Each and every site admin comes up a different idea for more secure authentication. Then clueless management insists on dumbing it down shredding what little remains.
For example E-trade will give you the RSA key fob. Am I supposed to get a dozen key fobs from each of my bank, brokerage, mutual fund, anf 401-K administrator? Schwab would not let me use special characters in passwords. I think they also have a ridiculous 8 char limit. In this day and age where GPUs are being used for dictionary attacks? 8 char? Fidelity wanted an all numeric password because they wanted the phone based log-in used by their older customers to work in web too. On top of all that they have the password reset procedure which asks for stuff that you can find on the facebook profile.
Then there are idiotic Paychex which will lock you out after two failed login attempts. There is this site securetransfer.com that requires some 16 char password with at least two capitals two numerals and two special characters to get 100% strong password quality rating. Then there are clueless admins who tell you "never write down the password". Hello! Is there any end to this password madness?
Why can't they give me two levels of access? Read only access that lets me see account balances and verify that the check has cleared. And the write access that requires one more password that allows me to transfer funds and trade securities. May be even a third level password to send cash out of that institution to outside.
The population of India is huge. About 25% of them live below the poverty line. And another 25% have barely enough income to survive. 500 million such people drown out the other 500 million people with some disposable income. The top 25% of India are solidly middle class by American standards. They have steady income, are willing to spend humongous portions of their pay on their children's education. The predatory education industry makes more money than you can imagine. Anyway the richest of the rich live in a kind of opulence that defies comprehension. One guy named Mukesh Ambani built a private residence in downtown Mumbai for the cost of some 1 billion US dollars. It is a 25 story high rise as a private residence! Then some astrologer dude told him such wanton flaunting of wealth would attract the evil eye, and the owner decided not to live there!!!
I'll tell you what the big deal is. Finding routes and sorting them by price, time, or any other criterion is essentially a multiple traveling salesman problem. It can not be solved in polynomial time. You have to jump through several techniques akin to making the computer play chess or play Jeopardy to solve this problem. ITA had a break through using some kind of push/pull cache based thing that makes it efficient or even possible to do it.
The CTO of ITA software topped entire India in his high school final examination. He went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and topped his class there too. Then worked on the Artificial Intelligence lab of MIT. That guy is amazing. He can read four or five books on diverse subjects ranging from history of America to ecology of rain forests to hedge fund trading strategies... His penmanship is so amazing in college we used to ask him to write the campus magazine by his hand instead of going through typing it up or typesetting it and printing it. His skits would win intra hostel competitions. He was the editor of the city newspaper's Youth page back then. And he did audience research for the local TV station in his spare time.
Yes, it takes a person of that level of intellect to attack the problem of airfare. We mortals have no chance against them.
When I was the GTA, I used to follow every scrap of written material to find some reason to award points. I have given full credit to correctly formed equations, even if the answer is wrong, with a warning note written on the margin. Never docked points for not solving any equation that requires a programmable calculator. I would spend time trying to follow whatever method the student has chosen to attack the problem to localize the exact mistake that led the student astray. If there are multiple ways to solve a problem, I would often solve in every possible way while posting the answer key.
Gosh, those were the happy days. Wish I could go back to being in grad school again. No money at hand. But had an adoring wife and an adorable baby and plenty of time to be with them. Now the baby is in college, I am pounding key board hacking out code and the missus is nagging me to clean the basement. . One would think all the credit I gave out grading Engineering Mechanics I and II would give me some karma. Nope. I get no credit till the last piece of junk is on the sidewalk before garbage day
The dumb astronomers are looking in the outer space for it. No wonder they can't find it. All the dark matter in the solar system has coalesced into the form of Dick Cheney.
Actually if I could couple my car electronically to a car ahead of me, so that it is always 5 feet behind it, but drives independently on its own, it would be great. We could create "virtual road train". Professional drivers assisted by machines will do the actual highway driving. We would link up to them and relax in our own cars.
OK You stick to gasoline cars. If the majority of the car owners switch to home charging of their electric vehicles, the gasoline supply infrastructure will shrink a lot. You could still refill your tank in 5 minutes. But you will spend 25 minutes looking for a gasoline dispensing stations. And those who charge their electric vehicles in half an hour during their lunch/dinner breaks will laugh at you as they pass you.
I also heard that in America a white man shot a black kid with ice tea and a bag of candy dead and claimed self defense. He was not even given a slap in the wrist till there was a huge media outcry following a report in Hindustan Times, Times Of India and a few more English newspapers in India. Shamed by the scathing letters to the editor written by the retired bureaucrats in Chennai, Delhi and Kadumaththinahalli, America finally decided to book the offender.
Politifact would give "mostly true" rating for that passage. How would you like that line of reasoning?
So let us stop hating this or that or any group of people based on what you "heard". OK? Deal? No Deal?
One of the main thesis of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer winning book "Guns Germs and Steel" has been high population densities and close proximity between livestock and humans led to very virulent diseases and consequently highly immunized population of the survivors. Today the combination of population density and live stock in close proximity has shifted from Europe to China. But if ever a virus jumps from livestock to humans, we are done for. The pandemic could be catastrophic.
The alternative bandied about since Star Wars by Lt Gen Abrahamson in Regan admin, was anti missile satellites. This avoids storing ABM assets in orbit. So to that extent it avoids weaponization of space. And since the drones would have limited range, Russia would not feel threatened. (Russia holds all ABM technology as arms race tipping the balance of power). It is moving from having nuclear armed bombers on 24/7 patrol on the northern Canadian border to having drones encircling North Korea/Iran 24/7. Limited area, non nuclear weapon, these are the good things you can say about this technology.
But, inevitable consequence of this would be to avoid the boost phase of ICBM. One way is cruise missile instead of a ballistic missile. The other way is to move the whole damned payload up into orbit. That would be a very dangerous development. Since countries with large area would not be at a big disadvantage here, this might be half decent solution against rogue regimes of smaller land area.
See Boeing is Seattle Washington. Some super smart engineers were laid off by another tech company in town and Boeing scooped them up for a low price in the depths of the recession. They pitched this idea involving some, "protected audio path", "protected video path", "Signed drivers" etc that essentially guarantee uncrackable computing platform. One of the engineers "it is impossible to crack it because, even legitimate users can hardly use it, hackers? foggetabotit"
If you don't get recognized for that you need to find a new job.
I know you mean well, but most bosses and most companies do not recognize better quality coding. Some programmers know how to talk "managementese" and make them do the right thing. Like, "Let us use the simpler algo, though slower, because it would get us to the maket sooner. In the next release we will replace this faster algo to sell the upgrade". But often the people who actually do the coding are removed several layers from the management and they rarely get a chance to sell their idea to their management.
Management is obsessed with the assembly line and Toyota factory model of software development. The software development process will be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually a set of generalist programmers will be able to implement the feature. That is their idea of cost control.
Unless there was a critical need for that extra 10% you would be foolish not to go with the simple approach. Cost, schedule, and reliability are almost always more important than an incremental performance improvement.
I totally agree, but people who think like you and I rarely go high into management.
There is simply no incentive to write bug free code or even to make a conscious effort to reduce the bugs. Given the incentive structure in most programming shops one should be amazed the bugs are as few as they are today.
Think about it, if I implement a feature that has absolutely no bugs, no problems, no one complained and it is all hunky dory all the way. How much praise will you get for it? How many of you have written in your annual self assessment, "I implemented a critical feature foo in 2009 that has no bugs reported on it"? If you had bothered to write something like that down, would it be given a higher reward than "I increased the speed of the feature foo by 10%"
A step further, if you had a choice of a complex, difficult to test algorithm (say, using AVL tree based on two custom hash functions on a data set) to give you a 10% speed up versus a clean simpler algorithm (say, using a std::multimap that is essentially a balanced binary tree) which one would be rewarded more by your company? If you had chosen the complex one and a critical bug shows up and the customer is breathing down the neck of the company, everyone from the VP of sales will be talking to you, asking when and how fast could you fix it, and if you do fix it, you get this glowing review and reward. The simpler algo? You are just leaving food on the table for some jerk to come in, replace it with a buggy 10% faster algorithm and ask for a raise, making you look like a fool implementing a "slow" algorithm.
The reward structure in the corporations place very little value on bug free code, reward it very little, under estimates the maintenance cost of buggy algorithms, the programmers see buggy/complex implementations as job security. That is the crux of the matter.
B-1 visas is the tourist visa. Typically you can stay in the country legally for some 4 months or 6 months once you enter. The duration is decided by the immigration officer depending on the purpose of the visit. Typically Indian seniors visiting their sons/daughters would ask for 4 or 6 months. Once you are in, you cant get a driver's license, you cant get a SSN, you are not supposed to work, you can't get a US pay through any US Bank. But if you actually show up for work with a jacket and a laptop and call yourself "contractor visiting from off shore site to provide close technical support" no one is going ask for the employment authorization. So you work, though you are not supposed to.
Typically the visitor is employed in India and his/her Indian salary will continue to accrue in India. They give an expense account, which will be almost 40% of US salary. The workers usually live quite frugally and save it all and take it home. It is tax free in India because it is not really pay, just left over money in the expense account. Way back in 1980s when they offered such a deal to me, they were offering me 5000 Rs a month in India (twice the pay of a commissioned officer or as they call in India gazetted officer) and an expense account of $1800 a month. US starting salaries those days were around $36000 for an engineering undergrad.
This has been going on for a long time. I know of people who came like on B1. I know people who applied for B-1, the embassy in India smelled a rat and got "banned from applying for USA for two years" stamped on their passports.
Me, I came as F-1, struggled as PIGS (poor indian grad student) got H1-B then green card and then hurried to get my citizenship just in time to vote against Santorum in the senate election. woot!
Best Buy may not be Shangri La, but in many rural and semi-rural parts of the U.S., it's the nearest and best place to actually find a wide selection of electronics.
Best Buy had the onerous burden of collecting sales taxes in its stores and remitting them to the local municipality or state. Amazon, whose entire business model came into existence because of Government investments in infrastructure, and which depends on the Government to enforce its silly patents like "one-click" says, "I wont collect the tax, because you cant make me do it". People who shop at these places have to voluntarily pay the use tax in most places, but they don't because "you cant make me do it". In the end Amazone executives award themselves large bonuses, Amazon investors get some bones. Large tracts of America devastated by the loss of tax revenue rot away. The libertarians are happy, "Everybody is for himself, if you can't compete, die!" claim the social Darwinists. And in the end it is all Obama's fault because he is playing divisive class warfare.
They really did a huge bait and switch on America after I immigrated.
No, the Romans conquered Greece and stole all their academics wholesale. But Greece had the last laugh because all these academics captured by the Romans became tutors who raised the next generation of Roman elite to in the image of Greece. Roman mythology and culture became Greek in all but name only. History can repeat again. All these Chinese academics coached in USA go back with a lot more culture acclimatization than the stolen grains of sand. In the end China might become America in all but name.
$100 joints are frequented by people spending their employer's money. Then some corporations control costs in a brain dead way. They look at per diem charges, get a discount off the rack rate, the company executive who extracted this "great cost savings" mentions it in his annual performance review and goes his merry way. The hotels nickel and dime.
Try installing 100 million molten sodium batteries or flywheels spinning in vacuum in cars. Before the first million installations there will be an accident. By the time "if-it-saves-one-child-it-is-worth-it crowd" gets done with regulations and the ambulance chasers are done with the court cases, the fuel maker and seller would have exited the market segment altogether and would have become costermongers or blood orange purveyors pelting people singing Sonny Boy with oranges, potatoes and bananas.
Technically it is true alcohol has only 70% of the energy of diesel or petrol per kg or per liter. But it stores easily in room temp, alcohol tanker trucks, alcohol pumping stations exist, and all of them are grandfathered out of any new hazardous materials handling laws. All new fuels will face significant hurdles in getting past the regulations. In fact, you can't transport handle petrol/diesel under present day haz mat rules economically. That and the liability case law and precedents set up a huge cost of entry barrier to anything trying to displace these fuels.
In fact, they were doing it back then too and I told them that was bullshit -- too bad they chose not to listen.
Still they made money, oodles of it would be left even after paying the 250K fine. And you are still posting in slashdot, "I told them so". As Scar told the mouse, "Life isn't fair".
Meanwhile, somewhere deep in the Arabian sea.... Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off. His face is shot so that is the only thing he got left to laugh with.
That ain't gonna cut it. Even if the nuke blows up the asteroid, its center of mass will continue on the original trajectory. All the chunks that were displaced in the tangential (to the trajectory at the moment of explosion) will hit the earth. Only the chunks displaced in the normal direction has some chance of missing the earth. Again given the size of the Earth's gravitational well, it would only delay the impact by a few thousand years. So nuking the asteroid is likely to nip in the bud any nascent life form emerging after the apocalyptic impact.
I mean, come on, after the Earth has collided with an errant asteroid and all life on it has been fried, would you really care that the space aliens are laughing at you? If people are not moved by "You are all going to die!" they are not likely to be persuaded by, "Space aliens would laugh at you!".
Slashdot Mirror
Get a damned cell phone and quit bugging a real google security guy speaking out here in slshdot.
For example E-trade will give you the RSA key fob. Am I supposed to get a dozen key fobs from each of my bank, brokerage, mutual fund, anf 401-K administrator? Schwab would not let me use special characters in passwords. I think they also have a ridiculous 8 char limit. In this day and age where GPUs are being used for dictionary attacks? 8 char? Fidelity wanted an all numeric password because they wanted the phone based log-in used by their older customers to work in web too. On top of all that they have the password reset procedure which asks for stuff that you can find on the facebook profile.
Then there are idiotic Paychex which will lock you out after two failed login attempts. There is this site securetransfer.com that requires some 16 char password with at least two capitals two numerals and two special characters to get 100% strong password quality rating. Then there are clueless admins who tell you "never write down the password". Hello! Is there any end to this password madness?
Why can't they give me two levels of access? Read only access that lets me see account balances and verify that the check has cleared. And the write access that requires one more password that allows me to transfer funds and trade securities. May be even a third level password to send cash out of that institution to outside.
The population of India is huge. About 25% of them live below the poverty line. And another 25% have barely enough income to survive. 500 million such people drown out the other 500 million people with some disposable income. The top 25% of India are solidly middle class by American standards. They have steady income, are willing to spend humongous portions of their pay on their children's education. The predatory education industry makes more money than you can imagine. Anyway the richest of the rich live in a kind of opulence that defies comprehension. One guy named Mukesh Ambani built a private residence in downtown Mumbai for the cost of some 1 billion US dollars. It is a 25 story high rise as a private residence! Then some astrologer dude told him such wanton flaunting of wealth would attract the evil eye, and the owner decided not to live there!!!
The CTO of ITA software topped entire India in his high school final examination. He went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and topped his class there too. Then worked on the Artificial Intelligence lab of MIT. That guy is amazing. He can read four or five books on diverse subjects ranging from history of America to ecology of rain forests to hedge fund trading strategies... His penmanship is so amazing in college we used to ask him to write the campus magazine by his hand instead of going through typing it up or typesetting it and printing it. His skits would win intra hostel competitions. He was the editor of the city newspaper's Youth page back then. And he did audience research for the local TV station in his spare time.
Yes, it takes a person of that level of intellect to attack the problem of airfare. We mortals have no chance against them.
Gosh, those were the happy days. Wish I could go back to being in grad school again. No money at hand. But had an adoring wife and an adorable baby and plenty of time to be with them. Now the baby is in college, I am pounding key board hacking out code and the missus is nagging me to clean the basement. . One would think all the credit I gave out grading Engineering Mechanics I and II would give me some karma. Nope. I get no credit till the last piece of junk is on the sidewalk before garbage day
The dumb astronomers are looking in the outer space for it. No wonder they can't find it. All the dark matter in the solar system has coalesced into the form of Dick Cheney.
Thank you, golddess. Exactly what I meant.
Actually if I could couple my car electronically to a car ahead of me, so that it is always 5 feet behind it, but drives independently on its own, it would be great. We could create "virtual road train". Professional drivers assisted by machines will do the actual highway driving. We would link up to them and relax in our own cars.
OK You stick to gasoline cars. If the majority of the car owners switch to home charging of their electric vehicles, the gasoline supply infrastructure will shrink a lot. You could still refill your tank in 5 minutes. But you will spend 25 minutes looking for a gasoline dispensing stations. And those who charge their electric vehicles in half an hour during their lunch/dinner breaks will laugh at you as they pass you.
I agree, I heard that in India, a man ...
I also heard that in America a white man shot a black kid with ice tea and a bag of candy dead and claimed self defense. He was not even given a slap in the wrist till there was a huge media outcry following a report in Hindustan Times, Times Of India and a few more English newspapers in India. Shamed by the scathing letters to the editor written by the retired bureaucrats in Chennai, Delhi and Kadumaththinahalli, America finally decided to book the offender.
Politifact would give "mostly true" rating for that passage. How would you like that line of reasoning?
So let us stop hating this or that or any group of people based on what you "heard". OK? Deal? No Deal?
One of the main thesis of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer winning book "Guns Germs and Steel" has been high population densities and close proximity between livestock and humans led to very virulent diseases and consequently highly immunized population of the survivors. Today the combination of population density and live stock in close proximity has shifted from Europe to China. But if ever a virus jumps from livestock to humans, we are done for. The pandemic could be catastrophic.
But, inevitable consequence of this would be to avoid the boost phase of ICBM. One way is cruise missile instead of a ballistic missile. The other way is to move the whole damned payload up into orbit. That would be a very dangerous development. Since countries with large area would not be at a big disadvantage here, this might be half decent solution against rogue regimes of smaller land area.
See Boeing is Seattle Washington. Some super smart engineers were laid off by another tech company in town and Boeing scooped them up for a low price in the depths of the recession. They pitched this idea involving some, "protected audio path", "protected video path", "Signed drivers" etc that essentially guarantee uncrackable computing platform. One of the engineers "it is impossible to crack it because, even legitimate users can hardly use it, hackers? foggetabotit"
If you don't get recognized for that you need to find a new job.
I know you mean well, but most bosses and most companies do not recognize better quality coding. Some programmers know how to talk "managementese" and make them do the right thing. Like, "Let us use the simpler algo, though slower, because it would get us to the maket sooner. In the next release we will replace this faster algo to sell the upgrade". But often the people who actually do the coding are removed several layers from the management and they rarely get a chance to sell their idea to their management.
Management is obsessed with the assembly line and Toyota factory model of software development. The software development process will be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, and eventually a set of generalist programmers will be able to implement the feature. That is their idea of cost control.
Unless there was a critical need for that extra 10% you would be foolish not to go with the simple approach. Cost, schedule, and reliability are almost always more important than an incremental performance improvement.
I totally agree, but people who think like you and I rarely go high into management.
Think about it, if I implement a feature that has absolutely no bugs, no problems, no one complained and it is all hunky dory all the way. How much praise will you get for it? How many of you have written in your annual self assessment, "I implemented a critical feature foo in 2009 that has no bugs reported on it"? If you had bothered to write something like that down, would it be given a higher reward than "I increased the speed of the feature foo by 10%"
A step further, if you had a choice of a complex, difficult to test algorithm (say, using AVL tree based on two custom hash functions on a data set) to give you a 10% speed up versus a clean simpler algorithm (say, using a std::multimap that is essentially a balanced binary tree) which one would be rewarded more by your company? If you had chosen the complex one and a critical bug shows up and the customer is breathing down the neck of the company, everyone from the VP of sales will be talking to you, asking when and how fast could you fix it, and if you do fix it, you get this glowing review and reward. The simpler algo? You are just leaving food on the table for some jerk to come in, replace it with a buggy 10% faster algorithm and ask for a raise, making you look like a fool implementing a "slow" algorithm.
The reward structure in the corporations place very little value on bug free code, reward it very little, under estimates the maintenance cost of buggy algorithms, the programmers see buggy/complex implementations as job security. That is the crux of the matter.
Typically the visitor is employed in India and his/her Indian salary will continue to accrue in India. They give an expense account, which will be almost 40% of US salary. The workers usually live quite frugally and save it all and take it home. It is tax free in India because it is not really pay, just left over money in the expense account. Way back in 1980s when they offered such a deal to me, they were offering me 5000 Rs a month in India (twice the pay of a commissioned officer or as they call in India gazetted officer) and an expense account of $1800 a month. US starting salaries those days were around $36000 for an engineering undergrad.
This has been going on for a long time. I know of people who came like on B1. I know people who applied for B-1, the embassy in India smelled a rat and got "banned from applying for USA for two years" stamped on their passports.
Me, I came as F-1, struggled as PIGS (poor indian grad student) got H1-B then green card and then hurried to get my citizenship just in time to vote against Santorum in the senate election. woot!
Best Buy may not be Shangri La, but in many rural and semi-rural parts of the U.S., it's the nearest and best place to actually find a wide selection of electronics.
Best Buy had the onerous burden of collecting sales taxes in its stores and remitting them to the local municipality or state. Amazon, whose entire business model came into existence because of Government investments in infrastructure, and which depends on the Government to enforce its silly patents like "one-click" says, "I wont collect the tax, because you cant make me do it". People who shop at these places have to voluntarily pay the use tax in most places, but they don't because "you cant make me do it". In the end Amazone executives award themselves large bonuses, Amazon investors get some bones. Large tracts of America devastated by the loss of tax revenue rot away. The libertarians are happy, "Everybody is for himself, if you can't compete, die!" claim the social Darwinists. And in the end it is all Obama's fault because he is playing divisive class warfare.
They really did a huge bait and switch on America after I immigrated.
No, the Romans conquered Greece and stole all their academics wholesale. But Greece had the last laugh because all these academics captured by the Romans became tutors who raised the next generation of Roman elite to in the image of Greece. Roman mythology and culture became Greek in all but name only. History can repeat again. All these Chinese academics coached in USA go back with a lot more culture acclimatization than the stolen grains of sand. In the end China might become America in all but name.
Was the primordial sound aum? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om
$100 joints are frequented by people spending their employer's money. Then some corporations control costs in a brain dead way. They look at per diem charges, get a discount off the rack rate, the company executive who extracted this "great cost savings" mentions it in his annual performance review and goes his merry way. The hotels nickel and dime.
Technically it is true alcohol has only 70% of the energy of diesel or petrol per kg or per liter. But it stores easily in room temp, alcohol tanker trucks, alcohol pumping stations exist, and all of them are grandfathered out of any new hazardous materials handling laws. All new fuels will face significant hurdles in getting past the regulations. In fact, you can't transport handle petrol/diesel under present day haz mat rules economically. That and the liability case law and precedents set up a huge cost of entry barrier to anything trying to displace these fuels.
In fact, they were doing it back then too and I told them that was bullshit -- too bad they chose not to listen.
Still they made money, oodles of it would be left even after paying the 250K fine. And you are still posting in slashdot, "I told them so". As Scar told the mouse, "Life isn't fair".
Meanwhile, somewhere deep in the Arabian sea .... Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off. His face is shot so that is the only thing he got left to laugh with.
That ain't gonna cut it. Even if the nuke blows up the asteroid, its center of mass will continue on the original trajectory. All the chunks that were displaced in the tangential (to the trajectory at the moment of explosion) will hit the earth. Only the chunks displaced in the normal direction has some chance of missing the earth. Again given the size of the Earth's gravitational well, it would only delay the impact by a few thousand years. So nuking the asteroid is likely to nip in the bud any nascent life form emerging after the apocalyptic impact.
I mean, come on, after the Earth has collided with an errant asteroid and all life on it has been fried, would you really care that the space aliens are laughing at you? If people are not moved by "You are all going to die!" they are not likely to be persuaded by, "Space aliens would laugh at you!".