Their policy means nothing, since they can always change it on a whim. The only way to have control over your information and privacy is to control it yourself.
Anyone feel like making a distributed peer to peer facebook clone where each user runs (or at least has the ability to run) their own server?
This is a sandbar in an estuary. It first accumulated enough silt to poke above the surface back in 1974, and was never more than 2 meters high. In addition, the nearest tide gauge is showing +0.54 (+/- 0.52, heh) mm per year rise in sea level, meaning that it would have taken nearly 4000 years for the local change in sea level to have caused it to disappear.
If you insist on bringing up global warming, you have to blame the sandbar's emergence on global cooling during the 70s and notice that we are now back where we started. A much wiser choice would be to simply notice that rivers flush crap down stream, and ignore this "island" the way we ignore all the other sandbars and ephemera.
I'm having a hard time finding anything in your post that isn't just plain wrong. Let me address some of the bigger points.
It isn't the carpenter that creates wealth, it is the backhoe that digs the foundation in hours instead of weeks, the concrete plant, the lumber industry, the building and the other tools and supplies he uses. It isn't the fry cook that creates wealth, it is the fryer, the building around it and the distribution network that creates and delivers the supplies. Sure, the carpenter and the fry cook do a bit, but the capital created and invested by others multiplies their efforts. If it were as you say, the Amish would be the wealthiest people in the US.
Now for taxes. How is it that you imagine that only the poor and the government spend money on productive endeavors? You seem to be saying that when taxes on the rich are low, that money is somehow lost. Huh?
And if you believe that the authors of the Constitution intended the commerce clause to nullify the entire remainder of the document, there is no point discussing it with you.
The whole of the Constitution is a document of limitations; an attempt to chain the beast of government down to the slimmest possible form still capable of doing the few enumerated duties felt to be necessary. Why the hell would the authors have hidden "Just kidding, do whatever you want" in the middle of it?
Now for your other insane notion. You claim to be in favor of state's rights, and yet you say that anything alleged to be "on behalf" of the people is the domain of the federal congress. What powers or rights then does this line reserve to the states? Or, for that matter, to the people? It seems to me that if Congress has the authority to do anything "the people" require, then no power at all has been reserved to "the people".
We can have a respectful disagreement about the way things should be. I can understand how someone think that a government health plan is a good idea. Hopefully you can understand how I could think otherwise.
What isn't really open to debate, however, is our Constitution. It says what it says, as it has for over 200 years, and in exceptionally clear language, a few pained constructions and archaic expressions notwithstanding. Go, read it again, and this time, please, read it as written, not as you wish it were.
Not that it matters much now. The slide from ultimate authority to quaint relic is now nearly complete.
Actually, it does say that. I'll quote it for you:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
3D rendering involves lots of integer math, and there are huge portions of any given render that do not depend on each other. For example, the scene may involve calculating the vectors from thousands of vertices and faces of polygons towards hundreds of light sources. That is millions of operations that are essentially independent. Another phase of a render will require calculating the intersection of each view vector (and more if you use FSAA) with a polygon in the scene.
So, modern GPUs are a special case of a CPU. They have many cores, each of which has many integer and/or vector units. Their sole purpose in life is to perform those millions of parallel operations as fast as possible. Modern GPUs can perform hundreds or thousands of operations per cycle, at speeds gradually approaching CPU speeds.
Technically, you can run arbitrary code on a GPU, just like your keyboard or SCSI controller is Turning Complete, but they are so optimized for their job that it would be impractical. Unless, of course, you have a massively parallel integer math problem you want to solve, like brute forcing a password...
Ahh, nothing makes me happier than some random euro tool posting evidence that they know nothing about the US banking system.
A banking system can choose to put security at the beginning of a transaction, or at the end. Putting it at the start means that the initiation of a transfer requires authentication that is, in someone's imagination, strong. Putting it at the end means that you audit the record after the fact and find errors and fraud that way.
In the US, the banking system decided a long, long time ago to use the audit approach. There are obvious trade-offs involved. For one, anyone that you give a check to now has literally everything they need to clean out your entire checking account. On the other hand, since everyone knows that the system has zero security on the front end, the clean up on the back end is generally pretty smooth.
Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a criminal operation in Europe that was doing some high tech ATM fraud? Weren't thousands of people deprived of their cash for years because the banks were so secure that they considered a breach to be impossible?
And before anyone gets into convenience, I should point out that US banking customers are not lacking for convenient ways to transfer money. I use my credit card whenever possible and earn 2% cash back on everything. For the few places that won't accept a credit card, they can use ACH (basically a check minus the paper) to pull the money from my account, or I can use my bank's online bill pay system to print a check (for free) and mail it (again free) to them, or better yet, straight to their bank for deposit. And if I need to do something in person, I still have the ability to write a check by hand (about 2 per year).
I guess the sorry state of education in this country is to blame.
Several of the original states (colonies) had established churches (official state churches, like the Church of England) at the time the constitution was being written. The establishment clause was specifically intended to protect those state churches by forbidding the federal government from legislating them away. It is really an anti-dis-establishment clause.
It really helps to understand that "establishment of religion" is being used as a noun here, and not as a verb.
The problem with analogies is that they allow people to focus on the wrong part of the analogy.
The difference between a house and a body is that you can't build a new body. If you die, your corpse is certain to be branded as uninsurable, just as the smoking ruins of a burned down house will be uninsurable. In your terms, it is like building a defective house and then having someone say "Sorry, THIS HOUSE can't be insured." But you can't build a new body, and that is where it all breaks down.
Insurance is NOT a gamble. It is a way to manage risk. Given a large enough pool, you can calculate how many events of a given type are expected each year and you can split that cost across the whole pool. When managing risk, more information is always better. If a given type of house is more prone to fires, the risk pool (insurance company) can charge them more, and charge the people with safer houses less.
A baby with a genetic disease (we are going to assume that this disease is expensive to treat) is fucked. What you suggest is that we should all be fucked too. What is your justification for stealing from me to pay for someone else's treatment? On what moral grounds am I made responsible for everyone's medical bills other than my own?
You also can't get fire insurance after your house burns down.
If you already have an expensive condition, the concept of insurance no longer applies to you. It is no longer possible to pool your risk. At that point, you are looking for a SUBSIDY.
Insurance is only possible when you have a large pool of people looking to mitigate the risk of a low probability but high downside event. Mathematically, fire insurance is a terrible purchase. The cost of premiums times the chance of having a claim is WAY higher than the expected payout. But you buy it because the downside is huge and you don't know if you are going to be on the unlucky side or not.
You consult your organization's written policy. The policy should probably say that you must not reveal them outside of the IT department except by a formal motion by the board (or other ultimate authority).
What? You don't have a written policy on password control? Did you sleep through the wake up call 18 months ago? In that case, let the trial be a reminder and DO IT NOW.
Don't imagine that Toyota believes the floor mat thing.
Back in the 80s, a kid got crushed to death between the family Audi and the back wall of the garage. His mom was pushing so hard on the "brakes" trying to stop it that she bent the gas pedal out of shape.
Now, Audi has to say something. Option A is "You killed your own son. If you have more kids and find yourself in a similar situation in the future, take your foot off the gas, shift out of drive, or turn the key off." Option B is "The floor mat must have gotten wedged in there. Freak accident, could have happened to anyone."
So, just because they say floor mats doesn't mean they really think it was floor mats.
Ok, repeat after me: there is no production car on the planet with an engine capable of suddenly overpowering simple hydraulic brakes.
Know what Audi's engineers found back in the 80s? They found gas pedals bent out of shape by people standing on their "brakes".
This is not "news for nerds". This is the same bullshit driver error as before, just the computers playing boogeyman are a bit more advanced this time.
P.S. This opinion is based on the statements quoted in the article. The laws of physics may not be widely known, but your car can't nullify them.
The goal of anonymous voting is to make it pointless for people to buy votes. Getting a "confirmation code" and being able to check it later defeats that goal.
I stopped reading CRYPTO-GRAM a few years back when he changed it from a newsletter to a list of links to his blog. It was not a good change, in my opinion, since his newsletter was a lot better written before the blog showed up.
That is the whole point of GPL! GPL keeps free software free for everyone.
Oh, and hint to future posters, if you see "GPL" in a story, that story is about free software and not about open source. The creators and users of the Gnu Public License don't give a fuck about your open source movement (in general).
"Tik-Tok, like you to meet Neeta Hup, the President's Special Advisor on Communications; what was it?" She laughed. "Special Advisor on Leisure Communications, Media Aesthetics and Bong." "Bong?" I asked, as Hornby drifted away again. "I felt the word _Art_ didn't belong on the end of a string of syllables like that, so I changed it to _Bong_," she said. "The President was furious, but so far no one else official has noticed. Maybe I'll try introducing bong into the language. People are tired of art, give them bong." "For bong's sake," I murmured. "_How_ do you advise?" "I buy, I make acquisitions for the President's collection. He wants to be the biggest bong collector since Goering. He's heard what a good investment it is, isn't that pathetic?" "Oh, I don't know. Money is real, money endures. All the noblest sentiments can be beautifully expressed in money. If everyone showered artists with money whenever they saw them, wouldn't this be a finer world?"
Don't forget that modern drives use material with obscenely high coercivity so that the domains don't spontaneously flip their neighbors. If you use a magnet powerful enough to randomize the platters, you'll warp all the steel parts.
The summary was so bad that I actually read the article, expecting that I could then come here and post the usual flame about mangled, misleading, or otherwise just bad summaries.
That was a HUGE mistake. The article really is bad enough that no improvement in the summary would have been possible.
The author of that article confuses "computer" and "network streaming". The confusion seems to be quite deep, perhaps to the point that the author thinks of computers as mere display screens for this magical "internet" thing that does all the work.
Imagine that you read an article about a traffic jam, but rather than saying that the flow of traffic at the moment didn't seem to be very fast, it instead suggested that the cars would "jitter and freeze". That's how I felt when I read that article.
This really is very safe, and all the technology is known (not at this scale maybe, but known). The only thing that has stopped us from doing it already has been a lack of willpower.
If you are sending microwaves from a smallish antenna (small enough that you can boost it into GEO, for example) all the way back to earth, the receiver needs to be huge, like many acres. Basically you find a good pasture, put posts in the ground every few dozen feet in a grid, run wires and diodes between the poles, and you now have a high efficiency rectenna and the cows grazing underneath won't even notice.
Even if the beam wandered, the power per square meter isn't that high, and to get through the atmosphere with minimal losses, it won't be at a frequency that is easily absorbed by water, which means that it won't be at a frequency that is easily absorbed by you or me.
I work with tons of confidential data. No hard drives, tapes, floppies, CDs/DVDs, memory cards or USB drives leave my care without being "erased" to my satisfaction.
All magnetic media (hard drive platters, tapes, floppies, etc) are raised above their Curie point. Usually FAR above their Curie point. Usually above their melting point, actually, and occasionally above their flash point.
Opticals (CDs, DVDs and UDO) are shredded in a paper shredder. If something really important was involved, the chunks are then burned.
Solid state storage (USB drives and memory cards) generally meets my drill press, particularly if there is a warranty involved. Burning works too, but you need to make sure the NAND die is reduced to ash, not merely the plastic package. For drilling, use a bit at least as big as the minor axis of the chip carrier (if you can identify it) and aim for roughly the center.
Thermite is cheap and easy to make. The most important thing to remember is not to get the stuff too finely ground. If you use very fine powders, it'll burn too fast and eject a lot of heat up into the air. Use coarser ingredients so that it burns slower and delivers more heat to the target.
I haven't had the balls to request that the board authorize payment for "secure destruction of confidential data" yet, so I've been paying for the thermite out of pocket, but I don't mind because it is fun. Other people here think it is pretty interesting too, so I usually get a crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
Their policy means nothing, since they can always change it on a whim. The only way to have control over your information and privacy is to control it yourself.
Anyone feel like making a distributed peer to peer facebook clone where each user runs (or at least has the ability to run) their own server?
This is a sandbar in an estuary. It first accumulated enough silt to poke above the surface back in 1974, and was never more than 2 meters high. In addition, the nearest tide gauge is showing +0.54 (+/- 0.52, heh) mm per year rise in sea level, meaning that it would have taken nearly 4000 years for the local change in sea level to have caused it to disappear.
If you insist on bringing up global warming, you have to blame the sandbar's emergence on global cooling during the 70s and notice that we are now back where we started. A much wiser choice would be to simply notice that rivers flush crap down stream, and ignore this "island" the way we ignore all the other sandbars and ephemera.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/25/bengal-island-succumbs-to-global-warming-nonsense-ap-gets-nutty-over-loss-of-a-sandbar/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Talpatti_Island
Move along, nothing to see here.
I'm having a hard time finding anything in your post that isn't just plain wrong. Let me address some of the bigger points.
It isn't the carpenter that creates wealth, it is the backhoe that digs the foundation in hours instead of weeks, the concrete plant, the lumber industry, the building and the other tools and supplies he uses. It isn't the fry cook that creates wealth, it is the fryer, the building around it and the distribution network that creates and delivers the supplies. Sure, the carpenter and the fry cook do a bit, but the capital created and invested by others multiplies their efforts. If it were as you say, the Amish would be the wealthiest people in the US.
Now for taxes. How is it that you imagine that only the poor and the government spend money on productive endeavors? You seem to be saying that when taxes on the rich are low, that money is somehow lost. Huh?
And if you believe that the authors of the Constitution intended the commerce clause to nullify the entire remainder of the document, there is no point discussing it with you.
The whole of the Constitution is a document of limitations; an attempt to chain the beast of government down to the slimmest possible form still capable of doing the few enumerated duties felt to be necessary. Why the hell would the authors have hidden "Just kidding, do whatever you want" in the middle of it?
Now for your other insane notion. You claim to be in favor of state's rights, and yet you say that anything alleged to be "on behalf" of the people is the domain of the federal congress. What powers or rights then does this line reserve to the states? Or, for that matter, to the people? It seems to me that if Congress has the authority to do anything "the people" require, then no power at all has been reserved to "the people".
We can have a respectful disagreement about the way things should be. I can understand how someone think that a government health plan is a good idea. Hopefully you can understand how I could think otherwise.
What isn't really open to debate, however, is our Constitution. It says what it says, as it has for over 200 years, and in exceptionally clear language, a few pained constructions and archaic expressions notwithstanding. Go, read it again, and this time, please, read it as written, not as you wish it were.
Not that it matters much now. The slide from ultimate authority to quaint relic is now nearly complete.
Actually, it does say that. I'll quote it for you:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Hardware acceleration in a browser? What am I missing?
3D rendering involves lots of integer math, and there are huge portions of any given render that do not depend on each other. For example, the scene may involve calculating the vectors from thousands of vertices and faces of polygons towards hundreds of light sources. That is millions of operations that are essentially independent. Another phase of a render will require calculating the intersection of each view vector (and more if you use FSAA) with a polygon in the scene.
So, modern GPUs are a special case of a CPU. They have many cores, each of which has many integer and/or vector units. Their sole purpose in life is to perform those millions of parallel operations as fast as possible. Modern GPUs can perform hundreds or thousands of operations per cycle, at speeds gradually approaching CPU speeds.
Technically, you can run arbitrary code on a GPU, just like your keyboard or SCSI controller is Turning Complete, but they are so optimized for their job that it would be impractical. Unless, of course, you have a massively parallel integer math problem you want to solve, like brute forcing a password...
Ahh, nothing makes me happier than some random euro tool posting evidence that they know nothing about the US banking system.
A banking system can choose to put security at the beginning of a transaction, or at the end. Putting it at the start means that the initiation of a transfer requires authentication that is, in someone's imagination, strong. Putting it at the end means that you audit the record after the fact and find errors and fraud that way.
In the US, the banking system decided a long, long time ago to use the audit approach. There are obvious trade-offs involved. For one, anyone that you give a check to now has literally everything they need to clean out your entire checking account. On the other hand, since everyone knows that the system has zero security on the front end, the clean up on the back end is generally pretty smooth.
Wasn't there a story not too long ago about a criminal operation in Europe that was doing some high tech ATM fraud? Weren't thousands of people deprived of their cash for years because the banks were so secure that they considered a breach to be impossible?
And before anyone gets into convenience, I should point out that US banking customers are not lacking for convenient ways to transfer money. I use my credit card whenever possible and earn 2% cash back on everything. For the few places that won't accept a credit card, they can use ACH (basically a check minus the paper) to pull the money from my account, or I can use my bank's online bill pay system to print a check (for free) and mail it (again free) to them, or better yet, straight to their bank for deposit. And if I need to do something in person, I still have the ability to write a check by hand (about 2 per year).
I guess the sorry state of education in this country is to blame.
Several of the original states (colonies) had established churches (official state churches, like the Church of England) at the time the constitution was being written. The establishment clause was specifically intended to protect those state churches by forbidding the federal government from legislating them away. It is really an anti-dis-establishment clause.
It really helps to understand that "establishment of religion" is being used as a noun here, and not as a verb.
The problem with analogies is that they allow people to focus on the wrong part of the analogy.
The difference between a house and a body is that you can't build a new body. If you die, your corpse is certain to be branded as uninsurable, just as the smoking ruins of a burned down house will be uninsurable. In your terms, it is like building a defective house and then having someone say "Sorry, THIS HOUSE can't be insured." But you can't build a new body, and that is where it all breaks down.
Insurance is NOT a gamble. It is a way to manage risk. Given a large enough pool, you can calculate how many events of a given type are expected each year and you can split that cost across the whole pool. When managing risk, more information is always better. If a given type of house is more prone to fires, the risk pool (insurance company) can charge them more, and charge the people with safer houses less.
A baby with a genetic disease (we are going to assume that this disease is expensive to treat) is fucked. What you suggest is that we should all be fucked too. What is your justification for stealing from me to pay for someone else's treatment? On what moral grounds am I made responsible for everyone's medical bills other than my own?
You also can't get fire insurance after your house burns down.
If you already have an expensive condition, the concept of insurance no longer applies to you. It is no longer possible to pool your risk. At that point, you are looking for a SUBSIDY.
Insurance is only possible when you have a large pool of people looking to mitigate the risk of a low probability but high downside event. Mathematically, fire insurance is a terrible purchase. The cost of premiums times the chance of having a claim is WAY higher than the expected payout. But you buy it because the downside is huge and you don't know if you are going to be on the unlucky side or not.
You consult your organization's written policy. The policy should probably say that you must not reveal them outside of the IT department except by a formal motion by the board (or other ultimate authority).
What? You don't have a written policy on password control? Did you sleep through the wake up call 18 months ago? In that case, let the trial be a reminder and DO IT NOW.
Thank you Barbera Streisand! I was going to let this one go, but now I'm going to download and keep a copy.
No seed of truth. Not even a smear campaign. Just a joke.
Google: gilbert gottfried bob saget roast
Don't imagine that Toyota believes the floor mat thing.
Back in the 80s, a kid got crushed to death between the family Audi and the back wall of the garage. His mom was pushing so hard on the "brakes" trying to stop it that she bent the gas pedal out of shape.
Now, Audi has to say something. Option A is "You killed your own son. If you have more kids and find yourself in a similar situation in the future, take your foot off the gas, shift out of drive, or turn the key off." Option B is "The floor mat must have gotten wedged in there. Freak accident, could have happened to anyone."
So, just because they say floor mats doesn't mean they really think it was floor mats.
Ok, repeat after me: there is no production car on the planet with an engine capable of suddenly overpowering simple hydraulic brakes.
Know what Audi's engineers found back in the 80s? They found gas pedals bent out of shape by people standing on their "brakes".
This is not "news for nerds". This is the same bullshit driver error as before, just the computers playing boogeyman are a bit more advanced this time.
P.S. This opinion is based on the statements quoted in the article. The laws of physics may not be widely known, but your car can't nullify them.
The goal of anonymous voting is to make it pointless for people to buy votes. Getting a "confirmation code" and being able to check it later defeats that goal.
I stopped reading CRYPTO-GRAM a few years back when he changed it from a newsletter to a list of links to his blog. It was not a good change, in my opinion, since his newsletter was a lot better written before the blog showed up.
That is the whole point of GPL! GPL keeps free software free for everyone.
Oh, and hint to future posters, if you see "GPL" in a story, that story is about free software and not about open source. The creators and users of the Gnu Public License don't give a fuck about your open source movement (in general).
"Tik-Tok, like you to meet Neeta Hup, the President's Special Advisor on
Communications; what was it?"
She laughed. "Special Advisor on Leisure Communications, Media
Aesthetics and Bong."
"Bong?" I asked, as Hornby drifted away again.
"I felt the word _Art_ didn't belong on the end of a string of syllables
like that, so I changed it to _Bong_," she said. "The President was furious,
but so far no one else official has noticed. Maybe I'll try introducing bong
into the language. People are tired of art, give them bong."
"For bong's sake," I murmured. "_How_ do you advise?"
"I buy, I make acquisitions for the President's collection. He wants to
be the biggest bong collector since Goering. He's heard what a good investment
it is, isn't that pathetic?"
"Oh, I don't know. Money is real, money endures. All the noblest
sentiments can be beautifully expressed in money. If everyone showered artists
with money whenever they saw them, wouldn't this be a finer world?"
Don't forget that modern drives use material with obscenely high coercivity so that the domains don't spontaneously flip their neighbors. If you use a magnet powerful enough to randomize the platters, you'll warp all the steel parts.
The summary was so bad that I actually read the article, expecting that I could then come here and post the usual flame about mangled, misleading, or otherwise just bad summaries.
That was a HUGE mistake. The article really is bad enough that no improvement in the summary would have been possible.
The author of that article confuses "computer" and "network streaming". The confusion seems to be quite deep, perhaps to the point that the author thinks of computers as mere display screens for this magical "internet" thing that does all the work.
Imagine that you read an article about a traffic jam, but rather than saying that the flow of traffic at the moment didn't seem to be very fast, it instead suggested that the cars would "jitter and freeze". That's how I felt when I read that article.
This really is very safe, and all the technology is known (not at this scale maybe, but known). The only thing that has stopped us from doing it already has been a lack of willpower.
If you are sending microwaves from a smallish antenna (small enough that you can boost it into GEO, for example) all the way back to earth, the receiver needs to be huge, like many acres. Basically you find a good pasture, put posts in the ground every few dozen feet in a grid, run wires and diodes between the poles, and you now have a high efficiency rectenna and the cows grazing underneath won't even notice.
Even if the beam wandered, the power per square meter isn't that high, and to get through the atmosphere with minimal losses, it won't be at a frequency that is easily absorbed by water, which means that it won't be at a frequency that is easily absorbed by you or me.
Who has friends at VISA? I suspect that Best Buy is in dire need of a PCI Compliance audit.
I work with tons of confidential data. No hard drives, tapes, floppies, CDs/DVDs, memory cards or USB drives leave my care without being "erased" to my satisfaction.
All magnetic media (hard drive platters, tapes, floppies, etc) are raised above their Curie point. Usually FAR above their Curie point. Usually above their melting point, actually, and occasionally above their flash point.
Opticals (CDs, DVDs and UDO) are shredded in a paper shredder. If something really important was involved, the chunks are then burned.
Solid state storage (USB drives and memory cards) generally meets my drill press, particularly if there is a warranty involved. Burning works too, but you need to make sure the NAND die is reduced to ash, not merely the plastic package. For drilling, use a bit at least as big as the minor axis of the chip carrier (if you can identify it) and aim for roughly the center.
Thermite is cheap and easy to make. The most important thing to remember is not to get the stuff too finely ground. If you use very fine powders, it'll burn too fast and eject a lot of heat up into the air. Use coarser ingredients so that it burns slower and delivers more heat to the target.
I haven't had the balls to request that the board authorize payment for "secure destruction of confidential data" yet, so I've been paying for the thermite out of pocket, but I don't mind because it is fun. Other people here think it is pretty interesting too, so I usually get a crowd.
Don't bother with shooting. Just makes a mess.