Having worked in a company that makes Ethernet adapters that implements IPsec offload, I can tell you EXACTLY what's holding up encryption across the network: Cisco and possibly a few other network hardware vendors. The problem is that they can't see into encrypted traffic, and they want to "own the network". If they can't see into the traffic for deep packet inspection, route optimization, traffic steering, etc. all their fancy hardware becomes pretty neigh useless. And encrypted traffic cannot be viewed by "lumps in the network". And these "lump makers" are, unfortunately, influential enough to make commercial implementation difficult by others.
In fact, the best, most effective encryption is done as high up the stack as possible so as to protect the traffic from as many lower layers as possible. And, if you study the problem carefully, you'll see that you actually need encryption at several layers to properly protect the entire attack surface. But you either have to do this cleverly with existing protocols - possibly getting into vendor-specific solutions that would need to be standardized, - or create new protocols. Just applying SSL/TLS to everything is not the answer.
As I said, solutions exist even at some large companies that could bring them to market inspite of Cisco. But to bring them to market, there needs to be some market pull from the user community for effective cross-network encryption, which, so far, does not exist.
I spend a year studying for my computer science degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara at the University College of Wales in Aberystwith. It was one of the best years of my life, and, in addition to leaning a lot about the subject, I learned about it from a non-US-centric point of view, which was quite interesting. I also learned a lot about the local culture (Aberystwith had a non-university population of about 15,000 and 41 pubs) and made some life-long friends. If an opportunity to study abroad lands in your lap, you'd be a fool not to grab it with both hands and squeeze all you can out of it. You will be learning computer science for the rest of your career, but you don't get many chances to live in a student community in another country.
I'll keep this short. Firstly, "basic reasoning skills" as a bar is, as you seem to agree, arbitrary and difficult to define. Age, on the other hand, is objective and is based on our legal traditions going back centuries. It is also the basis of a legal definition of adulthood implying enforceabilty of contracts, legal liability, etc. While I agree there are a lot of 18-year-olds who don't have much judgement, they can at least put thier lives on the line in defense of the country in the military, and that carries some weight.
To get back to basic reasoning skills, I can easily make an argument that the most erudite, educated, accomplished person who does not agree with me does not posess "basic reasoning skills". I might, were I in power, disqualify you. And you might disqualify me.
What you seem to be arguing for is the establishment of something along the lines of, if not Plato's philosopher kings, at least political participation by those who some authority has deemed up to the task. The problem I have is that I wouldn't trust anyone to make that selection. You shouldn't either.
I disagree. What is the standard of "basic reasoning skills", and who will make that decision. All citiziens over the age of 18 who are not recent felons are entitled by law to vote. Any bar of "basic reasoning skills" you set will by definition be discriminatory. Aren't stupid people entitled to representation too? Shouldn't people with strong political opinions but no technical sense be entitled to a voice in our democracy?
At the best, setting a bar for voting of "basic reasoning skills" is elitist (and I would be considered a member of the elite by reason of education and Democratic Party leanings by many Republican no-nothings, so by your definition would probably be allowed to vote, unless you mean by "basic reasoning skills" not being a Democrat, which is a possibility.)
At worst, such a bar is arbitrarily discrminatory because it can be set anywhere to disallow electoral participation by the bar setters of any group(s) they don't think should be allowed to vote.
No, voting should be open to all. It should be easy and as unconfusing as possible. One shouldn't be requried to pass any implicit intellegence test to vote, and the only qualifications besides age, citizenship and not having recently committed any felonies should be the desire to vote and a decision as to whom to vote for.
If the user intends to vote one way and the machine interface is so designed that it does not allow an easy, intuitive reflection of this intention in the vote that is cast, the machine is at fault.
We technologists sometimes feel frustration when non-technology oriented people don't see clearly what we see as intuitieve. But this is voting, for God's sake. WE MUST MAKE IT EASY for anyone or we have failed, and shoudl go back to easy-to-use paper ballots.
The woodcrest platform used for the Intel side of this test was a year old, while the AMD platform was their latest and greatest.
This kind of test is crap until they test the latest and greatest AMD latest and greatest Intel - same power supplies, etc.
Of course, to be valid at any given time, this requires that these kinds of tests be run after each release of a new platform by either company.
This is a result only an AMD fanboy could love.
The article that gave rise to this post is a canard. Actually, Core 2 Duo processors are 64-bit. The platforms they're built into might not be, but that's because in the real world today, few need, let alone can use, due to lack of drivers and apps, 64-bit computing. This is more an issue for the PC OEMs and MoBo vendors than the processor folks, either AMD or Intel.
When there's actual demand (and drivers and apps), there will be plenty of 64-bit computers. The processors are there already.
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Having worked in a company that makes Ethernet adapters that implements IPsec offload, I can tell you EXACTLY what's holding up encryption across the network: Cisco and possibly a few other network hardware vendors. The problem is that they can't see into encrypted traffic, and they want to "own the network". If they can't see into the traffic for deep packet inspection, route optimization, traffic steering, etc. all their fancy hardware becomes pretty neigh useless. And encrypted traffic cannot be viewed by "lumps in the network". And these "lump makers" are, unfortunately, influential enough to make commercial implementation difficult by others. In fact, the best, most effective encryption is done as high up the stack as possible so as to protect the traffic from as many lower layers as possible. And, if you study the problem carefully, you'll see that you actually need encryption at several layers to properly protect the entire attack surface. But you either have to do this cleverly with existing protocols - possibly getting into vendor-specific solutions that would need to be standardized, - or create new protocols. Just applying SSL/TLS to everything is not the answer. As I said, solutions exist even at some large companies that could bring them to market inspite of Cisco. But to bring them to market, there needs to be some market pull from the user community for effective cross-network encryption, which, so far, does not exist.
I spend a year studying for my computer science degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara at the University College of Wales in Aberystwith. It was one of the best years of my life, and, in addition to leaning a lot about the subject, I learned about it from a non-US-centric point of view, which was quite interesting. I also learned a lot about the local culture (Aberystwith had a non-university population of about 15,000 and 41 pubs) and made some life-long friends. If an opportunity to study abroad lands in your lap, you'd be a fool not to grab it with both hands and squeeze all you can out of it. You will be learning computer science for the rest of your career, but you don't get many chances to live in a student community in another country.
I'll keep this short. Firstly, "basic reasoning skills" as a bar is, as you seem to agree, arbitrary and difficult to define. Age, on the other hand, is objective and is based on our legal traditions going back centuries. It is also the basis of a legal definition of adulthood implying enforceabilty of contracts, legal liability, etc. While I agree there are a lot of 18-year-olds who don't have much judgement, they can at least put thier lives on the line in defense of the country in the military, and that carries some weight. To get back to basic reasoning skills, I can easily make an argument that the most erudite, educated, accomplished person who does not agree with me does not posess "basic reasoning skills". I might, were I in power, disqualify you. And you might disqualify me. What you seem to be arguing for is the establishment of something along the lines of, if not Plato's philosopher kings, at least political participation by those who some authority has deemed up to the task. The problem I have is that I wouldn't trust anyone to make that selection. You shouldn't either.
I disagree. What is the standard of "basic reasoning skills", and who will make that decision. All citiziens over the age of 18 who are not recent felons are entitled by law to vote. Any bar of "basic reasoning skills" you set will by definition be discriminatory. Aren't stupid people entitled to representation too? Shouldn't people with strong political opinions but no technical sense be entitled to a voice in our democracy? At the best, setting a bar for voting of "basic reasoning skills" is elitist (and I would be considered a member of the elite by reason of education and Democratic Party leanings by many Republican no-nothings, so by your definition would probably be allowed to vote, unless you mean by "basic reasoning skills" not being a Democrat, which is a possibility.) At worst, such a bar is arbitrarily discrminatory because it can be set anywhere to disallow electoral participation by the bar setters of any group(s) they don't think should be allowed to vote. No, voting should be open to all. It should be easy and as unconfusing as possible. One shouldn't be requried to pass any implicit intellegence test to vote, and the only qualifications besides age, citizenship and not having recently committed any felonies should be the desire to vote and a decision as to whom to vote for.
If the user intends to vote one way and the machine interface is so designed that it does not allow an easy, intuitive reflection of this intention in the vote that is cast, the machine is at fault. We technologists sometimes feel frustration when non-technology oriented people don't see clearly what we see as intuitieve. But this is voting, for God's sake. WE MUST MAKE IT EASY for anyone or we have failed, and shoudl go back to easy-to-use paper ballots.
The woodcrest platform used for the Intel side of this test was a year old, while the AMD platform was their latest and greatest. This kind of test is crap until they test the latest and greatest AMD latest and greatest Intel - same power supplies, etc. Of course, to be valid at any given time, this requires that these kinds of tests be run after each release of a new platform by either company. This is a result only an AMD fanboy could love.
The article that gave rise to this post is a canard. Actually, Core 2 Duo processors are 64-bit. The platforms they're built into might not be, but that's because in the real world today, few need, let alone can use, due to lack of drivers and apps, 64-bit computing. This is more an issue for the PC OEMs and MoBo vendors than the processor folks, either AMD or Intel.
When there's actual demand (and drivers and apps), there will be plenty of 64-bit computers. The processors are there already.