They're using the doppler effect to measure. Maybe they should try some other measurement techniques as well to see if they all match up. It might be a measurement error of some sort.
Bureaucracy has a strong tendency to diffuse accountability. There is a marvelous fictional anecdote about how this happens: The Hierarchy of Power Semantics.
Who in the chain in the anecdote is responsible for the bad decision? And that pretty much mirrors exactly what happened in the shuttle disaster. The engineers at the bottom knew there was a serious problem with flying in cold weather because of the O-rings, but at every step of the chain the problems reported at the lower level were made a little and happier for the level above.
This is true. But then again Pirate Bay isn't hosting those torrents themselves AFAIK.
Pirate Bay (like Napster before it) is on the edge of something that makes me fairly uncomfortable.
I don't know what the answer is. This stock photographer does something pretty useful and copyright enables his business model. He benefits directly from copyright. The people that use his photography benefit from what he does or they wouldn't pay him money for the photographs.
I don't think that copyright is inherently evil, but I don't think that words like 'stealing', 'theft' or 'piracy' are appropriate either. It is not a property right.
And having large organizations that themselves create nothing going after individuals for infringement doesn't seem right either. Maybe the answer is to abolish corporate copyright and to make contracts that enable a person to promise not to sell their work to anyone else not enforceable for a term of longer than 5 years or something.
FWIW, you should be attempting to educate yourself and think about your knowledge base constantly, rather than waiting for somebody to point out that you're incorrect. Otherwise, how will you know how much of your knowledge base is fundamentally flawed?
If I did that on an active basis I would have time for nothing else. I generally do this on a passive basis by being alert for contradicting information and being a bit aggressive about sources when I find it. In areas I consider core competency areas, I'm much more aggressive about hunting down sources and new information.
In this case, it's the profit involved. I would be upset and feel that someone who charged $50 for an unauthorized copy of Vista should be sued in a similar fashion.
Also, note that this damage award is fairly reasonable. $18,000 is a hefty price for a small-mid sized business, but not a 'this will destroy your business' damage award. Unlike the $100,000+ award given to RIAA over that woman in Duluth when real damages could likely be truthfully estimated in dollars or 10s of dollars and statutory damages of 100s of dollars would be reasonable (if the concept of suing a non-commercial distributor who derives no benefit from the distribution is reasonable at all).
As someone pointed out, lack of customer focus is not a new thing for Microsoft. They have always been competitor focused. I don't think Microsoft can change this, it's too core to what their company is all about. Microsoft is always really unhappy when anybody talks about someone else more than them. They want to be 'it' for some rather amorphous domain of computer oriented mindshare.
And unless you care to refute my actual point about where you got your "education", then it's still valid.
Ignorance is not brainwashing. I generally do not keep careful track of exactly where I came across every idea in my head though your surmise is likely correct. But I do usually take the time to go educate myself at least minimally when I discover one of them is wrong.
Perhaps you should actually know what you're talking about before shooting off your mouth. Especially when the fate of several living persons hangs in the balance, along with the concept of justice for the people.
My statements will have little or no impact on the fates of these people, so this is completely bogus. Additionally, in context, the error is rather minor. It doesn't affect the validity of the rest of what I said. As for perpetuating misinformation, I'm guilty. But I'm sure that people reading will find the numerous corrections I received, all of which but yours were reasonably civil.
Curing ignorance simply requires politely pointing it out, not disparaging comments.
Many people such as yourself use the Internet as an excuse to be complete jerks. If you had corrected me in face-to-face setting in the same manner as you chose on the Internet I would've dismissed your comments out of hand as coming from an asshole who couldn't even be bothered with the basics of civil society.
Here, it is much easier to separate the factual elements of your statement from its deplorable tone. A dubious advantage to be sure.
Nice to see you've been brainwashed by TV and movies.
Nice to see that you can find a nasty way to make a correction that at least 4 other people have made before you. It always warms my heart to see someone who likes to make themselves look big by trashing others in ways that are both ugly and redundant.
I stand corrected. I still think that the existing evidence leaves open many interpretations that do not involve Hans murdering Nina, or even her death. I'm not even sure the case as it stands meets the civil case standard of 'a preponderance of the evidence'.
All of what both of you are saying is complete conjecture. Nobody knows. It seems like you're both just trying to use facts and conjecture to back up an decision you've already made. I don't think it's at all clear that there is evidence that Hans murdered his wife.
It's not the Twinkie Defense. Hans is claiming he didn't murder her, not that some bizarre psychological condition associated with being a geek should mitigate his action in some way. The psychological aspect is used only to explain why he acted so strangely and why those strange actions are not indicative of guilt. Basically, it didn't even occur to him that those actions might be seen as acting guilty.
From what I can tell, the prosecution has absolutely not proven Hans' guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt. They have not met the standard of proof required for a criminal conviction. All they have is some fairly flimsy circumstantial evidence.
But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre. I can actually believe that Nina has managed to escape back to Russia and finagled the courts through the rest of her family into letting her children go back too. But I can also believe that Hans murdered her. Both scenarios fit the available evidence.
In short, there are several features of D-BUS that combined with it's limited area of application make it really useful and not nearly as evil as most RPC-based technologies. But Thrift is both missing these features and operates in a much more demanding environment, so it's not nearly so nice. OTOH, a significant portion of Thrift is devoted to a language and architecture agnostic data description language, and perhaps that feature alone can be leveraged along with generous helpings of other stuff to make it useful.
It didn't look academic to me. It looked pretty darned real. If you can recover even 90% of the key that's enough to make a brute force attack on the rest eminently feasible. And finding a laptop with the power on isn't hard. The power on my laptop is always on. I never turn the thing off. I just reboot it every month or two on the rare occasions when something goes wonky when it comes out of sleep (where the memory still has power, hibernate is when all the power is off) mode.
If you have physical security on your machine, why are you encrypting your drive at all then?
The whole point of drive encryption is to deal with situations in which you don't have complete physical security over your box. This attack completely blows it out of the water. The attack can be performed with a USB thumb drive with some software on it and a power-off, power-on reboot.
The only solution I can see is DRAM that purposefully scrambles itself when it loses power. Even that's not a perfect defense, but it raises the bar to the attacker with millions of dollars level.
The current attack can be done trivially by somebody with hardly any resources at all. And it might even be able to be done and information copied off without you even realizing that something had happened to your laptop.
Blaming the shuttle disaster on capitalism is erroneous. I do not necessarily disagree with your assessment in general, but capitalism was not at fault in that particular instance. What was at fault was bureaucrats trying to look good to their superiors and present a positive public image at the cost of real engineering.
I would say that in general is the meta-problem, not capitalism. In its current form in the US capitalism has caused the existence of many large entities that use hierarchical systems of command and control. These hierarchical systems frequently make sub-optimal decisions because individual actors within the system act for their own benefit but against the benefit of the larger system they are a part of. Particularly egregious examples of this can be found, and they tend to be highlighted as aberrations, but they aren't. They are merely extrema of a problem that is widespread.
Bureaucracy in general serves to insulate actors from responsibility for the results of their actions. As I recall we didn't see any of the middle management of NASA held accountable for the disaster they caused by attempting to look good for their superiors and the public. And this failure of accountability is endemic to the kinds of hierarchical systems you see in most bureaucracies.
I'm still thinking about how to answer this question. It may take me awhile and result in another small paper on my site. I think I'll also have to learn more about Thrift to see if I really feel that way about it or not. I know that D-BUS got a whole bunch of things right. It still, annoyingly enough, represents network messages as function calls, but for the domain of communication between processes on the same machine that's not nearly so evil as over-the-Internet RPC is.
And then you're left with software all kinds of weird little glitches because someone fixed a problem in a library and nobody ever bothers to upgrade to a newer version. Or somebody uses one version of a library to build a data structure or update a database and somebody else uses a different version and they get all confused about what the data really is.
Either you publish interfaces that are not based on any programming language at all and stick to those or you upgrade your libraries. Having a whole ton of different versions of various libraries wandering around your organization seems a recipe for disaster.
The answer to one particular parsing stupidity is not to introduce a different, altogether different set of parsing stupidities to fix it. XML is not a programming language, and making it into one is a pretty distressing and contorted thing to do.
That is like calling overloaded operators syntactic sugar. Sure they are, but your language is still very different if you have them.
Libraries that make messages look like function calls obscure some very important details about messages that make them rather different animals then function calls. The message may be going to an entity outside your 'state horizon'. Basically it may be going to an entity that has goals and motives that are completely opposed to yours, which is very different from a function call. Also the message will take at least milliseconds to get there, and a reply will take at least milliseconds to get back. This is in great contrast to a function call in which those things are measured in units 6 orders of magnitude (base 10) smaller.
And since these things are so different, messages sent over a network to a remote system should not look like function calls or be handled in the same way.
I don't know about Thrift being a real contender in the web/internet-based services area. Really, code generation? How 80's. Haven't we learned enough from Sun RPC that this is a PITA, give me a proper library dammit! And AFAIK D-Bus is for local IPC, good luck sending messages over a network without a couple of hoops to jump through.
The environment has changed. Dynamic languages allow the code generation to be done at runtime. I think Thrift has a good chance of succeeding in this sort of environment. Of course, IMHO, in order for that to really come into its own, Thrift must insist that any Thrift service support a standard API that allows downloading the API description.
I too prefer REST-style interfaces. I prefer technologies that encourage things to be done this way. RPC technologies almost universally try to make things 'easy' by making network messages look like function calls. And I think this is all the wrong approach for a variety of reasons, one if which is that it tends to lead to very non-RESTy interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if there's a way to apply selective pressure to the HIV version of polymerase to make it more accurate?
Oh, no! I accidentally added an 'e' onto the end of a word! Obviously this means I have no clue how to spell it properly.
They're using the doppler effect to measure. Maybe they should try some other measurement techniques as well to see if they all match up. It might be a measurement error of some sort.
Bureaucracy has a strong tendency to diffuse accountability. There is a marvelous fictional anecdote about how this happens:
The Hierarchy of Power Semantics.
Who in the chain in the anecdote is responsible for the bad decision? And that pretty much mirrors exactly what happened in the shuttle disaster. The engineers at the bottom knew there was a serious problem with flying in cold weather because of the O-rings, but at every step of the chain the problems reported at the lower level were made a little and happier for the level above.
This is true. But then again Pirate Bay isn't hosting those torrents themselves AFAIK.
Pirate Bay (like Napster before it) is on the edge of something that makes me fairly uncomfortable.
I don't know what the answer is. This stock photographer does something pretty useful and copyright enables his business model. He benefits directly from copyright. The people that use his photography benefit from what he does or they wouldn't pay him money for the photographs.
I don't think that copyright is inherently evil, but I don't think that words like 'stealing', 'theft' or 'piracy' are appropriate either. It is not a property right.
And having large organizations that themselves create nothing going after individuals for infringement doesn't seem right either. Maybe the answer is to abolish corporate copyright and to make contracts that enable a person to promise not to sell their work to anyone else not enforceable for a term of longer than 5 years or something.
FWIW, you should be attempting to educate yourself and think about your knowledge base constantly, rather than waiting for somebody to point out that you're incorrect. Otherwise, how will you know how much of your knowledge base is fundamentally flawed?
If I did that on an active basis I would have time for nothing else. I generally do this on a passive basis by being alert for contradicting information and being a bit aggressive about sources when I find it. In areas I consider core competency areas, I'm much more aggressive about hunting down sources and new information.
BTW, thank you for being reasonably polite. :-)
In this case, it's the profit involved. I would be upset and feel that someone who charged $50 for an unauthorized copy of Vista should be sued in a similar fashion.
Also, note that this damage award is fairly reasonable. $18,000 is a hefty price for a small-mid sized business, but not a 'this will destroy your business' damage award. Unlike the $100,000+ award given to RIAA over that woman in Duluth when real damages could likely be truthfully estimated in dollars or 10s of dollars and statutory damages of 100s of dollars would be reasonable (if the concept of suing a non-commercial distributor who derives no benefit from the distribution is reasonable at all).
As someone pointed out, lack of customer focus is not a new thing for Microsoft. They have always been competitor focused. I don't think Microsoft can change this, it's too core to what their company is all about. Microsoft is always really unhappy when anybody talks about someone else more than them. They want to be 'it' for some rather amorphous domain of computer oriented mindshare.
And unless you care to refute my actual point about where you got your "education", then it's still valid.
Ignorance is not brainwashing. I generally do not keep careful track of exactly where I came across every idea in my head though your surmise is likely correct. But I do usually take the time to go educate myself at least minimally when I discover one of them is wrong.
Perhaps you should actually know what you're talking about before shooting off your mouth. Especially when the fate of several living persons hangs in the balance, along with the concept of justice for the people.
My statements will have little or no impact on the fates of these people, so this is completely bogus. Additionally, in context, the error is rather minor. It doesn't affect the validity of the rest of what I said. As for perpetuating misinformation, I'm guilty. But I'm sure that people reading will find the numerous corrections I received, all of which but yours were reasonably civil.
Curing ignorance simply requires politely pointing it out, not disparaging comments.
Many people such as yourself use the Internet as an excuse to be complete jerks. If you had corrected me in face-to-face setting in the same manner as you chose on the Internet I would've dismissed your comments out of hand as coming from an asshole who couldn't even be bothered with the basics of civil society.
Here, it is much easier to separate the factual elements of your statement from its deplorable tone. A dubious advantage to be sure.
Nice to see you've been brainwashed by TV and movies.
Nice to see that you can find a nasty way to make a correction that at least 4 other people have made before you. It always warms my heart to see someone who likes to make themselves look big by trashing others in ways that are both ugly and redundant.
Yes, but Hans didn't stand to be in any better shape if Nina was murdered.
I stand corrected. I still think that the existing evidence leaves open many interpretations that do not involve Hans murdering Nina, or even her death. I'm not even sure the case as it stands meets the civil case standard of 'a preponderance of the evidence'.
All of what both of you are saying is complete conjecture. Nobody knows. It seems like you're both just trying to use facts and conjecture to back up an decision you've already made. I don't think it's at all clear that there is evidence that Hans murdered his wife.
It's not the Twinkie Defense. Hans is claiming he didn't murder her, not that some bizarre psychological condition associated with being a geek should mitigate his action in some way. The psychological aspect is used only to explain why he acted so strangely and why those strange actions are not indicative of guilt. Basically, it didn't even occur to him that those actions might be seen as acting guilty.
From what I can tell, the prosecution has absolutely not proven Hans' guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt. They have not met the standard of proof required for a criminal conviction. All they have is some fairly flimsy circumstantial evidence.
But that's a separate question from whether or not I think he's guilty. And given the available evidence I can't decide either way. This case just is too bizarre. I can actually believe that Nina has managed to escape back to Russia and finagled the courts through the rest of her family into letting her children go back too. But I can also believe that Hans murdered her. Both scenarios fit the available evidence.
My main complaints about emacs nowadays is how it can't use anti-aliased fonts and it has no good support for distributed version control systems.
I've written up a little summary of my thoughts on Thrift and D-BUS that may interest you because I address exactly this issue. :-)
I have written up an answer to this question in my journal here: Thoughts on Thrift and D-BUS
In short, there are several features of D-BUS that combined with it's limited area of application make it really useful and not nearly as evil as most RPC-based technologies. But Thrift is both missing these features and operates in a much more demanding environment, so it's not nearly so nice. OTOH, a significant portion of Thrift is devoted to a language and architecture agnostic data description language, and perhaps that feature alone can be leveraged along with generous helpings of other stuff to make it useful.
It didn't look academic to me. It looked pretty darned real. If you can recover even 90% of the key that's enough to make a brute force attack on the rest eminently feasible. And finding a laptop with the power on isn't hard. The power on my laptop is always on. I never turn the thing off. I just reboot it every month or two on the rare occasions when something goes wonky when it comes out of sleep (where the memory still has power, hibernate is when all the power is off) mode.
If you have physical security on your machine, why are you encrypting your drive at all then?
The whole point of drive encryption is to deal with situations in which you don't have complete physical security over your box. This attack completely blows it out of the water. The attack can be performed with a USB thumb drive with some software on it and a power-off, power-on reboot.
The only solution I can see is DRAM that purposefully scrambles itself when it loses power. Even that's not a perfect defense, but it raises the bar to the attacker with millions of dollars level.
The current attack can be done trivially by somebody with hardly any resources at all. And it might even be able to be done and information copied off without you even realizing that something had happened to your laptop.
Blaming the shuttle disaster on capitalism is erroneous. I do not necessarily disagree with your assessment in general, but capitalism was not at fault in that particular instance. What was at fault was bureaucrats trying to look good to their superiors and present a positive public image at the cost of real engineering.
I would say that in general is the meta-problem, not capitalism. In its current form in the US capitalism has caused the existence of many large entities that use hierarchical systems of command and control. These hierarchical systems frequently make sub-optimal decisions because individual actors within the system act for their own benefit but against the benefit of the larger system they are a part of. Particularly egregious examples of this can be found, and they tend to be highlighted as aberrations, but they aren't. They are merely extrema of a problem that is widespread.
Bureaucracy in general serves to insulate actors from responsibility for the results of their actions. As I recall we didn't see any of the middle management of NASA held accountable for the disaster they caused by attempting to look good for their superiors and the public. And this failure of accountability is endemic to the kinds of hierarchical systems you see in most bureaucracies.
I'm still thinking about how to answer this question. It may take me awhile and result in another small paper on my site. I think I'll also have to learn more about Thrift to see if I really feel that way about it or not. I know that D-BUS got a whole bunch of things right. It still, annoyingly enough, represents network messages as function calls, but for the domain of communication between processes on the same machine that's not nearly so evil as over-the-Internet RPC is.
And then you're left with software all kinds of weird little glitches because someone fixed a problem in a library and nobody ever bothers to upgrade to a newer version. Or somebody uses one version of a library to build a data structure or update a database and somebody else uses a different version and they get all confused about what the data really is.
Either you publish interfaces that are not based on any programming language at all and stick to those or you upgrade your libraries. Having a whole ton of different versions of various libraries wandering around your organization seems a recipe for disaster.
The answer to one particular parsing stupidity is not to introduce a different, altogether different set of parsing stupidities to fix it. XML is not a programming language, and making it into one is a pretty distressing and contorted thing to do.
That is like calling overloaded operators syntactic sugar. Sure they are, but your language is still very different if you have them.
Libraries that make messages look like function calls obscure some very important details about messages that make them rather different animals then function calls. The message may be going to an entity outside your 'state horizon'. Basically it may be going to an entity that has goals and motives that are completely opposed to yours, which is very different from a function call. Also the message will take at least milliseconds to get there, and a reply will take at least milliseconds to get back. This is in great contrast to a function call in which those things are measured in units 6 orders of magnitude (base 10) smaller.
And since these things are so different, messages sent over a network to a remote system should not look like function calls or be handled in the same way.
I don't know about Thrift being a real contender in the web/internet-based services area. Really, code generation? How 80's. Haven't we learned enough from Sun RPC that this is a PITA, give me a proper library dammit! And AFAIK D-Bus is for local IPC, good luck sending messages over a network without a couple of hoops to jump through.
The environment has changed. Dynamic languages allow the code generation to be done at runtime. I think Thrift has a good chance of succeeding in this sort of environment. Of course, IMHO, in order for that to really come into its own, Thrift must insist that any Thrift service support a standard API that allows downloading the API description.
I too prefer REST-style interfaces. I prefer technologies that encourage things to be done this way. RPC technologies almost universally try to make things 'easy' by making network messages look like function calls. And I think this is all the wrong approach for a variety of reasons, one if which is that it tends to lead to very non-RESTy interfaces.