Do you have a very large house? Or is your house very old? Or is it both? Is the heating gas or electric? I'm just curious. I live in fairly old house (for the US) in a cool climate (though probably comparable to just about anywhere in the UK), and mine is around 1000 USD a year. Granted, it's gas heated, including the water, and that runs me even more a year than the electric. But I do run the A/C a good bit in the summer, and that gas is paying to sometimes heat the house during prolonged double-digit subzero weather. Total square footage is around 2000, including basement. Must be all those CFLs.;)
Actually, I bring this up to ask if you've done everything you can to make your house energy efficient. I have double-glazed vinyl windows on pretty much every window that wasn't a non-standard size. And then there are the CFLs. I wonder how much you could cut down on your bill with these kinds of improvements.
Also, I'm a little puzzled by your comment about taking 10 years to break even. I think 10 years is unreasonably optimistic. If you are paying $2400/year, that would be $200/month. This setup was quoted at around $40K. Even if it halves your electric bill, that only saves you $100 a month. At $100 a month, it would take 33 years JUST to break even. And that's not even factoring in how much money you could have made with $40K over 33 years by investing it. Even if the $40K estimate is double what it would be for your home, that still means it's over 16 years. This also assumes it won't come with increased maintenance costs.
If such a system could save you $100/month at an initial outlay of $10K, then it might become reasonable.
What's the point of this? At $40k, that's $333/month over 10 years. Even at 30 years, it's $111/month. And you're running a big risk of either just not getting that $40k back on house resale, or actually getting a LOWER price because of it. Most people wouldn't be gung ho about such a setup, and restricting your pool of buyers will most likely cause the a price hit.
So, even living there, it's an extra $111 a month. What size house do you have to have for that to really make sense on your power bills? Is it supposed to be "greener"? As I see it, you'd be using more power than you would normally, especially during the winter where all that cold air won't do you any good. I've heard a lot of "amateur expert" talk about how power plants work and such, but will increasing their off-peak load proportionally increase the amount of fossil fuel they burn (if they are a fossil fuel plant)?
I still think you're departing from reality when you use prhases like "applying too much empathy." Empathy isn't something you consciously turn on or off. It's like anger, joy and sadness. Yes, it's something you can try to repress, just like you can try to cool your anger or shake off the blues. If it's an emotion and you have it, it's "real" empathy.
The thing is, I think most people wouldn't call the robot thing inhumane, either. And there are probably some people who would call the car thing inhumane, namely the car's owner. But not always.
The reason why it's more likely to happen with a robot (even of the kind we have) than a car is because of a more anthropomorphic shape. Just look at how it's described in terms of "limbs" and "legs." A great example of this is this video. The legs look lifelike enough that I've seen several people wince and pity the robot when it gets kicked. Our brains seem pretty hardwired for this sort of thing. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we'll probably empathize with it.
Once again, we come back around to our own humanity. As people have said, the terms "humane" and "inhumane" are all about the person being human, not the object on which they are taking some action. I see this as becoming more and more of an issue the better robot construction and more importantly virtual reality gets. People make a stink about FPSes and GTA being murder simulator, but can you imagine if it was a simulation that was indistinguishable from reality, and the "people" in it were programmed to look and act just like humans? If people decide to treat them differently from humans, what will that do the those people? Will it mess them up and make them treat "real" humans differently? In that sense, will their "inhumane" actions take away some of their humanity?
Who says human empathy has to make any sense? It's not like it's a rigidly programmed set of rules. We empathize with actors in a film, even when it's pure fiction.
Strange that you should pick the idea of the car. Some people get very attached to their cars (and other belongings) and DO empathize with them. Imagine a car you had first learned to drive as a teenager, lost your virginity in, drove your wife to the hospital in while she was having labor pains, and took your grandfather on a cross country ride right before he passed away later that year. Now imagine that the car has had it and will never again be feasible to drive. Do you take it to the scrapyard to be torn apart for parts and then crushed? Do you donate it to the junkyard derby to be smashed up and discarded?
Hell, at this point I'm not just empathizing with a car, I'm empathizing with a fictional car that I just made up.
Yes. Because, in Australia's proportional voting system, there remains a chance that a "3rd party candidate" (as Americans quaintly and disparagingly put it) can in fact win.
Ah. Well that's the problem with the analogy. In your original post, you said:
Then why don't you do this? I've never understood why people feel the need to vote for one of two parties only. We have the same system here in Australia.
If you have proportional voting, then you clearly don't have the same system we do.
If you had suggested we change the voting system (rather than just "throw away" a vote by voting 3rd-party), I would agree with you. Though I prefer something along the lines of instant runoff rather than proportional voting. And I definitely like keeping our President directly elected.
Because sometimes (many times) the other opponent from the main party is bad enough that you want to be damn sure they don't get elected. I think you'd feel the same way, you just appear to have a different line you would draw.
If Hitler was running against John Howard and polls showed they were neck-and-neck, would you still vote for some other candidate?
I thought democracy was supposed to be about voting for the representative of the party which you feel will do the best job of running your country. This concept of freedom to vote for whomever you want, as long as it's one of these two guys, just doesn't make any sense to me.
It's never been just about that. Democracy (or republicanism) has always been a process about limited selection. It's always been about who is willing and able to run. That in and of itself is a bit of a selector for the qualities you don't want in a elected official. What democracy in winner-take-all elections has always been about is majority rule. So if you are in a minority, you need to align with other minorities in order to make your vote matter.
In reality, the majority of people simply based on tradition, peer pressure and image. They do not listen and research the substance of a candidate. These people will always be hard to sway to vote for an obscure candidate because they really aren't fundamentally engaged in being good citizens. Voting is somewhere on the list of priorities between mowing the lawn and picking up some milk on the way home.
Actually, that's frequently what I do. It's when I run out of stuff to read that I go to the Newly Popular page. That's why I view the Newly Popular page as being as close to this proposed "random links" page as you can get and still have people actually want to read the stories.
One of the things I like about digg over slashdot is that I quickly run out of stuff to read on slashdot. If I had less free time while at the computer, it wouldn't be an issue.
I'm sad that someone spent this much time describing a system that seems like it would be a total failure. I think a system like this used on digg would actually give the users LESS influence in voting. Why? Because most users read digg from the standpoint of the most popular stories. They aren't interested in reading the dreck that hasn't been voted up yet. And believe me, there's a LOT of dreck. I certainly wouldn't waste time checking out the stories in the random box. The front page is random enough for me already. Something gets enough votes to be on the front page and then I check it out and digg it if it's good. But frequently crappy stuff will slide right off the front page if it's not really that good.
The problem is that the submitter is trying to translate a method that "diggs" a photo into a method that diggs a story. Story take much more time to read than photos. It simply doesn't work the same.
You're not just splitting hairs, you're assuming that a word is simply a collection of roots (Latin or otherwise) and it has a fixed and unchanging meaning derived from them.
That's really not the case with language. It's ESPECIALLY not the case with scientific language.
You might also notice that what you posted isn't the definition of universe, it's a definition of universe. Another from the same page: a world or sphere in which something exists or prevails. This is much more applicable to our usage of universe to mean the current cosmology we understand.
I know it makes some people who crave order and stability mad, but language is created, molded, abused and transformed by the speakers and writers with little remorse for whose feelings may be hurt.
Glad you and some other people get it. I don't celebrate his death because I don't want to be the guy who celebrates other people's deaths. It has nothing to do with the man and his life.
There's no point in acting like most of us liked him, even a little. We don't have to celebrate his death, but we also don't have to pretend he wasn't a douche.
I think you're assuming something that I didn't propose. I didn't say they should scrap the existing process and replace it with this. If you notice, the first bit of my process is the existing system of sending a regular CC# in. My system just adds functionality that companies can take advantage of. They could even have an extra little safety seal on their page for this system.
Right now, companies are having to pay a lot for security to try to avoid these attacks. Then when they get broken into, they may have to pay out compensation. Plus, they take a real financial hit from the bad public relations after getting hacked (there are several companies I tend to stay away from because of this). CC companies/banks also take a hit in people not using their CC to the maximum amount because they may be leery of the safety. They may have to pay for the fraudulent charges in a lot of cases. So really, it would be in everyone's interest to add this functionality.
If Amazon could be sure a breakin would only result in a couple thousand credit card numbers being stolen (the ones that had not already been tokenized and were waiting for a response from the CC company), they would be ALL OVER such a system.
Just to add to the other reply, I'd like to note I wasn't proposing each of the companies that sent charges to the CC# should have their own public/private keys. That would be nice, but quite a hassle to administer. I just mean that the message content will include the company name and address before it is encrypted and sent back by the CC#. That way (like the other poster said), if someone stole that encrypted message and tried to send it back in, only the original company will be credited, not the thief. This pretty much nullifies the motivation for stealing and resending the encrypted message.
Right, but I think you missed the point of my post. Some companies need to do recurring charges (WoW, for example). The other example is storing the card as a convenience, which really is very nice as long as you have some level of confidence in the site.
Some people have said that this may inaccurate since Steam requires that you enter a CC# at every purchase. In any case, I have to wonder why we don't have better technology than just storing CC#s. For purchases that happen instantaneously online, this would seem to be avoidable.
You enter your CC# on a company's website
Company sends CC# to credit card validation service
On successful transaction, the CC company uses its private key to encrypt a small message containing the cardholders name, address and CC# along with the billing companies name and address or other account info. It then sends that encrypted result back to the billing company. The billing company throws away the credit card number (except maybe the last four digits for easy identification purposes) and stores only this encrypted form.
Later, when the billing company wants to charge the customer again, it sends that encrypted form to the CC company instead.
The CC company accepts it and decrypts it using the private key, thus allowing payment only to the billing company listed in the file
Any obvious glaring errors? Any idea if this has already been proposed and shot down in the past? The data is never going to be truly secure. Someone is always going to get hacked. So it seems this might be a good way to minimize the amount of valuables lying around.
Slashdot Mirror
I dub this the "Score: 5, Funny" Trilogy.
What? Oh, you wanted a CATCHY name?
I'm waiting for Government.NET to come out. I figure with the better management, there will be no corruption.
Do you have a very large house? Or is your house very old? Or is it both? Is the heating gas or electric? I'm just curious. I live in fairly old house (for the US) in a cool climate (though probably comparable to just about anywhere in the UK), and mine is around 1000 USD a year. Granted, it's gas heated, including the water, and that runs me even more a year than the electric. But I do run the A/C a good bit in the summer, and that gas is paying to sometimes heat the house during prolonged double-digit subzero weather. Total square footage is around 2000, including basement. Must be all those CFLs. ;)
Actually, I bring this up to ask if you've done everything you can to make your house energy efficient. I have double-glazed vinyl windows on pretty much every window that wasn't a non-standard size. And then there are the CFLs. I wonder how much you could cut down on your bill with these kinds of improvements.
Also, I'm a little puzzled by your comment about taking 10 years to break even. I think 10 years is unreasonably optimistic. If you are paying $2400/year, that would be $200/month. This setup was quoted at around $40K. Even if it halves your electric bill, that only saves you $100 a month. At $100 a month, it would take 33 years JUST to break even. And that's not even factoring in how much money you could have made with $40K over 33 years by investing it. Even if the $40K estimate is double what it would be for your home, that still means it's over 16 years. This also assumes it won't come with increased maintenance costs.
If such a system could save you $100/month at an initial outlay of $10K, then it might become reasonable.
What's the point of this? At $40k, that's $333/month over 10 years. Even at 30 years, it's $111/month. And you're running a big risk of either just not getting that $40k back on house resale, or actually getting a LOWER price because of it. Most people wouldn't be gung ho about such a setup, and restricting your pool of buyers will most likely cause the a price hit.
So, even living there, it's an extra $111 a month. What size house do you have to have for that to really make sense on your power bills? Is it supposed to be "greener"? As I see it, you'd be using more power than you would normally, especially during the winter where all that cold air won't do you any good. I've heard a lot of "amateur expert" talk about how power plants work and such, but will increasing their off-peak load proportionally increase the amount of fossil fuel they burn (if they are a fossil fuel plant)?
It sounds neat, in theory, but bad in reality.
I still think you're departing from reality when you use prhases like "applying too much empathy." Empathy isn't something you consciously turn on or off. It's like anger, joy and sadness. Yes, it's something you can try to repress, just like you can try to cool your anger or shake off the blues. If it's an emotion and you have it, it's "real" empathy.
In what way is it "not healthy?" I think it's healthier (in a society functioning properly way) to have an excess of empathy than a dearth of it.
The thing is, I think most people wouldn't call the robot thing inhumane, either. And there are probably some people who would call the car thing inhumane, namely the car's owner. But not always.
The reason why it's more likely to happen with a robot (even of the kind we have) than a car is because of a more anthropomorphic shape. Just look at how it's described in terms of "limbs" and "legs." A great example of this is this video. The legs look lifelike enough that I've seen several people wince and pity the robot when it gets kicked. Our brains seem pretty hardwired for this sort of thing. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we'll probably empathize with it.
Once again, we come back around to our own humanity. As people have said, the terms "humane" and "inhumane" are all about the person being human, not the object on which they are taking some action. I see this as becoming more and more of an issue the better robot construction and more importantly virtual reality gets. People make a stink about FPSes and GTA being murder simulator, but can you imagine if it was a simulation that was indistinguishable from reality, and the "people" in it were programmed to look and act just like humans? If people decide to treat them differently from humans, what will that do the those people? Will it mess them up and make them treat "real" humans differently? In that sense, will their "inhumane" actions take away some of their humanity?
Who says human empathy has to make any sense? It's not like it's a rigidly programmed set of rules. We empathize with actors in a film, even when it's pure fiction.
Strange that you should pick the idea of the car. Some people get very attached to their cars (and other belongings) and DO empathize with them. Imagine a car you had first learned to drive as a teenager, lost your virginity in, drove your wife to the hospital in while she was having labor pains, and took your grandfather on a cross country ride right before he passed away later that year. Now imagine that the car has had it and will never again be feasible to drive. Do you take it to the scrapyard to be torn apart for parts and then crushed? Do you donate it to the junkyard derby to be smashed up and discarded?
Hell, at this point I'm not just empathizing with a car, I'm empathizing with a fictional car that I just made up.
If you had suggested we change the voting system (rather than just "throw away" a vote by voting 3rd-party), I would agree with you. Though I prefer something along the lines of instant runoff rather than proportional voting. And I definitely like keeping our President directly elected.
If Hitler was running against John Howard and polls showed they were neck-and-neck, would you still vote for some other candidate?It's never been just about that. Democracy (or republicanism) has always been a process about limited selection. It's always been about who is willing and able to run. That in and of itself is a bit of a selector for the qualities you don't want in a elected official. What democracy in winner-take-all elections has always been about is majority rule. So if you are in a minority, you need to align with other minorities in order to make your vote matter.
In reality, the majority of people simply based on tradition, peer pressure and image. They do not listen and research the substance of a candidate. These people will always be hard to sway to vote for an obscure candidate because they really aren't fundamentally engaged in being good citizens. Voting is somewhere on the list of priorities between mowing the lawn and picking up some milk on the way home.
Actually, that's frequently what I do. It's when I run out of stuff to read that I go to the Newly Popular page. That's why I view the Newly Popular page as being as close to this proposed "random links" page as you can get and still have people actually want to read the stories.
One of the things I like about digg over slashdot is that I quickly run out of stuff to read on slashdot. If I had less free time while at the computer, it wouldn't be an issue.
I'm sad that someone spent this much time describing a system that seems like it would be a total failure. I think a system like this used on digg would actually give the users LESS influence in voting. Why? Because most users read digg from the standpoint of the most popular stories. They aren't interested in reading the dreck that hasn't been voted up yet. And believe me, there's a LOT of dreck. I certainly wouldn't waste time checking out the stories in the random box. The front page is random enough for me already. Something gets enough votes to be on the front page and then I check it out and digg it if it's good. But frequently crappy stuff will slide right off the front page if it's not really that good.
The problem is that the submitter is trying to translate a method that "diggs" a photo into a method that diggs a story. Story take much more time to read than photos. It simply doesn't work the same.
You're not just splitting hairs, you're assuming that a word is simply a collection of roots (Latin or otherwise) and it has a fixed and unchanging meaning derived from them.
That's really not the case with language. It's ESPECIALLY not the case with scientific language.
You might also notice that what you posted isn't the definition of universe, it's a definition of universe. Another from the same page: a world or sphere in which something exists or prevails. This is much more applicable to our usage of universe to mean the current cosmology we understand.
I know it makes some people who crave order and stability mad, but language is created, molded, abused and transformed by the speakers and writers with little remorse for whose feelings may be hurt.
Glad you and some other people get it. I don't celebrate his death because I don't want to be the guy who celebrates other people's deaths. It has nothing to do with the man and his life.
There's no point in acting like most of us liked him, even a little. We don't have to celebrate his death, but we also don't have to pretend he wasn't a douche.
Well, the Steam thing turns out to be inaccurate (they put an update at the bottom of the linked story).
But if it had been true, the theft of credit card data would definitely have moved it out of the "mischief" category.
I think you're assuming something that I didn't propose. I didn't say they should scrap the existing process and replace it with this. If you notice, the first bit of my process is the existing system of sending a regular CC# in. My system just adds functionality that companies can take advantage of. They could even have an extra little safety seal on their page for this system.
Right now, companies are having to pay a lot for security to try to avoid these attacks. Then when they get broken into, they may have to pay out compensation. Plus, they take a real financial hit from the bad public relations after getting hacked (there are several companies I tend to stay away from because of this). CC companies/banks also take a hit in people not using their CC to the maximum amount because they may be leery of the safety. They may have to pay for the fraudulent charges in a lot of cases. So really, it would be in everyone's interest to add this functionality.
If Amazon could be sure a breakin would only result in a couple thousand credit card numbers being stolen (the ones that had not already been tokenized and were waiting for a response from the CC company), they would be ALL OVER such a system.
Just to add to the other reply, I'd like to note I wasn't proposing each of the companies that sent charges to the CC# should have their own public/private keys. That would be nice, but quite a hassle to administer. I just mean that the message content will include the company name and address before it is encrypted and sent back by the CC#. That way (like the other poster said), if someone stole that encrypted message and tried to send it back in, only the original company will be credited, not the thief. This pretty much nullifies the motivation for stealing and resending the encrypted message.
This breaks for recurring charges or automatic bill payments. That's kind of the whole point the system I proposed.
Right, but I think you missed the point of my post. Some companies need to do recurring charges (WoW, for example). The other example is storing the card as a convenience, which really is very nice as long as you have some level of confidence in the site.
Any obvious glaring errors? Any idea if this has already been proposed and shot down in the past? The data is never going to be truly secure. Someone is always going to get hacked. So it seems this might be a good way to minimize the amount of valuables lying around.
Yeah, it was because of the stupid virtualization restrictions that I pirated DOS 6.0.
And Flight Simulator.
Microsoft will get their hands on the leaky Dick any minute now. Their only hope is to come clean before then.