Does every potential vandal or thief ignore them? I posit the answer is no. I'll certainly believe that most will, but all? Even twitchy teenagers out for a thrill? If any potential criminals are deterred then there is some value. Of course you can still debate whether it's significant, or whether the value is enough to make it worthwhile, but I can't believe that they have no value whatsoever.
You don't get it. It's far easier to whine about the problem on slashdot and blame an entire class of people and devices for it than it is to actually take steps to resolve it.
Where I live, it's pretty quiet. Car alarms don't go off on their own. If an alarm were to go off, it would draw attention.
Interesting that I'm deluded if I think my alarm would deter anyone, but the guy up above who thinks his non-alarm blinking light might deter someone is just fine. My alarm has a blinking light too, you know.
Fill three or four large suitcases with the most powerful explosive money can buy. Put suitcases on luggage cart. Push luggage cart into security line. When you're surrounded by people, or you catch the attention of officials, detonate the explosives.
For best results, fill the outside parts of the suitcases with nails.
I'm pretty sure this will create mass casualties. Your comparison is irrelevant because you can easily get a lot more explosives into a security line than you can onto an airplane.
It's completely reasonable if you approach it from the proper point of view.
From the TSA's point of view they aren't searching pilots. They're searching people who appear to be pilots.
This is a key distinction. If you let pilots go through the checkpoint with no search, then all you do is encourage the bad guys to dress up like a pilot and acquire some fake pilot ID.
It's simpler and more effective for them to just search everybody than it is to have a complex failure-proof system for deciding who is and who is not a legitimate pilot.
I'm as anti-TSA as anybody and overall I think that their policies are insane and worthless, but searching flight crew is actually a completely reasonable thing to do.
Hussein was a bad man, Hitler was a bad man, the funny thing is though, the same people who lament that our government didn't do anything about Hitler until it involved the US (who killed his own people and invaded other countries) are the same people who think that we shouldn't go after Hussein (who killed his own people and invaded other countries). I'm one of those people, could you please explain what's funny about this? Logically speaking, this would only be consistent if the two men were equivalent threats and equally evil, and the response to each was the same.
Hitler was in charge of a major European power. By the time he started taking over other countries, he had amassed a fairly powerful, modern army, which was able to rival the best his opponents could muster.
Hussein was in charge of a crappy piece of desert in a place where all the good weapons are imported from other countries. Even at the height of its power in 1991, the Iraqi Army was powerless to even slow down the US Army and its friends. The kill ratio was something like a thousand to one. After the army was essentially destroyed in 1991, the sanctions imposed on the country never let it recover. The Iraqi Army in 2003 was but a shadow of its former self, and the US Army smashed it flat in about three weeks.
The best time to have stopped Hitler was Czechoslovakia. He took over that country, not by force of arms, but by diplomacy. The Allied powers were so afraid of war that they just let him have it. Czechoslovakia had a good, modern army and had excellent defenses prepared against Germany, but their political will to resist collapsed after France and the UK abandoned them and basically threw them to the wolves. If they had simply not abandoned Czechoslovakia, much would have turned out differently.
The best time to stop Hussein was... well, by the time we invaded, he was not a credible threat against any of his neighbors, and the invasion didn't stop him from taking any of them over because he wasn't going to anyway.
Hussein was no threat. It was known that he was no threat before the invasion. He may well have been as evil as Hitler, but he was never going to command anything remotely close to the military power possessed by Nazi Germany.
Given the above, I see absolutely no inconsistency in a position which holds that Hitler should have been stopped much earlier and Iraq should have been left alone.
Contacting representatives has the same problem as the rest. People who agree with my position today will suddenly change their minds if there's ever another big attack. A representative who votes against "security" will suffer badly in that event, whereas a representative who votes for it will not suffer much in the event of no attack.
But still... I'm trying to remember if I've written. I can't recall one way or another. If I have, it has been a very long time, so I should probably do it again. Thanks for the reminder!
Um, ok. That looked like an obviously rhetorical question to me. Clearly, depending on how you look at it, either he's not being paid to campaign (the rational position), or the taxpayers are being paid to campaign (the "I want to make him look bad" position). I thought the real question was why it was legal.
Do you have any statistics to back this up? I don't have any myself, but I'm just wondering, because I'm very curious to know what the real situation is. Anecdotally, I have always been able to find a sympathetic ear when I whine about how nonsensical airport security checks are, even when I'm doing it at the airport to random strangers.
I think that it's just not a big enough issue for most people to actually change their voting habits. The reason they're there is not because they're popular but as a direct result of American political culture. If you're in charge of security and you fail to prevent an attack, you'll lose your job, attract a ton of unhappy media attention, and quite possible have your entire department destroyed, redone, or absorbed into another agency. However, if all you do is waste billions of dollars and millions of hours of people's time, nothing bad happens to you. This still doesn't mean we'll be able to get rid of it, of course.
Ultimately I really wonder where this is going. Right now things only get more and more restrictive. Just over the past decade things have changed enormously, and many of the changes were not due to 9/11. Every change has been for more restrictions, with very minor exceptions such as the total ban on liquids changing to merely a near-total ban. Where does it end, though? Is there a steady-state for airline travel restrictions?
On the subject of the liquid ban, many people don't realize this but there is a blanket exception given for medication. One very common type of medication which is allowed an exception is contact lens solution. Contact lens solution can be obtained in quite large bottles. So the next time you get fed up with having to pay three bucks for a Coke in the airport, get some big contact lens solution bottles and fill them up with Coke. Or, you know, explosives.
There's an enormous difference between the proper skeptical view required for good science and the "This is too complicated for me to personally understand so it must be wrong, let's go shopping!" attitude displayed by the global warming denier and anti-evolution crowds.
All the more reason to complain about this stuff everywhere. Why do you think Europe and the USA are heading this way? It's because everyone looks around at other countries, says, "Look, they're not any better than what we're proposing," and thus we all slide down into the dark together.
"Other places are just as bad" is quite possibly the worst rebuttal to criticism that anyone has ever come up with.
American airport security checks are a joke too. The only difference is that in America they try to hide the fact that it's a joke. They do a lot of important-looking stuff which ends up being utterly pointless. As an American who is both subjected to this and who has to pay for it with my taxes, I can tell you that the only reason I tolerate it is because I have no other choice.
Is it just the english speaking countries that have gone completely batshit insane, or is liberty actually enadangered EVERYWHERE in the world now? It's the latter. However, this is no change from before. Liberty has always been endangered everywhere in the world. Liberty is not the natural state of humanity. It can only be preserved through the constant actions of those who support it.
Nearly everything bad about US customs applies equally to US citizens. The only real difference is that the lines are shorter and the probability of a bad encounter is somewhat less. Besides that, they can do all of this terrible crap to you just the same as to a foreigner. The Constitution doesn't mean jack all until you actually get inside the country, so any time you as a US citizen manage to cross the border without a baseless search of all your possessions and a long interrogation, the only reason is because the customs officials didn't feel like it.
Let me elaborate a bit on what I meant. And thanks for the original numbers, that makes it easier.
So step one, she married him when she was 25 and died at 50. They were not, in fact, necessarily married exactly 25 years. There's a whole year in which she is 25, and a whole year in which she is 50. If she got married on her 25th birthday and died one day before her 51st birthday, she was married 26 years minus one day. If she got married one day before her 26th birthday and died on her 50th birthday, she was married 24 years plus one day. To put it more simply, the range of years during which she was married was (24, 26) where the parentheses are the mathematical construct meaning "up to, but not including, this number".
Now, how old was he when she died? He started out at 30. This is actually [30, 31). Add (24, 26) and you get (54, 57).
Then he died at age 79, which is of course actually [79, 80). Subtract (54, 57) from [79, 80) and you get (22, 26). So he could have been a widower anywhere from 22 (plus a bit), to 25 (plus nearly a year) years.
The trouble here is that they, and you, are assuming that "X years" is an exact integer. But when we say that someone is X years old, this covers a period of an entire year. A person whose birthday is January 1, 1983 was 25 on January 1 of this year, is 25 now, and will be 25 on December 31.
Thus the question does not include nearly enough information to answer to the precision they require. If their choices were, say, 20, 25, 30, 35 then you could choose the one that's in range. But when multiple answers are in range and they don't count them all as being correct then they're just ridiculous.
And yes, I have seen our President, and he makes me sad.
The chance of failure is equal to one minus the probability of success, so that is included in the analysis. The other costs are indeed things I left out. But the overall point stands, there's nothing wrong with the logic presented, just that the numbers used are generally wrong.
Apple doesn't do delta updates. They do ship updates which only carry the changed files, but those updates contain a complete copy of the files in question. This means that if a 60MB binary needs one byte changed to fix one bug, that bug fix adds 60MB to the update. With the typical OS install clocking in at several gigabytes it's entirely believable that a slew of small fixes would require a 500MB of files to be changed.
The trouble is that the response to "harder" hacking is extremely nonlinear.
If you make it twice as hard to crack there won't be half as many pirates. Almost certainly there will be exactly the same number of pirates as before.
In the modern world you only need one person on the entire planet to crack a game, then you lose. There is no purpose in making it harder to crack if the result is still within that one person's capabilities and motivation.
Does TPM let you exceed his motivation? Unlikely. This sort of person thrives on challenge. The fact that you have to get down and dirty with logic analyzers and such will seem like just so much fun.
Does TPM let you exceed his capabilities? Maybe. But given that you have in effect increased his motivation, it seems unlikely. Pirates can have surprisingly good resources. And the resources and motivation will be increased even further by the fact that once you've cracked a TPM, you haven't just cracked one game, you've cracked every game. Of course it will turn into an arms race, as the manufacturers change their product and the pirates catch up to the changes, but each break will accomplish vastly more than breaking individual games one by one.
Either they really think that this will make it impossible to crack by the best pirate in the world with all the resources he can muster, or they don't actually understand the business they're in. Honestly I would bet on both, and I would bet that their belief in the impossibility of cracking is ultimately unfounded.
Yes, it is much more complicated than that. Now, IANAE(conomist) but I'm sure someone working for these video game publishers is. I'm also sure that they've worked out an optimal price to turn the biggest profit. Not make the highest possible revenue, but to turn the highest profit. I'm sure they've tried, but they definitely haven't actually found that optimal price.
This stuff is hard. Without a controlled experiment to find out just what the demand/price elasticity is for a particular product, you can do little more than guess. When companies have tried to perform such experiments (such as Amazon's random pricing a few years back) it has invariably resulted in great customer backlash, as people just hate to think that somebody else might get a better price due to nothing more than random chance.
Put simply, nobody really knows what the optimal prices for these things are. There are a lot of guesses, and a fair amount of history to go on, but when a company prices their game at $60 they really have no idea whether it would be possible to make three times as much money at $30, or at $180, and they can't even find out after the fact.
Is this really that difficult to understand? If you turn it off in the BIOS then applications which require it will no longer work. How does disabling media playback help you break the DRM?
That's nothing. Roughly 10% of women in the western world are killed by breast cancer. Let's pre-empt this cancerous carnage by chopping off all baby girls' boobs when they're born.
While we're at it, let's remove the testicles from boys (cancer) and the ovaries and uterus from girls (cancer again, plus dying in childbirth). This will also have the beneficial effect of reducing teenage premarital sex and attendant STD transmission. We can cut off the ends of their jawbones so they don't have to go through wisdom tooth removal, remove their appendixes so they don't have to have them out later, and cut out their tongues to remove all risk of flagpole stickage.
The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid. Ugh.
"Stupid stupid stupid" adequately describes someone who thinks that the cultural & knowledge based portions of an American IQ test would be left the same for use in another Country.
At +2, your comment is overrated It also adequately describes someone who thinks that all test takers living in America will be Americans and will share identical cultural backgrounds.
His comment may have been overrated, but on the other hand, you are a moron.
There was one question I got which talked about a guy who was 30 years old when he married his wife, who was 25 at the time. She died at age X, he died at age Y, how long was he a widower?
These no-talent ass clowns apparently were unable to realize that these ages give you a range of a year minus a day to either side, so that the "right answer" is going to a range including three years. Then they go and give you a choice between two years in that range, with one of them somehow being "wrong".
What a bunch of jerks. It's fine to be clueless, but not to parade your clueless in front of everybody while acting as though you were really smart.
Slashdot Mirror
Does every potential vandal or thief ignore them? I posit the answer is no. I'll certainly believe that most will, but all? Even twitchy teenagers out for a thrill? If any potential criminals are deterred then there is some value. Of course you can still debate whether it's significant, or whether the value is enough to make it worthwhile, but I can't believe that they have no value whatsoever.
You don't get it. It's far easier to whine about the problem on slashdot and blame an entire class of people and devices for it than it is to actually take steps to resolve it.
Not every place is Manhattan, you know.
Where I live, it's pretty quiet. Car alarms don't go off on their own. If an alarm were to go off, it would draw attention.
Interesting that I'm deluded if I think my alarm would deter anyone, but the guy up above who thinks his non-alarm blinking light might deter someone is just fine. My alarm has a blinking light too, you know.
Fill three or four large suitcases with the most powerful explosive money can buy. Put suitcases on luggage cart. Push luggage cart into security line. When you're surrounded by people, or you catch the attention of officials, detonate the explosives.
For best results, fill the outside parts of the suitcases with nails.
I'm pretty sure this will create mass casualties. Your comparison is irrelevant because you can easily get a lot more explosives into a security line than you can onto an airplane.
It's completely reasonable if you approach it from the proper point of view.
From the TSA's point of view they aren't searching pilots. They're searching people who appear to be pilots.
This is a key distinction. If you let pilots go through the checkpoint with no search, then all you do is encourage the bad guys to dress up like a pilot and acquire some fake pilot ID.
It's simpler and more effective for them to just search everybody than it is to have a complex failure-proof system for deciding who is and who is not a legitimate pilot.
I'm as anti-TSA as anybody and overall I think that their policies are insane and worthless, but searching flight crew is actually a completely reasonable thing to do.
Hitler was in charge of a major European power. By the time he started taking over other countries, he had amassed a fairly powerful, modern army, which was able to rival the best his opponents could muster.
Hussein was in charge of a crappy piece of desert in a place where all the good weapons are imported from other countries. Even at the height of its power in 1991, the Iraqi Army was powerless to even slow down the US Army and its friends. The kill ratio was something like a thousand to one. After the army was essentially destroyed in 1991, the sanctions imposed on the country never let it recover. The Iraqi Army in 2003 was but a shadow of its former self, and the US Army smashed it flat in about three weeks.
The best time to have stopped Hitler was Czechoslovakia. He took over that country, not by force of arms, but by diplomacy. The Allied powers were so afraid of war that they just let him have it. Czechoslovakia had a good, modern army and had excellent defenses prepared against Germany, but their political will to resist collapsed after France and the UK abandoned them and basically threw them to the wolves. If they had simply not abandoned Czechoslovakia, much would have turned out differently.
The best time to stop Hussein was... well, by the time we invaded, he was not a credible threat against any of his neighbors, and the invasion didn't stop him from taking any of them over because he wasn't going to anyway.
Hussein was no threat. It was known that he was no threat before the invasion. He may well have been as evil as Hitler, but he was never going to command anything remotely close to the military power possessed by Nazi Germany.
Given the above, I see absolutely no inconsistency in a position which holds that Hitler should have been stopped much earlier and Iraq should have been left alone.
Of course that $1 slightly devalues the investment by those of us whose cars have actual real alarms, so it may not actually be a net benefit!
Contacting representatives has the same problem as the rest. People who agree with my position today will suddenly change their minds if there's ever another big attack. A representative who votes against "security" will suffer badly in that event, whereas a representative who votes for it will not suffer much in the event of no attack.
But still... I'm trying to remember if I've written. I can't recall one way or another. If I have, it has been a very long time, so I should probably do it again. Thanks for the reminder!
Um, ok. That looked like an obviously rhetorical question to me. Clearly, depending on how you look at it, either he's not being paid to campaign (the rational position), or the taxpayers are being paid to campaign (the "I want to make him look bad" position). I thought the real question was why it was legal.
How did he not answer your question? Click the link he gave you....
Do you have any statistics to back this up? I don't have any myself, but I'm just wondering, because I'm very curious to know what the real situation is. Anecdotally, I have always been able to find a sympathetic ear when I whine about how nonsensical airport security checks are, even when I'm doing it at the airport to random strangers.
I think that it's just not a big enough issue for most people to actually change their voting habits. The reason they're there is not because they're popular but as a direct result of American political culture. If you're in charge of security and you fail to prevent an attack, you'll lose your job, attract a ton of unhappy media attention, and quite possible have your entire department destroyed, redone, or absorbed into another agency. However, if all you do is waste billions of dollars and millions of hours of people's time, nothing bad happens to you. This still doesn't mean we'll be able to get rid of it, of course.
Ultimately I really wonder where this is going. Right now things only get more and more restrictive. Just over the past decade things have changed enormously, and many of the changes were not due to 9/11. Every change has been for more restrictions, with very minor exceptions such as the total ban on liquids changing to merely a near-total ban. Where does it end, though? Is there a steady-state for airline travel restrictions?
On the subject of the liquid ban, many people don't realize this but there is a blanket exception given for medication. One very common type of medication which is allowed an exception is contact lens solution. Contact lens solution can be obtained in quite large bottles. So the next time you get fed up with having to pay three bucks for a Coke in the airport, get some big contact lens solution bottles and fill them up with Coke. Or, you know, explosives.
There's an enormous difference between the proper skeptical view required for good science and the "This is too complicated for me to personally understand so it must be wrong, let's go shopping!" attitude displayed by the global warming denier and anti-evolution crowds.
All the more reason to complain about this stuff everywhere. Why do you think Europe and the USA are heading this way? It's because everyone looks around at other countries, says, "Look, they're not any better than what we're proposing," and thus we all slide down into the dark together.
"Other places are just as bad" is quite possibly the worst rebuttal to criticism that anyone has ever come up with.
American airport security checks are a joke too. The only difference is that in America they try to hide the fact that it's a joke. They do a lot of important-looking stuff which ends up being utterly pointless. As an American who is both subjected to this and who has to pay for it with my taxes, I can tell you that the only reason I tolerate it is because I have no other choice.
What if I happen to live there?
Nearly everything bad about US customs applies equally to US citizens. The only real difference is that the lines are shorter and the probability of a bad encounter is somewhat less. Besides that, they can do all of this terrible crap to you just the same as to a foreigner. The Constitution doesn't mean jack all until you actually get inside the country, so any time you as a US citizen manage to cross the border without a baseless search of all your possessions and a long interrogation, the only reason is because the customs officials didn't feel like it.
Let me elaborate a bit on what I meant. And thanks for the original numbers, that makes it easier.
So step one, she married him when she was 25 and died at 50. They were not, in fact, necessarily married exactly 25 years. There's a whole year in which she is 25, and a whole year in which she is 50. If she got married on her 25th birthday and died one day before her 51st birthday, she was married 26 years minus one day. If she got married one day before her 26th birthday and died on her 50th birthday, she was married 24 years plus one day. To put it more simply, the range of years during which she was married was (24, 26) where the parentheses are the mathematical construct meaning "up to, but not including, this number".
Now, how old was he when she died? He started out at 30. This is actually [30, 31). Add (24, 26) and you get (54, 57).
Then he died at age 79, which is of course actually [79, 80). Subtract (54, 57) from [79, 80) and you get (22, 26). So he could have been a widower anywhere from 22 (plus a bit), to 25 (plus nearly a year) years.
The trouble here is that they, and you, are assuming that "X years" is an exact integer. But when we say that someone is X years old, this covers a period of an entire year. A person whose birthday is January 1, 1983 was 25 on January 1 of this year, is 25 now, and will be 25 on December 31.
Thus the question does not include nearly enough information to answer to the precision they require. If their choices were, say, 20, 25, 30, 35 then you could choose the one that's in range. But when multiple answers are in range and they don't count them all as being correct then they're just ridiculous.
And yes, I have seen our President, and he makes me sad.
The chance of failure is equal to one minus the probability of success, so that is included in the analysis. The other costs are indeed things I left out. But the overall point stands, there's nothing wrong with the logic presented, just that the numbers used are generally wrong.
Apple doesn't do delta updates. They do ship updates which only carry the changed files, but those updates contain a complete copy of the files in question. This means that if a 60MB binary needs one byte changed to fix one bug, that bug fix adds 60MB to the update. With the typical OS install clocking in at several gigabytes it's entirely believable that a slew of small fixes would require a 500MB of files to be changed.
The trouble is that the response to "harder" hacking is extremely nonlinear.
If you make it twice as hard to crack there won't be half as many pirates. Almost certainly there will be exactly the same number of pirates as before.
In the modern world you only need one person on the entire planet to crack a game, then you lose. There is no purpose in making it harder to crack if the result is still within that one person's capabilities and motivation.
Does TPM let you exceed his motivation? Unlikely. This sort of person thrives on challenge. The fact that you have to get down and dirty with logic analyzers and such will seem like just so much fun.
Does TPM let you exceed his capabilities? Maybe. But given that you have in effect increased his motivation, it seems unlikely. Pirates can have surprisingly good resources. And the resources and motivation will be increased even further by the fact that once you've cracked a TPM, you haven't just cracked one game, you've cracked every game. Of course it will turn into an arms race, as the manufacturers change their product and the pirates catch up to the changes, but each break will accomplish vastly more than breaking individual games one by one.
Either they really think that this will make it impossible to crack by the best pirate in the world with all the resources he can muster, or they don't actually understand the business they're in. Honestly I would bet on both, and I would bet that their belief in the impossibility of cracking is ultimately unfounded.
This stuff is hard. Without a controlled experiment to find out just what the demand/price elasticity is for a particular product, you can do little more than guess. When companies have tried to perform such experiments (such as Amazon's random pricing a few years back) it has invariably resulted in great customer backlash, as people just hate to think that somebody else might get a better price due to nothing more than random chance.
Put simply, nobody really knows what the optimal prices for these things are. There are a lot of guesses, and a fair amount of history to go on, but when a company prices their game at $60 they really have no idea whether it would be possible to make three times as much money at $30, or at $180, and they can't even find out after the fact.
Is this really that difficult to understand? If you turn it off in the BIOS then applications which require it will no longer work. How does disabling media playback help you break the DRM?
That's nothing. Roughly 10% of women in the western world are killed by breast cancer. Let's pre-empt this cancerous carnage by chopping off all baby girls' boobs when they're born.
While we're at it, let's remove the testicles from boys (cancer) and the ovaries and uterus from girls (cancer again, plus dying in childbirth). This will also have the beneficial effect of reducing teenage premarital sex and attendant STD transmission. We can cut off the ends of their jawbones so they don't have to go through wisdom tooth removal, remove their appendixes so they don't have to have them out later, and cut out their tongues to remove all risk of flagpole stickage.
"Stupid stupid stupid" adequately describes someone who thinks that the cultural & knowledge based portions of an American IQ test would be left the same for use in another Country.
At +2, your comment is overrated It also adequately describes someone who thinks that all test takers living in America will be Americans and will share identical cultural backgrounds.
His comment may have been overrated, but on the other hand, you are a moron.
There was one question I got which talked about a guy who was 30 years old when he married his wife, who was 25 at the time. She died at age X, he died at age Y, how long was he a widower?
These no-talent ass clowns apparently were unable to realize that these ages give you a range of a year minus a day to either side, so that the "right answer" is going to a range including three years. Then they go and give you a choice between two years in that range, with one of them somehow being "wrong".
What a bunch of jerks. It's fine to be clueless, but not to parade your clueless in front of everybody while acting as though you were really smart.