There lies a fundamental difference between the USSR vs. USA Cold War and the so-called USA vs. China Cold War: the USA just might collapse under its own weight just as the USSR did. America does not have the collective scientific, engineering, and military resources it once had. Our military is strung thin and war weary and our mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers are going into financial careers. Our economy has stagnated with unemployment at a high for this century. Also, our infrastructure such as roads, bridges, electrical grid, etc. is crumbling whereas in China it is growing. Towards the end of the first cold war, conditions in the USSR were economically very, very bad and there was an omnipresence of political infighting which ultimately lead to its demise. History may repeat itself yet again since the similar conditions can be found here in the USA>
Reasoning is not a uniquely human trait and to believe so is arrogance. If you study the behavior of animals, they too use reasoning to solve problems and maneuver through their world. Since I have two cats, I'll use them as an example. One is a young, just slightly out of kittenhood and the other is twelve years old. The young one dominates at the food bowl so the older one simply takes her paw to scoop some of the food out of the bowl and onto the floor so that she can eat. If that is not a good example of reasoning, I do not know what is. The "dumb aminal" belief is very much an anachronism today.
Instead of news being well written and thought out, we get our news in sounds bites that are coldly calculated by producers to be slanted and biased towards a particular point of view in harmony with its respective corporation. What is in print is of such poor quality it is no wonder there are such concerns expressed. It seems like the internet has condoned "internet speak" and I see it appear in what should be formal communication. I would never use abbreviations such as ppl, lol, or thx in formal communication yet it is happening all of the time. I recently turned down a job offer where the author, in the emailed letter, used LOL! To me, that is not avante guarde, but just plain unprofessional and lack of care or concern. This form of informal communication has taken the basic structure of the English language and reduced it to rubble! I do make mistakes from time to time but I have read blog postings that become giant run-on sentences without proper capitalization or some semblence of punctuation. The writing sounds like one long SMS message being sent between friends. You might argue that text messaging and IM is also responsible for this.
By making importation of drugs illegal, you spring a closet underground market for doing so. Legalizing all drugs is not the answer either. Some drugs are very, very harmful: even marijuana, when abused has some long-lasting side effects. It would be enough to legalize marijuana because that accounts for close to 56% of the cartel's gross trafficking.
If any politician was serious about stopping this, the answer is real simple: take the monetary incentive for the existence of the cartels out of the equation by legalizing marijuana in the United States. Arguably, the cartels would collapse overnight. However by doing this, a politician risks career suicide because she or he will lose campaign dollars as a result of lost support from industries such as: defense, pharmaceutical, paper products, etc. It would take politicians with balls, not those seeking re-election, to effect change. An entire industry has sprung up around this war on drugs that employs people in a shitty economy so another unfortunate consequence would be more people without jobs as a result. However, both Mexicans and Americans would be ultimately safer without the existence of the cartels: maybe even happier because they could smoke or eat pot without interference and not worry about the harmful anti-depressant drugs out on the market. I digress....
The original idea behind a patent was to protect someone's "mechanical" innovation and to allow the inventor to bring it to market and profit from it without competition from corporations that would have the money to steal it and mass market it faster. IMHO, the patent was never designed to protect the large corporation but the small time inventor to allow him or her to build a business and potentially make money at it. Software is basically almost obsolete from the time it goes out of beta and is brought to the market. Software patents really came about in force as software development companies became concerned that the threat posed by open source was no longer going away by fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaigns. The software patent system was designed, again in my humble opinion, to stifle open source.
Somehow I am not really concerned because one good constitutional challenge in the Federal courts and it will be struck down as both "void for overbreadth" and "void for vagueness."
In ideal world, it is supposed to work this way but anyone thinking that our markets are truly free is naive. In the days of heavy emphasis on IP protection enforcement, much of the free market has disappeared. Sure, someone can come up with a device as an alternative to Apple but they risk the wrath of Apple suing for IP rights violation. Don't tell me that is a free market! Look at the law suits that happen to Google over Android. The only true way to vote with your wallet is to say, "The hell with smart phones, who needs them anyway?" If a million or more people were doing that, Apple would keel over to its consumers. But, sadly, Americans are largely apathetic, lazy, and uneducated being really only concerned with the likes of Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, or themselves etc. Americans willingly and wontonly outsource their thinking to corporate America. After all, it's so easy to have someone else think for you. This creates a problem when you let someone with decided low intelligence or politically motivated think for you. The big name content and device manufacturers bank on this consumer mentality and are able to capitalize on it to the tunes of billions with a capital "B". I voted with my wallet, I took my iPhone, sold it, and bought an Android.
We are already in a police state! That slipper slope has already been travelled down. I'll bet law enforcement counts for a good bit, if not most, of the Federal budget.
It is time to hold banks civilly liable for behavior like this! Banks over the last decade have behaved recklessly and it is time for them to face the consequences.
It highlights exactly what is wrong with the United States. The US has become corrupt and full of special interests. In the US, profits trump freedom and it is a sorry shame. Good for the Dutch for doing the right thing instead of the money-making thing.
The idea is really a good one because, as the embedded videos in the article point out, not everyone has the same needs for a flashlight. The product allows customization through your computer. I really like the idea that you can charge the light over USB and program it too. This product really defines the saying, "Build a better mousetrap and world will beat a path to your door."
If I were in business doing high security work, I would design a secure network that is physically separate from the corporate one and have all jacks on the secure network colored in red with red cables. No software development related to high security work or high security information would be allowed on the corporate network. There would be no permanent connection to the outside world from the secure network. In the event that data does need to be transmitted, I would use a dial-on-demand style connection like PPPoE and wrap the data in sftp or scp encryption keeping the connection open only long enough to transmit, then dropping it. This is really the only way to stymie would be intruders. The connection would not be open long enough to try brute force methods. And, finally, perhaps most importantly, use OpenBSD to secure the network for when the transmission line is opened.
Since GPUs are rendering traditional passwords insecure and obsolete, why not go with a broader usage of smart cards? Also, build in mechanisms to deny IP addresses from machines that are attempting to use brute force. I do it with OpenBSD's PF. After so many failed attempts over a period of time, the IP gets blacklisted. After 24 hours, the blacklist gets purged.
The answer should yes if your efforts directly contributed to the sale of a product. If the decision to go with a product was based on your efforts, you should absolutely get compensated for it.
I am not sure 100% that this is the answer but I think it is high time that we use digital signatures to verify the authenticity of the code. In the open source community this is done all of the time with utilities like GNUPG. Just simply use the author's public key to verify the authenticity of the code. If there is a discrepancy, then there should be a provision to discard the downloaded app. That should, at least, put a severe curb on wrapping malware in legitimate applications.
Does this mean now that law enforcement could have a potential window into our own homes and that we could lose any rights to privacy. I can see this thing being co-opted for law enforcement and surveillance.
Natural gas and coal-fired power plants are not responsible alternatives to nuclear energy. Nuclear power does not belch out carbon monoxide and green house gases. By eschewing nuclear energy and blanketing as unsafe without looking into the technical problems and improving them, we may be headed down a entirely different wrong path. It seems like politicians the world around are excellent at making "large strategic decisions" without a clear, viable alternative. What about nuclear fusion? Where are we in that development?
Normally I am not a huge fan of Texas because, in Texas, you are guilty until proven innocent. However, I am glad to see them standing up to the Federal government's blatant violation the 4th Amendment protection from unreasonable search. The pat downs done by TSA does violate the fourth amendment because anyone can be subject to it. A police officer must have reasonably articulated suspicion or fear of personal harm before he or she can conduct a frisk.
It is a shame it has come to this. Colleges and Universities used to be bastions of free thought and higher learning. Now they are nothing more than money making engines under the guise of non-profit. The whole push to go to college spawned an entire sub-division within the financial industry, textbook industry, and other related services. Colleges and college administrators began getting monetary incentives and kickbacks.
I think it is possible for many people to be successful in business. In my very humble opinion, the businesses that have a high rate of failure are trying to do something too innovative or hair-brained to be brought to market. Seven years ago, I learned that lesson the hard way to the tune of 20,000.00. Since the United States' economy is essentially one of goods and services, you can make a decent living by offering a service. It isn't necessary to have some innovation to be successful - just look at the number of cleaning services and computer repair services where the owner(s) don't strike it rich but they have a modicum of financial stability in their lives. The key in whatever you do is customer service and it often differentiates the fly-by-nights from the professional. I don't patronize a business if I don't get good customer service and I don't mind parting with my money if I really felt welcomed. I am employed full time and have recently started a part time business doing computer repair but I've made a name for myself by treating every customer with respect, and honesty, as if they were friends of mine. I don't make a killing and I could certainly charge more money but I don't. I get business by word of mouth and my customers have said, "Oh I have a friend - oops- I meant I know someone who will do reliable fair work." So on my days off, I usually have two or three people drop off computers and I get a repair assembly line going in the comfort of my own home. It is easy work and I get satisfaction from customers telling me that their one or two hundred dollars has been well spent.
It does make for an interesting experiment because going to college gives you a formal, theoretical background but doesn't actually prepare you for the workplace nor does it make you necessarily a better employee or manager. There are poor managers that have business/managerial degrees. I have a decent career in a field totally unrelated to what I studied. I was a Criminal Justice major that ended up in IT. I am entirely self-taught and I am running my own part-time business to supplement income. To be successful, you must be willing to have an attitude of "life-long learning." I remember my first IT job was a low level help desk job that basically involved taking tickets and routing them so I spent time on my own to learn and improve. I learned basic networking by building one in my house. I also made use of the internet to read up on networking technologies and TCP/IP. If we were slow, I asked questions of the engineers to learn more. Due to my own motivation to be a "life-long learner," I quickly got out of that low level help desk position and on to desktop support and beyond. I have seen many people come out of college with degrees in Information Technology and I can run circles around them. I would hope that Peter Thiel would also encourage learning.
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There lies a fundamental difference between the USSR vs. USA Cold War and the so-called USA vs. China Cold War: the USA just might collapse under its own weight just as the USSR did. America does not have the collective scientific, engineering, and military resources it once had. Our military is strung thin and war weary and our mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers are going into financial careers. Our economy has stagnated with unemployment at a high for this century. Also, our infrastructure such as roads, bridges, electrical grid, etc. is crumbling whereas in China it is growing. Towards the end of the first cold war, conditions in the USSR were economically very, very bad and there was an omnipresence of political infighting which ultimately lead to its demise. History may repeat itself yet again since the similar conditions can be found here in the USA>
Reasoning is not a uniquely human trait and to believe so is arrogance. If you study the behavior of animals, they too use reasoning to solve problems and maneuver through their world. Since I have two cats, I'll use them as an example. One is a young, just slightly out of kittenhood and the other is twelve years old. The young one dominates at the food bowl so the older one simply takes her paw to scoop some of the food out of the bowl and onto the floor so that she can eat. If that is not a good example of reasoning, I do not know what is. The "dumb aminal" belief is very much an anachronism today.
Instead of news being well written and thought out, we get our news in sounds bites that are coldly calculated by producers to be slanted and biased towards a particular point of view in harmony with its respective corporation. What is in print is of such poor quality it is no wonder there are such concerns expressed. It seems like the internet has condoned "internet speak" and I see it appear in what should be formal communication. I would never use abbreviations such as ppl, lol, or thx in formal communication yet it is happening all of the time. I recently turned down a job offer where the author, in the emailed letter, used LOL! To me, that is not avante guarde, but just plain unprofessional and lack of care or concern. This form of informal communication has taken the basic structure of the English language and reduced it to rubble! I do make mistakes from time to time but I have read blog postings that become giant run-on sentences without proper capitalization or some semblence of punctuation. The writing sounds like one long SMS message being sent between friends. You might argue that text messaging and IM is also responsible for this.
By making importation of drugs illegal, you spring a closet underground market for doing so. Legalizing all drugs is not the answer either. Some drugs are very, very harmful: even marijuana, when abused has some long-lasting side effects. It would be enough to legalize marijuana because that accounts for close to 56% of the cartel's gross trafficking.
If any politician was serious about stopping this, the answer is real simple: take the monetary incentive for the existence of the cartels out of the equation by legalizing marijuana in the United States. Arguably, the cartels would collapse overnight. However by doing this, a politician risks career suicide because she or he will lose campaign dollars as a result of lost support from industries such as: defense, pharmaceutical, paper products, etc. It would take politicians with balls, not those seeking re-election, to effect change. An entire industry has sprung up around this war on drugs that employs people in a shitty economy so another unfortunate consequence would be more people without jobs as a result. However, both Mexicans and Americans would be ultimately safer without the existence of the cartels: maybe even happier because they could smoke or eat pot without interference and not worry about the harmful anti-depressant drugs out on the market. I digress ....
Not only do I get to lose that extra weight I gained, but, as an added bonus .... lung cancer! Gee, where do I sign up!
The original idea behind a patent was to protect someone's "mechanical" innovation and to allow the inventor to bring it to market and profit from it without competition from corporations that would have the money to steal it and mass market it faster. IMHO, the patent was never designed to protect the large corporation but the small time inventor to allow him or her to build a business and potentially make money at it. Software is basically almost obsolete from the time it goes out of beta and is brought to the market. Software patents really came about in force as software development companies became concerned that the threat posed by open source was no longer going away by fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaigns. The software patent system was designed, again in my humble opinion, to stifle open source.
Somehow I am not really concerned because one good constitutional challenge in the Federal courts and it will be struck down as both "void for overbreadth" and "void for vagueness."
In ideal world, it is supposed to work this way but anyone thinking that our markets are truly free is naive. In the days of heavy emphasis on IP protection enforcement, much of the free market has disappeared. Sure, someone can come up with a device as an alternative to Apple but they risk the wrath of Apple suing for IP rights violation. Don't tell me that is a free market! Look at the law suits that happen to Google over Android. The only true way to vote with your wallet is to say, "The hell with smart phones, who needs them anyway?" If a million or more people were doing that, Apple would keel over to its consumers. But, sadly, Americans are largely apathetic, lazy, and uneducated being really only concerned with the likes of Paris Hilton, Lady Gaga, or themselves etc. Americans willingly and wontonly outsource their thinking to corporate America. After all, it's so easy to have someone else think for you. This creates a problem when you let someone with decided low intelligence or politically motivated think for you. The big name content and device manufacturers bank on this consumer mentality and are able to capitalize on it to the tunes of billions with a capital "B". I voted with my wallet, I took my iPhone, sold it, and bought an Android.
We are already in a police state! That slipper slope has already been travelled down. I'll bet law enforcement counts for a good bit, if not most, of the Federal budget.
This is why I am thankful for Android. You don't have to go to an "App Store" in order to install applications.
It is time to hold banks civilly liable for behavior like this! Banks over the last decade have behaved recklessly and it is time for them to face the consequences.
It highlights exactly what is wrong with the United States. The US has become corrupt and full of special interests. In the US, profits trump freedom and it is a sorry shame. Good for the Dutch for doing the right thing instead of the money-making thing.
The idea is really a good one because, as the embedded videos in the article point out, not everyone has the same needs for a flashlight. The product allows customization through your computer. I really like the idea that you can charge the light over USB and program it too. This product really defines the saying, "Build a better mousetrap and world will beat a path to your door."
If I were in business doing high security work, I would design a secure network that is physically separate from the corporate one and have all jacks on the secure network colored in red with red cables. No software development related to high security work or high security information would be allowed on the corporate network. There would be no permanent connection to the outside world from the secure network. In the event that data does need to be transmitted, I would use a dial-on-demand style connection like PPPoE and wrap the data in sftp or scp encryption keeping the connection open only long enough to transmit, then dropping it. This is really the only way to stymie would be intruders. The connection would not be open long enough to try brute force methods. And, finally, perhaps most importantly, use OpenBSD to secure the network for when the transmission line is opened.
Since GPUs are rendering traditional passwords insecure and obsolete, why not go with a broader usage of smart cards? Also, build in mechanisms to deny IP addresses from machines that are attempting to use brute force. I do it with OpenBSD's PF. After so many failed attempts over a period of time, the IP gets blacklisted. After 24 hours, the blacklist gets purged.
The answer should yes if your efforts directly contributed to the sale of a product. If the decision to go with a product was based on your efforts, you should absolutely get compensated for it.
I am not sure 100% that this is the answer but I think it is high time that we use digital signatures to verify the authenticity of the code. In the open source community this is done all of the time with utilities like GNUPG. Just simply use the author's public key to verify the authenticity of the code. If there is a discrepancy, then there should be a provision to discard the downloaded app. That should, at least, put a severe curb on wrapping malware in legitimate applications.
Does this mean now that law enforcement could have a potential window into our own homes and that we could lose any rights to privacy. I can see this thing being co-opted for law enforcement and surveillance.
Natural gas and coal-fired power plants are not responsible alternatives to nuclear energy. Nuclear power does not belch out carbon monoxide and green house gases. By eschewing nuclear energy and blanketing as unsafe without looking into the technical problems and improving them, we may be headed down a entirely different wrong path. It seems like politicians the world around are excellent at making "large strategic decisions" without a clear, viable alternative. What about nuclear fusion? Where are we in that development?
Normally I am not a huge fan of Texas because, in Texas, you are guilty until proven innocent. However, I am glad to see them standing up to the Federal government's blatant violation the 4th Amendment protection from unreasonable search. The pat downs done by TSA does violate the fourth amendment because anyone can be subject to it. A police officer must have reasonably articulated suspicion or fear of personal harm before he or she can conduct a frisk.
I guess Thiel is trying to recoupe some lost PR image ...
Maybe he just watched this video: College Conspiracy.
It is a shame it has come to this. Colleges and Universities used to be bastions of free thought and higher learning. Now they are nothing more than money making engines under the guise of non-profit. The whole push to go to college spawned an entire sub-division within the financial industry, textbook industry, and other related services. Colleges and college administrators began getting monetary incentives and kickbacks.
I think it is possible for many people to be successful in business. In my very humble opinion, the businesses that have a high rate of failure are trying to do something too innovative or hair-brained to be brought to market. Seven years ago, I learned that lesson the hard way to the tune of 20,000.00. Since the United States' economy is essentially one of goods and services, you can make a decent living by offering a service. It isn't necessary to have some innovation to be successful - just look at the number of cleaning services and computer repair services where the owner(s) don't strike it rich but they have a modicum of financial stability in their lives. The key in whatever you do is customer service and it often differentiates the fly-by-nights from the professional. I don't patronize a business if I don't get good customer service and I don't mind parting with my money if I really felt welcomed. I am employed full time and have recently started a part time business doing computer repair but I've made a name for myself by treating every customer with respect, and honesty, as if they were friends of mine. I don't make a killing and I could certainly charge more money but I don't. I get business by word of mouth and my customers have said, "Oh I have a friend - oops- I meant I know someone who will do reliable fair work." So on my days off, I usually have two or three people drop off computers and I get a repair assembly line going in the comfort of my own home. It is easy work and I get satisfaction from customers telling me that their one or two hundred dollars has been well spent.
It does make for an interesting experiment because going to college gives you a formal, theoretical background but doesn't actually prepare you for the workplace nor does it make you necessarily a better employee or manager. There are poor managers that have business/managerial degrees. I have a decent career in a field totally unrelated to what I studied. I was a Criminal Justice major that ended up in IT. I am entirely self-taught and I am running my own part-time business to supplement income. To be successful, you must be willing to have an attitude of "life-long learning." I remember my first IT job was a low level help desk job that basically involved taking tickets and routing them so I spent time on my own to learn and improve. I learned basic networking by building one in my house. I also made use of the internet to read up on networking technologies and TCP/IP. If we were slow, I asked questions of the engineers to learn more. Due to my own motivation to be a "life-long learner," I quickly got out of that low level help desk position and on to desktop support and beyond. I have seen many people come out of college with degrees in Information Technology and I can run circles around them. I would hope that Peter Thiel would also encourage learning.