So let me get this straight. A research institution came to the conclusion that popular things tended to earn a lot of money, while unpopular things tended to tank?
No... a research institution found a way to quickly quantify popularity without expensive market research and focus groups. *That* is the innovation here.
It is gratifying for Google to be so open about the fact that it is a bug, the details of the bug, and a promise to fix it. Most consumer electronics companies are much more cagey about this sort of thing. I suspect Google will win some important trust because they are treating their customers like adults.
I realize the post was made by a Google engineer, but, wouldn't a bug in "the camera driver's autofocus routine" be on Motorola's end, not Google's? I'm sure they were working together on it, but aren't drivers usually written by the hardware vendor?
Daiya is fairly good, as is Follow Your Heart. But it is very difficult to replicate the stretchiness that casein imparts to cheese with other proteins.
I don't even want a cheese that's vegan, necessarily... I have no ethical problems with animal products*. I just want a cheese sub that doesn't contain any trace of dairy, soy, canola, eggs, or for that matter, gluten or corn.
* I have ethical problems with the way most food animals are raised, and do my best to choose meat that's been pastured and grass- (or otherwise naturally-) fed, because it's better for my family as well as more humane towards the animals.
Woops, silly me, repeating what I learned in upper-division Transportation Engineering lecture from professors with decades of experience in the field of road design. Guess I should have checked Wikipedia first, because it never lies!
Got a cite for your critique?
It's true that the majority of people who die in alcohol-related crashes have a BAC of.08 or higher (67% according to this site). However, lower down, we see that 37% of single-car crashes involve a BAC of.08 or higher, which is higher than the 22% average rate. Since my point was about the comparative risks to the drunk driver and the sober driver in an accident, single-car crashes are irrelevant. That takes out 67% of the drunk driving crashes overall, and similarly lowers the fatality numbers considerably.
...But in that particular accident, the drunk is less likely to suffer severe or fatal injuries. The relaxant effect of alcohol makes their body more resilient to sudden shocks. Also, they're usually having a head-on collision, while they may be striking the other vehicle from the side; as head-on collisions are by far the most common, most of a car's safety features are geared toward mitigating them.
And just *how* do you suggest getting on a plane, getting into a movie, or shipping a box "paperless"?
These are all applications where you can (or even must) print out something to take with you or attach to an item and receive a service, where in the "old days" you used to have to go somewhere to pick up a specialty-printed item.
I've been without a reliable printer for a few months, and it's HARD. Why? Because it's 2009, man, and there's a LOT of stuff available online now... like boarding passes, movie tickets, postage stamps, RMAs... that you can PRINT OUT and slap on a package or hand to the attendant at the door. In fact, sometimes, that's the only way to do something, like with shipping my broken Kindle back to Amazon.
Until we have ubiquitous e-ink paper, we're still going to have to print a lot of stuff out to make it available for uses that don't have a computer terminal.
Ditto, ditto, ditto... but the reliability with CUPS (under Ubuntu Happy Heron) has been only so-so. At this point, it generally won't print at all, and then every so often, a complete power cycle (which is accomplished through unplugging it or courtesy of a power company blip) will spark a few dozen sheets of unicode hearts or half a page of something I tried to print a month ago.
I keep planning to move it across the room and try to hook it up to the Win2k box, to find out if it's a Linux compatibility issue or the printer is just dying, but that requires a lot of shifting around I haven't had a chance to do yet.
WTF? Who uses crayons anymore when you can go down to Costco and get a set of 100 high-quality colored pencils for what the box of 64 Crayolas (with the built-in sharpener) used to cost? They're FAR more durable, give better image quality, and offer a much larger gamut. I've never seen a toddler eat a colored pencil, either.
the fact is you can run a few hundred digital prints from Wal Mart for what a single color Inkjet cartridge costs. The quality is better, the fade resistance is better, and most people don't get a few hundred prints from a cartridge. And, assuming you're going there anyway and you have a typical cheap inkjet, it's easier to send them to the photodepartment via their web site and pick them up when you go shopping than to print them at home.
Costco too, for those who refuse to shop at the Evil Emporium.
No it does not. It translates: "Find one with FREE cartridges."
TANSTAAFL. If you take home cartridges purchased by the company that pays your paycheck, those losses will impact their ability to pay you and the other folks who do stuff like what you do... increasing your workload per dollar.
Schedule 2 drugs can't be faxed, e-prescribed or phoned in. They have to hand-written (or computer printed), hand-signed and delivered by mail or by hand. The information that goes with prescriptions has to be printed and given to the patient.
There is no systems in place to change this.
Actually, there is a project in progress right now to test out a token authentication system for e-prescribing of Schedule 2 drugs. A health center in... I think... Massachusetts? is working with the DEA on it. They've developed the system and are currently using it on a trial basis. The project is funded by AHRQ, and there was a presentation of the work-in-progress during an AHRQ-sponsored Webex on e-prescribing and medication management on August 27th. If you can find a recording of it, you might find it fascinating.
ATMs have been in place since when? The 70s? But ATMs only give you money. They don't let you pay anything.
You are misinformed. US ATMs accept cash and check deposits, allow transfers between accounts, and sell stamps. Some may even let you pay bills or order cashier's checks.
If you just require banks to come up with tighter security, what will happen? People will see that they have to jump through even more hoops when doing online banking and they will ask why, which the banks will gladly blame on the new directive (whether it's from the EU or the US government...), and shift the blame of the hassle on government and the "nanny state" that tries to patronize us and protect us from reality and yaddayadda. Nobody will explain that these "hardships" are there to protect your money from being stolen.
Which is still a better outcome than that they DON'T tighten security so that they don't have to do any of that pesky explaining.
The market *won't* motivate banks to do it on their own, not for a very, very long time... because people don't actually understand the risks, so they don't see a value in protecting themselves against them. It's that tricky "perfect information" component of Adam Smith's triad.
And you, sir, have trouble with multiple nested negatives. He's NOT going to NOT move somewhere because they have a lot of spam... take out both negatives, he's perfectly fine living somewhere with a lot of spam. UNLESS (another negative) you are talking about the food variety... implying that he *would* avoid living somewhere that had an overrepresentation of food Spam (R). Such as Hawaii.
The bank is presumably liable for all unauthorized transactions, but can escape liability if they prove the consumer was negligent. And having an insecure machine should be considered negligente.
NO NO NO.
The bank should be able to escape liability if they prove that the damage was CAUSED BY customer's negligence. Otherwise, they might have let an employee capture all your "secure" information and sell it to the Russians, but they're not liable because it turns out you didn't download the latest WinXP patch.
Just as with a car accident, there has to be an investigation into who actually caused the problem. It's reasonable to share the blame, but I think in a case where reasonable actions on the part of the bank would have prevented the problem completely, it's also reasonable for them to be responsible. They're the professional service here. They *do* have a greater burden than their customers.
You're not able to audit online banking code. True. But are you dumb, deaf and blind? Do you think people will remain silent when their bank refuses to cover their loss? Don't you think some media outlet would greedily gobble up the story?
Show me the bank that's been demonstrated secure by a LACK of media coverage of their failures... and I'll show you a bank that's either (a) too small to do much of anything or (b) really, really good at shutting up media.
Inductive reasoning proves nothing. Just because there's no coverage of Bank A having customers' accounts get wiped out doesn't mean that it hasn't happened and won't happen. It just means you're now subject to the media's whim as far as information goes, rather than just the bank's. And since the media doesn't have any special rights WRT getting info from the banks about their practices, you're really not a whole lot better off at all... since all you're going to see is whatever sells ad spots. (Oh, Bank A wants a 30-second spot every half hour? All we have to do is drop that story... right. I'll get right on it.)
Great--now I've got to do paper banking, and get charged *extra* for the paper statements. Worse, if I take the money out of the account--just to move it to another company or invest it myself (because I now officially hate them)--I'm going to get nailed with a capital gains tax that will hit me like two years of rent. Taxes are the IRS' way of locking you into a bank for life.
Talk to the bank you want to move it to about a Rollover account. You don't have to pay taxes if you roll it over properly.
The problem is that you want the bank to secure what they cannot secure: Your PC.
I do not know of a single case of bank fraud where the fraud has been in any way connected to a security breach on the bank's side, and due to my work I know of a fair lot of fraud cases. Invariably the problem was on the customer's side.
Those types of breaches aren't limited to the world of online banking, though. Someone can walk up to me with a gun while I'm at the ATM and demand I take out ALL my money and hand it over. Someone could kidnap my child outside the bank during business hours and hold him hostage until I went in and emptied my account and handed it over.
But... the banks *have* implemented security measures to make these types of "attacks" more difficult. ATMs cap the amount you can withdraw during a single transaction, and also during the entire day across multiple transactions. They have security cameras installed to make catching and prosecuting offenders easier. They have silent alarms at the teller, which they can set off if they think something's iffy about a transaction. Accounts with multiple account holders may require multiple signatures for certain transactions.
They can't secure my body or my family, but they *do* do what they can to secure the transactions I make via their branch or resources. Why should I expect different from online banking?
Since I worked for banks with exactly this problem, I can reassure you that even if they aren't responsible for the losses, they have a very keen interest in making the whole deal secure: Cost.
You have NO idea how much money banks save by shifting the work of transfers to you, their customer. Banks shut down a lot of branches and laid off a lot of people because they don't need so many brick and mortar outlets and tellers anymore.
And this is primarily due to online banking, rather than ATMs?
Now imagine people lost faith in the security of online banking, to the point where they consider it untrustworthy enough to demand their human monkeys again to do their work.
And the banks say "Sure thing! That'll be just $5 per transaction!"
Furthermore, banks could not even easily return to brick and mortar transactions if everybody suddenly stopped using online banking, some banks are by now very dependent on online banking, to the point where they would quickly lose customers simply because there are no local branches anymore.
As others have pointed out, they'd *also* lose customers if they actually made online banking secure.
Think about it: first, they have to make things less convenient, because frankly, convenience and security are inversely proportional. That will lose them customers right off the bat.
But as several posters have pointed out, that's not enough... because people don't know how to keep themselves secure. So for a bank to actually make their customers' transactions as secure as feasible and reasonable, they would have to require everyone to pass a test or take a class before signing up for online banking. How many banks would permanently lose a lot of business if they cut off online access to their customers until they'd been certified to use online banking?
For exactly the reasons you stated, it's unlikely that banks will make online banking reasonably secure unless regulators step in. (And this is why we can't have nice things in a free market.)
Face it, programs are written by people, people are made to f*** up on epic scale, therefore, you need to be ready to handle epic f*** ups or just not play ball. Granted you don't get the same dynamic experience but that's the trade off. I'm sure the guy your quoting understands that.
Spam comprises 93% of emails in Idaho. Very big difference.
I'm guessing that's what they meant also, but really, there's no confirmation of this theory anywhere in TFA. It's simply the most sensible interpretation of their fumbling attempt to discourse.
You want to know the real reasons Idaho is one of the most spammed states?
Higher percentage of "noob" users. Idaho came to the table pretty late, and a disproportionate number of people in Idaho don't yet know basic ways of reducing spam.
Or possibly, people in Idaho are more likely to fall for spam advertising.
I doubt it's either of these. A very low percentage of emails give much geographic information about their associated users, so even if Idaho was the Spam Sucker Capital of the Universe, the spammers wouldn't know how to target Idahoans. And I think that, even if it's true that Idaho adopted email later relative to other worldwide locales, by now it's been long enough since widespread adoption that the n00b effect is diminished to statistical insignificance.
The most likely explanation (if, in fact, the phenomenon poorly documented in this article bears any semblance to reality) is that Idaho has a lower rate of email-based commerce than other states, due to lower population density and an economy that is largely rooted in agriculture (no pun intended). A larger percentage of email is probably personal rather than professional, and personal email use patterns are more likely to engender large spam-to-useful ratios.
yeah... I actually read TFA because I figured the summary was just garbage. But no, that's how the article puts it, too, without EVER explaining what on earth they're trying to say.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight. A research institution came to the conclusion that popular things tended to earn a lot of money, while unpopular things tended to tank?
No... a research institution found a way to quickly quantify popularity without expensive market research and focus groups. *That* is the innovation here.
I realize the post was made by a Google engineer, but, wouldn't a bug in "the camera driver's autofocus routine" be on Motorola's end, not Google's? I'm sure they were working together on it, but aren't drivers usually written by the hardware vendor?
Daiya is fairly good, as is Follow Your Heart. But it is very difficult to replicate the stretchiness that casein imparts to cheese with other proteins.
I don't even want a cheese that's vegan, necessarily... I have no ethical problems with animal products*. I just want a cheese sub that doesn't contain any trace of dairy, soy, canola, eggs, or for that matter, gluten or corn.
* I have ethical problems with the way most food animals are raised, and do my best to choose meat that's been pastured and grass- (or otherwise naturally-) fed, because it's better for my family as well as more humane towards the animals.
And it's a problem that may be more likely for Toyota, since they seem to have floor mats that like to smash their cars into other cars.
I, for one, will run screaming if one of these ever makes it onto the street.
Woops, silly me, repeating what I learned in upper-division Transportation Engineering lecture from professors with decades of experience in the field of road design. Guess I should have checked Wikipedia first, because it never lies!
Got a cite for your critique?
It's true that the majority of people who die in alcohol-related crashes have a BAC of .08 or higher (67% according to this site). However, lower down, we see that 37% of single-car crashes involve a BAC of .08 or higher, which is higher than the 22% average rate. Since my point was about the comparative risks to the drunk driver and the sober driver in an accident, single-car crashes are irrelevant. That takes out 67% of the drunk driving crashes overall, and similarly lowers the fatality numbers considerably.
...But in that particular accident, the drunk is less likely to suffer severe or fatal injuries. The relaxant effect of alcohol makes their body more resilient to sudden shocks. Also, they're usually having a head-on collision, while they may be striking the other vehicle from the side; as head-on collisions are by far the most common, most of a car's safety features are geared toward mitigating them.
And just *how* do you suggest getting on a plane, getting into a movie, or shipping a box "paperless"?
These are all applications where you can (or even must) print out something to take with you or attach to an item and receive a service, where in the "old days" you used to have to go somewhere to pick up a specialty-printed item.
I've been without a reliable printer for a few months, and it's HARD. Why? Because it's 2009, man, and there's a LOT of stuff available online now... like boarding passes, movie tickets, postage stamps, RMAs... that you can PRINT OUT and slap on a package or hand to the attendant at the door. In fact, sometimes, that's the only way to do something, like with shipping my broken Kindle back to Amazon.
Until we have ubiquitous e-ink paper, we're still going to have to print a lot of stuff out to make it available for uses that don't have a computer terminal.
Ditto, ditto, ditto... but the reliability with CUPS (under Ubuntu Happy Heron) has been only so-so. At this point, it generally won't print at all, and then every so often, a complete power cycle (which is accomplished through unplugging it or courtesy of a power company blip) will spark a few dozen sheets of unicode hearts or half a page of something I tried to print a month ago.
I keep planning to move it across the room and try to hook it up to the Win2k box, to find out if it's a Linux compatibility issue or the printer is just dying, but that requires a lot of shifting around I haven't had a chance to do yet.
HP Laserjet 4 and a box of crayons.
WTF? Who uses crayons anymore when you can go down to Costco and get a set of 100 high-quality colored pencils for what the box of 64 Crayolas (with the built-in sharpener) used to cost? They're FAR more durable, give better image quality, and offer a much larger gamut. I've never seen a toddler eat a colored pencil, either.
the fact is you can run a few hundred digital prints from Wal Mart for what a single color Inkjet cartridge costs. The quality is better, the fade resistance is better, and most people don't get a few hundred prints from a cartridge. And, assuming you're going there anyway and you have a typical cheap inkjet, it's easier to send them to the photodepartment via their web site and pick them up when you go shopping than to print them at home.
Costco too, for those who refuse to shop at the Evil Emporium.
No it does not. It translates: "Find one with FREE cartridges."
TANSTAAFL. If you take home cartridges purchased by the company that pays your paycheck, those losses will impact their ability to pay you and the other folks who do stuff like what you do... increasing your workload per dollar.
Schedule 2 drugs can't be faxed, e-prescribed or phoned in. They have to hand-written (or computer printed), hand-signed and delivered by mail or by hand. The information that goes with prescriptions has to be printed and given to the patient.
There is no systems in place to change this.
Actually, there is a project in progress right now to test out a token authentication system for e-prescribing of Schedule 2 drugs. A health center in... I think... Massachusetts? is working with the DEA on it. They've developed the system and are currently using it on a trial basis. The project is funded by AHRQ, and there was a presentation of the work-in-progress during an AHRQ-sponsored Webex on e-prescribing and medication management on August 27th. If you can find a recording of it, you might find it fascinating.
ATMs have been in place since when? The 70s? But ATMs only give you money. They don't let you pay anything.
You are misinformed. US ATMs accept cash and check deposits, allow transfers between accounts, and sell stamps. Some may even let you pay bills or order cashier's checks.
If you just require banks to come up with tighter security, what will happen? People will see that they have to jump through even more hoops when doing online banking and they will ask why, which the banks will gladly blame on the new directive (whether it's from the EU or the US government...), and shift the blame of the hassle on government and the "nanny state" that tries to patronize us and protect us from reality and yaddayadda. Nobody will explain that these "hardships" are there to protect your money from being stolen.
Which is still a better outcome than that they DON'T tighten security so that they don't have to do any of that pesky explaining.
The market *won't* motivate banks to do it on their own, not for a very, very long time... because people don't actually understand the risks, so they don't see a value in protecting themselves against them. It's that tricky "perfect information" component of Adam Smith's triad.
And you, sir, have trouble with multiple nested negatives. He's NOT going to NOT move somewhere because they have a lot of spam... take out both negatives, he's perfectly fine living somewhere with a lot of spam. UNLESS (another negative) you are talking about the food variety... implying that he *would* avoid living somewhere that had an overrepresentation of food Spam (R). Such as Hawaii.
The bank is presumably liable for all unauthorized transactions, but can escape liability if they prove the consumer was negligent. And having an insecure machine should be considered negligente.
NO NO NO.
The bank should be able to escape liability if they prove that the damage was CAUSED BY customer's negligence. Otherwise, they might have let an employee capture all your "secure" information and sell it to the Russians, but they're not liable because it turns out you didn't download the latest WinXP patch.
Just as with a car accident, there has to be an investigation into who actually caused the problem. It's reasonable to share the blame, but I think in a case where reasonable actions on the part of the bank would have prevented the problem completely, it's also reasonable for them to be responsible. They're the professional service here. They *do* have a greater burden than their customers.
You're not able to audit online banking code. True. But are you dumb, deaf and blind? Do you think people will remain silent when their bank refuses to cover their loss? Don't you think some media outlet would greedily gobble up the story?
Show me the bank that's been demonstrated secure by a LACK of media coverage of their failures... and I'll show you a bank that's either (a) too small to do much of anything or (b) really, really good at shutting up media.
Inductive reasoning proves nothing. Just because there's no coverage of Bank A having customers' accounts get wiped out doesn't mean that it hasn't happened and won't happen. It just means you're now subject to the media's whim as far as information goes, rather than just the bank's. And since the media doesn't have any special rights WRT getting info from the banks about their practices, you're really not a whole lot better off at all... since all you're going to see is whatever sells ad spots. (Oh, Bank A wants a 30-second spot every half hour? All we have to do is drop that story... right. I'll get right on it.)
Great--now I've got to do paper banking, and get charged *extra* for the paper statements. Worse, if I take the money out of the account--just to move it to another company or invest it myself (because I now officially hate them)--I'm going to get nailed with a capital gains tax that will hit me like two years of rent. Taxes are the IRS' way of locking you into a bank for life.
Talk to the bank you want to move it to about a Rollover account. You don't have to pay taxes if you roll it over properly.
The problem is that you want the bank to secure what they cannot secure: Your PC.
I do not know of a single case of bank fraud where the fraud has been in any way connected to a security breach on the bank's side, and due to my work I know of a fair lot of fraud cases. Invariably the problem was on the customer's side.
Those types of breaches aren't limited to the world of online banking, though. Someone can walk up to me with a gun while I'm at the ATM and demand I take out ALL my money and hand it over. Someone could kidnap my child outside the bank during business hours and hold him hostage until I went in and emptied my account and handed it over.
But... the banks *have* implemented security measures to make these types of "attacks" more difficult. ATMs cap the amount you can withdraw during a single transaction, and also during the entire day across multiple transactions. They have security cameras installed to make catching and prosecuting offenders easier. They have silent alarms at the teller, which they can set off if they think something's iffy about a transaction. Accounts with multiple account holders may require multiple signatures for certain transactions.
They can't secure my body or my family, but they *do* do what they can to secure the transactions I make via their branch or resources. Why should I expect different from online banking?
Since I worked for banks with exactly this problem, I can reassure you that even if they aren't responsible for the losses, they have a very keen interest in making the whole deal secure: Cost.
You have NO idea how much money banks save by shifting the work of transfers to you, their customer. Banks shut down a lot of branches and laid off a lot of people because they don't need so many brick and mortar outlets and tellers anymore.
And this is primarily due to online banking, rather than ATMs?
Now imagine people lost faith in the security of online banking, to the point where they consider it untrustworthy enough to demand their human monkeys again to do their work.
And the banks say "Sure thing! That'll be just $5 per transaction!"
Furthermore, banks could not even easily return to brick and mortar transactions if everybody suddenly stopped using online banking, some banks are by now very dependent on online banking, to the point where they would quickly lose customers simply because there are no local branches anymore.
As others have pointed out, they'd *also* lose customers if they actually made online banking secure.
Think about it: first, they have to make things less convenient, because frankly, convenience and security are inversely proportional. That will lose them customers right off the bat.
But as several posters have pointed out, that's not enough... because people don't know how to keep themselves secure. So for a bank to actually make their customers' transactions as secure as feasible and reasonable, they would have to require everyone to pass a test or take a class before signing up for online banking. How many banks would permanently lose a lot of business if they cut off online access to their customers until they'd been certified to use online banking?
For exactly the reasons you stated, it's unlikely that banks will make online banking reasonably secure unless regulators step in. (And this is why we can't have nice things in a free market.)
Face it, programs are written by people, people are made to f*** up on epic scale, therefore, you need to be ready to handle epic f*** ups or just not play ball. Granted you don't get the same dynamic experience but that's the trade off. I'm sure the guy your quoting understands that.
The above post is SFW.
Yes - Idaho is a filth-encrusted hole of pestilence and misery. You don't want to move here.
(We have to say that to keep all the Californians out.)
Gosh... I own a house in Idaho, and was planning to sell it, but maybe we should just move there!
(What's the job market like in Gooding?)
its not like I am going to NOT move somewhere because they have a lot of spam (unless you are talking about the "food" variety).
So you avoid Hawaii like the plague?
Idaho has 93% of spam. No.
Spam comprises 93% of emails in Idaho. Very big difference.
I'm guessing that's what they meant also, but really, there's no confirmation of this theory anywhere in TFA. It's simply the most sensible interpretation of their fumbling attempt to discourse.
You want to know the real reasons Idaho is one of the most spammed states?
Higher percentage of "noob" users. Idaho came to the table pretty late, and a disproportionate number of people in Idaho don't yet know basic ways of reducing spam.
Or possibly, people in Idaho are more likely to fall for spam advertising.
I doubt it's either of these. A very low percentage of emails give much geographic information about their associated users, so even if Idaho was the Spam Sucker Capital of the Universe, the spammers wouldn't know how to target Idahoans. And I think that, even if it's true that Idaho adopted email later relative to other worldwide locales, by now it's been long enough since widespread adoption that the n00b effect is diminished to statistical insignificance.
The most likely explanation (if, in fact, the phenomenon poorly documented in this article bears any semblance to reality) is that Idaho has a lower rate of email-based commerce than other states, due to lower population density and an economy that is largely rooted in agriculture (no pun intended). A larger percentage of email is probably personal rather than professional, and personal email use patterns are more likely to engender large spam-to-useful ratios.
yeah... I actually read TFA because I figured the summary was just garbage. But no, that's how the article puts it, too, without EVER explaining what on earth they're trying to say.