While you guys are all battling with tech-illiterate parents who can't learn, my parents can and do learn, which is by far a worse situation.:) Now this would be a good thing, but my dad being a engineer who's had to get up to speed with computers in the last 20 years, goes head to head with me on technical issues. As a natural problem solver he tackles issues head on with his PC and does very well for a member of the baby boomer generation who really didn't grow up saturated in technology the way later generations have.
Yet my dad makes the same observation that many of the elder techno-illiterate folk do. "Why doesn't it just work?" in this case is not an observation of a techno-phobe but a seasoned engineer who's been building things for 40 years that peoples live depends on.
"I design a bridge, if it crashed twice a day and had security problems I'd be out of a career." he says jokingly.
So in my case, pity me, for I have no clever comebacks for these kinds of remarks. I certainly can't impress my dad with meaningless technobabble because he would understand it.
I wouldn't rely solely on education to fix the meatspace vulnerabilities. You need to have some degree of fool-proofishness. A switch to Firefox + Thunderbird is a good start. Get them to use Firefox with addons such as myWOT which does a great job of warning of malicious and even just untrustworthy sites.
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[ ] Obligatory XKCD
[ ] _____ you insensitive clod.
[ ] Get off my lawn
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This made me laugh. Mostly becaues I've lost about 7 pounds reccently (not quite 12 weeks, more like 16) and a significant improvement in my general well being. I'm not overweight, not an over-eater, but my weight as creeping up and I was developing a beer gut. The solitary change I've made is making a point of boosting fibre and protein intake skipping the junk food. I do have some exercise.
But really, the secret to being healthy is quite simply to stop beating around the bush, prosetylizing and making excuses. An attitude change, together with getting a freaking clue is the single real solution.
Here is the multi step approach to a fitter you and keeping the weight off: 1. Do or do not, there is no moderation. Don't eat bullshit food and don't prosetylize about it if you do give in to temptation. Embrace your guilt, harden up and resolve to better.
That includes sugary drinks, salty fatty chips, snack foods, white pasta, white rice, white bread, butter/margarine, foods loaded with thickeners and no reall food content. These foods are bad even in very small quantities. They are for all practical purposes, poison. Moderation is trying to sugar coat it, and guess what you'd eat that too. These are addictive foods, the less you eat of them the more you'll not want them.
*The low fat varieties are even worse than full fat, becaues the glycemic index goes up. *
2. Avoid foods loaded with artificial flavours, MSG, artificial sweetners, food acids etc. Becaues these foods lie to your brain and your palate. MSG is cheating, used where there is little actual food content. Same with flavours and food acids, these substitute for natural ingredients that could have potentially given you some nutritional value. Artificial sweetners are purely demonic. They still send all the same signals to your brain, but without the calorific hit, thus making you crave more carbohydrates. There is research showing sweetners can permanently reset the calorie gauge in rats, and research in humans showing ditching the sweetners alone, resulted in weight loss. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080210183902.htm (one example)
Interestingly natural sweetners such as Xylitol have been shown (by multiple peer reviewed studies) to have health benefits
3. Get a clue on what a portion size is - because this is assuredly the main problem with the North American diet. It explains the french paradox, and how my American plates don't fit properly in my European dishwasher. Don't supersize that combo, unless you want to feed 3 adults with it. Better yet go home and make a wholegrain sandwhich.
4. Learn to cook, because you'll learn to love food, you'll learn to actually taste things for flavours and recalibrate your palate for texture, flavour, spice, rather than sweet/salty/fatty and flavourless shite which is what contemporary palates have adapted to. You need food to live, and paradoxically it'll slowly kill you if you get it wrong.
Most kids these days are growing up unable to name many vegetables let alone know how do to much more than rip a seal off a microwave dinner or open a packet of crisps. Don't let your kids end up like that.
5. Healthy food does not taste bad, get this into your head. If you think good food is bad, you are brainwashed by the gazillion marketting messages for junk food that hit you every day. Last time I checked I'm cooking with herbs I grow and fresh whole foods, lean meats, lots spices, and this stuff and the things you can make with it are delicious, especially if you have a sodding clue how to cook.
6. Hack your food. Sure I have porridge for breakfast, yuck you say. Well my porridge is hacked, I have wheat germ, wheat bran, a seed mix with flax seed (killer omega 3 hit), thats the nutrition taken care of, tastes ok kind of hearty. What makes it taste better than any store brought
I'm thinking rage will be a tricked up Far Cry 2, FPS with some wafer thin role playing elements, you drive around, shoot some stuff, drive around, repeat. Like any FPS it will have implausibly located exploding barrels, and crates... everywhere. We are long past the era significant innovation in the FPS genre.
Programming languages are already far two high level which incurrs a performance hit. We should all be coding in assembler. Personally, for fast executing binaries I prefer to tap the bits into the hard drive platter with magnetized needle.
The purpose of the ACTA treaty is actually to attack user-generated user-shared content, Youtube, Flickr, et al. Users, ISPs and content hosters will all shy away from such activity should such a treaty be ratified. The rise of crowd-sourced or independent content is the single biggest threat to the bottom line of Big Content, over and above any piracy or counterfeiting.
Time I spend on youtube not watching TV is time they can't make money out of. This scares them.
Witness the death of the Internet as we know it. Observe the demostrable impact of Koreas change in copyright law following the free trade agreement with the U.S. some years back. Increasingly draconian laws saw a down turn in user content generation, and providers shying away from serving koreans due to the liability and cost.
I'm disturbed that big corporates can do a end run around our (surposedly) democratic legislative systems. Note the plural. Remember a international treaty dictates law in the signing countries, overiding democratic soverenity.
Driver distraction is not the problem, it is a lack of engagement in the task of driving. Most vehicles on the road today are sensory deprivation tanks. It's far to easy to switch your brain off, far to easy to drive with one hand fiddle with the sat nav and other things.
If you've driven a 3-ton SUV these days the massive inertia is well masked by soft high-riding suspension and steering that isn't connected to anything. The brake pedal is so light you don't really grasp what it takes to bring something like that to a stop. So instead of driving such a road going tank with more care and more margin for error since it is so much more likely to kill you or someone else, this is why you drive like an idiot at 80mph while talking on the cellphone in such a vehicle, because over and above a tiny econobox it doesn't feel as unsafe as it actually is.
Something you would not have done in the days of unassited steering and braking. In those days cars would shake and rattle and feel like they are coming apart at 80mph, it would have had you clinging on for dear life.
Even today if you agressive modify a modern car for racing it will regain a sense of speed. Excluding suspension changes, it's sound deadening materials and other NVH reduction measures that is the primary difference.
One thing I found about going to sports car over a family sedan is I started driving with both hands on the wheel.
They want technological soultion to distracted driving?
1. How about some steering wheel feedback, some plausible pedal feedback and a stiffer progressive spring on the throttle (one of the first modifications I do on any car). How about stripping out all the heavy sound deadening and replacing it with active noise cancelation that decreases or shuts off when you exceed the speed limit or start driving like a idiot. 2.Watch the road toll come down.
Opps... I forgot the ettiquette here: 3. ??? 4. Profit
This again comes from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X releases are properly tested and maintained and tend to be in more professional quality.
But why don't the Linux distros go to same lenghts? It shouldn't be impossible, unless of course, commercial projects are maintained more professionally.
Linux distros tend to ride the bleeding edge, and therefore come bug ridden as a unintended feature.
Many people were running Windows 7 BETA stably and many are indeed RC full time even now, I can't say I've ever had the same experience, ever, with a major linux distro beta or release canidate.
1. Root: Users can't touch my shit, no exceptions.
2. Users: Software can't touch my shit, I can break it myself thanks, expections I must approve.
3. Software: Can't do shit without approval.
Amen.
Currently the UNIX / NT etc basic security model is:
1. Root: Anybody can touch my shit at any time if they have the password.
2. Users: Can break alot of shit, but need the root password to really break shit properly.
3. Software: See user privledge level.
A Linux virus started in user-level could get root easily in a number of ways. All else failing, it'd be trivial to phish/keylog for the root password.
A huge ammount of Linux security is the smarter breed of user. I see no less vulnerbility by design to social engineering of novices.
I'd like to point out the Windows 7 beta and RC were not advertised or marketed in the usual sense for a commercial OS. So what we have is a head to head comparission with other freely available OSes. Yet Windows blew away linux market share in a month or two, relying largely on the word spreading through the blogosphere with a link to the download page.
I would consider it harder to get started with a new Windows OS, since you have to install it, there is no live-CD option, you have to install alot of software from scratch for your system to be able to do anything rather than having a good usable set out of the box.
This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
You missed an important lesson didn't you? Do not begin programming with any faith in the users input. I find it helps my blood pressure.
The whole point of a overdrive 5th or 6th gear was that it was a highway cruising gear for optimal economy, because the old 'top gear' 4th in cars was the one where maximum horsepower arrived at top speed. Yet many small cars these days scream at 3500rpm or more on the open road, because the manurfacturers seem to have sacrificed economy for close ratios, and once again, peak hp at terminal speed. That despite no necessity for close ratios with a proper flexible free revving engine, even in a non-sports focused car.
Your results are interesting. Every car is different.
In overdrive I get:
2250rpm @ 62mph (100kph) 8.4l/100km (28mpg)
1100rpm @ 30mph (50kph) 5.5l/100km (43mpg)
A friend with the same car ditched his dead auto for a 6-speed and a final drive from a larger engined version of same car. Result was 1850rpm at 60mph, 38mpg and it still accelerated well in this gear. That's a whopping increase for a average V6 sedan.
So it would seem there are many cars that could merely do with lower final gearing or a lower highest ratio... to have the same impact as switching to a hybrid or diesel drive train .
New Zealand pretty much adopts what Australia does, in much the same relationship as Canada to USA. NZ is one close step behind Aus on the adoption of stupid ideas (therefore one step ahead on the adopt of smart ideas, some might say).
And then, the former British colonies Aus/NZ tends to adopt what the also former British colonies US and Canada do, being like a southern hemisphere mirror. Many stupid ideas originating in the oldest of these all colonies and trickling down the the youngest.
So, yes, why look down under? European and Asian thinking on matters of broadband is the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
While you guys are all battling with tech-illiterate parents who can't learn, my parents can and do learn, which is by far a worse situation. :) Now this would be a good thing, but my dad being a engineer who's had to get up to speed with computers in the last 20 years, goes head to head with me on technical issues.
As a natural problem solver he tackles issues head on with his PC and does very well for a member of the baby boomer generation who really didn't grow up saturated in technology the way later generations have.
Yet my dad makes the same observation that many of the elder techno-illiterate folk do. "Why doesn't it just work?" in this case is not an observation of a techno-phobe but a seasoned engineer who's been building things for 40 years that peoples live depends on.
"I design a bridge, if it crashed twice a day and had security problems I'd be out of a career." he says jokingly.
So in my case, pity me, for I have no clever comebacks for these kinds of remarks. I certainly can't impress my dad with meaningless technobabble because he would understand it.
I wouldn't rely solely on education to fix the meatspace vulnerabilities. You need to have some degree of fool-proofishness. A switch to Firefox + Thunderbird is a good start. Get them to use Firefox with addons such as myWOT which does a great job of warning of malicious and even just untrustworthy sites.
-- Slashdot posting form --
...
...
[ ] RTFA
[ ] In soviet russia ____ YOU!
[ ] Obligatory XKCD
[ ] _____ you insensitive clod.
[ ] Get off my lawn
[x] I don't even bother posting I use a form.
GoL?
(spanish: Goal)
gol en propia meta! (spanish: Own goal!)
This made me laugh. Mostly becaues I've lost about 7 pounds reccently (not quite 12 weeks, more like 16) and a significant improvement in my general well being. I'm not overweight, not an over-eater, but my weight as creeping up and I was developing a beer gut. The solitary change I've made is making a point of boosting fibre and protein intake skipping the junk food. I do have some exercise.
But really, the secret to being healthy is quite simply to stop beating around the bush, prosetylizing and making excuses. An attitude change, together with getting a freaking clue is the single real solution.
Here is the multi step approach to a fitter you and keeping the weight off:
1. Do or do not, there is no moderation. Don't eat bullshit food and don't prosetylize about it if you do give in to temptation. Embrace your guilt, harden up and resolve to better.
That includes sugary drinks, salty fatty chips, snack foods, white pasta, white rice, white bread, butter/margarine, foods loaded with thickeners and no reall food content. These foods are bad even in very small quantities. They are for all practical purposes, poison. Moderation is trying to sugar coat it, and guess what you'd eat that too. These are addictive foods, the less you eat of them the more you'll not want them.
*The low fat varieties are even worse than full fat, becaues the glycemic index goes up. *
2. Avoid foods loaded with artificial flavours, MSG, artificial sweetners, food acids etc. Becaues these foods lie to your brain and your palate. MSG is cheating, used where there is little actual food content. Same with flavours and food acids, these substitute for natural ingredients that could have potentially given you some nutritional value. Artificial sweetners are purely demonic. They still send all the same signals to your brain, but without the calorific hit, thus making you crave more carbohydrates. There is research showing sweetners can permanently reset the calorie gauge in rats, and research in humans showing ditching the sweetners alone, resulted in weight loss. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080210183902.htm (one example)
Interestingly natural sweetners such as Xylitol have been shown (by multiple peer reviewed studies) to have health benefits
3. Get a clue on what a portion size is - because this is assuredly the main problem with the North American diet. It explains the french paradox, and how my American plates don't fit properly in my European dishwasher. Don't supersize that combo, unless you want to feed 3 adults with it. Better yet go home and make a wholegrain sandwhich.
4. Learn to cook, because you'll learn to love food, you'll learn to actually taste things for flavours and recalibrate your palate for texture, flavour, spice, rather than sweet/salty/fatty and flavourless shite which is what contemporary palates have adapted to. You need food to live, and paradoxically it'll slowly kill you if you get it wrong.
Most kids these days are growing up unable to name many vegetables let alone know how do to much more than rip a seal off a microwave dinner or open a packet of crisps. Don't let your kids end up like that.
5. Healthy food does not taste bad, get this into your head. If you think good food is bad, you are brainwashed by the gazillion marketting messages for junk food that hit you every day. Last time I checked I'm cooking with herbs I grow and fresh whole foods, lean meats, lots spices, and this stuff and the things you can make with it are delicious, especially if you have a sodding clue how to cook.
6. Hack your food. Sure I have porridge for breakfast, yuck you say. Well my porridge is hacked, I have wheat germ, wheat bran, a seed mix with flax seed (killer omega 3 hit), thats the nutrition taken care of, tastes ok kind of hearty. What makes it taste better than any store brought
I'm waiting for 1.0
... you were running Linux^H^H^H^H^H Android
I'm thinking rage will be a tricked up Far Cry 2, FPS with some wafer thin role playing elements, you drive around, shoot some stuff, drive around, repeat. Like any FPS it will have implausibly located exploding barrels, and crates... everywhere. We are long past the era significant innovation in the FPS genre.
Programming languages are already far two high level which incurrs a performance hit. We should all be coding in assembler. Personally, for fast executing binaries I prefer to tap the bits into the hard drive platter with magnetized needle.
The purpose of the ACTA treaty is actually to attack user-generated user-shared content, Youtube, Flickr, et al. Users, ISPs and content hosters will all shy away from such activity should such a treaty be ratified. The rise of crowd-sourced or independent content is the single biggest threat to the bottom line of Big Content, over and above any piracy or counterfeiting.
Time I spend on youtube not watching TV is time they can't make money out of. This scares them.
Witness the death of the Internet as we know it. Observe the demostrable impact of Koreas change in copyright law following the free trade agreement with the U.S. some years back. Increasingly draconian laws saw a down turn in user content generation, and providers shying away from serving koreans due to the liability and cost.
I'm disturbed that big corporates can do a end run around our (surposedly) democratic legislative systems. Note the plural. Remember a international treaty dictates law in the signing countries, overiding democratic soverenity.
What do you say to your spouse with two black eyes?
Nothing they've already been told twice.
Stupid drivers ... replacing them with Artificial Stupidity?
Driver distraction is not the problem, it is a lack of engagement in the task of driving. Most vehicles on the road today are sensory deprivation tanks. It's far to easy to switch your brain off, far to easy to drive with one hand fiddle with the sat nav and other things.
... I forgot the ettiquette here:
If you've driven a 3-ton SUV these days the massive inertia is well masked by soft high-riding suspension and steering that isn't connected to anything. The brake pedal is so light you don't really grasp what it takes to bring something like that to a stop. So instead of driving such a road going tank with more care and more margin for error since it is so much more likely to kill you or someone else, this is why you drive like an idiot at 80mph while talking on the cellphone in such a vehicle, because over and above a tiny econobox it doesn't feel as unsafe as it actually is.
Something you would not have done in the days of unassited steering and braking. In those days cars would shake and rattle and feel like they are coming apart at 80mph, it would have had you clinging on for dear life.
Even today if you agressive modify a modern car for racing it will regain a sense of speed. Excluding suspension changes, it's sound deadening materials and other NVH reduction measures that is the primary difference.
One thing I found about going to sports car over a family sedan is I started driving with both hands on the wheel.
They want technological soultion to distracted driving?
1. How about some steering wheel feedback, some plausible pedal feedback and a stiffer progressive spring on the throttle (one of the first modifications I do on any car). How about stripping out all the heavy sound deadening and replacing it with active noise cancelation that decreases or shuts off when you exceed the speed limit or start driving like a idiot.
2.Watch the road toll come down.
Opps
3. ???
4. Profit
early adopters are having a tough time with ********
Where ******* is any application or hardware. Don't be an early adopter
+1 to you, the plural of Anecdote is not Data.
This again comes from the fact that both Windows and Mac OS X releases are properly tested and maintained and tend to be in more professional quality.
But why don't the Linux distros go to same lenghts? It shouldn't be impossible, unless of course, commercial projects are maintained more professionally.
Linux distros tend to ride the bleeding edge, and therefore come bug ridden as a unintended feature.
Many people were running Windows 7 BETA stably and many are indeed RC full time even now, I can't say I've ever had the same experience, ever, with a major linux distro beta or release canidate.
To summarise the security model you propose:
1. Root: Users can't touch my shit, no exceptions.
2. Users: Software can't touch my shit, I can break it myself thanks, expections I must approve.
3. Software: Can't do shit without approval.
Amen.
Currently the UNIX / NT etc basic security model is:
1. Root: Anybody can touch my shit at any time if they have the password.
2. Users: Can break alot of shit, but need the root password to really break shit properly.
3. Software: See user privledge level.
A Linux virus started in user-level could get root easily in a number of ways. All else failing, it'd be trivial to phish/keylog for the root password.
A huge ammount of Linux security is the smarter breed of user. I see no less vulnerbility by design to social engineering of novices.
I'd like to point out the Windows 7 beta and RC were not advertised or marketed in the usual sense for a commercial OS. So what we have is a head to head comparission with other freely available OSes. Yet Windows blew away linux market share in a month or two, relying largely on the word spreading through the blogosphere with a link to the download page.
I would consider it harder to get started with a new Windows OS, since you have to install it, there is no live-CD option, you have to install alot of software from scratch for your system to be able to do anything rather than having a good usable set out of the box.
This should give some insight into the problems with Linux and how it could be addressed: for all it's strengths, it's not something people want. They want Windows, despite it's weaknesses. Make Linux wantable, watch market share change dramatically.
Yes and some launch dates are perpetually wrong. Like Duke Nukem Forever
I don't think so but the possibility can't be ruled out without further investigation. Have you ever tried to expose a database application to users and subsequently lost all faith in humanity?
You missed an important lesson didn't you? Do not begin programming with any faith in the users input. I find it helps my blood pressure.
> ...what is "artificial intelligence"...
Artificial intelligence is whatever it is that machines can't do yet.
Artificial Supitidy is whatever holds us over in the mean time.
The whole point of a overdrive 5th or 6th gear was that it was a highway cruising gear for optimal economy, because the old 'top gear' 4th in cars was the one where maximum horsepower arrived at top speed. Yet many small cars these days scream at 3500rpm or more on the open road, because the manurfacturers seem to have sacrificed economy for close ratios, and once again, peak hp at terminal speed. That despite no necessity for close ratios with a proper flexible free revving engine, even in a non-sports focused car.
Your results are interesting. Every car is different.
In overdrive I get: 2250rpm @ 62mph (100kph) 8.4l/100km (28mpg) 1100rpm @ 30mph (50kph) 5.5l/100km (43mpg)
A friend with the same car ditched his dead auto for a 6-speed and a final drive from a larger engined version of same car. Result was 1850rpm at 60mph, 38mpg and it still accelerated well in this gear. That's a whopping increase for a average V6 sedan.
So it would seem there are many cars that could merely do with lower final gearing or a lower highest ratio... to have the same impact as switching to a hybrid or diesel drive train .
This would of course ruin sales of hybrids.
I had a time travel algorithim for my freeway commute, got pulled over at 87mph so never got to try it out.
New Zealand pretty much adopts what Australia does, in much the same relationship as Canada to USA. NZ is one close step behind Aus on the adoption of stupid ideas (therefore one step ahead on the adopt of smart ideas, some might say).
And then, the former British colonies Aus/NZ tends to adopt what the also former British colonies US and Canada do, being like a southern hemisphere mirror. Many stupid ideas originating in the oldest of these all colonies and trickling down the the youngest.
So, yes, why look down under? European and Asian thinking on matters of broadband is the way to go.