Most likely, the NIST folks use laptops in the field, and their job naturally involves sensitive information... hence the use of removable drives that were nominally supposed to be locked in safes.
In an organization with a physically separated network (or one with a darn strict firewall) so that you can't access data you need when you're outside, I could see a need for storing it on a laptop.
Say goodbye to activist rulings that go well beyond the Constitution. He's promised to appoint strict constructionists, which means to uphold the Constitution as it was written and amended, not to make policy on the basis of popularity or feelings. If it's not under Federal jurisdiction, then the Government should make no guarantees or prohibitions in either direction.
Unless, of course, you'd like to add "expedience" to justifications possible for ignoring the Constitution. Expedience served pretty well for numerous monarchs in their days, as well.
Hmmm. A lot of this indirectly affects them, doesn't it? Money that parents do not send to the US Treasury might be spent on the kids, for instance.;-)
But -- assuming this demographic has no plans to die en masse anytime soon, it will affect them -- now, and later.
Pay taxes? Or use government services? Then how much revenue the government collects, and how it spends it, is relevant. Government spending, if memory serves, accounts for a rather non-negligible portion of the GDP.
And don't forget the moral issues, like whether Gore should be at least partly blamed for tolerating and participating in the various malfesances committed by the adminstration (especially in raising money...); it seems a bit much to presuppose the entire block amoral.
Hmm, few days old -- but one of our former servicemen confessed to helping out bin Laden's people with planning the US Embassy bombings in Africa. Let's see what I can find that doesn't require money for an old article...
Former US Army Sgt. Ali Mohammed confessed to conspiring in the Kenya and Tanzania incidents. My bad; he was a former serviceman who apparently left the service in '89 (it does not say under what conditions).
In many churches in the US, you'd have to say "possibly armed", because a number of states DO permit CCW and don't prohibit it specifically in churches (and banning CCW in churches is a bit silly if you trust the people enough to allow it elsewhere).
So, for instance, if you tried to rob the congregation at a Sunday morning sermon, you'd be taking a chance. I'd suspect in most cases you'd win the bet (given the regulars are more likely to be older and female, if memory serves, and less likely to carry statistically) -- but it's still a a chance. And the wager would be the robber's life versus some amount of coinage, hostages or whatever the objective is.
In the UK, the odds, if the congregation is law-abiding and does not include on-duty armed policement (the armed response teams), happen to be zero; the group is practically guaranteed to be *unarmed*. Most convenient if you're crazy, but not crazy enough to ignore the possibility of being shot.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The wording is ambiguous -- does the phrase "of any State" modify "the Constitution" as well? -- but it could easily be read to imply that treaties override the (national) Constitution.
More specifically, for the folks in the US -- write your Senators. The House will have no say about this, but the treaty will not go into effect here unless the Senate ratifies it.
My suspicion is that any politician who clearly states that the state cannot usually protect you -- there are always people who will not be deterred -- but can often only help clean up the mess afterwards, is going to lose a LOT of votes.
Never mind that, if memory serves, courts have ruled that you are not entitled to the expectation of comprehensive police protection; you cannot sue the police for failing to proactively protect you.
After alleged Crisis X, the question posed by reporters / worrying parents / etc is usually something like, "What will you do to make sure that Crisis X never happens again?". The clause "...while preserving our individual rights" generally doesn't come into play. We've seen it again and again -- after Columbine, the OK City bombing, and so forth.
Only if they see viable options, and what is "broken" is VERY broken.
Both Netscape and IE have a long, long history of bugs, including numerous security issues -- yet, people haven't flocked en masse to, say, Opera or Amaya. For most tasks involved with light browsing, both of these two perform well -- vulnerabilities involving theft of cookies, for instance, do NOT suddenly mean it can't browse.
Instead, MS and AOL/Netscape simply release updates and, it seems, retain their user base.
Software doesn't need to be great or flawless (even in the sense of security) for people to use it; it just has to be "good enough", taking into account the availability and convenience (or lack thereof) of other options. Unfortunately, security flaws often do not impact apparent functionality enough to cause users to flee a product en masse...
Military systems also come to mind -- that is, those providing information.
Given that it's known now that folks like bin Laden have had, and probably still have, sympathizers and accomplices within the Armed Forces. Might be handy if they have physical access to a terminal on a "secure" network, that otherwise provides no external access. Things like blueprints, security precautions (shift schedules, for instance), and personnel files might be interesting.
Actually, the position is rather akin to Gore's stance on gun control...
Ask him about CCW in churches, for instance. Apparently, he's against it, as if this were a Highlander universe and we were all immortals who cannot fight on holy ground. That ignores multiple incidents, such as a certain loon in the UK who attacked an unarmed crowd in a church with a sword...
Or, for that matter, whether he supports the ban on handguns (even an unloaded handgun w/ a trigger lock in a gun safe) in DC. As we all know, DC is a WONDERFULLY safe city where such things as innocents being shot in a crossfire at a city zoo NEVER HAPPEN thanks to the gun control promoted by liberals everywhere...
He's been chastened. That is, he's now less likely to try to destabilize the whole region by invading somebody else, or lobbing missiles willy-nilly. His military is now meek enough that it tolerates -- it has no choice but to tolerate -- repeated invasion by Turkey (which has pursued Kurdish rebels across the border).
There also aren't that many good candidates for replacing him yet... and a UN/US-run government would NOT sit well with the rest of the Middle East, methinks.
* Harrassing, 'anonymous' e-mail to your coworkers. I'm not up on British law... but at least in the US, the employer might be liable if he fails to stop it (think 'hostile working environment')...
* Corporate espionage of sorts. Even intra-company. A Payroll employee could broadcast compensation figures, which might be most embarrassing for many.
* Details of conspiracy. More of a potential problem for financial businesses, I'd guess, where disgruntled employees plan an inside job.
Rare? Yes. It happens, 'tho, and if the employee has been acting suspiciously, maybe the employer would want to be able to check. Should he be allowed to? Depends on the rest of British law regarding data privacy...
Hmmm. An employer could go far to prevent this by, say, using a locked-down Linux (or similar) installation without a compiler, and 'noexec' flags on user-writable partitions. A BIOS setup password, LILO password, and using sulogin in/etc/inittab help.
Want to use GPG? Fine. But the local version implements key escrow... And so forth. It'd take a while to set up, perhaps (at least if you want to take into account SSL-capable browsers...), but it might be possible for a paranoid employer.
Considering that they have differences on military spending (how much to spend on R&D, for instance); health care (prescription drug coverage); foreign policy (use of military for peacekeeping); energy policy (how much, where to drill); social security (pump in taxes versus overhaul); taxation (degree of "progressiveness", tax credits versus tax cuts; also, if memory serves, differences regarding the AMT); gun control (registration, use of trigger locks, et al); balance of power (Federal vs state); education (mandatory standardized testing or no, etc) and so forth, it's arguable that you haven't been paying attention AT ALL.
They are NOT identical. If you think they are, you just haven't been looking.
Some of us do things that require a LOT of computations, and every little bit helps when you're running a series of experiments to test the scalability of an algorithm...
'course, by the time you start mucking about with 600MB data files on a lil' old desktop, you're hoping for faster disk, not just processors...
But they're not fully binary compatible, are they?
And there are a LOT of functions and libraries that differ significantly enough between, say, Linux and Solaris, that you need to have #ifdefs scattered about. Functions that are in different headers or libraries, functions that behave differently regarding whether they use static storage or return dynamically allocated memory, and so forth... POSIX isn't complete in that regard.
At least on the networks the bias is often obvious enough to filter out.;-)
Random example -- CBS News story on Firestone (IIRC) ties, with the reporter noting that 60% of returned tires in a given set (methinks it was national, for certain specific models) were returned due to tread separation issues, with the number '60%' prominently displayed onscreen.
Um. That's a remarkably useless number without context, such as
a) Information on what % of Firestone tires was actually returned.
b) Industry norms.
c) The severity of the tread separation issues.
It blatantly smelled like a hit piece designed so that a casual viewer -- say, one momentarily distracted -- would infer that 60% of all Firestone tires were vulnerable to tread separation. But at least t'was easy to discern.
CNN: the story that the SOGers were using chemical weapons on American defectors. Story retracted, apologies issued, reporters fired.
PrimeTime Live (think "Food Lion") got nailed in a court of law over planting people as workers...
The president of NBC News even resigned over a Dateline piece in which gas tanks of GM pickups were rigged to increase the probability of ignition upon a side-impact collision. He didn't micromanage the story, but it was on his watch...
...how about papers and networks sacking reporters for bad or fraudulent journalism?
Of the top of my head, heads rolled at...
CNN, due to a badly written, misleading piece on SOGers alleging use of chemical weapons by Special Operations Group troopers on American defectors, during 'Nam if memory serves.
The SJ Mercury, due to disagreements over the veracity of the CIA/Crack conspiracy series.
The Boston Globe, which canned a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, for having done fraudulent pieces including heart-wrenching interviews of non-existing people.
In all three cases, very, very public retractions and apologies were made. I'm sure there have been others, as well.
The NY Times and the local papers here run corrections in a regular space on the second page. In the case of the NYT, it's right under the summaries of the edition's contents -- which isn't exactly obscure.
How many people has Slashdot sacked for not bothering to check submissions that were hoaxes? How much checking do many onliners do?
There is no right for a musician to be paid, no more than an auto dealership has a right to your money. However, neither is there a right to consume their work, or for you to take a dealership's cars.
You want to play? Pay.
That's the basic model. If somebody else can provide something you want -- like the right to play his music -- but is not willing to let it go for free, then you rarely have the right to take it from him. Major exceptions include Governments and taxes, as it's rather non-trivial to switch countries and citizenships.
Of course, an artist could distribute electronically, freely, on his own, if he did not sign any contracts prohibiting this. That's his choice. He could also sign a contract selling this right, if he chose.
In the beginning, at least, it's very much like VC. The distributor takes a chance on an unknown in exchange for the rights, hoping that the unknown will become a well-known success.
If the unknown doesn't, well, at least it'll reduce your tax liability for the year...
A VCer -- or distributor -- doesn't have to win every bet. He, or it, just needs to win big enough on the odd bet -- be it Britney, the latest contrived boy band, or whatnot -- to cover his losses and a bit more.
A lot of us have a LOT of disk space compared to bandwidth. That goes doubly so for travellers; nowadays, you can get hard disks in the double-digit GB for a notebook, but if you're overseas, in the middle of a conference, or on a plane, you may not have *any* bandwidth let alone sufficient to do serious work over the web. That means you have to take the suite with you.
We'll see about the ubiquity of Office once a certain lawsuit is resolved. Things might change several years down the road once the bundling is stopped.
In addition, platform-independent Office suites are pretty rare IIRC; one Java version of the Corel suite comes to mind, but it died rather quickly.
They're advertising 4, with 16 on track for NEXT YEAR.
I don't know what the reporter was smokin' when the section header "100 products from 100 developers?" -- there's NO hint of 100 apps in the text -- but I do know this: You didn't read the article.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reminded of Los Alamos, heh.
Most likely, the NIST folks use laptops in the field, and their job naturally involves sensitive information... hence the use of removable drives that were nominally supposed to be locked in safes.
In an organization with a physically separated network (or one with a darn strict firewall) so that you can't access data you need when you're outside, I could see a need for storing it on a laptop.
And that's fine by me.
Say goodbye to activist rulings that go well beyond the Constitution. He's promised to appoint strict constructionists, which means to uphold the Constitution as it was written and amended, not to make policy on the basis of popularity or feelings. If it's not under Federal jurisdiction, then the Government should make no guarantees or prohibitions in either direction.
Unless, of course, you'd like to add "expedience" to justifications possible for ignoring the Constitution. Expedience served pretty well for numerous monarchs in their days, as well.
Hmmm. A lot of this indirectly affects them, doesn't it? Money that parents do not send to the US Treasury might be spent on the kids, for instance. ;-)
But -- assuming this demographic has no plans to die en masse anytime soon, it will affect them -- now, and later.
Pay taxes? Or use government services? Then how much revenue the government collects, and how it spends it, is relevant. Government spending, if memory serves, accounts for a rather non-negligible portion of the GDP.
And don't forget the moral issues, like whether Gore should be at least partly blamed for tolerating and participating in the various malfesances committed by the adminstration (especially in raising money...); it seems a bit much to presuppose the entire block amoral.
Hmm, few days old -- but one of our former servicemen confessed to helping out bin Laden's people with planning the US Embassy bombings in Africa. Let's see what I can find that doesn't require money for an old article...
Here's a CNN article.
Former US Army Sgt. Ali Mohammed confessed to conspiring in the Kenya and Tanzania incidents. My bad; he was a former serviceman who apparently left the service in '89 (it does not say under what conditions).
In many churches in the US, you'd have to say "possibly armed", because a number of states DO permit CCW and don't prohibit it specifically in churches (and banning CCW in churches is a bit silly if you trust the people enough to allow it elsewhere).
So, for instance, if you tried to rob the congregation at a Sunday morning sermon, you'd be taking a chance. I'd suspect in most cases you'd win the bet (given the regulars are more likely to be older and female, if memory serves, and less likely to carry statistically) -- but it's still a a chance. And the wager would be the robber's life versus some amount of coinage, hostages or whatever the objective is.
In the UK, the odds, if the congregation is law-abiding and does not include on-duty armed policement (the armed response teams), happen to be zero; the group is practically guaranteed to be *unarmed*. Most convenient if you're crazy, but not crazy enough to ignore the possibility of being shot.
As somebody noted a few days ago...
US Constitution, Article VI, paragraph 2.
This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.
The wording is ambiguous -- does the phrase "of any State" modify "the Constitution" as well? -- but it could easily be read to imply that treaties override the (national) Constitution.
More specifically, for the folks in the US -- write your Senators. The House will have no say about this, but the treaty will not go into effect here unless the Senate ratifies it.
It's what people clamor for -- safety.
My suspicion is that any politician who clearly states that the state cannot usually protect you -- there are always people who will not be deterred -- but can often only help clean up the mess afterwards, is going to lose a LOT of votes.
Never mind that, if memory serves, courts have ruled that you are not entitled to the expectation of comprehensive police protection; you cannot sue the police for failing to proactively protect you.
After alleged Crisis X, the question posed by reporters / worrying parents / etc is usually something like, "What will you do to make sure that Crisis X never happens again?". The clause "...while preserving our individual rights" generally doesn't come into play. We've seen it again and again -- after Columbine, the OK City bombing, and so forth.
Only if they see viable options, and what is "broken" is VERY broken.
Both Netscape and IE have a long, long history of bugs, including numerous security issues -- yet, people haven't flocked en masse to, say, Opera or Amaya. For most tasks involved with light browsing, both of these two perform well -- vulnerabilities involving theft of cookies, for instance, do NOT suddenly mean it can't browse.
Instead, MS and AOL/Netscape simply release updates and, it seems, retain their user base.
Software doesn't need to be great or flawless (even in the sense of security) for people to use it; it just has to be "good enough", taking into account the availability and convenience (or lack thereof) of other options. Unfortunately, security flaws often do not impact apparent functionality enough to cause users to flee a product en masse...
Military systems also come to mind -- that is, those providing information.
Given that it's known now that folks like bin Laden have had, and probably still have, sympathizers and accomplices within the Armed Forces. Might be handy if they have physical access to a terminal on a "secure" network, that otherwise provides no external access. Things like blueprints, security precautions (shift schedules, for instance), and personnel files might be interesting.
Actually, the position is rather akin to Gore's stance on gun control...
Ask him about CCW in churches, for instance. Apparently, he's against it, as if this were a Highlander universe and we were all immortals who cannot fight on holy ground. That ignores multiple incidents, such as a certain loon in the UK who attacked an unarmed crowd in a church with a sword...
Or, for that matter, whether he supports the ban on handguns (even an unloaded handgun w/ a trigger lock in a gun safe) in DC. As we all know, DC is a WONDERFULLY safe city where such things as innocents being shot in a crossfire at a city zoo NEVER HAPPEN thanks to the gun control promoted by liberals everywhere...
He's been chastened. That is, he's now less likely to try to destabilize the whole region by invading somebody else, or lobbing missiles willy-nilly. His military is now meek enough that it tolerates -- it has no choice but to tolerate -- repeated invasion by Turkey (which has pursued Kurdish rebels across the border).
There also aren't that many good candidates for replacing him yet... and a UN/US-run government would NOT sit well with the rest of the Middle East, methinks.
I believe it's meant to resemble an SQL query -- hence the keyword capitalization and list of hypothetical databases.
Can employers ask the police to invoke that authority without, say, the police deciding that a criminal investigation is needed?
Hmmm. Went to the Home Office site and got a 404 for the final version (the 4 August 2000 HTML). Obnoxious, that.
* Harrassing, 'anonymous' e-mail to your coworkers. I'm not up on British law... but at least in the US, the employer might be liable if he fails to stop it (think 'hostile working environment')...
/etc/inittab help.
* Corporate espionage of sorts. Even intra-company. A Payroll employee could broadcast compensation figures, which might be most embarrassing for many.
* Details of conspiracy. More of a potential problem for financial businesses, I'd guess, where disgruntled employees plan an inside job.
Rare? Yes. It happens, 'tho, and if the employee has been acting suspiciously, maybe the employer would want to be able to check. Should he be allowed to? Depends on the rest of British law regarding data privacy...
Hmmm. An employer could go far to prevent this by, say, using a locked-down Linux (or similar) installation without a compiler, and 'noexec' flags on user-writable partitions. A BIOS setup password, LILO password, and using sulogin in
Want to use GPG? Fine. But the local version implements key escrow... And so forth. It'd take a while to set up, perhaps (at least if you want to take into account SSL-capable browsers...), but it might be possible for a paranoid employer.
Considering that they have differences on military spending (how much to spend on R&D, for instance); health care (prescription drug coverage); foreign policy (use of military for peacekeeping); energy policy (how much, where to drill); social security (pump in taxes versus overhaul); taxation (degree of "progressiveness", tax credits versus tax cuts; also, if memory serves, differences regarding the AMT); gun control (registration, use of trigger locks, et al); balance of power (Federal vs state); education (mandatory standardized testing or no, etc) and so forth, it's arguable that you haven't been paying attention AT ALL.
They are NOT identical. If you think they are, you just haven't been looking.
Computational work.
Some of us do things that require a LOT of computations, and every little bit helps when you're running a series of experiments to test the scalability of an algorithm...
'course, by the time you start mucking about with 600MB data files on a lil' old desktop, you're hoping for faster disk, not just processors...
But they're not fully binary compatible, are they?
And there are a LOT of functions and libraries that differ significantly enough between, say, Linux and Solaris, that you need to have #ifdefs scattered about. Functions that are in different headers or libraries, functions that behave differently regarding whether they use static storage or return dynamically allocated memory, and so forth... POSIX isn't complete in that regard.
At least on the networks the bias is often obvious enough to filter out. ;-)
Random example -- CBS News story on Firestone (IIRC) ties, with the reporter noting that 60% of returned tires in a given set (methinks it was national, for certain specific models) were returned due to tread separation issues, with the number '60%' prominently displayed onscreen.
Um. That's a remarkably useless number without context, such as
a) Information on what % of Firestone tires was actually returned.
b) Industry norms.
c) The severity of the tread separation issues.
It blatantly smelled like a hit piece designed so that a casual viewer -- say, one momentarily distracted -- would infer that 60% of all Firestone tires were vulnerable to tread separation. But at least t'was easy to discern.
CNN: the story that the SOGers were using chemical weapons on American defectors. Story retracted, apologies issued, reporters fired.
PrimeTime Live (think "Food Lion") got nailed in a court of law over planting people as workers...
The president of NBC News even resigned over a Dateline piece in which gas tanks of GM pickups were rigged to increase the probability of ignition upon a side-impact collision. He didn't micromanage the story, but it was on his watch...
It happens.
...how about papers and networks sacking reporters for bad or fraudulent journalism?
Of the top of my head, heads rolled at...
CNN, due to a badly written, misleading piece on SOGers alleging use of chemical weapons by Special Operations Group troopers on American defectors, during 'Nam if memory serves.
The SJ Mercury, due to disagreements over the veracity of the CIA/Crack conspiracy series.
The Boston Globe, which canned a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, for having done fraudulent pieces including heart-wrenching interviews of non-existing people.
In all three cases, very, very public retractions and apologies were made. I'm sure there have been others, as well.
The NY Times and the local papers here run corrections in a regular space on the second page. In the case of the NYT, it's right under the summaries of the edition's contents -- which isn't exactly obscure.
How many people has Slashdot sacked for not bothering to check submissions that were hoaxes? How much checking do many onliners do?
There is no right for a musician to be paid, no more than an auto dealership has a right to your money. However, neither is there a right to consume their work, or for you to take a dealership's cars.
You want to play? Pay.
That's the basic model. If somebody else can provide something you want -- like the right to play his music -- but is not willing to let it go for free, then you rarely have the right to take it from him. Major exceptions include Governments and taxes, as it's rather non-trivial to switch countries and citizenships.
Of course, an artist could distribute electronically, freely, on his own, if he did not sign any contracts prohibiting this. That's his choice. He could also sign a contract selling this right, if he chose.
In the beginning, at least, it's very much like VC. The distributor takes a chance on an unknown in exchange for the rights, hoping that the unknown will become a well-known success.
If the unknown doesn't, well, at least it'll reduce your tax liability for the year...
A VCer -- or distributor -- doesn't have to win every bet. He, or it, just needs to win big enough on the odd bet -- be it Britney, the latest contrived boy band, or whatnot -- to cover his losses and a bit more.
A lot of us have a LOT of disk space compared to bandwidth. That goes doubly so for travellers; nowadays, you can get hard disks in the double-digit GB for a notebook, but if you're overseas, in the middle of a conference, or on a plane, you may not have *any* bandwidth let alone sufficient to do serious work over the web. That means you have to take the suite with you.
We'll see about the ubiquity of Office once a certain lawsuit is resolved. Things might change several years down the road once the bundling is stopped.
In addition, platform-independent Office suites are pretty rare IIRC; one Java version of the Corel suite comes to mind, but it died rather quickly.
They aren't advertising 100 apps.
They're advertising 4, with 16 on track for NEXT YEAR.
I don't know what the reporter was smokin' when the section header "100 products from 100 developers?" -- there's NO hint of 100 apps in the text -- but I do know this: You didn't read the article.