who will protect the consumer from their stranglehold ? 'invisible hand' of the market ? fairies ? and dont bullshit me about 'competition' by the way - it has never been a reality in between mega companies at the very top. they always act in conjunction.
That's really not true. There is fierce competition between companies at the top in many industries. Microsoft vs Apple anyone? Or are you going to try to claim that they are acting "in conjunction"?
You really have a couple of problems here. One, because of the longtime regulation of phones and networks and treating them like utilities, you only have one choice for your connection in many areas. You are lucky if you have two choices. Two, there are huge barriers to entry when it comes to new players entering the market, as well as regulations in some areas that impose monopolies because they don't want multiple utilities coming into the same house (i.e. - one set of water pipes, one set of electric wires, one set of cable, etc).
So it's not really that capitalism or competition don't work, it's that you don't have any capitalism or competition due to longtime government regulation and government imposed monopolies, and now due to the barriers to entry it's too late to get any competition. You talk about there being four companies acting in conjunction and not competing, but that's because they are split geographically. They don't compete because in the geographic regions they cover there most likely is no other competitor. In my part of Ohio, Time Warner Cable is the only game in town... I couldn't get service from Comcast or some other large carrier even if I wanted to. Each is a monopoly in their given area and each therefore acts like a monopoly, which is why they appear to be in conjunction. Contrast that with Microsoft, Apple and Google. Because they all compete in every region and market, you see actual, fierce competition.
Is HTML 5 still structured like XHTML? I hope that it is, because one of the biggest pains in the HTML standard was the inconsistent syntax. I think a strength of strict XHTML was that it could be easily parsed by an XML parser, and if we are going back to the syntax of HTML 4 I think that's a step backwards.
Nevermind, I found them, under "Ideas". No wonder Google hasn't given out any money, the ideas are really terrible.
No kidding. These are some of the WORST ideas I've ever seen, for a couple for reasons.
They are really vague with no specific ideas on how to accomplish any of them. It's unclear how ten million would help any of them to happen, or even what the money would be spent on.
They don't even make sense half the time. Take this one for instance "Help social entrepreneurs drive change". What the heck is that supposed to be? What is a "social entrepreneur"? Anyone who knows what an entrepreneur is knows there isn't any such thing. The google picture representing it was a guy standing around idly blowing flower petals, which is a pretty apt depiction of this supposedly great idea.
Kudos to google if they keep their money and pay nothing out for any of these. The money will be put to much better use if google uses it to develop more products and services instead.
Side Note: As a freedom loving individual who believes in limited government and free markets, I'd actually rather see the money burned than used for most of these ideas... "Work towards social conscious tax policies"? I might puke...
I tend to agree. Why is it the university's job to police this stuff when they are, for all intents and purposes, a general purpose ISP? Unless they are actually aiding and abetting piracy by running some kind of university sharing service, I really don't think policing all this is their job. I think this is just an example of the industry going after the entity with the deepest pockets rather than the person who is actually breaking the law. It's like going after the state highway department because a drug smuggler drove on the rode.
The only time I think a university should be involved is taking down, say, a pirate bay type website that student sets up using free university web server space that they often provide. But even then, that should be done at the request of the copyright holder. They shouldn't constantly have to peruse thousands of student websites to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In short, go after the lawbreaker, not the network provider. If they can sue anyone just because their product is used improperly, then we'll have no networks and no roads.
Because this guy believes that most advancements in science are cooperative efforts, and that recognizing individuals for merely putting the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle is intellectually dishonest: It devalues the work of everyone else who contributed.
Cooperative efforts yes, but I disagree with the rest of your statement. The person who puts the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle together is the one who makes the work the rest did useful. So another guy pointed out the pathway? Yes, but he didn't solve the problem. His contributions may have been valuable, and he should be credited for what he did do, but starting something is not the same as finishing something. Starting something is not worth 1 million. Finishing something revolutionary is. Finding the answer that others, including the starter could not, is what make his work worth 1 million. And it doesn't devalue the work of those who's work he built on. It doesn't say they did nothing. It accurately values their contributions as good, but values his as the more revolutionary contribution, which it was.
As the Clay institute even points out in the article, every mathematician follows in the work of others. Everyone does that. There's nothing to reward there. What not everyone does is tie all the pieces together into a revolutionary advance. THAT's why they want to award Perleman 1 million dollars and that's why they think he should accept it. And I agree, he should take the money as it is not a gift, but rather an earned reward for the hard, revolutionary work that he did.
I think the most you'll find are papers that suggest global change could result in positive things in some areas. I don't know of any saying that climate change is not happening.
That's because that's not what the debate is about. The Earth's climate is ALWAYS changing, as everyone well knows. Examining ice cores, fossils, geologic record, etc, prove that the Earth's climate is never steady and has always been changing. In fact, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today at various times in history.
The people you bash as "deniers" are actually not denying climate change, but are instead debating the following points that you seem to be ignoring. They argue that:
Climate change is happening, but the primary source of the change is not necessarily human activity. A common argument is that the sun is the main driver of the change.
Climate change is happening, but it may not longer be global warming. In other words, a lot of temperature data shows that we have flat-lined or cooled since 1998, though industrial output increased, especially in China. Some worry that with the absence of sunspots, we may be looking at the beginning of a new Maunder minimum, which could lead to another mini-ice age. I think a lot of people, including politicians, are starting to notice this point, because if you look at the late 90's the debate was all about the crisis of global warming, but now they've suddenly changed the name to "climate change" instead.
Climate change is happening, but considering that the climate has always changed, it is no reason to shutter our industries and destroy our economies. And it is also not a reason to give the government more control of our lives.
So you are right that the debate isn't over, but not for the reasons you describe. The debate will continue because people like you don't understand what the debate is about (you seem to think it's about whether or not climate change is happening), and because people like you are making a crisis out of nothing. If man-made global warming is happening, is that a crisis? It may be, if it can be proven that human activity is truly the primary cause. But is climate change in and of itself a crisis? Given that it always changes back and forth, I would say definitely not. Should we shut down our economies and destroy our industry just because the climate is changing, just like it always has? Definitely not! It's just something life has to adapt to. But as long as people like you continue to stick their heads in the sand and scream that change that always happens is "a crisis", and as long as you refuse to see what the debate is actually about, then people like me will keep fighting to educate you.
Main Point: We don't argue that climate change isn't happening, and if that's what you think the debate is about then you are completely wrong.
This just proves they have babies and men don't
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Women Dropping Out of IT
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· Score: 2, Interesting
And that isn't a sexist comment. I've seen quite a few women work 5-10 years in IT, get to about age 30 and then start having kids, after which point they leave to become a stay at home mom or scale back to part time hours. And of the women that do stay full time after having a few kids, they tend to really relegate computers to something they do no more than eight hours a day, and then that's it. Based on my observations (and this may be a stereotype, but I think it's true), the cause of this is that their husbands do WAY less of the childrearing work than the women. So they don't have the time to put in extra hours studying for certifications or trying to gte extra education. Obviously, that's not the case with every woman, but I've seen it happen a lot.
I think these factors are probably pretty good explanations for the statistics we all see. The lower pay on average is probably because the women are younger and less experienced on average as a work force (since a lot of women do leave to be moms instead of conituing on at about age 30), and they are more likely to work part time, which also reduces pay. And with less time available to study, they may be less likely to advance into the higher paying jobs, further increasing the salary gap. I don't think there's any blatant discrimination going on... I just think it's the reality of which gender is most affected by children during the mid-career period.
Oh yes, the Reagan theory of economy. I wonder how many more countries will go bankrupt before they realize that it doesn't work, and that they are not an exception?
Let's look at the countries going bankrupt now... Greece? Socialist. Portugal? Socialist. Spain? Socialist. UK? Not quite bankrupt yet, but socialist. United States of America? Socialist, and racing towards bankruptcy as fast as congress can carry it. Are any of those countries following Ronald Reagan's model? No! They are, as usual, following the Marxist liberal elitist model, and we have a century of empirical evidence, from the Soviet Union to North Korea to Cuba to Venezuela to Greece to East Germany (the list goes on and on) that flat out proves your Marxist ideas don't work.
So that said, what about the competing capitalist model (which Ronald Reagan generally believed in)? We have centuries worth of empirical evidence that that model DOES work. The most obvious proof was the 18th and 19th century United States of America, which with a very tiny, unobtrusive government went from undeveloped continent to world superpower faster than any nation in the history of the world (and it also saw much improvement during the 1980s when we switched from Carter socialism to Reagan capitalism). But besides that, there are a number of other countries the tilt towards the free market end of the spectrum that have also done well, such as Australia, Hong Kong, and now even China, which has jettisoned much of its communism and socialism in favor of capitalism, because capitalism grows their economy at a rate of more than 8% (similar to what the US used to be capable of doing).
So yeah, the evidence is in. The more capitalist you are, the more wealthy and economically advanced your country is. The more Marxist you are, the quicker it will be that your country goes into bankruptcy (at which point you get riots and/or the government collapses).
But hey, the financial elite of those countries can get themselves a bit more money at the expense of everyone else, so it's okay, right?
Capitalism lifts all boats. Capitalism provides jobs for everyone. And if you look at America, which up until Obama was by and large the best example of capitalism, you will find that even our poor are in the top 10% worldwide, and maybe even in the top 5%. Even most low income families here have their own washing machine and dryer, unlike many nations in Europe. Even low income people here tend to have more space than the tiny flats common in Europe. Even the poor here tend to have one (or often two) cars. They may not be very nice cars, but in most countries in the world you are lucky to have a bicycle. Most of our poor also find some way to get a TV (usually a pretty nice one) and cable TV service, as well as enough food to live on. And a lot of lower income people have cell phones and even luxuries like alcohol and cigarettes, which cost quite a bit. So let's be honest... being poor in a capitalist society may mean you don't have a boat, a luxury car or a second house by the lake, but it still lifts their boat WAY higher than the rest of the world. Go look at Africa, Venezuela or even Europe and then come try to tell me that the poor in capitalist America aren't way better off than the poor, and even the middle class, in a lot of these socialist countries.
actually there is no room for discussion on a news website. if you want discussion, go to a blog or a forum.
Well, to be technical, Yahoo! really isn't a news site. They are more of a web portal, and I'm sure if you pressed them, they would say the purpose of their existence is to entertain visitors with interesting content, not be a news organization. I mean, it's not like this is cnn.com... if comments keep people entertained (read some of them, they ARE entertaining) and coming back to the site then they are going to have comments and discussion.
On a side note though, I do take issue with your statement that there is no room for discussion on a news website. Maybe if there was more discussion of the story we would start getting both sides more reliably, and that's always a good thing.
Why are things like power plants, banks, or telcos directly connected to the internet? You'd think they could afford a completely separate network.
Actually, they probably aren't directly connected, at least not in the sense of being directly addressable. I work for a large manufacturing company, and our critical plant equipment, though networked, uses private IP addresses that are not routable on the general Internet. We have private IP segments for all equipment of that nature. So for someone to attack our critical production infrastructure, they would first have to breach something else on the network, and then use that as a proxy to forward on the attack into the internal network segments. Is that possible? Of course. But does it take a lot of extra time during the attack and make early reconnaissance of the critical parts of our company difficult? Absolutely.
Now, I don't work for a bank or a nuclear power plant, so I can't guarantee they work the same way. But assuming they do, which is fairly likely, then to attack everything would be very difficult for a hacker. You can't just do an easy drive by exploit, at least not if you are trying to gain information, steal money or anything else that requires precision. Your only real option would be a crippling worm (something like the blaster worm) that causes havoc everywhere at once. And the problem with that kind of attack is that most likely your own nation's populace and corporations would be vulnerable as well (especially in the case of a zero day vulnerability). And maybe you code the virus to avoid certain IP ranges, but it wouldn't be long before someone released a copycat without the restriction.
Cyber-warfare makes for great movie scripts, but it really doesn't work well except in the cases of limited, carefully planned surgical strikes or large, indiscriminate attacks on everything running a certain OS. Doing mass attacks that only target one country and smartly take down their computers is very difficult indeed.
As it is, there's little incentive for the industry to increase their security.
For some reason, everyone loves to ignore the reputation factor when talking about economics and capitalism. Most screwups in business are far more expensive due to reputation damage than they are in direct costs. If a bank has a major incident in which they lose the credit card numbers of thousands of consumers, that can really hurt their reputation, and people are less likely to sign with that bank. That's where banks really feel the pain, and why they do have an incentive to keep security strong.
In my opinion, the result of democracy should be that everyone can do as they please as long as their actions do not hurt "little ones".
Not quite right... the true definition of freedom would be that people can do what they want as long as their actions don't infringe upon the rights of anyone else. If you do something that infringes upon the rights of some rich powerful person, does that make it ok just because you didn't hurt a "little one"? Obviously not.
And with 380 million Web users in China and a sizzling online gaming market, analysts say it is no wonder Chinese youths are so skilled at hacking.
Umm, I attended a major US university and got degrees in computer engineering and computer science. During my senior year, I lived on a dorm floor that was the home of the "computer science learning community", basically where many of the new freshman CS majors elected to live. All of them, every single one, was a gamer, and many were of the stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons, renaissance festival attending, medieval replica weapon carrying, nonbathing comp sci niche. They got into comp sci because they were nerds with very strong interests in gaming, and quickly found out that comp sci was about math and programming, not slacking off playing games. Not one of them it to their sophomore year in computer science (not that no freshman made it, but none of the ones in the learning community did).
I'm sorry NYT, but you are wrong yet again. Having a bunch of gamers does not mean you have a bunch of hackers. In fact, it probably has an inverse correlation, because those who take the time to really master games like WoW, collecting every item and reaching every level, typically don't have the time to become an expert in how computers actually work. No wonder the NYT is going bankrupt... this is about the same level of accuracy we see in their political and economic stories as well.
I guess the fact that this is a chinese guy is shocking to some new york times readers?
The fact that one of the few books on this "hackers" desk is a C# book is the surprising part. I wonder how well hacking with C# is working out for him? Lol. Definitely a staged picture. I'm sure it looks good to people who know nothing about computers though.
And this is exactly why I bought a cheapo Dodge Caliber base model with as few electronics as possible in it. After buying a used BMW and having all kinds of crazy problems with the electronics. Problems included:
Electronics on power adjustable driver seat going out after my (short) wife drove the car, leaving the seat unadjustable and the car therefore undrivable for me because I couldn't fit my legs in the seat.
Electric windows rolled down and wouldn't come back up.
Problems with the transmission not shifting reliably and automatically going up to 5000 RPMs before shifting (which may or may not have been electrical.
Other strange problems and readings from the dashboard display.
After that experience, I basically said "screw it" and bought a car with a pull bar for adjusting the seat, manual locks and crank windows, and a manual transmission. And I've never had any breakdowns at all in the 35,000 miles I've put on it. I love computers and technology, but as a software developer I know how hard it is to write bug free code (almost impossible in all but the simplest programs). A bug is no big deal if you are sitting at your desk using facebook, but I'd rather have a simpler system in place when driving down the highway at 75 mph every day.
Meh, the whole article is irrelevant. Once it gets to the Supreme Court, they'll just say we're restricting spammers' freedom of speech.
That's unlikely. There's no such thing as unlimited free speech. You can't lie in a courtroom and claim free speech. That's perjury. You can't yell fire in a movie theater when there is no fire. That puts people's lives in danger. The speech of spammers is not covered by free speech laws because it is harrassment (constantly bombing someone with unsolicited messages they can't opt out of would be considered harrassment by probably any jury of the spammers peers) and fraud, because spam is almost always for fake viagra or something of the like. Both of those are not protected forms of speech.
If Microsoft had succeeded in driving all other browsers out of the market in 2000, then today, we would not have any other choice and would be forced to use a browser with a dangerous security risk.
This is absolutely silly. The EU didn't somehow save us from Microsoft, and they didn't give us any competing browsers. We got those from the private sector, and government regulation didn't do jack.
Did the EU give us Firefox/Mozilla? No. Opera? No. Safari? No. Konqueror? No. Chrome? No. And there have been many other browsers that have been developed as well. All by the private sector, and a number of them were under development before the EU started regulating everything.
And more importantly, did any of you out there switch to Firefox because the EU told you to? Or was it because the EU told Microsoft they had to make IE uninstallable that you suddenly switched to Firefox? I'm pretty sure no one did that. We all went out and downloaded Firefox, in many cases before the regulation took hold, because it was a better browser than IE 6. It complied to standards, had many useful plugins, and most importantly had tabs. It was a better product hands down, and it quickly started gaining marketshare. The reason Netscape got destroyed earlier was because it was not superior to the Microsoft product (at best it was equal, though I'm not convinced it was) and it had a worse business model that at one point included charging a fee for the browser. Obviously that was the wrong business model to choose, as evidenced by the fact that there are over a half a dozen competing browsers now, and all of them are free downloads. The browser just wasn't a peice of software people were willing to pay for.
Frankly, this worshipping at the shrine of the EU and its regulation is just plain boneheaded and wrong. Even if governmental regulation was a good thing (something I vehemently disagree with in almost all cases), using this as an example is stupid. Especially since this wasn't a monopoly. If it were, Microsoft could have charged a fee for IE after driving its competitors from the market (in a real monopoly the monopoly holder always gets to jack up the price when there is no competition), but obviously Microsoft couldn't do that. It would have been overtaken by Mozilla almost immediately, because it was also a free browser. In some markets, competition simply forces the price to zero, and that's what happened here. There were no monopolistic barriers to competition; just a temporary lack of a browser with good enough features and a decent business model. And once that browser (Firefox) appeared, no one minded downloading and installing it onto their OS, despite the fact that they already had IE.
PS - A little known fact is that Netscape almost totally dominated the browser market before IE jumped into the fray. In fact, many sites were designed to work exclusively with Netscape, and even required a user agent string beginning with "Mozilla" to run. In effect, if anyone had a monopoly, it was actually Netscape at the beginning, when they even had a monopoly on content. IE in the early days actually had to spoof the user agent string and pretend to be Mozilla just to get the site to work with it. IE was the underdog and fiercest competitor, which is why it won in the end. It had nothing to do with monopoly.
Except that none of the sort of data you are talking about it going to be on a laptop. It's going to be stored on a corporate server and accessed by some application like SAP or something. Remote users may be able to log into the server through some kind of web interface or something, but they aren't going to be storing the data on their machine. And as far as protecting the server goes, since a potential theif most likely won't get physical access, they have to do some sort of remote exploit. And if they are able to pull that off, then they'll probably be running in the user space as the application they exploited, likely making the disk encryption moot.
particularly when you can make more money in the private sector
Umm... you actually make way less in the private sector. A USA Today article that appeared last week confirmed what many of us have suspected for years, especially since this recession started. And that is that government employees make more than private sector employees. Period. They make more in salary (approximately 30% more), they have far better benefits (healthcare, pension, etc), and they get more perks. It's not the working/middle class vs the wealthy anymore... the two classes we have now are apparently the unionized government aristocracy and all the private sector schmucks footing the bill for it all.
By the way, I know that in this article some government types tried to explain this away by claiming that salaries are so high because the government only fills really important jobs, and that if government employees took equivalent jobs in the private sector they would be getting paid less (all this was said without any evidence). My assertion (also without proof, but I think fairly likely) is that the people in government could not get the equivalent jobs in the private sector because they aren't qualified enough. Hence, they are still being overpaid. And my empirical evidence is that there really aren't any private sector organizations as disorganized, inefficient and generally inept as the federal government (just think about the failed TSA pdf redacting story that was on here the other day). Are our best and brightest really working there? Are people who would otherwise be qualified for important private sector jobs really giving up their salaries en masse so that they can join the ranks of "public servants"? Maybe at the cabinet secretary level this happens, but at pretty much all the other levels of the bureaucracy, I think not. If you work for the government, you are not a "servant", and all us serfs out in the private sector are overpaying you.
And as an American in IT working at a unionized plant (I'm not in the union, but I write programs to do scheduling and such based on their ridiculously complicated seniority rules), let me give the other side of the story.
Suppress wages
Yeah, this really happens several different ways. First and most obviously, they surpress the wages of the competent. There are people at our plant who are awesome workers who deserve more pay, and lazy people who should be fired and paid nothing at all. But firing is almost impossible, and the union insists everyone gets paid on the same scale. So the people who are as lazy as a pet coon make more than they are worth, and the competent people subsidize this by being paid less. Also, the minute workers unionize, management has to start playing heavy defense and trying as hard as they can to not give raises. Why? Because if they give raises and then have a bad year as a company (such as Chrysler and GM), the union won't take a pay cut, and they may go bankrupt. Every company who has watched the UAW over the years intuitively understands this, so they work hard at not giving an inch even in good times... thus depressing wages. My unionized plant is actually paid less than our non-unionized plants, so it really can happen that way.
defend the inept
Happens constantly. My father in law (a union member) quit his job as a union steward because he was sick of defending people who were in the wrong. At my plant it's the same way. Most grievances are filed by inept workers with a sense of entitlement. Likewise, most of the times management tries to fire inept workers, they can't, because the union defends them tooth and nail. We busted one guy repeatedly for spending hours looking at porn at work, and he kept getting defended. The only way we got him out was by essentially plea-bargaining him: you agree to resign, and we won't make public what you did, so your family won't find out. Otherwise, we couldn't have gotten rid of him, because the contract says you can only be fired if you commit the same offense twice in a six month period, and he was doing it outside the six month window (or at least that's how often we were catching him).
petty crap during "bargaining" years
Happens all the time during bargaining, although to be fair both sides are petty. In my plant, both the union and the management hated a certain seniority rule, but neither wanted to negotiate or change it because "once it's gone we might not be able to get the rule back if we ever want it in the future." So you keep it (and fight over it) even though both sides agree it's stupid.
strong arming members
This has never been more true than under the current US administration. The unions are pushing for two new rules. The first is card check, which allows unions to organize based on a check of who is carrying cards, rather than having a formal vote in which both union and management make their case, and then the members vote. In fact, you don't even have to have a majority to unionize under this! And look at the "employee free choice act" rule change: it takes away the right to a secret ballot and makes people vote publicly for and against the union. That way everyone knows who didn't vote for the union, and coercion can take place. Both of these rules are strong arm tactics that do not benefit employees, and taking away a secret ballot or organizing without a vote or even a majority are all totally un-American.
and take money away for political purposes.
Every union I know of takes dues from its members and spends them to fund the Democratic party. Big Labor is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, and everyone knows it. My father in law sees his dues spent to elect Democrats every year, even though he votes Republican. But that's how unions operate... just like some companies (cough GE cough) try to get in bed with government and carve out monopolies and policies in their favor, Big Labor does the same. They are all about increasing their size, financial and power bases.
Slashdot Mirror
That's really not true. There is fierce competition between companies at the top in many industries. Microsoft vs Apple anyone? Or are you going to try to claim that they are acting "in conjunction"?
You really have a couple of problems here. One, because of the longtime regulation of phones and networks and treating them like utilities, you only have one choice for your connection in many areas. You are lucky if you have two choices. Two, there are huge barriers to entry when it comes to new players entering the market, as well as regulations in some areas that impose monopolies because they don't want multiple utilities coming into the same house (i.e. - one set of water pipes, one set of electric wires, one set of cable, etc).
So it's not really that capitalism or competition don't work, it's that you don't have any capitalism or competition due to longtime government regulation and government imposed monopolies, and now due to the barriers to entry it's too late to get any competition. You talk about there being four companies acting in conjunction and not competing, but that's because they are split geographically. They don't compete because in the geographic regions they cover there most likely is no other competitor. In my part of Ohio, Time Warner Cable is the only game in town... I couldn't get service from Comcast or some other large carrier even if I wanted to. Each is a monopoly in their given area and each therefore acts like a monopoly, which is why they appear to be in conjunction. Contrast that with Microsoft, Apple and Google. Because they all compete in every region and market, you see actual, fierce competition.
Is HTML 5 still structured like XHTML? I hope that it is, because one of the biggest pains in the HTML standard was the inconsistent syntax. I think a strength of strict XHTML was that it could be easily parsed by an XML parser, and if we are going back to the syntax of HTML 4 I think that's a step backwards.
So are they trying to advocate an insecure Hash in their logo? Why, in this day and age, didn't they use a different hash algorithm?
No kidding. These are some of the WORST ideas I've ever seen, for a couple for reasons.
Kudos to google if they keep their money and pay nothing out for any of these. The money will be put to much better use if google uses it to develop more products and services instead.
Side Note: As a freedom loving individual who believes in limited government and free markets, I'd actually rather see the money burned than used for most of these ideas... "Work towards social conscious tax policies"? I might puke...
I tend to agree. Why is it the university's job to police this stuff when they are, for all intents and purposes, a general purpose ISP? Unless they are actually aiding and abetting piracy by running some kind of university sharing service, I really don't think policing all this is their job. I think this is just an example of the industry going after the entity with the deepest pockets rather than the person who is actually breaking the law. It's like going after the state highway department because a drug smuggler drove on the rode.
The only time I think a university should be involved is taking down, say, a pirate bay type website that student sets up using free university web server space that they often provide. But even then, that should be done at the request of the copyright holder. They shouldn't constantly have to peruse thousands of student websites to make sure they aren't doing anything wrong. In short, go after the lawbreaker, not the network provider. If they can sue anyone just because their product is used improperly, then we'll have no networks and no roads.
Cooperative efforts yes, but I disagree with the rest of your statement. The person who puts the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle together is the one who makes the work the rest did useful. So another guy pointed out the pathway? Yes, but he didn't solve the problem. His contributions may have been valuable, and he should be credited for what he did do, but starting something is not the same as finishing something. Starting something is not worth 1 million. Finishing something revolutionary is. Finding the answer that others, including the starter could not, is what make his work worth 1 million. And it doesn't devalue the work of those who's work he built on. It doesn't say they did nothing. It accurately values their contributions as good, but values his as the more revolutionary contribution, which it was.
As the Clay institute even points out in the article, every mathematician follows in the work of others. Everyone does that. There's nothing to reward there. What not everyone does is tie all the pieces together into a revolutionary advance. THAT's why they want to award Perleman 1 million dollars and that's why they think he should accept it. And I agree, he should take the money as it is not a gift, but rather an earned reward for the hard, revolutionary work that he did.
That's because that's not what the debate is about. The Earth's climate is ALWAYS changing, as everyone well knows. Examining ice cores, fossils, geologic record, etc, prove that the Earth's climate is never steady and has always been changing. In fact, it has been both much warmer and much colder than today at various times in history.
The people you bash as "deniers" are actually not denying climate change, but are instead debating the following points that you seem to be ignoring. They argue that:
So you are right that the debate isn't over, but not for the reasons you describe. The debate will continue because people like you don't understand what the debate is about (you seem to think it's about whether or not climate change is happening), and because people like you are making a crisis out of nothing. If man-made global warming is happening, is that a crisis? It may be, if it can be proven that human activity is truly the primary cause. But is climate change in and of itself a crisis? Given that it always changes back and forth, I would say definitely not. Should we shut down our economies and destroy our industry just because the climate is changing, just like it always has? Definitely not! It's just something life has to adapt to. But as long as people like you continue to stick their heads in the sand and scream that change that always happens is "a crisis", and as long as you refuse to see what the debate is actually about, then people like me will keep fighting to educate you.
Main Point: We don't argue that climate change isn't happening, and if that's what you think the debate is about then you are completely wrong.
And that isn't a sexist comment. I've seen quite a few women work 5-10 years in IT, get to about age 30 and then start having kids, after which point they leave to become a stay at home mom or scale back to part time hours. And of the women that do stay full time after having a few kids, they tend to really relegate computers to something they do no more than eight hours a day, and then that's it. Based on my observations (and this may be a stereotype, but I think it's true), the cause of this is that their husbands do WAY less of the childrearing work than the women. So they don't have the time to put in extra hours studying for certifications or trying to gte extra education. Obviously, that's not the case with every woman, but I've seen it happen a lot.
I think these factors are probably pretty good explanations for the statistics we all see. The lower pay on average is probably because the women are younger and less experienced on average as a work force (since a lot of women do leave to be moms instead of conituing on at about age 30), and they are more likely to work part time, which also reduces pay. And with less time available to study, they may be less likely to advance into the higher paying jobs, further increasing the salary gap. I don't think there's any blatant discrimination going on... I just think it's the reality of which gender is most affected by children during the mid-career period.
Agreed... I've never heard of Utahrds, and I've lived in Iowa, Ohio, and Minnesota. Frankly, no one really talks about Utah at all to be honest.
Political, economic AND religious extremists want you dead!
Let's look at the countries going bankrupt now... Greece? Socialist. Portugal? Socialist. Spain? Socialist. UK? Not quite bankrupt yet, but socialist. United States of America? Socialist, and racing towards bankruptcy as fast as congress can carry it. Are any of those countries following Ronald Reagan's model? No! They are, as usual, following the Marxist liberal elitist model, and we have a century of empirical evidence, from the Soviet Union to North Korea to Cuba to Venezuela to Greece to East Germany (the list goes on and on) that flat out proves your Marxist ideas don't work.
So that said, what about the competing capitalist model (which Ronald Reagan generally believed in)? We have centuries worth of empirical evidence that that model DOES work. The most obvious proof was the 18th and 19th century United States of America, which with a very tiny, unobtrusive government went from undeveloped continent to world superpower faster than any nation in the history of the world (and it also saw much improvement during the 1980s when we switched from Carter socialism to Reagan capitalism). But besides that, there are a number of other countries the tilt towards the free market end of the spectrum that have also done well, such as Australia, Hong Kong, and now even China, which has jettisoned much of its communism and socialism in favor of capitalism, because capitalism grows their economy at a rate of more than 8% (similar to what the US used to be capable of doing).
So yeah, the evidence is in. The more capitalist you are, the more wealthy and economically advanced your country is. The more Marxist you are, the quicker it will be that your country goes into bankruptcy (at which point you get riots and/or the government collapses).
Capitalism lifts all boats. Capitalism provides jobs for everyone. And if you look at America, which up until Obama was by and large the best example of capitalism, you will find that even our poor are in the top 10% worldwide, and maybe even in the top 5%. Even most low income families here have their own washing machine and dryer, unlike many nations in Europe. Even low income people here tend to have more space than the tiny flats common in Europe. Even the poor here tend to have one (or often two) cars. They may not be very nice cars, but in most countries in the world you are lucky to have a bicycle. Most of our poor also find some way to get a TV (usually a pretty nice one) and cable TV service, as well as enough food to live on. And a lot of lower income people have cell phones and even luxuries like alcohol and cigarettes, which cost quite a bit. So let's be honest... being poor in a capitalist society may mean you don't have a boat, a luxury car or a second house by the lake, but it still lifts their boat WAY higher than the rest of the world. Go look at Africa, Venezuela or even Europe and then come try to tell me that the poor in capitalist America aren't way better off than the poor, and even the middle class, in a lot of these socialist countries.
Which, ironically, puts them just a few years behind the Chinese in progress, and China has a population of a billion people. Go free enterprise!
Well, to be technical, Yahoo! really isn't a news site. They are more of a web portal, and I'm sure if you pressed them, they would say the purpose of their existence is to entertain visitors with interesting content, not be a news organization. I mean, it's not like this is cnn.com... if comments keep people entertained (read some of them, they ARE entertaining) and coming back to the site then they are going to have comments and discussion.
On a side note though, I do take issue with your statement that there is no room for discussion on a news website. Maybe if there was more discussion of the story we would start getting both sides more reliably, and that's always a good thing.
Actually, they probably aren't directly connected, at least not in the sense of being directly addressable. I work for a large manufacturing company, and our critical plant equipment, though networked, uses private IP addresses that are not routable on the general Internet. We have private IP segments for all equipment of that nature. So for someone to attack our critical production infrastructure, they would first have to breach something else on the network, and then use that as a proxy to forward on the attack into the internal network segments. Is that possible? Of course. But does it take a lot of extra time during the attack and make early reconnaissance of the critical parts of our company difficult? Absolutely.
Now, I don't work for a bank or a nuclear power plant, so I can't guarantee they work the same way. But assuming they do, which is fairly likely, then to attack everything would be very difficult for a hacker. You can't just do an easy drive by exploit, at least not if you are trying to gain information, steal money or anything else that requires precision. Your only real option would be a crippling worm (something like the blaster worm) that causes havoc everywhere at once. And the problem with that kind of attack is that most likely your own nation's populace and corporations would be vulnerable as well (especially in the case of a zero day vulnerability). And maybe you code the virus to avoid certain IP ranges, but it wouldn't be long before someone released a copycat without the restriction.
Cyber-warfare makes for great movie scripts, but it really doesn't work well except in the cases of limited, carefully planned surgical strikes or large, indiscriminate attacks on everything running a certain OS. Doing mass attacks that only target one country and smartly take down their computers is very difficult indeed.
For some reason, everyone loves to ignore the reputation factor when talking about economics and capitalism. Most screwups in business are far more expensive due to reputation damage than they are in direct costs. If a bank has a major incident in which they lose the credit card numbers of thousands of consumers, that can really hurt their reputation, and people are less likely to sign with that bank. That's where banks really feel the pain, and why they do have an incentive to keep security strong.
Not quite right... the true definition of freedom would be that people can do what they want as long as their actions don't infringe upon the rights of anyone else. If you do something that infringes upon the rights of some rich powerful person, does that make it ok just because you didn't hurt a "little one"? Obviously not.
According to the article:
Umm, I attended a major US university and got degrees in computer engineering and computer science. During my senior year, I lived on a dorm floor that was the home of the "computer science learning community", basically where many of the new freshman CS majors elected to live. All of them, every single one, was a gamer, and many were of the stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons, renaissance festival attending, medieval replica weapon carrying, nonbathing comp sci niche. They got into comp sci because they were nerds with very strong interests in gaming, and quickly found out that comp sci was about math and programming, not slacking off playing games. Not one of them it to their sophomore year in computer science (not that no freshman made it, but none of the ones in the learning community did).
I'm sorry NYT, but you are wrong yet again. Having a bunch of gamers does not mean you have a bunch of hackers. In fact, it probably has an inverse correlation, because those who take the time to really master games like WoW, collecting every item and reaching every level, typically don't have the time to become an expert in how computers actually work. No wonder the NYT is going bankrupt... this is about the same level of accuracy we see in their political and economic stories as well.
The fact that one of the few books on this "hackers" desk is a C# book is the surprising part. I wonder how well hacking with C# is working out for him? Lol. Definitely a staged picture. I'm sure it looks good to people who know nothing about computers though.
And this is exactly why I bought a cheapo Dodge Caliber base model with as few electronics as possible in it. After buying a used BMW and having all kinds of crazy problems with the electronics. Problems included:
After that experience, I basically said "screw it" and bought a car with a pull bar for adjusting the seat, manual locks and crank windows, and a manual transmission. And I've never had any breakdowns at all in the 35,000 miles I've put on it. I love computers and technology, but as a software developer I know how hard it is to write bug free code (almost impossible in all but the simplest programs). A bug is no big deal if you are sitting at your desk using facebook, but I'd rather have a simpler system in place when driving down the highway at 75 mph every day.
That's unlikely. There's no such thing as unlimited free speech. You can't lie in a courtroom and claim free speech. That's perjury. You can't yell fire in a movie theater when there is no fire. That puts people's lives in danger. The speech of spammers is not covered by free speech laws because it is harrassment (constantly bombing someone with unsolicited messages they can't opt out of would be considered harrassment by probably any jury of the spammers peers) and fraud, because spam is almost always for fake viagra or something of the like. Both of those are not protected forms of speech.
They do have Donald Knuth, so that's saying something.
This is absolutely silly. The EU didn't somehow save us from Microsoft, and they didn't give us any competing browsers. We got those from the private sector, and government regulation didn't do jack.
Did the EU give us Firefox/Mozilla? No. Opera? No. Safari? No. Konqueror? No. Chrome? No. And there have been many other browsers that have been developed as well. All by the private sector, and a number of them were under development before the EU started regulating everything.
And more importantly, did any of you out there switch to Firefox because the EU told you to? Or was it because the EU told Microsoft they had to make IE uninstallable that you suddenly switched to Firefox? I'm pretty sure no one did that. We all went out and downloaded Firefox, in many cases before the regulation took hold, because it was a better browser than IE 6. It complied to standards, had many useful plugins, and most importantly had tabs. It was a better product hands down, and it quickly started gaining marketshare. The reason Netscape got destroyed earlier was because it was not superior to the Microsoft product (at best it was equal, though I'm not convinced it was) and it had a worse business model that at one point included charging a fee for the browser. Obviously that was the wrong business model to choose, as evidenced by the fact that there are over a half a dozen competing browsers now, and all of them are free downloads. The browser just wasn't a peice of software people were willing to pay for.
Frankly, this worshipping at the shrine of the EU and its regulation is just plain boneheaded and wrong. Even if governmental regulation was a good thing (something I vehemently disagree with in almost all cases), using this as an example is stupid. Especially since this wasn't a monopoly. If it were, Microsoft could have charged a fee for IE after driving its competitors from the market (in a real monopoly the monopoly holder always gets to jack up the price when there is no competition), but obviously Microsoft couldn't do that. It would have been overtaken by Mozilla almost immediately, because it was also a free browser. In some markets, competition simply forces the price to zero, and that's what happened here. There were no monopolistic barriers to competition; just a temporary lack of a browser with good enough features and a decent business model. And once that browser (Firefox) appeared, no one minded downloading and installing it onto their OS, despite the fact that they already had IE.
PS - A little known fact is that Netscape almost totally dominated the browser market before IE jumped into the fray. In fact, many sites were designed to work exclusively with Netscape, and even required a user agent string beginning with "Mozilla" to run. In effect, if anyone had a monopoly, it was actually Netscape at the beginning, when they even had a monopoly on content. IE in the early days actually had to spoof the user agent string and pretend to be Mozilla just to get the site to work with it. IE was the underdog and fiercest competitor, which is why it won in the end. It had nothing to do with monopoly.
Except that none of the sort of data you are talking about it going to be on a laptop. It's going to be stored on a corporate server and accessed by some application like SAP or something. Remote users may be able to log into the server through some kind of web interface or something, but they aren't going to be storing the data on their machine. And as far as protecting the server goes, since a potential theif most likely won't get physical access, they have to do some sort of remote exploit. And if they are able to pull that off, then they'll probably be running in the user space as the application they exploited, likely making the disk encryption moot.
Umm... you actually make way less in the private sector. A USA Today article that appeared last week confirmed what many of us have suspected for years, especially since this recession started. And that is that government employees make more than private sector employees. Period. They make more in salary (approximately 30% more), they have far better benefits (healthcare, pension, etc), and they get more perks. It's not the working/middle class vs the wealthy anymore... the two classes we have now are apparently the unionized government aristocracy and all the private sector schmucks footing the bill for it all.
By the way, I know that in this article some government types tried to explain this away by claiming that salaries are so high because the government only fills really important jobs, and that if government employees took equivalent jobs in the private sector they would be getting paid less (all this was said without any evidence). My assertion (also without proof, but I think fairly likely) is that the people in government could not get the equivalent jobs in the private sector because they aren't qualified enough. Hence, they are still being overpaid. And my empirical evidence is that there really aren't any private sector organizations as disorganized, inefficient and generally inept as the federal government (just think about the failed TSA pdf redacting story that was on here the other day). Are our best and brightest really working there? Are people who would otherwise be qualified for important private sector jobs really giving up their salaries en masse so that they can join the ranks of "public servants"? Maybe at the cabinet secretary level this happens, but at pretty much all the other levels of the bureaucracy, I think not. If you work for the government, you are not a "servant", and all us serfs out in the private sector are overpaying you.
And as an American in IT working at a unionized plant (I'm not in the union, but I write programs to do scheduling and such based on their ridiculously complicated seniority rules), let me give the other side of the story.
Yeah, this really happens several different ways. First and most obviously, they surpress the wages of the competent. There are people at our plant who are awesome workers who deserve more pay, and lazy people who should be fired and paid nothing at all. But firing is almost impossible, and the union insists everyone gets paid on the same scale. So the people who are as lazy as a pet coon make more than they are worth, and the competent people subsidize this by being paid less. Also, the minute workers unionize, management has to start playing heavy defense and trying as hard as they can to not give raises. Why? Because if they give raises and then have a bad year as a company (such as Chrysler and GM), the union won't take a pay cut, and they may go bankrupt. Every company who has watched the UAW over the years intuitively understands this, so they work hard at not giving an inch even in good times... thus depressing wages. My unionized plant is actually paid less than our non-unionized plants, so it really can happen that way.
Happens constantly. My father in law (a union member) quit his job as a union steward because he was sick of defending people who were in the wrong. At my plant it's the same way. Most grievances are filed by inept workers with a sense of entitlement. Likewise, most of the times management tries to fire inept workers, they can't, because the union defends them tooth and nail. We busted one guy repeatedly for spending hours looking at porn at work, and he kept getting defended. The only way we got him out was by essentially plea-bargaining him: you agree to resign, and we won't make public what you did, so your family won't find out. Otherwise, we couldn't have gotten rid of him, because the contract says you can only be fired if you commit the same offense twice in a six month period, and he was doing it outside the six month window (or at least that's how often we were catching him).
Happens all the time during bargaining, although to be fair both sides are petty. In my plant, both the union and the management hated a certain seniority rule, but neither wanted to negotiate or change it because "once it's gone we might not be able to get the rule back if we ever want it in the future." So you keep it (and fight over it) even though both sides agree it's stupid.
This has never been more true than under the current US administration. The unions are pushing for two new rules. The first is card check, which allows unions to organize based on a check of who is carrying cards, rather than having a formal vote in which both union and management make their case, and then the members vote. In fact, you don't even have to have a majority to unionize under this! And look at the "employee free choice act" rule change: it takes away the right to a secret ballot and makes people vote publicly for and against the union. That way everyone knows who didn't vote for the union, and coercion can take place. Both of these rules are strong arm tactics that do not benefit employees, and taking away a secret ballot or organizing without a vote or even a majority are all totally un-American.
Every union I know of takes dues from its members and spends them to fund the Democratic party. Big Labor is pretty much a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic party, and everyone knows it. My father in law sees his dues spent to elect Democrats every year, even though he votes Republican. But that's how unions operate... just like some companies (cough GE cough) try to get in bed with government and carve out monopolies and policies in their favor, Big Labor does the same. They are all about increasing their size, financial and power bases.