You missed my point. Once an identity is leaked it's essentially public. You are focussing merely on media-based losses. There are lots of ways IDs get compromised... password cracking, social engineering, human error, malice... and once an ID is compromised it stays compromised. Clearly, eventually, this type of demographic information (SSNs, birthdates, etc) will become less and less private. Sure, with strong encryption and security procedures, and stringent privacy laws we can stem the flow, but as I keep reading around these boards, "information wants to be free", and that is what will happen. Hence my conclusion that relying on a person's ability to provide information like their SSN, their first pet's name, their mother's maiden name, etc are less and less likely to reliably prove the person is who they say they are. Now, retinal or fingerprint scans... that's a whole other ballgame.
People will always make mistakes. They'll be careless and "forget" to encrypt. Or they'll put a post-it with the decryption key on the media. Or they'll disclose decryption information via some other easily intercepted channel (social engineering). Plus, consider the ever advancing capabilities of brute-force decryption technologies. Add to that malicious actions where people actively try to defeat security measures. 3 million IDs released today. 2.5 million next month. 12 million 6 months from now. You can only conclude that eventually (10 years? 20 years? sooner?) every US citizen's name, SSN, address, email address, birthdate, mother's maiden name, first pet's name, favorite sports, high school yearbook pictures, etc. will be widely available to anyone who wants it. So what do we do then? Clearly we will need a much tighter (biometric?) method of identification.
Veteran's benefits are 2.5%, so go ahead and add it to the 19% and see how close that gets you to "over half" of the federal budget.
Social Security isn't part of taxes collected? You know as well as I that the SS moneys go right into the general fund and are spent. That is why there is no trust fund, and why SS is headed for fiduciary ruin... because during the years when it was running a surplus the money was spent on other things (defense, welfare, medicaid being the big three). When it comes time to draw it down the money won't be there. So it is really not true to suggest SS should not be counted as part of the budget - it is used that way. Oh, and as regards your claim that "The government only puts that [SS} into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.", I think you are mistaken. One could equally conclude that they include SS into the official budget to make it look like they spend less on buying votes via welfare, unemployment and medicaid "entitlements", which are the lion's share of the budget.
I stand by my statement. He said the US government spends over half of its budget, not over half of its discretionary budget. Clearly that is not the case. In fact it's not even close.
As long as the US government wastes over half its budget on the military and wars.../blockquote>
Exaggerate much? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007 Try 19% in 2007. Yes, it's a lot of money, but a far cry from "over half".
Come on! When Win95 came out, with preemptive multitasking, Macs were still using "cooperative" multi-tasking, which is really just a toy by comparison. In many ways Win95 was quite an advance as a true preemptive multi-tasking OS that ran on off-the-shelf hardware. And it also maintained very good compatibility with the old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications (games) at the same time. Quite an achievement actually.
Technical skill is not even close to being on my radar of what I want in a president, nor necessarily even in his/her closest advisers. In fact, I worry when the ones at the top, be it a corporation or a government, think they know more than the underlings and specialists as regards any subject, including technology. In my mind, vision, scruples and the ability to see through BS are the leadership skills I look for in candidates. And as it happens, these are actually pretty easy to discern by simply examining their track records. The hardest way to determine these things is to listen to what they say.
I guess I was fooled by your refering to them as "M$", which is usually a pretty reliable indicator of the all too typical slashdot mindset. That said, I shouldn't jump to conclusions based solely on such flimsy evidence, and I apologize if I offended you. And for what it's worth, I am not a big fan of Vista either. I find it somewhat cumbersome to use, not because they made things difficult, but rather because they changed a lot of things for what appears to me to be no good reason. I remember being slightly annoyed when XP came out because some things moved around, but Vista takes that to a whole new level. And no, I am not change-averse. I gladly embrace change if it is done for good reason, or makes things demonstrably better. Anyhow, that is my Vista rant.
BTW, my company has stuck with XP, as have most I would wager. There is simply too much different in Vista for companies to incur the expense, disruption, and distraction of changing, especially given the rather meager payback. However, if I was starting up a new company I would almost certainly choose Vista as my platform. I find nothing really wrong with Vista; there is just not enough right ith it warrant switching.
ummm... I quoted your exact words... and they were pretty clear. I fail to see how it makes me "look ignorant" in pointing out that which is obvious:
Salesman hates the company that produces product A (proof: your last statement in the original comment).
Salesman cites the fact that his customers don't buy product A, implying this is proof that product A stinks.
As regards my signature, which you referenced, thank you for lowering my (already low) expectations of \. This board is indeed becoming more and more mediocre as the zealots continually rant about the same things over and over again. Micro$oft is teh sux. Bush is evil. FOSS rules! Yeah, we get it already! Can we talk intelligently about something substantive for a change?
I sell computers and parts to over 4000 schools, universities and gov't agencies...'
and
Vista is a load of crap and MS thinks we are so stupid enough to fall for their marketing nightmere!
Something tells me you are not exactly pushing Vista. In fact, I strongly suspect the opposite. Now, that is certainly your right and privilege, but to claim that because you successfully talk your customers out of Vista is proof that nobody wants it is about as credible as Balmer's claim that Vista is selling well.
On my new laptop, however, a simple 2GHz dual-core machine with 2GB RAM and a GeForce 8600M, Vista was a disaster.
I own a machine with virtually identical specs (mine is a Core 2 Duo 2GHz, same graphics). While it clearly wasn't "a disaster", some things were a bit sluggish. Then I upgraded to 4GB (I know, 3GB usable) and SP1, and now it is actually quite snappy. I'm not sure which thing did it... probably a combination of the two. For what it's worth, the first thing I did when I got the laptop was wipe it and put a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate on it, so I can't comment on how much affect the crap they preload on machines plays into your experience. I will say that I never trust simply uninstalling those applications. Suffice it to say the uninstall feature of a given application is rarely well-tested or thorough, so it seems to me if you are uninstalling a whole raft of applications, the likelihood you will be left with something less than optimum is very high. Perhaps the biggest gains you saw when installing XP was purely from having a clean, from the ground-up install?
Wow, school districts aren't adopting Vista? That's really significant, because we all know how forward-looking and technologically saavy school systems are! They've yet to see anything that beats their old IBM 1620 with punched cards.
Seriously - Vista Media Center is very well done. Couple it with the excellent HDHomerun () and you will have a pretty awesome Hi-Def DVR setup. And as to the question posed, yes, I *purchased* a copy of Vista Home Premium for my son's machine. He likes it a lot. Incidentally, he was upgraded from Win2K, not XP, so there were quite a few new features for him to explore/try.
... what will be the affect of the next election on NASA and NASA's budget. According to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG), it looks like Democrats tend to roll back NASA's budget whereas Republicans tend to increase it, ignoring of course the Apollo years (arguably that money was looked at as Cold War defense expenditures, not space program expenses). To summarize the chart, during the Carter years, NASA's inflation-adjusted budget went down. During the Reagan years it went up a little. During Bush I it went up dramatically, and then it went down quite a bit during the Clinton (I?) years. During Bush II it also went up a little. Now what will happen should a) Obama b) Clinton II c) McCain become the next president? My guess would be a) down a lot, b) down a little, c) up a little.
Apple's model is the most likely to produce something that "just works" (but if it doesn't, you're hosed) and Microsoft's model is the least likely to produce the same. FOSS is somewhere in the middle
I have to disagree slightly. Yes, you are correct that Apple's model is most likely to produce something that "just works" ASSUMING it does precisely what you want, because you basically have no options to make changes you pointed out). Conversely, Microsoft's model is only as good as the vendors who use their products. If you buy a well-designed and well-tested Windows machine from an HP or a Dell, you are very likely to get a machine that "just works". If on the other hand you buy components and mix-and-match, well then, that's really not a lot different from going the open source route. I think the "full custom hardware" model is the least likely to "just work", and this applies both to custom Windows boxes and custom FOSS boxes. Now, FOSS on a stable, tested platform (ala eee PC, or some pre-configured machines from Dell) should also be pretty stable, though I wouldn't put them any higher in terms of working than a Windows box from the same vendor, because in the end it's mostly about the hardware and the drivers.
And it doesn't matter that Ted Kennedy killed the Cape Wind project off of Nantucket because it would ruin his view from his compound, and it doesn't matter that Robert Byrd is a former Klansman. And it doesn't matter that the Democrats claim to be pro-choice, unless that choice involves schools. There are myriad examples on both sides of the aisle. Face it, no one party has a monopoly on hypocrisy.
Well, if you mean Windows compatible as in source code compatible, then you are mistaken. It is actually quite easy to develop an application that will compile and run on Windows desktops, Smartphones and PDAs. I know, I've done it. And it wasn't some lightweight application, it was multimedia, multithreaded, included network IO and a non-trivial GUI. I did 95% of my debugging on the desktop, then cross-compiled using the free Embedded Visual Studio and downloaded the ARM binaries to iPaq PDAs and Windows Smartphones.
Ummm, I've been carrying an iPaq for 4 years. Wouldn't leave home without it. I have also done quite a bit of software development for Windows Mobile (see my other comment at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543674&cid=23306112). I still have the iPaq after 4 years because it just works... syncs great with my desktop, I can carry Word docs and spreadsheets, it has a camera (stills and videos), I carry a boatload of mp3s (built-in SD slot) which I listen to with a 3rd party player because I dislike Media Player, it recognizes handwriting (printed or cursive), it has WiFi so I can web surf in a pinch, a built in instant messenger client, a bunch of games (including console emulators), and also serves as an eBook in a pinch. And it fits in my pocket... no man-purse for me;-)
The platform is still pretty useless to the application developer
Do you know this from experience? Because I have done quite a bit of developing on Smartphone and Windows Mobile. And these weren't toy applications - they were fat client applications involving quite a bit of math, multithreading, multimedia (audio), network IO, and a fairly complicated UI. In addition, I was able to use the exact same source tree for both the desktop client and the mobile client, with just a smattering of ifdefs to cover over the few differences. This made developing extremely convenient as I was able to do 95% of my debugging on my desktop in Visual Studio. Then I would cross-compile using the free Embedded Visual Studio and ActiveSync download the compiled application to he mobile device which, while cradled, could piggy-back on my desktop's internet connection to communicate with the server (thereby saving lots of money on wireless data charges).
I'm also pleased that my extensive photo collection in Flickr didn't just become the sole property of Microsoft. It would pain my to think that I just benefitted them in some way...
Yeah, I'm sure this deal was all about getting ahold of your picture collection. Imagine the leverage that would have given Microsoft!
OK, is my face red? I went back and re-read the original comment which listed the fatality rates as 2% and 1.75%. I had mistakenly read them as fatalities/missions, not fatalities/astronauts. I was advocating for the latter, thinking the statistics were the former. But I was mistaken - the normalization had already been done.
It's completely ridiculous to think that the Shuttle is safer because it achieves a similar fatality rate while launching (and killing) a larger group of people at a time.
At best, Soyuz' "safety" record is the same as the shuttle's since their unnormalized fatality rates are basically the same. If you normalize, as is usually done when evaluating transportation systems (such as comparing the relative safety of air travel versus automotive travel), the shuttle is twice as "safe". And I submit that it is not "completely ridiculous" to consider a normalized fatality rate when evaluating safety. Let's consider for a moment your assertion that the Soyuz is safer because more consideration (relative to the shuttle) was given to protecting the crew in the event of a system failure. This means that a failure is supposedly less likely to lead to fatality, and you claim this therefore makes the Soyuz a safer vehicle. By that logic, traveling by car is much safer than traveling by airplane because when a plane goes down, usually everyone dies. But in car crashes, survival is much more likely. Additionally, using another of your arguments, the plane "kills" hundreds whereas the car only kills a few. So clearly flying is much less safe than driving, right? Well, as it turns out, this is not the case if you normalize for passenger-miles traveled, and in fact the opposite is true.
Now, as regards "reliability", there has been much speculation in this thread that the Soyuz has a high rate of failure and so it has been designed to mitigate the results of those failures. If this speculation is indeed true, then the Soyuz is clearly less "reliable" than the shuttle. But this is speculation, so if we stick to the facts we have available we find the shuttle has basically the same (mission) failure rate as Soyuz.
It's completely ridiculous to think that the Shuttle is safer because it achieves a similar fatality rate while launching (and killing) a larger group of people at a time.
Actually, it is you who needs a statistics primer. The definition of safety for transportation vehicles ALWAYS divides fatalities by the number of people transported(actually, usually they multiple the number of people times the miles traveled). In other words, you need to normalize. Otherwise the comparison is meaningless.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Dan Rather produced it.
You missed my point. Once an identity is leaked it's essentially public. You are focussing merely on media-based losses. There are lots of ways IDs get compromised ... password cracking, social engineering, human error, malice ... and once an ID is compromised it stays compromised. Clearly, eventually, this type of demographic information (SSNs, birthdates, etc) will become less and less private. Sure, with strong encryption and security procedures, and stringent privacy laws we can stem the flow, but as I keep reading around these boards, "information wants to be free", and that is what will happen. Hence my conclusion that relying on a person's ability to provide information like their SSN, their first pet's name, their mother's maiden name, etc are less and less likely to reliably prove the person is who they say they are. Now, retinal or fingerprint scans ... that's a whole other ballgame.
People will always make mistakes. They'll be careless and "forget" to encrypt. Or they'll put a post-it with the decryption key on the media. Or they'll disclose decryption information via some other easily intercepted channel (social engineering). Plus, consider the ever advancing capabilities of brute-force decryption technologies. Add to that malicious actions where people actively try to defeat security measures. 3 million IDs released today. 2.5 million next month. 12 million 6 months from now. You can only conclude that eventually (10 years? 20 years? sooner?) every US citizen's name, SSN, address, email address, birthdate, mother's maiden name, first pet's name, favorite sports, high school yearbook pictures, etc. will be widely available to anyone who wants it. So what do we do then? Clearly we will need a much tighter (biometric?) method of identification.
Look again. Interest on debt (8.4%)
... because during the years when it was running a surplus the money was spent on other things (defense, welfare, medicaid being the big three). When it comes time to draw it down the money won't be there. So it is really not true to suggest SS should not be counted as part of the budget - it is used that way. Oh, and as regards your claim that "The government only puts that [SS} into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.", I think you are mistaken. One could equally conclude that they include SS into the official budget to make it look like they spend less on buying votes via welfare, unemployment and medicaid "entitlements", which are the lion's share of the budget.
Veteran's benefits are 2.5%, so go ahead and add it to the 19% and see how close that gets you to "over half" of the federal budget.
Social Security isn't part of taxes collected? You know as well as I that the SS moneys go right into the general fund and are spent. That is why there is no trust fund, and why SS is headed for fiduciary ruin
I stand by my statement. He said the US government spends over half of its budget, not over half of its discretionary budget. Clearly that is not the case. In fact it's not even close.
Come on! When Win95 came out, with preemptive multitasking, Macs were still using "cooperative" multi-tasking, which is really just a toy by comparison. In many ways Win95 was quite an advance as a true preemptive multi-tasking OS that ran on off-the-shelf hardware. And it also maintained very good compatibility with the old DOS and 16-bit Windows applications (games) at the same time. Quite an achievement actually.
Technical skill is not even close to being on my radar of what I want in a president, nor necessarily even in his/her closest advisers. In fact, I worry when the ones at the top, be it a corporation or a government, think they know more than the underlings and specialists as regards any subject, including technology. In my mind, vision, scruples and the ability to see through BS are the leadership skills I look for in candidates. And as it happens, these are actually pretty easy to discern by simply examining their track records. The hardest way to determine these things is to listen to what they say.
I guess I was fooled by your refering to them as "M$", which is usually a pretty reliable indicator of the all too typical slashdot mindset. That said, I shouldn't jump to conclusions based solely on such flimsy evidence, and I apologize if I offended you. And for what it's worth, I am not a big fan of Vista either. I find it somewhat cumbersome to use, not because they made things difficult, but rather because they changed a lot of things for what appears to me to be no good reason. I remember being slightly annoyed when XP came out because some things moved around, but Vista takes that to a whole new level. And no, I am not change-averse. I gladly embrace change if it is done for good reason, or makes things demonstrably better. Anyhow, that is my Vista rant.
BTW, my company has stuck with XP, as have most I would wager. There is simply too much different in Vista for companies to incur the expense, disruption, and distraction of changing, especially given the rather meager payback. However, if I was starting up a new company I would almost certainly choose Vista as my platform. I find nothing really wrong with Vista; there is just not enough right ith it warrant switching.
ummm ... I quoted your exact words ... and they were pretty clear. I fail to see how it makes me "look ignorant" in pointing out that which is obvious:
Salesman hates the company that produces product A (proof: your last statement in the original comment).
Salesman cites the fact that his customers don't buy product A, implying this is proof that product A stinks.
As regards my signature, which you referenced, thank you for lowering my (already low) expectations of \. This board is indeed becoming more and more mediocre as the zealots continually rant about the same things over and over again. Micro$oft is teh sux. Bush is evil. FOSS rules! Yeah, we get it already! Can we talk intelligently about something substantive for a change?
Wow, school districts aren't adopting Vista? That's really significant, because we all know how forward-looking and technologically saavy school systems are! They've yet to see anything that beats their old IBM 1620 with punched cards.
Seriously - Vista Media Center is very well done. Couple it with the excellent HDHomerun () and you will have a pretty awesome Hi-Def DVR setup. And as to the question posed, yes, I *purchased* a copy of Vista Home Premium for my son's machine. He likes it a lot. Incidentally, he was upgraded from Win2K, not XP, so there were quite a few new features for him to explore/try.
... what will be the affect of the next election on NASA and NASA's budget. According to this chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG), it looks like Democrats tend to roll back NASA's budget whereas Republicans tend to increase it, ignoring of course the Apollo years (arguably that money was looked at as Cold War defense expenditures, not space program expenses). To summarize the chart, during the Carter years, NASA's inflation-adjusted budget went down. During the Reagan years it went up a little. During Bush I it went up dramatically, and then it went down quite a bit during the Clinton (I?) years. During Bush II it also went up a little. Now what will happen should a) Obama b) Clinton II c) McCain become the next president? My guess would be a) down a lot, b) down a little, c) up a little.
And it doesn't matter that Ted Kennedy killed the Cape Wind project off of Nantucket because it would ruin his view from his compound, and it doesn't matter that Robert Byrd is a former Klansman. And it doesn't matter that the Democrats claim to be pro-choice, unless that choice involves schools. There are myriad examples on both sides of the aisle. Face it, no one party has a monopoly on hypocrisy.
Well, if you mean Windows compatible as in source code compatible, then you are mistaken. It is actually quite easy to develop an application that will compile and run on Windows desktops, Smartphones and PDAs. I know, I've done it. And it wasn't some lightweight application, it was multimedia, multithreaded, included network IO and a non-trivial GUI. I did 95% of my debugging on the desktop, then cross-compiled using the free Embedded Visual Studio and downloaded the ARM binaries to iPaq PDAs and Windows Smartphones.
Ummm, I've been carrying an iPaq for 4 years. Wouldn't leave home without it. I have also done quite a bit of software development for Windows Mobile (see my other comment at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=543674&cid=23306112). I still have the iPaq after 4 years because it just works ... syncs great with my desktop, I can carry Word docs and spreadsheets, it has a camera (stills and videos), I carry a boatload of mp3s (built-in SD slot) which I listen to with a 3rd party player because I dislike Media Player, it recognizes handwriting (printed or cursive), it has WiFi so I can web surf in a pinch, a built in instant messenger client, a bunch of games (including console emulators), and also serves as an eBook in a pinch. And it fits in my pocket ... no man-purse for me ;-)
OK, is my face red? I went back and re-read the original comment which listed the fatality rates as 2% and 1.75%. I had mistakenly read them as fatalities/missions, not fatalities/astronauts. I was advocating for the latter, thinking the statistics were the former. But I was mistaken - the normalization had already been done.
It's completely ridiculous to think that the Shuttle is safer because it achieves a similar fatality rate while launching (and killing) a larger group of people at a time.
At best, Soyuz' "safety" record is the same as the shuttle's since their unnormalized fatality rates are basically the same. If you normalize, as is usually done when evaluating transportation systems (such as comparing the relative safety of air travel versus automotive travel), the shuttle is twice as "safe". And I submit that it is not "completely ridiculous" to consider a normalized fatality rate when evaluating safety. Let's consider for a moment your assertion that the Soyuz is safer because more consideration (relative to the shuttle) was given to protecting the crew in the event of a system failure. This means that a failure is supposedly less likely to lead to fatality, and you claim this therefore makes the Soyuz a safer vehicle. By that logic, traveling by car is much safer than traveling by airplane because when a plane goes down, usually everyone dies. But in car crashes, survival is much more likely. Additionally, using another of your arguments, the plane "kills" hundreds whereas the car only kills a few. So clearly flying is much less safe than driving, right? Well, as it turns out, this is not the case if you normalize for passenger-miles traveled, and in fact the opposite is true.
Now, as regards "reliability", there has been much speculation in this thread that the Soyuz has a high rate of failure and so it has been designed to mitigate the results of those failures. If this speculation is indeed true, then the Soyuz is clearly less "reliable" than the shuttle. But this is speculation, so if we stick to the facts we have available we find the shuttle has basically the same (mission) failure rate as Soyuz.