Ah, yes. Everybody in every government department inherently knows what everybody in every other department is doing, and also implicitly, through inaction, approves of it. While I'm all for taking a government agency to task when it screws up, and for government accountability, sometimes they really do tell the truth. Really. Sometimes when an agency says that it was a few people doing things and not telling the people they're supposed to have told, that agency is telling the truth. Anybody who believes that government agencies, particularly those charged with security, always lie, needs to perform a self-reality check.
Judging by their comments in the interview, I would say they don't really *want* to be taken seriously. Why would a group that profess to want to be fun loving, etc, aspire to this?
They're right - life's too short to take everything seriously.
Do you believe that a public school would have a greater influence on your children than you yourself would?
My early public school education taught me to dislike imperialism as practised by the British in the 1800s (a series of left-wing, francophone teachers ensured this with a strong bias for the french method of settling and ruling what is now Canada) - which would have been against my parents' wishes at the time, I believe, had they known exactly what was going on. Nevertheless, I matured enough to be able to make my own decisions - to the point where if I were to meet up with these teachers again, I would very much want to engage them in a discussion on their teaching methods, or lack thereof.
Simply put, I believe a good parent encourages a child to look at *all* points of view, and choose whichever they think is best for them. Of course, I say this from the point of view of not being a parent myself, but this is the way my parents chose, and I'd like to think it worked out fairly well - so do they, I'm sure. This ensures that while such programs as are mentioned in this post are listened to by the child, they are not blindly accepted. I would never want any child of mine, or under my guidance, to blindly accept *anything*.
I got news for you, it's possible to do a 1-2-3 approach just by reading HOWTOs, etc. Why? Because I would suspect that the majority of the people likely to take the 1-2-3 approach read only enough of the HOWTOs and such to get what they need done, done, and any references to the information sources you mention are missed in the bottom text of the howto. Additionally, having read the NAG and the security releases and such does not automagically make you a network-god, and in the meantime, you still have an insecure system on the net, because you didn't have time to read that, oh, the version of BIND I'm using is vulnerable to this sort of attack... oops, now I'm r00ted!
Better to have the systems as secure as possible out of the box, and then let the users turn on what services they need - which requires reading also, by the way, just as likely to result in learning something about network security as whoop's approach.
When I graduated from high school and moved on to university, I found that my background in Turbo Pascal had prepared me very well for first year university programming courses. (Too well, in fact, I wound up getting bored and skipping class too much, but that's another story.) IMO, it isn't so much the specific language that's taught, so much as the principles you learn.
At the risk of sounding like a grandfather (if it was good enough for me, it should be good enough for Johnny), I don't see that Pascal is a poor choice for teaching newbies programming - although I must admit that my current field is not programming, and I have fallen way behind the field in terms of what's good and what isn't, etc.
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logical people? ;)
you've never tried selling computers, have you?
the number of people I get that just assume a bigger number is better is truly amazing.
"must have 50X CDROM, I don't want that 48X, those are too slow"
Ah, yes. Everybody in every government department inherently knows what everybody in every other department is doing, and also implicitly, through inaction, approves of it. While I'm all for taking a government agency to task when it screws up, and for government accountability, sometimes they really do tell the truth. Really. Sometimes when an agency says that it was a few people doing things and not telling the people they're supposed to have told, that agency is telling the truth. Anybody who believes that government agencies, particularly those charged with security, always lie, needs to perform a self-reality check.
Judging by their comments in the interview, I would say they don't really *want* to be taken seriously. Why would a group that profess to want to be fun loving, etc, aspire to this?
They're right - life's too short to take everything seriously.
Do you believe that a public school would have a greater influence on your children than you yourself would?
My early public school education taught me to dislike imperialism as practised by the British in the 1800s (a series of left-wing, francophone teachers ensured this with a strong bias for the french method of settling and ruling what is now Canada) - which would have been against my parents' wishes at the time, I believe, had they known exactly what was going on. Nevertheless, I matured enough to be able to make my own decisions - to the point where if I were to meet up with these teachers again, I would very much want to engage them in a discussion on their teaching methods, or lack thereof.
Simply put, I believe a good parent encourages a child to look at *all* points of view, and choose whichever they think is best for them. Of course, I say this from the point of view of not being a parent myself, but this is the way my parents chose, and I'd like to think it worked out fairly well - so do they, I'm sure. This ensures that while such programs as are mentioned in this post are listened to by the child, they are not blindly accepted. I would never want any child of mine, or under my guidance, to blindly accept *anything*.
I got news for you, it's possible to do a 1-2-3 approach just by reading HOWTOs, etc. Why? Because I would suspect that the majority of the people likely to take the 1-2-3 approach read only enough of the HOWTOs and such to get what they need done, done, and any references to the information sources you mention are missed in the bottom text of the howto. Additionally, having read the NAG and the security releases and such does not automagically make you a network-god, and in the meantime, you still have an insecure system on the net, because you didn't have time to read that, oh, the version of BIND I'm using is vulnerable to this sort of attack... oops, now I'm r00ted!
Better to have the systems as secure as possible out of the box, and then let the users turn on what services they need - which requires reading also, by the way, just as likely to result in learning something about network security as whoop's approach.
At the risk of sounding like a grandfather (if it was good enough for me, it should be good enough for Johnny), I don't see that Pascal is a poor choice for teaching newbies programming - although I must admit that my current field is not programming, and I have fallen way behind the field in terms of what's good and what isn't, etc.