You remember to come to/. and probably a large number of other sites as well.
More or less. But I might go days without getting around to it, and because of how it's set up, it's hard to catch up, also. Since I *do* visit online forums *and* subscribe to several email lists, I know exactly how my usage varies between the two.
* I KNOW what I've read already.
I would hope you'd know that no matter what communication medium you use.
Uh... just *how* am I supposed to tell what posts I've read previously on/., for example? Sure, if I read something *again*, I can tell you if I've read it before, but that's a waste of my time. I'd rather have a reliable system for marking things as read or unread, which email provides, and I have never seen a single online forum that's able to do this properly... especially if it's days between visits.
Most forums auto-redirect to your own post, making your own marked as read by default. Most also have ignore buttons for annoying people you'd rather not hear from.
Granted on the ignore button... but as for the former, this doesn't work properly on the largest board I frequent. It works if my post goes onto an existing page, but if it starts a new page, *even though I saw my post in the re-direct,* it bolds the subject line when I click a link to return to the forum page. Bogus.
* Thunderbird has a good search tool. Online forums often don't, and it's luck of the draw whether they do or not.
It isn't that difficult to set up a forum with a good search feature. The ones that don't typically don't need such a function. A specialized developer forum? I would laugh if you guys couldn't set that up.
I'm not on specialized developer forums. Most of the online forums I go to, besides/. obviously, are related to parenting issues. It may not be hard to set up a good search tool, but that doesn't mean it happens on a regular basis. PHPBB and BigBoards both have really crappy search tools, and they account for a really large proportion of the online forums I see.
Anyway, do you know what "luck of the draw" means? Just because it's possible doesn't mean that it gets done. If I'm viewing content using my email client, I have a predictable level of search ability, which (so far) is way better than what I find on online forums.
* If the internet is down, I can still find that post that tells me how to do what it is I want to do right now.
There are MANY ways to create and maintain a local copy of forum posts.
So? That's an extra step. Not only that, but are there many ways to maintain a synchronized local copy, or would I have to download the ENTIRE THING every time I made a backup? Should I do that every day? Every week? Every hour? POP will download each post exactly once. Are there online forums that do that?
* I can (with the original poster's permission) forward all or part of a message to an individual or another list.
* I can (with discretion and an x-post note) post the same text to multiple lists at the same time.
A forum, as opposed to email, does nothing to prevent you from forwarding that message with permission.
It's not in my email client, so I can't "forward" it. I can copy and paste it into an email, but again, I'm switching programs and taking extra steps. And cross-posting requires multiple steps as well. There's also the fact that if I *want* to include basic header info (original sender, date/timestamp, etc.) I probably have to manually grab each of those bits of data.
Translation: This is how I do it. This is how it's always been done. This is the only way to do it.
Just as your CEO is incompetent to do much of anything but is ultimately responsible for seeing that everything gets done
Clearly our physical security needs some work, because you've been spying on our office!;-)
Delegate overall security to someone with a firm grasp of what real security is (vs security theatre) and who has a good head for risk assessment and return-on-investment, and above all the competence to surround himself with specialized people competent in specific fields of security and you'll be fine.
Your right that will definitely result in different people managing network and physical security. But working together under one person, you won't spend millions on vault-like physical security while you have a hundred dollar linksys router protecting what's inside... or vice versa.
But one issue still remains, which is that while physical security is somewhat intuitive (you can note that it's way too easy for you to walk in after someone else and bypass the card reader, for example), it may be difficult if not impossible to determine whether your information security measures are in place. It takes a different skillset to check for security holes in your network, website, etc.
Ultimately (and this may be at the heart of that $6.6 million in costs associated with data compromises), an entire company is held hostage to a person or handful of people who *say* they're making data secure. You may never know if they actually do.
Maybe we need IT security professionals to start being bonded. If you have had a major breach happen on your watch, you'll lose your bond, and have to switch jobs, at least for a while.
I would probably start a unit in charge of security -- ALL Security, and have them monitor and interact with IT and janitorial and anyone else to manage security.
I think it might make sense to have a department (or at least person) that is in charge of developing, distributing, and enforcing policies that have a bearing on all forms of security... but I think you'll have a problem finding someone competent to supervise *both* the physical maintenance and server maintenance staff.
I was going to make this comment in computer-ish terms. It's called "push content" versus "pull content". Mailing lists PUSH the content to the user. Web fora require the user to PULL the content.
Thanks for the increase in precision.
PUSH is much better for important information. PULL is better for information that is not critical.
I think (especially in light of the example you gave) this is an oversimplification. PULL is preferable when:
* The information is not critical, AND * There is a non-trivial "cost" to transmitting the information.
PUSH is preferable when:
* The information is critical, and/or you know you want all parts of it, AND * There is no significant cost for transmissions.
If you have one condition and not the other, then it's more of a personal preference.
My email lists are, by and large, NOT critical... but it's all information I want locally, and I don't suffer a usability issue from getting it all pushed to my computer. I have everything filtered into nice neat folders, and I can read my various lists in the order that I prefer. But you're right; I wouldn't want all those messages showing up on my phone all the time.
Sure they won't get them all. But there are plenty they could. And any money transfer, credit card, whatever HAS to go through US jurisdiction.
Why? If my bank, a private entity, is (for my convenience) member of a network of banks, which allows me to conduct international transactions with my credit card, at what point is this "US jurisdiction?" If I'm purchasing something that cannot legally be sold in the US, but it is NOT being sold in the US, then it would need to also be illegal to buy or own in the US, and then it's the purchaser who is at fault. But in the case of prescription drugs, unless they're listed as "controlled substances," there's no restrictions on owning or buying, just on selling.
Here's the question: what's the difference between me going to Mexico and buying the item, vs. ordering it online from a Mexican vendor? (replace "Mexico/Mexican" with "Canada/Canadian" or "Russia/Russian" as suits your mood.)
Well, given that several other folks have posted that they've done similar things and had good results, I'm wondering about the curriculum of your class... maybe that's the weak link.
Ok, as clueless as most of your posts on this topic have been, this raises a good point: if the government engaged in a wholesale effort to send fake spam to identify and educate the people who respond to real spam, we *also* dilute the current system of reducing the impact of spam, because blacklisting government domains could be a problem. How would one (besides Eggplant62) address that issue?
Someone mod this post up! Very true. The problem with spam is that there's so darned *much* of it. A little spam wouldn't be that big a problem for anyone; you just delete the one or two spam emails you get every week. It's the unmitigated onslaught that makes spam a serious problem.
The technological issue is that, while I can identify a spam email, check the headers, and notify abuse@domain.com that someone is using their servers to spam me, they (1) may not care; (2) can't always find the person at fault; (3) have no recourse except to close their relay. Whereas, if you NEED a certificate, and a certificate costs money, and your cert gets revoked or blacklisted as soon as you send spam (because people like me report it), sending spam isn't free anymore, and will drop off quite a bit.
The problem with spam is that there is no accountability. If you can't find the guy who sends the mail, you can't punish him,
Most spam is motivated by profit: trying to sell something to the recipient. There is therefore a money trail. Law enforcement could simply respond to a small proportion of spam and track where the money goes, and then prosecute for fraud, selling unregistered drugs, tax evasion -- it;s a good bet they are breaking some existing laws, no new "cyber laws" are needed. But they don't because governments really don't care about it.
Or they don't have jurisdiction. The FTC can deal with commerce that crosses state lines, but the WTO has yet to get into the spam issue, and a LOT of spam is selling from outside the US. In that country, what they're doing may or may not be legal... if it is, then the trail ends; if it's not, the best you can do is notify the local authorities, who may be motivated to let their spammers "tax foreigners living abroad," as it doesn't hurt their populace and brings in GDP.
$2.75?! Where are you getting your coffee? A tall brewed at sbux is only $1.60, and even the cafe downstairs in our office building is only $1.75 for the same.
I'm not a kernel developer, but every mailing list to which I once subscribed moved to web based forums, which I find much, much more convenient to use. I think mailing lists are a relic which some are reluctant to give up, and I'm sure there may be good reasons for that. I just don't know what they are.
Here's some of the reasons I prefer my mailing lists to forums:
* I don't have to remember to go there; it comes to me.
* I KNOW what I've read already.
* I can set up filters to mark my own "posts" as read automatically, to delete posts from people I'd rather not hear from, to flag items with particular subject lines, etc.
* Thunderbird has a good search tool. Online forums often don't, and it's luck of the draw whether they do or not.
* If the internet is down, I can still find that post that tells me how to do what it is I want to do right now.
* I can (with the original poster's permission) forward all or part of a message to an individual or another list.
* I can (with discretion and an x-post note) post the same text to multiple lists at the same time.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those are the reasons I've advocated against email lists I belong to switching to online forums. Since most of them are Yahoo groups, though, people *can* read them as web forums if they want to instead.
I think that's the key statement. And you have to look at it systematically, not emotionally. It's very hard to do.
Bah, not *that* hard. The concept of latent demand has been empirically verified many times over. On average, when you add capacity to a congested roadway, it takes about four months for traffic levels to regain or even surpass where they were before the capacity increase.
The problem is, personal vehicle transportation costs are largely up-front costs, with very little cost per use. Once you've bought a car and paid for insurance, the very low price of gas (no, I'm not joking; even at $5/gallon it's cheaper than most of the industrialized world) isn't enough to allocate vehicle miles very efficiently. And gas consumption scales hardly at all with peak usage; you don't pay more per gallon if you drive at 8 a.m. instead of 8 p.m. (the decrease in gas mileage from sitting in traffic is not usually large enough to impact on decision-making). The only transportation cost that scales with congestion is the time cost of sitting in traffic. Consequently, you can bet that for everyone on the road during rush hour, there's someone who adjusted their schedule so they could stay off the road... but would, if the capacity was there, like to be out there too.
Most people are stupid. I would wager more than 65% of the population has an IQ of less than 100.
Hmmm... I'd venture to suggest that one definition of "stupid" is failing to do some very basic research on an assertion. By definition (and constant recalibration of tests to keep it this way), 100 is the median IQ score, with half the population falling above it and half below (which is the definition of "median", but I wasn't counting on you to look that up yourself, either).
Trying to get people who know nothing about the issues to make suggestions is just going to be a nightmare. Believe it or not there is a science to this and a long history of empirical learning that someone really needs to understand to make real planning and design judgments.
I'm a highway designer and I go to public meetings all the time and you wouldn't believe what some people suggest. There was one guy one time that was convinced that all exit ramps from Freeways should be on the left. He thought this because he's an idiot that doesn't understand the issues. The problem is idiotic ideas presented by a person that can work a crowd can become popular, even if they are stupid, again because individuals don't understand all the issues.
So why is the solution to keep the issues obfuscated from the general public? If some good, easy-to-use, reasonably accurate simulation tools were available to the general public, so your guy at your public meeting could *see* what happens when you move the exits to the left (and maybe he'd also get a ballpark on how much that would COST), he wouldn't even suggest it.
I'm not disagreeing that the general public has a really strong inclination to think they know exactly how to solve transportation issues, and that their ideas can sound completely idiotic to someone with some training in the field... but just because someone's never heard of latent demand or doesn't know the difference between a horizontal and a vertical curve doesn't mean that they can't *possibly* have valid input into the process.
And, as you know, they DO have input into the process, by law. But it's often of very poor quality. A project like this could improve the quality of that input, increasing the signal to noise ratio for those of us who have to implement plans that, let's face it, are supposed to work for "those people."
You want the same people who will be hopping around in their underwear, half-drunk, screaming at a television screen this sunday to be involved in how our roads are designed, our bus schedules, rail lines, and more? Allow me to interject some reality here -- there's a reason the public sector only allows people with the word "Engineer" in the job title to work on these projects.
Yes, because now that Mozilla is open-source, NASCAR dads are committing changes to the project without oversight.
But seriously... first of all, while all Transportation Engineering is done by engineers, and a lot of Transportation Planning is also, there's also planners (like me) who came through MA programs. I'm not going to be doing the calculations to determine the asphalt crowning to meet up with the manhole cover (though I did actually take Transportation Engineering, and learned how those calculations are done, even though it wasn't required for my program), but I can develop a gravity model that postulates the impact of a new development on the surrounding traffic load, and suggest mitigations that will help the community absorb the new traffic without undue negative impact.
Joe the Plumber can't do that, of course... but maybe he can give me valuable information. And maybe the right software could make it easier for *him* to do some pre-analysis of his own, and put that information into a format that makes it more useful and more likely to have an impact on the final project.
Building a city flow is very different than building data flow.
The number one difference is that cities take pride in their monuments and historical buildings, which tend to become the source of traffic bottlenecks. It would be best if our cities could move with traffic demand, and scale with traffic demand. But currently that is impossible.
Actually, the number one difference is that in road traffic, the packets can think, and decide that they're more clever about which route to take than the information available.
For example, for years and years now, there have been live signal systems that are capable of gathering traffic data and making realtime adjustments to signal timing to optimize flow. But they don't do that; instead, they use the traffic data to make changes to the established timing, but keep it basically the same from one day to the next. Why? Because if a person hits the same light at about the same time every day, and *sometimes* it's a short red and *sometimes* it's a long red, their frustration increases, and they're more likely to run the light if it's "taking too long."
Packets will patiently wait their turn, "trusting" the system to do things right. People, not so much.
He's even more confused than that... while Esri makes the most popular commercial GIS software, the very same shapefiles can be used in GRASS, which is an open-source GIS package originally developed by the military and now maintained by the University of Michigan.
You could easily remove all zoning ordinances (and do everything zoning ordinances are supposed to) by going to a pure land value tax, coupled with payment for all net societal costs.
That sounds like a fabulous idea, but I'm wondering how feasible it is to evaluate net societal costs? What about situations where some elements would see a particular development as a gain, while others see it as a loss? Do you just tally up the subjective dollar values each individual places on a particular development? If some judgments are weighted differently, how do you arbitrate that?
For example, if you live in a community that is largely young singles, but with a few families here and there. There's only one elementary school, because there's not that many children. Someone decides to open a 24-hour uh, "club" where people can meet up for uh, "private moments" or somesuch, right next door to the school. They want to serve alcohol at a communal bar, and offer private rooms for hourly rental. Maybe *most* of the community thinks this sounds like a GRAND idea, but the parents of the school kids are not so excited about it. They're in the minority, though. How do you calculate the social cost of this plan?
The who thing would be self-organizing, without the need for zoning ordinances at all
It would be an economic system of regulation rather than a command-and-control system, which I agree is usually more desirable... but it would hardly be "self-organizing." On the contrary, it would require an ENORMOUS amount of data collection and number crunching, with not a little subjective judgment, to create such a system.
That approach to Urban Planning was rampant in the 1960s and 70s, but has largely gone by the wayside today. Now, planners (and developers) want to see more mixed-use developments that put retail businesses, office space, and homes in communication with each other.
Ironically, it's the citizens who defend the outdated, inefficient approach to zoning; putting your office near your home would (he fears) lower your neighbor's home value, and so he fights it.
I had a sidebar on Open Source software in my comp exam for my Urban Planning degree in 2004. My assigned topic was to do a writeup on new technologies available for general-population paratransit implementations.
While it sounds all nice and open-source-cozy-and-warm, too many chefs spoil the soup. In the input end, more opinions, points of view, and unique ideas could yield some interesting options and maybe a new and better way. But as the planning process goes on, sooner or later decisions have to be made. The crowd is not necessarily better at making these decisions, nor does it make better decisions. Even the smaller group doesn't necessarily make better decisions when you increase the size of the group.
And opening up the planning process to all comers doesn't even guarantee you get good and talented people involved. You just get more. More is not always better. Knowing when it is and is not is key.
But the fact is, by *law*, we already do have the planning process open to all comers. The issue is not whether there is an opening for public participation, but for how effective that mechanism can be to engender *true* public participation in the process.
Right now, those with the most resources can use those resources to tie up projects they don't personally like, while those without resources who might benefit from the same project are largely silent. If this software effort can level the playing field so that "all comers" can participate more equitably in the environmental clearance process (where "environmental" includes a variety of socio-demographic factors too, such as historical preservation and quality of life), it would be a great benefit (and maybe, just maybe, the 710 freeway would finally get finished).
Urban planning can be good and bad. Certainly Central Park is a win, but highways largely suck when they are run through existing cities. New York's mass transit is a combination of free market and planned routes...
The reason why highways and cities seem to clash so violently has to do with how the routes were "planned," or actually, that they were not really planned at all.
The US Highway Plan went through three phases. The first time, it was going to be a smaller network of mostly toll roads. With each phase, the number of miles grew, and the tolls lowered, until the 1956 plan had a large network of free roads. Each iteration was an attempt to address objections of Congresscritters.
But the last plan, when it was first introduced, left the major urban areas blank on the proposed map. The Federal highway planners thought, strangely enough, that the urban routes should be planned at the local level, based on local knowledge and needs.
What Congressional representatives saw, though, was a bunch of rural roads and "nothing" for their cities. They didn't want to vote for a plan that left them off the map.
So... the Feds drew in lines in the cities, and the routes were now a matter of Federal law, whether they "worked" or not.:-/
Personally, one of my favorite little projects that demonstrates how a lack of planning is sometimes best is at University of Maryland. They have this center mall. Basically, the kept having to re-sod it because no one would stay on the paths. During a renovation it occurred to them to just pave the deer-paths... it looks crazy but now they don't have the same sod problems.
This illustrates a really general principle of usability, though. Any system or resource has to account for how it will be used. If it doesn't, then it will be misused. This is not just a feature of urban planning, but of computer software, library books, school desks... anything you can name. If you supply a classroom with only right-handed half-desks, and the chairs are movable, then left-handed students will probably pick up their desks and turn them sideways. If you make it require five clicks to log your input correctly, but you can do it "wrong" in only three, it's going to be done wrong over and over again. And so on.
So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe.
Absolutely, 100% WRONG. See Iraq, where a group of well-armed citizens armed with only small arms and improvised explosives made life absolutely for the most powerful military on the planet.
...halfway around the world from their home base.
When the guerrillas have the home field advantage and the invader doesn't the results are often pretty dismal for the invader. When they're both at home, though? Different story.
BTW, legal gun owners AREN'T the ones "threatening the liberty and health" of those without guns -- that's what violent criminals do who simply ignore any law you pass about using guns, knives, or clubs to rob, rape, or kill someone else. From Wikipedia: "Permit holders are a remarkably law-abiding subclass of the population. Florida, which has issued over 1,408,907 permits in twenty one years, has revoked only 166 for a "crime after licensure involving a firearm," and fewer than 4,500 permits for any reason." Quit restating the myth that legal gun owners pose any substantial threat to those who choose to be without guns -- there's absolutely nothing which backs up that statement, anywhere.
Ok, first of all, you're citing Floriduh statistics as an example of efficiently-run government... pardon me if I'm hardly convinced. Secondly, you're saying that the government hasn't revoked permits, not that the gun owners haven't committed crimes or are less likely to commit crimes. 0.011% of permit holders have been convicted of crimes involving a firearm; how does that compare to the general population? With about 0.45% percent of the Florida population behind bars in 2000, and knowing about a third of those are likely for drug offenses (based on nationwide statistics), then you have to wonder if the number of remaining offenses, some of which are non-violent (fraud, embezzlement, etc.), which involved guns exceeds about 10% of the total. Maybe it does. I can't find those stats right now, but I'll bet they exist; if you want to prove something, you need to normalize your data somehow, so you might want to dig. (In trying to find a comparable general population statistic, I found this article which calls into question the quoted statistic on its face, btw.)
Am I supposed to be reassured that they haven't revoked very many permits period?
Slashdot Mirror
You remember to come to /. and probably a large number of other sites as well.
More or less. But I might go days without getting around to it, and because of how it's set up, it's hard to catch up, also. Since I *do* visit online forums *and* subscribe to several email lists, I know exactly how my usage varies between the two.
* I KNOW what I've read already.
I would hope you'd know that no matter what communication medium you use.
Uh... just *how* am I supposed to tell what posts I've read previously on /., for example? Sure, if I read something *again*, I can tell you if I've read it before, but that's a waste of my time. I'd rather have a reliable system for marking things as read or unread, which email provides, and I have never seen a single online forum that's able to do this properly... especially if it's days between visits.
Most forums auto-redirect to your own post, making your own marked as read by default. Most also have ignore buttons for annoying people you'd rather not hear from.
Granted on the ignore button... but as for the former, this doesn't work properly on the largest board I frequent. It works if my post goes onto an existing page, but if it starts a new page, *even though I saw my post in the re-direct,* it bolds the subject line when I click a link to return to the forum page. Bogus.
* Thunderbird has a good search tool. Online forums often don't, and it's luck of the draw whether they do or not.
It isn't that difficult to set up a forum with a good search feature. The ones that don't typically don't need such a function. A specialized developer forum? I would laugh if you guys couldn't set that up.
I'm not on specialized developer forums. Most of the online forums I go to, besides /. obviously, are related to parenting issues. It may not be hard to set up a good search tool, but that doesn't mean it happens on a regular basis. PHPBB and BigBoards both have really crappy search tools, and they account for a really large proportion of the online forums I see.
Anyway, do you know what "luck of the draw" means? Just because it's possible doesn't mean that it gets done. If I'm viewing content using my email client, I have a predictable level of search ability, which (so far) is way better than what I find on online forums.
* If the internet is down, I can still find that post that tells me how to do what it is I want to do right now.
There are MANY ways to create and maintain a local copy of forum posts.
So? That's an extra step. Not only that, but are there many ways to maintain a synchronized local copy, or would I have to download the ENTIRE THING every time I made a backup? Should I do that every day? Every week? Every hour? POP will download each post exactly once. Are there online forums that do that?
* I can (with the original poster's permission) forward all or part of a message to an individual or another list.
* I can (with discretion and an x-post note) post the same text to multiple lists at the same time.
A forum, as opposed to email, does nothing to prevent you from forwarding that message with permission.
It's not in my email client, so I can't "forward" it. I can copy and paste it into an email, but again, I'm switching programs and taking extra steps. And cross-posting requires multiple steps as well. There's also the fact that if I *want* to include basic header info (original sender, date/timestamp, etc.) I probably have to manually grab each of those bits of data.
Translation: This is how I do it. This is how it's always been done. This is the only way to do it.
No, translation: this is wh
Just as your CEO is incompetent to do much of anything but is ultimately responsible for seeing that everything gets done
Clearly our physical security needs some work, because you've been spying on our office! ;-)
Delegate overall security to someone with a firm grasp of what real security is (vs security theatre) and who has a good head for risk assessment and return-on-investment, and above all the competence to surround himself with specialized people competent in specific fields of security and you'll be fine.
Your right that will definitely result in different people managing network and physical security. But working together under one person, you won't spend millions on vault-like physical security while you have a hundred dollar linksys router protecting what's inside... or vice versa.
But one issue still remains, which is that while physical security is somewhat intuitive (you can note that it's way too easy for you to walk in after someone else and bypass the card reader, for example), it may be difficult if not impossible to determine whether your information security measures are in place. It takes a different skillset to check for security holes in your network, website, etc.
Ultimately (and this may be at the heart of that $6.6 million in costs associated with data compromises), an entire company is held hostage to a person or handful of people who *say* they're making data secure. You may never know if they actually do.
Maybe we need IT security professionals to start being bonded. If you have had a major breach happen on your watch, you'll lose your bond, and have to switch jobs, at least for a while.
I would probably start a unit in charge of security -- ALL Security, and have them monitor and interact with IT and janitorial and anyone else to manage security.
I think it might make sense to have a department (or at least person) that is in charge of developing, distributing, and enforcing policies that have a bearing on all forms of security... but I think you'll have a problem finding someone competent to supervise *both* the physical maintenance and server maintenance staff.
I was going to make this comment in computer-ish terms. It's called "push content" versus "pull content". Mailing lists PUSH the content to the user. Web fora require the user to PULL the content.
Thanks for the increase in precision.
PUSH is much better for important information. PULL is better for information that is not critical.
I think (especially in light of the example you gave) this is an oversimplification. PULL is preferable when:
* The information is not critical, AND
* There is a non-trivial "cost" to transmitting the information.
PUSH is preferable when:
* The information is critical, and/or you know you want all parts of it, AND
* There is no significant cost for transmissions.
If you have one condition and not the other, then it's more of a personal preference.
My email lists are, by and large, NOT critical... but it's all information I want locally, and I don't suffer a usability issue from getting it all pushed to my computer. I have everything filtered into nice neat folders, and I can read my various lists in the order that I prefer. But you're right; I wouldn't want all those messages showing up on my phone all the time.
Or they don't have jurisdiction.
Sure they won't get them all. But there are plenty they could. And any money transfer, credit card, whatever HAS to go through US jurisdiction.
Why? If my bank, a private entity, is (for my convenience) member of a network of banks, which allows me to conduct international transactions with my credit card, at what point is this "US jurisdiction?" If I'm purchasing something that cannot legally be sold in the US, but it is NOT being sold in the US, then it would need to also be illegal to buy or own in the US, and then it's the purchaser who is at fault. But in the case of prescription drugs, unless they're listed as "controlled substances," there's no restrictions on owning or buying, just on selling.
Here's the question: what's the difference between me going to Mexico and buying the item, vs. ordering it online from a Mexican vendor? (replace "Mexico/Mexican" with "Canada/Canadian" or "Russia/Russian" as suits your mood.)
Well, given that several other folks have posted that they've done similar things and had good results, I'm wondering about the curriculum of your class... maybe that's the weak link.
Ok, as clueless as most of your posts on this topic have been, this raises a good point: if the government engaged in a wholesale effort to send fake spam to identify and educate the people who respond to real spam, we *also* dilute the current system of reducing the impact of spam, because blacklisting government domains could be a problem. How would one (besides Eggplant62) address that issue?
Someone mod this post up! Very true. The problem with spam is that there's so darned *much* of it. A little spam wouldn't be that big a problem for anyone; you just delete the one or two spam emails you get every week. It's the unmitigated onslaught that makes spam a serious problem.
The technological issue is that, while I can identify a spam email, check the headers, and notify abuse@domain.com that someone is using their servers to spam me, they (1) may not care; (2) can't always find the person at fault; (3) have no recourse except to close their relay. Whereas, if you NEED a certificate, and a certificate costs money, and your cert gets revoked or blacklisted as soon as you send spam (because people like me report it), sending spam isn't free anymore, and will drop off quite a bit.
The problem with spam is that there is no accountability. If you can't find the guy who sends the mail, you can't punish him,
Most spam is motivated by profit: trying to sell something to the recipient. There is therefore a money trail. Law enforcement could simply respond to a small proportion of spam and track where the money goes, and then prosecute for fraud, selling unregistered drugs, tax evasion -- it;s a good bet they are breaking some existing laws, no new "cyber laws" are needed. But they don't because governments really don't care about it.
Or they don't have jurisdiction. The FTC can deal with commerce that crosses state lines, but the WTO has yet to get into the spam issue, and a LOT of spam is selling from outside the US. In that country, what they're doing may or may not be legal... if it is, then the trail ends; if it's not, the best you can do is notify the local authorities, who may be motivated to let their spammers "tax foreigners living abroad," as it doesn't hurt their populace and brings in GDP.
If they charge, it'd be one way to raise revenue without raising taxes.
$2.75?! Where are you getting your coffee? A tall brewed at sbux is only $1.60, and even the cafe downstairs in our office building is only $1.75 for the same.
I'm not a kernel developer, but every mailing list to which I once subscribed moved to web based forums, which I find much, much more convenient to use. I think mailing lists are a relic which some are reluctant to give up, and I'm sure there may be good reasons for that. I just don't know what they are.
Here's some of the reasons I prefer my mailing lists to forums:
* I don't have to remember to go there; it comes to me.
* I KNOW what I've read already.
* I can set up filters to mark my own "posts" as read automatically, to delete posts from people I'd rather not hear from, to flag items with particular subject lines, etc.
* Thunderbird has a good search tool. Online forums often don't, and it's luck of the draw whether they do or not.
* If the internet is down, I can still find that post that tells me how to do what it is I want to do right now.
* I can (with the original poster's permission) forward all or part of a message to an individual or another list.
* I can (with discretion and an x-post note) post the same text to multiple lists at the same time.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but those are the reasons I've advocated against email lists I belong to switching to online forums. Since most of them are Yahoo groups, though, people *can* read them as web forums if they want to instead.
I think that's the key statement. And you have to look at it systematically, not emotionally. It's very hard to do.
Bah, not *that* hard. The concept of latent demand has been empirically verified many times over. On average, when you add capacity to a congested roadway, it takes about four months for traffic levels to regain or even surpass where they were before the capacity increase.
The problem is, personal vehicle transportation costs are largely up-front costs, with very little cost per use. Once you've bought a car and paid for insurance, the very low price of gas (no, I'm not joking; even at $5/gallon it's cheaper than most of the industrialized world) isn't enough to allocate vehicle miles very efficiently. And gas consumption scales hardly at all with peak usage; you don't pay more per gallon if you drive at 8 a.m. instead of 8 p.m. (the decrease in gas mileage from sitting in traffic is not usually large enough to impact on decision-making). The only transportation cost that scales with congestion is the time cost of sitting in traffic. Consequently, you can bet that for everyone on the road during rush hour, there's someone who adjusted their schedule so they could stay off the road... but would, if the capacity was there, like to be out there too.
Most people are stupid. I would wager more than 65% of the population has an IQ of less than 100.
Hmmm... I'd venture to suggest that one definition of "stupid" is failing to do some very basic research on an assertion. By definition (and constant recalibration of tests to keep it this way), 100 is the median IQ score, with half the population falling above it and half below (which is the definition of "median", but I wasn't counting on you to look that up yourself, either).
Trying to get people who know nothing about the issues to make suggestions is just going to be a nightmare. Believe it or not there is a science to this and a long history of empirical learning that someone really needs to understand to make real planning and design judgments.
I'm a highway designer and I go to public meetings all the time and you wouldn't believe what some people suggest. There was one guy one time that was convinced that all exit ramps from Freeways should be on the left. He thought this because he's an idiot that doesn't understand the issues. The problem is idiotic ideas presented by a person that can work a crowd can become popular, even if they are stupid, again because individuals don't understand all the issues.
So why is the solution to keep the issues obfuscated from the general public? If some good, easy-to-use, reasonably accurate simulation tools were available to the general public, so your guy at your public meeting could *see* what happens when you move the exits to the left (and maybe he'd also get a ballpark on how much that would COST), he wouldn't even suggest it.
I'm not disagreeing that the general public has a really strong inclination to think they know exactly how to solve transportation issues, and that their ideas can sound completely idiotic to someone with some training in the field... but just because someone's never heard of latent demand or doesn't know the difference between a horizontal and a vertical curve doesn't mean that they can't *possibly* have valid input into the process.
And, as you know, they DO have input into the process, by law. But it's often of very poor quality. A project like this could improve the quality of that input, increasing the signal to noise ratio for those of us who have to implement plans that, let's face it, are supposed to work for "those people."
You want the same people who will be hopping around in their underwear, half-drunk, screaming at a television screen this sunday to be involved in how our roads are designed, our bus schedules, rail lines, and more? Allow me to interject some reality here -- there's a reason the public sector only allows people with the word "Engineer" in the job title to work on these projects.
Yes, because now that Mozilla is open-source, NASCAR dads are committing changes to the project without oversight.
But seriously... first of all, while all Transportation Engineering is done by engineers, and a lot of Transportation Planning is also, there's also planners (like me) who came through MA programs. I'm not going to be doing the calculations to determine the asphalt crowning to meet up with the manhole cover (though I did actually take Transportation Engineering, and learned how those calculations are done, even though it wasn't required for my program), but I can develop a gravity model that postulates the impact of a new development on the surrounding traffic load, and suggest mitigations that will help the community absorb the new traffic without undue negative impact.
Joe the Plumber can't do that, of course... but maybe he can give me valuable information. And maybe the right software could make it easier for *him* to do some pre-analysis of his own, and put that information into a format that makes it more useful and more likely to have an impact on the final project.
Building a city flow is very different than building data flow.
The number one difference is that cities take pride in their monuments and historical buildings, which tend to become the source of traffic bottlenecks. It would be best if our cities could move with traffic demand, and scale with traffic demand. But currently that is impossible.
Actually, the number one difference is that in road traffic, the packets can think, and decide that they're more clever about which route to take than the information available.
For example, for years and years now, there have been live signal systems that are capable of gathering traffic data and making realtime adjustments to signal timing to optimize flow. But they don't do that; instead, they use the traffic data to make changes to the established timing, but keep it basically the same from one day to the next. Why? Because if a person hits the same light at about the same time every day, and *sometimes* it's a short red and *sometimes* it's a long red, their frustration increases, and they're more likely to run the light if it's "taking too long."
Packets will patiently wait their turn, "trusting" the system to do things right. People, not so much.
He's even more confused than that... while Esri makes the most popular commercial GIS software, the very same shapefiles can be used in GRASS, which is an open-source GIS package originally developed by the military and now maintained by the University of Michigan.
You could easily remove all zoning ordinances (and do everything zoning ordinances are supposed to) by going to a pure land value tax, coupled with payment for all net societal costs.
That sounds like a fabulous idea, but I'm wondering how feasible it is to evaluate net societal costs? What about situations where some elements would see a particular development as a gain, while others see it as a loss? Do you just tally up the subjective dollar values each individual places on a particular development? If some judgments are weighted differently, how do you arbitrate that?
For example, if you live in a community that is largely young singles, but with a few families here and there. There's only one elementary school, because there's not that many children. Someone decides to open a 24-hour uh, "club" where people can meet up for uh, "private moments" or somesuch, right next door to the school. They want to serve alcohol at a communal bar, and offer private rooms for hourly rental. Maybe *most* of the community thinks this sounds like a GRAND idea, but the parents of the school kids are not so excited about it. They're in the minority, though. How do you calculate the social cost of this plan?
The who thing would be self-organizing, without the need for zoning ordinances at all
It would be an economic system of regulation rather than a command-and-control system, which I agree is usually more desirable... but it would hardly be "self-organizing." On the contrary, it would require an ENORMOUS amount of data collection and number crunching, with not a little subjective judgment, to create such a system.
That approach to Urban Planning was rampant in the 1960s and 70s, but has largely gone by the wayside today. Now, planners (and developers) want to see more mixed-use developments that put retail businesses, office space, and homes in communication with each other.
Ironically, it's the citizens who defend the outdated, inefficient approach to zoning; putting your office near your home would (he fears) lower your neighbor's home value, and so he fights it.
I had a sidebar on Open Source software in my comp exam for my Urban Planning degree in 2004. My assigned topic was to do a writeup on new technologies available for general-population paratransit implementations.
I think I need to send this link to my advisor...
While it sounds all nice and open-source-cozy-and-warm, too many chefs spoil the soup. In the input end, more opinions, points of view, and unique ideas could yield some interesting options and maybe a new and better way. But as the planning process goes on, sooner or later decisions have to be made. The crowd is not necessarily better at making these decisions, nor does it make better decisions. Even the smaller group doesn't necessarily make better decisions when you increase the size of the group.
And opening up the planning process to all comers doesn't even guarantee you get good and talented people involved. You just get more. More is not always better. Knowing when it is and is not is key.
But the fact is, by *law*, we already do have the planning process open to all comers. The issue is not whether there is an opening for public participation, but for how effective that mechanism can be to engender *true* public participation in the process.
Right now, those with the most resources can use those resources to tie up projects they don't personally like, while those without resources who might benefit from the same project are largely silent. If this software effort can level the playing field so that "all comers" can participate more equitably in the environmental clearance process (where "environmental" includes a variety of socio-demographic factors too, such as historical preservation and quality of life), it would be a great benefit (and maybe, just maybe, the 710 freeway would finally get finished).
Do you really want to live in a city designed by a bunch of fifteen year olds whose idea of a great city is lifted from World of Warcraft?
I've always wished the Los Angeles Basin were encircled with a trench full of molten lava.
Urban planning can be good and bad. Certainly Central Park is a win, but highways largely suck when they are run through existing cities. New York's mass transit is a combination of free market and planned routes...
The reason why highways and cities seem to clash so violently has to do with how the routes were "planned," or actually, that they were not really planned at all.
The US Highway Plan went through three phases. The first time, it was going to be a smaller network of mostly toll roads. With each phase, the number of miles grew, and the tolls lowered, until the 1956 plan had a large network of free roads. Each iteration was an attempt to address objections of Congresscritters.
But the last plan, when it was first introduced, left the major urban areas blank on the proposed map. The Federal highway planners thought, strangely enough, that the urban routes should be planned at the local level, based on local knowledge and needs.
What Congressional representatives saw, though, was a bunch of rural roads and "nothing" for their cities. They didn't want to vote for a plan that left them off the map.
So... the Feds drew in lines in the cities, and the routes were now a matter of Federal law, whether they "worked" or not. :-/
Personally, one of my favorite little projects that demonstrates how a lack of planning is sometimes best is at University of Maryland. They have this center mall. Basically, the kept having to re-sod it because no one would stay on the paths. During a renovation it occurred to them to just pave the deer-paths... it looks crazy but now they don't have the same sod problems.
This illustrates a really general principle of usability, though. Any system or resource has to account for how it will be used. If it doesn't, then it will be misused. This is not just a feature of urban planning, but of computer software, library books, school desks... anything you can name. If you supply a classroom with only right-handed half-desks, and the chairs are movable, then left-handed students will probably pick up their desks and turn them sideways. If you make it require five clicks to log your input correctly, but you can do it "wrong" in only three, it's going to be done wrong over and over again. And so on.
So, a well-armed populace cannot prevent the scenario you describe.
Absolutely, 100% WRONG. See Iraq, where a group of well-armed citizens armed with only small arms and improvised explosives made life absolutely for the most powerful military on the planet.
...halfway around the world from their home base.
When the guerrillas have the home field advantage and the invader doesn't the results are often pretty dismal for the invader. When they're both at home, though? Different story.
BTW, legal gun owners AREN'T the ones "threatening the liberty and health" of those without guns -- that's what violent criminals do who simply ignore any law you pass about using guns, knives, or clubs to rob, rape, or kill someone else. From Wikipedia: "Permit holders are a remarkably law-abiding subclass of the population. Florida, which has issued over 1,408,907 permits in twenty one years, has revoked only 166 for a "crime after licensure involving a firearm," and fewer than 4,500 permits for any reason." Quit restating the myth that legal gun owners pose any substantial threat to those who choose to be without guns -- there's absolutely nothing which backs up that statement, anywhere.
Ok, first of all, you're citing Floriduh statistics as an example of efficiently-run government... pardon me if I'm hardly convinced. Secondly, you're saying that the government hasn't revoked permits, not that the gun owners haven't committed crimes or are less likely to commit crimes. 0.011% of permit holders have been convicted of crimes involving a firearm; how does that compare to the general population? With about 0.45% percent of the Florida population behind bars in 2000, and knowing about a third of those are likely for drug offenses (based on nationwide statistics), then you have to wonder if the number of remaining offenses, some of which are non-violent (fraud, embezzlement, etc.), which involved guns exceeds about 10% of the total. Maybe it does. I can't find those stats right now, but I'll bet they exist; if you want to prove something, you need to normalize your data somehow, so you might want to dig. (In trying to find a comparable general population statistic, I found this article which calls into question the quoted statistic on its face, btw.)
Am I supposed to be reassured that they haven't revoked very many permits period?