... I wouldn't want a remote-controllable power switch to be available to 3rd parties, authorities and who knows who else. Electricity is vital and this is just another vulnerability someone might exploit or use to control / blackmail me.
Funny how tourists aren't interested in any places or buildings that were built during the last 60 years.
That's wrong for Vienna (e.g. Hundertwasserhaus) and it's probably just as wrong for Graz. The most prominent architecture was always novel and radical and just because some examples were simply not good, you cannot discredit modern architecture in general. Would we have the buildings like the Secession if we had always stuck to preserving traditional styles? In a few decades, we'll wish we had built more buildings like the new Sofitel (Jean Nouvel!). Sadly, people are more keen on preserving ugly 1950's buildings on the other side of the Wienkanal than having great modern architecture like the French for example.
HTTP and HTTPS are fast enough, it's the web servers / content generation (and ads) that limit the user experience and make web pages load slowly, followed by low bandwidth in some areas. If you really want to fix old protocols that actually need fixing, go look at SMTP first.
Instead, it is a combination of the extra time needed to load Javascript from advertisers (whether it is to spy on you or just to rotate ads around), and programming defects in that Javascript (doesn't play well with others). Browsers have to stop and wait for scripts to finish loading before allowing everything to run or even be rendered. You can have a page freeze in a blank state when some advertiser's Javascript request isn't connecting or loading.
It is also a result of plain stupidity of some (major) ad server operating companies - here in Austria, we've heard things like "we try to disable caching for served media [images, swf etc.]" and we've actually seen images, animations, 200KB+ flash being loaded at every request because of this. Needless to say, the slow document.write() method of displaying ads is also still the norm... If the W3C had any sense, it would have come up with an <AD> tag that worked like a restricted IFRAME (with mandatory caching) but could be turned on and off by the users (browsers). But like so many committees, the W3C is not interested in good technical solutions, but rather in the commercial interests of particular contributing corporations.
Somehow all of that content needs to be coalesced into fewer connections.
We did use fewer connections before CDNs, CDN-hosted JS libraries and cookie-less content domains became the norm and before web developers were advised by PageSpeed and other "authorities" to put content on multiple hosts to facilitate parallel access by browsers. Yes, it was a stupid idea to fix a minor implementation problem of browsers on the web server side. Also, what contributes most to web page slowdown is ads and tracking code, both areas dominated by Google - who pretends to be somehow interested in speeding up the web (haha!).
You're right, slippery slopes do not exist and we should go down that road
at our peril
...
There are a lot of people who will tell you that they will not move to Linux until Photoshop or Solidworks works on Linux.
No problem for me, Linux doesn't get better or worse (well, more likely worse if the past 10 years have been any indication) if more people (esp. like those - who usually prefer pirating Photoshop over using free alternatives) use it. WINE should be improved to support more commercial software though.
Without getting major companies to start moving their paid, closed source software to Linux first, you/re/never/ going to see Autocad or the like as Free Software on Linux.
Which is why we have GIMP even though Adobe hasn't ported Photoshop to Linux?
The next step after major companies declaring to port stuff to Linux is demand for a non-removable DRM component for Linux. I think the intention of Open Source was to pollute closed-source habitats with (viral) Open Source software, not the other way round. Closed source / DRM isn't magically going to become open when it's a perfectly valid and undisputedly supported option for Linux, why should it?
IMHO, the way to go is the way of the Humble Indie Bundle V - it's astonishing how little attention the Linux port got
Not really true... I am using a Dell 27" display with 2560x1440 and a Radeon 6850 all day long and also tested a 2560x1600 NEC display with a comparatively old core 2 duo E8400 and an (old) GeForce 8800GTX - no problems at all (both with cheap Dual-Link DVI cables).
Soon we will see an article about how many hard passwords in recently leaked databases were "cracked" using this little test because users were gullible enough to test their real passwords...
In my opinion and from experience it's not about brutality, it's about money
Since you mentioned Nazis: money was one of the factors that drove the Nazi regime too. The question in both cases is: at what point do the insane ideologists take over (look at the Republican candiates for 2012...)? So it's not like it being about money at this time means we're not going in an entirely wrong direction. Regarding "brutal" - what would you call gitmo, all the secret CIA prisons, mass killing of suspects (as ordered by the president)? It's not something that affects us at the border controls, but it's the regime's brutality nevertheless.
t the DHS (and many other three-letter government agencies) does is a waste of money, I think it's also much worse than that.
Security is serious business (and money) and the DHS, TSA do a great job inciting anti-americanism and thus keeping the money flowing to the right corporations. The USA got rich by being a free country, now they (well, some) get even richer by doing the opposite. Isn't capitalism great?
No, it's not. The admin will - at gunpoint - log out my existing sessions and ignore my login cookie/session cookies the next time I try to log in and then intercept my plaintext password as I enter it and submit the login form. And of course he will already have given the bad guys access to all my data that is protected with the password. In this worst case / nearly worst case scenario, the strength of the hash is largely irrelevant when the data is stored in unencrypted form or when I have to enter plaintext passwords to log in (both the most common case).
Why do both XKCD and TFA assume having access to the hashed password? The normal "guessing" case is a password prompt and that'd better not allow 1000 guesses/second (try 10/day or so). The remedy for a compromised database of hashed passwords is: do not use the same credentials in several places. Afraid of someone stealing your hashed password by sniffing it? Use transport level encryption. Apart from that, using a password that you can type quickly and do not need to write down is a good idea.
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Wuala works a bit like that, with a somewhat clumsy UI though. Your files are also accessible from Wuala's web servers and you can start "groups" with members who can comment on the group, members, files (through Wuala's file system integration on Windows)... It's not really being used actively though, which is a shame - and the UI needs to be fixed.
So, while I do not like simple comparisons like "is Google the new Microsoft?", they have their share of morality issues like most large corporations...
Suggestion. Don't assume that any of the rest of your working life will in any way resemble your time in college. It won't. If you're not somehow independently wealthy, you're in the slave system we call "employment." Get used to it or get out.
So someone who disagrees with you must be a young college student and they make you feel so inferior that you try to give them a hard time as an employer? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but my uni time was 17 years ago and I've been an employer (who buys desktops but doesn't think it's relevant here since the users usually don't have a choice regarding OS) for 12 years. I find employers who think they have to keep up a "slave system" pretty desperate...
People are not buying desktop PCs anymore, they buy laptops, netbooks, tablets or use their smartphone most of the time.
Linux on laptops could be big nowdays if distributions and productivity apps didn't suck that much (give an Outlook user Thundebird and they'll complain about its lack of a proper calendar despite Lightning; give an MS Office user LibreOffice and they'll find some feature that doesn't work as well or similar enough to MS Office...). And then there's games, why isn't WINE there yet after all these years?
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... I wouldn't want a remote-controllable power switch to be available to 3rd parties, authorities and who knows who else. Electricity is vital and this is just another vulnerability someone might exploit or use to control / blackmail me.
Assange chose to flee from the prosecution because he knows better, he knows every well what would be the result if he chose to face the trial.
Yeah, he probably feels like he really raped that girl called USA ...
Funny how tourists aren't interested in any places or buildings that were built during the last 60 years.
That's wrong for Vienna (e.g. Hundertwasserhaus) and it's probably just as wrong for Graz. The most prominent architecture was always novel and radical and just because some examples were simply not good, you cannot discredit modern architecture in general. Would we have the buildings like the Secession if we had always stuck to preserving traditional styles? In a few decades, we'll wish we had built more buildings like the new Sofitel (Jean Nouvel!). Sadly, people are more keen on preserving ugly 1950's buildings on the other side of the Wienkanal than having great modern architecture like the French for example.
HTTP and HTTPS are fast enough, it's the web servers / content generation (and ads) that limit the user experience and make web pages load slowly, followed by low bandwidth in some areas. If you really want to fix old protocols that actually need fixing, go look at SMTP first.
Instead, it is a combination of the extra time needed to load Javascript from advertisers (whether it is to spy on you or just to rotate ads around), and programming defects in that Javascript (doesn't play well with others). Browsers have to stop and wait for scripts to finish loading before allowing everything to run or even be rendered. You can have a page freeze in a blank state when some advertiser's Javascript request isn't connecting or loading.
It is also a result of plain stupidity of some (major) ad server operating companies - here in Austria, we've heard things like "we try to disable caching for served media [images, swf etc.]" and we've actually seen images, animations, 200KB+ flash being loaded at every request because of this. Needless to say, the slow document.write() method of displaying ads is also still the norm ... If the W3C had any sense, it would have come up with an <AD> tag that worked like a restricted IFRAME (with mandatory caching) but could be turned on and off by the users (browsers). But like so many committees, the W3C is not interested in good technical solutions, but rather in the commercial interests of particular contributing corporations.
Somehow all of that content needs to be coalesced into fewer connections.
We did use fewer connections before CDNs, CDN-hosted JS libraries and cookie-less content domains became the norm and before web developers were advised by PageSpeed and other "authorities" to put content on multiple hosts to facilitate parallel access by browsers. Yes, it was a stupid idea to fix a minor implementation problem of browsers on the web server side.
Also, what contributes most to web page slowdown is ads and tracking code, both areas dominated by Google - who pretends to be somehow interested in speeding up the web (haha!).
>slippery slope argument
You're right, slippery slopes do not exist and we should go down that road
at our peril
...
There are a lot of people who will tell you that they will not move to Linux until Photoshop or Solidworks works on Linux.
No problem for me, Linux doesn't get better or worse (well, more likely worse if the past 10 years have been any indication) if more people (esp. like those - who usually prefer pirating Photoshop over using free alternatives) use it. WINE should be improved to support more commercial software though.
Without getting major companies to start moving their paid, closed source software to Linux first, you/re /never/ going to see Autocad or the like as Free Software on Linux.
Which is why we have GIMP even though Adobe hasn't ported Photoshop to Linux?
The next step after major companies declaring to port stuff to Linux is demand for a non-removable DRM component for Linux. I think the intention of Open Source was to pollute closed-source habitats with (viral) Open Source software, not the other way round. Closed source / DRM isn't magically going to become open when it's a perfectly valid and undisputedly supported option for Linux, why should it?
IMHO, the way to go is the way of the Humble Indie Bundle V - it's astonishing how little attention the Linux port got
Figureheads need to write placatory articles lest they should get caught playing L4D2 on Linux ...
Not really true ... I am using a Dell 27" display with 2560x1440 and a Radeon 6850 all day long and also tested a 2560x1600 NEC display with a comparatively old core 2 duo E8400 and an (old) GeForce 8800GTX - no problems at all (both with cheap Dual-Link DVI cables).
Soon we will see an article about how many hard passwords in recently leaked databases were "cracked" using this little test because users were gullible enough to test their real passwords...
Also a suitable motto for basement-dwelling, underwear-clad, forum-trolling nerds.
In my opinion and from experience it's not about brutality, it's about money
Since you mentioned Nazis: money was one of the factors that drove the Nazi regime too. The question in both cases is: at what point do the insane ideologists take over (look at the Republican candiates for 2012...)? So it's not like it being about money at this time means we're not going in an entirely wrong direction. Regarding "brutal" - what would you call gitmo, all the secret CIA prisons, mass killing of suspects (as ordered by the president)? It's not something that affects us at the border controls, but it's the regime's brutality nevertheless.
t the DHS (and many other three-letter government agencies) does is a waste of money, I think it's also much worse than that.
Security is serious business (and money) and the DHS, TSA do a great job inciting anti-americanism and thus keeping the money flowing to the right corporations. The USA got rich by being a free country, now they (well, some) get even richer by doing the opposite. Isn't capitalism great?
Just speculating, but the specs suggest that there will be one... Blergh.
No, it's not. The admin will - at gunpoint - log out my existing sessions and ignore my login cookie/session cookies the next time I try to log in and then intercept my plaintext password as I enter it and submit the login form. And of course he will already have given the bad guys access to all my data that is protected with the password. In this worst case / nearly worst case scenario, the strength of the hash is largely irrelevant when the data is stored in unencrypted form or when I have to enter plaintext passwords to log in (both the most common case).
The worst case is someone holding a gun to your head and asking you to log in, IMO...
Why do both XKCD and TFA assume having access to the hashed password? The normal "guessing" case is a password prompt and that'd better not allow 1000 guesses/second (try 10/day or so). The remedy for a compromised database of hashed passwords is: do not use the same credentials in several places. Afraid of someone stealing your hashed password by sniffing it? Use transport level encryption. Apart from that, using a password that you can type quickly and do not need to write down is a good idea.
It's intelligent design ...
The 64 bit ARM architecture for server CPUs is much more interesting ...
I will tell you what will destroy Facebook: A FB-like Dropbox-frontend. Something that allows you to share whatever you want to share, blurring the boundary between local and cloud by making "the cloud" just a directory on your device.
Wuala works a bit like that, with a somewhat clumsy UI though. Your files are also accessible from Wuala's web servers and you can start "groups" with members who can comment on the group, members, files (through Wuala's file system integration on Windows)... It's not really being used actively though, which is a shame - and the UI needs to be fixed.
So, while I do not like simple comparisons like "is Google the new Microsoft?", they have their share of morality issues like most large corporations...
The "suspect" will never know ... As the "authorities" have undoubtedly discovered already.
Suggestion. Don't assume that any of the rest of your working life will in any way resemble your time in college. It won't. If you're not somehow independently wealthy, you're in the slave system we call "employment." Get used to it or get out.
So someone who disagrees with you must be a young college student and they make you feel so inferior that you try to give them a hard time as an employer? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but my uni time was 17 years ago and I've been an employer (who buys desktops but doesn't think it's relevant here since the users usually don't have a choice regarding OS) for 12 years. I find employers who think they have to keep up a "slave system" pretty desperate...
People are not buying desktop PCs anymore, they buy laptops, netbooks, tablets or use their smartphone most of the time. Linux on laptops could be big nowdays if distributions and productivity apps didn't suck that much (give an Outlook user Thundebird and they'll complain about its lack of a proper calendar despite Lightning; give an MS Office user LibreOffice and they'll find some feature that doesn't work as well or similar enough to MS Office ...). And then there's games, why isn't WINE there yet after all these years?
.