It's funny, most old-school Unix people don't seem to have any trouble with textfile-based communication. It's only the Windows users that switch over and expect to do everything in Linux the same way as in Windows.
Of course nobody is suggesting that graphical configuration tools should replace text config files, just that there should be useful graphical tools available to generate and edit them. If you want to hack them by hand you should be allowed to, but you shouldn't cut users out because they want to do things using a GUI tool. The attitude that Unix has always used text config files and so it shouldn't need a GUI now has a lot to do with its reputation for being obscure and difficult to use.
It's almost as if they assume the Microsoft way is the best way... Seems logical, right?
As opposed to you, who assume that the Unix way is the right way, right? Just because MS uses graphical configuration tools doesn't mean that it's the wrong way of doing things. There are a number of ways that graphical tools can be useful, like having built in rulesets so that users can't accidentally use invalid values, or presenting users with a list of reasonable choices, or filling in default values when appropriate. They can also unify a large number of related config files into a single interface so that you don't have to jump back and forth between different files all the time. Just because MS got some aspects of their configuration tools wrong doesn't mean that you should reject the idea of GUI configuration completely.
Touche. I'll admit that education is an important role of an academic scientist, and there are even some schools (mostly of the 4 year Undergraduate only type) where teaching is the primary factor used in judging their effectiveness. That was a big mistake on my part and I should have written it better.
The distinction that I wanted to make was between a pure researcher, who is investigating phenomena in the pursuit of abstract knowledge, and an applied researcher who works in industry. For the "abstract knowledge" type of researcher publication of results is a critical part of the overall research effort and not just an afterthought as some people seem to think. Work that is not published, or is published somewhere so obscure that nobody ever hears about it, is essentially useless. The strong emphasis on publication as a measure of productivity is an accurate reflection of its importance. Publication is the product of a research scientist in the same way that tangible goods are the product of an engineer. The effort put into the research is wasted if it's not published in exactly the same way that the effort of designing a product is wasted if it's never built.
But the journals aren't actually doing the peer review themselves. The reviews are done on a volunteer basis by other scientists in the field, as is the editing in many cases. Top scientists will receive dozens of papers to review every year and are expected to do so without any compensation. This is actually one of the major threats that the signers of the letter are making; they're not just going to refuse to buy or publish in the journals but also to review papers for them. The journals are going to find it quite tough when they no longer get free content and editorial work.
The site was unusable well before the announcement came out on slashdot. I noticed last night that they were changing things on the site in preparation for rolling it out, but when I tried downloading this morning, well before this article hit, it was already maxed out on bandwidth. It's going to be a while before everyone can get it.
The recording industry provides another important service, and that service has no parallel in the scientific publication industry: publicity.
I knew almost all of the names of the people who published in my field, and more than that, they knew mine. There's a standard method
by which a newbie became established. I might miss a paper or two from a new star, but I could be confident that I'd know about them
"soon enough".
But how did you find out about them? I'm willing to bet that it's because you read their publications, not by word of mouth. When was the last time you heard about a great researcher who just kept his work to himself and never published anything? Scientific publications are critical to researchers exactly because they do provide publicity. Why do you think that publications in prestigious journals are so highly prized compared to ones in second and third tier journals? It's because they provide the widest, most significant audience for the scientists' ideas. IOW, publication is precisely a form of publicity for the author.
The second thing to realize is that, as I said above, prompt publication can be at least as important for a scientist as it is for a musician. There are plenty of ways for a musician to earn a living that don't involve signing with a major label; they can earn money performing live, for instance. Furthermore, failure to sign with a major label is not going to completely wreck their career for good. There are lots of musicians who made the big time only after working in obscurity for a long time, and they can rerecord and reissue their earlier work after signing with a big label. For a scientist, though, prompt publication is everything. A major gap in a scientist's publication record can easily kill his career, and there's a very good chance that any work that was saved from such a period would either get scooped or become irrelevant over time.
For scientists, their livelihoods are sponsored by universities, not directly through the act of publishing. Publishing is used as a benchmark of academic reputation, and although academic researchers are expected to publish, universities are much more understanding about this sort of protest than the landlord of a starving young musician.
Spoken like a non-scientist. Publication is not just the measure by which scientists are judged, it is in a real sense the only truly valuable activity that academic scientists do. Research that is carried out an never published is wasted; it's the sharing of that knowledge with the rest of the world that makes the process worthwhile. And while the Universities that are the scientists' nominal employers are fairly tolerant, they aren't really the ones who pay the bills. The government granting agencies are the ones who pay the bills, and they are quite unlikely to give grants to anyone without a publication record to justify their trust. Promotions are also very heavily based on publication track record, so anyone without tenure who tries this is seriously risking his career; if you don't get tenure your first time around you're not likely to be given a second shot by anyone. An artist who doesn't sell any work for a few years is normal and won't suffer from it later in his career; an academic scientist who doesn't publish anything for a few years is pretty much through with his career. The situation is quite harsh.
It actually will tend to rise very rapidly- much better than other typical gasses. For evidence that gasses don't need to be contained in order to rise, think about thermal plumes of various sorts; they rise and cause convection currents even though their difference in density compared to their surroundings is only a few percent. Helium is only about 1/7 the density of air, so it's going to go upward most satisfactorally. Bear in mind also that when escaping from a reactor it's also going to be thermally hot, which will help quite a bit.
Another critical advantage is that the helium itself won't become radioactive- it's a terrible neutron absorber- so even if it did get into the surrounding community it wouldn't contaminate it directly. And, of course, it won't get chemically added to the bodies of the locals the way some radioactive can.
There could be explosive decompression of the working gas, but since it's helium, it won't be particularly harmful. (Nor will it be terribly radioactive).
Nor, for that matter, will it tend to hang around for long, helium having the nice property that it tends to go straight up pretty quickly.
That said, the article does say that they don't forsee this kind of technology getting into homes anytime soon. Their suggestion was that the most likely use for it in anything like home use was as a power source for remote areas, when it would be an essentially sealed system without user servicable parts. There's already too much investment in power distribution infrastructure for it to be really sensible to try to put a nuclear generator in every basement. You might as well have them located somewhat centrally where they can be run by trained professionals and distribute their power through an already built and amortized power grid.
The real thing is that it isn't corporate IBM that's doing this. It's their ad agency that comes up with the strategy- and it's actually not a bad one IMO.
IBM has decided to go after the Linux market whole hog, but it's pretty clear that Linux is different from most IBM products and needs to be marketed differently. Big Blue has been the company that sold its products by convincing the suits and letting the techies live with it, while Linux has been a product that the techies sneak in behind the suits' backs. IBM needs to convince techies that it really understands that attitude, and an underground-feeling campaign like this is actually a pretty good way of doing so.
OK, I admit it. I want to see Lou Gerstner (IBM's CEO) scrubbin' the sidewalks tomorrow mornin'.
Now that would generate some real publicity. The current story is just a goofy little thing that gets a minor mention, but having the CEO of a megacorp out on the street cleaning up his company's graffiti would get photos on the front page of major metropolitan dailies. Somebody should suggest it to him.
I would never buy a cellphone, for the mere fact that I wouldn't want to be that accessible. I hardly ever answer the phone when I'm home, so why would I want to cart a cellphone around with me?
So use the off button and don't spread your number around like candy. I once thought that I'd never want a cell phone, but then I encountered enough situations when one would have been useful that I've changed my mind. I don't give my number to anyone who I wouldn't want to receive a call from, and I turn it off when I want to be unavailable, but it's turned out to be handy a number of times. Be restrained about making extreme claims like never wanting a cell phone; you never know when your situation will change and you'll decide that having one is an absolute necessity.
You'd have to be smoking something interesting to have that problem in Perl. There's a distinction made between > and gt, so you'd need to make an explicit decision to use a string rather than numerical comparison. Use of illicit substances is about the only plausible explanation I can think of for somebody doing something that brain dead.
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, your system already includes some fairly impressive protection against viruses, it's just that the sophistication of the viruses is much higher than you realize. For instance virus propagation is not on by default, but many viruses contain instructions that help turn on virus propagation mechanisms. And, quite frankly, I think that people have extremely good wireless networking capabilities. They are admittedly fairly low bandwidth and short range, but there's some quite impressive error correction for dealing with high noise environments.
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of
Windows 2000?
Of course not. It's just that the human genome doesn't suffer from code bloat as badly as typical Microsoft products do;-)
Saying that the genome project was a "map to nowhere" is the same sort of neo-luddite crap we hear from people bashing
pure research all the time.
If you read carefully, it's clear that the issue they're discussing is that there are no easily exploitable clinical applications. IOW, the companies that have been patenting every gene in sight may discover that their patents have expired before they've figured out how to turn their gene products into commercially applicable products. How terrible that their patents of publically funded discoveries won't turn out to enrich private businesses, no? Meanwhile, pure researchers are tremendously happy with the quantity of data that's useful in pure research. Not really surprising considering that the genome project was specifically designed as a pure research program, not as an applied clinical program.
One thing that is not at all well conveyed by the article is that people have known that the "one gene/one protein" view is oversimplified for quite some time. The concept of splicing variants, i.e. that a single gene produces a variety of related products, is something that my coworkers take as being so natural that it doesn't even bear mention. Yes, it's true that the textbooks may need to be rewritten, but that's because textbooks are always decades behind the cutting edge research.
In any case, people have already been working out ways to take advantage of the genomic data without needing to figure out in advance exactly how it is processed to produce proteins. That's because figuring out the exact splicing points is very tough, and people wanted to use the data before it was completely annotated. Thus the techniques they've been establishing are already well suited to dealing with multiple proteins coming from a single gene. It's a bump, but nothing like the drastic problem presented in the article.
How would you wire a home with an eye on making it so that future capabilities can be added in without painful construction bills?
It might not be pretty, but you should consider including easily rewirable conduits of some kind. You could include a central wiring closet, probably in the basement if the house is going to have one, and have conduits running from there to every room in the house. The conduits would be set flush with the wall but have removable covers of some type. That way when you need to rewire, you can just pop off the cover, pull out the old wiring, and run new wiring without having to rip up the walls. If you really want it to look nice, it might be possible to wallpaper over the conduits, so long as there's a clear marking for where they are.
Another point to consider is to make sure that you have enough electrical outlets. If you're really looking at a wired home, you're going to need a lot of power to run all the wired stuff, which means lots of outlets. Think about all the things you have now and then multiply it by 2-4 to figure how many outlets you're going to need for all the additional toys in the future. And don't skimp on having enough breakers and good quality wiring, either, because you don't know what kind of current draw you're going to have.
Of course SAMBA uses and even simple licensing scheme: connect as many clients as you want without any paperwork whatsoever. That's got to be a lot easier to deal with, don't you think?
This line bothers me. How do you get a bad report. You can't get a bad report unless you don't pay your bills on time. And even if you do have a bad report you can add to your file the reasons.
Yes you can. You can get bad credit by sharing a credit card with somebody who doesn't pay his/her bills. You can get bad credit if identity thieves steal your information and do bad things with it. You can get bad credit if your payments are lost or stolen in transit, or if erroneous information is entered into the database. And, of course, failure to pay your bills on time may reflect personal disaster rather than irresponsibility; many, many bankruptcies result from attempts to pay for expensive medical conditions by borrowing.
It could also be a guess-bot. I shouldn't be too tought to find a list of first and last names and assemble plausible usernames from combinations and spam them all. It might be an interesting experiment to try doing the same thing but with two different usernames at the same time. Choose one that should be easy prey to a guess-bot and one that's just a bunch of random gibberish. If the easy to guess name gets spam while the other one doesn't that would be evidence that it's a guess-bot.
The bank and the health insurance company go broke. Companies don't make money by turning customers away for idiotic reasons.
Sadly this is not necessarily true. Banks and insurance companies make money by avoiding doing business with people who present excessive risk. The way they stay profitable is not by doing the most business but by excluding the N% of the business that's most likely to cause them problems, which is why people get turned down for loans and insurance as often as they do. Those businesses will probably be willing to tolerate a certain error rate, too, so if 5% of the people turned down are rejected for bogus reasons that's just fine from a profitability standpoint. Actually, in both of the case I mentioned you'd most likely just get stuck with a worse deal rather than being rejected outright, but the underlying problem is still there. Aggregation of data without careful checking to make sure that it's accurate carries the risk of penalizing people because of somebody else's screwup.
A more realistic problem is that one of these databases may get seriously corrupted data, either accidentally or maliciously, that really destroy's somebody's life. If your entry falsely declares that you are an ex-convict, have previously filed for bankruptcy, or the like you may find life very difficult. Even worse, since these systems depend on swapping data back and forth between different providers all the time the corrupted data can be very hard to purge; it only has to avoid being removed in one place to reinfect the whole system.
The problem isn't really with record keeping, per se, but with record aggregation. It's just fine for your oil change guy to send you a message that your oil needs changing, or for grocery store to track purchases so they know what things you might want to buy. The problem comes when they start selling that information and some large database winds up containing everything about your daily activities. When somebody can see absolutely everything about you, they can start taking apparently innocent pieces of data and start compiling things that might hurt you.
What happens, for instance, if your bank decides that they want to do a hyper-thorough check on you before giving you a loan? They might decide not to give you a mortgage despite a perfect record of making payments on time because you don't change your oil often enough and they think that you won't take good care of your house. Or what happens when nobody wants to sell you health insurance because you buy too much ice cream? Even worse, what happens if they make those decisions in error because their records are slightly imperfect- you change your own oil sometimes but the shop you get your oil and filters from doesn't track those things, or you actually feed most of that ice cream to your dog, who loves it?
Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING.
You're boring until you want to do business with them. Then you become interesting, and they want to know everything about you that they can. And, as has been shown quite clearly by various problems with credit card companies and the like, erroneous data can get into the system and cause people no end of problems because it doesn't get flushed. Of course, businesses and governments aren't the only potential consumers of information. Do you really want all of your personal information to be available to private citizens who have grudges against you? How about somebody who's stalking you? It happens already, and it's a nightmare when it does. Adding more information to the pot will only make it get worse.
The reason the cops use guns? Permanent subjugation.
And, of course, no private company interested in maximizing profits would ever kill somebody for a silly motive like saving the cost of a trial and imprisonment. We know that the legal system is perfect, and poor people would always be able to afford lawyers who would be guaranteed to win them big judgments against large corporations and force them to care about people's saftey.
Give me a damn break. Corporations as a group have given ample evidence that they don't give a damn about people, only money, and if it turns out that it's cheaper to hire good lawyers and have the cops shoot people to save on imprisonment costs then that's exactly what they'll do. They already do things like deciding that it's cheaper to kill people with things like pollution and accidents and settle the lawsuits than to clean up their act. Why believe that shooting criminals will be treated any differently, particularly when it's so easy to put a gun in the hand of the guy you've just shot to make it look like it was justified?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't need to click on the Foot button on my Gnome desktop to log out. It has a perfectly good dedicated logout button right there on the panel, and IIRC that's part of the default installation. Yes, logging out is also avaliable under the foot menu, but you don't need to go through the silly, backward thought of pushing the start button to stop the machine.
Slight correction. It would be closer to correct to say that many embedded controllers have RT operating requirements, but by no means all do. Embedded controlers cover a huge range of conditions, everything from ABS controllers (where RT features are critical) to vending machines (where they're not). Embedded devices also include a number of things that are basically single purpose computers, like home firewall boxes, and Linux has some real potential there.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course nobody is suggesting that graphical configuration tools should replace text config files, just that there should be useful graphical tools available to generate and edit them. If you want to hack them by hand you should be allowed to, but you shouldn't cut users out because they want to do things using a GUI tool. The attitude that Unix has always used text config files and so it shouldn't need a GUI now has a lot to do with its reputation for being obscure and difficult to use.
As opposed to you, who assume that the Unix way is the right way, right? Just because MS uses graphical configuration tools doesn't mean that it's the wrong way of doing things. There are a number of ways that graphical tools can be useful, like having built in rulesets so that users can't accidentally use invalid values, or presenting users with a list of reasonable choices, or filling in default values when appropriate. They can also unify a large number of related config files into a single interface so that you don't have to jump back and forth between different files all the time. Just because MS got some aspects of their configuration tools wrong doesn't mean that you should reject the idea of GUI configuration completely.
Touche. I'll admit that education is an important role of an academic scientist, and there are even some schools (mostly of the 4 year Undergraduate only type) where teaching is the primary factor used in judging their effectiveness. That was a big mistake on my part and I should have written it better.
The distinction that I wanted to make was between a pure researcher, who is investigating phenomena in the pursuit of abstract knowledge, and an applied researcher who works in industry. For the "abstract knowledge" type of researcher publication of results is a critical part of the overall research effort and not just an afterthought as some people seem to think. Work that is not published, or is published somewhere so obscure that nobody ever hears about it, is essentially useless. The strong emphasis on publication as a measure of productivity is an accurate reflection of its importance. Publication is the product of a research scientist in the same way that tangible goods are the product of an engineer. The effort put into the research is wasted if it's not published in exactly the same way that the effort of designing a product is wasted if it's never built.
But the journals aren't actually doing the peer review themselves. The reviews are done on a volunteer basis by other scientists in the field, as is the editing in many cases. Top scientists will receive dozens of papers to review every year and are expected to do so without any compensation. This is actually one of the major threats that the signers of the letter are making; they're not just going to refuse to buy or publish in the journals but also to review papers for them. The journals are going to find it quite tough when they no longer get free content and editorial work.
The site was unusable well before the announcement came out on slashdot. I noticed last night that they were changing things on the site in preparation for rolling it out, but when I tried downloading this morning, well before this article hit, it was already maxed out on bandwidth. It's going to be a while before everyone can get it.
But how did you find out about them? I'm willing to bet that it's because you read their publications, not by word of mouth. When was the last time you heard about a great researcher who just kept his work to himself and never published anything? Scientific publications are critical to researchers exactly because they do provide publicity. Why do you think that publications in prestigious journals are so highly prized compared to ones in second and third tier journals? It's because they provide the widest, most significant audience for the scientists' ideas. IOW, publication is precisely a form of publicity for the author.
The second thing to realize is that, as I said above, prompt publication can be at least as important for a scientist as it is for a musician. There are plenty of ways for a musician to earn a living that don't involve signing with a major label; they can earn money performing live, for instance. Furthermore, failure to sign with a major label is not going to completely wreck their career for good. There are lots of musicians who made the big time only after working in obscurity for a long time, and they can rerecord and reissue their earlier work after signing with a big label. For a scientist, though, prompt publication is everything. A major gap in a scientist's publication record can easily kill his career, and there's a very good chance that any work that was saved from such a period would either get scooped or become irrelevant over time.
Spoken like a non-scientist. Publication is not just the measure by which scientists are judged, it is in a real sense the only truly valuable activity that academic scientists do. Research that is carried out an never published is wasted; it's the sharing of that knowledge with the rest of the world that makes the process worthwhile. And while the Universities that are the scientists' nominal employers are fairly tolerant, they aren't really the ones who pay the bills. The government granting agencies are the ones who pay the bills, and they are quite unlikely to give grants to anyone without a publication record to justify their trust. Promotions are also very heavily based on publication track record, so anyone without tenure who tries this is seriously risking his career; if you don't get tenure your first time around you're not likely to be given a second shot by anyone. An artist who doesn't sell any work for a few years is normal and won't suffer from it later in his career; an academic scientist who doesn't publish anything for a few years is pretty much through with his career. The situation is quite harsh.
It actually will tend to rise very rapidly- much better than other typical gasses. For evidence that gasses don't need to be contained in order to rise, think about thermal plumes of various sorts; they rise and cause convection currents even though their difference in density compared to their surroundings is only a few percent. Helium is only about 1/7 the density of air, so it's going to go upward most satisfactorally. Bear in mind also that when escaping from a reactor it's also going to be thermally hot, which will help quite a bit.
Another critical advantage is that the helium itself won't become radioactive- it's a terrible neutron absorber- so even if it did get into the surrounding community it wouldn't contaminate it directly. And, of course, it won't get chemically added to the bodies of the locals the way some radioactive can.
Nor, for that matter, will it tend to hang around for long, helium having the nice property that it tends to go straight up pretty quickly.
That said, the article does say that they don't forsee this kind of technology getting into homes anytime soon. Their suggestion was that the most likely use for it in anything like home use was as a power source for remote areas, when it would be an essentially sealed system without user servicable parts. There's already too much investment in power distribution infrastructure for it to be really sensible to try to put a nuclear generator in every basement. You might as well have them located somewhat centrally where they can be run by trained professionals and distribute their power through an already built and amortized power grid.
The real thing is that it isn't corporate IBM that's doing this. It's their ad agency that comes up with the strategy- and it's actually not a bad one IMO.
IBM has decided to go after the Linux market whole hog, but it's pretty clear that Linux is different from most IBM products and needs to be marketed differently. Big Blue has been the company that sold its products by convincing the suits and letting the techies live with it, while Linux has been a product that the techies sneak in behind the suits' backs. IBM needs to convince techies that it really understands that attitude, and an underground-feeling campaign like this is actually a pretty good way of doing so.
Now that would generate some real publicity. The current story is just a goofy little thing that gets a minor mention, but having the CEO of a megacorp out on the street cleaning up his company's graffiti would get photos on the front page of major metropolitan dailies. Somebody should suggest it to him.
So use the off button and don't spread your number around like candy. I once thought that I'd never want a cell phone, but then I encountered enough situations when one would have been useful that I've changed my mind. I don't give my number to anyone who I wouldn't want to receive a call from, and I turn it off when I want to be unavailable, but it's turned out to be handy a number of times. Be restrained about making extreme claims like never wanting a cell phone; you never know when your situation will change and you'll decide that having one is an absolute necessity.
You'd have to be smoking something interesting to have that problem in Perl. There's a distinction made between > and gt, so you'd need to make an explicit decision to use a string rather than numerical comparison. Use of illicit substances is about the only plausible explanation I can think of for somebody doing something that brain dead.
Actually, your system already includes some fairly impressive protection against viruses, it's just that the sophistication of the viruses is much higher than you realize. For instance virus propagation is not on by default, but many viruses contain instructions that help turn on virus propagation mechanisms. And, quite frankly, I think that people have extremely good wireless networking capabilities. They are admittedly fairly low bandwidth and short range, but there's some quite impressive error correction for dealing with high noise environments.
Of course not. It's just that the human genome doesn't suffer from code bloat as badly as typical Microsoft products do ;-)
If you read carefully, it's clear that the issue they're discussing is that there are no easily exploitable clinical applications. IOW, the companies that have been patenting every gene in sight may discover that their patents have expired before they've figured out how to turn their gene products into commercially applicable products. How terrible that their patents of publically funded discoveries won't turn out to enrich private businesses, no? Meanwhile, pure researchers are tremendously happy with the quantity of data that's useful in pure research. Not really surprising considering that the genome project was specifically designed as a pure research program, not as an applied clinical program.
One thing that is not at all well conveyed by the article is that people have known that the "one gene/one protein" view is oversimplified for quite some time. The concept of splicing variants, i.e. that a single gene produces a variety of related products, is something that my coworkers take as being so natural that it doesn't even bear mention. Yes, it's true that the textbooks may need to be rewritten, but that's because textbooks are always decades behind the cutting edge research.
In any case, people have already been working out ways to take advantage of the genomic data without needing to figure out in advance exactly how it is processed to produce proteins. That's because figuring out the exact splicing points is very tough, and people wanted to use the data before it was completely annotated. Thus the techniques they've been establishing are already well suited to dealing with multiple proteins coming from a single gene. It's a bump, but nothing like the drastic problem presented in the article.
It might not be pretty, but you should consider including easily rewirable conduits of some kind. You could include a central wiring closet, probably in the basement if the house is going to have one, and have conduits running from there to every room in the house. The conduits would be set flush with the wall but have removable covers of some type. That way when you need to rewire, you can just pop off the cover, pull out the old wiring, and run new wiring without having to rip up the walls. If you really want it to look nice, it might be possible to wallpaper over the conduits, so long as there's a clear marking for where they are.
Another point to consider is to make sure that you have enough electrical outlets. If you're really looking at a wired home, you're going to need a lot of power to run all the wired stuff, which means lots of outlets. Think about all the things you have now and then multiply it by 2-4 to figure how many outlets you're going to need for all the additional toys in the future. And don't skimp on having enough breakers and good quality wiring, either, because you don't know what kind of current draw you're going to have.
Of course SAMBA uses and even simple licensing scheme: connect as many clients as you want without any paperwork whatsoever. That's got to be a lot easier to deal with, don't you think?
Yes you can. You can get bad credit by sharing a credit card with somebody who doesn't pay his/her bills. You can get bad credit if identity thieves steal your information and do bad things with it. You can get bad credit if your payments are lost or stolen in transit, or if erroneous information is entered into the database. And, of course, failure to pay your bills on time may reflect personal disaster rather than irresponsibility; many, many bankruptcies result from attempts to pay for expensive medical conditions by borrowing.
It could also be a guess-bot. I shouldn't be too tought to find a list of first and last names and assemble plausible usernames from combinations and spam them all. It might be an interesting experiment to try doing the same thing but with two different usernames at the same time. Choose one that should be easy prey to a guess-bot and one that's just a bunch of random gibberish. If the easy to guess name gets spam while the other one doesn't that would be evidence that it's a guess-bot.
Sadly this is not necessarily true. Banks and insurance companies make money by avoiding doing business with people who present excessive risk. The way they stay profitable is not by doing the most business but by excluding the N% of the business that's most likely to cause them problems, which is why people get turned down for loans and insurance as often as they do. Those businesses will probably be willing to tolerate a certain error rate, too, so if 5% of the people turned down are rejected for bogus reasons that's just fine from a profitability standpoint. Actually, in both of the case I mentioned you'd most likely just get stuck with a worse deal rather than being rejected outright, but the underlying problem is still there. Aggregation of data without careful checking to make sure that it's accurate carries the risk of penalizing people because of somebody else's screwup.
A more realistic problem is that one of these databases may get seriously corrupted data, either accidentally or maliciously, that really destroy's somebody's life. If your entry falsely declares that you are an ex-convict, have previously filed for bankruptcy, or the like you may find life very difficult. Even worse, since these systems depend on swapping data back and forth between different providers all the time the corrupted data can be very hard to purge; it only has to avoid being removed in one place to reinfect the whole system.
The problem isn't really with record keeping, per se, but with record aggregation. It's just fine for your oil change guy to send you a message that your oil needs changing, or for grocery store to track purchases so they know what things you might want to buy. The problem comes when they start selling that information and some large database winds up containing everything about your daily activities. When somebody can see absolutely everything about you, they can start taking apparently innocent pieces of data and start compiling things that might hurt you.
What happens, for instance, if your bank decides that they want to do a hyper-thorough check on you before giving you a loan? They might decide not to give you a mortgage despite a perfect record of making payments on time because you don't change your oil often enough and they think that you won't take good care of your house. Or what happens when nobody wants to sell you health insurance because you buy too much ice cream? Even worse, what happens if they make those decisions in error because their records are slightly imperfect- you change your own oil sometimes but the shop you get your oil and filters from doesn't track those things, or you actually feed most of that ice cream to your dog, who loves it?
You're boring until you want to do business with them. Then you become interesting, and they want to know everything about you that they can. And, as has been shown quite clearly by various problems with credit card companies and the like, erroneous data can get into the system and cause people no end of problems because it doesn't get flushed. Of course, businesses and governments aren't the only potential consumers of information. Do you really want all of your personal information to be available to private citizens who have grudges against you? How about somebody who's stalking you? It happens already, and it's a nightmare when it does. Adding more information to the pot will only make it get worse.
And, of course, no private company interested in maximizing profits would ever kill somebody for a silly motive like saving the cost of a trial and imprisonment. We know that the legal system is perfect, and poor people would always be able to afford lawyers who would be guaranteed to win them big judgments against large corporations and force them to care about people's saftey.
Give me a damn break. Corporations as a group have given ample evidence that they don't give a damn about people, only money, and if it turns out that it's cheaper to hire good lawyers and have the cops shoot people to save on imprisonment costs then that's exactly what they'll do. They already do things like deciding that it's cheaper to kill people with things like pollution and accidents and settle the lawsuits than to clean up their act. Why believe that shooting criminals will be treated any differently, particularly when it's so easy to put a gun in the hand of the guy you've just shot to make it look like it was justified?
I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't need to click on the Foot button on my Gnome desktop to log out. It has a perfectly good dedicated logout button right there on the panel, and IIRC that's part of the default installation. Yes, logging out is also avaliable under the foot menu, but you don't need to go through the silly, backward thought of pushing the start button to stop the machine.
Slight correction. It would be closer to correct to say that many embedded controllers have RT operating requirements, but by no means all do. Embedded controlers cover a huge range of conditions, everything from ABS controllers (where RT features are critical) to vending machines (where they're not). Embedded devices also include a number of things that are basically single purpose computers, like home firewall boxes, and Linux has some real potential there.