Nothing like seeing a Libertardian utterly miss the point, which is that they're not doing the job and they're not going to. Are any of you guys capable of seeing beyond the time scale of two or three years? Corporations, at least as they are structured in the West, are inherently unable to take the long view. If short-term profits don't appear to either be distributed as dividends or to raise the stock price shareholders will vote the board out and install someone who does have the short-term blinders on. That's why pretty much everything worthwhile since the beginning of civilization has been pioneered by governments, if not carried out entirely by them. Greed and self-interest is fine for accomplishing short-term goals, like building a factory. It takes a government to build the roads to get the products to market.
What have Orbital Sciences and Space-X developed? Refinements of half a century of R&D done by NASA and Roscosmos (and its predecessor). They're doing interesting work but they're not doing it to "move humanity towards being a spacefaring species", they're doing it because they can make money. Like every other corporation their viewpoint is short-term, they won't be investing in a colony or even pure research if there isn't a return on investment in a reasonable period.
I wouldn't worry so much about the security of data on the device as much as once it's paired with your other devices you have a security hole inside your network that is trusted by your phone, laptop, whatever. Printers and security cameras have already been exploited to attack networks from the inside, this is yet another opportunity waiting to be exploited.
One of my favorite quotes came when Farley Mowat interviewed a Soviet general who said, "The difference between American propaganda and Soviet propaganda is that we don't believe ours."
Publicly run stuff doesn't have to be 'shitty', and in fact there are many of us old enough to remember when the city/county power company and other utilities were far and away better and cheaper than the for-profit utilities. The problem is that in order to make people think that government doesn't work and justify privatizing all the public infrastructure the conservatives (mostly Republicans but some Democrats) have spent the last three decades breaking as much of the government as they have been able to.
In three decades of watching privatization efforts all over the world I have yet to see a single one that ended up with better service at a lower price than the previous public system. None. Anywhere. Ever. Can you point at an example of a successful privatization project?
Well, since it's pretty much impossible to have a "secret network" when you're using wi-fi I'm going with the SlashDot headline for accuracy. Especially since an "internet" is any network of smaller networks (there isn't just one behemoth named The Internet).
Oh, you mean the upper class folks like Gloria Estafan's family (she once told an interviewer that "Before Castro everyone had their own car") and the hacendados? Yeah, I've talked to them. I've also talked to people who were of the vast majority who lived in poverty and (in rural areas) virtual slavery. Go look them up, you'll hear a different story about before/after.
There's a reason Cubans are more likely to expatriate
Yeah, Radio Marti tells them that if they come to the US they're guaranteed a free apartment, a good job, and a new car. They arrive, live 6-8 in a two-bedroom tenement, wash dishes for a living, and walk to work because they can't afford bus fare, but write home to their families that they're living the good life because they're too embarrassed to admit the reality. This is the reality of pretty much every rural migrant in Latin America to their country's capital city as well.
Well, not really. Cuba was a totalitarian hell-hole **before** Castro, and the communist government has been considerably less repressive and violent than any of the pseudo-democratic or crypto-democratic countries that the US set up in Central America. The El Salvadoran government just in the 1980s killed more people out of its smaller population in the 1980s than the Cuban government has killed in all the decades since the overthrow of Batista combined. The Cuban government has improved the lives of the entire population of the island in the past half century, unlike the population of every other country in Central America and the Caribbean, and their literacy rates and infant mortality numbers are superior to even the US. Good luck finding anyone on the island old enough to remember pre-Castro Cuba who wants to go back to the "good old days".
They also targeted progressive groups, in fact more progressive groups than conservatives. Of course since the congresscritters specifically ordered the IRS to **ONLY** report on actions against conservative (well, really, radical right-wing rather than actual conservative) groups that's the only news that you saw on Glen Beck's show so you may not be aware of the reality.
You do realize that they also admit to targeting openly liberal groups as well, don't you? They also gave extra attention to any group with the word 'progressive', 'occupy', 'rights' and several other key words in its title. The paper they presented to Congress only mentions Tea Party groups because Congress specifically told them to ONLY report on attention that they gave groups with 'tea party' in the name.
The teabaggers could have easily avoided the entire issue by choosing one of the other non-profit statuses that **do** allow political activities (which they were openly engaged in before even filing the paperwork), but those statuses wouldn't allow them to hide their donors, and the fact that that they're Astroturf groups rather than grass roots.
Right, the hospital that spent a gazillion dollars on an MRI machine should just throw it away because the control software runs on XP and Win7's security model breaks it. Get out in the real world and see what end users have to work with.
Well, not breaking the law, but breaking the PCI contract. Even then, it's only if you're doing CC processing on that machine or some transaction related to the processing. The receptionist could be using Win95 for all the PCI cares, as long as she can't touch the financial system.
The climate control system in the building that I'm sitting in uses some Linux version that's close to a decade old, if not older. Don't know what they're going to do when the current "server" (a desktop PC shoved under the maintenance guy's desk) dies. There are a lot of these out there, I know of an access control system running Win 95 in 2008, which hadn't been rebooted in over eight years because they weren't sure whether the machine would come back up and they had no way of getting the data off it. That box finally died a couple of years ago and they had to spend a week recreating everything from scratch, and replacing $18,000 of installed hardware that wouldn't work with the newer versions.
Place I used to contract had a knee-high pile of Compaq 386 laptops in the radio system engineers' office. When I offered to surplus them and get them out of the way they almost attacked me. They had a half million dollar radio tower that used a bleeding-edge control system when it was first installed. The manufacturer got bought out and the new owner didn't support the thing any more. The control system software would ONLY run on a 386 running DOS 3, nothing else, and that pile of laptops were their backup tower controllers. The last time I was there I noticed the pile was gone so they must have upgraded the tower.
There are a lot of expensive legacy systems that rely on outdated operating systems to function. I personally have encountered MRI machines, an access control system, metal lathes, a sawmill, and a factory floor automation system that will not run on anything higher than NT 4.0, a company isn't going to throw away a multimillion dollar automated lathe just because the OS is outdated (or at least they shouldn't). The security model in Server 2008 broke a lot of software, for companies that aren't on the continual upgrade treadmill Server 2003 is going to be around for quite some time.
Panasonic, Sony, and a bunch of other very large manufacturers send out their **security** cameras with trivial username/password like admin/12345 (Panasonic) or admin/admin (Sony) and do not require the installer to change them. This is why we prefer cameras from Pelco and Axis, which at least require the installers to change the password from the factory default on first use (although they do allow idiots to change it back to the factory default if they're so inclined). A couple of the large manufacturers of very high-quality cameras (crappy software, but nice hardware) have only one user (root) and do not allow the password to be changed. It's a bit sad when a customer's security system becomes a security hole.
My wife wants to retire later with more money, I want to retire earlier with more health. She said, "With more money we'll be able to travel more." I said, "I'll be damned if I'm going to visit the Great Pyramid using a walker." The debate continues.
Actually legal pot in Washington is cheaper and higher quality than what was available before. My only complaint is that I don't really care for the high-potency stuff, I prefer to smoke a joint or a bowl and then go out and **DO** something, weed the garden, paint a bedroom, go for a walk, whatever. Don't really like being so stoned I'm non-functional. Give me a baggie of leaf and I'm a lot happier, but then I'm not typical either.
I think that's the old normal. It wasn't until about 1900 that having a physician present actually improved your chance of survival, in many previous eras it would have increased your chance of dying instead. (George Washington was bled to death by his doctors, for example.)
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing like seeing a Libertardian utterly miss the point, which is that they're not doing the job and they're not going to. Are any of you guys capable of seeing beyond the time scale of two or three years? Corporations, at least as they are structured in the West, are inherently unable to take the long view. If short-term profits don't appear to either be distributed as dividends or to raise the stock price shareholders will vote the board out and install someone who does have the short-term blinders on. That's why pretty much everything worthwhile since the beginning of civilization has been pioneered by governments, if not carried out entirely by them. Greed and self-interest is fine for accomplishing short-term goals, like building a factory. It takes a government to build the roads to get the products to market.
What have Orbital Sciences and Space-X developed? Refinements of half a century of R&D done by NASA and Roscosmos (and its predecessor). They're doing interesting work but they're not doing it to "move humanity towards being a spacefaring species", they're doing it because they can make money. Like every other corporation their viewpoint is short-term, they won't be investing in a colony or even pure research if there isn't a return on investment in a reasonable period.
I wouldn't worry so much about the security of data on the device as much as once it's paired with your other devices you have a security hole inside your network that is trusted by your phone, laptop, whatever. Printers and security cameras have already been exploited to attack networks from the inside, this is yet another opportunity waiting to be exploited.
Yeah, but the processes to refine the stuff out is horrendous. They make oil refineries look like unspoiled wilderness in comparison.
One of my favorite quotes came when Farley Mowat interviewed a Soviet general who said, "The difference between American propaganda and Soviet propaganda is that we don't believe ours."
And still, it's better than any of the fossil fuels.
If you want no risk then it needs to be glassified and buried at the base of a subduction zone where it will get sucked into Earth's mantle.
Publicly run stuff doesn't have to be 'shitty', and in fact there are many of us old enough to remember when the city/county power company and other utilities were far and away better and cheaper than the for-profit utilities. The problem is that in order to make people think that government doesn't work and justify privatizing all the public infrastructure the conservatives (mostly Republicans but some Democrats) have spent the last three decades breaking as much of the government as they have been able to.
In three decades of watching privatization efforts all over the world I have yet to see a single one that ended up with better service at a lower price than the previous public system. None. Anywhere. Ever. Can you point at an example of a successful privatization project?
I thought that it took multiple generations of supernovas to produce enough heavy elements to accumulate into a rocky planet.
Well, since it's pretty much impossible to have a "secret network" when you're using wi-fi I'm going with the SlashDot headline for accuracy. Especially since an "internet" is any network of smaller networks (there isn't just one behemoth named The Internet).
Oh, you mean the upper class folks like Gloria Estafan's family (she once told an interviewer that "Before Castro everyone had their own car") and the hacendados? Yeah, I've talked to them. I've also talked to people who were of the vast majority who lived in poverty and (in rural areas) virtual slavery. Go look them up, you'll hear a different story about before/after.
There's a reason Cubans are more likely to expatriate
Yeah, Radio Marti tells them that if they come to the US they're guaranteed a free apartment, a good job, and a new car. They arrive, live 6-8 in a two-bedroom tenement, wash dishes for a living, and walk to work because they can't afford bus fare, but write home to their families that they're living the good life because they're too embarrassed to admit the reality. This is the reality of pretty much every rural migrant in Latin America to their country's capital city as well.
Well, not really. Cuba was a totalitarian hell-hole **before** Castro, and the communist government has been considerably less repressive and violent than any of the pseudo-democratic or crypto-democratic countries that the US set up in Central America. The El Salvadoran government just in the 1980s killed more people out of its smaller population in the 1980s than the Cuban government has killed in all the decades since the overthrow of Batista combined. The Cuban government has improved the lives of the entire population of the island in the past half century, unlike the population of every other country in Central America and the Caribbean, and their literacy rates and infant mortality numbers are superior to even the US. Good luck finding anyone on the island old enough to remember pre-Castro Cuba who wants to go back to the "good old days".
They also targeted progressive groups, in fact more progressive groups than conservatives. Of course since the congresscritters specifically ordered the IRS to **ONLY** report on actions against conservative (well, really, radical right-wing rather than actual conservative) groups that's the only news that you saw on Glen Beck's show so you may not be aware of the reality.
You do realize that they also admit to targeting openly liberal groups as well, don't you? They also gave extra attention to any group with the word 'progressive', 'occupy', 'rights' and several other key words in its title. The paper they presented to Congress only mentions Tea Party groups because Congress specifically told them to ONLY report on attention that they gave groups with 'tea party' in the name.
The teabaggers could have easily avoided the entire issue by choosing one of the other non-profit statuses that **do** allow political activities (which they were openly engaged in before even filing the paperwork), but those statuses wouldn't allow them to hide their donors, and the fact that that they're Astroturf groups rather than grass roots.
Good rant. We'll have to agree to disagree on this one.
Right, the hospital that spent a gazillion dollars on an MRI machine should just throw it away because the control software runs on XP and Win7's security model breaks it. Get out in the real world and see what end users have to work with.
Well, not breaking the law, but breaking the PCI contract. Even then, it's only if you're doing CC processing on that machine or some transaction related to the processing. The receptionist could be using Win95 for all the PCI cares, as long as she can't touch the financial system.
The climate control system in the building that I'm sitting in uses some Linux version that's close to a decade old, if not older. Don't know what they're going to do when the current "server" (a desktop PC shoved under the maintenance guy's desk) dies. There are a lot of these out there, I know of an access control system running Win 95 in 2008, which hadn't been rebooted in over eight years because they weren't sure whether the machine would come back up and they had no way of getting the data off it. That box finally died a couple of years ago and they had to spend a week recreating everything from scratch, and replacing $18,000 of installed hardware that wouldn't work with the newer versions.
Place I used to contract had a knee-high pile of Compaq 386 laptops in the radio system engineers' office. When I offered to surplus them and get them out of the way they almost attacked me. They had a half million dollar radio tower that used a bleeding-edge control system when it was first installed. The manufacturer got bought out and the new owner didn't support the thing any more. The control system software would ONLY run on a 386 running DOS 3, nothing else, and that pile of laptops were their backup tower controllers. The last time I was there I noticed the pile was gone so they must have upgraded the tower.
There are a lot of expensive legacy systems that rely on outdated operating systems to function. I personally have encountered MRI machines, an access control system, metal lathes, a sawmill, and a factory floor automation system that will not run on anything higher than NT 4.0, a company isn't going to throw away a multimillion dollar automated lathe just because the OS is outdated (or at least they shouldn't). The security model in Server 2008 broke a lot of software, for companies that aren't on the continual upgrade treadmill Server 2003 is going to be around for quite some time.
Panasonic, Sony, and a bunch of other very large manufacturers send out their **security** cameras with trivial username/password like admin/12345 (Panasonic) or admin/admin (Sony) and do not require the installer to change them. This is why we prefer cameras from Pelco and Axis, which at least require the installers to change the password from the factory default on first use (although they do allow idiots to change it back to the factory default if they're so inclined). A couple of the large manufacturers of very high-quality cameras (crappy software, but nice hardware) have only one user (root) and do not allow the password to be changed. It's a bit sad when a customer's security system becomes a security hole.
I regularly used to take the shortcut through the cemetery, even after sundown. That scared me worse than the thought of bears.
My wife wants to retire later with more money, I want to retire earlier with more health. She said, "With more money we'll be able to travel more." I said, "I'll be damned if I'm going to visit the Great Pyramid using a walker." The debate continues.
Actually legal pot in Washington is cheaper and higher quality than what was available before. My only complaint is that I don't really care for the high-potency stuff, I prefer to smoke a joint or a bowl and then go out and **DO** something, weed the garden, paint a bedroom, go for a walk, whatever. Don't really like being so stoned I'm non-functional. Give me a baggie of leaf and I'm a lot happier, but then I'm not typical either.
I think that's the old normal. It wasn't until about 1900 that having a physician present actually improved your chance of survival, in many previous eras it would have increased your chance of dying instead. (George Washington was bled to death by his doctors, for example.)