Not admitting that the sky is blue and not admitting that UFOs kidnapped Elvis are not the same kind of things, even though they both have to do with admitting something.
I think this discussion is done. You don't want to admit that people can be intelligent even if they're not in the same way that you are, and there's really no point continuing.
This has serious ramifications on congressional oversight of intelligence orgs. At stake is the existence of any elected oversight of spooks.
This. So few people understand this. This is a major battle in the war the intelligence agencies wage to become independent from the electorate and to avoid any meaningful oversight. We laugh when conspiracy theorists rant about the NWO, but we are watching on as a shadow government gets formed right in front of our eyes.
Believe it or not, there are people with PhDs that are absolutely idiotic;
There are also three-headed monkeys. That doesn't mean that every monkey is one of them. Anyway, you are distracting from the original point which was that the assumption that absolutely everyone except yourself is an idiot is arrogant, foolish, ignorant and almost certainly untrue.
You make the same kind of stupid mistakes in other peoples field of expertise as they make in yours. If you conclude from one that they are morons, you by necessity have to conclude from the reciprocal that you are, too.
So... There are several people in possession of a information that has a value and that has been publicly identified as valuable.
No problem. Governments only hire people immune to corruption.
There's an important difference. Yes, this information can be obtained by a determined adversary with considerable resources. Making it public, however, would mean every blabbering fool in a cave with an Internet connection has it.
That is quite a difference. We're all constantly going on about how we realize that there's no 100% security - this is just such a case. Making critical information hard to obtain is precisely what security is all about.
I didn't bother wasting my money on such a thing, so no, I don't have a piece of paper. What a shame.
Worst excuse ever. It's not the paper, it's the process, the learning experience, and what you pick up towards it. The paper is just the confirmation that you did.
Remaining willfully ignorant on a few simple facts and then proceeding to do stupid shit over and over is a good sign that someone is unintelligent. Deal with it.
Your argument is debunked by the last thing I wrote, so I won't repeat it. The difference between theoretical known facts and practical application of knowledge appears to elude you.
omg, what a bullshit argument. Yeah, I'm sure going through university and getting a Ph.D. means little, which is why you have ten of them, right?
Get your head out of your ass. Tech is not the only discipline that requires skill and intelligence, and a lot of those "idiots" can run circles around you in anything except tech. Maybe instead of insulting them, you could try actually *gasp* talking to them for a change?
Basically, the fact that they do stupid shit like this is a very, very good indicator that they're not intelligent.
It is not.
You confuse intelligence with domain knowledge. That someone knows little about a specific subfield of a specific domain (IT security in the tech field) doesn't say anything at all about his intelligence. To pick up the old prejudice again: By the same record, the typical geek is an idiot because he stumbled around social situations, and people who know how to handle that are shaking their heads in disbelief how someone can be so stupid.
Somehow, we seem to think that for your house and your car - probably the two most expensive pieces of property you own - physical keys are good enough. But for your Twitter account, the danger that someone could steal them is insurmountable?
Or, rather than playing the 'jealousy card', maybe it's because they're legitimately stupid?
Unless you have seriously investigated the possibility that they aren't stupid, You don't have a leg to stand on. Some of these "idiots" have degrees, Ph.D.s and other indicators that lack of IQ is not among their problems.
but what lesson are we to learn from someone who emails lists of passwords to herself?
That real-world security is very disconnected from the clean and nice scenarios in your books and head, because real users think differently than geeks and do different things for different reasons. Some of them we gloat over and call them Lusers and other deragatory terms, but that's mostly to cover up our own insecurity because most of the Lusers out there have had ten times as many and twice as beautiful women and don't live in their mothers basements anymore.
Yes, I know that's also untrue. The point is that different people have different skills and while many of the non-techie people do stuff that we techies consider stupid, they could laugh just as much about us in other areas of expertise. Maybe not women, maybe for them it's sports or marketing or making friends.
So stop gloating and calling people stupid and look at what they can, in fact, teach you. In this case, there's quite a bit to be learned, not the least of which is that passwords are a moronic concept and need to die.
That wouldn't be true in Finland. I doubt it would be true in any EU country.
Yes, of course "within applicable law" could be added to that, but then in the words of Richard Hammond, they don't put up signs saying "no murdering" on every street corner, do they?
In my country, for example, monitoring of employees is allowed if and only if the employees (via their elected representatives, I'm not talking politicians but intra-company employee councils) agree to it. I've been on such a council, and we did agree to some requests and rejected others.
. The "Root CA" referred to by the original post is the public key of the
Which is why I explicitly wrote "the private key part" as being a potential danger. You do realize that if there's a public key, there's also a private key, yes?
Of course a public key is not a danger, that's why it's called a public key in the first place.
Some of these days I feel old. There used to be a time on/. when you didn't have to explain how PKI works or other baby steps and could take a base intelligence level of your readers for granted.
No, it isn't. You utterly fail to understand whats going on here or how SSL and PKI in general works.
:-)
You wanted to misread me and succeeded. I'm not speaking about the pupils notebooks. I was clearly talking about the security of the private key part, wherever it is kept. I explicitly added that word to my response, specifically so people wouldn't misunderstand it in the precise way that you did.
First, a school network is not a public network and it can run any policy it wants, including intercepting and monitoring traffic. You don't have to sign anything, using the network is implicit consent to the rules it is run by. The only legal requirement in my country (so your laws may differ) is disclosure of those rules, you must be able to look them up somewhere.
Second, regarding danger. The danger is exactly equivalent of the lowest security among the machine(s) that have a copy of the school root certificate (the private key part). If any of them gets compromised and the attacker gets a copy, he can do everything the school does, including interception and manipulation of traffic. If the school rates that as "low", then it assumes that users of the network don't do anything of personal importance, like online banking.
The mistake you're making is associating labor with wealth.
I don't. You are putting those words into my mouth. Most importantly, by me including things like creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship, it should've been very, very obvious that my understanding includes skill and knowledge differences between people. I must assume you are intentionally trying to misunderstand me.
So if you call it labor or work or anything else is pure semantics to me. What's important is that wealth creation is done by people who do stuff. If they do it in their heads or with their hands is a detail. If they do it with bare hands or with tools is a detail.
As to your insistence on invalidating the concept of money and therefore value and therefore wealth itself...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here. I've never invalidated money anywhere, on the contrary I've tried to explain how money gets value that is independent of its physical representation. How you arrive at an invalidation of money from there is a mystery to me.
... Okay... so this is another "labor = wealth" argument. What if I use robots or my factory is otherwise automated?
Only if you define "labor" in the widest possible sense. Creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship as well as design, and, of course marketing go into the equation as well.
Your robot factory is purely theoretical. There is no 100% automated corporation anywhere on this planet nor will there be in the forseable future. You can automate some of the manual labor, but not the design, development, research and marketing that are equally necessary to generate revenue.
But even if you'd accept the theoretical concept of a fully automated factory, there are still humans in the equation, as the managers and owners of the factory. Wealth generation can use tools, and it doesn't matter if your tool is a hammer or a robot or a whole assembly line.
It boils down to the same thing.
Yes, to the medium of exchange being an abstract concept. It doesn't matter if it's numbers or potatoes, if you use it as a medium of exchange, it is money, and as such it is abstract. It is abstract because the people who sell you something for a sack of potatoes aren't looking for ingredients for dinner, they are looking at the abstract monetary value of the potatoes.
The abstractness is not in it being printed paper or numbers in an electronic account, it is abstract because its value is not linked to the use of the actual physical entity. If it were, a dollar bill would be worth very little because you can't use it as note nor toilet paper and it doesn't burn very well, either. Likewise, if you'd use potatoes as units of exchange, the value of a sack of potatoes would very, very rapidly detach from the actual nutritional value of potatoes.
And where does the money people have to pay for things come from?
Here's the thing: Money is an abstract entity. It doesn't grow on trees. However, corporations are abstract entities, too. A corporation does not generate wealth, because if you take away the people, there is nothing there.
People can generate wealth without a corporate entity around them. Corporations make things easier because they provide a framework, legal and organisational, but they are not essential. A dozen people setting up a workshop together will produce wealth, whether or not they incorporate.
But corporations can not generate wealth without people. If there's nobody there doing the work, then the organisational framework is just an empty shell.
Apologies for not satisfying your preconceptions about "marxist bullshit". I personally think that both marxists and capitalists are equal parts full of shit and in the right, it's just the parts which are which that differ.
Everything. And at some level, society needs to be built around facilitating and accommodating business. Again... they pay for EVERYTHING.
That is total bullshit.
People pay for everything. Corporations pay nothing whatsoever. I'm not talking about dodging taxes, I'm talking about the simple fact that any tax you leverage on them will simply be added to the price of whatever they're selling, so whatever money a corporation pays in taxes was first taken from its customers.
It's an absolutely horrible precedent. It is a step back more than 2,000 years. The closest thing in real history was the very first firefighters in ancient Rome - a private enterprise that made its owner one of the richest men in Rome through a simple principle: Whenever there was a fire, he'd show up with his firefighters (slaves, btw.) and offer the owner of the house to buy it on the spot and make him a tenant in his (formerly) own house. The price he offered was ridiculously low. If the owner sold, they'd put out the fire. If not, he'd let it burn to the ground.
So, will this be a personal/private cop? No, that would be too obvious. They'll all make sure it looks all clean, because it's only the first step.
But it does mean that if ever Facebook runs afoul of the law, there'll be one less cop willing to raid them...
I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.
There are, however, good and bad tools. Powerpoint is a bad tool, and it is not by accident that almost all presentations suck, and it's not because everyone is bad at it. The whole program is focussed on being flashy, not on content. There's 50 buttons and options for animations, colour, flash, bling, look-a-three-headed-monkey - and maybe 5 buttons for content. There are plenty of examples included for different visual styles, but none for different methods of content presentation.
And, like almost all Microsoft products, it wants to be everything to everyone. So it doesn't restrict you, but every designer knows that restrictions are great. You can put 9pt fonts on a Powerpoint slide. For 99% of the usage cases, that is an absolutely abysmal idea. But it leads to people misappropriating habits from Word for Powerpoint - if your content doesn't fit, shrink the font size. Ugh.
Powerpoint is for sales presentations to a large and anonymous audience. Basically, when you want to be Steve Jobs(1). In a small meeting, or something with interactivity, Powerpoint is probably the most misused tool on the planet today.
(1) Actually, if you want to give a professional presentation, you'll use Keynote, but if you want to be a cheap ripoff, you'll use Powerpoint.
He wanted to be left alone, there is nothing the public gains from knowing his identity except some entertainment. There are cases where identifying someone serves the public good, but in this case it really serves nobody except the rag that published it.
Hiding under his real name was actually pretty smooth. I'm sure a dozen nosy reporters passed him up before because they thought that can't be.
Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.
Slashdot Mirror
Not admitting that the sky is blue and not admitting that UFOs kidnapped Elvis are not the same kind of things, even though they both have to do with admitting something.
Let's just end it here, it's getting pathetic.
I think this discussion is done. You don't want to admit that people can be intelligent even if they're not in the same way that you are, and there's really no point continuing.
This has serious ramifications on congressional oversight of intelligence orgs. At stake is the existence of any elected oversight of spooks.
This. So few people understand this. This is a major battle in the war the intelligence agencies wage to become independent from the electorate and to avoid any meaningful oversight. We laugh when conspiracy theorists rant about the NWO, but we are watching on as a shadow government gets formed right in front of our eyes.
Believe it or not, there are people with PhDs that are absolutely idiotic;
There are also three-headed monkeys. That doesn't mean that every monkey is one of them. Anyway, you are distracting from the original point which was that the assumption that absolutely everyone except yourself is an idiot is arrogant, foolish, ignorant and almost certainly untrue.
You make the same kind of stupid mistakes in other peoples field of expertise as they make in yours. If you conclude from one that they are morons, you by necessity have to conclude from the reciprocal that you are, too.
So... There are several people in possession of a information that has a value and that has been publicly identified as valuable.
No problem. Governments only hire people immune to corruption.
There's an important difference. Yes, this information can be obtained by a determined adversary with considerable resources. Making it public, however, would mean every blabbering fool in a cave with an Internet connection has it.
That is quite a difference. We're all constantly going on about how we realize that there's no 100% security - this is just such a case. Making critical information hard to obtain is precisely what security is all about.
I didn't bother wasting my money on such a thing, so no, I don't have a piece of paper. What a shame.
Worst excuse ever. It's not the paper, it's the process, the learning experience, and what you pick up towards it. The paper is just the confirmation that you did.
Remaining willfully ignorant on a few simple facts and then proceeding to do stupid shit over and over is a good sign that someone is unintelligent. Deal with it.
Your argument is debunked by the last thing I wrote, so I won't repeat it. The difference between theoretical known facts and practical application of knowledge appears to elude you.
omg, what a bullshit argument. Yeah, I'm sure going through university and getting a Ph.D. means little, which is why you have ten of them, right?
Get your head out of your ass. Tech is not the only discipline that requires skill and intelligence, and a lot of those "idiots" can run circles around you in anything except tech. Maybe instead of insulting them, you could try actually *gasp* talking to them for a change?
Basically, the fact that they do stupid shit like this is a very, very good indicator that they're not intelligent.
It is not.
You confuse intelligence with domain knowledge. That someone knows little about a specific subfield of a specific domain (IT security in the tech field) doesn't say anything at all about his intelligence. To pick up the old prejudice again: By the same record, the typical geek is an idiot because he stumbled around social situations, and people who know how to handle that are shaking their heads in disbelief how someone can be so stupid.
Which is more moronic?
Passwords.
Somehow, we seem to think that for your house and your car - probably the two most expensive pieces of property you own - physical keys are good enough. But for your Twitter account, the danger that someone could steal them is insurmountable?
Or, rather than playing the 'jealousy card', maybe it's because they're legitimately stupid?
Unless you have seriously investigated the possibility that they aren't stupid, You don't have a leg to stand on. Some of these "idiots" have degrees, Ph.D.s and other indicators that lack of IQ is not among their problems.
but what lesson are we to learn from someone who emails lists of passwords to herself?
That real-world security is very disconnected from the clean and nice scenarios in your books and head, because real users think differently than geeks and do different things for different reasons. Some of them we gloat over and call them Lusers and other deragatory terms, but that's mostly to cover up our own insecurity because most of the Lusers out there have had ten times as many and twice as beautiful women and don't live in their mothers basements anymore.
Yes, I know that's also untrue. The point is that different people have different skills and while many of the non-techie people do stuff that we techies consider stupid, they could laugh just as much about us in other areas of expertise. Maybe not women, maybe for them it's sports or marketing or making friends.
So stop gloating and calling people stupid and look at what they can, in fact, teach you. In this case, there's quite a bit to be learned, not the least of which is that passwords are a moronic concept and need to die.
That wouldn't be true in Finland. I doubt it would be true in any EU country.
Yes, of course "within applicable law" could be added to that, but then in the words of Richard Hammond, they don't put up signs saying "no murdering" on every street corner, do they?
In my country, for example, monitoring of employees is allowed if and only if the employees (via their elected representatives, I'm not talking politicians but intra-company employee councils) agree to it. I've been on such a council, and we did agree to some requests and rejected others.
. The "Root CA" referred to by the original post is the public key of the
Which is why I explicitly wrote "the private key part" as being a potential danger. You do realize that if there's a public key, there's also a private key, yes?
Of course a public key is not a danger, that's why it's called a public key in the first place.
Some of these days I feel old. There used to be a time on /. when you didn't have to explain how PKI works or other baby steps and could take a base intelligence level of your readers for granted.
No, it isn't. You utterly fail to understand whats going on here or how SSL and PKI in general works.
:-)
You wanted to misread me and succeeded. I'm not speaking about the pupils notebooks. I was clearly talking about the security of the private key part, wherever it is kept. I explicitly added that word to my response, specifically so people wouldn't misunderstand it in the precise way that you did.
First, a school network is not a public network and it can run any policy it wants, including intercepting and monitoring traffic. You don't have to sign anything, using the network is implicit consent to the rules it is run by. The only legal requirement in my country (so your laws may differ) is disclosure of those rules, you must be able to look them up somewhere.
Second, regarding danger. The danger is exactly equivalent of the lowest security among the machine(s) that have a copy of the school root certificate (the private key part). If any of them gets compromised and the attacker gets a copy, he can do everything the school does, including interception and manipulation of traffic. If the school rates that as "low", then it assumes that users of the network don't do anything of personal importance, like online banking.
The mistake you're making is associating labor with wealth.
I don't. You are putting those words into my mouth. Most importantly, by me including things like creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship, it should've been very, very obvious that my understanding includes skill and knowledge differences between people. I must assume you are intentionally trying to misunderstand me.
So if you call it labor or work or anything else is pure semantics to me. What's important is that wealth creation is done by people who do stuff. If they do it in their heads or with their hands is a detail. If they do it with bare hands or with tools is a detail.
As to your insistence on invalidating the concept of money and therefore value and therefore wealth itself...
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about here. I've never invalidated money anywhere, on the contrary I've tried to explain how money gets value that is independent of its physical representation. How you arrive at an invalidation of money from there is a mystery to me.
... Okay... so this is another "labor = wealth" argument. What if I use robots or my factory is otherwise automated?
Only if you define "labor" in the widest possible sense. Creativity, ingenuity and craftsmanship as well as design, and, of course marketing go into the equation as well.
Your robot factory is purely theoretical. There is no 100% automated corporation anywhere on this planet nor will there be in the forseable future. You can automate some of the manual labor, but not the design, development, research and marketing that are equally necessary to generate revenue.
But even if you'd accept the theoretical concept of a fully automated factory, there are still humans in the equation, as the managers and owners of the factory. Wealth generation can use tools, and it doesn't matter if your tool is a hammer or a robot or a whole assembly line.
It boils down to the same thing.
Yes, to the medium of exchange being an abstract concept. It doesn't matter if it's numbers or potatoes, if you use it as a medium of exchange, it is money, and as such it is abstract. It is abstract because the people who sell you something for a sack of potatoes aren't looking for ingredients for dinner, they are looking at the abstract monetary value of the potatoes.
The abstractness is not in it being printed paper or numbers in an electronic account, it is abstract because its value is not linked to the use of the actual physical entity. If it were, a dollar bill would be worth very little because you can't use it as note nor toilet paper and it doesn't burn very well, either. Likewise, if you'd use potatoes as units of exchange, the value of a sack of potatoes would very, very rapidly detach from the actual nutritional value of potatoes.
And where does the money people have to pay for things come from?
Here's the thing: Money is an abstract entity. It doesn't grow on trees. However, corporations are abstract entities, too. A corporation does not generate wealth, because if you take away the people, there is nothing there.
People can generate wealth without a corporate entity around them. Corporations make things easier because they provide a framework, legal and organisational, but they are not essential. A dozen people setting up a workshop together will produce wealth, whether or not they incorporate.
But corporations can not generate wealth without people. If there's nobody there doing the work, then the organisational framework is just an empty shell.
Apologies for not satisfying your preconceptions about "marxist bullshit". I personally think that both marxists and capitalists are equal parts full of shit and in the right, it's just the parts which are which that differ.
Everything. And at some level, society needs to be built around facilitating and accommodating business. Again... they pay for EVERYTHING.
That is total bullshit.
People pay for everything. Corporations pay nothing whatsoever. I'm not talking about dodging taxes, I'm talking about the simple fact that any tax you leverage on them will simply be added to the price of whatever they're selling, so whatever money a corporation pays in taxes was first taken from its customers.
It's an absolutely horrible precedent. It is a step back more than 2,000 years. The closest thing in real history was the very first firefighters in ancient Rome - a private enterprise that made its owner one of the richest men in Rome through a simple principle: Whenever there was a fire, he'd show up with his firefighters (slaves, btw.) and offer the owner of the house to buy it on the spot and make him a tenant in his (formerly) own house. The price he offered was ridiculously low. If the owner sold, they'd put out the fire. If not, he'd let it burn to the ground.
So, will this be a personal/private cop? No, that would be too obvious. They'll all make sure it looks all clean, because it's only the first step.
But it does mean that if ever Facebook runs afoul of the law, there'll be one less cop willing to raid them...
They both do the same exact thing.
Obviously, you've never used one of them. They are "the same thing" in the same sense that a Lada and a Veyron are both cars.
It almost always comes down to how the tool is used, not the tool itself.
Tools matter. They don't replace skill, but if you want to get really great results, you need both skill and the right tools.
I agree most power point presentations are a waste of time. Most of them have very little content. Most of them suck big time. Where I disagree is, blaming the tool for the sins of the tool wielder.
There are, however, good and bad tools. Powerpoint is a bad tool, and it is not by accident that almost all presentations suck, and it's not because everyone is bad at it. The whole program is focussed on being flashy, not on content. There's 50 buttons and options for animations, colour, flash, bling, look-a-three-headed-monkey - and maybe 5 buttons for content. There are plenty of examples included for different visual styles, but none for different methods of content presentation.
And, like almost all Microsoft products, it wants to be everything to everyone. So it doesn't restrict you, but every designer knows that restrictions are great. You can put 9pt fonts on a Powerpoint slide. For 99% of the usage cases, that is an absolutely abysmal idea. But it leads to people misappropriating habits from Word for Powerpoint - if your content doesn't fit, shrink the font size. Ugh.
Powerpoint is for sales presentations to a large and anonymous audience. Basically, when you want to be Steve Jobs(1). In a small meeting, or something with interactivity, Powerpoint is probably the most misused tool on the planet today.
(1) Actually, if you want to give a professional presentation, you'll use Keynote, but if you want to be a cheap ripoff, you'll use Powerpoint.
This. Even asking the question is fucking stupid.
He wanted to be left alone, there is nothing the public gains from knowing his identity except some entertainment. There are cases where identifying someone serves the public good, but in this case it really serves nobody except the rag that published it.
Hiding under his real name was actually pretty smooth. I'm sure a dozen nosy reporters passed him up before because they thought that can't be.
Thanks, that is good factual information to have.
Still, would losing 100 or 200 coins make headlines these days when thousands got lost and stolen in what makes the news (Silkroad, Mt. Gox, etc.) ?
Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.