't have the skills for reverse-engineering (I find it tedious and boring), they never bother analyzing the systems. This is why COMP128, CMEA, ORYX, the Firewire cipher, the DVD cipher, and the Netscape PRNG were all broken within months of their disclosure (despite the fact that some of them have been widely deployed for many years); once the algorithm is revealed, it's easy to see the flaw, but it might take years before someone bothers to reverse-engineer the algorithm and publish it. Contests don't help.
There you have it, in the man's own words. Bruce Schneier has unwittingly produced excellent evidence that security through obscurity keeps systems solid, but disclosure opens them to cracking 'within months'.
Looks like real-world experience suggests that if you know your algorithm is going to be shaky, keeping it in the dark is the wisest course of action.
That's true, I hadn't thought of that. But then, how clueful are the conservative politicians who are going to rant and rave about the "new red menace" when this hits the Rush Limbaugh show?
To expand a little on the "Free tibet" theory, the notion is that enemies of teh Chinese state spoof a Chinese assault on American property. All the Vladmir Zhirinovsky-esque republican nationalists go ballistic and China is severed from our good graces forever (or at least until WWIII).
It's just some deluded "Free Tibet" American rich-kid-larva spoofing the IP addresses on his/her packet. I don't think the Chinese are dumb enough to aggravate our national sovereignty just now. Vicious, yes, but not stupid. Stupidity is mostly reserved to the crusading middle-american script kiddies.
At Microsoft, we all use Exchange, many of us POP3 for laptops and such, but most MAPI (I personally prefer IMAP). Our organization is roughly 20,000 individuals and while adminstrating it may be a headache in the background for all I know, our servers almost never go down. When they do, it's typically because of scheduled maintenance.
The prevalent opinion on Slashdot seems to be that this is impossible. Obviously it isn't.
While I personally like Outlook2000 a lot, I can understand how some people might dislike it. The positive side is that the Exchange servers are naturals with the POP and IMAP protocols, so any compliant client will do. Eudora and OE are the two other clients I use commonly against the server.
So sure, it's scalable. As to ease of implementation, my small team of five has set up 10 exchange servers (releases varying from 5.0 to 5.5sp2) for team use and it took about three days. Your order of magnitude would be considerably greater but after you've done it a dozen times, I'd guess the method will be clear.
I can't say it's the best solution because I don't know. But it is a solution.
If this is the best they can do. As the poster comments, Red Hat's purported revenue stream comes from support, but in reality they're squinting at two goals:
1) Make sure Red Hat is synonymous with Linux among newbies and PHB's
2) Aggregate brains in their development department so that the other distros can do little other than play catchup
(No, this isn't yet another "Red Hat is Microsoft!" rant.) The money they charge for their product is not much more than a "confidence payment" to satisfy the purchaser that they have made a legitimate business transaction. People who receive goods for free in our money-oriented economy can never really shake the impression that they're just playing around - gaining something trivial. In a sense, when you purchase Red Hat Linux, what you are really purchasing is the purchase price itself. Weird, huh?
1) Women will never be attracted to doughy geeks with stringy unwashed hair and a nervous stutter, so just forget it. The jet set (aka daddy's little boys & girls + 20 years) were glamorous because they could afford to be Beautiful People and excelled at - and were interested in - very little else. These "researchers", who are searching for tenure rather desperately I must add, are not talking about all the pimply salivating AC's posting right now. No, the fictional people referenced in this "study" are the finely chiseled slogan-beshirted models on the cover of wired. Of course those people are attractive. They look nice and they have cash. They also don't exist.
2) People inventing utopian futures always manage to put themselves on top of the pile. The very first utopian, Plato, did the same thing in his Republic. "There will be a perfect society... ruled by philosphers!" This study is playing to our egotism and the credulity of the press to earn a few uninspired professers a little extra kudo-money at lecture time. Done.
3) We are all slaves. The jet set were the infant spawn of powerful business moguls who could afford the gift of indolence for their kids. We, the geeks of the world, are functionally the hirelings of those same moguls. We occupy the same space in the corporate hierarchy that clerks held in Dicken's time. Oh ye geeks, full of self importance, just wait until our talents become common in the marketplace. Very soon it will be clear how much a technical mind is valued.
Crypto will soon solve all the problems of anonymnity. It will solve them by removing the possiblity of anonymnity on most of the 'net.
You have this slightly confused. Crypto does not validate a digital signature to an identity. It validates the signature to an email address. Digital signatures from anon3321@anonymous.com will be just as effective. Since the mail is encrypted, you can identify yourself in the body of the mail and be certain only the legitimate recipient can parse it.
Slashdot Mirror
New Colours! The G4s are "silver and graphite"
So... "grey and dark grey"? Apple is so daring.
-konstant
This is off-topic since I agree the bill is foolish. But here are a few facts for you:
/. demonstrates that most technical types fail miserably on these considerations.
they only work 9 months out of the year, with 3 months vacation. given a starting salary of at least $23k, thats like 23/0.75 = 30k a year?
Because of course they place them in hibernation tanks for the remaining three months of the year. When I was in high school, I worked summers in a book packaging factory - menial labor with 9 hour days - right alongside the "respected professionals" who taught me how to differentiate and conjugate spanish the rest of the year. These teachers were so underpaid that they had to perform grunt labor to support their families during the summer. Please tell me whether you expect this sort of job incentive to attract the bright bulbs or the dim bulbs to the respected profession of producing the next generation of little Anonymous Cowards.
And don't even get started on the old saw that teachers only work 9-5 nine months a year. IIRC, school generally involves such details as homework, exams, labs, and lessons. All of these must be planned beforehand and assessed afterward. How do you think this gets done? Teachers work long hours both before and after punching off the clock. If you think it's time consuming to do fifty statics calculations, imagine how much fun it is to grade thirty of those submissions.
-any dumbass can get a elementary edu degree. in fact take a look at the people who are in the curriculum. it is a known fact that graduates with an eled degree scored in the lowest rankings of ACT and SAT tests before coming to college of any graduating college students.
My sister is currently pursuing a masters in education (BTW, I'd be happy to sponsor a brain wrestling match between her and yourself any day) for the reason that schools do not hire "just any dumbass" with an elementary education degree.
Additionally, you forget that teaching is far more than the brains-in-cubicles model that you and I are familiar with. They must be humane, compassionate, patient, and interact well with children. Just to look at the average tenor of discourse on
every single one of the people I knew in those curriculums spent far more time partying and screwing off while still earning good (B and higher) grades.
If you couldn't earn high marks in CS without abstaining from partying and screwing off, then I don't think its the teachers' brain capacity at fault here.
-konstant
It strikes me that the only reliable means of enforcement for a bill of this kind is to bring government into the loop on every transaction. But consider that commerce over the internet is at least supposed to be conducted over SSL. So... unless the gummint is prepared to accept the receipts of electronic businesses and take on faith that they are accurate, the only way that a bill like this could be enforced would be to require the IRS to snoop on secure transactions.
If a bill of this kind ever makes it out, the IRS might mandate that every secure sale also be encrypted to their published key and sent to a massive Audit-bot hub. Imagine the incentive to crack that key! But even if no third party gains control of the information, the blow to personal privacy would be immense. Not only will they know what you're buying, but also when, with what credit card, to what address, etc etc.
Another means of enforcement (and I'm sure this sends guilty erotic shivers up and down some spook's spine) is to require that secure transactions be performed using a key-escrowed or otherwise governmentally-crackable protocol. Then they could perform random audits. Of course, this capability would never be abused...
-konstant
Introduced by Sen. Hollings from South Carolina and currently before the Finance Committee:
S.1433 Sales Tax Safety Net and Teacher Funding Act
Note that this is only a bill, and has not passed committee. There is nothing at this point to distinguish this bill from any of the other hundreds of proposals submitted by "our" representatives every year. No need to panic just yet, unless you are from South Carolina. Here is the contact info for Senator Hollings:
Ernest "Fritz" Hollings
And here is the webpage for the Finance Committee so you can see whether your senator might be influential in this process. If so, please contact him or her!
Senate Committee on Finance
Productivity absolutely has increased! The fallacy that Solow and Moody both accept is that if I can get my old job done in half the time, my boss will let me go home at noon every day. Bullshit! Clearly my boss will take that extra time and set me to work on features that are desireable but that previously couldn't be budgeted. I'll still spend the same number of hours working, but the resulting product will be spiffier than had I worked at my old pace.
:) hours a day" but "How does my definition of 'productive' differ from the definition of 30 years ago?"
The trouble with Solow's "Paradox" (I thought that word was reserved for logical impossibilities, not just quirky statistics) and with this column is that nobody is thinking outside the box. The obvious question to ask here is not "Why do I still work 8 (or 12 or 23
I'm sure we've all wished to ourselves at one time or another that sleep weren't necessary and that we could spend our nights working. Elysium dreams of endless freetime spring into our minds. But this is nonsense, because you know that if nobody had to sleep, our economy would gobble up the slack and the PHB's would have us all working 20 hours a day.
The obvious parallel is the electric light. I wonder whether people deluded themselves into thinking at the turn of the century that their bosses would still release them at dusk and that they could spend the rest of their day before bed on their own pursuits. Hah! A quick look around any server farm at 3am quickly illustrates the defectiveness of that reasoning.
Sure it takes the same number of work-hours to produce a 1999 car as it did a 1950 car. But look at the difference in complexity between the cars!
-konstant
Now hold on, I don't think the military had anything to do with planning this competition, but if you don't think they're interested then I'm not the one who's deluded.
What better way to counteract ground troops than a phalanx of flame-throwing, machine-gun mounted, automated tanklets?
And unless NASA is interested in a way to "flip" or roast chunks of inoffensive sandstone, I don't think they'll be getting much out of this.
-konstant
...is thinking about who might be lurking in the audience at competitions like these. Recruiters from the military looking for the next genius of mass destruction?
This sort of competition has always thrilled me with its glitzy hardware and clever ideas, but I hope we can all keep in mind the fact that the military has no scruples about funneling that sort of exuberant enthusiasm into their war programs. This competition provides them with free research and publicity - they don't have to spend a single dime to turn hundreds, perhaps thousands of fertile minds onto the old problem: How to kill.
-konstant
I very much agree with you about Rushmore. My girlfriend didn't especially like it, but I was entranced. And also surprised that Peter Venkman :) would take on such a meaningful role.
Regarding looking for info on the latest flicks, I highly endorse the internet movie database and aint it cool news.
-konstant
The posts I'm reading here are mostly lambasting Katz for pulling a Katz, which is reasonable and endorsed by yours truly. On the other hand, I think he may be right in the short term, where "short" is defined as "next years' blockbuster season".
TBWP certainly did not reinvent the genre, and it pulled no stunts that aren't at least as old as the spooky campfire horror-story, but it did manage to accomplish something rarely (dare I say never) seen on the indie landscape: it pulled millions of plaid-wearing college kids into independent theaters. Without question there have been fiscally successful independent films shot in black and white with a wobbly lens, but none that so clearly appeal to the demographic hollywood desperately wants to please.
My prediction is that we will be seeing quite a few cinema verité productions from large studios next summer. The majority of them will be wretched and highly regrettable, a few will be quite good. But after the box offices close and the season rolls back to winter, the market for this sort of "novelty" will have dwindled.
I'm sure we've all noticed that the major studios attempt to dilute each other by producing movies with similar themes. E.g Armageddon/Deep Impact, Deep Blue Sea/Lake Placid, etc. This will be a similar phenomenon. But, contrary to what Katz apparently believes, it will enjoy only a brief season of fruitfullness before the Powers That Be decide we are no longer sufficiently enthusiastic.
-konstant
To begin with, as several other Northwesterners have mentioned, the weather on the day of the Win2k crash test was incredible. My girlfriend was practically struck by a lightning bolt on her way across the 520 bridge and when I made it home my cats were shivering in a dark corner, terrified of the incessant thunder. Very odd weather. Perhaps the Almighty was displeased with Microsoft.
And secondly, do not even try to suggest that the tidal wave of 3l337 d000dz breaking themselves bodily against the walls of that Win2k box were in any way duplicated in the case of the LinuxPPC. Judging from the volume of vitriolic comments on /., just a single ping from each of the would-be crackers would have been enough to constitute a DoS attack. Everybody hates Microsoft. Very few people hate LinuxPPC. The savagery of the attacks bear no comparison to one another. -konstant
I know that many of you are enthusiastic about your Rios and will regret losing Diamond to the Forces of Evil(tm), but aren't there a number of other significant hardware players moving into the MP3 market? I recall Bose (or was it Grundig?) recently released an MP3 player, and they are well respected as a producer of personal music systems. Not to mention the fact that they are german (I think) and thus somewhat outside the American capital/political scene.
Isn't this really worse news for Diamond than for lovers of MP3's?
-konstant
You appear to have a somewhat wild impression of me, friend. Regardless, please don't flock to Katz simply because you loathe me. The man enjoys a power none of us enjoy - namely the power to dictate what is news on Slashdot - and he seems to have done very little to merit it. He is using us, plain and simple. Of course I'm upset.
I believe the post hasn't been moderated down because, unlike the Japan post which apparently you misinterpreted (it was tongue-in-cheek), this one has a point people can agree with.
-konstant (who doesn't hate you OR the Japanese)
Of course Katz won't try to orchestrate a boycott. He'd have to announce it to the broader media for it to be effective, but nobody would pay the least attention to him. He'd be revealed as ineffective the nation over.
-konstant
Please let's have another vote, Rob.
-konstant
God, here he goes, flogging the "oppressed children" horse into the ground again.
KATZ - WHY DON'T YOU SEE WHAT A HYPOCRITE YOU ARE?
More importantly, why doesn't Slashdot? The people Katz purportedly despises, the cynical politicians who use "our children" as an excuse to pass their pet legislation, don't have a thing on Jonathan Katz.
This man has the power to POST his OWN messages on Slashdot indiscriminately. This is a power almost none of the loyal and enthusiastic readers of Slashdot possess. And how does he use this power? Why, to whip us all into a frenzy over the children of course!
I've said it before: Jon Katz clearly is using Slashdot for credibility. He sees what all of us see: that Slashdot is going to break into the big time very very soon now. And what would gratify his ego more than to be "Slashdot's JonKatz", spokesman for geeks everywhere, widely sought after for his sage opinions.
If I read another post whimpering about the poor children from Katz, I will filter him. But damn, I do wish that Slashdot had a more equitable means of deciding which posts are worthy of making it onto the board. Slashdot space is a valuable and limited resource. I for one do not want it wasted on self-aggradizement in the name of "the children".
-konstant
IE5 has some bugs with many (like >64) windows opened in this way during one session, but IE4 works perfectly.
-konstant
This is not flamebait. I want to hear why I'm wrong, but please don't flame me about it.
From the article referenced above...
Most contests don't disclose the algorithm. And since most cryptanalysts don't have the skills for reverse-engineering (I find it tedious and boring), they never bother analyzing the systems. This is why COMP128, CMEA, ORYX, the Firewire cipher, the DVD cipher, and the Netscape PRNG were all broken within months of their disclosure (despite the fact that some of them have been widely deployed for many years); once the algorithm is revealed, it's easy to see the flaw, but it might take years before someone bothers to reverse-engineer the algorithm and publish it. Contests don't help.
There you have it, in the man's own words. Bruce Schneier has unwittingly produced excellent evidence that security through obscurity keeps systems solid, but disclosure opens them to cracking 'within months'.
Looks like real-world experience suggests that if you know your algorithm is going to be shaky, keeping it in the dark is the wisest course of action.
Responses?
-konstant
That's true, I hadn't thought of that. But then, how clueful are the conservative politicians who are going to rant and rave about the "new red menace" when this hits the Rush Limbaugh show?
To expand a little on the "Free tibet" theory, the notion is that enemies of teh Chinese state spoof a Chinese assault on American property. All the Vladmir Zhirinovsky-esque republican nationalists go ballistic and China is severed from our good graces forever (or at least until WWIII).
-konstant
It's just some deluded "Free Tibet" American rich-kid-larva spoofing the IP addresses on his/her packet. I don't think the Chinese are dumb enough to aggravate our national sovereignty just now. Vicious, yes, but not stupid. Stupidity is mostly reserved to the crusading middle-american script kiddies.
-konstant
...there are easy way around this. Amazon just relocates its SSL servers to Botswana, and presto - I'm no longer purchasing an American good.
Did I just not read this thoroughly enough? This was a hardware problem.
-konstant
At Microsoft, we all use Exchange, many of us POP3 for laptops and such, but most MAPI (I personally prefer IMAP). Our organization is roughly 20,000 individuals and while adminstrating it may be a headache in the background for all I know, our servers almost never go down. When they do, it's typically because of scheduled maintenance.
The prevalent opinion on Slashdot seems to be that this is impossible. Obviously it isn't.
While I personally like Outlook2000 a lot, I can understand how some people might dislike it. The positive side is that the Exchange servers are naturals with the POP and IMAP protocols, so any compliant client will do. Eudora and OE are the two other clients I use commonly against the server.
So sure, it's scalable. As to ease of implementation, my small team of five has set up 10 exchange servers (releases varying from 5.0 to 5.5sp2) for team use and it took about three days. Your order of magnitude would be considerably greater but after you've done it a dozen times, I'd guess the method will be clear.
I can't say it's the best solution because I don't know. But it is a solution.
-konstant
If this is the best they can do. As the poster comments, Red Hat's purported revenue stream comes from support, but in reality they're squinting at two goals:
1) Make sure Red Hat is synonymous with Linux among newbies and PHB's
2) Aggregate brains in their development department so that the other distros can do little other than play catchup
(No, this isn't yet another "Red Hat is Microsoft!" rant.) The money they charge for their product is not much more than a "confidence payment" to satisfy the purchaser that they have made a legitimate business transaction. People who receive goods for free in our money-oriented economy can never really shake the impression that they're just playing around - gaining something trivial. In a sense, when you purchase Red Hat Linux, what you are really purchasing is the purchase price itself. Weird, huh?
1) Women will never be attracted to doughy geeks with stringy unwashed hair and a nervous stutter, so just forget it. The jet set (aka daddy's little boys & girls + 20 years) were glamorous because they could afford to be Beautiful People and excelled at - and were interested in - very little else. These "researchers", who are searching for tenure rather desperately I must add, are not talking about all the pimply salivating AC's posting right now. No, the fictional people referenced in this "study" are the finely chiseled slogan-beshirted models on the cover of wired. Of course those people are attractive. They look nice and they have cash. They also don't exist.
2) People inventing utopian futures always manage to put themselves on top of the pile. The very first utopian, Plato, did the same thing in his Republic. "There will be a perfect society... ruled by philosphers!" This study is playing to our egotism and the credulity of the press to earn a few uninspired professers a little extra kudo-money at lecture time. Done.
3) We are all slaves. The jet set were the infant spawn of powerful business moguls who could afford the gift of indolence for their kids. We, the geeks of the world, are functionally the hirelings of those same moguls. We occupy the same space in the corporate hierarchy that clerks held in Dicken's time. Oh ye geeks, full of self importance, just wait until our talents become common in the marketplace. Very soon it will be clear how much a technical mind is valued.
-konstant
Crypto will soon solve all the problems of anonymnity. It will solve them by removing the possiblity of anonymnity on most of the 'net.
You have this slightly confused. Crypto does not validate a digital signature to an identity. It validates the signature to an email address. Digital signatures from anon3321@anonymous.com will be just as effective. Since the mail is encrypted, you can identify yourself in the body of the mail and be certain only the legitimate recipient can parse it.
Crypto preserves privacy in all forms.
-konstant