The risk would still be non-zero, and in some cases -- especially in some corporate IT environments (for example, banks) -- it simply isn't worth it.
Having said that, if I found a USB stick in a corporation that had such a policy, I'd take it home, build a PC from spares I have laying around (yes, I have enough spares to do that) install Ubuntu or Gentoo from a live CD, disconnect the PC from my home network and then investigate the USB stick. Even though the risk of such a procedure is still slightly greater than zero, I'd call it safe enough.
And despite attitudes like that, people still wonder why those Nazis in corporate IT do things like disallowing USB mass storage devices, filtering HTTP traffic through a proxy, etc.
Because that option doesn't scale well? Also, unless you are using surface-mount components, you will also need a 1/16 inch drill bit and a drill to drill the holes for the leads of the parts you will be soldering to the PCB.
Because it is easy to remember, and given a choice between "easy" and "secure" most people will choose "easy" unless forced to do otherwise. Even here on/. you see some pretty lively arguments between good password security and real-world usability. Think about it this way: do you use Enigmail or a VPN to correspond with others, or do you send your SMTP traffic in clear text from the free WiFi hotspot at the coffee shop?
Well, the obvious way to interpret his sentence is, "Be sure to stop anyone from messing with your phone when you aren't there to protect your phone" which is, of course, a trifle difficult to do. However, it could also be interpreted as "Don't leave your phone unattended in an unsafe location" which is quite a bit more reasonable, and is, I suspect, what O.P. meant by what he said.
Blame AOL for making every minor point release a new version, because other companies felt the need to release "new major versions" to be perceived by the clueless public as releasing an update as often. If Google is releasing new major versions(based on version number) every few months, then Mozilla HAS to, or the clueless masses will think that Firefox is not advancing as quickly.
Are you kidding me? Most of the "clueless masses" barely know what Firefox is, much less what version they are running. I talk to "field techs" all day who, when I ask if they are using Windows or Ubuntu (we provide Windows laptops and Ubuntu desktops for our remote sites), tell me, "Uhhh....it's a Dell." Then, when their e-mail passwords expire every 90 days, they can't figure out how to change them, even though we've had that password rotation policy for THREE FRIGGING YEARS now. Last night, while helping my mom pick out a new laptop, she asked me if she could "run Google" on the one I recommended:facepalm: My wife can't understand why she lost all of her e-mails when she canceled our Internet account with our (former) ISP and she had only used web mail rather than the Apple Mail program. THIS is how computer illiterate the "clueless masses" are. I guarantee you that 99+% of them have no idea if they are running version 5.x, 4.x or 1.x...nor do they care.
2) Because America receives lots of income from tourism, and the more people like him who choose to vacation elsewhere, the more our economy suffers, and
3) Did I mention that he's right?
I, too, have decided not to fly anywhere in the U.S. anymore due to the nonsense at the airports, and I am a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. Worse than that, I live in Alaska, so if I want to go anywhere, flying is pretty much my only choice. It would take up most of my vacation just trying to get through Canada to go anywhere else. But I REFUSE to subject myself or my family to TSA. I hope more people make the same choice, because once the airlines start to feel the pinch, maybe they can generate enough leverage to get the policies to change.
How about the government goes back to respecting the spirit of the 4th Amendment? You don't have the right to conduct an invasive pat-down or electronic strip search until and unless you have a bona fide reason to suspect that I might be a danger to other airline passengers, and no, buying a ticket is not a "reasonable suspicion."
...americans are cowardly people taking their own safety to absurd levels. Goes right along with bankrupting yourself to fight a "war".
I wish I could argue with you and tell you why you're wrong...but you aren't. Yeah, there are individuals here in the U.S. that still have cojones -- I hope I'm one of them -- but by and large, we have become a nation of wusses. Sigh...
Do you think TSA actually helps the economy? After finding out about TSA's grope/nudie scan policies last fall, I took exactly one airline flight, an already scheduled business trip, and that only after verifying that there were no x-ray scanners at either airport I was flying to. My wife and I planned to take a trip to Hawaii this year, but it's not gonna happen until the TSA backs off a bit on their policies. I know I'm not alone, because I've heard similar comments from many, many people in various on-line forums. I haven't researched the stats for hard numbers, but based on comments I've heard and what I've witnessed in my home state -- which has an economy heavily driven by tourism -- I'd guess that TSA is roughly equivalent to 9/11 in terms of how much economic damage they can do to the airlines and tourism in general.
Yes, actually, I do. Do you?
To make your golf ball example a little more realistic, cover your groin with about a foot of bubble wrap and repeat your experiment. Can you feel the golf ball now? No? Nor would the earth feel the impact from the asteroid, as it would explode and burn up way, way, way up high in the upper atmosphere. The effects on the earth would be essentially nil.
Well...it was a total no-brainer copyright case, yes. But I fail to see how the DMCA should be involved in this one. If the plaintiff sued exclusively on the basis of the DMCA, I can totally see how the lower courts would side with the radio station, since the radio station didn't strip copyright information from a digital image. I could get the DMCA bit, if they removed a watermark or EXIF data from an image they scrounged on the web, but that's not what they did. Rather, they converted an actual, physical photograph into an electronic format.
Not being a lawyer and all that, I'm probably missing all kinds of details that are relevant, but in my tin-foil-hat mind, I can see this opening up all kinds of scary precedents. For example, could an architect sue for DMCA violations if you take a vacation photograph of a building she designed, with your spouse/kids/cute bystander in front of the plaque that tells who designed the building and uploading it to your Flickr page? After all, there's not that much difference between a digital camera and a scanner when you think about it. Just sayin'...
From the TFS: "...the appeals court said that a photo credit printed in the gutter of a magazine [emphasis mine]..." Yes, there are print magazines that are also published in electronic format, but TFS sounds like it was the print version, which TFA corroborates: "After the image appeared in the magazine, someone at WKXW scanned it without permission [emphasis mine, again]..."
The radio station published it electronically, but the original image was published on paper and scanned by the radio station.
While my sympathies are with the photographer in this instance and while I can easily see how the radio station's actions violated copyright on the image, I agree with GPP -- how, exactly, does the DIGITAL Millenium Copyright Act apply in this case? They weren't removing copyright/accreditation from an electronic format. I'm no lawyer, but it seems really asinine to apply the DMCA here. Obviously, however, the judge disagrees, and his opinion carries a lot more weight than mine.
Like you, I'm 40, and like you, I cut my programming teeth on the C-64 (among others). I started writing code because because I didn't have *ANY* software for my first computer (a ZX-81). I pursued programming through junior high and high school because I wanted to fly...but at thirteen and with no income, that dream was a long way off (four years is an eternity when you're a teenager). So, I tried to write a helicopter flight simulator. I didn't have a snowball's chance with what I knew at the time, but I learned a lot about programming, which eventually lead to a job that paid enough for me to get a pilot's license.
As I said elsewhere in the comments, provide kids with the right motivation, and you'll be surprised at what they can do.
Are you saying OOP but meaning structured programming, by any chance? My biggest concern about BASIC -- and it was my first programming language too, at roughly the same time frame -- is that it all but actively encourages writing spaghetti code. IMHO, while OOP can certainly wait until later, writing structured code ought to be taught from the very beginning.
Really? Recursion was that difficult for you? That was one of the more intuitive concepts for me in my college CS courses. Pointers took a while to wrap my head around, and to this day, I still find pointers cumbersome to use, even though I get the concept now. It's one of the two main reasons I went into system administration rather than programming -- I just couldn't get the knack of C, since pointers are so integral to the language. I found that I was more suited to scripting in Perl, Python, Bash, etc. than writing large programs in C/C++, etc.
IMHO, most of the problem is cultural, not a lack of potential. I knew a man who went to Poland several years ago, and took a bunch of footballs to give to the kids there. None of them had any idea what a football was. However, he noticed that many of the kids there were playing chess every chance they had. Here in the States, we worship our athletes and sports stars. In Poland, their heroes were the chess grandmasters. What do you see in our media? "Beavis and Butthead", "Dumb and Dumber", etc. As long as we continue to glamorize intellectual mediocrity, we'll have trouble raising up new generations of programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and such.
If nothing else, join a FOSS project and start contributing code. Then you'll have something to show on your resume, even if it's not "professional" (i.e., paid) work.
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The risk would still be non-zero, and in some cases -- especially in some corporate IT environments (for example, banks) -- it simply isn't worth it.
Having said that, if I found a USB stick in a corporation that had such a policy, I'd take it home, build a PC from spares I have laying around (yes, I have enough spares to do that) install Ubuntu or Gentoo from a live CD, disconnect the PC from my home network and then investigate the USB stick. Even though the risk of such a procedure is still slightly greater than zero, I'd call it safe enough.
And despite attitudes like that, people still wonder why those Nazis in corporate IT do things like disallowing USB mass storage devices, filtering HTTP traffic through a proxy, etc.
Decaff, bro.
Because that option doesn't scale well? Also, unless you are using surface-mount components, you will also need a 1/16 inch drill bit and a drill to drill the holes for the leads of the parts you will be soldering to the PCB.
Because it is easy to remember, and given a choice between "easy" and "secure" most people will choose "easy" unless forced to do otherwise. Even here on /. you see some pretty lively arguments between good password security and real-world usability. Think about it this way: do you use Enigmail or a VPN to correspond with others, or do you send your SMTP traffic in clear text from the free WiFi hotspot at the coffee shop?
Well, the obvious way to interpret his sentence is, "Be sure to stop anyone from messing with your phone when you aren't there to protect your phone" which is, of course, a trifle difficult to do. However, it could also be interpreted as "Don't leave your phone unattended in an unsafe location" which is quite a bit more reasonable, and is, I suspect, what O.P. meant by what he said.
Why is Mozilla under attack for this, when MS released three browsers in under 12 months?
Maybe because no one in their right mind wants their browser to be like Microsoft's?
Fire fox is not fucking IE6.
I certainly hope not. The offspring of that unholy union would be truly horrendous!
Blame AOL for making every minor point release a new version, because other companies felt the need to release "new major versions" to be perceived by the clueless public as releasing an update as often. If Google is releasing new major versions(based on version number) every few months, then Mozilla HAS to, or the clueless masses will think that Firefox is not advancing as quickly.
Are you kidding me? Most of the "clueless masses" barely know what Firefox is, much less what version they are running. I talk to "field techs" all day who, when I ask if they are using Windows or Ubuntu (we provide Windows laptops and Ubuntu desktops for our remote sites), tell me, "Uhhh....it's a Dell." Then, when their e-mail passwords expire every 90 days, they can't figure out how to change them, even though we've had that password rotation policy for THREE FRIGGING YEARS now. Last night, while helping my mom pick out a new laptop, she asked me if she could "run Google" on the one I recommended :facepalm: My wife can't understand why she lost all of her e-mails when she canceled our Internet account with our (former) ISP and she had only used web mail rather than the Apple Mail program. THIS is how computer illiterate the "clueless masses" are. I guarantee you that 99+% of them have no idea if they are running version 5.x, 4.x or 1.x...nor do they care.
1) Because he's right.
2) Because America receives lots of income from tourism, and the more people like him who choose to vacation elsewhere, the more our economy suffers, and
3) Did I mention that he's right?
I, too, have decided not to fly anywhere in the U.S. anymore due to the nonsense at the airports, and I am a U.S. citizen living in the U.S. Worse than that, I live in Alaska, so if I want to go anywhere, flying is pretty much my only choice. It would take up most of my vacation just trying to get through Canada to go anywhere else. But I REFUSE to subject myself or my family to TSA. I hope more people make the same choice, because once the airlines start to feel the pinch, maybe they can generate enough leverage to get the policies to change.
'Kay. I vote "Don't", then.
Yeah, exactly! Fortunately, TSA only conducts searches at airports before you board the airplane and they never, ever, direct train passengers to a secure area (where it wasn't otherwise necessary for them to go) at the END of a trip BY TRAIN. Because that would just be absurd. How soon will the government apologists be arguing that if you leave your house, you are giving implied consent to be searched?
How about the government goes back to respecting the spirit of the 4th Amendment? You don't have the right to conduct an invasive pat-down or electronic strip search until and unless you have a bona fide reason to suspect that I might be a danger to other airline passengers, and no, buying a ticket is not a "reasonable suspicion."
...americans are cowardly people taking their own safety to absurd levels. Goes right along with bankrupting yourself to fight a "war".
I wish I could argue with you and tell you why you're wrong...but you aren't. Yeah, there are individuals here in the U.S. that still have cojones -- I hope I'm one of them -- but by and large, we have become a nation of wusses. Sigh...
Do you think TSA actually helps the economy? After finding out about TSA's grope/nudie scan policies last fall, I took exactly one airline flight, an already scheduled business trip, and that only after verifying that there were no x-ray scanners at either airport I was flying to. My wife and I planned to take a trip to Hawaii this year, but it's not gonna happen until the TSA backs off a bit on their policies. I know I'm not alone, because I've heard similar comments from many, many people in various on-line forums. I haven't researched the stats for hard numbers, but based on comments I've heard and what I've witnessed in my home state -- which has an economy heavily driven by tourism -- I'd guess that TSA is roughly equivalent to 9/11 in terms of how much economic damage they can do to the airlines and tourism in general.
Hey, genius...is a CD digital or analog? :rolleyes:
As long as we've got our towels, we're fine :) But we should probably scarf down some peanuts; we'll need the salt.
Yes, actually, I do. Do you? To make your golf ball example a little more realistic, cover your groin with about a foot of bubble wrap and repeat your experiment. Can you feel the golf ball now? No? Nor would the earth feel the impact from the asteroid, as it would explode and burn up way, way, way up high in the upper atmosphere. The effects on the earth would be essentially nil.
Well...it was a total no-brainer copyright case, yes. But I fail to see how the DMCA should be involved in this one. If the plaintiff sued exclusively on the basis of the DMCA, I can totally see how the lower courts would side with the radio station, since the radio station didn't strip copyright information from a digital image. I could get the DMCA bit, if they removed a watermark or EXIF data from an image they scrounged on the web, but that's not what they did. Rather, they converted an actual, physical photograph into an electronic format.
Not being a lawyer and all that, I'm probably missing all kinds of details that are relevant, but in my tin-foil-hat mind, I can see this opening up all kinds of scary precedents. For example, could an architect sue for DMCA violations if you take a vacation photograph of a building she designed, with your spouse/kids/cute bystander in front of the plaque that tells who designed the building and uploading it to your Flickr page? After all, there's not that much difference between a digital camera and a scanner when you think about it. Just sayin'...
From the TFS: "...the appeals court said that a photo credit printed in the gutter of a magazine [emphasis mine]..." Yes, there are print magazines that are also published in electronic format, but TFS sounds like it was the print version, which TFA corroborates: "After the image appeared in the magazine, someone at WKXW scanned it without permission [emphasis mine, again]..."
The radio station published it electronically, but the original image was published on paper and scanned by the radio station.
While my sympathies are with the photographer in this instance and while I can easily see how the radio station's actions violated copyright on the image, I agree with GPP -- how, exactly, does the DIGITAL Millenium Copyright Act apply in this case? They weren't removing copyright/accreditation from an electronic format. I'm no lawyer, but it seems really asinine to apply the DMCA here. Obviously, however, the judge disagrees, and his opinion carries a lot more weight than mine.
Exactly.
Like you, I'm 40, and like you, I cut my programming teeth on the C-64 (among others). I started writing code because because I didn't have *ANY* software for my first computer (a ZX-81). I pursued programming through junior high and high school because I wanted to fly...but at thirteen and with no income, that dream was a long way off (four years is an eternity when you're a teenager). So, I tried to write a helicopter flight simulator. I didn't have a snowball's chance with what I knew at the time, but I learned a lot about programming, which eventually lead to a job that paid enough for me to get a pilot's license.
As I said elsewhere in the comments, provide kids with the right motivation, and you'll be surprised at what they can do.
Are you saying OOP but meaning structured programming, by any chance? My biggest concern about BASIC -- and it was my first programming language too, at roughly the same time frame -- is that it all but actively encourages writing spaghetti code. IMHO, while OOP can certainly wait until later, writing structured code ought to be taught from the very beginning.
Really? Recursion was that difficult for you? That was one of the more intuitive concepts for me in my college CS courses. Pointers took a while to wrap my head around, and to this day, I still find pointers cumbersome to use, even though I get the concept now. It's one of the two main reasons I went into system administration rather than programming -- I just couldn't get the knack of C, since pointers are so integral to the language. I found that I was more suited to scripting in Perl, Python, Bash, etc. than writing large programs in C/C++, etc.
I am absolutely confident i could learn it quickly if i had to.
If you have any ability to program at all, you could. It was one of the easiest-to-learn languages I ever used.
+1
IMHO, most of the problem is cultural, not a lack of potential. I knew a man who went to Poland several years ago, and took a bunch of footballs to give to the kids there. None of them had any idea what a football was. However, he noticed that many of the kids there were playing chess every chance they had. Here in the States, we worship our athletes and sports stars. In Poland, their heroes were the chess grandmasters. What do you see in our media? "Beavis and Butthead", "Dumb and Dumber", etc. As long as we continue to glamorize intellectual mediocrity, we'll have trouble raising up new generations of programmers, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and such.
If nothing else, join a FOSS project and start contributing code. Then you'll have something to show on your resume, even if it's not "professional" (i.e., paid) work.