This may just be to screen out the real whackos. Trust me, this is important. You don't want to hire a guy with all the technical skills who:
in the interview, puts his hand over his mouth every time he giggles
looks over his shoulder nervously every time you use the word
'security' and says you shouldn't be talking about this
after being hired by the clueless manager, does random exercises in his
office "to quiet his head"
when given a half-day task, disappears into his office for a week (no
one wanted to deal with him and it was low priority, so we let him be).
when he comes out and you ask where the result is, he says "oh that. I
didn't feel like working on that so I've been doing something completely
different."
confides in a coworker that he's afraid one day some black suits from
Raytheon (his former employer) will shove him into a van, drive him out to
the desert, and put a bullet in his head
after finishing a week-long project with no overtime, says to the president
of the company "boy that was tough. i need some time off." and promptly walks
out of the office at 2pm on Wed without another word.
doesn't show up the next day. or the next. or the following Mon.
finally Tues morning a coworker spots him in the breakroom getting coffee.
asked where he's been for 3 days, he replies "riding my bike around town".
when the coworker says "at least you're back", he responds "i'm not back,
i'm just here getting coffee." then disappears for another two days.
one day you see him wearing a bright orange shirt and a snap cap. you say
"boy, you look different today". he says "no, it's still me". takes off
his hat. "see? it's still me."
doesn't show up early one morning when he's supposed to get a ride to an
out-of-town conference with you. you wait and wait and finally decide to
leave without him. as you're pulling out of the parking lot, you see him
walking up. you shout his name. he sprints off down the street in the
other direction. you catch up to him in your car and identify yourself.
he says "oh i thought you were someone else." you say "let's go to the
conference." he says "i can't go. i have to go home and shower." which
he does.
all this during his probationary period and they still kept him on
full-time. it wasn't til months later when the women in the office said
they were seriously afraid of him that he was let go.
Insider attacks (mole, rootkit, spy camera, etc) which occur AFTER reception and decryption do not count, because the encryption method has nothing to do with that.
Which is exactly why this is a solution looking for a problem. No one ever breaks modern crypto when it's used correctly. Attacking the periphery of the system is orders of magnitude easier. Your resources are much better spent guarding against insider attacks than buying the next useless whiz-bang crypto device.
It doesn't matter much what the GPL says on the subject. The GPL gets its teeth from copyright law. But copyright protection does not cover interfaces required for interoperability. A string of cases establishes this:
Galoob v Nintendo, 964 F.2d 965 (game genie case)
Sega v Accolade, 977 F.2d 1510 (unlicensed genesis cartridges)
Sony v Connectix, 203 F.3d 596 (pc-based playstation emulator)
I believe this means anyone can release a linux kernel module under any license they choose. That said, there's no Supreme Court ruling on the issue, nor is there likely to be. If I were a defendant, I wouldn't want to fight the case in the 9th Circ (CA and pacific nw), which is notoriously harsh on fair use.
The thing about ubuntu. It was made to be the safety scissors of linux. It's linux "for the rest of us." Linux for people who don't know a thing about computers, don't want to learn a thing about computers, but just want to use it for their day-to-day activities.
Except it's not just for novices. I've been on linux since 97 and migrated from debian to ubuntu last year. It's a god send. Just because I know how to recompile the kernel and setup runlevels by hand doesn't mean I want to. Ubuntu makes typical things easy. I can customize beyond that to suit my needs, but I never have to just to make things work. It's a much better use of my time.
How about instead we boycott the games that make gold farming a viable strategy? I play to relax and have fun, not shoot wamprats all day. Probably why I haven't liked an MMO game since Diablo 2 (which to be fair had some farming, but nothing like today's games).
Evolution, on the other hand, tells us that we are just the most recent iteration and that our species will eventually either go extinct and be replaced with a higher life form, or that we will continue to evolve.
It's probably not intentional, but "higher life form" isn't a scientific term, as it assumes some form of heirarchy for ranking organisms. Characteristics can be more general/ancestral or more derived, strictly speaking there is no high and low.
Secondly, evolution isn't necessarily continual. There's good evidence that many species remain relatively stable during their existence. Some theories contend evolution mainly occurs in quick bursts (on geological timescales) in response to changing environment. A species that's well-adapted to its current environment may not have much selective pressure to evolve, keeping it relatively unchanged for long periods. A large interbreeding population also tends to dampen the effects of change.
If you're in this camp, it's easy to see that humans may not evolve much from here on out. We generally adapt to new conditions much quicker through technology than by evolving. That's not to say this condition is permanent, as the next ebola-type pandemic may thin the herd before we can solve it. Even then, I think most of the adaptation will be limited to to our immune systems. Nor is it to say that minor pressures like sexual selection have no effect. But I don't foresee any consequential changes in human physiology absent a total collapse of western civilization.
There's a difference between looks like kde and works like kde. Will the menus/config/keybindings be in the right place/format? Will the application handle dcop messages properly? Cross-platform toolkits usually abstract away the differences between platforms. It might translate the function calls and provide the right look, but that's only half of getting the proper look-and-feel.
The ubuntu openoffice-kde package does a nice job, but it's obviously not a kde application. I hope this toolkit gets it right because I would kill for a KDE version of firefox (damn these infernal gnome save dialogs!).
"One time encryption pads are widely accepted as being the most secure form of encryption..."
Only for very limited definitions of secure. You have to produce the pads. You have to distribute the pads. You have to synchronize the pads. You have to dispose of the pads. All these steps are tedious and error-prone, and a chink in any of them destroys your supposed "perfect" security.
Now if you said "OTP are the most algorithmically secure pads under ideal conditions", then I'd buy it. Otherwise, there's a reason only well-funded governments use these things. Ask the Soviets how well it worked for them.
If they notice and don't complain to their ISP or switch ISPs, it's not important to them. What you're seeing in the case of hotmail is people who don't get a newsletter they didn't really want in the first place. That's why they don't leave, because they don't care.
Actually it means the inconvenience of not getting the newsletter was less than the huge hassle of changing email addresses (for the user), and the cost of ignoring user complaints was less than the cost of investigating whether to unblock the email (for the ISP). It's not that users don't care, it's that they have no rational recourse that removes the block, especially when they can get the email by other means (web page, a second account, etc).
Not only do prosecutors have discretion, they're also supposed to pursue justice, not just represent "the state". From talking to a few prosecutors, I can say some of them (but by no means all) do take this obligation seriously.
Stepping around the whole "What is natural?" landmine for a second, most everything in tv and movies is a "fake image", as you call it. So are children's novels and fairy tales. Entertainment deals in highly stylized, idealized forms. The problem isn't letting kids see these things, it's not giving them the context to understand how reality differs from fiction.
I'm confused. Transactions over the internet are already taxed the same as any others. Companies pay income tax on revenue generated from online sales. Users pay sales/use tax on goods bought online (at least they're supposed to; many don't due to lack of enforcement, not lack of regulation). The govt doesn't lose out on any money from an internet sale.
Any additional taxes on internet goods and services are therefore infrastructure taxes: fees simply for using the net as a transactional medium. It effectively discourages internet transactions by adding costs that can be avoided through other mediums. Any discussion of internet taxes boils down to whether that policy is desirable or not. I say not.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces...
Beautifully put (your whole response). Anything more is simply unnecessary. I'll just tip by hat and be on my way.
I would agree over the short term that is absolutely the case. What is why I phrased this so weakly, "will tend to stabilize at" rather than something much stronger like "will tend te be" or "will be".
Which works fine if you accept the assumption that the economy is usually at or near equilibrium, or moves from one equilibrium point to another. OTOH if you view the economy as a dynamical system governed by nonlinear mathematics, your argument breaks down. It makes sense at the two extreme examples you gave, but lots of counterintuitive stuff can happen in the middle.
As for which assumption is preferable, most economics is built on the first, while Debunking Economics makes a case for the second. It's worth reading if only to consider an alternative viewpoint.
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
Your moral argument against the quoted line of reasoning is spot on. But as some are only swayed by "scientific" arguments, I wanted to point out that there are many counterarguments within economic theory itself to the free-market apologists. I highly recommend the book Debunking Economics as a critical examination of the claptrap taught in introductory econ.
Further economic theory indicates that wages will tend to stabilize at roughly the added value that employees bring to an economic enterprise
That is the in-vogue theory. However, there is a strong case to be made that salaries are determined more by the relative power of employee and employer than by "added value". This is not a Marxist position, but one supported by Keynes, Sraffa, and the empirical data.
The book Debunking Economics ought to be required reading. It's a critical look at the claptrap that passes for high-school economics.
it's not surprising that as the price difference between desktops and laptops has eroded, so too has the market share of desktops.
It doesn't even have to be people buying laptops in lieu of desktops. The desktop market is already saturated. There's just more room for growth in laptops, especially among people who already have desktops and want some extra mobility.
The question that interests me is: are laptops becoming any more durable?
I'd guess they're getting better, but as long as any disparity exists, laptops will be replaced at a faster pace than desktops. It's the same reason Mac sales relative to PCs don't accurately reflect the installed base of that platform.
It's by crypto genius Bruce Schneier, it uses Blowfish
A few things to keep in mind:
Schneier handed this project off to others several years ago. His involvement since appears to be minimal. While he wrote the initial version, that code may have long since been sent to the bitbucket in the sky.
Schneier's crypto credentials are well established, but how is his programming knowledge, especially in regards to security? I don't know of any large open projects he's worked on that give us an indication of this.
AES and 3-DES are more reliable than Blowfish, having received orders of magnitude more attention from cryptanalysts. Besides which, "uses Blowfish" is a long way from "uses Blowfish correctly with proper handling of the key material and plaintext at every point in its lifecycle".
Bruce is a cool guy, and Password Safe may be great, but I wouldn't trust it soley on his reputation.
Slashdot Mirror
This may just be to screen out the real whackos. Trust me, this is important. You don't want to hire a guy with all the technical skills who:
all this during his probationary period and they still kept him on full-time. it wasn't til months later when the women in the office said they were seriously afraid of him that he was let go.
I was thinking more along the lines of soylent green.
Which is exactly why this is a solution looking for a problem. No one ever breaks modern crypto when it's used correctly. Attacking the periphery of the system is orders of magnitude easier. Your resources are much better spent guarding against insider attacks than buying the next useless whiz-bang crypto device.
It doesn't matter much what the GPL says on the subject. The GPL gets its teeth from copyright law. But copyright protection does not cover interfaces required for interoperability. A string of cases establishes this:
I believe this means anyone can release a linux kernel module under any license they choose. That said, there's no Supreme Court ruling on the issue, nor is there likely to be. If I were a defendant, I wouldn't want to fight the case in the 9th Circ (CA and pacific nw), which is notoriously harsh on fair use.
IANAL but IAALS(tudent)
Except it's not just for novices. I've been on linux since 97 and migrated from debian to ubuntu last year. It's a god send. Just because I know how to recompile the kernel and setup runlevels by hand doesn't mean I want to. Ubuntu makes typical things easy. I can customize beyond that to suit my needs, but I never have to just to make things work. It's a much better use of my time.
How about instead we boycott the games that make gold farming a viable strategy? I play to relax and have fun, not shoot wamprats all day. Probably why I haven't liked an MMO game since Diablo 2 (which to be fair had some farming, but nothing like today's games).
Evolution, on the other hand, tells us that we are just the most recent iteration and that our species will eventually either go extinct and be replaced with a higher life form, or that we will continue to evolve.
It's probably not intentional, but "higher life form" isn't a scientific term, as it assumes some form of heirarchy for ranking organisms. Characteristics can be more general/ancestral or more derived, strictly speaking there is no high and low.
Secondly, evolution isn't necessarily continual. There's good evidence that many species remain relatively stable during their existence. Some theories contend evolution mainly occurs in quick bursts (on geological timescales) in response to changing environment. A species that's well-adapted to its current environment may not have much selective pressure to evolve, keeping it relatively unchanged for long periods. A large interbreeding population also tends to dampen the effects of change.
If you're in this camp, it's easy to see that humans may not evolve much from here on out. We generally adapt to new conditions much quicker through technology than by evolving. That's not to say this condition is permanent, as the next ebola-type pandemic may thin the herd before we can solve it. Even then, I think most of the adaptation will be limited to to our immune systems. Nor is it to say that minor pressures like sexual selection have no effect. But I don't foresee any consequential changes in human physiology absent a total collapse of western civilization.
There's a difference between looks like kde and works like kde. Will the menus/config/keybindings be in the right place/format? Will the application handle dcop messages properly? Cross-platform toolkits usually abstract away the differences between platforms. It might translate the function calls and provide the right look, but that's only half of getting the proper look-and-feel.
The ubuntu openoffice-kde package does a nice job, but it's obviously not a kde application. I hope this toolkit gets it right because I would kill for a KDE version of firefox (damn these infernal gnome save dialogs!).
"One time encryption pads are widely accepted as being the most secure form of encryption..."
Only for very limited definitions of secure. You have to produce the pads. You have to distribute the pads. You have to synchronize the pads. You have to dispose of the pads. All these steps are tedious and error-prone, and a chink in any of them destroys your supposed "perfect" security.
Now if you said "OTP are the most algorithmically secure pads under ideal conditions", then I'd buy it. Otherwise, there's a reason only well-funded governments use these things. Ask the Soviets how well it worked for them.
As Lisa Simpson would say, I know what those words mean, but that headline makes no sense.
Wow, what a stupid mistake. Thanks. Trust me, it makes a lot more sense when you're drunk.
If they notice and don't complain to their ISP or switch ISPs, it's not important to them. What you're seeing in the case of hotmail is people who don't get a newsletter they didn't really want in the first place. That's why they don't leave, because they don't care.
Actually it means the inconvenience of not getting the newsletter was less than the huge hassle of changing email addresses (for the user), and the cost of ignoring user complaints was less than the cost of investigating whether to unblock the email (for the ISP). It's not that users don't care, it's that they have no rational recourse that removes the block, especially when they can get the email by other means (web page, a second account, etc).
I think you can even change back [from kubuntu] by using the above and "ubuntu-desktop" instead.
Well... I suppose, theoretically... if you wanted to see... uh... no, sorry, you lost me.
Why should it be the responsiblity of corporations, who's only concern is to it's shareholders, and the almighty dollar, to pay for health insurance?
Why should it be the responsiblity of corporations, who's only concern is to it's shareholders, and the almighty dollar, to pay for a living wage?
Nothing exists in a vaccuum. The costs are born by someone. Internalizing them usually creates a more efficient system.
rather 1 in 1000, and... you get almost a 1 in 2 chance of catching it after 500 days
actually no, you have a 1 in 2 chance after a bit more than 100 days, because of the Birthday Problem.
Not only do prosecutors have discretion, they're also supposed to pursue justice, not just represent "the state". From talking to a few prosecutors, I can say some of them (but by no means all) do take this obligation seriously.
Stepping around the whole "What is natural?" landmine for a second, most everything in tv and movies is a "fake image", as you call it. So are children's novels and fairy tales. Entertainment deals in highly stylized, idealized forms. The problem isn't letting kids see these things, it's not giving them the context to understand how reality differs from fiction.
I'm confused. Transactions over the internet are already taxed the same as any others. Companies pay income tax on revenue generated from online sales. Users pay sales/use tax on goods bought online (at least they're supposed to; many don't due to lack of enforcement, not lack of regulation). The govt doesn't lose out on any money from an internet sale.
Any additional taxes on internet goods and services are therefore infrastructure taxes: fees simply for using the net as a transactional medium. It effectively discourages internet transactions by adding costs that can be avoided through other mediums. Any discussion of internet taxes boils down to whether that policy is desirable or not. I say not.
Beautifully put (your whole response). Anything more is simply unnecessary. I'll just tip by hat and be on my way.
Which works fine if you accept the assumption that the economy is usually at or near equilibrium, or moves from one equilibrium point to another. OTOH if you view the economy as a dynamical system governed by nonlinear mathematics, your argument breaks down. It makes sense at the two extreme examples you gave, but lots of counterintuitive stuff can happen in the middle.
As for which assumption is preferable, most economics is built on the first, while Debunking Economics makes a case for the second. It's worth reading if only to consider an alternative viewpoint.
Your moral argument against the quoted line of reasoning is spot on. But as some are only swayed by "scientific" arguments, I wanted to point out that there are many counterarguments within economic theory itself to the free-market apologists. I highly recommend the book Debunking Economics as a critical examination of the claptrap taught in introductory econ.
That is the in-vogue theory. However, there is a strong case to be made that salaries are determined more by the relative power of employee and employer than by "added value". This is not a Marxist position, but one supported by Keynes, Sraffa, and the empirical data.
The book Debunking Economics ought to be required reading. It's a critical look at the claptrap that passes for high-school economics.
it's not surprising that as the price difference between desktops and laptops has eroded, so too has the market share of desktops.
It doesn't even have to be people buying laptops in lieu of desktops. The desktop market is already saturated. There's just more room for growth in laptops, especially among people who already have desktops and want some extra mobility.
The question that interests me is: are laptops becoming any more durable?
I'd guess they're getting better, but as long as any disparity exists, laptops will be replaced at a faster pace than desktops. It's the same reason Mac sales relative to PCs don't accurately reflect the installed base of that platform.
It's by crypto genius Bruce Schneier, it uses Blowfish
A few things to keep in mind:
Bruce is a cool guy, and Password Safe may be great, but I wouldn't trust it soley on his reputation.
Done (depending on your definition of "decent" :).