Look, there's nothing Blackberry can do about it and it's not their job.
I thought part of the problem with Blackberry is that they route mail unencrypted through their own servers. If you use your iPhone to check your Exchange account, it doesn't give Apple access to your email. If you use your Blackberry to check the same account, then RIM can read all of your email.
So it's exactly true that "there's nothing RIM can do about it." It's more that RIM has chosen technological solutions that enable things like this to happen.
Well let's begin by presuming nothing about rights: presume neither that she has the right to obtain the content nor that she lacks the right, neither that content producers have the right to set prices arbitrarily and force consumers to buy their product nor that they lack the right to control the future of their product.
So what happens? She obtains the content on the terms that are most favorable to her. Although there are multiple channels through which she is willing to pay to access the content, she choses the option that (to some degree) offends her moral views and violates the law. Why? Because the alternatives that the content owner are trying to push are so annoying and onerous that even the troubling and dangerous option of visiting piracy sites is preferable.
We want to blame the finance guys, but the problem was banks giving loans to people they knew couldn't repay them because they could just sell the loan to someone else and not care.
... which was enabled by things like CDOs. The finance guys arranged a system which hid risk and dumped risk on someone else so that they could get rich quick. They did things like create funds they knew would collapse, took out unregulated insurance policies on those funds, and then sold them to other people pretending they were solid.
Well first, Marketing =/= Lies. You might be thinking of advertising, which is different from marketing. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it's an important distinction that people miss very often. "Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer." Marketing is the whole process that includes figuring out that there is a market for a product, producing the product to meet the market, developing a pricing strategy, and even deciding how the product will be shelved in stores.
But *anyway*, not every product requires the same level of deception in their sales and advertising. In this case, I'm not really shocked or upset that Samsung felt the need to have paid actors give fake testimonials, but it is kind of sad. Do you have any doubt that if Apple showed a similar set of videos, they would be videos of real people who actually loved their iPads? The whole thing calls to mind the embarrassing marketing materials for the Dell Adamo. What's noteworthy about these things isn't so much that they're being manipulative or misleading, but that they're doing such a terrible job at it.
One of the best bosses I ever had once told me, "A manager's job is to take everything off your desk that isn't your job." And what he meant, if it's not clear enough, was that if you're an engineer, then you should spend your day working as an engineer. If there's politicking and excessive paperwork and stuff like that, and it's not part of your job, then it's your manager's job to make sure you don't have to do that stuff.
Well there are some funny factors to consider. For one thing, Apple is moving these things in greater volume, and greater volume means cheaper prices. Not only are they moving more tablets than Samsung, but they're also moving a lot of iPhones and laptops, which means that they can probably negotiate great terms on common elements (e.g. screens, disks, memory). Also, this is an instance where Apple can leverage their other products. They already pay for the OS because of the iPhone, which was also a modified version of an OS they had already built. They/re already engineering for small/light electronics in both the iPod/iPhone and their Macbooks. The things they learn about squeezing a lot of power into the Macbook Air can be used to make the iPad lighter, and vice versa.
And, that's knowing full-well that Facebook is just doing this to increase platform adoption, since if you want to 'text', you'd have to be on FB..
This is sort of my concern. Carriers are charging ridiculous prices, which should be a lesson of what happens when you give a company too much control. So is the solution to hand the control over to Facebook?
Why not come up with a standard/open messaging protocols? I really don't understand why we need to go with Facebook or Twitter to deal with status messages and short-form messaging. It's like being in the dark ages of the Internet, when you had AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe, but their respective users couldn't interact with each other.
Ultimately, all these social media companies are guarding their own little fiefdoms, and no one has the influence to push a standard, so I guess we're just never going to get a well-designed system.
Then again, the real world is a lot more stressful...
Stress isn't really linked to actual importance. Like losing your job is not necessarily more stressful than deleting a facebook friend. Stress is more about emotional attachment and an inability to resolve conflict.
I'm not that surprised by this. I still have access to the network from one of my previous jobs, but it's because they specifically wanted me to still have access in case they wanted help. At another job, it took a while for my account to be disabled because I was the guy who would have normally disabled accounts. I had assumed my boss would disable my accounts when he left, but it took him a while.
It really wasn't that big of a deal, though. I left under amicable terms, and even if I hadn't, I'm a professional. The reality is, even when I still had some kind of access, I had no interest in doing anything with it. I always very relieved when I leave a job-- relieved that I can cede all my responsibilities, never log in again, and never fix another problem. Really, it's always bad security to give unnecessary access, but sometimes you need to assess the real threat.
When you make transportation policy, you need to plan for between 10 and 40 years in the future.
This is one of my regular annoyances when talking about these issues: I always get people telling me things like, "Well you can't just build trains all over the place in the next 3 years!" or "But all the roads and cars are already built! Why should we replace any of it?!"
Nobody with any sense is worrying about this stuff on the timeline of 3 years. Over the next 50 years, all this stuff is going to be replaced at least once or twice. If we're sticking with roads and cars as our primary mode of transportation, most people will replace their cars a few times over in the next 50 years, all the roads will be repaved, and new roads will be built. We don't have the options of "just keeping what we have."
The real question here is, what should we do if we want to build a sustainable (both environmentally and economically) and prosperous society 20 years from now? 40 years from now? 100 years from now? How do we plan for that. What steps do we need to take today to prepare? Any infrastructure project you undertake today won't begin to pay off for a decade or more, but that's not a good reason to quit building and expanding and replacing infrastructure. It's an investment, and if it's planned well then it will pay off.
So here's the thing that we should all be realizing by now: It's not sustainable for a society of our size to have everyone buy their own individual car and commute an hour to work every day. It takes up too many resources and uses too much energy. It's economically wasteful. It's environmentally disastrous.
Some of these things exist in the US already (Accela run by Amtrak between DC and New York City),
Actually the Acela trains don't really run much faster than the normal trains. The trip between NYC and DC is something like half an hour faster than the normal regional train, but that's also because it's making fewer stops. The tickets can be much more expensive, but as far as I can tell, you're just paying to ride in a newer/fancier train.
c) Take a train that takes maybe 8-10 hours, costs as much as the airplane ride, but is comfy and relaxing?
If it takes 12 hours to drive, it shouldn't take 10 hours for a train that can go 250 mph. Sure, the train will make stops, but on a 12 hour drive you'll also be stopping for gas, food, and maybe just to stretch your legs or rest your eyes.
Sure, you can build a high speed train, but if its run by Amtrak and exists in this countries rail system mentality, it will quickly become worthless. Fix the real issues.
As far as I can tell, the problem isn't even Amtrak. The train between DC and Boston runs just about every hour, is generally on time (or close to it), and doesn't really suffer from any problem aside from being fairly expensive. However, that stretch of tracks is apparently the only place in the country where Amtrak is profitable.
In most of the country, living without a car isn't remotely practical, so when people want to go on a short trip, they drive. They're already paying for the car, so the cost of driving is basically the cost of gas. The trains aren't any faster than cars, so the only real advantage is not needing to drive. If people want to take a longer trip, then trains take too long so people want to drive.
If you ask me, there's no solution here except for people to agree that we should be building world class modern public transportation infrastructure, including high speed rail between cities and towns, and other public transportation within cities and towns. We have to make it feasible for people to live complete lives without owning a car-- more than that, we need to turn cars into luxury items that most people would consider a waste of time.
Yeah, honestly my first response is, "Can we get this from a reputable news outlet?" Honestly I don't mind paying for some kind of news subscription if it's well done and useful, but I don't trust News Corp.
Nothing you can afford can handle a "Big DDOS attack".
And most of us don't remotely need our servers to withstand a "big DDOS attack". It's like saying, "The security in your home can't keep out a world-class catburglar." Well that's true. It's true that we can't afford that kind of security, and it's also true that we don't need that kind of security.
Your security really only needs to be able to withstand the kind of attacks that you're likely to encounter. For most of us, that's only the most casual of attacks. Many sites are more likely to be taken offline by being slashdotted than being purposefully attacked.
I just wouldn't want to make someone overconfident, thinking, "I have backups, so I'm pretty safe." Backups are a necessity for a variety of reasons, but they're not *much* protection against a rogue admin, especially if that admin is the one administering the backups.
So yes, if you assume that the disgruntled rogue admin decides to sabotage your network right now, and he only has a small window of time before his access is cut off, then it's a significant protection to have backups that aren't readily accessed-- assuming the dishonest admin was contentious enough to be making good backups in the first place. If the rogue admin has time to plot his revenge, he could sabotage the backups, recall old offsite backups and destroy them, delete online backups, and "lose" encryption keys for encrypted backups.
Causing trouble is easy. It doesn't happen very often, mostly because doing these things would ruin your career and might bring legal repercussions.
Backups are a pretty good answer, but there are some problems to consider. First, deleting files is not the only thing an admin can do. They can screw with your data without deleting it. They can configure something so that it will fail spectacularly at an inopportune moment. They can screw with your backups and make them inaccessible. They can leave access for themselves back into your network so they can sabotage things later.
Before you get to any details, there's a sort of logical problem in protecting against admins: Who are you going to get to set up the protections? If you hire me as an admin and then ask me to secure the network against myself, there's nothing to prevent me from putting in some kind of alternate access (i.e. a secret backdoor). If you hire someone else to secure the network against me, then there's nothing to prevent that person from keeping some alternate means of access. That's before you even get to the problem of an admin securing things against himself which he'll need continued access to.
It's a difficult problem, and there are things that you can do to mitigate the dangers somewhat, but ultimately if you're not able to handle the security yourself, then you're going to have to trust someone. Make sure you hire trustworthy people, and maintain good relationships with them. If you are able to, make sure you have 2 IT people who keep each other informed about security issues and changes in configuration. That way, if you have a less-than-amicable break with one of the IT people, the other can help you lock him out.
Show me a real world example of where the two are not used interchangeably.
It's not on the public internet, but I've made a site where instead of making "strong" tags bold, they were made all uppercase (and a different color) instead. It was the design I wanted, semantically correct, and it was appropriate to have the page fall back to making the text bold if CSS was not loaded. However, for the design I was using tagging that text as "bold" wouldn't ultimately make a lot of sense.
In light of that, I think what's really going on is just that you're not used to using those tags. It's not less practical or less sensible or less correct to ask people to use "strong" instead of "b", but it's just the convention that you're used to.
Of course, it's not as simple as "cut spending". We need to cut, but we also need to shift things around. We can't just cut everything, since cutting things that are helping economic prosperity (assuming you believe that some government spending does help prosperity-- which is something you should believe) could lower tax revenue and increase the deficit. Yes, it's possible (at least theoretically) that a cut in spending could increase the deficit.
So the question is, what do we cut and what do we shift. You're not going to make significant cuts without hitting defense, social security, and medicare. Find anyone in Washington willing to make cuts in defense, social security, or medicare. There are 3 of them, and everyone thinks they're kooks. We're screwed.
EM and STRONG are shining example of retarded changes to a protocol because some people involved in the discussion don't have a clue.
I think that's going a bit far. What was really going on is that CSS had gained prominence, and lots of people wanted to be thorough in separating the semantic information (HTML) from the styling information (CSS). Telling the browser to render text as "bold" or "italic" is display information, and so those specific controls got thrown into CSS. Instead you got semantic tags for "strong" and "emphatic" which then get styled by default to be bold and italic, respectively, but can sensibly be restyled as something else in CSS.
And it kind of makes sense, in a manner of thinking. CSS allows me to easily take all the text tagged as "b" and make it non-bold, which means that having an HTML tag for "bold" is arguably going to be inaccurate and confusing. You might still disagree with the decision, but I don't think it's retarded or that the people making the decision didn't "have a clue".
1) in this context, Apple is the WebKit open source project
To me, this is key to the issue. Yes, a handful of companies have basically taken a lot of the responsibility for the HTML standard. Really, though, this isn't strange since it's the same handful of companies produce all the major web standards, and so are the companies responsible for implementing those standards in some kind of HTML rendering engine. Even so, the standard itself is open, and most of the rendering engines are open source.
It doesn't really sound like a problem to me. Now if you had a consensus among web developers that some feature should be implemented, and Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft banded together and refused, that'd be a bit scary. I haven't heard of anything like that. If it did happen, it wouldn't be too hard to fork gecko/webkit and add whatever features people wanted. It seems that the reason nobody is bothering with major forks to these engines/browsers is that these developers are doing a pretty good job. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Even IE 9 really isn't bad, as far as I can tell (though honestly I haven't done any web development in years).
Why should I have to? I mean, I'm not talking about a huge professional site with loads of traffic. Even now, colocation can get expensive. Again, I think it assumes that the Internet is supposed to be a broadcast network, and people's homes (and small businesses) are just supposed to be receivers. This is unfortunate, and goes against a lot of the promise that the Internet has traditionally held.
Stream the 1080p video to a server in a datacenter, and then have that server stream it to viewers.
How are you going to stream it to a datacenter on a 256k uplink?
it's rather the fact that when they laid down the wiring they didn't bother planning it for future expansions and just did it as quick and dirty as possible.
My understanding was that part of the problem-- at least part-- was that we laid our telephone lines out relatively early. We started putting telephone lines all over the place a hundred years ago, which much of Europe never put in telephone lines to the same extent. It has been explained to me (though I have no first-hand knowledge) that this was also part of the reason European cell phone adoption was much faster. A lot of people basically skipped having landlines and went straight to cell phones.
But this meant that we had copper lines all over the place that companies wanted to leverage, but it wasn't laid with the intention of being used for data. If an analog voice line in your house was crossed somewhere, it didn't keep you from having a conversation, but it might keep DSL from working properly.
But that's not really the problem. The problem is that right now, today, Americans don't want to invest in infrastructure. They don't want to pay for roads or trains or busses or airports or data lines. Instead of paying for these things in taxes, we want to hand them off to private companies who will magically come up with the money without taking it from us. Meanwhile those companies are happy to sit on existing infrastructure, milk it for everything they can, and then leave it in disrepair.
What's more, people here don't think that the Internet is important. I don't know if this is true elsewhere, but if you talk to people about the importance of the Internet, they see it as an entertainment service. It's just the service that provides you with porn, music, and movies, and therefore isn't necessary. People don't think of it as vital infrastructure for communication and commerce.
What's the point of having 50 Mbit internet when even a HD movie from netflix will stream on 5 Mbit connection.
Well you're still talking about an SD video stream-- maybe you want to watch HD. Physical media is going away, so what happens when people want to watch high-quality 1080p movies? What if they want to watch them in HD? What if they do want to watch multiple streams, e.g. I want to watch TV and my kids want to watch a different show upstairs?
Or what if I'm running a web server that gets hit by a decent amount of traffic? I find it really sad, the degree to which people seem to have accepted that the Internet is a broadcast network were we all download, and the upstream is only used to request the next page. What if I want to stream a 1080p video out of my home for some reason?
There are loads of things that can be done with fast connections. Today, you're saying 3Mbps is good enough. 25 years ago, you'd be saying "640k should be enough for anybody."
I know that's why they've named it OpenOffice and now LibreOffice, but I still think it's bad marketing. My reasoning is that the people who care about it being open source know that it's open source, while those who don't care about it being open source *don't care*. Therefore, there isn't a lot of point in making it's libre-ness the primary selling point.
They'd probably do better to call it "Pro-Office X" or some crap. Hell, even "Awesome Office: Kick-Ass Edition" would probably get more users. Market it on the idea that it's a fully-functioning and powerful office suite.
I've often thought that FLOSS software should consider posting on their websites that you can buy the software for $50, while still putting it in the license that you absolutely don't have to buy it. Let them download, never make them pay, and let them think they've gotten away with something. There are still people who don't trust anything free, but they're happy to steal things.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, there's nothing Blackberry can do about it and it's not their job.
I thought part of the problem with Blackberry is that they route mail unencrypted through their own servers. If you use your iPhone to check your Exchange account, it doesn't give Apple access to your email. If you use your Blackberry to check the same account, then RIM can read all of your email.
So it's exactly true that "there's nothing RIM can do about it." It's more that RIM has chosen technological solutions that enable things like this to happen.
Well let's begin by presuming nothing about rights: presume neither that she has the right to obtain the content nor that she lacks the right, neither that content producers have the right to set prices arbitrarily and force consumers to buy their product nor that they lack the right to control the future of their product.
So what happens? She obtains the content on the terms that are most favorable to her. Although there are multiple channels through which she is willing to pay to access the content, she choses the option that (to some degree) offends her moral views and violates the law. Why? Because the alternatives that the content owner are trying to push are so annoying and onerous that even the troubling and dangerous option of visiting piracy sites is preferable.
We want to blame the finance guys, but the problem was banks giving loans to people they knew couldn't repay them because they could just sell the loan to someone else and not care.
... which was enabled by things like CDOs. The finance guys arranged a system which hid risk and dumped risk on someone else so that they could get rich quick. They did things like create funds they knew would collapse, took out unregulated insurance policies on those funds, and then sold them to other people pretending they were solid.
Well first, Marketing =/= Lies. You might be thinking of advertising, which is different from marketing. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but it's an important distinction that people miss very often. "Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and keep the customer." Marketing is the whole process that includes figuring out that there is a market for a product, producing the product to meet the market, developing a pricing strategy, and even deciding how the product will be shelved in stores.
But *anyway*, not every product requires the same level of deception in their sales and advertising. In this case, I'm not really shocked or upset that Samsung felt the need to have paid actors give fake testimonials, but it is kind of sad. Do you have any doubt that if Apple showed a similar set of videos, they would be videos of real people who actually loved their iPads? The whole thing calls to mind the embarrassing marketing materials for the Dell Adamo. What's noteworthy about these things isn't so much that they're being manipulative or misleading, but that they're doing such a terrible job at it.
One of the best bosses I ever had once told me, "A manager's job is to take everything off your desk that isn't your job." And what he meant, if it's not clear enough, was that if you're an engineer, then you should spend your day working as an engineer. If there's politicking and excessive paperwork and stuff like that, and it's not part of your job, then it's your manager's job to make sure you don't have to do that stuff.
Well there are some funny factors to consider. For one thing, Apple is moving these things in greater volume, and greater volume means cheaper prices. Not only are they moving more tablets than Samsung, but they're also moving a lot of iPhones and laptops, which means that they can probably negotiate great terms on common elements (e.g. screens, disks, memory). Also, this is an instance where Apple can leverage their other products. They already pay for the OS because of the iPhone, which was also a modified version of an OS they had already built. They/re already engineering for small/light electronics in both the iPod/iPhone and their Macbooks. The things they learn about squeezing a lot of power into the Macbook Air can be used to make the iPad lighter, and vice versa.
And, that's knowing full-well that Facebook is just doing this to increase platform adoption, since if you want to 'text', you'd have to be on FB..
This is sort of my concern. Carriers are charging ridiculous prices, which should be a lesson of what happens when you give a company too much control. So is the solution to hand the control over to Facebook?
Why not come up with a standard/open messaging protocols? I really don't understand why we need to go with Facebook or Twitter to deal with status messages and short-form messaging. It's like being in the dark ages of the Internet, when you had AOL and Prodigy and CompuServe, but their respective users couldn't interact with each other.
Ultimately, all these social media companies are guarding their own little fiefdoms, and no one has the influence to push a standard, so I guess we're just never going to get a well-designed system.
Then again, the real world is a lot more stressful...
Stress isn't really linked to actual importance. Like losing your job is not necessarily more stressful than deleting a facebook friend. Stress is more about emotional attachment and an inability to resolve conflict.
I'm not that surprised by this. I still have access to the network from one of my previous jobs, but it's because they specifically wanted me to still have access in case they wanted help. At another job, it took a while for my account to be disabled because I was the guy who would have normally disabled accounts. I had assumed my boss would disable my accounts when he left, but it took him a while.
It really wasn't that big of a deal, though. I left under amicable terms, and even if I hadn't, I'm a professional. The reality is, even when I still had some kind of access, I had no interest in doing anything with it. I always very relieved when I leave a job-- relieved that I can cede all my responsibilities, never log in again, and never fix another problem. Really, it's always bad security to give unnecessary access, but sometimes you need to assess the real threat.
When you make transportation policy, you need to plan for between 10 and 40 years in the future.
This is one of my regular annoyances when talking about these issues: I always get people telling me things like, "Well you can't just build trains all over the place in the next 3 years!" or "But all the roads and cars are already built! Why should we replace any of it?!"
Nobody with any sense is worrying about this stuff on the timeline of 3 years. Over the next 50 years, all this stuff is going to be replaced at least once or twice. If we're sticking with roads and cars as our primary mode of transportation, most people will replace their cars a few times over in the next 50 years, all the roads will be repaved, and new roads will be built. We don't have the options of "just keeping what we have."
The real question here is, what should we do if we want to build a sustainable (both environmentally and economically) and prosperous society 20 years from now? 40 years from now? 100 years from now? How do we plan for that. What steps do we need to take today to prepare? Any infrastructure project you undertake today won't begin to pay off for a decade or more, but that's not a good reason to quit building and expanding and replacing infrastructure. It's an investment, and if it's planned well then it will pay off.
So here's the thing that we should all be realizing by now: It's not sustainable for a society of our size to have everyone buy their own individual car and commute an hour to work every day. It takes up too many resources and uses too much energy. It's economically wasteful. It's environmentally disastrous.
Some of these things exist in the US already (Accela run by Amtrak between DC and New York City),
Actually the Acela trains don't really run much faster than the normal trains. The trip between NYC and DC is something like half an hour faster than the normal regional train, but that's also because it's making fewer stops. The tickets can be much more expensive, but as far as I can tell, you're just paying to ride in a newer/fancier train.
c) Take a train that takes maybe 8-10 hours, costs as much as the airplane ride, but is comfy and relaxing?
If it takes 12 hours to drive, it shouldn't take 10 hours for a train that can go 250 mph. Sure, the train will make stops, but on a 12 hour drive you'll also be stopping for gas, food, and maybe just to stretch your legs or rest your eyes.
Sure, you can build a high speed train, but if its run by Amtrak and exists in this countries rail system mentality, it will quickly become worthless. Fix the real issues.
As far as I can tell, the problem isn't even Amtrak. The train between DC and Boston runs just about every hour, is generally on time (or close to it), and doesn't really suffer from any problem aside from being fairly expensive. However, that stretch of tracks is apparently the only place in the country where Amtrak is profitable.
In most of the country, living without a car isn't remotely practical, so when people want to go on a short trip, they drive. They're already paying for the car, so the cost of driving is basically the cost of gas. The trains aren't any faster than cars, so the only real advantage is not needing to drive. If people want to take a longer trip, then trains take too long so people want to drive.
If you ask me, there's no solution here except for people to agree that we should be building world class modern public transportation infrastructure, including high speed rail between cities and towns, and other public transportation within cities and towns. We have to make it feasible for people to live complete lives without owning a car-- more than that, we need to turn cars into luxury items that most people would consider a waste of time.
Yeah, honestly my first response is, "Can we get this from a reputable news outlet?" Honestly I don't mind paying for some kind of news subscription if it's well done and useful, but I don't trust News Corp.
Nothing you can afford can handle a "Big DDOS attack".
And most of us don't remotely need our servers to withstand a "big DDOS attack". It's like saying, "The security in your home can't keep out a world-class catburglar." Well that's true. It's true that we can't afford that kind of security, and it's also true that we don't need that kind of security.
Your security really only needs to be able to withstand the kind of attacks that you're likely to encounter. For most of us, that's only the most casual of attacks. Many sites are more likely to be taken offline by being slashdotted than being purposefully attacked.
I just wouldn't want to make someone overconfident, thinking, "I have backups, so I'm pretty safe." Backups are a necessity for a variety of reasons, but they're not *much* protection against a rogue admin, especially if that admin is the one administering the backups.
So yes, if you assume that the disgruntled rogue admin decides to sabotage your network right now, and he only has a small window of time before his access is cut off, then it's a significant protection to have backups that aren't readily accessed-- assuming the dishonest admin was contentious enough to be making good backups in the first place. If the rogue admin has time to plot his revenge, he could sabotage the backups, recall old offsite backups and destroy them, delete online backups, and "lose" encryption keys for encrypted backups.
Causing trouble is easy. It doesn't happen very often, mostly because doing these things would ruin your career and might bring legal repercussions.
Backups are a pretty good answer, but there are some problems to consider. First, deleting files is not the only thing an admin can do. They can screw with your data without deleting it. They can configure something so that it will fail spectacularly at an inopportune moment. They can screw with your backups and make them inaccessible. They can leave access for themselves back into your network so they can sabotage things later.
Before you get to any details, there's a sort of logical problem in protecting against admins: Who are you going to get to set up the protections? If you hire me as an admin and then ask me to secure the network against myself, there's nothing to prevent me from putting in some kind of alternate access (i.e. a secret backdoor). If you hire someone else to secure the network against me, then there's nothing to prevent that person from keeping some alternate means of access. That's before you even get to the problem of an admin securing things against himself which he'll need continued access to.
It's a difficult problem, and there are things that you can do to mitigate the dangers somewhat, but ultimately if you're not able to handle the security yourself, then you're going to have to trust someone. Make sure you hire trustworthy people, and maintain good relationships with them. If you are able to, make sure you have 2 IT people who keep each other informed about security issues and changes in configuration. That way, if you have a less-than-amicable break with one of the IT people, the other can help you lock him out.
Show me a real world example of where the two are not used interchangeably.
It's not on the public internet, but I've made a site where instead of making "strong" tags bold, they were made all uppercase (and a different color) instead. It was the design I wanted, semantically correct, and it was appropriate to have the page fall back to making the text bold if CSS was not loaded. However, for the design I was using tagging that text as "bold" wouldn't ultimately make a lot of sense.
In light of that, I think what's really going on is just that you're not used to using those tags. It's not less practical or less sensible or less correct to ask people to use "strong" instead of "b", but it's just the convention that you're used to.
Of course, it's not as simple as "cut spending". We need to cut, but we also need to shift things around. We can't just cut everything, since cutting things that are helping economic prosperity (assuming you believe that some government spending does help prosperity-- which is something you should believe) could lower tax revenue and increase the deficit. Yes, it's possible (at least theoretically) that a cut in spending could increase the deficit.
So the question is, what do we cut and what do we shift. You're not going to make significant cuts without hitting defense, social security, and medicare. Find anyone in Washington willing to make cuts in defense, social security, or medicare. There are 3 of them, and everyone thinks they're kooks. We're screwed.
EM and STRONG are shining example of retarded changes to a protocol because some people involved in the discussion don't have a clue.
I think that's going a bit far. What was really going on is that CSS had gained prominence, and lots of people wanted to be thorough in separating the semantic information (HTML) from the styling information (CSS). Telling the browser to render text as "bold" or "italic" is display information, and so those specific controls got thrown into CSS. Instead you got semantic tags for "strong" and "emphatic" which then get styled by default to be bold and italic, respectively, but can sensibly be restyled as something else in CSS.
And it kind of makes sense, in a manner of thinking. CSS allows me to easily take all the text tagged as "b" and make it non-bold, which means that having an HTML tag for "bold" is arguably going to be inaccurate and confusing. You might still disagree with the decision, but I don't think it's retarded or that the people making the decision didn't "have a clue".
1) in this context, Apple is the WebKit open source project
To me, this is key to the issue. Yes, a handful of companies have basically taken a lot of the responsibility for the HTML standard. Really, though, this isn't strange since it's the same handful of companies produce all the major web standards, and so are the companies responsible for implementing those standards in some kind of HTML rendering engine. Even so, the standard itself is open, and most of the rendering engines are open source.
It doesn't really sound like a problem to me. Now if you had a consensus among web developers that some feature should be implemented, and Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft banded together and refused, that'd be a bit scary. I haven't heard of anything like that. If it did happen, it wouldn't be too hard to fork gecko/webkit and add whatever features people wanted. It seems that the reason nobody is bothering with major forks to these engines/browsers is that these developers are doing a pretty good job. Honestly, I'm pretty happy with the current state of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Even IE 9 really isn't bad, as far as I can tell (though honestly I haven't done any web development in years).
Colo it.
Why should I have to? I mean, I'm not talking about a huge professional site with loads of traffic. Even now, colocation can get expensive. Again, I think it assumes that the Internet is supposed to be a broadcast network, and people's homes (and small businesses) are just supposed to be receivers. This is unfortunate, and goes against a lot of the promise that the Internet has traditionally held.
Stream the 1080p video to a server in a datacenter, and then have that server stream it to viewers.
How are you going to stream it to a datacenter on a 256k uplink?
it's rather the fact that when they laid down the wiring they didn't bother planning it for future expansions and just did it as quick and dirty as possible.
My understanding was that part of the problem-- at least part-- was that we laid our telephone lines out relatively early. We started putting telephone lines all over the place a hundred years ago, which much of Europe never put in telephone lines to the same extent. It has been explained to me (though I have no first-hand knowledge) that this was also part of the reason European cell phone adoption was much faster. A lot of people basically skipped having landlines and went straight to cell phones.
But this meant that we had copper lines all over the place that companies wanted to leverage, but it wasn't laid with the intention of being used for data. If an analog voice line in your house was crossed somewhere, it didn't keep you from having a conversation, but it might keep DSL from working properly.
But that's not really the problem. The problem is that right now, today, Americans don't want to invest in infrastructure. They don't want to pay for roads or trains or busses or airports or data lines. Instead of paying for these things in taxes, we want to hand them off to private companies who will magically come up with the money without taking it from us. Meanwhile those companies are happy to sit on existing infrastructure, milk it for everything they can, and then leave it in disrepair.
What's more, people here don't think that the Internet is important. I don't know if this is true elsewhere, but if you talk to people about the importance of the Internet, they see it as an entertainment service. It's just the service that provides you with porn, music, and movies, and therefore isn't necessary. People don't think of it as vital infrastructure for communication and commerce.
What's the point of having 50 Mbit internet when even a HD movie from netflix will stream on 5 Mbit connection.
Well you're still talking about an SD video stream-- maybe you want to watch HD. Physical media is going away, so what happens when people want to watch high-quality 1080p movies? What if they want to watch them in HD? What if they do want to watch multiple streams, e.g. I want to watch TV and my kids want to watch a different show upstairs?
Or what if I'm running a web server that gets hit by a decent amount of traffic? I find it really sad, the degree to which people seem to have accepted that the Internet is a broadcast network were we all download, and the upstream is only used to request the next page. What if I want to stream a 1080p video out of my home for some reason?
There are loads of things that can be done with fast connections. Today, you're saying 3Mbps is good enough. 25 years ago, you'd be saying "640k should be enough for anybody."
I know that's why they've named it OpenOffice and now LibreOffice, but I still think it's bad marketing. My reasoning is that the people who care about it being open source know that it's open source, while those who don't care about it being open source *don't care*. Therefore, there isn't a lot of point in making it's libre-ness the primary selling point.
They'd probably do better to call it "Pro-Office X" or some crap. Hell, even "Awesome Office: Kick-Ass Edition" would probably get more users. Market it on the idea that it's a fully-functioning and powerful office suite.
I've often thought that FLOSS software should consider posting on their websites that you can buy the software for $50, while still putting it in the license that you absolutely don't have to buy it. Let them download, never make them pay, and let them think they've gotten away with something. There are still people who don't trust anything free, but they're happy to steal things.