I think you may have taken the implications of the ruling a bit too broadly. The court is only declaring that since PayPal is not a registered bank, its customers should not expect and do not inherently have the legal protections and procedures afforded to bank customers. If you ask me, it's a good thing, because it points directly to the next step that government regulators and legislators need to take: define the type of instituation PayPal is and write consumer-protection laws. Not to mention possibly doing what Louisiana did and put them out of business until consumers are protected.
Businesses like to (and must) manage their risk. If software companies are in fact reasonably liable for bugs/security issues in their software, IT managers and their bosses will have to weigh the ease with which they can tell their lawyers to sue someone against trusting their network administrators and support personnel with verifying open source software is secure. If the current sheep-like decision making holds -- *bleat* Buy Microsoft! *bleat* -- this could result in much less corporate adoption of open source software.
As usual, the comic strip Doonesbury is way ahead of the curve. Check out a week's worth of strips starting on April 12, 1982. Obviously, computer simulations of social phenomena can be more or less productive.
I don't think you've used an answering machine lately. If you want to access someone else's answering machine without breaking into their home then you'd usually have to call their number and type a secret code (ooooooh... a password!) on your phone before you could listen to their messages.
I don't agree with the judge's comparison anyway though.;-)
Sorry Taco, but for purposes of law there is no "duh" here. There are fundamental differences between messages sent over the Internet and telephone conversations. Issues regarding wiretapping (and privacy in general when it comes to police surveillance) are based on standards of "reasonable expectations of privacy". When you pick up the phone and make a call, you have the reasonable expectation that no one can intercept it (CIA spook theories notwithstanding) because it runs over a heavily-regulated essentially-private network. For that reason, the police must get the approval of a court before they can violate that expectation. But unencrypted transmissions over a public network via an unregulated service like AIM? I think the differences are obvious.
There is a fundamental social question here, and the reason Taco says "duh" is because his opinion is squarely on one side of the issue. It is the balance of individual privacy and public safety. Most of the Slashdot readership probably figures that the principle at stake here is official surveillance of purportedly-private communication, and feels that universaly shouldn't be possible without court supervision. On the other hand though is a well-established legal standard which could reasonably be interpreted to allow the practice at issue. It comes down to whether widespread public ignorance about insecurity of Internet transmissions should be construed to create that "reasonable expectation of privacy". I don't think it should, but that's for the courts and legislature to decide, isn't it?
Perhaps you've forgotten the whole point of the steering system. Thanks to the basic setup of the device and the gyros you don't need accelerate/brake buttons -- you just lean. That can't be accomplished on a device with wheels in front and back, because it would always remain level relative to the ground in that plane.
Re:We (probably) won't ever actually ACHIEVE AI
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Regarding the subject of your comment: if you call humans "intelligent", and you do not subscribe to the argument that there is some "soul" or non-physical essence that gives us consciousness, how can one believe that we won't ever achieve AI? It seems illogical to assume that humans will never be capable of duplicating something already in existence. The real question, if you ask me, is if we will find a way to do so that wholly differs from the organic model that has evolved on Earth, or whether we will just end up creating imitations (through emulation on an electronic platform or actual biological construction) of ourselves.
The article made a most useful point. I hadn't thought about it before (since HDTV is currently way out of my price range), but once it becomes mainstream I'll be awfully annoyed if I have to downsample the picture to NTSC to save a program. Now I'm sure DVRs will be more commonplace at that point too, but it will be an incredibly long time before those are useful for long-term storage. For now, this format fills a gaping void, and I would think that as HDTV becomes more popular and comes down in price, this will too.
You're not off your rocker, but you're not right either.:-) If you do any investing, you should know that the sort of ridiculous returns the other web pages talk about are clear signs of a scam. In other words, the SEC thinks that anyone whose curiosity is even slightly piqued by that website is in danger of making a bad invesetment. They're right.
And the irony of that irony is that this is probably the best way to do it, because if the case goes against them they shouldn't really suffer serious financial punishment. The "aggrieved party" would have to sue them in Russia.:-)
The CNN article that's linked to here is the one I read. While it seems silly they even bothered to run this story, they at least offered significant skepticism and the words of several expert-types who said it was probably a big load of crap. In other words, they don't need to correct themselves, because they never said "this is true".
Though not nearly as egregious a manipulation of statistics as, say, Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve, 3 weeks of intense and draining examination of the book chapter by chapter in a political science class (sigh) led me to the conclusion that Putnam's lines from cause to effect are a little sketchy. The worst part was that his model of a society with high social capital is 1950s America. Maybe whites had high social capital, but there were an awful lot of other people who were excluded -- not to mention that a society based on forced conformity isn't too healthy for a whole other set of reasons. Basically, this decline in communal activity may not be nearly as severe as he claims it to be, or as meaningful. And very much like The Bell Curve, the book ends with a chapter where statistics are forgotten and the author's motives and underlying prejudices are finally revealed. To sum it up, Putnam thinks television is the downfall of civilization. His conclusion is that if we would just all turn off our TVs and find other things to do, our "social capital" would magically reappear.
Maybe. American society is awfully different than it was 50 years ago when Putnam thought everything was so great. But either way, Katz seems to underrate or ignore how some people are indeed using the Internet to connect and unite. It's not just a television substitute. Exactly the kinds of organizations Putnam saw as creating "bridging" social capital are extending their reach around the country or even around the world. People interested in a particular social issue are creating vast lobbying networks online. Minority opinions have a greater chance of being included in public debate. Television can't do this, but the Internet is creating social capital every day. Whether it is a solid replacement for the bowling league remains to be seen.
Anyway, for those of you intrigued by Katz' article who want to read the book, take it with a serious grain of salt. The "social capital" concept is a good one, but Putnam's measures of it and his ideas for how to get it back are not conclusive.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It was a cheap shot. I read this story, remembered how I had snorted about the line from the first one, and just felt like being mean. Watergate was an awfully long time ago though...;-)
...are they supposed to be able to achieve this? The article's point about a 'flag' having to be universally accepted and followed is right on. But unless they try to actually encrypt the full signal, anyone could manufacture a non-compliant device, and it'd be an instant mega-seller. I don't even see the point of this initiative. Without the force of law or unbreakable encryption, it's useless.
Well, if I had felt like preaching on and on about my political ideals, I would have said that this is why the world should pour zillions of dollars into education. I've had the same thought as you many times ("maybe lots of people just aren't up to it"), but I think that's selling us all a bit short without evidence for doing so. For example, in 200 years we may be able, a la The Matrix, to flash-imprint massive amounts of "foundation" knowledge like the physical sciences or the history of one's nation once the brain has reached adult maturity. Everyone can then work from there, with our usual varying degrees of success. Anyway, what I suggest is probably WAY down the road, but it is the logical end point of the capitalist way of thinking -- maximized efficiency of resource use.
You are sort of correct, but you should note that the Japanese economy has been in the toilet for a decade. Unemployment is higher than it has been since their economy took off post-WWII. The concept you speak of -- employment with a single company for life -- has rapidly disappeared. Men who had worked for a single company for decades were laid off. Essentially, the model has been revealed as ineffective.
I'm sure true academics have myriad explanations for why, but I'm guessing the problem is that institutions like large successful businesses are rarely flexible enough to keep up with the pace of change. Some are -- witness the giant multinationals that continue their success for decades -- but most eventually are surpassed and fade away. Individual workers are far more flexible. So what usually happens, especially in places like the US that don't have kieretsus, is that someone with a new idea starts a new company that's already focused on the new technology. Then they can hire/train the people they need. It's a much more efficient system.
I will not diminish the wrenching horror of losing one's job. But this comment sounds exactly like ones from people who got laid off from factories in the 80s. "Whatever happened to hard work?..." "Used to be, a man could learn a trade, put in his 40 hours, and provide for his family...." What we discovered, with the advent of all these new technologies, as well as with the growth of practicing business across national borders, is that there are more efficient ways of doing things. Pidgeon-holing an individual into doing a single task for their entire working life is antithetical to the progress that capitalism values. And while, in that huge shift away from factories and manual trades in the US, many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us because the labor required to make them wasn't so expensive anymore.
Assuming Katz got the point of the book right, I think the author hit the nail right on the head. We (meaning the post-industrialized nations) have seen a shift that requires everyone to be educated enough to learn whatever trade is needed at a given time. Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources. Until then, we will continue to experience the turmoil as seen by factory workers in the 80s and by the poster I'm replying to.
I heartily agree with all the highly-moderated posts that take Katz to task for being an idiot. Those are VERY good points. But people are perhaps missing the boat a little about market share with computers versus automobiles. ALL CARS ARE COMPATIBLE. They can all use basically the same gas, drive on the same roads, obey the same traffic signals. If you know how to drive one of them, you can pretty much drive them all. The switch between Windows and Macintosh is much more wrenching than between a manual and automatic transmission.
My point is that market share does mean a lot more in the computer world, when it comes to operating systems, than BMW's market share does in the car world. Apple vs Dell is irrelevant, but Apple vs Windows is a meaningful statistic. This certainly doesn't mean Apple can't survive, or even thrive, as a "niche player" (I hate that term, since Apple's influence is huge). But don't just blow off such comparisons, because they do say something about the near future of the computing world.
I submitted this article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the anniversary last week (rejected, naturally). It has a nice discussion about the film's creation and influence.
I think perhaps many posters are missing the point here. TCP is an obvious choice for traffic with congestion control built in. But with the increasingly firewalled nature of the Internet, most of us have noticed how much of a pain it can be for services to automate file transfers. I think what these engineers want to do is figure out a good way of automating file transfers that doesn't have so many problems with firewalls, or will automatically work given the particular network configuration if the text-sending messaging protocol can get through.
Ok, comment withdrawn. I thought Sex In The City was an hour show. It's not. I still think they could knock $25-30 off the price by not putting it in "collector" packaging, but it's not as much of a rip-off as I thought.:-)
DVDs of the 2nd season of Sex In The City (from HBO), 18 episodes, is $37.48 at Amazon.com (and fits on 3 DVDs). Sorry, but 26 episodes should under no circumstances cost this much. I would love to own some of the later seasons, but $100 is ridiculous. Making the licensee even more greedy is the fact that HBO is selling at that price without any additional income coming in on the show's balance sheets from syndication rights. Paramount, on the other hand... Sigh.
Oh, c'mon man. Yeah, N'Sync got the shaft. But what happened here was a whole lot of people who really love Star Wars didn't want to see it cheapened, however slightly, by mixing in the dregs of teeny-bop pop culture. It seems sort of trivial, but I can understand their feelings. I mean, they already had to deal with Jar-Jar.
Are we sure they're really doing this? At least on the page I got when I clicked the link, I didn't see any such thing. Perhaps it was a *gasp* minor error or mistake. Like that never happens here at Slashdot...;-P
Slashdot Mirror
I think you may have taken the implications of the ruling a bit too broadly. The court is only declaring that since PayPal is not a registered bank, its customers should not expect and do not inherently have the legal protections and procedures afforded to bank customers. If you ask me, it's a good thing, because it points directly to the next step that government regulators and legislators need to take: define the type of instituation PayPal is and write consumer-protection laws. Not to mention possibly doing what Louisiana did and put them out of business until consumers are protected.
Businesses like to (and must) manage their risk. If software companies are in fact reasonably liable for bugs/security issues in their software, IT managers and their bosses will have to weigh the ease with which they can tell their lawyers to sue someone against trusting their network administrators and support personnel with verifying open source software is secure. If the current sheep-like decision making holds -- *bleat* Buy Microsoft! *bleat* -- this could result in much less corporate adoption of open source software.
As usual, the comic strip Doonesbury is way ahead of the curve. Check out a week's worth of strips starting on April 12, 1982 . Obviously, computer simulations of social phenomena can be more or less productive.
I don't agree with the judge's comparison anyway though. ;-)
There is a fundamental social question here, and the reason Taco says "duh" is because his opinion is squarely on one side of the issue. It is the balance of individual privacy and public safety. Most of the Slashdot readership probably figures that the principle at stake here is official surveillance of purportedly-private communication, and feels that universaly shouldn't be possible without court supervision. On the other hand though is a well-established legal standard which could reasonably be interpreted to allow the practice at issue. It comes down to whether widespread public ignorance about insecurity of Internet transmissions should be construed to create that "reasonable expectation of privacy". I don't think it should, but that's for the courts and legislature to decide, isn't it?
Perhaps you've forgotten the whole point of the steering system. Thanks to the basic setup of the device and the gyros you don't need accelerate/brake buttons -- you just lean. That can't be accomplished on a device with wheels in front and back, because it would always remain level relative to the ground in that plane.
Regarding the subject of your comment: if you call humans "intelligent", and you do not subscribe to the argument that there is some "soul" or non-physical essence that gives us consciousness, how can one believe that we won't ever achieve AI? It seems illogical to assume that humans will never be capable of duplicating something already in existence. The real question, if you ask me, is if we will find a way to do so that wholly differs from the organic model that has evolved on Earth, or whether we will just end up creating imitations (through emulation on an electronic platform or actual biological construction) of ourselves.
The article made a most useful point. I hadn't thought about it before (since HDTV is currently way out of my price range), but once it becomes mainstream I'll be awfully annoyed if I have to downsample the picture to NTSC to save a program. Now I'm sure DVRs will be more commonplace at that point too, but it will be an incredibly long time before those are useful for long-term storage. For now, this format fills a gaping void, and I would think that as HDTV becomes more popular and comes down in price, this will too.
You're not off your rocker, but you're not right either. :-) If you do any investing, you should know that the sort of ridiculous returns the other web pages talk about are clear signs of a scam. In other words, the SEC thinks that anyone whose curiosity is even slightly piqued by that website is in danger of making a bad invesetment. They're right.
And the irony of that irony is that this is probably the best way to do it, because if the case goes against them they shouldn't really suffer serious financial punishment. The "aggrieved party" would have to sue them in Russia. :-)
The CNN article that's linked to here is the one I read. While it seems silly they even bothered to run this story, they at least offered significant skepticism and the words of several expert-types who said it was probably a big load of crap. In other words, they don't need to correct themselves, because they never said "this is true".
Maybe. American society is awfully different than it was 50 years ago when Putnam thought everything was so great. But either way, Katz seems to underrate or ignore how some people are indeed using the Internet to connect and unite. It's not just a television substitute. Exactly the kinds of organizations Putnam saw as creating "bridging" social capital are extending their reach around the country or even around the world. People interested in a particular social issue are creating vast lobbying networks online. Minority opinions have a greater chance of being included in public debate. Television can't do this, but the Internet is creating social capital every day. Whether it is a solid replacement for the bowling league remains to be seen.
Anyway, for those of you intrigued by Katz' article who want to read the book, take it with a serious grain of salt. The "social capital" concept is a good one, but Putnam's measures of it and his ideas for how to get it back are not conclusive.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It was a cheap shot. I read this story, remembered how I had snorted about the line from the first one, and just felt like being mean. Watergate was an awfully long time ago though... ;-)
As said by Michael in the first item about this story:
That about made me want to puke when I read it. :-)
...are they supposed to be able to achieve this? The article's point about a 'flag' having to be universally accepted and followed is right on. But unless they try to actually encrypt the full signal, anyone could manufacture a non-compliant device, and it'd be an instant mega-seller. I don't even see the point of this initiative. Without the force of law or unbreakable encryption, it's useless.
Well, if I had felt like preaching on and on about my political ideals, I would have said that this is why the world should pour zillions of dollars into education. I've had the same thought as you many times ("maybe lots of people just aren't up to it"), but I think that's selling us all a bit short without evidence for doing so. For example, in 200 years we may be able, a la The Matrix, to flash-imprint massive amounts of "foundation" knowledge like the physical sciences or the history of one's nation once the brain has reached adult maturity. Everyone can then work from there, with our usual varying degrees of success. Anyway, what I suggest is probably WAY down the road, but it is the logical end point of the capitalist way of thinking -- maximized efficiency of resource use.
You are sort of correct, but you should note that the Japanese economy has been in the toilet for a decade. Unemployment is higher than it has been since their economy took off post-WWII. The concept you speak of -- employment with a single company for life -- has rapidly disappeared. Men who had worked for a single company for decades were laid off. Essentially, the model has been revealed as ineffective.
I'm sure true academics have myriad explanations for why, but I'm guessing the problem is that institutions like large successful businesses are rarely flexible enough to keep up with the pace of change. Some are -- witness the giant multinationals that continue their success for decades -- but most eventually are surpassed and fade away. Individual workers are far more flexible. So what usually happens, especially in places like the US that don't have kieretsus, is that someone with a new idea starts a new company that's already focused on the new technology. Then they can hire/train the people they need. It's a much more efficient system.
I will not diminish the wrenching horror of losing one's job. But this comment sounds exactly like ones from people who got laid off from factories in the 80s. "Whatever happened to hard work?..." "Used to be, a man could learn a trade, put in his 40 hours, and provide for his family...." What we discovered, with the advent of all these new technologies, as well as with the growth of practicing business across national borders, is that there are more efficient ways of doing things. Pidgeon-holing an individual into doing a single task for their entire working life is antithetical to the progress that capitalism values. And while, in that huge shift away from factories and manual trades in the US, many people lost their jobs, a lot of goods got cheaper for the rest of us because the labor required to make them wasn't so expensive anymore.
Assuming Katz got the point of the book right, I think the author hit the nail right on the head. We (meaning the post-industrialized nations) have seen a shift that requires everyone to be educated enough to learn whatever trade is needed at a given time. Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources. Until then, we will continue to experience the turmoil as seen by factory workers in the 80s and by the poster I'm replying to.
I heartily agree with all the highly-moderated posts that take Katz to task for being an idiot. Those are VERY good points. But people are perhaps missing the boat a little about market share with computers versus automobiles. ALL CARS ARE COMPATIBLE. They can all use basically the same gas, drive on the same roads, obey the same traffic signals. If you know how to drive one of them, you can pretty much drive them all. The switch between Windows and Macintosh is much more wrenching than between a manual and automatic transmission.
My point is that market share does mean a lot more in the computer world, when it comes to operating systems, than BMW's market share does in the car world. Apple vs Dell is irrelevant, but Apple vs Windows is a meaningful statistic. This certainly doesn't mean Apple can't survive, or even thrive, as a "niche player" (I hate that term, since Apple's influence is huge). But don't just blow off such comparisons, because they do say something about the near future of the computing world.
I submitted this article from the San Francisco Chronicle about the anniversary last week (rejected, naturally). It has a nice discussion about the film's creation and influence.
I think perhaps many posters are missing the point here. TCP is an obvious choice for traffic with congestion control built in. But with the increasingly firewalled nature of the Internet, most of us have noticed how much of a pain it can be for services to automate file transfers. I think what these engineers want to do is figure out a good way of automating file transfers that doesn't have so many problems with firewalls, or will automatically work given the particular network configuration if the text-sending messaging protocol can get through.
Ok, comment withdrawn. I thought Sex In The City was an hour show. It's not. I still think they could knock $25-30 off the price by not putting it in "collector" packaging, but it's not as much of a rip-off as I thought. :-)
DVDs of the 2nd season of Sex In The City (from HBO), 18 episodes, is $37.48 at Amazon.com (and fits on 3 DVDs). Sorry, but 26 episodes should under no circumstances cost this much. I would love to own some of the later seasons, but $100 is ridiculous. Making the licensee even more greedy is the fact that HBO is selling at that price without any additional income coming in on the show's balance sheets from syndication rights. Paramount, on the other hand... Sigh.
Oh, c'mon man. Yeah, N'Sync got the shaft. But what happened here was a whole lot of people who really love Star Wars didn't want to see it cheapened, however slightly, by mixing in the dregs of teeny-bop pop culture. It seems sort of trivial, but I can understand their feelings. I mean, they already had to deal with Jar-Jar.
Are we sure they're really doing this? At least on the page I got when I clicked the link, I didn't see any such thing. Perhaps it was a *gasp* minor error or mistake. Like that never happens here at Slashdot... ;-P