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Comment Re:Where is the NFC 2-factor? (Score 1) 121

The ownership thing can be mildly obnoxious. It's fairly standard practice at Google to click the checkbox to allow all attendees to edit a meeting. Even without that, though, it's always possible to make the change on your own copy; no one else will see the change if they look, but you can add someone (or a room), and the meeting will be added to the appropriate person/room calendar. Maybe Google Calendar works a little differently externally... I wouldn't think that part would be different.

Doesn't the Chromebox offer you the ability to type in a meeting name? That's another option on the internal system. We just go to the other room and manually enter the meeting name. Actually this was a problem a couple of years ago, but refreshes have gotten fast enough I haven't had to do that for a while, except when no one added a Hangout to begin with and we just have to make one up on the fly. Then we pick a name send it to everyone via chat or whatever, and type it into the room controller.

As for getting the other room booked, that's easy. Just make a calendar appointment and put the room on it. Fast.

Comment Re:DOS version? (Score 3, Informative) 101

The current firmware update ships as a bootable ISO. Burn it to a CD/DVD (or a flash drive if you can work it out), hold down "option" at boot, and you'll be looking at a DOS prompt in no time. I verified this two days ago when I misread the firmware version on the website and downloaded an updater for the version I already had.

Comment Re:Can we stop trying to come up with a reason? (Score 1) 786

Actually it's both.

Sexism is a huge issue. Both sexes do it too. In female dominated fields, they abuse and sexually harass the men. It's not about sex per se as much as it is "my group is in the majority and yours is in the minority".

But... minecraft has so many 9 year old male redstone programmers. And very few female redstone programmers. Etc. for the java side.

If you don't find programming entertaining- you are not going to excel at it like people who do. You are going to put in your 6 hours programming and go home while the other person puts in their 6 hours programming, goes home, and "plays" programming for another 6 hours.

In 30 years, I've worked with exactly 1 female who enjoyed programming. I worked with dozens who did it for a living. Some were quite good but they still didn't like coding per se. It was just a job. Many went into management. 70% of our team leads were female at my last corporate job.

Comment Re:Government Dictionary (Score 1) 239

Words have multiple definitions in dictionaries and in ordinary speech, which definition is assigned depends entirely on context. For example "feet smell and noses run". Scientists and lawyers have one thing in common, they are very careful about definitions, they tell others which definition they are using upfront, it doesn't have to be interpreted through context. It's an exacting and fully transparent tradition in Science and Law. Clinton's lawyer debating the definition of "is" for 15min is a fine example. The quantum property of "colour" is another one from the Scientific world.

Using the same rules for a state and a person ignores the basic nature of political power and leaves brute force as the only method of arbitration. The existing state would lose any and all authority and instantaneously collapse (re: looting of Iraq after US sacked entire public service), the power vacuum left behind would very likely be filled by the kind of people you fear most, heavily armed 18-25yo males who have just one rule for everyone - "might is right". Like Humpty Dumpty, they have no use for dictionaries, to them a word means whatever they say it means, and they will execute and torture as many people as it takes to demonstrate their point.

Aside from that the very thing you suggest happened on a smaller scale when I was at HS. The largest internal migration in US history was in the early 70's when hippies left cities in droves and started up communes on shared private land, a similar social phenomena occurred here in Oz. They had the same "no one is in charge" ideology, rules were simply "discussed" by the group rather than defined and enforced by the group. Very few of these communes survived more that 2yrs.

The most common cause of commune collapse was not financial woes or lack of soap, in almost every case the commune collapsed when the "natural leader" in the group filled the power vacuum and basically bullied everyone else out of their legal share of the land. By the mid seventies the migration had gone full circle and the hippies were mostly back in the cities, albeit older, poorer, but a lot wiser about human nature.

Comment Re:I'm still waiting... (Score 1) 161

We keep statistics, yes, but only in the context of criminal law.

To study, say, gun ownership as a matter of public health, as a risk factor for overall mortality, is illegal(with public funds).

Cite?

It seems to me that the main obstacle to such studies is detailed information on gun ownership, because mortality information is readily available, and not just from law enforcement. The CDC tracks it closely.

In any case, I'd love to see this research done... though I suspect that I anticipate a different result than you expect.

Comment Re:How does it secure against spoofing? (Score 1) 121

No, there is no guarantee that the user will not use a mobile phone to access his online banking (and the idiocy of some banks pushing out mobile apps for online banking doesn't actually improve security in that area either).

You can't make the user secure. You can only offer it to him and hope that he's intelligent enough to accept it.

Comment Re:What future? (Score 2) 131

This. Actual stamps is mostly a consumer thing, I just checked our commercial postal service and they recommend a "stamping" machine if you send more than 40 letters/week where you charge it up like a prepaid cell phone, same thing for packages except there they normally print to labels they slap on the package. And for the big companies you get bulk pre-printed envelopes with logo that are collected at your place of business and charged to your corporate account, we have those at work. The potential for abuse is small since you can't drop them off at a regular mailbox and it'd be obvious who you're using to pay for your postage. A lot of the consumer-to-business mail is prepaid and rolled into the cost of business too, the few times I use stamps is to other people but most of that is replaced by email since you don't need a formal signature on anything. I guess there's the odd package, but if it's too big to fit a mail box you're going to the post office anyway.

Comment Re:Wait, wait, trying to keep up (Score 1) 786

They're both. Just like men.

Ah, the old "If I can say it in a grammatically correct sentence, it must be true!!" fallacy.

No. They can't be both, because the groups OP defined are mutually exclusive. Men can't be both either.

Nonsense. Even individuals aren't only one thing. They're different things at different times and in different contexts. Further, you're talking about two large groups of people; there's clearly a lot of variation among them.

Why would you think that women should fit neatly into one bucket or another?

To state the obvious, because some buckets are neatly defined. For instance, a woman can only fit into at most one of these buckets: "Likes math" or "Hates math." (They could be in neither of those buckets.)

You're a little bit closer in recognizing that women aren't all the same. Congratulations! But you're still wrong. A given woman can like some kinds of math but not others, can like math during some parts of her life but not others, can even like math in some moods but not others.

Comment Re:Where is the NFC 2-factor? (Score 1) 121

I don't see how fumbling around with USB sticks is much better.

I use a YubKey NEO-n. It's a tiny device, only extends from the USB port by a millimeter or so... just enough that you can touch it to activate it. I just leave it plugged into my laptop all the time, so there's no "fumbling with USB sticks", I just run my finger along the side of the laptop until it hits the key. It's extremely convenient.

Doesn't leaving the device plugged into your laptop all the time defeat the purpose of two-factor authentication? If someone steals your laptop they have your key now, same is if you left your one-time pad as a text document on the desktop.

I addressed this in the paragraph below the one you quoted, and a bit more in the paragraph after that.

Comment Re:How does it secure against spoofing? (Score 1) 121

The second channel will not secure a compromised channel, but it will make it easier to detect it.

Oh, you're talking about a completely separate channel, with no joining to the primary channel? That creates its own set of problems... when the user authorizes a login, how do we bind that authorization to the login the user is attempting, rather than a login from some other location? Without a join (e.g. entering OTP from second channel into primary channel, or vice versa), the attacker just has to figure out when the user is logging in, and beat them.

There is very little you can do to combat malware infections unless you are willing to use a second channel.

I maintain that a second channel doesn't really help, either as defense or for detection, and you haven't suggested any way that it might.

At some point in the communication the data is vulnerable to modifiction, no matter how well you try to shield it. It resides in memory, unencrypted, at some point in time.

In the case of a security key no, it does not. Not in the memory of the PC. The PC and browser are merely a conduit for an authentication process that occurs between security key and server. It's actually pretty reasonable to characterize this as a second, virtual channel. It's MITM-resistant; an attacker can block the messages but can't fake, modify or replay them without failing the auth. It is also bound to the primary channel, though that binding is admittedly dependent on the PC being uncompromised. But if the PC is compromised to the level that the attacker can cause the auth plugin to lie to the security key then there is no hope of achieving any security. A separate channel definitely wouldn't help.

And it's heaps easier to do if the interface used is a browser.

Sure. But the goal is to create as much security as possible within the context of what people actually use. Theorizing about some completely different approach that no one would use is entertaining but pointless.

Comment Re:Wait, wait, trying to keep up (Score 0) 786

...so today are women ndividuals who can do anything men can do and are perfectly capable of functioning in modern society to wit, choosing the career path that they want to follow out of interest, talent, and education?

Or are they intimidatable, wilting violets incapable of exercising free will, intimidated by the faintest approbation, and unable to choose a career because some shitty 1980s movies didn't ACTUALLY show "girls doing data entry"?

I'm just trying to keep track here. I need to know if I should treat them like plain old people, or tread delicately around their fragile sensibilities?

They're both. Just like men.

Why would you think that women should fit neatly into one bucket or another?

Comment Re:Toys vs tools (Score 2) 786

When computers were viewed as toys, it was acceptable for girls to have them. Once they became tools, however, they were only for boys.

Then explain why a high percentage of programmers were women back when the only computers that existed filled rooms, cost millions of dollars and were clearly anything but toys, but once microcomputers were widely available in homes and used for playing games as much as anything, the percentage of women began to decline.

I think you may have the right concept, but with the genders reversed.

Comment 80s movies? Really? (Score 3, Interesting) 786

So it's also the 80s movies to blame that women are not interested in careers like soldier, spy, pilot, policeman (apology, -woman), archaeologist, exorcist, karate fighter,...

Has anyone ever looked closer at the 80s? The 80s were not a geek decade. The only movie I can remember where geeks were not just the comic foil (ok, even in that one they were) was "Revenge of the nerds". The whole "engineering geeks" were no role model in 80s movies, and even less so in TV series. Whenever they were in some prominent role, they were the little sidekick of the actual hero. Be it Automan's creator Walter, who was mostly a comic sidekick (ok, the show wasn't that memorable, but the special effects were great for its time) or Street Hawk's Norman who was some timid, beancounter-ish scaredy-cat. The geek roles were at best meant to make the hero shine some more.

Actually, the only engineer role I can remember that was allowed to be superior in areas to the hero and be more than a nuisance to him was that of Bonnie in Knight Rider.

A woman.

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