"Would you like to discuss, or would you like to throw loaded adjectives at each other for a while?"
I wasn't trying to be rude, just offering an observation based (as I stated) on my personal opinion.
So... I would ask this: if property is not a right, then you would not mind if things you had spent years to acquire, like a home for example, via your own hard labor, were appropriated for other purposes, or the use of other people?
If that is not what you are implying, then I guess I don't understand your position.
"Or Give them some real consequences and watch the remaining criters get in line. The only thing they understand is the same degree of 'message sending' they attempted."
"There's no such thing as "inflation due to scarcity" because inflation is a drop in the value of currency (typically through creation of such currency in large amounts, but possibly also through faster transaction speeds, also called "velocity of money")."
Yes, technically you are correct, and I should have been more clear. I wasn't referring to actual inflation of currency, but inflation or deflation of the price of the commodity.
"Focusing on those two (whose behavior does indeed seem pretty despicable) is going to accomplish very little in the long term."
I disagree completely. We have experience in my local area with a prosecutor who was apparently corrupt, and cherry-picked who he was going to prosecute (and how hard) based on reasons other than the law.
I say: DO focus on these two, and punish them harshly for overstepping. Part of the reason for their overreach in the first place has been the ability to do such things without consequence. Give them some real consequences, and watch them shape up.
As someone else said, we can do both. The Feds are going to have to be put back in their place, and by that I don't just mean prosecutors. But that's a good place to start.
And as for the judges who let them get away with it: be advised that contrary to popular belief, Federal judges are not appointed for life. They can only hold office during "good behaviour"! (U.S. Constitution, Article 3, Section 9). That paragraph explicitly states that this is true even of Supreme Court justices. So let's get a movement rolling about bad behavior.
"The error is computing the "cost of hunger" using today's data."
No, it's not, and it's not small, either.
Note that I stated he already took into account the changed conditions (like projected crop failures and desertification due to warming), and increased population. His calculations were based on the worst-case IPCC predictions of the time.
Of course, the upcoming IPCC report retracts many of those predictions, and discusses far less severe consequences than it had projected before.
And if you don't want to put up with "coastal destruction", don't live there. Even according to the worst projections from officialdom that we've seen, there are 100 years to prepare for changes of that magnitude.
"Oil only seems expensive because governments around the world are destroying the value of their currencies."
You have a point. But when you adjust for new sources, it still reflects unhealthy inflation due to scarcity. Despite government rhetoric to the contrary, in a healthy market, prices don't inflate, they go down. Look at electronics for example, and computers specifically.
History is chock full of examples of deflation in healthy markets. Despite what "mainstream" economists say, inflation is bad news. But oil is a limited resource, so the more used, the scarcer it gets.
"Now, anarchists -- libertarian socialists, the original libertarians -- are down with that, but most Americans talking about getting government out of economics mean that government should create private property, give it to capitalists, and then use force to defend those capitalist's "property rights"."
Nothing personal, but I think you have a rather twisted view of the whole thing.
"For reference Norway has a homicide rate of 0.6/100k the USA is at 4.8/100k."
Not much of a reference, if you consider that over 90% of firearm homicides are committed by gangs and/or drug dealers (which are often the same thing) shooting each other, not "civilians". And that takes into account innocent bystanders.
So if you are an average citizen in the U.S., that would put your odds of getting killed by gunfire at about 0.46/100k... below that of Norway.
Of course your figures are "intentional homicide", not necessarily firearms. My point is that raw numbers often mean little, without a context to put them in.
"What if global warming is true... but we spend trillions of dollars - presumably to the
detriment of other beneficial things - to obtain only a marginally better outcome?"
I don't know if it's true (and I do have my doubts) but I think this is really the essential point.
Even if you dismiss economist Bjorn Lomborg as an "anti-warmist", nobody has really refuted his calculations: that the cost of reducing CO2 warming by 1 degree C over the course of 100 years is about the same that it would cost to completely end world hunger... and that's taking changed conditions and population into account.
"Nope, many people today just understand that crony corporatism is the natural evolution of capitalism."
"Corporate cronyism" is a political phenomenon, and has nothing directly to do with economics. It can exist -- has existed -- under fascism (in fact, Mussolini said it was the definition of fascism), and in virtually indistinguishable form under socialism... they're just not called "corporations" and there is no pretense to capitalism.
It is a political issue, and it will be solved politically. Problems arise when you get government confused with (or involved in) economics.
"Some of the confusion comes from the fact that we don't really have free markets for many things, instead we have protectionist markets."
Mod up. Many people today seem to confuse crony corporatism with "capitalism", when they are not even remotely the same things. Our economic woes have not been due to capitalism at all... but rather to the lack of same.
"As an added bonus the fridge could save me some money by making greater use of off-peak electricity, or even talk directly to the power company and negotiate the best times to kick."
That's all great, but that much is not really related to remote control. It would be better to automate it. Building an accessible list of contents may be great, but something like that has to be done before remote control of the refrigerator is useful at all.
My point was that for years now, people have been dreaming up silly ideas for things to put on the internet. Some of them might not be silly in the future, after other advances, but they are still silly now.
As for the thermostat: a $30 programmable unit will warm your house for you properly 99% of the time, if you keep a semi-consistent schedule, and most of them today have different programs for each day (so you can have a diferent schedule for weekends), and overrides for temporary out-of-schedule changes. If you travel a lot or don't keep a regular schedule, though, I could see the remote being practical.
"you don't need WAN reachability (inbound, probably even outbound) from embedded networked systems."
You aren't correcting me, because I didn't claim you did need it. Please read again: I stated "... a lot of these things are silly". I didn't say all of them were, and I didn't elaborate.
But just so you are aware: I have seen proposals online to do things like remote control your oven and the like from work, or wherever you happen to be outside the home. And it's a bad idea.
Not only that, but a lot of these things are silly ideas or worse. Sure, some might be good but others are not.
Do you REALLY want to give Mary Jo the ability to control her oven from some remote place? Who will pay to put out all the fires? And why the hell anybody would want their refrigerator connected to the Internet is beyond me, but if I recall correctly, Bill Gates suggested it about 15 years ago. Why???
I don't need my thermostat controlled by a smartphone. It does just fine on its own, thanks very much.
"Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?"
You can, if you buy from Pragmatic Programmers. It costs a little extra for both versions... but it also takes more work to produce both versions, so it's hard to bitch.
" So, under a 35 USC 101 analysis, is it a machine? Yes. Does it have a use in pedaling a bike? Yes. The end."
Precisely. Some people here seem to think that "utility" means it has to be actually useful to somebody in order to get a patent... or worse, somehow more useful than some other thing. But that's not what it means. It simply means that it does something, and that something is what the patent claims say it will do.
No, they don't. They just have to DO SOMETHING. That something doesn't have to be "useful". The Patent Office (nor anybody else) is not capable of determining what is "useful" to everybody under all conditions.
The guy's goofy cranks certainly do something... they just don't do what he thinks they do. I haven't seen the patent, so I don't know what kind of claims he made.
My memory stuttered. The one particular flaw I mentioned did not allow the user to bypass the encryption. What it actually did was block the government "escrowed" key from working. Defeating the whole purpose of the device.
"Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from/. headlines."
It might help if you got your own facts straight.
I was head of an IT department when the Clipper Chip was under proposal. There was a LOT of attention to it among professionals... but the government did not listen.
The algorithm was "secret" and not available to cryptography experts to evaluate. The chip itself was also "secret", and made to be tamper-proof, so it could also not be evaluated by private parties.
Under pressure, the government did finally capitulate and allow a few experts to BRIEFLY examine the algorithm. They stated that it was "in a family of known secure algorithms"... hardly a recommendation, and no guarantee that there was no trickery going on.
After years of development, at the last minute, NIST finally called for public input on the proposal... 30 whole days of it, before the idea was to be implemented.
During those 30 days, approximately 85,000 input messages were received from the public. By official count, only 3 of them (that is not a typo... 3 as in "three") were positive. The rest were negative.
The government completely ignored that public input and proceeded with the program anyway... until such public outcry arose that they finally backed off and made it "voluntary". And of course nobody volunteered. The tech and manufacturing industries wanted nothing to do with it, and the public (those who were aware of it) were strictly opposed in almost every case.
Some time later -- AFTER the government realized that the idea was truly dead and its corpse was rotting beyond redemption -- they released the algorithm to the public. Serious flaws in it (including one that would allow users to bypass the encryption entirely) were found within a month.
Clipper was an idea that was ill-conceived, unwanted, and executed in an outrageously poor manner.
"... compared to a SQL Injection you can't do much about."
Quite the contrary; it is ridiculously easy to prevent this SQL injection attack. All you have to do is change the default "secret" key value, which should always be done in a Rails program.
Every competent Rails programmer knows about the "secret" value, and that it should be changed from the default. They documentation clearly says so, and the file containing it says "Change this!". Failing to do so is akin to not changing the default password on your WiFi router... anybody can get in if they know how. (AND, in this case, if you happen to be using Authologic.)
This is a "flaw" that normally affects only programs written by Ruby noobs. (Newby rubes...)
Slashdot Mirror
"Would you like to discuss, or would you like to throw loaded adjectives at each other for a while?"
I wasn't trying to be rude, just offering an observation based (as I stated) on my personal opinion.
So... I would ask this: if property is not a right, then you would not mind if things you had spent years to acquire, like a home for example, via your own hard labor, were appropriated for other purposes, or the use of other people?
If that is not what you are implying, then I guess I don't understand your position.
"Or Give them some real consequences and watch the remaining criters get in line. The only thing they understand is the same degree of 'message sending' they attempted."
I think that comment deserves better than a -1.
"There's no such thing as "inflation due to scarcity" because inflation is a drop in the value of currency (typically through creation of such currency in large amounts, but possibly also through faster transaction speeds, also called "velocity of money")."
Yes, technically you are correct, and I should have been more clear. I wasn't referring to actual inflation of currency, but inflation or deflation of the price of the commodity.
"Focusing on those two (whose behavior does indeed seem pretty despicable) is going to accomplish very little in the long term."
I disagree completely. We have experience in my local area with a prosecutor who was apparently corrupt, and cherry-picked who he was going to prosecute (and how hard) based on reasons other than the law.
I say: DO focus on these two, and punish them harshly for overstepping. Part of the reason for their overreach in the first place has been the ability to do such things without consequence. Give them some real consequences, and watch them shape up.
As someone else said, we can do both. The Feds are going to have to be put back in their place, and by that I don't just mean prosecutors. But that's a good place to start.
And as for the judges who let them get away with it: be advised that contrary to popular belief, Federal judges are not appointed for life. They can only hold office during "good behaviour"! (U.S. Constitution, Article 3, Section 9). That paragraph explicitly states that this is true even of Supreme Court justices. So let's get a movement rolling about bad behavior.
"The error is computing the "cost of hunger" using today's data."
No, it's not, and it's not small, either.
Note that I stated he already took into account the changed conditions (like projected crop failures and desertification due to warming), and increased population. His calculations were based on the worst-case IPCC predictions of the time.
Of course, the upcoming IPCC report retracts many of those predictions, and discusses far less severe consequences than it had projected before.
And if you don't want to put up with "coastal destruction", don't live there. Even according to the worst projections from officialdom that we've seen, there are 100 years to prepare for changes of that magnitude.
"Oil only seems expensive because governments around the world are destroying the value of their currencies."
You have a point. But when you adjust for new sources, it still reflects unhealthy inflation due to scarcity. Despite government rhetoric to the contrary, in a healthy market, prices don't inflate, they go down. Look at electronics for example, and computers specifically.
History is chock full of examples of deflation in healthy markets. Despite what "mainstream" economists say, inflation is bad news. But oil is a limited resource, so the more used, the scarcer it gets.
"Now, anarchists -- libertarian socialists, the original libertarians -- are down with that, but most Americans talking about getting government out of economics mean that government should create private property, give it to capitalists, and then use force to defend those capitalist's "property rights"."
Nothing personal, but I think you have a rather twisted view of the whole thing.
"For reference Norway has a homicide rate of 0.6/100k the USA is at 4.8/100k."
Not much of a reference, if you consider that over 90% of firearm homicides are committed by gangs and/or drug dealers (which are often the same thing) shooting each other, not "civilians". And that takes into account innocent bystanders.
So if you are an average citizen in the U.S., that would put your odds of getting killed by gunfire at about 0.46/100k... below that of Norway.
Of course your figures are "intentional homicide", not necessarily firearms. My point is that raw numbers often mean little, without a context to put them in.
"What if global warming is true ... but we spend trillions of dollars - presumably to the
detriment of other beneficial things - to obtain only a marginally better outcome?"
I don't know if it's true (and I do have my doubts) but I think this is really the essential point.
Even if you dismiss economist Bjorn Lomborg as an "anti-warmist", nobody has really refuted his calculations: that the cost of reducing CO2 warming by 1 degree C over the course of 100 years is about the same that it would cost to completely end world hunger... and that's taking changed conditions and population into account.
Which is more important?
"... to prepare the world economy for the end of cheap oil."
We saw the end of "cheap" oil years ago. I think you mean "necessary" oil.
It will still be necessary, of course, for lots of things. Just not powering automobiles.
"Nope, many people today just understand that crony corporatism is the natural evolution of capitalism."
"Corporate cronyism" is a political phenomenon, and has nothing directly to do with economics. It can exist -- has existed -- under fascism (in fact, Mussolini said it was the definition of fascism), and in virtually indistinguishable form under socialism... they're just not called "corporations" and there is no pretense to capitalism.
It is a political issue, and it will be solved politically. Problems arise when you get government confused with (or involved in) economics.
"Some of the confusion comes from the fact that we don't really have free markets for many things, instead we have protectionist markets."
Mod up. Many people today seem to confuse crony corporatism with "capitalism", when they are not even remotely the same things. Our economic woes have not been due to capitalism at all... but rather to the lack of same.
"As an added bonus the fridge could save me some money by making greater use of off-peak electricity, or even talk directly to the power company and negotiate the best times to kick."
That's all great, but that much is not really related to remote control. It would be better to automate it. Building an accessible list of contents may be great, but something like that has to be done before remote control of the refrigerator is useful at all.
My point was that for years now, people have been dreaming up silly ideas for things to put on the internet. Some of them might not be silly in the future, after other advances, but they are still silly now.
As for the thermostat: a $30 programmable unit will warm your house for you properly 99% of the time, if you keep a semi-consistent schedule, and most of them today have different programs for each day (so you can have a diferent schedule for weekends), and overrides for temporary out-of-schedule changes. If you travel a lot or don't keep a regular schedule, though, I could see the remote being practical.
"you don't need WAN reachability (inbound, probably even outbound) from embedded networked systems."
You aren't correcting me, because I didn't claim you did need it. Please read again: I stated "... a lot of these things are silly". I didn't say all of them were, and I didn't elaborate.
But just so you are aware: I have seen proposals online to do things like remote control your oven and the like from work, or wherever you happen to be outside the home. And it's a bad idea.
"great plan, if you are not a consumer"
Not only that, but a lot of these things are silly ideas or worse. Sure, some might be good but others are not.
Do you REALLY want to give Mary Jo the ability to control her oven from some remote place? Who will pay to put out all the fires? And why the hell anybody would want their refrigerator connected to the Internet is beyond me, but if I recall correctly, Bill Gates suggested it about 15 years ago. Why???
I don't need my thermostat controlled by a smartphone. It does just fine on its own, thanks very much.
"Why can't we get copies of our ebooks when we buy the dead-tree version?"
You can, if you buy from Pragmatic Programmers. It costs a little extra for both versions... but it also takes more work to produce both versions, so it's hard to bitch.
" Simplistically... One can patent stupid and/or inefficient things and bad designs - as long as they're new and unique."
What amazes me is not the patent. It's that he actually got a university to test the thing without laughing him out of town.
"And because bike pedals haven't been invented yet it's not prior art ?"
Lasers have already been invented. But you could invent a better, or -- more to the point -- different laser, and still get a patent for it.
" So, under a 35 USC 101 analysis, is it a machine? Yes. Does it have a use in pedaling a bike? Yes. The end."
Precisely. Some people here seem to think that "utility" means it has to be actually useful to somebody in order to get a patent... or worse, somehow more useful than some other thing. But that's not what it means. It simply means that it does something, and that something is what the patent claims say it will do.
Argh. Bad sentence there. That should have read "Neither the Patent Office or anybody else can determine what is "useful" to all people all the time."
"They also have to be useful."
No, they don't. They just have to DO SOMETHING. That something doesn't have to be "useful". The Patent Office (nor anybody else) is not capable of determining what is "useful" to everybody under all conditions.
The guy's goofy cranks certainly do something... they just don't do what he thinks they do. I haven't seen the patent, so I don't know what kind of claims he made.
My memory stuttered. The one particular flaw I mentioned did not allow the user to bypass the encryption. What it actually did was block the government "escrowed" key from working. Defeating the whole purpose of the device.
"Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from /. headlines."
It might help if you got your own facts straight.
I was head of an IT department when the Clipper Chip was under proposal. There was a LOT of attention to it among professionals... but the government did not listen.
The algorithm was "secret" and not available to cryptography experts to evaluate. The chip itself was also "secret", and made to be tamper-proof, so it could also not be evaluated by private parties.
Under pressure, the government did finally capitulate and allow a few experts to BRIEFLY examine the algorithm. They stated that it was "in a family of known secure algorithms"... hardly a recommendation, and no guarantee that there was no trickery going on.
After years of development, at the last minute, NIST finally called for public input on the proposal... 30 whole days of it, before the idea was to be implemented.
During those 30 days, approximately 85,000 input messages were received from the public. By official count, only 3 of them (that is not a typo... 3 as in "three") were positive. The rest were negative.
The government completely ignored that public input and proceeded with the program anyway... until such public outcry arose that they finally backed off and made it "voluntary". And of course nobody volunteered. The tech and manufacturing industries wanted nothing to do with it, and the public (those who were aware of it) were strictly opposed in almost every case.
Some time later -- AFTER the government realized that the idea was truly dead and its corpse was rotting beyond redemption -- they released the algorithm to the public. Serious flaws in it (including one that would allow users to bypass the encryption entirely) were found within a month.
Clipper was an idea that was ill-conceived, unwanted, and executed in an outrageously poor manner.
Given the simplicity of the problem, I hardly think immediate optimization is "premature".
"... compared to a SQL Injection you can't do much about."
Quite the contrary; it is ridiculously easy to prevent this SQL injection attack. All you have to do is change the default "secret" key value, which should always be done in a Rails program.
Every competent Rails programmer knows about the "secret" value, and that it should be changed from the default. They documentation clearly says so, and the file containing it says "Change this!". Failing to do so is akin to not changing the default password on your WiFi router... anybody can get in if they know how. (AND, in this case, if you happen to be using Authologic.)
This is a "flaw" that normally affects only programs written by Ruby noobs. (Newby rubes...)