Agree. But meteors also have negative consequences at the tier-1 level.
No reason why you can't build a backbone to someone who will peer - it'll happen when there's money in it. And that will happen when enough people get annoyed.
Yes, but there are only so many hours in a day. Purchases are made 24/7 - surely not everyone abandoned their purchasing plans, but there were several hours where they could have been making money, but weren't.
They're $31,000/hr * hours poorer this year. It's a massive stiffing you of your hours this week, but you might get a few more next week (or next year).
Not to mention the extra money it must cause to repair equipment/buy new equipment/pay people to do said things/etc.
I use the Vista codec pack. Anything and everything plays in Windows Media Player or Media Center. (I have 200 GB of Japanese cartoons; I mean everything.) If anyone on this site runs a Windows box (*ahem*), I recommend you check it out.
And, for "porting the visualization" over to another machine, isn't that something that's built into VLC? The whole "VideoLAN Client" thing? I thought you could multicast a playback list and any other machine on your network could listen in. I used it to watch (degraded resolution) television shows on the computers at school.
And for the last one... (rolls d20)... PowerShell and Task Scheduler?
Take your pick; cheating bastard or mental retard.
I don't get it. Do you actually think he's one or the other?
Until grandparent pointed out that you were pulling corruption charges out of your ass, he was a "cheating bastard." But, since he's not taking money, he's a "mental retard"? Would he be less retarded if he did take money?
Or, are you the type that has to invent something new if those silly "facts" get in the way of your worldview?
Now, being a CEO is (really) different from managerial work, but I have an anecdote.
My dad works for Proctor & Gamble. They hire almost exclusively engineers for every position. They figure it's easier to teach an engineer sales/managing/whatever than it is to teach a business type how to engineer. Heck, they pay for some people to get their MBAs - if you could handle an engineering degree, you sure as heck can handle business.
Maybe not many geeks have business acumen - but it seems to be easier to pick up than geekery.
I like your argument - freedom to enforce your own privacy and security is something made easier when you have the source code.
But, you assume that the existence of closed-source software lets corporations and governments "control" our tools. We can still always write our own; commercial software is just yet another option should a person want it. ("Tools for jobs", etc.)
Corporations want money, not necessarily control. Freedom is valuable; software that gives more freedoms than others is more valuable. People will pay more for it. The Amazon MP3 store is a good example of this - adequate competition within a market will eventually lead to a superior (no DRM!) product.
Since more powerful software makes more money than crippleware, someone will eventually take the "good" route - even if it's just for simple greed. Then again, even if the software exists to control our media, it requires legislation to enforce and maintain that control.
I guess I'm trying to say that while free software definitely makes it (massively) easier to "enforce your own privacy and security", commercial software doesn't necessarily take it away. Something like that requires a market with zero competition and government cooperation.
Random access, relational, transactional, adjective-al databases.
Random access time is (evidently) much better on flash. That's how Vista ReadyBoost works - there's a performance boost (a tiny one) if you let it put the non-sequential parts of the swap file onto a flash key.
I imagine that you could increase performance for some types of databases by running on a solid-state drive.
I poked around in Visual Studio a bit. There's the STL "rand()" function, which I would suspect to be crap for cryptography. Probably crap for roll-1d6-pewpew RPG games, too.
But, Win32/C gives us CryptGenRandom, as my Googling turned up earlier.
BOOL WINAPI CryptGenRandom(
HCRYPTPROV hProv,
DWORD dwLen,
BYTE* pbBuffer
);
HCRYPTPROV is a handle to a "Cryptographic Service Provider." I don't speak French, so I looked that up, too. You get one by calling CryptAcquireContext, which is a scary function. Help wasn't as enlightening as I'd like, and I'm too lazy to go on MSDN, but this function hooks up a CSP - an abstraction of what could be a software crypto library, a smart card, or a hardware card - with a "key container" managed by said CSP. It seems that key containers are usually a name meaningful to the CSP that lets it whip out a public/private key pair.
Given a CSP and key container name, you get a handle to a CSP, which is used by CryptGenRandom to generate dwLen bytes of random bits at pbBuffer.
So, going back to the (great-great-grand)parent's post, the allegedly backdoor-ed random number generator is being offered as an additional Cryptographic Service Provider you can hook into with CryptAcquireContext. If you don't like it, don't specifically ask for it by name when generating numbers. Now, I'm just guessing here - I don't program crypto - but this is what it sounds like to me.
Now, I'd suspect the Windows default random number generator would be pretty decent. It's what NTFS's Encrypted File System uses, and probably what Windows' kerberos uses, and possibly even what Internet Explorer's SSL/SSH/whatever uses.
Because I'm lazy, verifying my wild conjecture is left as an exercise to the reader. ^.^ But CryptAcquireContext sounds really neat - just say "SmartCard! Pew!" and Windows takes care of the rest; no need to know about the underlying hardware (or software).
Link? I can't find any documentation for urandom on Windows. Nothing shows up on MSDN, or www.google.com/microsoft. I'll check my Visual Studio DVD, but it's not handy atm.
And as I said, urandom is the Wal-Mart random number generator of Linux. Not for crypto. For Windows, you want GenCryptRandom() or something like that.
That's actually really interesting to me, but here's the thing - urandom() exists for POSIX compatibility, and isn't part of the Windows API. And, in UNIX-land, it's not supposed to provide crypto-quality random numbers - that's/dev/random./dev/urandom is the "fast" non-blocking version that comes at the cost of less entropy.
Given it's purpose (fast at the cost of randomness), I'd be surprised of urandom() did return crypto-suitable numbers.
Windows encryption doesn't "include such backdoors."
The random number generator is not used by default; a program has to specifically request it. If it does have a backdoor in it, presumably Microsoft added it so that other programs could be written with NSA backdoors.
I'm not sure if my school's network ate my original reply, so here goes a potentially duplicate reply:
Maybe you misunderstand the vague evil that is "capitalism." We in America do not have it, per se - we forked from the standard "unbridled capitalism" branch for our own "regulation" distro, which lets us see such improvements as clean air and water. It also permits the introduction of artificial scarcity - DRM on MP3s on our example - which, although needed by some traditional business models, is not needed by "capitalism."
Traditional economics predict that given a lack of scarcity, supply will be infinite and cost will be zero. This lack of scarcity was uninteresting to the pre-digital philosophers and economists of the 1700s, which is why classical economics focuses almost exclusively on the study and implications of scarcity.
You cite "Try selling breathing air on Earth and you'll find it won't get you very far" as a failure of capitalism? Sounds like the good ol' invisible hand's working to me.
I've always marvelled at how poorly teachers are paid. Then again, they only work 9 months out of the year, have weekends and holidays off, and in the districts where I live, great benefits and tenured positions.
If your wife really could be making more money in "virtually any other field" - why is she a teacher? Why is anyone a teacher? Either all the warm and fuzzy non-material "benefits" of working with screaming children 8 hours a day really make up for the pay, or that conjecture is incorrect.
The "real" problem is crappy teachers. There are a lot of them, and in my experiences they dwarf the good ones. We could offer more money to try to attract better ones, but as you say, you would have to offer enough to compete with the private sector. How much money does someone with, say, a math degree go for?
But, say we pay teachers adequately. Enough to bribe them away from other fields. The flip side is firing the crappy educators; unions, tenure, and our nation's teacher-worship make this impossible.
In my opinion, you are absolutely right about salaries being too low and parental apathy being causes of crappy schools. But, we need higher turnover - attracting better teachers doesn't matter if you hold on to the deadwood. And, in the districts I went to, there is a lot of deadwood.
Depending on how you "siphon out all the cash", you could go to jail for fraud or embezzlement. Even if you did do that (which would suck for your five employees) it would be stupid - I'm assuming your company provides you with income, which your pludering would end. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Which is why that doesn't happen very often - usually it's one person getting hired and looting another company before leaving. But in that case, that individual can be sued or jailed.
Now... "megacorps that act like sociopaths"? Concrete buildings are being diagnosed under the DSM-IV now? Because of your "niche" market, your "risk of becming that 'fascist' corp is pretty low?" Do people really believe that evil is a function of size? Should your market expand and your business boom, when would you become "evil"? If you hit 21 employees? 100? 1000?
And I actually like those informercials for products that don't work. If a person stupid enough to buy into the infomercial (and that product) has any amount of money, it's probably too much. Those As-Seen-On-TV fraudsters are doing society a favor. (Unless the knives really don't lose their edge!)
So many labels and buzzwords thrown about... Is everyone quoting wiktionary now?
A "socialist state" would be one in which (at least) essential services and factors of production would be publicly and cooperatively owned, with the intent to provide equal access to these services. Maybe you're thinking of a "welfare state" for corporations, which is blatantly untrue - the 535 critteres who control our country will work for anyone with money, not just the nebulous "corporation."
"Feudal state for humans"? You're free to leave the farm, aren't you? You can even pack up and move to Canada, or Britain, or whatever utopia is currently purported to have better standards of living for its citizens. If you meant to imply that American salarymen are vassals to corporations, you're sadly mistaken - especially in times of only 5% unemployment.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree. But meteors also have negative consequences at the tier-1 level.
No reason why you can't build a backbone to someone who will peer - it'll happen when there's money in it. And that will happen when enough people get annoyed.
Yes, but there are only so many hours in a day. Purchases are made 24/7 - surely not everyone abandoned their purchasing plans, but there were several hours where they could have been making money, but weren't.
They're $31,000/hr * hours poorer this year. It's a massive stiffing you of your hours this week, but you might get a few more next week (or next year).
Not to mention the extra money it must cause to repair equipment/buy new equipment/pay people to do said things/etc.
We really need a new ISP. The current ones are creating a market for inexpensive, unthrottled domestic connections.
Hyperbole much? You have to remember to inhale every once in a while; what you're doing isn't healthy.
Imagine having every city on earth rendered in perfect 3D.
That'd be pretty neat. With perfect 3D renderings of every city on earth, you could turn them into a videogame environment.
Then, you could put that videogame online. People from all over the world could log in, and level their avatars in class-specific professions.
Imagine this with 3D/VR technology. Hmm, I'm patenting this idea. But some jackass is going to claim "prior art" on the Earth...
One could argue that CGI porn that looks real should be handled by the law as real. Making CGI look "not real" isn't difficult after all.
I'd worry about making real porn look like CGI porn.
They're not exempted from this - I haven't read the article yet (of course) but it says ebay follows all of the laws.
This group wants them to go not sell any Ivory - no antiques, pianos, etc. Nothing. Even if it's perfectly legal.
Next will be any fur and leather products. Stay tuned!
I use the Vista codec pack. Anything and everything plays in Windows Media Player or Media Center. (I have 200 GB of Japanese cartoons; I mean everything.) If anyone on this site runs a Windows box (*ahem*), I recommend you check it out.
And, for "porting the visualization" over to another machine, isn't that something that's built into VLC? The whole "VideoLAN Client" thing? I thought you could multicast a playback list and any other machine on your network could listen in. I used it to watch (degraded resolution) television shows on the computers at school.
And for the last one... (rolls d20)... PowerShell and Task Scheduler?
Take your pick; cheating bastard or mental retard.
I don't get it. Do you actually think he's one or the other?
Until grandparent pointed out that you were pulling corruption charges out of your ass, he was a "cheating bastard." But, since he's not taking money, he's a "mental retard"? Would he be less retarded if he did take money?
Or, are you the type that has to invent something new if those silly "facts" get in the way of your worldview?
Now, being a CEO is (really) different from managerial work, but I have an anecdote.
My dad works for Proctor & Gamble. They hire almost exclusively engineers for every position. They figure it's easier to teach an engineer sales/managing/whatever than it is to teach a business type how to engineer. Heck, they pay for some people to get their MBAs - if you could handle an engineering degree, you sure as heck can handle business.
Maybe not many geeks have business acumen - but it seems to be easier to pick up than geekery.
beer shortages cause global warming.
Wrong! Not an IFF thing!
Global warming causes beer shortages! (No more "tall ones" in the bars?!)
I like your argument - freedom to enforce your own privacy and security is something made easier when you have the source code.
But, you assume that the existence of closed-source software lets corporations and governments "control" our tools. We can still always write our own; commercial software is just yet another option should a person want it. ("Tools for jobs", etc.)
Corporations want money, not necessarily control. Freedom is valuable; software that gives more freedoms than others is more valuable. People will pay more for it. The Amazon MP3 store is a good example of this - adequate competition within a market will eventually lead to a superior (no DRM!) product.
Since more powerful software makes more money than crippleware, someone will eventually take the "good" route - even if it's just for simple greed. Then again, even if the software exists to control our media, it requires legislation to enforce and maintain that control.
I guess I'm trying to say that while free software definitely makes it (massively) easier to "enforce your own privacy and security", commercial software doesn't necessarily take it away. Something like that requires a market with zero competition and government cooperation.
The Deliverator does not approve of meta-verse wiretapping.
Umm... overlords?!
Random access, relational, transactional, adjective-al databases.
Random access time is (evidently) much better on flash. That's how Vista ReadyBoost works - there's a performance boost (a tiny one) if you let it put the non-sequential parts of the swap file onto a flash key.
I imagine that you could increase performance for some types of databases by running on a solid-state drive.
I didn't fail "Economy", but I passed a related course that my school offered. ("Economics." But in Soviet Russia, the Economy fails you?)
Is English not your first language?
I poked around in Visual Studio a bit. There's the STL "rand()" function, which I would suspect to be crap for cryptography. Probably crap for roll-1d6-pewpew RPG games, too.
But, Win32/C gives us CryptGenRandom, as my Googling turned up earlier.
BOOL WINAPI CryptGenRandom(
HCRYPTPROV hProv,
DWORD dwLen,
BYTE* pbBuffer
);
HCRYPTPROV is a handle to a "Cryptographic Service Provider." I don't speak French, so I looked that up, too. You get one by calling CryptAcquireContext, which is a scary function. Help wasn't as enlightening as I'd like, and I'm too lazy to go on MSDN, but this function hooks up a CSP - an abstraction of what could be a software crypto library, a smart card, or a hardware card - with a "key container" managed by said CSP. It seems that key containers are usually a name meaningful to the CSP that lets it whip out a public/private key pair.
Given a CSP and key container name, you get a handle to a CSP, which is used by CryptGenRandom to generate dwLen bytes of random bits at pbBuffer.
So, going back to the (great-great-grand)parent's post, the allegedly backdoor-ed random number generator is being offered as an additional Cryptographic Service Provider you can hook into with CryptAcquireContext. If you don't like it, don't specifically ask for it by name when generating numbers. Now, I'm just guessing here - I don't program crypto - but this is what it sounds like to me.
Now, I'd suspect the Windows default random number generator would be pretty decent. It's what NTFS's Encrypted File System uses, and probably what Windows' kerberos uses, and possibly even what Internet Explorer's SSL/SSH/whatever uses.
Because I'm lazy, verifying my wild conjecture is left as an exercise to the reader. ^.^ But CryptAcquireContext sounds really neat - just say "SmartCard! Pew!" and Windows takes care of the rest; no need to know about the underlying hardware (or software).
Ahhh... so many random()s floating about.
Urandom in python, the urandom() that just reeks of POSIX, the CryptGenRandom()... the getRandomNumber()...
If anyone actually knows anything, chime in! I'm not a Python person, so what underlying function does it call on Windows?
Link? I can't find any documentation for urandom on Windows. Nothing shows up on MSDN, or www.google.com/microsoft. I'll check my Visual Studio DVD, but it's not handy atm.
And as I said, urandom is the Wal-Mart random number generator of Linux. Not for crypto. For Windows, you want GenCryptRandom() or something like that.
That's actually really interesting to me, but here's the thing - urandom() exists for POSIX compatibility, and isn't part of the Windows API. And, in UNIX-land, it's not supposed to provide crypto-quality random numbers - that's /dev/random. /dev/urandom is the "fast" non-blocking version that comes at the cost of less entropy.
Given it's purpose (fast at the cost of randomness), I'd be surprised of urandom() did return crypto-suitable numbers.
Windows encryption doesn't "include such backdoors."
The random number generator is not used by default; a program has to specifically request it. If it does have a backdoor in it, presumably Microsoft added it so that other programs could be written with NSA backdoors.
I'm not sure if my school's network ate my original reply, so here goes a potentially duplicate reply:
Maybe you misunderstand the vague evil that is "capitalism." We in America do not have it, per se - we forked from the standard "unbridled capitalism" branch for our own "regulation" distro, which lets us see such improvements as clean air and water. It also permits the introduction of artificial scarcity - DRM on MP3s on our example - which, although needed by some traditional business models, is not needed by "capitalism."
Traditional economics predict that given a lack of scarcity, supply will be infinite and cost will be zero. This lack of scarcity was uninteresting to the pre-digital philosophers and economists of the 1700s, which is why classical economics focuses almost exclusively on the study and implications of scarcity.
You cite "Try selling breathing air on Earth and you'll find it won't get you very far" as a failure of capitalism? Sounds like the good ol' invisible hand's working to me.
Just to nitpick, capitalism works just in a lack of scarcity. DRM and DMCA is a government and legislation thing - capitalism is an economic system.
Traditional Adam-Smith-Invisible-Hand-esque capitalist economics say MP3s should be free.
I've always marvelled at how poorly teachers are paid. Then again, they only work 9 months out of the year, have weekends and holidays off, and in the districts where I live, great benefits and tenured positions.
If your wife really could be making more money in "virtually any other field" - why is she a teacher? Why is anyone a teacher? Either all the warm and fuzzy non-material "benefits" of working with screaming children 8 hours a day really make up for the pay, or that conjecture is incorrect.
The "real" problem is crappy teachers. There are a lot of them, and in my experiences they dwarf the good ones. We could offer more money to try to attract better ones, but as you say, you would have to offer enough to compete with the private sector. How much money does someone with, say, a math degree go for?
But, say we pay teachers adequately. Enough to bribe them away from other fields. The flip side is firing the crappy educators; unions, tenure, and our nation's teacher-worship make this impossible.
In my opinion, you are absolutely right about salaries being too low and parental apathy being causes of crappy schools. But, we need higher turnover - attracting better teachers doesn't matter if you hold on to the deadwood. And, in the districts I went to, there is a lot of deadwood.
Depending on how you "siphon out all the cash", you could go to jail for fraud or embezzlement. Even if you did do that (which would suck for your five employees) it would be stupid - I'm assuming your company provides you with income, which your pludering would end. Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Which is why that doesn't happen very often - usually it's one person getting hired and looting another company before leaving. But in that case, that individual can be sued or jailed.
Now... "megacorps that act like sociopaths"? Concrete buildings are being diagnosed under the DSM-IV now? Because of your "niche" market, your "risk of becming that 'fascist' corp is pretty low?" Do people really believe that evil is a function of size? Should your market expand and your business boom, when would you become "evil"? If you hit 21 employees? 100? 1000?
And I actually like those informercials for products that don't work. If a person stupid enough to buy into the infomercial (and that product) has any amount of money, it's probably too much. Those As-Seen-On-TV fraudsters are doing society a favor. (Unless the knives really don't lose their edge!)
So many labels and buzzwords thrown about... Is everyone quoting wiktionary now?
A "socialist state" would be one in which (at least) essential services and factors of production would be publicly and cooperatively owned, with the intent to provide equal access to these services. Maybe you're thinking of a "welfare state" for corporations, which is blatantly untrue - the 535 critteres who control our country will work for anyone with money, not just the nebulous "corporation."
"Feudal state for humans"? You're free to leave the farm, aren't you? You can even pack up and move to Canada, or Britain, or whatever utopia is currently purported to have better standards of living for its citizens. If you meant to imply that American salarymen are vassals to corporations, you're sadly mistaken - especially in times of only 5% unemployment.