I haven't heard of any sting operations for hitting the phishers...
Then you're apparently not listening. Why is it that stupid people think that just because they haven't heard about something means it isn't going on? You haven't heard about the new fashions in Milan. Does that mean fashion doesn't exist either? Or, Milan?
Why should ebay care? They don't bear the cost of phising, you do.
Nonsense. I've had someone attempt to take advantage of me through PayPal, and PayPal ate the cost. Know why? Because I actually read their instructions and followed the steps I'm required to follow in order to protect myself. The only people who bear the cost of phishing are the people who refuse to follow PayPal's protection rules. That you can't tell why they're the only ones you hear from is honestly pretty naïve.
But I do believe we have a right to call people stupid when they do things like fall for a PayPal scam, buy from spam, send important (highly confidential!) information over email, refuse to apply patches (or not know how), and so on, and so on.
Did you know that 85% of dead televisions just have a blown fuse? Did you know the $120 transmission fluid replacement at Jiffy Lube is a twelve dollar bottle of green grease, and the opening and closing of one valve? Did you know that almost everything a plumber ever actually does is run a drain snake and a plunger?
I mean, we have Sex education, we have Driver's education, I don't think it's unreasonable that we know the computer equivalent of wearing a condom, stopping at red lights, buckling your seatbelt...
Here's the difference: one costs people their lives, the other costs them an hour at the local computer shop. I don't think it's unreasonable that we know how to maintain appliances; nonetheless, nobody requires it, because that's batshit retarded.
Most people think I'm a snobbish bastard, like every other Linux user.
It's got nothing to do with your being a Linux user. It's because you're condescending and because you can't fathom that some people don't have the time or the desire to learn to maintain their computers. Believe it or not, some people have better things to do with their lives.
Next time you pull into a jiffy lube, call a repair person, go to a barber shop, buy art tools, purchase clothes or engage in any service activity whatsoever, please remember that that's something you could learn to do and then spend your life doing, just like a seventy year old woman could spend a year reading tech sites and manuals and getting up to speed on jargon.
Guess what? You don't want to either. You're just too dense to tell the difference.
Paypalsucks.com is a front for a group which claims to be a paypal competitor. Guess what? They're a scam quite like the one being discussed in the article. The difference? They're selling something real but useless: a merchant account that literally nobody accepts. So, when you try to go get your seven hundred dollars back, the bank tells you "well, they haven't actually done anything illegal, so, no."
That is not true, banks over here (UK) do phone you up and ask for personal information for security reasons because they cannot discuss your account due to data protection laws.
That's an absurd system, and UK banking regulators should be ashamed. To require a bank to behave in the same fashion as identity thieves is a gigantic and wholly unnessecary risk.
Back here in civilization, we have these things called "passcodes." We also have a setup where the bank gives *you* a password which they'll replace on request. Bank calls you? Ask them the current account verification code, and if they respond correctly, first tell them to replace it, then start dealing with them.
Someone should let Britain know that it really isn't that hard to provide bidirectional identification.
That's because China is my motherland, you self-righteous idiot.... and I feel I'm far from saying I'm familiar with the 230 years of her history and culture.
Indeed: the Chinese culture is several thousand years old. Of course,
That's because China is my motherland, you self-righteous idiot.... I've only lived in this country for less than 10 years
Why do I not believe you?
You are posting on a topic about the Chinese government denying information and other fundamental rights to most of its people
No, douche, I was talking about what you said. I'm ending this thread, as it's obvious you're not able to focus on fact.
but a few page-downs later I found my rage hardly contained so here more comes
Oh honestly. You act like I punched your mother.
I just can't stand people like you who think you are the only ones understanding the "true meaning of valuing freedom"
I never said any such thing. The desperation for you to win is driving you to invent things to be angry at. How sad. All I did was to point out that your statement presumed American values over Chinese values.
What's it like being unable to admit an error?
Who do you think you are to assume the Chinese - "the Chinese" as in "the Chinese People" instead of "the Chinese in the Party core" - do not want the freedom to think, to speak, and to know?
I never said any such thing. Remarkably, people can want to think and speak and know, and still be worried about external cultural pressures eliminating their own culture, just as we've done to Japan.
Who do you think you are to assume the way China is run now is actually what most of the Chinese want?
Someone who's been there, and asked. You haven't been, have you?
Next time before you try and piggy back your own US domestic agenda
Er, I've done no such thing. You appear to be looking in a mirror. You, sir, are the one who wants to change Chinese behavior according to American standards. All I did was to point that out. Funny how you've now managed to convince yourself it's the other way around, when I've said nothing even remotely to that end.
YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT CHINA.
I've been there several times and am deeply familiar with both their culture and history. That said, I never made any statements about China, so you can get off of your soapbox. The only origin I talked about was you. Stop trying to invent things I said to be angry at me.
What I said, since you appear to have missed it last time: "You're applying your cultural beliefs to a foreign nation and deriving from that that they're doing the wrong thing and need to be changed from the outside."
Where in that do you see me talking about Chinese? I'm talking about you. Quit pretending otherwise.
Part of valuing freedom is valuing Chinese self-governance. It's not freedom if we step in and replace it every time someone disagrees with us. Banging the drum and screaming freedom is not a good reason to go tell the Chinese they're running their own country wrong. That's what self-important plutocrats and warmongers who need justifications behind which to hide do.
Believe it or not, even America has to say "wow, China, you get to run your own country today" once in a while.
Incidentally, there are more Cambridges in the US than in the UK
Er. No, there's exactly one of each over 10k people in eachnation. Of course, since Cambridge in this context isn't a city at all, and since there's essentially nobody who actually thinks of MIT when someone says Cambridge who has even a passing familiarity with universities, this is essentially moot.
at least one of which is also notable for its large univerity. Used to confuse the fuck out of me, for one.
Probably because you're posting without reading articles, at which point it would have been bloody obvious. Making excuses for being a dumbass just makes you look dumber. Stop while you're only sorta behind.
Evangelism just means bringer of good news (greek evangelizesthai "bring good news," from eu- "good" + angellein "announce," from angelos "messenger.") That a branch of Christians have co-opted the word and that you need to pray to get MS software to work is merely coincidence.
Estimation is complex and difficult. All four of the major methods today involve keeping significant statistical data on past performance and using it to mathematically generate estimates. This is remarkably accurate - using the PSP and TSP, I've managed to whittle my estimates down to +- 20%. The inventor of the process made a video about eight years ago describing it; in lots of ways it's kind of quaint, since it talks about how big the internet is going to be (for example,) but it also gives a lot of surprising hard data. Since the training courses are several thousand dollars per person and require the whole team, you might want to start by reading the books (Intro to PSP and Intro to TSP) to make sure it's something you like and which is appropriate to your business model.
PSP and TSP are appropriate for up front engineered projects - application sequels, industrial software, military software (it's originally a DoD system,) et cetera. If you're writing business software or games, PSP and TSP aren't for you - they don't allow for the kind of rapid change that characterizes those designs. They can be bent into it, but there are better tools. Extreme Programming (start with Explained then read installed) are built for rapid-change environments, and were built on the Chrysler C4 project. They're industrial-ready, but they spend a lot of time on post-organization. You want that if your project is changing a lot, like an application you're building for a client who isn't sure what they want. You don't want that when you know exactly what you're building, like a realtime control system which has to respond to an exact list of inputs.
When you're somewhere inbetween those two poles - say, the new version of an office suite, or a game sequel, where you know most of the features and most of the format, but have to add some small and jazzy new stuff to get an upgrade, you might want to work with a thrash control process. The idea with thrash control processes is to start with a really wide (25-400%) range, and progressively whittle that down as the project takes shape. This is a very good process for when you have a fairly good idea what you're going to do, but when there's still a significant amount of mystery. For that you want the Microsoft axis, largely characterized by McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide and Sullivan's UPOT. Thrash control processes have a very nasty tendency to suffer detrimental early optimism, and they're already in a dangerous place for second system syndrome since they're mostly for reasonably well defined projects, so you'd do well to get some cold blanket advice from The Mythical Man-Month if you go this route.
And then, there's the hard-nosed engineer camp. They tend to use things like formal estimation based on code points and function points, systemal analysis and big models like COCOMO. This kind of thing is appropriate for large projects. You can get a clearer understanding of formal estimating practices, instead of just that one practice, from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art.
That should get you started. There are a lot of real approaches to this sort of thing which aren't "zomg double your estimate" or "totally refuse." This is something business needs, and it needs to be done right. There are programmers and there are software engineers. Regardless of what your co
The reason I originally started programming was that my father, sick of going to the store every day for maze books, implemented Kruskal's algorithm on his Smokestack machine and cranked up the dot matrix. That day was the first day I understood automation.
The modern patent costs almost $400,000 and 2.2 man years. Most people aren't willing to dispose of that much money or time in the name of the public good. It's a fact of life: inventors have to eat too.
The lack of millions of dollars in R&D.... or 2) just have people brainstorm ideas and patent them.
Yeah, um. Those brainstorming sessions are the basis of (you guessed it) R&D. That's why it's got a multiple hundred million dollar war-chest. Maybe you should have RTFA; it explained this.
What they are doing is screwing over those in the future who will make it work by patenting it now.
Yeah, that's not actually possible. Patents cover implementations, not ideas. You can't patent something if you can't demonstrate a concrete method to actually make it happen.
An idea farm such is this exists solely to exploit the patent system, for good or ill, but with the system rigged the way it is now, which would not have happend if powerful interests didn't want it that way, the propensity for ill is far greater than that of good.
Whereas I respect your opinion and the quality with which it was stated, I also disagree with it strongly. The question boils down quite nicely into the original question the patent system was formed around: is it worth giving away 20 years of specific-focus technological monopoly to the inventor to provide the economic impetus to release said inventions to the public afterwards?
Given the vast bulk of well documented technology we now have free and legal access to, I believe that the answer is an emphatic "yes." I can go legally manufacturing 386es if I want to, because Intel effectively sold their technologies for protection. In exchange, every company that has a use for that technology can now use it without paying licensure fees.
Yes, there is a good argument that that 20 year margin is a problem, but the issue is effectively this: given the often staggering cost of developing some of these technologies, if we don't let them be temporarily protected from competitors and thieves, how can the inventors justify the expense of invention in the first place?
The only other answer that I see is just keeping it all secret. In my opinion, that's a far more destructive answer, and the market agrees with me (you can tell by inspecting the balance of patent to trade secret.) So, is it worth it to you to let people protect their inventions for N years in order to produce the economic reason to do the work? I suspect the dividing point between us is the answer to this question.
Do you see a different mechanism than patents and trade secrets? If not, do you prefer trade secrets to patents? If not, do you see a way to fund multimillion dollar development projects without the protection of a patent?
If not, what do you suggest as an alternative? I guarantee you my current company, which is generating something new (and, I believe something remarkable,) could not exist, because the second we went public, we'd have competition from the established players in our market which we don't have the war chest to fight back against. To be plain, the only reason my business is possible is because of the protection afforded by our patents.
I would welcome another solution; I don't like this one much, either. But it's the least of the evils I'm able to see.
Actually, we can generate most things cheaper than any other nation on Earth, because of our advanced production technologies, which is why we are still the world's leading industrial power. It's the simple things which can be produced cheaply elsewhere, and even then it's a question of scale: can we develop custom robots to do the work cheaply enough to offset the benefits of nearly-free foreign labor plus shipping?
For almost every company in this country, the answer is "yes." Places like Nike and Reebok are an aberration: shoes are complex shapes to manufacture, but easy to explain, so in their case when those factories were built 30-40 years ago, that was the right way. You'll notice newer companies like Saucony and Teva are machine-manufactured domestically. Levi used to be a sweatshop employer too; now they cut the denim with high-pressure water.
We can compete with almost everyone on almost everything - and we do, quite successfully.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't heard of any sting operations for hitting the phishers...
Then you're apparently not listening. Why is it that stupid people think that just because they haven't heard about something means it isn't going on? You haven't heard about the new fashions in Milan. Does that mean fashion doesn't exist either? Or, Milan?
Why should ebay care? They don't bear the cost of phising, you do.
Nonsense. I've had someone attempt to take advantage of me through PayPal, and PayPal ate the cost. Know why? Because I actually read their instructions and followed the steps I'm required to follow in order to protect myself. The only people who bear the cost of phishing are the people who refuse to follow PayPal's protection rules. That you can't tell why they're the only ones you hear from is honestly pretty naïve.
But I do believe we have a right to call people stupid when they do things like fall for a PayPal scam, buy from spam, send important (highly confidential!) information over email, refuse to apply patches (or not know how), and so on, and so on.
Did you know that 85% of dead televisions just have a blown fuse? Did you know the $120 transmission fluid replacement at Jiffy Lube is a twelve dollar bottle of green grease, and the opening and closing of one valve? Did you know that almost everything a plumber ever actually does is run a drain snake and a plunger?
I mean, we have Sex education, we have Driver's education, I don't think it's unreasonable that we know the computer equivalent of wearing a condom, stopping at red lights, buckling your seatbelt...
Here's the difference: one costs people their lives, the other costs them an hour at the local computer shop. I don't think it's unreasonable that we know how to maintain appliances; nonetheless, nobody requires it, because that's batshit retarded.
Most people think I'm a snobbish bastard, like every other Linux user.
It's got nothing to do with your being a Linux user. It's because you're condescending and because you can't fathom that some people don't have the time or the desire to learn to maintain their computers. Believe it or not, some people have better things to do with their lives.
Next time you pull into a jiffy lube, call a repair person, go to a barber shop, buy art tools, purchase clothes or engage in any service activity whatsoever, please remember that that's something you could learn to do and then spend your life doing, just like a seventy year old woman could spend a year reading tech sites and manuals and getting up to speed on jargon.
Guess what? You don't want to either. You're just too dense to tell the difference.
Er, yes, they do.
Paypalsucks.com is a front for a group which claims to be a paypal competitor. Guess what? They're a scam quite like the one being discussed in the article. The difference? They're selling something real but useless: a merchant account that literally nobody accepts. So, when you try to go get your seven hundred dollars back, the bank tells you "well, they haven't actually done anything illegal, so, no."
Caveat emptor.
That is not true, banks over here (UK) do phone you up and ask for personal information for security reasons because they cannot discuss your account due to data protection laws.
That's an absurd system, and UK banking regulators should be ashamed. To require a bank to behave in the same fashion as identity thieves is a gigantic and wholly unnessecary risk.
Back here in civilization, we have these things called "passcodes." We also have a setup where the bank gives *you* a password which they'll replace on request. Bank calls you? Ask them the current account verification code, and if they respond correctly, first tell them to replace it, then start dealing with them.
Someone should let Britain know that it really isn't that hard to provide bidirectional identification.
Why the hell would you reply to say you don't know?
That's because China is my motherland, you self-righteous idiot. ... and I feel I'm far from saying I'm familiar with the 230 years of her history and culture.
... I've only lived in this country for less than 10 years
Indeed: the Chinese culture is several thousand years old. Of course,
That's because China is my motherland, you self-righteous idiot.
Why do I not believe you?
You are posting on a topic about the Chinese government denying information and other fundamental rights to most of its people
No, douche, I was talking about what you said. I'm ending this thread, as it's obvious you're not able to focus on fact.
Whilst
Middle English != Formal. Whilst has had no place in English for more than 600 years. Posing only works for other stupid people.
what single word has caused more problems and brought more pain and misery to more people?
Marriage.
Sophisticated enough to spell cappucino?
I am not the original "dumbass", so I don't need to make excuses.
And yet, you did anyway.
All I wanted to say is: "Cambridge academics'" isn't that obvious if you are a) not from the english speaking world and b) not into academics.
There is no point at which "Cambridge academics" reads to someone unfamiliar with academia as academics from any area other than Cambridge.
but a few page-downs later I found my rage hardly contained so here more comes
Oh honestly. You act like I punched your mother.
I just can't stand people like you who think you are the only ones understanding the "true meaning of valuing freedom"
I never said any such thing. The desperation for you to win is driving you to invent things to be angry at. How sad. All I did was to point out that your statement presumed American values over Chinese values.
What's it like being unable to admit an error?
Who do you think you are to assume the Chinese - "the Chinese" as in "the Chinese People" instead of "the Chinese in the Party core" - do not want the freedom to think, to speak, and to know?
I never said any such thing. Remarkably, people can want to think and speak and know, and still be worried about external cultural pressures eliminating their own culture, just as we've done to Japan.
Who do you think you are to assume the way China is run now is actually what most of the Chinese want?
Someone who's been there, and asked. You haven't been, have you?
Next time before you try and piggy back your own US domestic agenda
Er, I've done no such thing. You appear to be looking in a mirror. You, sir, are the one who wants to change Chinese behavior according to American standards. All I did was to point that out. Funny how you've now managed to convince yourself it's the other way around, when I've said nothing even remotely to that end.
YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT CHINA.
I've been there several times and am deeply familiar with both their culture and history. That said, I never made any statements about China, so you can get off of your soapbox. The only origin I talked about was you. Stop trying to invent things I said to be angry at me.
What I said, since you appear to have missed it last time: "You're applying your cultural beliefs to a foreign nation and deriving from that that they're doing the wrong thing and need to be changed from the outside."
Where in that do you see me talking about Chinese? I'm talking about you. Quit pretending otherwise.
Part of valuing freedom is valuing Chinese self-governance. It's not freedom if we step in and replace it every time someone disagrees with us. Banging the drum and screaming freedom is not a good reason to go tell the Chinese they're running their own country wrong. That's what self-important plutocrats and warmongers who need justifications behind which to hide do.
Believe it or not, even America has to say "wow, China, you get to run your own country today" once in a while.
Incidentally, there are more Cambridges in the US than in the UK
Er. No, there's exactly one of each over 10k people in each nation. Of course, since Cambridge in this context isn't a city at all, and since there's essentially nobody who actually thinks of MIT when someone says Cambridge who has even a passing familiarity with universities, this is essentially moot.
at least one of which is also notable for its large univerity. Used to confuse the fuck out of me, for one.
Probably because you're posting without reading articles, at which point it would have been bloody obvious. Making excuses for being a dumbass just makes you look dumber. Stop while you're only sorta behind.
In Korea, even people know that's not a Ranma 1/2 joke.
Cambridge ... in the U.S.
You're a navigator by blood, aren't you? Wrong side of the planet, by the way.
<ryoga class="satire/obscure">WHERE THE FUCK IS JAPAN?</ryoga>
Evangelism just means bringer of good news (greek evangelizesthai "bring good news," from eu- "good" + angellein "announce," from angelos "messenger.") That a branch of Christians have co-opted the word and that you need to pray to get MS software to work is merely coincidence.
Estimation is complex and difficult. All four of the major methods today involve keeping significant statistical data on past performance and using it to mathematically generate estimates. This is remarkably accurate - using the PSP and TSP, I've managed to whittle my estimates down to +- 20%. The inventor of the process made a video about eight years ago describing it; in lots of ways it's kind of quaint, since it talks about how big the internet is going to be (for example,) but it also gives a lot of surprising hard data. Since the training courses are several thousand dollars per person and require the whole team, you might want to start by reading the books (Intro to PSP and Intro to TSP) to make sure it's something you like and which is appropriate to your business model.
PSP and TSP are appropriate for up front engineered projects - application sequels, industrial software, military software (it's originally a DoD system,) et cetera. If you're writing business software or games, PSP and TSP aren't for you - they don't allow for the kind of rapid change that characterizes those designs. They can be bent into it, but there are better tools. Extreme Programming (start with Explained then read installed) are built for rapid-change environments, and were built on the Chrysler C4 project. They're industrial-ready, but they spend a lot of time on post-organization. You want that if your project is changing a lot, like an application you're building for a client who isn't sure what they want. You don't want that when you know exactly what you're building, like a realtime control system which has to respond to an exact list of inputs.
When you're somewhere inbetween those two poles - say, the new version of an office suite, or a game sequel, where you know most of the features and most of the format, but have to add some small and jazzy new stuff to get an upgrade, you might want to work with a thrash control process. The idea with thrash control processes is to start with a really wide (25-400%) range, and progressively whittle that down as the project takes shape. This is a very good process for when you have a fairly good idea what you're going to do, but when there's still a significant amount of mystery. For that you want the Microsoft axis, largely characterized by McConnell's Software Project Survival Guide and Sullivan's UPOT. Thrash control processes have a very nasty tendency to suffer detrimental early optimism, and they're already in a dangerous place for second system syndrome since they're mostly for reasonably well defined projects, so you'd do well to get some cold blanket advice from The Mythical Man-Month if you go this route.
And then, there's the hard-nosed engineer camp. They tend to use things like formal estimation based on code points and function points, systemal analysis and big models like COCOMO. This kind of thing is appropriate for large projects. You can get a clearer understanding of formal estimating practices, instead of just that one practice, from Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art.
That should get you started. There are a lot of real approaches to this sort of thing which aren't "zomg double your estimate" or "totally refuse." This is something business needs, and it needs to be done right. There are programmers and there are software engineers. Regardless of what your co
The reason I originally started programming was that my father, sick of going to the store every day for maze books, implemented Kruskal's algorithm on his Smokestack machine and cranked up the dot matrix. That day was the first day I understood automation.
Sometimes parents have less-than-obvious reasons.
Who gives a shit if humans are causing it. We can't stop being human.
Someone hasn't been watching politics lately.
The modern patent costs almost $400,000 and 2.2 man years. Most people aren't willing to dispose of that much money or time in the name of the public good. It's a fact of life: inventors have to eat too.
The lack of millions of dollars in R&D. ... or 2) just have people brainstorm ideas and patent them.
Yeah, um. Those brainstorming sessions are the basis of (you guessed it) R&D. That's why it's got a multiple hundred million dollar war-chest. Maybe you should have RTFA; it explained this.
What they are doing is screwing over those in the future who will make it work by patenting it now.
Yeah, that's not actually possible. Patents cover implementations, not ideas. You can't patent something if you can't demonstrate a concrete method to actually make it happen.
An idea farm such is this exists solely to exploit the patent system, for good or ill, but with the system rigged the way it is now, which would not have happend if powerful interests didn't want it that way, the propensity for ill is far greater than that of good.
Whereas I respect your opinion and the quality with which it was stated, I also disagree with it strongly. The question boils down quite nicely into the original question the patent system was formed around: is it worth giving away 20 years of specific-focus technological monopoly to the inventor to provide the economic impetus to release said inventions to the public afterwards?
Given the vast bulk of well documented technology we now have free and legal access to, I believe that the answer is an emphatic "yes." I can go legally manufacturing 386es if I want to, because Intel effectively sold their technologies for protection. In exchange, every company that has a use for that technology can now use it without paying licensure fees.
Yes, there is a good argument that that 20 year margin is a problem, but the issue is effectively this: given the often staggering cost of developing some of these technologies, if we don't let them be temporarily protected from competitors and thieves, how can the inventors justify the expense of invention in the first place?
The only other answer that I see is just keeping it all secret. In my opinion, that's a far more destructive answer, and the market agrees with me (you can tell by inspecting the balance of patent to trade secret.) So, is it worth it to you to let people protect their inventions for N years in order to produce the economic reason to do the work? I suspect the dividing point between us is the answer to this question.
Do you see a different mechanism than patents and trade secrets? If not, do you prefer trade secrets to patents? If not, do you see a way to fund multimillion dollar development projects without the protection of a patent?
If not, what do you suggest as an alternative? I guarantee you my current company, which is generating something new (and, I believe something remarkable,) could not exist, because the second we went public, we'd have competition from the established players in our market which we don't have the war chest to fight back against. To be plain, the only reason my business is possible is because of the protection afforded by our patents.
I would welcome another solution; I don't like this one much, either. But it's the least of the evils I'm able to see.
Actually, we can generate most things cheaper than any other nation on Earth, because of our advanced production technologies, which is why we are still the world's leading industrial power. It's the simple things which can be produced cheaply elsewhere, and even then it's a question of scale: can we develop custom robots to do the work cheaply enough to offset the benefits of nearly-free foreign labor plus shipping?
For almost every company in this country, the answer is "yes." Places like Nike and Reebok are an aberration: shoes are complex shapes to manufacture, but easy to explain, so in their case when those factories were built 30-40 years ago, that was the right way. You'll notice newer companies like Saucony and Teva are machine-manufactured domestically. Levi used to be a sweatshop employer too; now they cut the denim with high-pressure water.
We can compete with almost everyone on almost everything - and we do, quite successfully.
Er, they've been directly applicable in more than 90% of the world since the 1993 Berne Conventions. Any country in the UN.