The scenario you describe can certainly happen, but is also not inevitable.
I work for a major university myself, and similarly to what you described, we implemented an alert system after 9/11 ourselves.
It is opt-in. People can join and leave at will. This fact is critical to making it work.
Every single time a message goes out, we think about how many people will consider that usage frivolous, and how many will unsubscribe as a result. And we think about how many people will then not receive an alert that could have saved their lives, and how many dead students we might end up with as a result. When you spell it out in those terms, it becomes considerably easier to silence any requests to use the system for frivolous purposes.
I think the most frivolous things our system has been used for were "the weather on campus is so bad that you had better not come in today", and "the water in the dorms is contaminated, don't drink it, pick up fresh water at these locations instead". Also for bomb threats and stuff ("clear building ${FOO} as it may explode at any moment").
We do test the system, yeah, something like twice a year. And every single time we use other channels (eg. email, newsletters) to tell people ahead of time that we'll be testing it, when we'll be testing it, and how to opt in. This doesn't just warn them to explain and expect the interruption, it also ensures they can figure out if the messages aren't getting through to them! If you just do the test without letting people know ahead of time, then nobody will ever find out about the people who were supposed to be contacted but who weren't!
---
That said, some system that ties directly into the gaming networks in some novel way is probably not necessary. I know exactly how I'd implement this for XBox Live.
What I'd do is set up a gateway between our alert system and MSN Messenger (or whatever the hell they call it these days). If you're signed into XBox Live with a silver or gold account, and you have an MSN Messenger account tied to it, you can receive instant messages on your console directly. They pop up in a little alert just like an achievement. If the message is short enough it goes into that alert, and if it's longer you have to go to the chat screen to read it. This is fine for this purpose, and will also get the messages out to some computer users and even some handheld users (okay, mostly just both of the WiMo users, but still).
If you think of Joe Hewitt as the developer, then one developer left and another joined. If you think of the developer as Facebook, then nothing happened at all.
The app isn't leaving the app store. The app is still going to be updated. Facebook owns it. Joe Hewitt threw a hissy fit, and stopped working on it, and Facebook assigned other developers to it, so in practical terms there's nobody actually leaving, just some noise.
At least that's my understanding from reading up on this.
What is it lately with people using precise terms with only vague ideas about what they actually mean? Is this a side-effect of H1N1 or something?
I mean, here we have someone talking about something an individual does all by themselves with one device, calling it a "distributed denial of service attack", when there's nothing "distributed" about it and it's just a denial of service attack.
In other contexts, we have people talking about Blizzard's new selling of in-game WoW pets for $10 a pop, calling that a microtransaction, when there's nothing "micro" about this, thes are just transactions. (A microtransaction is worth talking about as such only because strange things happen when the value of a transaction gets too close to the overhead of collecting that value, which does not happen up around the $10 range. I can talk about this at length, but it doesn't matter, people are still idiots and will say "microtransaction" to sound like they're more clever than they are.)
WTF? Gah! Makes me wish I could just reach through the internet to grab people and shake them.
Am I willing to trade some of my anonymity for the use of an interesting, free service?
Oh, me too, as long as it's all done completely above-board with no manipulations, complete disclosure of what's going on, and a clear way to opt out of the system later on.
Which doesn't happen to be the case here, which is the reason I have a problem with it.
There are plenty of times I've been presented with "just give us this info and permission to talk to you later on about some stuff, and we'll let you download this ${prerelease game, beta of VMWare, handy collection of open source Sun software, Oracle developer tools, $whatever}". That's fine, because it was presented to me as a transaction, what I was providing was made clear to me, what I was getting in return was made clear to me, and how to change my mind at some eventual point down the road was made clear to me. I've done that before and I'll do it again. This really is different.
Did you honestly just make the argument "But it's free to develop software for the Xbox! *cough*youjusthavetopaytorunit"?
Nope. But I can certainly understand why someone who was attempting to create a misleading impression in a public forum in order to justify an overwhelmingly immoral behavior would claim to think so!
The remaining 0.1%, yes, actually just wants to write software for it.
Actually, there's no reason to mod your xbox to write software for it.
There's a hobbyist dev kit! It's a free download, even. You can write code for the XBox on it for free, and some schools are doing this. Now, if you want to install that code onto your own XBox... you need to pay an annual membership fee for the service that lets you do this, and then you can load the code onto your own unmodded xbox, and you can connect to it with a debugger and stuff. No hacks or mods necessary (in fact they interfere).
(And that fee also covers what you need to submit the stuff you write to the process that lets other people download it, and lets you get paid for that. I have bought a game or two that were written this way. There's some innovative stuff in there.)
When just, so be it. What happens when it is unjust? Is it still simply their right?
Yeup, it is! And if they get out of hand with it, they're idiots.
They do not have a monopoly in this space, and aren't likely to soon, so market forces can work here. Their stance on this stuff makes some people chose PS3, or makes some people who'd otherwise enthusiastically get an XB360 remain content with the lesser processing power on a Wii or PS2, or makes some people stick to PC gaming instead of console gaming. And this is all fine. Microsoft gets to experiment to find the right balance point, and gets to make horrible mistakes in doing so, and gets to be marginalized if they're too stupid about it (cf. "Zune", "Windows Mobile"). As long as they're not in a position of sufficient monopoly power, as they are in some other markets, it's fine.
It seems a bit surprising to me that this study shows that only 15% of vulnerabilities are in IE.
Well. Remember that "the front door is unlocked, the guard has been dosed with chloral hydrate, and there's a loaded shotgun just laying there on the credenza" could collectively be called one single vulnerability. Quantity doesn't trump quality!
Oh yeah, I don't actually have a problem with the statement. I just find the inherent (and actually necessary) hypocrisy to be amusing, not some kind of flaw or counter-argument, that's all. Perhaps I'm just too easily amused.
Here's an idea: just don't do business with DRM-centric content creators or the distribution networks/agents with whom they've chosen to do business. Give your business to people who want to give away their work for free.
False dichotomy.
I buy a ton of etexts. I pay money for them, and the authors get compensated. But the etexts do not have DRM! This doesn't mean the authors want to give the product away for free, it just means that they don't use DRM to enforce their wishes in this regard. (Baen webscriptions is one example of a publishing house that puts out etexts that don't use DRM. They do put out some stuff for free, but they sell much more, and none of it that I've seen involves any DRM. If you use "Stanza" on the iPhone, you can configure it to talk to their store, and then you can download the books you've purchased directly to the device.)
I'd hate to to think what this guy would do when he realizes that cameras don't pander to the visually impaired market.
Actually... some do.
I know a guy who happens to be blind, and also happens to go skydiving, mountain climbing, et cetera. He takes pictures to show his friends, but often he has to ask a sighted person to help him identify which pictures are which. So I showed him the camera I carry all the time -- it has a feature that didn't make much sense to me until I had heard how he uses cameras.
See, I can configure my camera so that when it takes a picture, it automatically records 15 seconds of audio right after the photo. Then when you load the pictures off, the audio is attached to each picture. So with this camera, he could snap a photo and then immediately say aloud something like "Everest, first night at the base camp", and then he could load off his photos and post them to the web without anyone's help.
So, yeah, cameras are pandering to the visually impaired market. FYI.
I was wondering after we implement your changes if you wanted to have any garbage men in your neighborhood when you were 70? I ask because if you make it a huge burden to have kids then it is conceivable that the average number of children could drop to 1 meaning that at some point we would have an elderly population over twice as large as the middle aged.
I guarantee you, if that ever starts to look like a realistic possibility, we will finally get comprehensive immigration reform.
But why would you want to use a proprietary protocol with limited software and hardware support to do this? Seems more sensible to use an industry standard protocol.
I don't have enough information at my fingertips to respond to this. Are there any industry standard protocols for this that are already as widely deployed today as Skype? That are already being used by as many customers in as many settings? If so, sure. If not, that answer might provide the answer to your own question above.
I do know that whenever I hear about people doing general-purpose IP telephony, I hear about exactly two things: either Skype, or some service where the fact that it's IP-based is irrelevant and you should just treat it like a normal phone call. Now, maybe all those other things are using standard protocols, but if so, I'm not sure that helps much if you end up going through the old phone networks anyway.
(If you add special-purpose IP telephony, you'd have to add Ventrilo and TeamSpeak to the list of things I hear about all the time. But those also use proprietary protocols.)
It's neither completely perfect nor completely worthless.
If they're actually putting the protocol implementation out as a binary-only library, and encouraging open source development on top of that, this enables some freedoms without enabling all freedoms.
For example, this makes it possible for me to write a program that monitors a twitter feed, looks for certain keywords in it, and when it finds them, calls me via Skype and uses my own text-to-speech code to read the message containing the keyword out loud to me.
In theory, it also lets me implement my own IVR application on top of the protocol. You know what I mean, "say yes to continue", that kind of crap. We could build an IVR Wikipedia tool for the blind with this.
So: some freedoms, yes, but certainly not all the freedoms folks might want.
If you think about it, it's really a little like using a credit card processing system. You have hooks to do certain financial transactions, and building that into your applications lets you do valuable things, but you don't have the complete freedom to do whatever you want with the financial protocols.
Snuffing it on facebook before your time is not much of an issue, as they explicitly don't disable the account's ability to actually log in. If you wake up one day to find out you're dead, you can still log in, and that provides a pretty decent avenue for contesting the claim.
Heh, except Sony just killed Linux on the PS3. The new slims don't have the stuff needed to run it.
All the console makers are sadly headed in the same direction, it's just that some have a head-start and some are moving faster. There are no good guys here.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
Very often the case. But is it necessarily the case?
Remember, the subset of libertarians that are completely opposed to any regulation of any kind at all ever is an extremely small set, the anarcho-libertarians. Almost all libertarians support some regulation.
Is it possible to use regulations of the sort that most libertarians could support to combat racism, sexism, or other prejudices?
I don't intend to provide the answer here (because I don't have time to write a master's thesis right now). But I don't think it has to be impossible.
The angle I'd probably start from is, a lot of times, such prejudices (if actually expressed as behavior) can be regarded as fraud. If you advertise a job with one set of requirements, and then fill it by another set of requirements that you never mentioned, you are doing something fraudulent. And punishment of outright fraud is something that even a lot of fairly extreme libertarians and capitalists (and heck, even Objectivists!) can enthusiastically support.
(Yeah, I know that's just the kernel of the seed of the beginnings of the argument. I know a lot more reasoning than that would be required to make it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Someone is finally standing up for the legitimate hobbyists. Should Microsoft worry?
Nah. It'll probably be really easy to just buy off both legitimate hobbyists.
The scenario you describe can certainly happen, but is also not inevitable.
I work for a major university myself, and similarly to what you described, we implemented an alert system after 9/11 ourselves.
It is opt-in. People can join and leave at will. This fact is critical to making it work.
Every single time a message goes out, we think about how many people will consider that usage frivolous, and how many will unsubscribe as a result. And we think about how many people will then not receive an alert that could have saved their lives, and how many dead students we might end up with as a result. When you spell it out in those terms, it becomes considerably easier to silence any requests to use the system for frivolous purposes.
I think the most frivolous things our system has been used for were "the weather on campus is so bad that you had better not come in today", and "the water in the dorms is contaminated, don't drink it, pick up fresh water at these locations instead". Also for bomb threats and stuff ("clear building ${FOO} as it may explode at any moment").
We do test the system, yeah, something like twice a year. And every single time we use other channels (eg. email, newsletters) to tell people ahead of time that we'll be testing it, when we'll be testing it, and how to opt in. This doesn't just warn them to explain and expect the interruption, it also ensures they can figure out if the messages aren't getting through to them! If you just do the test without letting people know ahead of time, then nobody will ever find out about the people who were supposed to be contacted but who weren't!
---
That said, some system that ties directly into the gaming networks in some novel way is probably not necessary. I know exactly how I'd implement this for XBox Live.
What I'd do is set up a gateway between our alert system and MSN Messenger (or whatever the hell they call it these days). If you're signed into XBox Live with a silver or gold account, and you have an MSN Messenger account tied to it, you can receive instant messages on your console directly. They pop up in a little alert just like an achievement. If the message is short enough it goes into that alert, and if it's longer you have to go to the chat screen to read it. This is fine for this purpose, and will also get the messages out to some computer users and even some handheld users (okay, mostly just both of the WiMo users, but still).
If you think of Joe Hewitt as the developer, then one developer left and another joined. If you think of the developer as Facebook, then nothing happened at all.
Except I'm not really sure if Joe Hewitt counts.
The app isn't leaving the app store. The app is still going to be updated. Facebook owns it. Joe Hewitt threw a hissy fit, and stopped working on it, and Facebook assigned other developers to it, so in practical terms there's nobody actually leaving, just some noise.
At least that's my understanding from reading up on this.
What is it lately with people using precise terms with only vague ideas about what they actually mean? Is this a side-effect of H1N1 or something?
I mean, here we have someone talking about something an individual does all by themselves with one device, calling it a "distributed denial of service attack", when there's nothing "distributed" about it and it's just a denial of service attack.
In other contexts, we have people talking about Blizzard's new selling of in-game WoW pets for $10 a pop, calling that a microtransaction, when there's nothing "micro" about this, thes are just transactions. (A microtransaction is worth talking about as such only because strange things happen when the value of a transaction gets too close to the overhead of collecting that value, which does not happen up around the $10 range. I can talk about this at length, but it doesn't matter, people are still idiots and will say "microtransaction" to sound like they're more clever than they are.)
WTF? Gah! Makes me wish I could just reach through the internet to grab people and shake them.
Am I willing to trade some of my anonymity for the use of an interesting, free service?
Oh, me too, as long as it's all done completely above-board with no manipulations, complete disclosure of what's going on, and a clear way to opt out of the system later on.
Which doesn't happen to be the case here, which is the reason I have a problem with it.
There are plenty of times I've been presented with "just give us this info and permission to talk to you later on about some stuff, and we'll let you download this ${prerelease game, beta of VMWare, handy collection of open source Sun software, Oracle developer tools, $whatever}". That's fine, because it was presented to me as a transaction, what I was providing was made clear to me, what I was getting in return was made clear to me, and how to change my mind at some eventual point down the road was made clear to me. I've done that before and I'll do it again. This really is different.
Did you honestly just make the argument "But it's free to develop software for the Xbox! *cough*youjusthavetopaytorunit"?
Nope. But I can certainly understand why someone who was attempting to create a misleading impression in a public forum in order to justify an overwhelmingly immoral behavior would claim to think so!
The remaining 0.1%, yes, actually just wants to write software for it.
Actually, there's no reason to mod your xbox to write software for it.
There's a hobbyist dev kit! It's a free download, even. You can write code for the XBox on it for free, and some schools are doing this. Now, if you want to install that code onto your own XBox... you need to pay an annual membership fee for the service that lets you do this, and then you can load the code onto your own unmodded xbox, and you can connect to it with a debugger and stuff. No hacks or mods necessary (in fact they interfere).
(And that fee also covers what you need to submit the stuff you write to the process that lets other people download it, and lets you get paid for that. I have bought a game or two that were written this way. There's some innovative stuff in there.)
When just, so be it. What happens when it is unjust? Is it still simply their right?
Yeup, it is! And if they get out of hand with it, they're idiots.
They do not have a monopoly in this space, and aren't likely to soon, so market forces can work here. Their stance on this stuff makes some people chose PS3, or makes some people who'd otherwise enthusiastically get an XB360 remain content with the lesser processing power on a Wii or PS2, or makes some people stick to PC gaming instead of console gaming. And this is all fine. Microsoft gets to experiment to find the right balance point, and gets to make horrible mistakes in doing so, and gets to be marginalized if they're too stupid about it (cf. "Zune", "Windows Mobile"). As long as they're not in a position of sufficient monopoly power, as they are in some other markets, it's fine.
It seems a bit surprising to me that this study shows that only 15% of vulnerabilities are in IE.
Well. Remember that "the front door is unlocked, the guard has been dosed with chloral hydrate, and there's a loaded shotgun just laying there on the credenza" could collectively be called one single vulnerability. Quantity doesn't trump quality!
Oh yeah, I don't actually have a problem with the statement. I just find the inherent (and actually necessary) hypocrisy to be amusing, not some kind of flaw or counter-argument, that's all. Perhaps I'm just too easily amused.
My post was not a generalisation.
The bit I quoted was! The statement "Huge generalisations really help no one." is in and of itself a perfect example of a generalization.
Huge generalisations really help no one.
Sorry, I just felt a deep, burning need to quote this sentence out of context.
That's all, I'm done. Everyone can move along now.
But don't encourage ripping them off, either, as so many people do.
Eh? Sorry, was someone doing that? If so, I missed it. I hadn't seen any encouragement of ripping anyone off, so your comments are confusing me.
Here's an idea: just don't do business with DRM-centric content creators or the distribution networks/agents with whom they've chosen to do business. Give your business to people who want to give away their work for free.
False dichotomy.
I buy a ton of etexts. I pay money for them, and the authors get compensated. But the etexts do not have DRM! This doesn't mean the authors want to give the product away for free, it just means that they don't use DRM to enforce their wishes in this regard. (Baen webscriptions is one example of a publishing house that puts out etexts that don't use DRM. They do put out some stuff for free, but they sell much more, and none of it that I've seen involves any DRM. If you use "Stanza" on the iPhone, you can configure it to talk to their store, and then you can download the books you've purchased directly to the device.)
I'd hate to to think what this guy would do when he realizes that cameras don't pander to the visually impaired market.
Actually... some do.
I know a guy who happens to be blind, and also happens to go skydiving, mountain climbing, et cetera. He takes pictures to show his friends, but often he has to ask a sighted person to help him identify which pictures are which. So I showed him the camera I carry all the time -- it has a feature that didn't make much sense to me until I had heard how he uses cameras.
See, I can configure my camera so that when it takes a picture, it automatically records 15 seconds of audio right after the photo. Then when you load the pictures off, the audio is attached to each picture. So with this camera, he could snap a photo and then immediately say aloud something like "Everest, first night at the base camp", and then he could load off his photos and post them to the web without anyone's help.
So, yeah, cameras are pandering to the visually impaired market. FYI.
Face it peeps, only Linux or Windows are man enough.
Well. Except for Windows.
I was wondering after we implement your changes if you wanted to have any garbage men in your neighborhood when you were 70? I ask because if you make it a huge burden to have kids then it is conceivable that the average number of children could drop to 1 meaning that at some point we would have an elderly population over twice as large as the middle aged.
I guarantee you, if that ever starts to look like a realistic possibility, we will finally get comprehensive immigration reform.
But why would you want to use a proprietary protocol with limited software and hardware support to do this? Seems more sensible to use an industry standard protocol.
I don't have enough information at my fingertips to respond to this. Are there any industry standard protocols for this that are already as widely deployed today as Skype? That are already being used by as many customers in as many settings? If so, sure. If not, that answer might provide the answer to your own question above.
I do know that whenever I hear about people doing general-purpose IP telephony, I hear about exactly two things: either Skype, or some service where the fact that it's IP-based is irrelevant and you should just treat it like a normal phone call. Now, maybe all those other things are using standard protocols, but if so, I'm not sure that helps much if you end up going through the old phone networks anyway.
(If you add special-purpose IP telephony, you'd have to add Ventrilo and TeamSpeak to the list of things I hear about all the time. But those also use proprietary protocols.)
I run my own IMAP server in my own basement. I can go and touch the machine that the mail is actually stored on.
Does this ruling have any implications for me? It looks to me like it doesn't.
It's neither completely perfect nor completely worthless.
If they're actually putting the protocol implementation out as a binary-only library, and encouraging open source development on top of that, this enables some freedoms without enabling all freedoms.
For example, this makes it possible for me to write a program that monitors a twitter feed, looks for certain keywords in it, and when it finds them, calls me via Skype and uses my own text-to-speech code to read the message containing the keyword out loud to me.
In theory, it also lets me implement my own IVR application on top of the protocol. You know what I mean, "say yes to continue", that kind of crap. We could build an IVR Wikipedia tool for the blind with this.
So: some freedoms, yes, but certainly not all the freedoms folks might want.
If you think about it, it's really a little like using a credit card processing system. You have hooks to do certain financial transactions, and building that into your applications lets you do valuable things, but you don't have the complete freedom to do whatever you want with the financial protocols.
Snuffing it on facebook before your time is not much of an issue, as they explicitly don't disable the account's ability to actually log in. If you wake up one day to find out you're dead, you can still log in, and that provides a pretty decent avenue for contesting the claim.
And I'd rather not go into how I know.
Heh, except Sony just killed Linux on the PS3. The new slims don't have the stuff needed to run it.
All the console makers are sadly headed in the same direction, it's just that some have a head-start and some are moving faster. There are no good guys here.
Huh. My favorite thing about the 2012ers is simply that I enjoy being exposed to people who are just utterly batshit fucking crazy.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
Very often the case. But is it necessarily the case?
Remember, the subset of libertarians that are completely opposed to any regulation of any kind at all ever is an extremely small set, the anarcho-libertarians. Almost all libertarians support some regulation.
Is it possible to use regulations of the sort that most libertarians could support to combat racism, sexism, or other prejudices?
I don't intend to provide the answer here (because I don't have time to write a master's thesis right now). But I don't think it has to be impossible.
The angle I'd probably start from is, a lot of times, such prejudices (if actually expressed as behavior) can be regarded as fraud. If you advertise a job with one set of requirements, and then fill it by another set of requirements that you never mentioned, you are doing something fraudulent. And punishment of outright fraud is something that even a lot of fairly extreme libertarians and capitalists (and heck, even Objectivists!) can enthusiastically support.
(Yeah, I know that's just the kernel of the seed of the beginnings of the argument. I know a lot more reasoning than that would be required to make it.)