Information assurance is more than IT security. At the risk of constructing a caricature, IT security is about preventing any information compromise. Information assurance assumes that IT security will fail. The goal of IA is to manage the risks associated with failed IT security. An even broader goal is mission assurance: given that systems (including information systems) will fail, how can we be reasonably sure that the broader mission will still succeed. As always, Wikipedia has more information.
This reminds me of Cat (from Red Dwarf) walking around with a spray bottle: "This is mine, this is mine, and all of this is mine." Or, the seagulls from Finding Nemo. Regardless, you sir, are living in comedic hell.
It is often the case that the sensitive systems aren't directly connected to the Internet. Instead, the sensitive system gets inadvertently connected to another (less-sensitive) system that is connected to the Internet. The second systems gets compromised, which gives the attacker a way to attack the first system.
For example, as I understand it, a nuclear plant was taken offline by attackers. The control system was not connected to the Internet. However, the management system (payroll, timecards, etc.) was connected to the Internet so that managers could get work done via the Web. Based on some insider knowledge, the attackers subverted the management system, which was mistakenly connected to the control system (by the contractors responsible for the management system). Thus, the attackers were able to shut down the plant. So, the people responsible for the sensitive systems know to keep these systems off the Internet, but mistakes happen.
At the risk of incurring a "think of the children!" response, I'm going to use child porn as an example.
So, I see that not one amongst our libertarian crowd has yet taken you to task for your kmee-jerk 'think of the blinkin' children' response. Perhaps because they know better than to feed the stinkin' trolls. Regardless, I'm just dumb enough to bite.
Here goes: Are you frackin' stupid? It's illegal to show someone speeding? Or running a red light? It's illegal to show OJ failing to pull over? Or to show Martha Stewart committing perjury?
Those were all 'silly' examples. More seriously, the crime in child pornography resides in the person abusing the child. It does not reside in the viewer. Next you'll tell me that I'm guilty of terrorism for having read about how to manufacture a bomb? Or guilty of illegal immigration for having learned some Spanish? Look, if a crime was committed, go after the perpetrator, not everyone to whom you can draw a line with your purple crayon.
Okay, I have to jummp in at some point, so it may as well be here. I grew up in Minnesota (St. Cloud, but I spent a lot of time in Duluth as well). My vehicle of choice? A monster pickup? Nope. A killer-cool SUV? Nope. Wait for it... A Geo Metro for everyday use and a 4WD Subaru station wagon when there was extra cargo. These vehicles were able to handle Minnesota winters; I never needed a truck.
(Pretty funny to drive past Chevy Suburbans in the ditch during blizzards---I guess they had four-wheel drive to power them even further into the ditch. Stopped a couple of times to give the passengers a ride to the next town since cell phones weren't around yet.)
"You can use any language you want as long as it can do the job it's required to do and your TA is willing to accept it"
This is truly an enlightened position. I had a computational biology professor with basically this attitude. All we submitted were the outputs of our program. He warned us that if we tried to use a high-level language (such as Java or Perl) that our code would never run to completion. I took this as a personal challenge and implemented every assignment using Java or MS Access. My programs may have taken twice as long to run (an overestimate), but due to my familiarity with these tools and the excellent development environments available, I could complete the assignment much faster than my peers. Personally, I value my time over my CPU's time, so as far as I was concerned, this choice was a big win.
Aside: Thanks to the original submitter for an excellent "Ask/." question.
I don't think it is true that poor people pay a greater percentage in taxes than the rich. The lowest quintile has an effective tax rate of roughly 4% (down from 8% in 1979): Social insurance 8.3% + Corporate income 0.4% + Excise 2.1% + Income -6.5% = 4.3%.
The highest quintile has an effective tax rate of roughly 25% (down slightly from 27.5% in 1979).
Please do not construe this to suggest that I think we should increase the tax rate for the poor. I'm well into that top quintile, and I'm okay paying a much larger percentage than someone making $15K. I just felt the need to inject numbers from the CBO.
Also, these numbers do not include sales or property taxes because the federal government doesn't collect those. But, the gap between 4 and 25 is hard to close with these revenue sources.
My apologies that you found my post "high and mighty." However, it turns out that the minimum income needed to be in the top 5% is only ~$125K. If we define rich as income >= $200K, then the rich account for ~2% of the US population. (I don't have the exact percentage at my fingertips, but the cutoff for the top 1% is ~$300K.) I cut out the dollar definition because it did not jive with the top 5% definition, which was the definition I wanted to reply to. I then introduced the average income so that I could compare the top 5% to the bottom 20%. (These figures drawn from 2005 data, as published in Dec. 2007 by the CBO.)
The "rich"... who make up about 5% of the population pay the vast majority of taxes in this country.
You, sir, have a strange notion of "vast majority". According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 5% (for whom the average income is $457,400) of the population account for 41.4% of all tax revenue*. That percentage is a far cry from a "vast majority." Perhaps you meant the top quintile (average income = $214,500) who account for 67.2% of the tax revenue. The effective tax rate for this group is 25.2%.
How much blood do you expect to extract from the lowest quintile (average income = $15,800) anyway? Sure their effective tax rate is only 4.3%, but increasing their tax rate to 25% won't have much impact on the massive deficits to which we've grown addicted.
*Like so many tax critics, you have forgotten that income tax is but one source of tax revenue. Once you account for the additional sources (social insurance, corporate income, and excise taxes), the picture changes considerably. The upper quintile account for 58.5% of income tax revenue, but only 41.4% of all revenue.
As the GP mentioned, you only get to make a good impression once you have the interview. Getting to the interview is based first (and foremost) on networking (who you know). If you don't have connections, then you need to rely on your resume; fresh out of college, the school's reputation is one of the few hooks you have to land that interview. Companies tend to get many more applicants than they can reasonably interview, so some amount of cheap (however unfair) filtering is necessary.
Once you're in the interview, your resume serves largely to help the interviewer frame his questions.
If you initially choose the door with the car, are shown a goat, then swap: you lose!
If you initially choose a door with a goat, are shown a goat, then swap: you win!
Obvious, you say. However, these are the only two possible scenarios. What are the odds that you're in the first scenario? It's not 1/2, it's 1/3. Thus, you should always swap because your odds of winning are greatly increased.
Clearly, showing you a goat doesn't change your initial odds of having chosen the car. But, it does give you more information about the initial scenario. Hence the reason to switch.
First, let me acknowledge that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, others have already provided the statistics indicating that a gun in the home is overwhelmingly more likely to harm a family member than an intruder.
Caveats aside: my home has been broken into once. It was a drunk guy looking for the party next door. With this nuke-'em-from-orbit bullshit attitude, a couple of things might have happened: 1) there might have been a largely innocent dead guy fouling up the carpet or 2) there might have been a truly innocent family member spilling loosing bodily fluids to the carpet. With a more reasoned guns-do-kill-people attitude, we ended up in a situation where a) the cops were called, b) a drunk guy got a ride home or to a holding cell and c) we went back to bed. Note that in the real scenario, my father was not dead, I was not dead, my mother was not raped, and our money was not stolen.
Emptying a clip because you-have-more-firepower-than-him is pretty much guaranteed to end in tragedy. Insightful my ass.
It wasn't April Fools, but we had an RPG-convention twist on this trick: We'd set out a bowl clearly labelled "Chocolate-Covered Flies." People would stop by, munch a couple and ask what the candies really were. We'd then have to explain about truth in advertising: we had carefully dipped freeze-dried flies (available at a pet food store) in melted chocolate, chilled the result, and put them out for snacking. You wouldn't believe how many people refused to believe that they had just eaten chocolate-covered flies. Sometimes we'd have to break one open to show them the little freeze-dried wings. Ah, the good old days.
And therein lies the problem. The moment you ascribe to "good guys" and "bad guys" (with white and black hats?) is the moment you lose your ability to think critically. We're all just people with more or less compatible urges and mores. (More in most cases, less in extreme cases.)
I'm with you d. And to "pay it forward" (or whatever that meme is), my WAP is wide open. Feel free to visit Rockville and, if you're in the neighborhood, borrow some bandwidth (the SSID is Caetarn). Now, if my logs show that you're traffic is getting in my way, I may disconnect you, but that has yet to happen. Keeping this on topic, I don't care what you do with this shared bandwidth (even if it's illegal). I refuse to buckle just because big brother might be watching me not watching you. If BB doesn't like my attitude, it can kiss my shiny metallic router!
I haven't tested it extensively, but every chunk of text I threw at the program, it asserted was authored by a male. And yet, more than half the samples were from papers/blogs/fiction authored by female friends. I think that the program assumes that if you are even vaguely literate, you must be male.
I take it you've never had somebody break into your house. The last time it happened to me, the guy who broke in was a drunk college student looking for the party next door. He thought that his buddies had played a trick on him, locking him out. In this case, despite my extreme annoyance at the imposition, I am quite glad that this was not the last mistake he'll ever make. (Instead he got a police escort to a place suitable for sobering up---a holding cell I presume.) Ending a life is not something to be taken so lightly.
In other words, they knew that when religion sticks its face in government's business, religion becomes corrupt and a tool for the power-hungry and causes the people to lose respect for it. And when government sticks its nose in religion's business, government becomes oppressive and controlling and causes people to lose respect for it.
Alternatively:
In other words, they knew that when business sticks its face in government's affairs, business becomes corrupt and a tool for the power-hungry and causes the people to lose respect for it. And when government sticks its nose in business's affairs, government becomes oppressive and controlling and causes people to lose respect for it.
Off topic, true, but the comment quoted was to insightful to ignore without reply.
For example, if somebody is held up at security it will automatically move them into the last loading zone and move them to an aisle seat.
This proposal has some serious unintended consequences. Many people really prefer aisle seats. If one's odds of getting an aisle seat are increased by arriving late, I forsee many travellers deliberately reaching security late. Personally, I really like window seats. Once I have a confirmed seat assignment, I get grouchy if I don't have my window. It's the little boy in me that likes to watch the scenery go by.
I'm guessing (without evidence) that the doctor was speaking in terms of conditional probabilities and not making that clear (he may not have even realized he was talking about conditional probabilities). Are you better with this: P(depression | 1 parent has depression) = 0.5? Stated like this, depression would be a single-locus dominant trait (assuming that homozygous-depressives are so far gone so as never to reproduce), which strikes me as an over-simplification, but not fishy.
Personally, when writing code, I find the computer to be an insignificant portion of the means of production. Much more salient are the packages and libraries at my disposal. In a capitalistic system, these means of production are controlled by those with capital, generally corporations such as Microsoft (MFC) or Sun (Java pre-FOSS). With FOSS, the means of production are owned by the community (i.e., FOSS libraries are not private property). To a large extent, FOSS is developed by each according to his ability and distribted to each according to his need.
So, I may be (seriously) deluded. However, I instead think we have a different perspective on what constitutes the means of production in software development.
Aside: True, the definition I cited does not mention products. However, those who control the means of production usually control the products. But, I admit that this piece of the analogy breaks down. Just because I don't control MFC (and must purchase access to it) doesn't mean Microsoft has control over the tools I develop with it.
I don't see how FOSS is like communism at all actually. Does the government strictly control the creation and supply of software?
"Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production." (from the (reasonable) Wikipedia defintion) Nothing in this definition mentions the government. FOSS really is quite communistic in that everyone owns the means of production and the product. Up the irons!
I refuse to believe that the religious reich (sic) is a majority.
Agreed! "About 14 percent of the electorate in 2000 identified itself as part of the "Christian Right," with 79 percent of this sector voting for George W. Bush," quoted from this article.
I disagree. In many cases, we are being tyrannized by our ancestors. The current generation is much more permissive of sex, drugs (including alcohol) and rock 'n' roll than was society fifty (or a hundred) years ago. Laws that were perfectly reasonable back then have been preserved out of inertia. Consider strip clubs, for example. Which politician is going to go on record saying, "I think strip clubs aren't so bad. Let's allow more of them in our community." It doesn't matter that the majority of the population would agree with this sentiment. A very vocal minority can ensure that the restrictions are never lifted. Thus, laws that once served the community now serve to repress the community (e.g., so-called blue laws). What once was opted for may no longer be sensible. Unfortunately, we seem to be regressing with respect to individual rights.
(Caveat: IANAMB) As I understand it, immunoglobins are encoded by genes in so-called hypervariable regions. Basically, there are regions of the genome in which variability is beneficial because it allows the body to more easily generate immunities to various antigens. However, allergies turn the immune system against harmless antigens. So, if there's any genetic variation between identical twins, I would expect it to be in the hypervariable regions and therefore exhbited as differing allergies.
Slashdot Mirror
Information assurance is more than IT security. At the risk of constructing a caricature, IT security is about preventing any information compromise. Information assurance assumes that IT security will fail. The goal of IA is to manage the risks associated with failed IT security. An even broader goal is mission assurance: given that systems (including information systems) will fail, how can we be reasonably sure that the broader mission will still succeed. As always, Wikipedia has more information.
This reminds me of Cat (from Red Dwarf) walking around with a spray bottle: "This is mine, this is mine, and all of this is mine." Or, the seagulls from Finding Nemo. Regardless, you sir, are living in comedic hell.
It is often the case that the sensitive systems aren't directly connected to the Internet. Instead, the sensitive system gets inadvertently connected to another (less-sensitive) system that is connected to the Internet. The second systems gets compromised, which gives the attacker a way to attack the first system.
For example, as I understand it, a nuclear plant was taken offline by attackers. The control system was not connected to the Internet. However, the management system (payroll, timecards, etc.) was connected to the Internet so that managers could get work done via the Web. Based on some insider knowledge, the attackers subverted the management system, which was mistakenly connected to the control system (by the contractors responsible for the management system). Thus, the attackers were able to shut down the plant. So, the people responsible for the sensitive systems know to keep these systems off the Internet, but mistakes happen.
So, I see that not one amongst our libertarian crowd has yet taken you to task for your kmee-jerk 'think of the blinkin' children' response. Perhaps because they know better than to feed the stinkin' trolls. Regardless, I'm just dumb enough to bite.
Here goes: Are you frackin' stupid? It's illegal to show someone speeding? Or running a red light? It's illegal to show OJ failing to pull over? Or to show Martha Stewart committing perjury?
Those were all 'silly' examples. More seriously, the crime in child pornography resides in the person abusing the child. It does not reside in the viewer. Next you'll tell me that I'm guilty of terrorism for having read about how to manufacture a bomb? Or guilty of illegal immigration for having learned some Spanish? Look, if a crime was committed, go after the perpetrator, not everyone to whom you can draw a line with your purple crayon.
Okay, I have to jummp in at some point, so it may as well be here. I grew up in Minnesota (St. Cloud, but I spent a lot of time in Duluth as well). My vehicle of choice? A monster pickup? Nope. A killer-cool SUV? Nope. Wait for it ... A Geo Metro for everyday use and a 4WD Subaru station wagon when there was extra cargo. These vehicles were able to handle Minnesota winters; I never needed a truck.
(Pretty funny to drive past Chevy Suburbans in the ditch during blizzards---I guess they had four-wheel drive to power them even further into the ditch. Stopped a couple of times to give the passengers a ride to the next town since cell phones weren't around yet.)
This is truly an enlightened position. I had a computational biology professor with basically this attitude. All we submitted were the outputs of our program. He warned us that if we tried to use a high-level language (such as Java or Perl) that our code would never run to completion. I took this as a personal challenge and implemented every assignment using Java or MS Access. My programs may have taken twice as long to run (an overestimate), but due to my familiarity with these tools and the excellent development environments available, I could complete the assignment much faster than my peers. Personally, I value my time over my CPU's time, so as far as I was concerned, this choice was a big win.
Aside: Thanks to the original submitter for an excellent "Ask /." question.
I don't think it is true that poor people pay a greater percentage in taxes than the rich. The lowest quintile has an effective tax rate of roughly 4% (down from 8% in 1979): Social insurance 8.3% + Corporate income 0.4% + Excise 2.1% + Income -6.5% = 4.3%.
The highest quintile has an effective tax rate of roughly 25% (down slightly from 27.5% in 1979).
Please do not construe this to suggest that I think we should increase the tax rate for the poor. I'm well into that top quintile, and I'm okay paying a much larger percentage than someone making $15K. I just felt the need to inject numbers from the CBO.
Also, these numbers do not include sales or property taxes because the federal government doesn't collect those. But, the gap between 4 and 25 is hard to close with these revenue sources.
My apologies that you found my post "high and mighty." However, it turns out that the minimum income needed to be in the top 5% is only ~$125K. If we define rich as income >= $200K, then the rich account for ~2% of the US population. (I don't have the exact percentage at my fingertips, but the cutoff for the top 1% is ~$300K.) I cut out the dollar definition because it did not jive with the top 5% definition, which was the definition I wanted to reply to. I then introduced the average income so that I could compare the top 5% to the bottom 20%. (These figures drawn from 2005 data, as published in Dec. 2007 by the CBO.)
You, sir, have a strange notion of "vast majority". According to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 5% (for whom the average income is $457,400) of the population account for 41.4% of all tax revenue*. That percentage is a far cry from a "vast majority." Perhaps you meant the top quintile (average income = $214,500) who account for 67.2% of the tax revenue. The effective tax rate for this group is 25.2%.
How much blood do you expect to extract from the lowest quintile (average income = $15,800) anyway? Sure their effective tax rate is only 4.3%, but increasing their tax rate to 25% won't have much impact on the massive deficits to which we've grown addicted.
*Like so many tax critics, you have forgotten that income tax is but one source of tax revenue. Once you account for the additional sources (social insurance, corporate income, and excise taxes), the picture changes considerably. The upper quintile account for 58.5% of income tax revenue, but only 41.4% of all revenue.
As the GP mentioned, you only get to make a good impression once you have the interview. Getting to the interview is based first (and foremost) on networking (who you know). If you don't have connections, then you need to rely on your resume; fresh out of college, the school's reputation is one of the few hooks you have to land that interview. Companies tend to get many more applicants than they can reasonably interview, so some amount of cheap (however unfair) filtering is necessary.
Once you're in the interview, your resume serves largely to help the interviewer frame his questions.
If you initially choose the door with the car, are shown a goat, then swap: you lose!
If you initially choose a door with a goat, are shown a goat, then swap: you win!
Obvious, you say. However, these are the only two possible scenarios. What are the odds that you're in the first scenario? It's not 1/2, it's 1/3. Thus, you should always swap because your odds of winning are greatly increased.
Clearly, showing you a goat doesn't change your initial odds of having chosen the car. But, it does give you more information about the initial scenario. Hence the reason to switch.
First, let me acknowledge that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, others have already provided the statistics indicating that a gun in the home is overwhelmingly more likely to harm a family member than an intruder.
Caveats aside: my home has been broken into once. It was a drunk guy looking for the party next door. With this nuke-'em-from-orbit bullshit attitude, a couple of things might have happened: 1) there might have been a largely innocent dead guy fouling up the carpet or 2) there might have been a truly innocent family member spilling loosing bodily fluids to the carpet. With a more reasoned guns-do-kill-people attitude, we ended up in a situation where a) the cops were called, b) a drunk guy got a ride home or to a holding cell and c) we went back to bed. Note that in the real scenario, my father was not dead, I was not dead, my mother was not raped, and our money was not stolen.
Emptying a clip because you-have-more-firepower-than-him is pretty much guaranteed to end in tragedy. Insightful my ass.
It wasn't April Fools, but we had an RPG-convention twist on this trick: We'd set out a bowl clearly labelled "Chocolate-Covered Flies." People would stop by, munch a couple and ask what the candies really were. We'd then have to explain about truth in advertising: we had carefully dipped freeze-dried flies (available at a pet food store) in melted chocolate, chilled the result, and put them out for snacking. You wouldn't believe how many people refused to believe that they had just eaten chocolate-covered flies. Sometimes we'd have to break one open to show them the little freeze-dried wings. Ah, the good old days.
And therein lies the problem. The moment you ascribe to "good guys" and "bad guys" (with white and black hats?) is the moment you lose your ability to think critically. We're all just people with more or less compatible urges and mores. (More in most cases, less in extreme cases.)
I'm with you d. And to "pay it forward" (or whatever that meme is), my WAP is wide open. Feel free to visit Rockville and, if you're in the neighborhood, borrow some bandwidth (the SSID is Caetarn). Now, if my logs show that you're traffic is getting in my way, I may disconnect you, but that has yet to happen. Keeping this on topic, I don't care what you do with this shared bandwidth (even if it's illegal). I refuse to buckle just because big brother might be watching me not watching you. If BB doesn't like my attitude, it can kiss my shiny metallic router!
I haven't tested it extensively, but every chunk of text I threw at the program, it asserted was authored by a male. And yet, more than half the samples were from papers/blogs/fiction authored by female friends. I think that the program assumes that if you are even vaguely literate, you must be male.
I take it you've never had somebody break into your house. The last time it happened to me, the guy who broke in was a drunk college student looking for the party next door. He thought that his buddies had played a trick on him, locking him out. In this case, despite my extreme annoyance at the imposition, I am quite glad that this was not the last mistake he'll ever make. (Instead he got a police escort to a place suitable for sobering up---a holding cell I presume.) Ending a life is not something to be taken so lightly.
Alternatively:
In other words, they knew that when business sticks its face in government's affairs, business becomes corrupt and a tool for the power-hungry and causes the people to lose respect for it. And when government sticks its nose in business's affairs, government becomes oppressive and controlling and causes people to lose respect for it.
Off topic, true, but the comment quoted was to insightful to ignore without reply.
This proposal has some serious unintended consequences. Many people really prefer aisle seats. If one's odds of getting an aisle seat are increased by arriving late, I forsee many travellers deliberately reaching security late. Personally, I really like window seats. Once I have a confirmed seat assignment, I get grouchy if I don't have my window. It's the little boy in me that likes to watch the scenery go by.
I'm guessing (without evidence) that the doctor was speaking in terms of conditional probabilities and not making that clear (he may not have even realized he was talking about conditional probabilities). Are you better with this: P(depression | 1 parent has depression) = 0.5? Stated like this, depression would be a single-locus dominant trait (assuming that homozygous-depressives are so far gone so as never to reproduce), which strikes me as an over-simplification, but not fishy.
Personally, when writing code, I find the computer to be an insignificant portion of the means of production. Much more salient are the packages and libraries at my disposal. In a capitalistic system, these means of production are controlled by those with capital, generally corporations such as Microsoft (MFC) or Sun (Java pre-FOSS). With FOSS, the means of production are owned by the community (i.e., FOSS libraries are not private property). To a large extent, FOSS is developed by each according to his ability and distribted to each according to his need.
So, I may be (seriously) deluded. However, I instead think we have a different perspective on what constitutes the means of production in software development.
Aside: True, the definition I cited does not mention products. However, those who control the means of production usually control the products. But, I admit that this piece of the analogy breaks down. Just because I don't control MFC (and must purchase access to it) doesn't mean Microsoft has control over the tools I develop with it.
"Communism is a socioeconomic structure that promotes the establishment of a classless, stateless society based on common ownership of the means of production." (from the (reasonable) Wikipedia defintion) Nothing in this definition mentions the government. FOSS really is quite communistic in that everyone owns the means of production and the product. Up the irons!
Agreed! "About 14 percent of the electorate in 2000 identified itself as part of the "Christian Right," with 79 percent of this sector voting for George W. Bush," quoted from this article.
I disagree. In many cases, we are being tyrannized by our ancestors. The current generation is much more permissive of sex, drugs (including alcohol) and rock 'n' roll than was society fifty (or a hundred) years ago. Laws that were perfectly reasonable back then have been preserved out of inertia. Consider strip clubs, for example. Which politician is going to go on record saying, "I think strip clubs aren't so bad. Let's allow more of them in our community." It doesn't matter that the majority of the population would agree with this sentiment. A very vocal minority can ensure that the restrictions are never lifted. Thus, laws that once served the community now serve to repress the community (e.g., so-called blue laws). What once was opted for may no longer be sensible. Unfortunately, we seem to be regressing with respect to individual rights.
(Caveat: IANAMB) As I understand it, immunoglobins are encoded by genes in so-called hypervariable regions. Basically, there are regions of the genome in which variability is beneficial because it allows the body to more easily generate immunities to various antigens. However, allergies turn the immune system against harmless antigens. So, if there's any genetic variation between identical twins, I would expect it to be in the hypervariable regions and therefore exhbited as differing allergies.