This "fear" of errors decreases the likelihood of committing them. Topic, orthography, grammar and even calligraphy (which increases the likelihood of your message getting across) are all helped by this conscious effort.
I attended grammar school in Germany, where—at least at the time—what you describe was pretty much the official teaching philosophy—only, you needn't put quotes around the word fear. It was more like mortal terror. Yes, we were taught by real grammar Nazis![1]
In first grade, we got a slate with a chalk-like stylus. You cleaned the slate with a wet sponge. Easy, forgiving, and economical. Second grade came as quite a shock: suddenly, we were made to write everything in notebooks with a fountain pen. It was a capital offense to *gasp* tear out a page, so any mistakes you made in your composition book lived to shame you forever. I'm quite sure the fear factor made it worse; I was so afraid of making mistakes that I couldn't keep my mind on what I was supposed to be writing.
1. OK, I'm exaggerating. I'm pretty sure that none of my teachers was an actual Nazi. This was the 50s, and the Nazis had all mysteriously disappeared in something grownups referred to as "the war", but never talked about.
I don't understand why you think the act of typing somehow causes your spelling or grammatical skills to deteriorate. Maybe you type too fast or carelessly; maybe you don't proofread. I personally hate to write anything by hand. Regrettably, there are still some formal communications (for example, those regarding death and weddings) that should be hand-written. I find this a painful and frustrating chore, as I am constantly making spelling mistakes, then have to buy a new card and start over. Come to think of it, nobody can read my handwriting, so it probably doesn't matter.
Of course, I probably make as many typos per word as I misspell by hand...but thanks to the greatest gift of technology to the scrivener since the pencil eraser—the DELETE key—it is easy to make them disappear. Typos happen. Back when I was pounding away on college papers using my mother's Remington portable (the one with a greasy square of leather stuck on top of it so I could rest my head on it and doze in between inspired sentences), I would use erasable paper. The bottom of the typewriter frequently filled up with eraser fuzzies to the point where the keys wouldn't move, so I'd have to turn it upside down and whack it to empty it.
If you were asking whether using electronic devices to communicate is deleterious to spelling and grammar skills, I'd have to say that, considering the ways in which these devices are used, it probably is. But it has nothing to do with typing. Standards are lower in email; typos and grammatical infelicities seem to be tolerated by people in email, though those same offenses in, say, a published book would cause complaint. The same is true of online fora. Were I to dare correct someone's spelling or grammar on/., I would be condemned as a "spelling nazi". I hardly need comment on that destroyer of articulate communication, the practice of "texting" and its egregious ally, "133t5p34k" (um...did I spell that right?).
I'd definitely put grinding with guildmates above grinding solo, granted that they actually say shit. Part of my problem is the lack of people who are willing to talk at all.
Yeah, I've noticed that the people in WoW seem to be singularly inarticulate. Not a word, not an emote, not a joke to be had at any price. It's sad. People won't even discuss strategy. Sign up for a battleground, get thrown together with a random selection of people, and no one says anything about how we might win this instance.
Sometimes, I wonder if those other people really exist...maybe they are NPCs. Maybe WoW doesn't have a gazillion subscribers, just a fairly adequate AI that emulates a crowded server population...
EVE Online, for instance, has some of the first and last in the above list, and that gives it a depth most other MMOs cannot match. Subscriber numbers have constantly grown over the years and are over 300k now according to CCP. While not at WOW size, that is a nice success.
Yeah, I played Eve for two years, until I realized how evil it was. Talk about "forced grouping"—in Eve you are nothing if you do not belong to an elite corporation. The game has some excellent features; there's a reason why I played it as long as I did. Eve lures you in by giving you the illusion that you can choose from a number of play styles, and that playing solo without PvP, or playing PvP solo and surviving are options. In fact, there's no such choice—once you get to a certain point, you must get at high-level content to keep the game interesting. To get at this content, you must venture into "low sec" space. Once you enter low sec space, you will get ganked. I'm not talking fair fight here, or even a single pilot who's just much better than you ambushing you—I'm talking about a dozen hostiles jumping you as you emerge from a jump point. Poof. Dead. Nothing you could have done.
I got an offer to play free for 30 days a few months ago; I guess CCCP was hoping they'd lure me back. I decided I'd give it another try, and took my battleship to a low-sec area to salvage some tech artifacts. After hours of launching probes and watching for stuff to show up, I did find some neat artifacts. I then jumped back through the nearest gate to head back to my base. When I came out the other end of the gate...Cluster-Gank! This caused me to remember why I had quit Eve in the first place: the game is full of people who do not play to have a good time, but who have a good time by giving you a bad one.
That is what I meant when I said that Eve is evil. And the evil doesn't just manifest itself in people ganking you for just the fun of making you feel bad, but also in lying to you ("Please help me with my quest!") in order to lure you into ambushes, and generally acting like antisocial rat-bastards. The moral tone of Eve is set by the developers, who have repeatedly cheated in the game to give their pet corporations advantages and who were not fired by CCP when they were found out.
"So join a corp" you say. I tried. The first one I joined was made up of nice, laid back people just like me...who were, of course, absolutely no use in a fight.
I tried joining another corp, and got a very rude reply from the corp officer I contacted that accused me of being a pirate trying to infiltrate them! That's actually what made me quit the first time—I decided that playing a game that is that close to real life is just plain masochism.
You can never, through cryptography, make other (competent) people's computers do tasks (such as deleting files) for you.
Ah, I wasn't very clear about how this works. The central point here is that when the forensic investigator runs her decryption mechanism, she has no way of knowing if all the information has been recovered.
The following assumptions pertain:
There are two sets of data, contained in a nonstandard volume created from directories in a regular filesystem.
The "deep secret" data was hidden in something like image files; it's protected by steganography, and encrypted strongly.
The "fake" password will correctly decrypt everything, except the "deep" level. The stego material will be rendered in such a way that it cannot be proven that any information other than the ostensible content (the image) was ever there.
The forensics people need the password, otherwise why are we talking about passwords at all?
Of course, the forensicist (is that a word?) has the option of not processing the parts of the data that she thinks contain suspicious stuff...but then it's not decrypted, and she can't prove it contains encrypted material. Remember, the disk volume is itself written in an obfuscated way, so she can't just pick out files.
Hmm...sounds like a motion sensitive switch that shuts off the power between the motherboard and the power supply would counter this. Of course, you'd have to be careful not to jiggle the computer yourself. Heck, a mercury tilt switch and a relay would do it...
Disclaimer: I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on things crypto; I'm just throwing out this suggestion to see what people think.
So how's this: write a really good backup utility and give it away for free. (Yes, I know it's been done...but not for Windows and for free and really well.) Mass adoption ensues. Lots of people have this program installed, and have backups made by it.
As a bonus, the backup files are encrypted to protect your privacy with a password you supply. This is important: encryption is mandatory. You must supply a password. That's so everyone who uses this program has encrypted backups—this is not grounds for suspicion. There is also another undocumented (but well-known) option: you can supply two more passwords to the program when it compresses and backs up your files. The second password is used to encrypt a list of files or directories that you designate for special handling. The third password works just like the first one, with one small exception: it destroys all the files on the "specials" list, or manipulates them in such a way as to make them look innocuous. (This might work especially well with a steganographic approach using image files...so you have a bunch of blurry under-exposed.bmp photos...being a bad photographer isn't a crime)
The first password is for decrypting the non-sensitive files if you need them. The second one decrypts the sensitive data after the first round of decryption is completed. Obviously, the third password is the one you surrender to the police (after a reasonably realistic show of resistance).
And there are USB keys small enough to swallow. For best results, chew first.
Heck, put it on a Micro-SD card that plugs into a USB drive. I bet it wouldn't even show up on an X-ray—especially if you chewed it a bit. Or, you could just flick the card (I refer to them as "data flakes") under your bed when the authorities come knocking—they'll never find it hidden among the dust bunnies. Of course, neither will you.
Congratulations. I wish I worked for you...or are you perhaps a member of the Church hierarchy with fast track to sainthood? In that case...ah...forget I said that.
I've had good managers and I've had bad managers. The good managers valued my abilities, encouraged me, kept the fecal matter from rolling downhill on me, and didn't get in my way when I was trying to work. However, all my managers had certain traits in common: they would sometimes lie to me, and—when push came to shove—they were perfectly capable of throwing me to the wolves to save themselves.
Does that mean that even my good managers were evil people? No...I think they were just normal. Being a manager puts certain constraints on you and your behavior. It forces you to make moral compromises. For example, if your manager is told that a layoff is imminent, then he can't tell you. If you ask directly, he will lie about it. If he's asked to pick some victims, he will do it—regardless of how friendly and ostensibly trusting the relationship between him and the victim has been. That's because, by accepting a position as manger, a person implicitly agrees that he will advance the interests of the organization over that of his subordinates.
Um, running your apps on timeshared mainframes is hardly "new".
The fact that it's not new doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. It wouldn't be the first time that technology moved in cycles. Also, it's only the concept of big iron and thin servers that's old; the implementation today will be much faster because networks are much faster. So fast that inefficient protocols don't matter.
I used to work on a Unix "mainframe" (a Convex, actually), using a diskless Sun workstation. It was a great collaborative environment, and it was sure a lot less hassle for the IT folks to maintain than a zillion PCs all running Windows. Yeah, it was slow...that was the big drawback. If there was more than one user on the network, they all complained that it was too slow. (One user would complain too, but nobody would hear him.) But there were compensations—like starting "Crabs" on somebody else's Xdisplay. *Evil laughter*
But slowness isn't what killed the diskless Suns...it was the managers. They wanted to run Excel and do "roll-ups" (whatever the farking hell those are), so they got PCs. But then they noticed that they were cut off from our network. That could not be allowed. So we all had to get PCs. And here we are. Personally, I wouldn't mind going back to the dumb terminals at work, with fast networks.
If Google is serious about developing a new OS, they're going to have to release hardware to run it. Why? To circumvent Microsoft's death-grip on the personal computer market, for one thing. If people remain convinced that they must have a PC, and it remains difficult to buy a computer that does not have Windows bundled with it, then Microsoft will keep raking in bucks, and the pre-installed MS OS will act as a barrier to unsophisticated users who want to run Google's OS.
Of course, the new hardware does not have to be a personal computer. Indeed, I think it's likely that the Google OS won't run primarily on devices like the personal computers of today. That's because the PC is on the verge of extinction. One hardware platform for Google OS is obvious: phones. Netbooks is another. And then there's e-book readers and game consoles. In fact, Google may never enter the PC marketplace if they agree with my hypothesis that the PC is about to go: most people want appliances that connect them to facebook, the web in general, e-communication (email is old-fashioned, you know), entertainment media, games and whatever else that's available out there. Light business applications needed by individuals can be run on a server (owned by Google, probably). Most people just don't need a computer—all they need is a thin client to connect them to services.
Would that kill Microsoft? It would pound some nails into their coffin...but it won't necessarily be fatal—they still have their huge business market. However, that market may change also: a workgroup or intranet "cloud" composed of central servers and thin clients makes a lot more sense than maintaining tens of thousands of PCs in a large corporation, or even hundreds of PCs in a smaller one. Will the corporate cloud be a Microsoft cloud? There's arguments for this: corporations are more concerned with the security of their data, so are less likely to trust it to some server outside their firewall. Corporate IT departments are highly conservative, and like to deal with known quantities—i.e., vendors they've dealt with before.
The question is how quickly Microsoft will adapt to the change. They have to stop thinking in terms of pumping out new operating systems, and start developing client/server networks and applications that run in such an environment.
If I'm right, and business turns back to the corporate mainframe/client model, then there will be many opportunities for vendors other than Microsoft to sell their solutions to businesses which want to save some money, or perceive value in the competing system. Businesses will no longer be locked into software as part of a hardware purchase in which there is no real choice of operating systems, as they are today. The best-case scenario—from Microsoft's viewpoint—is that we go back to something like the days when IBM dominated, but did not wholly own, the business IT market. There will be vendors to compete with Microsoft, just as there were DEC and Amdahl.
Fact is, the kid broke the law. You can hate the law, and work to change it, but that doesn't change the fact the kid broke the law.
Uh, could I humbly point out that the kid allegedly broke the law? The article alleges that he hacked some number of game consoles "to run pirated programs". Even if he "hacked" some game consoles, it remains to be seen if he did this to run pirated programs. There are a lot of questions here, and the law under discussion is a highly complex piece of...legislation. Meanwhile, as someone who likes to screw around with...I mean modify everyday objects—not all electronic—this kind of news makes me just a little bit more afraid that I'm going to, in some prosecutor's eyes, break some law and get sent to the Gulag.
Yeah I used to get lots of respect during my motorcycle days, but ever since I got 40 years older and went on meds, I haven't been crazy enough to ride one. Still, no PHB would have dared push me around back in those heady days of youth. Is there a chance that it wasn't the mororcycle? Maybe it was my outfit! Maybe wearing black leather with lots of little silver studs was the reason I was so well-regarded (some would say "avoided") by normal sane people. Wrapping a huge case-hardened steel chain around my waist, some grease smeared on my face and a devil-may care sneer quite completed the effect. Chicks seemed to dig it, too...but for some reason, they were all crazy.
Hey, this article has given me an idea—maybe there's a way I can regain the awesomeness of my former self without risking quadraplegia! I'm going to dig out the old leathers, get a Segway and ride it to my cubicle tomorrow morning. Then I'll get respect!
Judging by the fact that this comment has been modded up, I suspect the readers of/. must be more conservative than most. I have never even looked at Facebook or Myspace, and I'm not sure exactly what Twitter is, but the current crop of people under 40 seem to think that having an "online presence" is not only good, but downright required. I recently talked to a friend who is manager of a game software company, and he said he wouldn't even consider hiring anyone who doesn't have a Facebook page. "What's he got to hide?" was his comment about whether he would consider a hypothetical candidate who doesn't have an online presence. Other comments on this subject on/. have said pretty much the same thing.
There's much talk about privacy, but the collective actions of the people in our society says quite clearly that there is no real desire for privacy, and that this commodity is not appreciated. It's only occasionally when someone realizes that what he has written or imaged and posted on a web site was badly received by someone with the ability to hurt him that you hear someone regret flaunting his every trivial action and opinion in a way that is both public and enduring. By then it's too late, of course.
I often think of how badly the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge got it wrong in his novelette True Names . Vinge pictured a society of elite computer network users who considered one rule to be paramount: never, never give anyone your true name. Never let them find you; your cyber-persona is a mask that must not be penetrated, or you will suffer the consequences. Of course, the computer-users of today—the epigonoi of the Eternal September—are far from the elite who populated the USENET of old...they are the dumb masses. And they give everyone their true names. How sad.
Meanwhile, unlike other domesticates, cats have no obvious utility, aside from maybe local pest control
You think "pest control" is not useful? Then you've never lived in a place that was infested with mice or rats. Cats were once essential to any rural household (and very useful in the barn as well) because they are able to perform this one function that you think so negligible.
Heck, my house used to be crawling with "palmetto bugs" (Texan for for "giant cockroaches so big you could saddle up and ride them"). They live outside, but come into the house to forage. After I got a couple of cats, I never saw one of the monsters again. And the cats are getting remarkably fat...
With a dog, you can find out exactly how smart he is, because he'll cooperate with the whole exercise. A dog is a social animal. His whole life is focused around *you*. A cat is altogether a different beast. A cat does what it wants, when it wants.
I'm afraid that's a false generalization. I once had a dog who was very smart, but not at all cooperative. If I tried to play "fetch" with her, she'd run and get the stick the first time I threw it, and drop it at my feet. When I threw it again, she'd sit there and look at me like I was an idiot. She'd do it the first time to show she was smart enough to get what I wanted, but she wouldn't do it again because she thought it was a really dumb game that involved her doing all the work.
This dog did all kinds of amazing things, like find her way to me across a town she'd never been before. One night I got angry at her and said, "Get lost!". I never saw her again.
The cats follow me around from room to room while I'm home.
I have two cats who do this with my daughter. They are absolutely fixated on her (she's 19 now, but we've had these cats since she was young). They spend most of their time in her room. When my daughter comes into another room—say my office/study—it's as though an unruly mob has entered. The cats will start jumping up on my desk, mess with my stuff, and generally drive me crazy; I think they do this to make her go back to her room so they will have her to themselves. One of the cats is semi-social, and will allow other people to pet her, but the other is completely a one-person cat. Occasionall, daughter leaves for a vacation. When this happens, the one-person cat freaks. First, I won't see her for a week—she hides somewhere, and doesn't come out. Then after a week, she will occasionally come into the same room with me and meow plaintively. By the third week, the cat will start to approach me, complaining bitterly, but evading any attempt at contact. Finally, she overcomes her revulsion and jumps into my lap.
I guess being second choice is better than last...the cat never goes near my wife, no matter how desperate she is.
to grown up male cats, humans are a source of food and entertainment. maybe like a brother. to females, humans are more like ofsprings. that's why they bring in dead and half-dead animals home. they want you - the human - to use that carcass/weakened creature as play toys. this teaches usefull hunting and killing skills.
It's fun to guess why cats do stuff, but in the end, only the cat knows. I once had a friend who left her cat for a few weeks. I was in charge of filling up the kibble container and the water dish. She left one of the windows open a crack so the cat could come and go as he pleased. When she returned, she found a "present" nicely centered on the pillow of her bed. It was a long-dead bird, crawling with maggots. Now, was this in fact a present for my friend, or was it revenge for being gone? That was the truly sinister aspect of it, as far as I was concerned—revenge is at its most cruel when it keeps you guessing.
Nope, the only thing about cats you can be sure of is that they really, really hate doors.
The difference here is that with voluntary service and relatively easy transitions to and from military life, many of us either are or were the military.
Your idea of the effect of "voluntary service" on the "citizen-soldier" character of the U.S. Army seems a bit skewed. The situation you describe pertains much more to the non-volunteer draft Army of the past, not to today's mercenary...ah I mean "all-volunteer" force. The draftee Army of the 60s was indeed a cross-section of American male youths, and could not have been relied on to serve as an instrument of tyrannical oppression by the government of its own citizens. Indeed, they were notoriously unreliable in oppressing the citizens of a foreign nation (Vietnam). Why do you think the system was changed?
I speak, incidentally, from personal experience. I fought at Berkeley. Despite the events at Kent State, we were usually relieved to see the National Guard march in, as they were much less brutal and likely to shoot than some of the police forces we faced (e.g. those notorious thugs, the Alameda County Sherrif's Deputies who did fire on non-violent protesters).
Sometimes, the naivete of the Guards was touching. We took to flying kites above our assembly areas to prevent helicopters from flying in and gassing us. One day, a chopper actually landed, a very nice captain emerged who asked us politely to please stop flying those kites, as they were a navigational hazard. We replied with equal courtesy that perhaps he would like to borrow a kite and fly it.
Not to mention that its pretty much proven that surveillance equipment does not prevent crime.
Precisely. The first prerequisite for crime prevention is that the police actually give a rodent's posterior about protecting citizens, instead of getting themselves on TV and beating the PR drums. Heck, my car radio was stolen out of the parking lot where I work. My employer turned over the video—complete with clearly visible license plate of the truck these yahoos were riding in—and nothing has happened. That was a year ago.
No, obviously the next step is employing Predator drones to conduct surveillance. This would bring the added benefit of allowing remote police "operators" to simply blow evildoers away via remote control. That, my friends, would constitute a "police state". —Now being beta-tested in a faraway country...
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I attended grammar school in Germany, where—at least at the time—what you describe was pretty much the official teaching philosophy—only, you needn't put quotes around the word fear. It was more like mortal terror. Yes, we were taught by real grammar Nazis![1]
In first grade, we got a slate with a chalk-like stylus. You cleaned the slate with a wet sponge. Easy, forgiving, and economical. Second grade came as quite a shock: suddenly, we were made to write everything in notebooks with a fountain pen. It was a capital offense to *gasp* tear out a page, so any mistakes you made in your composition book lived to shame you forever. I'm quite sure the fear factor made it worse; I was so afraid of making mistakes that I couldn't keep my mind on what I was supposed to be writing.
1. OK, I'm exaggerating. I'm pretty sure that none of my teachers was an actual Nazi. This was the 50s, and the Nazis had all mysteriously disappeared in something grownups referred to as "the war", but never talked about.
Of course, I probably make as many typos per word as I misspell by hand...but thanks to the greatest gift of technology to the scrivener since the pencil eraser—the DELETE key—it is easy to make them disappear. Typos happen. Back when I was pounding away on college papers using my mother's Remington portable (the one with a greasy square of leather stuck on top of it so I could rest my head on it and doze in between inspired sentences), I would use erasable paper. The bottom of the typewriter frequently filled up with eraser fuzzies to the point where the keys wouldn't move, so I'd have to turn it upside down and whack it to empty it.
If you were asking whether using electronic devices to communicate is deleterious to spelling and grammar skills, I'd have to say that, considering the ways in which these devices are used, it probably is. But it has nothing to do with typing. Standards are lower in email; typos and grammatical infelicities seem to be tolerated by people in email, though those same offenses in, say, a published book would cause complaint. The same is true of online fora. Were I to dare correct someone's spelling or grammar on /., I would be condemned as a "spelling nazi". I hardly need comment on that destroyer of articulate communication, the practice of "texting" and its egregious ally, "133t5p34k" (um...did I spell that right?).
I'd definitely put grinding with guildmates above grinding solo, granted that they actually say shit. Part of my problem is the lack of people who are willing to talk at all.
Yeah, I've noticed that the people in WoW seem to be singularly inarticulate. Not a word, not an emote, not a joke to be had at any price. It's sad. People won't even discuss strategy. Sign up for a battleground, get thrown together with a random selection of people, and no one says anything about how we might win this instance.
Sometimes, I wonder if those other people really exist...maybe they are NPCs. Maybe WoW doesn't have a gazillion subscribers, just a fairly adequate AI that emulates a crowded server population...
It's hardly a poor clone of Elite, in fact it's significantly more sophisticated than elite.
I find it rather odd that you couldn't find any other players in game however, the world is filled with other players.
Yeah, he must never have made it to Jita.
EVE Online, for instance, has some of the first and last in the above list, and that gives it a depth most other MMOs cannot match. Subscriber numbers have constantly grown over the years and are over 300k now according to CCP. While not at WOW size, that is a nice success.
Yeah, I played Eve for two years, until I realized how evil it was. Talk about "forced grouping"—in Eve you are nothing if you do not belong to an elite corporation. The game has some excellent features; there's a reason why I played it as long as I did. Eve lures you in by giving you the illusion that you can choose from a number of play styles, and that playing solo without PvP, or playing PvP solo and surviving are options. In fact, there's no such choice—once you get to a certain point, you must get at high-level content to keep the game interesting. To get at this content, you must venture into "low sec" space. Once you enter low sec space, you will get ganked. I'm not talking fair fight here, or even a single pilot who's just much better than you ambushing you—I'm talking about a dozen hostiles jumping you as you emerge from a jump point. Poof. Dead. Nothing you could have done.
I got an offer to play free for 30 days a few months ago; I guess CCCP was hoping they'd lure me back. I decided I'd give it another try, and took my battleship to a low-sec area to salvage some tech artifacts. After hours of launching probes and watching for stuff to show up, I did find some neat artifacts. I then jumped back through the nearest gate to head back to my base. When I came out the other end of the gate... Cluster-Gank! This caused me to remember why I had quit Eve in the first place: the game is full of people who do not play to have a good time, but who have a good time by giving you a bad one.
That is what I meant when I said that Eve is evil. And the evil doesn't just manifest itself in people ganking you for just the fun of making you feel bad, but also in lying to you ("Please help me with my quest!") in order to lure you into ambushes, and generally acting like antisocial rat-bastards. The moral tone of Eve is set by the developers, who have repeatedly cheated in the game to give their pet corporations advantages and who were not fired by CCP when they were found out.
"So join a corp" you say. I tried. The first one I joined was made up of nice, laid back people just like me...who were, of course, absolutely no use in a fight. I tried joining another corp, and got a very rude reply from the corp officer I contacted that accused me of being a pirate trying to infiltrate them! That's actually what made me quit the first time—I decided that playing a game that is that close to real life is just plain masochism.
You can never, through cryptography, make other (competent) people's computers do tasks (such as deleting files) for you.
Ah, I wasn't very clear about how this works. The central point here is that when the forensic investigator runs her decryption mechanism, she has no way of knowing if all the information has been recovered.
The following assumptions pertain:
Of course, the forensicist (is that a word?) has the option of not processing the parts of the data that she thinks contain suspicious stuff...but then it's not decrypted, and she can't prove it contains encrypted material. Remember, the disk volume is itself written in an obfuscated way, so she can't just pick out files.
Hmm...sounds like a motion sensitive switch that shuts off the power between the motherboard and the power supply would counter this. Of course, you'd have to be careful not to jiggle the computer yourself. Heck, a mercury tilt switch and a relay would do it...
Disclaimer: I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert on things crypto; I'm just throwing out this suggestion to see what people think.
So how's this: write a really good backup utility and give it away for free. (Yes, I know it's been done...but not for Windows and for free and really well.) Mass adoption ensues. Lots of people have this program installed, and have backups made by it.
As a bonus, the backup files are encrypted to protect your privacy with a password you supply. This is important: encryption is mandatory. You must supply a password. That's so everyone who uses this program has encrypted backups—this is not grounds for suspicion. There is also another undocumented (but well-known) option: you can supply two more passwords to the program when it compresses and backs up your files. The second password is used to encrypt a list of files or directories that you designate for special handling. The third password works just like the first one, with one small exception: it destroys all the files on the "specials" list, or manipulates them in such a way as to make them look innocuous. (This might work especially well with a steganographic approach using image files...so you have a bunch of blurry under-exposed .bmp photos...being a bad photographer isn't a crime)
The first password is for decrypting the non-sensitive files if you need them. The second one decrypts the sensitive data after the first round of decryption is completed. Obviously, the third password is the one you surrender to the police (after a reasonably realistic show of resistance).
And there are USB keys small enough to swallow. For best results, chew first.
Heck, put it on a Micro-SD card that plugs into a USB drive. I bet it wouldn't even show up on an X-ray—especially if you chewed it a bit. Or, you could just flick the card (I refer to them as "data flakes") under your bed when the authorities come knocking—they'll never find it hidden among the dust bunnies. Of course, neither will you.
We're not all compulsively evil.
Congratulations. I wish I worked for you...or are you perhaps a member of the Church hierarchy with fast track to sainthood? In that case...ah...forget I said that.
I've had good managers and I've had bad managers. The good managers valued my abilities, encouraged me, kept the fecal matter from rolling downhill on me, and didn't get in my way when I was trying to work. However, all my managers had certain traits in common: they would sometimes lie to me, and—when push came to shove—they were perfectly capable of throwing me to the wolves to save themselves.
Does that mean that even my good managers were evil people? No...I think they were just normal. Being a manager puts certain constraints on you and your behavior. It forces you to make moral compromises. For example, if your manager is told that a layoff is imminent, then he can't tell you. If you ask directly, he will lie about it. If he's asked to pick some victims, he will do it—regardless of how friendly and ostensibly trusting the relationship between him and the victim has been. That's because, by accepting a position as manger, a person implicitly agrees that he will advance the interests of the organization over that of his subordinates.
Read the sig.
Um, running your apps on timeshared mainframes is hardly "new".
The fact that it's not new doesn't mean that it's not going to happen. It wouldn't be the first time that technology moved in cycles. Also, it's only the concept of big iron and thin servers that's old; the implementation today will be much faster because networks are much faster. So fast that inefficient protocols don't matter.
I used to work on a Unix "mainframe" (a Convex, actually), using a diskless Sun workstation. It was a great collaborative environment, and it was sure a lot less hassle for the IT folks to maintain than a zillion PCs all running Windows. Yeah, it was slow...that was the big drawback. If there was more than one user on the network, they all complained that it was too slow. (One user would complain too, but nobody would hear him.) But there were compensations—like starting "Crabs" on somebody else's Xdisplay. *Evil laughter*
But slowness isn't what killed the diskless Suns...it was the managers. They wanted to run Excel and do "roll-ups" (whatever the farking hell those are), so they got PCs. But then they noticed that they were cut off from our network. That could not be allowed. So we all had to get PCs. And here we are. Personally, I wouldn't mind going back to the dumb terminals at work, with fast networks.
If Google is serious about developing a new OS, they're going to have to release hardware to run it. Why? To circumvent Microsoft's death-grip on the personal computer market, for one thing. If people remain convinced that they must have a PC, and it remains difficult to buy a computer that does not have Windows bundled with it, then Microsoft will keep raking in bucks, and the pre-installed MS OS will act as a barrier to unsophisticated users who want to run Google's OS.
Of course, the new hardware does not have to be a personal computer. Indeed, I think it's likely that the Google OS won't run primarily on devices like the personal computers of today. That's because the PC is on the verge of extinction. One hardware platform for Google OS is obvious: phones. Netbooks is another. And then there's e-book readers and game consoles. In fact, Google may never enter the PC marketplace if they agree with my hypothesis that the PC is about to go: most people want appliances that connect them to facebook, the web in general, e-communication (email is old-fashioned, you know), entertainment media, games and whatever else that's available out there. Light business applications needed by individuals can be run on a server (owned by Google, probably). Most people just don't need a computer—all they need is a thin client to connect them to services.
Would that kill Microsoft? It would pound some nails into their coffin...but it won't necessarily be fatal—they still have their huge business market. However, that market may change also: a workgroup or intranet "cloud" composed of central servers and thin clients makes a lot more sense than maintaining tens of thousands of PCs in a large corporation, or even hundreds of PCs in a smaller one. Will the corporate cloud be a Microsoft cloud? There's arguments for this: corporations are more concerned with the security of their data, so are less likely to trust it to some server outside their firewall. Corporate IT departments are highly conservative, and like to deal with known quantities—i.e., vendors they've dealt with before.
The question is how quickly Microsoft will adapt to the change. They have to stop thinking in terms of pumping out new operating systems, and start developing client/server networks and applications that run in such an environment.
If I'm right, and business turns back to the corporate mainframe/client model, then there will be many opportunities for vendors other than Microsoft to sell their solutions to businesses which want to save some money, or perceive value in the competing system. Businesses will no longer be locked into software as part of a hardware purchase in which there is no real choice of operating systems, as they are today. The best-case scenario—from Microsoft's viewpoint—is that we go back to something like the days when IBM dominated, but did not wholly own, the business IT market. There will be vendors to compete with Microsoft, just as there were DEC and Amdahl.
It's no different than the appendix. Apparently, unless its function is obvious, we're not too good at figuring these things out.
That's unfair. At least we've figured out that the brain is useful for cooling blood. All those folds...it's obviously a heat exchanger.
Right. So head shots it is.
Fact is, the kid broke the law. You can hate the law, and work to change it, but that doesn't change the fact the kid broke the law.
Uh, could I humbly point out that the kid allegedly broke the law? The article alleges that he hacked some number of game consoles "to run pirated programs". Even if he "hacked" some game consoles, it remains to be seen if he did this to run pirated programs. There are a lot of questions here, and the law under discussion is a highly complex piece of...legislation. Meanwhile, as someone who likes to screw around with...I mean modify everyday objects—not all electronic—this kind of news makes me just a little bit more afraid that I'm going to, in some prosecutor's eyes, break some law and get sent to the Gulag.
Yeah I used to get lots of respect during my motorcycle days, but ever since I got 40 years older and went on meds, I haven't been crazy enough to ride one. Still, no PHB would have dared push me around back in those heady days of youth. Is there a chance that it wasn't the mororcycle? Maybe it was my outfit! Maybe wearing black leather with lots of little silver studs was the reason I was so well-regarded (some would say "avoided") by normal sane people. Wrapping a huge case-hardened steel chain around my waist, some grease smeared on my face and a devil-may care sneer quite completed the effect. Chicks seemed to dig it, too...but for some reason, they were all crazy.
Hey, this article has given me an idea—maybe there's a way I can regain the awesomeness of my former self without risking quadraplegia! I'm going to dig out the old leathers, get a Segway and ride it to my cubicle tomorrow morning. Then I'll get respect!
Judging by the fact that this comment has been modded up, I suspect the readers of /. must be more conservative than most. I have never even looked at Facebook or Myspace, and I'm not sure exactly what Twitter is, but the current crop of people under 40 seem to think that having an "online presence" is not only good, but downright required. I recently talked to a friend who is manager of a game software company, and he said he wouldn't even consider hiring anyone who doesn't have a Facebook page. "What's he got to hide?" was his comment about whether he would consider a hypothetical candidate who doesn't have an online presence. Other comments on this subject on /. have said pretty much the same thing.
There's much talk about privacy, but the collective actions of the people in our society says quite clearly that there is no real desire for privacy, and that this commodity is not appreciated. It's only occasionally when someone realizes that what he has written or imaged and posted on a web site was badly received by someone with the ability to hurt him that you hear someone regret flaunting his every trivial action and opinion in a way that is both public and enduring. By then it's too late, of course.
I often think of how badly the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge got it wrong in his novelette True Names . Vinge pictured a society of elite computer network users who considered one rule to be paramount: never, never give anyone your true name. Never let them find you; your cyber-persona is a mask that must not be penetrated, or you will suffer the consequences. Of course, the computer-users of today—the epigonoi of the Eternal September—are far from the elite who populated the USENET of old...they are the dumb masses. And they give everyone their true names. How sad.
You think "pest control" is not useful? Then you've never lived in a place that was infested with mice or rats. Cats were once essential to any rural household (and very useful in the barn as well) because they are able to perform this one function that you think so negligible.
Heck, my house used to be crawling with "palmetto bugs" (Texan for for "giant cockroaches so big you could saddle up and ride them"). They live outside, but come into the house to forage. After I got a couple of cats, I never saw one of the monsters again. And the cats are getting remarkably fat...
I'm afraid that's a false generalization. I once had a dog who was very smart, but not at all cooperative. If I tried to play "fetch" with her, she'd run and get the stick the first time I threw it, and drop it at my feet. When I threw it again, she'd sit there and look at me like I was an idiot. She'd do it the first time to show she was smart enough to get what I wanted, but she wouldn't do it again because she thought it was a really dumb game that involved her doing all the work.
This dog did all kinds of amazing things, like find her way to me across a town she'd never been before. One night I got angry at her and said, "Get lost!". I never saw her again.
I have two cats who do this with my daughter. They are absolutely fixated on her (she's 19 now, but we've had these cats since she was young). They spend most of their time in her room. When my daughter comes into another room—say my office/study—it's as though an unruly mob has entered. The cats will start jumping up on my desk, mess with my stuff, and generally drive me crazy; I think they do this to make her go back to her room so they will have her to themselves. One of the cats is semi-social, and will allow other people to pet her, but the other is completely a one-person cat. Occasionall, daughter leaves for a vacation. When this happens, the one-person cat freaks. First, I won't see her for a week—she hides somewhere, and doesn't come out. Then after a week, she will occasionally come into the same room with me and meow plaintively. By the third week, the cat will start to approach me, complaining bitterly, but evading any attempt at contact. Finally, she overcomes her revulsion and jumps into my lap.
I guess being second choice is better than last...the cat never goes near my wife, no matter how desperate she is.
It's fun to guess why cats do stuff, but in the end, only the cat knows. I once had a friend who left her cat for a few weeks. I was in charge of filling up the kibble container and the water dish. She left one of the windows open a crack so the cat could come and go as he pleased. When she returned, she found a "present" nicely centered on the pillow of her bed. It was a long-dead bird, crawling with maggots. Now, was this in fact a present for my friend, or was it revenge for being gone? That was the truly sinister aspect of it, as far as I was concerned—revenge is at its most cruel when it keeps you guessing.
Nope, the only thing about cats you can be sure of is that they really, really hate doors.
I assume that by "self-domesticated" you mean "they just moved in". Yeah, that's accurate.
Your idea of the effect of "voluntary service" on the "citizen-soldier" character of the U.S. Army seems a bit skewed. The situation you describe pertains much more to the non-volunteer draft Army of the past, not to today's mercenary...ah I mean "all-volunteer" force. The draftee Army of the 60s was indeed a cross-section of American male youths, and could not have been relied on to serve as an instrument of tyrannical oppression by the government of its own citizens. Indeed, they were notoriously unreliable in oppressing the citizens of a foreign nation (Vietnam). Why do you think the system was changed?
I speak, incidentally, from personal experience. I fought at Berkeley. Despite the events at Kent State, we were usually relieved to see the National Guard march in, as they were much less brutal and likely to shoot than some of the police forces we faced (e.g. those notorious thugs, the Alameda County Sherrif's Deputies who did fire on non-violent protesters).
Sometimes, the naivete of the Guards was touching. We took to flying kites above our assembly areas to prevent helicopters from flying in and gassing us. One day, a chopper actually landed, a very nice captain emerged who asked us politely to please stop flying those kites, as they were a navigational hazard. We replied with equal courtesy that perhaps he would like to borrow a kite and fly it.
Precisely. The first prerequisite for crime prevention is that the police actually give a rodent's posterior about protecting citizens, instead of getting themselves on TV and beating the PR drums. Heck, my car radio was stolen out of the parking lot where I work. My employer turned over the video—complete with clearly visible license plate of the truck these yahoos were riding in—and nothing has happened. That was a year ago.
No, obviously the next step is employing Predator drones to conduct surveillance. This would bring the added benefit of allowing remote police "operators" to simply blow evildoers away via remote control. That, my friends, would constitute a "police state". —Now being beta-tested in a faraway country...