Security by Obscurity was there motto. The first time i got fired by them was because i pointed out holes in their security which they didn't want to address because it costs money to do that. Of course they had to rehire me once i went to the ombudsman and the union. I gave up trying to improve their computer security after they fired/rehired me for the third time.

Ah, gotta love the stupidy of the canadian government. I remember when we bought some stupid search engine technology from the US gov't (that should have been a clue). Problem with the search engine, doesn't actually search documents, only meta-data. Problem with that, virtually no documents had meta-data. Absolutely useless for any of us who worked there, so everybody had their own link farms.

I used to work for the canadian gov't. This would never fly because most of the admins can't wrap their head around something like PGP let alone the non-techs.

Non-techs can't even seem to follow the rule of locking their computers when not at their desks. They tried to be more secure by adding short expirations for passwords without the ability to recycle passwords and passwords having to be different for each system. So what happens? A plethora of yellow stickies on monitors with everybodies latest passwords.

Hell, when i was there the tech people couldn't even understand what a video card with digital output was, 'it's a computer so it's all digital right?'.

Besides, this is nothing special, this happened more than once every notable holiday where people send those stupid digital cards which have always been expressly forbidden. My guess is that the big story is 'China bad man!', and probably only because they've finally learned how to trace attacks one hop backwards.

It's all propaganda against China, because of course all these chinese hackers breaking into govts everywhere are too stupid to use a proxy. Geeks shouldn't fall for this type of propaganda, but the majority will. The question is, why all the propaganda against China? My slightly conspiratorial view is that it will make it so much easier for the states to default on everything it owes China, but i guess we'll see in a few years.

Let me explain. It's the Canadian Government.

Maybe i should elaborate, i used to work for the Canadian Government. The salaries that they offer computer programmers is about the same salary they offer to somebody whose job is to get and put away paper files. So about 2 times less than a code monkey would get in the private sector, and about 4-5 times less than a good programmer would receive. Seriously.

So what happens is most of the programmers and most of the programs get written in VB, yes pathetic i know. Security is virtually non-existant. I actually got let go the first time (got fired 3 times and quit once, gotta love their stupidity) because i was seen as a security threat because i knew more about the computers there than the fresh out of school computer grads. Not your normal grads, but the ones who got the degree because they thought that's where the money is and don't even own computers at home. Yes, tech admins who can't even assemble their own computers.

False. Only certain sects do, one of the earliest splits in the church was due to the creation of the trinity. Trinity was introduced by the Roman Catholics to put the people in their place, i.e., make Jesus special unlike all other humans, regardless of how many times Jesus said that all humans are sons of god.

Well, they also have that other thing where the US is in debt up to their eyeballs with them.

Thanks for the tip. If Nokia sends me a replacement instead of a refund (i hope not with this news) i'll be sure to remember that.

Just remember to baby the usb connector. Worst design ever, attached only by the 4 very thin, very fragile pieces of metal. Mine broke 3 months after purchase, and still waiting 1.5 months now to see what Nokia will do about it. Now i just wish i could get a refund.

We don't have unrest here. You might be referring to all the poor people fighting over a chance to provide drug addicted US'ians with their fix. That's a bit of a different story.

Then we have a president who's learning from the states about the profiitability of running a war on drugs, even though it's currently reaping in less money than the cartels were offering the gov't every year to just let them provide drugs to the US who so desperately want them.

That would be funny... if the US gov't didn't already have a commissioned study to do exactly that when the shit starts to hit the fan. Well, BC/Alberta anyways. Seems for resources like gold and silver Mexico is much easier to annex.

Could be wrong, but i do recall that the they have mapped out an earth worms nervous system, a bit of a stretch to call it a brain though.

Ant's aren't easy because you can't really view them as individuals.

With the thermostat example, you're saying that a human is intelligent because it can choose to not lower the temperature at night even though it would save energy while the thermostat would have to always lower the temperature to save energy.

So basically your definition of Intelligence is the ability to choose to act non-intelligently?

Umm, can you point ANY human that can learn chess just starting from nothing but the board and pieces. You do realize that you have to teach humans how to play chess as well.

Show me a human who could do that and i wouldn't call them Intelligent, i would call them psychic!

It's pretty trivial to teach a computer the rules of chess and have the computer build a database of moves on it's own, actually a lot simpler and a lot quicker than having a human do exactly the same thing. It might take a lot of work to come up with a computer that beats grandmasters all the time, but a trivial chess learning program will easily beat more than half the human population, if not closer to 90% or upwards. Nature actually does a lot worse since if you just taught all humans the rules and nothing else they wouldn't get very far, hence the reason that there are books out there that are basically databases of moves and algorithms for humans.

Perhaps the problem is that you think that humans exhibit intelligence which is rarely the case.

Well, considering that there are no plans to switch to IPv6 even though nobody can deny that is absolutely necessary, then yes.

Now, even when the switch does happen, i'm guessing most isps will have IPv6 connections to the internet but may use IPv4 to assign addressess to their customers, after all, which ISP is going to want to replace every single cable modem out there with a new upgraded version? So yes, it'll still work.

Of course, in true slashdot fashion i have no idea if any of this is true, just thought i'd give an alternate un-research opinion to the ones you've already gotten :)

I may be the only one, but i find the act of speaking into pieces of plastic for hours baffling as well and try to limit such exchanges to pure data transfer.

I just prefer talking to real people i can see i guess.

I basically view all posts to slashdot as talking to myself even though i view that behaviour as crazy if done out loud :)