Furthering your analogy, your version of the flu would have been tailored to only attack individuals with chromosomal characteristics common to the Asiatic region.
It's not just that it was first discovered by a Chinese security firm. It also appears to be targeted at Chinese PCs. From the original post:
The infection is clearly focused on Chinese users, because the dropper is carefully checking if the system it’s going to infect is protected by Chinese security software Rising Antivirus and Jiangmin KV Antivirus.
Makes one wonder who developed it and what the intent was.
Yeah... those damned chickens absolutely REFUSE to alter their method of timekeeping. Always checking the clock, looking over calendars... makes one wonder if maybe chickens built Stonehenge or something... damned chickens...
There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.
Actually, with regard to shortened holidays, research indicates that continued academic effort (reading in the linked case) positively impacts academic performance in the subsequent semester. Granted in this case the study was performed on students who continued to read during summer vacation and checked their performance when they came back, which is different from concentrated classroom study. Furthermore, according to the wiki there is a measured "summer learning loss" attributed to summer holidays where students do not perform any notable academic tasks, suggesting that the inverse would hold true as well, that real academic tasks throughout the long summer holiday might help stave off the worst effects of this "learning loss".
When looking at a 4 day school week, I don't think the loss of one day would in itself negative impact education. Obviously cutting it much further would probably tend to have negative consequences. I think keeping the kids in class longer hours during those 4 days will actually have a more negative effect, especially among younger students who don't tend to have the mental stamina for longer sessions of concentrated focus. The problem is I think they added the hours into the remaining days in order to be able say they are still covering the entire curriculum, but the focus problem may come into play and the kids won't be able to pick up the material as readily as before. Tacking on extra weeks at the end of the year would simply bring the financial problem back into play. What kids need are a regular steady diet of learning time, not huge gobs with vast periods of time between.
Regarding a payoff in 100 years, I think that's the GP's point. Private investors won't touch it because they have to think in the much shorter term. Even governments have historically not planned 100 years out. No one really has. And in this context, I shouldn't say 'planned' but rather 'executed'. Plenty of folks "sit on their ass and day dream". Few actually put anything into action with a view to things paying off well after they are dead.
That said, we (as a species) need to be thinking in these terms. Right now, the entirety of our species is tied up into the ongoing balanced existence on this one rock. Any number of cosmic events could wipe us out. For all we know, there's something heading toward us on an approach or in a manner that we can't detect and that will destroy all life on our planet.
While there have been other endeavors undertaken which weren't expected to reach fruition within the lifetime of the original actors, they were usually within a generation of completion. Speaking of social revolution, various technologies, etc. Full on independent existence of humans in a self sustaining manner on another planet is, I believe, going to be a multi-generational effort, something that if we start now in earnest, we won't see, our children won't see, our grandchildren won't see.
And that's the problem, as others have pointed out. We're, most of us, self-interested. That extends to our interest in our loved ones, those who are alive now or that we can imagine (kids or grandkids possibly). But few people are far-sighted enough and focused enough on the long haul to take these sorts of causes up. And the further down the line the payoffs are, the less tangible they become for those who would have to start acting now and the less likely any such effort is to get started.
The carbon footprint of insomnia is pretty high too, as you produce more CO2 in a waking cycle than in a sleep cycle, not to mention your likely increased activity levels on electronics or other equipment while you are awake. You're pretty much hosing us all. Get a Humvee, burn a bunch of gas going to the mall, but for heaven's sake, calm down and sleep at night!
Demand will go up, but it's also possible that production efficiency will go up too which coupled with competition from other manufacturers would cause prices to go back down.
You're being an agent provocateur here but it has to be said that this is a trend in the UK security services - they want the right to monitor everything you do but a notoriously camera-shy themselves. I guess it's similar to how nobody is more paranoid about their posessions being taken than a thief.
Personally I think that an always-on camera wirelessly streaming to a backup server should be standard equipment for the police. It would eliminate a level of "He said,she said" in coourt cases. But I guess the police don't like the idea because at the moment if it's your word against an officer the officer's word has precedence so they feel they don't need it.
Then it seems as though we need a consumer grade model is in order. As always it comes down to money though. I wonder how well it would sell.
Yet surely there is a subsequent decrease in valuation of a company due to the patent portfolios of competitors. Such that Google would see very little devaluation due to "loss" of their relatively small patent portfolio but with a potential sizable gain in value because their competitors no longer have that sword dangling over them.
And while Apple might seem to be in the cat bird seat regarding patents, they are still embroiled in patent disputes, some of which aren't going their way. Those problems would disappear also increasing their worth.
Wouldn't it be a zero sum effect overall? Yes some would win, some would lose, but wouldn't the values not be altered THAT much?
I think he's implying something more along the lines of exploit vectors.
For example, if a successful exploit requires that the user simultaneously download and run a malware app while an already installed app is opening an external connection while at the same time an inbound connection attempt is made, your chances of being infected drop quite a bit and the work needed to pull it off as a malware author goes up, possibly to the point where it's no longer worth it in most cases. It also perhaps increases the chances of a security watchdog detecting the behavior and responding to it in real time to squash the threat.
I don't think he's suggesting a scenario where you might only succumb if you have clicked on three separate malware downloads or something along those lines.
(And preempting a few comments, yes, I'm aware that strictly speaking the scenario I put forth isn't really too tough. The outbound connection might be prompted by the very malware you downloaded and clicked on and could automatically trigger the inbound hack attempt. I'm working under the assumption of the original speaker where defenses are up and active to protect against each of those approaches. My analogy isn't perfect, in fact I suspect it's quite flawed actually, but I believe the spirit is accurate. Make the malware authors work hard enough and you eliminate most of the threats because the reward:effort ratio is no longer high enough.)
From some quick googling, it seems that that safety FAQ was only recently made available, perhaps in response to the whole EJ incident. If you go to the Wayback Machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web) and enter that page's URL (http://www.airbnb.com/home/safety) and click 'Show All', it will tell you it doesn't have it but there are other pages. Go ahead and look at what airbnb had to offer the wayback machine and you'll see a tips page. Check that one out and you'll see some very very simple safety suggestions. Except they aren't NEARLY as protective as what this new page makes out.
Should she have done more to protect herself? Sure. Would I personally ever use airbnb? No; my trust of my fellow human doesn't go that far. But don't make it appear that at the time EJ performed her transaction on the website that airbnb had posted stringent rules about staying safe and protecting yourself.
Why wouldn't he be? He shows up with his scale cardboard cutout model of himself, plants it in the middle of the room, attaches the sign stating "If you want to party with me, I will be at..." and of course he includes his home address where there is a party every night.
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
Right now, the differentiator between you and me should not be how we store our data. Whether my data resides on a server in my office or in a databank with some outfit I can only access through my ISP, what decides it for our potential clients should be the quality of service we offer respectively, or even the types of service we offer.
Nah, Google will just start using Googlebids as their versioning scheme. (With one Googlebid being equal to version pi-billion for any other browser). That'll make short work of the browser VERSION wars (to heck with the browser wars).
It would only be fiscally responsible of the CEO to do so if they lost more money due to fighting software related patents than they earn by licensing their own software patents. That means the motivation to eliminate software patents is borne entirely by the smaller companies with little to nothing in the way of a software portfolio, everything to lose if they remain intact, and much less money to fight that system with.
And if your admin screen and client screen are both written to invoke the GetUserProfile() method in the Profile class, then you still only have one thing to rewrite.
Not to say there isn't a case where you absolutely must have multiple points in your code invoking the same stored procedure but then again there's nothing preventing you from designing things so that you have a 1:1 mapping between stored procedures and methods in your code to invoke them.
Hopefully we do it democratically, by voting. Conveniently, we already have a reasonable quantity of individuals who have already been elected for some purpose or another by the public. I suggest, for the sake of efficiency, we just reuse the same votes.
The main focus of laser technology seems to be shooting down incoming projectiles, SAVING lives rather than killing them. Is that such a terrible thing?
It is when we're launching humans as projectiles at our enemies. Then even your vaunted DEFENSIVE lasers will undoubtedly be being used to KILL HUMANS.
you'll end up with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines
The TSA already hires cheap labor, there have already been documented failures of the TSA to catch folks who tested the TSA's security measures and while the result might be a low margin approach, right now it's a government monopoly and not a particularly effective one.
My little company does IT work for small local business, often playing liaison between them and their other vendors. Once I worked with a third party timekeeping software company to help onboard my client onto the system. I was like you, thinking "enter the hours on the day, done". I got to talking with one of the developers and, recognizing there must be some hidden complexity, politely broached the subject. He agreed that yes, it seems simple on the surface, and for a handful of cases it can be. But apparently where things can get bogged down is with adherence to local, state and federal regulations regarding various levels and types of compensation (overtime, sick time, holidays and the like) . He mentioned other issues too but that seemed to be the major bugbear.
I'm surprised you kept using the Wii even for Netflix given you had a 360 (unless you were unwilling to get the higher tiered Xbox Live account needed for Netflix access on that platform). I had a Wii and a 360 and set up Netflix on both machines, first the Wii and then later on the 360. I switched to the 360 because with the Wii I consistently saw stuttering and pausing and the video quality wasn't great. When I switched to the 360 for Netflix, I saw a lot less mid-stream pausing and it seemed to me that the video quality improved. The only thing I can imagine was that it was related to the hardware discrepancy between the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthering your analogy, your version of the flu would have been tailored to only attack individuals with chromosomal characteristics common to the Asiatic region.
It's not just that it was first discovered by a Chinese security firm. It also appears to be targeted at Chinese PCs. From the original post:
Makes one wonder who developed it and what the intent was.
Best bring a nice portable A/C unit. Here ya go... got a good sturdy one to sell ya right here. Cash only. No refunds.
An oversexed trapeze artist?
Yeah... those damned chickens absolutely REFUSE to alter their method of timekeeping. Always checking the clock, looking over calendars... makes one wonder if maybe chickens built Stonehenge or something... damned chickens...
There is no evidence that a 4-day school week makes education worse. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It would be an interesting task to figure out the optimal hours for children to be educated - it may be that less daily hours may be helpful or not, and it may be that cutting the long holidays may be beneficial or not. Perhaps a 7-day school week would be optimal. But this kind of research should be done as controlled experiments with the aim of figuring out the best way to educate children. Doing it in a haphazard way because of lack of funding is not useful.
Actually, with regard to shortened holidays, research indicates that continued academic effort (reading in the linked case) positively impacts academic performance in the subsequent semester. Granted in this case the study was performed on students who continued to read during summer vacation and checked their performance when they came back, which is different from concentrated classroom study. Furthermore, according to the wiki there is a measured "summer learning loss" attributed to summer holidays where students do not perform any notable academic tasks, suggesting that the inverse would hold true as well, that real academic tasks throughout the long summer holiday might help stave off the worst effects of this "learning loss".
When looking at a 4 day school week, I don't think the loss of one day would in itself negative impact education. Obviously cutting it much further would probably tend to have negative consequences. I think keeping the kids in class longer hours during those 4 days will actually have a more negative effect, especially among younger students who don't tend to have the mental stamina for longer sessions of concentrated focus. The problem is I think they added the hours into the remaining days in order to be able say they are still covering the entire curriculum, but the focus problem may come into play and the kids won't be able to pick up the material as readily as before. Tacking on extra weeks at the end of the year would simply bring the financial problem back into play. What kids need are a regular steady diet of learning time, not huge gobs with vast periods of time between.
Regarding a payoff in 100 years, I think that's the GP's point. Private investors won't touch it because they have to think in the much shorter term. Even governments have historically not planned 100 years out. No one really has. And in this context, I shouldn't say 'planned' but rather 'executed'. Plenty of folks "sit on their ass and day dream". Few actually put anything into action with a view to things paying off well after they are dead.
That said, we (as a species) need to be thinking in these terms. Right now, the entirety of our species is tied up into the ongoing balanced existence on this one rock. Any number of cosmic events could wipe us out. For all we know, there's something heading toward us on an approach or in a manner that we can't detect and that will destroy all life on our planet.
While there have been other endeavors undertaken which weren't expected to reach fruition within the lifetime of the original actors, they were usually within a generation of completion. Speaking of social revolution, various technologies, etc. Full on independent existence of humans in a self sustaining manner on another planet is, I believe, going to be a multi-generational effort, something that if we start now in earnest, we won't see, our children won't see, our grandchildren won't see.
And that's the problem, as others have pointed out. We're, most of us, self-interested. That extends to our interest in our loved ones, those who are alive now or that we can imagine (kids or grandkids possibly). But few people are far-sighted enough and focused enough on the long haul to take these sorts of causes up. And the further down the line the payoffs are, the less tangible they become for those who would have to start acting now and the less likely any such effort is to get started.
The carbon footprint of insomnia is pretty high too, as you produce more CO2 in a waking cycle than in a sleep cycle, not to mention your likely increased activity levels on electronics or other equipment while you are awake. You're pretty much hosing us all. Get a Humvee, burn a bunch of gas going to the mall, but for heaven's sake, calm down and sleep at night!
Demand will go up, but it's also possible that production efficiency will go up too which coupled with competition from other manufacturers would cause prices to go back down.
You're being an agent provocateur here but it has to be said that this is a trend in the UK security services - they want the right to monitor everything you do but a notoriously camera-shy themselves. I guess it's similar to how nobody is more paranoid about their posessions being taken than a thief.
Personally I think that an always-on camera wirelessly streaming to a backup server should be standard equipment for the police. It would eliminate a level of "He said,she said" in coourt cases. But I guess the police don't like the idea because at the moment if it's your word against an officer the officer's word has precedence so they feel they don't need it.
Then it seems as though we need a consumer grade model is in order. As always it comes down to money though. I wonder how well it would sell.
Yet surely there is a subsequent decrease in valuation of a company due to the patent portfolios of competitors. Such that Google would see very little devaluation due to "loss" of their relatively small patent portfolio but with a potential sizable gain in value because their competitors no longer have that sword dangling over them.
And while Apple might seem to be in the cat bird seat regarding patents, they are still embroiled in patent disputes, some of which aren't going their way. Those problems would disappear also increasing their worth.
Wouldn't it be a zero sum effect overall? Yes some would win, some would lose, but wouldn't the values not be altered THAT much?
ADDH
And dyslexic I'm guessing
I think he's implying something more along the lines of exploit vectors.
For example, if a successful exploit requires that the user simultaneously download and run a malware app while an already installed app is opening an external connection while at the same time an inbound connection attempt is made, your chances of being infected drop quite a bit and the work needed to pull it off as a malware author goes up, possibly to the point where it's no longer worth it in most cases. It also perhaps increases the chances of a security watchdog detecting the behavior and responding to it in real time to squash the threat.
I don't think he's suggesting a scenario where you might only succumb if you have clicked on three separate malware downloads or something along those lines.
(And preempting a few comments, yes, I'm aware that strictly speaking the scenario I put forth isn't really too tough. The outbound connection might be prompted by the very malware you downloaded and clicked on and could automatically trigger the inbound hack attempt. I'm working under the assumption of the original speaker where defenses are up and active to protect against each of those approaches. My analogy isn't perfect, in fact I suspect it's quite flawed actually, but I believe the spirit is accurate. Make the malware authors work hard enough and you eliminate most of the threats because the reward:effort ratio is no longer high enough.)
From some quick googling, it seems that that safety FAQ was only recently made available, perhaps in response to the whole EJ incident. If you go to the Wayback Machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web) and enter that page's URL (http://www.airbnb.com/home/safety) and click 'Show All', it will tell you it doesn't have it but there are other pages. Go ahead and look at what airbnb had to offer the wayback machine and you'll see a tips page. Check that one out and you'll see some very very simple safety suggestions. Except they aren't NEARLY as protective as what this new page makes out.
Should she have done more to protect herself? Sure. Would I personally ever use airbnb? No; my trust of my fellow human doesn't go that far. But don't make it appear that at the time EJ performed her transaction on the website that airbnb had posted stringent rules about staying safe and protecting yourself.
Why wouldn't he be? He shows up with his scale cardboard cutout model of himself, plants it in the middle of the room, attaches the sign stating "If you want to party with me, I will be at..." and of course he includes his home address where there is a party every night.
Also, it becomes difficult to differentiate your business from others.
Right now, the differentiator between you and me should not be how we store our data. Whether my data resides on a server in my office or in a databank with some outfit I can only access through my ISP, what decides it for our potential clients should be the quality of service we offer respectively, or even the types of service we offer.
Nah, Google will just start using Googlebids as their versioning scheme. (With one Googlebid being equal to version pi-billion for any other browser). That'll make short work of the browser VERSION wars (to heck with the browser wars).
It would only be fiscally responsible of the CEO to do so if they lost more money due to fighting software related patents than they earn by licensing their own software patents. That means the motivation to eliminate software patents is borne entirely by the smaller companies with little to nothing in the way of a software portfolio, everything to lose if they remain intact, and much less money to fight that system with.
And if your admin screen and client screen are both written to invoke the GetUserProfile() method in the Profile class, then you still only have one thing to rewrite.
Not to say there isn't a case where you absolutely must have multiple points in your code invoking the same stored procedure but then again there's nothing preventing you from designing things so that you have a 1:1 mapping between stored procedures and methods in your code to invoke them.
Hopefully we do it democratically, by voting. Conveniently, we already have a reasonable quantity of individuals who have already been elected for some purpose or another by the public. I suggest, for the sake of efficiency, we just reuse the same votes.
The main focus of laser technology seems to be shooting down incoming projectiles, SAVING lives rather than killing them. Is that such a terrible thing?
It is when we're launching humans as projectiles at our enemies. Then even your vaunted DEFENSIVE lasers will undoubtedly be being used to KILL HUMANS.
you'll end up with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines
The TSA already hires cheap labor, there have already been documented failures of the TSA to catch folks who tested the TSA's security measures and while the result might be a low margin approach, right now it's a government monopoly and not a particularly effective one.
My little company does IT work for small local business, often playing liaison between them and their other vendors. Once I worked with a third party timekeeping software company to help onboard my client onto the system. I was like you, thinking "enter the hours on the day, done". I got to talking with one of the developers and, recognizing there must be some hidden complexity, politely broached the subject. He agreed that yes, it seems simple on the surface, and for a handful of cases it can be. But apparently where things can get bogged down is with adherence to local, state and federal regulations regarding various levels and types of compensation (overtime, sick time, holidays and the like) . He mentioned other issues too but that seemed to be the major bugbear.
I'm surprised you kept using the Wii even for Netflix given you had a 360 (unless you were unwilling to get the higher tiered Xbox Live account needed for Netflix access on that platform). I had a Wii and a 360 and set up Netflix on both machines, first the Wii and then later on the 360. I switched to the 360 because with the Wii I consistently saw stuttering and pausing and the video quality wasn't great. When I switched to the 360 for Netflix, I saw a lot less mid-stream pausing and it seemed to me that the video quality improved. The only thing I can imagine was that it was related to the hardware discrepancy between the two.
With less and less attention being given to the RIM platform, it's just going to make it harder and harder to get a RIM job.