But who cares? Does anyone actually think cable companies are going to provide any sort of significant speed boost to consumers any time soon? They've already demonstrated people are willing to pay $55 USD/month for 3 Mbps/768 kpbs service*; why should they increase those numbers?
And it's not like they're operating in a vacuum, since you can get 6 Mbps/1 Mbps ADSL for $35 USD/month.
They aren't creating a national ID database. [snip] The regulation would also require all state databases of qualifying IDs to be accessible by other state databases.
These two statements are mutually exclusive. Insofar as there will not be one single, physical data store holding all the information, I suppose it's technically correct to say it won't be a national ID database.
But if a person in one state can issue a single query against all the "separate" databases to pull a result set from everywhere in the country at the same time, my professional opinion as a DBA is that it sure as hell is a single database. And that's the goal of making sure all the state databases are accessible from every state and talk the same language.
There's three numbers* that might be credit card numbers (again, I don't actually know). Is this in violation of anything?
Now, if I were to post:
Rufus T. Firefly 078-05-1120 4512 5184 9425 1314 06/09 221
That would be a clear offense.
Posting the 09 key by itself is akin to the first two examples. Posting the 09 key, along with code or software to make use of it is akin to the latter.
Banning the numbers themselves is ridiculous. It may or may not be ridiculous to ban posting an implemenation (or an implementable set of instructions) of the number that allows the reader to use it for nefary.
*Yes, I was going to put six numbers in there for symmetry, but slashdot decided it was too lame.
Frankly, I only saw your half of it, since the other posts were below my +2 reading threshold. I just wanted to respond to that portion of your comment, since it sounded more black & white than things really are.
On the whole, I pretty much agree with your position.
Which raises another question - are you circletimessquare anywhere else? I distinctly recall going at it hammer-and-tongs with someone of that handle somewhere...and if it was you, I'd be tempted to go dig those threads out and see if I disagree with myself back then. I've begun to mellow in my old age;).
you are responsible for your community. a million of your words can not changed that simple fact
This statement does not stand on its own merits. If you assume that the individual bears responsibility for the good of the whole, all your arguments are sound. If you do not make that assumption, however, your arguments have no basis.
Now, there are very few people - and I am not among them - who would claim that no one has any responsibility to his community. There are, however, many people who disagree over what "community" means, as well as to what degree that responsibility exists.
For example: almost everyone will agree that you share responsibility for the community that is your immediate family.
Almost all of those people will include extended family.
Many of the preceding group will include their network of close friends.
Many of the preceding group will include their neighborhood/village/town/city.
Many of the preceding group will include their state (in the US sense).
Many of the preceding group will include their region.
Many of the preceding group will include their nation.
Many of the preceding group will include the entire world.
By the time you get to the last two, however, all those "manies" have added up to a lot of people who don't include that level. I lose ~25% of my gross income to federal taxation. Irrespective of the ethical value of that, the hard economic reality of this means that I have less money to, in my case, help my fiancee get her cracked molar crowned.
Now, I am being forced by law to sacrifice some of my immediate family's well-being for the general well-being of the nation as a whole. There are two responsibilities to community, here, which are (to some extent) incompatible with each other.
I'm not complaining, certainly, about my standard of living; I'm doing just fine. And this is, obviously, a simplified example. But the choice you present is an incomplete one: there are degrees of responsibility to community, and degrees of community to which you're responsible. It's entirely possible to not think one owes money towards the dental care of someone a thousand miles away, while still recognizing communal responsibility.
(A large part of the problem is that while production benefits from economies of scale, human relationships do not. Somewhere between family and small town there lies a community size that is optimal for social good. Past that number, the faceless nature of "society" no longer leverages the general human qualities of care and responsibility.)
In other words, health care is a scarce resource that must be allocated in some fashion. Just like any other scarce resource allocation problem, there will always be some methodology where it is decided who gets what.
One system is to decide based on money: the people with the most money will get the most health care. The advantage to this system of allocation is that it will happen no matter what else you do - more money will always equal better health care, because there will always be someone willing to take payment for services. Various factors can affect how much more money is required to receive the best health care, but the fundamental fact will still hold true.
Another system is to decide what a basic minimum of health care is, and guarantee that minimum to all people irrespective of the money they, personally, have. This will increase the relative scarcity of health care to everyone else, thereby increasing that "how much" number from the previous paragraph. The net effect will tend to be raising the level of health care for lower incomes, maintaining it for low/middle incomes, decreasing it for upper/middle incomes, and maintaining it (at higher cost) for the high incomes.
Yet another system is to subsidize all health care, and give everyone equal access to all levels of medical attention. This shifts the burden of allocating the scarce resource away from having money, and towards having time/luck. The net effect of this will depend entirely on what system replaces money (interpersonal relationships? How long you can wait in a waiting room? A national lottery system?) as the determinant of allocation. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that it won't change the availability of health care for the high incomes (though it will increase the cost, both in money and, possibly, time - if, for example, they need to go to less-regulated countries for some procedures).
That's just the reality of the situation. There are only so many doctors, nurses, MRI machines, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, what-have-you to go around. How many childhood immunizations could each one of the people in the ER for an 18-hour heart operation perform in that 18 hours? All those immunizations go undone while the person on the bed is having his quadruple bypass.
What we have now may well be the worst of all worlds, where the customers are the least involved in determining costs of all the players, and organizations that neither receive nor provide health care are the major profit makers. You can make a good case that any sort of somewhat planned system is better than the agglomeration of interests from all sides coming to an emergent compromise that we have right now - I'd agree with that completely.
But you're never going to get past the fact that the weatlhiest will always get whatever health care they want, you're never going to be able to provide the best possible health care for everyone, and you're going to have to, in some fashion, decide who doesn't get care that they need.
Is that true? The assertion about pi, that is. Have we determined that the digits of pi approximate a random distribution well enough that any given set of digits must exist somewhere within it?
I'm not trying to be a jackass, this is a serious question - I really thought this was an open question in math.
Er...isn't that what I said? The people who pay Google are Google's customers. Keeping their customers happy is Google's goal. It so happens that the best way to keep their customers happy is to keep their product - searchers - happy, so everyone wins.
The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
That's not even close to true. Your customers are, without fail, the people that pay you (or at least, the people you're trying to convince to pay you). Searchers are Google's product; advertisers are Google's customers.
This is no different (in this respect) than radio and ad-supported television: your listeners/viewers are the product you sell to your advertisers.
Don't ever think that Google wants to make you, the searcher, happy - they want to make their advertisers happy. If the best way to do that is by making you happy (and so far, it pretty much has been), then lucky for you. If it isn't, tough cookies: you're not the one keeping the cooling on.
You're making a pretty huge assumption about the probability of life forming. Specifically, you're assuming that the major hurdle to the formation of life is a hospitable world, which may or may not be the case. Even if you've got an average of one Earth-like planet every hundred stars, given 1E20 stars in the known universe, you've got 1E18 Earth-like planets. If the odds of life arising on an Earth-like planet are worse than 1E18 to 1, you've got no reason to think there are other planets with life.
Now, I personally think that the odds of life arising given a hospitable environment are much better than that, but I'm unaware of any reason aside from optimism supporting that belief.
...who finds it depressing that several of the first comments on this article are mocking the person for attempting to follow through on the actions the law gives him access to? Unless there are people defending spam, I don't see what's wrong with anyone trying to hold the people involved accountable to some degree for their violation of the law.
It's not like this is going to eliminate spam, and it's not even like going the small claims court route is something that I find personally worth the effort. But that doesn't mean I'm inclined to think less of someone who does take legal action.
Free will is an entirely moot point: the case where free will exists is indistinguishable from the case where it does not. For free will to mean anything, it requires that a person be capable of choosing any of the available courses of action in response to a given set of stimuli. That is, if a person decides to eat an orange, it must be the case that the person could have decided to not eat the orange (if free will holds true).
The problem is that, unless we gain the ability to move freely through time, this can't be demonstrated one way or another. Each event is fundamentally non-repeatable, since the state of the brain is non-reversible. So you can never know whether a given person would ever not eat the orange in a given situation; you only have a single trial for every event.
All we're left with, then, is the belief that we can decide our courses of action. This turns out to be practically effective, and a generally good approach to living and interacting with the universe.
Profit is not, by any means, the only thing that motivates human beings. It is, however, the single thing which most reliably motivates the greatest number of human beings. From the point of view of an organization trying to motivate large numbers of people (governments, businesses), it is the best bet. This is why employers, by and large, offer salaries.
I agree with everything else you said, but not this:
As soon as you invent a fucking magic wand, though, feel free to wave it and banish all guns and the ability to create them. That would truly be a better world.
Eliminating all guns would just make the world even more of a might-makes-right sort of place. The way it stands now, the difference between the winner and the loser is the willingness to pull the trigger. Without guns, the difference between the winner and the loser is the willingness to swing the fist/club/mace/sword, and the physical strength and skill to effectively swing it. The difference is, some people are weaker than others (for example, on average, women) and can't significantly change that fact. Willingness to pull the trigger can be learned.
The problem people have with guns is that guns make it easy (compared to other weapons in history) to kill people. But that means that everyone has the ability to kill someone. This sounds terrible, but the alternative is that only some people have the ability to kill someone - and that's a power imbalance that has historically led to very unjust societies.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a less end-to-end efficient way to bring energy to the wheels of your car than to generate it at a power plant, send it over power lines, turn it into light, shine that on your car, have your car's solar cells convert it back into electricity, which your motor/motors then convert into kinetic energy.
1&1 is inept at best, crooked at worst. I signed on with them when they were doing their 2-year free hosting promotion. Used their name servers, registered my domain name through them (paying for this service), and hosted my website there. It was a site that died a quick and forgettable death, and I stopped performing any maintenance on it about eight or nine months after putting it up.
Imagine my surprise when, eleven months after signing on with them, I got a creditor nastygram railing at me about my unpaid hosting bills. Getting that off my credit report was a cast iron bitch. Then, when I (oddly) decided that I didn't want them as my registrar, trying to force them to release my domain name was another epic struggle.
Notably, the guy I lived with at the time who also signed up with them after we heard about the promotion went through exactly the same fight I did to clear his credit report and recover his domain name. Two data points aren't exactly conclusive, but there are enough hosting companies out there that I have no reason to use or recommend 1&1, and enough reason to warn other people off of them.
The problem isn't top speed, it's how fast you get there. I need to be able to get up to ~60mph in the length of an average on ramp - many of which are an uphill climb to get onto the elevated freeway. My Scion xA is rated at 0-60 in under 11 seconds (108 hp, 105 lb-ft), and when it's cold, I can just barely make it up to speed on one of the on ramps I normally use.
The '92 Corolla I had previously couldn't make it up to speed on the on ramp I used most frequently then when it was cold out - I narrowly avoided three accidents over five years, each almost caused by the fact that I was entering traffic a solid 10 mph slower than it was moving.
I once calculated the world's nuclear destructive capacity. As of 2000, it was around 13,000 megatons. Which is roughly half the total energy of a 2-km asteroid (of average, for the asteroid belt, density) hitting the planet at 27kps (which is ~150% of average impact velocity).
Slashdot Mirror
But who cares? Does anyone actually think cable companies are going to provide any sort of significant speed boost to consumers any time soon? They've already demonstrated people are willing to pay $55 USD/month for 3 Mbps/768 kpbs service*; why should they increase those numbers?
And it's not like they're operating in a vacuum, since you can get 6 Mbps/1 Mbps ADSL for $35 USD/month.
*I'm looking at you, Charter.
They aren't creating a national ID database.
[snip]
The regulation would also require all state databases of qualifying IDs to be accessible by other state databases.
These two statements are mutually exclusive. Insofar as there will not be one single, physical data store holding all the information, I suppose it's technically correct to say it won't be a national ID database.
But if a person in one state can issue a single query against all the "separate" databases to pull a result set from everywhere in the country at the same time, my professional opinion as a DBA is that it sure as hell is a single database. And that's the goal of making sure all the state databases are accessible from every state and talk the same language.
If your angel food cake is yellow, then I think you've got way more than probable cause to be suspicious.
Actually, yes, I would expect immunity.
384211648
482001341
394152346
514859784
314159265
134144532
There's six numbers that might be SSNs (I don't actually know). Am I now in violation of any laws?
Or, how about:
5147528016234522
4400225181453164
6415782156483125
There's three numbers* that might be credit card numbers (again, I don't actually know). Is this in violation of anything?
Now, if I were to post:
Rufus T. Firefly
078-05-1120
4512 5184 9425 1314 06/09 221
That would be a clear offense.
Posting the 09 key by itself is akin to the first two examples. Posting the 09 key, along with code or software to make use of it is akin to the latter.
Banning the numbers themselves is ridiculous. It may or may not be ridiculous to ban posting an implemenation (or an implementable set of instructions) of the number that allows the reader to use it for nefary.
*Yes, I was going to put six numbers in there for symmetry, but slashdot decided it was too lame.
Fair enough.
;).
Frankly, I only saw your half of it, since the other posts were below my +2 reading threshold. I just wanted to respond to that portion of your comment, since it sounded more black & white than things really are.
On the whole, I pretty much agree with your position.
Which raises another question - are you circletimessquare anywhere else? I distinctly recall going at it hammer-and-tongs with someone of that handle somewhere...and if it was you, I'd be tempted to go dig those threads out and see if I disagree with myself back then. I've begun to mellow in my old age
you are responsible for your community. a million of your words can not changed that simple fact
This statement does not stand on its own merits. If you assume that the individual bears responsibility for the good of the whole, all your arguments are sound. If you do not make that assumption, however, your arguments have no basis.
Now, there are very few people - and I am not among them - who would claim that no one has any responsibility to his community. There are, however, many people who disagree over what "community" means, as well as to what degree that responsibility exists.
For example: almost everyone will agree that you share responsibility for the community that is your immediate family.
Almost all of those people will include extended family.
Many of the preceding group will include their network of close friends.
Many of the preceding group will include their neighborhood/village/town/city.
Many of the preceding group will include their state (in the US sense).
Many of the preceding group will include their region.
Many of the preceding group will include their nation.
Many of the preceding group will include the entire world.
By the time you get to the last two, however, all those "manies" have added up to a lot of people who don't include that level. I lose ~25% of my gross income to federal taxation. Irrespective of the ethical value of that, the hard economic reality of this means that I have less money to, in my case, help my fiancee get her cracked molar crowned.
Now, I am being forced by law to sacrifice some of my immediate family's well-being for the general well-being of the nation as a whole. There are two responsibilities to community, here, which are (to some extent) incompatible with each other.
I'm not complaining, certainly, about my standard of living; I'm doing just fine. And this is, obviously, a simplified example. But the choice you present is an incomplete one: there are degrees of responsibility to community, and degrees of community to which you're responsible. It's entirely possible to not think one owes money towards the dental care of someone a thousand miles away, while still recognizing communal responsibility.
(A large part of the problem is that while production benefits from economies of scale, human relationships do not. Somewhere between family and small town there lies a community size that is optimal for social good. Past that number, the faceless nature of "society" no longer leverages the general human qualities of care and responsibility.)
No.
In other words, health care is a scarce resource that must be allocated in some fashion. Just like any other scarce resource allocation problem, there will always be some methodology where it is decided who gets what.
One system is to decide based on money: the people with the most money will get the most health care. The advantage to this system of allocation is that it will happen no matter what else you do - more money will always equal better health care, because there will always be someone willing to take payment for services. Various factors can affect how much more money is required to receive the best health care, but the fundamental fact will still hold true.
Another system is to decide what a basic minimum of health care is, and guarantee that minimum to all people irrespective of the money they, personally, have. This will increase the relative scarcity of health care to everyone else, thereby increasing that "how much" number from the previous paragraph. The net effect will tend to be raising the level of health care for lower incomes, maintaining it for low/middle incomes, decreasing it for upper/middle incomes, and maintaining it (at higher cost) for the high incomes.
Yet another system is to subsidize all health care, and give everyone equal access to all levels of medical attention. This shifts the burden of allocating the scarce resource away from having money, and towards having time/luck. The net effect of this will depend entirely on what system replaces money (interpersonal relationships? How long you can wait in a waiting room? A national lottery system?) as the determinant of allocation. The only thing that can be guaranteed is that it won't change the availability of health care for the high incomes (though it will increase the cost, both in money and, possibly, time - if, for example, they need to go to less-regulated countries for some procedures).
That's just the reality of the situation. There are only so many doctors, nurses, MRI machines, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, what-have-you to go around. How many childhood immunizations could each one of the people in the ER for an 18-hour heart operation perform in that 18 hours? All those immunizations go undone while the person on the bed is having his quadruple bypass.
What we have now may well be the worst of all worlds, where the customers are the least involved in determining costs of all the players, and organizations that neither receive nor provide health care are the major profit makers. You can make a good case that any sort of somewhat planned system is better than the agglomeration of interests from all sides coming to an emergent compromise that we have right now - I'd agree with that completely.
But you're never going to get past the fact that the weatlhiest will always get whatever health care they want, you're never going to be able to provide the best possible health care for everyone, and you're going to have to, in some fashion, decide who doesn't get care that they need.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
-The Narrator
Is that true? The assertion about pi, that is. Have we determined that the digits of pi approximate a random distribution well enough that any given set of digits must exist somewhere within it?
I'm not trying to be a jackass, this is a serious question - I really thought this was an open question in math.
Wow...this must be some kind of meta-humor that's way too abstruse for me to get.
'Cause surely no one could possibly have missed the joke that completely.
Er...isn't that what I said? The people who pay Google are Google's customers. Keeping their customers happy is Google's goal. It so happens that the best way to keep their customers happy is to keep their product - searchers - happy, so everyone wins.
The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
That's not even close to true. Your customers are, without fail, the people that pay you (or at least, the people you're trying to convince to pay you). Searchers are Google's product; advertisers are Google's customers.
This is no different (in this respect) than radio and ad-supported television: your listeners/viewers are the product you sell to your advertisers.
Don't ever think that Google wants to make you, the searcher, happy - they want to make their advertisers happy. If the best way to do that is by making you happy (and so far, it pretty much has been), then lucky for you. If it isn't, tough cookies: you're not the one keeping the cooling on.
Let's see, the PS3 loses Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto IV to multiplatform releases.
The 360 loses two games I've already forgotten the names of to multiplatform releases.
Yep, the tide is definitely turning.
You're making a pretty huge assumption about the probability of life forming. Specifically, you're assuming that the major hurdle to the formation of life is a hospitable world, which may or may not be the case. Even if you've got an average of one Earth-like planet every hundred stars, given 1E20 stars in the known universe, you've got 1E18 Earth-like planets. If the odds of life arising on an Earth-like planet are worse than 1E18 to 1, you've got no reason to think there are other planets with life.
Now, I personally think that the odds of life arising given a hospitable environment are much better than that, but I'm unaware of any reason aside from optimism supporting that belief.
Well, I was going to post a weak witticism about cultural victories...but instead I'll just post the translated version:
I get your joke.
...who finds it depressing that several of the first comments on this article are mocking the person for attempting to follow through on the actions the law gives him access to? Unless there are people defending spam, I don't see what's wrong with anyone trying to hold the people involved accountable to some degree for their violation of the law.
It's not like this is going to eliminate spam, and it's not even like going the small claims court route is something that I find personally worth the effort. But that doesn't mean I'm inclined to think less of someone who does take legal action.
Free will is an entirely moot point: the case where free will exists is indistinguishable from the case where it does not. For free will to mean anything, it requires that a person be capable of choosing any of the available courses of action in response to a given set of stimuli. That is, if a person decides to eat an orange, it must be the case that the person could have decided to not eat the orange (if free will holds true).
The problem is that, unless we gain the ability to move freely through time, this can't be demonstrated one way or another. Each event is fundamentally non-repeatable, since the state of the brain is non-reversible. So you can never know whether a given person would ever not eat the orange in a given situation; you only have a single trial for every event.
All we're left with, then, is the belief that we can decide our courses of action. This turns out to be practically effective, and a generally good approach to living and interacting with the universe.
Profit is not, by any means, the only thing that motivates human beings. It is, however, the single thing which most reliably motivates the greatest number of human beings. From the point of view of an organization trying to motivate large numbers of people (governments, businesses), it is the best bet. This is why employers, by and large, offer salaries.
I agree with everything else you said, but not this:
As soon as you invent a fucking magic wand, though, feel free to wave it and banish all guns and the ability to create them. That would truly be a better world.
Eliminating all guns would just make the world even more of a might-makes-right sort of place. The way it stands now, the difference between the winner and the loser is the willingness to pull the trigger. Without guns, the difference between the winner and the loser is the willingness to swing the fist/club/mace/sword, and the physical strength and skill to effectively swing it. The difference is, some people are weaker than others (for example, on average, women) and can't significantly change that fact. Willingness to pull the trigger can be learned.
The problem people have with guns is that guns make it easy (compared to other weapons in history) to kill people. But that means that everyone has the ability to kill someone. This sounds terrible, but the alternative is that only some people have the ability to kill someone - and that's a power imbalance that has historically led to very unjust societies.
"Solar insolation" is a particularly redundant turn of phrase.
We've lost containment of the hellium! Quick, we need a goateed doctor and a musclebound space marine from Phobos!
Wow.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a less end-to-end efficient way to bring energy to the wheels of your car than to generate it at a power plant, send it over power lines, turn it into light, shine that on your car, have your car's solar cells convert it back into electricity, which your motor/motors then convert into kinetic energy.
1&1 is inept at best, crooked at worst. I signed on with them when they were doing their 2-year free hosting promotion. Used their name servers, registered my domain name through them (paying for this service), and hosted my website there. It was a site that died a quick and forgettable death, and I stopped performing any maintenance on it about eight or nine months after putting it up.
Imagine my surprise when, eleven months after signing on with them, I got a creditor nastygram railing at me about my unpaid hosting bills. Getting that off my credit report was a cast iron bitch. Then, when I (oddly) decided that I didn't want them as my registrar, trying to force them to release my domain name was another epic struggle.
Notably, the guy I lived with at the time who also signed up with them after we heard about the promotion went through exactly the same fight I did to clear his credit report and recover his domain name. Two data points aren't exactly conclusive, but there are enough hosting companies out there that I have no reason to use or recommend 1&1, and enough reason to warn other people off of them.
The problem isn't top speed, it's how fast you get there. I need to be able to get up to ~60mph in the length of an average on ramp - many of which are an uphill climb to get onto the elevated freeway. My Scion xA is rated at 0-60 in under 11 seconds (108 hp, 105 lb-ft), and when it's cold, I can just barely make it up to speed on one of the on ramps I normally use.
The '92 Corolla I had previously couldn't make it up to speed on the on ramp I used most frequently then when it was cold out - I narrowly avoided three accidents over five years, each almost caused by the fact that I was entering traffic a solid 10 mph slower than it was moving.
14+ seconds is unacceptable.
I once calculated the world's nuclear destructive capacity. As of 2000, it was around 13,000 megatons. Which is roughly half the total energy of a 2-km asteroid (of average, for the asteroid belt, density) hitting the planet at 27kps (which is ~150% of average impact velocity).
I'm not sure which is more worrisome.
(Why I figured this out (shameless plug))