It's the newspapers fault for printing untrue and damaging stories. The defence: "but that's what they told me" is what you'd expect from a 6 year-old, grassing up a friend who did something bad. The publishers have a duty of care to verify the information they print, and must accept the consequences for being wrong. However, that does not mean the originator of the story is completely blameless - but they're not professional (I use that term in the loosest possible way) journalists.
I can't say I have sympathy with any of the parties in this case. If I was the judge, ruling on this libel case I'd want to award damages AGAINST both sides.
For the lady and her daughter - abject stupidity. Once you put something on the internet, it's there for life - if you don't realise this, you are not qualified to use the internet. Just as if yo don't realise cars can kill, if improperly driven, you have no business being behind the wheel.
For the newspapers - whatever happened to validating your sources? Is this something that only happens in the movies, or has the average rag descended to the point where all it does is reprint salacious and unverified fiction from all and any sources. They really do deserve to be sued out of existence in that case.
If the regime requires exotic substances or drugs, would the average "man in the street" ever be able to afford the treatment or would it just extend the long tail of the life-expectancy distribution for the super/mega rich?
You will have the right to apply for other jobs within your new employer.
Obviously it depends on what the regulations are in your particular country, but here you become a fully fledged employee of the new company. That gives you the seniority you transferred from your old job (status, number of years employed, rights etc.) and it also gives you the right to apply for internal vacancies with the same status as anyone else within the new parent company.
Don't feel therefore that you have to continue doing your old job - look around in the bigger organisation for something you may prefer and go for it.
I wonder how much "staying power" some of these words will have. OK they've been around in specialised usages for some years, in an industry that's famous for making up new words. However, until they make the leap from being geek words to being words your mother would use I will still be sceptical that they haven't been properly accepted.
This smacks of the dictionary trying to be overly trendy - I expect a lot of these will be quietly dropped from this dictionary in years to come.
How about just applying one of these to every citizen at birth (OK, you'd have to replace them as children grow). That way you could have total control over the whole population, all the time.
The major benefit is when they get attached to politicians, these bracelets would provide a form of instant feedback for their popularity. Maybe theirs could be fitted with an extra heavy shock capability to let them know when it's time to step down.
When a human-interfacing technology gets past the experimental stage, the major aspects (size, weight, function, layout) tend to remain static. Partly because that's what people expect - and there's a cost to having people change their habits, and partly because they work well.
So it will be in the laptop of the future. Keyboards won't get any bigger or smaller, same with screen sizes. So the LotF will be the same size as todays (and 10 years' ago's, too).
Functions will probably be similar, also: documents, games, media, communication.
Yes, they'll be faster, but all the extra DRM and security features (such as having everything encrypted) will take away most of the gain. Disks will be gone - hello SSDs - but that's an easy prediction, as is wireless connectivity. the O/S and applications will be so transparent to the user that who owns/makes them will be irrelevant.
The only major change I can foresee is the need for personal identification and possibly a built-in payment mechanism, for all the media - whicj will have to be paid for, before you can view it.
The main differentiator between an invasive monitor and malware is whether the author (or organisation employing it) uses it covertly, or if they make the user aware of what will happen.
If a piece of software makes it clear, before you purchase it, that it will install monitoring software on your machine and/or it would phone home then that's one thing. You have the option of not buying it.
If this situation only becomes apparent after the package has been installed, then (IMHO) that's not an acceptance practice.
I'm not a doctor, but I do recognise the symptoms of eye-strain and general stress as they affected me. Basically, either you're overdoing it or there are other environmental factors such as reflections that I'd say are the cause.
Ain't none of us getting any younger - but we can help to slow down the degradation. See an eye-doctor, take a look at where you do your work and take a break every 20 minutes or so.
I think they do get it. the one thing governments hate is the uncontrolled spreading of information. Whether that's pr0n, plans for bombs, propaganda or state secrets doesn't matter. What they would all like - whether a country has a bill of rights, a constitution or whatever - is to have ultimate control over what their people get to see.
So far the internet has been seen as a necessary evil. Something that has some benefits (outsourcing, e-commerce) and some small disadvantages. Now we have a situation where a large pressure group (the media) want to change the order of things and are using their influence to put a halt to this unregulated area.
Governments like the idea of people paying for things. That way they get to tax them more and also put in place commercial frameworks where it is in the suppliers interests to toe the line. (For some reason they haven't managed this with the drugs trade - yet). It also allows them to regulate the content, by controlling the providers. So far, because of their general cluelessness in technical areas, governments haven't come up with an effective way to do this - while keeping the veneer of freedom/democracy that they like people to think they have. Just as soon as they can come up with a "think of the children" strategy that works, they'll implement it and the internet will become a top-down hierarchy with laws, penalties and controls.
In the early 80's there was a scare that the world supply of tantalum was running out. This is a key ingredient in tantalum capacitors, which were (and still are) used in place of wel electrolytic capacitors.
Did we run out? No. Did the price go up? Yes. And when it did increase, more people decided to go prospecting for more sources of the metal. The industry also developed alternatives to the small, red components - which is why they're less common on circuit boards today than on those from 20 years ago.
When someone says "we're running out of X", what they're really saying is "we're running out of cheap X". With the possible exception of Helium, there are and always will be millions to billions of tonnes of even the rarest commercial elements in the planet. The only thing that prevents their use is the price of extraction and/or processing.
I stand by my original points and do not think your abusive coments are helpful or credible.
A nice scare story, but flawed. As the amount of a material declines, the price goes up. That makes it more economical to extract it from more expensive sites/ores and also makes prospecting for more sources worthwhile.
We saw this with oil scares (it's all going to run out/there's only 25 years supply) in the 70's and 80's. We'll see it with pretty much every other resource as it makes a nice, juicy story. In practice the price may well go up, but we'll live with it or maybe find cheaper alternatives
earth's cries...ear-piercing.... sounds.... heard by aliens...listening
I used to think that space,com had some credibility, but it looks like they're willing to give up any principles of sound (ooops, pun unintended) reporting in the pursuit of a good headline
All that's happened is some scientists have concluded the solar wind interacts with our magnetic field to emit radio waves. Hardly a big deal, but I suppose it's a cheap, undemanding article that attracts the uniniatated (and slashdot readers) to their advertising.
> have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session... They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself
And in the next (or two) release of SSH implementations, this weakness will, no doubt, be fixed.
Professional cryptographers have known for decades that you don't just switch on your transmitter when you want to send a secret message - no matter how well encrypted it is. The mere fact of traffic is frequently a sizeable tell-tale itself. Instead, you keep your transmitter on 24*7 sending encrypted garbage, with the ability to interleave genuine messages when the need arises. I'm sure that in a short time, the SSH people will remove the ability to profile the transmission to glean anything usable from it.
My guess is because he was on the commercial side of the business (though the FT referred to him as a "systems analyst" in their obit. yesterday). From the little I know of academic teachings, it's not considered trendy to focus on such areas - particularly as he didn't program in Java
What this article boils down to is that the analysts (whose job it is to talk up any threat) reckon there's a guy up a mountain 10,000 miles away with a laptop and a video camera. He's downloaded some free software to encrypt his emails and that's a "propaganda boom".
Now I realise it's the government's role to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the population but, if that's all they've got then I reckon we're all pretty safe.
Have a problem that costs a lot to solve - for very little apparent gain?
Find some other country/organisation that has an interest in the outcome and let them do it for you.
Strictly speaking, the phrase for this is "having an axe to grind[1]", although the meaning of this phrase is frequently mutated into ranting on about something.
[1] Having an axe to grind: a task you want performed, but don't fancy doing yourself. Persuade, deceive or con some other person into doing it for you.
The article states that the testers (only!) tested 14 people. The subjects pressed a button whenever they felt like it. The testers could see some tell-tales up to 10 seconds before the button was pressed.
All this really tells us that when we think we're making a random action, we really commit to it some time beforehand. It only tells when people make a random decision - not what the choice is
... pick any two.
That was the only career advice I got. Whether you consider IT boring or interesting depends on the actual job (obviously) and also on your approach. If you are able to think in the abstract then you'll be better suited to an IT job. If you prefer to have tanglible results - to product things you can touch, then a job in a "thought" industry won't suit.
Sadly, many people think of IT as a job of last resort: if I can't get anything better I'll go into IT. Sadly, a lot of IT companies take on this sort of individual and both sides end up hating the deal.
Even if your job is dull, that's hardly a problem - afterall that's why people have hobbies
Any sysadmin worth his or her pay knows how to automate the boring tasks. In this case it's relatively easy to set up a job to scan the directors / VP's email for key words like "lay off" "redundancy" "merger" "jail" etc. But most importantly, to scan for their own name.
The trick is to keep your automated scanning away from the prying eyes of all the other systadmins, who might just stumble across it while they're installing their own methods of getting one step ahead of the rest of the crowd.
The ultimate recipe for disaster is where you have bored staff, and the IT policy does not permit personal internet use. As the old saying goes: The Devil makes work for idle hands. So in that case it's better they focus their boredom into outward-facing activities than inward-facing ones.
The results of this survey are pretty meaningless. From a company perspective, they should assume that any or all sysadmins / DBAs (the DBAs will have juicier pickings) can and will rake through the company's data. Merely hoping that the interview process will weed out those who are likely to have a snoop is naive to the point of negligence.
Given that anyone with both the access and the inclination will have harvested any information they want long before they hand in their notice, having them escorted out is going to be ineffective. From that position, threatening dismissal will not be an effective deterrent, especially now that it's so hard to put allegations into a job reference, unless there's a criminal case that's been proved.
Probably the only industry where safeguards come close to working is in the financial sector - where the regulations about insider trading make it hard to exploit privileged information without getting caught. However, that's a legal solution, not a technical one.
Even if someone did try one of these amateurish techniques, they are unlikely to come up with anything they can use against you. Apart from the fact that most people simply aren't that interesting, do you really care if they hear you talking to Aunt Ethel.
Most people use their mobile phones for any discrete communication - far less chance of someone in your own house picking up an extension, or hitting redial.
This is old information which didn't ever work properly and is increasingly irrelevant today.
Coming up next: how to get free long-distance by whistling down the phone...
Any design method or technique can result in a good product.
All it needs is the tried and trusted combination of
talented workers
experienced managers
clear vision
sufficient time and budget
Without these features you will not get top grade product, no matter what development methodologies you use. If you do have these factors in your favour, the methodology, tools or standards won't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the newspapers fault for printing untrue and damaging stories. The defence: "but that's what they told me" is what you'd expect from a 6 year-old, grassing up a friend who did something bad. The publishers have a duty of care to verify the information they print, and must accept the consequences for being wrong. However, that does not mean the originator of the story is completely blameless - but they're not professional (I use that term in the loosest possible way) journalists.
For the lady and her daughter - abject stupidity. Once you put something on the internet, it's there for life - if you don't realise this, you are not qualified to use the internet. Just as if yo don't realise cars can kill, if improperly driven, you have no business being behind the wheel.
For the newspapers - whatever happened to validating your sources? Is this something that only happens in the movies, or has the average rag descended to the point where all it does is reprint salacious and unverified fiction from all and any sources. They really do deserve to be sued out of existence in that case.
If the regime requires exotic substances or drugs, would the average "man in the street" ever be able to afford the treatment or would it just extend the long tail of the life-expectancy distribution for the super/mega rich?
Obviously it depends on what the regulations are in your particular country, but here you become a fully fledged employee of the new company. That gives you the seniority you transferred from your old job (status, number of years employed, rights etc.) and it also gives you the right to apply for internal vacancies with the same status as anyone else within the new parent company.
Don't feel therefore that you have to continue doing your old job - look around in the bigger organisation for something you may prefer and go for it.
This smacks of the dictionary trying to be overly trendy - I expect a lot of these will be quietly dropped from this dictionary in years to come.
The major benefit is when they get attached to politicians, these bracelets would provide a form of instant feedback for their popularity. Maybe theirs could be fitted with an extra heavy shock capability to let them know when it's time to step down.
Democracy and freedom! wouldn't ya' just love it?
So it will be in the laptop of the future. Keyboards won't get any bigger or smaller, same with screen sizes. So the LotF will be the same size as todays (and 10 years' ago's, too). Functions will probably be similar, also: documents, games, media, communication.
Yes, they'll be faster, but all the extra DRM and security features (such as having everything encrypted) will take away most of the gain. Disks will be gone - hello SSDs - but that's an easy prediction, as is wireless connectivity. the O/S and applications will be so transparent to the user that who owns/makes them will be irrelevant.
The only major change I can foresee is the need for personal identification and possibly a built-in payment mechanism, for all the media - whicj will have to be paid for, before you can view it.
If a piece of software makes it clear, before you purchase it, that it will install monitoring software on your machine and/or it would phone home then that's one thing. You have the option of not buying it.
If this situation only becomes apparent after the package has been installed, then (IMHO) that's not an acceptance practice.
I'm not a doctor, but I do recognise the symptoms of eye-strain and general stress as they affected me. Basically, either you're overdoing it or there are other environmental factors such as reflections that I'd say are the cause.
Ain't none of us getting any younger - but we can help to slow down the degradation. See an eye-doctor, take a look at where you do your work and take a break every 20 minutes or so.
So far the internet has been seen as a necessary evil. Something that has some benefits (outsourcing, e-commerce) and some small disadvantages. Now we have a situation where a large pressure group (the media) want to change the order of things and are using their influence to put a halt to this unregulated area.
Governments like the idea of people paying for things. That way they get to tax them more and also put in place commercial frameworks where it is in the suppliers interests to toe the line. (For some reason they haven't managed this with the drugs trade - yet). It also allows them to regulate the content, by controlling the providers. So far, because of their general cluelessness in technical areas, governments haven't come up with an effective way to do this - while keeping the veneer of freedom/democracy that they like people to think they have. Just as soon as they can come up with a "think of the children" strategy that works, they'll implement it and the internet will become a top-down hierarchy with laws, penalties and controls.
Did we run out? No. Did the price go up? Yes. And when it did increase, more people decided to go prospecting for more sources of the metal. The industry also developed alternatives to the small, red components - which is why they're less common on circuit boards today than on those from 20 years ago.
When someone says "we're running out of X", what they're really saying is "we're running out of cheap X". With the possible exception of Helium, there are and always will be millions to billions of tonnes of even the rarest commercial elements in the planet. The only thing that prevents their use is the price of extraction and/or processing.
I stand by my original points and do not think your abusive coments are helpful or credible.
We saw this with oil scares (it's all going to run out/there's only 25 years supply) in the 70's and 80's. We'll see it with pretty much every other resource as it makes a nice, juicy story. In practice the price may well go up, but we'll live with it or maybe find cheaper alternatives
I used to think that space,com had some credibility, but it looks like they're willing to give up any principles of sound (ooops, pun unintended) reporting in the pursuit of a good headline
All that's happened is some scientists have concluded the solar wind interacts with our magnetic field to emit radio waves. Hardly a big deal, but I suppose it's a cheap, undemanding article that attracts the uniniatated (and slashdot readers) to their advertising.
So much for a decent science article
And in the next (or two) release of SSH implementations, this weakness will, no doubt, be fixed.
Professional cryptographers have known for decades that you don't just switch on your transmitter when you want to send a secret message - no matter how well encrypted it is. The mere fact of traffic is frequently a sizeable tell-tale itself. Instead, you keep your transmitter on 24*7 sending encrypted garbage, with the ability to interleave genuine messages when the need arises. I'm sure that in a short time, the SSH people will remove the ability to profile the transmission to glean anything usable from it.
My guess is because he was on the commercial side of the business (though the FT referred to him as a "systems analyst" in their obit. yesterday). From the little I know of academic teachings, it's not considered trendy to focus on such areas - particularly as he didn't program in Java
Now I realise it's the government's role to instill fear, uncertainty and doubt in the population but, if that's all they've got then I reckon we're all pretty safe.
Find some other country/organisation that has an interest in the outcome and let them do it for you.
Strictly speaking, the phrase for this is "having an axe to grind[1]", although the meaning of this phrase is frequently mutated into ranting on about something.
[1] Having an axe to grind: a task you want performed, but don't fancy doing yourself. Persuade, deceive or con some other person into doing it for you.
All this really tells us that when we think we're making a random action, we really commit to it some time beforehand. It only tells when people make a random decision - not what the choice is
bad reporting.
Maybe you don't want the parallels to be too close.
Sadly, many people think of IT as a job of last resort: if I can't get anything better I'll go into IT. Sadly, a lot of IT companies take on this sort of individual and both sides end up hating the deal.
Even if your job is dull, that's hardly a problem - afterall that's why people have hobbies
The trick is to keep your automated scanning away from the prying eyes of all the other systadmins, who might just stumble across it while they're installing their own methods of getting one step ahead of the rest of the crowd.
The ultimate recipe for disaster is where you have bored staff, and the IT policy does not permit personal internet use. As the old saying goes: The Devil makes work for idle hands. So in that case it's better they focus their boredom into outward-facing activities than inward-facing ones.
Given that anyone with both the access and the inclination will have harvested any information they want long before they hand in their notice, having them escorted out is going to be ineffective. From that position, threatening dismissal will not be an effective deterrent, especially now that it's so hard to put allegations into a job reference, unless there's a criminal case that's been proved.
Probably the only industry where safeguards come close to working is in the financial sector - where the regulations about insider trading make it hard to exploit privileged information without getting caught. However, that's a legal solution, not a technical one.
This is old information which didn't ever work properly and is increasingly irrelevant today.
Coming up next: how to get free long-distance by whistling down the phone ...
All it needs is the tried and trusted combination of
- sufficient time and budget
Without these features you will not get top grade product, no matter what development methodologies you use. If you do have these factors in your favour, the methodology, tools or standards won't matter.