The NeXT machine was a smartly packaged, excellent practical compromise. Jobs deserves a lot of credit for good taste and
practicality. But it wasn't breakthrough or even particularly novel technology given the systems that preceded it by nearly a
decade. And, of course, reasonable as it was technically, it was still considered too radical and too expensive by industry.
Basically, NeXT might have been based on Unix, but it didn't really learn the essence of the Unix "New Jersey" philosophy- that good enough and available beats great and unavailable. It was a wonderful piece of technology, but they tried to cram so much immature, overpriced hardware into the mix that it wasn't affordable to the average Joe. That meant that it was always going to be a niche product that would only appeal to people who were willing to pony up a lot of cash for its advantages. But its real advantages weren't from the expensive hardware, nice as it might be, but from the software. In that sense it's a lot like the Mac, where Apple has used its superior user interface to sell overpriced hardware, only more so.
That is the whole point of the issue. I - and zillion other people like me - have no beef with "advanced", "politically incorrect", etc... art, speach, whatever. The beef is, we don't want it to be paid for by our tax dollars.
This just isn't as good an argument as it sounds at first. The big problem is that by restricting public funds to art that doesn't offend anyone, you inherently reduce it to the most boring, insipid of the lot. A substantial role of art is to provoke thought and controversy, so by preventing funding of controversial art you eviscerate the purpose of funding it in the first place.
Arts should be like science - if you want to fund whatever you want, you either make it worth the money and submit a proposal to NSF, or seek private funding.
But if you truly follow the NSF/NIH model, you're not going to prevent funding of offensive art. Why? Because NSF and NIH fund projects based heavily on peer review, and depend on the informed opinions of top people in the field about what areas of science are most worth investingating. If you translate that into the NEA, you'll wind up with funding for art projects being doled out on the advice of other top notch artists, most of whom won't share your opinion about the undesirability of controversial artworks.
Just so this doesn't seem completely academic, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC is a great example of what I'm talking about. The Memorial Wall was the winner as judged by a panel of artists, but the politicians didn't like it because it inherently presents the decisions about the war in a negative light. They wanted to kill the proposal in favor of a conventional monument with a statue of a group of Nam era soldiers that wasn't going to offend anyone, but wound up compromising by building both. Today, everyone knows about the Wall, and it's one of the most popular monuments to visit in DC and just about nobody knows or cares about the other half. If you base your decisions on the principle of not offending anyone, you're going to get the half that's ignored, not the half that's considered the greatest war monument in the world.
Except that you'll also hear people complaining about things like the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List because it's going way too far. I'd say that the overall opinion on the matter was very strongly leaning toward the "blocking whole blocks is evil" side, not the "it's OK" side.
Ultimately, though, you're missing an important point. Spam blocking is about me controlling what I see by filtering out unwanted messages. Filtering is about other people controlling what I see by deciding which content is OK. MAPS RBL got blasted because its policy changed from the desirable (letting me block messages from known spammers) to the undesirable (blocking messages for the political reason that their originator was associated, however distantly, with spammers). If you can't see the difference, you're blind.
gnupedia's finally coming...i just want to know how accurate its gonna be:|
Well the article does mention this point, to wit:
But what some pages are erroneous, or even deceptive? We cannot assume this won't happen. But the corrective is for other articles to point out the error. Instead of having "quality control" by one privileged organization, we will have review by various groups, which will earn respect by their own policies and actions. In a world where no one is infallible, this is the best we can do.
I personally think that this is the correct answer. The plain fact is that, try as they might, existing encyclopedias are not perfect. They contain erroneous information, authorial and editorial bias, and plain old opinion. You can't really trust a single article on any topic no matter who wrote it, because nobody is perfectly informed and free of bias. The only practical alternative is to let many well informed people write articles so that reviewers and readers can form their own judgments.
We need politicians with backbones that can actually do the right thing, even if it is unpopular. Instead of the current bunch that are swayed by the whim of polls. Just having a referendum on every damn issue makes it worse - nobody thinks of the BIG picture, every little minutia is debated on it's own merits ONLY.
Even worse, experience shows that referenda are at least as succeptible to influence as politicians are. In California, at least, businesses that don't get their way in the Legislature can try to put the issue on the ballot for a referendum, and big money advertizing is surprisingly effective at swaying the public.
The best example I can think of was a recent one sponsored by the insurance industry. The Legislature passed a law that would have allowed victims of an accident to sue the perpetrator's insurance company when the company tried to stiff the victim (the old system required the victim to sue the perpetrator, who would then have to sue his own insurance company to recover what they were supposed to pay). The insurance industry didn't like this, so they hired ballot circulators to put the bill up for a vote, claiming truthfully but disingenously that the initiative would legalize suits against insurance companies. They then launched a multi million dollar campaign to defeat the referendum that they themselves had paid to get on the ballot. It's a corruption of a system that was intended to take the power out of the hands of moneyed interests and put it back in the hands of the people.
Well, I haven't been picked in the times I've been called, but that's also part of the system. The jury system is, IMO, similar to what somebody said about Democracy: it's a terrible system with only one redeeming feature- that every other system people have tried is worse.
Actually it's better than that. It means that every citizen, even those who aren't picked to sit in judgment, has an opportunity to see the justice system in action. It's hard to emphasize how important that is. And, quite frankly, if you think about how suspicious people are about corruption in the system today, think about how bad it would be if there weren't a strong random element in selecting the arbiters of the facts. Professional jurors would be predominantly people with judicial axes to grind, rather than ordinary people with ordinary views. If you relied exclusively on judges, the political pressure on their appointments would be much, much greater than it is today. The alternatives are just too scary to consider seriously.
Start with a random group of schmoes, remove anyone capable of thinking up an excuse, then give each side the opportunity to get rid of any juror which the lawyers think cannot be convinced of their side's case.
Well, you're not helping matters any with that kind of attitude. If you don't like the way that juries work, there's something that you personally can do about it: don't try to wriggle out the next time you get called for duty. If all of the intelligent, creative people who you seem to think are trying to avoid jury duty would go down there and do their part, it would be that much tougher for the lawyers to try to bias things. Remember that in most cases the lawyers have only a limited number of peremptory challenges, so if there is a high enough percentage of non-gullible people in the jury pool they won't be able to get rid of them all.
Why is it that the people who complain about our political system can't be bothered to vote, and the people who complain about our justice system can't be bothered to serve jury duty?
True, but those juries weren't selected from the laypeople at large. Proper jury selection should be a lottery of society at large.
Sadly, though, the law doesn't actually wind up generating juries that accurately reflect the community from which they come. The rules of jury selection allow the lawyers to throw a certain number of potential jurors out without having to justify their exclusion. The result is that in a community with a large slant favoring one side or the other, the slant is exaggerated by the selection process. Of course the racially biased juries from the old South were made worse by the fact that in many cases all of the officers of the court were complicit in helping the racial bias, but it can still happen today. If, for instance, 80% of the people in a community are impressionable idiots, a lawyer who thinks that it will help his client to have a jury full of impressionable idiots can probably get one, while a lawyer who wants a jury of smart independent-minded people will have a lot of trouble.
First, you're mistaken if you believe that juries are "incapable" of being biased. Go back to your history books and you'll see hundreds of cases where juries have overlooked vast amounts of evidence to arrive at a guilty (or not guilty) verdict.
This is an excellent point. A good example of biased juries (and I don't mean this as flamebait) were the all-while juries that were used to perpetuate racial injustice in the old South. They would vote not guilty for any crime perpetrated by a white against a black and guilty for any crime allegedly committed by a black against a white. The only facts that mattered were the skin colors of the defendant and victim.
And, of course, there are people today who seem just about as biased on the issue of corporations as those old South juries were on race. There are some corporatists who seem to think that companies should be allowed to do anything they want as long as they're trying to make a buck for their shareholders. Of course there are also people who think that corporations are all inherently evil and that any action they take is suspect. I'm sure that we'll hear from both sides within this very discussion, as we always do whenever there's a Slashdot article talking about potentially bad corporate actions. I'm also quite sure that some people with one view or the other would lie during jury questioning in an attempt to get on the jury in a case like Microsoft's just so that they could vote their preconceive notions about the case.
I've seen people make 1-2 hour cellphone calls. Dividing by 1000 [power ratio of microwave to
cellphone] that gives up to 7 seconds of your head in the microwave on a regular basis.
But you can't necessarily get the total damage from total energy absorbed. If you stand under a 100 Watt lightbulb for 3 hours (about 10,000 seconds) nothing much will happen to you. If you exposed yourself to a 1 MW light source for 1 second you could get flash burns. This is because your body has some heat dissipating capacity, so exposure well below that capacity has comparatively minor effect, while exposure well above that capability can result in severe heating, burns, etc.
Your brain already burns something like 30 W and has good cooling from blood flowing through it. That means that adding even the total power output from a modern mobile phone- a few hundred mW- will have negligible heating effect no matter how long you are exposed. Blasting yourself with 1000 W, though, will easily overwhelm your ability to cool your brain and doing so for any appreciable period will start to cause it to overheat. Even so, your estimated 7000 J of energy is only enough to raise your brain temperature by about 1 degree C, and actually much less if it's absorbed by other parts of your head. A fever of 38 C isn't particularly serious even when it lasts for a long time, so I doubt that a couple of minutes of such a fever (by which point your body would have dispersed the heat throughout the body) would cause any notable harm.
As someone living in a country where over 50 % of the entire population has a cell phone, I find it odd that somewhere talking on the
cellular phone while riding a bus or in a restaurant could be seen as rude behaviour.
It's not so much that talking on a cell phone in those environments is considered rude. It's that some people seem incined to talk very loudly into their cell phones, and that they do so quite ostentatiously in a way apparently calculated to say, "Look how cool I am! I have a cell phone!" People who speak that loudly but not into cell phones are also viewed as rude, it's just that many fewer people do so. OTOH, people who use their phones quietly and unostentatiously don't attract much attention.
Well, there is a company that keeps alive the legacy of Bill and Dave, it just doesn't happen to be the branch that kept their names. Agilent now has all of the parts of the business that were near and dear to the founders (i.e. scientific and technical instruments, rather than computers and peripherals) and is keeping closer to their principles. It also looks as though it's not going to go into the tank in the near future. Maybe when the company currently calling itself HP goes bankrupt Agilent will be able to buy their rightful name back on the cheap.
Of course it may be true that the air is still dirty in an absolute sense, but that does not mean that the pollution regulation has been a failure. Air quality (at least in Southern California) has gotten dramatically better, as anyone who has either A) examined any statistics about air quality or B) actually lived there for an extended period can tell you. But I guess that people like you who favor pollution can't possibly grasp the idea that Californians as a group both understand the consequences of and are willing to pay the costs of our expensive anti-pollution legislation. That would destroy your idea that anyone should be allowed to pollute to their hearts' content without consequence.
(2) Blame deregulation for the energy shortage! Can't have liberals blaming their eco legislation or (gasp!) call for repealing some of it.
Gee, a system that allows power producers to charge essentially unlimited prices but doesn't allow the resellers to pass the costs on to consumers (and doesn't allow long term contracts to prevent price gouging during peak consumption periods) couldn't have anything to do with the resellers going bankrupt could it? No, the fault must be exclusively with environmental regulations, since you don't like them. Damn the facts, full speed ahead.
What will you do? Here's my prediction: Democrats will do ***NOTHING***. They'll sit and endure the rolling blackouts and come up with bullshit to justify them to the people. They will wait for republicans to propose building more power plants, and repealing the legislation preventing their construction.
Well, guess what. You're wrong. California's Democratic administration has reversed the policy of the previous Republican one and started giving approval for new power plant construction already. But don't worry and let silly things like facts get in the way of your rants. Go ahead and imagine what's happening instead of bothering to do any research to find out. You wouldn't want inconvenient data to interfere with your theories.
MS now seems to feel that the server market is their true core business, and Linux (and Unix in general) is their strongest competitor there. When you look at the cost of MS server OSes (like Win 2000 Advanced Server) you can see why they view that as a critical market. Since OSX isn't really playing there, while Unix/Linux most certainly is, you can see why Unix/Linux is their key opponent, not OSX.
As IBM found with OS/2, once MS percieves you as a threat, they attack like a rabid pit bull. I expect we'll see a lot more negative Linux press on zdnet, reporters paid to laud Windows and slam UNIX, fake grass roots movements, and all the other favorite MS tricks." Well, I'm not that quite that paranoid, but I'll be keping my eyes open.
Interesting you should mention it, because the article referenced had this nice little bit:
It is widely expected that Corel, which received a critical $135 million infusion in cash from Microsoft (stock: MSFT) in October, will dump its Linux line of products, such as its WordPerfect suite for Linux, to focus on Microsoft's.Net initiative.
Now I'm not going to go and shout and scream about how Microsoft is buying off a potential competitor, but it does look kind of suspicious. Here's a company that could do a lot to boost Linux as a desktop competitor for Windows, and after getting a big cash infusion from Microsoft they're giving up their plans to do so. It's not a cut and dried as pay for non-competetion, but it does deserve careful scrutiny.
It is a wonderful idea, and I appauled the creator, but for now I will stick to Amazon and the library.
I think that's sort of the point. They're expecting that you'll download books to sample them but wind up buying the print copy for the better print and portability. The originator of the idea is expecting it to help sales, and I think that your preference for hard copy is evidence that he's likely correct.
The question is whether you want to take a legal, blame applying attitude or an engineering, failure analysis attitude. While it's true that the murderer is morally and legally responsible for his own actions, from a causitive standpoint everyone else did play a role. No action has a single, perfectly isolatable cause, as your chain of people involved in the manufacture of a gun points out. In most cases, it's possible to cut off a possible event at many of those stages, not just the final one, so it makes sense from a prevention standpoint to close off as many possible causes as possible. Just because a murderer is legally responsible for killing you, that doesn't make it smart to piss off a person with a short temper and a loaded gun.
The point is that we need to take two different tacks to solve the problem. I would certainly never suggest letting the perp off; if you can track him down you should definitely lock him up and throw away the key. But that doesn't help now, and it won't necessarily help against the next bozo who thinks he's clever enough to get away with it. That's certainly also true because he's probably right- you can check out and see how badly we've actually done at nabbing the vandals who do this kind of thing. To solve the problem and keep attacks from continuing or starting in the first place you have to lock down the boxes that script kiddies are taking advantage of to launch their attacks.
As long as people have the attitude that it's just fine to leave an insecure box out on the net, and that attacks that take advantage of their wide open box are not their fault, the attacks will continue. To solve the problem of kiddies launching these attacks, we need to hold the people who facilitate the attacks responsible somehow. I'm not saying "get rooted, go to jail" or even "get rooted, pay a big fine", but maybe if there were a policy of "get rooted, lose your connection for a year" then people would take security seriously and script kiddies wouldn't be able to run wild.
I'm tired of the 'if you would just secure your boxen' stuff. So, my servers aren't locked down - doesn't give every
Tom, Dick, and 5kr1p7 kiddie the right to mess with my crap.
That is, interestingly enough, not in line with traditional Anglo-Saxon common law concepts, such as maintaining an attractive nusiance. If, for instance, you have a swimming pool, you are legally responsible for taking active steps to keep neighborhood children out. If you don't and one jumps in and drowns, you can be held civilly and (IIRC) criminally liable. If you don't lock your tool shed and the neighborhood drug dealer takes it over as his place of business, you can be held liable. I am merely suggesting holding people with open network connections to a similar standard: if you have a box that's likely to attract DoS kiddies, you must take serious steps to keep them out or be held partially liable for whatever damage they do with your box.
We're about to run out of new ideas, since we can only code in so much security so
fast, and law enforcement isn't terribly effective. What does the Slashdot community
say?
Well, how about trying to secure some of the boxes that are being used for the attacks first? According to the second linked article:
Another Under Net operator stated that the attack began Saturday when the unidentified youth telnetted from Romania to
FishNet, a Ventura, California-based Internet service provider. Once he obtained highest-level "root" access at FishNet, the
youth launched at least smurf attacks - one against his former Internet service provider, the Romania-based Logicnet, and
another against a UUNet service in New York...
Benefield said the youth entered FishNet services via news and mail server daemons, leaving his electronic footprints in the
server logs.
The youth, who is believed to be between 16 and 19 years of age, then went on a juggernaut across the global network, stopping
first at ISPs in Oslo, London and other parts of the UK, as well as hitting Chicago ISP Napnet.
At each stop, the youth would log onto the server, obtain root access, then delete files, canceling accounts. In some cases, it
wiped out the entire businesses such as the ISP in Oslo.
The first thing to do is to stop letting the guy root computers with great connectivity and bandwidth. Secure the damn boxes and he won't be able to do this kind of thing. Get on the case of the companies that are letting him root them, and force them to take responsiblity for the damage he does with their computers. There's really nothing you can do as long as this vandal can get his hands on serious DoS capable hardware.
Profs being suspended because people find discussing the history of slavery offensive, and other similar things.
This is, at least in theory, exactly why tenure was invented. A tenured professor is supposed to be protected against suspension or dismissal for what he does or does not teach in his classes. In fact, the protection is supposed to go further than that and protect against dismissal for just about anything short of a crime, so that other actions can't be used as a pretext for dismissal when the real cause of action is his teaching. Remember the next time that people talk about doing away with tenure as a way of clearing away an entrenched academic system that it also is a vital protection for academic freedom.
And of course reasonable targeting of ads is a boon for the consumer, too. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be much happier if I only saw ads for things that I'm actually interested in, rather than a completely random selection. Well targeted advertizing is potentially useful, and is also more likely to be an attempt to inform instead of just capture my eyeballs. And don't forget that if Yahoo can charge a lot more per ad then they can make money while still cutting down on the total number of ads displayed and hence my bandwidth consumed and the visual blight on my page. Sounds like a (potentially) great thing to me.
Yes, the Olympics have pretty clearly been completely corrupted, but they're hardly the only ones in that position. There's just too much money for athletics of all kinds for any sport claiming to be amateur to remain really clean. What's worse is that their amateur status winds up attracting the worst kind of profiteering, because it gives them an excuse not to pay the athletes and put more into their own pockets. The net result is that they often wind up much more corrupt than sports organizations that are willing to admit their profit motive. Another very good example of this is the NCAA.
I think that this really hits the nail on the head. People who have gotten used to the advantages of a PC (i.e. powerful, upgradeable, under your personal control) don't like to give them up. OTOH, the box is big and moderately expensive and you can't take it with you around the house. What you really want isn't an independant, stand alone appliance but rather a terminal that connects to the household PC where all the guts are. People have already started talking about "information furnaces"- the powerful computer tucked away in a closet somewhere that has the household fast internet connection and large-scale storage that drives terminals and appliances throughout the house- and that sounds like a much more likely direction for things to develop than a bunch of standalone special purpose devices.
Re:If you want that feature, whey not do it yourse
on
Linus Talks About 2.4
·
· Score: 3
More like drive quickly into some serious ass. When Hawking was visiting Caltech, he had a reputation for running students down with his cart. The thing is pretty fast.
Speaking from experience, employees sometimes have their security clearance (keycards, network login, etc) revoked before being informed of their termination to reduce the risk of retribution to the company.
That sounds like a plausible explanation, but in this case it sounds as though the company wanted to drop firings on employees by complete surprise, rather than just limiting retribution. They literally demanded to know how she knew that she had been fired, despite the fact that they had already turned off her phone and disabled her logon and key card. If you want to prevent mischief, write a shell script that will log off and disable the accounts of everyone on a list, and run it as soon as you've called them in to let them know that they've been laid off. But don't come to pick up their computer before telling them they've been fired (as this company did with other employees) or just let them figure it out when their stuff stops working.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, NeXT might have been based on Unix, but it didn't really learn the essence of the Unix "New Jersey" philosophy- that good enough and available beats great and unavailable. It was a wonderful piece of technology, but they tried to cram so much immature, overpriced hardware into the mix that it wasn't affordable to the average Joe. That meant that it was always going to be a niche product that would only appeal to people who were willing to pony up a lot of cash for its advantages. But its real advantages weren't from the expensive hardware, nice as it might be, but from the software. In that sense it's a lot like the Mac, where Apple has used its superior user interface to sell overpriced hardware, only more so.
This just isn't as good an argument as it sounds at first. The big problem is that by restricting public funds to art that doesn't offend anyone, you inherently reduce it to the most boring, insipid of the lot. A substantial role of art is to provoke thought and controversy, so by preventing funding of controversial art you eviscerate the purpose of funding it in the first place.
But if you truly follow the NSF/NIH model, you're not going to prevent funding of offensive art. Why? Because NSF and NIH fund projects based heavily on peer review, and depend on the informed opinions of top people in the field about what areas of science are most worth investingating. If you translate that into the NEA, you'll wind up with funding for art projects being doled out on the advice of other top notch artists, most of whom won't share your opinion about the undesirability of controversial artworks.
Just so this doesn't seem completely academic, the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC is a great example of what I'm talking about. The Memorial Wall was the winner as judged by a panel of artists, but the politicians didn't like it because it inherently presents the decisions about the war in a negative light. They wanted to kill the proposal in favor of a conventional monument with a statue of a group of Nam era soldiers that wasn't going to offend anyone, but wound up compromising by building both. Today, everyone knows about the Wall, and it's one of the most popular monuments to visit in DC and just about nobody knows or cares about the other half. If you base your decisions on the principle of not offending anyone, you're going to get the half that's ignored, not the half that's considered the greatest war monument in the world.
Except that you'll also hear people complaining about things like the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List because it's going way too far. I'd say that the overall opinion on the matter was very strongly leaning toward the "blocking whole blocks is evil" side, not the "it's OK" side.
Ultimately, though, you're missing an important point. Spam blocking is about me controlling what I see by filtering out unwanted messages. Filtering is about other people controlling what I see by deciding which content is OK. MAPS RBL got blasted because its policy changed from the desirable (letting me block messages from known spammers) to the undesirable (blocking messages for the political reason that their originator was associated, however distantly, with spammers). If you can't see the difference, you're blind.
Well the article does mention this point, to wit:
I personally think that this is the correct answer. The plain fact is that, try as they might, existing encyclopedias are not perfect. They contain erroneous information, authorial and editorial bias, and plain old opinion. You can't really trust a single article on any topic no matter who wrote it, because nobody is perfectly informed and free of bias. The only practical alternative is to let many well informed people write articles so that reviewers and readers can form their own judgments.
Even worse, experience shows that referenda are at least as succeptible to influence as politicians are. In California, at least, businesses that don't get their way in the Legislature can try to put the issue on the ballot for a referendum, and big money advertizing is surprisingly effective at swaying the public.
The best example I can think of was a recent one sponsored by the insurance industry. The Legislature passed a law that would have allowed victims of an accident to sue the perpetrator's insurance company when the company tried to stiff the victim (the old system required the victim to sue the perpetrator, who would then have to sue his own insurance company to recover what they were supposed to pay). The insurance industry didn't like this, so they hired ballot circulators to put the bill up for a vote, claiming truthfully but disingenously that the initiative would legalize suits against insurance companies. They then launched a multi million dollar campaign to defeat the referendum that they themselves had paid to get on the ballot. It's a corruption of a system that was intended to take the power out of the hands of moneyed interests and put it back in the hands of the people.
Well, I haven't been picked in the times I've been called, but that's also part of the system. The jury system is, IMO, similar to what somebody said about Democracy: it's a terrible system with only one redeeming feature- that every other system people have tried is worse.
Actually it's better than that. It means that every citizen, even those who aren't picked to sit in judgment, has an opportunity to see the justice system in action. It's hard to emphasize how important that is. And, quite frankly, if you think about how suspicious people are about corruption in the system today, think about how bad it would be if there weren't a strong random element in selecting the arbiters of the facts. Professional jurors would be predominantly people with judicial axes to grind, rather than ordinary people with ordinary views. If you relied exclusively on judges, the political pressure on their appointments would be much, much greater than it is today. The alternatives are just too scary to consider seriously.
Well, you're not helping matters any with that kind of attitude. If you don't like the way that juries work, there's something that you personally can do about it: don't try to wriggle out the next time you get called for duty. If all of the intelligent, creative people who you seem to think are trying to avoid jury duty would go down there and do their part, it would be that much tougher for the lawyers to try to bias things. Remember that in most cases the lawyers have only a limited number of peremptory challenges, so if there is a high enough percentage of non-gullible people in the jury pool they won't be able to get rid of them all.
Why is it that the people who complain about our political system can't be bothered to vote, and the people who complain about our justice system can't be bothered to serve jury duty?
Sadly, though, the law doesn't actually wind up generating juries that accurately reflect the community from which they come. The rules of jury selection allow the lawyers to throw a certain number of potential jurors out without having to justify their exclusion. The result is that in a community with a large slant favoring one side or the other, the slant is exaggerated by the selection process. Of course the racially biased juries from the old South were made worse by the fact that in many cases all of the officers of the court were complicit in helping the racial bias, but it can still happen today. If, for instance, 80% of the people in a community are impressionable idiots, a lawyer who thinks that it will help his client to have a jury full of impressionable idiots can probably get one, while a lawyer who wants a jury of smart independent-minded people will have a lot of trouble.
This is an excellent point. A good example of biased juries (and I don't mean this as flamebait) were the all-while juries that were used to perpetuate racial injustice in the old South. They would vote not guilty for any crime perpetrated by a white against a black and guilty for any crime allegedly committed by a black against a white. The only facts that mattered were the skin colors of the defendant and victim.
And, of course, there are people today who seem just about as biased on the issue of corporations as those old South juries were on race. There are some corporatists who seem to think that companies should be allowed to do anything they want as long as they're trying to make a buck for their shareholders. Of course there are also people who think that corporations are all inherently evil and that any action they take is suspect. I'm sure that we'll hear from both sides within this very discussion, as we always do whenever there's a Slashdot article talking about potentially bad corporate actions. I'm also quite sure that some people with one view or the other would lie during jury questioning in an attempt to get on the jury in a case like Microsoft's just so that they could vote their preconceive notions about the case.
But you can't necessarily get the total damage from total energy absorbed. If you stand under a 100 Watt lightbulb for 3 hours (about 10,000 seconds) nothing much will happen to you. If you exposed yourself to a 1 MW light source for 1 second you could get flash burns. This is because your body has some heat dissipating capacity, so exposure well below that capacity has comparatively minor effect, while exposure well above that capability can result in severe heating, burns, etc.
Your brain already burns something like 30 W and has good cooling from blood flowing through it. That means that adding even the total power output from a modern mobile phone- a few hundred mW- will have negligible heating effect no matter how long you are exposed. Blasting yourself with 1000 W, though, will easily overwhelm your ability to cool your brain and doing so for any appreciable period will start to cause it to overheat. Even so, your estimated 7000 J of energy is only enough to raise your brain temperature by about 1 degree C, and actually much less if it's absorbed by other parts of your head. A fever of 38 C isn't particularly serious even when it lasts for a long time, so I doubt that a couple of minutes of such a fever (by which point your body would have dispersed the heat throughout the body) would cause any notable harm.
It's not so much that talking on a cell phone in those environments is considered rude. It's that some people seem incined to talk very loudly into their cell phones, and that they do so quite ostentatiously in a way apparently calculated to say, "Look how cool I am! I have a cell phone!" People who speak that loudly but not into cell phones are also viewed as rude, it's just that many fewer people do so. OTOH, people who use their phones quietly and unostentatiously don't attract much attention.
Well, there is a company that keeps alive the legacy of Bill and Dave, it just doesn't happen to be the branch that kept their names. Agilent now has all of the parts of the business that were near and dear to the founders (i.e. scientific and technical instruments, rather than computers and peripherals) and is keeping closer to their principles. It also looks as though it's not going to go into the tank in the near future. Maybe when the company currently calling itself HP goes bankrupt Agilent will be able to buy their rightful name back on the cheap.
Of course it may be true that the air is still dirty in an absolute sense, but that does not mean that the pollution regulation has been a failure. Air quality (at least in Southern California) has gotten dramatically better, as anyone who has either A) examined any statistics about air quality or B) actually lived there for an extended period can tell you. But I guess that people like you who favor pollution can't possibly grasp the idea that Californians as a group both understand the consequences of and are willing to pay the costs of our expensive anti-pollution legislation. That would destroy your idea that anyone should be allowed to pollute to their hearts' content without consequence.
Gee, a system that allows power producers to charge essentially unlimited prices but doesn't allow the resellers to pass the costs on to consumers (and doesn't allow long term contracts to prevent price gouging during peak consumption periods) couldn't have anything to do with the resellers going bankrupt could it? No, the fault must be exclusively with environmental regulations, since you don't like them. Damn the facts, full speed ahead.
Well, guess what. You're wrong. California's Democratic administration has reversed the policy of the previous Republican one and started giving approval for new power plant construction already. But don't worry and let silly things like facts get in the way of your rants. Go ahead and imagine what's happening instead of bothering to do any research to find out. You wouldn't want inconvenient data to interfere with your theories.
MS now seems to feel that the server market is their true core business, and Linux (and Unix in general) is their strongest competitor there. When you look at the cost of MS server OSes (like Win 2000 Advanced Server) you can see why they view that as a critical market. Since OSX isn't really playing there, while Unix/Linux most certainly is, you can see why Unix/Linux is their key opponent, not OSX.
Interesting you should mention it, because the article referenced had this nice little bit:
Now I'm not going to go and shout and scream about how Microsoft is buying off a potential competitor, but it does look kind of suspicious. Here's a company that could do a lot to boost Linux as a desktop competitor for Windows, and after getting a big cash infusion from Microsoft they're giving up their plans to do so. It's not a cut and dried as pay for non-competetion, but it does deserve careful scrutiny.
I think that's sort of the point. They're expecting that you'll download books to sample them but wind up buying the print copy for the better print and portability. The originator of the idea is expecting it to help sales, and I think that your preference for hard copy is evidence that he's likely correct.
The question is whether you want to take a legal, blame applying attitude or an engineering, failure analysis attitude. While it's true that the murderer is morally and legally responsible for his own actions, from a causitive standpoint everyone else did play a role. No action has a single, perfectly isolatable cause, as your chain of people involved in the manufacture of a gun points out. In most cases, it's possible to cut off a possible event at many of those stages, not just the final one, so it makes sense from a prevention standpoint to close off as many possible causes as possible. Just because a murderer is legally responsible for killing you, that doesn't make it smart to piss off a person with a short temper and a loaded gun.
The point is that we need to take two different tacks to solve the problem. I would certainly never suggest letting the perp off; if you can track him down you should definitely lock him up and throw away the key. But that doesn't help now, and it won't necessarily help against the next bozo who thinks he's clever enough to get away with it. That's certainly also true because he's probably right- you can check out and see how badly we've actually done at nabbing the vandals who do this kind of thing. To solve the problem and keep attacks from continuing or starting in the first place you have to lock down the boxes that script kiddies are taking advantage of to launch their attacks.
As long as people have the attitude that it's just fine to leave an insecure box out on the net, and that attacks that take advantage of their wide open box are not their fault, the attacks will continue. To solve the problem of kiddies launching these attacks, we need to hold the people who facilitate the attacks responsible somehow. I'm not saying "get rooted, go to jail" or even "get rooted, pay a big fine", but maybe if there were a policy of "get rooted, lose your connection for a year" then people would take security seriously and script kiddies wouldn't be able to run wild.
That is, interestingly enough, not in line with traditional Anglo-Saxon common law concepts, such as maintaining an attractive nusiance. If, for instance, you have a swimming pool, you are legally responsible for taking active steps to keep neighborhood children out. If you don't and one jumps in and drowns, you can be held civilly and (IIRC) criminally liable. If you don't lock your tool shed and the neighborhood drug dealer takes it over as his place of business, you can be held liable. I am merely suggesting holding people with open network connections to a similar standard: if you have a box that's likely to attract DoS kiddies, you must take serious steps to keep them out or be held partially liable for whatever damage they do with your box.
The first thing to do is to stop letting the guy root computers with great connectivity and bandwidth. Secure the damn boxes and he won't be able to do this kind of thing. Get on the case of the companies that are letting him root them, and force them to take responsiblity for the damage he does with their computers. There's really nothing you can do as long as this vandal can get his hands on serious DoS capable hardware.
This is, at least in theory, exactly why tenure was invented. A tenured professor is supposed to be protected against suspension or dismissal for what he does or does not teach in his classes. In fact, the protection is supposed to go further than that and protect against dismissal for just about anything short of a crime, so that other actions can't be used as a pretext for dismissal when the real cause of action is his teaching. Remember the next time that people talk about doing away with tenure as a way of clearing away an entrenched academic system that it also is a vital protection for academic freedom.
And of course reasonable targeting of ads is a boon for the consumer, too. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be much happier if I only saw ads for things that I'm actually interested in, rather than a completely random selection. Well targeted advertizing is potentially useful, and is also more likely to be an attempt to inform instead of just capture my eyeballs. And don't forget that if Yahoo can charge a lot more per ad then they can make money while still cutting down on the total number of ads displayed and hence my bandwidth consumed and the visual blight on my page. Sounds like a (potentially) great thing to me.
Yes, the Olympics have pretty clearly been completely corrupted, but they're hardly the only ones in that position. There's just too much money for athletics of all kinds for any sport claiming to be amateur to remain really clean. What's worse is that their amateur status winds up attracting the worst kind of profiteering, because it gives them an excuse not to pay the athletes and put more into their own pockets. The net result is that they often wind up much more corrupt than sports organizations that are willing to admit their profit motive. Another very good example of this is the NCAA.
I think that this really hits the nail on the head. People who have gotten used to the advantages of a PC (i.e. powerful, upgradeable, under your personal control) don't like to give them up. OTOH, the box is big and moderately expensive and you can't take it with you around the house. What you really want isn't an independant, stand alone appliance but rather a terminal that connects to the household PC where all the guts are. People have already started talking about "information furnaces"- the powerful computer tucked away in a closet somewhere that has the household fast internet connection and large-scale storage that drives terminals and appliances throughout the house- and that sounds like a much more likely direction for things to develop than a bunch of standalone special purpose devices.
More like drive quickly into some serious ass. When Hawking was visiting Caltech, he had a reputation for running students down with his cart. The thing is pretty fast.
That sounds like a plausible explanation, but in this case it sounds as though the company wanted to drop firings on employees by complete surprise, rather than just limiting retribution. They literally demanded to know how she knew that she had been fired, despite the fact that they had already turned off her phone and disabled her logon and key card. If you want to prevent mischief, write a shell script that will log off and disable the accounts of everyone on a list, and run it as soon as you've called them in to let them know that they've been laid off. But don't come to pick up their computer before telling them they've been fired (as this company did with other employees) or just let them figure it out when their stuff stops working.