I especially like the points about authoritarian leaders vs authoritarian followers. Some (many, actually, IME) people like and even prefer being told what to do. As long as life isn't too bad, removing *choices* from people makes them more comfortable. People do vary, but every decision is a stress, and once people are used to making decisions the stress for making any given decision goes down. But the fewer things someone has to decide the more stressful it becomes to make any decision.
And politicians (and talking heads and baptist preachers and...) are here to make those decisions for you. Some people find this more comforting than others, but it is a relief to not have to make decisions and that is the allure of an authoritarian figure.
"What we need is a strong leader" is a phrase I've heard more than once. What those saying that want is someone to say strongly and unequivocally what should be done and make that happen. Your post has helped me connect the dots to realize why Trump is so popular.
I think the problem is less with attribution -- as so many people are pointing out including a link is a basic part of code documentation -- and more with pretending to have authority to license the code that is posted.
Consider a few situations:
If someone posts public domain code, then SO is claiming that they can take the code out of the public domain. While a government can pass a law to do something that idiotic, SO lacks the authority.
If someone posts proprietary code without permission, then SO is claiming the code is free to use as long as you provide attribution -- even though they have no authority to do so.
The right thing for SO to do is encourage the obvious -- link because it is a basic form of documentation, but don't pretend to provide a license.
They should take pains to point out they are not responsible for the posts of its users and provide a "take down" mechanism so that if code is misappropriated then the answer providing it can be marked as such. By using the link as documentation, someone maintaining code would have a chance to discover that proprietary code had been misappropriated and take appropriate action.
i realize this was probably intended as a joke but...
"Hermetically sealed" is a reference to the hermetic heretics who, among other things, practiced what most people would call alchemy and one part of that involved sealing something air-tight. Long story short, if you wanted something to have an air-tight seal you wanted it hermetically sealed and the phrase outlasted the heretics by a long, long time.
(As an aside, they didn't consider themselves to be heretics but felt that their beliefs were entirely consistent with Christianity. There were not the only heretics to believe so.)
I take it you've never worked with secured material or systems. What you suggest would be an extreme violation of rules. If the system is cleared for TS then it is never to be provided to someone with a lower clearance. Heck, only dealing with secret requires special handling. For example, secret must be protected in a safe. At least some years ago the common practice was to use removable hard drives -- office is secured during work, and at the end of the day all of the hard drives were secured in the safe.
The idea that you can simply "close the application" and hand over a system approved for TS to someone without a TS clearance is absurd in the extreme.
you introduce your unspecified "millionaires club" and then point out that, over someone's work life, they can easily make a million dollars. So what? WTF does that have to do with the question at hand?
I'm not going to claim to know what GP meant by millionaire in "the average millionaire is a millionaire", but he clearly referenced income ("and each returning approximately 25 cents of interest"), not savings.
If you are trying to imply that an average worker can become one of the wealthy elite by simply saving better than average you are:
Why would you think that government employees would be immune to it? What makes them different, other than the fact that they work for an employer that uses an open system? Do you think only people who are okay with openess work for the government? On what basis?
I don't work for the federal government, but like many state employees my salary is public information. I deliberately *don't* look at what other people make because it is too depressing (anyone who thinks that publicly disclosed pay makes it equitable is very wrong) and because it is misleading. For example, a friend of mine negotiated (private company) for more PTO rather than aiming for the highest salary. If you blindly compared his salary to someone else's you would be left with the impression that he was under compensated -- but that very likely wasn't true.
I agree insofar as I don't see how public salaries make things better (other than for public employees where the transparency is definitely needed), but they don't make things any worse, either.
why post AC? If I hadn't already posted I'd have modded this up. Of course, that naturally leads into a discussion about the gravity of the punishment for those charges...
By old usage, "cracking" was about breaking copy protection. In the 80s I can only recall it being used to refer game piracy. I don't recall the term "hacker" being used for game piracy at all. The terms "crack" and "cracker" are still primarily applied to game piracy.
Of course, breaking into someone's accounts is not the same as pirating a game. Attempts to retroactively define "evil hacker" as "cracker" are just that, retroactive. And not particularly successful. Yeah, someone who likes to "hack" might also be involved in game piracy. There is room for overlap.
However, the truth is both words are new to the English vocabulary and even words that are well established can have fuzzy meaning or change over time. "moot point" vs "mute point"; "beg the question" vs "raise the question"; "gay" vs "joyous"; "wood" vs "crazy" vs "boner".
So it isn't really surprising that people have different ideas about what newly coined words "mean" or that someone trying to make sense of things and keep their language orderly tries to insist on their personal convention being the rule. What I particularly object to, however, is the insistence that past usage was something that it rather was not.
so... you agree with gstoddart that the term and distinction occurred in the 90s? You do realize that your "1994" data point does not disagree with his assertion?
BTW: life existed before you were born, people (including your parents) had sex. Yes, it was a new discovery for them too. Every generation thinks it is unique, special, and the first to discover everything. Honestly, since you seem to have been self aware twenty years ago I'm a little surprised you haven't figured this all out yet.
No, bringing in sex isn't off topic, it is central to much of what each generation thinks is new and discovered by them and rejects out of hand that their forebears could have known about despite the obvious fact that they did. The existence of hacking for decades before the 90s is another symptom of the same phenomena.
Microsoft doesn't care in the slightest if every customer hates them with a passion. They only care about whether or not they can make money. Making money off teeming masses of enraged users is perfectly fine with them...because they are making money.
Apple certainly disabled Java and will currently disable flash. They only do so when it is being exploited *and* a patched version is available. Personally, I think they shouldn't bother waiting for a patched version, but, hey.
Google has a deal with Adobe (part of their "FU" to Apple, amusingly enough) so that Chrome is always up-to-date with Flash. Doesn't stop it from being exploited before an update is available, though.
But, sure, go ahead and conflate OS major version upgrades with security fixes. I mean, its all the same thing, right?
Many many years (some centuries ago), in Spain I believe, they had a serious problem with crime. It just wasn't safe for law abiding citizens to go about at night what with all the dark streets and criminals lurking in the shadows.
But! A solution was found: a law was made that required anyone abroad at night to carry a lit lantern so that they would make a conspicuous target... I mean so that only criminals would be lurking in the shadows... I mean, gosh darn it, why can't people just see we are legislating our way toward a better tomorrow?!
In short, your point is well made. You cannot legislate crime away -- and sometimes well intended laws at best either make normal citizens into criminals or put them at even greater risk.
Not exactly that. What they did was junk the entire KDE locale, presumably in order to have less code to maintain (hard to figure out why else they would). It is actually less shiny -- no preview of what the change will do, etc.
It isn't as if KDE's user space consisted largely of people who liked to customize the shit out of it. Oh, wait...
Holy cow that is awful. Although I've been using KDE for the last fifteen years or so my current workstation is KDE only because of long refresh cycles. Since I can't have KDE 3 I think I'll switch to MATE. Not great, but better than that.
For those who can't be bothered to follow the link: one of the "improvements" in KDE 5 is removing Locale and using Qt's limited locale functionality. Which eliminated nearly all locale configurability. The lack of configurability won't be fixed by the KDE team because it is a feature of their elimination of KDE's locale.
I didn't see it stated, but I expect Qt won't add it because the configurability belongs in the desktop manager, not individual applications. In other words, if your locale is "US" then you get the stupid US date format (I only ever use YYYY-MM-DD) and similar stupidity. In KDE 5 your locale settings can only be what is normal for your region. Don't like it? Find a region that does match what you like (usually not possible) and set it to that. The usability is actually even worse, but for more you'd have to read through the bug report comments.
Apple isn't interested, though. You know what is a great way (from Apple's point of view) to introducing people? The iPhone. Apple isn't that focused on OS X. They don't even really care if you never use it. What they *do* care about is getting people into their ecosystem so that whatever money they spend is spent on or through Apple.
So while it might be nice for a consumer to be able to buy a compute stick loaded with OS X -- that isn't really something that Apple has any motivation to provide.
As for the "... use for some existing low-RAM applications"? Are you kidding? OS X and Windows are close enough in terms of hogging resources as to be the same. If you kit out linux to be anything like either of them then it also requires equivalent resources -- its advantage is that you don't have to. Windows (probably because MS is paying Intel) and Linux (for those who don't want it).
While I don't completely disagree with you, your argument rests entirely on the flawed premise that your free time has no value. In business terms the exchange you are talking about is opportunity cost. The time you spend futzing with something rather than just paying for a solution is time that could have been spent doing something else.
Of course it isn't as simple as placing an hourly rate valuation on your free time. When I was a college student I had far more free time which resulted in a lower "value" placed on it than it presently has. However, "futzing with something else" isn't always a cost -- it could be a value providing activity. And when that saves money as well it is a no-brainer.
But to pretend that there isn't opportunity cost is missing the reason *why* most people will willing spend $100 (or $500 or more) on Windows or some other "sub-optimal" solution.
Your claim is only sort of true. The collisions are not quite that arbitrary. The best known for MD5 allows substituting an arbitrary file, but by appending calculated gibberish until the desired hash is achieved. The SHA1 collision attacks, while significant from a cryptographic perspective, are not so dire from an integrity point of view.
Currently, MD5 is sufficient to demonstrate that no unintentional data alterations took place (e.g., data corruption, as you refer to). SHA1 is sufficient to demonstrate that a file is unchanged. Combine MD5 with a file size and integrity checking (e.g., can the ISO file system be mounted without errors) and you are in the clear. Some people use MD5 and SHA1 because there is no known attack methodology that can defeat both.
The problem for downloading that prevents MD5 from rising above checking for corruption in transit is that in most cases you have no way to validate the provided MD5 hash. This is actually a rather difficult problem when talking about Internet downloads -- the communications channel is untrusted and there is no practical out of band mechanism (much less a trusted one).
Related, this is the fundamental problem with https. You are supposed to trust the pre-loaded certificates in your browser that anything in a signing chain from their matching private certificate can be trusted. But there are numerous examples to prove this wrong. The *only* thing that https does (if it even does that, and frequently it doesn't) is encrypt the communications channel between your browser and the server it is talking to -- which may very well not be the one which you *think* that you are talking to.
In other words, neither hashing nor encryption provide any surety by themselves. But SHA-1 (and even MD5) are not broken quite as badly as you think (given non-cryptographic uses).
I noticed you don't have anything to say about the rest of the post, and admit that the quoted part is at least partially true. The strange thing is that there is so much anti-North Korea propaganda that it makes it hard to tell what is true and what isn't.
I can tell you this, though, and that is that if the propaganda you refer to were actually true there would have been a revolution by now. That kind of situation cannot last, people will put up with a lot, but only so much. And North Korea has been around too long.
Is it pleasant there? I rather don't think so. But gp's point wasn't that it was great, but that compared to other enemies of the US they seem to be doing pretty well. Of course, it isn't hard to beat the current situation in Syria and from the Libyans I know I think he is exaggerating how bad it is in Libya. Moreover, even if *currently* it is better in North Korea than Syria I don't think the same claim can be made when considering the last sixty years.
The impression I'm left with is that gp took some essentially true statements and combined them in a misleading way to support his thesis that nuclear weapons protect the interests of a country or ethnic group. I'm really not sure if it is funny or troll -- which is why I'm posting rather than using my mod points.
the summary may simply be poor, but most likely what is being referred to is password re-use.
Say my email address is thoromyr@gmail.com and I'm a customer at Acme Corporation. Like many places, they use my email address as the username. I use the password "Pass1234" because it is strong (upper case, lower case and numbers) and easy to remember (those security guys said I needed to create a memorable password that met their "complexity requirements").
Later on, I get an account at Atlassian and, surprise, they also use my email address as the username. Now, coming up with one memorable yet complex password is hard work so, like most people, I use it again. A few months later, Atlassian announces that their Jira system was compromised and usernames and passwords leaked.
Acme Corporation hasn't had a compromise, but now someone with the information from the Atlassian compromise can login as me on their system.
Even worse, if I'm like most people I used the same password at gmail, so they can login as me there and probably find every place I do business with and can try the logins there (and if for some reason the password does not work go through the password reset procedure).
sorry, but "unabridged" means nothing with respect to the comprehensiveness of a dictionary -- except that if there is an abridged edition of the same dictionary the abridged version will have fewer words (or smaller definitions, or something).
Your conclusion is based on a flawed assumption. I've been using a small dictionary for around thirty five years now. I can't check it (the dictionary is at home), but based on frequency of word use over time and the quality of that dictionary I expect the word would be listed. Maybe your unabridged dictionary isn't as good as you think it is -- if you actually care about words it is worthwhile having more than one dictionary.
People often don't really register words that they hear or see (especially if the words seem familiar) and tend to underestimate the frequency of usage or overestimate their recency of usage as a result.
Lets compare "performant" (which has apparently been in use for over a hundred years and is still used with many people having a basic idea of what it means from its form and in context) with "tergiversator" (which comes from latin and is essentially unused in recent years though still listed in dictionaries -- and I'd wager most people have no idea what it means without consulting a dictionary).
No, it is not. Apparently you do not understand the relationship between education (not necessarily university) and the economy. Educating citizens advances the group as a whole. It improves the economy and increases wealth. I thought this was well understood, but apparently not. I'm too lazy to go look it up, but there at least used to be an approximation of this effect by measuring engineers per capita.
It all depends on where you are at, which department is involved and the faculty pool that is available.
When I was a student I happened to take Soc 101 from the department chair. Normally she taught graduate level classes, but something had happened (I never did know just what) so that she taught the intro class. It was a large class, typical of required introductory classes. It was clear that the vast majority of the students hated it, but I loved it. She had a hard time slowing down to high school graduate level, though to be fair many entering students are not up to university work (I moved around a lot at first during college so I attended each university's required introductory courses and thus got exposed to more entering students than most other students).
My point was, the class was great, at least from my perspective. Definitely one of the most interesting I've taken (almost convinced me to switch majors to sociology).
On the other hand I had Calc II from a professor who bragged about not passing the majority of his students. As you might expect his lectures were worthless, but near the end of the semester the TA for my section was replaced and the new TA was excellent (an art major who had switched to math, interestingly enough). That experience sure argues for the TA over the professor, but the TA we had initially was no better than the professor.
As for research faculty: if they are successful (meaning, lots of research dollars) they will normally get a reduced class load and, in the extreme case, be relieved of class responsibility. It is not common for them to teach introductory courses. This varies by department and over time, but *usually* introductory courses are taught by junior faculty.
But some of the researchers will simply refuse to teach classes and instead have TAs do all of the lecturing, grading and... well, teach the class. (Some of them also have the TAs do all of their research as well, but that is a different topic.) But to your point, the *reason* for a university is to teach, not to do research. Often, research goes along with graduate students and so fulfills that teaching role. But given that the general expectation is that faculty teach... that is why they are expected to teach.
Sadly, brilliance has little to do with ability to teach. As a student I knew a TA and I felt sorry for his students. He was brilliant in his field and couldn't comprehend how a student wouldn't immediately grasp every concept when it was first presented. After all, he did. I'm acquainted with a math professor who corrected some function on an HP calculator. But he can't teach and nearly every student drops the class if he ends up as the assigned instructor.
Whether the instructor is adjunct or tenured, a TA or a researcher, the quality of instruction just varies.
... and where were grades raised in that discussion? Oh, right, they weren't.
The issue raised was a perceived lack of concern about racial issues on the part of the university administration. Every single instance I recall seeing reported was outside of the classroom (and some off of the campus).
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wish i had mod points...
I especially like the points about authoritarian leaders vs authoritarian followers. Some (many, actually, IME) people like and even prefer being told what to do. As long as life isn't too bad, removing *choices* from people makes them more comfortable. People do vary, but every decision is a stress, and once people are used to making decisions the stress for making any given decision goes down. But the fewer things someone has to decide the more stressful it becomes to make any decision.
And politicians (and talking heads and baptist preachers and ...) are here to make those decisions for you. Some people find this more comforting than others, but it is a relief to not have to make decisions and that is the allure of an authoritarian figure.
"What we need is a strong leader" is a phrase I've heard more than once. What those saying that want is someone to say strongly and unequivocally what should be done and make that happen. Your post has helped me connect the dots to realize why Trump is so popular.
I think the problem is less with attribution -- as so many people are pointing out including a link is a basic part of code documentation -- and more with pretending to have authority to license the code that is posted.
Consider a few situations:
If someone posts public domain code, then SO is claiming that they can take the code out of the public domain. While a government can pass a law to do something that idiotic, SO lacks the authority.
If someone posts proprietary code without permission, then SO is claiming the code is free to use as long as you provide attribution -- even though they have no authority to do so.
The right thing for SO to do is encourage the obvious -- link because it is a basic form of documentation, but don't pretend to provide a license.
They should take pains to point out they are not responsible for the posts of its users and provide a "take down" mechanism so that if code is misappropriated then the answer providing it can be marked as such. By using the link as documentation, someone maintaining code would have a chance to discover that proprietary code had been misappropriated and take appropriate action.
i realize this was probably intended as a joke but...
"Hermetically sealed" is a reference to the hermetic heretics who, among other things, practiced what most people would call alchemy and one part of that involved sealing something air-tight. Long story short, if you wanted something to have an air-tight seal you wanted it hermetically sealed and the phrase outlasted the heretics by a long, long time.
(As an aside, they didn't consider themselves to be heretics but felt that their beliefs were entirely consistent with Christianity. There were not the only heretics to believe so.)
I take it you've never worked with secured material or systems. What you suggest would be an extreme violation of rules. If the system is cleared for TS then it is never to be provided to someone with a lower clearance. Heck, only dealing with secret requires special handling. For example, secret must be protected in a safe. At least some years ago the common practice was to use removable hard drives -- office is secured during work, and at the end of the day all of the hard drives were secured in the safe.
The idea that you can simply "close the application" and hand over a system approved for TS to someone without a TS clearance is absurd in the extreme.
you introduce your unspecified "millionaires club" and then point out that, over someone's work life, they can easily make a million dollars. So what? WTF does that have to do with the question at hand?
I'm not going to claim to know what GP meant by millionaire in "the average millionaire is a millionaire", but he clearly referenced income ("and each returning approximately 25 cents of interest"), not savings.
If you are trying to imply that an average worker can become one of the wealthy elite by simply saving better than average you are:
1) a fucking moron ...
2) trolling
3)
nah, I think its just one or the other
Why would you think that government employees would be immune to it? What makes them different, other than the fact that they work for an employer that uses an open system? Do you think only people who are okay with openess work for the government? On what basis?
I don't work for the federal government, but like many state employees my salary is public information. I deliberately *don't* look at what other people make because it is too depressing (anyone who thinks that publicly disclosed pay makes it equitable is very wrong) and because it is misleading. For example, a friend of mine negotiated (private company) for more PTO rather than aiming for the highest salary. If you blindly compared his salary to someone else's you would be left with the impression that he was under compensated -- but that very likely wasn't true.
I agree insofar as I don't see how public salaries make things better (other than for public employees where the transparency is definitely needed), but they don't make things any worse, either.
why post AC? If I hadn't already posted I'd have modded this up. Of course, that naturally leads into a discussion about the gravity of the punishment for those charges...
By old usage, "cracking" was about breaking copy protection. In the 80s I can only recall it being used to refer game piracy. I don't recall the term "hacker" being used for game piracy at all. The terms "crack" and "cracker" are still primarily applied to game piracy.
Of course, breaking into someone's accounts is not the same as pirating a game. Attempts to retroactively define "evil hacker" as "cracker" are just that, retroactive. And not particularly successful. Yeah, someone who likes to "hack" might also be involved in game piracy. There is room for overlap.
However, the truth is both words are new to the English vocabulary and even words that are well established can have fuzzy meaning or change over time. "moot point" vs "mute point"; "beg the question" vs "raise the question"; "gay" vs "joyous"; "wood" vs "crazy" vs "boner".
So it isn't really surprising that people have different ideas about what newly coined words "mean" or that someone trying to make sense of things and keep their language orderly tries to insist on their personal convention being the rule. What I particularly object to, however, is the insistence that past usage was something that it rather was not.
so... you agree with gstoddart that the term and distinction occurred in the 90s? You do realize that your "1994" data point does not disagree with his assertion?
BTW: life existed before you were born, people (including your parents) had sex. Yes, it was a new discovery for them too. Every generation thinks it is unique, special, and the first to discover everything. Honestly, since you seem to have been self aware twenty years ago I'm a little surprised you haven't figured this all out yet.
No, bringing in sex isn't off topic, it is central to much of what each generation thinks is new and discovered by them and rejects out of hand that their forebears could have known about despite the obvious fact that they did. The existence of hacking for decades before the 90s is another symptom of the same phenomena.
Microsoft doesn't care in the slightest if every customer hates them with a passion. They only care about whether or not they can make money. Making money off teeming masses of enraged users is perfectly fine with them...because they are making money.
This. So much this.
Apple certainly disabled Java and will currently disable flash. They only do so when it is being exploited *and* a patched version is available. Personally, I think they shouldn't bother waiting for a patched version, but, hey.
Google has a deal with Adobe (part of their "FU" to Apple, amusingly enough) so that Chrome is always up-to-date with Flash. Doesn't stop it from being exploited before an update is available, though.
But, sure, go ahead and conflate OS major version upgrades with security fixes. I mean, its all the same thing, right?
Many many years (some centuries ago), in Spain I believe, they had a serious problem with crime. It just wasn't safe for law abiding citizens to go about at night what with all the dark streets and criminals lurking in the shadows.
But! A solution was found: a law was made that required anyone abroad at night to carry a lit lantern so that they would make a conspicuous target... I mean so that only criminals would be lurking in the shadows... I mean, gosh darn it, why can't people just see we are legislating our way toward a better tomorrow?!
In short, your point is well made. You cannot legislate crime away -- and sometimes well intended laws at best either make normal citizens into criminals or put them at even greater risk.
"user space" -> "user base". Doh!
Not exactly that. What they did was junk the entire KDE locale, presumably in order to have less code to maintain (hard to figure out why else they would). It is actually less shiny -- no preview of what the change will do, etc.
It isn't as if KDE's user space consisted largely of people who liked to customize the shit out of it. Oh, wait...
Holy cow that is awful. Although I've been using KDE for the last fifteen years or so my current workstation is KDE only because of long refresh cycles. Since I can't have KDE 3 I think I'll switch to MATE. Not great, but better than that.
For those who can't be bothered to follow the link: one of the "improvements" in KDE 5 is removing Locale and using Qt's limited locale functionality. Which eliminated nearly all locale configurability. The lack of configurability won't be fixed by the KDE team because it is a feature of their elimination of KDE's locale.
I didn't see it stated, but I expect Qt won't add it because the configurability belongs in the desktop manager, not individual applications. In other words, if your locale is "US" then you get the stupid US date format (I only ever use YYYY-MM-DD) and similar stupidity. In KDE 5 your locale settings can only be what is normal for your region. Don't like it? Find a region that does match what you like (usually not possible) and set it to that. The usability is actually even worse, but for more you'd have to read through the bug report comments.
I'd agree with you, up to KDE 3 -- after that it took a nose dive. Its just a shame that Trinity didn't succeed because KDE used to be great.
(this message posted from a system running KDE... its still my daily environment)
Apple isn't interested, though. You know what is a great way (from Apple's point of view) to introducing people? The iPhone. Apple isn't that focused on OS X. They don't even really care if you never use it. What they *do* care about is getting people into their ecosystem so that whatever money they spend is spent on or through Apple.
So while it might be nice for a consumer to be able to buy a compute stick loaded with OS X -- that isn't really something that Apple has any motivation to provide.
As for the "... use for some existing low-RAM applications"? Are you kidding? OS X and Windows are close enough in terms of hogging resources as to be the same. If you kit out linux to be anything like either of them then it also requires equivalent resources -- its advantage is that you don't have to. Windows (probably because MS is paying Intel) and Linux (for those who don't want it).
While I don't completely disagree with you, your argument rests entirely on the flawed premise that your free time has no value. In business terms the exchange you are talking about is opportunity cost. The time you spend futzing with something rather than just paying for a solution is time that could have been spent doing something else.
Of course it isn't as simple as placing an hourly rate valuation on your free time. When I was a college student I had far more free time which resulted in a lower "value" placed on it than it presently has. However, "futzing with something else" isn't always a cost -- it could be a value providing activity. And when that saves money as well it is a no-brainer.
But to pretend that there isn't opportunity cost is missing the reason *why* most people will willing spend $100 (or $500 or more) on Windows or some other "sub-optimal" solution.
Your claim is only sort of true. The collisions are not quite that arbitrary. The best known for MD5 allows substituting an arbitrary file, but by appending calculated gibberish until the desired hash is achieved. The SHA1 collision attacks, while significant from a cryptographic perspective, are not so dire from an integrity point of view.
Currently, MD5 is sufficient to demonstrate that no unintentional data alterations took place (e.g., data corruption, as you refer to). SHA1 is sufficient to demonstrate that a file is unchanged. Combine MD5 with a file size and integrity checking (e.g., can the ISO file system be mounted without errors) and you are in the clear. Some people use MD5 and SHA1 because there is no known attack methodology that can defeat both.
The problem for downloading that prevents MD5 from rising above checking for corruption in transit is that in most cases you have no way to validate the provided MD5 hash. This is actually a rather difficult problem when talking about Internet downloads -- the communications channel is untrusted and there is no practical out of band mechanism (much less a trusted one).
Related, this is the fundamental problem with https. You are supposed to trust the pre-loaded certificates in your browser that anything in a signing chain from their matching private certificate can be trusted. But there are numerous examples to prove this wrong. The *only* thing that https does (if it even does that, and frequently it doesn't) is encrypt the communications channel between your browser and the server it is talking to -- which may very well not be the one which you *think* that you are talking to.
In other words, neither hashing nor encryption provide any surety by themselves. But SHA-1 (and even MD5) are not broken quite as badly as you think (given non-cryptographic uses).
I noticed you don't have anything to say about the rest of the post, and admit that the quoted part is at least partially true. The strange thing is that there is so much anti-North Korea propaganda that it makes it hard to tell what is true and what isn't.
I can tell you this, though, and that is that if the propaganda you refer to were actually true there would have been a revolution by now. That kind of situation cannot last, people will put up with a lot, but only so much. And North Korea has been around too long.
Is it pleasant there? I rather don't think so. But gp's point wasn't that it was great, but that compared to other enemies of the US they seem to be doing pretty well. Of course, it isn't hard to beat the current situation in Syria and from the Libyans I know I think he is exaggerating how bad it is in Libya. Moreover, even if *currently* it is better in North Korea than Syria I don't think the same claim can be made when considering the last sixty years.
The impression I'm left with is that gp took some essentially true statements and combined them in a misleading way to support his thesis that nuclear weapons protect the interests of a country or ethnic group. I'm really not sure if it is funny or troll -- which is why I'm posting rather than using my mod points.
the summary may simply be poor, but most likely what is being referred to is password re-use.
Say my email address is thoromyr@gmail.com and I'm a customer at Acme Corporation. Like many places, they use my email address as the username. I use the password "Pass1234" because it is strong (upper case, lower case and numbers) and easy to remember (those security guys said I needed to create a memorable password that met their "complexity requirements").
Later on, I get an account at Atlassian and, surprise, they also use my email address as the username. Now, coming up with one memorable yet complex password is hard work so, like most people, I use it again. A few months later, Atlassian announces that their Jira system was compromised and usernames and passwords leaked.
Acme Corporation hasn't had a compromise, but now someone with the information from the Atlassian compromise can login as me on their system.
Even worse, if I'm like most people I used the same password at gmail, so they can login as me there and probably find every place I do business with and can try the logins there (and if for some reason the password does not work go through the password reset procedure).
Password re-use is very common.
sorry, but "unabridged" means nothing with respect to the comprehensiveness of a dictionary -- except that if there is an abridged edition of the same dictionary the abridged version will have fewer words (or smaller definitions, or something).
Your conclusion is based on a flawed assumption. I've been using a small dictionary for around thirty five years now. I can't check it (the dictionary is at home), but based on frequency of word use over time and the quality of that dictionary I expect the word would be listed. Maybe your unabridged dictionary isn't as good as you think it is -- if you actually care about words it is worthwhile having more than one dictionary.
People often don't really register words that they hear or see (especially if the words seem familiar) and tend to underestimate the frequency of usage or overestimate their recency of usage as a result.
Lets compare "performant" (which has apparently been in use for over a hundred years and is still used with many people having a basic idea of what it means from its form and in context) with "tergiversator" (which comes from latin and is essentially unused in recent years though still listed in dictionaries -- and I'd wager most people have no idea what it means without consulting a dictionary).
No, it is not. Apparently you do not understand the relationship between education (not necessarily university) and the economy. Educating citizens advances the group as a whole. It improves the economy and increases wealth. I thought this was well understood, but apparently not. I'm too lazy to go look it up, but there at least used to be an approximation of this effect by measuring engineers per capita.
It all depends on where you are at, which department is involved and the faculty pool that is available.
When I was a student I happened to take Soc 101 from the department chair. Normally she taught graduate level classes, but something had happened (I never did know just what) so that she taught the intro class. It was a large class, typical of required introductory classes. It was clear that the vast majority of the students hated it, but I loved it. She had a hard time slowing down to high school graduate level, though to be fair many entering students are not up to university work (I moved around a lot at first during college so I attended each university's required introductory courses and thus got exposed to more entering students than most other students).
My point was, the class was great, at least from my perspective. Definitely one of the most interesting I've taken (almost convinced me to switch majors to sociology).
On the other hand I had Calc II from a professor who bragged about not passing the majority of his students. As you might expect his lectures were worthless, but near the end of the semester the TA for my section was replaced and the new TA was excellent (an art major who had switched to math, interestingly enough). That experience sure argues for the TA over the professor, but the TA we had initially was no better than the professor.
As for research faculty: if they are successful (meaning, lots of research dollars) they will normally get a reduced class load and, in the extreme case, be relieved of class responsibility. It is not common for them to teach introductory courses. This varies by department and over time, but *usually* introductory courses are taught by junior faculty.
But some of the researchers will simply refuse to teach classes and instead have TAs do all of the lecturing, grading and... well, teach the class. (Some of them also have the TAs do all of their research as well, but that is a different topic.) But to your point, the *reason* for a university is to teach, not to do research. Often, research goes along with graduate students and so fulfills that teaching role. But given that the general expectation is that faculty teach... that is why they are expected to teach.
Sadly, brilliance has little to do with ability to teach. As a student I knew a TA and I felt sorry for his students. He was brilliant in his field and couldn't comprehend how a student wouldn't immediately grasp every concept when it was first presented. After all, he did. I'm acquainted with a math professor who corrected some function on an HP calculator. But he can't teach and nearly every student drops the class if he ends up as the assigned instructor.
Whether the instructor is adjunct or tenured, a TA or a researcher, the quality of instruction just varies.
... and where were grades raised in that discussion? Oh, right, they weren't.
The issue raised was a perceived lack of concern about racial issues on the part of the university administration. Every single instance I recall seeing reported was outside of the classroom (and some off of the campus).