The government is made up of individuals, but they are easily identifiable
Easily identifiable? On one level, all citizens comprise the government and participate in it (as voters, or potential voters, jurors, grand jurors, etc.) One could define the government more narrowly as those employed by public agencies, but then is the boundary "regular" employment, or does it include contractors? Are corporations (which are not individuals but creations of law -- and, therefore, the government) public or private? If corporations are private (as I suspect most would say) what about public-private hybrid agencies, government-owned corporations? (examples being the Federal Reserve Banks, the U.S. Postal Service, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation ["Amtrak"])?
and the distinction between their private lives and their official actions is quite clear.
Is voting a matter of "private lives" that should be secret, or "official action" that should be transparent? Is the answer different if the voting is in an election for a government official, or if it is voting directly on a law (as would be the case for a public initiative or referendum)?
What about grand jury deliberations?
What about requests by a rank-and-file public employee to their supervisor for time off because they are undergoing a medical procedure, and the documentation supporting that request?
Transparency for the state means transparency on laws as they are prepared, transparency towards regulatory bodies of those laws, etc...
Tranparency on voting on public initiatives and referenda? (That's, after all, part of the process of making laws.) Transparency on voting for public officials (after all, choosing lawmakers is part of making law.)
It means that the rules that state officials prepare and their work is fully transparent.
So, no private personnel matters (including health matters) for any public employee?
And does the rule for "state officials" apply only to public employees, or does it apply to contractors as well?
State is indeed some concrete thing, independent from individuals.
No, its not. Its an abstract concept with a fuzzy boundary, and is, in any case, comprised of, not independent from, individuals.
The idea of "privacy for individuals, transparency for the State" is perhaps a useful starting point in determining how to balance the fundamentally conflicting goals of privacy and transparency, but its just that--a starting point in how to balance conflicting interests--not some kind of clear answer.
Except that "the State" is merely an abstract concept for certain actions of individuals, not some concrete thing that exists independently of any individuals.
15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
I have a scar from slicing a knuckle to the bone that indicates that the word "almost" should be removed from this description.
It isn't really a 'classic' mistake, but the biggest PC design problem today from where I'm standing is over-reliance on fans. High volume fans will result in fuzzy lint growing on the devices which can least afford a layer of fuzzy lint.
I don't think fans are the problem. Lots of things that aren't computers use fans to move large volumes of air and have functions that require them not to blow dust, and solve this problem with a novel invention called an "air filter", which allows air to pass through, but not dust.
Any object travelling through the atmosphere at substantial speed is going to be hot (at least on its surface; once it hits, a meteor is going to cool off pretty quickly, since it doesn't spend a lot of time in the atmosphere, and the heating is just at the surface, which is why meteorites recovered just after they have landed tend not to be hot.)
Second, if a "pea-sized piece of rock" is going fast enough to make "a foot wide crater in the ground," it's not going to be "bouncing off" shit, least of all this kid's hand. It would tear through him like a shotgun slug.
Assuming it hit perpendicularly, rather than grazing. ("Bouncing" isn't quite accurate for a graze, but its near enough to be typically imprecise speech from a normal human describing the situation, rather than a lie.)
Was the kid's hand blown off? No? Then it didn't leave a fucking crater in the ground either.
This assumes that its angle to the ground was the same as its angle with respect to the hand, which is an unwarranted assumption.
It seems reasonable, in this case, to assume the meteor struck the kid tangentially.
The injury suggests that it passed along his hand; had it not been tangential, the injury would have been very different. Essentially, it looks like it was close enough for the heat from the meteorite to cause burns in the ~1 ms it took to pass by his hand on the way to the ground.
I suspect, but can't prove, that a direct hit would have had a terminal velocity in at least one other sense.
I don't know about "can't", but it would at best be rather unethical to attempt a direct test.
The final size of the meteorite is related to the starting size (before it hit the atmosphere)
And the initial velocity, the composition, and the angle at which it strikes the atmosphere, IIRC.
The final size was much to small to have been going that fast.
A bare assertion is somewhat inadequate to provide a convincing argument for that point, especially given that every source I can find on the internet indicates that most meteorites are of that size, and that most move at the speed suggested (within about a factor of 2).
Music sales going down because game sales are increasing? Where's the support for that? This has all the appearance of two random facts being pulled out of the air and a causal link assumed for no particular reason.
(Especially given that, in the graph in TFA, game and DVD sales appear to have been increasing over the whole period [1999-2008] and music sales appear to have started significantly declining in 2004 -- they appear to have been pretty close to static before that, though its hard to tell precisely on a stacked bar graph -- and the chart has a footnote "methodology for measuring value of music changed in 2004". The best explanation for the change in apparent trend after that point is that what was being measured changed in 2004.)
Windows does provide this kind of isolation (as do all other modern OSes). It's up to the application writers to use that, however.
If its up to application writers to use it, rather than enforced before allowing anything to run, then it is not the kind of security model I am describing. The model I am describing is where software cannot run unless it has requested permissions from the OS (which, in normal circumstances, would require the user to confirm the grant, though such a security model might allow some software to grant subsets of its own access rights to other software, though that itself would have to be a specific, requested permission), and cannot ever act outside of the security permissions it requested at installation.
Wrong, most of the malware spread through email, IM, "codec.exe" on shady sites, things masquerading as antiviruses, etc. I.E more of social engineering than actual software exploits.
If a downloaded application posing as a codec had to be installed before it was run, and had to request permission for everything it wanted to do to be installed, there would be less chance of "social" exploits working. The all-or-nothing choice inherent in software installation posed when the OS doesn't enforce that kind of security model is what makes gives these kind of tricks the impact they have.
You seem to be pretty misinformed. IE7/IE8 on Vista/Windows 7 already do exactly what you described from like 3 years.
What I was describing was a security model, that to be effective, the OS must enforce on all applications.
Your solution takes care of only holes in applications. What about installing a new App?
My solution addresses that, too, specifically. Of course, the user can choose poorly in granting permissions when an app is installed; as long as users have administrative control, they can make errors that compromise security. What restricting all apps to permissions that must be requested at implementation does is limit where the most dangerous failures can occur and thus mitigate the risk of failure.
What company in their right mind is going to upload the crown jewels into someone else's computer?
While the pre-alpha version of Fusion Tables does require uploading the data to it for it to use, the whole concept of Dataspaces is providing a unified interface to heterogenous collections of underlying datastores that aren't directly under the complete control of the Dataspace, so presumably, when the system is more developed, you won't need to trust anyone else's computer with control of your data to make use of it with this product.
But there isn't a lot of information about where they plan to go on this; that's just what I glean from having read the paper on Dataspaces and looked at what Fusion Tables does now.
Seriously though. Why all the relational database and SQL bashing? Someone explain to be what sort of new math people are trying to invent that will invalidate the mathematics of set theory and render it obsolete?
Dataspaces (ignoring the hype explosion) has nothing to do with relational database or SQL bashing; it fills a different role than RDBMSs; a particular purposes of "Dataspaces" is to unify access to heterogenous collections of data, including the case where some of the underlying data is held in RDBMSs, as is apparent from the paper describing them.
The pre-alpha implementation here doesn't seem to do much of that; it requires importing fairly simple tabular data into its internal datastore, and doesn't seem to do much to unify diverse underlying datastores, but given the technology that Google says its based on, one presumes that that's the future goal of Fusion Tables, and that the current version mostly is a demonstration of some what you will be able to do on the front-end given the existence of the right back-end data. The really interesting part will come if and when they support back-end data other than stuff exported into there internal servers in CSV/XLS format, particularly, linking to externally-stored and maintained data. And, for that matter, when they can support aggregation and calculation rather than just simple filtering and joins.
The marketing speak and abuse of the term "dimensions" in TFS is entirely unhelpful as to what "dataspaces" are about. The pre-alpha release of Fusion Tables now available has pretty limited (though interesting) functionality; a broader picture of what "dataspaces" are about is available in this paper, which is probably more useful to the technically- (rather than marketing-) oriented crowd on Slashdot.
Of particular note, a "DataSpace Support Platform" (DSSP) is not a replacement for RDBMSs, but instead something that fits a different role and provides a common interface for data stored in heterogenous underlying storage systems, some of which could be RDBMSs. Its true that some RDBMSs do provide some features along these lines, but they aren't the principal strength of RDBMSs.
Very few malware use the holes in MS software these days.
Almost all Widows-targetting malware, whether it works by directly compromising a Windows component or through compromising an app running on Windows, exploits fundamental holes in the Windows security model which make it so that compromising any bit of software is equivalent to compromising the user account that runs the software, which is almost always either a regular user account or the system account.
Of course, this is a fairly common feature of OS structure that's far from unique to Windows, but its not the only way to do things, either.
Name a OS where user error can't lead to the OS being compromised.
The risk can be greatly mitigated by a system similar to that used by bitfrost, where installation of a program also involves the program requesting the needed permissions. A system in which programs usually run with the full privilege of a particular user account rather than with program-specific permissions exposes the user to much greater risk from the compromise of any program (this is, of course, more true when the user account at issue is an admin account, which Microsoft has made some strides in dealing with, but its still very much a problem even with "regular" user accounts.)
If my web browser can't -- because of restrictions enforced by the OS based on permissions it requested at installation -- write to anything but the local storage space it uses for web applications and its bookmarks and history files, and if it can't read arbitrary data on the hard disk, then there are pretty firm boundaries to what damage that can be done if it is compromised. But if the OS doesn't support that kind of isolation, any compromised application is equivalent to hijacking the user account that would normally run the application. It may be impractical to make most consumer applications uncompromisable, but it certainly isn't impractical to make available the tools to limit the damage that compromise to one application can do, and there is nowhere to do that but in the OS.
It's non-intrusive though. You click OK, and it goes away. No more for two days. It's preferable to the alternatives that are out there.
How is an advertisement popping up every two days preferable to, e.g., what Avast! Home does, which is give free license keys that are good for a year, and only prompting you for an upgrade when they get ready to expire (you can, of course, choose instead to renew with a new free key, as well.)
When are these companies going to give up with BR? The format just wasn't going to catch on since most people see plain DVD as "good enough".
Most people saw plain VHS as "good enough", and the same argument as you make against BluRay was made against Laser Disc first, and DVD after that. It turned out right in the first case, with only a narrow segment ever adopting the technology, and wrong in the second case, with eventual fairly broad adoption. There are certainly ways in which BluRay looks a lot more like DVD in the time when it had not yet become the prime choice but was spreading (available widely for things other than dedicated video players, e.g., game machines and PCs; carried in most of the places that carry DVD, no major playback deficiencies compared to the DVD along the lines of the disk-flipping that went with LDs compared to the dominant, no physical media inconveniences compared to DVD the way the size of LDs was a problem, etc.)
OTOH, there's a lot more competition for physical media now, too.
"And even the MPAA itself recommends using a camcorder pointed at a TV as a way to make fair use copies, creating another analog hole." WHAAAAAATTTTT? We're supposed to take this mean to do backups?
No, backups are not, generally, "fair use". For some copyright-protected material, archival backups are protected under other provisions of copyright law (ISTR there is, or was, a specific provision for this for computer software), but not all exceptions to the exclusive rights under copyright are "fair use" or generally applicable in the way "fair use" is.
I just did as a matter of fact, and IMHO it just isn't as good. The related searches area is at the bottom
That depends on how you use Google Search. If you have the Search Options on, and have "Related searches" selected, the related searches area is at the bottom.
For example when I looked up "The Dark Knight" in Yahoo under the "more/related concepts" tab I found really good interviews with the cast, the director, and a nice overview of Heath Ledger's film career. While I might have found the Gary Oldman interview or the story about Heath Ledger, I wouldn't have thought thought to look up Christopher Nolan or Christian Bale, as I didn't know either by name.
Heath Ledger and Christian Bale come up as part of the related searches on Google, no matter whether or not I use quotes for "The Dark Knight". Christopher Nolan doesn't (though if you do "crew of the dark knight", he does), though he's mentioned in the short preview section on several of the search results, so one way or the other the Google Search points you in that direction. So I'm not sure why this would be a point in favor of Yahoo! over Google.
In the past, we have named influenza outbreaks such as these after their country of origin (see Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu)
Well, except that the 1918 flu pandemic ("Spanish Flu") seems to have originated in the US; but it originated during WWI, and most of the countries it hit were suppressing information about it as part of wartime censorship. Spain was one of the first countries hit where it was highly visible because information regarding the epidemic wasn't actively suppressed.
Slashdot Mirror
Easily identifiable? On one level, all citizens comprise the government and participate in it (as voters, or potential voters, jurors, grand jurors, etc.) One could define the government more narrowly as those employed by public agencies, but then is the boundary "regular" employment, or does it include contractors? Are corporations (which are not individuals but creations of law -- and, therefore, the government) public or private? If corporations are private (as I suspect most would say) what about public-private hybrid agencies, government-owned corporations? (examples being the Federal Reserve Banks, the U.S. Postal Service, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation ["Amtrak"])?
Is voting a matter of "private lives" that should be secret, or "official action" that should be transparent? Is the answer different if the voting is in an election for a government official, or if it is voting directly on a law (as would be the case for a public initiative or referendum)?
What about grand jury deliberations?
What about requests by a rank-and-file public employee to their supervisor for time off because they are undergoing a medical procedure, and the documentation supporting that request?
Tranparency on voting on public initiatives and referenda? (That's, after all, part of the process of making laws.) Transparency on voting for public officials (after all, choosing lawmakers is part of making law.)
So, no private personnel matters (including health matters) for any public employee?
And does the rule for "state officials" apply only to public employees, or does it apply to contractors as well?
No, its not. Its an abstract concept with a fuzzy boundary, and is, in any case, comprised of, not independent from, individuals.
The idea of "privacy for individuals, transparency for the State" is perhaps a useful starting point in determining how to balance the fundamentally conflicting goals of privacy and transparency, but its just that--a starting point in how to balance conflicting interests--not some kind of clear answer.
Except that "the State" is merely an abstract concept for certain actions of individuals, not some concrete thing that exists independently of any individuals.
I have a scar from slicing a knuckle to the bone that indicates that the word "almost" should be removed from this description.
I don't think fans are the problem. Lots of things that aren't computers use fans to move large volumes of air and have functions that require them not to blow dust, and solve this problem with a novel invention called an "air filter", which allows air to pass through, but not dust.
"Finite", perhaps, but not fixed over time, which is what the argument you present requires.
Any object travelling through the atmosphere at substantial speed is going to be hot (at least on its surface; once it hits, a meteor is going to cool off pretty quickly, since it doesn't spend a lot of time in the atmosphere, and the heating is just at the surface, which is why meteorites recovered just after they have landed tend not to be hot.)
Assuming it hit perpendicularly, rather than grazing. ("Bouncing" isn't quite accurate for a graze, but its near enough to be typically imprecise speech from a normal human describing the situation, rather than a lie.)
This assumes that its angle to the ground was the same as its angle with respect to the hand, which is an unwarranted assumption.
The injury suggests that it passed along his hand; had it not been tangential, the injury would have been very different. Essentially, it looks like it was close enough for the heat from the meteorite to cause burns in the ~1 ms it took to pass by his hand on the way to the ground.
I don't know about "can't", but it would at best be rather unethical to attempt a direct test.
And the initial velocity, the composition, and the angle at which it strikes the atmosphere, IIRC.
A bare assertion is somewhat inadequate to provide a convincing argument for that point, especially given that every source I can find on the internet indicates that most meteorites are of that size, and that most move at the speed suggested (within about a factor of 2).
Game sales going up...okay.
Music sales going down...okay.
Music sales going down because game sales are increasing? Where's the support for that? This has all the appearance of two random facts being pulled out of the air and a causal link assumed for no particular reason.
(Especially given that, in the graph in TFA, game and DVD sales appear to have been increasing over the whole period [1999-2008] and music sales appear to have started significantly declining in 2004 -- they appear to have been pretty close to static before that, though its hard to tell precisely on a stacked bar graph -- and the chart has a footnote "methodology for measuring value of music changed in 2004". The best explanation for the change in apparent trend after that point is that what was being measured changed in 2004.)
If its up to application writers to use it, rather than enforced before allowing anything to run, then it is not the kind of security model I am describing. The model I am describing is where software cannot run unless it has requested permissions from the OS (which, in normal circumstances, would require the user to confirm the grant, though such a security model might allow some software to grant subsets of its own access rights to other software, though that itself would have to be a specific, requested permission), and cannot ever act outside of the security permissions it requested at installation.
If a downloaded application posing as a codec had to be installed before it was run, and had to request permission for everything it wanted to do to be installed, there would be less chance of "social" exploits working. The all-or-nothing choice inherent in software installation posed when the OS doesn't enforce that kind of security model is what makes gives these kind of tricks the impact they have.
What I was describing was a security model, that to be effective, the OS must enforce on all applications.
My solution addresses that, too, specifically. Of course, the user can choose poorly in granting permissions when an app is installed; as long as users have administrative control, they can make errors that compromise security. What restricting all apps to permissions that must be requested at implementation does is limit where the most dangerous failures can occur and thus mitigate the risk of failure.
While the pre-alpha version of Fusion Tables does require uploading the data to it for it to use, the whole concept of Dataspaces is providing a unified interface to heterogenous collections of underlying datastores that aren't directly under the complete control of the Dataspace, so presumably, when the system is more developed, you won't need to trust anyone else's computer with control of your data to make use of it with this product.
But there isn't a lot of information about where they plan to go on this; that's just what I glean from having read the paper on Dataspaces and looked at what Fusion Tables does now.
Dataspaces (ignoring the hype explosion) has nothing to do with relational database or SQL bashing; it fills a different role than RDBMSs; a particular purposes of "Dataspaces" is to unify access to heterogenous collections of data, including the case where some of the underlying data is held in RDBMSs, as is apparent from the paper describing them.
The pre-alpha implementation here doesn't seem to do much of that; it requires importing fairly simple tabular data into its internal datastore, and doesn't seem to do much to unify diverse underlying datastores, but given the technology that Google says its based on, one presumes that that's the future goal of Fusion Tables, and that the current version mostly is a demonstration of some what you will be able to do on the front-end given the existence of the right back-end data. The really interesting part will come if and when they support back-end data other than stuff exported into there internal servers in CSV/XLS format, particularly, linking to externally-stored and maintained data. And, for that matter, when they can support aggregation and calculation rather than just simple filtering and joins.
The marketing speak and abuse of the term "dimensions" in TFS is entirely unhelpful as to what "dataspaces" are about. The pre-alpha release of Fusion Tables now available has pretty limited (though interesting) functionality; a broader picture of what "dataspaces" are about is available in this paper, which is probably more useful to the technically- (rather than marketing-) oriented crowd on Slashdot.
Of particular note, a "DataSpace Support Platform" (DSSP) is not a replacement for RDBMSs, but instead something that fits a different role and provides a common interface for data stored in heterogenous underlying storage systems, some of which could be RDBMSs. Its true that some RDBMSs do provide some features along these lines, but they aren't the principal strength of RDBMSs.
Almost all Widows-targetting malware, whether it works by directly compromising a Windows component or through compromising an app running on Windows, exploits fundamental holes in the Windows security model which make it so that compromising any bit of software is equivalent to compromising the user account that runs the software, which is almost always either a regular user account or the system account.
Of course, this is a fairly common feature of OS structure that's far from unique to Windows, but its not the only way to do things, either.
The risk can be greatly mitigated by a system similar to that used by bitfrost, where installation of a program also involves the program requesting the needed permissions. A system in which programs usually run with the full privilege of a particular user account rather than with program-specific permissions exposes the user to much greater risk from the compromise of any program (this is, of course, more true when the user account at issue is an admin account, which Microsoft has made some strides in dealing with, but its still very much a problem even with "regular" user accounts.)
If my web browser can't -- because of restrictions enforced by the OS based on permissions it requested at installation -- write to anything but the local storage space it uses for web applications and its bookmarks and history files, and if it can't read arbitrary data on the hard disk, then there are pretty firm boundaries to what damage that can be done if it is compromised. But if the OS doesn't support that kind of isolation, any compromised application is equivalent to hijacking the user account that would normally run the application. It may be impractical to make most consumer applications uncompromisable, but it certainly isn't impractical to make available the tools to limit the damage that compromise to one application can do, and there is nowhere to do that but in the OS.
How is an advertisement popping up every two days preferable to, e.g., what Avast! Home does, which is give free license keys that are good for a year, and only prompting you for an upgrade when they get ready to expire (you can, of course, choose instead to renew with a new free key, as well.)
Whenever I see that name, my mind initially takes it as a Software Removal Tool that is Malicious rather than a tool for removing malicious software.
Most people saw plain VHS as "good enough", and the same argument as you make against BluRay was made against Laser Disc first, and DVD after that. It turned out right in the first case, with only a narrow segment ever adopting the technology, and wrong in the second case, with eventual fairly broad adoption. There are certainly ways in which BluRay looks a lot more like DVD in the time when it had not yet become the prime choice but was spreading (available widely for things other than dedicated video players, e.g., game machines and PCs; carried in most of the places that carry DVD, no major playback deficiencies compared to the DVD along the lines of the disk-flipping that went with LDs compared to the dominant, no physical media inconveniences compared to DVD the way the size of LDs was a problem, etc.)
OTOH, there's a lot more competition for physical media now, too.
No, backups are not, generally, "fair use". For some copyright-protected material, archival backups are protected under other provisions of copyright law (ISTR there is, or was, a specific provision for this for computer software), but not all exceptions to the exclusive rights under copyright are "fair use" or generally applicable in the way "fair use" is.
That depends on how you use Google Search. If you have the Search Options on, and have "Related searches" selected, the related searches area is at the bottom.
Heath Ledger and Christian Bale come up as part of the related searches on Google, no matter whether or not I use quotes for "The Dark Knight". Christopher Nolan doesn't (though if you do "crew of the dark knight", he does), though he's mentioned in the short preview section on several of the search results, so one way or the other the Google Search points you in that direction. So I'm not sure why this would be a point in favor of Yahoo! over Google.
No, "actor" is a (not "the") correct word for either male and female; it is also not incorrect to use it specifically to refer to males.
"Actress" is also a correct word, specifically for female.
Well, except that the 1918 flu pandemic ("Spanish Flu") seems to have originated in the US; but it originated during WWI, and most of the countries it hit were suppressing information about it as part of wartime censorship. Spain was one of the first countries hit where it was highly visible because information regarding the epidemic wasn't actively suppressed.