Exactly. That's the source of my amusement (albeit a sad sort of amusement) at the use of the term "free market" as either salvation or some form of ultimate corruption. It's not a major economic force; it's an illusion used to divert attention from what's actually happening.
Wrote more than I was anticipating, mostly not on-topic, but I'll post it all anyway.
It was meant as a joke, and I needed a less inflammatory example than the British Empire.:)
It's hard to accurately compare the size of modern or historic organizations that primarily employed terrorist tactics, but there's little dispute about the size or power of the Roman Empire, so it made a good candidate for the joke. Terrorists are by nature secretive about their size and extent, and uncovering the truth has proven difficult or impossible in most cases. There also is a great deal of controversy regarding what constitutes a terrorist organization. Usually it depends on your perspective, though there are notable groups that exist, or have existed, which are almost universally perceived as terrorist (such as Al Qaeda).
It's not really a reference to any particular event, more to the entire Roman culture as a whole (perhaps excepting art). While not exactly terrorism from a modern perspective (which is itself hard to define), the Roman Empire certainly thrived on the use of terror tactics to maintain or extend their political order. They commonly struck non-military targets in order to maintain a constant fear of brutal reprisal for acts against their interests, and enslaved the men, women, and children who were not simply killed outright in response to provincial disobedience.
You're probably thinking of the firing of the Roman fleet in Ostia, which is among the more notable incidents of terrorism committed against Rome. The ensuing panic provided the springboard for the dissolution of the Roman Republic through the passage of the Lex Gabinia, and all but ensured the eventual military takeover of the government. There are many, many others though. Given the nature of their military, terrorist tactics were certainly preferable to many of those subject to Roman aggression.
It works out well for people who leave the service relatively sound of mind and body.
Unfortunately, there are many who don't, and frequently they are the ones who do not have the needs incurred by their service met after they leave.
Positive anecdotal experiences do not negate the negative ones, and vice versa. There is more than one side to military service, because there is more than one person who has served in the military.
Advocacy is wasted at this point. There are too many people too interested in short-term gains for the Titanic to be turned away from the iceberg.
Whether gold or paper, the currency doesn't prevent runs on banks, or the fallout that causes. Failure to keep reserves high enough to satisfy panicky customers is the problem, again regardless of what's perceived to be the container of value. Both are susceptible. It's just easier to disguise the failure with paper, since printing is dirt cheap and hides the real cost of the fix.
Novelty is a perfectly reasonable goal when it means the difference between turning the wheel and preserving the tradition of "staying the course" when there's an iceberg dead ahead and in plain view to anyone who bothers to look.
I would note that my comments were in a larger societal context. On a large scale I would agree such a market has never existed, just like communism. On a small scale, I would disagree, as both have occurred in local contexts very close to the idealized notion of what each is, and have in one form or another for likely the entirety of human history.
They cease to exist when scaled past relatively non-complex interactions.
The economy is toast no matter who is elected. The current growth rate of public spending is unsustainable and will either collapse the economy when it reaches the breaking point or will collapse the economy in the process of being reigned in. Since politicians don't reign anything in, it will almost certainly be the former.
At least trying something different would be novel, even if it doesn't work.
Then again, I'd also support the complete dissolution of the United States into 50 independent republics. But that's just me.
The answer, of course, is to attack everyone in such a circumstance. Who cares where it's coming from? Bomb everything with an EM signature.
If there's no link that can be determined, they'll just make one up. If/when it gets found out, they'll blame someone, make up another excuse, and claim that was the reason all along.
I do believe that office software is the chink in MSFT's armor. It's far easier to replace, and has a vastly lower degree of associated hassles than switching to another OS does.
It's amusing to think that MSFT would probably prefer people to pirate MS Office than to forgo it and install OpenOffice. I'm sure they'd never confirm that was the case, but I have a hunch it's true.
I've got to agree, especially in regard to BeOS. It just goes to show that the only thing that really wins in the consumer space is how quickly you get the best lies to market.
It's funny how so many people use the term "free market" as both salvation and pejorative, when no such thing exists (or really ever has, except on an icredibly limited scale) in the United States.
There have been shades of it, but that's about as close as it gets. Sort of like calling what happened in Russia "communism," when it was anything but.
Unless you're talking to yourself in that post, you must have missed all the "I's" in it. The poster was talking about their own choices. Nowhere in there was a lecture regarding what you should and shouldn't do. It was a commentary on their own choices and specifically denoted opinion about the nature of how many people look past the process that gets them the resulting products they use.
So now butt out & don't lecture
The only one telling someone what they should and shouldn't do is you, right here.
Unfortunately, our society has become increasingly sociopathic. It's alright as long as someone else does it. If you want the end result, what it takes to get there doesn't matter, and so forth. Unless you do it yourself, and then you're a monster. Or, unless you do it for others, then you're a service provider.
Then there are the people like the one you responded to, who are incapable of distinguishing between personal responsibility and a fleeting desire to get what they want regardless of the consequences.
I was not saying it was harmful in general, but that it is harmful to a large number of people, and not typically those attending private colleges. It's typically those attending commercial or public colleges.
I also was not saying it applies to all fields, but it certainly cuts across hard, soft, and non-science fields. There are places, like physics, where there simply are not enough jobs to employee even a majority of new graduates.
You'll find that the enormous field of commercial education, which encompasses more than half of all Federal loans underwritten, comes with far more than anecdotal evidence of wholesale economic devestation of almost half of those who attend.
Yes, there are two sides. I posted because few people present the ugly side of higher education, and it is very, very ugly in many places.
I find it highly unlikely that those passwords were used by multiple people. Much more likely that they were used on multiple accounts by the same people. While the Myspace phishing list is useful as a dictionary source, the further down the list you get the less useful the passwords are in general.
The pattern of non-alphas that repeat 3 times isn't surprising. What is surprising is that, in looking through an analysis of the Myspace list of 34,000 released passwords, it appears that those above are the only 3 passwords in the entire list to use the # character. That also means they're not duplicated, which was part of an earlier point I made. I was asking for passwords that multiple people use, not one-offs that will never be useful unless targeted at the person they were originally stolen from. There may be a lot of them in dictionaries, but the likelihood of strong passwords using non-obvious replacement or pattern mechanism and incorporating numbers, letters, and characters, is still an extraordinarily small percentage.
Looking up the various professional analyses done on the major password database breaches, this is borne out repeatedly. Such passwords encompass an insignificant percentage of those broken. For example, passwords from the combined Myspace, phpBB, and singles.org password lists contained a whopping 0.61% occurrence of the use of non-alphanumeric characters. That, to me, is a significantly insubstantial minority.
The likelihood of overlapping use of the same non-alpha characters in the same place, in the same password, is vanishingly small. Have you ever encountered, or seen anyone else encounter, that actually happening? If so, I'd be interested to see what 'strong' passwords those are, though not some obvious 'l33t' replacement scheme (given that any decent dictionary attack accounts for them without explicit addition).
That's about as likely as any of the things I listed in my above reply to Eunuchswear, which is to say not at all likely. In a lot of ways, it's even less likely, since people who tend to fall for phishing attacks tend to be those who wouldn't use a strong password anyway.
I fundamentally believe that if you go to school, it should be because you enjoy learning, and want to make the best you can of your education. Otherwise, you're going through the motions, and you're not going to learn anything worthwhile. Worse yet, your critical thinking abilities remain unchanged, defeating the very purpose of higher education.
This is the problem with those who think a college education is the cure for all problems. College is beneficial for people who actually want to be there. Shoe-horning people into college for some utopian ideal that it's "for their own good" is completely moronic. Those people usually end up at the bottom of the stack in the same way they would if they never attended college, but just cause more paper to have to be shuffled through to find those who would have gotten the job anyway.
If there are X jobs, and X+Y applicants who are qualified, regardless of whether they have a diploma or not, the same X applicants will more than likely get the job. If those Y applicants got loans to go to school because they felt they had to, not only are the no better off, they're likely to me much worse off.
And then they'd have no startup capital to create a business, which is the point of the endeavor. Doing both is vastly more expensive. Not everyone needs a college education to excel. He's not paying people to become more-rounded members of society. He's paying people to create jobs and possibly The Next Big Thing.
This is the exact opposite of actually helping advance this particular goal. $100,000 and a good business idea is worth far more financially than almost any college education, as long as they have a good vetting process.
If only one person succeeds, they'll generate jobs for a lot of those people who stay in college and would not have a job afterward but for the person who dropped out.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. That's the source of my amusement (albeit a sad sort of amusement) at the use of the term "free market" as either salvation or some form of ultimate corruption. It's not a major economic force; it's an illusion used to divert attention from what's actually happening.
Wrote more than I was anticipating, mostly not on-topic, but I'll post it all anyway.
It was meant as a joke, and I needed a less inflammatory example than the British Empire. :)
It's hard to accurately compare the size of modern or historic organizations that primarily employed terrorist tactics, but there's little dispute about the size or power of the Roman Empire, so it made a good candidate for the joke. Terrorists are by nature secretive about their size and extent, and uncovering the truth has proven difficult or impossible in most cases. There also is a great deal of controversy regarding what constitutes a terrorist organization. Usually it depends on your perspective, though there are notable groups that exist, or have existed, which are almost universally perceived as terrorist (such as Al Qaeda).
It's not really a reference to any particular event, more to the entire Roman culture as a whole (perhaps excepting art). While not exactly terrorism from a modern perspective (which is itself hard to define), the Roman Empire certainly thrived on the use of terror tactics to maintain or extend their political order. They commonly struck non-military targets in order to maintain a constant fear of brutal reprisal for acts against their interests, and enslaved the men, women, and children who were not simply killed outright in response to provincial disobedience.
You're probably thinking of the firing of the Roman fleet in Ostia, which is among the more notable incidents of terrorism committed against Rome. The ensuing panic provided the springboard for the dissolution of the Roman Republic through the passage of the Lex Gabinia, and all but ensured the eventual military takeover of the government. There are many, many others though. Given the nature of their military, terrorist tactics were certainly preferable to many of those subject to Roman aggression.
It works out well for people who leave the service relatively sound of mind and body.
Unfortunately, there are many who don't, and frequently they are the ones who do not have the needs incurred by their service met after they leave.
Positive anecdotal experiences do not negate the negative ones, and vice versa. There is more than one side to military service, because there is more than one person who has served in the military.
Advocacy is wasted at this point. There are too many people too interested in short-term gains for the Titanic to be turned away from the iceberg.
Whether gold or paper, the currency doesn't prevent runs on banks, or the fallout that causes. Failure to keep reserves high enough to satisfy panicky customers is the problem, again regardless of what's perceived to be the container of value. Both are susceptible. It's just easier to disguise the failure with paper, since printing is dirt cheap and hides the real cost of the fix.
Novelty is a perfectly reasonable goal when it means the difference between turning the wheel and preserving the tradition of "staying the course" when there's an iceberg dead ahead and in plain view to anyone who bothers to look.
I would note that my comments were in a larger societal context. On a large scale I would agree such a market has never existed, just like communism. On a small scale, I would disagree, as both have occurred in local contexts very close to the idealized notion of what each is, and have in one form or another for likely the entirety of human history.
They cease to exist when scaled past relatively non-complex interactions.
The economy is toast no matter who is elected. The current growth rate of public spending is unsustainable and will either collapse the economy when it reaches the breaking point or will collapse the economy in the process of being reigned in. Since politicians don't reign anything in, it will almost certainly be the former.
At least trying something different would be novel, even if it doesn't work.
Then again, I'd also support the complete dissolution of the United States into 50 independent republics. But that's just me.
I fully support a War on Spam, and would like to see the CIA's Predator drones re-tasked with the bombing of those involved in spamming. :)
Nobody remembers, at least in the US, because it's not convenient to the conventional world-view held by the majority of US citizens.
it's petty and ignorant to compare him to the leader of the largest terrorist organization ever in known history.
Osama Bin Laden was the emperor of Rome?!
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Of course, that gets really complicated when everyone hates you and each other. Does that make everyone friends when it occurs?
I may have to dig up some Dr Demento now.
The answer, of course, is to attack everyone in such a circumstance. Who cares where it's coming from? Bomb everything with an EM signature.
If there's no link that can be determined, they'll just make one up. If/when it gets found out, they'll blame someone, make up another excuse, and claim that was the reason all along.
I do believe that office software is the chink in MSFT's armor. It's far easier to replace, and has a vastly lower degree of associated hassles than switching to another OS does.
It's amusing to think that MSFT would probably prefer people to pirate MS Office than to forgo it and install OpenOffice. I'm sure they'd never confirm that was the case, but I have a hunch it's true.
I've got to agree, especially in regard to BeOS. It just goes to show that the only thing that really wins in the consumer space is how quickly you get the best lies to market.
It's funny how so many people use the term "free market" as both salvation and pejorative, when no such thing exists (or really ever has, except on an icredibly limited scale) in the United States.
There have been shades of it, but that's about as close as it gets. Sort of like calling what happened in Russia "communism," when it was anything but.
If his Ex has to read /. to know he's not paying child support... yeah...
Finally, a company that understands the DRM is irrelevant past the release date.
Unless you're talking to yourself in that post, you must have missed all the "I's" in it. The poster was talking about their own choices. Nowhere in there was a lecture regarding what you should and shouldn't do. It was a commentary on their own choices and specifically denoted opinion about the nature of how many people look past the process that gets them the resulting products they use.
So now butt out & don't lecture
The only one telling someone what they should and shouldn't do is you, right here.
Unfortunately, our society has become increasingly sociopathic. It's alright as long as someone else does it. If you want the end result, what it takes to get there doesn't matter, and so forth. Unless you do it yourself, and then you're a monster. Or, unless you do it for others, then you're a service provider.
Then there are the people like the one you responded to, who are incapable of distinguishing between personal responsibility and a fleeting desire to get what they want regardless of the consequences.
I was not saying it was harmful in general, but that it is harmful to a large number of people, and not typically those attending private colleges. It's typically those attending commercial or public colleges.
I also was not saying it applies to all fields, but it certainly cuts across hard, soft, and non-science fields. There are places, like physics, where there simply are not enough jobs to employee even a majority of new graduates.
You'll find that the enormous field of commercial education, which encompasses more than half of all Federal loans underwritten, comes with far more than anecdotal evidence of wholesale economic devestation of almost half of those who attend.
Yes, there are two sides. I posted because few people present the ugly side of higher education, and it is very, very ugly in many places.
I find it highly unlikely that those passwords were used by multiple people. Much more likely that they were used on multiple accounts by the same people. While the Myspace phishing list is useful as a dictionary source, the further down the list you get the less useful the passwords are in general.
The pattern of non-alphas that repeat 3 times isn't surprising. What is surprising is that, in looking through an analysis of the Myspace list of 34,000 released passwords, it appears that those above are the only 3 passwords in the entire list to use the # character. That also means they're not duplicated, which was part of an earlier point I made. I was asking for passwords that multiple people use, not one-offs that will never be useful unless targeted at the person they were originally stolen from. There may be a lot of them in dictionaries, but the likelihood of strong passwords using non-obvious replacement or pattern mechanism and incorporating numbers, letters, and characters, is still an extraordinarily small percentage.
Looking up the various professional analyses done on the major password database breaches, this is borne out repeatedly. Such passwords encompass an insignificant percentage of those broken. For example, passwords from the combined Myspace, phpBB, and singles.org password lists contained a whopping 0.61% occurrence of the use of non-alphanumeric characters. That, to me, is a significantly insubstantial minority.
The likelihood of overlapping use of the same non-alpha characters in the same place, in the same password, is vanishingly small. Have you ever encountered, or seen anyone else encounter, that actually happening? If so, I'd be interested to see what 'strong' passwords those are, though not some obvious 'l33t' replacement scheme (given that any decent dictionary attack accounts for them without explicit addition).
That's about as likely as any of the things I listed in my above reply to Eunuchswear, which is to say not at all likely. In a lot of ways, it's even less likely, since people who tend to fall for phishing attacks tend to be those who wouldn't use a strong password anyway.
I fundamentally believe that if you go to school, it should be because you enjoy learning, and want to make the best you can of your education. Otherwise, you're going through the motions, and you're not going to learn anything worthwhile. Worse yet, your critical thinking abilities remain unchanged, defeating the very purpose of higher education.
This is the problem with those who think a college education is the cure for all problems. College is beneficial for people who actually want to be there. Shoe-horning people into college for some utopian ideal that it's "for their own good" is completely moronic. Those people usually end up at the bottom of the stack in the same way they would if they never attended college, but just cause more paper to have to be shuffled through to find those who would have gotten the job anyway.
If there are X jobs, and X+Y applicants who are qualified, regardless of whether they have a diploma or not, the same X applicants will more than likely get the job. If those Y applicants got loans to go to school because they felt they had to, not only are the no better off, they're likely to me much worse off.
And then they'd have no startup capital to create a business, which is the point of the endeavor. Doing both is vastly more expensive. Not everyone needs a college education to excel. He's not paying people to become more-rounded members of society. He's paying people to create jobs and possibly The Next Big Thing.
This is the exact opposite of actually helping advance this particular goal. $100,000 and a good business idea is worth far more financially than almost any college education, as long as they have a good vetting process.
If only one person succeeds, they'll generate jobs for a lot of those people who stay in college and would not have a job afterward but for the person who dropped out.