"Find an independant radio station on the dial, and you'll find they don't have some automated list of the lowest-common-denominator songs, repeated 15 times every single day."
No, they'll just have a different set of songs repeated 15 times every day.... Every now and then you will encounter stations that won't repeat songs for a day-they have more variety. The inherent problem is that you only have 24 hours in a day and you will only play about 15 songs an hour. That works out to about 360 slots per day. You cannot have much variety on a single radio station.
"Copyright is a time-limited privilege, granted to further the public interest, not to enrich the "owners" of IP."
It used to be. I don't think a reasonable person would consider current copyright periods limited (what that says about the SCOTUS I'll leave to your imagination). As a result, in practice copyright exists to enrich the owners of IP (some would say this is in the public interest).
And when was last time a federal court seriously entertained 9th Amendment issues? At best raising that issue is just covering all your legal bases. I doubt it would have a chance in hell to beat an interstate commerce clause argument.
"Question from Lisa L. Spangenberg, UCLA: Given that there are no viruses or Trojan horses for the current Macintosh system, OS X 10.3, and given that it is essentially UNIX, and given that the most common applications (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe applications) work very well on OS X, why don't more institutions adopt Macs and encourage faculty to use them?"
Perhaps because they don't run the needed software? Security is a much smaller issue because faculty doesn't have to secure the boxes-support staff does. Ever try to tell a professor they are the cause of security related problems and get them to change? It takes a combination of diplomacy, education and patience that is lacking in most people...
That said, if the system admistrators have a clue they already are increasing the number of Macs where possible. If the number of Macs aren't increasing it is probably the fault of the sysadmins.
And what happens if you get a virus on a phone/PDA that can be transferred to networked computers? A virus on a phone is probably only annoying but if it can get into a network.... Unlikely but possible.
""* A survey of the impact of 22 turbines on citizens and landowners in the Township of Lincoln, WI asked 'How close to the wind turbines would you consider buying or building a home?': "61% stated they would not build or buy within one-half mile of turbines, 41% would have to be two or more miles away from turbines in order to build or buy, and 74% would not build or buy within one-quarter mile of turbines." Additional conclusions were: "Sales within 1 mile away prior to construction were 104% of the assessed values, and properties selling in the same area after construction were at 78%, a decrease of 26 points. Sales more than 1 mile away prior to construction were 105% of assessed values, and sales of properties 1 mile or more away after the construction of the turbines declined to 87% of the assessed value, an 18% decline.""
Well the first part is rather worthless-people do things they say they won't all the time. The second part is more interesting. Or course, as the one mile and beyond (with no? bounding limites) decreased also, there may be less of an impact than expected. And this is only valid if land is plentiful vs demand. If there is more demand for land, people WILL live near these things and pay good money. Of course, I would also want to know the general real estate trends, how these things were assessed, etc.
"New nuclear power plants are about as expensive (if not a little cheaper) and take as long to build as coal plants (3 years construction.)"
Thanks, I needed a good laugh. While in a technical sense this may be true, it ignores reality. Siting and building power plants is essentially a POLITICAL issue.
Multiple coal plants could be built in the time it takes to PERMIT a nuclear plant. I doubt the time to permit would be less than 10 years for a nuclear plant in the US. Time is money. Not to mention the cost overruns common in the nuclear energy field (in the US).
"And I really hate the shitheads who think they've got some moral right to tell everyone else what they "should" do with their private property. But there do seem to be a lot of them around lately, all yammering on about their personal agendas, usually telling all and sundry that it's for "the greater good"."
Followed later by:
Not telling other people how to live their lives should be a civic responsibility, like not committing crimes or voting. Minding your own goddamned business would also be nice.
You seem to have just committed what you despise-telling people how to live. Pot, meet kettle....
"Usually what happens is that the professor takes the opportunity of a first offense to scare the snot out of you. Second offenses get you turfed."
Speaking as someone who has lectured at the college level and who has had discussions with other professors, I doubt second offenses would "get you turfed." Generally the first offense MIGHT result in the professor scaring the hell out of you. In fact some places make it hard to do this. At a certain large university in Columbus, OH all plagiarism is supposed to be reported to academic affairs (or whatever they are called these days). Individual professors are technically not allowed to punish plagiarism or cheating.
The result? Plagiarism is rampant. Unless it is obvious, nothing happens, because it is a major PITA to report it. In general those who do it get graded poorly, mostly because the copied work sucks....
I once went to school with a women who claimed she had over ten names (much more than the typical first middle last), some of them rather long. Don't know if it was true but I suspect she would have problems with the 128 character limit.:)
In any case, what kind of idiot would limit it to only 128 characters? I have my suspicions....:)
"The Consitution explicitly states that the only things the fed.gov is allowed to do are those things enumerated in the Constitution; anything else is reserved to the people, or the states. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as an asshole, here; I'm not trying to. But, assuming you live in the US, it's apalling to me that you can be so fundamentally wrong about how our government works."
Kind of like you? Ever hear of the instate commerce clause? If it can be used to justify the supremacy of federal drug laws (and upheld by the courst) even when no drugs were moved across state lines (aka personal use laws in various states), then it sure as heck can be used to justify the real ID act. What the Constitution states is often irrelevent as the courts decide what it really means (and even then relies on the Congress and Excutive to enforce it).
States rights suffered a mortal wound in 1865. Some are just hanging on longer than others.
"For instance, a birth certificate, which may or may not have foot prints, is considered a valid ID for applying for other IDs. How does a birth certificate IDentify anybody in this day and age?????!!!!! In 99% of cases, it's a non-standard scrap of paper (every county has a different looking one) you happen to have on your person."
And how is this different from any other piece of ID used in the process of getting another ID? I mean if a birth certificate can be faked a utility bill, social security card, voter registration card, work ID, etc. can be faked. An ID is only as good as the underlying documents that allowed you to get it in the first place. Unless you link ALL the databases it won't help-and even then.....
Even if we are fingerprinted, DNA sampled and chipped at birth ID's would still be faked. ID's are not totally secure and never can be. As someone stated in another thread, we really want to know who is the bad guy. But that can only be determined from actions not an ID.
"As for Automatic Updates - they need to be completely automatic. They should run COMPLETELY in the background and update automatically without the user's knowledge."
Nice idea...if you are on broadband. Automatic updates and dial up are painful-which I believe are a large part of the population. On the other hand it is difficult for those computers if infected to harm anyone else.
So are you going to direct that all concerns go to this discussion from now on? Or are you only interested when it reaches a critical mass (hence this article)? Either way, it would be useful information to know.
The GP's point was to have a "feedback" section that is always active. Like him, I don't expect it to be actively read but once you have it you can reasonably state that all complaints go there or they are "offtopic". Otherwise I don't see those posts as automatically offtopic in general articles. After all, most of the mod categories are rather fuzzy and poorly explained. And that is after reading the guidelines:)
But is commenting about who submitted the story REALLY offtopic? I mean it can matter quite a bit who wrote the story (submission in this case). If you don't want the submitter to become the story make them anonymous. This is somewhat similar to an article attributed to a particular reporter vs a wire service.
Heck, it you removed the complaints from some stories there wouldn't be much left. If most of the discussion revolves around the submitter then the story wasn't very good.... Sometimes the "offtopic" discussions are the best and most informative parts. There is a reason I rarely use that mod.
And another point about the moderation. It would help (for those who really care about it) if there were examples of what offtopic, flamebait, overrated, underrated, etc. should mean. Heck I would really would like a negative moderation for "incorrect" or "wrong". I mean as near as I can tell, overrated is the nearest thing. Then you get someone whining that they post at +2 and how dare they be called overrated (when everything they stated was factually incorrect).....
"I believe my first priority is to the readers here."
Then why is the editing done so poorly? Heck, I see very little evidence that there are any editors here. I have worked as an editor before and this level of quality would result in unemployment. I am genuinely curious.
"I don't think you were intentionally trying to lie with statistics, but your apparent methodology doesn't account for the year-end skew and ignores multiple instances of daily clusters."
Well someone gets it. And when that person has 37 stories in the space of three days it's like a flashing neon sign. If those were spread out over a month nobody would care.
For the most part I don't pay any attention to who submitted the story. But even I stopped paying attention to those stories once I realized there was essentially only one person getting stories accepted. I find it hard to believe those were the best article summaries submitted over that time period.
Maybe it will be thrown out. But it sounds like another way to screw someone over selectively (criticize some important person, oops). After all, it won't be used very often-just when it is "useful".
Imagine the costs incurred by someone tried under this law even if they win....
"If you think we are not at war now, you must have been living in a cave for the last few year."
Well I think we are not at war and I haven't been living in a cave. There is nothing technical about it-we have been fighting terrorists for a long time. We are engaged in multiple conflicts and troops are suffering casualties. Nothing unususal there-it happens regularly.
Frankly the "war on terror" is roughly akin to the "war on drugs" or the "war on x". They all are poorly defined and generally impossible to win. Because they fail to address the underlying problems. Invading a country is easy. Changing a society is hard.
Frankly I am not concerned about Osama. Neither is the US government based on its actions. I am concerned about a government that wants to reduce my rights and priviledges for a false sense of security and so they can be seen as "doing something". Of course, I am more afraid of the clueless people like you who support those measures. That is the real threat.
Remember that terrorism is insignificant when compared to other preventable deaths. More people are killed driving in a month than died in 9/11. But you don't see a "war on road deaths".
"I edited out the 'tyranny of the majority' from my OP, but that's exactly the problem with the winner-take-all system."
But it prevents the "tyranny of the minority" in proportional representation. I wonder about the reasoning ability of anyone who thinks THAT is a good idea (see Italy, France for examples....)
The fact of the matter-all systems have problems. "Fixing" one may cause unintended side effects. Our system was deliberately designed. Parliamentary systems can get much more accomplished (when they say they are going to do something, it generally happens) but that can also be a very bad thing.
If they test extensively, then why do so many of their patches (aka service packs) cause problems? Perhaps they don't really test very extensively or they aren't good at what they do? Why take a long time to release a patch that still potentially breaks things?
As near as I can tell, the answer is "It would be bad." Or "It just isn't done that way here." Bureaucracy at its best....
Good companies fix problems quickly. Some even provide "unoffical" patches. The best don't allow these things to happen in the first place.
"I am--by default--IT support for my company, but I don't make the purchasing decisions. My only allowed input to our network upgrade two years ago was to tell my boss that one of the consultants was a known idiot, which advice was ignored. I was not consulted at all about our single biggest software purchase until after the contract was signed, when I was asked if we would need new hardware. But now that the purchases are here, I have to keep them running, because I'm the only one who has a clue."
A few thoughts come to mind. One, you're screwed. Two, if hiring competent help will send the business into bankruptcy but poor decisions won't, something doesn't add up (Now competent help PLUS stupid decisions....) Third, you are enabling the poor decisions.
If you aren't paid to do the IT work, don't. If you are, do it (yeah, it may require overtime). In either case I would be looking for another job-the future there sucks from your description (not to mention the present).
Slashdot Mirror
"Find an independant radio station on the dial, and you'll find they don't have some automated list of the lowest-common-denominator songs, repeated 15 times every single day."
No, they'll just have a different set of songs repeated 15 times every day.... Every now and then you will encounter stations that won't repeat songs for a day-they have more variety. The inherent problem is that you only have 24 hours in a day and you will only play about 15 songs an hour. That works out to about 360 slots per day. You cannot have much variety on a single radio station.
"Copyright is a time-limited privilege, granted to further the public interest, not to enrich the "owners" of IP."
It used to be. I don't think a reasonable person would consider current copyright periods limited (what that says about the SCOTUS I'll leave to your imagination). As a result, in practice copyright exists to enrich the owners of IP (some would say this is in the public interest).
And when was last time a federal court seriously entertained 9th Amendment issues? At best raising that issue is just covering all your legal bases. I doubt it would have a chance in hell to beat an interstate commerce clause argument.
You forgot point 6) Deliberately overwriting data
and 7) Deliberately deleting data
As others have stated, RAID is not for backup.
"Question from Lisa L. Spangenberg, UCLA:
Given that there are no viruses or Trojan horses for the current Macintosh system, OS X 10.3, and given that it is essentially UNIX, and given that the most common applications (Microsoft Office Suite, Adobe applications) work very well on OS X, why don't more institutions adopt Macs and encourage faculty to use them?"
Perhaps because they don't run the needed software? Security is a much smaller issue because faculty doesn't have to secure the boxes-support staff does. Ever try to tell a professor they are the cause of security related problems and get them to change? It takes a combination of diplomacy, education and patience that is lacking in most people...
That said, if the system admistrators have a clue they already are increasing the number of Macs where possible. If the number of Macs aren't increasing it is probably the fault of the sysadmins.
And what happens if you get a virus on a phone/PDA that can be transferred to networked computers? A virus on a phone is probably only annoying but if it can get into a network.... Unlikely but possible.
"The average user is never really going to be able to fend off all social engineering attacks sadly."
I think you missed the part after firewall-"common sense".
And if the average user cannot be expected to utilize common sense, we as a species are screwed.
""* A survey of the impact of 22 turbines on citizens and landowners in the Township of Lincoln, WI asked 'How close to the wind turbines would you consider buying or building a home?': "61% stated they would not build or buy within one-half mile of turbines, 41% would have to be two or more miles away from turbines in order to build or buy, and 74% would not build or buy within one-quarter mile of turbines." Additional conclusions were: "Sales within 1 mile away prior to construction were 104% of the assessed values, and properties selling in the same area after construction were at 78%, a decrease of 26 points. Sales more than 1 mile away prior to construction were 105% of assessed values, and sales of properties 1 mile or more away after the construction of the turbines declined to 87% of the assessed value, an 18% decline.""
Well the first part is rather worthless-people do things they say they won't all the time. The second part is more interesting. Or course, as the one mile and beyond (with no? bounding limites) decreased also, there may be less of an impact than expected. And this is only valid if land is plentiful vs demand. If there is more demand for land, people WILL live near these things and pay good money. Of course, I would also want to know the general real estate trends, how these things were assessed, etc.
"New nuclear power plants are about as expensive (if not a little cheaper) and take as long to build as coal plants (3 years construction.)"
Thanks, I needed a good laugh. While in a technical sense this may be true, it ignores reality. Siting and building power plants is essentially a POLITICAL issue.
Multiple coal plants could be built in the time it takes to PERMIT a nuclear plant. I doubt the time to permit would be less than 10 years for a nuclear plant in the US. Time is money. Not to mention the cost overruns common in the nuclear energy field (in the US).
Let's see:
"And I really hate the shitheads who think they've got some moral right to tell everyone else what they "should" do with their private property. But there do seem to be a lot of them around lately, all yammering on about their personal agendas, usually telling all and sundry that it's for "the greater good"."
Followed later by:
Not telling other people how to live their lives should be a civic responsibility, like not committing crimes or voting. Minding your own goddamned business would also be nice.
You seem to have just committed what you despise-telling people how to live. Pot, meet kettle....
"Usually what happens is that the professor takes the opportunity of a first offense to scare the snot out of you. Second offenses get you turfed."
Speaking as someone who has lectured at the college level and who has had discussions with other professors, I doubt second offenses would "get you turfed." Generally the first offense MIGHT result in the professor scaring the hell out of you. In fact some places make it hard to do this. At a certain large university in Columbus, OH all plagiarism is supposed to be reported to academic affairs (or whatever they are called these days). Individual professors are technically not allowed to punish plagiarism or cheating.
The result? Plagiarism is rampant. Unless it is obvious, nothing happens, because it is a major PITA to report it. In general those who do it get graded poorly, mostly because the copied work sucks....
I once went to school with a women who claimed she had over ten names (much more than the typical first middle last), some of them rather long. Don't know if it was true but I suspect she would have problems with the 128 character limit. :)
:)
In any case, what kind of idiot would limit it to only 128 characters? I have my suspicions....
"The Consitution explicitly states that the only things the fed.gov is allowed to do are those things enumerated in the Constitution; anything else is reserved to the people, or the states. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as an asshole, here; I'm not trying to. But, assuming you live in the US, it's apalling to me that you can be so fundamentally wrong about how our government works."
Kind of like you? Ever hear of the instate commerce clause? If it can be used to justify the supremacy of federal drug laws (and upheld by the courst) even when no drugs were moved across state lines (aka personal use laws in various states), then it sure as heck can be used to justify the real ID act. What the Constitution states is often irrelevent as the courts decide what it really means (and even then relies on the Congress and Excutive to enforce it).
States rights suffered a mortal wound in 1865. Some are just hanging on longer than others.
"For instance, a birth certificate, which may or may not have foot prints, is considered a valid ID for applying for other IDs. How does a birth certificate IDentify anybody in this day and age?????!!!!! In 99% of cases, it's a non-standard scrap of paper (every county has a different looking one) you happen to have on your person."
And how is this different from any other piece of ID used in the process of getting another ID? I mean if a birth certificate can be faked a utility bill, social security card, voter registration card, work ID, etc. can be faked. An ID is only as good as the underlying documents that allowed you to get it in the first place. Unless you link ALL the databases it won't help-and even then.....
Even if we are fingerprinted, DNA sampled and chipped at birth ID's would still be faked. ID's are not totally secure and never can be. As someone stated in another thread, we really want to know who is the bad guy. But that can only be determined from actions not an ID.
"As for Automatic Updates - they need to be completely automatic. They should run COMPLETELY in the background and update automatically without the user's knowledge."
Nice idea...if you are on broadband. Automatic updates and dial up are painful-which I believe are a large part of the population. On the other hand it is difficult for those computers if infected to harm anyone else.
So are you going to direct that all concerns go to this discussion from now on? Or are you only interested when it reaches a critical mass (hence this article)? Either way, it would be useful information to know.
:)
The GP's point was to have a "feedback" section that is always active. Like him, I don't expect it to be actively read but once you have it you can reasonably state that all complaints go there or they are "offtopic". Otherwise I don't see those posts as automatically offtopic in general articles. After all, most of the mod categories are rather fuzzy and poorly explained. And that is after reading the guidelines
But is commenting about who submitted the story REALLY offtopic? I mean it can matter quite a bit who wrote the story (submission in this case). If you don't want the submitter to become the story make them anonymous. This is somewhat similar to an article attributed to a particular reporter vs a wire service.
Heck, it you removed the complaints from some stories there wouldn't be much left. If most of the discussion revolves around the submitter then the story wasn't very good.... Sometimes the "offtopic" discussions are the best and most informative parts. There is a reason I rarely use that mod.
And another point about the moderation. It would help (for those who really care about it) if there were examples of what offtopic, flamebait, overrated, underrated, etc. should mean. Heck I would really would like a negative moderation for "incorrect" or "wrong". I mean as near as I can tell, overrated is the nearest thing. Then you get someone whining that they post at +2 and how dare they be called overrated (when everything they stated was factually incorrect).....
"I believe my first priority is to the readers here."
Then why is the editing done so poorly? Heck, I see very little evidence that there are any editors here. I have worked as an editor before and this level of quality would result in unemployment. I am genuinely curious.
"In Taco's place, I'd serve up a bunch of beatles beatles posts then go to the DVD store."
:)
Well, with 37 stories over three days I'd say it was more than a trip to the DVD store.
"I don't think you were intentionally trying to lie with statistics, but your apparent methodology doesn't account for the year-end skew and ignores multiple instances of daily clusters."
Well someone gets it. And when that person has 37 stories in the space of three days it's like a flashing neon sign. If those were spread out over a month nobody would care.
For the most part I don't pay any attention to who submitted the story. But even I stopped paying attention to those stories once I realized there was essentially only one person getting stories accepted. I find it hard to believe those were the best article summaries submitted over that time period.
Maybe it will be thrown out. But it sounds like another way to screw someone over selectively (criticize some important person, oops). After all, it won't be used very often-just when it is "useful".
Imagine the costs incurred by someone tried under this law even if they win....
"If you think we are not at war now, you must have been living in a cave for the last few year."
Well I think we are not at war and I haven't been living in a cave. There is nothing technical about it-we have been fighting terrorists for a long time. We are engaged in multiple conflicts and troops are suffering casualties. Nothing unususal there-it happens regularly.
Frankly the "war on terror" is roughly akin to the "war on drugs" or the "war on x". They all are poorly defined and generally impossible to win. Because they fail to address the underlying problems. Invading a country is easy. Changing a society is hard.
Frankly I am not concerned about Osama. Neither is the US government based on its actions. I am concerned about a government that wants to reduce my rights and priviledges for a false sense of security and so they can be seen as "doing something". Of course, I am more afraid of the clueless people like you who support those measures. That is the real threat.
Remember that terrorism is insignificant when compared to other preventable deaths. More people are killed driving in a month than died in 9/11. But you don't see a "war on road deaths".
"I edited out the 'tyranny of the majority' from my OP, but that's exactly the problem with the winner-take-all system."
But it prevents the "tyranny of the minority" in proportional representation. I wonder about the reasoning ability of anyone who thinks THAT is a good idea (see Italy, France for examples....)
The fact of the matter-all systems have problems. "Fixing" one may cause unintended side effects. Our system was deliberately designed. Parliamentary systems can get much more accomplished (when they say they are going to do something, it generally happens) but that can also be a very bad thing.
If they test extensively, then why do so many of their patches (aka service packs) cause problems? Perhaps they don't really test very extensively or they aren't good at what they do? Why take a long time to release a patch that still potentially breaks things?
As near as I can tell, the answer is "It would be bad." Or "It just isn't done that way here." Bureaucracy at its best....
Good companies fix problems quickly. Some even provide "unoffical" patches. The best don't allow these things to happen in the first place.
"I am--by default--IT support for my company, but I don't make the purchasing decisions. My only allowed input to our network upgrade two years ago was to tell my boss that one of the consultants was a known idiot, which advice was ignored. I was not consulted at all about our single biggest software purchase until after the contract was signed, when I was asked if we would need new hardware. But now that the purchases are here, I have to keep them running, because I'm the only one who has a clue."
A few thoughts come to mind. One, you're screwed. Two, if hiring competent help will send the business into bankruptcy but poor decisions won't, something doesn't add up (Now competent help PLUS stupid decisions....) Third, you are enabling the poor decisions.
If you aren't paid to do the IT work, don't. If you are, do it (yeah, it may require overtime). In either case I would be looking for another job-the future there sucks from your description (not to mention the present).