Though self-signed certificates are fine enough for testing, they have a problem when you try to use them for securing real communications over the 'net. The problem? The bad guys can create them too
The bad guys can create certificates from the certificate authorities too. This in turn creates a situation where the only actual use for certificates is encryption. Unless you can come up with a plan that actually prevents the bad guys from getting certificates from the CA's while at the same time not coming up with Verisign-like prices where the smaller vendors are locked out, your ideas don't have any merit.
There is no identity service provided. You can't demonstrate one because it isn't technically possible with any part of the system in place. Nothing tracks where the certificate holder is post-purchase, and with location goes accountability. It's a scam. Encryption is all there is, and for that, self-signed certificates are just as effective as a CA certificate, plus they are free. The only "problem" they have is that browsers will have a fit if they encounter one; that's a browser problem, and it can be fixed by the browser manufacturers in moments if they can think their way out of their complicity in this scam.
but on the Internet the work you did to determine whether a business is acceptably safe is wasted if you end up at a typo squatter's site.
As I said, it is up to us to take responsibility for what we are doing. Who typed the address in wrong? And since the answer is the user - us - then whose fault would that be? Not the legitimate businesses, and not even the CAs; No, it is the ours. And my precise point is that we should be careful with what we do, the certs don't help in any way to ensure we are where we meant to be. For that, we need our eyes, our memories, and our wits.
limited by the relatively weak checking and the fact that virtually no customers understand it
It isn't limited by it, it never existed in the first place. Customers - IOW your average netizen today - look for the lock indicating encryption is on. If they look for that. There never was any value here, it is entirely illusory, the product of a very powerful marketing campaign. It's a scam, one that will only evaporate if the browser manufacturers wake up and realize they are the fools in this chain of fraud - they get no income, they screw the vendors, and they enable the scammers - the "certificate authorities" - to rake in huge amounts of money for no service, unless you call deceiving Internet e-commerce customers a "service."
if you see a cert then you can look at the DN and know where to send a process server if something goes wrong
Again, no. Reputable people will be right where they said they would be. Which doesn't help, because you're not looking for them. Scammers will not. You can send the process server to the address on the certificate, but they won't be there. Cert authorities only check (if they do check at all) that you are where you say you are when they issue the certificate. The same day you get it, it can be installed on your laptop, and the very next day you can be taking orders a thousand miles from there. The cert authorities don't have any idea of your post-purchase whereabouts, nor does the address on the certificate help even a little bit.
In principle, certs from CAs provide the mapping from a public key to meatspace identity
That's my precise point. They don't do any such thing. They can't. Where the scammer was the day the cert was issued is in no way tied to where they are when you try to go after them.
Who put that government there I wonder? Whoops, that was the people of the United States.
No, it really wasn't. A small group of people, long since dead, wrote up the constituting authority for the legitimate government.
Very few of today's citizens have signed off on that authority, or taken an oath with regard to it. I know I certainly didn't, nor would I without substantial changes. Aside from that, the end result we have today bears very little resemblance to that old document, and I really wouldn't sign off on the rights-crushing, war-mongering, federal tyrannosaur that is running the show today. It needs to die, and I surely wish it would.
The fact is, our government is not under our control in any way, shape or form. Anyone who thinks it is has been deceived, or is bewildered. The current structure represents the interests of a very wealthy and powerful elite, as well as groups of corporate citizens. That's why we can't get out of Iraq. That's why we got in. That's why 9 out of 10 of the bill of rights are worthless. That's why you can't make informed decisions about personal, consensual issues. That's why marriage is a religion-inspired gateway to government privilege.
Doesn't matter. No one is willing to risk their comfort to rattle the government's cage, so this sleigh-ride downhill will only pick up speed until we crash. We are a pale shadow of our forefathers.
The idea is sound enough, it just doesn't go far enough.
Certificates and the technology surrounding them provides two things, one of them useful, one of them harmful. The useful thing is encryption. This means that as your data goes from point A to point B, it is very, very difficult to make any sense of. This is useful because often, as in the case of when we share our credit card data with some other entity, that is as far as we meant to share it and the encryption erases one of the situations where it is highly vulnerable to interception by others. We definitely want encryption.
The harmful thing is the illusion of "identity." This is 100% harmful, and on several fronts. First, the idea that you "know" who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with is illusory. No mechanism within the process positively or reliably identifies where, or which, computer you are connecting with, only that the certificate at hand has, at some point in the last year or more, been issued by a "certificate authority" that was convinced to some degree that at the time the certificate was issued there was somebody at a phone number and an address, possibly with a business, possibly not. They could have moved 20 minutes after the certificate was issued, and they'd have [certificate expiration time] to fraud up a storm if they so chose. In no way does the actions of the certificate "authority" serve to determine if that entity had nefarious intentions, or if the transaction you are entering into at any one time is legitimate. So you don't know who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with, and nothing the "certificate authority" does even begins to help you out in this manner. Despite very expensive marketing campaigns claiming precisely the opposite, gaining the consumer's trust with glossy, high end advertising.
But things are even worse, because with that illusion of "trust", the impression that the consumer no longer has any reason to check out the business is quite strong; this is partially a consequence of the method, but it is also a marketing lie told to consumers, and there the responsibility rests upon the promulgators of the scam, the "certificate authorities" themselves.
The fact is, as a consumer, you have to determine the legitimacy of the business yourself, and if you don't do that, there isn't a single thing that the "certificate authorities" have done, or can do, that will reduce your risks.
Now we come to the idea that to be useful, certificates have to be issued by a certificate authority. This is entirely false in terms of service, but entirely true because there is a huge scam going on.
Service-wise, a vendor can produce their own certificate, 100% as effective at encryption as anything they can get from the "certificate authorities." That certificate is 100% capable of working with any browser and protecting data during transfer to the connected party as well as anything they might get from a "certificate authority." So effective encryption 100% identical to what everyone uses now doesn't require a "certificate authority." Period.
Scam-wise, not the certificate authorities, but the browser vendors (though certainly encouraged by the "certificate authorities"), have created a situation where if the certificate you have cannot be traced in origin to one of the "certificate authorities", then the browser will pop up a warning and scare the dickens out of the consumer, thereby eroding your ability to do business. Consumers don't understand what is going on, all they know is they got a WARNING OMG WTF.
Therefore, to do e-commerce, a vendor must use a certificate from a "certificate authority" or they will have shot themselves in the foot. It would be the work of only a few moments for each of the browsers to remove these untrue, scam warnings; at that point, any properly generated certificate would work to provide encryption, consumers would stop getting these baseless warnings about "identity" t
The 'skin colour' and latitude argument has been dismissed already by evolutionary biologists, not least because humans haven't actually been in Northern Europe for long enough for evolution to have played a role in developing the pale skin colour found there.
Evolutionary change can occur very quickly; we've seen this. Deer moved to an island shrank in size over the course of several generations. Insects change their colors to cope with soot. Outright mutations only take one generation, no matter what changes.
So wherever you got your "information", stop going there. They don't know how evolution works. It isn't just gradual change, though it encompasses that too.
Thats what university is, not higher learning but a institution to excludes those who could not hack the course.
Could not... or simply did not. For some people, college is largely a combination of going over things you already know more about than the college does, and going over irrelevant things some person in power thinks you should know, when in fact you don't need to know any such thing.
I certainly wouldn't hold a college degree against an applicant, but it isn't an indicator of anything significant to me. Except perhaps the ability to endure your ass cheeks falling asleep while sitting through things you probably could have learned on your own, sprawled on a couch with your arm around your favorite person, or fooling about on your own workbench while occasionally knocking the cat out of the way.
Most college graduates have traded years of potential experience actually working in a field for a piece of paper. Very few of them actually walk in the door looking for a job, having any kind of decent ability to apply their classes to the job at hand. If a degree is anything, it is a metric to cull, and not a really great one at that. Sometimes I think we need to go back to the apprentice system.
And others would argue that having kids represents abject failure (of everything from contraception to one's ability to pursue a lifestyle that isn't subjugated to raising additional people the world doesn't appear to need.)
So obviously, there are people on both ends of the issue, and some in the middle. He was just expressing his opinion that one might want to get the lifestyle stuff done before the subjugation begins; so where is your comment coming from?
Oh, wait - you thought your opinion was worth more than his. I get it now.
Well, the most obvious one that comes to mind is that if Gore had won, a) we wouldn't be in Iraq and b) we'd still have standing in the international community
The problem with your idea is you're working under the assumption that the presidents do what they choose, as opposed to the reality that presidents do what they are told by unelected power brokers and and power managers that the parties keep in place 100% of the time. You really think GW Bush, with his demonstrated ability to just barely put two words together correctly about half the time, is the intelligence manipulating things like the justifications offered to the public to go into Iraq? You think he can even understand the bills that can cross his desk? Don't be absurd. Mr. "I'm the decider" nuk-u-lar mental-mangler isn't running anything. He's being run. Cheny is another matter - he's intelligent enough, but he's still a puppet. Whoever the party decides to put in there (and they do decide - your choices are limited to those the parties choose for you to choose from, and even in the end, the electoral college will choose the winner, not your vote) that person is well aware that they'll be following the cues given to them like a well planned script. This isn't a democracy; it is a mutated republic with an ultra-powerful upper class whose primary concern is the welfare of the corporate citizens. It is so far from reacting to citizen input that it is almost incomprehensible. Which in turn is why you don't understand it.
Right now, there is exactly one presidential candidate that stands out as really backing a lot of the ideas we, as citizens, hold dear. That is Texan Ron Paul, and the one thing you can just about count on as a certainty is that he will not be made president. But should the unthinkable happen, the other thing you can count on is that he will have caved in and accepted oversight. He'll do what he is told.
Here is an outline of the simplest multi-party general deception these politicians use: Politician A, in power, does something citizens won't like. Politician B, after the fact, claims something along the lines of "I wouldn't have done that!", Politician B, for whatever reason, gets into power. He is now A, and the loop begins again. Also - should B make campaign promises, they won't be kept. Clinton didn't help the gays. Bush didn't keep taxes down. No one has protected our liberties. No politician will make any difference at all. The system is flat out "busted." As a citizen, your rights are gone. In fact, of the Bill of rights, only amendment 3 remains untrampled. The only reason for that, though, is because they don't need it - the military is fully capable of handling its own lodging.
If this is all you see a manager doing, then there is no need for them at all. All three of these can be provided at the executive level with the stroke of a pen.
If one requires the manager to have both management skills and (in this case) development skills, then the need to "get out of the way" will go away with a good manager. They can step in when the group being managed needs help, resources, mediation, or course change and they'll understand these requests so they can actually make a qualified decision on the matter at hand.
A good manager can spend five minutes with an already-launched, directed and running team and get a good sense of where they are as compared to where they were, and still not "be in the way." They can also sit down with a tech person for an hour and work through something complex. They'll have the patience, skill and knowledge required to explain this to the top level and keep them off the team's back, from cutting the team's resources, from "featuritis" (and keep the team from it too) and from making unrealistic promises or marketing excursions.
So, just to add my two cents here, a good manager is someone who would make a great tech person, and has management skills. If "getting out of the way" is their idea of management, I have no use for them. For the record, there are only two managers, per se, in the four companies I own, and about 300 employees.
In what universe is "image and animation processing software" not "niche" or "specialised" ?
The one we live in, of course. Anyone can use such software; because the uses begin with people who have an image they are interested in changing somehow such as removing redeye, cropping, or resizing, and they extend all the way to Hollywood setting someone's hair on fire in HD as they run down a hall, or shooting lightning from someone's fingertips. In between are a massive number of potential users and uses. So to describe our image manipulation software as "niche or specialized" is quite naive.
(It seems such a simple question. Why is it apparently so hard to answer ?)
I've answered it twice. You're just ignoring, or misunderstanding, the answer: I identify them when, and because, they pay me. You give me money for my product, you become my customer. Prior to that, at best, you were only a potential customer, and probably not even that. All of my customers are treated the same. Get it now?
As for the rest, you are entitled to make those choices; I decline. As for alternatives, both linux and OSX do not saddle the user with "activation", and should anyone really need an MS OS, there is always Windows 2000, which is basically 99.9% of XP without the eye candy. Which, btw, you can run safely in a sandbox under OSX, without having to accept the risk of MS's continuing security issues.
And what of the DRM on XP and Vista? Change your machine once too often... someone steals your codes (or generates them using a hacking tool)... next time your OS has a hissy fit, Microsoft might refuse to re-activate it, leaving all your software and data high and dry.
If you buy XP or Vista, or any other software package that claims the right to "revoke" your ability to use it, you're directly supporting DRM.
IF that ever happens, then you have a point (not to mention grounds for a lawsuit).
And how do you sue a company that has gone out of business? How do you sue one that is compacted debris at the bottom of a meteor crater? What good does it do to sue one who has been attacked by a virus and no longer has the means to activate anyone? How do you sue them and win if your serial number gets out on the net because some hacker cooked it up on a serial number generator?
If you buy software that requires a dongle (which is what this is), if the company goes out of business and your dongle fails, you're out of luck. That program and whatever proprietary data you were manipulating with it are no longer available to you. In the case a CAD system, it would be all your drawings. In the case of an OS, it is everything you were doing. All your programs, all your data.
The point isn't just that Microsoft might elect not to support you, though that is certainly a possibility, the point is that you require them to support you because XP won't work without activation and anything that stops them from activating you not only kills the OS, it locks out all your apps and all your data. Aside from the fact that they put you in this precarious position on purpose, there is little enough reason to trust the company. They have clearly demonstrated predatory, not to mention corrupt, business practices.
Sure, everything seems fine now. Nothing electronic ever breaks, right? And, no company ever goes out of business or does anything that might inconvenience you. That kind of attitude is living in fairyland. We owe it to ourselves and our families not to give people that kind of power over us.
How do you identify your legitimate customers ?
What part of "Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust" did you not understand? Also, was I unclear when I wrote about "treating my customers as if they were the people who did something nice for me"?
If those quotes really don't make the point, then bluntly, when someone gives me money for my product, I consider it my obligation to provide them with that product. No strings. No copy protection. No DRM. They can install it on as many machines as they see fit. They can use it all across the office and/or home. They can back it up. They can count on us, for as long as we are around, to back up their purchase for them if they lose the software for any reason. We ask them not to loan it out or give it away, and to justify this request, we explain that the more copies we can sell, the better we are able to support the product. In our turn, we try to make the product something that they want to see supported. We provide a good product, we don't threaten the customer, nor do we put them at risk. That's the basis for our relationship with our customers.
Why? Well, the customer pays with the idea that they fork over money, and in return, they get something they can use. That's the core of the implicit agreement between any merchant and their customers. I decline to presume that the agreement changes when the product at hand is software. Is there risk involved? Certainly. There is risk in any relationship. However, my customers are better served when I assume the risk that they might do something untoward with the software, as opposed to them assuming the risk that I might not be willing or able to keep their software working for them. And it is my strong feeling that serving my customers to the best of my ability is my job. If I can make money at it, then it's a good job. If I can't, I should be doing something else, rather than change the relationship to an adversarial one. As it turns out, it is a good job, so I have continued to do it.
I don't have any way to clear my cache, 'cause it's on my ISP's server.
Wow. I am stunned. That really sucks. In fact, that worse than sucks. That's some kind of magnificently clueless FUBAR, right there. Hmm. Who is your ISP? Can you get them to turn this off for your account, or altogether? Or give you a means to bypass it? I mean, it really isn't a reasonable assumption to make that a page's links won't change from one day to the next. That happens all the time, all over the net; the only thing unusual about our site is that we do it every day, instead of just some days.
Why not just make the art gallery URLs change? That's the only bit anyone's going to want to bandwidth-leech.
Actually not, they take animations off other pages. One particularly common one is an animation of a spinning, ray-traced diamond. Apparently, this is "blingy", and attracts people like (I am not making this up) "PrettyBoyBeBallin'", who deep-mine that, animations of lips made to kiss via morphing, and so on. But the next time we redo the site, probably summer of 2007, we'll probably put all the images, gallery and everything else in one place and then move that around.
The site itself - if you could get to it, which you can't because of your ISP's approach to the net - catches all 404 (not found) errors, and if it is an HTML page you are trying to get to, it will find where the page is now, then silently redirect you to the new location; if it is an image, it won't. So most visitors - you excepted, again, because you're not actually dealing with our site, you're dealing with your ISP - would not see a "page not found" error, they'd just silently end up on the new page, fetching the graphics from the new location, with all the links in the new page correct and ready to go. This works even if you're on the page when the serve changes everything, because as I say, if the link is wrong, the 404 mechanism will catch and fix it as long as you're going to one of our web pages.
Hey - idea - you don't have scripting turned off, do you? Because the 404/forwarding uses one line of script to toss the forward to your browser. You might check that. That seems more likely than your ISP caching unfound links, frankly, though you seem pretty certain you know that. That little bit of forwarding is the only thing we script on the site, it's 100% benign.
Or block based on Referer:
That actually doesn't work because in a fit of almost entirely irrelevant paranoia, various browsers no longer send it, and various software firewalls block it. That means that we either are forced to serve to anyone who doesn't send HTTP_REFERER, which means we're going to get deep mined a lot, or we have to block anyone who shows an invalid HTTP_REFERER, which means that many legitimate customers (who probably have no idea what HTTP_REFERER even is) see blanks or error blocks where the images are supposed to be.
The sad thing is that HTTP_REFERER would be really useful if you could actually use it to ensure someone is on your site. But you can't.
Another way to do this is to "cookie" the visitor and feed the images through a CGI that looks for the cookie. As cookies are site-specific, this ensures that the visitor is on your site. However, if the visitor has cookies off, which, unlike HTTP_REFERER, really is a security issue, again, we're stuck with not showing images. Another issue with this is the overhead of running that degree of CGI. We do use dedicated hardware, but the site is busy enough as it is.
Until today, I honestly had never heard of anyone who was unable to use the site in its current configuration. I hadn't heard of any ISP's caching pages, either, though. DNS systems caching IP's can even cause problems; you'd think that the someone, somewhere, who thunked of this gem would have gone... "Hey! What a great idea... no, wait, it won't work under the following common conditions. Oh well."
No one has "rolled over" us yet, and it isn't likely they ever will. It isn't the difference between a tank and a popgun, because they have no means to even slow us down. It's more like the difference between some dude with a big, slow, gas-wasting limo taking up two lanes and yelling louder than anyone else about how great his limo is, pointing to the collection of "me-too" sycophants in suits he's collected into his back seat, while the quiet, clever fellow runs off down the shoulder on his 200+ MPH Hayabusa, with a super-hot chick wrapped around his back, completely ignoring Mr. Limo Dude and his suits for the best reasons in the world: (a) He's got the chick, (b) the limo is far behind him, and (c) he never thought a clumsy limo was "cool" anyway.
But don't let that bother you. You look good in that limo!
Not every little thing works in MS Office, either, or for that matter, almost any large software product you can name, free or not. Openoffice works great. I've got over a hundred people using it every day across four companies (a software company, a literary agency, a music studio and a lingerie store) on three different operating systems and we do just fine.
The interface is not the same as the rest of the Mac.
Oy. Look. It works. I run businesses. Not "interface appreciation retreats." Functionality is what I'm looking for. An employee of mine comes to me whining about interface appearances, or that the poor baby had to reach for a menu in a different place than usual, I'm likely to fire them or at least chew their ass into mangled wreckage. If I give someone a perfectly good hammer, I expect them to drive the nail. If I give them a perfectly good hammer, but it is pink, I still expect them to drive the nail, even if they don't like pink.
Seriously, what is the big deal about entering a code to activate software you have purchased?
Argh. I'm gonna rant here. It isn't directed at you, it's directed at the stupidity of DRM.
The big deal is that down the road, they may, for reasons of policies I have no control over, decide to deny me that activation. They may do so because XP has gotten old, just as they dropped support for Win98. They may do it because some asshat with a serial number generator has put my serial number out on the web. They may do it because I changed my hardware around too many times to suit them. They may not be around to do it because some better company - like Apple - or OS - like linux or OSX - arose and kicked their ass, or because they finally got destroyed in court for being ruthless, monopolistic, cold hearted business trolls, or because not enough people upgraded to Vista or Office Version 2732, and their other operations (like XBox) lose money, or because a sinkhole opened up and swallowed them, or because there was a huge earthquake, or because a meteor hit them, or simply because there was a mistake in their database / activation process, or even temporarily if their activation system is down or thinks I'm on one of the many government "unacceptables" lists.
If I give a company $$$ for an OS or any other program for that matter, I expect them to give me the OS and ANYTHING I NEED TO MAKE IT WORK and then never, ever, interfere again unless I (a) ask them to or (b) they ask me, and I say "yes." Activation is *bullshit* DRM and as such it is the very lowest form of subtly screwing over your customers. Piracy... the bloody pirates aren't inconvenienced in the least. They've got activation tools, cracking, hacking and whacking tools, all manner of leverage and time, and they could care less about the DRM other than as a source of much amusement. I'm a legitimate, ethical user, and I darned well BUY all my software and I neither have the time nor the inclination nor the comfort level to go scrabbling around for illegal tools to re-enable my LEGITIMATE software purchase if a company has any of the above issues or any of the no doubt myriad others I've not thought of.
MS has the most pirated OS on earth, what do you expect them to do?
I expect them to do exactly what I do: Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust, require an initial gateway that you do your best to control that you open to them when payment is received, and don't do anything that costs your legitimate customers money (like developing activation) or time (like making them activate) or business, data, or worse (like FAILING to activate for ANY reason.) Does my stuff get pirated? Sure it does. It is powerful, highly useful software with broad functionality, so it is doomed to be pirated. You can find pirated copies, or the means to pirate, out there with a cursory look. Do I do anything to screw over the people who give me money for my app in a knee jerk reaction? No - because that would be STUPID. What I do is spend my time making my software more powerful than the competition, I make sure we keep the pricing affordable, and I never, NEVER, treat a paying customer as if he's a pirate, EVEN IF HE BLOODY WELL IS, because if you're NOT a pirate, and I treat you like one, then I am the asshole, and you know what? I'm not the asshole, the pirates are, and I have never been confused about that the way Microsoft, the music industry, the DVD industry, and large portions of the software industry are. And yes, I make more than enough money from my paying customers to be one heck of a happy camper, piracy or not, and even though I'm a very quiet competitor to Adobe with an application that is ver
Yeah, it's because all the OSX versions are named after cats... (scroll down a bit and also check the other page links at bottom for some of the "I'm in ur...")
Slashdot Mirror
The bad guys can create certificates from the certificate authorities too. This in turn creates a situation where the only actual use for certificates is encryption. Unless you can come up with a plan that actually prevents the bad guys from getting certificates from the CA's while at the same time not coming up with Verisign-like prices where the smaller vendors are locked out, your ideas don't have any merit.
There is no identity service provided. You can't demonstrate one because it isn't technically possible with any part of the system in place. Nothing tracks where the certificate holder is post-purchase, and with location goes accountability. It's a scam. Encryption is all there is, and for that, self-signed certificates are just as effective as a CA certificate, plus they are free. The only "problem" they have is that browsers will have a fit if they encounter one; that's a browser problem, and it can be fixed by the browser manufacturers in moments if they can think their way out of their complicity in this scam.
As I said, it is up to us to take responsibility for what we are doing. Who typed the address in wrong? And since the answer is the user - us - then whose fault would that be? Not the legitimate businesses, and not even the CAs; No, it is the ours. And my precise point is that we should be careful with what we do, the certs don't help in any way to ensure we are where we meant to be. For that, we need our eyes, our memories, and our wits.
It isn't limited by it, it never existed in the first place. Customers - IOW your average netizen today - look for the lock indicating encryption is on. If they look for that. There never was any value here, it is entirely illusory, the product of a very powerful marketing campaign. It's a scam, one that will only evaporate if the browser manufacturers wake up and realize they are the fools in this chain of fraud - they get no income, they screw the vendors, and they enable the scammers - the "certificate authorities" - to rake in huge amounts of money for no service, unless you call deceiving Internet e-commerce customers a "service."
Again, no. Reputable people will be right where they said they would be. Which doesn't help, because you're not looking for them. Scammers will not. You can send the process server to the address on the certificate, but they won't be there. Cert authorities only check (if they do check at all) that you are where you say you are when they issue the certificate. The same day you get it, it can be installed on your laptop, and the very next day you can be taking orders a thousand miles from there. The cert authorities don't have any idea of your post-purchase whereabouts, nor does the address on the certificate help even a little bit.
That's my precise point. They don't do any such thing. They can't. Where the scammer was the day the cert was issued is in no way tied to where they are when you try to go after them.
No, it really wasn't. A small group of people, long since dead, wrote up the constituting authority for the legitimate government.
Very few of today's citizens have signed off on that authority, or taken an oath with regard to it. I know I certainly didn't, nor would I without substantial changes. Aside from that, the end result we have today bears very little resemblance to that old document, and I really wouldn't sign off on the rights-crushing, war-mongering, federal tyrannosaur that is running the show today. It needs to die, and I surely wish it would.
The fact is, our government is not under our control in any way, shape or form. Anyone who thinks it is has been deceived, or is bewildered. The current structure represents the interests of a very wealthy and powerful elite, as well as groups of corporate citizens. That's why we can't get out of Iraq. That's why we got in. That's why 9 out of 10 of the bill of rights are worthless. That's why you can't make informed decisions about personal, consensual issues. That's why marriage is a religion-inspired gateway to government privilege.
Doesn't matter. No one is willing to risk their comfort to rattle the government's cage, so this sleigh-ride downhill will only pick up speed until we crash. We are a pale shadow of our forefathers.
The idea is sound enough, it just doesn't go far enough.
Certificates and the technology surrounding them provides two things, one of them useful, one of them harmful. The useful thing is encryption. This means that as your data goes from point A to point B, it is very, very difficult to make any sense of. This is useful because often, as in the case of when we share our credit card data with some other entity, that is as far as we meant to share it and the encryption erases one of the situations where it is highly vulnerable to interception by others. We definitely want encryption.
The harmful thing is the illusion of "identity." This is 100% harmful, and on several fronts. First, the idea that you "know" who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with is illusory. No mechanism within the process positively or reliably identifies where, or which, computer you are connecting with, only that the certificate at hand has, at some point in the last year or more, been issued by a "certificate authority" that was convinced to some degree that at the time the certificate was issued there was somebody at a phone number and an address, possibly with a business, possibly not. They could have moved 20 minutes after the certificate was issued, and they'd have [certificate expiration time] to fraud up a storm if they so chose. In no way does the actions of the certificate "authority" serve to determine if that entity had nefarious intentions, or if the transaction you are entering into at any one time is legitimate. So you don't know who, or where, you are "locking certificates" with, and nothing the "certificate authority" does even begins to help you out in this manner. Despite very expensive marketing campaigns claiming precisely the opposite, gaining the consumer's trust with glossy, high end advertising.
But things are even worse, because with that illusion of "trust", the impression that the consumer no longer has any reason to check out the business is quite strong; this is partially a consequence of the method, but it is also a marketing lie told to consumers, and there the responsibility rests upon the promulgators of the scam, the "certificate authorities" themselves.
The fact is, as a consumer, you have to determine the legitimacy of the business yourself, and if you don't do that, there isn't a single thing that the "certificate authorities" have done, or can do, that will reduce your risks.
Now we come to the idea that to be useful, certificates have to be issued by a certificate authority. This is entirely false in terms of service, but entirely true because there is a huge scam going on.
Service-wise, a vendor can produce their own certificate, 100% as effective at encryption as anything they can get from the "certificate authorities." That certificate is 100% capable of working with any browser and protecting data during transfer to the connected party as well as anything they might get from a "certificate authority." So effective encryption 100% identical to what everyone uses now doesn't require a "certificate authority." Period.
Scam-wise, not the certificate authorities, but the browser vendors (though certainly encouraged by the "certificate authorities"), have created a situation where if the certificate you have cannot be traced in origin to one of the "certificate authorities", then the browser will pop up a warning and scare the dickens out of the consumer, thereby eroding your ability to do business. Consumers don't understand what is going on, all they know is they got a WARNING OMG WTF.
Therefore, to do e-commerce, a vendor must use a certificate from a "certificate authority" or they will have shot themselves in the foot. It would be the work of only a few moments for each of the browsers to remove these untrue, scam warnings; at that point, any properly generated certificate would work to provide encryption, consumers would stop getting these baseless warnings about "identity" t
Evolutionary change can occur very quickly; we've seen this. Deer moved to an island shrank in size over the course of several generations. Insects change their colors to cope with soot. Outright mutations only take one generation, no matter what changes.
So wherever you got your "information", stop going there. They don't know how evolution works. It isn't just gradual change, though it encompasses that too.
All that aside from the circumstantial evidence.
Could not... or simply did not. For some people, college is largely a combination of going over things you already know more about than the college does, and going over irrelevant things some person in power thinks you should know, when in fact you don't need to know any such thing.
I certainly wouldn't hold a college degree against an applicant, but it isn't an indicator of anything significant to me. Except perhaps the ability to endure your ass cheeks falling asleep while sitting through things you probably could have learned on your own, sprawled on a couch with your arm around your favorite person, or fooling about on your own workbench while occasionally knocking the cat out of the way.
Most college graduates have traded years of potential experience actually working in a field for a piece of paper. Very few of them actually walk in the door looking for a job, having any kind of decent ability to apply their classes to the job at hand. If a degree is anything, it is a metric to cull, and not a really great one at that. Sometimes I think we need to go back to the apprentice system.
Did someone hear something? Let me check the sensors... score 0... source is AC... nope. Must have been the wind.
And others would argue that having kids represents abject failure (of everything from contraception to one's ability to pursue a lifestyle that isn't subjugated to raising additional people the world doesn't appear to need.)
So obviously, there are people on both ends of the issue, and some in the middle. He was just expressing his opinion that one might want to get the lifestyle stuff done before the subjugation begins; so where is your comment coming from?
Oh, wait - you thought your opinion was worth more than his. I get it now.
The problem with your idea is you're working under the assumption that the presidents do what they choose, as opposed to the reality that presidents do what they are told by unelected power brokers and and power managers that the parties keep in place 100% of the time. You really think GW Bush, with his demonstrated ability to just barely put two words together correctly about half the time, is the intelligence manipulating things like the justifications offered to the public to go into Iraq? You think he can even understand the bills that can cross his desk? Don't be absurd. Mr. "I'm the decider" nuk-u-lar mental-mangler isn't running anything. He's being run. Cheny is another matter - he's intelligent enough, but he's still a puppet. Whoever the party decides to put in there (and they do decide - your choices are limited to those the parties choose for you to choose from, and even in the end, the electoral college will choose the winner, not your vote) that person is well aware that they'll be following the cues given to them like a well planned script. This isn't a democracy; it is a mutated republic with an ultra-powerful upper class whose primary concern is the welfare of the corporate citizens. It is so far from reacting to citizen input that it is almost incomprehensible. Which in turn is why you don't understand it.
Right now, there is exactly one presidential candidate that stands out as really backing a lot of the ideas we, as citizens, hold dear. That is Texan Ron Paul, and the one thing you can just about count on as a certainty is that he will not be made president. But should the unthinkable happen, the other thing you can count on is that he will have caved in and accepted oversight. He'll do what he is told.
Here is an outline of the simplest multi-party general deception these politicians use: Politician A, in power, does something citizens won't like. Politician B, after the fact, claims something along the lines of "I wouldn't have done that!", Politician B, for whatever reason, gets into power. He is now A, and the loop begins again. Also - should B make campaign promises, they won't be kept. Clinton didn't help the gays. Bush didn't keep taxes down. No one has protected our liberties. No politician will make any difference at all. The system is flat out "busted." As a citizen, your rights are gone. In fact, of the Bill of rights, only amendment 3 remains untrampled. The only reason for that, though, is because they don't need it - the military is fully capable of handling its own lodging.
If this is all you see a manager doing, then there is no need for them at all. All three of these can be provided at the executive level with the stroke of a pen.
If one requires the manager to have both management skills and (in this case) development skills, then the need to "get out of the way" will go away with a good manager. They can step in when the group being managed needs help, resources, mediation, or course change and they'll understand these requests so they can actually make a qualified decision on the matter at hand.
A good manager can spend five minutes with an already-launched, directed and running team and get a good sense of where they are as compared to where they were, and still not "be in the way." They can also sit down with a tech person for an hour and work through something complex. They'll have the patience, skill and knowledge required to explain this to the top level and keep them off the team's back, from cutting the team's resources, from "featuritis" (and keep the team from it too) and from making unrealistic promises or marketing excursions.
So, just to add my two cents here, a good manager is someone who would make a great tech person, and has management skills. If "getting out of the way" is their idea of management, I have no use for them. For the record, there are only two managers, per se, in the four companies I own, and about 300 employees.
The one we live in, of course. Anyone can use such software; because the uses begin with people who have an image they are interested in changing somehow such as removing redeye, cropping, or resizing, and they extend all the way to Hollywood setting someone's hair on fire in HD as they run down a hall, or shooting lightning from someone's fingertips. In between are a massive number of potential users and uses. So to describe our image manipulation software as "niche or specialized" is quite naive.
I've answered it twice. You're just ignoring, or misunderstanding, the answer: I identify them when, and because, they pay me. You give me money for my product, you become my customer. Prior to that, at best, you were only a potential customer, and probably not even that. All of my customers are treated the same. Get it now?
As for the rest, you are entitled to make those choices; I decline. As for alternatives, both linux and OSX do not saddle the user with "activation", and should anyone really need an MS OS, there is always Windows 2000, which is basically 99.9% of XP without the eye candy. Which, btw, you can run safely in a sandbox under OSX, without having to accept the risk of MS's continuing security issues.
Funny, I wasn't aware that the only way to abuse a customer was with music or video.
And what of the DRM on XP and Vista? Change your machine once too often... someone steals your codes (or generates them using a hacking tool)... next time your OS has a hissy fit, Microsoft might refuse to re-activate it, leaving all your software and data high and dry.
If you buy XP or Vista, or any other software package that claims the right to "revoke" your ability to use it, you're directly supporting DRM.
DRM is intellectual and social poison.
It hardly describes our product, either. We make image and animation processing software. Like Photoshop, only with more features and capabilities.
And how do you sue a company that has gone out of business? How do you sue one that is compacted debris at the bottom of a meteor crater? What good does it do to sue one who has been attacked by a virus and no longer has the means to activate anyone? How do you sue them and win if your serial number gets out on the net because some hacker cooked it up on a serial number generator?
If you buy software that requires a dongle (which is what this is), if the company goes out of business and your dongle fails, you're out of luck. That program and whatever proprietary data you were manipulating with it are no longer available to you. In the case a CAD system, it would be all your drawings. In the case of an OS, it is everything you were doing. All your programs, all your data.
The point isn't just that Microsoft might elect not to support you, though that is certainly a possibility, the point is that you require them to support you because XP won't work without activation and anything that stops them from activating you not only kills the OS, it locks out all your apps and all your data. Aside from the fact that they put you in this precarious position on purpose, there is little enough reason to trust the company. They have clearly demonstrated predatory, not to mention corrupt, business practices.
Sure, everything seems fine now. Nothing electronic ever breaks, right? And, no company ever goes out of business or does anything that might inconvenience you. That kind of attitude is living in fairyland. We owe it to ourselves and our families not to give people that kind of power over us.
What part of "Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust" did you not understand? Also, was I unclear when I wrote about "treating my customers as if they were the people who did something nice for me"?
If those quotes really don't make the point, then bluntly, when someone gives me money for my product, I consider it my obligation to provide them with that product. No strings. No copy protection. No DRM. They can install it on as many machines as they see fit. They can use it all across the office and/or home. They can back it up. They can count on us, for as long as we are around, to back up their purchase for them if they lose the software for any reason. We ask them not to loan it out or give it away, and to justify this request, we explain that the more copies we can sell, the better we are able to support the product. In our turn, we try to make the product something that they want to see supported. We provide a good product, we don't threaten the customer, nor do we put them at risk. That's the basis for our relationship with our customers.
Why? Well, the customer pays with the idea that they fork over money, and in return, they get something they can use. That's the core of the implicit agreement between any merchant and their customers. I decline to presume that the agreement changes when the product at hand is software. Is there risk involved? Certainly. There is risk in any relationship. However, my customers are better served when I assume the risk that they might do something untoward with the software, as opposed to them assuming the risk that I might not be willing or able to keep their software working for them. And it is my strong feeling that serving my customers to the best of my ability is my job. If I can make money at it, then it's a good job. If I can't, I should be doing something else, rather than change the relationship to an adversarial one. As it turns out, it is a good job, so I have continued to do it.
Wow. I am stunned. That really sucks. In fact, that worse than sucks. That's some kind of magnificently clueless FUBAR, right there. Hmm. Who is your ISP? Can you get them to turn this off for your account, or altogether? Or give you a means to bypass it? I mean, it really isn't a reasonable assumption to make that a page's links won't change from one day to the next. That happens all the time, all over the net; the only thing unusual about our site is that we do it every day, instead of just some days.
Actually not, they take animations off other pages. One particularly common one is an animation of a spinning, ray-traced diamond. Apparently, this is "blingy", and attracts people like (I am not making this up) "PrettyBoyBeBallin'", who deep-mine that, animations of lips made to kiss via morphing, and so on. But the next time we redo the site, probably summer of 2007, we'll probably put all the images, gallery and everything else in one place and then move that around.
The site itself - if you could get to it, which you can't because of your ISP's approach to the net - catches all 404 (not found) errors, and if it is an HTML page you are trying to get to, it will find where the page is now, then silently redirect you to the new location; if it is an image, it won't. So most visitors - you excepted, again, because you're not actually dealing with our site, you're dealing with your ISP - would not see a "page not found" error, they'd just silently end up on the new page, fetching the graphics from the new location, with all the links in the new page correct and ready to go. This works even if you're on the page when the serve changes everything, because as I say, if the link is wrong, the 404 mechanism will catch and fix it as long as you're going to one of our web pages.
Hey - idea - you don't have scripting turned off, do you? Because the 404/forwarding uses one line of script to toss the forward to your browser. You might check that. That seems more likely than your ISP caching unfound links, frankly, though you seem pretty certain you know that. That little bit of forwarding is the only thing we script on the site, it's 100% benign.
That actually doesn't work because in a fit of almost entirely irrelevant paranoia, various browsers no longer send it, and various software firewalls block it. That means that we either are forced to serve to anyone who doesn't send HTTP_REFERER, which means we're going to get deep mined a lot, or we have to block anyone who shows an invalid HTTP_REFERER, which means that many legitimate customers (who probably have no idea what HTTP_REFERER even is) see blanks or error blocks where the images are supposed to be.
The sad thing is that HTTP_REFERER would be really useful if you could actually use it to ensure someone is on your site. But you can't.
Another way to do this is to "cookie" the visitor and feed the images through a CGI that looks for the cookie. As cookies are site-specific, this ensures that the visitor is on your site. However, if the visitor has cookies off, which, unlike HTTP_REFERER, really is a security issue, again, we're stuck with not showing images. Another issue with this is the overhead of running that degree of CGI. We do use dedicated hardware, but the site is busy enough as it is.
Until today, I honestly had never heard of anyone who was unable to use the site in its current configuration. I hadn't heard of any ISP's caching pages, either, though. DNS systems caching IP's can even cause problems; you'd think that the someone, somewhere, who thunked of this gem would have gone... "Hey! What a great idea... no, wait, it won't work under the following common conditions. Oh well."
What part of "(Parallels is the way to go, but it is a few extra bucks)" did you not understand?
No one has "rolled over" us yet, and it isn't likely they ever will. It isn't the difference between a tank and a popgun, because they have no means to even slow us down. It's more like the difference between some dude with a big, slow, gas-wasting limo taking up two lanes and yelling louder than anyone else about how great his limo is, pointing to the collection of "me-too" sycophants in suits he's collected into his back seat, while the quiet, clever fellow runs off down the shoulder on his 200+ MPH Hayabusa, with a super-hot chick wrapped around his back, completely ignoring Mr. Limo Dude and his suits for the best reasons in the world: (a) He's got the chick, (b) the limo is far behind him, and (c) he never thought a clumsy limo was "cool" anyway.
But don't let that bother you. You look good in that limo!
Not every little thing works in MS Office, either, or for that matter, almost any large software product you can name, free or not. Openoffice works great. I've got over a hundred people using it every day across four companies (a software company, a literary agency, a music studio and a lingerie store) on three different operating systems and we do just fine.
Oy. Look. It works. I run businesses. Not "interface appreciation retreats." Functionality is what I'm looking for. An employee of mine comes to me whining about interface appearances, or that the poor baby had to reach for a menu in a different place than usual, I'm likely to fire them or at least chew their ass into mangled wreckage. If I give someone a perfectly good hammer, I expect them to drive the nail. If I give them a perfectly good hammer, but it is pink, I still expect them to drive the nail, even if they don't like pink.
Argh. I'm gonna rant here. It isn't directed at you, it's directed at the stupidity of DRM.
The big deal is that down the road, they may, for reasons of policies I have no control over, decide to deny me that activation. They may do so because XP has gotten old, just as they dropped support for Win98. They may do it because some asshat with a serial number generator has put my serial number out on the web. They may do it because I changed my hardware around too many times to suit them. They may not be around to do it because some better company - like Apple - or OS - like linux or OSX - arose and kicked their ass, or because they finally got destroyed in court for being ruthless, monopolistic, cold hearted business trolls, or because not enough people upgraded to Vista or Office Version 2732, and their other operations (like XBox) lose money, or because a sinkhole opened up and swallowed them, or because there was a huge earthquake, or because a meteor hit them, or simply because there was a mistake in their database / activation process, or even temporarily if their activation system is down or thinks I'm on one of the many government "unacceptables" lists.
If I give a company $$$ for an OS or any other program for that matter, I expect them to give me the OS and ANYTHING I NEED TO MAKE IT WORK and then never, ever, interfere again unless I (a) ask them to or (b) they ask me, and I say "yes." Activation is *bullshit* DRM and as such it is the very lowest form of subtly screwing over your customers. Piracy... the bloody pirates aren't inconvenienced in the least. They've got activation tools, cracking, hacking and whacking tools, all manner of leverage and time, and they could care less about the DRM other than as a source of much amusement. I'm a legitimate, ethical user, and I darned well BUY all my software and I neither have the time nor the inclination nor the comfort level to go scrabbling around for illegal tools to re-enable my LEGITIMATE software purchase if a company has any of the above issues or any of the no doubt myriad others I've not thought of.
I expect them to do exactly what I do: Arbitrarily treat the paying customers as people you can trust, require an initial gateway that you do your best to control that you open to them when payment is received, and don't do anything that costs your legitimate customers money (like developing activation) or time (like making them activate) or business, data, or worse (like FAILING to activate for ANY reason.) Does my stuff get pirated? Sure it does. It is powerful, highly useful software with broad functionality, so it is doomed to be pirated. You can find pirated copies, or the means to pirate, out there with a cursory look. Do I do anything to screw over the people who give me money for my app in a knee jerk reaction? No - because that would be STUPID. What I do is spend my time making my software more powerful than the competition, I make sure we keep the pricing affordable, and I never, NEVER, treat a paying customer as if he's a pirate, EVEN IF HE BLOODY WELL IS, because if you're NOT a pirate, and I treat you like one, then I am the asshole, and you know what? I'm not the asshole, the pirates are, and I have never been confused about that the way Microsoft, the music industry, the DVD industry, and large portions of the software industry are. And yes, I make more than enough money from my paying customers to be one heck of a happy camper, piracy or not, and even though I'm a very quiet competitor to Adobe with an application that is ver
Yeah, it's because all the OSX versions are named after cats... (scroll down a bit and also check the other page links at bottom for some of the "I'm in ur...")
Oh, that's not true at all. You just aren't familiar with the competition.
Friendly: s/b "alluding"; to "elude" is to avoid.
I'm a huge Mac fan and I completely agree.
Justin Long is not a Mac.
Jet Li is a Mac.