And of course, a lot of people will claim some sort of moral protest to justify thier actions if confronted, but I'll give YOU the benefit of the doubt.
Hehe. Appreciated, and thank you. But if it tips the scales in your eyes any, I didn't download music at all & was that obnoxious finger-waving kid who scolded others -- until I was presented with the mroal arguments about the RIAA.
I don't think I'm reaching too far when I say the moral objections you have against paying for music is the exception, rather than the rule. Most people that age don't see beyond "I like getting shit for free."
Possibly not, but don't sell everybody short out-of-hand. If nothing else, there's probably some latent guilt for a lot of them -- how many of us were in bands, or wanted to be, or even dreamed of being a musician? You'd probably be able to squeeze $5 for a couple months out of at least 75%, I'd say, but it's all theoretical jibber-jabber really...
Ahhh, then you've clearly never met the children of impoverished parents who have literally no prospects for self-improvement. The education system does not provide them an opportunity to get the least amount of leg-up. College is not even a word they will ever hear; shootings are regular events in their neighborhoods, and some of them don't even have heat.
If you are poor, it is more often because you are lazy.
For a person who's had all the advantages of a quality suburban education and a college degree, this may be true. For someone who grows up with no parental guidance, no home life, no education at school, and no order, and as a result can't even sit still in a classroom (or who can't learn in a primary classroom because the teachers are so busy trying to keep other kids from putting each other in headlocks), there just isn't hope.
Look, I'm sorry, but if you're unaware of the nature of life in the ghetto, and of the systemic problems that lead to disadvantagement and a non-level playing field, then there are facts that you either don't know about or are choosing not to take into consideration.
It's not laziness that winds up screwing over kids when their parents work sixteen hour days every day of the week in a futile effort to make ends meet. Yes, this is the market value of a job at McDonald's or sweeping the streets. What's the market value of a society where all children grow up having heat?
I could go on, but it's clear that there's an experience gap here.
But one other thing -- congratulations that your business is hiring. Are you going to tell me you'll hire an inner-city kid who barely made it through a ghetto high school? I'm assuming that's a no.
consider the following reasons why a cash-strapped college student isn't paying for music:
1. They're not paying because of a moral objection to the RIAA's business practices. 2. They're not paying because they don't trust DRM. 3. They're not paying because they don't have to pay.
Think back to your college days; chances are you weren't independently wealthy. Considering that, which scenario do YOU think is the most likely?
Which scenario? All three.
Thinking back to when I was a college student (uhh... nine months ago?) I could've (and probably would've) come up with $5 a month, but I refuse to give a penny to the RIAA vampires. And I refuse to pay to support a model under which powerful corporations continue to own everything and I just license it (the same reason I'm using OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office; not so much the price as the ridiculous assertion that they own something I bought). And, sure, who can complain with free as long as I'm not paying anyways? But I'd rather see artists paid than see me not deprived of my $5. The great majority of students I've met could afford a small price like that, simply by giving up some other entertainment -- really college students exaggerate their poverty way too much; the solution is just to spend less. $5 is what, a beer? A sandwich? Geez, I'd skip lunch one day a month if I really had to.
You want for everyone in the world to say, Yes.. Mr Gay Person.. Your love with Chuck is just like My love with Sarah.
That is the goal of the Gay movement. I think that is wrong. That is what I have a problem with.
Buddy, that's pretty clueless. Rich has no idea if his love for Jane is exactly the same as Chuck's love for Betty. I have no idea if my love for Yvette is different from Bob's love for Joe. Why? Because they are all personal feelings which can't be translated across the boundary of a human skull. Besides which, I don't really care if my emotion is identical to anybody else's; it doesn't need to match other people's feelings exactly in order for it to be legitimate (and I'm saying that about straight relationships, queer relationships, polyamorous relationships, whatever kind of relationships you want).
The goal of the gay movement is not to be convinced that its love feels just the same as any other love. It is for that love to be accepted by society in the same way as straight love is. If you really have, as you say, no problem with gay sex, then why should you have a problem admitting that gay people can love each other? Do you have to insist that no, their love is inferior to yours/impossible, because they happen to be of the same gender? There simply is no way to testify what that love "feels" like compared to any other love, because that's an individual question, but if a couple tells you they're in love, can't you just believe them and have done with it?
Let's imagine it's 60 years ago. Now try any of the arguments in your post against gay marriage, as applied to mixed-race marriages (which, hey, you may have a problem with, but nothing you've said so far invalidates them.)
Their lifestyle SHOULD be legitimized.
I disagree. I feel as though it is a condition that is unwanted. If it happens, that is fine, but it should be something avoided.
"I feel as though if people of different races fall in love, it is unwanted. If it happens, that is fine, but it should be something [to be] avoided." Does this make sense in any way aside from prejudice?
This is a simple concept. I do not want my child to be gay. Ask every person in the U.S. if they want their child to be gay.
More than 80% will say no (yes I'm guessing).
"I do not want my child to marry a person of a different race. Ask every person in the U.S. if they want their child to marry a person of a different race. More than 80% will say no." Does that make any sense?
This is only about a gay man's want to feel like his love is exactly the same as a man who loves a woman. It is not.
What needs to be delt with here is a gay man's issues with needed to feel the same was as a man does towards a woman. Or any number of similar quandrys.
"This is only about a black man's want to feel like his love for a white woman is exactly the same as a white man who loves a white woman. It is not. What needs to be de[a]lt with here is a black man's issues with need[ing] to feel the same wa[y] as a white man does towards a white woman. Or any number of similar quand[a]rys." This is obviously racist tripe, but at one time would have been just as accepted as your argument against gay people.
Meanwhile, what makes you think that a gay man wants to feel the same as a man does towards a woman? They don't need someone else to tell them they're in love, and nobody's looking for that kind of legitimation. They're looking for equal treatment in the most important human relationship, a love relationship, and for their love to be recognized as legitimate. And, of course, for legal rights that the government insists on handing out. The issue is people not wanting to be discriminated against because they love others. Or, how about this --
"What needs to be dealt with here is a closed-minded straight man's issues with needing to feel different from the way a gay man loves another man. "Deal with that. That's the issue." Seems a bit more psychologically accurate to me.
What if single people want to start marrying themselves so they can declare themselves as dependents on their tax forms?
You're already allowed to claim yourself as a dependent on your tax form. Don't be a tool.
Or their sibling? Face it, marriage is a union between a man and a woman.
If a marriage is just a union between a man and a woman, then there's nothing in that definition that prevents two adult siblings of differing genders from marrying. Your argument doesn't have anything to do with your point.
This is valuable in society, and life. We need to make babies....
Actually, given the current world population, we don't need to make any more babies for quite a while. We'd probably be better off if we didn't. The babies certainly would.
Tying marriage to procreation is a red herring. A gay couple is perfectly capable of having a child in the lab, with the help of a friend or relative.
Meanwhile, if marriage is significant because of babies, then why do we provide 1. tax incentives 2. inheritance incentives 3. additional medical rights 4. legal incentives (privilege against forced court testimony) and 5. anything else I'm forgetting to married couples?
and, this way you are giving a lower ranking to pages which use text in images.
If all your text is in images, then you're already not going to rank very highly in Google -- they're not going to OCR your text, they're going to see you as content-free. (Which you most likely are, if you can't be read comfortably in Lynx -- the message is still more important than the medium -- but that's a side issue/flamebait). It's the same problem for folks who are using database-driven sites to serve up lots of content manageably (a most excellent idea); if the dumb spider can't figure out how to read it, they're not getting ranked.
I'm even going to go out on a limb here and say that the company that can handle database-driven sites best will wind up having a serious advantage in the Search Engine Wars... that company will be best able to index content from well-managed periodical sites, as well as handling commercial sites better (and maybe even putting them in a separate category).
The US is in Afghanistan and Iraq, why don't they set up schools to teach the current generation of kids there not to hate, and why terrorism is bad?
Those schools would be called "non-interference in foreign domestic affairs," "removal of military presence in foreign nations" and "non-endorsement of repressive monarchies." Unfortunately such an education tends to raise oil prices.
Anyway, those measures wouldn't stop fanatics like Osama -- just the common and middle-class people who wind up supporting him, since he's the only one doing anything (however reprehensible) about what they view as a major problem with national sovereignty and domestic freedoms. But, if Osama had to carry out suicide attacks himself, we wouldn't have too much longer to worry about.
"$66.4 million is being spent on a research project to "deny, disrupt and degrade adversary space-based surveillance and reconnaissance systems." He said another $79 million is funding efforts to build a "constellation of optical sensing satellites to track and identify space forces."
In other news, $0 million is currently being spent to save the Hubble Space Telescope, an optical sensing satellite to track and identify the wonders of space.
It's all going to depend on how much they change the syntax, which Yahoo!!!!!111! doesn't seem to be providing us with right now. (I'm sure if I were on a perl list I'd hear more about it.)
Personally what I'd recommend (as a full-time perl programmer) is to learn 5 anyway. It'll take two or three years before the next edition of the Llama (O'Reilly, _Learning_Perl_, look it up your own darn self on Amazon if you must) is out, and in the meantime you can get out of the baby-talk phase this way. Learn regular expressions thoroughly, absolutely thoroughly, backwards and forwards, even if you won't need to use most of the complex stuff -- you'll wind up using it sooner or later, and if you know if cold, then you've got better odds of remembering something obscure when you need it. [Caveat: apparently regexes are a big part of the language changes. So learn the Perl 5 regex engine as thoroughly as you can, and then compare and contrast with this rundown on the new stuff.]
Obviously core language features aren't likely to go anywhere, and you won't be wasting your time learning them. And you'd be amazed at what even a couple of months will do for your language maturity.
Sorry, I think you may have misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying that I endorse the US' actions on this matter -- just that I think this is what it's doing The US Gov't is doing such and such, which might make strategic sense to them in such-and-such a way -- that's what I was saying, not that I agree with the goals or methods that the Government is using. I do not think that the UN should try to maintain American technical superiority (if that even exists anymore -- Japan has surpassed the US in robotics, to name only one example). I can see why the US might want to maintain its own tech. superiority, but I certainly don't think the UN should automatically try to do what the US wants. Nor do I think that other countries should be dependent on US technology to develop. I'm just trying to analyze the problem as though I were someone trying to maintain US power over the rest of the world. Which, if you look at the history of American diplomacy, is what our leaders have tried to do. For example, I do not support Henry Kissinger's policies, but I do think it's important that I understand them.
So, don't worry. I'm just looking at the situation, not talking about my personal desires.
the US is doing the same thing it's always done in the UN -- attempt to provide token participation in a body that is sometimes useful for achieving otherwise-difficult ends, but that can be easily bogged down or otherwise rendered useless when it tries to do something that we don't care for.
I would even go so far as to say this isn't about maintaining capitalist dominance or corporate dominance per se, so much as it is derailing something that could potentially be highly disruptive to the US position as a technological leader and controlling force on third-world technological innovation. Open Source would drastically lower the barrier to entry for pretty much any country looking to develop an information technology regime, which puts countries on a much more even footing to do things the US doesn't like (organize, provide information to people, utilize cryptography, and heavens! even provide a means for impoverished people to have true democracy), let alone making governments more effective. Strict politics-of-power thinking would suggest that other countries having strong, independent governments is not in the US' interests, because such governments and countries (and ultimately, populations) are much harder to manipulate...
IHBT. Nevertheless. Look dude, anyone with any sense recognizes that deregulation and the stupid things that private enterprise was trying to do with a previously-very-efficient system was what borked the grid. When it was run by state-regulated monopoly, there was enough information-sharing to provide good quality services, and we weren't trying to transmit power across half the continent chasing higher prices (and thus causing the grid linkages that resulted in a trans-regional power takedown). The state was doing it right, until they decided to let dereg in.
But no, animals do not have culture. When a dog writes "Marraige of Figaro" then it might be possible.
Well, when you write "Marriage of Figaro" maybe I'll listen to your judgments on other species.
Meanwhile, "culture" is something everyday, that we all participate in, rather than strictly the highbrow Culture with a capital C.
And who's to say that dogs don't have an extremely elevated aesthetic sensibility that's just beyond the grasp of our (differently limited) human brains?
Once you get your Bachelors, you can load up on as many Masters and PhDs as you have time for.
1. s/time/money/
2. Just don't be dumb and get a PhD -- we've been over the whole "overqualified" thing before. And with the bar always getting lower... well, let's just say I've seen a lot more job postings looking for a high school degree and four years' experience than I have looking for my summa Ivy diploma.
Unless you want to do hard science or teach, you want an MBA or a Law degree. And that'll be glutted fast enough, when there's nobody here left to manage...
Apart from huge savings, it allows US companies to concentrate on their core competencies and the people (in the US) can move on to higher paying, more creative, more value generating jobs...
Gee, I'm sure glad that the only thing keeping me from moving on to a higher paying and more creative job was that I had to do all that troublesome IT work. Sure was generous of me to take the hit for the team like that, though, having a job and all. Maybe now that they're outsourcing everything, I can sit on my rump and be creative while I'm paid thousands of dollars an hour by mystical corporate faeries!
Look, as far as outsourcing goes, this does not matter.
Outsourcing will continue unless the parent company is held financially responsible for the non-economic problems caused by their decision to outsource. (This is technically known as "internalizing market externalities" -- for instance making someone pay for the social/environmental/etc bad effects of something they do that doesn't affect their business directly).
Even if they're held financially responsible, if the outsourcing is still cheaper, it'll still continue. Even if major firms have to pay hush money on 5% of the data they use. or, of course, if they just have to pay to write a couple perl scripts to randomize the characters in a data set... (It's a couple hours max, if you're slow.) So don't go looking for privacy issues to be the magic bullet that saves your IT job...
(N.B. this case was not actually an instance of outsourcing; I'm just making a point about the economics driving the outsourcing movement.)
Sure, I guess I shouldn't knock it til I try it... [sorry]
your Denial of Service attack has zero effectiveness unless the kiddies snooped my incoming IP address and then are spoofing it.
Yes, but do you think this wouldn't happen? If your packets are so inviolable, why bother with SSH, why not just use telnet?
Ok, that's a little unfair, I'll admit the circumstances would have to be right and it's not a guaranteed DoS. OTOH, it's a lot easier than spreading malware to hijack half the internet and do it the old-fashioned way. (And note that I did say spoofed packets in my original post).
the problem lies in a skilled cracker hijacking your domain and simply listening for your knock pattern and recording it. if it see's the same pattern twice, foreward all connections to the origional machine... all a user would see is "internet is acting up but I got in anyways."
Yeah, that's one of many ways the knocking thing would be easily defeated. I guess the overwhelming point to me is that it's just not that much additional security.
and this technique was used back in the late 80's early 90's on hacker-boards. ring pattern to activate the modem on the next call.
Really? Hmm. It seems like the circumstances would make this a bit more secure there -- no reason to expect that a random phone number will have a modem connected to it, etc. (Though this is still bogus security-through-obscurity). And that it'd be at least a little harder to intercept the incoming knock pattern, because the phone system is centrally switched rather than relying on many many hops between connected machines. But I know basically nothing about phreaking or old hacker boards, so I'd appreciate correction.
Anyway, one of the biggest problems is failure rate. If that "secret knock" fails unless you correctly use the appropriate sequence of knocks, then anyone malicious can implement a trivial denial-of-service attack just by constantly hitting random ports, preventing any knock completion.
Alternatively, if you ignore non-knockable ports, or ports that aren't part of the knock, then you've dramatically whittled down the strength of your virtual password, and made it that much easier to brute-force.
Perhaps this would deter some of the lowest levels of sk|21p7 |<1dd13z from getting in, but that would be true only for about two weeks, whereupon new toyz are released that automate these attacks, and you've given the black hats one more weapon (DoS through spoofed noise packets) in the meantime.
I guess if you really, really wanted to do this, you could have a single accessible port that would listen for access, and then receive an encrypted key that determines which other port your server opens for a possible connection. But basically all you're doing then is adding on another layer of password protection, whose effect will be circumvented when somebody finally decides it's annoying to have to login twice or enter multiple passwords, and sets them both to the same thing, on auto-login, then leaves his laptop sitting around for three minutes. And you've still not fixed the sniffing problem. There are bigger security soft spots to be addressed than trivially hiding access to your ssh port.
If you want your message to get through, call or send a handwritten letter. Typed is fine too, especially if your handwriting is illegible, provided you have sufficient content (bullet-point memos are good, as are references to research, rather than just crotchety opinions, though keep in mind the people who read and reply to your letter are paid to be researching the issue you're writing about.) The people who open the mail (usually an intern, ie a bored and overqualified college student) are very, very good at spotting form faxes, even if you add a little bit of bonus non-form text.
Contrary to commonly held misperceptions, government officials are not stupid. They know just as much about fax gateways as you do, and probably more, since they've talked to more of them than you have.
Email is still bad, though. You're usually not guaranteed a response this way, and you'll be lucky if anybody in an advisory position even reads it (instead of just an even-more-bored office flunky).
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly not, but don't sell everybody short out-of-hand. If nothing else, there's probably some latent guilt for a lot of them -- how many of us were in bands, or wanted to be, or even dreamed of being a musician? You'd probably be able to squeeze $5 for a couple months out of at least 75%, I'd say, but it's all theoretical jibber-jabber really...
For a person who's had all the advantages of a quality suburban education and a college degree, this may be true. For someone who grows up with no parental guidance, no home life, no education at school, and no order, and as a result can't even sit still in a classroom (or who can't learn in a primary classroom because the teachers are so busy trying to keep other kids from putting each other in headlocks), there just isn't hope.
Look, I'm sorry, but if you're unaware of the nature of life in the ghetto, and of the systemic problems that lead to disadvantagement and a non-level playing field, then there are facts that you either don't know about or are choosing not to take into consideration.
It's not laziness that winds up screwing over kids when their parents work sixteen hour days every day of the week in a futile effort to make ends meet. Yes, this is the market value of a job at McDonald's or sweeping the streets. What's the market value of a society where all children grow up having heat?
I could go on, but it's clear that there's an experience gap here.
But one other thing -- congratulations that your business is hiring. Are you going to tell me you'll hire an inner-city kid who barely made it through a ghetto high school? I'm assuming that's a no.
Thinking back to when I was a college student (uhh... nine months ago?) I could've (and probably would've) come up with $5 a month, but I refuse to give a penny to the RIAA vampires. And I refuse to pay to support a model under which powerful corporations continue to own everything and I just license it (the same reason I'm using OpenOffice.org instead of MS Office; not so much the price as the ridiculous assertion that they own something I bought). And, sure, who can complain with free as long as I'm not paying anyways? But I'd rather see artists paid than see me not deprived of my $5.
The great majority of students I've met could afford a small price like that, simply by giving up some other entertainment -- really college students exaggerate their poverty way too much; the solution is just to spend less. $5 is what, a beer? A sandwich? Geez, I'd skip lunch one day a month if I really had to.
The goal of the gay movement is not to be convinced that its love feels just the same as any other love. It is for that love to be accepted by society in the same way as straight love is. If you really have, as you say, no problem with gay sex, then why should you have a problem admitting that gay people can love each other? Do you have to insist that no, their love is inferior to yours/impossible, because they happen to be of the same gender? There simply is no way to testify what that love "feels" like compared to any other love, because that's an individual question, but if a couple tells you they're in love, can't you just believe them and have done with it?
"I feel as though if people of different races fall in love, it is unwanted. If it happens, that is fine, but it should be something [to be] avoided." Does this make sense in any way aside from prejudice?
"I do not want my child to marry a person of a different race. Ask every person in the U.S. if they want their child to marry a person of a different race. More than 80% will say no." Does that make any sense?
"This is only about a black man's want to feel like his love for a white woman is exactly the same as a white man who loves a white woman. It is not. What needs to be de[a]lt with here is a black man's issues with need[ing] to feel the same wa[y] as a white man does towards a white woman. Or any number of similar quand[a]rys."
This is obviously racist tripe, but at one time would have been just as accepted as your argument against gay people.
Meanwhile, what makes you think that a gay man wants to feel the same as a man does towards a woman? They don't need someone else to tell them they're in love, and nobody's looking for that kind of legitimation. They're looking for equal treatment in the most important human relationship, a love relationship, and for their love to be recognized as legitimate. And, of course, for legal rights that the government insists on handing out. The issue is people not wanting to be discriminated against because they love others. Or, how about this --
"What needs to be dealt with here is a closed-minded straight man's issues with needing to feel different from the way a gay man loves another man.
"Deal with that. That's the issue."
Seems a bit more psychologically accurate to me.
If a marriage is just a union between a man and a woman, then there's nothing in that definition that prevents two adult siblings of differing genders from marrying. Your argument doesn't have anything to do with your point.
Tying marriage to procreation is a red herring. A gay couple is perfectly capable of having a child in the lab, with the help of a friend or relative.
Meanwhile, if marriage is significant because of babies, then why do we provide 1. tax incentives 2. inheritance incentives 3. additional medical rights 4. legal incentives (privilege against forced court testimony) and 5. anything else I'm forgetting to married couples?
I'm even going to go out on a limb here and say that the company that can handle database-driven sites best will wind up having a serious advantage in the Search Engine Wars... that company will be best able to index content from well-managed periodical sites, as well as handling commercial sites better (and maybe even putting them in a separate category).
Those schools would be called "non-interference in foreign domestic affairs," "removal of military presence in foreign nations" and "non-endorsement of repressive monarchies."
Unfortunately such an education tends to raise oil prices.
Anyway, those measures wouldn't stop fanatics like Osama -- just the common and middle-class people who wind up supporting him, since he's the only one doing anything (however reprehensible) about what they view as a major problem with national sovereignty and domestic freedoms. But, if Osama had to carry out suicide attacks himself, we wouldn't have too much longer to worry about.
"$66.4 million is being spent on a research project to "deny, disrupt and degrade adversary space-based surveillance and reconnaissance systems." He said another $79 million is funding efforts to build a "constellation of optical sensing satellites to track and identify space forces."
In other news, $0 million is currently being spent to save the Hubble Space Telescope, an optical sensing satellite to track and identify the wonders of space.
It's all going to depend on how much they change the syntax, which Yahoo!!!!!111! doesn't seem to be providing us with right now. (I'm sure if I were on a perl list I'd hear more about it.)
Personally what I'd recommend (as a full-time perl programmer) is to learn 5 anyway. It'll take two or three years before the next edition of the Llama (O'Reilly, _Learning_Perl_, look it up your own darn self on Amazon if you must) is out, and in the meantime you can get out of the baby-talk phase this way. Learn regular expressions thoroughly, absolutely thoroughly, backwards and forwards, even if you won't need to use most of the complex stuff -- you'll wind up using it sooner or later, and if you know if cold, then you've got better odds of remembering something obscure when you need it. [Caveat: apparently regexes are a big part of the language changes. So learn the Perl 5 regex engine as thoroughly as you can, and then compare and contrast with this rundown on the new stuff.]
Obviously core language features aren't likely to go anywhere, and you won't be wasting your time learning them. And you'd be amazed at what even a couple of months will do for your language maturity.
Start now. No sense putting it off.
Sorry, I think you may have misunderstood my point. I wasn't saying that I endorse the US' actions on this matter -- just that I think this is what it's doing The US Gov't is doing such and such, which might make strategic sense to them in such-and-such a way -- that's what I was saying, not that I agree with the goals or methods that the Government is using. I do not think that the UN should try to maintain American technical superiority (if that even exists anymore -- Japan has surpassed the US in robotics, to name only one example). I can see why the US might want to maintain its own tech. superiority, but I certainly don't think the UN should automatically try to do what the US wants. Nor do I think that other countries should be dependent on US technology to develop. I'm just trying to analyze the problem as though I were someone trying to maintain US power over the rest of the world. Which, if you look at the history of American diplomacy, is what our leaders have tried to do. For example, I do not support Henry Kissinger's policies, but I do think it's important that I understand them. So, don't worry. I'm just looking at the situation, not talking about my personal desires.
the US is doing the same thing it's always done in the UN -- attempt to provide token participation in a body that is sometimes useful for achieving otherwise-difficult ends, but that can be easily bogged down or otherwise rendered useless when it tries to do something that we don't care for.
I would even go so far as to say this isn't about maintaining capitalist dominance or corporate dominance per se, so much as it is derailing something that could potentially be highly disruptive to the US position as a technological leader and controlling force on third-world technological innovation. Open Source would drastically lower the barrier to entry for pretty much any country looking to develop an information technology regime, which puts countries on a much more even footing to do things the US doesn't like (organize, provide information to people, utilize cryptography, and heavens! even provide a means for impoverished people to have true democracy), let alone making governments more effective. Strict politics-of-power thinking would suggest that other countries having strong, independent governments is not in the US' interests, because such governments and countries (and ultimately, populations) are much harder to manipulate...
IHBT. Nevertheless.
Look dude, anyone with any sense recognizes that deregulation and the stupid things that private enterprise was trying to do with a previously-very-efficient system was what borked the grid. When it was run by state-regulated monopoly, there was enough information-sharing to provide good quality services, and we weren't trying to transmit power across half the continent chasing higher prices (and thus causing the grid linkages that resulted in a trans-regional power takedown). The state was doing it right, until they decided to let dereg in.
Meanwhile, "culture" is something everyday, that we all participate in, rather than strictly the highbrow Culture with a capital C.
And who's to say that dogs don't have an extremely elevated aesthetic sensibility that's just beyond the grasp of our (differently limited) human brains?
1. s/time/money/
2. Just don't be dumb and get a PhD -- we've been over the whole "overqualified" thing before. And with the bar always getting lower... well, let's just say I've seen a lot more job postings looking for a high school degree and four years' experience than I have looking for my summa Ivy diploma.
Unless you want to do hard science or teach, you want an MBA or a Law degree. And that'll be glutted fast enough, when there's nobody here left to manage...
Being a "knowledge worker" is all well and good, until you realize that everybody's got some knowledge to work with...
Look, as far as outsourcing goes, this does not matter.
Outsourcing will continue unless the parent company is held financially responsible for the non-economic problems caused by their decision to outsource. (This is technically known as "internalizing market externalities" -- for instance making someone pay for the social/environmental/etc bad effects of something they do that doesn't affect their business directly).
Even if they're held financially responsible, if the outsourcing is still cheaper, it'll still continue. Even if major firms have to pay hush money on 5% of the data they use. or, of course, if they just have to pay to write a couple perl scripts to randomize the characters in a data set... (It's a couple hours max, if you're slow.) So don't go looking for privacy issues to be the magic bullet that saves your IT job...
(N.B. this case was not actually an instance of outsourcing; I'm just making a point about the economics driving the outsourcing movement.)
Yes, but do you think this wouldn't happen? If your packets are so inviolable, why bother with SSH, why not just use telnet?
Ok, that's a little unfair, I'll admit the circumstances would have to be right and it's not a guaranteed DoS. OTOH, it's a lot easier than spreading malware to hijack half the internet and do it the old-fashioned way. (And note that I did say spoofed packets in my original post).
Yeah, that's one of many ways the knocking thing would be easily defeated. I guess the overwhelming point to me is that it's just not that much additional security.
Really? Hmm. It seems like the circumstances would make this a bit more secure there -- no reason to expect that a random phone number will have a modem connected to it, etc. (Though this is still bogus security-through-obscurity). And that it'd be at least a little harder to intercept the incoming knock pattern, because the phone system is centrally switched rather than relying on many many hops between connected machines. But I know basically nothing about phreaking or old hacker boards, so I'd appreciate correction.
on debian-security a couple of months back.
Anyway, one of the biggest problems is failure rate. If that "secret knock" fails unless you correctly use the appropriate sequence of knocks, then anyone malicious can implement a trivial denial-of-service attack just by constantly hitting random ports, preventing any knock completion.
Alternatively, if you ignore non-knockable ports, or ports that aren't part of the knock, then you've dramatically whittled down the strength of your virtual password, and made it that much easier to brute-force.
Perhaps this would deter some of the lowest levels of sk|21p7 |<1dd13z from getting in, but that would be true only for about two weeks, whereupon new toyz are released that automate these attacks, and you've given the black hats one more weapon (DoS through spoofed noise packets) in the meantime.
I guess if you really, really wanted to do this, you could have a single accessible port that would listen for access, and then receive an encrypted key that determines which other port your server opens for a possible connection. But basically all you're doing then is adding on another layer of password protection, whose effect will be circumvented when somebody finally decides it's annoying to have to login twice or enter multiple passwords, and sets them both to the same thing, on auto-login, then leaves his laptop sitting around for three minutes. And you've still not fixed the sniffing problem. There are bigger security soft spots to be addressed than trivially hiding access to your ssh port.
I worked in a Senatorial office.
If you want your message to get through, call or send a handwritten letter. Typed is fine too, especially if your handwriting is illegible, provided you have sufficient content (bullet-point memos are good, as are references to research, rather than just crotchety opinions, though keep in mind the people who read and reply to your letter are paid to be researching the issue you're writing about.) The people who open the mail (usually an intern, ie a bored and overqualified college student) are very, very good at spotting form faxes, even if you add a little bit of bonus non-form text.
Contrary to commonly held misperceptions, government officials are not stupid. They know just as much about fax gateways as you do, and probably more, since they've talked to more of them than you have.
Email is still bad, though. You're usually not guaranteed a response this way, and you'll be lucky if anybody in an advisory position even reads it (instead of just an even-more-bored office flunky).