Actually I already have that unchecked. Doesn't help. I think maybe if I uncheck the Enable Dynamic Discussions box that might do it, but i actually like the new discussions system (as implemented on most threads, the ones on Idle are crap). I want an option to just revert the user page back to the old non-crap design, not everything (although if you could get Idle to look a little less like crap that would be good to).
I'm glad someone other than me has noticed it as well. I clicked on my use page to see if anyone had posted replies to any of my comments the other day and thought at first that I had clicked on the firehose or worse, Idle. I did something I've never done before for the simple fact I didn't know what else to do, and posted a journal entry asking what the fuck happened to the user page.
Please, do what you will with Idle/Firehose, no one really reads those anyway, but leave the user page alone, it's genuinely useful... or at least it was till you fucked with it.
Just remember that cutting off the head won't kill it. Its arms and legs will be gone but the head will still be around biting and yelling at people, like Jack Thompson.
This deserves a +5 Funny if for no other reason than the best Jack Thompson reference ever.
Does it matter what copyright was intended to do, or how it is legislated and enforced today?
Depends, morally or legally? The original question was one of the moral (or ethical if you prefer) thing to do, not a question of the legal thing to do. It's entirely possible to be ethically correct, but legally wrong, and in fact that happens quite often. It's one of the reason why judges and juries are allowed some leeway in sentencing and conviction. There's an expression which goes "no jury would convict you" often used such as "He was so annoying you could beat him to death and no jury would convict you."
Make sure this gets mainstream press coverage. Be sure to sensationalize it and compare it to the RIAA. Watch them back down quickly.
So far it looks like they're being very diplomatic about it. It's somewhat disturbing that they're actually monitoring Limewire for copyright infringement, but as far as possible responses go, sending a letter that essentially says "We tracked someone to your network, we'd appreciate if you'd do something about it." is one of the better ones. It would have been nice if they actually asked for something to be done, instead of leaving it open with the implication of possible legal action, but it's a lot better than saying pay up or we'll see you in court (which is no doubt what the RIAA would do). This approach is similar to the one that the MPAA has adopted in which they send a letter that essentially says "We know you're violating our copyright, we have records of you transferring such and such movie on such and such time from such and such IP. This is a warning, please stop now or we'll pursue legal avenues." (friend of mine received such a letter). Notice that the ESA isn't asking for money, and no where in the letter (at least the portion we're provided) does it say anything about a lawsuit.
Personally, I'd start by tracking down the moron running Limewire on a company system and have a chat with them. Then I'd block Limewire (no reason to be running that period, bittorrent is defensible, but Limewire is just an excuse to get a trojan on your system), and circulate a memo explaining that it's unacceptable to be running unapproved P2P software (to allow for possible valid uses of bittorrent). In the memo I'd make sure to stress the security implications and strong risk of virus infection possible from downloading off a P2P network. In particular make sure to point out that anti-virus software really only defends against well known threats and that it's trivially easy to create a trojan or virus that can go undetected and then distribute it through a P2P network for weeks or longer before AV software becomes aware of it. This nicely sidesteps the whole copyright infringement argument while still pointing our the very real security concern these apps pose for a commercial (or government as the case may be) intranet.
Ridiculous isn't it. The RIAA or local variant (in the case of Australia this would be the government) are one of the most despised groups in the world now, and it's like the software industry looked and thought "WOW! We MUST get a slice of that juicy animosity pie!"
Of course, the most massively abused addon ever is ActiveX. Also, when the "addon" ships with the browser, you shouldn't really be able to call it an addon anymore.
Firefox has the right idea with extensions, they're relatively small, lightweight, incredibly flexible, but also easy to corral and sandbox. Since most things you want to do can be handled by extensions, there's really very little reason to use plugins in Firefox outside of things like flash, pdf, or embedding mplayer/vlc/media player of choice. Over on the IE side of things however, anything you want to change must be done via a plugin, which means running a binary blob and having to trust it not to do something nasty.
Anyone have any clue what kind of sentence generator this bot is using? I've seen several of these posts now in various threads and either it's a very benign sort of bot (nothing it's posted seems offensive or in general anything but slightly on-topic sounding drivel), or he/she is still testing out the grammar file before switching into troll mode. At any rate, it seems to be producing interesting results (markov chains maybe?), and looks like it seeds the inputs with random words picked out of the article description, then extrapolates using some sort of random seeding in combination with an association dictionary. In this instance it looks like it grabbed onto "Santa Cruz" as a physical location, and then switched into PHB/CEO mode to serve up some buzzword salad.
Well, yes and no. Although a human could potentially live for hundreds of years, doing so would lead either to much slower breeding cycles (and thus slower evolution), or massive overpopulation (even with out limited lifespans this is an issue). Although it's true that a longer lived human could contribute back more over their lifetime, it would also tend to cause the species as a whole to stagnate on a genetic level. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense to have shorter lifespans, although given our relative genetic stability at this point combined with our massive numbers a longer lifespan with a much slower and shorter breeding period would probably be preferable, sadly evolution doesn't work on the sort of time scales that would make that change naturally, before such a change would likely be obsolete.
The layout and navigation is better, but the actual aesthetic and use of screen real-estate blows. I'd be much happier if they went back to the look and feel of the old blade system (large flat panels to use the most of the screen instead of those silly psuedo-3D panels with all that dead space around them), but kept the overall layout of NXE. There was absolutely no reason to switch to the stupid 3D panels to display what is ultimately 2D information, it's an absolute waste of space and doesn't even look particularly good. I'm also pissed that the themes which used to offer a little variety from blade to blade have now been reduced to what is essentially a static wallpaper.
I'm familiar with L4 (and it's various relatives) and I rather like the kernel, although I think it needs a lot of work to achieve anything close to good security. That's not really the kernels fault of course, it's only part of the problem, and there's really very little wrong security wise with the actual kernel, but a kernel by itself is only a very tiny piece of the overall security of the system, it's the other system utilities and even the filesystem itself that's the biggest security problem. Pointing at a kernel and calling it secure as opposed to an OS (and all the baggage that entails) is a little like pointing to a safe and calling it secure as opposed to a bank. It doesn't matter how badass your safe is if anyone can walk in, pick it up, and walk off with it, it's a layered approach to security that makes it secure, and somewhere along the way people need to be involved. Security always comes down to people at some point, and as such anything that does not quantify the person and take them into account is not truly secure. To go back to our previous metaphor of the safe, you can mathematically prove the number of combination's the lock might have, and you can mathematically prove the physical strength of the various components, but what you cannot do is mathematically prove that the guy in charge of guarding that safe is doing his job, or that someone won't somehow manage to steal the safe itself.
Now, formal verification is a nice tool, it lets you efficiently spot certain kinds of problems, but formal verification by itself is far from a good measure of how "secure" something is. A good secure OS must be both free from code defects and exploits (buffer overflows, various injection attacks, escalation bugs), and must be designed with an overall goal of ensuring that the user is given all the tools and information they need in order to make informed judgments about the state of the system.
Having working with the OS in question and directly with the NSA on getting our own OS certified (which we decided was too expensive in the end, and wound up throwing it away to use Integrity-178B)....
NSA does employ a sizeable group of mathemeticians in the area of security now as well. They've invested a lot of time in money in mathematical models for proving security, namely from the vantage point of possible combinations of system states, and how to minimize those into a human-testable number of states.
Yes, I've seen some of the work that's been done on trying to create a OS that can be mathematically proven to be secure, but I just don't buy it. Sure you can use some set theory and various other things to try to show how mathematically the system is bounded within the secure states, but all of that goes out the window once you move beyond a non-trivial set of functionality, and completely ignores the human side of the equation (which is the most important part, if the system makes it hard on the user to remain secure, then the user won't use the system the way it's meant). I also wasn't saying that mathematicians have no place in software security, or that they aren't useful, just that a mathematician isn't necessarily the best (or even good) choice for designing a OS.
Computer security is equal parts software, hardware, interface, and user training. Ignore any of those and you've just introduced your weak link in the system (usually the user and/or interface which go hand in hand). Hardware is only really an issue of you're trying to secure against a threat with physical access, which any halfway competent security professional can tell you is a stalling tactic at best. Software is critical to prevent things like buffer overflow attacks, but can be tested automatically with a good degree of accuracy. Interface and user training are really the linchpins of security. A good interface is a must in order to allow the user to make informed decisions concerning how trustworthy the system in question is, and proper training is important to allow the user to properly interpret the information they're receiving from the interface and to learn to spot subtle signs of problems.
Of course, in a specialized environment like a B2, or highly secured and hardened systems like no doubt the NSA uses the problem can be reduced in scope as to be nearly fully encompassed by a mathematical state model, but in so doing you massively limit the capability of the underlying system. In essence you take a general purpose system (computer) and reduce it's functionality to one specific task in order to be assured of it performing that single task in a easily controlled fashion. Although this is fine for the highly specialized tasks the NSA puts these systems to it would never work in a general purpose system used by end consumers and even most businesses. Once you go down that route, you might as well just use an embedded device as you've already lost the greatest advantage a PC has which is generalized functionality.
Cryptography yes, security no. Although cryptography is a very important tool in designing a secure OS, it's not the only one, and probably not even the most important one. Likewise for software in general. Cryptography is important for communications, and data protection which makes it important for communications between programs, and storage of programs, but actually ensuring the integrity of the system or application has a lot more to do with CS than it does Math. Both math and CS students can be equally smart, but in different ways. The math students will tend to be good at number crunching and abstract thinking, particularly in regard to projecting problems into various spaces where they can be solved using various functions. The CS students are going to tend towards a more systematic view of things in which they break problems down into sub-components without losing track of the larger picture and the way the various pieces interlock and interact with each other. You most likely perceive the math students as being "more intelligent" because you yourself are more inclined to the mathematical way of thinking about things.
When the NSA was first created the primary concern with regards to security was a combination of mathematical and physical problems. Mathematics in the form of encrypted communications, and physical in the form of ensuring that the people and/or documents that contained sensitive information and the devices used to cypher them were properly secured. With the rise of the internet and the switch to an increasingly interconnected infrastructure software security has emerged as a factor now. It no longer matters how good the encryption is between your two programs if the OS their running on can be compromised and the data scraped as the application decodes it (or better yet the encryption key itself). As such even though the NSA started as an organization specializing in primarily cryptographic systems it must expand to include software and hardware security as well.
If the non-religious also hold those viewpoints I would be very interested in hearing why and debating it with them. I don't mind when people don't agree, so long as they have a logical reason for doing so. That's the inherit difference between the highly religious and the non-religious, the religious hold a position on certain topics because there dogma says they must, or because it would contradict their dogma, and as such they cannot be reasoned with. The non-religious in contrast, even if they don't agree, can at least be debated with logically, and stand a chance of either being swayed to the opposing viewpoint, or else convincing the other party of their viewpoint.
The US does have the right to govern itself, but that doesn't mean it's always right, and it doesn't mean that everyone who disagrees should accept it just because the zealots outnumber them. The same argument could have been given with regards to womens suffrage, slavery, and prohibition. There is no logical reason why Gay people should be denied the legal status of marriage. If a Gay person getting married somehow affected the quality of life of someone besides that person and their partner the argument might have a leg to stand on, but as it is there's no reason other than ones based on religious dogma.
I really wish that if the teaching of creationism was mandated (I believe it is in at least one state) in science classes that it would be used as an example of how not to formulate a scientific hypothesis and shown for the complete bunk that it is. Unfortunately I'm not that optimistic. The churches would ensure that it's held up as a shining paragon of scientific theory, and all the flaws carefully glossed over. Anyone that questions its validity would get tossed out of the class. If you doubt this you've probably not been in the public school system anytime in the last 10 years as most teachers already treat the school textbooks and the "curriculum" as if it were itself a form of holy scripture. If this sort of thing is allowed to go through unchallenged entire generations will grow up indoctrinated to the church dogma even more than the previous generations, after all "god did it" would then be an accepted scientific theory.
If the religious would stick solely to the questions of whether or not god exists, what happens after death, and if there is a god what the meaning of everything is we wouldn't have a problem, but they insist on trying to tell everyone else what they can and cannot do based on their own religious beliefs. Examples of areas where the religious need to butt out include the teaching of creationism in a science class (creationism is not a scientific theory, it does not follow the scientific process, you can teach it in a theology class if you so desire), opposition to gay marriage (marriage is both a social and a legal relationship, I don't care if you don't want gay people being married in your church, but you have no right to deny them the legal relationship of marriage), abortion, and stem cell research. It's not currently a problem, but I also expect them to try to interfere in genetic research, human cloning, and human genetic manipulation in the near future.
The rules set forth by the scientific process. Pay particular attention to rule 4, and the clause that specifies observing a expected result does not qualify as a affirmative test of a hypothesis.
It seems there still are and always will be millions of people on this planet who will not and cannot live only such rules.
There are a great number of people that are highly superstitious (which is the same thing as being religious), although I rather hope this isn't permanent state of affairs.
There are people in this world who will fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves into tiny pieces over the really important questions that science cannot answer.
No, there are people in this world who will fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves into tiny pieces because they've been raised to be unable to realize the difference between religious dogma and reality, and work themselves into a psychotic state over unimportant triviality.
Most things we, even we Westerners do, are based on faith, belief, not sure knowledge. You don't get into an airplane or a car because you know for sure that it will take you to the other end where you want to go, but you believe there is a good statistical probability that you will get there. The question, will I get to my destination is not answerable by science, but only in belief over good probability that you will.
Much of the western world, and some of the eastern world makes irrational decisions based on their damaged ability to deal with reality caused by early indoctrination in religious dogma. Getting into a car or airplane does not require faith, and you do not need to believe you are guaranteed to arrive at your destination. Any sane well adjusted individual should know and understand the risk involved in any activity including riding in a car of airplane. When you choose to get into a vehicle you're gambling based on the knowledge that the odds are in your favor that nothing life threatening will happen versus the inconvenience that not getting into the vehicle would cause. You may hope that nothing bad happens, much as you might hope that if you purchase a lottery ticket that you'll win, but neither getting in the car, nor purchasing a lottery ticket requires an ounce of faith in anything.
To paraphrase a famous quote, there are no guarantees in life but death and taxes.
Actually this is both the OEM, and Microsofts fault. Microsoft came out with a program to certify OEM hardware as able to run Vista with acceptable performance. Had Microsoft actually done what they said they were doing things would have been fine. Instead when the OEMs started complaining to Microsoft that only the most powerful most expensive systems they were selling that year meet the certification requirements, Microsoft lowered the requirements knowing that by doing so they were representing underpowered systems as being able to run Vista with an acceptable level of performance. Apparently being able to boot in under 10 minutes and run solitaire without completely pegging all the system resources is considered "acceptable performance" by MS, but unfortunately for them not by anyone else.
"We predicted that 9 cars would be stolen this month, but only 4 were! Of the remaining 6, 3 stopped working, 2 will probably be stolen next month, and the last one exploded."
Actually in this example it would be undercharging. They predicted more exploits would happen than actually did, which given the nature of the predictions I'm happy with. Had they predicted that only only 1 of the exploits was likely to be used and 6 of them were instead then I'd be more ticked at them. Of course what would make me fscking ecstatic is if MS actually managed to create a piece of software with less than 100 security flaws (and calc, notepad, and paint don't count).
Science provides the answers it can, and anything it can't answer is by definition unanswerable (at the present time) and we must accept that and move on. Better to say we don't know, than to lie and make up some nonsensical answer. We can always put forth theories and hypothesis of course, but they must have a scientific basis which means saying "some invisible omnipotent being did it" is against the rules, unless of course you can devise a test to prove his existence.
Have you looked at Spring lately? With the annotation support that's been added recently you can eliminate just about all the XML out of Spring. You still need a single XML file that specifies the package or packages to search for annotated classes (an inherent problem with the way class loading is handled), but aside from that everything else can be configured via annotations. Injecting a service into a controller is as simple as annotating the service class with
@Service("SomeService")
public class SomeService {
and then on the controller having
@Autowired
private SomeService theService;
Spring takes care of everything else, including dealing with circular dependencies. Likewise Hibernate can handle any association you care to toss at it, and can be entirely configured with annotations (once again baring a single XML entry to list packages/classes to scan for annotations).
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Actually I already have that unchecked. Doesn't help. I think maybe if I uncheck the Enable Dynamic Discussions box that might do it, but i actually like the new discussions system (as implemented on most threads, the ones on Idle are crap). I want an option to just revert the user page back to the old non-crap design, not everything (although if you could get Idle to look a little less like crap that would be good to).
I'm glad someone other than me has noticed it as well. I clicked on my use page to see if anyone had posted replies to any of my comments the other day and thought at first that I had clicked on the firehose or worse, Idle. I did something I've never done before for the simple fact I didn't know what else to do, and posted a journal entry asking what the fuck happened to the user page.
Please, do what you will with Idle/Firehose, no one really reads those anyway, but leave the user page alone, it's genuinely useful... or at least it was till you fucked with it.
Just remember that cutting off the head won't kill it. Its arms and legs will be gone but the head will still be around biting and yelling at people, like Jack Thompson.
This deserves a +5 Funny if for no other reason than the best Jack Thompson reference ever.
Does it matter what copyright was intended to do, or how it is legislated and enforced today?
Depends, morally or legally? The original question was one of the moral (or ethical if you prefer) thing to do, not a question of the legal thing to do. It's entirely possible to be ethically correct, but legally wrong, and in fact that happens quite often. It's one of the reason why judges and juries are allowed some leeway in sentencing and conviction. There's an expression which goes "no jury would convict you" often used such as "He was so annoying you could beat him to death and no jury would convict you."
Quit stealing my oxygen.
Make sure this gets mainstream press coverage. Be sure to sensationalize it and compare it to the RIAA. Watch them back down quickly.
So far it looks like they're being very diplomatic about it. It's somewhat disturbing that they're actually monitoring Limewire for copyright infringement, but as far as possible responses go, sending a letter that essentially says "We tracked someone to your network, we'd appreciate if you'd do something about it." is one of the better ones. It would have been nice if they actually asked for something to be done, instead of leaving it open with the implication of possible legal action, but it's a lot better than saying pay up or we'll see you in court (which is no doubt what the RIAA would do). This approach is similar to the one that the MPAA has adopted in which they send a letter that essentially says "We know you're violating our copyright, we have records of you transferring such and such movie on such and such time from such and such IP. This is a warning, please stop now or we'll pursue legal avenues." (friend of mine received such a letter). Notice that the ESA isn't asking for money, and no where in the letter (at least the portion we're provided) does it say anything about a lawsuit.
Personally, I'd start by tracking down the moron running Limewire on a company system and have a chat with them. Then I'd block Limewire (no reason to be running that period, bittorrent is defensible, but Limewire is just an excuse to get a trojan on your system), and circulate a memo explaining that it's unacceptable to be running unapproved P2P software (to allow for possible valid uses of bittorrent). In the memo I'd make sure to stress the security implications and strong risk of virus infection possible from downloading off a P2P network. In particular make sure to point out that anti-virus software really only defends against well known threats and that it's trivially easy to create a trojan or virus that can go undetected and then distribute it through a P2P network for weeks or longer before AV software becomes aware of it. This nicely sidesteps the whole copyright infringement argument while still pointing our the very real security concern these apps pose for a commercial (or government as the case may be) intranet.
Ridiculous isn't it. The RIAA or local variant (in the case of Australia this would be the government) are one of the most despised groups in the world now, and it's like the software industry looked and thought "WOW! We MUST get a slice of that juicy animosity pie!"
Idiocy.
There you go, that should cover it.
Of course, the most massively abused addon ever is ActiveX. Also, when the "addon" ships with the browser, you shouldn't really be able to call it an addon anymore.
Firefox has the right idea with extensions, they're relatively small, lightweight, incredibly flexible, but also easy to corral and sandbox. Since most things you want to do can be handled by extensions, there's really very little reason to use plugins in Firefox outside of things like flash, pdf, or embedding mplayer/vlc/media player of choice. Over on the IE side of things however, anything you want to change must be done via a plugin, which means running a binary blob and having to trust it not to do something nasty.
Anyone have any clue what kind of sentence generator this bot is using? I've seen several of these posts now in various threads and either it's a very benign sort of bot (nothing it's posted seems offensive or in general anything but slightly on-topic sounding drivel), or he/she is still testing out the grammar file before switching into troll mode. At any rate, it seems to be producing interesting results (markov chains maybe?), and looks like it seeds the inputs with random words picked out of the article description, then extrapolates using some sort of random seeding in combination with an association dictionary. In this instance it looks like it grabbed onto "Santa Cruz" as a physical location, and then switched into PHB/CEO mode to serve up some buzzword salad.
Well, yes and no. Although a human could potentially live for hundreds of years, doing so would lead either to much slower breeding cycles (and thus slower evolution), or massive overpopulation (even with out limited lifespans this is an issue). Although it's true that a longer lived human could contribute back more over their lifetime, it would also tend to cause the species as a whole to stagnate on a genetic level. From an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense to have shorter lifespans, although given our relative genetic stability at this point combined with our massive numbers a longer lifespan with a much slower and shorter breeding period would probably be preferable, sadly evolution doesn't work on the sort of time scales that would make that change naturally, before such a change would likely be obsolete.
The layout and navigation is better, but the actual aesthetic and use of screen real-estate blows. I'd be much happier if they went back to the look and feel of the old blade system (large flat panels to use the most of the screen instead of those silly psuedo-3D panels with all that dead space around them), but kept the overall layout of NXE. There was absolutely no reason to switch to the stupid 3D panels to display what is ultimately 2D information, it's an absolute waste of space and doesn't even look particularly good. I'm also pissed that the themes which used to offer a little variety from blade to blade have now been reduced to what is essentially a static wallpaper.
I'm familiar with L4 (and it's various relatives) and I rather like the kernel, although I think it needs a lot of work to achieve anything close to good security. That's not really the kernels fault of course, it's only part of the problem, and there's really very little wrong security wise with the actual kernel, but a kernel by itself is only a very tiny piece of the overall security of the system, it's the other system utilities and even the filesystem itself that's the biggest security problem. Pointing at a kernel and calling it secure as opposed to an OS (and all the baggage that entails) is a little like pointing to a safe and calling it secure as opposed to a bank. It doesn't matter how badass your safe is if anyone can walk in, pick it up, and walk off with it, it's a layered approach to security that makes it secure, and somewhere along the way people need to be involved. Security always comes down to people at some point, and as such anything that does not quantify the person and take them into account is not truly secure. To go back to our previous metaphor of the safe, you can mathematically prove the number of combination's the lock might have, and you can mathematically prove the physical strength of the various components, but what you cannot do is mathematically prove that the guy in charge of guarding that safe is doing his job, or that someone won't somehow manage to steal the safe itself.
Now, formal verification is a nice tool, it lets you efficiently spot certain kinds of problems, but formal verification by itself is far from a good measure of how "secure" something is. A good secure OS must be both free from code defects and exploits (buffer overflows, various injection attacks, escalation bugs), and must be designed with an overall goal of ensuring that the user is given all the tools and information they need in order to make informed judgments about the state of the system.
What do you use to catch a jaded pessimist?
Having working with the OS in question and directly with the NSA on getting our own OS certified (which we decided was too expensive in the end, and wound up throwing it away to use Integrity-178B)....
NSA does employ a sizeable group of mathemeticians in the area of security now as well. They've invested a lot of time in money in mathematical models for proving security, namely from the vantage point of possible combinations of system states, and how to minimize those into a human-testable number of states.
Yes, I've seen some of the work that's been done on trying to create a OS that can be mathematically proven to be secure, but I just don't buy it. Sure you can use some set theory and various other things to try to show how mathematically the system is bounded within the secure states, but all of that goes out the window once you move beyond a non-trivial set of functionality, and completely ignores the human side of the equation (which is the most important part, if the system makes it hard on the user to remain secure, then the user won't use the system the way it's meant). I also wasn't saying that mathematicians have no place in software security, or that they aren't useful, just that a mathematician isn't necessarily the best (or even good) choice for designing a OS.
Computer security is equal parts software, hardware, interface, and user training. Ignore any of those and you've just introduced your weak link in the system (usually the user and/or interface which go hand in hand). Hardware is only really an issue of you're trying to secure against a threat with physical access, which any halfway competent security professional can tell you is a stalling tactic at best. Software is critical to prevent things like buffer overflow attacks, but can be tested automatically with a good degree of accuracy. Interface and user training are really the linchpins of security. A good interface is a must in order to allow the user to make informed decisions concerning how trustworthy the system in question is, and proper training is important to allow the user to properly interpret the information they're receiving from the interface and to learn to spot subtle signs of problems.
Of course, in a specialized environment like a B2, or highly secured and hardened systems like no doubt the NSA uses the problem can be reduced in scope as to be nearly fully encompassed by a mathematical state model, but in so doing you massively limit the capability of the underlying system. In essence you take a general purpose system (computer) and reduce it's functionality to one specific task in order to be assured of it performing that single task in a easily controlled fashion. Although this is fine for the highly specialized tasks the NSA puts these systems to it would never work in a general purpose system used by end consumers and even most businesses. Once you go down that route, you might as well just use an embedded device as you've already lost the greatest advantage a PC has which is generalized functionality.
Cryptography yes, security no. Although cryptography is a very important tool in designing a secure OS, it's not the only one, and probably not even the most important one. Likewise for software in general. Cryptography is important for communications, and data protection which makes it important for communications between programs, and storage of programs, but actually ensuring the integrity of the system or application has a lot more to do with CS than it does Math. Both math and CS students can be equally smart, but in different ways. The math students will tend to be good at number crunching and abstract thinking, particularly in regard to projecting problems into various spaces where they can be solved using various functions. The CS students are going to tend towards a more systematic view of things in which they break problems down into sub-components without losing track of the larger picture and the way the various pieces interlock and interact with each other. You most likely perceive the math students as being "more intelligent" because you yourself are more inclined to the mathematical way of thinking about things.
When the NSA was first created the primary concern with regards to security was a combination of mathematical and physical problems. Mathematics in the form of encrypted communications, and physical in the form of ensuring that the people and/or documents that contained sensitive information and the devices used to cypher them were properly secured. With the rise of the internet and the switch to an increasingly interconnected infrastructure software security has emerged as a factor now. It no longer matters how good the encryption is between your two programs if the OS their running on can be compromised and the data scraped as the application decodes it (or better yet the encryption key itself). As such even though the NSA started as an organization specializing in primarily cryptographic systems it must expand to include software and hardware security as well.
If the non-religious also hold those viewpoints I would be very interested in hearing why and debating it with them. I don't mind when people don't agree, so long as they have a logical reason for doing so. That's the inherit difference between the highly religious and the non-religious, the religious hold a position on certain topics because there dogma says they must, or because it would contradict their dogma, and as such they cannot be reasoned with. The non-religious in contrast, even if they don't agree, can at least be debated with logically, and stand a chance of either being swayed to the opposing viewpoint, or else convincing the other party of their viewpoint.
The US does have the right to govern itself, but that doesn't mean it's always right, and it doesn't mean that everyone who disagrees should accept it just because the zealots outnumber them. The same argument could have been given with regards to womens suffrage, slavery, and prohibition. There is no logical reason why Gay people should be denied the legal status of marriage. If a Gay person getting married somehow affected the quality of life of someone besides that person and their partner the argument might have a leg to stand on, but as it is there's no reason other than ones based on religious dogma.
I really wish that if the teaching of creationism was mandated (I believe it is in at least one state) in science classes that it would be used as an example of how not to formulate a scientific hypothesis and shown for the complete bunk that it is. Unfortunately I'm not that optimistic. The churches would ensure that it's held up as a shining paragon of scientific theory, and all the flaws carefully glossed over. Anyone that questions its validity would get tossed out of the class. If you doubt this you've probably not been in the public school system anytime in the last 10 years as most teachers already treat the school textbooks and the "curriculum" as if it were itself a form of holy scripture. If this sort of thing is allowed to go through unchallenged entire generations will grow up indoctrinated to the church dogma even more than the previous generations, after all "god did it" would then be an accepted scientific theory.
If the religious would stick solely to the questions of whether or not god exists, what happens after death, and if there is a god what the meaning of everything is we wouldn't have a problem, but they insist on trying to tell everyone else what they can and cannot do based on their own religious beliefs. Examples of areas where the religious need to butt out include the teaching of creationism in a science class (creationism is not a scientific theory, it does not follow the scientific process, you can teach it in a theology class if you so desire), opposition to gay marriage (marriage is both a social and a legal relationship, I don't care if you don't want gay people being married in your church, but you have no right to deny them the legal relationship of marriage), abortion, and stem cell research. It's not currently a problem, but I also expect them to try to interfere in genetic research, human cloning, and human genetic manipulation in the near future.
Whose rules?
The rules set forth by the scientific process. Pay particular attention to rule 4, and the clause that specifies observing a expected result does not qualify as a affirmative test of a hypothesis.
It seems there still are and always will be millions of people on this planet who will not and cannot live only such rules.
There are a great number of people that are highly superstitious (which is the same thing as being religious), although I rather hope this isn't permanent state of affairs.
There are people in this world who will fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves into tiny pieces over the really important questions that science cannot answer.
No, there are people in this world who will fly airplanes into buildings and blow themselves into tiny pieces because they've been raised to be unable to realize the difference between religious dogma and reality, and work themselves into a psychotic state over unimportant triviality.
Most things we, even we Westerners do, are based on faith, belief, not sure knowledge. You don't get into an airplane or a car because you know for sure that it will take you to the other end where you want to go, but you believe there is a good statistical probability that you will get there. The question, will I get to my destination is not answerable by science, but only in belief over good probability that you will.
Much of the western world, and some of the eastern world makes irrational decisions based on their damaged ability to deal with reality caused by early indoctrination in religious dogma. Getting into a car or airplane does not require faith, and you do not need to believe you are guaranteed to arrive at your destination. Any sane well adjusted individual should know and understand the risk involved in any activity including riding in a car of airplane. When you choose to get into a vehicle you're gambling based on the knowledge that the odds are in your favor that nothing life threatening will happen versus the inconvenience that not getting into the vehicle would cause. You may hope that nothing bad happens, much as you might hope that if you purchase a lottery ticket that you'll win, but neither getting in the car, nor purchasing a lottery ticket requires an ounce of faith in anything.
To paraphrase a famous quote, there are no guarantees in life but death and taxes.
Actually this is both the OEM, and Microsofts fault. Microsoft came out with a program to certify OEM hardware as able to run Vista with acceptable performance. Had Microsoft actually done what they said they were doing things would have been fine. Instead when the OEMs started complaining to Microsoft that only the most powerful most expensive systems they were selling that year meet the certification requirements, Microsoft lowered the requirements knowing that by doing so they were representing underpowered systems as being able to run Vista with an acceptable level of performance. Apparently being able to boot in under 10 minutes and run solitaire without completely pegging all the system resources is considered "acceptable performance" by MS, but unfortunately for them not by anyone else.
Doh! Math fail... change that to only 3 were.
"We predicted that 9 cars would be stolen this month, but only 4 were! Of the remaining 6, 3 stopped working, 2 will probably be stolen next month, and the last one exploded."
They're off either side, they're the ones labeled "OS X", "Linux", and "Unix".
Actually in this example it would be undercharging. They predicted more exploits would happen than actually did, which given the nature of the predictions I'm happy with. Had they predicted that only only 1 of the exploits was likely to be used and 6 of them were instead then I'd be more ticked at them. Of course what would make me fscking ecstatic is if MS actually managed to create a piece of software with less than 100 security flaws (and calc, notepad, and paint don't count).
Science provides the answers it can, and anything it can't answer is by definition unanswerable (at the present time) and we must accept that and move on. Better to say we don't know, than to lie and make up some nonsensical answer. We can always put forth theories and hypothesis of course, but they must have a scientific basis which means saying "some invisible omnipotent being did it" is against the rules, unless of course you can devise a test to prove his existence.
@Service("SomeService")
public class SomeService {
and then on the controller having
@Autowired
private SomeService theService;
Spring takes care of everything else, including dealing with circular dependencies. Likewise Hibernate can handle any association you care to toss at it, and can be entirely configured with annotations (once again baring a single XML entry to list packages/classes to scan for annotations).