Later versions of driverless technology could reduce jams by directing vehicles to space themselves close together, almost as if they were cars in a train, and maximize the use of space on a freeway, he said.
And what happens when a deer jumps into the path of said cars? Instead of a single car accident, we'll have a few dozen crumpled cars and a massive tradgedy.
With engineers this naive, I don't think the driverless car will go anywhere. There are still too many variances in normal driving conditions for a computer to deal with. A computer cannot make good judgments about out-of-the-ordinary events, such as a flooded roadway (would it even know?) or a road construction crew, or even a protest blocking the street. Would the driverless car plow into a group of protesters? Would it run down the officer redirecting traffic around an accident?
I don't want to be denied the ability to travel to certain areas because the government thinks I have no business being there. Now, you have post an armed guard. In the future, they might just issue a "voluntary" GPS update with the same effect. Presto - your car thinks the road doesn't exist, so you aren't allowed to drive there.
I think it would be nice to sleep on the morning commute, read a book, etc...
But knowing that technologies which were formerly optional have become mandatory (airbags, black boxes in cars, etc...) I'm not at all excited about this. Inevitably, such technologies will be used by the powers that be to exert even greater control over the population.
And sadly, all too many Americans are willing to trade freedom for convenience.
I think I'll pass this one up. I like my freedom, thank you.
IIRC, domain squatting is illegal. I think all that needs to be done, if NSI is indeed doing this, is to document it thoroughly and send a nice explanatory letter to the Attorney General.
My company insists on thinking of IT as a cost center rather than a strategic advantage. They would sacrifice millions of dollars in engineering productivity for the sake of saving a few thousand in the IT budget.
Okay, so I was wrong. They won't have to hire PR departments when posters like you are willing to excuse a corporation's culpability because, "Everyone else was doing it..."
You know, the interesting thing about global warming is that everybody is doing it. So why not just burn more coal, pollute the environment, etc..? Why bother holding companies responsible for their actions at all?
At some point, you have to realize that the torch has been passed to us. Our world is the way it is because we don't demand any better. If we let our rights be trampled on, we have only ourselves to blame. We have a right to demand that companies behave in ethical and responsible ways.
Sometimes, for example, when you need to get a bunch of disparate, differently built systems talking to each other, open source software fills that need much better than closed. Extending the authors example, look at the difference between the iPhone and the Internet:
One is built on open standards, and ubiquitous, and
The other is built on proprietary software and struggling to gain market share.
Sure, the iPhone serves its purpose, but its purpose is to make Apple money. It's closed source, and it does that well. The Internet, OTOH, serves its purpose well, too - its purpose is to be a global communication network.
So closed source is appropriate for some situations, but not for others. But the primary difference between the two is that while closed source software benefits the creators of the software, open source software benefits the entire public at large. I would chance to guess that the total societal benefit from open source software is far greater than the benefit from closed source software:
If we consider Microsoft, while they have made billions of dollars from Windows, the world at large has suffered billions of dollars in losses from their negligence and security problems. So their net effect on the world is probably negative.
While Linux hasn't produced the commercial boon that closed-source Windows has, the end users have gained far
more in value from it than they would had they used Windows and had to deal with the security issues. So it is probably a net positive, and the positive value to users probably exceeds the revenues made by Microsoft on Windows.
Of course, I don't have the numbers to back up my hypothesis, but the point still holds: closed source software must perform substantially better than open source software to be a net benefit to the world, all things considered. Because proprietary software is limited in its distribution by its economic model, it has a very difficult time producing the same net positive benefit that open source software achieves with ease.
are doing is seeing if the judge is going to call them on the carpet for calling personal copying infringement.
The idea is that they want to establish a few things:
If the judge is favorable to their interpretation of copyright law, or:
If the judge is neutral, perhaps that neutrality can be shifted by their suggestion that personal copies are illegal, and
The implication that the copies are illegal presumes the defendant was engaged in illegal activity irrespective of the copyright claims. So, the case is less likely to be dismissed, and
The implication that the copies are illegal will weigh upon the penalty phase of the trial, where the RIAA will attempt to convince the judge that the scope of the infringement was not merely the specific files shared, but all of the "illegal copies" on the defendant's hard drive. This will greatly multiply the possible damages.
By including all of the copies as counts of infringement, they seek to nullify any defense mitigation of damages by claiming the infringement was not willful. If they can get the judge to establish that even copies of a CD - whether shared or not - are illegal, then they have a much better case that the infringement was willful, which carries much stronger penalties.
And finally, they'd like to get the judge to establish - through precedent, by mentioning in his opinion - that even personal copies are infringing. If they suggest that personal copies are infringing in the complaint, the judge might quote the complaint in his opinion, hence opening the door to expanding the precedent for what constitutes copyright infringement.
This is not merely an innocuous mistake. The inclusion of this language in the complaint is meant for a very specific purpose: to progress toward a legal climate where everyone who hears a copy of a song or views a copy of a movie must pay the RIAA/MPAA or face liability for copyright infringement. The removal of fair use rights is only the beginning. The RIAA wants to return to the 18th century model where every performance is a paid performance; the fact that technology now makes it possible for the performance to proceed absent the performer is irrelevant to their business model.
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility?
Yes, because I got a degree in computer science, not programming.
Were I to be suddenly transplanted to an Amish community tomorrow, I would have no problem finding ways of improving the efficiency of otherwise manual processes through critical analysis of their process*. The same techniques used to optimize algorithms and model complex phenomena can be applied to real world processes, even absent a computer; the computer's speed just makes the "brute force" approach slightly more practical.
But I think your observation is an important one; the number of people who constantly seek out new challenges in their career field is a very small minority. I work in a facility with a few thousand other engineers, and have yet to meet anyone who does side projects in their spare time. If it's not part of their career - that is, directly related to the business at hand - they don't know it. And this regardless of whether "it" is a technical standard, algorithm, college course, etc... And this is truly sad.
* - perhaps the Amish, after 200 years, already know the most efficient ways of getting things done. But the point still applies: I can bring to bear the skills learned in college on a wide variety of problems, even those far removed from the classroom context. It just requires that one actually think about what they're doing. Suprisingly, I've encountered all too many people who act as if thinking is some kind of taboo to be avoided at all costs; apparently, they believe it better to use brute force than to actually think for themselves.
Which do well to explain the reason why, when a $1000 PC is faster than a $1,000,000 mainframe, that businesses still buy the mainframe. And then they stock the washrooms with single-ply toilet paper to cut costs.
Microsoft has made a lot of noise about being "Enterprise class" software, and having "Reliable" servers, but when things like this happen, it just goes to show that Microsoft won't ever be able to touch big iron:
Why wasn't this caught by QA? And it has been out for a full year before they figured out that it was a problem? Clearly, Microsoft, even after 30 years in the industry, doesn't know much about software engineering. This is the same company that took 5 years to produce Vista.
The fact that Microsoft is the most virus-prone vendor in the industry doesn't reflect well on it as a company. But in light of issues like this, it seems that their persistent problems with viruses - dominating the field for the past decade - has more to do with their lack of design than their popularity.
Microsoft has a patch mentality which is totally abhorrent to those of us in the high-availability industry. Sysadmins simply can't "just patch" every time Microsoft discovers a hole in their operating system. It takes weeks - if not months - of testing before a business can roll out a new patch, during which time, the whole business is at risk. This is a risk which is simply not present on mainframe and UNIX systems.
The next time I hear anyone use the term "enterprise class" and Microsoft in the same sentence, I'm simply going to refer them to this bug. Totally unacceptable - even for a gaming OS.
Email is a valid distraction. Some of the places I've worked had a real problem with email - their corporate, CYA, political buck-passing culture meant that they exchanged far more email than was really necessary. In some of my other firms, people talked face to face. Now, it seems, everyone wants a "paper trail" so they can blame someone else when things go wrong. Hence the flood of irrelevant, distracting, work-stopping email.
Typical problems:
I don't care about your stupid cat or its 3rd birthday party.
I'm happy that you've been promoted, but I don't even know who you are or even the department for which you work. Don't bother me with such things.
I could care less that someone in the six layers of management above me has a new plan to realign our mission critical assets for increased cost savings... - again, in a department I've never heard of.
So another department in the company is introducing a new pricing structure for their dying product line. Why don't you just spam everyone in the entire company, because, you know, I might just sell a 5 million dollar communications infrastructure upgrade on my morning train ride.
Bug discovery emails. You know, the kind where everyone on the CC list, including your boss, and the 6 other departments in the header, feel the need to offer their opinion on what it could be. And of course, the originator didn't include log files and doesn't know how to reproduce it.
The inevitable political email trail, where each of the recipients does their best to deflect the blame for a particular problem to someone else, or another department.
I estimate that I spend a few hours a day dealing with email. Granted, some of it is my job - I do have to support the product. But a large portion of it is spent reading - no, skimming; if I read them, it would take too long - things which do not increase my productivity at all.
The problem isn't email. It's a corporate culture where everyone refuses to take responsibility for anything, including their own job. It's a culture where people spend a greater effort avoiding work than they would if they had just done what they were supposed to do. It's a culture where people are more concerned about the appearance of professionalism than the actual practice thereof.
And my employer is willing to pay me for such inefficient use of my time (theirs, actually). In fact, my boss wants me to maintain an email trail for everything, just for the CYA value. But I can't help but wonder how efficient things would be, if we just got together and worked together, instead of all this email pedantry.
Well, let's extend your analogy: Suppose you bought a Jeep. Would you expect the contents in the back to be safe from theft, or inspection by law enforcement? Vista is that Jeep - it exposes your personal life to anyone who wants to have a look, breaks down a lot, costs a lot to maintain, and leaves the user exposed to anything hostile coming its way.
Have any expectation of privacy or security in the first place?
IIRC, some of the key SCOTUS decisions regarding the Fourth Amendment have centered around a person's expectation of privacy. They've argued:
That someone doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their garbage.
That email doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy...
That a person's car is subject to Fourth Amendment protection.
That said, the government could persuasively argue that someone who runs Windows, especially Vista, has no expectation of privacy in the first place:
More malware and trojans run on Windows than Mac and Linux combined. In fact, there are more viruses available for Windows than there are editors - even applications - for Linux.
Microsoft has continued a trend of introducing software with gaping holes for that past 10 years. No OS vendor in the last decade has produced a less secure OS than Microsoft. Surely the user must be aware of this, and have accepted the risk.
Users accept the Windows EULA, which, among other things, allows Microsoft to remotely check Windows for proper activation - so they already have given up their privacy to a corporation.
Now the sad thing is that this does come across as a troll, but sadly, it's true. And it needs to be addressed. For some reason, the/. crowd thinks it is acceptable that a majority of the population uses an OS which is horribly less secure than the ones we ourselves use (Linux, Macs, etc...). We're supposed to be the technical ones who have the solution to these problems, and yet, most/.ers just choose to blame the victim and whine about Microsoft being evil. Granted, we already know that.
Is it really acceptable that our collective rights are surrendered because a major corporation finds more profit in insufficient design and testing of its software? I realize that most of you loathe Windows, but unless we actually do something to fix the social barriers to the adoption of Linux, we can expect that, because Windows is so insecure, our government will be able to convince SCOTUS that a computer user has no "reasonable expectation of privacy".
It doesn't matter so much that this PRNG is insecure. A knowledgeable cryptographer isn't going to trust the OS for random numbers, anyway - unless it is in compliance with some standard to which their code must comply. What matters is that Vista is full of holes, and we're talking about a PRNG which no software of cryptographical consequence is going to use anyway.
Instead, we ought to worry that Windows itself is easily compromised by the government. That is the real problem. Why would you break the PRNG when you can rootkit even a fully patched Vista box with an email?.
It seems that the priorities of our politicians lie not with expanding the market for new technologies and benefitting the whole of the United States, but rather, with protecting the outdated market models of a few dominant players in the industry. It occurs neither to the politicians nor the industry that there is a lot of money to be made by embracing technology. If you want examples, look at Google. Look at Microsoft.
But instead of the RIAA and MPAA embracing technology, building new markets, and experiencing the stock-increase-frenzy of being the Next Big Thing(TM), they seek to expand copyright law, stifle the market, and strangle the industry. And when their efforts don't produce the increases they seek, what do they do? Blame piracy, of course!
Of course the artists are starving; the record companies don't know how to sell music!
And we're slipping farther along into becoming the technological backwater of the first world. Truly sad, that technology is being vilified for the evil that can be done with it, rather than the good that it already does society.
It must be nice to have a job where you can always blame your poor performance on the actions of others.
The fundamental problem I see with this is that the ISP is changing the content of webpages to suit their own interests. There are a myriad of problems here, regardless of whether or not the customer accepts it:
Copyright law: technically, the modified web page is a derived work. The ISP can now be held liable for copyright infringement if, say, Google, or the New York Times objects. The potential revenues sinkhole from copyright litigators is far greater than what any ISP could bear.
There are ethical problems with an ISP artificially inflating the size of webpages, especially if they charge for the bandwidth.
This smacks of 1984-esque censorship. Once it becomes commonplace for an ISP to change a web page, how long before government uses this for nefarious purposes.
Consider how the above may be abused: a political rival logs onto Google, and the ISP replaces the normal content with child porn. Enter the police and 10 to 20 years in prison...
If I can't trust my ISP to deliver an unmodified webpage, the only alternative is to use https for everything. While I'm personally favorable to such a thing, I realize it will disenfranchize a lot of part time and small time web operators who don't have the sophistication to setup an https server properly. Thus, one of the great egalitarian aspects of the web dies.
In light of the fact that a certain ISP blocked access to union websites, this is an alarming event indeed. Democracy depends on the free flow of information, and I'm thinking that it might be appropriate to make such a practice illegal, if only for the sake of preserving democracy. It will first be used for commercial gain, and later, leveraged as a political tool.
If the RIAA has their way, making available copyrighted works to people other than the purchaser will be considered copyright infringement. You don't want to get sued by the books publishers, do you?
If you design it right in the first place, you don't have to worry so much about scope creep.
If you design it right in the first place, you limit the kinds of problems you can have; hence, you don't need to spend as much time in testing and debugging.
If you design it right in the first place, you might actually be retained to maintain your code, as opposed to being fired when the whole project tanks. And yes, I have worked at places where this happened.
Design isn't done because management wants to fulfill some programmer's odd views about how things should be done; it's done because management realizes that it reduces the cost of software over the entire lifecycle.
But I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of those types that management loves, but programmers hate. You know, the type who gets things done quickly, but in a manner so sloppy that the code maintainers curse you under their breath.
Maybe what people have to start doing is claim copyright on all their personal information and file class action suits when it is illegally copied by some entity.
You mean like the MLB and NFL have been trying to do for years - copyright facts? Fortunately, facts aren't copyrightable, and there's a long history of case law to this effect.
You know, it's interesting that privacy advocates are trying, essentially, for what amounts to security through obscurity. That is, they think that someone's private life can remain so by simply passing legislation which would limit what others can do with facts about a private individual. There are two problems with this:
It amounts to an extension of copyright from creative content to merely observable facts, and
It doesn't address the root problem of privacy; that is, individuals making decisions about one base upon facts gathered by others, often of dubious accountability.
The solution to the problem of privacy is simply to require more human interaction. The job interview is the classic example - imagine if employers hired based on resume and credit score alone. While I'll admit that I don't like the fact that an employer makes hiring decisions based on rumors (which is really what a credit score is...), it could be worse...
And then there's also the problem of "identity theft" - which is a misnomer, because even if someone uses my credentials to open accounts in my name, I still know who I am. This too, is not a problem of user privacy, but rather, that the financial industry has adopted some rather questionable protocols for verifying the identity of their cutstomers. As it's been said before, "Failure to plan on your part does not create an emergency on my part..." If banks paid punitive damages for losing their customer's money, the problem would fix itself.
Well, because of copyright, J.R.R. Tolkien's heirs are able to earn a living from his legacy. Given that most authors do not earn enough to pass on large monetary endowments to their heirs, life plus 70 isn't so bad.
It's little different than a farmer passing his farm down to his son - who will get the farm for free, unlike the original farmer, who had to pay the mortgage on it. Just be glad copyright isn't subject to a capital gains tax (another debate entirely.)
Why would I buy such a large drive if I don't intend on using it for media.
It really isn't WD's place to restrict filesharing.
In the first place, this is a troubling precedent. My own hardware won't obey my instructions? Does WD believe they still own the machine, even after I've bought it?
Technical issues aside, this means that most users won't be able to share their home videos and sound recordings. So, no garage band videos allowed.
Media files aren't the only things copyrighted. For example, most text files, binaries programs, etc... are also copyrighted. In fact, almost every file on your PC, is copyrighted. So if WD is concerned about copyright violations, they shouldn't allow any type of file to be shared.
This is truly a troubling precedent. The problem is that by building a device which automatically attempts to enforce copyright law, they build a precedent which can be used against them in the future:
RIAA Lawyer: So you manufactured the device knowing full well it could be used for copyright infringement, did you not?
WD: Well, um, yes.
RIAA Lawyer: So you admit that you contributed to copyright infringement, do you not?
WD: Well, it's not like that -
RIAA Lawyer: Yes! Yes it is like that! See - you put the restriction on filesharing on one of your drives, but neglected to place it on the rest of them! So you could have prevented filesharing, but chose not to. You deliberately made this device capable of copyright infringement...
Later... During Congressional anti-terrorism hearings...
Expert: Yes, we've known for a long time that simulating a nuclear weapon requires large amounts of data - typically beyond the capacity of the PC, until WD started manufacturing large capacity disks...
Congresscritter: (to WD) Why did you make such large capacity drives?
WD: Well, we intended them to be used for media...
Congresscritter: Such as movies?
WD: Well, um...
Congresscritter: Because that would be copyright infringement.
WD: Um, no. We didn't intend them to be used for copyright infringement.
Congresscritter: Ah, so you intended them to be used for something else? What else would someone do with a terabyte of data?
WD: Well, um...
Congresscritter: It's fairly obvious to everyone here that you helped terrorist countries with their nuclear ambitions - you even went so far as to make the drive unable to share media. Clearly, you had some other purpose in mind.... Let me help you out here - you knew they could be used for terrorism, but hoped that no one would find out. You put your profits above the safety and security of the American people.
Electronic devices don't decide what's legal and illegal - the courts do. When people think that they are capable of doing so, two key things are going to happen:
Manufacturers will be held liable for any illegal use of their products, and:
To minimize liability, the functionality available to the end user will be extremely crippled.
It is really unfortunate when our fear of what someone might do with technology overrules the good that they are doing with it.
The interesting thing about these studies is that they often conflate "computer users" with "Windows users". The problem is, that as a Linux user, I have no need to run anti-virus software or a firewall. I know which services are running on my machine, and have accepted the security risk thereof. But, consequently, we, (and the Mac users) get counted in the insecure group because of the faulty study methodology.
I really don't think most users expect their machine to be secure. Microsoft Windows has been insecure for so long now that getting hacked is just expected after a certain period of time. In fact, I had a rather interesting conversation with an anasthesiologist:
Him: I'm thinking about buying a new computer. What kind should I buy...
Me: (I rattle off some specs) Why?
Him: Well, it's slowed down again.
Me: Well, why don't you just run Linux.
Him: Well, I do a lot of gaming. I figure you're going to have to replace your PC once a year, anyway.
Me: Why don't you just format and reinstall, and get yourself a good virus scanner and firewall?
Him: What, do all that work? And then I have to reinstall everything? No, I'll just buy a new PC.
Me: But you're just going to have the same problem a later on. You'll get infected by a virus, etc... and you'll have to buy antivirus software.
Him: No I won't - I'll just buy another PC. It's not worth my time to do all of that antivirus and firewall stuff...
Words failed me at that point. But he did have a point. Most users believe that computers "just wear out" and slow down like an old automobile. They think that virus infection is a normal part of owning a computer.
The problem isn't Windows, per se. It's that people don't expect any better.
The technical problem is that you have to take out the battery to turn the phone completely off.
The social problem is why would you bother to carry a phone if you don't intend to receive calls? Sure, I suppose you can always replace the battery to make an outgoing call, but then you've reintroduced points 1 and 2. And number 3 will chide you for not answering your phone.
Do not confuse Roman Catholicism with Christian fundamentalism.
Let's review some of the larger differences:
One started the modern university system. The other has a suspicion of intellectuals.
One has a billion adherents spread throughout the world. The other is limited largely to America, and represents only a small portion of American Christians, and an even smaller portion worldwide.
One embraces faith and reason, while the other simply requires blind faith.
It is particularly unsettling that critics of Christianity will deride it for not embracing reason; yet, when Christians do so, their arguments are rejected a priori, because they are Christian, not because they are flawed. Which leaves observers with the impression that the detractors of Christianity do so simply out of some deep-seated emotional problems or hidden agenda. Should it surprise anyone that the public in general is distrustful of scientists when the prominent members refuse to enter into a logical debate with Christians? Shouldn't someone skilled in the use of reason be able to roundly and quickly win such a debate? Yet, more often than not, those prominent in the sciences dismiss Christian positions without any reason whatsoever. People can tell a hypocrit when they see it, and this, I think, is why science has such a bad reputation in the US. It's not because a bunch of fundamentalists are brainwashing people.
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Later versions of driverless technology could reduce jams by directing vehicles to space themselves close together, almost as if they were cars in a train, and maximize the use of space on a freeway, he said.
And what happens when a deer jumps into the path of said cars? Instead of a single car accident, we'll have a few dozen crumpled cars and a massive tradgedy.
With engineers this naive, I don't think the driverless car will go anywhere. There are still too many variances in normal driving conditions for a computer to deal with. A computer cannot make good judgments about out-of-the-ordinary events, such as a flooded roadway (would it even know?) or a road construction crew, or even a protest blocking the street. Would the driverless car plow into a group of protesters? Would it run down the officer redirecting traffic around an accident?
I don't want to be denied the ability to travel to certain areas because the government thinks I have no business being there. Now, you have post an armed guard. In the future, they might just issue a "voluntary" GPS update with the same effect. Presto - your car thinks the road doesn't exist, so you aren't allowed to drive there.
I think it would be nice to sleep on the morning commute, read a book, etc...
But knowing that technologies which were formerly optional have become mandatory (airbags, black boxes in cars, etc...) I'm not at all excited about this. Inevitably, such technologies will be used by the powers that be to exert even greater control over the population.
And sadly, all too many Americans are willing to trade freedom for convenience.
I think I'll pass this one up. I like my freedom, thank you.
IIRC, domain squatting is illegal. I think all that needs to be done, if NSI is indeed doing this, is to document it thoroughly and send a nice explanatory letter to the Attorney General.
My company insists on thinking of IT as a cost center rather than a strategic advantage. They would sacrifice millions of dollars in engineering productivity for the sake of saving a few thousand in the IT budget.
Okay, so I was wrong. They won't have to hire PR departments when posters like you are willing to excuse a corporation's culpability because, "Everyone else was doing it..."
You know, the interesting thing about global warming is that everybody is doing it. So why not just burn more coal, pollute the environment, etc..? Why bother holding companies responsible for their actions at all?
At some point, you have to realize that the torch has been passed to us. Our world is the way it is because we don't demand any better. If we let our rights be trampled on, we have only ourselves to blame. We have a right to demand that companies behave in ethical and responsible ways.
His reasoning is specious.
Software fills a need.
Let me repeat that: Software fills a need .
Sometimes, for example, when you need to get a bunch of disparate, differently built systems talking to each other, open source software fills that need much better than closed. Extending the authors example, look at the difference between the iPhone and the Internet:
Sure, the iPhone serves its purpose, but its purpose is to make Apple money. It's closed source, and it does that well. The Internet, OTOH, serves its purpose well, too - its purpose is to be a global communication network.
So closed source is appropriate for some situations, but not for others. But the primary difference between the two is that while closed source software benefits the creators of the software, open source software benefits the entire public at large. I would chance to guess that the total societal benefit from open source software is far greater than the benefit from closed source software:
Of course, I don't have the numbers to back up my hypothesis, but the point still holds: closed source software must perform substantially better than open source software to be a net benefit to the world, all things considered. Because proprietary software is limited in its distribution by its economic model, it has a very difficult time producing the same net positive benefit that open source software achieves with ease.
are doing is seeing if the judge is going to call them on the carpet for calling personal copying infringement.
The idea is that they want to establish a few things:
This is not merely an innocuous mistake. The inclusion of this language in the complaint is meant for a very specific purpose: to progress toward a legal climate where everyone who hears a copy of a song or views a copy of a movie must pay the RIAA/MPAA or face liability for copyright infringement. The removal of fair use rights is only the beginning. The RIAA wants to return to the 18th century model where every performance is a paid performance; the fact that technology now makes it possible for the performance to proceed absent the performer is irrelevant to their business model.
Is that just like IBM, etc... who sold Hollerith machines to the Nazis to assist them with their "final solution"...
The purveyors of this system are going to have to hire some smart PR folks to manage the public impression. Nothing more.
And the people who speak out against this sort of thing will be vilified as crackpots and crazies.
How about yourself? if someday the sun came up and the Internet was no longer important, could you reinvent yourself? Can you even imagine that possibility?
Yes, because I got a degree in computer science, not programming.
Were I to be suddenly transplanted to an Amish community tomorrow, I would have no problem finding ways of improving the efficiency of otherwise manual processes through critical analysis of their process*. The same techniques used to optimize algorithms and model complex phenomena can be applied to real world processes, even absent a computer; the computer's speed just makes the "brute force" approach slightly more practical.
But I think your observation is an important one; the number of people who constantly seek out new challenges in their career field is a very small minority. I work in a facility with a few thousand other engineers, and have yet to meet anyone who does side projects in their spare time. If it's not part of their career - that is, directly related to the business at hand - they don't know it. And this regardless of whether "it" is a technical standard, algorithm, college course, etc... And this is truly sad.
* - perhaps the Amish, after 200 years, already know the most efficient ways of getting things done. But the point still applies: I can bring to bear the skills learned in college on a wide variety of problems, even those far removed from the classroom context. It just requires that one actually think about what they're doing. Suprisingly, I've encountered all too many people who act as if thinking is some kind of taboo to be avoided at all costs; apparently, they believe it better to use brute force than to actually think for themselves.
Which do well to explain the reason why, when a $1000 PC is faster than a $1,000,000 mainframe, that businesses still buy the mainframe. And then they stock the washrooms with single-ply toilet paper to cut costs.
Microsoft has made a lot of noise about being "Enterprise class" software, and having "Reliable" servers, but when things like this happen, it just goes to show that Microsoft won't ever be able to touch big iron:
The next time I hear anyone use the term "enterprise class" and Microsoft in the same sentence, I'm simply going to refer them to this bug. Totally unacceptable - even for a gaming OS.
Email is a valid distraction. Some of the places I've worked had a real problem with email - their corporate, CYA, political buck-passing culture meant that they exchanged far more email than was really necessary. In some of my other firms, people talked face to face. Now, it seems, everyone wants a "paper trail" so they can blame someone else when things go wrong. Hence the flood of irrelevant, distracting, work-stopping email.
Typical problems:
I estimate that I spend a few hours a day dealing with email. Granted, some of it is my job - I do have to support the product. But a large portion of it is spent reading - no, skimming; if I read them, it would take too long - things which do not increase my productivity at all.
The problem isn't email. It's a corporate culture where everyone refuses to take responsibility for anything, including their own job. It's a culture where people spend a greater effort avoiding work than they would if they had just done what they were supposed to do. It's a culture where people are more concerned about the appearance of professionalism than the actual practice thereof.
And my employer is willing to pay me for such inefficient use of my time (theirs, actually). In fact, my boss wants me to maintain an email trail for everything, just for the CYA value. But I can't help but wonder how efficient things would be, if we just got together and worked together, instead of all this email pedantry.
Well, let's extend your analogy: Suppose you bought a Jeep. Would you expect the contents in the back to be safe from theft, or inspection by law enforcement? Vista is that Jeep - it exposes your personal life to anyone who wants to have a look, breaks down a lot, costs a lot to maintain, and leaves the user exposed to anything hostile coming its way.
Have any expectation of privacy or security in the first place?
IIRC, some of the key SCOTUS decisions regarding the Fourth Amendment have centered around a person's expectation of privacy. They've argued:
That said, the government could persuasively argue that someone who runs Windows, especially Vista, has no expectation of privacy in the first place:
Now the sad thing is that this does come across as a troll, but sadly, it's true. And it needs to be addressed. For some reason, the /. crowd thinks it is acceptable that a majority of the population uses an OS which is horribly less secure than the ones we ourselves use (Linux, Macs, etc...). We're supposed to be the technical ones who have the solution to these problems, and yet, most /.ers just choose to blame the victim and whine about Microsoft being evil. Granted, we already know that.
Is it really acceptable that our collective rights are surrendered because a major corporation finds more profit in insufficient design and testing of its software? I realize that most of you loathe Windows, but unless we actually do something to fix the social barriers to the adoption of Linux, we can expect that, because Windows is so insecure, our government will be able to convince SCOTUS that a computer user has no "reasonable expectation of privacy".
It doesn't matter so much that this PRNG is insecure. A knowledgeable cryptographer isn't going to trust the OS for random numbers, anyway - unless it is in compliance with some standard to which their code must comply. What matters is that Vista is full of holes, and we're talking about a PRNG which no software of cryptographical consequence is going to use anyway.
Instead, we ought to worry that Windows itself is easily compromised by the government. That is the real problem. Why would you break the PRNG when you can rootkit even a fully patched Vista box with an email?.
Politics is the enemy of technology.
It seems that the priorities of our politicians lie not with expanding the market for new technologies and benefitting the whole of the United States, but rather, with protecting the outdated market models of a few dominant players in the industry. It occurs neither to the politicians nor the industry that there is a lot of money to be made by embracing technology. If you want examples, look at Google. Look at Microsoft.
But instead of the RIAA and MPAA embracing technology, building new markets, and experiencing the stock-increase-frenzy of being the Next Big Thing(TM), they seek to expand copyright law, stifle the market, and strangle the industry. And when their efforts don't produce the increases they seek, what do they do? Blame piracy, of course!
Of course the artists are starving; the record companies don't know how to sell music!
And we're slipping farther along into becoming the technological backwater of the first world. Truly sad, that technology is being vilified for the evil that can be done with it, rather than the good that it already does society.
It must be nice to have a job where you can always blame your poor performance on the actions of others.
I can get sharks with laser beams on their heads. Then I'll be interested.
This is a dupe, but it's worth commenting on.
The fundamental problem I see with this is that the ISP is changing the content of webpages to suit their own interests. There are a myriad of problems here, regardless of whether or not the customer accepts it:
In light of the fact that a certain ISP blocked access to union websites, this is an alarming event indeed. Democracy depends on the free flow of information, and I'm thinking that it might be appropriate to make such a practice illegal, if only for the sake of preserving democracy. It will first be used for commercial gain, and later, leveraged as a political tool.
If the RIAA has their way, making available copyrighted works to people other than the purchaser will be considered copyright infringement. You don't want to get sued by the books publishers, do you?
Then don't create a library. It's that simple.
If you design it right in the first place, you don't have to worry so much about scope creep.
If you design it right in the first place, you limit the kinds of problems you can have; hence, you don't need to spend as much time in testing and debugging.
If you design it right in the first place, you might actually be retained to maintain your code, as opposed to being fired when the whole project tanks. And yes, I have worked at places where this happened.
Design isn't done because management wants to fulfill some programmer's odd views about how things should be done; it's done because management realizes that it reduces the cost of software over the entire lifecycle.
But I wouldn't be surprised if you're one of those types that management loves, but programmers hate. You know, the type who gets things done quickly, but in a manner so sloppy that the code maintainers curse you under their breath.
Maybe what people have to start doing is claim copyright on all their personal information and file class action suits when it is illegally copied by some entity.
You mean like the MLB and NFL have been trying to do for years - copyright facts? Fortunately, facts aren't copyrightable, and there's a long history of case law to this effect.
You know, it's interesting that privacy advocates are trying, essentially, for what amounts to security through obscurity. That is, they think that someone's private life can remain so by simply passing legislation which would limit what others can do with facts about a private individual. There are two problems with this:
The solution to the problem of privacy is simply to require more human interaction. The job interview is the classic example - imagine if employers hired based on resume and credit score alone. While I'll admit that I don't like the fact that an employer makes hiring decisions based on rumors (which is really what a credit score is...), it could be worse...
And then there's also the problem of "identity theft" - which is a misnomer, because even if someone uses my credentials to open accounts in my name, I still know who I am. This too, is not a problem of user privacy, but rather, that the financial industry has adopted some rather questionable protocols for verifying the identity of their cutstomers. As it's been said before, "Failure to plan on your part does not create an emergency on my part..." If banks paid punitive damages for losing their customer's money, the problem would fix itself.
Well, because of copyright, J.R.R. Tolkien's heirs are able to earn a living from his legacy. Given that most authors do not earn enough to pass on large monetary endowments to their heirs, life plus 70 isn't so bad.
It's little different than a farmer passing his farm down to his son - who will get the farm for free, unlike the original farmer, who had to pay the mortgage on it. Just be glad copyright isn't subject to a capital gains tax (another debate entirely.)
Yes.
They're selling science news, not making scientific discoveries. Important, subtle difference there.
Why would I buy such a large drive if I don't intend on using it for media.
It really isn't WD's place to restrict filesharing.
This is truly a troubling precedent. The problem is that by building a device which automatically attempts to enforce copyright law, they build a precedent which can be used against them in the future:
Electronic devices don't decide what's legal and illegal - the courts do. When people think that they are capable of doing so, two key things are going to happen:
It is really unfortunate when our fear of what someone might do with technology overrules the good that they are doing with it.
The interesting thing about these studies is that they often conflate "computer users" with "Windows users". The problem is, that as a Linux user, I have no need to run anti-virus software or a firewall. I know which services are running on my machine, and have accepted the security risk thereof. But, consequently, we, (and the Mac users) get counted in the insecure group because of the faulty study methodology.
I really don't think most users expect their machine to be secure. Microsoft Windows has been insecure for so long now that getting hacked is just expected after a certain period of time. In fact, I had a rather interesting conversation with an anasthesiologist:
Him: I'm thinking about buying a new computer. What kind should I buy...
Me: (I rattle off some specs) Why?
Him: Well, it's slowed down again.
Me: Well, why don't you just run Linux.
Him: Well, I do a lot of gaming. I figure you're going to have to replace your PC once a year, anyway.
Me: Why don't you just format and reinstall, and get yourself a good virus scanner and firewall?
Him: What, do all that work? And then I have to reinstall everything? No, I'll just buy a new PC.
Me: But you're just going to have the same problem a later on. You'll get infected by a virus, etc... and you'll have to buy antivirus software.
Him: No I won't - I'll just buy another PC. It's not worth my time to do all of that antivirus and firewall stuff...
Words failed me at that point. But he did have a point. Most users believe that computers "just wear out" and slow down like an old automobile. They think that virus infection is a normal part of owning a computer.
The problem isn't Windows, per se. It's that people don't expect any better.
The technical problem is that you have to take out the battery to turn the phone completely off.
The social problem is why would you bother to carry a phone if you don't intend to receive calls? Sure, I suppose you can always replace the battery to make an outgoing call, but then you've reintroduced points 1 and 2. And number 3 will chide you for not answering your phone.
Do not confuse Roman Catholicism with Christian fundamentalism.
Let's review some of the larger differences:
It is particularly unsettling that critics of Christianity will deride it for not embracing reason; yet, when Christians do so, their arguments are rejected a priori, because they are Christian, not because they are flawed. Which leaves observers with the impression that the detractors of Christianity do so simply out of some deep-seated emotional problems or hidden agenda. Should it surprise anyone that the public in general is distrustful of scientists when the prominent members refuse to enter into a logical debate with Christians? Shouldn't someone skilled in the use of reason be able to roundly and quickly win such a debate? Yet, more often than not, those prominent in the sciences dismiss Christian positions without any reason whatsoever. People can tell a hypocrit when they see it, and this, I think, is why science has such a bad reputation in the US. It's not because a bunch of fundamentalists are brainwashing people.