Reading over this, it seems pretty clear that Broder is an idiot. He claims to have been given bad instructions - when a moment's thought ("Accelerating and breaking will give you MORE CHARGE!", "Running my car with the heater on but not driving will make the range magically rise", "...The magic rising battery meter with heat didn't work last time, LET'S TRY IT WITH DRIVING TOO") would realize is impossible ("Wait, wouldn't that require this to be a perpetual motion machine and violate the second law of thermodynamics?")
More likely, I bet, is that he's an idiot who misunderstood instructions given to him by these Tesla engineers - possibly on purpose (Guy's got a bit of a history of being a probable oil company shill, do some googling). All of his arguments against the Telsa S are really arguments against the quality of Tesla employees......Who apparently made major failures of common sense. Over multiple people. On three different incidents. While the car actually did exactly what it said it was going to do the ENTIRE TIME. And then he tries to call this a gross failure of the car? No, he's looking for a scoop. I'm just wondering if he's acting the idiot, or is an idiot.
Wrong. Synthetic CDOs. Let me explain them, briefly:
You want to buy a batch of subprime mortgage CDOs. BUT,t here are no more! We've already made all the loans we can? So what do we do?
We get someone to go 'short' (Bet that they're bad) and agree to pay 'insurance premiums', basically, on a set of bad mortgage loans. Because we think they're still good, and that this idiot is just handing us money. We KNOW they're sound.
Meanwhile, his payments - we take a cut, then pass along the rest to someone who went 'long', betting that they are good, and thus, that they're getting free money. Note both sides are betting. There are no loans involved. You know why this structure evolved?
THERE WERE NO MORE LOANS TO MAKE, BUT WALL STREET WANTED MORE. That's it. You want some facts? Here's one - look for a book called "Liar's Poker". Published in 1990, by a Salomon Brother's bond salesman (Salomon Brothers, by the way, invented mortgage bonds) about his experiences in the 80s. Well before the "Community Reinvestment Act". Hell, the book was PUBLISHED before that act.
CRA is just another tool for Wall Street to shift the blame from their own greed.
Oh, for sure. I remember dealing with one system as the Family Tech Guy that had Anti-Virus software - that had not been updated since I first installed it 850 days ago. When I informed them they had a virus, they thought it was impossible. Didn't I put Anti-Virus software on it?
The computer wound up trashed because it needed a reformat and they had long ago thrown out things like their Windows discs, and I wasn't going to bother with that much work for free.
A lot of people just innately trust anything on the PC. Not just their address book, but anything they find. What we need to do is, yes, build a culture of suspicion into this - Why is this thing you want available? Why is someone sending you this offer? Why are you receiving an attachment from this person? If you can't figure it out, then you need to either realize you're taking a risk and search for more info/evalute if it's worth it (What we do, particularly if we're searching for pirated software or the like where there IS a risk), or just back away and don't do it.
What most people do is find out by clicking - the equivalent of taste-testing stuff off the New York Sidewalk. Maybe if someone started a seminar where attendees who blindly open attachments are forced into such unsavory blind taste tests, we'd see a little improvement. Even the BEST viruses I've seen as far as making a 'believable' e-mail, are obvious to me. Even if it came from my brother I wouldn't click on 'em. Because I have some healthy mistrust and suspicion of the internet.
In 2000, because the ballot was clearly screwed up. You clearly had a problem in people voting for Buchanan, in a more then large enough margin to swing the state and a Presidential Election. You're joining the problem here in that you're ignoring, the same way that Bush (And I admit, Gore too) did - assuming that there was 'nothing that could be done' about the screwed up Buchanan votes. That should have forced a re-election. Yes it would have been expensive, yes it would've been a pain, and you can start by taking the money straight from the officials in Florida who didn't fix this problem before hand. But in all seriousness, if at my job, I ran something that screwed up, tried to say 'nothing could be done', and forced through a change based on bad testing, they'd fire my ass, and maybe even take me to court for negligence to take the cost of fixing it out of my paychecks.
And, this is why I consider the exit polling more reliable - not because exit polling is awesome, reliable, or favors either side, but because it's done in public and thus has more accountability then these voting systems people have got. In other words, it's the failure of the competition that makes them arguably superior.
Or, take a look at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012401441.html where you have the evidence of election staff being -convicted- of tampering with the election! Ohio law requires that 3% of votes be manually counted as selected at random, and if there's a discrepancy, to have a full recount to weed out potential tampering; this is a case where workers were convicted of picking ballots they knew would not force a recount.
We need to actually have a system for revotes rather then recounts in our elections. We've had multiple tainted elections now. Wish to god people cared enough to have fair elections in America.
Exit polls are, frankly, more reliable then our actual vote tallies now. The Florida ballot was, quite clearly, confusing. Go look at it from a statistical perspective - Buchanan's results were clearly skewed, as acknowledge by everyone but Bush (Meaning, Buchanan agreed they were screwed up too!), because only Bush had soemthing to gain. Oh, and he was elected president without a plurality popular support. In Florida, back then, the Republicans clearly proved that they were in this to win the presidency, not win an election. If you want to contest this, offer more proof.
Meanwhile, in this article, the argument is not as simple 'It COULD have happened therefore it happened", which would be the grounds you would use to contest any election in any system no matter what. No, here, you have a clearly partisan system, you have an unexplained security lapse, you have an unexplained vote shift. You have strong circumstantial effort of foul play - and while it's not enough to convict someone, this bloody well should have invalidated the election results and forced a revote. You need to know that your election system is clean and reliable, and in this, Ohio's system failed - there's just too great of a chnce for the election to have been stolen to tolerate it. We're America. Run another election. We're supposed to care about that, right?
The Bachelor's Degree, in my experience (Of having gotten one, graduated, and entered the job maket) is nigh-worthless already in actually working. Someone said that it signals you're willing to do the 'deep dive' - in short, that you have tolerance for an extraordinarily large pile of bullshit to be shoveled into you.
But you know what I've learned, very quickly, in the business world?
They've got no interest in shoveling it at you! They've got to actually produce a product of some kind, that people want to buy, in order to survive! The colleges work on a circlejerk philosophy; the more people they produce, the more valuable their product becomes (As you're comparatively worthless - see how they cut on Masters just because they can), and thus, more demand for their educational product.
If you know economics, lemme put it this way: For colleges, when their supply goes up, their demand also goes up. And based on how tuition is skyrocketing, at a faster pace. This is why janitors will have PHDs; they set a standard and keep raising it. Nobody seems to care that the experience is irrelevant - at least not now. Businesses can hire Masters at BA prices right now with such a crappy economy, so they win. Colleges get more money, so they win. The student loses if they don't get a degree because of the competition. The student loses if they do get a degree because they're wasting more money. And the quality of the degree is meaningless because even from the same INSTIUTION, the professors you have make a monumental difference. (I had two professors who were crappy enough to get FIRED! Compared to other students in my class who took classes in a different order, thanks to that, they're much better prepared then me.)
We need an educational overhaul. The teachers are problematic, the obsession with testing is pointless, the obsession with degrees is pointless, and we're just stacking illusory value on top of illusory value so that nobody realizes just how screwed up it all is. Too busy looking at the new sleight-of-hand to remember the old. Can't wait for it to collapse and stop wasting time as college gets away from academia and back towards more useful skills and teaching.
The problem is that if you're uploading something to infect people, there's a risk, for one, that it'll get out of control; and for second, that you might interfere with law enforcement efforts. If I pulled the same stunt here, and infected an FBI system with my virus, then who wouldn't expect them to come rip me a new one? If they wanted honeytraps set they'd do it themselves and get the laws written for it, because, they can shout "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" and get the permission to do it in a second.
This guy might not be the best example of a conviction with the new law (It'd be nice to have one of the fake AV program writers get busted for it), but on the other hand, I'm glad to see such a law being put on the books and enforced. It's even got the exceptions for AV and anti-malware programs so that they won't get busted, or white hats. Sounds solid to me.
So the company's annual revenue should be in the ballpark of $65 M/yr.
The estimated cost to build the thing is $750M, and their estimated payback period is 11 years. That doesn't quite jive with the numbers I've come up with, and doesn't take into account net-present-value calculations, financing costs, operating expenses, etc. But, even so, you should certainly be able to pay for the thing over its many-decades-long lifetime.
If I had to guess, it's that they're adjusting the revenue (That 65M/yr) for inflation because it's not all going to be in today's money, but not the $750m, since that's going to be spent relatively quickly. This is entirely a guess - I don't know how businesses usually account for this - but it would close up the logical gap you're pointing out, without requiring fancy stuff.
This is, by far, the kind of tech we need to be investing in, preferably starting a decade ago. Genuine renewable, reliable power - are deserts hot? Yes? Let's make power from it! It'll be terribly uneconomical at first, of course, but it can improve given time. And it's worth trying out. It might not pan out, but it's sure as hell a better investment then 1.1 million in legal fees trying to surpress video games or whatever other legal action is popular at the moment.
So even if it's silly, go for it, Arizona - this is a much better investment then your immigration laws. In fact, triple your budget for this.
Sounds fun as hell, and pretty probable too, TBH. Number one is hat Stuxnet got in there -before-; nothing keeps it from being re-inserted, possibly with modifications to avoid re-detection. Secondly is - think back to your corporate IT department and how often they make all their fixes right. They screw up sometimes, don't they?
Trust me, the Iranian government's a lot worse. They've got less expertise, less experience, less skills, and a language barrier to deal with most the time. I'd consider it a safe bet that they could've screwed up the cleanup, especially since they also tend to go cheap compared to other militaries (Look at rifles for a basic example here).
Either way, whoever's doing Stuxnet, good job here. I've got more faith in this then I do our diplomat's efforts for the reasons mentioned before - we bend over backwards for anyone who DOES have nukes and invade people who give 'em up. Doesn't take much IQ to see that throwing out your weapons program is a boneheaded idea if you're not going to take that 500 million bribe straightaway and retire before you get bit in the ass.
School priorities are still screwed up. To put this in perspective: At my school, I was a member of the Quiz Bowl and Deabte teams both. And in terms of the attention we got from the school newspaper, announcements, and so forth, it was, quite literally, about 10% of the coverage that our sports teams got.
Education was clearly a second priority at times - teachers showing up baked, obsession with authority, and, of course, not much prize placed on student interaction with the lessons. School's a job for kids and it's always such a rare and special thing for a teacher who has kids that 'love to learn' - bloody hell! Maybe if we started treating the teachers well and clearly explaining their jobs, this would be [i]every[/i] class. They teach stuff that's interesting as hell! American History and Civics? You've got Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, FDR, JFK...Chemistry? Work more experiments in, kids like combining stuff, especially if it looks pretty, explosive, or shiny. English? Focus less on literary classics (You know, which let you not update your lesson plan for 20 years) and work in books that the kids will actually like to read and discuss them.
Teachers will half-ass it because their pay and direction are half-assed; they're treated more like bureaucrats then educators, so why are we surprised that throwing money at the problem without fixing the broken fundamentals has resulted in little improvement? The only reason that you see the H1-B discrepancy is the monumental difference in effort that comes from living in a harder life, having more pressure, but that's not the only way to succeed - good teachers can produce these results from all students. We just don't have, and don't encourage, good teaching.
Could anyone infiltrate a group such as this? Absolutely; there's few criteria for membership, no real review of members, no centralized leadership to weed out trolls from governments or other sources, and basically no defenses.
The catch is, because there's no central leadership, there's not too much to gain from 'infiltrating' them. lulzsec does not operate secretly; they operate openly and blatantly. They're a rampaging elephant. And because leadership is decentralized, your careful 'people management' system that you would advertise to use in your 'infiltration' to 'control lulzsec' will be totally derailed the moment they all decide attacking X is cool and run off to do it.
They organization is too anarchic and open to really be 'infiltrated' by the sense implied here; it's like trying to 'infiltrate' your average recess in grade school. What the hell are you going to gain from it? Maybe assign an intern you pay minimum wage to hang out in an Anon IRC and get a bit more heads-up warning, but it's not gonna be worth more then that.
Hopefully now we'll get to see some real patent reform; honestly, I'm not sure why this hasn't come up already. The popular political topic right now is 'Obamacare' and how it 'creates uncertainty' and that is a horrible thing for business; understandable in a way, as they set aside money for the worst-case scenario whenever possible.
So, assuming along those same lines, I wonder what their patent costs are? I know I've heard before that tech companies set aside a 'patent licensing fund' when they can to deal with patent trolls; if they could get rid of the need for that, or at least substantially lessen that, it'd be great for business, right? And everyone HATES a patent troll, right? C'mon, someone take this ball already and dunk it. The only people who hate it are easily turned into villains for the camera. They're leeches profiting off of GOOD Ol" FASHIONED AMERICAN INGENUITY.
...So, wait, lemme get this straight. Because of privacy and tracking issues, they'll deal with Facebook, but not Google? Here's some links from approximately ten seconds of searching one reliable site.
I mean, google ain't a saint. They've got tons of ammunition that can be pulled up ALMOST as easily as Facebook, but, well, Facebook's got at least a 3.5-year track record since Beacon of violating your privacy in a way that a prison boss could only envy with it's depth. If you tell me I've got to give that information to one of them, I'm picking Google any day of the week. They let me delete more stuff.
Their selling point is, basically, that they'll respect privacy and all those other things that we, the tech geeks, care about. After that, they'll use their Google brand, the widespread dissastisfaction with Facebook's frequent UI and ToS changes, and our own social pressure to pull people in. But really, see Swordgeek's post. http://xkcd.com/918/ is exactly what they offer. And why they've got all these people interested.
This makes me wonder - seeing the HUGE level of success achieved here, relative to the XBLIG, and compared to PSN Minis, what do people see as the chances of Steam or a Steam-like platform dedicated solely to indie games coming out soon? This story's starting to pick up some major press for an 'Indie' game, enough that other developers are going to see it. I think Steam's going to become a part of all their plans now - they're interested enough in making money to do it. I think the Indie scene is looking better then ever with this result.
No, I don't think so - not for a while. The Redbox model is highly productive. People still want the premium editions, still want the Blu-Rays. Not everyone has the bandwith needed for high quality streaming. People still prize the reliability and dependency of physical media, ESPECIALLY with how sometimes things just disappear from Netflix. If Netflix is killing DVDs (Which I'll admit is possible), I don't see DVDs dying for about a decade, at least, as the content models have to shift first - and those guys are notorious for suing the pants off of everyone, getting stupid laws passed to protect their industry, and have tons of money to fight with.
I actually think that there's something going here. Pretty much all of us here, personally, would not benefit from government intervention - this is true. If you're here on/. reading the comments, I'll bet damn near all of us who have GOTTEN a virus, either did it on purpose or took a calculated risk expecting one. Most people who pick up malware are, to put it bluntly, idiots when it comes to computers.
And the bad part IMO comes from when they get themselves turned into zombies - I wouldn't mind seeing the government trying their hand at applying their force and legal requirements to this end. Because most people don't have a financial incentive to try to remove themselves from a botnet if they're part of one, they won't go through the effort - or spend the money - for a private solution. To them, it's just a hassle, and one they've got no reason to go through with. The only way to persuade them to deal with that, at least, is a bigger hassle - the government being a pain in the neck.
Now, for other malware, for phishers and scammers, hostile viruses and worms that attack you directly, I don't think the government can do much that the private industry isn't already doing - or the free software available is. When a problem comes up, they respond quickly, and I don't see how the government could aid aside from mandating some AV software of some kind - but that will already get rammed down your throat by whoever you call for tech support when your system goes belly-up, rendering it IMO not much improvement at all.
Neat ideas, but unfortunately if an innocent, law-abiding person is driving the vehicle of someone who's license is suspended / is uninsured / a criminal, we're going to have a lot of false positives. If my license was suspended and I was obeying the law and not driving, it's totally possible that a family member or friend would then be driving my car, and it'd be out on the road getting scanned by these scanners.
True, but, that still leaves out why the information is being retained. I'm somewhat supportive of dragnet'ing the uninsured/suspended: Mainly because I come from New Orleans, which had the highest auto insurance costs ANYWHERE because of the number of uninsured drivers. See, if both drivers are insured, the insurance company for the driver at fault pays out for the repair of both cars - if the other dude is uninsured, then even if you're not at fault (Someone rammed your car while it was parked in the driveway after plowing through an orphanage), then your insurance company has to pay. The higher rates reflect that - not that you're a worse driver, but that they've agreed to repair your car. You might not pay, but someone will.
And, hell, even if it's a false positive to pick up someone driving a criminal's car, if you're driving his car, that's a good enough reason to guess you might know where he is. But there's still no reason for the retention if that's your goal. It's got to be something else. That's my point here - a lot of people are discussing the right/wrong about the police implications here, but the police implications do not fully explain this policy.
...Because, seriously, I'm thinking, but, I cannot think of ANYTHING the state can do productively with that kind of information that isn't going to be thrown out in court. It's the 'held onto indefinitely' part that's damning.
An idea I could get behind and understand: Immediately comparing on arrival the information with a database of license plate numbers of people with warrants currently out on them. Bonus points if you can get the hits back to the officer in time for him to turn on the lights and go after the guy. But there's no need to keep the data for more then a minute after the search is done.
The 'redundant' idea: You already -have- a list of what plate goes with what vehicle and where it's supposed to be, it's your Motor Vehicle Registry. Cops already delve into this all the time.
The 'criminal' idea: Immediately taking said registry information and...doing much of anything with it, you've just performed a dragnet search.
The 'likely' idea: Guess what! Facebook and Google, along with many other valued partners, are now government affiliates! (Seriously, I'm thinking, and this is the only thing I've come up with so far that wouldn't go to the Redundant Department of Redundancy, considering the data retention)
Indeed, the problem that all these people need to identify:
The pirates are NOT beating you just because their product is free. Their product is also SUPERIOR. It arrives quicker, it's more reliable, it's more versatile. If you want to beat them, then work at making your product the better one, first! Go ahead and provide 'Product Codes' on CDs/DVDs that allow access to 'cool extras' and 'bonus clubs' and what have you - you can do this, and the pirates can't! Use those internet connections for more then just providing ads - I know people who prize Netflix's suggested movies! The more you try to squeeze, the more people are going to slip away.
And for the love of god, make a benign pricing model. You know, the sort where subscribing rates are 'locked in' because there's no realistic justification for anything else except your naked greed, where you 'value customers' by allowing them one track for free a month permanently and an option to buy others at a discount...you could be doing a lot more to make people WANT your product, but instead, you're trying to compel your entire target audience into accepting an inferior product at legal gunpoint. There's already mass legal disobedience, you're an inch away from obsolence - you should stop.
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Reading over this, it seems pretty clear that Broder is an idiot. He claims to have been given bad instructions - when a moment's thought ("Accelerating and breaking will give you MORE CHARGE!", "Running my car with the heater on but not driving will make the range magically rise", "...The magic rising battery meter with heat didn't work last time, LET'S TRY IT WITH DRIVING TOO") would realize is impossible ("Wait, wouldn't that require this to be a perpetual motion machine and violate the second law of thermodynamics?") More likely, I bet, is that he's an idiot who misunderstood instructions given to him by these Tesla engineers - possibly on purpose (Guy's got a bit of a history of being a probable oil company shill, do some googling). All of his arguments against the Telsa S are really arguments against the quality of Tesla employees... ...Who apparently made major failures of common sense. Over multiple people. On three different incidents. While the car actually did exactly what it said it was going to do the ENTIRE TIME. And then he tries to call this a gross failure of the car? No, he's looking for a scoop. I'm just wondering if he's acting the idiot, or is an idiot.
Wrong target; JSTOR came out and said "This is ridiculous, please stop", but MIT didn't, so Ortiz used MIT as her impetus to go ahead.
No, but there's an FXXX, and you don't want to know what they do. (The AC you quoted - I post as AC from work.)
Wrong. Synthetic CDOs. Let me explain them, briefly: You want to buy a batch of subprime mortgage CDOs. BUT,t here are no more! We've already made all the loans we can? So what do we do? We get someone to go 'short' (Bet that they're bad) and agree to pay 'insurance premiums', basically, on a set of bad mortgage loans. Because we think they're still good, and that this idiot is just handing us money. We KNOW they're sound. Meanwhile, his payments - we take a cut, then pass along the rest to someone who went 'long', betting that they are good, and thus, that they're getting free money. Note both sides are betting. There are no loans involved. You know why this structure evolved? THERE WERE NO MORE LOANS TO MAKE, BUT WALL STREET WANTED MORE. That's it. You want some facts? Here's one - look for a book called "Liar's Poker". Published in 1990, by a Salomon Brother's bond salesman (Salomon Brothers, by the way, invented mortgage bonds) about his experiences in the 80s. Well before the "Community Reinvestment Act". Hell, the book was PUBLISHED before that act. CRA is just another tool for Wall Street to shift the blame from their own greed.
Oh, for sure. I remember dealing with one system as the Family Tech Guy that had Anti-Virus software - that had not been updated since I first installed it 850 days ago. When I informed them they had a virus, they thought it was impossible. Didn't I put Anti-Virus software on it?
The computer wound up trashed because it needed a reformat and they had long ago thrown out things like their Windows discs, and I wasn't going to bother with that much work for free.
A lot of people just innately trust anything on the PC. Not just their address book, but anything they find. What we need to do is, yes, build a culture of suspicion into this - Why is this thing you want available? Why is someone sending you this offer? Why are you receiving an attachment from this person? If you can't figure it out, then you need to either realize you're taking a risk and search for more info/evalute if it's worth it (What we do, particularly if we're searching for pirated software or the like where there IS a risk), or just back away and don't do it.
What most people do is find out by clicking - the equivalent of taste-testing stuff off the New York Sidewalk. Maybe if someone started a seminar where attendees who blindly open attachments are forced into such unsavory blind taste tests, we'd see a little improvement. Even the BEST viruses I've seen as far as making a 'believable' e-mail, are obvious to me. Even if it came from my brother I wouldn't click on 'em. Because I have some healthy mistrust and suspicion of the internet.
In 2000, because the ballot was clearly screwed up. You clearly had a problem in people voting for Buchanan, in a more then large enough margin to swing the state and a Presidential Election. You're joining the problem here in that you're ignoring, the same way that Bush (And I admit, Gore too) did - assuming that there was 'nothing that could be done' about the screwed up Buchanan votes. That should have forced a re-election. Yes it would have been expensive, yes it would've been a pain, and you can start by taking the money straight from the officials in Florida who didn't fix this problem before hand. But in all seriousness, if at my job, I ran something that screwed up, tried to say 'nothing could be done', and forced through a change based on bad testing, they'd fire my ass, and maybe even take me to court for negligence to take the cost of fixing it out of my paychecks. And, this is why I consider the exit polling more reliable - not because exit polling is awesome, reliable, or favors either side, but because it's done in public and thus has more accountability then these voting systems people have got. In other words, it's the failure of the competition that makes them arguably superior.
Or, take a look at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/24/AR2007012401441.html where you have the evidence of election staff being -convicted- of tampering with the election! Ohio law requires that 3% of votes be manually counted as selected at random, and if there's a discrepancy, to have a full recount to weed out potential tampering; this is a case where workers were convicted of picking ballots they knew would not force a recount.
We need to actually have a system for revotes rather then recounts in our elections. We've had multiple tainted elections now. Wish to god people cared enough to have fair elections in America.
Exit polls are, frankly, more reliable then our actual vote tallies now. The Florida ballot was, quite clearly, confusing. Go look at it from a statistical perspective - Buchanan's results were clearly skewed, as acknowledge by everyone but Bush (Meaning, Buchanan agreed they were screwed up too!), because only Bush had soemthing to gain. Oh, and he was elected president without a plurality popular support. In Florida, back then, the Republicans clearly proved that they were in this to win the presidency, not win an election. If you want to contest this, offer more proof.
Meanwhile, in this article, the argument is not as simple 'It COULD have happened therefore it happened", which would be the grounds you would use to contest any election in any system no matter what. No, here, you have a clearly partisan system, you have an unexplained security lapse, you have an unexplained vote shift. You have strong circumstantial effort of foul play - and while it's not enough to convict someone, this bloody well should have invalidated the election results and forced a revote. You need to know that your election system is clean and reliable, and in this, Ohio's system failed - there's just too great of a chnce for the election to have been stolen to tolerate it. We're America. Run another election. We're supposed to care about that, right?
The Bachelor's Degree, in my experience (Of having gotten one, graduated, and entered the job maket) is nigh-worthless already in actually working. Someone said that it signals you're willing to do the 'deep dive' - in short, that you have tolerance for an extraordinarily large pile of bullshit to be shoveled into you.
But you know what I've learned, very quickly, in the business world?
They've got no interest in shoveling it at you! They've got to actually produce a product of some kind, that people want to buy, in order to survive! The colleges work on a circlejerk philosophy; the more people they produce, the more valuable their product becomes (As you're comparatively worthless - see how they cut on Masters just because they can), and thus, more demand for their educational product.
If you know economics, lemme put it this way: For colleges, when their supply goes up, their demand also goes up. And based on how tuition is skyrocketing, at a faster pace. This is why janitors will have PHDs; they set a standard and keep raising it. Nobody seems to care that the experience is irrelevant - at least not now. Businesses can hire Masters at BA prices right now with such a crappy economy, so they win. Colleges get more money, so they win. The student loses if they don't get a degree because of the competition. The student loses if they do get a degree because they're wasting more money. And the quality of the degree is meaningless because even from the same INSTIUTION, the professors you have make a monumental difference. (I had two professors who were crappy enough to get FIRED! Compared to other students in my class who took classes in a different order, thanks to that, they're much better prepared then me.)
We need an educational overhaul. The teachers are problematic, the obsession with testing is pointless, the obsession with degrees is pointless, and we're just stacking illusory value on top of illusory value so that nobody realizes just how screwed up it all is. Too busy looking at the new sleight-of-hand to remember the old. Can't wait for it to collapse and stop wasting time as college gets away from academia and back towards more useful skills and teaching.
The problem is that if you're uploading something to infect people, there's a risk, for one, that it'll get out of control; and for second, that you might interfere with law enforcement efforts. If I pulled the same stunt here, and infected an FBI system with my virus, then who wouldn't expect them to come rip me a new one? If they wanted honeytraps set they'd do it themselves and get the laws written for it, because, they can shout "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" and get the permission to do it in a second.
This guy might not be the best example of a conviction with the new law (It'd be nice to have one of the fake AV program writers get busted for it), but on the other hand, I'm glad to see such a law being put on the books and enforced. It's even got the exceptions for AV and anti-malware programs so that they won't get busted, or white hats. Sounds solid to me.
Sigh... I have a pen, anyone have an envelope?
So the company's annual revenue should be in the ballpark of $65 M/yr.
The estimated cost to build the thing is $750M, and their estimated payback period is 11 years. That doesn't quite jive with the numbers I've come up with, and doesn't take into account net-present-value calculations, financing costs, operating expenses, etc. But, even so, you should certainly be able to pay for the thing over its many-decades-long lifetime.
If I had to guess, it's that they're adjusting the revenue (That 65M/yr) for inflation because it's not all going to be in today's money, but not the $750m, since that's going to be spent relatively quickly. This is entirely a guess - I don't know how businesses usually account for this - but it would close up the logical gap you're pointing out, without requiring fancy stuff.
This is, by far, the kind of tech we need to be investing in, preferably starting a decade ago. Genuine renewable, reliable power - are deserts hot? Yes? Let's make power from it! It'll be terribly uneconomical at first, of course, but it can improve given time. And it's worth trying out. It might not pan out, but it's sure as hell a better investment then 1.1 million in legal fees trying to surpress video games or whatever other legal action is popular at the moment.
So even if it's silly, go for it, Arizona - this is a much better investment then your immigration laws. In fact, triple your budget for this.
Sounds fun as hell, and pretty probable too, TBH. Number one is hat Stuxnet got in there -before-; nothing keeps it from being re-inserted, possibly with modifications to avoid re-detection. Secondly is - think back to your corporate IT department and how often they make all their fixes right. They screw up sometimes, don't they?
Trust me, the Iranian government's a lot worse. They've got less expertise, less experience, less skills, and a language barrier to deal with most the time. I'd consider it a safe bet that they could've screwed up the cleanup, especially since they also tend to go cheap compared to other militaries (Look at rifles for a basic example here).
Either way, whoever's doing Stuxnet, good job here. I've got more faith in this then I do our diplomat's efforts for the reasons mentioned before - we bend over backwards for anyone who DOES have nukes and invade people who give 'em up. Doesn't take much IQ to see that throwing out your weapons program is a boneheaded idea if you're not going to take that 500 million bribe straightaway and retire before you get bit in the ass.
School priorities are still screwed up. To put this in perspective: At my school, I was a member of the Quiz Bowl and Deabte teams both. And in terms of the attention we got from the school newspaper, announcements, and so forth, it was, quite literally, about 10% of the coverage that our sports teams got.
Education was clearly a second priority at times - teachers showing up baked, obsession with authority, and, of course, not much prize placed on student interaction with the lessons. School's a job for kids and it's always such a rare and special thing for a teacher who has kids that 'love to learn' - bloody hell! Maybe if we started treating the teachers well and clearly explaining their jobs, this would be [i]every[/i] class. They teach stuff that's interesting as hell! American History and Civics? You've got Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, FDR, JFK...Chemistry? Work more experiments in, kids like combining stuff, especially if it looks pretty, explosive, or shiny. English? Focus less on literary classics (You know, which let you not update your lesson plan for 20 years) and work in books that the kids will actually like to read and discuss them.
Teachers will half-ass it because their pay and direction are half-assed; they're treated more like bureaucrats then educators, so why are we surprised that throwing money at the problem without fixing the broken fundamentals has resulted in little improvement? The only reason that you see the H1-B discrepancy is the monumental difference in effort that comes from living in a harder life, having more pressure, but that's not the only way to succeed - good teachers can produce these results from all students. We just don't have, and don't encourage, good teaching.
Could anyone infiltrate a group such as this? Absolutely; there's few criteria for membership, no real review of members, no centralized leadership to weed out trolls from governments or other sources, and basically no defenses.
The catch is, because there's no central leadership, there's not too much to gain from 'infiltrating' them. lulzsec does not operate secretly; they operate openly and blatantly. They're a rampaging elephant. And because leadership is decentralized, your careful 'people management' system that you would advertise to use in your 'infiltration' to 'control lulzsec' will be totally derailed the moment they all decide attacking X is cool and run off to do it.
They organization is too anarchic and open to really be 'infiltrated' by the sense implied here; it's like trying to 'infiltrate' your average recess in grade school. What the hell are you going to gain from it? Maybe assign an intern you pay minimum wage to hang out in an Anon IRC and get a bit more heads-up warning, but it's not gonna be worth more then that.
Hopefully now we'll get to see some real patent reform; honestly, I'm not sure why this hasn't come up already. The popular political topic right now is 'Obamacare' and how it 'creates uncertainty' and that is a horrible thing for business; understandable in a way, as they set aside money for the worst-case scenario whenever possible.
So, assuming along those same lines, I wonder what their patent costs are? I know I've heard before that tech companies set aside a 'patent licensing fund' when they can to deal with patent trolls; if they could get rid of the need for that, or at least substantially lessen that, it'd be great for business, right? And everyone HATES a patent troll, right? C'mon, someone take this ball already and dunk it. The only people who hate it are easily turned into villains for the camera. They're leeches profiting off of GOOD Ol" FASHIONED AMERICAN INGENUITY.
...So, wait, lemme get this straight. Because of privacy and tracking issues, they'll deal with Facebook, but not Google? Here's some links from approximately ten seconds of searching one reliable site.
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/05/understanding-the-latest-facebook-privacy-train-wreck.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/privacy-groups-complain-to-ftc-over-facebook-privacy-tweaks.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/ftc-complaint-says-facebooks-privacy-changes-are-deceptive.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/more-privacy-headaches-for-facebook-gay-users-outed-to-advertisers.ars
http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2010/08/privacy-groups-facebook-already-facing-off-over-places.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/11/facebook-reevaluating-beacon-after-privacy-outcry-possible-ftc-complaint.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/04/suit-accuses-blockbuster-facebook-of-privacy-law-violations.ars
I mean, google ain't a saint. They've got tons of ammunition that can be pulled up ALMOST as easily as Facebook, but, well, Facebook's got at least a 3.5-year track record since Beacon of violating your privacy in a way that a prison boss could only envy with it's depth. If you tell me I've got to give that information to one of them, I'm picking Google any day of the week. They let me delete more stuff.
Their selling point is, basically, that they'll respect privacy and all those other things that we, the tech geeks, care about. After that, they'll use their Google brand, the widespread dissastisfaction with Facebook's frequent UI and ToS changes, and our own social pressure to pull people in. But really, see Swordgeek's post. http://xkcd.com/918/ is exactly what they offer. And why they've got all these people interested.
This makes me wonder - seeing the HUGE level of success achieved here, relative to the XBLIG, and compared to PSN Minis, what do people see as the chances of Steam or a Steam-like platform dedicated solely to indie games coming out soon? This story's starting to pick up some major press for an 'Indie' game, enough that other developers are going to see it. I think Steam's going to become a part of all their plans now - they're interested enough in making money to do it. I think the Indie scene is looking better then ever with this result.
No, I don't think so - not for a while. The Redbox model is highly productive. People still want the premium editions, still want the Blu-Rays. Not everyone has the bandwith needed for high quality streaming. People still prize the reliability and dependency of physical media, ESPECIALLY with how sometimes things just disappear from Netflix. If Netflix is killing DVDs (Which I'll admit is possible), I don't see DVDs dying for about a decade, at least, as the content models have to shift first - and those guys are notorious for suing the pants off of everyone, getting stupid laws passed to protect their industry, and have tons of money to fight with.
I actually think that there's something going here. Pretty much all of us here, personally, would not benefit from government intervention - this is true. If you're here on /. reading the comments, I'll bet damn near all of us who have GOTTEN a virus, either did it on purpose or took a calculated risk expecting one. Most people who pick up malware are, to put it bluntly, idiots when it comes to computers.
And the bad part IMO comes from when they get themselves turned into zombies - I wouldn't mind seeing the government trying their hand at applying their force and legal requirements to this end. Because most people don't have a financial incentive to try to remove themselves from a botnet if they're part of one, they won't go through the effort - or spend the money - for a private solution. To them, it's just a hassle, and one they've got no reason to go through with. The only way to persuade them to deal with that, at least, is a bigger hassle - the government being a pain in the neck.
Now, for other malware, for phishers and scammers, hostile viruses and worms that attack you directly, I don't think the government can do much that the private industry isn't already doing - or the free software available is. When a problem comes up, they respond quickly, and I don't see how the government could aid aside from mandating some AV software of some kind - but that will already get rammed down your throat by whoever you call for tech support when your system goes belly-up, rendering it IMO not much improvement at all.
Neat ideas, but unfortunately if an innocent, law-abiding person is driving the vehicle of someone who's license is suspended / is uninsured / a criminal, we're going to have a lot of false positives. If my license was suspended and I was obeying the law and not driving, it's totally possible that a family member or friend would then be driving my car, and it'd be out on the road getting scanned by these scanners.
True, but, that still leaves out why the information is being retained. I'm somewhat supportive of dragnet'ing the uninsured/suspended: Mainly because I come from New Orleans, which had the highest auto insurance costs ANYWHERE because of the number of uninsured drivers. See, if both drivers are insured, the insurance company for the driver at fault pays out for the repair of both cars - if the other dude is uninsured, then even if you're not at fault (Someone rammed your car while it was parked in the driveway after plowing through an orphanage), then your insurance company has to pay. The higher rates reflect that - not that you're a worse driver, but that they've agreed to repair your car. You might not pay, but someone will.
And, hell, even if it's a false positive to pick up someone driving a criminal's car, if you're driving his car, that's a good enough reason to guess you might know where he is. But there's still no reason for the retention if that's your goal. It's got to be something else. That's my point here - a lot of people are discussing the right/wrong about the police implications here, but the police implications do not fully explain this policy.
...Because, seriously, I'm thinking, but, I cannot think of ANYTHING the state can do productively with that kind of information that isn't going to be thrown out in court. It's the 'held onto indefinitely' part that's damning.
An idea I could get behind and understand: Immediately comparing on arrival the information with a database of license plate numbers of people with warrants currently out on them. Bonus points if you can get the hits back to the officer in time for him to turn on the lights and go after the guy. But there's no need to keep the data for more then a minute after the search is done.
The 'redundant' idea: You already -have- a list of what plate goes with what vehicle and where it's supposed to be, it's your Motor Vehicle Registry. Cops already delve into this all the time.
The 'criminal' idea: Immediately taking said registry information and...doing much of anything with it, you've just performed a dragnet search.
The 'likely' idea: Guess what! Facebook and Google, along with many other valued partners, are now government affiliates! (Seriously, I'm thinking, and this is the only thing I've come up with so far that wouldn't go to the Redundant Department of Redundancy, considering the data retention)
Indeed, the problem that all these people need to identify:
The pirates are NOT beating you just because their product is free. Their product is also SUPERIOR. It arrives quicker, it's more reliable, it's more versatile. If you want to beat them, then work at making your product the better one, first! Go ahead and provide 'Product Codes' on CDs/DVDs that allow access to 'cool extras' and 'bonus clubs' and what have you - you can do this, and the pirates can't! Use those internet connections for more then just providing ads - I know people who prize Netflix's suggested movies! The more you try to squeeze, the more people are going to slip away.
And for the love of god, make a benign pricing model. You know, the sort where subscribing rates are 'locked in' because there's no realistic justification for anything else except your naked greed, where you 'value customers' by allowing them one track for free a month permanently and an option to buy others at a discount...you could be doing a lot more to make people WANT your product, but instead, you're trying to compel your entire target audience into accepting an inferior product at legal gunpoint. There's already mass legal disobedience, you're an inch away from obsolence - you should stop.