I've believed for a while now that despite having had some people laugh at them, it may well be that the Amish themselves will have the last laugh once peak oil hits.
I've read a lot (from both sides) about Peak Oil and I've come to the conclusion that while the end of oil is nigh, the end of the world and civilization is not. The thing that Peak theories fail to take into account is the fact that as the price of oil-derived energy rises, the attractiveness of alternate sources also rises. As more people switch to alternate fuel sources, there will be more incentive for companies to put resources into research and the economy of scale will take over after a while.
So yeah, it's not a good time to buy a new car, but the gears of industry aren't exactly about to come to a screeching halt.
Of course, depending on how rough the transition is, the Amish very well could have a lot to teach us.
AP makers should force, once the device is connected for the first time, for it to go to a config page which outlines all the security settings (WEP, etc.)..... maybe then some people will start to understand security.
Netgear routers do this. The radio is disabled by default, forcing you to configure the router (via a wizard) before using it.
The bots would be connected to their own P2P-ish system. Commands would be passed around the network in a method similar to searches in Gnutella.
All commands would by signed by my private key. My bots would all have my public key. This, I would be *the only person* who could issue valid commands to my botnet.
This would make it impossible to tell where the commands are coming from since the originator would look just like another bot on the network.
You know, I was thinking about this the other day. It's actually frightening how closely Lucas' story--written over 30 years ago--parallels modern-day politics. Star Wars had the Clone Wars, Palpatine, and the Senate; we have "The War on Terror," Bush, and Congress. The only difference is the Galatic Republic took 1,000 years to fall into complete corruption--we've managed to pull it off in a mere 250.
Hell, Lucas himself says it best: (thanks, Wikipedia)
At the Premiere of Episode III in Cannes, George Lucas mentioned the political stance, notably saying, "I hope this doesn't come true in our country [the USA]" and "Maybe the film will waken people to the situation"; he went on to comment on the war in Iraq.
Life imitates art indeed. It looks like we're simply doomed to repeating history over and over--can't we learn something from Rome? Bah - no one ever pays attention in history class, so this comes as no suprise to me. (Of course, this is if we have a chance to repeat history before civilization falls apart anyway.)
For those of us who've been using Javascript to do things like confirm webforms...
For the love of god, NO!!! Do not rely on client-side scripting for input validation. If you insist on doing it, you still need to do it again on the server. Failure to do this properly opens your app to bad data and even (unnecessary) security risks. It's really not that hard to alter or fake a browser's POST data.
Hell, I'm guilty of doing this myself. When my domain registrar asked for data they didn't need, all it took was typing a few characters in the location bar (javascript:...) to completely bypass their client-side input check and submit the incomplete form--which the server blindly accepted.
Web apps that don't do server-side input validation are simply the hallmark of an amateur.
Seconded. I recently took some university courses through a teleconfrencing system ("Distance Learning"), so I can share my experiences:
Avoid NetMeeting like the plague. That software hasn't been updated since Windows 98, and as a result it is completely unreliable. The university is now using TANDBERG's See & Share software. It allows the presenter to share his desktop and (assuming you are using SMART boards) remote sites can draw on the presenter's screen. I highly recommend the SMART board/See & Share setup. It was easy enough for the professors and students to use, so it should be easy enough for your executives.
To control the whole setup, they had an AMX panel. The panel had a simple tabbed interface that let you turn the system on/off, adjust cameras, select inputs, change the volume, etc.
The video confrencing side is powered by some TANDBERG equipment. I'm not sure what specific box they used, but I can go look at it if you'd like. The cameras were some motorized SONY cams.
The room was set up with a dual display--one big screen TV to see the presenter/far sites and one SMART board. Overall, the system worked very well and was rather seamless. I'd recommend getting in touch with a local university and talking with them. If they have a DL setup, I'm sure they can give you some valuable insight. You can also take a look at this page about DL from the university I took my classes from (and a picture of a DL room).
Actually, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that in the US, Copyright is NOT a moral right (as it is in most of Europe); rather it is a (Constitutionally-granted) temporary monopoly over distribution. This is a very important distinction to note because if I own the copyright to some creative work, my control over that work extands only as far as distribution is concerned. After that, I have no legal standing to dictate how you use my work. For example, if I were to use a picture of Jar-Jar as toilet paper, George can't sue me for violating the intregrity of his work. However, if George did have moral rights over his work, he could sue me.
Essentially, what it comes down to is under US law, the creator gets more of a 'licence' to his work whereas in other countries his creative works are treated like real property. This is why the bastardized term "Intellectual Property" really pisses me off--there exists no intellectual property in the US. Creators have no moral right to their property. As much as some corporate interests would love complete control of their "Property," their protections are bestowed to them by the Constitution and the Constitution only.
So you're just bitter because they busted you for violating the AUP. Guess what: it is their computers, their network. They control what goes over their wire. You set up a proxy to bypass the Web filters yet you're baffled that the administration took action against you?
Get real. If you pulled the same shit at your job, you'd get fired. Their computers, their network. "Dundee crown has a web filter. I do not appreciate this." Who gives a flying fuck what you appreciate? You have to play by their rules. Welcome to life.
Now, I'm not saying it's right. In fact, I thoroughly agree that US education functions only to turn out pacifist sheep--why else is voter turnout so damn low? However, civil disobedience is not going to get you anywhere. When it comes down to it, the school can do whatever the fuck they want to you--and there's nothing you can do about it. Just like in your experience, they don't even have to cite a specific written policy you've violated. Basically, all it takes is "because I say so."
Reform is certainly necessary if we really want to create an enviornment that fosters free thinking. But people don't really want free thinking. They just want their TV remote.
(Don't even get me started on Charter Schools. If you're looking to reform education, this isn't the way. It's a complete waste of money and does nothing for the kids.)
Ajax is basically a buzzword (meaning 'Asynchronous JavaScript + XML') to describe something that's been done years before but now popularized by the likes of Google and Amazon's A9. Really nothing to see here.
On the other hand, Ajax does sound like an interesting meat byproduct.
In my book, people are more than welcome to express their political opinion and opposing views. However, when you present such opinion as Truth on my airwaves, well, we have a problem.
All I'm asking for is to present both sides as just that -- opposing views. Moore offered Sinclair his movie for free. If they were truly interested in political neutrality, they'd play F9/11 right after Stolen Honor.
Again, you might own the licence to the spectrum, but they're everyone's airwaves. Respect that.
I get wrong number calls all the time, but that's beside the point.
If you want to use a "phone number type" system, you're more than welcome to use 66.35.250.150 to come to Slashdot from now on. And 216.239.37.99 for Google. Can you remember those numbers without writing them down?
The whole point of having domain names is so you don't have to remember the IP address of the computers you want to connect to. DNS is the "yellow pages" of the Internet. If someone wanted to, they could register their phone sex business as "Teh White House" in the phone book.
I think he was talking about snow chains in the sense of the people you call in the morning when a snow day is called, not the kind that go around your tires. At least that's the first thing that came to my mind.
It snowed here yesterday with an inch of accumulation. Today it is 60. Never move to this state.
You make some good points and I won't get too much into the first half of your post other than mentioning this: while--as you claim--Americans are aware of most (if not all) of the things you mentioned, the problem isn't their ignorance of these facts. The problem is the American's apathy toward them. For example, our last Presidential election was one of the most hotly contested elections in the history of this country. Yet out of 217,767,000 eligible voters, only 165,607,114 were registered and only 122,300,696 actually voted. [1] People just don't give a shit so long as it doesn't conflict with their religion, cf. gay marriage and abortion. The people behind the Bush Administration know this and they have used it quite successfully to their advantage. But I digress. I'm here to argue you on education: (Which I just recently wrote a rant about.)
I don't know what you think No Child Left Behind actually does,... but there were virtually no critics of the law until the run-up to this last election.
Clearly you don't know anyone who is actually in education. My parents have been in the education field for nearly 60 years combined. They know how things work and saw this law as the worthless piece of crap it is. (See my rant, linked above, to read more.)
Granted, some portions of the law might do good things, or at least attempt to do good things. Additional testing isn't one of them. This is yet another issue that has been needlessly federalized. The Federal Government really has no business telling my local school district how to operate itself. School boards exist because local control works best: if there are actually teachers or administrators who are underperforming, the local school board can take care of the problem.
At any rate, mark my words: Politicians want to kill public education. In my state, the state legislators have been at it for well over a few decades by underfunding the system so badly it'll collapse and they get to look like heroes "saving the taxpayers money" by eliminating the system altogether. Now the Federal government is trying to privatize the whole damn system by undermining public confidence in the system. ("Your child's school isn't meeting [our unrealistic] AYP!") But does the Federal Government's desire to privatize education surprise you considering BushCo wants to privatize everything else?
The buzzword throughout public education is accountability, the state's primary and secondary schools rigorously scrutinized on how much they spend and how well students score. In that kind of atmosphere, the rapid growth of charter schools is all the more remarkable. Charter schools cost the state more and more money, yet they produce test scores no better than public schools.
...
Once the profit motive was introduced to education, the obvious should have been anticipated. To follow charter schools means following the money.
Should it be a surprise that online charter schools, with drastically lower overhead costs, now enroll about one-fourth of all charter-school children? Or that the number of special education students in charter schools, bringing in more state money per pupil, has increased?
Oh, how I enjoy having my tax dollars raped by some profiteering bastards.
As an American citizen, with all due respect, speak for yourself. I might not be calling for revolution quite yet, but I do certainly feel like our government has ceased to represent its people. Hell, it doesn't even respect its people any more. Laws are passed which are clearly against the best interests of the people and serve only to benefit the few. Combined with a wholly ignorant and apathetic population, we have a recepie to be screwed at every corner.
As a foreigner commenting on American politics, I assume you're addressing foreign policy. Do you realize how much shit would have to go down for a revolution to occur over foreign policy?
This has already been tried in the form of Semacode. Much less of a pain in the ass than using a cell keypad to type in the 'link.'
Besides, they want me to effectively pay to read graffiti (in the form of picture messaging charges)? I knew the whole IP situation was kinda getting out of hand, but damn!
President Bush today unveiled his plans to build upon the success of the historic
No Child Left Behind education reforms...
I wasn't aware the Iraqi Information Minister worked for the US government now.
The only thing that piece of shit legislation does is give the kids more tests to suffer through. It adds no actual "accountability" to schools. Instead of teachers preparing their students for what they might actually need in life, they focus on only what's going to be on the test. What happens when some struggling inner-city school gets shut down because their kids don't pass their proficiency tests? They disperse into other schools and bring their scores down, resulting in less funding for those schools. Brilliant.
If Bush has added $13 billion in education funding, I'd like to know where it went. Districts all over are struggling just to keep the lights on. They are being forced to go to the voters for property tax increases. It's not a pleasant situation for anyone. The kids suffer because all their extracurriculars get cut and the property owners suffer because their taxes go up.
The state of education in Ohio (where both of my parents are in the field) is abysmal. Over 10 years ago, the state's Supreme Court ruled our school funding system was unconstitutional. Yet here we are 10+ years later, and the Legislature hasn't done a damned thing about it. My dad is convinced they're trying to kill public education, and from what I see, it's working. People are getting laid off, everything outside of the State Board of Ed.'s required curriculum is being cut, and the kids suffer. They've even cut bussing. It's really a very unfortunate situation.
In conclusion, fuck our incompetent politicans. I'm sick of agendas (as they almost always end up screwing the common man).
Personally, I don't see this as too big of an issue. All of your network-addressable appliances would be on your private network, behind a firewall. They'd have private (10.x, 192.168.x, etc.) IPs. When you wanted to login to remotely access your devices, you'd go to a web control panel of sorts on a secured PC which would take your commands over HTTPS and pass them on to your appliances on your private network. Computers on the public internet would have no direct access to your appliances. (At least that's how I'd do it.)
If your webserver PC gets owned, you probably have bigger issues than a refrigerator being vulnerable to a 'sploit. Besides, in the grand scheme of things, is losing a case of beer really a big deal? I'd be more concerned with hospitals making sure their systems are secure.
Slashdot Mirror
I decided I would not support a company which has so blatantly abused both the law and their customers.
Did you hear that, Lexmark? You lost a sale because of your lawsuits. Fuck you, I'll buy HP instead.
So yeah, it's not a good time to buy a new car, but the gears of industry aren't exactly about to come to a screeching halt.
Of course, depending on how rough the transition is, the Amish very well could have a lot to teach us.
Works well.
The bots would be connected to their own P2P-ish system. Commands would be passed around the network in a method similar to searches in Gnutella.
All commands would by signed by my private key. My bots would all have my public key. This, I would be *the only person* who could issue valid commands to my botnet.
This would make it impossible to tell where the commands are coming from since the originator would look just like another bot on the network.
Yes.
Hell, Lucas himself says it best: (thanks, Wikipedia)
Life imitates art indeed. It looks like we're simply doomed to repeating history over and over--can't we learn something from Rome? Bah - no one ever pays attention in history class, so this comes as no suprise to me. (Of course, this is if we have a chance to repeat history before civilization falls apart anyway.)
Hell, I'm guilty of doing this myself. When my domain registrar asked for data they didn't need, all it took was typing a few characters in the location bar (javascript:...) to completely bypass their client-side input check and submit the incomplete form--which the server blindly accepted.
Web apps that don't do server-side input validation are simply the hallmark of an amateur.
Avoid NetMeeting like the plague. That software hasn't been updated since Windows 98, and as a result it is completely unreliable. The university is now using TANDBERG's See & Share software. It allows the presenter to share his desktop and (assuming you are using SMART boards) remote sites can draw on the presenter's screen. I highly recommend the SMART board/See & Share setup. It was easy enough for the professors and students to use, so it should be easy enough for your executives.
To control the whole setup, they had an AMX panel. The panel had a simple tabbed interface that let you turn the system on/off, adjust cameras, select inputs, change the volume, etc.
The video confrencing side is powered by some TANDBERG equipment. I'm not sure what specific box they used, but I can go look at it if you'd like. The cameras were some motorized SONY cams.
The room was set up with a dual display--one big screen TV to see the presenter/far sites and one SMART board. Overall, the system worked very well and was rather seamless. I'd recommend getting in touch with a local university and talking with them. If they have a DL setup, I'm sure they can give you some valuable insight. You can also take a look at this page about DL from the university I took my classes from (and a picture of a DL room).
Essentially, what it comes down to is under US law, the creator gets more of a 'licence' to his work whereas in other countries his creative works are treated like real property. This is why the bastardized term "Intellectual Property" really pisses me off--there exists no intellectual property in the US. Creators have no moral right to their property. As much as some corporate interests would love complete control of their "Property," their protections are bestowed to them by the Constitution and the Constitution only.
/confused
Get real. If you pulled the same shit at your job, you'd get fired. Their computers, their network. "Dundee crown has a web filter. I do not appreciate this." Who gives a flying fuck what you appreciate? You have to play by their rules. Welcome to life.
Now, I'm not saying it's right. In fact, I thoroughly agree that US education functions only to turn out pacifist sheep--why else is voter turnout so damn low? However, civil disobedience is not going to get you anywhere. When it comes down to it, the school can do whatever the fuck they want to you--and there's nothing you can do about it. Just like in your experience, they don't even have to cite a specific written policy you've violated. Basically, all it takes is "because I say so."
Reform is certainly necessary if we really want to create an enviornment that fosters free thinking. But people don't really want free thinking. They just want their TV remote.
(Don't even get me started on Charter Schools. If you're looking to reform education, this isn't the way. It's a complete waste of money and does nothing for the kids.)
On the other hand, Ajax does sound like an interesting meat byproduct.
All I'm asking for is to present both sides as just that -- opposing views. Moore offered Sinclair his movie for free. If they were truly interested in political neutrality, they'd play F9/11 right after Stolen Honor.
Again, you might own the licence to the spectrum, but they're everyone's airwaves. Respect that.
Benefits aren't all that great, but at least there's no hard manual labor.
If you want to use a "phone number type" system, you're more than welcome to use 66.35.250.150 to come to Slashdot from now on. And 216.239.37.99 for Google. Can you remember those numbers without writing them down?
The whole point of having domain names is so you don't have to remember the IP address of the computers you want to connect to. DNS is the "yellow pages" of the Internet. If someone wanted to, they could register their phone sex business as "Teh White House" in the phone book.
Scrapping DNS is certainly not the solution.
Sweeeeet... *fires up VCR*
Anyone want a torrent?
It snowed here yesterday with an inch of accumulation. Today it is 60. Never move to this state.
Granted, some portions of the law might do good things, or at least attempt to do good things. Additional testing isn't one of them. This is yet another issue that has been needlessly federalized. The Federal Government really has no business telling my local school district how to operate itself. School boards exist because local control works best: if there are actually teachers or administrators who are underperforming, the local school board can take care of the problem.
At any rate, mark my words: Politicians want to kill public education. In my state, the state legislators have been at it for well over a few decades by underfunding the system so badly it'll collapse and they get to look like heroes "saving the taxpayers money" by eliminating the system altogether. Now the Federal government is trying to privatize the whole damn system by undermining public confidence in the system. ("Your child's school isn't meeting [our unrealistic] AYP!") But does the Federal Government's desire to privatize education surprise you considering BushCo wants to privatize everything else?
Basically, it comes down the rich lining their pockets at our expense. And guess what? (Get ready for this one...) Privatized schools don't actually work! Read this great editorial:
Oh, how I enjoy having my tax dollars raped by some profiteering bastards.Besides, they want me to effectively pay to read graffiti (in the form of picture messaging charges)? I knew the whole IP situation was kinda getting out of hand, but damn!
The only thing that piece of shit legislation does is give the kids more tests to suffer through. It adds no actual "accountability" to schools. Instead of teachers preparing their students for what they might actually need in life, they focus on only what's going to be on the test. What happens when some struggling inner-city school gets shut down because their kids don't pass their proficiency tests? They disperse into other schools and bring their scores down, resulting in less funding for those schools. Brilliant.
If Bush has added $13 billion in education funding, I'd like to know where it went. Districts all over are struggling just to keep the lights on. They are being forced to go to the voters for property tax increases. It's not a pleasant situation for anyone. The kids suffer because all their extracurriculars get cut and the property owners suffer because their taxes go up.
The state of education in Ohio (where both of my parents are in the field) is abysmal. Over 10 years ago, the state's Supreme Court ruled our school funding system was unconstitutional. Yet here we are 10+ years later, and the Legislature hasn't done a damned thing about it. My dad is convinced they're trying to kill public education, and from what I see, it's working. People are getting laid off, everything outside of the State Board of Ed.'s required curriculum is being cut, and the kids suffer. They've even cut bussing. It's really a very unfortunate situation.
In conclusion, fuck our incompetent politicans. I'm sick of agendas (as they almost always end up screwing the common man).
If your webserver PC gets owned, you probably have bigger issues than a refrigerator being vulnerable to a 'sploit. Besides, in the grand scheme of things, is losing a case of beer really a big deal? I'd be more concerned with hospitals making sure their systems are secure.