Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Kardashian? (Score 1) 697

Thats really unfair on the baby. How would you like to be related to a Kardashian?

OK, am I the only one who finds it fucking hilarious this was modded Insightful?

Oh, c'mon! When you read this post, deep inside you that 12-year old just screamed out, "OOHHH, BUUUUUURRRRRN!!!" and you know it.

That's pretty much what Insightful means in that context...

Comment Re:In-browser encryption? (Score 2) 314

Anybody poke around yet to see how they do the client-side encryption w/o a plugin? I suppose it could be done in Javascript. Another thought I had is maybe using the SSL stream its self and storing that. I would hope they are at least not using Java or Flash.

In any case, I would imagine that this would attract a lot of attention to see just how secure the mechanism is.

SSL wraps the entire HTTP session, so by the time your Javascript is running, everything is arriving as clear text.

There are any number of Javascript crypto libraries, and for small files it's probably Good Enough.

Comment Re:Honeypot (Score 4, Insightful) 314

This will obviously be watched very closely by some fellows with a lot of power.

Yes it's obvious that unknown persons with an unquantified amount of indeterminate influence will be watching a public website with an unspecified degree of closeness through some unmentioned mechanism.

Comment Re:DuckDuckGo (Score 1) 101

but the search results were so often so much worse than of Google's that it eventually just got too clunky.

That's the awkward thing about principles, sometimes they require a little inconvenience. That's why few people exhibit any principles these days, unless the law demands it.

The more people that stick with DDG the better it will become.

What principle was this, again?

Comment Re:Totally defective study. (Score 1) 78

Whereas the drivel on Facebook and Twitter has virtually no context what-so-ever except for the immediately preceding sentence of drivel.

If all you see is drivel on Facebook, then you need a better quality of friend, or maybe you just need to care about other human beings.

I've got plenty of smart, talented friends on Facebook, and they routinely post drivel. Hell, looking back at my posts, many of them are drivel, and I actually try to edit what I write.

If you think there's great quality stuff on Facebook, you need to be more critical.

Comment Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score 1) 162

I know it's verboten to point out any downside to this sort of thing, in this age of "Everything should be free and open!" But I just wanted to point out, before the flood of "This is great!" and "All academics should do this!" posts that are inevitably to follow, that those commercial publishers and traditional academic journals employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families. Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.

And someone has to pay for the research, and the researchers themselves have to actually get published or they have no career. So let's also think of the consumers' families and the researchers' families as well/

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 412

You, madame, have obviously been home schooled.

Lameness like that could only come from a Rachel Maddow fan.

This has exactly nothing to do with "having to justify" anything, but rather FIGURING OUT WHAT IS BROKEN instead of firing from the hip.
So the Donald "Duck" Trump style "you're fired!" approach makes little sense unless you are actually firing someone who is heavily contributing to the problem. And this is not proven at all wrt teachers and how schools work.

Except that millions of people are firing the public school system, even while they're still paying taxes for it.

I've been in both public and private schools, and the public schools let students run around like madmen. I've even been back to volunteer at public schools, and some inner city schools are so loud it's like walking into a jet engine. Students just do whatever the fuck they please, teachers are dispirited and all looking for transfers.

But that's just an anecdote. In Chicago, the real educational authorities have spoken: almost 40% of Chicago teachers have fired their school system, sending their kids to private schools.

The whole notion that we have to continually prop up a firm that is failing is bullshit. That's what got us "too big to fail" with completely broken banks or companies like GM. Those firms should have been liquidated and someone else given a chance to make something that works.

And the same is true of schools. There is nothing special about the public school system that makes it the ideal vehicle for educating children. If anything, it's probably going to be obsolete in 20 years time.

Comment Re:Need better security (Score 1) 71

What banking website are you using that doesn't use SSL/TLS? I think what you're suggesting is that instead of websites using a simple username and password (something you know), they should move to having user certificates for each client (something you have). The problem with that is you still have a single factor authentication, which is no more secure.

Bullshit. A good single factor is a lot more secure than a shitty single factor.

With passwords, you're still transmitting the secret token, which is what makes phishing work in the first place. With a client cert, you explicitly do not send your secret key. The phisher can't use that to impersonate you.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1, Insightful) 412

Unfortunately it's easier to come up with scapegoats than address real problems.

For example, see how many people will blame Teacher's Unions or the Federal Department of Education rather than question how much emphasis the local school board puts on Football stadiums.

I don't need to justify firing them. They need to justify their jobs because they're being paid with money extracted from people by the threat of jail.

You want to take tax dollars to pay for your noble cause, the burden of proof is on you, not on the taxpayers.

Comment Re:Stupid anecdotes are a waste of time (Score 1) 1862

With a question like this, anecdotes are pretty much worthless, just a way of distracting people from thinking rationally about the real issues of risk and benefit. For every anecdote of somebody whose life or the life of a loved one was saved because a gun was in the house, there is another anecdote of somebody who died in an accidental shooting or shot a loved one by mistake.

No there aren't. There are about 20,000 accidental gun deaths per year. There are possibly 2 million defensive usages.

You wanted numbers, here you go. Decent numbers are anywhere from 800,000 to 2.5 million defensive usages in a year. Firearms prevent crime at a rate that utterly dwarfs all the killings, even including the racial and drug fueled violence in our inner cities.

Comment Re:Blood is on the NRA Hands (Score 1) 1862

So how do you explain the current government tyranny? According to you there should be none.

Seatbelts protect people from crashes, but they don't make you invincible.

An armed populace can, if the provocation is severe enough, form an insurgent movement and wage asymmetric war against an invading force. It's quite effective; we saw just how so in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were unable to make real progress until we finally developed a counterinsurgency doctrine that was based on getting the locals on our side. A more brutal approach would not have worked, as the Soviets discovered in Afghanistan earlier.

Firearms have historically protected against many local tyrannies. Even without proper firearms, Native Americans fought us to a draw, and had they been a more unified people, the face of the US might be quite different.

After the civil war, the confederates couldn't fight a conventional war, so they formed the KKK and used lynchings and such to terrorize newly freed blacks. The freemen defended their lands with firearms, and the Democrats working with the KKK pushed for some of the earliest gun control measures.

Tyranny doesn't, of course, come just from governments. The worst tyranny in the US is from criminal gangs terrorizing poor urban areas; those areas invariably have strict gun control.

Firearms are nothing without human spirit resolved to use them if need be. That's why the worst abuses of government power are, invariably, the popular ones. The war on drugs has been incredibly popular in the name of The Children, and it's still a minority view to oppose it.

And that makes gun control the greatest potential tyranny because so many people are entirely willing to give the police license to forcibly disarm their neighbors.

Comment Re:Clip (Score 1) 1862

You do realize that you guys lost that war at least 35 years ago? I was raised in the 1960s and 1970s, around lots of cops and other heavy users of firearms, who all called their handgun magazines "clips". I don't think I even heard the word "magazine" used for such things until I was an adult.

In language, actual usage always wins.

Not necessarily. In this case, you've got a debate between gun rights and gun control and when people demonstrate their ignorance, they lose credibility.

Here's the classic example in the gun rights debate, where she is proposing to regulate "barrel shrouds" and can't explain what one is.

Slashdot Top Deals

Business is a good game -- lots of competition and minimum of rules. You keep score with money. -- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari

Working...