Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right. Our public anonymity could always be punctured by anyone with enough of an interest - law enforcement, PIs, even plain old stalkers or nosey neighbors. Public anonymity is inversely proportional to how interesting you are.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models. If your CC agreement denys the CC company the right to keep and sell information about your purchases, good for you: otherwise, everything you do is being captured and sold. It's just too easy now (and that's the big difference from the public anonymity we all grew used to in the past.)
So what legal activity is actually justified in this context? For one, you should strictly defend any contract you have with your service providers - ensure that they are living up to their end of it. Second, we probably need a revamped libel law that will create significant punitive damages if any information broker promulgates false information about you (ie "slander"). It used to be that slander was primarily attached to public figures, but that was really just because they were the only ones anyone paid enough attention to. All that's changed is that there are now many companies publishing (in one form or other) information about virtually everyone. They all need to be held to high standards of integrity - this is not a case where we should let the market set price/quality punishment for bad behavior.
you know you're both wrong and trolling, so why did you press the "submit" button at all?
Linux does fine with high density displays. actually, the place it does worse is on extremely low-density displays. I have some 42" 1366x768 displays that take some painful tweaking to setup, since environments like KDE try to be smart about the ruler-size of fonts, not noticing that these screens really do have pixels big enough to throw a rubber chicken through...
especially because "retina" is just assinine Apple marketing jingo. almost every LCD panel produced is purely off-the-shelf and available to any customer who wants it. in particular, there are lots of devices that have pixel densities as high or higher than the particular models Apple selected from the catalog...
I think you're confusing high-availability clustering with high-performance clustering. in HPC, there are some efforts at making single jobs fault-tolerant, but it's definitely not widespread. checkpointing is the standard, and it works reasonably, though is an IO-intensive way to mitigate failure.
we don't know that much about early human development, though it's pretty clearly not simple (more like chaotic). without knowing which sensory inputs are important to healthy development, an artificial womb would need to attempt to replicate them all. heck, there are plenty of substances that cross the placenta, and most of them would need to be emulated too.
in other words, producing a mouse-like mouse from an artificial mouse womb is rather different from doing it with humans...
companies are like children, and can't be trusted to play with sharp, pointy objects. actually, it's more like they were digging in the back yard and found a buried mine that happened to be a neutron bomb. they're poking at it with sticks now.
society created the whole concept of IP, and we need to clean it up now, before it causes more damage.
nonsense. technical pens can be touchy, but not really more than traditional fountain pens. I used them for years, including taking notes in class. yes, it takes some control, but it's not hard to build expertise. conventional pens tend to be more convenient though, easier to carry, and good enough for basic writing.
the OP's goal of minimizing bleeding, though is a problem, since drafting pens use liquid ink. that'll be OK for good paper, but thicker gel ink (in ball-point pens) avoids bleeding on a wider variety of paper.
It's amusing that human brains are not fully mature until around age 25 - in particular, frontal areas involved in executive control. The fact that we let people with impaired brains vote and drive cars, let alone drink - shocking to most people who know about neural development...
this is not very useful, as it mainly points out that the initial generations of commodity SSDs were immature. not to mention that return rates contain other phenomena than wear or even failure.
or maybe "nature abhors an information vacuum"? in any case, it seems natural for people to avail themselves of information, though we might try to limit the behavior of out elected officials (and, theoretically, the civil servants who answer to them...) I don't really see any point to telling people what they can do with information, though it would be great if there were some punitive incentive for them to get it right. public action based on wrong data should be, IMO, punished by more than just libel laws.
you'd think they could have rounded up to 150 gigameters. if politicians can be SD-conservative, why can't astronomers? we all know that significance is precious and rare...
PortHaven seems to have a chip on his/her shoulder about tenure. that's too bad. there are lots of tenured profs who provide excellent pedagogy and empathetic support for students. I find that a hard-assed attitude correlates most strongly with the size of the class, since no prof teaching 500 students in a class can spare a lot of time for handholding. it's also impossible to deny that student entitlement correlates strongly with student dissatisfaction.
"allowed"? you make it sound as if they are competent. alas, they are not, and the riding mechanism merely guarantees that many, often MOST voters are disenfranchised.
I agree. and full enfranchisement is far more important than fast.
I'd rather see a system where some long period is permitted for voting - say a week, with partial results shown immediately. If you don't like how your candidate is doing, and you haven't voted, then do so. I'm not sure there would even be harm in letting people change their votes partway through.
I'm an American and recent Canadian immigrant - I haven't voted here, in Canada, yet. But I've been receiving "you are registered to vote" cards for about at least a decade.
The point is: counting is only a fairly small, technical part of the problem. WHO VOTES is if anything, more important. not only outright fraud (double voting, or voting in the wrong riding), but clear campaigns of voter suppression (phone calls claiming to be from Elections Canada, but which provided a misleading polling place.) our current "majority" government might well be illegitimate - and oddly enough, Elections Canada is reluctant to make much of an effort to find out. on tactic is to delay any investigation - this has already succeeded in burying evidence of who paid for those misleading phone calls. other charming things: voting records have "disappeared" from close elections, where the margin (26 votes IIRC) were well within the "margin of possible fraud".
In short, the Canadian system definitely does not work well, and may have permitted profound errors recently. in comparison to the existing flaws, I don't see a lot of threat from the obvious issues related to non-paper voting. the country would clearly be better off if we had decent participation.
current wafers still yield large numbers of current-sized chips. and for the most part, chip architects are not primarily limited by available area: relentless process shrinks bring, if anything, more transistors than they know how to use. sure, you can always throw on more cache, especially L3. but the main issues today are power and IPC/TLP-type efficiency, not space. the K20 team at NVidia might disagree, but they _should_ be pushing the bounds, since their target is less cost-sensitive HPC, not commodity/gaming.
in short, the action is in litho, process, transistor topology, power and microarchitecture, not the number of chips spoiled by the edges.
high-frequency trading is simply a way to take advantage, arbitrage-like, of failures in market-making. sooner or later, market-makers (and clients, for pete's sake!) will realize this, and simply make HF trading irrelevant. OTOH it may take neutrino-based networking for market makers to do this;)
besides, if we're looking for exotic physics to leverage, wouldn't entanglement be even better?
"datacenter" once had a reasonably well-defined meaning: a physical location where computers were maintained. but in the context of this article, it has come to mean "the entiity of what is _in_ the machineroom, and everything about how everything works".
for instance, to me, a datacenter consists of one or a couple of HPC clusters. each cluster is fairly standalone (though possibly with shared filesystems, etc). there's not a lot of reconfiguration to do: I don't want anything reprovisioned, because every node in a cluster simply boots the same NFS-root image. (statefull installs of clusters are so 1995...)
to amazon, a datacenter is a vast army of VM-hosting nodes (not unlike my HPC nodes), with S3-like storage infrastructure. of course, the latter takes the form of a cluster, really, which also does not want to be reprovisioned all the time. sure, adding some nodes, but the new nodes need to become as much like the old nodes as possible.
VMware seems to be pushing this as a way to grow their already prodigious lock-in. people whose brains have been sucked into the VMware way of thinking really seem to like a single console for controlling all provisioning. extending from provisioning a set of VM hosts to datacenter-wide provisioning is mainly just about switch management, routing design, etc. technically, nothing is gained, but the appeal of a single ring to rule them all - well, we know where that leads.
the nexus 7 (and some of the recent larger slates) are really competitive with the ipad even on a prettiness scale. 216 ppi IPS is nice, and it's not as if anyone can't walk up to sharp/samsung/etc and get exactly the same display specs as apple. or better, if they think it would sell.
this is such a non-event - so why would MSFT make a big deal out of it? the only plausible explanation is that everyone has forgotten that MSFT contributed hyperv support at all...
this is a paradoxical time: we've all become used to the mostly-anonymous nature of living in large cities. we confused this sense of "freedom from recognition" with privacy, though. they're very much not the same things. privacy never applied to what you do in public, even if it sorta felt that way because no one knew who you were. if you drive somewhere away from your usual circles in order to buy drugs or dildos, it used to be low probability that someone would recognize you. a PI might still tail you, or maybe your relative happens to be working the register. the only thing that facial recognition has changed is the chances of anonymity. the things that actually were private are still private. of course, travel as a way of obtaining anonymity used to be relatively difficult and uncommon - if you never leave your village, you're never anonymous. (and this probably explains why there was a certain de-identification aspect to certain feasts/festivals...)
zuck is an idiot when he says privacy is dead - it's the presumed anonymity in public that's dead. should we care? I think so, but only to the extent that it actually impinges on what we do in private. if I can't get my drugs or dildos without being recognized, what do I do, make them myself? anonymity was a way of extending privacy, not privacy itself.
of course, there are segments of society who would like nothing better than to have TIA at their fingertips. I don't see any way to prevent people from collecting whatever data they want from public sources; we can, theoretically at least, limit the degree to which the gov does this.
Slashdot Mirror
Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right. Our public anonymity could always be punctured by anyone with enough of an interest - law enforcement, PIs, even plain old stalkers or nosey neighbors. Public anonymity is inversely proportional to how interesting you are.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models. If your CC agreement denys the CC company the right to keep and sell information about your purchases, good for you: otherwise, everything you do is being captured and sold. It's just too easy now (and that's the big difference from the public anonymity we all grew used to in the past.)
So what legal activity is actually justified in this context? For one, you should strictly defend any contract you have with your service providers - ensure that they are living up to their end of it. Second, we probably need a revamped libel law that will create significant punitive damages if any information broker promulgates false information about you (ie "slander"). It used to be that slander was primarily attached to public figures, but that was really just because they were the only ones anyone paid enough attention to. All that's changed is that there are now many companies publishing (in one form or other) information about virtually everyone. They all need to be held to high standards of integrity - this is not a case where we should let the market set price/quality punishment for bad behavior.
Why do corps get to pay tax only on profits? How would you like it if individuals paid tax only on their leftover "profit"?
you know you're both wrong and trolling, so why did you press the "submit" button at all?
Linux does fine with high density displays. actually, the place it does worse is on extremely low-density displays. I have some 42" 1366x768 displays that take some painful tweaking to setup, since environments like KDE try to be smart about the ruler-size of fonts, not noticing that these screens really do have pixels big enough to throw a rubber chicken through...
especially because "retina" is just assinine Apple marketing jingo. almost every LCD panel produced is purely off-the-shelf and available to any customer who wants it. in particular, there are lots of devices that have pixel densities as high or higher than the particular models Apple selected from the catalog...
yes, checkpointing is a reasonable answer. no large machines use Gb, though.
"hegemonous", wow.
I think you're confusing high-availability clustering with high-performance clustering. in HPC, there are some efforts at making single jobs fault-tolerant, but it's definitely not widespread. checkpointing is the standard, and it works reasonably, though is an IO-intensive way to mitigate failure.
if it must frob for strings, let's all just agree to put "grub" in there.
we don't know that much about early human development, though it's pretty clearly not simple (more like chaotic). without knowing which sensory inputs are important to healthy development, an artificial womb would need to attempt to replicate them all. heck, there are plenty of substances that cross the placenta, and most of them would need to be emulated too.
in other words, producing a mouse-like mouse from an artificial mouse womb is rather different from doing it with humans...
companies are like children, and can't be trusted to play with sharp, pointy objects. actually, it's more like they were digging in the back yard and found a buried mine that happened to be a neutron bomb. they're poking at it with sticks now.
society created the whole concept of IP, and we need to clean it up now, before it causes more damage.
nonsense. technical pens can be touchy, but not really more than traditional fountain pens. I used them for years, including taking notes in class. yes, it takes some control, but it's not hard to build expertise. conventional pens tend to be more convenient though, easier to carry, and good enough for basic writing.
the OP's goal of minimizing bleeding, though is a problem, since drafting pens use liquid ink. that'll be OK for good paper, but thicker gel ink (in ball-point pens) avoids bleeding on a wider variety of paper.
It's amusing that human brains are not fully mature until around age 25 - in particular, frontal areas involved in executive control.
The fact that we let people with impaired brains vote and drive cars, let alone drink - shocking to most people who know about neural development...
this is not very useful, as it mainly points out that the initial generations of commodity SSDs were immature. not to mention that return rates contain other phenomena than wear or even failure.
or maybe "nature abhors an information vacuum"? in any case, it seems natural for people to avail themselves of information, though we might try to limit the behavior of out elected officials (and, theoretically, the civil servants who answer to them...) I don't really see any point to telling people what they can do with information, though it would be great if there were some punitive incentive for them to get it right. public action based on wrong data should be, IMO, punished by more than just libel laws.
you'd think they could have rounded up to 150 gigameters.
if politicians can be SD-conservative, why can't astronomers? we all know that significance is precious and rare...
PortHaven seems to have a chip on his/her shoulder about tenure. that's too bad. there are lots of tenured profs who provide excellent pedagogy and empathetic support for students. I find that a hard-assed attitude correlates most strongly with the size of the class, since no prof teaching 500 students in a class can spare a lot of time for handholding. it's also impossible to deny that student entitlement correlates strongly with student dissatisfaction.
"allowed"? you make it sound as if they are competent. alas, they are not, and the riding mechanism merely guarantees that many, often MOST voters are disenfranchised.
I agree. and full enfranchisement is far more important than fast.
I'd rather see a system where some long period is permitted for voting - say a week, with partial results shown immediately. If you don't like how your candidate is doing, and you haven't voted, then do so. I'm not sure there would even be harm in letting people change their votes partway through.
I'm an American and recent Canadian immigrant - I haven't voted here, in Canada, yet. But I've been receiving "you are registered to vote" cards for about at least a decade.
The point is: counting is only a fairly small, technical part of the problem. WHO VOTES is if anything, more important. not only outright fraud (double voting, or voting in the wrong riding), but clear campaigns of voter suppression (phone calls claiming to be from Elections Canada, but which provided a misleading polling place.) our current "majority" government might well be illegitimate - and oddly enough, Elections Canada is reluctant to make much of an effort to find out. on tactic is to delay any investigation - this has already succeeded in burying evidence of who paid for those misleading phone calls. other charming things: voting records have "disappeared" from close elections, where the margin (26 votes IIRC) were well within the "margin of possible fraud".
In short, the Canadian system definitely does not work well, and may have permitted profound errors recently. in comparison to the existing flaws, I don't see a lot of threat from the obvious issues related to non-paper voting. the country would clearly be better off if we had decent participation.
current wafers still yield large numbers of current-sized chips. and for the most part, chip architects are not primarily limited by available area: relentless process shrinks bring, if anything, more transistors than they know how to use. sure, you can always throw on more cache, especially L3. but the main issues today are power and IPC/TLP-type efficiency, not space. the K20 team at NVidia might disagree, but they _should_ be pushing the bounds, since their target is less cost-sensitive HPC, not commodity/gaming.
in short, the action is in litho, process, transistor topology, power and microarchitecture, not the number of chips spoiled by the edges.
high-frequency trading is simply a way to take advantage, arbitrage-like, of failures in market-making. sooner or later, market-makers (and clients, for pete's sake!) will realize this, and simply make HF trading irrelevant. OTOH it may take neutrino-based networking for market makers to do this ;)
besides, if we're looking for exotic physics to leverage, wouldn't entanglement be even better?
"datacenter" once had a reasonably well-defined meaning: a physical location where computers were maintained. but in the context of this article, it has come to mean "the entiity of what is _in_ the machineroom, and everything about how everything works".
for instance, to me, a datacenter consists of one or a couple of HPC clusters. each cluster is fairly standalone (though possibly with shared filesystems, etc). there's not a lot of reconfiguration to do: I don't want anything reprovisioned, because every node in a cluster simply boots the same NFS-root image. (statefull installs of clusters are so 1995...)
to amazon, a datacenter is a vast army of VM-hosting nodes (not unlike my HPC nodes), with S3-like storage infrastructure. of course, the latter takes the form of a cluster, really, which also does not want to be reprovisioned all the time. sure, adding some nodes, but the new nodes need to become as much like the old nodes as possible.
VMware seems to be pushing this as a way to grow their already prodigious lock-in. people whose brains have been sucked into the VMware way of thinking really seem to like a single console for controlling all provisioning. extending from provisioning a set of VM hosts to datacenter-wide provisioning is mainly just about switch management, routing design, etc. technically, nothing is gained, but the appeal of a single ring to rule them all - well, we know where that leads.
the nexus 7 (and some of the recent larger slates) are really competitive with the ipad even on a prettiness scale. 216 ppi IPS is nice, and it's not as if anyone can't walk up to sharp/samsung/etc and get exactly the same display specs as apple. or better, if they think it would sell.
why the hell do people think consolidation is advantageous at any scale? once you're past a few dozen racks (small), costs go pretty neatly linear.
if the issue is poorly operated DCs not operating at capacity, why would a bigger DC be any different? 50% of 10x larger is still 50%...
this is such a non-event - so why would MSFT make a big deal out of it?
the only plausible explanation is that everyone has forgotten that MSFT contributed hyperv support at all...
this is a paradoxical time: we've all become used to the mostly-anonymous nature of living in large cities. we confused this sense of "freedom from recognition" with privacy, though. they're very much not the same things. privacy never applied to what you do in public, even if it sorta felt that way because no one knew who you were. if you drive somewhere away from your usual circles in order to buy drugs or dildos, it used to be low probability that someone would recognize you. a PI might still tail you, or maybe your relative happens to be working the register. the only thing that facial recognition has changed is the chances of anonymity. the things that actually were private are still private. of course, travel as a way of obtaining anonymity used to be relatively difficult and uncommon - if you never leave your village, you're never anonymous. (and this probably explains why there was a certain de-identification aspect to certain feasts/festivals...)
zuck is an idiot when he says privacy is dead - it's the presumed anonymity in public that's dead. should we care? I think so, but only to the extent that it actually impinges on what we do in private. if I can't get my drugs or dildos without being recognized, what do I do, make them myself? anonymity was a way of extending privacy, not privacy itself.
of course, there are segments of society who would like nothing better than to have TIA at their fingertips. I don't see any way to prevent people from collecting whatever data they want from public sources; we can, theoretically at least, limit the degree to which the gov does this.