Because it worked so well for the KGB. KGB agents planted by photocopiers to ensure the wrong documents didn't get copied. Typewriters with unique typefaces in a single nonstandard size so that official documents couldn't be faked. Yes, if you are restrictive enough eventually you can bring everything crashing to a halt. However, the concept that everything is forbidden except what is compulsory has hardly proven the most successful business paradigm. IT is supposed to be an enabling technology, not a disabling technology. The sudden focus on security has brought to the fore all the anal retentives who secretly want to stop people doing things, and now have a justification for doing it.
The answer with all these technologies is to get away from the "everything is permitted, everything links to everything else" model that Microsoft promoted till it ran into trouble, and work out a way of implementing security policies that are comprehensible and that work.
We recently visited a customer who seem to be on the verge of announcing that anybody accessing their systems with any sensitive information will be required to use e-Gap, a dongle based security system from a Microsoft subsidiary (and not to be confused, as Google does, with electronic Grant Application and Processing.) The internal IT people told us e-Gap would refuse to allow a client to connect if it did not have working anti-virus installed, and that in order to verify this, active-x objects would be downloaded to inspect the system. If I have this wrong, apologies, but I'm reporting what I was told.
This is a worrying scenario. Apart from the minor issue that external users will not want to pay for the dongles and that the internal customer is seeing his IT bill spiral, Trusted Computing seems to be heading to a Mexican standoff situation as follows:
Device 1: Permit me to inspect your system by downloading and running this program.
Device 2: Only after YOU have allowed me to verify your credentials by uploading and running this program.
Device 1: No, it is I who am deciding whether you are to be trusted!
Device 2: No, it is I who am deciding that!
Device 1: Anyway, my content is digitally signed by Microsoft, and you must trust it.
Device 2: Microsoft? Not a hope in Hell. I require all downloads to be digitally signed by Steve Jobs in person with a DNA signature.
And so on. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And how long before an army unit gets wiped out because of a defective dongle?
In many places in the world the deep soil temperature never reaches summer air temperature maximum. In such cases it is theoretically possible to use the Sterling cycle to obtain energy by, effectively, transferring heat from air into the soil. However, eventually this is going to stop working as the soil around the heat exchanger warms up. There is also the problem that the efficiency of a heat engine cycle is limited to 1- the ratio of output to input temperature. Since the ratio is rarely lower than about 0.95, and you need power to drive the fluid through the soil circuit - do the math. It would be much more effective to grow sunflowers or sugar beet and use the product in your bio-Diesel or bio-ethanol engine.
So you had rather that the family cycle didn't exist, and the entire world was by now owned by one man? At least the third generation rich kid provides a living for Indian tribes and interesting employment for other people.
Being serious, your argument is flawed. This might not in fact be a good way to make better solar cells. You can invest as much as you like in technology, but if you try to push too far in one direction too fast you will fail to get synergies. Putting a man on the moon has actually achieved very little for space flight overall. Heavy expenditure on military programs leads to waste and inefficiency, and ends up with paradoxes like commercial semiconductor designs being more reliable than extensively tested military ones.
It actually takes a long time to train PhDs who can build on the work of the previous generation, and the number of people with the capability of doing leading edge work is limited. Before you can spend $300 billion on R&D you have to get a big enough educated population, and that means rapid social development under less than ideal conditions. Don't misunderstand me, I believe we need large investments to mitigate global warming - but the answer may not be solar power, or hydrogen, and it would be foolish to bet the planet on any one technology.
It isn't, because you have to take into account the losses in generating the charging power, getting it to the car, and then the charging losses themselves (run 10-20% on most battery technologies.) Generating plant is only around 40% efficient, add in 30% transmission loss,15% charging loss and 20% motor loss and that is under 20%. Factoring in transport costs for fuel, transmission losses etc., a decent modern Diesel car can manage around 25-30%, the same as hybrids achieve in practice. The Diesel has the lowest manufacturing energy cost, followed by the hybrid, followed a long way off by the electric car (huge energy input just to make the batteries.)
I think my intelligence is possibly being insulted by the original article. The analogies described seem to be a massive exaggeration of the capabilities of the process, intended to attract the attention of people with funding. "Hey, we can move atoms around on little conveyor belts. And we can write on them. Please give us lots and lots of money so we can build everything from a computer that can read the encrypted emails of a million terrorist suspects in one millisecond, down to free hard drives holding petabytes which have to have RFID tags attached so you can find them if you sneeze." Of course, how this is going to do anything which connects to the real world is quite another matter.
Yes, it is interesting (I don't think I am a Luddite) but attempts to make leading edge practical physics understandable by governments and the great unwashed seem doomed to founder in misunderstanding. This is not a conveyor belt, this is not a tweezer, and nobody is writing anything on atoms. It's about as helpful as saying that I've succeeded in using a matter transfer process to increase the potential energy of a car (I've driven up a hill.)
This may be a slightly excessive rant, but I do think that any attempt to popularise or spread understanding of science by proceeding from reality to an extremely high level analogical overview while completely missing all the science in the middle - is doomed to failure and symptomatic of a society with growing scientific illiteracy.
I did. Every piece of electronics survived except for my phone, which was in my shirt. Which, fortunately, I was not wearing when the battery got hot...river water is not too conductive usually, but this was tidal. Advice: don't try this in the sea.
If you have a car that runs on gasoline (i.e. spark ignition high volatility fuel) you may already have minor gas leaks and you are probably losing a certain amount of fuel through evaporation, unless you happen to be in very high latitudes in the Southern hemisphere. Gasoline is so volatile that it is very hard to spot small leaks. In cars and trucks this is rarely that important so long as the engine compartment is well ventilated, but there is a reason why marine approvals bodies discourage inboard gasoline engines on boats (where there are going to be unventilated spaces, for sufficiently obvious reasons.)
I had an undetected small leak in a Diesel system for some time because it only leaked under feed pump pressure, which meant the engine was running, and the heat volatilised the fuel which was then sucked into the air inlet above the leak. It may have been there for several years undetected.
Despite all the fuss about it being hydrazine, it may be safer and easier to ignore it because any attempt to fix the leak may simply make it worse.
Market capitalisation is a joke number, meaningful only to people who do not understand the most basic economic laws. At any time only a small percentage of a company's shares is traded, and the price reflects the "scarcity value". Market capitalisation is based on the ludicrous idea that the worth of a company = number of shares issued * current trading price.
In fact, as with any situation where supply is (actually) relatively inelastic, if the supply side suddenly increased the price would drop dramatically. If Bill wanted to sell all his shares on Monday, how much do you think he would get for them? A lot, but nothing like the current price. The shares would be suspended as they started to go into freefall. Goes for houses, goes for Rembrandts, goes for shares. At one time during the Tokyo land price boom, Tokyo was capitalised at more, I believe, than the entire real estate of the US. Would you have swapped the US for metropolitan Tokyo?
Microsoft's market capitalisation is unimportant and meaningless; what matters is the effect of ongoing fines on their day to day operations, the market perception, and the buying decisions made by large institutions who will be reading all about it in the FT, Handelsblatt etc.
It lost its data the moment you read it if the read/modify/write circuitry failed. Anyone remember the PDP-8, whose accumulator cleared when you read it, presumably so if it was implemented in core, there would not be a wasted rewrite cycle if you didn't need the accumulator data again? Ah, the fun of early machines...and you could even use them in IBMs, which is more than you can do with a P4.
Yesterday's mainframe, today's rackmount server, tomorrow's desktop. As computers get faster, software functions at ever higher levels of abstraction. The holy grail is when you have the array of blade servers which you can grow or shrink on the fly, the sea of running operating systems, and the application that spreads itself across the lowest loaded operating systems as needed. Fault tolerance, load balancing, all out of the box.
With the growing evidence of the human brain's ability to rewire itself and route around failures on the fly, and the effective virtualisation of perception (why do I appear to see a three dimensional picture of the world when I have only 2 curved arrays of photosensors?) we are probably just following a well trodden evolutionary path.
is passed through the female line. As the Roman author had it, mater certus, pater semper incertus est (The mother is certain, the father always uncertain.)
In the days when Europeans first made to the West Indies and then the US, the risks of sea travel were enormous, but so were the risks of everyday life. You could die of storms at sea, shipwreck, piracy or malnutrition, but then you could easily die back home because of famine, war, disease or accident. When the mean life expectancy was only around 27-30, the risk/benefit analysis of a long sea voyage was not too hard a calculation to make, as a single successful voyage could jump start a career even for an ordinary seaman.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the British Royal Navy gradually improved its safety record until, in the absence of actual battles at sea, the best captains were achieving around 1% fatality rates per year on long voyages on known routes (I'm indebted to N A M Rodger's quite amazing history book The Command of the Ocean for this statistic, by the way.) The interesting point here is that for a lot of the period it was probably safer to be a qualified (able) seaman on a well run British warship than to live ashore.
The difficulty with space exploration (actually near Earth orbital trips) is that the risk/benefit analysis seems to be nowhere near as good as with these earlier voyages, which were also pushing the envelope with what was possible for human exploration. Travelling on the Shuttle is clearly more dangerous than not travelling on the Shuttle, whereas the benefits are hard to quantify. Astronauts do not suddenly become rich, either as a result of bringing back large quantities of valuables (resulting from piracy or trade), or as a result of being made unrefusable offers by other countries wishing to profit from their expertise. The same issue is going to apply to anyone who tries to commercialise "space". Anybody trying to sell bits of the Moon is a fraudulent businessman, and the difference between, say, low Earth orbit and asteroid mining is probably about equivalent to the difference between building a footpath from one hamlet to another, and establishing regular trade routes between Europe and India or China. Unfortunately, there is a step function in the way. In every previous advance in transport, there have been immediate or rapid commercial benefits. When the Duke of Bridgwater built the first real commercial canal in the North of England, he went heavily into debt but made a fortune in a few years. Railways caused bigger cash flow problems for early investors but main lines rapidly went into profit. It took only a few steam ships to establish new profitable trade routes. But to make any real money with space exploration, you have in effect to bypass almost the entirety of transportation history in one leap. A few rich guys will doubtless piddle about losing their fortunes trying to build a bigger phallic symbol than the neighbour - but when it comes to hard, cold risk benefit analysis, the commercial world won't find the cash and it won't find the crews. Personally, I doubt whether even governments can do it and I regard Professor Hawking as being seriously barking on this one. But the only way to fix the odds is to have nearly bottomless pockets and the ability to appeal to pride and patriotism, and that is what governments do.
The trouble will the Shuttle is that it lacks the appeal to pride and patriotism; it's the equivalent of setting off to sea in a rust bucket and noticing that the owner has spent more on insurance than repairs.
It's sad (but understandable) that IBM sold to the Chinese, because the combination of Ubuntu 6.6 and a Thinkpad is pretty good. This is in fact Apple's problem. The rest of the world has caught up and you CAN have rock solid industrial strength *Nix on a reliable laptop. I'm sorry, but dock icons that rise to meet you are a CGI too far for real world users. When I bought an Acer two and half years ago because there was no G5 Powerbook, people told me it would be an unreliable piece of crap. Actually it is solid, has never gone wrong, the battery still holds over 90% of original charge, and the only thing it lacks is built in Bluetooth. With an upgrade to a Maxtor 5400rpm drive and Ubuntu 6.6, it's still my main machine.
I watched a demo on a 17" X86 Powerbook the other day and I decided the ONLY real selling point was the screen, for road warriors. The downside is that in order to get the very thin design they must have made compromises, and I bet this is at the root of both the battery problems and the trackpad problems. Lots of research has gone into making reliable batteries with rolled construction - it is much harder to make a reliable thin battery.
Introduce a properly run certification scheme for "Certified ethical hacker". Base it on a course taking in relevant law, security techniques etc., and make damn sure it is vendor-agnostic. Only make the course available to persons who have no criminal convictions, are on the voter's list, member of a professional body, and pass FBI checks or your national alternative. It will be free to qualified applicants.
Now issue those people with a set of official paper forms, with proper security marking and tied to the individual. When they encounter a security issue, they issue a paper based advisory (because it is still traceable, and because you do not then leave a trail on the net that might enable the black hats to find and target you.) copy to some official body who every year will report the statistics, and list the companies that failed to respond to security advisories.
So now you have it on your resume when you write in for the bank job: Certified Ethical Hacker, 42 confirmed alerts (or whatever).
Before anybody tells me this is simply fantasy, consider that there are already volunteer public security forces. In the UK we have Special Constables and the Territorial Army, and there are equivalents in many other countries. We have a Health and Safety Executive who can walk into any company at any time it is operating and demand immediately to observe what is going on. So why not a properly trained volunteer Internet security force?
To all the people who fantasise about mining asteroids and the commercial exploitation of the rest of the Solar System I have only one comment to make: Gravity well. You can pour all Gates's or Buffet's billions into the gravity well and nothing significant will float to the surface. All this Libertarian crap about corporations being the way to exploit space is just that: fantasy.
Any credible plan to, for instance, acquire a nickel bearing asteroid into a useful Earth orbit (somehow avoiding an accidental mass extinction event) is going to require vast amounts of investment in systems development with a payoff perhaps around 2050 (based on the actual timescales for lunar and proposed Martian landings.) Can you imagine any group of shareholders that would invest billions in that idea, given that historically and over the longer recent term the price of metal commodities has actually declined? Where would you find the executives, given that modern corporate managers work to timescales measured in quarters rather than even single digit years?
Corporatisation has turned us all into short termists with blinkers, looking for risk-free strategies to maximise the income from incentive schemes. Sadly perhaps, only in some government departments do you get any long term strategic planning - and then they get accused of bureaucracy and inefficiency because they cannot turn things around in three months.
If the Government is handing over the exploitation of space to corporations, that is surely a sign that the government sees no strategic or long term value in space exploration. The longest term is for a successful politician or administrator in his 40s to want to do something for which he can get credit in his 60s. That's a 20 year timeframe, roughly.
The plastic cover doesn't have any significant insulating properties. This is/. and I can't draw a diagram, but the insulation probably can't withstand more than about 10kV. For an analogy in relative terms, would you feel safe if the mains wiring in your house was insulated with nothing but a fine layer of dust?
A portable computer optimised for use on a pregnant woman's bump.
This is definitely one for the people who brought you the polka dot iMac.
It should be pastel colored, and have a speaker in the base to play suitable
noises to the fetus while mother to be works from home.
Are you serious? I'm prepared to accept that there are plenty of programming systems for automation that are Windows-based, but actual robots?
Alternatively, if there really is this multithreaded, pre-emptive scheduling, determinate time execution, tightly coupled networking, highly reliable, checked Windows kernel and services management system out there, why have they been hiding it all these years?
Priority is from the date of first application. NOT the claimed date of invention (submarine patents anyone)
Once a patent is applied for, the applicant has a cooling off period in which to decide whether to go through the whole
process or to talk to other people about licensing (this helps small inventors)
The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties
on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current
licensing rate for the goods sold to date. (If there are NO goods currently employing the patent, the licensing rate
will be zero.)
Mathematical algorithms, natural laws and anything which has been created by a natural process (e.g. DNA sequences)
cannot be patentable.
It shall not be possible to patent any business process simply because it is carried on in a different medium (e.g.
one click is basically walking into shop, handing over money, receiving goods in exchange, and should not be patentable simply because it is computer implemented.)
Basically, the European patent system before the US and Microsoft started lobbying and threatening in order to try and break it.
But at the end of the day I am the CIO of an IT consultancy with 25 years of experience, qualifications in quality management and business software development, a former member of IEC technical committees, a track record of product development. And you are?
I live in a house, I have two cars and a boat. The cars are products. I buy them, I run them, periodically I have to replace something. The house and the boat are projects. They are continually being modified - the only rule being that the house has to work all the year round and the boat has to work from March to November. I find things, I fix things, I improve things. But then for me cars are just a form of transport, and for some people they too are projects.
I can't be the only person who believes that, now that software does all the basic things, much of it is evolving from Product to Project. Even Microsoft, the supplier of boxed software par excellence, has got to come to terms with this; we now know that under the shiny paint there are hidden recesses with rust and loose parts and we expect them to be fixed as they are discovered. We also know that a company of some size can release stuff and label it beta, simply being more honest than labelling it "release 0.8" or whatever.
You can see Open Source as the logical outcome of all the work that was done on quality in the 80s and 90s: everybody involved, continuous improvement, no hiding place for bad work. You can see it as a response to the perception by many people in the standards world that software standards were abysmal. Oh, and I have yet to see the new product that can just be placed in someone's hands and used. It may be "ready for use", but the user will not be. Continuous improvement and user feedback makes the learning curve easier.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer with all these technologies is to get away from the "everything is permitted, everything links to everything else" model that Microsoft promoted till it ran into trouble, and work out a way of implementing security policies that are comprehensible and that work.
This is a worrying scenario. Apart from the minor issue that external users will not want to pay for the dongles and that the internal customer is seeing his IT bill spiral, Trusted Computing seems to be heading to a Mexican standoff situation as follows:
Device 1: Permit me to inspect your system by downloading and running this program.
Device 2: Only after YOU have allowed me to verify your credentials by uploading and running this program.
Device 1: No, it is I who am deciding whether you are to be trusted!
Device 2: No, it is I who am deciding that!
Device 1: Anyway, my content is digitally signed by Microsoft, and you must trust it.
Device 2: Microsoft? Not a hope in Hell. I require all downloads to be digitally signed by Steve Jobs in person with a DNA signature.
And so on. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And how long before an army unit gets wiped out because of a defective dongle?
In many places in the world the deep soil temperature never reaches summer air temperature maximum. In such cases it is theoretically possible to use the Sterling cycle to obtain energy by, effectively, transferring heat from air into the soil. However, eventually this is going to stop working as the soil around the heat exchanger warms up. There is also the problem that the efficiency of a heat engine cycle is limited to 1- the ratio of output to input temperature. Since the ratio is rarely lower than about 0.95, and you need power to drive the fluid through the soil circuit - do the math. It would be much more effective to grow sunflowers or sugar beet and use the product in your bio-Diesel or bio-ethanol engine.
Being serious, your argument is flawed. This might not in fact be a good way to make better solar cells. You can invest as much as you like in technology, but if you try to push too far in one direction too fast you will fail to get synergies. Putting a man on the moon has actually achieved very little for space flight overall. Heavy expenditure on military programs leads to waste and inefficiency, and ends up with paradoxes like commercial semiconductor designs being more reliable than extensively tested military ones.
It actually takes a long time to train PhDs who can build on the work of the previous generation, and the number of people with the capability of doing leading edge work is limited. Before you can spend $300 billion on R&D you have to get a big enough educated population, and that means rapid social development under less than ideal conditions. Don't misunderstand me, I believe we need large investments to mitigate global warming - but the answer may not be solar power, or hydrogen, and it would be foolish to bet the planet on any one technology.
It isn't, because you have to take into account the losses in generating the charging power, getting it to the car, and then the charging losses themselves (run 10-20% on most battery technologies.) Generating plant is only around 40% efficient, add in 30% transmission loss,15% charging loss and 20% motor loss and that is under 20%. Factoring in transport costs for fuel, transmission losses etc., a decent modern Diesel car can manage around 25-30%, the same as hybrids achieve in practice. The Diesel has the lowest manufacturing energy cost, followed by the hybrid, followed a long way off by the electric car (huge energy input just to make the batteries.)
Yes, it is interesting (I don't think I am a Luddite) but attempts to make leading edge practical physics understandable by governments and the great unwashed seem doomed to founder in misunderstanding. This is not a conveyor belt, this is not a tweezer, and nobody is writing anything on atoms. It's about as helpful as saying that I've succeeded in using a matter transfer process to increase the potential energy of a car (I've driven up a hill.)
This may be a slightly excessive rant, but I do think that any attempt to popularise or spread understanding of science by proceeding from reality to an extremely high level analogical overview while completely missing all the science in the middle - is doomed to failure and symptomatic of a society with growing scientific illiteracy.
Torvalds doesn't read /. any more, and I've been too busy to do anything.
I did. Every piece of electronics survived except for my phone, which was in my shirt. Which, fortunately, I was not wearing when the battery got hot...river water is not too conductive usually, but this was tidal. Advice: don't try this in the sea.
I had an undetected small leak in a Diesel system for some time because it only leaked under feed pump pressure, which meant the engine was running, and the heat volatilised the fuel which was then sucked into the air inlet above the leak. It may have been there for several years undetected.
Despite all the fuss about it being hydrazine, it may be safer and easier to ignore it because any attempt to fix the leak may simply make it worse.
Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who though once only and but from far away
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
I had an Eureka moment last week...it is far from her best sonnet, though.
Google the first line, it is all over the Internet (so much for copyright)
In fact, as with any situation where supply is (actually) relatively inelastic, if the supply side suddenly increased the price would drop dramatically. If Bill wanted to sell all his shares on Monday, how much do you think he would get for them? A lot, but nothing like the current price. The shares would be suspended as they started to go into freefall. Goes for houses, goes for Rembrandts, goes for shares. At one time during the Tokyo land price boom, Tokyo was capitalised at more, I believe, than the entire real estate of the US. Would you have swapped the US for metropolitan Tokyo?
Microsoft's market capitalisation is unimportant and meaningless; what matters is the effect of ongoing fines on their day to day operations, the market perception, and the buying decisions made by large institutions who will be reading all about it in the FT, Handelsblatt etc.
It lost its data the moment you read it if the read/modify/write circuitry failed. Anyone remember the PDP-8, whose accumulator cleared when you read it, presumably so if it was implemented in core, there would not be a wasted rewrite cycle if you didn't need the accumulator data again? Ah, the fun of early machines...and you could even use them in IBMs, which is more than you can do with a P4.
With the growing evidence of the human brain's ability to rewire itself and route around failures on the fly, and the effective virtualisation of perception (why do I appear to see a three dimensional picture of the world when I have only 2 curved arrays of photosensors?) we are probably just following a well trodden evolutionary path.
is passed through the female line. As the Roman author had it, mater certus, pater semper incertus est (The mother is certain, the father always uncertain.)
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the British Royal Navy gradually improved its safety record until, in the absence of actual battles at sea, the best captains were achieving around 1% fatality rates per year on long voyages on known routes (I'm indebted to N A M Rodger's quite amazing history book The Command of the Ocean for this statistic, by the way.) The interesting point here is that for a lot of the period it was probably safer to be a qualified (able) seaman on a well run British warship than to live ashore.
The difficulty with space exploration (actually near Earth orbital trips) is that the risk/benefit analysis seems to be nowhere near as good as with these earlier voyages, which were also pushing the envelope with what was possible for human exploration. Travelling on the Shuttle is clearly more dangerous than not travelling on the Shuttle, whereas the benefits are hard to quantify. Astronauts do not suddenly become rich, either as a result of bringing back large quantities of valuables (resulting from piracy or trade), or as a result of being made unrefusable offers by other countries wishing to profit from their expertise. The same issue is going to apply to anyone who tries to commercialise "space". Anybody trying to sell bits of the Moon is a fraudulent businessman, and the difference between, say, low Earth orbit and asteroid mining is probably about equivalent to the difference between building a footpath from one hamlet to another, and establishing regular trade routes between Europe and India or China. Unfortunately, there is a step function in the way. In every previous advance in transport, there have been immediate or rapid commercial benefits. When the Duke of Bridgwater built the first real commercial canal in the North of England, he went heavily into debt but made a fortune in a few years. Railways caused bigger cash flow problems for early investors but main lines rapidly went into profit. It took only a few steam ships to establish new profitable trade routes. But to make any real money with space exploration, you have in effect to bypass almost the entirety of transportation history in one leap. A few rich guys will doubtless piddle about losing their fortunes trying to build a bigger phallic symbol than the neighbour - but when it comes to hard, cold risk benefit analysis, the commercial world won't find the cash and it won't find the crews. Personally, I doubt whether even governments can do it and I regard Professor Hawking as being seriously barking on this one. But the only way to fix the odds is to have nearly bottomless pockets and the ability to appeal to pride and patriotism, and that is what governments do.
The trouble will the Shuttle is that it lacks the appeal to pride and patriotism; it's the equivalent of setting off to sea in a rust bucket and noticing that the owner has spent more on insurance than repairs.
I watched a demo on a 17" X86 Powerbook the other day and I decided the ONLY real selling point was the screen, for road warriors. The downside is that in order to get the very thin design they must have made compromises, and I bet this is at the root of both the battery problems and the trackpad problems. Lots of research has gone into making reliable batteries with rolled construction - it is much harder to make a reliable thin battery.
Introduce a properly run certification scheme for "Certified ethical hacker". Base it on a course taking in relevant law, security techniques etc., and make damn sure it is vendor-agnostic. Only make the course available to persons who have no criminal convictions, are on the voter's list, member of a professional body, and pass FBI checks or your national alternative. It will be free to qualified applicants.
Now issue those people with a set of official paper forms, with proper security marking and tied to the individual. When they encounter a security issue, they issue a paper based advisory (because it is still traceable, and because you do not then leave a trail on the net that might enable the black hats to find and target you.) copy to some official body who every year will report the statistics, and list the companies that failed to respond to security advisories.
So now you have it on your resume when you write in for the bank job: Certified Ethical Hacker, 42 confirmed alerts (or whatever).
Before anybody tells me this is simply fantasy, consider that there are already volunteer public security forces. In the UK we have Special Constables and the Territorial Army, and there are equivalents in many other countries. We have a Health and Safety Executive who can walk into any company at any time it is operating and demand immediately to observe what is going on. So why not a properly trained volunteer Internet security force?
Any credible plan to, for instance, acquire a nickel bearing asteroid into a useful Earth orbit (somehow avoiding an accidental mass extinction event) is going to require vast amounts of investment in systems development with a payoff perhaps around 2050 (based on the actual timescales for lunar and proposed Martian landings.) Can you imagine any group of shareholders that would invest billions in that idea, given that historically and over the longer recent term the price of metal commodities has actually declined? Where would you find the executives, given that modern corporate managers work to timescales measured in quarters rather than even single digit years?
Corporatisation has turned us all into short termists with blinkers, looking for risk-free strategies to maximise the income from incentive schemes. Sadly perhaps, only in some government departments do you get any long term strategic planning - and then they get accused of bureaucracy and inefficiency because they cannot turn things around in three months.
If the Government is handing over the exploitation of space to corporations, that is surely a sign that the government sees no strategic or long term value in space exploration. The longest term is for a successful politician or administrator in his 40s to want to do something for which he can get credit in his 60s. That's a 20 year timeframe, roughly.
The plastic cover doesn't have any significant insulating properties. This is /. and I can't draw a diagram, but the insulation probably can't withstand more than about 10kV. For an analogy in relative terms, would you feel safe if the mains wiring in your house was insulated with nothing but a fine layer of dust?
This is definitely one for the people who brought you the polka dot iMac.
It should be pastel colored, and have a speaker in the base to play suitable noises to the fetus while mother to be works from home.
Alternatively, if there really is this multithreaded, pre-emptive scheduling, determinate time execution, tightly coupled networking, highly reliable, checked Windows kernel and services management system out there, why have they been hiding it all these years?
Once a patent is applied for, the applicant has a cooling off period in which to decide whether to go through the whole process or to talk to other people about licensing (this helps small inventors)
The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current licensing rate for the goods sold to date. (If there are NO goods currently employing the patent, the licensing rate will be zero.)
Mathematical algorithms, natural laws and anything which has been created by a natural process (e.g. DNA sequences) cannot be patentable.
It shall not be possible to patent any business process simply because it is carried on in a different medium (e.g. one click is basically walking into shop, handing over money, receiving goods in exchange, and should not be patentable simply because it is computer implemented.)
Basically, the European patent system before the US and Microsoft started lobbying and threatening in order to try and break it.
But at the end of the day I am the CIO of an IT consultancy with 25 years of experience, qualifications in quality management and business software development, a former member of IEC technical committees, a track record of product development. And you are?
I can't be the only person who believes that, now that software does all the basic things, much of it is evolving from Product to Project. Even Microsoft, the supplier of boxed software par excellence, has got to come to terms with this; we now know that under the shiny paint there are hidden recesses with rust and loose parts and we expect them to be fixed as they are discovered. We also know that a company of some size can release stuff and label it beta, simply being more honest than labelling it "release 0.8" or whatever.
You can see Open Source as the logical outcome of all the work that was done on quality in the 80s and 90s: everybody involved, continuous improvement, no hiding place for bad work. You can see it as a response to the perception by many people in the standards world that software standards were abysmal. Oh, and I have yet to see the new product that can just be placed in someone's hands and used. It may be "ready for use", but the user will not be. Continuous improvement and user feedback makes the learning curve easier.