In this case, it was a little vague. I had an inkling you were being sarcastic (see my previous post), but I wasn't at all sure. I assume everyone else who replied like I did was equally on the fence.
I don't know if you omitted the tag hoping people would catch it implicitly, or if you really believe what you are saying. I'm hoping it's the former, but just in case it isn't...
Firing people from their jobs because you don't like their political positions is the very definition of tyranny.
Just because you don't like Obama doesn't mean you are racist. I think Obama and GWB are quite possibly tied as the worst presidents in the history of this country (I never thought I would long for the "good old days" when Clinton was president, but...well...I do), but that's because of politics, not race. It is, at best, disingenuous -- actually, I'd say racist, absent some kind of proof -- to claim that I dislike Obama because of his race, but disliked GWB because of his political decisions.
Finally, I don't recall any provision anywhere in the Constitution or any of its amendments that says we have the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights, except where they are hateful. While I certainly wish that people could exercise judgment and self-control such that there were no longer any kind of hate speech (i.e., all of our discourses were logical, rational and devoid of emotional outbursts), I also wish that we exercised judgment and self-control so that there was no need for any kind of law at all. But that isn't likely to happen, and as a result, we get a choice: we get to freely express ourselves, in which case we get both the good and the bad, or we just get rid of the pretense of allowing free speech and instead become a nation of yes-men. Personally, I'd rather take the first option because that seems to be a much lesser evil. The real test of free speech is how we react to speech that we find offensive. If that's true, you don't really believe in free speech at all -- you believe in the right to not be offended. I, on the other hand, place much, much more value on finding the truth which is absolutely dependent upon being allowed to discuss our differing views, even if we offend people in that search for truth.
Not sure if you've heard, but for the last ten years, Commanders-in-Chief from both of the major political parties have been busy stacking that judicial branch with their poster boys/girls (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito courtesy of GWB, and Sotomayer and Kagan courtesy of Obama) while doing everythingtheycan to gutand/orreinterpret the Constitution . I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope that the courts are going to do a whole lot to help out...if you even manage to get to the courts before being dragged off to Gitmo for providing "material aid or support" to "terrorist organizations".
And this is just the @#$!!! we have heard about. Somehow I suspect, no matter how bad you think it is...it's actually much, much worse.
# Voluntary: The identity ecosystem is voluntary. You will still be able to surf the Web, write a blog, participate in an online discussion, and post comments to a wiki anonymously or using a pseudonym. You would choose when to use your trusted ID. When you want stronger identity protection, you use your credential, enabling higher levels of trust and security.
Yeah...I trust the government's statements about privacy and security just about as much as I trust anything Blogger Bob says: not at all.
I'm not an RF engineer, and I don't pretend to have more than average (for an IT guy) understanding of radio. However, my experience corresponds with what you describe. I was able to get a usable signal in my old neighborhood, but running kismet, I could see that the spectrum was getting pretty crowded. My brother, OTOH, used to find his laptop connecting to a neighbor's WIFI more readily than his own more often than not because his whole neighborhood was running full-power and there were no uncluttered frequencies available (this was pre-802.11n).
That's one of the fringe benefits I've noticed from recently relocating to the boondocks in my home town: my nearest neighbor is 1/4 mile away, so just about the only RF I pick up at my house is the RF that my own equipment is generating. I even had to install a cellular repeater in my house because cell phone signals are fair to poor outside and nil inside.
Three karates will give you a black eye, a broken arm and a voice permanently one octave higher than it should be. Three carats, on the other hand, will give you anywhere from 24 hours to one year of marital bliss, depending upon how wisely you chose your spouse:D
But even if it is harder to break into a cloud service, the reward:effort ratio is much, MUCH higher for the cloud service.
Break into Joe Luser's home PC, and you get his porn collection, the e-mail addresses in his address book, and *maybe* the user names and passwords to get into his financial accounts. Repeat for a sufficiently large number of home PCs and you might have something of value...if you don't get caught first.
Break into facebook/wordpress/$RANDOM_CLOUD_SERVICE and you get that information for *EVERY USER ON THAT SERVICE*...and you only had to get root access on one host.
Unfortunately, it's not the call center drone who is going to enact a policy change. That person may very well understand and agree with what you are saying -- and may even complain to his/her boss that this is a stupid practice -- but the odds of it trickling up to the decision maker who has the power to enact a change is virtually nil, because even if the call center drone gets it, chances are the call center manager *won't* and even if that manager does, there's about a hundred thousand layers of middle-management between between that person and the real decision maker.
As if that wasn't reason enough -- and it is -- there's the fact that it is quite simply easier for the bank to write off the losses caused by such insecure practices than it is to create policies that provide *real* security. It's all about CYA -- show that you are complying with your SoX/PCI/other-TLA policies and you're good, even if in the real world, your policies suck.
Maybe, but that would be a possible consequence of my e-mail being stolen *AND* me being stupid -- not just a possible consequence of my e-mail addy being compromised.
I'm not going to give you my credentials just because you ask for them in an e-mail. In fact, the first thing I do when I get an e-mail that looks at all suspicious (and asking me for any personally identifiable information in an e-mail is a sure-fire way to trigger my alarms) is blow open the headers and see where the e-mail came from. Then and only then will I even consider opening up a web browser and going to my bank/other web site *by clicking on my bookmark* (rather than the link in the e-mail) and searching for the web page to update my information.
Hold on -- I just got an e-mail saying I can win ${ITEM_OF_VALUE_TO_ME} by clicking a link...BRB...
There's a big difference between being the biggest, toughest kid on the playground that no one wants to mess with because they *know* they will get pummeled if they try, and being the bully on the playground who goes around picking fights.
I know what you are trying to say, but just think about it for a second: "prevention of war" by going to war? And you said that with a straight face? (Well, typed it, anyway).
If you really think dropping bombs on people is the best way to prevent war, then I humbly suggest you read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson.
To some extent, you are both right, but you are both somewhat mistaken as well.
In my experience, the Japanese people respected honor (at all costs) and they respected aesthetics (the cherry blossoms and gardens bluefoxlucid mentions). In many ways, Japanese culture was indeed very beautiful. Respect for honor and beauty still exists in Japan, or at least it did when I moved back to the U.S. in 1983; I can't say how or if it has changed since then. I have never lived in a place that works with nature the way the Japanese people do. In the U.S., we bulldoze mountains to build highways through obstacles; in Japan, roads wind with natural lay of the land. Traditional Japanese architecture reflects the environment around it; Americans build ugly boxes that look starkly out-of-place in the landscape.
However, for all of the aesthetic sense, traditional Japanese culture had its dark side, as well. I loved the Japanese people while I was there, so don't get me wrong here, but bluefoxlucid is seriously deluded to think that they have a "strong respect for life". To the Japanese, honor is everything and life meant nothing. If you were dishonored, you were nothing in Japan. I had a Japanese culture teacher while I lived there whose wife left him, and by doing so, she dishonored him. Because honor meant everything, and life meant nothing, the only honorable option he had was to regain his honor by committing suicide, so he hung himself. In another example, I knew an American family that wanted to adopt a Japanese child. They met a single Japanese woman who was pregnant (already a dishonor in such a strict, traditional society). The family already had a son, so they said they would be willing to adopt the woman's child if it was a girl. When the baby was born, it was a boy, so the family said no. The adoption agency they were working with told them, "You do realize that if you don't adopt this boy, the mother is going to put him in a plastic bag and suffocate him, because being an unwed mother is a huge dishonor to her and her family?" That's hardly a "strong respect for life." (The family adopted the boy, by the way, and later adopted a girl from someone else).
And this is pretty much what happened in China during the Japanese occupation in WWII. If you were defeated in battle, you were dishonored in your defeat. Consequently, the (defeated) Chinese were sub-human in Japanese philosophy, and therefore did not deserve to live. If you were to die bravely on the field of battle, that was one thing -- you died with honor, and therefore deserved their respect -- but if you surrendered, then you were a disgraced coward, deserving only to die.
So while bluefoxlucid gets a lot right in his (?) post, you are correct that it is a very whitewashed, utopian view of Japanese culture, pre-WWII. There was an awful lot to admire in that culture, but there was a lot that was very brutal and very ugly as well, and it didn't all go away after the war.
Thank you for the correction. Although I did spend some time in Japan (over seven years), I was very young at the time and consequently, there are some gaps in my education. You have helped to fill in one of those gaps.
However, perhaps people might be more open to what you have to teach if you learn to be less abrasive in your approach. It was not really necessary to be quite so smug and condescending. Just a suggestion; take it for what you will.
Admittedly, you said "desktops", but I've got a counter-example for you.
Where I work, we recently were trying to figure out what to do with a quartet of older, out-of-warranty Dell PE2970 servers. They were perfectly good servers, but they were no longer covered under a maintenance contract, so using them for mission-critical services was rather like playing Russian roulette. They might last for another decade, or they might die tomorrow, and if they were to die tomorrow, we would have down time while performing an emergency migration to a new physical host.
However, we had just built a new virtual server pool with a smoking-fast SAN on the back-end, and it occurred to us that these PE2970s would be great as a second pool of servers. This would allow us to continue to use these servers, rather than replace them with new hardware. The machines would be out of warranty so a hardware failure still means we have a physical machine down, but with four of them and with Xen's ability to move virtual machines between physical hosts in a server pool, a catastrophic failure of a physical host would only mean dropping a couple of packets until the virtual host was running on another physical machine (we've tested it, and it works as advertised).
But there's a catch: Xen will only allow you to create a pool of servers that share the exact same type of CPU. Unfortunately, each of the 2970s had a different AMD CPU, so we bought three of the fastest CPU that was still available (a 2387, IIRC) and upgraded the three different machines.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it was a little vague. I had an inkling you were being sarcastic (see my previous post), but I wasn't at all sure. I assume everyone else who replied like I did was equally on the fence.
I don't know if you omitted the tag hoping people would catch it implicitly, or if you really believe what you are saying. I'm hoping it's the former, but just in case it isn't...
Firing people from their jobs because you don't like their political positions is the very definition of tyranny.
Just because you don't like Obama doesn't mean you are racist. I think Obama and GWB are quite possibly tied as the worst presidents in the history of this country (I never thought I would long for the "good old days" when Clinton was president, but...well...I do), but that's because of politics, not race. It is, at best, disingenuous -- actually, I'd say racist, absent some kind of proof -- to claim that I dislike Obama because of his race, but disliked GWB because of his political decisions.
Finally, I don't recall any provision anywhere in the Constitution or any of its amendments that says we have the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights, except where they are hateful. While I certainly wish that people could exercise judgment and self-control such that there were no longer any kind of hate speech (i.e., all of our discourses were logical, rational and devoid of emotional outbursts), I also wish that we exercised judgment and self-control so that there was no need for any kind of law at all. But that isn't likely to happen, and as a result, we get a choice: we get to freely express ourselves, in which case we get both the good and the bad, or we just get rid of the pretense of allowing free speech and instead become a nation of yes-men. Personally, I'd rather take the first option because that seems to be a much lesser evil. The real test of free speech is how we react to speech that we find offensive. If that's true, you don't really believe in free speech at all -- you believe in the right to not be offended. I, on the other hand, place much, much more value on finding the truth which is absolutely dependent upon being allowed to discuss our differing views, even if we offend people in that search for truth.
Not sure if you've heard, but for the last ten years, Commanders-in-Chief from both of the major political parties have been busy stacking that judicial branch with their poster boys/girls (Roberts, Thomas, and Alito courtesy of GWB, and Sotomayer and Kagan courtesy of Obama) while doing everything they can to gut and/or reinterpret the Constitution . I'm not holding out a whole lot of hope that the courts are going to do a whole lot to help out...if you even manage to get to the courts before being dragged off to Gitmo for providing "material aid or support" to "terrorist organizations".
And this is just the @#$!!! we have heard about. Somehow I suspect, no matter how bad you think it is...it's actually much, much worse.
why aren't citizens revolting over this?
Because our government is revolting enough?
From the NIST NSTIC link in TFA:
# Voluntary: The identity ecosystem is voluntary. You will still be able to surf the Web, write a blog, participate in an online discussion, and post comments to a wiki anonymously or using a pseudonym. You would choose when to use your trusted ID. When you want stronger identity protection, you use your credential, enabling higher levels of trust and security.
Yeah...I trust the government's statements about privacy and security just about as much as I trust anything Blogger Bob says: not at all.
How is one supposed to run Ethernet throughout their apartment and then plug in their iPhone or Android?
Or, how do you run CAT-V in a 20-year-old log house like mine?
I'm not an RF engineer, and I don't pretend to have more than average (for an IT guy) understanding of radio. However, my experience corresponds with what you describe. I was able to get a usable signal in my old neighborhood, but running kismet, I could see that the spectrum was getting pretty crowded. My brother, OTOH, used to find his laptop connecting to a neighbor's WIFI more readily than his own more often than not because his whole neighborhood was running full-power and there were no uncluttered frequencies available (this was pre-802.11n).
That's one of the fringe benefits I've noticed from recently relocating to the boondocks in my home town: my nearest neighbor is 1/4 mile away, so just about the only RF I pick up at my house is the RF that my own equipment is generating. I even had to install a cellular repeater in my house because cell phone signals are fair to poor outside and nil inside.
Three karates will give you a black eye, a broken arm and a voice permanently one octave higher than it should be. Three carats, on the other hand, will give you anywhere from 24 hours to one year of marital bliss, depending upon how wisely you chose your spouse :D
</pedantic>
Gravitational lensing?
But even if it is harder to break into a cloud service, the reward:effort ratio is much, MUCH higher for the cloud service.
Break into Joe Luser's home PC, and you get his porn collection, the e-mail addresses in his address book, and *maybe* the user names and passwords to get into his financial accounts. Repeat for a sufficiently large number of home PCs and you might have something of value...if you don't get caught first.
Break into facebook/wordpress/$RANDOM_CLOUD_SERVICE and you get that information for *EVERY USER ON THAT SERVICE*...and you only had to get root access on one host.
Agreed.
Unfortunately, it's not the call center drone who is going to enact a policy change. That person may very well understand and agree with what you are saying -- and may even complain to his/her boss that this is a stupid practice -- but the odds of it trickling up to the decision maker who has the power to enact a change is virtually nil, because even if the call center drone gets it, chances are the call center manager *won't* and even if that manager does, there's about a hundred thousand layers of middle-management between between that person and the real decision maker.
As if that wasn't reason enough -- and it is -- there's the fact that it is quite simply easier for the bank to write off the losses caused by such insecure practices than it is to create policies that provide *real* security. It's all about CYA -- show that you are complying with your SoX/PCI/other-TLA policies and you're good, even if in the real world, your policies suck.
...And have those money put into schools to raise the educational levels so people will be smart enough not to mess with credits?
Education != intelligence. Actually, more to the point, wisdom != intelligence.
Maybe, but that would be a possible consequence of my e-mail being stolen *AND* me being stupid -- not just a possible consequence of my e-mail addy being compromised.
I'm not going to give you my credentials just because you ask for them in an e-mail. In fact, the first thing I do when I get an e-mail that looks at all suspicious (and asking me for any personally identifiable information in an e-mail is a sure-fire way to trigger my alarms) is blow open the headers and see where the e-mail came from. Then and only then will I even consider opening up a web browser and going to my bank/other web site *by clicking on my bookmark* (rather than the link in the e-mail) and searching for the web page to update my information.
Hold on -- I just got an e-mail saying I can win ${ITEM_OF_VALUE_TO_ME} by clicking a link...BRB...
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." --G.K. Chesterton (source)
Can we also settle, once and for all, to-may-toe vs. to-mah-toe, po-tay-toe vs. po-tah-toe, and a-pri-cot vs. ay-pri-cot?
IMHO, a little inconsistency adds spice to life. I'm glad not everyone is like me (as is, most likely, the rest of the world).
"Prepare," sure. "Go to," no.
There's a big difference between being the biggest, toughest kid on the playground that no one wants to mess with because they *know* they will get pummeled if they try, and being the bully on the playground who goes around picking fights.
I know what you are trying to say, but just think about it for a second: "prevention of war" by going to war? And you said that with a straight face? (Well, typed it, anyway).
If you really think dropping bombs on people is the best way to prevent war, then I humbly suggest you read Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson.
To some extent, you are both right, but you are both somewhat mistaken as well.
In my experience, the Japanese people respected honor (at all costs) and they respected aesthetics (the cherry blossoms and gardens bluefoxlucid mentions). In many ways, Japanese culture was indeed very beautiful. Respect for honor and beauty still exists in Japan, or at least it did when I moved back to the U.S. in 1983; I can't say how or if it has changed since then. I have never lived in a place that works with nature the way the Japanese people do. In the U.S., we bulldoze mountains to build highways through obstacles; in Japan, roads wind with natural lay of the land. Traditional Japanese architecture reflects the environment around it; Americans build ugly boxes that look starkly out-of-place in the landscape.
However, for all of the aesthetic sense, traditional Japanese culture had its dark side, as well. I loved the Japanese people while I was there, so don't get me wrong here, but bluefoxlucid is seriously deluded to think that they have a "strong respect for life". To the Japanese, honor is everything and life meant nothing. If you were dishonored, you were nothing in Japan. I had a Japanese culture teacher while I lived there whose wife left him, and by doing so, she dishonored him. Because honor meant everything, and life meant nothing, the only honorable option he had was to regain his honor by committing suicide, so he hung himself. In another example, I knew an American family that wanted to adopt a Japanese child. They met a single Japanese woman who was pregnant (already a dishonor in such a strict, traditional society). The family already had a son, so they said they would be willing to adopt the woman's child if it was a girl. When the baby was born, it was a boy, so the family said no. The adoption agency they were working with told them, "You do realize that if you don't adopt this boy, the mother is going to put him in a plastic bag and suffocate him, because being an unwed mother is a huge dishonor to her and her family?" That's hardly a "strong respect for life." (The family adopted the boy, by the way, and later adopted a girl from someone else).
And this is pretty much what happened in China during the Japanese occupation in WWII. If you were defeated in battle, you were dishonored in your defeat. Consequently, the (defeated) Chinese were sub-human in Japanese philosophy, and therefore did not deserve to live. If you were to die bravely on the field of battle, that was one thing -- you died with honor, and therefore deserved their respect -- but if you surrendered, then you were a disgraced coward, deserving only to die.
So while bluefoxlucid gets a lot right in his (?) post, you are correct that it is a very whitewashed, utopian view of Japanese culture, pre-WWII. There was an awful lot to admire in that culture, but there was a lot that was very brutal and very ugly as well, and it didn't all go away after the war.
Just a suggestion, but I think you meant...:
sed "s/silicone/silicon/"
I imagine /. would be less of a distraction on an Osborne, as well...
Thank you for the correction. Although I did spend some time in Japan (over seven years), I was very young at the time and consequently, there are some gaps in my education. You have helped to fill in one of those gaps.
However, perhaps people might be more open to what you have to teach if you learn to be less abrasive in your approach. It was not really necessary to be quite so smug and condescending. Just a suggestion; take it for what you will.
Admittedly, you said "desktops", but I've got a counter-example for you.
Where I work, we recently were trying to figure out what to do with a quartet of older, out-of-warranty Dell PE2970 servers. They were perfectly good servers, but they were no longer covered under a maintenance contract, so using them for mission-critical services was rather like playing Russian roulette. They might last for another decade, or they might die tomorrow, and if they were to die tomorrow, we would have down time while performing an emergency migration to a new physical host.
However, we had just built a new virtual server pool with a smoking-fast SAN on the back-end, and it occurred to us that these PE2970s would be great as a second pool of servers. This would allow us to continue to use these servers, rather than replace them with new hardware. The machines would be out of warranty so a hardware failure still means we have a physical machine down, but with four of them and with Xen's ability to move virtual machines between physical hosts in a server pool, a catastrophic failure of a physical host would only mean dropping a couple of packets until the virtual host was running on another physical machine (we've tested it, and it works as advertised).
But there's a catch: Xen will only allow you to create a pool of servers that share the exact same type of CPU. Unfortunately, each of the 2970s had a different AMD CPU, so we bought three of the fastest CPU that was still available (a 2387, IIRC) and upgraded the three different machines.
Word count matters not.
Present yourself in haiku.
Concepts are retained.
No, make it a catchy marketing buzzword, like "B3" or "b-cubed"!
And suddenly, there was a great whooshing sound over the AC's head...