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No shit. Look at this pile of b.s.:
> is that when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat.
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> Small blocks of thorium generate heat surges that are configured as a thorium-based laser
[MSc Physics] WHAT?!??? [/MSc]
I'm on your side, I am, but I'm seeing more and more things that make me think the Germans do in fact know what they're talking about. (Hey, they've always been good with technology and engineering).
> Wind
Have you taken a train ride across Germany any time in the past 5 years? Their countryside is jam packed with 2MW windmills. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
> Solar
http://imgur.com/nu9D7 and they're installing 7GW more each year.
Are you sure they can't use natural gas to backfill? Russia provides huge amounts of it to Europe...
> they are trying to control the food supply
Those bits are gross hyperbole and utter BS. The mafia force you to pay them or else you're not allowed to eat at all.
If Monsanto can invent a form of potatos that have a 50% higher yield, why shouldn't they be allowed to take 20% of that as profit, and we end up with 30% cheaper potatos? Or 50% more potatos for just 20% more cost?
If you don't want to use Monsanto potatos, don't. They can't force you to pay them. Even without labelling laws (which I'd support btw), you just have to go to the nearest farmers market and there's tons of people selling non-monsanto product. Enough people do that and supermarkets will be forced to sell non-monsanto product too, labelling laws or not.
And, after saying all that, I'd still agree that Monsanto is much
Very true. But this bit:
> "..buyers of used gear typically have to send the product in for inspection by Cisco before they can purchase a new contract, which can be an expensive process"
The right responsible thing for website and application developers/owners to do is NOT allow users to create their own passwords. Generate one for them.
But that doesn't mean the passwords have to be hard to remember. Four randomly chosen 3-5 character words from the standard 25k word dictionary on Solaris is identical in strength to an 8 character purely random password that that uses all possible keyboard characters (26 lower case, 26 uppper case, 10 numbers, 12 special characters). Three of those is identical in strength to a 6 character password, which is certainly far more secure than 95% of the stuff I see people using, even "professionals".
ex: fuse larva elite scare
Question -- why doesn't Firefox or Windows or Linux come with a little application that GENERATES a secure password for the user? Why do people who make operating systems and Browsers expect USERS to generate passwords themselves, and then you wonder why they are so insecure?
In my professional opinion -- the professionals are to blame.
*** WHERE is an average user supposed to get a properly generated secure password? ***
Linux has a perfectly good random number generator based on proper entropy collection, does Windows? Unfortunately, neither is usable as is by an end user. Don't point me to some idiot website run by who knows who. Unless someone big like google or yahoo have an SSL page that I know I can trust to have done it right and/or not be tracking IPs and passwords for latter exposure.
(Disclaimer - I am a professional, and in the small company that I work at, I've been slowly eliminating all of the "luser generated" passwords for quite some time now, and forcing them to use ones that have been properly generated.)
The second thing to do would be to get things like OpenID working and make users aware of them, do things to encourage them to use it. Unfortunately I tried to use OpenID myself (as a user) a year ago -- and I was *really* unhappy with how hard it was. There's no way in hell I can recommend friends and family to use it. There's huge usability problems with it impo. It requires way way too much expertise and willingness to screw around.
We need something conceptually simple to USE, but that still doesn't present a single target that would result in all of the end user's accounts being violated if a single site is penetrated. This is an excercise left to the reader.
And for every one instance of that, how many other homeowners and/or their family members were killed by return gunfire from the rest of the officers on scene?
I wonder how long it would take with dtrace/truss/strace/etc to build a similar tool on Unix/Linux.
(( Sorry for the quick re-reply (Slashdot, isn't it time for an edit button?) ))
> The bottom line is that Windows was never designed to be secure
Oooh, that makes me wonder. Can Linux/Solaris/Unix be attacked *simply* using the PATH environment variable? Forget limiting the attack to shared objects, anything that is loaded or exec'd by any other binary/scripts.
The complicated thing is many applications build their own PATHs, and you're looking for a directory on that path that is writable to whatever user you are, one that you can put a file that doesn't yet appear that high up on the PATH.
Which suddenly makes it brilliantly clear that perhaps this isn't an OS problem. Not unless you're going to ALSO blame all the Unix/Linux authors 10-40 years ago for "(not) consider(ing) security at all when (using PATHs)", and for somehow magically making sure applications and installers don't accidentially leave directories writable by other users.
It used to be an important/useful feature of the web/html -- until "website designers" decided that they didn't like the look and started making certain that all links looked the same, and other things that also made it stop working.
I have a question - why the ****** does a website need to have/see/retreive the list of URLs I've been at in order to do this - coloring links is a browser side feature! The only thing a website needs to do is suggest which colors to use for said links.
This was grossly unintentional right? Someone didn't choose to implement this specific behaviour, right?
PPphhht, *I* properly encrypt my data.
I only use a bootable encrypted USB key to do my online banking - and that's the only thing I used that OS image for. It'd be a pain shutting down your home PC while you boot to the secure environment just to check the e-mail...
Another option, boot from a read-only CDR of Knoppix.
In both cases you will have to go an extra step to ensure the Linux firewall is up by default and root gets assigned a password, and that the OS doesn't automatically find and use a local HDD linux swap partition for swap space, as that would "leak" unencrypted data to the local hard disk. With the USB key OS that's easy, as it can persist itself, but you'd have to re-master/re-image Knoppix to get it to do that. Coming up on a strange network with no firewall and a blank root password -- bad idea...
I really liked "Dies the Fire", by S.M. Stirling. In it some of the constants of nature change - and even combustion is affected - no more electricity, gunpowder, explosives, or combustion engines, etc. (Although I think they could perhaps make gunpowder out of former-explosives, but so far as I've read in the ensuing series they haven't hit on that idea yet)
A bit more survivalist and post-apocalyptic semi-fantasy in nature, but I suppose most such books are.
I deleted my gmail account as soon as I heard about the horrific gross absent-minded violation of my privacy. "fixing things after the fact" doesn't cut it when it comes to things like this. If they're this utterly stupid once, then they'll be this stupid again.
Seriously, google at one time was "I trust them more than anyone, do no evil and they seem to mean it", but then lately over to "maybe kinda not trust" - but this throws them all the way right through to "trust less that Microsoft, and no where f***** near as trustworthy as Yahoo".
I will not under any circumstances ever trust them with anything important ever again.
7-11 speakout baby. Pre-paid that don't expire for one year. If you top up, all minutes roll over to one more year. I can't recall what the minimum purchase is, probably $25, and there's a minimum $1/mo 911 charge, so that's the base.
..how will you feel when they tell you -- it wasn't a game!
Or when the old fogey in the space car comes to get you, because you're the best and only you can command the fleet and save the galaxy?
Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once. -- Winston Churchill