How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
Do you know why the US has (most of) the best universities in the world (and the same holds for the high-tech industry sector)? You think it's because americans are somehow magically smarter than everyone else? It's because the US has attracted the top talent from all over the world. Stop letting talent in (while the rest of the world has started to compete to get it), and america will become a backwards and remote province in a matter of decades. But don't worry, outsourcing will stop once your standards of living are as low as china's.
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them
Then give them a green card or a visa that allows them to change employer at will, without compromising their chances for a green card. That will give them the market power they need to demand decent wages like everyone else.
If I were rovio software (the makers of angry birds) I would be pretty annoyed that the name of their popular game, and artwork from it, has been used to distribute a malicious program, even if it's just for demonstration purposes.
.
So the real question is, will rovio hit the authors with an explosive angry bird or bomb them with an egg-dropping angry bird?
On the plus side, this has reminded me that there is one more level pack I can buy for my n900...
I don't find anything wrong with the lend program. I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, (...)
TFS is an excerpt of TFA, which is an article from the economist. As the name suggests, the economist has no such "...should be free ethos". Still, they argues that the publishing business should not follow the steps of the music and movie business because the consumers will not be duped into confusing a restricted digital copy with real ownership of a physical book. This does not mean the economist is against DRM, in fact this article suggests a lower-priced, "rental" model for digital books.
A friend of mine some time ago downloaded book four of harry potter as an e-book off some website, and read it. He then proceeded to download and read book five, only to find out that the story was completely inconsistent with the plot of book four... It turns out the book he had read was a fan-made harry potter spin-off, probably written before book four actually came out, but it was good enough that, while a few parts seemed strange, he did not notice it was a fake until he saw the inconsistencies to the following tome...
Facebook is so keen on having us use this feature so they get all of our email contacts as well, that it frequently show "suggestions" on the right hand side telling you that some of your friends have used the facebook friend finder feature... and the best thing is that in several cases it is an outright lie! I have asked my contacts if they had really used that, and several told me they had not, including a few security geeks who I trust are telling the truth (you know, people with papers published on social networks privacy flaws).
All kinds of people enjoy waste and freewheeling. Government money is the largest source. But boss, compnay, NGO and even family money gets abused all the time too. There is really only one place for decency or lack thereof. In minds are hearts. And only one way to really reduce it from there, education. Prosecution makes people think twice sometimes, but doesn't really change who they are. Legislation and lawsuits and punishment just create even more social confusion, just visit some courts and lawsuits and you will see it offerts no real decency and solutions to society.
An article recently discussed on schneier's blog (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/control_fraud.html) argues otherwise... That under-deterrence creates an environment where corruption can become systemic and that regulatory frameworks need to be designed keeping in mind the possibility of fraud at the highest levels, and optimized to reduce it, rather than be designed based on economic models that wish corruption away as a market inefficiency that is somehow automagically eliminated by free market forces.
If the ipad is overpriced, then why hasn't anybody been able to duplicate it in less than a years time? Just try to find a capacitance touch screen with an OS designed for touch screen use(windows 7 isn't a touch screen OS, it has touch elements but still needs a mouse to work right, and is way over priced) For $500 find one you can buy right now.
Apple has been competitively priced for the last decade. You get less processor options, but overpriced they are not, stop trying to compare them to dell, but instead to thinkpads.
I don't know about the ipad, but apple laptops are definitely overpriced -in this decade-. Last two laptops I bought I did out of curiosity compare with the prices I would get for an apple of same specs, and both times found that the apple option was almost exactly twice as expensive. My current laptop I compared with a mac air that weighted the same, but to get the 128GB SSD on the air the price went over the roof. The difference is smaller (but still there) if you buy the basic device, because all of the cpu/memory etc options, as well as applecare extensions, are ludicrously expensive.
I don't even know why they bother with names. They are confusing and random, and I don't use them. I don't use the Mac OS names either. I just use the version number:
Laptop 1 = Ubuntu 8.0 (first version of 2008)
Laptop 2 = Lightweight Ubuntu 10.1 (second version of 2010)
Mac G3 = 10.4
Mac G5 = 10.5
Not a clue what their "names" are supposed to be.
Names are much easier to google than version numbers, especially if they are unusual words not frequently used in the tech domain. So yes, please keep up using those natty names...
Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine's memory. This will kill your file I/O performance on your host, since these huge files are constantly being written to.
This definitely works with virtualbox. We have a server in the lab that runs virtualbox guests on linux, and the virtualbox hard disks are LVM logical volumes, so there is no extra file system overhead there, and thanks to LVM it should be straightforward to resize them. I also use virtualbox on my desktops and laptops, for experimenting with stuff and for when I need a windows box (but here the virtual hard disks are just files). Have not booted into a windows partition in... forget how long...
We have also been migrating away from VMWare server everywhere we can because the web admin interface that they shoved down users throat a few versions ago is a stinking pile of crap that doesn't work at all with most browsers. And that was not a strong incentive to try ESX.
With this, Mac OS X users get all their OS updates automatically from one place. Too bad Microsoft & the various BSD & Linux vendors are not able to do this too.
Did you ever actually use linux? Any linux distribution from this decade has a centralized installation/upgrade mechanism such as apt-get, etc. This is one huge usability advantage over windows, that makes linux in my opinion much more usable than windows at the moment. Plus, it is an open mechanism, because if you want a software that is not provided by your distribution you can add a new repository source and it will get auto-updated just like all the rest.
Do YOU want to learn from a professor that's sat in a lab for 20 years (but worked for Nasa launching the Moon rocket) or do you want to learn from a Sales guy that teaches in between meetings with customers right now? Or how about learning business from a guy that actually started his own business and uses it to feed his family?
Also, the actual number of dead civilians is 100k I believe, not half a million. Note also that this number includes all civilians who died as a consequence of the war regardless of who directly killed them. All these 100k civilians were not shot/bombed by US troops, they may have been killed by Talibans. I'm not sure if this number includes people who died as an indirect consequence of the war, for example people who died of illness/hunger because the war may have made medication/food unavailable. If not, then the total number of civilian war casualties is higher and may in fact reach half a million.
It doesn't include indirect deaths from illness or hunger:
I daresay you could teach an intermediate coder how to do OO in straight C and get better results than if they were trying to use C++.
I have done OO in C, and it's not pretty... with my own hacked up implementation of a virtual function table that you have to explicitly fill with the right pointers. This was some kind of expression evaluation code where the only alternative really was a huge switch statement, so it might have been better than the alternative, but I wouldn't advise, let alone teach, anyone to do this.
But here's the thing, their behavior wasn't honest or genuinely based on real belief in the value of the stocks.
Do you really think that savvy investors putting money into stock markets or housing markets or CDS or whatever during a bubble really think that the "fundamentals" justify such prices? No. They just think that the stocks will rise *a bit longer* so they better buy now and wait a little longer before jumping off the bubble. People who jump off the bubble too early lose their wall street job. There are even "momentum funds" that simply buy stocks as soon as the price starts rising, and sell shortly after, based on the idea that when a price starts moving up it keeps going up for a little while (and by the way, the fact that these funds make money disproves the random walk model and hence the rational expectations hypothesis). Honestly, any kind of fast trading clearly has little or nothing to do with the *real* value of stocks.
Not to mention algorithm trading... try asking a neural network if it *really really honestly* believes that a certain stock is worth more than its current value.
As a fan of NoScript (the only plugin that *really* keeps me with firefox), I can tell you this: it's too hard to use for normal users.
Yeah, because Joe User can't be bothered to learn the following sequence:
1: Notice that an element of the page isn't "working as intended".
2: Click the little "S" icon in the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser.
3: (this is the one causing the most issues with NoScript usage, IMHO) select only the bare minimum of sites to allow scripting from (typically the one in the address bar, duh)
4: Profit! (view your youtube videos without most of the additional crap/ads/whatever)
Unfortunately, my experience is that the typical response to "my youtube is broken!" is to either "allow all this page" or close FF and use IE...
As a user of noscript: yes, it is too hard for Joe User. When friends and family use my laptop I usually turn off noscript for them first. Or... wait until they fill a huge form with 27 fields and find out that it doesn't work because of noscript, click on the little S button, the page gets reloaded and the form gets reset... noscript is great but it's not for everyone.
A network protection scheme doesn't have to verify that Macs, ubuntus etc etc are "compliant", because those are noise in the signal as a percentage of customer endpoint equipment. A network protection scheme has to keep people who want to continue running MS stuff up to date and patched. It doesnt' ahve to keep windows power users from getting on the internet if they can read about registry hacks or whatever,
If this is client-side, what stops malware from performing those same "registry hacks or whatever" automatically on behalf of the user?
This post needs some perspective I think. Let me qualify my post by saying:
1) I am a former Blockbuster employee (5 years ago while I was in college).
2) I am a current Netflix subscriber and occasional Redbox user. I can not recall the last time I walked into a Blockbuster. I think their business model is archaic
evercookie is written in JavaScript and additionally
uses a SWF (Flash) object for the Local Shared Objects and
PHP for the server-side generation of cached PNGs.
[...]
If a user gets cookied on one browser and switches to
another browser as long as they still have the Local Shared Object
cookie, the cookie will reproduce in both browsers.
Well, the site's EXAMPLE failed on my box. That's NoScript at work.
Same here. But what if this script were used by a website for which you need or want to enable scripting?
If you use BetterPrivacy (another FF extension), it removes the LSO at
browser shutdown.
Which helps, but doesn't solve the problem, since the cookie is also stored in a cached PNG's RGB values and in your browser history, and in a bunch of HTML5 related storage options that your browser may or may not support and betterprivacy may or may not have been updated to take care of.
I agree, really, Google should let -us- decide what an app can do.
Google won't, and shouldn't, add that. Google doesn't know what an application needs to function, (..)
Yes, google does know... more precisely, your android phone knows. Android apps come with a manifest file that specifies which of over 100 different privileges it requires to function (in fact, at usenix security last year, the chief android security guy was saying that the large number of distinct privileges is a usability pitfall that they are working on improving on). As a user, you are presented with a summary of this list and can then decide whether to install the entire application (and grant it all the privileges it has requested), or not install it at all. Being instead able to install the application but deny some specific privileges makes sense. Of course, if the app is not coded to check for success of the operations you are denying it and handle the error this will likely lead to a crash. Still, this could be a useful feature for power-users, perhaps hidden behind some "advanced" button during the installation process.
The EU version of the DMCA specifically only provides protection for effective encryption measures. So for example the first time the CSS wast taken to the European Court the ruling was that it was not an effective encryption measure and the case was thrown out. The fact that due to flaws in the scheme an ordinary PC can crack the CSS encryption in less than a second makes it ineffective and thus not eligible for protection.
If HDCP simply required gathering 40 public keys from 40 different bits of hardware to work out the master key then it is highly likely that it would be ruled and ineffective encryption measure and thrown out.
Similarly your two bit scheme would also fall foul of the requirement to be effective.
Excuse me... but if the protection measure is effective (as in, no-one has manged to break it), then you don't need a law that forbids breaking it. It would be like forbidding perpetual motion (as in "Lisa, in this house we follow the laws of thermodynamics!").
Slashdot Mirror
How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
Do you know why the US has (most of) the best universities in the world (and the same holds for the high-tech industry sector)? You think it's because americans are somehow magically smarter than everyone else? It's because the US has attracted the top talent from all over the world. Stop letting talent in (while the rest of the world has started to compete to get it), and america will become a backwards and remote province in a matter of decades. But don't worry, outsourcing will stop once your standards of living are as low as china's.
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them
Then give them a green card or a visa that allows them to change employer at will, without compromising their chances for a green card. That will give them the market power they need to demand decent wages like everyone else.
If I were rovio software (the makers of angry birds) I would be pretty annoyed that the name of their popular game, and artwork from it, has been used to distribute a malicious program, even if it's just for demonstration purposes.
. So the real question is, will rovio hit the authors with an explosive angry bird or bomb them with an egg-dropping angry bird?
On the plus side, this has reminded me that there is one more level pack I can buy for my n900...
I don't find anything wrong with the lend program. I realize Slashdot has a certain "information should be free" ethos, (...)
TFS is an excerpt of TFA, which is an article from the economist. As the name suggests, the economist has no such "...should be free ethos". Still, they argues that the publishing business should not follow the steps of the music and movie business because the consumers will not be duped into confusing a restricted digital copy with real ownership of a physical book. This does not mean the economist is against DRM, in fact this article suggests a lower-priced, "rental" model for digital books.
A friend of mine some time ago downloaded book four of harry potter as an e-book off some website, and read it. He then proceeded to download and read book five, only to find out that the story was completely inconsistent with the plot of book four... It turns out the book he had read was a fan-made harry potter spin-off, probably written before book four actually came out, but it was good enough that, while a few parts seemed strange, he did not notice it was a fake until he saw the inconsistencies to the following tome...
Facebook is so keen on having us use this feature so they get all of our email contacts as well, that it frequently show "suggestions" on the right hand side telling you that some of your friends have used the facebook friend finder feature... and the best thing is that in several cases it is an outright lie! I have asked my contacts if they had really used that, and several told me they had not, including a few security geeks who I trust are telling the truth (you know, people with papers published on social networks privacy flaws).
All kinds of people enjoy waste and freewheeling. Government money is the largest source. But boss, compnay, NGO and even family money gets abused all the time too. There is really only one place for decency or lack thereof. In minds are hearts. And only one way to really reduce it from there, education. Prosecution makes people think twice sometimes, but doesn't really change who they are. Legislation and lawsuits and punishment just create even more social confusion, just visit some courts and lawsuits and you will see it offerts no real decency and solutions to society.
An article recently discussed on schneier's blog (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/control_fraud.html) argues otherwise... That under-deterrence creates an environment where corruption can become systemic and that regulatory frameworks need to be designed keeping in mind the possibility of fraud at the highest levels, and optimized to reduce it, rather than be designed based on economic models that wish corruption away as a market inefficiency that is somehow automagically eliminated by free market forces.
If the ipad is overpriced, then why hasn't anybody been able to duplicate it in less than a years time? Just try to find a capacitance touch screen with an OS designed for touch screen use(windows 7 isn't a touch screen OS, it has touch elements but still needs a mouse to work right, and is way over priced) For $500 find one you can buy right now.
Apple has been competitively priced for the last decade. You get less processor options, but overpriced they are not, stop trying to compare them to dell, but instead to thinkpads.
I don't know about the ipad, but apple laptops are definitely overpriced -in this decade-. Last two laptops I bought I did out of curiosity compare with the prices I would get for an apple of same specs, and both times found that the apple option was almost exactly twice as expensive. My current laptop I compared with a mac air that weighted the same, but to get the 128GB SSD on the air the price went over the roof. The difference is smaller (but still there) if you buy the basic device, because all of the cpu/memory etc options, as well as applecare extensions, are ludicrously expensive.
..to the actual slides, position paper, video, or whatever, so we can get some of the meat?
I don't even know why they bother with names. They are confusing and random, and I don't use them. I don't use the Mac OS names either. I just use the version number:
Laptop 1 = Ubuntu 8.0 (first version of 2008) Laptop 2 = Lightweight Ubuntu 10.1 (second version of 2010) Mac G3 = 10.4 Mac G5 = 10.5
Not a clue what their "names" are supposed to be.
Names are much easier to google than version numbers, especially if they are unusual words not frequently used in the tech domain. So yes, please keep up using those natty names...
Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine's memory. This will kill your file I/O performance on your host, since these huge files are constantly being written to.
This definitely works with virtualbox. We have a server in the lab that runs virtualbox guests on linux, and the virtualbox hard disks are LVM logical volumes, so there is no extra file system overhead there, and thanks to LVM it should be straightforward to resize them. I also use virtualbox on my desktops and laptops, for experimenting with stuff and for when I need a windows box (but here the virtual hard disks are just files). Have not booted into a windows partition in... forget how long...
We have also been migrating away from VMWare server everywhere we can because the web admin interface that they shoved down users throat a few versions ago is a stinking pile of crap that doesn't work at all with most browsers. And that was not a strong incentive to try ESX.
With this, Mac OS X users get all their OS updates automatically from one place. Too bad Microsoft & the various BSD & Linux vendors are not able to do this too.
Did you ever actually use linux? Any linux distribution from this decade has a centralized installation/upgrade mechanism such as apt-get, etc. This is one huge usability advantage over windows, that makes linux in my opinion much more usable than windows at the moment. Plus, it is an open mechanism, because if you want a software that is not provided by your distribution you can add a new repository source and it will get auto-updated just like all the rest.
Do YOU want to learn from a professor that's sat in a lab for 20 years (but worked for Nasa launching the Moon rocket) or do you want to learn from a Sales guy that teaches in between meetings with customers right now? Or how about learning business from a guy that actually started his own business and uses it to feed his family?
Easy! Is that supposed to be a trick question?
Also, the actual number of dead civilians is 100k I believe, not half a million. Note also that this number includes all civilians who died as a consequence of the war regardless of who directly killed them. All these 100k civilians were not shot/bombed by US troops, they may have been killed by Talibans. I'm not sure if this number includes people who died as an indirect consequence of the war, for example people who died of illness/hunger because the war may have made medication/food unavailable. If not, then the total number of civilian war casualties is higher and may in fact reach half a million.
It doesn't include indirect deaths from illness or hunger:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
It is about 100k "documented civilian deaths from violence".
I daresay you could teach an intermediate coder how to do OO in straight C and get better results than if they were trying to use C++.
I have done OO in C, and it's not pretty... with my own hacked up implementation of a virtual function table that you have to explicitly fill with the right pointers. This was some kind of expression evaluation code where the only alternative really was a huge switch statement, so it might have been better than the alternative, but I wouldn't advise, let alone teach, anyone to do this.
But here's the thing, their behavior wasn't honest or genuinely based on real belief in the value of the stocks.
Do you really think that savvy investors putting money into stock markets or housing markets or CDS or whatever during a bubble really think that the "fundamentals" justify such prices? No. They just think that the stocks will rise *a bit longer* so they better buy now and wait a little longer before jumping off the bubble. People who jump off the bubble too early lose their wall street job. There are even "momentum funds" that simply buy stocks as soon as the price starts rising, and sell shortly after, based on the idea that when a price starts moving up it keeps going up for a little while (and by the way, the fact that these funds make money disproves the random walk model and hence the rational expectations hypothesis). Honestly, any kind of fast trading clearly has little or nothing to do with the *real* value of stocks.
Not to mention algorithm trading... try asking a neural network if it *really really honestly* believes that a certain stock is worth more than its current value.
I think "anonymously" is a #fish (http://bit.ly/9njClc)
As a fan of NoScript (the only plugin that *really* keeps me with firefox), I can tell you this: it's too hard to use for normal users.
Yeah, because Joe User can't be bothered to learn the following sequence:
1: Notice that an element of the page isn't "working as intended". 2: Click the little "S" icon in the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser. 3: (this is the one causing the most issues with NoScript usage, IMHO) select only the bare minimum of sites to allow scripting from (typically the one in the address bar, duh) 4: Profit! (view your youtube videos without most of the additional crap/ads/whatever)
Unfortunately, my experience is that the typical response to "my youtube is broken!" is to either "allow all this page" or close FF and use IE...
As a user of noscript: yes, it is too hard for Joe User. When friends and family use my laptop I usually turn off noscript for them first. Or... wait until they fill a huge form with 27 fields and find out that it doesn't work because of noscript, click on the little S button, the page gets reloaded and the form gets reset... noscript is great but it's not for everyone.
A network protection scheme doesn't have to verify that Macs, ubuntus etc etc are "compliant", because those are noise in the signal as a percentage of customer endpoint equipment. A network protection scheme has to keep people who want to continue running MS stuff up to date and patched. It doesnt' ahve to keep windows power users from getting on the internet if they can read about registry hacks or whatever,
If this is client-side, what stops malware from performing those same "registry hacks or whatever" automatically on behalf of the user?
actually they don't need to. a simple google search gives you the answer.
facebook policy is that if a company advertises on facebook, they have 100% access to any and all profiles - regardless of your privacy settings..
Is this true? Can we have a reference for it?
This post needs some perspective I think. Let me qualify my post by saying:
1) I am a former Blockbuster employee (5 years ago while I was in college).
2) I am a current Netflix subscriber and occasional Redbox user. I can not recall the last time I walked into a Blockbuster. I think their business model is archaic
http://www.theonion.com/video/historic-blockbuster-store-offers-glimpse-of-how-m,14233/
evercookie is written in JavaScript and additionally uses a SWF (Flash) object for the Local Shared Objects and PHP for the server-side generation of cached PNGs. [...] If a user gets cookied on one browser and switches to another browser as long as they still have the Local Shared Object cookie, the cookie will reproduce in both browsers. Well, the site's EXAMPLE failed on my box. That's NoScript at work.
Same here. But what if this script were used by a website for which you need or want to enable scripting?
If you use BetterPrivacy (another FF extension), it removes the LSO at browser shutdown.
Which helps, but doesn't solve the problem, since the cookie is also stored in a cached PNG's RGB values and in your browser history, and in a bunch of HTML5 related storage options that your browser may or may not support and betterprivacy may or may not have been updated to take care of.
Look, no matter how smart you think you are, there is no way you can find out my intent without telepathy.
That's a few versions down the road.
Oh, come on.
Americans can be irritating, but wanting them to go down in a blaze of self inflicted gunshot wounds is mean.
Which reminds me of this...
http://www.theonion.com/articles/mexico-killed-in-drug-deal,18109/
Google won't, and shouldn't, add that. Google doesn't know what an application needs to function, (..)
Yes, google does know... more precisely, your android phone knows. Android apps come with a manifest file that specifies which of over 100 different privileges it requires to function (in fact, at usenix security last year, the chief android security guy was saying that the large number of distinct privileges is a usability pitfall that they are working on improving on). As a user, you are presented with a summary of this list and can then decide whether to install the entire application (and grant it all the privileges it has requested), or not install it at all. Being instead able to install the application but deny some specific privileges makes sense. Of course, if the app is not coded to check for success of the operations you are denying it and handle the error this will likely lead to a crash. Still, this could be a useful feature for power-users, perhaps hidden behind some "advanced" button during the installation process.
The EU version of the DMCA specifically only provides protection for effective encryption measures. So for example the first time the CSS wast taken to the European Court the ruling was that it was not an effective encryption measure and the case was thrown out. The fact that due to flaws in the scheme an ordinary PC can crack the CSS encryption in less than a second makes it ineffective and thus not eligible for protection.
If HDCP simply required gathering 40 public keys from 40 different bits of hardware to work out the master key then it is highly likely that it would be ruled and ineffective encryption measure and thrown out.
Similarly your two bit scheme would also fall foul of the requirement to be effective.
Excuse me... but if the protection measure is effective (as in, no-one has manged to break it), then you don't need a law that forbids breaking it. It would be like forbidding perpetual motion (as in "Lisa, in this house we follow the laws of thermodynamics!").