I assume most will not read the paper, so here is a couple of points to consider before weighing into the discussion:
* The touting is not illegal in and of itself - most touters are even including disclosures about their own activities (it is, however, one of the authors' recommendations to nail some of them for breach of CAN-SPAM) * These are not NASDAQ or NYSE stocks, and don't behave anything like that. Those are unknown, small stocks with very small trading volumes. The touter and the people he is fooling are often making up much of the trading activity in the period around the touting. They are also "penny" stocks, which "tick" in pretty large increments (percentagewise). * Consequently, the only people likely to benefit or hurt are the touters and the people who bought into their messages (i.e. no "innocent bystanders")
It is unclear to me that this is a problem for the regulators, at least not from the point of view of protecting the "victims". After all, people are free to make bad choices and these are not fraud cases (the authors note that this is "investor irrationality"). There is, however, a negative impact on everyone else, because this sustains high spam levels. Probably the "CAN-SPAM direction" is the regulatory way to go, rather than something more specific related to touting of financial assets.
There is an old saying that goes caveat emptor - Let the Buyer Beware.
In fact, the main problem the UN has is that it's not accountable to anyone.
I followed you until that one, last sentence.
The accountability issue is frequently cited by UN critics as The Final Argument that settles the debate once and for all. However, it does not stand up to scrutiny. Why?
1. Because, short of having a world government with a world army, it is impossible to have accountability in the formal sense in a world-spanning organization. This because there is no legitimate force that could enforce such accountability.
2. Because accountable is not the only thing, nor even necessarily the main thing, we need the UN to be. I would for instance prefer a useful UN to an accountable UN any day (defining useful as 'making an important contribution to world peace and prosperity').
3. Because accountability is an elusive term, and it is a matter opinion whether one calls the UN accountable or not. One definition of accountability is 'responsibility to someone or for something'. The UN relies on the countries of the world for its material resources, and it relies on its reputation for legitimacy. Thus, if the UN behaves outside the wishes of its constituent countries, it risks loosing budgets, peace-keeping forces and legitimacy. It is thus constantly being held accountable. No, it is not democratic in terms of procedures, proportional representation etc. It is, however, hard to see how it could be (except by becoming the World State, as previously mentioned).
I am in no way arguing that the UN is flawless, that it needs no reform, or anything like that. My argument is solely that the accountability argument is flawed and shallow.
Why are we not directing our massive GNP towards scientific exploration such as studying genetic therapies to cure the rift raft of ailiments that curse mankind instead of fighting petty wars against a minor enemy "aka terrorist".
I partially agree with you, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. There is a very real possibility of bio or nuclear terrorism, which would make 9/11 look like a minor accident. Take you pick of "nuke-Manhattan", smallpox or "San Fransisco Dirty Bomb" scenarios - all of these are (1) realistically achievable (technically and logistically) for a resourceful group of people and (2) the ultimate scoop for a number of groups. These kind of threats must be estimated beforehand and with incomplete information - we cannot wait for statistical evidence before engaging in prevention.
2. Comparing "number of deaths" is a crude and imprecise analysis. A better approach typically used is the concept of "disability-adjusted life-years". This takes into account the number of extra years lived by people saved (adjusted for lower quality of life due to disabilities, as the name suggests). From this perspective you would have to factor into the analysis that the average person killed at WTC probably had life expectancies many times higher than would the average patient saved by e.g. a cure for prostate cancer.
3. Life-years aren't even the only aspect of national well-being. Sense of security is an important aspect of quality of life, and thus there is a broader benefit to the nation feeling protected from terrorism. (On the other hand, the scare-mongering by the presidential candidates has the exact opposite effect).
4. The economic damage from terrorism is even much higher than a "life-years" analysis would suggest. This in turn has a feedback effect on the economic capacity for the country to undertake important tasks, such as, err..., cancer research (or weapons systems - take your pick).
That having been said, I agree that "big headline risks" get too much focus and priority in politics, media an popular opinion. Here is a very good Economist article on this issue.
How can the monopolies commission come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft for locking people into a technology, when the only way you can legally download music for the iPod is through iTunes?
"Locking people into a technology" is not inconsistent with healthy competition (ref. Playstation vs. Xbox vs. Gamecube - all of these lock users into a technology, but compete plenty). Microsoft has been accused of leveraging a dominating position in one market (operating systems) to compete unfairly in related markets (browsers, media players). So it is "competing unfairly" that is the complaint, not walled-garden technology.
This is of course the legal aspect. You can still choose to dislike Apple for the iTunes model. Some might also choose to sell the stock, as failing to license is a mistake that has already proved disasterous for Apple once (can you say: Mac vs. PC?).
I think it is hard to overestimate the long term impact of this technology, if it lives up to its promises. This could be the final piece in the puzzle needed to make wearable computing a mainstream reality (rather than a thing for visionary geeks). My guess is that within 10 years of the first real massmarket product, we will all be wearing those when working, driving, shopping, etc.
The infamous flexibility of Excel is all too often used for creative accounting/planning as well.
No doubt about it. However, that doesn't mean Excel causes these phenomena. Creative accounting was around for quite a while before Excel. People were overoptimistic about resources and ventures long before Excel.
The classical Slashdot debate features something-stupid-done-or-said-by-non-IT-savvy-gene ral-managers, and then the appropriate bashing by IT-savvy Slashdotters. If there were a similar forum where my profession were in majority, they would probably be bashing this very thread right now (I am an economist and business manager).
Just like, say, PERL or Java, spreadsheets can be used well, and they can be used poorly. Furthermore, people with good "technical" Excel skills can produce lousy spreadsheets with little analytical value, and vice versa. I have seen some fantastic spreadsheets which have totally revolutionized the way people saw a problem. At an insurance company I worked with, they used a huge spreadsheet to do a simulation of the effects on every single customer of a planned, dramatic price increase. The result: They realized that the price increase would have much less impact than they feared. Thus, the product was kept and the employees kept their jobs. The thing with the spreadsheet was that it was developed in fast trial-and-error loops, which meant that their run-once-per-night SAS tools were not an option (this was 7 years ago).
(I have, by the way, also seen people spend 3 months on developing a mega-spreadsheet for assessing the value of a company, only to use the wrong assumption for a critical value and thereby introducing an error of about 40% in the valuation [that critical value being the discount rate]).
I can assure all the concerned citizens of this forum that there is indeed a lot of excellent, first-rate Excel usage out there. Analytical power beyond our wildest dreams is at the fingertips of people without skills in programming at any lower level. This, believe it or not, is a good thing, because anyone who has dedicated himself to becoming great at programming is probably less skilled in disciplines such as financial analysis.
Sure, there is "bad code". Sure, people get a false sense of control. Sure, this new tool puts too much options in the hands of people who do not know how to use them. But how would that be untrue of other IT tools or programming environments? What does it matter that they use Excel as a database, as long as it gets their work done easier than getting an SQL education and then doing it "right"?
Biases are part of all decision-making (as even economists are realizing). So what if that is the case in Spreadsheet World, too?
So would this stop what happened to Virtual Dub? The author added support for the ASF (or something similar, been a while) file format and Microsoft forced him to remove it. And this is a Windows program.
I am not familiar with the case, but file formats and OS APIs are very different in terms of the need for anti-trust intervention. Inability to use the OS APIs puts an outsider at a competitive disadvantage when trying to compete with the OS provider's applications. However, the outsider can simply use its own file formats if the OS provider won't share his. This would only become anti-competitive if the OS somehow favored the "home" format.
But that information may still remain proprietary. MS could share the information and at the same time sue any up and coming rivals for patent violations or something equally silly.
The anti-trust action is not meant to open up for rivals in the OS business, but rather in the applications that run on Windows. Using Windows' APIs would not open up for MS legal action, and even if it did the competition authorities would strike swiftly down upon that as anti-competitive behavior.
Standard oil was broken up by the government why shouldn't we do the same now to Microsoft?
Try: "We" don't have the jurisdiction. Otherwise I totally agree with you. So does The Economist, which in 1999 wrote:
-------------- [stuff deleted]
The Road Ahead
So what should Mr Klein [the judge in the US Microsoft case] suggest? His starting-point must be that any action should provide consumers with choices they do not have today, and also stimulate innovation that would have otherwise been chilled. One potentially elegant structural solution that stops short of breaking the firm up would be to force it to publish the full specifications of the Windows "application program interfaces" (APIs), the codes that software firms who want their products to run on Windows must follow. IBM spent a fortune in the early 1990s in an attempt to reverse engineer or "clone" these for a rival operating system. But it could not persuade its customers that it had done enough to run a critical mass of Windows's applications; and Microsoft, as the incumbent, was always able to stay one jump ahead. Were such expense and uncertainty to be removed, IBM might be tempted back into the fray.
Going further, Microsoft could be required to license the source code for Windows itself to the highest bidders. If that encouraged the entry of powerful companies such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, a main objective of the Justice Department would have been achieved.
Yet a drawback of both approaches is that they rely on other firms' appetite for risk-taking. So if after a year, say, no new entrant had appeared to challenge Microsoft's monopoly, the break-up option would need to be revived. There is one version of the 'Baby Bills' that would carry less risk of perverse unintended consequences: to divide Microsoft into two or three competing operating-system companies and an applications company. (The firm's expanding investments in web services could simply be sold--the Internet can do very well without Microsoft's attentions.)
If there were two or three Windows companies, they would have no incentive to create different APIs, as they would all have a strong interest in supporting the greatest possible number of Windows applications. They would instead compete on price, ease of use, features and the trade-off between stability and backwards compatibility. The remaining applications firm would, for its part, have an equal interest in ensuring smooth integration with differing versions of Windows; and it would want to make both Office and BackOffice (which includes Microsoft's database product) available on Linux, the fledgling open-source Windows rival, and on every flavour of commercial Unix operating systems. The discipline of real competition would thus trigger innovation and give consumers more choice--but without jeopardising the Holy Grail of interoperability. And without having the government trying to run a technology industry.
("Now bust Microsoft's trust", Nov 11 1999) ---------------------
The sad thing is that you won't save all of these resources by not purchasing that computer. Sure, the first order effect will be that one less computer is manufactured. However, the second order effects in a market economy will be:
1. Less demand for the resources in question 2. A drop in the price of the resources in question 3. As a result of cheaper resources: More demand for the resources for other uses
There will also be second order effects in terms of your own behavior, depending on what you get instead of the monitor. If you get a digital camera instead, the environment may be no better off (or even worse). If you, on the other hand, spend it for a massage, a restaurant dinner or a nice painting, then the environment will still remain grateful.
In the end, global resource consumption will reflect the aggregated preferences of us consumers in terms of resource-hungry vs. resource economical products and services.
that most people didn't hear about the asteroid until long after the near-miss was over. Seems to bring up the old argument of whether it'd be better to inform the public and try to do something about it or keep it under wraps and possibly die in blissful ignorance...
Using utilitarian calculations, you can actually compute whether or not the expected consequences of informing are preferable to the expected consequences of secrecy. It would go something like:
where EU(i), EU(s) are the expected utility functions of informing and keeping secret, respectively p(h) is the probability of a hit p(prev) is the probability that a hit could be prevented if known to the public U(knowing) is the value people would place on knowing in advance if they were going to be dead tomorrow U(nondisr) is the value people would place on the avoided distruption of a global panic (the economic + emotional "costs" saved)
Thus, whether to inform depends on: - How certain are you that the asteroid will hit? - How big do you think the disruption will be if word of potential impact spreads? - Is there anything you can do, given that it is going to hit?
I think the first one is really important. It has repeatedly been shown in research that people do not react rationally to probabilistic information. Thus, telling the public that "there is a chance that an asteroid could hit us", even when qualified by a quantification of the probability to the best of our knowledge, could actually lead to a greater mis-assessment of the risk than if nothing were said of it.
This is, of course, not a question of probabilistic and utilitarian calculations. There is a "right to information" aspect to it, as well. A good formulation would be "where is the borderline between 'creating unneccesary panic' and 'respecting people's right to know'". I would say that if the expert is worried to the point of personally taking significant action based on the information, such as buying emergency supplies etc., then he should inform the general public.
Why should we care whether the publicly accepted [i.e. 'accepted by media'] figures for the cost of a certain public problem are realistic?
Simple: Because decisions will inevitably be based on such figures.
Of course you can argue that "hey, they're not taking it seriously enough anyway, so who cares if numbers are inflated". Apply that method simultaneously to security, the environment, the spread of various diseases, education and 20 other areas that "aren't taken seriously enough". What you end up with is a total inability to prioritize between them, because no reliable figures exist. Given limited resources in the public sector, prioritization is critical to general welfare.
A similar argument applies to the private sector. If business leaders accept inflated figures when making decisions about e.g. some area of risk, uneconomic decisions will be made. A case in point was the Y2K craze. Where did eventually the money come to spend millions of manyears on mitigating vastly exaggerated risks? From the pension funds and mutual funds where the savings of our parents are kept, and from the customers of the companies in question. In other words, inflated figures can harm ordinary people financially.
I found that for gaming, cordless is bad. Not only did my wife's Logitech cordless stuff interfere with mine. I also found that there were spontaneous lags even when no other set of keyboard/mouse was present. Furthermore, if my mobile happened to ring while I played, mouse and keyboard performance was near zero until the phone stopped ringing.
I now use a Boomslang Razor for playing. It is extremely precise, but I'm not all that crazy about its very low design - it doesn't support the hand very well. On the positive side, the button design is perfect for playing (as well as for surfing the web, with 'back' and 'forward' buttons on the left and right side, respectively. A bonus is also the very flexible cord, which assures that cord tension does not affect mouse movement. A very good mouse, but is it worth the dough? Depends on your pockets, I guess.
I have a Logitech Internet Navigator corded keyboard, whish is excellent except for the hot buttons. The F-keys are toggled between "Logitech mode" and normal mode by a hotbutton, with a difficult-to-discern status indicator, and you're screwed if you need F1 fast and you accidentally hit that toggle lately. Even more screwed you are if you happen to touch some of the web-related buttons, because then helpful IE jumps up to cover your entire game. Apart from these annoying extras the keyboard is fine.
It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form.
Incorrect. Search advertising such those offered by Google (AdWords), Overture and numerous other players are better in terms of click-throughs, conversion rates, or any other relevant measure of advertising effectiveness. The same goes for online yellow pages advertising.
The point of these "directional" forms of advertising is that the consumer identifies a need or an area of interest before the ad is displayed. The very reason why this advertising is less annoying - its relevance - is why it is effective.
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they.
For these companies, this is not a lot of money. What they really are putting on the line (and have been for a while) is their prestige and reputation.
I was in court for the defence procedure, and here is some additional info:
DVD Jon was charged with breaking a rule in the Norwegian penal code that makes it illegal to "break a protection... and thereby gain illegitimate access to data" (145,2). This is a different part of Norwegian law than that which deals with protection of Intellectual Property. The defence argued that this rule was a continuation of the old one that protected the secrecy of letters and other forms of communication, and that a movie therefore is not "data" according to this law. As far as I understand, the court did not concede this.
However, the crux of the case ended up being the term "illegitimate access". The court decided that there is nothing illegitimate about breaking a protection to gain access to something you have bought. An important part of this is that in Norway, the labels that distributors stick on DVDs, CDs and software are not binding for consumers (more explicit consent is required for binding agreements). If the labels were binding, the access would have been illegitimate. Luckily for Jon (and for freedom of information), this is not the case.
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality.
This is simply not correct. Time travel does not contradict causality, only some people's concept of "free will".
To explain: You cannot "change" history, simply because it "is already there". The notion of going back and "overwriting" one history with another a la Back To The Future suffers from the "Second Time Around Fallacy". History can by definition not be changed.
History can, however, be influenced by a time traveler. The history we know has been produced by past events, some of which can have been caused by a time traveler. So when I go back, I know in advance that everything I do must be consistent with the history I know. How this is "enforced" is the big question, but I bet a bit of Bayesian probabilities are involved. By that I mean the following: The base probability of various events that may prevent me from killing my grandfather can be very low (e.g. the probability of loosing the gun down a chasm just before I reach his house). However, the conditional probability of these events given that I will not kill my grandfather is much higher. In fact, given that my grandfather most evidently survived my attempt, the only thing to be resolved is how my intended murder was averted. So, if I try, somehow I will fail (and this is where "free will" becomes problematic for some people).
However, I can still influence things in history. For instance, I could go back to look for some legendary treasure that hasn't been found - maybe it hasn't been found because I went back in time to find it before others and move it! The causal integrity is intact.
Two additional observations: The above disregards the possibility of "parallell universes". Conceivably, I could go back in time and start "a different history", i.e. a different universe. Given the current state of our knowledge, we cannot rule out that the universe branches into a finite or infinite number of parallell universes at intervals which could be real or infinitessimal. However, you could never move between those universes, so the integrity of the history of each universe would still be preserved. This means that a time traveler "changing history" would actually just move back to an earlier branching point and go down an alternative history.
Note also that causal loops are quite possible with time travel, and that this does not contradict causality in any way. So you could go back in time and introduce your grandparents to each other (unless you already knew for sure that they introduced themselves to each other).
Screws up your mind, doesn't it?
[I have used past and future tenses here, since Douglas Adams neglected leaving us with a copy of the book on the time travel grammar].
Where information security work really breaks down is when password theory meets the average user. Personally, I had to try approx. 15 times to come up with a password that would be accepted by the system at my university, and by then it was so complex that I had to write it down to remember it. (As usual, there had to be 3 types of characters, but in addition, there where heaps of rules saying such things as "caps at the start or end of the word don't count".
We must find a systemic solution that includes the users as part of the system. The main requirement for a new password regime is therefore that it must work within the bounds of users' bad habits and limited capacity for recalling a gazillion passwords which change regularly.
Created: 10/8/2001 2:13:42 AM Modified: 10/25/2002 11:07:05 AM
We can only surmise what the previous entry read. Maybe:
-------- Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the "Any" key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859)
The "Any" key is not a single key on your keyboard, but a combination of keys to be pressed simultaneously. Those keys are the ones marked "Ctrl", "Alt" and "Del". After pressing those keys, complete the action by clicking "Shutdown" on that little message box that appears. Having finished this, move away from this and any other computer you might encounter, and live a safe life in the non-digital world. --------
Slashdot Mirror
I assume most will not read the paper, so here is a couple of points to consider before weighing into the discussion:
* The touting is not illegal in and of itself - most touters are even including disclosures about their own activities (it is, however, one of the authors' recommendations to nail some of them for breach of CAN-SPAM)
* These are not NASDAQ or NYSE stocks, and don't behave anything like that. Those are unknown, small stocks with very small trading volumes. The touter and the people he is fooling are often making up much of the trading activity in the period around the touting. They are also "penny" stocks, which "tick" in pretty large increments (percentagewise).
* Consequently, the only people likely to benefit or hurt are the touters and the people who bought into their messages (i.e. no "innocent bystanders")
It is unclear to me that this is a problem for the regulators, at least not from the point of view of protecting the "victims". After all, people are free to make bad choices and these are not fraud cases (the authors note that this is "investor irrationality"). There is, however, a negative impact on everyone else, because this sustains high spam levels. Probably the "CAN-SPAM direction" is the regulatory way to go, rather than something more specific related to touting of financial assets.
There is an old saying that goes caveat emptor - Let the Buyer Beware.
You must bed new here.
Oh MAN, are you behind...
In fact, the main problem the UN has is that it's not accountable to anyone.
I followed you until that one, last sentence.
The accountability issue is frequently cited by UN critics as The Final Argument that settles the debate once and for all. However, it does not stand up to scrutiny. Why?
1. Because, short of having a world government with a world army, it is impossible to have accountability in the formal sense in a world-spanning organization. This because there is no legitimate force that could enforce such accountability.
2. Because accountable is not the only thing, nor even necessarily the main thing, we need the UN to be. I would for instance prefer a useful UN to an accountable UN any day (defining useful as 'making an important contribution to world peace and prosperity').
3. Because accountability is an elusive term, and it is a matter opinion whether one calls the UN accountable or not. One definition of accountability is 'responsibility to someone or for something'. The UN relies on the countries of the world for its material resources, and it relies on its reputation for legitimacy. Thus, if the UN behaves outside the wishes of its constituent countries, it risks loosing budgets, peace-keeping forces and legitimacy. It is thus constantly being held accountable. No, it is not democratic in terms of procedures, proportional representation etc. It is, however, hard to see how it could be (except by becoming the World State, as previously mentioned).
I am in no way arguing that the UN is flawless, that it needs no reform, or anything like that. My argument is solely that the accountability argument is flawed and shallow.
Why are we not directing our massive GNP towards scientific exploration such as studying genetic therapies to cure the rift raft of ailiments that curse mankind instead of fighting petty wars against a minor enemy "aka terrorist".
I partially agree with you, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1. There is a very real possibility of bio or nuclear terrorism, which would make 9/11 look like a minor accident. Take you pick of "nuke-Manhattan", smallpox or "San Fransisco Dirty Bomb" scenarios - all of these are (1) realistically achievable (technically and logistically) for a resourceful group of people and (2) the ultimate scoop for a number of groups. These kind of threats must be estimated beforehand and with incomplete information - we cannot wait for statistical evidence before engaging in prevention.
2. Comparing "number of deaths" is a crude and imprecise analysis. A better approach typically used is the concept of "disability-adjusted life-years". This takes into account the number of extra years lived by people saved (adjusted for lower quality of life due to disabilities, as the name suggests). From this perspective you would have to factor into the analysis that the average person killed at WTC probably had life expectancies many times higher than would the average patient saved by e.g. a cure for prostate cancer.
3. Life-years aren't even the only aspect of national well-being. Sense of security is an important aspect of quality of life, and thus there is a broader benefit to the nation feeling protected from terrorism. (On the other hand, the scare-mongering by the presidential candidates has the exact opposite effect).
4. The economic damage from terrorism is even much higher than a "life-years" analysis would suggest. This in turn has a feedback effect on the economic capacity for the country to undertake important tasks, such as, err..., cancer research (or weapons systems - take your pick).
That having been said, I agree that "big headline risks" get too much focus and priority in politics, media an popular opinion. Here is a very good Economist article on this issue.
But the point is that a pebble bed design doesn't risk a disaster! ...kinda like the Titanic.
How can the monopolies commission come down like a ton of bricks on Microsoft for locking people into a technology, when the only way you can legally download music for the iPod is through iTunes?
"Locking people into a technology" is not inconsistent with healthy competition (ref. Playstation vs. Xbox vs. Gamecube - all of these lock users into a technology, but compete plenty). Microsoft has been accused of leveraging a dominating position in one market (operating systems) to compete unfairly in related markets (browsers, media players). So it is "competing unfairly" that is the complaint, not walled-garden technology.
This is of course the legal aspect. You can still choose to dislike Apple for the iTunes model. Some might also choose to sell the stock, as failing to license is a mistake that has already proved disasterous for Apple once (can you say: Mac vs. PC?).
It's been said before (by VCs in my last startup) that an IPO is three things:
A funding event (which they don't need), and
A PR event (which is always welcome)
I guess number 3 would be:
An opportunity for venture capital and other investors to get paid. At some point of time, you need to exit.
I think it is hard to overestimate the long term impact of this technology, if it lives up to its promises. This could be the final piece in the puzzle needed to make wearable computing a mainstream reality (rather than a thing for visionary geeks). My guess is that within 10 years of the first real massmarket product, we will all be wearing those when working, driving, shopping, etc.
The infamous flexibility of Excel is all too often used for creative accounting/planning as well.
No doubt about it. However, that doesn't mean Excel causes these phenomena. Creative accounting was around for quite a while before Excel. People were overoptimistic about resources and ventures long before Excel.
The classical Slashdot debate features something-stupid-done-or-said-by-non-IT-savvy-gene ral-managers, and then the appropriate bashing by IT-savvy Slashdotters. If there were a similar forum where my profession were in majority, they would probably be bashing this very thread right now (I am an economist and business manager).
Just like, say, PERL or Java, spreadsheets can be used well, and they can be used poorly. Furthermore, people with good "technical" Excel skills can produce lousy spreadsheets with little analytical value, and vice versa. I have seen some fantastic spreadsheets which have totally revolutionized the way people saw a problem. At an insurance company I worked with, they used a huge spreadsheet to do a simulation of the effects on every single customer of a planned, dramatic price increase. The result: They realized that the price increase would have much less impact than they feared. Thus, the product was kept and the employees kept their jobs. The thing with the spreadsheet was that it was developed in fast trial-and-error loops, which meant that their run-once-per-night SAS tools were not an option (this was 7 years ago).
(I have, by the way, also seen people spend 3 months on developing a mega-spreadsheet for assessing the value of a company, only to use the wrong assumption for a critical value and thereby introducing an error of about 40% in the valuation [that critical value being the discount rate]).
I can assure all the concerned citizens of this forum that there is indeed a lot of excellent, first-rate Excel usage out there. Analytical power beyond our wildest dreams is at the fingertips of people without skills in programming at any lower level. This, believe it or not, is a good thing, because anyone who has dedicated himself to becoming great at programming is probably less skilled in disciplines such as financial analysis.
Sure, there is "bad code". Sure, people get a false sense of control. Sure, this new tool puts too much options in the hands of people who do not know how to use them. But how would that be untrue of other IT tools or programming environments? What does it matter that they use Excel as a database, as long as it gets their work done easier than getting an SQL education and then doing it "right"?
Biases are part of all decision-making (as even economists are realizing). So what if that is the case in Spreadsheet World, too?
So would this stop what happened to Virtual Dub? The author added support for the ASF (or something similar, been a while) file format and Microsoft forced him to remove it. And this is a Windows program.
I am not familiar with the case, but file formats and OS APIs are very different in terms of the need for anti-trust intervention. Inability to use the OS APIs puts an outsider at a competitive disadvantage when trying to compete with the OS provider's applications. However, the outsider can simply use its own file formats if the OS provider won't share his. This would only become anti-competitive if the OS somehow favored the "home" format.
But that information may still remain proprietary. MS could share the information and at the same time sue any up and coming rivals for patent violations or something equally silly.
The anti-trust action is not meant to open up for rivals in the OS business, but rather in the applications that run on Windows. Using Windows' APIs would not open up for MS legal action, and even if it did the competition authorities would strike swiftly down upon that as anti-competitive behavior.
Standard oil was broken up by the government why shouldn't we do the same now to Microsoft?
Try: "We" don't have the jurisdiction. Otherwise I totally agree with you. So does The Economist, which in 1999 wrote:
--------------
[stuff deleted]
The Road Ahead
So what should Mr Klein [the judge in the US Microsoft case] suggest? His starting-point must be that any action should provide consumers with choices they do not have today, and also stimulate innovation that would have otherwise been chilled. One potentially elegant structural solution that stops short of breaking the firm up would be to force it to publish the full specifications of the Windows "application program interfaces" (APIs), the codes that software firms who want their products to run on Windows must follow. IBM spent a fortune in the early 1990s in an attempt to reverse engineer or "clone" these for a rival operating system. But it could not persuade its customers that it had done enough to run a critical mass of Windows's applications; and Microsoft, as the incumbent, was always able to stay one jump ahead. Were such expense and uncertainty to be removed, IBM might be tempted back into the fray.
Going further, Microsoft could be required to license the source code for Windows itself to the highest bidders. If that encouraged the entry of powerful companies such as Sun Microsystems and Oracle, a main objective of the Justice Department would have been achieved.
Yet a drawback of both approaches is that they rely on other firms' appetite for risk-taking. So if after a year, say, no new entrant had appeared to challenge Microsoft's monopoly, the break-up option would need to be revived. There is one version of the 'Baby Bills' that would carry less risk of perverse unintended consequences: to divide Microsoft into two or three competing operating-system companies and an applications company. (The firm's expanding investments in web services could simply be sold--the Internet can do very well without Microsoft's attentions.)
If there were two or three Windows companies, they would have no incentive to create different APIs, as they would all have a strong interest in supporting the greatest possible number of Windows applications. They would instead compete on price, ease of use, features and the trade-off between stability and backwards compatibility. The remaining applications firm would, for its part, have an equal interest in ensuring smooth integration with differing versions of Windows; and it would want to make both Office and BackOffice (which includes Microsoft's database product) available on Linux, the fledgling open-source Windows rival, and on every flavour of commercial Unix operating systems. The discipline of real competition would thus trigger innovation and give consumers more choice--but without jeopardising the Holy Grail of interoperability. And without having the government trying to run a technology industry.
("Now bust Microsoft's trust", Nov 11 1999)
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Amen.
I seem to recall it was eaten by a mutant space goat... or was it used as ball in a game of galactic ultra-cricket?
The sad thing is that you won't save all of these resources by not purchasing that computer. Sure, the first order effect will be that one less computer is manufactured. However, the second order effects in a market economy will be:
1. Less demand for the resources in question
2. A drop in the price of the resources in question
3. As a result of cheaper resources: More demand for the resources for other uses
There will also be second order effects in terms of your own behavior, depending on what you get instead of the monitor. If you get a digital camera instead, the environment may be no better off (or even worse). If you, on the other hand, spend it for a massage, a restaurant dinner or a nice painting, then the environment will still remain grateful.
In the end, global resource consumption will reflect the aggregated preferences of us consumers in terms of resource-hungry vs. resource economical products and services.
that most people didn't hear about the asteroid until long after the near-miss was over. Seems to bring up the old argument of whether it'd be better to inform the public and try to do something about it or keep it under wraps and possibly die in blissful ignorance...
Using utilitarian calculations, you can actually compute whether or not the expected consequences of informing are preferable to the expected consequences of secrecy. It would go something like:
Inform if EU(i) > EU(s)
where
EU(i) = p(h) * (1 - p(prev)) * U(knowing)
EU(s) = (1 - p(h)) * U(nondisr)
where
EU(i), EU(s) are the expected utility functions of informing and keeping secret, respectively
p(h) is the probability of a hit
p(prev) is the probability that a hit could be prevented if known to the public
U(knowing) is the value people would place on knowing in advance if they were going to be dead tomorrow
U(nondisr) is the value people would place on the avoided distruption of a global panic (the economic + emotional "costs" saved)
Thus, whether to inform depends on:
- How certain are you that the asteroid will hit?
- How big do you think the disruption will be if word of potential impact spreads?
- Is there anything you can do, given that it is going to hit?
I think the first one is really important. It has repeatedly been shown in research that people do not react rationally to probabilistic information. Thus, telling the public that "there is a chance that an asteroid could hit us", even when qualified by a quantification of the probability to the best of our knowledge, could actually lead to a greater mis-assessment of the risk than if nothing were said of it.
This is, of course, not a question of probabilistic and utilitarian calculations. There is a "right to information" aspect to it, as well. A good formulation would be "where is the borderline between 'creating unneccesary panic' and 'respecting people's right to know'". I would say that if the expert is worried to the point of personally taking significant action based on the information, such as buying emergency supplies etc., then he should inform the general public.
Why should we care whether the publicly accepted [i.e. 'accepted by media'] figures for the cost of a certain public problem are realistic?
Simple: Because decisions will inevitably be based on such figures.
Of course you can argue that "hey, they're not taking it seriously enough anyway, so who cares if numbers are inflated". Apply that method simultaneously to security, the environment, the spread of various diseases, education and 20 other areas that "aren't taken seriously enough". What you end up with is a total inability to prioritize between them, because no reliable figures exist. Given limited resources in the public sector, prioritization is critical to general welfare.
A similar argument applies to the private sector. If business leaders accept inflated figures when making decisions about e.g. some area of risk, uneconomic decisions will be made. A case in point was the Y2K craze. Where did eventually the money come to spend millions of manyears on mitigating vastly exaggerated risks? From the pension funds and mutual funds where the savings of our parents are kept, and from the customers of the companies in question. In other words, inflated figures can harm ordinary people financially.
That is why I care.
I found that for gaming, cordless is bad. Not only did my wife's Logitech cordless stuff interfere with mine. I also found that there were spontaneous lags even when no other set of keyboard/mouse was present. Furthermore, if my mobile happened to ring while I played, mouse and keyboard performance was near zero until the phone stopped ringing.
I now use a Boomslang Razor for playing. It is extremely precise, but I'm not all that crazy about its very low design - it doesn't support the hand very well. On the positive side, the button design is perfect for playing (as well as for surfing the web, with 'back' and 'forward' buttons on the left and right side, respectively. A bonus is also the very flexible cord, which assures that cord tension does not affect mouse movement. A very good mouse, but is it worth the dough? Depends on your pockets, I guess.
I have a Logitech Internet Navigator corded keyboard, whish is excellent except for the hot buttons. The F-keys are toggled between "Logitech mode" and normal mode by a hotbutton, with a difficult-to-discern status indicator, and you're screwed if you need F1 fast and you accidentally hit that toggle lately. Even more screwed you are if you happen to touch some of the web-related buttons, because then helpful IE jumps up to cover your entire game. Apart from these annoying extras the keyboard is fine.
It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form.
Incorrect. Search advertising such those offered by Google (AdWords), Overture and numerous other players are better in terms of click-throughs, conversion rates, or any other relevant measure of advertising effectiveness. The same goes for online yellow pages advertising.
The point of these "directional" forms of advertising is that the consumer identifies a need or an area of interest before the ad is displayed. The very reason why this advertising is less annoying - its relevance - is why it is effective.
IBM & Intel won't just throw all this money away would they.
For these companies, this is not a lot of money. What they really are putting on the line (and have been for a while) is their prestige and reputation.
I was in court for the defence procedure, and here is some additional info:
... and thereby gain illegitimate access to data" (145,2). This is a different part of Norwegian law than that which deals with protection of Intellectual Property. The defence argued that this rule was a continuation of the old one that protected the secrecy of letters and other forms of communication, and that a movie therefore is not "data" according to this law. As far as I understand, the court did not concede this.
DVD Jon was charged with breaking a rule in the Norwegian penal code that makes it illegal to "break a protection
However, the crux of the case ended up being the term "illegitimate access". The court decided that there is nothing illegitimate about breaking a protection to gain access to something you have bought. An important part of this is that in Norway, the labels that distributors stick on DVDs, CDs and software are not binding for consumers (more explicit consent is required for binding agreements). If the labels were binding, the access would have been illegitimate. Luckily for Jon (and for freedom of information), this is not the case.
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality.
This is simply not correct. Time travel does not contradict causality, only some people's concept of "free will".
To explain: You cannot "change" history, simply because it "is already there". The notion of going back and "overwriting" one history with another a la Back To The Future suffers from the "Second Time Around Fallacy". History can by definition not be changed.
History can, however, be influenced by a time traveler. The history we know has been produced by past events, some of which can have been caused by a time traveler. So when I go back, I know in advance that everything I do must be consistent with the history I know. How this is "enforced" is the big question, but I bet a bit of Bayesian probabilities are involved. By that I mean the following: The base probability of various events that may prevent me from killing my grandfather can be very low (e.g. the probability of loosing the gun down a chasm just before I reach his house). However, the conditional probability of these events given that I will not kill my grandfather is much higher. In fact, given that my grandfather most evidently survived my attempt, the only thing to be resolved is how my intended murder was averted. So, if I try, somehow I will fail (and this is where "free will" becomes problematic for some people).
However, I can still influence things in history. For instance, I could go back to look for some legendary treasure that hasn't been found - maybe it hasn't been found because I went back in time to find it before others and move it! The causal integrity is intact.
Two additional observations: The above disregards the possibility of "parallell universes". Conceivably, I could go back in time and start "a different history", i.e. a different universe. Given the current state of our knowledge, we cannot rule out that the universe branches into a finite or infinite number of parallell universes at intervals which could be real or infinitessimal. However, you could never move between those universes, so the integrity of the history of each universe would still be preserved. This means that a time traveler "changing history" would actually just move back to an earlier branching point and go down an alternative history.
Note also that causal loops are quite possible with time travel, and that this does not contradict causality in any way. So you could go back in time and introduce your grandparents to each other (unless you already knew for sure that they introduced themselves to each other).
Screws up your mind, doesn't it?
[I have used past and future tenses here, since Douglas Adams neglected leaving us with a copy of the book on the time travel grammar].
Where information security work really breaks down is when password theory meets the average user. Personally, I had to try approx. 15 times to come up with a password that would be accepted by the system at my university, and by then it was so complex that I had to write it down to remember it. (As usual, there had to be 3 types of characters, but in addition, there where heaps of rules saying such things as "caps at the start or end of the word don't count".
We must find a systemic solution that includes the users as part of the system. The main requirement for a new password regime is therefore that it must work within the bounds of users' bad habits and limited capacity for recalling a gazillion passwords which change regularly.
From the page:
Created: 10/8/2001 2:13:42 AM
Modified: 10/25/2002 11:07:05 AM
We can only surmise what the previous entry read. Maybe:
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Compaq FAQ: Where do I find the "Any" key on my keyboard? (FAQ2859)
The "Any" key is not a single key on your keyboard, but a combination of keys to be pressed simultaneously. Those keys are the ones marked "Ctrl", "Alt" and "Del". After pressing those keys, complete the action by clicking "Shutdown" on that little message box that appears. Having finished this, move away from this and any other computer you might encounter, and live a safe life in the non-digital world.
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