the high risk activities are usually farmed out to smaller companies that can be folded easily with little risk of the larger multinationals getting sued
of course if Exxon Mobile just happens to buy and resell the oil... well their hands are clean
we are just flowers to be plucked to supply bouquets of posies, so that the gentry do not need to smell the foulness of our rotting bodies
So... does anybody directly remember the outrages of the 19th century? The work farms, then pauper prisons, the crowded workplaces where worker's only options to escape a fire were to launch themselves from multi-story buildings, or when the 'babysitter' was a bottle of laudanum to knock your baby out with opiates while you were working?
Probably not, but all of these abuses were well documented and they are the direct result for the Union movements (along with global socialism) that knocked the landed gentry and robber barons off of their roosts and allowed the growth of a new class, the educated middle class that American hold so dear
It is well past time that the middle class recognized that they are being pushed back into the 19th century and start pushing back
This proposal would only make sense if you planned on using the first few missions to establish the ability to turn local Lunar resources into solar panels
On the other hand, an orbital system would have to lift well... how much?
current solar panels weigh 15.8 kg/m^2, lets make life simple and imagine that they can make solar panels that are 1kg/m^2 and the moons equator is 11,000 Km (I can;t believe that the story said that it was miles...) and lets say they decide to make it a Km wide that is 11 billion kg of mass you are putting into orbit to match the generating ability of the lunar system
Ouch, that is a big win for a Lunar system right there... Even if you could get a solar film in space that was down to a gram per square meter, that is still 11 million kg... or 460 shuttle launches ouch!
My first construction job was in Texas in an area where the was a lot of limestone and caves. If the construction hit a cave, they would have to stop work and hire an archaeologist to investigate for Native American artifacts, and then excavate if they found any
As a result, they would quietly fill any 'gaps' they found with concrete (sometimes truckloads) just to avoid finding any inconvenient remains
All in all, the effect of the law ran exactly opposite to the intent of the law
I appreciate your fervor, but you really need to put your bullshit detector on full
As of this point: "Update at 2:50 p.m. ET on June 16: We're pulling the plug on this story — (for clarification: ZDNet's story, not CNET's) — following Rep. Nadler's latest comments casting doubt on CNET's story. In a statement to our sister site, Nadler said: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant." We've left the amended article (post the previous update, below) intact for transparency, but corrected the headline." http://www.zdnet.com/nsa-can-allegedly-listen-to-phone-calls-without-warrants-report-7000016864/
It is becoming apparent to me that this issue is being propagandized into a wedge between 'young voters' and President Obama. This seems to be an expected reaction to the huge misalignment between the current gop platform and the expectations of most young people (apparently even young republicans). To whit, just piss the young people off at the other guys instead of amending their platform
yeah, damn the MBA's... oh wait I am one, but then I had already been working in software development for over a decade before I chose to learn about the dark side
The business education was painful and enlightening. It was both maddening in how companies rate investment against perceived roi (no business person would ever fund pure research with no clear return on investment over what they could make just shutting down research in favor of a stock portfolio) and troubling (how business 'ethics' has been transformed into an all-out race for short term profits to meet shareholder expectations regardless of long-term outcomes)
If left to the business people, this entire country would be reduced to a backwater selling buggy whips in MLM schemes that maximize profits at the top and the rest of the world would be scrambling to leave us in the dust. I think that the most dangerous thing for a technology company to do is to allow their fate to fall into the hands of a business person with no technical background that only cares about the next quarters returns and ignores the need to plan ahead 5, 10 and 20 years into the future
Every time that I speak with an HP hardware rep they spend all of their time pushing the integrity/Itanium servers for about 10x the cost of the (formerly Compaq) proliant x86-64 line
They are wasting their breath, when we finally moved out the last of our DEC/Compaq Alpha servers we switched everything to proliant/operton servers running SUSE linux for our databases and blade servers (with lowest total cost per core) for vmware
I would have loved it HP had seen the looming failure of Itanium and Alpha was delivering its ev-12 generation, but that was not to be and HP should see its future in the path that it took Alpha down, obsolescence
HP wants to be what IBM used to be (and still struggles to be), the single source provider for their customer
Autonomy looked like a great opportunity, but just like inexpensive hardware has undercut high-end server sales, open source solutions and tens of thousands of developers using those tools have undercut their market and dimmed the rosy projections that made HP willing to lay down so much cash
I think that this is less about Autonomy's shrinking value and more about HP's willingness to pay any price to enter new markets and their failure to recognize an opportunity to drive down the selling price by being willing to walk away from the deal
On Autonomy's part, they 'enhanced shareholder value' and returned a greater profit to them by negotiating the highest selling price possible, Do we really expect corporations to behave differently?
I remember watching the old BBC show, 'Connections'
It was a fascinating take on history, but after a while I noted that almost every invention was first developed (at great cost) to aid some war effort (blow up stuff, target artillery, canned food for soldiers, refrigerated beef for soldiers...)
Even a vast amount of 'foundational' research that produced our beloved net-centric world was largely produced to provide decentralized communications following a nuclear war...
So, then 'profit' is probably a better incentive than 'killing' and the 'sake of knowledge' is pretty much left to crack-pots and tinkerers
Natural diamonds are not rare, it is simply that the people who have the largest supplies of them (de Beers, the Russians and now some folks in Canada) create an artificial scarcity by controlling the amount that they release onto the market
Just loved getting the multi-ball and making the machine 'climax' by winning games. Maybe it was the voice synth, the sexy graphics, or the speaker aimed at my groin, but I really did love that machine... *sniff*
MP3.com was awesome, first place I ever heard 'Laziest Men on Mars' and the ever popular 'Terrible Secret of Space'
That said, they added a 'feature' that allowed people to use 'cloud' storage and the Evil Ones (UMG) demonstrated that somebody stored *gasp* copyrighted material there
The company was sued out of existence and was eventually taken over by Vivendi Universal
Yep, delivering content directly from Artist to Consumer and not allowing the record companies to sequester the bulk of the money to themselves will get you sued... imagine that
I also find that my nano-particle infused wrist band that is tightly quantum-coupled with my nano-particle infused mouse pad allows each mouse click to perform TEN TIMES as many system configurations than my outdated neoprene mouse pad alone. This performance increase alone more than justifies the $12,000 cost
Then you dismantle the entire base and replace it with paper mache and blow-up objects so that the potential enemy targets a fake base while you re-build it in secret
Because, at that time I lacked the business acumen to take advantage of it... I had led the development of postscript based high resolution mapping and even got our agency to receive national awards for the work. My first inclination was to give lectures to other GIS-folk on how to do it themselves. My first presentation was 20 minutes of me talking as fast as I could and a room full of people who looked like a pterodactyl had just swooped over their heads... complete and utter incomprehension
At that point, other ArcInfo users started hiring me on contract to apply the methods to their systems, and even then I horribly undercharged them for the work and spent my own time training their people to take it over
That is to say, I had no idea on how to profit from my knowledge and I missed on out on a prime opportunity because of it
I'll agree with you that obscure hacks suck, even more so when they are rife with regular expressions and scant man pages like awk and sed...
My approach was to do things in a repeatable manner so that the next time that I ran into the problem I already had a solution in my head that I could either apply directly, or extend in a common manner to handle the problem at hand. I can not tell you how much it pisses me off to have a single developer apply a different solution each time they run into the same problem... The big things (many to many relationships and cursor processing) took me a couple of week-long headaches to get a handle on, but the pain resulted in re-usable code that I would apply repeatedly (eventually I switched from Infos to pl/sql and started making my work more reusable with calls to stored procedures). Honestly, when I read my own code it might as well just be comments because it is based on an internal approach that I already understand. With larger teams I have had to write (and ask others to write) more universal comments, but at least I can communicate to them the reasons for the effort and the benefits that they will receive
I really do feel sorry for the person who ran into the first dynamic segmentation project that I worked up... But, that was what the 'jerk' me wanted to happen anyways
That depends, do you see PT Barnum as a 'lying weasel' or the most successful entrepreneur of his age?
You and I might know that there is never enough bandwidth... but try explaining to an accountant, stock analyst or other such ROI-based thinker that they should spend a few billion on an international, built from the ground up, communications network. It is a hard sale...
However, get Mr Crowe to float an article in Wired magazine about what it would take to deliver a retina-resolution immersive environment to tens of millions of users and BANG, Level3 was the darling of its era (and still alive today at 1% of it peak stock value)
So there you go, the planet's biggest, baddest network was funded on PT Barnum-like premises... Was that a bad thing? Do you like leasing 10GB Ethernet links for the same cost of a T3 under ATT's reign? Could a bad-ass engineer in a white shirt, clip-on tie and pocket protector have done a better job of it?
So yeah, we definitely need the PT Barnums, in my mind the issue is communicating to BOTH sides that they really do need each other
I have been the jerk and karma has certainly made me pay
About 20 years ago I was working on GIS for a local government. The challenge was to present our Pavement Management System data (from a beloved DG Mini) on our spiffy new GIS system. I proposed using dynamic segmentation (new concept in ArcInfo 6) and set about learning what needed to be done. My boss assigned his bestest buddy to ride along on this and even split the coding responsibilities down the middle... The bestest buddy decided to work in awk and sed instead of the software tools that were part of ArcInfo... Pissed me off so much that I kept all documentation in my head and set about finding another job. When I left, it took them about three years to get back on track...
As luck would have it, I walked into a new job where people had been pulling the same stunt for the last decade. Every day of my life was debugging undocumented code and re-creating wheels. These days I invest a lot of time into cross training, documentation and making certain that my developers are happy
I got mine about 3 years ago, it is part of my transition from technical 'jerk' to affable manager
A 'good' businessman is part PT Barnum and part Blackbeard the pirate, it takes a lot of puffery and cut throat decision making to get a business afloat and frankly, 20 odd years of writing code and jockeying servers really had not prepared me for it.
As a technical person I was looked at as essential to the success of the company, but it was a bit of a risk to bring me into business meetings since I might quote something out of Alice in Wonderland, identify the immediate failings of our business plan or rant about the need to spend a bunch of money to shore up security before doing anything else... stuff that business-people would rather ignore once that they are in PT Barnum mode
My solution is a technical one... put your technical jerks in a DMZ, control your ports of access in and out of the DMZ, give them the resources that they need and (if you really want to trot them out in public) invest a few years in preparing them to be 'seen' by non-techies
BTW, if you really think that all of the 'jerks' are technical and not the business people, then you are missing out on the other half of the story
Car manufacturers have always allowed defective products into the field, as long as the costs (lawsuits, bad press) do not outweigh the benefits (PROFIT!)
Of course, they already have lawyers on retainer, and 'good relationships' with the media outlets, so that can cover most complaints by simply quashing them with legal briefs and keeping the complainants from ever getting media coverage
There was a long period of time when MS seemed to follow that model, but they seemed to have gotten on their game in the past few years, hopefully this is not a sign that they are falling back to the lowest level of service that they can give to security issues without getting sued
Kind of a shaggy dog story there, the alternative shaggy dog story to yours is that (as of 1999, I'm old) the only way to make a Windows NT server meet B2 security requirements was to remove the network card, keyboard and monitor and keep the machine in a locked room with no physical access.
In context to the story, the thing that slays your dragon (complex passwords, etc) is a token system like openid, which is aided in great length by integrated private key exchanges
The push back that you will get at this point is from executives (OpenID is EXPENSIVE) and BOFHs (key exchanges make your head hurt), but it is always fun to torment those groups, particularly after you discover that some knucklehead has used your SAN to store DVDs on
implementation and usage are the weakest links in any security plan
any given encryption tool can be made weak in implementation by using short keys or failing to salt the encryption
any security infrastructure can be made weak by users who send email in clear text, directly exchange passwords in the same medium the password is used for, continue to use telnet or ftp when ssh and sftp are available
It makes me happy to think about a completely secure computer system with NO USERS since that is the only way that you could possibly make a system secure
I am 'willing' to not get downsized in the next set of sweeps I am 'willing' to keep my income from stagnating I am 'willing' to not seem less competitive than other workers
of course you could replace 'willing' with 'scared shitless', 'being strong-armed' or 'having a gun held to my head' and it would describe the situation all the same
What is truly shocking is the long-term loss of effectiveness of unions and/or their complete lack of influence in hi-tech 'salary' jobs. Sure, you can poo poo Unions, their largess in the '70s even their (apparently) corrupt leadership, but it is high time that Americans came to realize the positive benefits of Union membership and the need to maintain leverage against corporate leadership that seems willing to work us to death and feed our remains back to the rest of the workers (for the sake of shareholder value dammit)
Yeah, I'm willing, yeah I'm tired, yeah it gives me a sad chuckle to read about the rosy projections from the 1950's about 20 hour workweeks and the benefits of automation
Slashdot Mirror
the high risk activities are usually farmed out to smaller companies that can be folded easily with little risk of the larger multinationals getting sued
of course if Exxon Mobile just happens to buy and resell the oil... well their hands are clean
we are just flowers to be plucked to supply bouquets of posies, so that the gentry do not need to smell the foulness of our rotting bodies
So... does anybody directly remember the outrages of the 19th century? The work farms, then pauper prisons, the crowded workplaces where worker's only options to escape a fire were to launch themselves from multi-story buildings, or when the 'babysitter' was a bottle of laudanum to knock your baby out with opiates while you were working?
Probably not, but all of these abuses were well documented and they are the direct result for the Union movements (along with global socialism) that knocked the landed gentry and robber barons off of their roosts and allowed the growth of a new class, the educated middle class that American hold so dear
It is well past time that the middle class recognized that they are being pushed back into the 19th century and start pushing back
This proposal would only make sense if you planned on using the first few missions to establish the ability to turn local Lunar resources into solar panels
On the other hand, an orbital system would have to lift well... how much?
current solar panels weigh 15.8 kg/m^2, lets make life simple and imagine that they can make solar panels that are 1kg/m^2
and the moons equator is 11,000 Km (I can;t believe that the story said that it was miles...) and lets say they decide to make it a Km wide that is
11 billion kg of mass you are putting into orbit to match the generating ability of the lunar system
Ouch, that is a big win for a Lunar system right there... Even if you could get a solar film in space that was down to a gram per square meter, that is still 11 million kg... or 460 shuttle launches ouch!
My first construction job was in Texas in an area where the was a lot of limestone and caves. If the construction hit a cave, they would have to stop work and hire an archaeologist to investigate for Native American artifacts, and then excavate if they found any
As a result, they would quietly fill any 'gaps' they found with concrete (sometimes truckloads) just to avoid finding any inconvenient remains
All in all, the effect of the law ran exactly opposite to the intent of the law
I appreciate your fervor, but you really need to put your bullshit detector on full
As of this point:
"Update at 2:50 p.m. ET on June 16: We're pulling the plug on this story — (for clarification: ZDNet's story, not CNET's) — following Rep. Nadler's latest comments casting doubt on CNET's story. In a statement to our sister site, Nadler said: "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant." We've left the amended article (post the previous update, below) intact for transparency, but corrected the headline." http://www.zdnet.com/nsa-can-allegedly-listen-to-phone-calls-without-warrants-report-7000016864/
It is becoming apparent to me that this issue is being propagandized into a wedge between 'young voters' and President Obama. This seems to be an expected reaction to the huge misalignment between the current gop platform and the expectations of most young people (apparently even young republicans). To whit, just piss the young people off at the other guys instead of amending their platform
yeah, damn the MBA's... oh wait I am one, but then I had already been working in software development for over a decade before I chose to learn about the dark side
The business education was painful and enlightening. It was both maddening in how companies rate investment against perceived roi (no business person would ever fund pure research with no clear return on investment over what they could make just shutting down research in favor of a stock portfolio) and troubling (how business 'ethics' has been transformed into an all-out race for short term profits to meet shareholder expectations regardless of long-term outcomes)
If left to the business people, this entire country would be reduced to a backwater selling buggy whips in MLM schemes that maximize profits at the top and the rest of the world would be scrambling to leave us in the dust. I think that the most dangerous thing for a technology company to do is to allow their fate to fall into the hands of a business person with no technical background that only cares about the next quarters returns and ignores the need to plan ahead 5, 10 and 20 years into the future
Every time that I speak with an HP hardware rep they spend all of their time pushing the integrity/Itanium servers for about 10x the cost of the (formerly Compaq) proliant x86-64 line
They are wasting their breath, when we finally moved out the last of our DEC/Compaq Alpha servers we switched everything to proliant/operton servers running SUSE linux for our databases and blade servers (with lowest total cost per core) for vmware
I would have loved it HP had seen the looming failure of Itanium and Alpha was delivering its ev-12 generation, but that was not to be and HP should see its future in the path that it took Alpha down, obsolescence
HP wants to be what IBM used to be (and still struggles to be), the single source provider for their customer
Autonomy looked like a great opportunity, but just like inexpensive hardware has undercut high-end server sales, open source solutions and tens of thousands of developers using those tools have undercut their market and dimmed the rosy projections that made HP willing to lay down so much cash
I think that this is less about Autonomy's shrinking value and more about HP's willingness to pay any price to enter new markets and their failure to recognize an opportunity to drive down the selling price by being willing to walk away from the deal
On Autonomy's part, they 'enhanced shareholder value' and returned a greater profit to them by negotiating the highest selling price possible, Do we really expect corporations to behave differently?
I remember watching the old BBC show, 'Connections'
It was a fascinating take on history, but after a while I noted that almost every invention was first developed (at great cost) to aid some war effort (blow up stuff, target artillery, canned food for soldiers, refrigerated beef for soldiers...)
Even a vast amount of 'foundational' research that produced our beloved net-centric world was largely produced to provide decentralized communications following a nuclear war...
So, then 'profit' is probably a better incentive than 'killing' and the 'sake of knowledge' is pretty much left to crack-pots and tinkerers
Natural diamonds are not rare, it is simply that the people who have the largest supplies of them (de Beers, the Russians and now some folks in Canada) create an artificial scarcity by controlling the amount that they release onto the market
Used to play a lot of Xenon pinball machine back in '82 (while avoiding EE classes my first year of college)
http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?gid=2821
Just loved getting the multi-ball and making the machine 'climax' by winning games. Maybe it was the voice synth, the sexy graphics, or the speaker aimed at my groin, but I really did love that machine... *sniff*
MP3.com was awesome, first place I ever heard 'Laziest Men on Mars' and the ever popular 'Terrible Secret of Space'
That said, they added a 'feature' that allowed people to use 'cloud' storage and the Evil Ones (UMG) demonstrated that somebody stored *gasp* copyrighted material there
The company was sued out of existence and was eventually taken over by Vivendi Universal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3.com
Yep, delivering content directly from Artist to Consumer and not allowing the record companies to sequester the bulk of the money to themselves will get you sued... imagine that
Go DotCom, Go DotCom
I am fairly certain that ESRI can show prior art on this, unless of course it was part of a defense mapping contract...
I also find that my nano-particle infused wrist band that is tightly quantum-coupled with my nano-particle infused mouse pad allows each mouse click to perform TEN TIMES as many system configurations than my outdated neoprene mouse pad alone. This performance increase alone more than justifies the $12,000 cost
please, it is not the 1960's anymore and nobody really buys that whole 'enemy going to launch tonight if we fail to show absolute strength'
More likely that Taiwan wants to have more Apple plants built there and does not want to piss them off
Then you dismantle the entire base and replace it with paper mache and blow-up objects so that the potential enemy targets a fake base while you re-build it in secret
Shake, bake and repeat
Because, at that time I lacked the business acumen to take advantage of it... I had led the development of postscript based high resolution mapping and even got our agency to receive national awards for the work. My first inclination was to give lectures to other GIS-folk on how to do it themselves. My first presentation was 20 minutes of me talking as fast as I could and a room full of people who looked like a pterodactyl had just swooped over their heads... complete and utter incomprehension
At that point, other ArcInfo users started hiring me on contract to apply the methods to their systems, and even then I horribly undercharged them for the work and spent my own time training their people to take it over
That is to say, I had no idea on how to profit from my knowledge and I missed on out on a prime opportunity because of it
I'll agree with you that obscure hacks suck, even more so when they are rife with regular expressions and scant man pages like awk and sed...
My approach was to do things in a repeatable manner so that the next time that I ran into the problem I already had a solution in my head that I could either apply directly, or extend in a common manner to handle the problem at hand. I can not tell you how much it pisses me off to have a single developer apply a different solution each time they run into the same problem... The big things (many to many relationships and cursor processing) took me a couple of week-long headaches to get a handle on, but the pain resulted in re-usable code that I would apply repeatedly (eventually I switched from Infos to pl/sql and started making my work more reusable with calls to stored procedures). Honestly, when I read my own code it might as well just be comments because it is based on an internal approach that I already understand. With larger teams I have had to write (and ask others to write) more universal comments, but at least I can communicate to them the reasons for the effort and the benefits that they will receive
I really do feel sorry for the person who ran into the first dynamic segmentation project that I worked up... But, that was what the 'jerk' me wanted to happen anyways
That depends, do you see PT Barnum as a 'lying weasel' or the most successful entrepreneur of his age?
You and I might know that there is never enough bandwidth... but try explaining to an accountant, stock analyst or other such ROI-based thinker that they should spend a few billion on an international, built from the ground up, communications network. It is a hard sale...
However, get Mr Crowe to float an article in Wired magazine about what it would take to deliver a retina-resolution immersive environment to tens of millions of users and BANG, Level3 was the darling of its era (and still alive today at 1% of it peak stock value)
So there you go, the planet's biggest, baddest network was funded on PT Barnum-like premises... Was that a bad thing? Do you like leasing 10GB Ethernet links for the same cost of a T3 under ATT's reign? Could a bad-ass engineer in a white shirt, clip-on tie and pocket protector have done a better job of it?
So yeah, we definitely need the PT Barnums, in my mind the issue is communicating to BOTH sides that they really do need each other
I have been the jerk and karma has certainly made me pay
About 20 years ago I was working on GIS for a local government. The challenge was to present our Pavement Management System data (from a beloved DG Mini) on our spiffy new GIS system. I proposed using dynamic segmentation (new concept in ArcInfo 6) and set about learning what needed to be done. My boss assigned his bestest buddy to ride along on this and even split the coding responsibilities down the middle... The bestest buddy decided to work in awk and sed instead of the software tools that were part of ArcInfo... Pissed me off so much that I kept all documentation in my head and set about finding another job. When I left, it took them about three years to get back on track...
As luck would have it, I walked into a new job where people had been pulling the same stunt for the last decade. Every day of my life was debugging undocumented code and re-creating wheels. These days I invest a lot of time into cross training, documentation and making certain that my developers are happy
I got mine about 3 years ago, it is part of my transition from technical 'jerk' to affable manager
A 'good' businessman is part PT Barnum and part Blackbeard the pirate, it takes a lot of puffery and cut throat decision making to get a business afloat and frankly, 20 odd years of writing code and jockeying servers really had not prepared me for it.
As a technical person I was looked at as essential to the success of the company, but it was a bit of a risk to bring me into business meetings since I might quote something out of Alice in Wonderland, identify the immediate failings of our business plan or rant about the need to spend a bunch of money to shore up security before doing anything else... stuff that business-people would rather ignore once that they are in PT Barnum mode
My solution is a technical one... put your technical jerks in a DMZ, control your ports of access in and out of the DMZ, give them the resources that they need and (if you really want to trot them out in public) invest a few years in preparing them to be 'seen' by non-techies
BTW, if you really think that all of the 'jerks' are technical and not the business people, then you are missing out on the other half of the story
and that is called, 'returning shareholder value'
Car manufacturers have always allowed defective products into the field, as long as the costs (lawsuits, bad press) do not outweigh the benefits (PROFIT!)
Of course, they already have lawyers on retainer, and 'good relationships' with the media outlets, so that can cover most complaints by simply quashing them with legal briefs and keeping the complainants from ever getting media coverage
There was a long period of time when MS seemed to follow that model, but they seemed to have gotten on their game in the past few years, hopefully this is not a sign that they are falling back to the lowest level of service that they can give to security issues without getting sued
Kind of a shaggy dog story there, the alternative shaggy dog story to yours is that (as of 1999, I'm old) the only way to make a Windows NT server meet B2 security requirements was to remove the network card, keyboard and monitor and keep the machine in a locked room with no physical access.
In context to the story, the thing that slays your dragon (complex passwords, etc) is a token system like openid, which is aided in great length by integrated private key exchanges
The push back that you will get at this point is from executives (OpenID is EXPENSIVE) and BOFHs (key exchanges make your head hurt), but it is always fun to torment those groups, particularly after you discover that some knucklehead has used your SAN to store DVDs on
implementation and usage are the weakest links in any security plan
any given encryption tool can be made weak in implementation by using short keys or failing to salt the encryption
any security infrastructure can be made weak by users who send email in clear text, directly exchange passwords in the same medium the password is used for, continue to use telnet or ftp when ssh and sftp are available
It makes me happy to think about a completely secure computer system with NO USERS since that is the only way that you could possibly make a system secure
I am 'willing' to not get downsized in the next set of sweeps
I am 'willing' to keep my income from stagnating
I am 'willing' to not seem less competitive than other workers
of course you could replace 'willing' with 'scared shitless', 'being strong-armed' or 'having a gun held to my head' and it would describe the situation all the same
What is truly shocking is the long-term loss of effectiveness of unions and/or their complete lack of influence in hi-tech 'salary' jobs. Sure, you can poo poo Unions, their largess in the '70s even their (apparently) corrupt leadership, but it is high time that Americans came to realize the positive benefits of Union membership and the need to maintain leverage against corporate leadership that seems willing to work us to death and feed our remains back to the rest of the workers (for the sake of shareholder value dammit)
Yeah, I'm willing, yeah I'm tired, yeah it gives me a sad chuckle to read about the rosy projections from the 1950's about 20 hour workweeks and the benefits of automation