The problem with investigate reporting in politics is that it might (gasp!) lead to a conclusion! The mainstream media hates offering conclusions. Just listen to the fucking slogans. "We report, you decide." "Fair and Balanced." "We're Spineless Pussies." (Okay I made that last one up.) The press' notion of "objectivity" is simply parroting whatever government officials tell them, maybe showing a response from the opposition party and not doing a god damn thing to find out whether or not the official statement was full of shit (which it usually is). Because the minute the news starts coming down on one side, they're apparently no longer unbiased.
People seem to have forgotten that that it is perfectly possible to arrive at a conclusion favoring one side of an argument without any bias at all. Bias is not something you deduce by saying, "Whichever side this person supports is the side he's biased toward." Bias is affects the way you look at evidence and evaluate.
But no, everyone except Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann seems to have forgotten that there do not exist two equally-valid, logical sides to every argument, both sides of an argument do not always deserve equal consideration and in short, sometimes one side is just right, and the other is just wrong.
The point was that your suggestion would force them to marginalize their only marketable skill by relying on t-shirt sales and essentially not making money directly off their skill.
Because programmers have a marketable skill that allows them to make money independent of selling t-shirts. If the artists did what you suggest, they'd have no source of income but the t-shirts. Granted, this is what happens a lot of the time anyway, since you see so many "artists" trying to get by flipping burgers or working at Starbucks.
I read through the text of the law (Yes, I'm very bored), and it looks like it defines wagers specifically as those that are based on chance (i.e. roulette, cards, etc) or a single competition (i.e. betting on a football game).
It excludes things that are based on statistical returns (They're allowing stuff like fantasy football), and a few other things.
How the hell is Roulette not based on statistical returns? The whole reason casinos are able to operate and make money is because of statistical returns.
You're absolutely right; it's not that difficult, and don't let anyone make excuses for Diebold by saying it's a "complex problem". It's not. The Open Voting Consortium has a spec for a cheap, reliable and secure voting system using physically-secured home PCs and barcode readers. I suggested a system that uses barcoded-receipts and removable hard drives to do two separate counts on the same data in order to provide some sort of error correction in the event of a discrepancy between the counts. But seriously, any computer science graduate worth his salt could come up with and implement a better system than what we have.
ATMs are different from voting machines. Diebold doesn't really do much to design an ATM. They use already-existing APIs to interface with the ATM network. Pretty much all they do is grab input, send it across the network and interpret some output. They don't validate a user's account or manage the communication channel or anything complicated like that. The only thing that happens is Diebold code is probably a call to some function like send_withdrawal_request(char *card_number, char *PIN, short amt).
With a voting machine though, they had to design a system from the ground-up that was supposed to be computationally secure. Needless to say, they suck at it. Badly. It's almost unfathomable how idiotically flawed these things are. Why they even have any kind of networking capabilities at all is completely beyond me. But when you've got the company's founder saying that he was "committed" to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, it's not all that surprising. It's far easier to take advantage of incompetence than to try and overtly cheat. So by designing the machines so horribly, the thieves at the GOP manufacture an opportunity to alter votes while making it plausible that the machines were just badly designed.
Naturally, no one will ask why nothing is being done about it, why the flaws just happen to benefit one party in virtually every case, why the people who contracted these bad designs should be allowed to remain in power or why we're still letting Diebold near our voting booths. No, such concerns are far beyond the American people. The American people are good ole "salt of the earth" types, who are unsophisticated and treasure "small town" values, like inbreeding, detesting intellectuals and willfully remaining ignorant of the world at large. Demanding that Republicans put someone competent in charge of eVoting would be "elitism" and catering to those Volvo-driving, latte-sipping leftists, whose ultimate goal is to destroy American society as we know it.
Seriously, if the eVoting catastrophe is solely the result of massive incompetence at Diebold, I'd start a petition demanding that the programmers working there have their credentials stripped and be black-balled. You just can't get incompetence like that without actively trying.
Sorry, but you don't remember correctly. Apple stated that SecureWorks had not demonstrated any vulnerability in the AirPort drivers to them. As far as anyone knows, this is true. The SecureWorks people never owned a MacBook through exploiting AirPort drivers.
Indeed. A lot of those OS detection scripts don't parse the Intel Safari user agent string correctly, so they just relegate it to "other". Also, every other Mac browser includes the string "PPC" in its user-agent string for PowerPC. So if the libraries were set to look for that string, they'd miss something that said "Intel" instead.
Vouchers would eliminate the badly run government "defacto" monopoly we have on education. EVERYTHING the government does is loaded with fraud, politics, costs more, takes longer, and the final result is worse.
So your solution is to turn it over to corporations, who have absolutely no allegiances other than their own bottom lines? Christ, with solutions like that, who needs problems?
These guys had a demonstrable bias against Apple's platform and users from the get-go. They specifically chose the MacBook because they didn't like Mac users' supposedly smug attitude about security, so they wanted to make a public example of a Mac getting 0wned. But oh wait, they used a third-party wireless device with a third-party driver, a setup that's about as common on Mac hardware as steaming shit in Antarctica. When asked why they chose this, they claimed that Apple had put pressure on them to not demonstrate the flaw with Apple hardware... but to go ahead and tell everyone that the same flaw existed in Apple hardware anyway. Why Apple would ask them to do that is anyone's guess. This was a highly dubious claim at the least. It's not surprising at all that it turned out to be total bullshit.
With the statements from Apple, the questionable reasons given by the researchers and their ire about the Mac community in general, I think the most probable conclusion is that these guys are full of shit. What I can't understand is why they'd risk their reputations on something seemingly so petty.
DOS was simply the first perversion of the backslash. But I think we all know that Windows' popularity is what drove "backslash" into the mainstream's consciousness. And NTFS still uses it as a path separator. Hell, people use it in fucking English papers as a separator because they think it's the correct one. This isn't even limited to computer illiterates. A lot of people who know Windows well pull this shit too. People who post on web boards, too. Why? Because it's littered all over Windows. Windows uses it for network share URIs, paths, digging around the registry, etc...
It used to be a simple escape character. Now it's like a fucking plague.
Seriously, down with the backslash. It started out nobly enough as an escape character for Unix operating systems, but the poor little guy has been beaten and abused by clueless Windows users. How many times have we all seen fliers on a school bulletin board with URLs that looked like http:\\www.site.com\bla.html? How many times have we heard narrators on radio and TV commercials spell out a URL like "www.site.com backslash bla dot html"? How many times have we all told our relatives "Okay go to this link, 'www.site.com slash bla dot html'" only to spend five minutes figuring out that they think slashes are backslashes, causing them to type in a syntactically incorrect URL?
Our poor friend the backslash has been warped into a disgusting visage of its former self. It's begging to be taken off end users' keyboards. It can't take being typed into browser address fields anymore. It wants us to take it out back and, with a lone tear, put it down for good. And I think we all know the source of our friend's misery: Windows.
This is the problem with people who don't understand science. They see things as black and white. Science is about degrees of accuracy. Evolutionary theory is not wrong. It happens to be highly accurate, and that will simply never change. There are some things which is cannot explain, but that doesn't change the fact that there are mountains of things which it can explain. If a new theory comes along that explains everything evolution does and more, that theory will be superior, but evolution will not be wrong or invalidated. It will remain the highly accurate theory that it is today. Conceptually, it may be incorrect (in the description of the mechanism), but it will still be able to generate useful predictions.
You might as well claim that all those mechanical engineers using Newtonian mechanics to make cars are "wrong", too, because as we all know, the theory of special relativity replaced Newton's laws of motion. But oh wait, it turns out that the differences between Newton's laws and relativity are insignificant below 0.6c.
Garbage collection can't stop bad programming. It's perfectly easy to write a program in a garbage-collected language which bloats like crazy by simply leaving references to your objects around. Garbage collectors aren't psychic. They clear out an object when no more references are left.
So what about the kernel determines whether something is a "true Unix"? The simple fact is nothing, unless you're snobbish about monolithic versus microkernels or don't consider Mach to be a "real" kernel or something equally ridiculous. As long as the proper APIs are implemented, you could argue that something is a Unix. It doesn't matter whether you're running Mach, Windows NT or Linux underneath. A Unix can be built on any kernel; that's the whole point of POSIX.
Wow, that's great for him. Except that he's a journalist, not a software developer. As such, he wasn't in a position to appreciate the things that were presented during the Keynote. I know that journalists get intimidated when presented with things they can't understand or distill into small, 3- to 4-word sound bytes, but that's no reason to shoot the messenger. This conference is not about the average user. It was about the developers. Sometimes those interests coincide, like when the Intel transition was announced. Sometimes they don't. The press need to get it through their heads that Steve Jobs isn't going to introduce a new iPod every time he gets on stage.
Whether or not something is a Unix has nothing to do with the kernel. It has to do with whether it is compliant with the POSIX standard. Apple hasn't gotten OS X POSIX certified as far as I'm aware, but they implement all the necessary APIs as far as I can tell.
Enron is a poster-child for corporate regulation. Beyond the fact that they cooked the books, they also had the state of California by the balls for quite a while. They'd artificially introduce power outages to squeeze every last dime out of their customers, and they did it while laughing on the phone with each other about how much money they were making off of others' misery. All because the Grand Conservative Experiment gave them a free hand to do so. (Although Gray Davis could've just sent the National Guard into those power plants and taken them over by force, such measures are not part of your standard free market.)
Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie.
All a corporation has to answer to is its bottom line. They don't care about people's suffering as long as it makes them money. As another example, look at what happened when Saint Reagan removed regulations on radio station ownership. All of a sudden, exactly six corporations started controlling the entirety of American radio.
I guess there actually is a flaw in the built-in drivers, but Apple asked the guy not to do the demo with AirPort. Weird. I wouldn't think it'd make a difference, really.
Expect to see plenty of post below, with this exact attitude. Many will begin by saying "This is not a virus" or noting you need proximity to take advantage of this flaw.
Actually, they'll be pointing out that there the flaw is not in Mac OS X or even AirPort. It's in a third-party wireless card. And since MacBooks and MacBook Pros have AirPort built-in, what Mac user is going to buy a vulnerable card? The article was completely disingenuous, and the researchers were basically dickheads. Cool exploit, but it's basically a non-issue for Macs.
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The problem with investigate reporting in politics is that it might (gasp!) lead to a conclusion! The mainstream media hates offering conclusions. Just listen to the fucking slogans. "We report, you decide." "Fair and Balanced." "We're Spineless Pussies." (Okay I made that last one up.) The press' notion of "objectivity" is simply parroting whatever government officials tell them, maybe showing a response from the opposition party and not doing a god damn thing to find out whether or not the official statement was full of shit (which it usually is). Because the minute the news starts coming down on one side, they're apparently no longer unbiased.
People seem to have forgotten that that it is perfectly possible to arrive at a conclusion favoring one side of an argument without any bias at all. Bias is not something you deduce by saying, "Whichever side this person supports is the side he's biased toward." Bias is affects the way you look at evidence and evaluate.
But no, everyone except Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann seems to have forgotten that there do not exist two equally-valid, logical sides to every argument, both sides of an argument do not always deserve equal consideration and in short, sometimes one side is just right, and the other is just wrong.
The point was that your suggestion would force them to marginalize their only marketable skill by relying on t-shirt sales and essentially not making money directly off their skill.
Because programmers have a marketable skill that allows them to make money independent of selling t-shirts. If the artists did what you suggest, they'd have no source of income but the t-shirts. Granted, this is what happens a lot of the time anyway, since you see so many "artists" trying to get by flipping burgers or working at Starbucks.
You're absolutely right; it's not that difficult, and don't let anyone make excuses for Diebold by saying it's a "complex problem". It's not. The Open Voting Consortium has a spec for a cheap, reliable and secure voting system using physically-secured home PCs and barcode readers. I suggested a system that uses barcoded-receipts and removable hard drives to do two separate counts on the same data in order to provide some sort of error correction in the event of a discrepancy between the counts. But seriously, any computer science graduate worth his salt could come up with and implement a better system than what we have.
ATMs are different from voting machines. Diebold doesn't really do much to design an ATM. They use already-existing APIs to interface with the ATM network. Pretty much all they do is grab input, send it across the network and interpret some output. They don't validate a user's account or manage the communication channel or anything complicated like that. The only thing that happens is Diebold code is probably a call to some function like send_withdrawal_request(char *card_number, char *PIN, short amt).
With a voting machine though, they had to design a system from the ground-up that was supposed to be computationally secure. Needless to say, they suck at it. Badly. It's almost unfathomable how idiotically flawed these things are. Why they even have any kind of networking capabilities at all is completely beyond me. But when you've got the company's founder saying that he was "committed" to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to Bush in 2004, it's not all that surprising. It's far easier to take advantage of incompetence than to try and overtly cheat. So by designing the machines so horribly, the thieves at the GOP manufacture an opportunity to alter votes while making it plausible that the machines were just badly designed.
Naturally, no one will ask why nothing is being done about it, why the flaws just happen to benefit one party in virtually every case, why the people who contracted these bad designs should be allowed to remain in power or why we're still letting Diebold near our voting booths. No, such concerns are far beyond the American people. The American people are good ole "salt of the earth" types, who are unsophisticated and treasure "small town" values, like inbreeding, detesting intellectuals and willfully remaining ignorant of the world at large. Demanding that Republicans put someone competent in charge of eVoting would be "elitism" and catering to those Volvo-driving, latte-sipping leftists, whose ultimate goal is to destroy American society as we know it.
Seriously, if the eVoting catastrophe is solely the result of massive incompetence at Diebold, I'd start a petition demanding that the programmers working there have their credentials stripped and be black-balled. You just can't get incompetence like that without actively trying.
Actually, if I remember right, he was using a pre-release copy of Mac OS 8. You could tell by the Platinum appearance.
Sorry, but you don't remember correctly. Apple stated that SecureWorks had not demonstrated any vulnerability in the AirPort drivers to them. As far as anyone knows, this is true. The SecureWorks people never owned a MacBook through exploiting AirPort drivers.
"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
-George W. Bush, Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000
Give credit where credit's due.
Indeed. A lot of those OS detection scripts don't parse the Intel Safari user agent string correctly, so they just relegate it to "other". Also, every other Mac browser includes the string "PPC" in its user-agent string for PowerPC. So if the libraries were set to look for that string, they'd miss something that said "Intel" instead.
These guys had a demonstrable bias against Apple's platform and users from the get-go. They specifically chose the MacBook because they didn't like Mac users' supposedly smug attitude about security, so they wanted to make a public example of a Mac getting 0wned. But oh wait, they used a third-party wireless device with a third-party driver, a setup that's about as common on Mac hardware as steaming shit in Antarctica. When asked why they chose this, they claimed that Apple had put pressure on them to not demonstrate the flaw with Apple hardware ... but to go ahead and tell everyone that the same flaw existed in Apple hardware anyway. Why Apple would ask them to do that is anyone's guess. This was a highly dubious claim at the least. It's not surprising at all that it turned out to be total bullshit.
With the statements from Apple, the questionable reasons given by the researchers and their ire about the Mac community in general, I think the most probable conclusion is that these guys are full of shit. What I can't understand is why they'd risk their reputations on something seemingly so petty.
DOS was simply the first perversion of the backslash. But I think we all know that Windows' popularity is what drove "backslash" into the mainstream's consciousness. And NTFS still uses it as a path separator. Hell, people use it in fucking English papers as a separator because they think it's the correct one. This isn't even limited to computer illiterates. A lot of people who know Windows well pull this shit too. People who post on web boards, too. Why? Because it's littered all over Windows. Windows uses it for network share URIs, paths, digging around the registry, etc ...
It used to be a simple escape character. Now it's like a fucking plague.
Uh, yeah. I know. I was joking.
Seriously, down with the backslash. It started out nobly enough as an escape character for Unix operating systems, but the poor little guy has been beaten and abused by clueless Windows users. How many times have we all seen fliers on a school bulletin board with URLs that looked like http:\\www.site.com\bla.html? How many times have we heard narrators on radio and TV commercials spell out a URL like "www.site.com backslash bla dot html"? How many times have we all told our relatives "Okay go to this link, 'www.site.com slash bla dot html'" only to spend five minutes figuring out that they think slashes are backslashes, causing them to type in a syntactically incorrect URL?
Our poor friend the backslash has been warped into a disgusting visage of its former self. It's begging to be taken off end users' keyboards. It can't take being typed into browser address fields anymore. It wants us to take it out back and, with a lone tear, put it down for good. And I think we all know the source of our friend's misery: Windows.
This is the problem with people who don't understand science. They see things as black and white. Science is about degrees of accuracy. Evolutionary theory is not wrong. It happens to be highly accurate, and that will simply never change. There are some things which is cannot explain, but that doesn't change the fact that there are mountains of things which it can explain. If a new theory comes along that explains everything evolution does and more, that theory will be superior, but evolution will not be wrong or invalidated. It will remain the highly accurate theory that it is today. Conceptually, it may be incorrect (in the description of the mechanism), but it will still be able to generate useful predictions.
You might as well claim that all those mechanical engineers using Newtonian mechanics to make cars are "wrong", too, because as we all know, the theory of special relativity replaced Newton's laws of motion. But oh wait, it turns out that the differences between Newton's laws and relativity are insignificant below 0.6c.
Garbage collection can't stop bad programming. It's perfectly easy to write a program in a garbage-collected language which bloats like crazy by simply leaving references to your objects around. Garbage collectors aren't psychic. They clear out an object when no more references are left.
Ah yes, repeat what you said with absolutely no justification so that your claims can't be critically examined. Truly brilliant. Period. Seriously.
So what about the kernel determines whether something is a "true Unix"? The simple fact is nothing, unless you're snobbish about monolithic versus microkernels or don't consider Mach to be a "real" kernel or something equally ridiculous. As long as the proper APIs are implemented, you could argue that something is a Unix. It doesn't matter whether you're running Mach, Windows NT or Linux underneath. A Unix can be built on any kernel; that's the whole point of POSIX.
Wow, that's great for him. Except that he's a journalist, not a software developer. As such, he wasn't in a position to appreciate the things that were presented during the Keynote. I know that journalists get intimidated when presented with things they can't understand or distill into small, 3- to 4-word sound bytes, but that's no reason to shoot the messenger. This conference is not about the average user. It was about the developers. Sometimes those interests coincide, like when the Intel transition was announced. Sometimes they don't. The press need to get it through their heads that Steve Jobs isn't going to introduce a new iPod every time he gets on stage.
Actually I thought it was a gcc compiler flag at first.
Whether or not something is a Unix has nothing to do with the kernel. It has to do with whether it is compliant with the POSIX standard. Apple hasn't gotten OS X POSIX certified as far as I'm aware, but they implement all the necessary APIs as far as I can tell.
Enron is a poster-child for corporate regulation. Beyond the fact that they cooked the books, they also had the state of California by the balls for quite a while. They'd artificially introduce power outages to squeeze every last dime out of their customers, and they did it while laughing on the phone with each other about how much money they were making off of others' misery. All because the Grand Conservative Experiment gave them a free hand to do so. (Although Gray Davis could've just sent the National Guard into those power plants and taken them over by force, such measures are not part of your standard free market.)
Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie.
All a corporation has to answer to is its bottom line. They don't care about people's suffering as long as it makes them money. As another example, look at what happened when Saint Reagan removed regulations on radio station ownership. All of a sudden, exactly six corporations started controlling the entirety of American radio.
I guess there actually is a flaw in the built-in drivers, but Apple asked the guy not to do the demo with AirPort. Weird. I wouldn't think it'd make a difference, really.