MLS isn't hard to build the infrastructure for, or hard to use, but to understand it well enough to sysadmin takes a week course with tons of exercises, and really makes your head ache. Been there, did that, ran Trusted Solaris at home. That eventually got repackaged into zones, to simplify it into reasoning about separate virtual machines.

I run zones and SE Linux these days, which is a Trusted system with the levels and categories left out for a simple single-level system with pretty reasonable results.

Alas, to get the security I'd want for fairly basic banking services, you're back into writing proof schemas to figure out if you have your MAC access rules right. That's harder than just sysadmining the darned things. Unless your name is Ron Rivest, don't go there (:-))

--dave

A recent article in the Communications of the ACM pointed out that the banks have massive expenses securing and paying for failed security in ATM payments, so expect it to be much worse with mobile.

See Simons and Jones, "Internet Voting in the U.S.", CACM October 2012, p 68, "However, banks routinely and quickly replenish funds lost to online fraud in order to maintain public confidence". This was part of a discussion of why voting is claimed to be safe, based on the fallacious assertion that online banking is safe.

--dave

Yup, been going on for some time. Probably 40 years!

The University of Toronto used to use Kraft, p., Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (Heidelberg Science Library, 1984) as a textbook in their programming and software engineering curricula.

I still recommend it, as managers still try to get rid of the good people, hire cheap ones, and then promote from within.It's a dumb move, but common.

One of my customers noticed that dumbness, and has been preferentially hiring the semi-retired.

--dave

HUH????

Oh, sorry folks, I accidentally fed the troll.. --dave

I'd suggest that the differences between the races in school results in the U.S. have little if anything to do with inherent abilities of the races, and tons to do with people's expectations.

I grew up at the northern terminus of the Underground railway. Chatham is half-way between North Buxton and Hope, and is very mixed-race. The number of light-brown people versus dark-pink people in the top academic class at CCI (the collegiate institute) is proportional to their presence in the population as a whole, and has been that way since my father was a little kid. During my lifetime, that became generally true of at least Ontario, and arguably true of Canada as a whole.

In my youth we started doing IQ testing, and found no significant differences in the intelligence of grade 9 students that could be correlated with race. We did see, if I remember correctly, a correlation between IQ and number of years in Canada for immigrants, but we think that was a language-based bias.

There are still race-based differences in outcomes after school, but in the schools, we're driving toward an equilibrium.

--dave

If there is a statistically significant difference between the school marks of any kind of group, all other things being equal, it will show up in the extreme tails of the distribution, not the centre. On average, there will be a few more super-geniuses and a few less utter dolts in one group. You deal with that by allocating a few more dollars for gifted classes and a few less for remedial classes.

You certainly don't add an arbitrary number to everyone's scores in the other group!

--dave

I looked at some older TPC results, and see the previous Itanium delivering 4/7 the speed of the T5440, one of Sun's oldest threads-not-clock-speed boxes. Compared to IBM Power 7, Itanium delivered 4/10, so the doubling should being it up to 80% of the IBM.

Not to be sneezed at! Nevertheless, not competitive with Power, Fujitsu (Sun) M series or even the new Sun T4 boxes.

--dave