Purportedly, about 20% of the benjamin's have traces of cocaine. I have to wonder now if the monetarily denser (100's are 11 lb per US$1e6, IIRC) €500 note might be similarly highly-scented.
An effective drug-sniffing device should therefore help to find large-denomination currency.
always thought a CEO should know as much as possible about what is going on in his/her firm.
Yes. And reading emails from underlings that are 6 layers beneath him should be done from time to time.
But, even better would be to appoint honest brokers as direct underlings who know how to place a finger on the pulse of the company, filter out the unessential information and present you with the most important bald facts, be they good, bad, or whatever.
It's nice, too, if these VP's are able to execute in the reality-based world as well as spout off jargon picked up from the latests issue of Harvard Business Review to forums of peers.
For counterexamples to these principles, see any of the numerous failing companies and governments.
I can't say it's a great thing for America to have so many Republican justices
I don't care much for strict constitutionalist judges, either. But they will have value.
But, I'm thinking they'll provide a nice counterbalance about 5 years from now when the mess created by the current legislative and executive branches comes to roost, the public gets fed up, throws the bastards out and elects scary progressive candidates that propose all kinds of ways to fix the ills of super{inflation|recession} that will be the result of current policies.
In some sense, there's a nice time-lagged control system (IIRC, adding some "I" to control systems like PID, PI lends stability) about the judicial branch that lends stability to the usual knee-jerk emotionalism that seems to govern politics generally.
Oh, I did I mention that all your data will belong to Microsoft?
Well, the tin-foil hat crowd (about 1% of users) might care about that, as might business owners with valuable trade secrets (30%?).
But Mikey's term paper on Otters is not so critical. Parents don't want to buy Office XP Pro for that. Pirate it from, maybe. But a dedicated purchase for domestic use? No.
Microsoft (hotmail), Google (gmail), as well as Yahoo and others have proven that a great number of people don't mind compromising their privacy with casual use of free email accounts.
Free, web-based documents doesn't seem too much of a stretch.
A firmer barrier to web-based use of Office tools is spreadsheets. Business owners have absolutely no interest in placing their crown jewels on someone else's server no matter the low price and convenience. But even home users would think twice about putting their checkbooks or 401k histories on someone else's server.
A service like this needs the option of (i) free easy access for any consumer, then (ii) the ability for business owners to lock down their own web-based office document servers, use SSL/TLS, etc.
MS could play in this space very competently, but it would be cannibalizing its lucrative revenue stream for shrink-wrapped Office, so it would have to overcome a great deal of apprehension: a classic Innovators Dilemma.
Spoofing, to me, seems intrisically a social engineering attack, not so much a flaw in the application.
Designing applications (be it Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.) can only provide ways to make identifying spoofs easier, reducing the risks. But I contend applications can never nail every thing down so tightly, considering the wide range of sites users could visit. If your design requirement is "The most foolish user must never be fooled by the most clever phisher anywhere, ever, in the future, too. amen." then you better get a different boss.
That being the case, why not go the route that the conventional mail system has adopted? There are extra heavy penalties for using the mails to defraud.
Kind of like using a gun in a holdup -- there are extra penalties associated with using certain tools for evil. [No, not for tool possession, nor even for using a tool - just for using a tool for evil.]
Likewise, criminal prosecution of spoofers should be aided by legislation that makes it extra double bad if they use the public Internet as an aid in the commission of their crime.
it is the Mozilla innovations which encourage people to switch
Exactly.
I've often felt that if Mozilla/Firefox gave users an easy way to compose and publish precise SVG using a WYSIWYG interface, including international language support, across platform, that usage would increase markedly.
A little Googling revealed a FAQ about HP and Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) program of the DoD Military Health System sponsoring a validation test for OpenSSL 0.9.7b for FIPS-140 certification of its cryptographic modules.
Besides being widely used, I gather that certification of the cryptographic modules alone can help later versions of OpenSSL be credible so long as the crypto module remains the same.
As usual, any corporate and/or government sponsor for work like this gets extra gold stars in my book when it comes time to evaluate which product to buy from which company, which govt program to support, etc.
What we need are dashboards, like the ones Americans invented for cars.
We've lost our good dashboards, though.
Where there once were clean, informative analog gauges with coolant temperature, oil temperature, oil pressure, etc., we now have....a yellow "Check Engine" light.
Marketeting and cost pressures have led us to automotive dashboards that are good enough for the average sheep buying a car, but frustratingly opaque to those of us that really want to know what's wrong with our car.
I'm so afraid that desktop computing diagnostics are moving in exactly the same direction.
If you look at what APIs exist for this sort of functionality, pretty much the only one that has a significant amount of traction is SQL. And SQL isn't exactly the nicest language to work with.
For API, how about Google? I know, I know, the API is 0wn3d, but it is cross-platform.
Something interesting could be built from using a browser plug-in or proxy (say, squid) to collect every searched keyword, time, hit-frequency, pathgraph of URLs clicked taken whenever I do a http://www.google.com/search?q=YourTermHere
so that dynamic graphs could be built up as alternatives to static filesystems.
Then, instead of coming up with a crappy static set of folders/subdirectories, I'd let this application build up ~/YourTermHere
~/YourPreviousTermHere
all cached up.
Kind of combining my Google Search history with my Bookmarks(indicate I think something is important), with my History (with the longest connected graphs in the URL click history showing the most interesting lines to pursue).
And, to decrease dependence on Google, one could simply create a GoogleIntercept proxy that normally refers out to Google, but can do other things should the need arise.
What do you get for YOUR taxes in the states?" I had to agree
From what I recall about the federal budget, very little of it anymore is "discretionary spending". Large chunks go towards entitlement spending and interest on the national debt (look for that component to rise significantly RSN). The "discretionary" part is eaten mostly by defence spending. Pork barrel projects are like foreign aid spending - they get a lot more bad press than the true size of the expenditure justifies.
The US health care system is the world's most expensive. And while it's true that, if you're insured or independently wealthy, and you take the time to get inside knowledge about the best doctors, you can get the world's best care without waiting in line in the USA. And, in the US, you get to sue your provider if their god-like status, supposedly guaranteed by strict input quotas at board accredited medical schools, can be persuasively challenged by a more god-like lawyer who perceptively notices that your provider didn't order up an expensive CYA diagnostic test for you. But enough of the benefits.
Look at the wait times in an emergency room in a poor urban area sometime. Or how many of the people in the ER will require medical care costing two or three orders of magnitude than if they were offered regular checkups.
Or how many hours it takes to drive to a clinic in a rural area that collects doctors that either are saints (for passing up a lucrative urban position) or sinners (for egregious behavior another state won't tolerate).
Or, consider the people working that are ineligible for Medicaid because they're "too rich", but whose employers don't want to provide health insurance cause it costs too much (cf, GM and its retirees). Such insurance does really cost too much. Try buying it retail sometime.
Those people in the middle, when they go get medical care, get bills at full retail markup prices that would take your breath away. To top it off, bankruptcy will become a more difficult option for avoiding such catastrophic medical expenses, starting in October.
The US health care system, like European systems, is broken. It's just broken in different ways.
It's not so much that there isn't a patch this month, as that Microsoft has decided to hold off on releasing a patch due to stability concerns, which is laudable.
It's laudable if the stability concerns truly do outweigh the security concerns.
But, then, Microsoft is weighing the evidence and making the decision for everyone, all at once; not individual sysadmins, who might weight the balance differently, depending on the stability of their particular application mix. You're not making the decision. They are.
Meanwhile, the alien voices in my head keep telling me that Microsoft will use the cumulative security record in all its gore to help us swallow TCPA to come at a later date.
Microsoft's criticism of the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts deserves scrutiny.
They contend that a bad solution for
"public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies."
And they are correct, in a way.
The single document format is actually a good thing because the benefits of standardization in terms of communication can outweigh many concerns about the technical functionality of a format.
But it's the "functional" part that is interesting. There are different definitions of "functional document format" that may be operating:
a format which is technically capable of expressing almost anything an author would wish to include and be commonly used by others (this is what MS states in their criticism).
a format which expresses can be freely used by others for all time, independent of platform and unencumbered by licensing and royalty requirements on the part of users (or citizens) (objective of MA's policy)
a format which, when it proliferates into common usage, may be leveraged successfully in a business model.
a format which, when waved over the head of the monopolist, is one of the few means of negotiating a lower price for their commonly used products
The discussion may be taking place on the highly principled ground of the first two meanings, but the latter two meanings are where money is at stake and, therefore, represent a likelihood.
This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
I'm surprised everyone is so surprised about this.
Do we believe the people running the country are more familiar with their own problems, or with the problems of the 100,000 poor residents of N.O.?
Taking an action such as evacuation is something I could plan and execute for myself if I needed to.
But, then, I rely on homeowners insurance to protect my property while I'm gone, I have good credit and can buy supplies on my VISA card, I have a working vehicle, I can buy gas, I have a cell phone I can use to call friends and relatives, etc.
Many of the working assumptions I rely upon are missing altoegether for the very poor.
But I suspect too many of the decision makers in the highest places have no familiarity with that issue.
Which comes to down to competency in leadership.
And since the leaders of a democratic republic are the results of elections in which we citizens vote (or choose not to vote), then this failure of leadership reflects our own bad collective judgement, our shortsightedness or our gullibility.
No, as appalling as it is, as sad as it is, none of it is particularly surprising.
Let's just pay attention and actually learn a lesson, shall we? Then, perhaps there's a chance the country, or some part of it, will suffer less the next time that careful thoughtful planning, active responsible relevant leadership and execution is needed. We really do have the capability of doing much better.
What's most curious about this is why less complex creatures have an enormous ability to regenerate but more complex ones don't.
Complex creatures have already developed a sustainable means for regenerating - sex.
It seems to work fairly well.
It's only with our highly-developed sense of self-importance and our heightened awareness of the past that we are disappointed that "I" cannot be regenerated in a revitalized physical body.
If humanity is ever able to fulfill this instinct of self-preservation, then technically sex will become unnecessary. But it might never disappear, not simply because the instinct to reproduce is so strong, but because stronger instincts to reproduce will still be passed on preferentially to more offspring.
Slashdot Mirror
Purportedly, about 20% of the benjamin's have traces of cocaine. I have to wonder now if the monetarily denser (100's are 11 lb per US$1e6, IIRC) €500 note might be similarly highly-scented.
An effective drug-sniffing device should therefore help to find large-denomination currency.
Yes. And reading emails from underlings that are 6 layers beneath him should be done from time to time.
But, even better would be to appoint honest brokers as direct underlings who know how to place a finger on the pulse of the company, filter out the unessential information and present you with the most important bald facts, be they good, bad, or whatever.
It's nice, too, if these VP's are able to execute in the reality-based world as well as spout off jargon picked up from the latests issue of Harvard Business Review to forums of peers.
For counterexamples to these principles, see any of the numerous failing companies and governments.
So you're running SELInux, too?
I don't care much for strict constitutionalist judges, either. But they will have value.
But, I'm thinking they'll provide a nice counterbalance about 5 years from now when the mess created by the current legislative and executive branches comes to roost, the public gets fed up, throws the bastards out and elects scary progressive candidates that propose all kinds of ways to fix the ills of super{inflation|recession} that will be the result of current policies.
In some sense, there's a nice time-lagged control system (IIRC, adding some "I" to control systems like PID, PI lends stability) about the judicial branch that lends stability to the usual knee-jerk emotionalism that seems to govern politics generally.
Well, the tin-foil hat crowd (about 1% of users) might care about that, as might business owners with valuable trade secrets (30%?).
But Mikey's term paper on Otters is not so critical. Parents don't want to buy Office XP Pro for that. Pirate it from, maybe. But a dedicated purchase for domestic use? No.
Microsoft (hotmail), Google (gmail), as well as Yahoo and others have proven that a great number of people don't mind compromising their privacy with casual use of free email accounts.
Free, web-based documents doesn't seem too much of a stretch.
A firmer barrier to web-based use of Office tools is spreadsheets. Business owners have absolutely no interest in placing their crown jewels on someone else's server no matter the low price and convenience. But even home users would think twice about putting their checkbooks or 401k histories on someone else's server.
A service like this needs the option of (i) free easy access for any consumer, then (ii) the ability for business owners to lock down their own web-based office document servers, use SSL/TLS, etc.
MS could play in this space very competently, but it would be cannibalizing its lucrative revenue stream for shrink-wrapped Office, so it would have to overcome a great deal of apprehension: a classic Innovators Dilemma.
Spoofing, to me, seems intrisically a social engineering attack, not so much a flaw in the application.
Designing applications (be it Internet Explorer, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.) can only provide ways to make identifying spoofs easier, reducing the risks. But I contend applications can never nail every thing down so tightly, considering the wide range of sites users could visit. If your design requirement is "The most foolish user must never be fooled by the most clever phisher anywhere, ever, in the future, too. amen." then you better get a different boss.
That being the case, why not go the route that the conventional mail system has adopted? There are extra heavy penalties for using the mails to defraud.
Kind of like using a gun in a holdup -- there are extra penalties associated with using certain tools for evil. [No, not for tool possession, nor even for using a tool - just for using a tool for evil.]
Likewise, criminal prosecution of spoofers should be aided by legislation that makes it extra double bad if they use the public Internet as an aid in the commission of their crime.
Bring a pack of playing cards for group entertainment in the evenings if there's not much in the way of electric power, etc.
Exactly.
I've often felt that if Mozilla/Firefox gave users an easy way to compose and publish precise SVG using a WYSIWYG interface, including international language support, across platform, that usage would increase markedly.
Yeah.
A little Googling revealed a FAQ about HP and Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) program of the DoD Military Health System sponsoring a validation test for OpenSSL 0.9.7b for FIPS-140 certification of its cryptographic modules.
Besides being widely used, I gather that certification of the cryptographic modules alone can help later versions of OpenSSL be credible so long as the crypto module remains the same.
As usual, any corporate and/or government sponsor for work like this gets extra gold stars in my book when it comes time to evaluate which product to buy from which company, which govt program to support, etc.
I know you're right and all, but, nevertheless, in the real world there are always nagging questions about whether boxes have been checked.
It reminds me - a few years back wasn't there some effort to gain FIPS compliance or something with regard to OpenSSL?
Has all that been done so that I can use OpenSSH and sleep soundly at night knowing that no bureaucrat will bring the hammer down on me?
We've lost our good dashboards, though.
Where there once were clean, informative analog gauges with coolant temperature, oil temperature, oil pressure, etc., we now have ....a yellow "Check Engine" light.
Marketeting and cost pressures have led us to automotive dashboards that are good enough for the average sheep buying a car, but frustratingly opaque to those of us that really want to know what's wrong with our car.
I'm so afraid that desktop computing diagnostics are moving in exactly the same direction.
You are correct.
At the highest levels of achievement, real genuine successful progress is only achieved about 2% of the time.
The rest of the time, simply rehashing the work of others can be done with greater scores.
If the Slashdot editors had done some checking, they would have discovered Microsoft has been after the Evil market for some time.
Wait a minute, assuming "x86" is hex due to the prefix, and 64 decimal, or 0x40, I get
Which is 70 base 10.Or one more than 69.
This won't be on the final, will it?
For API, how about Google? I know, I know, the API is 0wn3d, but it is cross-platform.
Something interesting could be built from using a browser plug-in or proxy (say, squid) to collect every searched keyword, time, hit-frequency, pathgraph of URLs clicked taken whenever I do a
http://www.google.com/search?q=YourTermHere
so that dynamic graphs could be built up as alternatives to static filesystems.
Then, instead of coming up with a crappy static set of folders/subdirectories, I'd let this application build up
~/YourTermHere
~/YourPreviousTermHere
all cached up.
Kind of combining my Google Search history with my Bookmarks(indicate I think something is important), with my History (with the longest connected graphs in the URL click history showing the most interesting lines to pursue).
And, to decrease dependence on Google, one could simply create a GoogleIntercept proxy that normally refers out to Google, but can do other things should the need arise.
From what I recall about the federal budget, very little of it anymore is "discretionary spending". Large chunks go towards entitlement spending and interest on the national debt (look for that component to rise significantly RSN). The "discretionary" part is eaten mostly by defence spending. Pork barrel projects are like foreign aid spending - they get a lot more bad press than the true size of the expenditure justifies.
The US health care system is the world's most expensive. And while it's true that, if you're insured or independently wealthy, and you take the time to get inside knowledge about the best doctors, you can get the world's best care without waiting in line in the USA. And, in the US, you get to sue your provider if their god-like status, supposedly guaranteed by strict input quotas at board accredited medical schools, can be persuasively challenged by a more god-like lawyer who perceptively notices that your provider didn't order up an expensive CYA diagnostic test for you. But enough of the benefits.
Look at the wait times in an emergency room in a poor urban area sometime. Or how many of the people in the ER will require medical care costing two or three orders of magnitude than if they were offered regular checkups.
Or how many hours it takes to drive to a clinic in a rural area that collects doctors that either are saints (for passing up a lucrative urban position) or sinners (for egregious behavior another state won't tolerate).
Or, consider the people working that are ineligible for Medicaid because they're "too rich", but whose employers don't want to provide health insurance cause it costs too much (cf, GM and its retirees). Such insurance does really cost too much. Try buying it retail sometime.
Those people in the middle, when they go get medical care, get bills at full retail markup prices that would take your breath away. To top it off, bankruptcy will become a more difficult option for avoiding such catastrophic medical expenses, starting in October.
The US health care system, like European systems, is broken. It's just broken in different ways.
It's laudable if the stability concerns truly do outweigh the security concerns.
But, then, Microsoft is weighing the evidence and making the decision for everyone, all at once; not individual sysadmins, who might weight the balance differently, depending on the stability of their particular application mix. You're not making the decision. They are.
Meanwhile, the alien voices in my head keep telling me that Microsoft will use the cumulative security record in all its gore to help us swallow TCPA to come at a later date.
I'd heard Maildir was a higher performance storage system, too. It reminds me some of how MH would store messages in individual files.
But, then, what motived the Evolution team to drop Maildir support for mbox?
Microsoft's criticism of the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts deserves scrutiny.
They contend that a bad solution for
And they are correct, in a way.
The single document format is actually a good thing because the benefits of standardization in terms of communication can outweigh many concerns about the technical functionality of a format.
But it's the "functional" part that is interesting. There are different definitions of "functional document format" that may be operating:
The discussion may be taking place on the highly principled ground of the first two meanings, but the latter two meanings are where money is at stake and, therefore, represent a likelihood.
I'm surprised everyone is so surprised about this.
Do we believe the people running the country are more familiar with their own problems, or with the problems of the 100,000 poor residents of N.O.?
Taking an action such as evacuation is something I could plan and execute for myself if I needed to.
But, then, I rely on homeowners insurance to protect my property while I'm gone, I have good credit and can buy supplies on my VISA card, I have a working vehicle, I can buy gas, I have a cell phone I can use to call friends and relatives, etc.
Many of the working assumptions I rely upon are missing altoegether for the very poor.
But I suspect too many of the decision makers in the highest places have no familiarity with that issue.
Which comes to down to competency in leadership.
And since the leaders of a democratic republic are the results of elections in which we citizens vote (or choose not to vote), then this failure of leadership reflects our own bad collective judgement, our shortsightedness or our gullibility.
No, as appalling as it is, as sad as it is, none of it is particularly surprising.
Let's just pay attention and actually learn a lesson, shall we? Then, perhaps there's a chance the country, or some part of it, will suffer less the next time that careful thoughtful planning, active responsible relevant leadership and execution is needed. We really do have the capability of doing much better.
Is it even technically possible and/or has anyone considered constructing wrappers so that DirectX API may overlay an OpenGL implementation?
Or should we abandon DirectX and OpenGL for this Cg I hear about?
Unfortunately, the extended copyright protections in the Sonny Bono Act hasn't spurred Walt Disney's productivity.
He's dead, Jim.
Or acquiescence, as the case may be.
My experience tells me that every attempt to flatten a learning curve at the beginning results in a steeper gradient that must be overcome later.
The really steep learning curves are practically indistinguishable from brick walls:)
Complex creatures have already developed a sustainable means for regenerating - sex.
It seems to work fairly well.
It's only with our highly-developed sense of self-importance and our heightened awareness of the past that we are disappointed that "I" cannot be regenerated in a revitalized physical body.
If humanity is ever able to fulfill this instinct of self-preservation, then technically sex will become unnecessary. But it might never disappear, not simply because the instinct to reproduce is so strong, but because stronger instincts to reproduce will still be passed on preferentially to more offspring.
IOW, hornier people produce more horny kids.