If you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy? Really?
So, suppose the government decides that a particular relgion, or activist group, or whatever, has goals that are "un-American"; or harbors or aids terrorists; etc. Is it ok that they intercept communications and use what they find to identify and persecute members and/or supporters of that organization?
It's not a question of whether you're doing something "wrong"; it's a question of whether you're doing anything that someone in power might choose to dislike.
Hm. If there were an anti-trust trial of MS today, are you sure they'd be found to hold monopoly power? In which market? In the past they've been found to hold an OS monopoly; but I don't think it's straight-forward to say they have a music monopoly, or that their DRM policy somehow leverages their OS monopoloy to competitive advantage in the music area...
For full disclosure, I didn't think the prevous trial's finding of fact did a very good job of establishing MS as a monopoly.
But either way, that was before MacOS on Intel. It was before sub-laptops that have some of the least technical people I know using Linux. I'm pretty sure it was before any major seller of PC's offered a pre-install of non-MS operating systems.
"Don't see anything in there regarding it being for the 'po folk only'"
Feel free to show me where I said it did. Best of luck with that.
What I did say is: "the program has a purpose". The purpose is to help with the transition. (See where the material you quoted says that?) If you don't need the help (e.g. you're already set up to handle the transition just fine on your own) but you take the coupon anyway to get a free toy, then you are abusing the program, likely at the expense of someone who does need the help.
"Maybe you should use try getting some of that assitance you are so proud of refusing to re-evaluate what you actually know and what you've just decided you 'know'."
So the only reason you can think of that I might reach conclusions different from your, is that my vision is somehow preventing me from reasoning to the "correct" answer? Interesting.
"And I don't see anything in there other than an asshole using his blindness to throw a barb"
Your continued attempts to define my motivations remain amusing.
All of which is well and good. Of course, "just following orders" has been rejected as a defense in war crimes trials in the past. So where exactly do you draw the line? Or, do you argue that the Nurenburg trials came to the wrong concluion?
You should probably go look up the justification for the coupon program. It is in fact targeted at meeting a need, and not merely at passing out toys.
btw, I do not "use" my vision for any purpose. Your failure to accept information about my relative perspective is slightly more amusing than your attempt to define my motivations.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the way the Drew / Mayer case played out. OTOH, the summary slips in one important fact that seems to have escaped media attention previously: The law they used is predicated on $500 of damage being done.
That doesn't make it right, but it is worth paying attention to the details. Those who say "every web site can write criminal law now" are -- albeit perhaps unintentionally -- exagerating. MyEvilWebSite.com can say "you must write a thank-you note to the webmaster every time you access our site" in their EULA, but that doesn't mean that merely accessing their site without writing a thank-you note to the webmaster is criminal. It means that accessing their site without writing a thank-you note to teh webmaster and causing $500 of damage in the process is criminal.
That would almost be true, if there were enough coupons for everyone to get one. Since there aren't, it's just one more rationalization to do what you want instead of what you know is right.
That they aren't defining and policing specific guidelines for who can get a coupon, does not change the fact that the program exists for a reason. "I'll ignore the program's purpose because nobody will stop me, and screw the people who this assistance was intended for" is not illegal; but it is immoral.
Of course, I'm a legally blind individual who doesn't take the various forms of assistance for which I do specifically qualify unless I actually need them, so I doubt you and I have much in common in our debating positions.
You can look at it as "as much his money as GP's".
I suppose, then, that we're saying that a tax dollar belongs equally to all U.S. citizens.
Which means that even if it's as much his as mine, it's still roughly 99.9999997% not his money; less than a penny of the value of the coupon is "his", outside the purpose of the coupon program.
I agree with GP's sentiment. The program exists for a reason, and geek hobbying isn't the reason. Buy your own toys.
Of course, in the application of PageRank to general internet search, there is a clear economic incentive to game the system (and so sometimes you see it done).
Why would anyone care enough where they land in a PageRank search of academic papers to game the system?
People react in the strangest way to very large numbers. The question isn't how many tons of coal are wasted on these devices (which is a very large number). The question is what percentage that contributes to the total (which is a very small number).
At an average draw of 15W (20W 75% of the time), if we assume your TV is always supposed to be off/sleeping, we're talking 10.8kWh/month; roughly $1 on your electric bill. Not "nothing", but still only about 1% of my energy usage. (Probably less; tough to estimate since some of my energy usage is gas rather than electric.)
Reduce a 1% contribution by 99%, and you've still only saved 0.99%. Scale that up to millions of homes, and you've still only saved 0.99%. Now multiply that by the percentage of energy use that's residential (vs. industrial or commercial)...
Not saying it shouldn't be improved; if you can add up a bunch of small improvements, it can make a difference. But let's not dazzle ourselves with the "tons and tons of CO2"; that only shows a failure to understand the scale of the issue. And, let's not forget to look or hidden energy costs that come with chage -- i.e. if manufacturing the set is more expensive, then more energy will have gone into it, so we'll need to know how many months it takes to break even on that cost.
Really? An article from 2003? So... over 5 years ago.
*yawn*
I guess maybe you've never expressed a strongly-held view only to find at a later time that you no longer held that view, and instead held a different, contrary view.
"I'm not really sure that this is the sort of crime that the lawmakers writing the legislation had in mind when they passed it."
Probably true. I suspect we're seeing some combination of two things.
First, people may legitimately be struggling to interpret a complex and arguably vague law that addresses a lot of sensitive issues. The executive branch may not understand whether a given picture meets the law's definition of child pornography. Maybe they confidently believe, rightly or wrongly, that it does, and that it is their duty to pursue the case. Even if the legislature didn't intend this act to qualify, they may have written the law too broadly for their real intent.
Second, there may be people rationalizing a fit between the laws on the books and the activities they want to prohibit - a practice given considerable backing in the Drew "hacking" case not long ago.
Either way, that's what the judicial branch is for -- to interpret the law and apply it to the facts of the specific case as determined at trial. It's not ideal; the system will never be perfect. These kids may be dragged through the mud only to be acquitted in the end; and if that's how it goes, we would hope that as the law becomes better understood (or gets rewritten/replaced with something more clear), the charges raised should come into increased alignment with what the law says. The executive branch shouldn't knowingly misinterpret the law, just as the legislative shouldn't knowingly pass unconstitutional laws; but that doesn't mean that the executive should be required to perform the full function of the judicial before acting.
Your computer does lots of thigns at boot-up that you wouldn't want it to do during "normal operation", and you depend on the chip designers having done a lot of things right that are more complex than what is proposed here. If you're worried about adding a feature because you can imagine it malfunctioning, then you probably haven't thought about all the failure modes that are theoretically conceivable in any working system.
The proposed solution -- memory that wipes itself either when power is lost or when power is restored -- is the correct approach. TFA is clever and a good work-around, but ultimately it's trying to apply a software solution to a hardware problem. In any case TFA isn't, as it calls itself, a general solution to cold-boot attacks; it addresses specifically a laptop that's stolen when locked.
Which only proves that sometimes intuition can mislead you to the right answer, I guess.
There's a lot of room in between "the data is safely destroyed" (i.e. 0% chance of recovering any sizable run of bits) and "the data is preserved so well that it can be considered part of the drive's capacity" (i.e. 100% chance of recovering all of the bits).
Now I've heard enough conflicting opinions that I don't claim to know what it takes to safely eliminate the data on a drive. Regardless, all but the most paranoid appraisals I've heard say that the question is, after I wipe my drive, is there a chance that someone will get some of the data back? That's not something a drive manufacturer can sell as capacity.
As far as I'm concerned, that is completely beside the point. How badly she handled the situation, or even what ulterior motives she might have had not to try very hard, do not change the fact that she is a common user who could not get her LInux system to do what she wanted it to do.
MicroSoft understands that being "right" is only part of the equation, which is why they have a marketing department and tend to refrain from overtly insulting potential customers. (In public or to their face, at least.)
That's pretty much the point. Focusing on making Linux impervious to user error is the wrong approach; no OS or UI is or ever will be. The question isn't whether the user will have problems; the question is how the support community responds when the user has problems. (If you're a linux advocate and you don't think you're part of the support community, then you aren't a very good advocate.)
The support community includes the software company that backs the OS, the computer manufacturer or retailer (assuming the user bought a ready-built system), the ISP, maybe the user's social network, and maybe (depending on the user's comfort on the internet) forums and discussion boards. Like how they do it or not, MicroSoft shores up that network for Windows. Look for the same support on Linux, and you're liable to get someone who'd rather talk about what a lUser you are and how many reasons there are that you shouldn't have the problem, than help fix it.
However, you've also picked an interesting example... "The PRESS ANY KEY issue isn't OS specific"
And yet have you noticed how much more rare that prompt is today in dominant desktop OS's, than it was in the days when there was a real "computer literacy" gap? Do you remember that back when DOS used that prompt, were the days when the Mac was the non-technical user's computer of choice?
Ok, no factual disagreement on the basic point, that a service that requires a particular OS sucks. But I wonder how many people are grasping the real issue here...
You, and many others, when faced with a reason why this situation didn't work for a common user, focus on reasons why those issues shouldn't be issues.
Well, that's why 2009 won't be the year of Linux on the desktop. "Linux to conquer the world" is much more ambitious a goal than "Linux to conquer a made-up world in which only problems that 'should' exist do exist".
Some people go as far as to attack the user for not knowing enough, or for not handling the situation the way the poster thinks he/she would've handled it even if they didn't know what they know. Well, again, "Linux for the common user" is far more ambitious than "Linux for the common user where common user is defined to be like me".
Linux will be hindered in the consumer market as long as the typical approach is to think that the market should change to accept Linux, and not the other way around. And that's fine if that's what Linux wants to be -- but just don't act confused about why other OS's still dominate the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
With an asteroid that small, it would be debatable whether the ship landed on it, or the other way around...
So I guess you'd have to use a soyuz.
(Get it? Because in soviet russia... Never mind.)
If you have nothing to hide, you don't need privacy? Really?
So, suppose the government decides that a particular relgion, or activist group, or whatever, has goals that are "un-American"; or harbors or aids terrorists; etc. Is it ok that they intercept communications and use what they find to identify and persecute members and/or supporters of that organization?
It's not a question of whether you're doing something "wrong"; it's a question of whether you're doing anything that someone in power might choose to dislike.
Hm. If there were an anti-trust trial of MS today, are you sure they'd be found to hold monopoly power? In which market? In the past they've been found to hold an OS monopoly; but I don't think it's straight-forward to say they have a music monopoly, or that their DRM policy somehow leverages their OS monopoloy to competitive advantage in the music area...
For full disclosure, I didn't think the prevous trial's finding of fact did a very good job of establishing MS as a monopoly.
But either way, that was before MacOS on Intel. It was before sub-laptops that have some of the least technical people I know using Linux. I'm pretty sure it was before any major seller of PC's offered a pre-install of non-MS operating systems.
"Don't see anything in there regarding it being for the 'po folk only'"
Feel free to show me where I said it did. Best of luck with that.
What I did say is: "the program has a purpose". The purpose is to help with the transition. (See where the material you quoted says that?) If you don't need the help (e.g. you're already set up to handle the transition just fine on your own) but you take the coupon anyway to get a free toy, then you are abusing the program, likely at the expense of someone who does need the help.
"Maybe you should use try getting some of that assitance you are so proud of refusing to re-evaluate what you actually know and what you've just decided you 'know'."
So the only reason you can think of that I might reach conclusions different from your, is that my vision is somehow preventing me from reasoning to the "correct" answer? Interesting.
"And I don't see anything in there other than an asshole using his blindness to throw a barb"
Your continued attempts to define my motivations remain amusing.
All of which is well and good. Of course, "just following orders" has been rejected as a defense in war crimes trials in the past. So where exactly do you draw the line? Or, do you argue that the Nurenburg trials came to the wrong concluion?
You should probably go look up the justification for the coupon program. It is in fact targeted at meeting a need, and not merely at passing out toys.
btw, I do not "use" my vision for any purpose. Your failure to accept information about my relative perspective is slightly more amusing than your attempt to define my motivations.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the way the Drew / Mayer case played out. OTOH, the summary slips in one important fact that seems to have escaped media attention previously: The law they used is predicated on $500 of damage being done.
That doesn't make it right, but it is worth paying attention to the details. Those who say "every web site can write criminal law now" are -- albeit perhaps unintentionally -- exagerating. MyEvilWebSite.com can say "you must write a thank-you note to the webmaster every time you access our site" in their EULA, but that doesn't mean that merely accessing their site without writing a thank-you note to the webmaster is criminal. It means that accessing their site without writing a thank-you note to teh webmaster and causing $500 of damage in the process is criminal.
That would almost be true, if there were enough coupons for everyone to get one. Since there aren't, it's just one more rationalization to do what you want instead of what you know is right.
That they aren't defining and policing specific guidelines for who can get a coupon, does not change the fact that the program exists for a reason. "I'll ignore the program's purpose because nobody will stop me, and screw the people who this assistance was intended for" is not illegal; but it is immoral.
Of course, I'm a legally blind individual who doesn't take the various forms of assistance for which I do specifically qualify unless I actually need them, so I doubt you and I have much in common in our debating positions.
You can look at it as "as much his money as GP's".
I suppose, then, that we're saying that a tax dollar belongs equally to all U.S. citizens.
Which means that even if it's as much his as mine, it's still roughly 99.9999997% not his money; less than a penny of the value of the coupon is "his", outside the purpose of the coupon program.
I agree with GP's sentiment. The program exists for a reason, and geek hobbying isn't the reason. Buy your own toys.
"Money in research" != "money in gaming the PageRank"
Of course, in the application of PageRank to general internet search, there is a clear economic incentive to game the system (and so sometimes you see it done).
Why would anyone care enough where they land in a PageRank search of academic papers to game the system?
People react in the strangest way to very large numbers. The question isn't how many tons of coal are wasted on these devices (which is a very large number). The question is what percentage that contributes to the total (which is a very small number).
At an average draw of 15W (20W 75% of the time), if we assume your TV is always supposed to be off/sleeping, we're talking 10.8kWh/month; roughly $1 on your electric bill. Not "nothing", but still only about 1% of my energy usage. (Probably less; tough to estimate since some of my energy usage is gas rather than electric.)
Reduce a 1% contribution by 99%, and you've still only saved 0.99%. Scale that up to millions of homes, and you've still only saved 0.99%. Now multiply that by the percentage of energy use that's residential (vs. industrial or commercial)...
Not saying it shouldn't be improved; if you can add up a bunch of small improvements, it can make a difference. But let's not dazzle ourselves with the "tons and tons of CO2"; that only shows a failure to understand the scale of the issue. And, let's not forget to look or hidden energy costs that come with chage -- i.e. if manufacturing the set is more expensive, then more energy will have gone into it, so we'll need to know how many months it takes to break even on that cost.
Really? An article from 2003? So... over 5 years ago.
*yawn*
I guess maybe you've never expressed a strongly-held view only to find at a later time that you no longer held that view, and instead held a different, contrary view.
Ah, the anonymous straw man. Too bad I'll never know what position (s)he thinks I'm rationalizing.
Depends on context.
Your target may not be the only person in the area hostile to you.
You may not know all of their locations.
You would probably prefer that none of them know your location.
Social stigma and limitation of career options is only a little different in your opinion from violent murder?
It's an interesting place society has come to.
"I'm not really sure that this is the sort of crime that the lawmakers writing the legislation had in mind when they passed it."
Probably true. I suspect we're seeing some combination of two things.
First, people may legitimately be struggling to interpret a complex and arguably vague law that addresses a lot of sensitive issues. The executive branch may not understand whether a given picture meets the law's definition of child pornography. Maybe they confidently believe, rightly or wrongly, that it does, and that it is their duty to pursue the case. Even if the legislature didn't intend this act to qualify, they may have written the law too broadly for their real intent.
Second, there may be people rationalizing a fit between the laws on the books and the activities they want to prohibit - a practice given considerable backing in the Drew "hacking" case not long ago.
Either way, that's what the judicial branch is for -- to interpret the law and apply it to the facts of the specific case as determined at trial. It's not ideal; the system will never be perfect. These kids may be dragged through the mud only to be acquitted in the end; and if that's how it goes, we would hope that as the law becomes better understood (or gets rewritten/replaced with something more clear), the charges raised should come into increased alignment with what the law says. The executive branch shouldn't knowingly misinterpret the law, just as the legislative shouldn't knowingly pass unconstitutional laws; but that doesn't mean that the executive should be required to perform the full function of the judicial before acting.
[Citation Needed] || FUD.
I can think of no conceivable "smart" reason why the system would remove power from the DRAM, because if it did there would be a risk of data loss.
Your computer does lots of thigns at boot-up that you wouldn't want it to do during "normal operation", and you depend on the chip designers having done a lot of things right that are more complex than what is proposed here. If you're worried about adding a feature because you can imagine it malfunctioning, then you probably haven't thought about all the failure modes that are theoretically conceivable in any working system.
The proposed solution -- memory that wipes itself either when power is lost or when power is restored -- is the correct approach. TFA is clever and a good work-around, but ultimately it's trying to apply a software solution to a hardware problem. In any case TFA isn't, as it calls itself, a general solution to cold-boot attacks; it addresses specifically a laptop that's stolen when locked.
Which only proves that sometimes intuition can mislead you to the right answer, I guess.
There's a lot of room in between "the data is safely destroyed" (i.e. 0% chance of recovering any sizable run of bits) and "the data is preserved so well that it can be considered part of the drive's capacity" (i.e. 100% chance of recovering all of the bits).
Now I've heard enough conflicting opinions that I don't claim to know what it takes to safely eliminate the data on a drive. Regardless, all but the most paranoid appraisals I've heard say that the question is, after I wipe my drive, is there a chance that someone will get some of the data back? That's not something a drive manufacturer can sell as capacity.
As far as I'm concerned, that is completely beside the point. How badly she handled the situation, or even what ulterior motives she might have had not to try very hard, do not change the fact that she is a common user who could not get her LInux system to do what she wanted it to do.
MicroSoft understands that being "right" is only part of the equation, which is why they have a marketing department and tend to refrain from overtly insulting potential customers. (In public or to their face, at least.)
"People have stupid problems with all computers"
That's pretty much the point. Focusing on making Linux impervious to user error is the wrong approach; no OS or UI is or ever will be. The question isn't whether the user will have problems; the question is how the support community responds when the user has problems. (If you're a linux advocate and you don't think you're part of the support community, then you aren't a very good advocate.)
The support community includes the software company that backs the OS, the computer manufacturer or retailer (assuming the user bought a ready-built system), the ISP, maybe the user's social network, and maybe (depending on the user's comfort on the internet) forums and discussion boards. Like how they do it or not, MicroSoft shores up that network for Windows. Look for the same support on Linux, and you're liable to get someone who'd rather talk about what a lUser you are and how many reasons there are that you shouldn't have the problem, than help fix it.
However, you've also picked an interesting example... "The PRESS ANY KEY issue isn't OS specific"
And yet have you noticed how much more rare that prompt is today in dominant desktop OS's, than it was in the days when there was a real "computer literacy" gap? Do you remember that back when DOS used that prompt, were the days when the Mac was the non-technical user's computer of choice?
Ok, no factual disagreement on the basic point, that a service that requires a particular OS sucks. But I wonder how many people are grasping the real issue here...
You, and many others, when faced with a reason why this situation didn't work for a common user, focus on reasons why those issues shouldn't be issues.
Well, that's why 2009 won't be the year of Linux on the desktop. "Linux to conquer the world" is much more ambitious a goal than "Linux to conquer a made-up world in which only problems that 'should' exist do exist".
Some people go as far as to attack the user for not knowing enough, or for not handling the situation the way the poster thinks he/she would've handled it even if they didn't know what they know. Well, again, "Linux for the common user" is far more ambitious than "Linux for the common user where common user is defined to be like me".
Linux will be hindered in the consumer market as long as the typical approach is to think that the market should change to accept Linux, and not the other way around. And that's fine if that's what Linux wants to be -- but just don't act confused about why other OS's still dominate the desktop.
Well, unless someone's donating all the fuel to ship the bulbs.
Curse you, environment-hating philanthropists!