Hey Rob, hard to believe it's been 10 years. I remember you pimping your new website on #linuxos in EFnet IRC 10 years ago. If only I had listened to you when you said that it was gonna be HUGE, and registered an account a little earlier. Then I could have had a two digit slashdot ID instead of my pathetic four digit one... and then the women would find me irresistible. If only... sigh.
There's a book out there called "The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps" that might be exactly what you need. It is written by a few heavy hitters in IT and information security, including George Spafford and Gene Kim. It is based around a subset of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which is the major international standard for IT management. It revolves around sane configuration management of data centers, in particular making all changes predictable and reliable, and lowering the likelihood of unexpected downtime and failure. Metrics are a big part of this system, and it might be exactly what your boss is looking for, as well as a good way to make your own lives easier. It is really short, at about a hundred pages or so. You can pick it up in any number of places, including here. Good luck!
Actually, I would expect Canada's military requirements to rise somewhat due to pressures from global warming. The legendary northwest passage is opening up, which will make Canada a major trade route and open up disputes over borders and natural resources (oil, fishing, etc.). There are already heated debates over whether these areas are international waters, or sovereign Canadian territory. Of course, most of those conflicts are relatively benign ones with the US at the moment, but I wouldn't put it past the Russians, Chinese, or North Koreans to try something shady. Maybe you won't need a huge army, but you will need a substantial navy/coast guard. Also, not to sound xenophobic, but there is the potential that Canada's relatively large immigrant population may increase its vulnerability to terrorism and other forms of extremism.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
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Vertical Farming
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· Score: 1
I really have to wonder how big a problem light is. How much sunlight do typical crops really need to grow? Would a light tube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_guide be sufficient? A big light tube would probably be easier to build than having the entire building shift around to follow the sun, as some have suggested.
The biggest problem to me is the assumption that pests and diseases can be kept out. We have a difficult time keeping this stuff outside of hospitals, space stations, etc., and those interests have a lot of resources to throw around. How can we possibly keep nasty stuff out of greenhouses? In greenhouses, we are inherently more limited in how we sterilize things because we don't want to kill off the plants and their supporting symbiotic life, or poison the humans and animals that eat them. If anything, increasing the population density of the food crops and decreasing natural predators and other natural pressures should make pests, parasites, and diseases even bigger problems. Fish farms are notorious disease incubators, for instance. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself "What is better adapted and more likely to flourish in an ideal environment lacking any kind of external pressures: food crops, or microbes?" I just don't see this as very workable. As anyone who has ever owned an aquarium will attest, our knowledge of and power over the balance of life is still very limited.
Unfortunately, that is not my (very limited) experience. For example, an American-educated Chinese expatriate I knew who had been living in Virginia for several years still believed that Taiwan and Tibet both clearly belong to China, and that any talk otherwise was just insanity. Oppression can be pretty powerful if you don't know any different, and the ability and willingness to unlearn things that aren't true is not exactly mankind's greatest attribute.
The courts have generally ruled that obscenity is determined at the local community level via the Miller Test. The FCC only has the authority to regulate TV and radio by virtue of its control over airwaves. No federal body has the authority to define national obscenity regulations, because we are a nation of individual communities, and there can be no national standard defining what is obscene. Given this, would it even be constitutionally permitted for the federal government to mandate an obscenity ratings system, through the FTC or any other body?
Another one of NIST's big security certification schemes is NIAP. It's difficult to see it as anything but a failure. The "protection profiles" that systems are tested against sometimes explicitly assume a benign environment with no hackers. Hello, what's the point then? Also, the most common certifications don't involve source code verification or any other kind of strenuous testing. Just take a look at the list of crap that they have validated, including some products with absurd levels of vulnerabilities. Apparently, Microsoft Windows is very secure, according to NIST's NIAP. Note also that, because this is pay to play, many of the best security tools are completely missing from the list. If I had to bet money, I'd say that well-heeled companies like Diebold will make it through the testing despite a lot of vulnerabilities, and the public will be no better off.
Actually, the article basically agrees with you. The current model of paying for distribution on a per album/song basis just doesn't make sense anymore. Where the article starts to disagree with you is the end solution. While both legal and illegal distribution costs have plummeted lately, the cost of the artist composing and performing hasn't. Unless you want to listen to just amateur musicians, you've got to have some way to reimburse them. We've got street musicians all over the place here in Heidelberg, and I can only listen to that old guy with the recorder for a couple of minutes before I want to kill him with it. I'd like to listen to professional quality musicians, too. Saying that they've got to perform and sell T-shirts to pay their bills is only part of the answer.
A blanket license would probably operate similar to how the European TV/radio tax works: You pay a certain amount of money periodically as a special fee tacked onto your ISP bill. In return, you get to download as much music as you want. The money collected is then distributed to the artists in proportion to their relative popularity of download. There is already some precedent for this in the form of blank media levies, it's just that we consumers don't get anything in return due to music industry lobbying and increasing use of DRM.
I've got a few worries with regards to the blanket licensing proposal: One, how do you distinguish between business customers who may or may not be using their networks and computers for music distribution, and home users who are more likely to be distributing music? Two, how do you distinguish between commercial and private users/downloaders of music? Three, how can we keep the politicians from mucking things up in a quest to "save the children"? There will be a lot of temptation to deny royalties to artists producing rap music, black metal, etc.
The shocking thing to me isn't successfully using a laptop on the London tube, despite how crowded it typically is. No, I'm more shocked at how successful he was at traveling on the tube at all. Typical announcements in tube stations include "there is good service on the Piccadilly Line". This distinguishes it from all of the other tube lines which are, by implication, offering less than good service.
I agree with your reply. Up until Napleon's final defeat, and later France's humiliating loss in the Franco-Prussian War, France had for centuries been one of the most successful warrior nations on the planet. Living as an expatriate in Germany, I am surrounded by historic reminders like Heidelberg's castle ruins of how France constantly defeated the fragmented German states in warfare for centuries. More recently, despite not being a formal part of the NATO's military organization, France has frequently been key allies of America, including important roles in the first Gulf War and in the Balkans. That said, France does sometimes repeat its mistakes in war. From the citadel of Bitche up through the Maginot line and later Dien Bien Phu, France took a very long time to realize the limitations of fixed defenses.
As an American who has always been treated well whenever I've visited France, I'm somewhat embarassed by the tired old "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes. I think that America's popular disdain for France stems from a perception (much of it quite valid) that France has recently adopted certain foreign and domestic policies that work against our interests. In fact, it is a common perception in America that many of these French policies were adopted for the primary purpose of frustrating what the French people perceive (much of it quite validly) as American hegemony. Let's face it, while France was correct in opposing war with Iraq, your prime minister's (then foreign minister's) world tour to oppose the war wasn't purely for altruistic motives; France wanted to test the waters to see if it could unite other countries in opposition to American foreign policies in general. Many Americans also view France's foreign policies as over-reliant on diplomacy without any real teeth, especially when one party involved clearly can't/won't offer what the other parties require. Of course, France's over-reliance on diplomacy isn't as big a sin as America's disgusting under-reliance on it. Hopefully one day soon American and French foreign policies and methods will become most closer together, and "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes will just be an embarassing footnote in the history books.
You really think that the Democrats are much more incorruptible than the Republicans, that the press was out to get Clinton, or that there was "only one legit Clinton scandal?" Maybe you should check out Filegate, a Clinton whitehouse scandal that never seemed to get a whole lot of press at the time (or at least not nearly as much as it should have). In a page reminiscent of the Nixon playbook, the Clinton whitehouse manipulated the FBI into delivering dirt on his political opponents. Bush and the Republicans aren't the only ones in recent history encouraging abusive FBI behavior.
The real lesson here is that corruption transcends political party and ideology, and the government should always be viewed with suspicion in a healthy democracy.
One thing I've always been unclear about are technical requirements to comply with CALEA for a packet-switched network. Other than providing the FBI on an as-court-ordered basis with rack space and a SPAN port off of either an aggregation switch or a switch close to the target, what else is there to do?
Regarding the specifics of the situation of this university, it seems to be a real stretch that a school should be required to comply with CALEA. Organizations that provide a telecommunications service to the public for fee are required to abide by CALEA, as well as organizations "engaged in providing wire or electronic communication switching or transmission service to the extent that the Commission finds that such service is a replacement for a substantial portion of the local telephone exchange service"[1]. I don't know how one could reasonably interpret that to include a school. They don't provide telecommunications to the public at large, but only to selected students and employees. It's also unreasonable to view their own internal networks, as large as they may be for big universities, as being substantial replacements for telephone services.
I think the legitimate question is "should a consumer expect full freedom to engage in potentially risky behavior from a consumer-grade ISP service?" I think the answer is, VERY unfortunately, no. If you want to have greater freedom (e.g., running your own network services, having unrestricted outbound SMTP, etc.), then you should seriously consider colocation. Paul Vixie has been nice enough to catalog many places all across the US and a few places internationally where you can get a box (or virtual vmware box) hosted for relatively cheap:
Personal Co-location Registry
Excuse me, when I said "However, I'm not sure that I follow your reasoning that there are more disabled vets from Desert Storm as opposed to Vietnam" I really meant to tack on to the end of that statement "primarily (or even significantly) as a result of gulf war syndrome."
First off, I agree with your arguments concerning Vivendi'a legal department. I'm curious about your signature, however, and hope you won't mind a little tangential discussion of it...
"Disabled US vets 10 yrs after Viet Nam: 10% 12 yrs after Gulf War: 56% Stop uranium inhalation poisoning!"
I know that gulf war syndrome isn't very well understood, and that uranium is likely the culprit in many of the cases. However, I'm not sure that I follow your reasoning that there are more disabled vets from Desert Storm as opposed to Vietnam. Working as an Army contractor, I know a TON of ex-soldiers who have partial medical disabilities. I strongly suspect that the Army is much more liberal about passing out medical disability certifications now than it was in the past.
Also, soldiers are surviving much more serious wounds now than they were in previous wars. Vietnam started this trend with helicopter evacuations of wounded, but it's only gotten better since then. I strongly suspect that we're also doing a better job of keeping seriously wounded people alive than we were back then, from basic first aid on the battlefield through several years of long term medical care and physical therapy.
Today you've also got body armor the prevents fatal wounds to the head and torso but still allows very serious wounds to the limbs. You can see that in the stats with the war in Iraq, with over 1000 soldiers dead, but something over 10000 soldiers wounded. Many of these wounds are very serious and will naturally continue to be problems for years afterwards. So, you've got a lot of very seriously wounded people that in previous wars would have never made it back from the battlefield, much less lived another decade. Armor wasn't quite the factor in the first war as it was in this one, but it was still better than Vietnam.
Anyway, are you really implying that the bulk of long-term war wounded are that way because of gulf war syndrome? Not to belittle gulf war syndrome, but I'm skeptical of your statistics.
I'm sorry... but did a Microsoft employee just poopoo password security using the argument that rainbow tables make them obsolete? That's absolutely hilarious. Brute forcing of passwords using rainbow tables (e.g., rainbow crack) is only feasible today when passwords aren't salted. Microsoft's LanMan hash system doesn't bother salting (or doing a bunch of other things that would be wise from a security perspective). If Microsoft had bothered to implement a halfway decent password storage system, then their users wouldn't be nearly as susceptible to password cracking as they are today. There's a reason for salts and nonces, people!
By the way, for those of you managing WIndows networks, make sure that you turn off the LanMan hashing system. Disabling this will do a lot to prevent a compromise of one single system in your network from turning into a cascading compromise of everything. N.B., this is only practical when you don't have Win9x-based OSes on your network, but those don't really belong on a corporate network anyway (easier said than done, I know).
All this being said, you have to be careful to not go too far with password security. The bad guys always go for the weakest link in the chain. If the hash and password strength requirements are too difficult to reasonably break through off-line cracking, then the bad guys will just get the passwords through keyboard loggers or inserting trojan shims into your password and authentication systems. After all, grabbing the password hashes is only practical given administrator access, so you have to assume that a bad guy can install a keyboard logger, too.
If you ban passwords in favor of PKI smart cards, biometrics, SecurID, one-time-passwords, or the other really complicated and expensive solutions, you still haven't done a great deal. The folks advocating these systems are either ivory tower types with little foundation in operational reality, or marketing droids trying to sell you something. Once again, assuming a bad guy already has administrator access to a system, he can wait until you authenticate to another system, and then take control. Remember, you are not authenticating to the remote server, you are allowing your workstation to authenticate to it. If you assume a potentially compromised workstation, then your fancy shmancy authentication system that cost you a bundle to implement just became almost as useless as passwords.
If you want to keep the bad guys from stealing or subverting your authentication mechanisms, then you're going to have to prevent the bad guys from getting onto the systems in the first place, including all of the workstations. Looking at yet another monsterous list of critical vulnerabilities released last Tuesday from Microsoft, it's pretty clear to me that Microsoft hasn't done a great deal to prevent successful remote attacks when they sold their software in the first place.
How about a simple restraint of trade lawsuit? Heck, you've got spammers threatening lawsuits of this nature all the time. Wouldn't it be nice to see a good guy winning a case like this for once?
I just moved here 2 years ago. One of the biggest changes most Americans notice upon moving here is recycling. Germans recycle basically everything. You've got returns on drink bottles, separate recycling of glass for those items that don't have a return, clothing and shoes, special recycling on batteries, a special recycling day just for Christmas trees, biodegradable waste, paper, and the "yellow sack" system that includes recyclable plastics, steel, aluminum, etc. There's only a very small bit of stuff leftover that makes it to regular trash. It's a pain to learn at first, and there are some ambiguities I still haven't figured out. However, overall it works for me because the government makes it convenient for the average household. Now whether it's actually cost effective, I really don't know. I know that there have been some controversies over what really happens to the yellow sack materials. However, it's made convenient for me so I make full use of it whenever I can.
In any case, recycling of computers really makes me kinda wonder. Yeah, I'm sure that there's nasty stuff in computers that ideally shouldn't make its way into a normal dump. But what do you actually do with it? Can you really recycle this stuff? I can't imagine someone tearing open a CRT monitor, risking high voltage electric death, to scrape lead out of a vacuum tube. Shouldn't other items that are more recyclable be higher priorities? How about a national system for recycling aluminum, paper, and plastics that makes it convenient for households to perform? We can actually do something useful with that stuff. Maybe we ought to be looking at particular components of computers and electronics devices, namely the batteries, before going for the computers as a whole. Let's try to crawl before we run a marathon race.
I also see some irony in the same country that is legally shielding printer manufacturers from ink cartridge reuse/recycling turning around and ordering the "recycling" of computers.
Let's get some perspective on this. Other countries are not exactly the bastion of privacy that they are made out to be on Slashdot. It is common in Europe that you need to present identification when checking into a hotel. For foreigners, they usually make a copy of your passport. This information is then kept for later use or forwarded to the police so that they can then (you guessed it) track you.
I see a lot of talk about how the house is environmentally friendly and low in cost, but don't see any data on how well this material insulates. Yeah, that's great that the house is recyclable and all, but it isn't exactly helping the environment if you have to compensate for a lack of insulative properties by cranking up the heat and air conditioning all the way to make it livable. I've read a lot of articles about landfill crises relating to old refridgerators, old computers and electronics, etc., but I've never heard of any kind of landfill crisis stemming from old housing materials. However, I have seen lots of concern over the high heating and air conditioning leading to environmental and cost problems. I just don't see this solving many problems, except perhaps for temporary housing situations like natural disaster relief, refugee camps, or housing troops in support of a military campaign or large exercise. It could really shine there, but for permanent housing it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
As for myself, I'm quite happy living in Germany where just about everything built after WW2 (hmm, most of the country) is made from reinforced concrete. I never turn on my heating until it is well below freezing outside. It's been pretty hot here the last couple of summers, but as long as it doesn't stay about 85F for several days it's quite comfortable without AC. It's much nicer than the cheap wood crap that we use in the US.
Color me cruel but...
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HIV Vaccine
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Am I the only person who thinks that therapeutic treatments (like this one) designed to prolong the lives of epidemic disease carriers is actually a horrible idea in the long term? Looking at this from a purely survivability-of-the-human-race perspective, the idea of increasing the exposure of disease carriers to healthy populations is not so hot. Prevention/eduction is key, and a full cure would be fantastic, but an in-between solution just isn't good.
Because there will always be Bob, that guy who works down the hall in marketing. You know, the one who always opens up all of the attachments even if you just told him 30 seconds ago not to, the guy who somehow manages to infect a box with dozens of viruses and spyware programs just by being in the same room as his computer, the guy who lets his kids stick crayons and brussel sprouts into every open slot and port in his computer. We hate him, and his legion of similarly-skilled friends, but he'll keep us gainfully employed for life.
I've got a problem with the premise that space colonization is a solution to overpopulation on Earth. Let's say we wanted to reduce our population by a billion or so... Well, most of the areas in the world with huge population problems aren't the kind of places with the skillsets needed for space colonization, they're in 3rd world countries. Also, can you imagine how much power and resources would be required to move a billion people out of the earth's atmosphere, out of orbit, and safely back down to some other location? It's a ridiculous amount of energy even for something that carries a handful of people to orbit, like a space shuttle. Space colonization doesn't solve any practical problem for the people on Earth, except perhaps obliquely through inventions like Tang, Velcro, and nifty pens that can write in zero gravity. Mind you, I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, just that it doesn't solve any problem for those of us stuck here.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in the Kyoto treaty or environmentalism in general, but why in the world is "per capita" considered the proper measurement of CO2 emissions rather than something like "per square mile?" It seems to me that given the US's low population density that our country is far better able to absorb what we churn out than other areas of the world. I've read frequent complaints about Kyoto not weighting carbon sinks enough, but all that I've seen from either side is rhetoric.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Rob, hard to believe it's been 10 years. I remember you pimping your new website on #linuxos in EFnet IRC 10 years ago. If only I had listened to you when you said that it was gonna be HUGE, and registered an account a little earlier. Then I could have had a two digit slashdot ID instead of my pathetic four digit one... and then the women would find me irresistible. If only... sigh.
-Bugoid, a.k.a., Dave
There's a book out there called "The Visible Ops Handbook: Implementing ITIL in 4 Practical and Auditable Steps" that might be exactly what you need. It is written by a few heavy hitters in IT and information security, including George Spafford and Gene Kim. It is based around a subset of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), which is the major international standard for IT management. It revolves around sane configuration management of data centers, in particular making all changes predictable and reliable, and lowering the likelihood of unexpected downtime and failure. Metrics are a big part of this system, and it might be exactly what your boss is looking for, as well as a good way to make your own lives easier. It is really short, at about a hundred pages or so. You can pick it up in any number of places, including here. Good luck!
Actually, I would expect Canada's military requirements to rise somewhat due to pressures from global warming. The legendary northwest passage is opening up, which will make Canada a major trade route and open up disputes over borders and natural resources (oil, fishing, etc.). There are already heated debates over whether these areas are international waters, or sovereign Canadian territory. Of course, most of those conflicts are relatively benign ones with the US at the moment, but I wouldn't put it past the Russians, Chinese, or North Koreans to try something shady. Maybe you won't need a huge army, but you will need a substantial navy/coast guard. Also, not to sound xenophobic, but there is the potential that Canada's relatively large immigrant population may increase its vulnerability to terrorism and other forms of extremism.
I really have to wonder how big a problem light is. How much sunlight do typical crops really need to grow? Would a light tube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_guide be sufficient? A big light tube would probably be easier to build than having the entire building shift around to follow the sun, as some have suggested.
The biggest problem to me is the assumption that pests and diseases can be kept out. We have a difficult time keeping this stuff outside of hospitals, space stations, etc., and those interests have a lot of resources to throw around. How can we possibly keep nasty stuff out of greenhouses? In greenhouses, we are inherently more limited in how we sterilize things because we don't want to kill off the plants and their supporting symbiotic life, or poison the humans and animals that eat them. If anything, increasing the population density of the food crops and decreasing natural predators and other natural pressures should make pests, parasites, and diseases even bigger problems. Fish farms are notorious disease incubators, for instance. Ultimately, you have to ask yourself "What is better adapted and more likely to flourish in an ideal environment lacking any kind of external pressures: food crops, or microbes?" I just don't see this as very workable. As anyone who has ever owned an aquarium will attest, our knowledge of and power over the balance of life is still very limited.
Unfortunately, that is not my (very limited) experience. For example, an American-educated Chinese expatriate I knew who had been living in Virginia for several years still believed that Taiwan and Tibet both clearly belong to China, and that any talk otherwise was just insanity. Oppression can be pretty powerful if you don't know any different, and the ability and willingness to unlearn things that aren't true is not exactly mankind's greatest attribute.
The courts have generally ruled that obscenity is determined at the local community level via the Miller Test. The FCC only has the authority to regulate TV and radio by virtue of its control over airwaves. No federal body has the authority to define national obscenity regulations, because we are a nation of individual communities, and there can be no national standard defining what is obscene. Given this, would it even be constitutionally permitted for the federal government to mandate an obscenity ratings system, through the FTC or any other body?
Another one of NIST's big security certification schemes is NIAP. It's difficult to see it as anything but a failure. The "protection profiles" that systems are tested against sometimes explicitly assume a benign environment with no hackers. Hello, what's the point then? Also, the most common certifications don't involve source code verification or any other kind of strenuous testing. Just take a look at the list of crap that they have validated, including some products with absurd levels of vulnerabilities. Apparently, Microsoft Windows is very secure, according to NIST's NIAP. Note also that, because this is pay to play, many of the best security tools are completely missing from the list. If I had to bet money, I'd say that well-heeled companies like Diebold will make it through the testing despite a lot of vulnerabilities, and the public will be no better off.
Actually, the article basically agrees with you. The current model of paying for distribution on a per album/song basis just doesn't make sense anymore. Where the article starts to disagree with you is the end solution. While both legal and illegal distribution costs have plummeted lately, the cost of the artist composing and performing hasn't. Unless you want to listen to just amateur musicians, you've got to have some way to reimburse them. We've got street musicians all over the place here in Heidelberg, and I can only listen to that old guy with the recorder for a couple of minutes before I want to kill him with it. I'd like to listen to professional quality musicians, too. Saying that they've got to perform and sell T-shirts to pay their bills is only part of the answer.
A blanket license would probably operate similar to how the European TV/radio tax works: You pay a certain amount of money periodically as a special fee tacked onto your ISP bill. In return, you get to download as much music as you want. The money collected is then distributed to the artists in proportion to their relative popularity of download. There is already some precedent for this in the form of blank media levies, it's just that we consumers don't get anything in return due to music industry lobbying and increasing use of DRM.
I've got a few worries with regards to the blanket licensing proposal: One, how do you distinguish between business customers who may or may not be using their networks and computers for music distribution, and home users who are more likely to be distributing music? Two, how do you distinguish between commercial and private users/downloaders of music? Three, how can we keep the politicians from mucking things up in a quest to "save the children"? There will be a lot of temptation to deny royalties to artists producing rap music, black metal, etc.
The shocking thing to me isn't successfully using a laptop on the London tube, despite how crowded it typically is. No, I'm more shocked at how successful he was at traveling on the tube at all. Typical announcements in tube stations include "there is good service on the Piccadilly Line". This distinguishes it from all of the other tube lines which are, by implication, offering less than good service.
I agree with your reply. Up until Napleon's final defeat, and later France's humiliating loss in the Franco-Prussian War, France had for centuries been one of the most successful warrior nations on the planet. Living as an expatriate in Germany, I am surrounded by historic reminders like Heidelberg's castle ruins of how France constantly defeated the fragmented German states in warfare for centuries. More recently, despite not being a formal part of the NATO's military organization, France has frequently been key allies of America, including important roles in the first Gulf War and in the Balkans. That said, France does sometimes repeat its mistakes in war. From the citadel of Bitche up through the Maginot line and later Dien Bien Phu, France took a very long time to realize the limitations of fixed defenses.
As an American who has always been treated well whenever I've visited France, I'm somewhat embarassed by the tired old "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes. I think that America's popular disdain for France stems from a perception (much of it quite valid) that France has recently adopted certain foreign and domestic policies that work against our interests. In fact, it is a common perception in America that many of these French policies were adopted for the primary purpose of frustrating what the French people perceive (much of it quite validly) as American hegemony. Let's face it, while France was correct in opposing war with Iraq, your prime minister's (then foreign minister's) world tour to oppose the war wasn't purely for altruistic motives; France wanted to test the waters to see if it could unite other countries in opposition to American foreign policies in general. Many Americans also view France's foreign policies as over-reliant on diplomacy without any real teeth, especially when one party involved clearly can't/won't offer what the other parties require. Of course, France's over-reliance on diplomacy isn't as big a sin as America's disgusting under-reliance on it. Hopefully one day soon American and French foreign policies and methods will become most closer together, and "freedom fries" and "cheese eating surrender monkey" jokes will just be an embarassing footnote in the history books.
You really think that the Democrats are much more incorruptible than the Republicans, that the press was out to get Clinton, or that there was "only one legit Clinton scandal?" Maybe you should check out Filegate, a Clinton whitehouse scandal that never seemed to get a whole lot of press at the time (or at least not nearly as much as it should have). In a page reminiscent of the Nixon playbook, the Clinton whitehouse manipulated the FBI into delivering dirt on his political opponents. Bush and the Republicans aren't the only ones in recent history encouraging abusive FBI behavior. The real lesson here is that corruption transcends political party and ideology, and the government should always be viewed with suspicion in a healthy democracy.
Regarding the specifics of the situation of this university, it seems to be a real stretch that a school should be required to comply with CALEA. Organizations that provide a telecommunications service to the public for fee are required to abide by CALEA, as well as organizations "engaged in providing wire or electronic communication switching or transmission service to the extent that the Commission finds that such service is a replacement for a substantial portion of the local telephone exchange service"[1]. I don't know how one could reasonably interpret that to include a school. They don't provide telecommunications to the public at large, but only to selected students and employees. It's also unreasonable to view their own internal networks, as large as they may be for big universities, as being substantial replacements for telephone services.
[1] DOJ's Joint Petition for Expedited Rulemaking, March 2004
I think the legitimate question is "should a consumer expect full freedom to engage in potentially risky behavior from a consumer-grade ISP service?" I think the answer is, VERY unfortunately, no. If you want to have greater freedom (e.g., running your own network services, having unrestricted outbound SMTP, etc.), then you should seriously consider colocation. Paul Vixie has been nice enough to catalog many places all across the US and a few places internationally where you can get a box (or virtual vmware box) hosted for relatively cheap: Personal Co-location Registry
Excuse me, when I said "However, I'm not sure that I follow your reasoning that there are more disabled vets from Desert Storm as opposed to Vietnam" I really meant to tack on to the end of that statement "primarily (or even significantly) as a result of gulf war syndrome."
First off, I agree with your arguments concerning Vivendi'a legal department. I'm curious about your signature, however, and hope you won't mind a little tangential discussion of it...
"Disabled US vets 10 yrs after Viet Nam: 10%
12 yrs after Gulf War: 56%
Stop uranium inhalation poisoning!"
I know that gulf war syndrome isn't very well understood, and that uranium is likely the culprit in many of the cases. However, I'm not sure that I follow your reasoning that there are more disabled vets from Desert Storm as opposed to Vietnam. Working as an Army contractor, I know a TON of ex-soldiers who have partial medical disabilities. I strongly suspect that the Army is much more liberal about passing out medical disability certifications now than it was in the past.
Also, soldiers are surviving much more serious wounds now than they were in previous wars. Vietnam started this trend with helicopter evacuations of wounded, but it's only gotten better since then. I strongly suspect that we're also doing a better job of keeping seriously wounded people alive than we were back then, from basic first aid on the battlefield through several years of long term medical care and physical therapy.
Today you've also got body armor the prevents fatal wounds to the head and torso but still allows very serious wounds to the limbs. You can see that in the stats with the war in Iraq, with over 1000 soldiers dead, but something over 10000 soldiers wounded. Many of these wounds are very serious and will naturally continue to be problems for years afterwards. So, you've got a lot of very seriously wounded people that in previous wars would have never made it back from the battlefield, much less lived another decade. Armor wasn't quite the factor in the first war as it was in this one, but it was still better than Vietnam.
Anyway, are you really implying that the bulk of long-term war wounded are that way because of gulf war syndrome? Not to belittle gulf war syndrome, but I'm skeptical of your statistics.
I'm sorry... but did a Microsoft employee just poopoo password security using the argument that rainbow tables make them obsolete? That's absolutely hilarious. Brute forcing of passwords using rainbow tables (e.g., rainbow crack) is only feasible today when passwords aren't salted. Microsoft's LanMan hash system doesn't bother salting (or doing a bunch of other things that would be wise from a security perspective). If Microsoft had bothered to implement a halfway decent password storage system, then their users wouldn't be nearly as susceptible to password cracking as they are today. There's a reason for salts and nonces, people!
By the way, for those of you managing WIndows networks, make sure that you turn off the LanMan hashing system. Disabling this will do a lot to prevent a compromise of one single system in your network from turning into a cascading compromise of everything. N.B., this is only practical when you don't have Win9x-based OSes on your network, but those don't really belong on a corporate network anyway (easier said than done, I know).
All this being said, you have to be careful to not go too far with password security. The bad guys always go for the weakest link in the chain. If the hash and password strength requirements are too difficult to reasonably break through off-line cracking, then the bad guys will just get the passwords through keyboard loggers or inserting trojan shims into your password and authentication systems. After all, grabbing the password hashes is only practical given administrator access, so you have to assume that a bad guy can install a keyboard logger, too.
If you ban passwords in favor of PKI smart cards, biometrics, SecurID, one-time-passwords, or the other really complicated and expensive solutions, you still haven't done a great deal. The folks advocating these systems are either ivory tower types with little foundation in operational reality, or marketing droids trying to sell you something. Once again, assuming a bad guy already has administrator access to a system, he can wait until you authenticate to another system, and then take control. Remember, you are not authenticating to the remote server, you are allowing your workstation to authenticate to it. If you assume a potentially compromised workstation, then your fancy shmancy authentication system that cost you a bundle to implement just became almost as useless as passwords.
If you want to keep the bad guys from stealing or subverting your authentication mechanisms, then you're going to have to prevent the bad guys from getting onto the systems in the first place, including all of the workstations. Looking at yet another monsterous list of critical vulnerabilities released last Tuesday from Microsoft, it's pretty clear to me that Microsoft hasn't done a great deal to prevent successful remote attacks when they sold their software in the first place.
How about a simple restraint of trade lawsuit? Heck, you've got spammers threatening lawsuits of this nature all the time. Wouldn't it be nice to see a good guy winning a case like this for once?
I just moved here 2 years ago. One of the biggest changes most Americans notice upon moving here is recycling. Germans recycle basically everything. You've got returns on drink bottles, separate recycling of glass for those items that don't have a return, clothing and shoes, special recycling on batteries, a special recycling day just for Christmas trees, biodegradable waste, paper, and the "yellow sack" system that includes recyclable plastics, steel, aluminum, etc. There's only a very small bit of stuff leftover that makes it to regular trash. It's a pain to learn at first, and there are some ambiguities I still haven't figured out. However, overall it works for me because the government makes it convenient for the average household. Now whether it's actually cost effective, I really don't know. I know that there have been some controversies over what really happens to the yellow sack materials. However, it's made convenient for me so I make full use of it whenever I can.
In any case, recycling of computers really makes me kinda wonder. Yeah, I'm sure that there's nasty stuff in computers that ideally shouldn't make its way into a normal dump. But what do you actually do with it? Can you really recycle this stuff? I can't imagine someone tearing open a CRT monitor, risking high voltage electric death, to scrape lead out of a vacuum tube. Shouldn't other items that are more recyclable be higher priorities? How about a national system for recycling aluminum, paper, and plastics that makes it convenient for households to perform? We can actually do something useful with that stuff. Maybe we ought to be looking at particular components of computers and electronics devices, namely the batteries, before going for the computers as a whole. Let's try to crawl before we run a marathon race.
I also see some irony in the same country that is legally shielding printer manufacturers from ink cartridge reuse/recycling turning around and ordering the "recycling" of computers.
Let's get some perspective on this. Other countries are not exactly the bastion of privacy that they are made out to be on Slashdot. It is common in Europe that you need to present identification when checking into a hotel. For foreigners, they usually make a copy of your passport. This information is then kept for later use or forwarded to the police so that they can then (you guessed it) track you.
Just give all web visitors a Voigt-Kampff empathy test.
I see a lot of talk about how the house is environmentally friendly and low in cost, but don't see any data on how well this material insulates. Yeah, that's great that the house is recyclable and all, but it isn't exactly helping the environment if you have to compensate for a lack of insulative properties by cranking up the heat and air conditioning all the way to make it livable. I've read a lot of articles about landfill crises relating to old refridgerators, old computers and electronics, etc., but I've never heard of any kind of landfill crisis stemming from old housing materials. However, I have seen lots of concern over the high heating and air conditioning leading to environmental and cost problems. I just don't see this solving many problems, except perhaps for temporary housing situations like natural disaster relief, refugee camps, or housing troops in support of a military campaign or large exercise. It could really shine there, but for permanent housing it seems to be a solution looking for a problem.
As for myself, I'm quite happy living in Germany where just about everything built after WW2 (hmm, most of the country) is made from reinforced concrete. I never turn on my heating until it is well below freezing outside. It's been pretty hot here the last couple of summers, but as long as it doesn't stay about 85F for several days it's quite comfortable without AC. It's much nicer than the cheap wood crap that we use in the US.
Am I the only person who thinks that therapeutic treatments (like this one) designed to prolong the lives of epidemic disease carriers is actually a horrible idea in the long term? Looking at this from a purely survivability-of-the-human-race perspective, the idea of increasing the exposure of disease carriers to healthy populations is not so hot. Prevention/eduction is key, and a full cure would be fantastic, but an in-between solution just isn't good.
Because there will always be Bob, that guy who works down the hall in marketing. You know, the one who always opens up all of the attachments even if you just told him 30 seconds ago not to, the guy who somehow manages to infect a box with dozens of viruses and spyware programs just by being in the same room as his computer, the guy who lets his kids stick crayons and brussel sprouts into every open slot and port in his computer. We hate him, and his legion of similarly-skilled friends, but he'll keep us gainfully employed for life.
I've got a problem with the premise that space colonization is a solution to overpopulation on Earth. Let's say we wanted to reduce our population by a billion or so... Well, most of the areas in the world with huge population problems aren't the kind of places with the skillsets needed for space colonization, they're in 3rd world countries. Also, can you imagine how much power and resources would be required to move a billion people out of the earth's atmosphere, out of orbit, and safely back down to some other location? It's a ridiculous amount of energy even for something that carries a handful of people to orbit, like a space shuttle. Space colonization doesn't solve any practical problem for the people on Earth, except perhaps obliquely through inventions like Tang, Velcro, and nifty pens that can write in zero gravity. Mind you, I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, just that it doesn't solve any problem for those of us stuck here.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in the Kyoto treaty or environmentalism in general, but why in the world is "per capita" considered the proper measurement of CO2 emissions rather than something like "per square mile?" It seems to me that given the US's low population density that our country is far better able to absorb what we churn out than other areas of the world. I've read frequent complaints about Kyoto not weighting carbon sinks enough, but all that I've seen from either side is rhetoric.