Gee, how very surprising. I knew without doubt that one of these would come.
If you're racist.. why dont you just come out and say it instead of dancing around the bush.
Uh huh. This is the classic lobbyist effort that is used extensively in Canada and the United States by the pro-immigration movement to keep the majority from ever voicing their opinion: If you have an opinion about it and you're white, well damnit you're a racist! The `visible minority' comment indicates, obviously, that I wouldn't be aware if someone was hiring all Christians, or people with the first name Bob, but if a company is 100% ethnic Chinese, well then that's a little more obvious.
So your Canadian equity is being diluted? Oh dear, in that case what about the original native Canadians.. wasnt their Canadian equity diluted?
Here's another of the pro-immigration bullshit arguments: Well we can come and take what we'd like because 100s of years ago you did the same. Of course, almost all of these groups FERVENTLY protect the sanctity of THEIR homeland. The reality is that most of these "open the doors" people are VERY protective of their own homeland, and deep in their mind many keep the idea that at some point they'll go back.
The fact that there are that many immigrant resumes flying around means they are willing to work and harness resources..that's a good thing.
No it doesn't: It means that many aren't getting work because industry has found that foreign training and cultural barriers make it too difficult to get productive output.
A couple of quick points about headhunters and HR:
Most jobs that are advertised are vapour positions: They don't exist, but are pretend positions to keep HR people employed (HR is one of those roles that almost certainly should be "outsourced" at most firms, as a sidenote).
Even if you're overwhelmingly qualified, your resume will be piled under thousands of applicants who are grossly underqualified and just email their resume to any and every job posting, hoping that random odds will get them a job. I've been involved in resume selection here in Ontario, and because our government continues to bring in >1% of the population in new immigrants annually (an insane number by any measure, especially during times of economic uncertainty, but that's just my personal opinion. Of course being a "whitey" I have no rights to voice my opinion about the dilution of my Canadian equity, or the fact that certain nations have been relegated to baby machines) about 99% of the resumes were new arrivals who, without fail, relocate to Toronto. That's just a fact of interest.
The resume selection process says way more about the people reviewing the resumes than it does about you, the resume submitter. This is a very important point for those who feel rejected or slighted: When confronted with thousands of resumes, people will toss aside resumes for the most ridiculous of reasons (I heard about one woman who rejected a resume because the person said "Have a great day". To her that was being presumptuous). I've seen organizations where the visible minority owner strangely hires only his own race. I've seen organizations where inferior management looks for the bottom of the barrel (i.e. Those who're looking forward to that movie "XXX") to avoid any threat to their own job. I've seen firms where political infighting leads to the selection of people with very specific biases (some hiring people will toss aside a resume if you mention Linux: To them they equate you to that bearded stinky guy who won't shut up. Other places toss resumes if it mentions an MCSE because they happen to have a bonehead with an MCSE. I've seen people toss resumes where the application graduated from particular schools, all because they have a coworker who is a moron and is from that school).
While obviously going 150 is a more serious offense than going 120, I actually generally believe that people from out of province should go the posted limit (in the slow lane): They are unaware of the culture that prevails on the road, the role of law enforcement in tacit limits, and they didn't pay for the roads. I follow this rule when traveling, and when driving through the states I go the posted speed limit quite precisely (because I have no idea what speed limit prevailed over time, or which states heavily enforce it and which don't, etc.).
No, speed isn't the problem, dozy drivers are and there are way too many of these out there.
I've heard this a lot, and quite honestly I agree: You can count the moronic maneuvers on any fairly busy highway by the hundreds per hour. So we've established that in North America people don't pay enough attention to the road, they don't have enough respect for the seriousness of driving, and often they are undertrained: Do you think increasing the speed is going to help that? Speed has a direct correlation with possible reaction time, and personally failing to change other things I'd rather than Jimmy whose busy yapping on the cell phone while fiddling with the stereo were going 100km/h rather than 180km/h : That's almost 100% more time he has to see and react to a situation.
Speeding isnt dangerous per say its excessive speed differential that is dangerous.
True, but you'll never get a straw-poll consensus that'll lead to everyone going the same speed. Hence, it's folly to blame "the slow guy" for being the differential when there are countless differentials between the "fast guys" (some are speeding a bit, others moderately, and then there are the morons grossly speeding). Usually these morons believe that during busy rush hours the left lane should remain magically open for them (I've watched this with fascination in Toronto: The guy who thinks that in a highway about 90% saturated that somehow that left lane is going to be clear for him to shoot through), and for those moments that it isn't they weave in and out of traffic to maintain their speed. No amount of raising the speed limit (until you hit the speed of light) will stop differentials so long as the limit is more of a recommendation.
What needs to happen is that speed "limits" need to become "the speed" and people should be severely punished (and not just financially, but also loss of license, car repossession, etc) if they go outside of a given band : Only by getting people to god damn relax and just accept that they're going 120km/h, and that's it (there is no getting ahead so they should mellow and lay off the constant lane changes), will the dangers of differentials be alleviated.
In the real world, nobody ever drives the speed limit under good driving conditions.
Interesting observation about that: Here in Ontario we have a series of highways where the speed limit is 100km/h, but the tacit speed limit (which even the Provincial Police have acknowledged) is 120. On the 401 in sections it averages about 130. Fairly frequently you'll have some moron zipping along at 150+ (~100mph) AND ALMOST INVARIABLY THEY ARE FROM MICHIGAN. Could someone explain this to me? New Yorkers use our highways a lot and they seem to be a very good bunch of drivers generally, but about 95% of Michigan drivers are driving Ford Expeditions and they insist upon absolute and blatant disregard for a whole different countries laws. I find this especially fascinating as the last time I was in Michigan, about 95% of the cars were going the speed limit, a speed limit that is about 105km/h. If there's someone from Michigan who insists upon treating the 400 series highways as an autobahn, I'm curious to hear why you think you have that right.
...and cars going under that speed are actually at increased risk.
I have a real problem with this: the sad reality is that people aren't speeding on the highways to get somewhere faster, generally, they're speeding because of personality "issues" and a desire to demonstrate their "alpha-human" status by being the fastest man on the road (a particularly fascinating and simple study in this goes as such: Say you're in the "slow lane" going 120 and you're about to catch up to the next guy in the slow lane. You check and there's someone about 15 car lengths back in the "fast" lane, very marginally gaining on you: Perhaps 123 or so. You can easily clear the car ahead before they catch up to you, so you move over and commence overtaking-> A high percentage of the time the person in the left lane will then speed up, often considerably). This means that if you let people go 140, then there'll be the ahole going 160. If you let them go 160 then he'll go 180. Etc. Personally I'd love to see Ontario institute a system where the speed limit is raised to something more reasonable, say 120, but simultaneously the punishment for speeding is DRAMATICALLY increased -> Go 140 and you lose your license for a year. Go 150 and you lose your car. Etc.
your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means)
That's great at keeping your own kid alive, but how about the people they kill? Again here in Ontario, there have been an INFURIATING series of events involved asshole kids being "men" by pushing a gas pedal (and often they're in 117hp Honda Civics with "performance" improvements such as a stolen Acura logo). In a reason case a little sack of shit smashed into a truck causing a 6 month pregnant woman to lose her baby. His punishment will be a slap on the wrist. In another case a pair of 17 year olds raced on a city street, lost control, and killed a teen walking down the street, minding his own business: They got a 45 day weekend sentence. I think the only time that our roads will get better is when driving is treated with the seriousness it deserves, and people who intentionally perform moronic maneuvers lose their license for years at a time.
I wouldn't say that I'm overly cynical about police: I blame society just as much because, as public servants, they really are doing pretty much what we've asked for. Many people have a "oh, don't worry about it: That's what insurance is for" attitude that permeates the "personal theft is no biggie" situation, but the problem is that that encourages and breeds crime. Car thefts (and the incidental costs of them being used for joy riding, crash up derbies, etc) are a HUGE problem in my area, but again everyone has a "no biggie" attitude about it, despite the fact that in the end we all are paying for every penny of loss and damage (and, of course, because car thefts aren't heavily pursued, thieves steal cars to use as transport for even bigger crimes. It's the old broken window effect).
Considering that pawn shops cater, generally, to the dregs of society, I find it very hard to believe that they would do anything more than an empty gesture towards law enforcement: Pawn shops wouldn't exist without people ripping off jewellery from their parents, or B&Eing their neighbours. Perhaps pawn shops offer up a sacrifice to the law enforcement gods every now and then, but it certainly wouldn't be their norm.
Pawn shops exist primarily because the reality is that police, at least in most places, really don't care about "petty theft": It is VERY unlikely that they would put out any effort whatsoever to check pawn shops for stolen goods, or to watch Ebay, etc. A friend's laptop was stolen from a coworker's car a while back while they ate lunch in a nearby restaurant (in the middle of the day), and they could actually visibly SEE the greasy finger prints of the culprit(s) all over the top of the window where they pulled it out. Did the police take fingerprints, even when asked to? Nope, it's "just a laptop" and isn't worth their top. At MOST most police limit pawn shop enforcement to "when someone sees something of their own for sale in a pawnshop and won't stop calling us to do something about it". Personally I find this fact, the ignorance of most police to crimes against personal property, an outrageous situation: These same police will blanket a neighbourhood with dozens of cars if someone stole a case from the liquor store or shoplifted a sharpie from Kmart.
Re:Sigh, More /. Conspiracy Theories
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A "good" business decision by Microsoft is often very bad for Microsoft's competitors. Don't get me wrong, either: I am not anti-Microsoft by any measure of the imagination (ironically I'm working on an IIS/SQL Server project in another window at this very moment, and I do almost entirely Microsoft platform consulting work), but rather I am realistic, and every single decision Microsoft makes has underlying motives. They might be aligned with other peoples, and sometimes they might be best for the computer industry as a whole, but sometimes they aren't: It's pretty naive to presume that it's "conspiracy theories" to assess why Microsoft does what they do.
You sort of contradict yourself in any case: You claim that they are "making.NET viable by supporting it on the world's most popular web browser" (presuming you mean web server), but then you berate those who think it's "some plot by Micro$oft to take over the world" : Wouldn't that be exactly why they're targeting the most popular web platform?
.NET did not invent web services
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Way before.NET there were websites offering up data in some documented format, intended for it to be parsed and used by custom clients..NET did not invent web services, nor is it really a revolution in web services (I implemented projects using "web services" as a control and monitoring infrastructure for power generation projects years ago). At best you could say that.NET makes it a little bit easier to put together the starting blocks for a web service (though, like always, the zero-to-demo time has very little to do with the timelines of an actual project, hence why most VB projects fail miserably regardless of the quick initial wizard "productivity").
This is a very important point because it seems like a lot of people are willing to hand Microsoft some sort of invention credits for web services, when the reality is that where appropriate web services are a no brainer extension of the basic paradigm of the net (hell, POP3 could be considered a "web service": I don't have to use Outlook Web Access! Again, long before.NET Yahoo could serve up stock quotes in CSV format from their website via a particular get string).
I should also mention that lots of people involved with spec'ing systems often want to avoid single vendor "lock-in", and this may very well be the ticket that gets Microsoft in the door: "Don't worry about having all your software developed for the.NET platform, because if MS really pissed you off you can (theoretically) switch over to FreeBSD/Apache". With all of the "monopolistic" press that Microsoft has been getting, this is a very important factor for becoming a chosen technology these days.
At a prior contract I literally heard this play out, with management concerned about Microsoft lock-in, and I heard a Microsoft keener (a VB-no-idea-how-to-program moron) exclaim that Microsoft "Soon would have.NET on all sorts of other platforms....like Java!".
The "web service" model that Microsoft and IBM has pushed has nothing to do with.NET (though, from a technical perspective, it may very well be implemented in.NET on the server side, it could equally be implemented in PHP, Java, etc), but rather standards such as SOAP and friends.
The only real advantage I can see to Microsoft supporting.NET is the old "lure 'em in" technique: Lots of otherwise anti-MS open sourcers will run out and install.NET on their Apache servers (thereby legitimizing Microsoft while cutting the foundations out of their own arguments) and may very well develop projects based on it for clients and employers. Soon enough they'll have deployed ".NET" solutions that would run even better if you use SQL Server rather than Oracle (because of course with SQL Server you can use the super high performance, SQL Server only ADO.NET objects), and of course it'll run best on its native platform: Windows.NET Server.
Re:Cool... or Uncool?
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Microsoft really is doing the exact same tactic that Sun has attempted with Java: Propagate your standard on many platforms to get wide interest and adoption, with the natural goal that people will eventually migrate to the one "preferred", "superior" platform when the barriers to switching are low enough (which with.NET web applications with text configurations would be trivially low: Move some web folders). I don't think there is any surprize that Microsoft is trying this, though you have to wonder why anyone developing for.NET wouldn't be using a Windows platform machine anyways (which is why the non-Windows platform is so marginal of importance).
On top of that, you don't need something quite so overt as a non-supported.NET version 2 to close the door: All you need is a subtle performance advantage with the preferred platform, and just a general instance of "Quirks" on the non-preferred platform (and I guarantee that mono is not 100% compatible with.NET: It'll be 99.99%, with those tiny quirks every now and then that make you go "Damnit...why am I not using the official platform?"
The last time we saw something on this scale it was followed by a world-wide economic "downturn" that lasted the better part of an entire generation (fifteen or so years.)
The world today has virtually nothing in parallel with the worlds of the great depression, yet that doesn't seem to stop it from being brought up every cyclical 6 years or so. Sortof like how every two-bit third world dictator is the "next Hitler" : The analogies get old after a while (my god: I just berated someone and used the "Usenet Hitler rule"....I guess I just lost:-)).
As a note, I heard this past Thursday or Friday that the market has already lost more than the '29 crash, but I don't want to give too much credence to that until I can know what is being compared and how; it's very easy to lie with numbers (there's a pun in there somewhere, but I'm not going to fish for it, thank you.)
Firstly, most "OH MY GOD!" scenarios talk about points rather than percentages, and of course they are absolutely uncomparable and are nothing but fodder for news companies looking for BIG NEWS (and where there is no big news, they just invent it). Statements such as "biggest point drop ever!" are absolutely ridiculous comparisons because of course a 100 point drop in the 20s was huge, but is a blip nowadays.
Remember that the stock market doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It doesn't? Explain the UNBELIEVABLE and hard to comprehend runup of tech stocks a couple of years ago for me then. Not only was there no profits in most of these companies, there was no reasonable expectation of profits anytime in the distant future, yet that didn't stop them from spiralling upwards on the stock charts. The stock market, and I mean this literally, shares a lot in common with pyramid schemes: When they run out of suckers who are looking for a quick payoff, the collapse comes quick. The simple reality is that wealth is not created on the stock markets (apart from through inflation and GDP/population growth), but rather it is just redistributed, and this means that when reckoning day comes every now and then there will be `corrections' like this.
I have a relative whose been out of work for sometime, and for YEARS now he has been proclaiming the Next Great Depression. Why? Because it legitimizes his position. I have no idea what your situation is, but I always find it fascinating when people are willing to proclaim that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Bah.
How lame to claim that (s)he's "affiliated with the RIAA/MPAA" for arguing in a manner that you disagree with. Seriously, that is as pathetic as mentioning Hitler in days of yore on Usenet: Instantly you've lost the argument.
People's buying habits tend to stay the same, or become invigored. They rarely buy CD's b/c most stuff is crap -- i.e., one hit song, 10 filler songs. If anything, file sharing has been good for the music industry because its generated alot more interest in music.
Keep on convincing yourself of that. You make your argument transparent when you claim that "most stuff is crap": Why don't you give some examples? The reality is that most CDs "one hit song" is the worst of the CD, but it just happens to have the type of mass appeal and middle of the road attributes that it becomes a "hit", but the "non-hit" status of the other 10 songs says NOTHING about their quality, or lack thereof. If, of course, all you care about is putting the song that's player 40 times a day on the radio on repeat in your car stereo so you can go cruisin' the strip in your Tercel, then maybe the mass appeal of a song is what defines how good it is (and you should limit your purchases to "Dance Beats 2002" and other such compilation CDs), but the rest of us realize that when you play a CD from beginning to end you find things to appreciate in virtually every song. The `crap' argument is instantly moot anyways: If people won't buy it because it's "crap", then what the hell are they wasting their time and hard drive space pirating it for?
You realize how hopeless it is to convince the self-delusional, don't you? These people will rant on about how they just wish that they could personally hand over money to the artists, and then they'll be the first to call the same music "garbage" if such a tip jar were created and the empirical evidence of cobweb covered port 80s was blatant. These people will alternate between "I buy more CDs!" postings in one discussion, to "All music is garbage nowadays! It's all boom boom boom so I therefore rip it!" postings in another, all depending on the slant of the article and whichever study they think they're refuting. These people will defend what they do using cave man "what's stopping me?" tragedy of the commons epitomes, all the while pretending that somehow they're looking out for artists by scamming their music online. These people will slam the RIAA while busy filling their MP3 collections full of RIAA sponsored artists (there are hundreds of thousands of non-RIAA sponsored artists, but don't expect these people to know who they are or where to find them: They're just busy ripping what they hear on the "evil RIAA controlled radio"). These people will slam the record industry when it doesn't support the little guy, but then they'll slam the record company because it subsidizes the little guy with part of the royalty by successful acts.
It really is sad seeing what goes on on Slashdot, and society in general: When people will spin any web, regardless of how ridiculous or knowingly fraudulent, they define the decline of democracy: People who don't care about what's right, or what's reasonable and honest, but just about how they can get more for their greedy selves, no matter the price. As you've seen, there is endless justification on Slashdot for music and software piracy, from "I wouldn't have bought it anyways" to "it's all garbage anyways, so ignore the astounding irony of me pirating it" to "well the artist doesn't get 100% of what I pay, so therefore I'm helping them by giving them nothing...uh, I'll buy a T-shirt at their concert which I almost certainly won't actually go to". These people sound like carjackers and B&E experts who are sure that, damnit, the world owes them something.
While history will tell who's right, I highly doubt that the "downturn" will last more than a half a year more, and unlikely that it'll be a "sucky next few years". There has been a MASSIVE cleaning of the house, and quite honestly this is merely a "back to reality" sanity-check (there never was a "new economy", or "e-economy", and the mad rush of retail investments into the stock market fueled an insanity rush: Few bothering to take time to assess the reality of the situation...that would slow them down from the dream of MAKE MONEY FAST). The saddest thing is that there's been a gross OVER-correction in the tech industry: People got so jaded that their Dr Koop and pets.com investments went under (you mean people won't pay $45 shipping to get a $5 bag of kitty litter? Who'da thunk it?) that they now shun the entire tech community, despite a tremendous array of great investment possibilities.
Of course the whole stock market really is very hard to differentiate from a pyramid scheme anyways: Even abstract notions like "P/E" are just attempts to legitimize the abstract notion that share ownership entails (apart from companies that issue dividends, which is a clear and obvious return on investment).
When organizations owe more money than they have in assets, current stockholders get NOTHING : Either the stock is voided and new ownership issues are tendered to the creditors, or the creditors are given such a massive issuance that current holders have virtually nothing. The "UUNet backbone" will most certainly be sold off to another party (for example, Microsoft) and the proceeds used to pay creditors.
Anyone who thinks that institutional holders who just took hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars in losses are all just kooks who don't see real value is crazy, and this stock would probably be worth nothing if there weren't so many "Gosh golly, it once was high so surely it must be sometime again!" misinformed bottom feeders.
It is amazing how the clue density in this thread appears to be minimal.
As a participant in this thread, let me say that it's even more amazing how much of a self-righteous dickhead you are, especially considering the fact that you posted a method absolutely void of any useful facts, nor even relating to the conversation that was being had.
Piece of advice: The next time you feel the urge to show your self-promoted superiority, add something useful or at least relevant to the conversation.
The problem with using things like IPSEC is that you need IPSEC servers which are your choke points, unless you want to have a configuration nightmare and manage thousands of independant IPSEC configs on thousands of machine
I really don't see how either SSH or IPSec is different in this regard, unless you're claiming that instead you run SSH on every machine (just as I could run IPSec on every machine, and of course firewall wise they'd be identical: You open port 22 TCP to everyone, and I'd open port 500 UDP to everyone. Of course actually doing that would be insanity, but regardless). Personally I prefer IPSec to be on for all communications throughout the entire organization (versus just "from the Internet in". I'd do that via a L2TP VPN server). As far as "thousands of independant IPSec configs": In the Windows world this is a group policy, and can be applied to an entire domain in minutes. With literally a minimal amount of effort you can have every system communication, intranet/LAN or internet, via secure IPSec tunnels (for every application, and without any user interventions or even knowledge).
I'm not sure what exactly you mean regarding cell phones, etc: Again, IPSec and L2TP are as big or bigger of standards than SSH.
It's easier to poke a SINGLE hole through a firewall on any port you want, with no compatability issues.
IPSec to DMZ machines is a simple "Pass in UDP port 500 to my DMZ netmask". Again, IPSec isn't some esoteric, proprietary fringe standard: It is highly deployed (BTW: PGP adds IPSec to pre Windows 2000 machines if you choose that option) and heavily supported.
Regarding compression, authentication, etc: These are all separate elements of the communications layers, and personally I don't LIKE to see them all slammed together in some emacs type "cater to everyone" combination.
SSH tunneling is basically a predecessor to IPSec (and a hackish one at that). Both IPSec and L2TP are standards, and neither are proprietary to Windows: Both are supported in Linux, or any other major operating system, as well.
Microsoft has already provided L2TP (and its predecessor PPTP) and IPSec: It is backwards, and quite frankly quite silly, to try to program encryption into every single program when you can utilize these system features to add encryption to any and all applications (and yes you can make it mandatory if you want. In 20 seconds I can configure my system to only allow IPSec high security communications to my HTTP server).
You possibly are approaching this problem in a "like UNIX" sort of way, however security on Windows system depends more on all encompassing technologies like L2TP or IPSec: Take a look at IPSec. It separates encryption and payload integrity from the application, and of course works with all applications because they're unaware that it's acting as a pipe between systems. If you're concerned about performance then get yourself a NIC that offloads encryption processing. Note that your system can be configured to only allow connections to certain services if an IPSec connection has already been established: Launch an MMC console (Start/Run/mmc.exe) and add the snap-in "IP Security Policies" for the local computer and play around: The possibilities are endless.
Next time you're at your local book store, take a look for the Microsoft training book for their exam number 70-220 : Designing Windows 2000 Network Security. Because XP is 2000 with a nice GUI it is entirely relevant.
Probably the best source is the microsoft.* tree (add msnews.microsoft.com as one of your news server). I've found it very helpful for those few times that Deja comes up empty. Caveat: Messages have a strange habit of spontaneously disappearing from those servers-Several times now I've posted a question that was very much ontopic to find a day later that it disappeared (though sometimes orphaning some replies). Whether they have a weak cancel authentication system and someone is abusing it, or they have overly delete-hungry moderators I'm not sure.
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Gee, how very surprising. I knew without doubt that one of these would come.
.. why dont you just come out and say it instead of dancing around the bush.
.. wasnt their Canadian equity diluted?
..that's a good thing.
If you're racist
Uh huh. This is the classic lobbyist effort that is used extensively in Canada and the United States by the pro-immigration movement to keep the majority from ever voicing their opinion: If you have an opinion about it and you're white, well damnit you're a racist! The `visible minority' comment indicates, obviously, that I wouldn't be aware if someone was hiring all Christians, or people with the first name Bob, but if a company is 100% ethnic Chinese, well then that's a little more obvious.
So your Canadian equity is being diluted? Oh dear, in that case what about the original native Canadians
Here's another of the pro-immigration bullshit arguments: Well we can come and take what we'd like because 100s of years ago you did the same. Of course, almost all of these groups FERVENTLY protect the sanctity of THEIR homeland. The reality is that most of these "open the doors" people are VERY protective of their own homeland, and deep in their mind many keep the idea that at some point they'll go back.
The fact that there are that many immigrant resumes flying around means they are willing to work and harness resources
No it doesn't: It means that many aren't getting work because industry has found that foreign training and cultural barriers make it too difficult to get productive output.
While obviously going 150 is a more serious offense than going 120, I actually generally believe that people from out of province should go the posted limit (in the slow lane): They are unaware of the culture that prevails on the road, the role of law enforcement in tacit limits, and they didn't pay for the roads. I follow this rule when traveling, and when driving through the states I go the posted speed limit quite precisely (because I have no idea what speed limit prevailed over time, or which states heavily enforce it and which don't, etc.).
No, speed isn't the problem, dozy drivers are and there are way too many of these out there.
I've heard this a lot, and quite honestly I agree: You can count the moronic maneuvers on any fairly busy highway by the hundreds per hour. So we've established that in North America people don't pay enough attention to the road, they don't have enough respect for the seriousness of driving, and often they are undertrained: Do you think increasing the speed is going to help that? Speed has a direct correlation with possible reaction time, and personally failing to change other things I'd rather than Jimmy whose busy yapping on the cell phone while fiddling with the stereo were going 100km/h rather than 180km/h : That's almost 100% more time he has to see and react to a situation.
Speeding isnt dangerous per say its excessive speed differential that is dangerous.
True, but you'll never get a straw-poll consensus that'll lead to everyone going the same speed. Hence, it's folly to blame "the slow guy" for being the differential when there are countless differentials between the "fast guys" (some are speeding a bit, others moderately, and then there are the morons grossly speeding). Usually these morons believe that during busy rush hours the left lane should remain magically open for them (I've watched this with fascination in Toronto: The guy who thinks that in a highway about 90% saturated that somehow that left lane is going to be clear for him to shoot through), and for those moments that it isn't they weave in and out of traffic to maintain their speed. No amount of raising the speed limit (until you hit the speed of light) will stop differentials so long as the limit is more of a recommendation.
What needs to happen is that speed "limits" need to become "the speed" and people should be severely punished (and not just financially, but also loss of license, car repossession, etc) if they go outside of a given band : Only by getting people to god damn relax and just accept that they're going 120km/h, and that's it (there is no getting ahead so they should mellow and lay off the constant lane changes), will the dangers of differentials be alleviated.
In the real world, nobody ever drives the speed limit under good driving conditions.
Interesting observation about that: Here in Ontario we have a series of highways where the speed limit is 100km/h, but the tacit speed limit (which even the Provincial Police have acknowledged) is 120. On the 401 in sections it averages about 130. Fairly frequently you'll have some moron zipping along at 150+ (~100mph) AND ALMOST INVARIABLY THEY ARE FROM MICHIGAN. Could someone explain this to me? New Yorkers use our highways a lot and they seem to be a very good bunch of drivers generally, but about 95% of Michigan drivers are driving Ford Expeditions and they insist upon absolute and blatant disregard for a whole different countries laws. I find this especially fascinating as the last time I was in Michigan, about 95% of the cars were going the speed limit, a speed limit that is about 105km/h. If there's someone from Michigan who insists upon treating the 400 series highways as an autobahn, I'm curious to hear why you think you have that right.
I have a real problem with this: the sad reality is that people aren't speeding on the highways to get somewhere faster, generally, they're speeding because of personality "issues" and a desire to demonstrate their "alpha-human" status by being the fastest man on the road (a particularly fascinating and simple study in this goes as such: Say you're in the "slow lane" going 120 and you're about to catch up to the next guy in the slow lane. You check and there's someone about 15 car lengths back in the "fast" lane, very marginally gaining on you: Perhaps 123 or so. You can easily clear the car ahead before they catch up to you, so you move over and commence overtaking-> A high percentage of the time the person in the left lane will then speed up, often considerably). This means that if you let people go 140, then there'll be the ahole going 160. If you let them go 160 then he'll go 180. Etc. Personally I'd love to see Ontario institute a system where the speed limit is raised to something more reasonable, say 120, but simultaneously the punishment for speeding is DRAMATICALLY increased -> Go 140 and you lose your license for a year. Go 150 and you lose your car. Etc.
your best bet is to buy your kid a fairly modern, safe car without too much extra juice (try a Toyota with side-curtain airbags with traction control and ABS, or a Volvo if it's in your means)
That's great at keeping your own kid alive, but how about the people they kill? Again here in Ontario, there have been an INFURIATING series of events involved asshole kids being "men" by pushing a gas pedal (and often they're in 117hp Honda Civics with "performance" improvements such as a stolen Acura logo). In a reason case a little sack of shit smashed into a truck causing a 6 month pregnant woman to lose her baby. His punishment will be a slap on the wrist. In another case a pair of 17 year olds raced on a city street, lost control, and killed a teen walking down the street, minding his own business: They got a 45 day weekend sentence. I think the only time that our roads will get better is when driving is treated with the seriousness it deserves, and people who intentionally perform moronic maneuvers lose their license for years at a time.
I wouldn't say that I'm overly cynical about police: I blame society just as much because, as public servants, they really are doing pretty much what we've asked for. Many people have a "oh, don't worry about it: That's what insurance is for" attitude that permeates the "personal theft is no biggie" situation, but the problem is that that encourages and breeds crime. Car thefts (and the incidental costs of them being used for joy riding, crash up derbies, etc) are a HUGE problem in my area, but again everyone has a "no biggie" attitude about it, despite the fact that in the end we all are paying for every penny of loss and damage (and, of course, because car thefts aren't heavily pursued, thieves steal cars to use as transport for even bigger crimes. It's the old broken window effect).
Considering that pawn shops cater, generally, to the dregs of society, I find it very hard to believe that they would do anything more than an empty gesture towards law enforcement: Pawn shops wouldn't exist without people ripping off jewellery from their parents, or B&Eing their neighbours. Perhaps pawn shops offer up a sacrifice to the law enforcement gods every now and then, but it certainly wouldn't be their norm.
Pawn shops exist primarily because the reality is that police, at least in most places, really don't care about "petty theft": It is VERY unlikely that they would put out any effort whatsoever to check pawn shops for stolen goods, or to watch Ebay, etc. A friend's laptop was stolen from a coworker's car a while back while they ate lunch in a nearby restaurant (in the middle of the day), and they could actually visibly SEE the greasy finger prints of the culprit(s) all over the top of the window where they pulled it out. Did the police take fingerprints, even when asked to? Nope, it's "just a laptop" and isn't worth their top. At MOST most police limit pawn shop enforcement to "when someone sees something of their own for sale in a pawnshop and won't stop calling us to do something about it". Personally I find this fact, the ignorance of most police to crimes against personal property, an outrageous situation: These same police will blanket a neighbourhood with dozens of cars if someone stole a case from the liquor store or shoplifted a sharpie from Kmart.
A "good" business decision by Microsoft is often very bad for Microsoft's competitors. Don't get me wrong, either: I am not anti-Microsoft by any measure of the imagination (ironically I'm working on an IIS/SQL Server project in another window at this very moment, and I do almost entirely Microsoft platform consulting work), but rather I am realistic, and every single decision Microsoft makes has underlying motives. They might be aligned with other peoples, and sometimes they might be best for the computer industry as a whole, but sometimes they aren't: It's pretty naive to presume that it's "conspiracy theories" to assess why Microsoft does what they do.
.NET viable by supporting it on the world's most popular web browser" (presuming you mean web server), but then you berate those who think it's "some plot by Micro$oft to take over the world" : Wouldn't that be exactly why they're targeting the most popular web platform?
You sort of contradict yourself in any case: You claim that they are "making
Way before .NET there were websites offering up data in some documented format, intended for it to be parsed and used by custom clients. .NET did not invent web services, nor is it really a revolution in web services (I implemented projects using "web services" as a control and monitoring infrastructure for power generation projects years ago). At best you could say that .NET makes it a little bit easier to put together the starting blocks for a web service (though, like always, the zero-to-demo time has very little to do with the timelines of an actual project, hence why most VB projects fail miserably regardless of the quick initial wizard "productivity").
.NET Yahoo could serve up stock quotes in CSV format from their website via a particular get string).
This is a very important point because it seems like a lot of people are willing to hand Microsoft some sort of invention credits for web services, when the reality is that where appropriate web services are a no brainer extension of the basic paradigm of the net (hell, POP3 could be considered a "web service": I don't have to use Outlook Web Access! Again, long before
I should also mention that lots of people involved with spec'ing systems often want to avoid single vendor "lock-in", and this may very well be the ticket that gets Microsoft in the door: "Don't worry about having all your software developed for the .NET platform, because if MS really pissed you off you can (theoretically) switch over to FreeBSD/Apache". With all of the "monopolistic" press that Microsoft has been getting, this is a very important factor for becoming a chosen technology these days.
.NET on all sorts of other platforms....like Java!".
At a prior contract I literally heard this play out, with management concerned about Microsoft lock-in, and I heard a Microsoft keener (a VB-no-idea-how-to-program moron) exclaim that Microsoft "Soon would have
The "web service" model that Microsoft and IBM has pushed has nothing to do with .NET (though, from a technical perspective, it may very well be implemented in .NET on the server side, it could equally be implemented in PHP, Java, etc), but rather standards such as SOAP and friends.
.NET is the old "lure 'em in" technique: Lots of otherwise anti-MS open sourcers will run out and install .NET on their Apache servers (thereby legitimizing Microsoft while cutting the foundations out of their own arguments) and may very well develop projects based on it for clients and employers. Soon enough they'll have deployed ".NET" solutions that would run even better if you use SQL Server rather than Oracle (because of course with SQL Server you can use the super high performance, SQL Server only ADO.NET objects), and of course it'll run best on its native platform: Windows .NET Server.
The only real advantage I can see to Microsoft supporting
Microsoft really is doing the exact same tactic that Sun has attempted with Java: Propagate your standard on many platforms to get wide interest and adoption, with the natural goal that people will eventually migrate to the one "preferred", "superior" platform when the barriers to switching are low enough (which with .NET web applications with text configurations would be trivially low: Move some web folders). I don't think there is any surprize that Microsoft is trying this, though you have to wonder why anyone developing for .NET wouldn't be using a Windows platform machine anyways (which is why the non-Windows platform is so marginal of importance).
.NET version 2 to close the door: All you need is a subtle performance advantage with the preferred platform, and just a general instance of "Quirks" on the non-preferred platform (and I guarantee that mono is not 100% compatible with .NET: It'll be 99.99%, with those tiny quirks every now and then that make you go "Damnit...why am I not using the official platform?"
On top of that, you don't need something quite so overt as a non-supported
The last time we saw something on this scale it was followed by a world-wide economic "downturn" that lasted the better part of an entire generation (fifteen or so years.)
The world today has virtually nothing in parallel with the worlds of the great depression, yet that doesn't seem to stop it from being brought up every cyclical 6 years or so. Sortof like how every two-bit third world dictator is the "next Hitler" : The analogies get old after a while (my god: I just berated someone and used the "Usenet Hitler rule"....I guess I just lost :-)).
As a note, I heard this past Thursday or Friday that the market has already lost more than the '29 crash, but I don't want to give too much credence to that until I can know what is being compared and how; it's very easy to lie with numbers (there's a pun in there somewhere, but I'm not going to fish for it, thank you.)
Firstly, most "OH MY GOD!" scenarios talk about points rather than percentages, and of course they are absolutely uncomparable and are nothing but fodder for news companies looking for BIG NEWS (and where there is no big news, they just invent it). Statements such as "biggest point drop ever!" are absolutely ridiculous comparisons because of course a 100 point drop in the 20s was huge, but is a blip nowadays.
Remember that the stock market doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It doesn't? Explain the UNBELIEVABLE and hard to comprehend runup of tech stocks a couple of years ago for me then. Not only was there no profits in most of these companies, there was no reasonable expectation of profits anytime in the distant future, yet that didn't stop them from spiralling upwards on the stock charts. The stock market, and I mean this literally, shares a lot in common with pyramid schemes: When they run out of suckers who are looking for a quick payoff, the collapse comes quick. The simple reality is that wealth is not created on the stock markets (apart from through inflation and GDP/population growth), but rather it is just redistributed, and this means that when reckoning day comes every now and then there will be `corrections' like this.
I have a relative whose been out of work for sometime, and for YEARS now he has been proclaiming the Next Great Depression. Why? Because it legitimizes his position. I have no idea what your situation is, but I always find it fascinating when people are willing to proclaim that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Bah.
How lame to claim that (s)he's "affiliated with the RIAA/MPAA" for arguing in a manner that you disagree with. Seriously, that is as pathetic as mentioning Hitler in days of yore on Usenet: Instantly you've lost the argument.
People's buying habits tend to stay the same, or become invigored. They rarely buy CD's b/c most stuff is crap -- i.e., one hit song, 10 filler songs. If anything, file sharing has been good for the music industry because its generated alot more interest in music.
Keep on convincing yourself of that. You make your argument transparent when you claim that "most stuff is crap": Why don't you give some examples? The reality is that most CDs "one hit song" is the worst of the CD, but it just happens to have the type of mass appeal and middle of the road attributes that it becomes a "hit", but the "non-hit" status of the other 10 songs says NOTHING about their quality, or lack thereof. If, of course, all you care about is putting the song that's player 40 times a day on the radio on repeat in your car stereo so you can go cruisin' the strip in your Tercel, then maybe the mass appeal of a song is what defines how good it is (and you should limit your purchases to "Dance Beats 2002" and other such compilation CDs), but the rest of us realize that when you play a CD from beginning to end you find things to appreciate in virtually every song. The `crap' argument is instantly moot anyways: If people won't buy it because it's "crap", then what the hell are they wasting their time and hard drive space pirating it for?
You realize how hopeless it is to convince the self-delusional, don't you? These people will rant on about how they just wish that they could personally hand over money to the artists, and then they'll be the first to call the same music "garbage" if such a tip jar were created and the empirical evidence of cobweb covered port 80s was blatant. These people will alternate between "I buy more CDs!" postings in one discussion, to "All music is garbage nowadays! It's all boom boom boom so I therefore rip it!" postings in another, all depending on the slant of the article and whichever study they think they're refuting. These people will defend what they do using cave man "what's stopping me?" tragedy of the commons epitomes, all the while pretending that somehow they're looking out for artists by scamming their music online. These people will slam the RIAA while busy filling their MP3 collections full of RIAA sponsored artists (there are hundreds of thousands of non-RIAA sponsored artists, but don't expect these people to know who they are or where to find them: They're just busy ripping what they hear on the "evil RIAA controlled radio"). These people will slam the record industry when it doesn't support the little guy, but then they'll slam the record company because it subsidizes the little guy with part of the royalty by successful acts.
It really is sad seeing what goes on on Slashdot, and society in general: When people will spin any web, regardless of how ridiculous or knowingly fraudulent, they define the decline of democracy: People who don't care about what's right, or what's reasonable and honest, but just about how they can get more for their greedy selves, no matter the price. As you've seen, there is endless justification on Slashdot for music and software piracy, from "I wouldn't have bought it anyways" to "it's all garbage anyways, so ignore the astounding irony of me pirating it" to "well the artist doesn't get 100% of what I pay, so therefore I'm helping them by giving them nothing...uh, I'll buy a T-shirt at their concert which I almost certainly won't actually go to". These people sound like carjackers and B&E experts who are sure that, damnit, the world owes them something.
While history will tell who's right, I highly doubt that the "downturn" will last more than a half a year more, and unlikely that it'll be a "sucky next few years". There has been a MASSIVE cleaning of the house, and quite honestly this is merely a "back to reality" sanity-check (there never was a "new economy", or "e-economy", and the mad rush of retail investments into the stock market fueled an insanity rush: Few bothering to take time to assess the reality of the situation...that would slow them down from the dream of MAKE MONEY FAST). The saddest thing is that there's been a gross OVER-correction in the tech industry: People got so jaded that their Dr Koop and pets.com investments went under (you mean people won't pay $45 shipping to get a $5 bag of kitty litter? Who'da thunk it?) that they now shun the entire tech community, despite a tremendous array of great investment possibilities.
Of course the whole stock market really is very hard to differentiate from a pyramid scheme anyways: Even abstract notions like "P/E" are just attempts to legitimize the abstract notion that share ownership entails (apart from companies that issue dividends, which is a clear and obvious return on investment).
if worldcom bellys up, how will the next owners of the network handle it?
People have always said that Microsoft wanted to own the Internet...
When organizations owe more money than they have in assets, current stockholders get NOTHING : Either the stock is voided and new ownership issues are tendered to the creditors, or the creditors are given such a massive issuance that current holders have virtually nothing. The "UUNet backbone" will most certainly be sold off to another party (for example, Microsoft) and the proceeds used to pay creditors.
Anyone who thinks that institutional holders who just took hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars in losses are all just kooks who don't see real value is crazy, and this stock would probably be worth nothing if there weren't so many "Gosh golly, it once was high so surely it must be sometime again!" misinformed bottom feeders.
It is amazing how the clue density in this thread appears to be minimal.
As a participant in this thread, let me say that it's even more amazing how much of a self-righteous dickhead you are, especially considering the fact that you posted a method absolutely void of any useful facts, nor even relating to the conversation that was being had.
Piece of advice: The next time you feel the urge to show your self-promoted superiority, add something useful or at least relevant to the conversation.
The problem with using things like IPSEC is that you need IPSEC servers which are your choke points, unless you want to have a configuration nightmare and manage thousands of independant IPSEC configs on thousands of machine
I really don't see how either SSH or IPSec is different in this regard, unless you're claiming that instead you run SSH on every machine (just as I could run IPSec on every machine, and of course firewall wise they'd be identical: You open port 22 TCP to everyone, and I'd open port 500 UDP to everyone. Of course actually doing that would be insanity, but regardless). Personally I prefer IPSec to be on for all communications throughout the entire organization (versus just "from the Internet in". I'd do that via a L2TP VPN server). As far as "thousands of independant IPSec configs": In the Windows world this is a group policy, and can be applied to an entire domain in minutes. With literally a minimal amount of effort you can have every system communication, intranet/LAN or internet, via secure IPSec tunnels (for every application, and without any user interventions or even knowledge).
I'm not sure what exactly you mean regarding cell phones, etc: Again, IPSec and L2TP are as big or bigger of standards than SSH.
It's easier to poke a SINGLE hole through a firewall on any port you want, with no compatability issues.
IPSec to DMZ machines is a simple "Pass in UDP port 500 to my DMZ netmask". Again, IPSec isn't some esoteric, proprietary fringe standard: It is highly deployed (BTW: PGP adds IPSec to pre Windows 2000 machines if you choose that option) and heavily supported.
Regarding compression, authentication, etc: These are all separate elements of the communications layers, and personally I don't LIKE to see them all slammed together in some emacs type "cater to everyone" combination.
SSH tunneling is basically a predecessor to IPSec (and a hackish one at that). Both IPSec and L2TP are standards, and neither are proprietary to Windows: Both are supported in Linux, or any other major operating system, as well.
Microsoft has already provided L2TP (and its predecessor PPTP) and IPSec: It is backwards, and quite frankly quite silly, to try to program encryption into every single program when you can utilize these system features to add encryption to any and all applications (and yes you can make it mandatory if you want. In 20 seconds I can configure my system to only allow IPSec high security communications to my HTTP server).
You possibly are approaching this problem in a "like UNIX" sort of way, however security on Windows system depends more on all encompassing technologies like L2TP or IPSec: Take a look at IPSec. It separates encryption and payload integrity from the application, and of course works with all applications because they're unaware that it's acting as a pipe between systems. If you're concerned about performance then get yourself a NIC that offloads encryption processing. Note that your system can be configured to only allow connections to certain services if an IPSec connection has already been established: Launch an MMC console (Start/Run/mmc.exe) and add the snap-in "IP Security Policies" for the local computer and play around: The possibilities are endless.
Next time you're at your local book store, take a look for the Microsoft training book for their exam number 70-220 : Designing Windows 2000 Network Security. Because XP is 2000 with a nice GUI it is entirely relevant.
Probably the best source is the microsoft.* tree (add msnews.microsoft.com as one of your news server). I've found it very helpful for those few times that Deja comes up empty. Caveat: Messages have a strange habit of spontaneously disappearing from those servers-Several times now I've posted a question that was very much ontopic to find a day later that it disappeared (though sometimes orphaning some replies). Whether they have a weak cancel authentication system and someone is abusing it, or they have overly delete-hungry moderators I'm not sure.