Lets say Google gets around $2 CPM on normal searches. That means a single search is worth something like $0.002 for Google. It's going to take lots of searches and ad clicks from every user to even cover the costs of the netbook.
Exactly. And because of infinite demand, you'll really need a lot of clicks, but you probably won't get many. Here's why. Let's say you make something free. Say a McDonald's hamburger. Suddenly you are going to have everyone running out to get the hamburger, even though they weren't planning to get one today, just because it is free. Now consider a netbook. I really don't want one, but heck, if it's free I'll take one! Everyone would take one, whether they really wanted one before or not, because it's a free portable computer. Now most of those people will later put that netbook on a shelf to gather dust as soon as the novelty wears off, because they really didn't have a deep need/desire for the netbook in the first place. They've probably got a desktop or laptop that has more computing power, more privacy, and runs a greater variety of apps, so they won't really need the netbook. The problem for google is that each of those netbooks still cost them 150, and now they don't even have people using them and clicking on ads.
So this will be a guaranteed fiasco for Google should they choose to go through with this. They will have to make about 305 million of the netbooks because everyone in the US will want one (ok, maybe 250 million because there will be some 1 year olds and grandmas that don't, but anyone who knows how to use a computer will probably take one). Multiply those millions of units by 150 dollars, and that's how much advertising dollars google will need to have just to break even. And that's oversimplifying things, because since the apps live in the cloud, you have to have the server infrastructure, bandwidth costs, engineering, support techs, software developers, etc. Their costs will be much greater than the costs for the Windows OS, because at least with a Windows OS you don't have to provide a server, bandwidth, PC, etc, because it's off running on a user PC somewhere. I think you start to see how there is no way this will possibly happen... no way can they get the ad revenue to cover this. Plus it's naive to assume that they will even get that many users (something they would have to have, since that's the only way they could truly corner the ad market and charge the premium prices they'd need to pay for this), since most people will probably stick with Linux, Mac, or Windows.
Clearly this person has no clue as to what ASP is.
Absolutely true. As a web-developer, let me clue you (the grandparent) in... ASP is a server side programming language used to create HTML based web pages on the fly. It is exactly the same kind of technology as PHP... it's on the server and, and the client has no knowledge of it. All it gets is HTML, and it doesn't care whether it was static or created by PHP or ASP on the fly.
And just to add to the chorus, I have viewed many a webpage that was generated by ASP using firefox.
Lol, the party you refer to was actually called the "Bull Moose" party, not the "Bull" party. Although I can't blame you for getting confused, because we have a couple of parties today that could easily be called the "Bull" party as well, because everything that comes out of their mouths is Bull.
You can't write an algorithm that takes as input another algorithm and outputs whether that second algorithm is correct or not.
I personally disagree with this statement, on the grounds that humans can take programs and determine if they are correct. No one understands exactly how the brain works, but it is clearly very capable of making any calculation a computer could make (albeit at slower speeds), and in that sense it is a computer. Again, no one understands the actual programming, how the mind moves from item to item, but it does often move from sequential thought to sequential thought as a program might. Though different than the computers we have invented ourselves, I think there are enough similarities to say that we work as an enormously complex, self-modifying algorithm, and that particular algorithm can in fact take an arbitrary program and prove correctness. Granted, we aren't born with this ability, and require training (hence the self modifying part), but a properly trained computer scientist/mathemetician will have developed, in his mind, an appropriate algorithm for generally verifying program correctness.
My basic conclusion, then, is that because we know intelligence exists, then it should be possible to construct it (though that is exceedingly hard). In the specific case of proving correctness, though, we may not even need to be a self modifying algorithm, because once someone has learned enough about computer science/math, they have the general tools in their mind to prove correctness, and they need not add any more logical rules. But for sure, as long as desiging a self modifying algorithm is considered fair game, then designing an algorithm that can become capable of proving correctness is possible.
But this whole discussion is actually a moot point, because ClearView doesn't fall (or claim to fall) into the category of determining whether a program is correct. In fact, it doesn't claim to make even a subset of a program correct. It simply replaces specific cases of undesirable behavior with behavior that, while not 100% equivalent, is still less likely to cause major problems. For example, if code has a buffer overflow problem, it is obviously not correct because it can be exploited. If replaced with a fixed length buffer, it won't be equivalent to the original, but the program at least will do nothing more than crash, as opposed to allowing a hacker to gain control of your machine. This is just an exercise in making broken code slightly less dangerous; it's not about proving correctness in any way. And therefore, it is totally possible and outside the scope of the algorithm-that-verifies-correctness problem.
A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank.
For large volumes of data, this makes a lot of sense, even for some enterprise users. My manufacturing facility (1200 employees, probably over 1TB of data) does this, and if you have a pretty big box and high density tapes this is very workable. We don't do it nightly, but we do put a backup in the bank every week.
For larger enterprises, such as the Fortune 500 company that owns my plant, it makes more sense to actually have a backup datacenter in a separate location several miles away. You can pay to lay have some very large data connections laid, and then you are all set (assuming you don't live in a San Francisco earthquake zone, and assuming your city doesn't get nuked. Fires, tornadoes and other disasters aren't likely to destroy a big enough area to get them both). This is *FAR* more practical than some slow and insecure cloud computing service, and for the amount of data involved, way cheaper as well.
Personally, I think cloud computing/storage is a bit of a fad that is at best going to be niche market unless bandwidth is vastly increased. And even then, you still have security issues, uptime issues, performance issues, etc, that are all complicated by a third party being involved. All the marketing hype aside, I really haven't seen a killer use for any of these cloud services as yet.
In 1934, German citizens wearing brownshirts were encouraged to spy on each other and report possible dissidents to the authorities. So yes, this is very Nazi/Fascist.
Fixed!
And yes, I've read 1984 but just in case anyone doubts, this can/did happen in real life also.
Unluckily for me, it happened to be Symantec's. For this day I've still tried to get it off my system, with no luck. Every week it popups during night, scans all of my harddrives and tells me I have to buy their product to protect myself - just like every scareware product. And it only detected some *tracking cookies*.
Yeah, that sounds exactly how it worked on my system up until the latest version. I was going to dump Symantec for something else (finally), but then heard they had made major improvements to performance and other issues you mentioned, so I tried the trial version and was hooked. If I'm going to run anti-virus software, it WILL be Norton (at least this year). Everything you mention above has been fixed. The popups, the goofy stuff about tracking cookies, the slowness, it's all better. And I'm not a shill for Norton either, and I'm not someone who works for them. I just genuinely like the latest version of their product and find it to be better. Credit where credit is due...
...so... humanities departments are basically a botnet executing a DDoS on the brains of unsuspecting undergraduates?
As a recent college graduate, I have to say that's about the best description of the humanities departments at my university that I've ever heard. I'm so glad I'm an engineer and don't have to deal with all the fluff and wishful thinking posing as reality anymore.
And a similar "scientific" poll on MSNBC revealed that 2% of American voters in the 2008 elections really were named Mickey Mouse, and every vote for left wing candidates was valid! (I suspect ACORN was watching).
I was about to say, I think this story just ruined a perfectly good Star Trek episode. Oh well, maybe the 2-dimensional telepathic overloading creatures that were dragging the Enterprise toward the cosmic string still exist! Then again, maybe not:).
I dunno, I've been able to rip thousands, maybe tens of thousands of songs off my CDs and store them on a single hard drive. I think that's fairly scalable:D.
If I send 10 emails a day, which is probably much more than your average computer user...
Actually, I think that's way less than an average computer user. That may be average for at home personal use, but what about businesses? Do you realize how much correspondence happens via email? The costs of this would kill business (and if it comes down to centmail killing business via adoption, or business killing centmail by not adopting it, I think we ought to chip in and buy centmail's tombstone right now).
This is a really stupid idea for other reasons as well, because part of the reason IM, Email, Desktop Sharing, Videoconferencing, VoIP and other technologies have caught on is that they allow collaboration for free, as opposed to shipping things, paying for expensive phone line teleconferencing or traveling to meet with someone. If centmail were by some miracle able to catch on, five years from now someone will ask why we are paying for each message and will invent a "free" message carrying protocol. Basically they'll reinvent email and we'll be right back where we started.
And lastly, if this were adopted, all the message traffic would have to go through some central authority or clearinghouse for centmail, in order to be charged a bill and given the certificate. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have all my email going through one group. That's a security risk if nothing else (and there are other problems).
Maybe we need to look past "secret ballots are good" and focus on why we consider them to be good, and on whether that good is being preserved under current systems.
They are considered good because they prevent bribery and coercion. In other words, if someone says, "Vote for X or I'll break your legs!", all you have to do is say you voted for X when you come out of the booth. You can still vote for whoever you want, and they have no way of following up. It also prevents bribes, because if you bribe someone to vote for X, how will you know if they did what you are paying them for? Thus, no one directly bribes anyone.
The reason the system is bad, though, is because you can't go back after the fact and check for ballots cast illegally. You can't check for fraud by groups like ACORN (ACORN falsely registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys in Nevada and has been indicted in 14+ states), because you can't tell if one of the ballots was caused by a person you found out later was committing a fraud. This is easilly fixable, but the key is preventing fraud by requiring every voter to present photo ID (this was upheld by the Supreme Court several times, btw). If you make sure that everyone who got in and voted was who they say they are, then you don't have to worry (as much) about checking for fraud or matching ballots later. Under the current system, though, you have states letting people show up with utility bills (easilly falsified), a mortgage statement (also easilly falsified), or even a friend who will vouch for you!
Basically, to put it in IT security terms, the problem with elections is that we authorize without really authenticating. Would any of you give the password to your computer to someone you met in an Internet chatroom? Maybe this person claims to be someone you know, but would you really send him your password without verifying that he really is the acquaintance he claims to be? Of course you wouldn't... no rational person would. Why, then, do we do this with our elections, which determine who controls, not a computer, but a country? Why do we let our leaders refuse to pass laws requiring the authentication of voters BEFORE they vote? Why do we let them stop authentication laws (such as photo ID) with BS excuses like, "Someone might get disenfranchised?" We are ALL disenfranchised when elections can't be proven to be free and fair. The problem is not the secret ballot, it is simply the lack of authentication and the corrupt politicians who block reform and run cover for the cheaters.
You have to be kidding about Silverlight overtaking Flash. Not only has Silverlight failed to take any notable market share to date, many projects that started with Silverlight have switched to Flash (or even Java and JavaScript).
You are partly right in what you are saying, but wrong if you are implying that Silverlight is anything less than a big leap forward over Flash and Javascript. As a developer, the first time I used Silverlight I swore I'd never go back to AJAX or anything else. It is so easy, well designed, well integrated with Visual Studio and uses the same.Net languages I'm used to. It really feels elegant to use in many ways, and it's much faster to make something in Silverlight than other technologies, ESPECIALLY AJAX.
However, after the initial euphoria wore off, I ended up choosing not to do anything in Silverlight and to design my new projects using AJAX, again. The main reason was that, because Silverlight is not heavily adopted yet, I don't know what support will be like five years from now. Will it be dropped by Microsoft due to lack of adoption? Also, can I count on developers moving into my role behind me to know Silverlight, since it isn't heavily used right now? I think it is an outstanding technology, but until it's more widely adopted, its status will be uncertain. And that's the real catch-22... as long as it is uncertain, more people won't adopt it, at least not quickly. And that, I think, is the biggest reason it is failing to take any market share from Flash. Everyone is waiting around to see if it goes anywhere, and as long as everyone just waits, Silverlight can't take off despite being a good technology.
And this brings up an interesting side question: Most likely if there was a major, open industry standard around Silverlight that anyone could use, the uncertainty would be dissolved and adoption would start. Does this situation indicate that the market is no longer receptive to proprietary standards (at least in areas such as the web, where open standards are the norm)?
I think any IT department that can't figure out a strategy to upgrade IE6 is either useless or fucking lazy. I simply don't believe in this mythical "mountain of HTML code" that has so many problems that couldn't be fixed in a relatively short space of time by a competent professional.
This actually is true though, believe it or not. I am a web developer for a very large fortune 500 company, and you have to consider how things work in a really large corporation. They have been developing apps for IE 6 for years. Once written and no longer actively developed, these apps are put into maintenance "keep the lights on" mode more or less, and you can often have a single developer in charge of supporting 8-12 of them, while at the same time doing development with a team on some new application. Now I know a lot of people say 90% of the work done on software is support, but that hasn't been true in my observations, perhaps because most of our programmers are quite competent. At the very least, there's a curve involved where most of that support is done within a year, at most two years, after the app is released. At that time most of the bugs are found, and after that, aside from very occasional bug fixes, the apps can be left alone, with many of them managed by a single person.
So here's the point: while one person can manage 8-12 stable apps without much difficulty, it does become a mountain when they have to convert ALL of them to IE 7 compatibility, especially when you don't have to work on them much and don't know the code that well. My organization has been working towards an IE 7 conversion plan for probably 1.5-2 years now, and it looks like we will be finally making the switch this fall. And nobody's "smoking crack" (as another poster said) for not having gotten it done faster or having a faster plan, or even making the "mountain of HTML" excuse. Unless you stop all current development of new applications, it DOES take a while. The only part that I think might be a little bit of "smoking crack" is the fact that IE 8 got released during the conversion plan, and we aren't just going to switch to that and catch up while we're at it. But I do think they have a plan for moving to 8 a year after we hit 7, so it's not like we are going to sit still either.
In conclusion, if you ever worked for a really big business, you wouldn't make you ungenerous statements. Big objects have big inertia, and big codebases.
I have been looking for formal academic training in computing security for quite some time.
Try Iowa State University's program. It is one of the charter schools under a 1994 act signed by former President Clinton to do research and training in this area. The school has an excellent program (I actually attended it) with some good research going on, as well as very good formal courses. It's not just CISSP stuff or competitions, although the school does very well in competitions as well and hosts some of its own (and ISU undergraduate team also just won a major hardware hacking competition, beating out many prestigious schools). Personally, I'm very glad I attended ISU and studied in their security program, because it has made me a much better developer.
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
I highly disagree with this statement from General Eisenhower. While it may or may not have been debatable back then, I don't think there is any way you can claim this is true now, at least in the modern United States. According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
So if Americans in the bottom 40% income-wise do not pay any taxes, then how is it robbing them of their food or clothing when guns are purchased? How is it robbery when the other 60% spend their own money that they earned on missiles?
Now, one could argue that the bottom 40% commit robbery, because they often vote for missiles and don't have to foot the bill (while some in the top 60% don't want to spend any money on missiles), and those in the bottom 40% often vote for social and welfare programs that they don't have to pay for, but I digress. The point is that, if anyone in America is starving or without clothes today, they are certainly in the bottom 40% of income earners, and they don't pay a dime for missiles, so clearly they aren't the ones being robbed. And if their argument is that that money could have been spent on social programs for them instead, well, sorry, but someone else choosing not to give their money to you (via a social program) is not robbing you. It is only robbery if they take what you rightfully earned and is rightfully yours.
I expect none, because what the proponents of mass transit always fail to tell you is how heavily subsidized all forms of it are by the government. Amtrak, for instance, has not made a profit in 40 years and just got another billion dollars in the stimulus bill. And it isn't just Amtrak... it's mass transit buses, light rails, etc, just about everywhere, except perhaps in the extremely densely populated areas like New York City. Even medium sized city groups like Minneapolis/St. Paul have to heavily subsidize fares for their light rail lines and bus lines, or no one will ride them.
If you are for mass transit, fine, but lets at least have an honest debate about it with some real numbers. Anything based on average fare prices is inherently dishonest. You must include the billions spent in taxes too.
And here's a thought that ought to settle the question about which is cheaper once and for all: if mass transit was really a better deal, wouldn't we all ride it? Could it be that the reason they have to pay us to take mass transit (by subsidizing it) is that it isn't that great, and we wouldn't naturally pick it if we were left to our own devices? So yeah, I expect there is absolutely zero benefit to mass transit, or it would have caught on in the marketplace long ago. People aren't stupid... they don't choose to do things that don't benefit them over things that do.
Is it just me who finds it ironic that nuclear power plants are going to be used to power drilling for oil, which will be used to run chemical power plants? I still question why we don't use nuclear power in all our power plants.
And for all of those reasons, my company drops a couple ethernet ports to every office, and we make people use wired when they are in their offices (by hooking the wire to the laptop dock). And we don't hear any complaining, because ethernet is still much faster and is also much more reliable than wireless is when you have a whole office online.
If the business tells IT it wants PC's powered off when not in use, then it will happen.
That's true, but it's not the only reason IT isn't powering them down. We've talked about it in my group, but it makes a lot more sense to leave them on for two reasons: updates and boot times. Updates because if computers are left on and locked (which a fair number of people do) then they can grab SMS and Windows updates. Boot times because a lot of people come in in a hurry to get into outlook to figure out where their meeting is and don't want to wait 7 or 8 minutes for the machine to boot up and open Outlook.
Also, considering I work in IT for a factory, we wouldn't save much power anyway. Most of our PCs are shared across all three shifts, so they get used around the clock. People feel pretty free to use any PC, even those in the office cubicle areas, so unless you have a locked office door the PC is probably getting used even at night.
Yeah but what can we do? We're just a bunch of people that bitch and moan on slashdot.
If only there was some respected, well known figures in the tech world that could try and get the ear of people that mattered.
If only there was someone that already had advised the Obama administration, other national governments and even spoke at the UN that could raise the concerns with people that matter.:)
We all could have not voted for Obama, as I know many of us did. If we would have made better choices (and I'm not saying John McCain was it), we might not have a government that is trying to nationalize everything that moves. The first step would be a deep clean of congress, voting out about 90% of the incumbents, but a really good second step would be not voting for people like Obama, who cling to irrational ideas that say government intervention in private industry is successful and helpful, despite how often the 20th century has proven them wrong. People that can't learn form history shouldn't be in office.
I know we don't have any statesmen on slashdot that have the ear of those in power, but the slashdot effect would suggest we could wield large amounts of power at the ballot box.
Learning is the mental absorption and retention of information. Whether the information you learned is true or false is something else again, and I think that's the point he was making. Some universities may, in fact, be causing their students to learn false information. Brainwashing is a form of learning too.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. And because of infinite demand, you'll really need a lot of clicks, but you probably won't get many. Here's why. Let's say you make something free. Say a McDonald's hamburger. Suddenly you are going to have everyone running out to get the hamburger, even though they weren't planning to get one today, just because it is free. Now consider a netbook. I really don't want one, but heck, if it's free I'll take one! Everyone would take one, whether they really wanted one before or not, because it's a free portable computer. Now most of those people will later put that netbook on a shelf to gather dust as soon as the novelty wears off, because they really didn't have a deep need/desire for the netbook in the first place. They've probably got a desktop or laptop that has more computing power, more privacy, and runs a greater variety of apps, so they won't really need the netbook. The problem for google is that each of those netbooks still cost them 150, and now they don't even have people using them and clicking on ads.
So this will be a guaranteed fiasco for Google should they choose to go through with this. They will have to make about 305 million of the netbooks because everyone in the US will want one (ok, maybe 250 million because there will be some 1 year olds and grandmas that don't, but anyone who knows how to use a computer will probably take one). Multiply those millions of units by 150 dollars, and that's how much advertising dollars google will need to have just to break even. And that's oversimplifying things, because since the apps live in the cloud, you have to have the server infrastructure, bandwidth costs, engineering, support techs, software developers, etc. Their costs will be much greater than the costs for the Windows OS, because at least with a Windows OS you don't have to provide a server, bandwidth, PC, etc, because it's off running on a user PC somewhere. I think you start to see how there is no way this will possibly happen... no way can they get the ad revenue to cover this. Plus it's naive to assume that they will even get that many users (something they would have to have, since that's the only way they could truly corner the ad market and charge the premium prices they'd need to pay for this), since most people will probably stick with Linux, Mac, or Windows.
Absolutely true. As a web-developer, let me clue you (the grandparent) in... ASP is a server side programming language used to create HTML based web pages on the fly. It is exactly the same kind of technology as PHP... it's on the server and, and the client has no knowledge of it. All it gets is HTML, and it doesn't care whether it was static or created by PHP or ASP on the fly.
And just to add to the chorus, I have viewed many a webpage that was generated by ASP using firefox.
Lol, the party you refer to was actually called the "Bull Moose" party, not the "Bull" party. Although I can't blame you for getting confused, because we have a couple of parties today that could easily be called the "Bull" party as well, because everything that comes out of their mouths is Bull.
I personally disagree with this statement, on the grounds that humans can take programs and determine if they are correct. No one understands exactly how the brain works, but it is clearly very capable of making any calculation a computer could make (albeit at slower speeds), and in that sense it is a computer. Again, no one understands the actual programming, how the mind moves from item to item, but it does often move from sequential thought to sequential thought as a program might. Though different than the computers we have invented ourselves, I think there are enough similarities to say that we work as an enormously complex, self-modifying algorithm, and that particular algorithm can in fact take an arbitrary program and prove correctness. Granted, we aren't born with this ability, and require training (hence the self modifying part), but a properly trained computer scientist/mathemetician will have developed, in his mind, an appropriate algorithm for generally verifying program correctness.
My basic conclusion, then, is that because we know intelligence exists, then it should be possible to construct it (though that is exceedingly hard). In the specific case of proving correctness, though, we may not even need to be a self modifying algorithm, because once someone has learned enough about computer science/math, they have the general tools in their mind to prove correctness, and they need not add any more logical rules. But for sure, as long as desiging a self modifying algorithm is considered fair game, then designing an algorithm that can become capable of proving correctness is possible.
But this whole discussion is actually a moot point, because ClearView doesn't fall (or claim to fall) into the category of determining whether a program is correct. In fact, it doesn't claim to make even a subset of a program correct. It simply replaces specific cases of undesirable behavior with behavior that, while not 100% equivalent, is still less likely to cause major problems. For example, if code has a buffer overflow problem, it is obviously not correct because it can be exploited. If replaced with a fixed length buffer, it won't be equivalent to the original, but the program at least will do nothing more than crash, as opposed to allowing a hacker to gain control of your machine. This is just an exercise in making broken code slightly less dangerous; it's not about proving correctness in any way. And therefore, it is totally possible and outside the scope of the algorithm-that-verifies-correctness problem.
For large volumes of data, this makes a lot of sense, even for some enterprise users. My manufacturing facility (1200 employees, probably over 1TB of data) does this, and if you have a pretty big box and high density tapes this is very workable. We don't do it nightly, but we do put a backup in the bank every week.
For larger enterprises, such as the Fortune 500 company that owns my plant, it makes more sense to actually have a backup datacenter in a separate location several miles away. You can pay to lay have some very large data connections laid, and then you are all set (assuming you don't live in a San Francisco earthquake zone, and assuming your city doesn't get nuked. Fires, tornadoes and other disasters aren't likely to destroy a big enough area to get them both). This is *FAR* more practical than some slow and insecure cloud computing service, and for the amount of data involved, way cheaper as well.
Personally, I think cloud computing/storage is a bit of a fad that is at best going to be niche market unless bandwidth is vastly increased. And even then, you still have security issues, uptime issues, performance issues, etc, that are all complicated by a third party being involved. All the marketing hype aside, I really haven't seen a killer use for any of these cloud services as yet.
Fixed!
And yes, I've read 1984 but just in case anyone doubts, this can/did happen in real life also.
Is there a known online repository of other forms similar to this somewhere?
Yeah, that sounds exactly how it worked on my system up until the latest version. I was going to dump Symantec for something else (finally), but then heard they had made major improvements to performance and other issues you mentioned, so I tried the trial version and was hooked. If I'm going to run anti-virus software, it WILL be Norton (at least this year). Everything you mention above has been fixed. The popups, the goofy stuff about tracking cookies, the slowness, it's all better. And I'm not a shill for Norton either, and I'm not someone who works for them. I just genuinely like the latest version of their product and find it to be better. Credit where credit is due...
As a recent college graduate, I have to say that's about the best description of the humanities departments at my university that I've ever heard. I'm so glad I'm an engineer and don't have to deal with all the fluff and wishful thinking posing as reality anymore.
And a similar "scientific" poll on MSNBC revealed that 2% of American voters in the 2008 elections really were named Mickey Mouse, and every vote for left wing candidates was valid! (I suspect ACORN was watching).
I was about to say, I think this story just ruined a perfectly good Star Trek episode. Oh well, maybe the 2-dimensional telepathic overloading creatures that were dragging the Enterprise toward the cosmic string still exist! Then again, maybe not :).
I dunno, I've been able to rip thousands, maybe tens of thousands of songs off my CDs and store them on a single hard drive. I think that's fairly scalable :D.
Actually, I think that's way less than an average computer user. That may be average for at home personal use, but what about businesses? Do you realize how much correspondence happens via email? The costs of this would kill business (and if it comes down to centmail killing business via adoption, or business killing centmail by not adopting it, I think we ought to chip in and buy centmail's tombstone right now).
This is a really stupid idea for other reasons as well, because part of the reason IM, Email, Desktop Sharing, Videoconferencing, VoIP and other technologies have caught on is that they allow collaboration for free, as opposed to shipping things, paying for expensive phone line teleconferencing or traveling to meet with someone. If centmail were by some miracle able to catch on, five years from now someone will ask why we are paying for each message and will invent a "free" message carrying protocol. Basically they'll reinvent email and we'll be right back where we started.
And lastly, if this were adopted, all the message traffic would have to go through some central authority or clearinghouse for centmail, in order to be charged a bill and given the certificate. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have all my email going through one group. That's a security risk if nothing else (and there are other problems).
They are considered good because they prevent bribery and coercion. In other words, if someone says, "Vote for X or I'll break your legs!", all you have to do is say you voted for X when you come out of the booth. You can still vote for whoever you want, and they have no way of following up. It also prevents bribes, because if you bribe someone to vote for X, how will you know if they did what you are paying them for? Thus, no one directly bribes anyone.
The reason the system is bad, though, is because you can't go back after the fact and check for ballots cast illegally. You can't check for fraud by groups like ACORN (ACORN falsely registered the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys in Nevada and has been indicted in 14+ states), because you can't tell if one of the ballots was caused by a person you found out later was committing a fraud. This is easilly fixable, but the key is preventing fraud by requiring every voter to present photo ID (this was upheld by the Supreme Court several times, btw). If you make sure that everyone who got in and voted was who they say they are, then you don't have to worry (as much) about checking for fraud or matching ballots later. Under the current system, though, you have states letting people show up with utility bills (easilly falsified), a mortgage statement (also easilly falsified), or even a friend who will vouch for you!
Basically, to put it in IT security terms, the problem with elections is that we authorize without really authenticating. Would any of you give the password to your computer to someone you met in an Internet chatroom? Maybe this person claims to be someone you know, but would you really send him your password without verifying that he really is the acquaintance he claims to be? Of course you wouldn't... no rational person would. Why, then, do we do this with our elections, which determine who controls, not a computer, but a country? Why do we let our leaders refuse to pass laws requiring the authentication of voters BEFORE they vote? Why do we let them stop authentication laws (such as photo ID) with BS excuses like, "Someone might get disenfranchised?" We are ALL disenfranchised when elections can't be proven to be free and fair. The problem is not the secret ballot, it is simply the lack of authentication and the corrupt politicians who block reform and run cover for the cheaters.
You are partly right in what you are saying, but wrong if you are implying that Silverlight is anything less than a big leap forward over Flash and Javascript. As a developer, the first time I used Silverlight I swore I'd never go back to AJAX or anything else. It is so easy, well designed, well integrated with Visual Studio and uses the same .Net languages I'm used to. It really feels elegant to use in many ways, and it's much faster to make something in Silverlight than other technologies, ESPECIALLY AJAX.
However, after the initial euphoria wore off, I ended up choosing not to do anything in Silverlight and to design my new projects using AJAX, again. The main reason was that, because Silverlight is not heavily adopted yet, I don't know what support will be like five years from now. Will it be dropped by Microsoft due to lack of adoption? Also, can I count on developers moving into my role behind me to know Silverlight, since it isn't heavily used right now? I think it is an outstanding technology, but until it's more widely adopted, its status will be uncertain. And that's the real catch-22... as long as it is uncertain, more people won't adopt it, at least not quickly. And that, I think, is the biggest reason it is failing to take any market share from Flash. Everyone is waiting around to see if it goes anywhere, and as long as everyone just waits, Silverlight can't take off despite being a good technology.
And this brings up an interesting side question: Most likely if there was a major, open industry standard around Silverlight that anyone could use, the uncertainty would be dissolved and adoption would start. Does this situation indicate that the market is no longer receptive to proprietary standards (at least in areas such as the web, where open standards are the norm)?
This actually is true though, believe it or not. I am a web developer for a very large fortune 500 company, and you have to consider how things work in a really large corporation. They have been developing apps for IE 6 for years. Once written and no longer actively developed, these apps are put into maintenance "keep the lights on" mode more or less, and you can often have a single developer in charge of supporting 8-12 of them, while at the same time doing development with a team on some new application. Now I know a lot of people say 90% of the work done on software is support, but that hasn't been true in my observations, perhaps because most of our programmers are quite competent. At the very least, there's a curve involved where most of that support is done within a year, at most two years, after the app is released. At that time most of the bugs are found, and after that, aside from very occasional bug fixes, the apps can be left alone, with many of them managed by a single person.
So here's the point: while one person can manage 8-12 stable apps without much difficulty, it does become a mountain when they have to convert ALL of them to IE 7 compatibility, especially when you don't have to work on them much and don't know the code that well. My organization has been working towards an IE 7 conversion plan for probably 1.5-2 years now, and it looks like we will be finally making the switch this fall. And nobody's "smoking crack" (as another poster said) for not having gotten it done faster or having a faster plan, or even making the "mountain of HTML" excuse. Unless you stop all current development of new applications, it DOES take a while. The only part that I think might be a little bit of "smoking crack" is the fact that IE 8 got released during the conversion plan, and we aren't just going to switch to that and catch up while we're at it. But I do think they have a plan for moving to 8 a year after we hit 7, so it's not like we are going to sit still either.
In conclusion, if you ever worked for a really big business, you wouldn't make you ungenerous statements. Big objects have big inertia, and big codebases.
Try Iowa State University's program. It is one of the charter schools under a 1994 act signed by former President Clinton to do research and training in this area. The school has an excellent program (I actually attended it) with some good research going on, as well as very good formal courses. It's not just CISSP stuff or competitions, although the school does very well in competitions as well and hosts some of its own (and ISU undergraduate team also just won a major hardware hacking competition, beating out many prestigious schools). Personally, I'm very glad I attended ISU and studied in their security program, because it has made me a much better developer.
I highly disagree with this statement from General Eisenhower. While it may or may not have been debatable back then, I don't think there is any way you can claim this is true now, at least in the modern United States. According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
So if Americans in the bottom 40% income-wise do not pay any taxes, then how is it robbing them of their food or clothing when guns are purchased? How is it robbery when the other 60% spend their own money that they earned on missiles?
Now, one could argue that the bottom 40% commit robbery, because they often vote for missiles and don't have to foot the bill (while some in the top 60% don't want to spend any money on missiles), and those in the bottom 40% often vote for social and welfare programs that they don't have to pay for, but I digress. The point is that, if anyone in America is starving or without clothes today, they are certainly in the bottom 40% of income earners, and they don't pay a dime for missiles, so clearly they aren't the ones being robbed. And if their argument is that that money could have been spent on social programs for them instead, well, sorry, but someone else choosing not to give their money to you (via a social program) is not robbing you. It is only robbery if they take what you rightfully earned and is rightfully yours.
I expect none, because what the proponents of mass transit always fail to tell you is how heavily subsidized all forms of it are by the government. Amtrak, for instance, has not made a profit in 40 years and just got another billion dollars in the stimulus bill. And it isn't just Amtrak... it's mass transit buses, light rails, etc, just about everywhere, except perhaps in the extremely densely populated areas like New York City. Even medium sized city groups like Minneapolis/St. Paul have to heavily subsidize fares for their light rail lines and bus lines, or no one will ride them.
If you are for mass transit, fine, but lets at least have an honest debate about it with some real numbers. Anything based on average fare prices is inherently dishonest. You must include the billions spent in taxes too.
And here's a thought that ought to settle the question about which is cheaper once and for all: if mass transit was really a better deal, wouldn't we all ride it? Could it be that the reason they have to pay us to take mass transit (by subsidizing it) is that it isn't that great, and we wouldn't naturally pick it if we were left to our own devices? So yeah, I expect there is absolutely zero benefit to mass transit, or it would have caught on in the marketplace long ago. People aren't stupid... they don't choose to do things that don't benefit them over things that do.
Is it just me who finds it ironic that nuclear power plants are going to be used to power drilling for oil, which will be used to run chemical power plants? I still question why we don't use nuclear power in all our power plants.
And for all of those reasons, my company drops a couple ethernet ports to every office, and we make people use wired when they are in their offices (by hooking the wire to the laptop dock). And we don't hear any complaining, because ethernet is still much faster and is also much more reliable than wireless is when you have a whole office online.
That's true, but it's not the only reason IT isn't powering them down. We've talked about it in my group, but it makes a lot more sense to leave them on for two reasons: updates and boot times. Updates because if computers are left on and locked (which a fair number of people do) then they can grab SMS and Windows updates. Boot times because a lot of people come in in a hurry to get into outlook to figure out where their meeting is and don't want to wait 7 or 8 minutes for the machine to boot up and open Outlook.
Also, considering I work in IT for a factory, we wouldn't save much power anyway. Most of our PCs are shared across all three shifts, so they get used around the clock. People feel pretty free to use any PC, even those in the office cubicle areas, so unless you have a locked office door the PC is probably getting used even at night.
We all could have not voted for Obama, as I know many of us did. If we would have made better choices (and I'm not saying John McCain was it), we might not have a government that is trying to nationalize everything that moves. The first step would be a deep clean of congress, voting out about 90% of the incumbents, but a really good second step would be not voting for people like Obama, who cling to irrational ideas that say government intervention in private industry is successful and helpful, despite how often the 20th century has proven them wrong. People that can't learn form history shouldn't be in office.
I know we don't have any statesmen on slashdot that have the ear of those in power, but the slashdot effect would suggest we could wield large amounts of power at the ballot box.
Plus I think NCC 1701 was a much better name that actually fit the NASA criteria. I am disappointed it didn't win, thanks to Colbert.
Learning is the mental absorption and retention of information. Whether the information you learned is true or false is something else again, and I think that's the point he was making. Some universities may, in fact, be causing their students to learn false information. Brainwashing is a form of learning too.