In basketball, the top coaches earn less than the top players.
The players are good at what they do, the coaches are good at what they do, there's a bit more "supply and demand" in effect.
Whereas in most corporations it seems like there is a rule that the managers must earn more than the "players" even if they are crap and there is lot of supply.
That to me is very stupid rule.
That said, good "coaches" aka middle managers can be worth a LOT to the company.
They let the "players" do their stuff without having to deal with or worry about the bullshit, and they know when to prod the players, who to prod and how to prod - yes most need a bit of prodding once in a while if you want to get the best out of them, but do it wrong and it's not effective or worse).
They also know how to handle upper management, which is equally as important.
So to me it's fine for top coaches to be paid more than good players. But I see no _good_ reason why crap coaches should be paid more than good players. In fact they often cause significant damage to the company.
"I worked for Dell recently and saw Regional managers demoted for making idiotic mistakes that other ppl in the company tried to steer them away from it."
Interesting. Dell doesn't sound that bad then.
In fact Dell seems to be working fine if what you say is true.
If you're a manager, whether your staff like it or not, you get a lot more say. And your bosses aren't normally supposed to override your "say" until you screw up big enough, or are about to very badly hurt the company (otherwise what's the point of having you, if your bosses have to micromanage your decisions).
So, you screw up and the bosses can say - "You screwed up, so you deserve to be punished".
Now Dell would be in long term trouble if people were regularly promoted for making idiotic mistakes.
You're expecting users to only download stuff via package managers. That's even more fascist than the Windows world.
With my proposal even if bad things happen to the repository, as long as the sandbox templates aren't compromised the user has a good chance of still being safe.
"I do think you're a bit naive, though"
"That said, no one's going to click through a security dialog, no matter how friendly, every time they go to YouTube"
Use the "Remember this" check box then.
Yes I didn't mention that in that post, sorry if I'm expecting too much, I was assuming people would be able to fill in the rather obvious blanks themselves before calling me naive.
I'm not going to type in full implementation details on Slashdot.
Anyway, it'll be safe to use that check box since the app will from then on always be in that sandbox. The youtube flash app doesn't change all the time. It's not a "Remember - run this as Admin always" checkbox which would be bad.
"Convincing 67% of the population war is necessary has allready been proven as doable on many occasions"
I don't see that as a failure at all, if a country wants war, then they get war.
Even better if 99% of a country want to attack your country, it sure makes it a lot easier on your conscience when you nuke them to hell.
The problem I see is often only a vocal 20% want war or even just a handful want war, and everyone else gets dragged into it. And my proposal deals with that.
As for hiding your intent, big deal. It's not like Iraq didn't know that the USA wanted to attack them. It's not like USSR didn't know that the USA was not happy about the missiles in Cuba. In modern times, there's no surprise at the going to war or not unless some leader is insane (which my proposal deals with). You only have surprise in the military strategic or tactical level.
With my proposal if the target country does a preemptive strike before the referendum is finished, then that means it's a defensive war, which means no need for all that vote counting - just strike back.
If your military strength sucks so much that you won't be able to strike back, then it's a rather bad idea to go to war right?
Don't forget the target country could always try to peacefully convince people in your country to just stay home and not vote - war would be terrible for them etc, and if it does a good job they can soon watch the leaders get executed. Then everyone left can live their lives peacefully.
Lastly - if leaders are caught lying and they manage to convince enough voters, then lucky for them. At least with my way they still risk their _lives_. With current popular methods, leaders typically sacrifice other people's lives with very little risk to their own lives.
"And just what is the mechanism by which a program asks for a particular sandbox"
I can think of a few, but anyway it's up to Microsoft (or Apple - who have a good track record of making devs jump through Apple Certified Hoops).
You may think my proposal makes no sense but after how many years and lots of $$$, all people get for security is UAC? And now this guy says is was designed to be _annoying_? That makes even less sense.
"if the developer is willing to change the program, why not just change it so it doesn't do stupid stuff (like write preferences to a file in the \program files tree) to begin with"
You miss the point. I'm not talking about "best practices for the good guys so that their stuff plays nice with the abomination called UAC", but rather "How to make it harder for bad guys to take over systems run by Joe Sixpacks".
With Linux/OSX, if you download a new program, you don't 100% know what the program will do. It could work as you expect. Or it could make your machine a spam spewing zombie.
With Vista you get tons of UAC prompts, so there is a chance that a user could realize something is going wrong. But because users get tons of UAC prompts they turn off UAC. So no progress then.
With my proposal: If an alleged XYZ Screensaver said "I require normal screensaver privileges", the user says OK, and the OS enforces the sandbox, the program gets to behave like screensaver, which normally does not involve making outbound SMTP connections.
If an alleged XYZ Screensaver said "I require full network privileges", if the user goes "Uh no way!", then all is fine. If the user goes "Oh OK", then XYZ Screensaver gets to spew spam. Can't win them all.
Still, you have a much better chance of knowing what the program really is going to do, and it'll be a lot less annoying than UAC, esp if you have a "remember this" checkbox in the pop up. Then voila no more prompts for that program, and it'll still be restricted in what it can do.
Sure there was something wrong with the daughter. But in my opinion the safety standards for compulsory vaccines must be higher than for elective treatment/drugs.
Example:
For elective treatment/drugs it's acceptable if only 1:5000 cause serious damage, especially if you are already very sick. For mass compulsory treatments of usually not very sick people, 1:5000 isn't good.
AFAIK there are alternatives to thimerosal. Someone that's not biased should go find out if those alternatives are safer in the long run.
What is already known about the toxicity of thimerosal[1], I don't see why it's such a good idea to use thimerosal in vaccines for everybody, unless you're conducting some massive experiment/scheme to try to get rid of people who are more vulnerable to ethyl mercury and other mercury compounds (either more sensitive or can't eliminate it as well).
I wonder if giving combined vaccines for lots of different diseases at the same time is such a good idea. Haven't been able to find animal studies on this though.
It'll probably be ok for most people, but perhaps some people's immune systems get confused. After all not much point for most animals to evolve the ability fight off many serious and different infectious diseases simultaneously (unless you're a croc;) ). In fact for social animals it's probably better for the host to die if the host has so many infectious diseases - the host dies, stops infecting others and the group is more likely to live.
Lastly: Is it OK if only 1 in 2000 animals had problems with combined/multi vaccines? These rates might not be OK for humans if the treatment is compulsory for practically all.
You can't have the same safety standards for compulsory vaccines as you can for other drugs/treatment. The other drugs are "optional" - you only take them if you are unlucky enough to have a problem and the doctor prescribes them to you.
"Linux and Unix had a great approach from their beginnings"
Great? What's so great about their approach in their beginnings? Sorry, I expect far better than the early crappy Linux/Unix approach. How many decades have passed already?
When Joe Average runs a downloaded app why should it have full access to Joe's documents and email?
Why should Joe Average have to solve a version of the halting problem without being able to read the program's source code? "Is this program going to halt when I run it" is similar to "Is this program going to hurt me badly when I run it". The last I checked, the halting problem is still unsolvable.
I hope the future Linux/Unix approach would involve better sandboxing, in a way most users can manage, understand and most importantly, be happy with.
UAC is actually very bad from a security viewpoint. By annoying users more than necessary (more later), all it does it makes most users turn UAC off.
From a cynical POV, I think all UAC is for is to allow Microsoft to blame users for security problems (ah you turned UAC off - so it's YOUR fault).
If Microsoft was really interested in security they would have done more and better sandboxing of applications.
My suggestion is to have a manageable number of default templates for sandboxing applications. If the app is unsigned by a user-trusted entity, the user gets a pop up which tells the user what type of sandbox the application wants to run in.
It would be far easier to train Joe Schmoe to not run a "flash game" which asks for "Full User Privileges" or even "Full System Privileges" (with all the scary warnings etc) and to only run a "flash game" that asks for a "Guest Game" sandbox. After all there is no need for most legitimate flash games to access "My Documents" or your web browser bookmarks, or even your microphone/webcam.
The idea is even if a program wanted to do something nasty, if it is running in a sandbox, it can't, and if a program requests an unusual sandbox so that it can do something nasty, it is easier for a user to know something strange is going on.
This would also be a lot less work than UAC. Don't need to make 10 decisions one after another when you run the app.
There could be custom sandbox templates that are validated and signed by a mutually trusted authority. So that new apps that require fancy privileges can run in fancy sandboxes without annoying prompts that bother Joe Schmoe.
As for Linux and OSX, they aren't really more secure than Windows, with both these OSes if Joe Schmoe is about to run something new, he doesn't even know what the program is really going to do till he runs it. It is like expecting Joe Schmoe to solve the halting problem and without him being able to read the source code either - "Is this program going to halt, or is it going to take over my computer?". So my suggestions are just as applicable to them.
That only works as a deterrent if the pain is felt by the people calling for the war.
If people don't like wars they should consider my proposal:
If leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner: A referendum is held. If there are insufficient votes (for example: less than 66% of the population), the lives of the war proposers are forfeit. They are put on deathrow.
If more than say 33% of the population voted for the war (but less than 66%), there could be "redemption" referendums held later at a convenient time, then if each leader on death row gets enough votes, that leader gets out of deathrow.
A similar referendum is also held if at any time it is found that a politician caused the public to be deceived/misinformed (even unknowingly) and thus "justify" a war or similar military action (tricked people into thinking it's a defensive war etc).
If a leader was executed as per the above, but later it is found the war was really justified, the leader will get the equivalent of a "purple heart", and a nice ceremony will be held for his/her family etc.
The idea is that even leaders who have no qualms about lying about "caring about the lives of soldiers" would then actually think twice about starting wars.
Even amoral people without a conscience would be inclined to take things a bit more seriously when it's not just a matter of losing the next election, or going to jail for a few years.
If a leader thinks it is worth risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, that leader should also be willing to risk his/her life. That's only fair right?
Also, if more than 66% of Nation A thinks it's worth attacking Nation B, then people in Nation B will have less qualms about wiping out Nation A if necessary.
Otherwise, why kill people who have nothing against you, who may not even want to harm anyone, but are dragged into a war just because of a minority at the top? But if a country really wants a war, then they get a war.
"My wife is an independent recording artist, and at first it pained her to see the promo copies on eBay and Amazon marketplace competing with the real product, but at least the music is out there"
Well if your wife is any good, she can release another work without promos the next time. AFAIK the Doom shareware release didn't hurt ID Software at all, even if many people didn't pay for it in the end.
So if enough people liked the previous promos, they might buy her next piece of work and future ones.
If your wife can only manage to come up with just a promo and nothing else, then she should really get another job and do that artist thing as a hobby.
Even though I write software for a living[1], to me it's a bad idea to have copyrights lasting more than 7 years. If I stop producing anything decent for 7 years I don't see why I should keep getting paid for doing nothing, just because someone wants to make a copy of my old stuff (using their own resources). That sure seems rather greedy and slothful.
Long copyright terms hold back progress. You think Microsoft would have dared to release something as crap as Vista if copyright terms were only 7 years? Their own Win2K would kill them.
[1] I can compose music too, but I can't come up with that much new material that I consider good enough, so I don't try to pretend I'm an artist. Even though in my biased opinion, given a bit of "production polish" (I can make music, but I'm not very good at playing my own stuff without mistakes) some of my stuff could actually be quite decent:).
"eBay reseller is in no way whatsoever violating copyright"
Just want to add that:
1) If you sell the CD you aren't copying it. 2) If you didn't copy it, you aren't infringing their Copyright. 3) If you did copy it, then depending on the laws of your country you may or may not be infringing. 4) If such one-way contracts are enforcable, I think a bunch of us are going to start sending our own one-way contracts to various parties. "Do unto others before they do unto you, and do it quick" comes to mind.
Not sure. I'm no expert but I believe that many higher temperature superconductors lose their superconductivity if exposed to strong magnetic fields. You could say these are weak superconductors in a way.
Whereas the "conventional" liquid helium superconductors can retain their superconductivity in very strong magnetic fields.
Being able to "tolerate" strong magnetic fields is very useful if you actually are intending to use the superconductors in many interesting applications - like MRI scanning devices, or maglev stuff and so on.
Q) How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb? A) Free market economists don't change lightbulbs, they sit in the darkness[1] and wait for Adam Smith's invisible hand to do it.:)
I thought we paid already, and the ISPs just didn't reinvest into rebuilding their network.
The last I checked most of these ISPs either had monopolies granted to them, and/or had existing infrastructure handed to them by Governments.
Some even had billions of _public_ money handed to them by Governments to build their _future_ networks.
So now they want us to pay again?
This is like the power and water companies asking us to pay extra just because they went "Oops, oh yeah forgot about this reinvesting into infrastructure for the future thing".
Compare how much ISPs charge and how much power and water companies charge, and what you get for it. While small ISPs have to pay per bit (like water and power companies which have to pay per unit of gas/coal/water), AFAIK large ISPs have cushier arrangements with each other, since the incremental costs of sending bits isn't high once the network capacity is paid for - if nobody uses the bandwidth, the ISP still has to pay about the same for the network.
"Indeed, blue receptors are the less sensitive and therefore blue is a good background for a desktop"
Well I find that my visual receptors are least sensitive to black, and therefore I prefer to use black for backgrounds (except for some admin logins - where I set the background to red).
To me something like a diebolded election is far far far more dangerous than lack of anonymity.
Elections here in Malaysia are nonanonymous (from what I observed anyway), and I actually had no problems with the incumbent Gov knowing exactly how I voted in my country's past elections. And this is in a country which the western media liked to portray as controlled by an Authoritarian Government.
I fine with them knowing I gave them a "D Minus":). They lost a fair bit of power in the last elections - they still won, but no 2/3rd majority and if a bunch switch over they will lose their majority.
Personally I think these fears about people knowing how you vote are overrated. Because by the time the lack of anonymous voting is significantly dangerous, you're in deep shit already. Otherwise you have recourse from the Courts, there is (some) rule of Law etc. In a situation you don't have working Courts and rule of law, good luck even getting to vote and having your vote count.
The real problem with nonanonymous voting is gerrymandering. To me obvious gerrymandering should be made illegal.
"In much writing things are still going to take a while"
AFAIK the copyright term stuff is _after_ publication. So if you're not done yet, don't publish.
My point was nowadays, after you publish, you should be able to get word out really quickly. Just some emails to your friends linking to your "teaser material" and word will soon get around, especially if you didn't actually produce crap. Or your crap is so crap that it "wrapped round to great" - just look at some of the "internet phenoms";). If you're good or entertainingly crap you can get $$$.
If the teaser material is all you've managed to produce, perhaps you should just do it as a hobby and get different job.
Wouldn't it be great if my employer paid me for the next 100 years just because I created one piece of work? It might be cushy for me, but I doubt this sort of thing benefits society, especially if it means nobody else can use that piece of work or a close derivative without my permission for the next 100 years. I think that's very wrong.
Lastly, someone else putting name on your work = plagiarism, which is something different from copying since it involves lying.
A copyright term of even just 7 years should be ok. Microsoft will still get money from XP, but they'd then have to make something much better than Vista, since people could use Win2K instead.
If they don't like it, I'm sure Apple or IBM will happily step up to take their place.
Yeah, and some of us can keep producing value, not like other people who _apparently_ can only produce value once in their lifetime and so require copyright terms of > 100 years to support them (or long patent terms).
To the latter bunch I say, go find something you are better at and stop wasting time and resources.
If the speed of communications has got faster, and people want a faster pace of progress, then the length of all these monopolies should be getting shorter and shorter, not longer and longer. In the old days it takes a long time for a book (or other work) to get from an author to people (takes time for people to get to know about the book, and for payment to reach the author etc). Now I believe it should be much faster if you are doing things right.
I find very little reason to watch "news" on TV unless it's amusing for some reason, or I am getting something "live" and interesting.
Newsreaders read out news much slower than I can read a webpage. So even after all the scrolling text etc it's still not very efficient when it comes to getting news. And, the analysis is usually either nonexistent or crap.
The USA is rich. Rich enough to spend trillions in choosing the governments of other countries.
So it should be able to afford a good voting system. Nothing like the diebold crap.
Manual vote counting and counter-checking can be easily parallelizable. The more voters you have, the more vote counters and observers you should be able to recruit.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard.
With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily. If you have an e-voting system where 3rd parties can watch easily and it's verifiable, it'll probably cost more in the end.
So what if you have to wait a few hours before you get the results?
Lastly, Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _SEEN_ to be fair (enough;) ). Otherwise you get too many people not accepting the results. In which case it becomes a big waste of time (and often lives).
Carly Fiorina had a track record of being a "slash and burn" CEO, how could they not see the damage she did to Lucent?
They should give CEOs a not spectacular base package and give potentially huge bonuses dependent on the performance of the company 3 years later (related to the rest of the market).
Slashdot Mirror
In basketball, the top coaches earn less than the top players.
The players are good at what they do, the coaches are good at what they do, there's a bit more "supply and demand" in effect.
Whereas in most corporations it seems like there is a rule that the managers must earn more than the "players" even if they are crap and there is lot of supply.
That to me is very stupid rule.
That said, good "coaches" aka middle managers can be worth a LOT to the company.
They let the "players" do their stuff without having to deal with or worry about the bullshit, and they know when to prod the players, who to prod and how to prod - yes most need a bit of prodding once in a while if you want to get the best out of them, but do it wrong and it's not effective or worse).
They also know how to handle upper management, which is equally as important.
So to me it's fine for top coaches to be paid more than good players. But I see no _good_ reason why crap coaches should be paid more than good players. In fact they often cause significant damage to the company.
"I worked for Dell recently and saw Regional managers demoted for making idiotic mistakes that other ppl in the company tried to steer them away from it."
Interesting. Dell doesn't sound that bad then.
In fact Dell seems to be working fine if what you say is true.
If you're a manager, whether your staff like it or not, you get a lot more say. And your bosses aren't normally supposed to override your "say" until you screw up big enough, or are about to very badly hurt the company (otherwise what's the point of having you, if your bosses have to micromanage your decisions).
So, you screw up and the bosses can say - "You screwed up, so you deserve to be punished".
Now Dell would be in long term trouble if people were regularly promoted for making idiotic mistakes.
Uh in this case you're probably the pollutant not the flower :).
You're expecting users to only download stuff via package managers. That's even more fascist than the Windows world.
With my proposal even if bad things happen to the repository, as long as the sandbox templates aren't compromised the user has a good chance of still being safe.
"I do think you're a bit naive, though"
"That said, no one's going to click through a security dialog, no matter how friendly, every time they go to YouTube"
Use the "Remember this" check box then.
Yes I didn't mention that in that post, sorry if I'm expecting too much, I was assuming people would be able to fill in the rather obvious blanks themselves before calling me naive.
I'm not going to type in full implementation details on Slashdot.
Anyway, it'll be safe to use that check box since the app will from then on always be in that sandbox. The youtube flash app doesn't change all the time. It's not a "Remember - run this as Admin always" checkbox which would be bad.
"Convincing 67% of the population war is necessary has allready been proven as doable on many occasions"
I don't see that as a failure at all, if a country wants war, then they get war.
Even better if 99% of a country want to attack your country, it sure makes it a lot easier on your conscience when you nuke them to hell.
The problem I see is often only a vocal 20% want war or even just a handful want war, and everyone else gets dragged into it. And my proposal deals with that.
As for hiding your intent, big deal. It's not like Iraq didn't know that the USA wanted to attack them. It's not like USSR didn't know that the USA was not happy about the missiles in Cuba. In modern times, there's no surprise at the going to war or not unless some leader is insane (which my proposal deals with). You only have surprise in the military strategic or tactical level.
With my proposal if the target country does a preemptive strike before the referendum is finished, then that means it's a defensive war, which means no need for all that vote counting - just strike back.
If your military strength sucks so much that you won't be able to strike back, then it's a rather bad idea to go to war right?
Don't forget the target country could always try to peacefully convince people in your country to just stay home and not vote - war would be terrible for them etc, and if it does a good job they can soon watch the leaders get executed. Then everyone left can live their lives peacefully.
Lastly - if leaders are caught lying and they manage to convince enough voters, then lucky for them. At least with my way they still risk their _lives_. With current popular methods, leaders typically sacrifice other people's lives with very little risk to their own lives.
Read again - I said offensive wars. Not defensive wars. Defensive wars = no need for all that referendum stuff.
"And just what is the mechanism by which a program asks for a particular sandbox"
I can think of a few, but anyway it's up to Microsoft (or Apple - who have a good track record of making devs jump through Apple Certified Hoops).
You may think my proposal makes no sense but after how many years and lots of $$$, all people get for security is UAC? And now this guy says is was designed to be _annoying_? That makes even less sense.
"if the developer is willing to change the program, why not just change it so it doesn't do stupid stuff (like write preferences to a file in the \program files tree) to begin with"
You miss the point. I'm not talking about "best practices for the good guys so that their stuff plays nice with the abomination called UAC", but rather "How to make it harder for bad guys to take over systems run by Joe Sixpacks".
With Linux/OSX, if you download a new program, you don't 100% know what the program will do. It could work as you expect. Or it could make your machine a spam spewing zombie.
With Vista you get tons of UAC prompts, so there is a chance that a user could realize something is going wrong. But because users get tons of UAC prompts they turn off UAC. So no progress then.
With my proposal:
If an alleged XYZ Screensaver said "I require normal screensaver privileges", the user says OK, and the OS enforces the sandbox, the program gets to behave like screensaver, which normally does not involve making outbound SMTP connections.
If an alleged XYZ Screensaver said "I require full network privileges", if the user goes "Uh no way!", then all is fine. If the user goes "Oh OK", then XYZ Screensaver gets to spew spam. Can't win them all.
Still, you have a much better chance of knowing what the program really is going to do, and it'll be a lot less annoying than UAC, esp if you have a "remember this" checkbox in the pop up. Then voila no more prompts for that program, and it'll still be restricted in what it can do.
Sure there was something wrong with the daughter. But in my opinion the safety standards for compulsory vaccines must be higher than for elective treatment/drugs.
Example:
For elective treatment/drugs it's acceptable if only 1:5000 cause serious damage, especially if you are already very sick. For mass compulsory treatments of usually not very sick people, 1:5000 isn't good.
AFAIK there are alternatives to thimerosal. Someone that's not biased should go find out if those alternatives are safer in the long run.
What is already known about the toxicity of thimerosal[1], I don't see why it's such a good idea to use thimerosal in vaccines for everybody, unless you're conducting some massive experiment/scheme to try to get rid of people who are more vulnerable to ethyl mercury and other mercury compounds (either more sensitive or can't eliminate it as well).
[1] http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/suppl-1/11-23clarkson/clarkson-full.html
I wonder if giving combined vaccines for lots of different diseases at the same time is such a good idea. Haven't been able to find animal studies on this though.
;) ). In fact for social animals it's probably better for the host to die if the host has so many infectious diseases - the host dies, stops infecting others and the group is more likely to live.
It'll probably be ok for most people, but perhaps some people's immune systems get confused. After all not much point for most animals to evolve the ability fight off many serious and different infectious diseases simultaneously (unless you're a croc
Lastly: Is it OK if only 1 in 2000 animals had problems with combined/multi vaccines? These rates might not be OK for humans if the treatment is compulsory for practically all.
You can't have the same safety standards for compulsory vaccines as you can for other drugs/treatment. The other drugs are "optional" - you only take them if you are unlucky enough to have a problem and the doctor prescribes them to you.
"Linux and Unix had a great approach from their beginnings"
Great? What's so great about their approach in their beginnings? Sorry, I expect far better than the early crappy Linux/Unix approach. How many decades have passed already?
When Joe Average runs a downloaded app why should it have full access to Joe's documents and email?
Why should Joe Average have to solve a version of the halting problem without being able to read the program's source code? "Is this program going to halt when I run it" is similar to "Is this program going to hurt me badly when I run it". The last I checked, the halting problem is still unsolvable.
I hope the future Linux/Unix approach would involve better sandboxing, in a way most users can manage, understand and most importantly, be happy with.
My proposal is:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-bugs/2007-09/msg02994.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
UAC is actually very bad from a security viewpoint. By annoying users more than necessary (more later), all it does it makes most users turn UAC off.
From a cynical POV, I think all UAC is for is to allow Microsoft to blame users for security problems (ah you turned UAC off - so it's YOUR fault).
If Microsoft was really interested in security they would have done more and better sandboxing of applications.
My suggestion is to have a manageable number of default templates for sandboxing applications. If the app is unsigned by a user-trusted entity, the user gets a pop up which tells the user what type of sandbox the application wants to run in.
It would be far easier to train Joe Schmoe to not run a "flash game" which asks for "Full User Privileges" or even "Full System Privileges" (with all the scary warnings etc) and to only run a "flash game" that asks for a "Guest Game" sandbox. After all there is no need for most legitimate flash games to access "My Documents" or your web browser bookmarks, or even your microphone/webcam.
The idea is even if a program wanted to do something nasty, if it is running in a sandbox, it can't, and if a program requests an unusual sandbox so that it can do something nasty, it is easier for a user to know something strange is going on.
This would also be a lot less work than UAC. Don't need to make 10 decisions one after another when you run the app.
There could be custom sandbox templates that are validated and signed by a mutually trusted authority. So that new apps that require fancy privileges can run in fancy sandboxes without annoying prompts that bother Joe Schmoe.
As for Linux and OSX, they aren't really more secure than Windows, with both these OSes if Joe Schmoe is about to run something new, he doesn't even know what the program is really going to do till he runs it. It is like expecting Joe Schmoe to solve the halting problem and without him being able to read the source code either - "Is this program going to halt, or is it going to take over my computer?". So my suggestions are just as applicable to them.
"Going to war _should_ be painful"
That only works as a deterrent if the pain is felt by the people calling for the war.
If people don't like wars they should consider my proposal:
If leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner:
A referendum is held. If there are insufficient votes (for example: less than 66% of the population), the lives of the war proposers are forfeit. They are put on deathrow.
If more than say 33% of the population voted for the war (but less than 66%), there could be "redemption" referendums held later at a convenient time, then if each leader on death row gets enough votes, that leader gets out of deathrow.
A similar referendum is also held if at any time it is found that a politician caused the public to be deceived/misinformed (even unknowingly) and thus "justify" a war or similar military action (tricked people into thinking it's a defensive war etc).
If a leader was executed as per the above, but later it is found the war was really justified, the leader will get the equivalent of a "purple heart", and a nice ceremony will be held for his/her family etc.
The idea is that even leaders who have no qualms about lying about "caring about the lives of soldiers" would then actually think twice about starting wars.
Even amoral people without a conscience would be inclined to take things a bit more seriously when it's not just a matter of losing the next election, or going to jail for a few years.
If a leader thinks it is worth risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, that leader should also be willing to risk his/her life. That's only fair right?
Also, if more than 66% of Nation A thinks it's worth attacking Nation B, then people in Nation B will have less qualms about wiping out Nation A if necessary.
Otherwise, why kill people who have nothing against you, who may not even want to harm anyone, but are dragged into a war just because of a minority at the top? But if a country really wants a war, then they get a war.
"My wife is an independent recording artist, and at first it pained her to see the promo copies on eBay and Amazon marketplace competing with the real product, but at least the music is out there"
:).
Well if your wife is any good, she can release another work without promos the next time. AFAIK the Doom shareware release didn't hurt ID Software at all, even if many people didn't pay for it in the end.
So if enough people liked the previous promos, they might buy her next piece of work and future ones.
If your wife can only manage to come up with just a promo and nothing else, then she should really get another job and do that artist thing as a hobby.
Even though I write software for a living[1], to me it's a bad idea to have copyrights lasting more than 7 years. If I stop producing anything decent for 7 years I don't see why I should keep getting paid for doing nothing, just because someone wants to make a copy of my old stuff (using their own resources). That sure seems rather greedy and slothful.
Long copyright terms hold back progress. You think Microsoft would have dared to release something as crap as Vista if copyright terms were only 7 years? Their own Win2K would kill them.
[1] I can compose music too, but I can't come up with that much new material that I consider good enough, so I don't try to pretend I'm an artist. Even though in my biased opinion, given a bit of "production polish" (I can make music, but I'm not very good at playing my own stuff without mistakes) some of my stuff could actually be quite decent
"eBay reseller is in no way whatsoever violating copyright"
Just want to add that:
1) If you sell the CD you aren't copying it.
2) If you didn't copy it, you aren't infringing their Copyright.
3) If you did copy it, then depending on the laws of your country you may or may not be infringing.
4) If such one-way contracts are enforcable, I think a bunch of us are going to start sending our own one-way contracts to various parties. "Do unto others before they do unto you, and do it quick" comes to mind.
Whooosh!
That's the sound of his joke being buried.
Not sure. I'm no expert but I believe that many higher temperature superconductors lose their superconductivity if exposed to strong magnetic fields. You could say these are weak superconductors in a way.
Whereas the "conventional" liquid helium superconductors can retain their superconductivity in very strong magnetic fields.
Being able to "tolerate" strong magnetic fields is very useful if you actually are intending to use the superconductors in many interesting applications - like MRI scanning devices, or maglev stuff and so on.
Adam Smith?
:)
Q) How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A) Free market economists don't change lightbulbs, they sit in the darkness[1] and wait for Adam Smith's invisible hand to do it.
[1] Writing their papers etc.
I thought we paid already, and the ISPs just didn't reinvest into rebuilding their network.
The last I checked most of these ISPs either had monopolies granted to them, and/or had existing infrastructure handed to them by Governments.
Some even had billions of _public_ money handed to them by Governments to build their _future_ networks.
So now they want us to pay again?
This is like the power and water companies asking us to pay extra just because they went "Oops, oh yeah forgot about this reinvesting into infrastructure for the future thing".
Compare how much ISPs charge and how much power and water companies charge, and what you get for it. While small ISPs have to pay per bit (like water and power companies which have to pay per unit of gas/coal/water), AFAIK large ISPs have cushier arrangements with each other, since the incremental costs of sending bits isn't high once the network capacity is paid for - if nobody uses the bandwidth, the ISP still has to pay about the same for the network.
"Indeed, blue receptors are the less sensitive and therefore blue is a good background for a desktop"
Well I find that my visual receptors are least sensitive to black, and therefore I prefer to use black for backgrounds (except for some admin logins - where I set the background to red).
To me something like a diebolded election is far far far more dangerous than lack of anonymity.
:). They lost a fair bit of power in the last elections - they still won, but no 2/3rd majority and if a bunch switch over they will lose their majority.
Elections here in Malaysia are nonanonymous (from what I observed anyway), and I actually had no problems with the incumbent Gov knowing exactly how I voted in my country's past elections. And this is in a country which the western media liked to portray as controlled by an Authoritarian Government.
I fine with them knowing I gave them a "D Minus"
Personally I think these fears about people knowing how you vote are overrated. Because by the time the lack of anonymous voting is significantly dangerous, you're in deep shit already. Otherwise you have recourse from the Courts, there is (some) rule of Law etc. In a situation you don't have working Courts and rule of law, good luck even getting to vote and having your vote count.
The real problem with nonanonymous voting is gerrymandering. To me obvious gerrymandering should be made illegal.
"In much writing things are still going to take a while"
;). If you're good or entertainingly crap you can get $$$.
AFAIK the copyright term stuff is _after_ publication. So if you're not done yet, don't publish.
My point was nowadays, after you publish, you should be able to get word out really quickly. Just some emails to your friends linking to your "teaser material" and word will soon get around, especially if you didn't actually produce crap. Or your crap is so crap that it "wrapped round to great" - just look at some of the "internet phenoms"
If the teaser material is all you've managed to produce, perhaps you should just do it as a hobby and get different job.
Wouldn't it be great if my employer paid me for the next 100 years just because I created one piece of work? It might be cushy for me, but I doubt this sort of thing benefits society, especially if it means nobody else can use that piece of work or a close derivative without my permission for the next 100 years. I think that's very wrong.
Lastly, someone else putting name on your work = plagiarism, which is something different from copying since it involves lying.
A copyright term of even just 7 years should be ok. Microsoft will still get money from XP, but they'd then have to make something much better than Vista, since people could use Win2K instead.
If they don't like it, I'm sure Apple or IBM will happily step up to take their place.
Yeah, and some of us can keep producing value, not like other people who _apparently_ can only produce value once in their lifetime and so require copyright terms of > 100 years to support them (or long patent terms).
To the latter bunch I say, go find something you are better at and stop wasting time and resources.
If the speed of communications has got faster, and people want a faster pace of progress, then the length of all these monopolies should be getting shorter and shorter, not longer and longer. In the old days it takes a long time for a book (or other work) to get from an author to people (takes time for people to get to know about the book, and for payment to reach the author etc). Now I believe it should be much faster if you are doing things right.
I find very little reason to watch "news" on TV unless it's amusing for some reason, or I am getting something "live" and interesting.
Newsreaders read out news much slower than I can read a webpage. So even after all the scrolling text etc it's still not very efficient when it comes to getting news. And, the analysis is usually either nonexistent or crap.
The USA is rich. Rich enough to spend trillions in choosing the governments of other countries.
;) ). Otherwise you get too many people not accepting the results. In which case it becomes a big waste of time (and often lives).
So it should be able to afford a good voting system. Nothing like the diebold crap.
Manual vote counting and counter-checking can be easily parallelizable. The more voters you have, the more vote counters and observers you should be able to recruit.
It is MUCH harder to tamper with paper ballots. You might be able to do a few areas, but to do it all while the other parties have people watching is hard.
With most electronic voting systems, 3rd parties can't watch the "counting" easily. If you have an e-voting system where 3rd parties can watch easily and it's verifiable, it'll probably cost more in the end.
So what if you have to wait a few hours before you get the results?
Lastly, Elections don't just have to be fair, they have to be _SEEN_ to be fair (enough
Sure but why does the board get CEOs like that?
Carly Fiorina had a track record of being a "slash and burn" CEO, how could they not see the damage she did to Lucent?
They should give CEOs a not spectacular base package and give potentially huge bonuses dependent on the performance of the company 3 years later (related to the rest of the market).