Certainly narrows down the activites available to drunken bridesmaids. Should be easier to get them to shed the one-time-only dresses now that dancing is off the agenda. Perhaps this is a good development.
Actually I do follow Amercian politics - as only ex-pats and people who have left the States do. My reply ignored the current crop of political idiots (nice turn of phrase by the way) and was hopefully representative of the people. The people all realized long ago that the political system was broken and pointless - one glance at any branch of the US government proves that. Since people have realized they can't expect leadership from leaders many have moved back into the driver's seat and have been guiding the next generation in the leadership void.
The only partially sensible person visible in the current GOP Hunger Games (meaning the nomination process) unfortunately drifts into periodic bouts of lunacy - which unortunately kills his chances. I'm referring to Ron Paul who has a good grasp of the fundamental economic issues which have cornered the US into a debt position it can't get out of without serious pain. Decades of abusing the great power in the hands of the Fed, printing money and abusing Reserve Currency status have brought the States to a Greece-like position. Pretty soon, the rest of the world will get royally pissed with Bernanke/Greenspan watering down the Reserve Currency, and will move the Reserve Currency outside the grasp of the Fed. When that happens, watch out! - Wall Street will be a bit player in the global economy and the tail will wag the dog.
I have to wonder about these studies. Seems like they ignore the population's ability to modify their behaviour based on the events of the times in which they live. Most societies are currently realizing that the baby boomer's frat party is over, and our children will live in a different world than we were born into. By reaching this understanding, we are all actively changing how we prepare our children for the future. My parent's generation had concepts like lifelong employment, pensions and isolated economies. My generation is adapting to fragmented employment, self insuring for old age and global economic influences. My son's generation is very aware that employment prospects are grim without very focused education and preparation. Quality of life standards are redistributing globally on a daily basis.
As a result of the changing world and it's impact on various societies, many of the conditions required to reach MIT's predicted disaster scenario are changing radically. Fossil fuel pricing changes are certainly real. The effect on casual motoring, inefficient vehicle purchase and the old-school cachet of driving Hummers and Escalades is visibly changing to admiration of Prius and other vehicles. At the same time, emerging economies aren't getting cheap gas, and will never go through the V-8 powered 60's and 70's that I did.
Computer predictions on a societal level are about as useful as using Excel to predict business performance. If Excel was such a good tool the whole tech market bubble would never have burst, because all the projected growth and ridiculous valuations would be true. Idiots behind analytical tools can predict any result they envision, and construct plausible worksheet scenarios to reach that goal. The real challenge is in critically questioning their assumptions and formulas - while also realzing that the world changes continually making those assumptions worthless.
Question everything. Doubt everyone. Make your own future. The timeline of our life may progress at a fixed rate, but the conditions affectting it do not. Massive influences can happen in fractions of seconds - and societies DO respond. Look at the USA - once freedom and liberties there meant something very different than they do today. 9/11 changed the whole mentality in the US in seconds. The Supreme Court just made it legal to strip search anyone for any infraction. Wasn't like that in the US I was born into in 1960.
You might want to read about how DNS works - you can substitute real IP addresses in your local hosts file to allow your system to find servers where their DNS lookup is blocked by your ISP. You can read about creating an encrypted SSH tunnel to an external proxy server - so your web requests are external to your ISP. You can read about the Onion Router project - where your web access is handled outside your ISP's perview. There are lots of commercial services allowing non-technical access to this type of ISP bypass - so this is not just for folks like me. You can extrude externally localed IP addesses through a tunnel to your system, effectively placing your system ouside your ISP's control. Perhaps reading about implementing OpenDNS would be worthwhile.
Fundamentally whatever someone does on the Internet can be bypassed by someone else with equal or better knowledge. Understanding the OSI layered communication model provides a framework for analyzing what your ISP is doing. Most simple schemes for controlling the user herd are towards the top of the model - and can be bypassed pretty easily. A little more complex is port blocking, but that can be handled by changing what ports you are communicating on - or by piggybacking traffic on ports that can not be easily blocked as they are used for critical services. Content scanning can be bypassed by tunneling encryptped traffic to an external proxy - and no ISP is going to block encrypted traffic on 443 - or ecommerce won't work. No ISP is going to block 587, 993 or normal SSL/TLS ports used for mail transit. In really extreme cases you can send/receive external data inside content packets for legitimate traffic. Who knows what data you've got in an email stream? Who knows what data is lurking inside unused bits in a JPG file?
Basically, if you know enough and have someone outside the fence willing to act on your behalf, there isn't really anything that can stop you. The more complex the problem, the slower the solution - but there isn't any perfect way for ANY ISP to plug every hole. Just allowing basic, limited Internet services creates huge opportunities for exploitation.
My original post was intended to provoke people into reading and understanding more about how things work - because that understanding is the thing that used to distinguish Slashdotters from Facebookers and Twits. The world "under the hood" is way more interesting to me than sitting on the bus with someone else driving the route they choose on the schedule they set.
Guess you don't have a 60" HIgh Def TV, you like watching commercials, you like public seating, you like paying $25 for oversalted greasy popcorn & a pail of carbonated chemicals. Oh yeah, and they want you to pay 13-17 dollars per butt for the priviledge of watching content on their schedule with no pause for bathroom breaks, someone kicking the chair behind you and watching through the sneeze/virus fog of 200 people.
Me? I'd rather watch at home, skip all the commercials, avoid the one-time only delivery, eat better quality food and have a cold beer with my wife. I guess we have different priorities than your Earth. What are you, a NATO shill?
Doesn't anyone read anymore? See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by... wait for it... Eric Raymond. Available online. Basic routing protocols DO route around damage - how about READING about RIP and BGP?
Anyone who CAN read can find ways to avoid getting coralled by their ISP, government or corporate overloards. The fun of the Internet is that the only thing obstructing your path to freedom is your own ignorance. Fight your own ignorance and you can be free. How do you think political dissidents bypass censorship?
Why do you think content overloards are still fighting their losing battle instead of thinking ways around the problem? If they had half a brain, they would embed the commericial message they are paid to present inside the content, and they would willingly release their product for cheaper (free as in beer?), wider and more long lived distribution. Charge way more to "advertisers" doing product placements to compensate for revenue lost in theatrical release. The advertisers will pony up the cash because they know their message will live forever and not have recurring payments for broadcast. Product placement advertising costs are far cheaper than traditional commercials - but they won't stay that way once Hollywood wakes up.
No one wants to pay to sit in large dark public rooms, smelling other people's offgassing while eating horrid overpriced "snacks" when they can watch great quality content at home in their media rooms. The Hollywood business model failed a long time ago.
People have already figured out the content delivery system championed by the US entertainment industry is broken. And they are routing around it. Since that horse left the barn long ago, the people relying on the revenue from it should get ahead of the problem and fix their business model. Why can't people even see and understand the events happening around them.
Roundabouts exist here in Canada and they've been on the increase. Traffic is generally much faster during non-peak periods, but it can get stalled during peak periods if the majority of traffic is coming from one direction. Once a flow is established, it is hard for other entrances to break into the stream, as people on the circle have the right of way to entrants.
In tourist areas circles give the buses a place to turn around without the usual trouble.
These things really work well when not placed in a major commuter route. I'd much rather travel around in a city with circles than stop lights. And the center creates a focal place for flowers and general beautification not found in city center intersections. My suburb (Orleans) looks much nicer with the traffic lights removed and circles in their place.
You obviously don't watch the shows - Colbert is far more biting with his satire of the right wing than Stewart. Stewart maintains a veneer of objectivity in his political comedy - Colbert goes all out and makes Beck, Limbaugh and O'Reilly look bad by emulating them mercilessly.
Don't know how you modded up - since your post is written by someone who does not understand the subject matter.
Nonsense. Ideas are not property. I've been through the original poster's scenario, complete with legal battles and all complications. My previous employer lost. Completely.
As long as you take a clean room approach, take the advice of legal counsel seriously and are prepared to defend yourself down to the last line of source code, you are okay.
Non-competes are another story, but even non-competes can be broken if the non-compete prevents you from all chance earning a living in your chosen profession. The key here is that the agreements must be reasonable and enforceable without being completely one-sided. Employers generally try to stack the deck completely in their favor while drafting agreements, and many of these one-sided agreements, often signed under pressure without benefit of counsel are thrown out of court.
What goes in your head is yours. What goes in your hands, USB stick or pockets is theirs.
NSA == CSE (Communications Security Establishment)
CIA == CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service)
FBI == RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police)
These organizations have very good co-ordination of data - and work co-operatively with their NATO counterparts. There are exchanges of staff and information on a regular basis with the NSA etc. I have friends working there.
As far as pay goes, the RCMP and other groups pay reasonably well. I live in a neighborhood of these folks and nobody is out spare-changing when not at work. Pensions, benefits etc. are better than private industry. The government isn't going to pay you in share options that never mature, and they'll never go out of business like nine out of ten tech startups.
The reason you never hear about these people is that they do not advertise, they do not talk and they are actively encouraged to not talk about their work. They are not by nature braggers, talkers or blabbermouths. Those folks never make it through screening.
Success in what they do is never advertised, and every cyber-failure in Canada gets blamed on them. The above poster obviously believes what they read, and the only material they read is from people who have no idea what actually goes on.
He should have to spend one day at Canadian Forces Station Leitrim spouting his nonsense and see what the people really doing this work think of him.
As far as laws go, do a little reading on Michael Geist's blog about Internet law and Canadian positions and you'll have a very different viewpoint quickly. Canada has plenty of laws, and is in the process of adopting more and more - many completely inappropriate in response to American leverage from the RIAA and the MPIA. I do not advocate theft in any form (I pay for everything in use on my networks), but I do believe in fair use and civil liberties as well as innocent until proven guilty.
To melt steel, according to Google, is 377 kWh/mt. Since a kWh is about 3.6Mjoules or 3413 BTU. So, a single gallon of gasoline has enough energy, in a modern electric furnace, to melt over thirty six metric tons of steel in a modern electric furnace.
I suggest your assumptions may be off, and you are trusting Google over a proper physics education. In addition, mining the ore has costs, environmental damage is done by the mining, pollution is created by the production etc. One gallon of gasoline does not contain enough energy to melt 36 metric tons - you've let Google override common sense.
I'm all for efficiency - when the overall goal of the function in question is measured against the real cost of attaining that goal - especially when there is an incumbent method of performing the function in place, and the efficiency benefit is only an incremental improvement on the incumbent.
Although the idea seems nice on the surface, how much more energy goes into refining the metal for the additional engine? How much weight is added? How much cost is added? Although many of these schemes seem beneficial, when evaluated over the lifespan of the product it may be a net zero or net loss from the existing technology. If people would stop buying new cars every two years, we would be better off than everyone buying the newest, latest greatest enviro-trendmobile constantly.
The key word is DISCLOSED in this discussion. The report isn't worth the electrons used unless we are comparing vulnerabilites apples to apples. Vulnerabilities that are undisclosed and publicly ignored by vendors can skew statistics dramatically.
Given the open and extremely public nature of open source projects, I would expect that there are less undisclosed vulnerabilities, therefore chances are the stats quoted are worth less than advertised.
This is not due to your IT folks being great at what they are doing - it is due to a relatively educated, technical user base being smart enough to not play with matches.
Locked down systems are incredibly frustrating to people used to complete administrative access - I've been through the transition many times, but even operating system level lockdowns can't prevent bootable pendrives running DamnedSmallLinux or similar things - the hardware just can't prevent users from clearing CMOS boot settings passwords, changing boot device priority and having their way with your network.
Don't give your IT folks credit due to your user population - not every user is a bonehead!
The ratio changes from tangible to intangible assets doesn't surprise me in the least. For some srtange reason, accounting and stock market analysts have used the ever-inflating intangible asset valuations to drive corporate valuations into the stratosphere, forming the nucleus of every bubble market that eventualy pops. It isn't the technology or people of these companies that fail - its the valuations. Here in Ottawa, I see great technology from Nortel destroyed due to market bubble related carnage. We need last mile / high speed technology and the people that can imagine it and then make in real. The scary thing is that a lot of these people are flipping burgers, while the stock market analysts and accountants are busy trying to create the next bubble from intangible assets. Christ, it pisses me off!
There was an article in the National Post yesterday about these guys. Nothing appeared to be even mildly remarkable. They mentioned Transgaming and CodeWeavers as things they were "intending" to include with their Fedora Core based distribution. Basically, they looked like they were very much in beginning stages of their execution of the concept. Surprisingly, their marketing materials looked reasonably professional, so I would guess their skills lay more in promotion and presentation than technical execution. I saw their site prior to the/.'tting, and it had many content holes. If I had to guess, they are good promoters that have managed to convince their professors they are on to a good thing, but obviously, their professors haven't been plugged in to the Linux community at all. Nothing really of note here, and I wouldn't want anyone to think there is anything new here.
As a child of both countrys, (Citizen of US and Canada, born to American father and Canadian mother), I see both systems pretty clearly.
The appointed Canadian Senate (loosely mirroring the House of Lords in British terms) is a highly partisan collection of political people being paid back for years of loyal service to the goverment of the time. There is no accountability, no voter control and no representation of the people. There is no election / funding corruption, but this is due to the unelected nature - not at all to the people being on unimpeachable nature.
Completely useless? Yes. Completely corrupt? As corrupt as every politically appointed body. This means that 80% of the people are politically partisan, and the 20% that deliver value for their time are outvoted in the Senate all the time.
Sober second thought? I live on Ottawa, and the discussion that go on in some of the establishments like Hys downtown are not exactly sober - lobbyists are campaigning HARD here, and money is moving constantly.
Canada's system isn't better or worse than the US - just different and just as corrupt. The kind of people attracted to power determines the corruption level, not the specific system of government.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly narrows down the activites available to drunken bridesmaids. Should be easier to get them to shed the one-time-only dresses now that dancing is off the agenda. Perhaps this is a good development.
Actually I do follow Amercian politics - as only ex-pats and people who have left the States do. My reply ignored the current crop of political idiots (nice turn of phrase by the way) and was hopefully representative of the people. The people all realized long ago that the political system was broken and pointless - one glance at any branch of the US government proves that. Since people have realized they can't expect leadership from leaders many have moved back into the driver's seat and have been guiding the next generation in the leadership void.
The only partially sensible person visible in the current GOP Hunger Games (meaning the nomination process) unfortunately drifts into periodic bouts of lunacy - which unortunately kills his chances. I'm referring to Ron Paul who has a good grasp of the fundamental economic issues which have cornered the US into a debt position it can't get out of without serious pain. Decades of abusing the great power in the hands of the Fed, printing money and abusing Reserve Currency status have brought the States to a Greece-like position. Pretty soon, the rest of the world will get royally pissed with Bernanke/Greenspan watering down the Reserve Currency, and will move the Reserve Currency outside the grasp of the Fed. When that happens, watch out! - Wall Street will be a bit player in the global economy and the tail will wag the dog.
I have to wonder about these studies. Seems like they ignore the population's ability to modify their behaviour based on the events of the times in which they live. Most societies are currently realizing that the baby boomer's frat party is over, and our children will live in a different world than we were born into. By reaching this understanding, we are all actively changing how we prepare our children for the future. My parent's generation had concepts like lifelong employment, pensions and isolated economies. My generation is adapting to fragmented employment, self insuring for old age and global economic influences. My son's generation is very aware that employment prospects are grim without very focused education and preparation. Quality of life standards are redistributing globally on a daily basis. As a result of the changing world and it's impact on various societies, many of the conditions required to reach MIT's predicted disaster scenario are changing radically. Fossil fuel pricing changes are certainly real. The effect on casual motoring, inefficient vehicle purchase and the old-school cachet of driving Hummers and Escalades is visibly changing to admiration of Prius and other vehicles. At the same time, emerging economies aren't getting cheap gas, and will never go through the V-8 powered 60's and 70's that I did.
Computer predictions on a societal level are about as useful as using Excel to predict business performance. If Excel was such a good tool the whole tech market bubble would never have burst, because all the projected growth and ridiculous valuations would be true. Idiots behind analytical tools can predict any result they envision, and construct plausible worksheet scenarios to reach that goal. The real challenge is in critically questioning their assumptions and formulas - while also realzing that the world changes continually making those assumptions worthless.
Question everything. Doubt everyone. Make your own future. The timeline of our life may progress at a fixed rate, but the conditions affectting it do not. Massive influences can happen in fractions of seconds - and societies DO respond. Look at the USA - once freedom and liberties there meant something very different than they do today. 9/11 changed the whole mentality in the US in seconds. The Supreme Court just made it legal to strip search anyone for any infraction. Wasn't like that in the US I was born into in 1960.
You might want to read about how DNS works - you can substitute real IP addresses in your local hosts file to allow your system to find servers where their DNS lookup is blocked by your ISP. You can read about creating an encrypted SSH tunnel to an external proxy server - so your web requests are external to your ISP. You can read about the Onion Router project - where your web access is handled outside your ISP's perview. There are lots of commercial services allowing non-technical access to this type of ISP bypass - so this is not just for folks like me. You can extrude externally localed IP addesses through a tunnel to your system, effectively placing your system ouside your ISP's control. Perhaps reading about implementing OpenDNS would be worthwhile.
Fundamentally whatever someone does on the Internet can be bypassed by someone else with equal or better knowledge. Understanding the OSI layered communication model provides a framework for analyzing what your ISP is doing. Most simple schemes for controlling the user herd are towards the top of the model - and can be bypassed pretty easily. A little more complex is port blocking, but that can be handled by changing what ports you are communicating on - or by piggybacking traffic on ports that can not be easily blocked as they are used for critical services. Content scanning can be bypassed by tunneling encryptped traffic to an external proxy - and no ISP is going to block encrypted traffic on 443 - or ecommerce won't work. No ISP is going to block 587, 993 or normal SSL/TLS ports used for mail transit. In really extreme cases you can send/receive external data inside content packets for legitimate traffic. Who knows what data you've got in an email stream? Who knows what data is lurking inside unused bits in a JPG file?
Basically, if you know enough and have someone outside the fence willing to act on your behalf, there isn't really anything that can stop you. The more complex the problem, the slower the solution - but there isn't any perfect way for ANY ISP to plug every hole. Just allowing basic, limited Internet services creates huge opportunities for exploitation.
My original post was intended to provoke people into reading and understanding more about how things work - because that understanding is the thing that used to distinguish Slashdotters from Facebookers and Twits. The world "under the hood" is way more interesting to me than sitting on the bus with someone else driving the route they choose on the schedule they set.
Guess you don't have a 60" HIgh Def TV, you like watching commercials, you like public seating, you like paying $25 for oversalted greasy popcorn & a pail of carbonated chemicals. Oh yeah, and they want you to pay 13-17 dollars per butt for the priviledge of watching content on their schedule with no pause for bathroom breaks, someone kicking the chair behind you and watching through the sneeze/virus fog of 200 people.
Me? I'd rather watch at home, skip all the commercials, avoid the one-time only delivery, eat better quality food and have a cold beer with my wife. I guess we have different priorities than your Earth. What are you, a NATO shill?
Jesus, what has happened to /.?
Doesn't anyone read anymore? See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by ... wait for it ... Eric Raymond. Available online. Basic routing protocols DO route around damage - how about READING about RIP and BGP?
Anyone who CAN read can find ways to avoid getting coralled by their ISP, government or corporate overloards. The fun of the Internet is that the only thing obstructing your path to freedom is your own ignorance. Fight your own ignorance and you can be free. How do you think political dissidents bypass censorship?
Why do you think content overloards are still fighting their losing battle instead of thinking ways around the problem? If they had half a brain, they would embed the commericial message they are paid to present inside the content, and they would willingly release their product for cheaper (free as in beer?), wider and more long lived distribution. Charge way more to "advertisers" doing product placements to compensate for revenue lost in theatrical release. The advertisers will pony up the cash because they know their message will live forever and not have recurring payments for broadcast. Product placement advertising costs are far cheaper than traditional commercials - but they won't stay that way once Hollywood wakes up.
No one wants to pay to sit in large dark public rooms, smelling other people's offgassing while eating horrid overpriced "snacks" when they can watch great quality content at home in their media rooms. The Hollywood business model failed a long time ago.
People have already figured out the content delivery system championed by the US entertainment industry is broken. And they are routing around it. Since that horse left the barn long ago, the people relying on the revenue from it should get ahead of the problem and fix their business model. Why can't people even see and understand the events happening around them.
Roundabouts exist here in Canada and they've been on the increase. Traffic is generally much faster during non-peak periods, but it can get stalled during peak periods if the majority of traffic is coming from one direction. Once a flow is established, it is hard for other entrances to break into the stream, as people on the circle have the right of way to entrants. In tourist areas circles give the buses a place to turn around without the usual trouble. These things really work well when not placed in a major commuter route. I'd much rather travel around in a city with circles than stop lights. And the center creates a focal place for flowers and general beautification not found in city center intersections. My suburb (Orleans) looks much nicer with the traffic lights removed and circles in their place.
You obviously don't watch the shows - Colbert is far more biting with his satire of the right wing than Stewart. Stewart maintains a veneer of objectivity in his political comedy - Colbert goes all out and makes Beck, Limbaugh and O'Reilly look bad by emulating them mercilessly. Don't know how you modded up - since your post is written by someone who does not understand the subject matter.
Nonsense. Ideas are not property. I've been through the original poster's scenario, complete with legal battles and all complications. My previous employer lost. Completely. As long as you take a clean room approach, take the advice of legal counsel seriously and are prepared to defend yourself down to the last line of source code, you are okay. Non-competes are another story, but even non-competes can be broken if the non-compete prevents you from all chance earning a living in your chosen profession. The key here is that the agreements must be reasonable and enforceable without being completely one-sided. Employers generally try to stack the deck completely in their favor while drafting agreements, and many of these one-sided agreements, often signed under pressure without benefit of counsel are thrown out of court. What goes in your head is yours. What goes in your hands, USB stick or pockets is theirs.
NSA == CSE (Communications Security Establishment)
CIA == CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service)
FBI == RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police)
These organizations have very good co-ordination of data - and work co-operatively with their NATO counterparts. There are exchanges of staff and information on a regular basis with the NSA etc. I have friends working there.
As far as pay goes, the RCMP and other groups pay reasonably well. I live in a neighborhood of these folks and nobody is out spare-changing when not at work. Pensions, benefits etc. are better than private industry. The government isn't going to pay you in share options that never mature, and they'll never go out of business like nine out of ten tech startups.
The reason you never hear about these people is that they do not advertise, they do not talk and they are actively encouraged to not talk about their work. They are not by nature braggers, talkers or blabbermouths. Those folks never make it through screening.
Success in what they do is never advertised, and every cyber-failure in Canada gets blamed on them. The above poster obviously believes what they read, and the only material they read is from people who have no idea what actually goes on.
He should have to spend one day at Canadian Forces Station Leitrim spouting his nonsense and see what the people really doing this work think of him.
As far as laws go, do a little reading on Michael Geist's blog about Internet law and Canadian positions and you'll have a very different viewpoint quickly. Canada has plenty of laws, and is in the process of adopting more and more - many completely inappropriate in response to American leverage from the RIAA and the MPIA. I do not advocate theft in any form (I pay for everything in use on my networks), but I do believe in fair use and civil liberties as well as innocent until proven guilty.
Microsoft ignores the hosts file for Microsoft addresses - they are hard coded in the TCP/IP stack. If you read Slashdot you'd know this.
I suggest your assumptions may be off, and you are trusting Google over a proper physics education. In addition, mining the ore has costs, environmental damage is done by the mining, pollution is created by the production etc. One gallon of gasoline does not contain enough energy to melt 36 metric tons - you've let Google override common sense.
I'm all for efficiency - when the overall goal of the function in question is measured against the real cost of attaining that goal - especially when there is an incumbent method of performing the function in place, and the efficiency benefit is only an incremental improvement on the incumbent.
Although the idea seems nice on the surface, how much more energy goes into refining the metal for the additional engine? How much weight is added? How much cost is added? Although many of these schemes seem beneficial, when evaluated over the lifespan of the product it may be a net zero or net loss from the existing technology. If people would stop buying new cars every two years, we would be better off than everyone buying the newest, latest greatest enviro-trendmobile constantly.
$250 BILLION? Rutan would freak. $250 MILLION is more accurate.
The key word is DISCLOSED in this discussion. The report isn't worth the electrons used unless we are comparing vulnerabilites apples to apples. Vulnerabilities that are undisclosed and publicly ignored by vendors can skew statistics dramatically.
Given the open and extremely public nature of open source projects, I would expect that there are less undisclosed vulnerabilities, therefore chances are the stats quoted are worth less than advertised.
This is not due to your IT folks being great at what they are doing - it is due to a relatively educated, technical user base being smart enough to not play with matches.
Locked down systems are incredibly frustrating to people used to complete administrative access - I've been through the transition many times, but even operating system level lockdowns can't prevent bootable pendrives running DamnedSmallLinux or similar things - the hardware just can't prevent users from clearing CMOS boot settings passwords, changing boot device priority and having their way with your network.
Don't give your IT folks credit due to your user population - not every user is a bonehead!
This kind of stuff is why a lot of people tire of reading /.
Not funny, not a contribution to the discussion and pointless karma whoring.
The ratio changes from tangible to intangible assets doesn't surprise me in the least. For some srtange reason, accounting and stock market analysts have used the ever-inflating intangible asset valuations to drive corporate valuations into the stratosphere, forming the nucleus of every bubble market that eventualy pops. It isn't the technology or people of these companies that fail - its the valuations. Here in Ottawa, I see great technology from Nortel destroyed due to market bubble related carnage. We need last mile / high speed technology and the people that can imagine it and then make in real. The scary thing is that a lot of these people are flipping burgers, while the stock market analysts and accountants are busy trying to create the next bubble from intangible assets. Christ, it pisses me off!
Actually, it was the Globe and Mail - I read a bunch of papers and got the reference wrong. Ignalum Linux.
The references to CodeWeavers and Transgaming were on their website before it went south.
There was an article in the National Post yesterday about these guys. Nothing appeared to be even mildly remarkable. They mentioned Transgaming and CodeWeavers as things they were "intending" to include with their Fedora Core based distribution. Basically, they looked like they were very much in beginning stages of their execution of the concept. Surprisingly, their marketing materials looked reasonably professional, so I would guess their skills lay more in promotion and presentation than technical execution. I saw their site prior to the /.'tting, and it had many content holes. If I had to guess, they are good promoters that have managed to convince their professors they are on to a good thing, but obviously, their professors haven't been plugged in to the Linux community at all. Nothing really of note here, and I wouldn't want anyone to think there is anything new here.
As a child of both countrys, (Citizen of US and Canada, born to American father and Canadian mother), I see both systems pretty clearly. The appointed Canadian Senate (loosely mirroring the House of Lords in British terms) is a highly partisan collection of political people being paid back for years of loyal service to the goverment of the time. There is no accountability, no voter control and no representation of the people. There is no election / funding corruption, but this is due to the unelected nature - not at all to the people being on unimpeachable nature. Completely useless? Yes. Completely corrupt? As corrupt as every politically appointed body. This means that 80% of the people are politically partisan, and the 20% that deliver value for their time are outvoted in the Senate all the time. Sober second thought? I live on Ottawa, and the discussion that go on in some of the establishments like Hys downtown are not exactly sober - lobbyists are campaigning HARD here, and money is moving constantly. Canada's system isn't better or worse than the US - just different and just as corrupt. The kind of people attracted to power determines the corruption level, not the specific system of government.