Erm, competition can only work if the incentive is provided on achievement of part of the goal.
There is no incentive for Wikipedia editors to produce an encyclopedia. Ssimilar applies to any Wikipedia-style project (though not necessarily any project using a Wiki: it's quite possible to have editorial oversight).
Yahoo had its directory back in '94. Lists of lists would be good, where the source of each list is very clear and can be filtered on. Then I don't get an ever-increasing list of biased sources, but can stick to lists prepared by academics, professional organisations, recognised hobbyist groups, etc.
Wikipedia's done a lot to damage the 'net. It used to be that autonomous entities acting under often well-known editorial control would be first ports of call for various subjects, but now everyone wastes their time in the edit war game that is Wikipedia. It's the worst example of centralisation of Internet control - Facebook may be larger, but it is primarily an entertainment service. Google's flawed popularity ranking algorithm (does anyone remember when nerds used to point out that popular does not imply best?) always leads people to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia won't die, but we are at least progressively seeing fewer people take it seriously. May the next decade see it turn into something perceived as valuable to humanity as Facebook.
That post was a whole lot of appeal to emotion (ignored) plus half a dozen examples (quoted below) of corruption and incompetence which are nothing to do with communism and everything to do with typical behaviour of humans in power.
a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them.
So, is your argument that similar inefficiencies and corruptions cannot be found in Western governments and corporations? Or what exactly are you trying to say?
Note that I didn't say "Soviet communism was great; capitalism sucks!" I asked whether the people of Russia are any better off now than before the Soviet Union. I've asked it lots of times to many people. I've heard lots of "yeah it's much better!" from those who have prospered financially, and lots of "no it sucks!" from those who have lost various securities. I've never been provided with a well-researched answer which tries to make an objective study of the change in quality of life throughout the country. Surely someone, somewhere has been interested in answering the question from a sociological/psychological/anthropological point of view rather than taking the opportunity to start a political rant.
Any evidence that 141 million people spied on each other? I'm happy to compare and contrast Soviet surveillance in the 1980s with US surveillance today, if it puts things into context.
Perhaps you're thinking of the GDR? We're not talking about whether Soviet satellite states are better off today.
Were there any advantages to the Russian people of the fall of the Soviet Union? Ignore the half a dozen oligarchs whose limits on greedy and corrupt behaviour were lifted. Consider the other 141 million people.
Although the landscape has changed slightly in the UK over the past decade as government has prodded banks to provide basic accounts, there were/are a shocking number of people which banks won't open accounts for: at the one end we have illegal immigrants, then people in financial trouble (and not everyone who gets into debt managed money poorly!), then people who were victims of ID fraud, then those for whom computer repeatedly says no - some faceless algorithm (e.g. National Hunter) has wrongly decided that they're some risk. Oh, and make sure you have paid for a full passport or driver's licence.
Then, over the past decade, you have anti-money-laundering regulations meaning automated algorithms flagging people up for non-standard banking activity. The response by banks when the accounts owner hasn't got large deposits or is otherwise profitable is simply to close the accounts with ~30 days' notice. HSBC had a fairly well-known spate of this a few years ago, but Natwest and Barclays do it too (and probably Lloyds - I don't really pay attention to them).
I'm lucky never to have experienced any of the above problems, and I'm in a position where it probably wouldn't affect me. But I'm very much aware of what can go wrong.
And everything assumes that you are prepared to accept the government's system of money to the extent that you have spare cash lying around to pay for usable Internet access. Now you could try working outside the system cash-in-hand, and if you're sufficiently successful and sneaky then you can still have what you want - but the same applies anywhere. For the average person, however, this means a "legal" job, i.e. paying your taxes. At this point you're "in the regime" no matter how free you feel. How high up you are is labelled perhaps as Party affiliation in Soviet style, and labelled worker/middle/upper class in the Western style. It's true that the West still has a larger (dwindling) middle tier than NK, but the principle's the same.
Strictly speaking, the same thing applies in the West. Those who choose not to follow their government's system of money/tax/etc aren't going to be getting Internet access any time soon.
As always, it's leaders and followers of the local regime who get access to the resources which in turn make them feel free. The rest are either marginalised or incarcerated. It's just harder for people in the West to accept how limited they are in how they may interact in order for them to enjoy the benefits of modern life.
as the necessary result of supporting a wide array of capabilities (not necessarily hardware)
Explain.
BIOSes (especially RAID) are the slowest part these days, and UEFI is hopefully going to combat that.
Many modern BIOS implementations are just a UEFI implementation with a translation layer. The "problem" is the firmware self-testing and doing lots of patient device detection/initialisation - there's no inherent reason UEFI would improve that.
...booted in about 5 seconds, and that was to a general desktop.
And my toy homebrew OS boots to a primitive UI in under 2 seconds after BIOS, and much of that is running interpreted bytecode.
The fact is that a full BIOS + Linux / Windows system is a horrible fucking mess of bloat, but part of it is the price you pay finding and initialising all those millions of third party devices your old/embedded device isn't going to need to worry about.
Still, as always, I believe any engineer's claim not before I get to test it myself.
"Release candidate" means "release this version if it's good enough, otherwise produce another RC", not "something random to put out before a deadline".
It's enough to make me miss IE5. Sleek, simple, didn't have any notion of the unnecessary Web2.0 shit. Optimising the browsing of a web of information was always a lofty goal for a web browser, I guess.
No, not really. For a population to even maintain its size requires every couple to produce over 2 two children.
The average number of children is already more than two per couple, so that's been satisfied. The world's population is increasing.
With the social programs in place in nearly every country in the first world, we need the population to continue growing in order to support our aged.
No, we "need" government and private pension schemes to stop regarding money reserved for old age as something to invest in pork and yachts. We "need" to acknowledge that we're living longer and can work for longer. Don't trot out the third world absurdity of children being needed to look after the grandparents.
So, unless you're big on human extinction or ageism or something,
I'm not assuming that there's any imperative to cause the human race to continue. Or any need to cause it to become extinct. But no currently living human need suffer.
If you choose not to have kids, FINE. There's no need to attack others to affirm your own opinion.
An attack involves knives and such. I was offering an argument using the same tone provided by tehcyder to TheGratefulNet.
Having a child is the most selfish thing anyone can do.
When there are so many others who are in need, and when you have acknowledged that you have the resources to help another helppless human, you create a new one to use resources instead. And you leave existing humans to suffer.
While I have as much concern for a missing child as any other human in need, the parent is almost certainly a cunt. And you're castigating TheGratefulNet for not opening his door to someone he knew he couldn't help (maybe he is actively helping many of the other 6.9 billion) and who was demonstrably violent. You're a cunt too.
Re:Liberals don't actually believe...
on
In the Google Navy
·
· Score: 1
Yes, quite.
Re:Liberals don't actually believe...
on
In the Google Navy
·
· Score: 1
The world is full of liberals/socialists/workers/puritans/humanists who live by their beliefs. You usually don't hear them in the media because they're too busy living off a worker's wage, possibly playing a part in a local union, looking after people in the family and community, etc. to have the money to make their voice sufficiently loud.
Unfortunately, like the undergrad banner-waving protester who says "capitalists r evil hypocrites look at Bush/Hitler!", we have childlike Randroids with the idential "librals r evil hypocrites look at Gore/Stalin!" A nice balance of idealists from every faction seems to make for a nice outcome, with pragmatists acting as the glue to keep everyone stuck together.
(1) Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 5(b)(i). By default, no wireless telegraphy may be intercepted. This is the opposite to US tradition (although this was modified for certain bands), but the basic principle is that UK wireless users get privacy unless they give express permission otherwise.
(2) However you'd like the law to be is irrelevant. And properly securing your home systems and network against a determined eavesdropper is very hard. Hell, until recently simply choosing a moderately secure WiFi protocol required a degree of knowledge far beyond the average user's. The law should not enforce a technocracy.
(3) Yes, EU directives are deliberately and annoyingly vague. But recording of the whole packet was not incidental and you can't just record anything then claim you're only going to use it for statistical purposes.
You're calling me an idiot and the centrepiece of your argument is that I don't trust Google's story.
Google wrote software, gslite, to log a packet provided by kismet along with time and GPS location. They admit this much. Their claim is that they accidentally put their software into production around the world without testing or monitoring of results as they came in. This is hilarious.
Or maybe they found out that an anonymous/ex-employee was about to release the information. Or maybe they wanted to stimulate debate with a carefully engineered announcement of bullshit. Who knows? Without proof, I can't come to the conclusion that Google are honest simpletons - especially given so much evidence to the contrary.
In the real world the messenger bearing bad news gets shot.
Certain mature business environments understand that mistakes are made and know that it is far healthier and more productive for cooperating individuals/departments/firms to be open than to cover up mistakes.
If you're that sceptical, why are you even bothering to ask these questions anyway? How can you trust his answers?
I can't trust his answers, but anyone who is open and honest (and ultimately, if I am a business partner, allows me to inspect his processes and systems) is more likely to be telling the truth.
The real problem is believing people are who they claim they are just because those people can give an SSN and other easily obtainable stuff.
That's a problem, but a separate one. There is no silver bulllet technological solution to the social problem of identity theft, only an arms race.
It doesn't matter if I did or not (though I did), because in my company had contracts authorizing us to use the data however we wanted.
1. "Only following contract/orders" is no excuse, as every single professional organisation will tell you; 2. SSNs/local equivalents are subject to regulation in many jurisdictions. The law trumps your contract.
All the logs were stored on encrypted volumes anyway, in known locations. Since the information never (because of preexisting security) left the company, no reporting was needed.
I see. So I'm supposed to trust your competence here even though you're demonstrably incompetent when it comes to the simpler task of correct logging.
The correct procedure is to issue a notice to anyone whose data you are handling of: (i) what you did wrong; (ii) what you believe the impact was and why; (iii) and how it was corrected. This applies even when your hubris makes you 100% sure that nothing could possibly have gone wrong. Then people have something to work with in the event that you were wrong and data was leaked.
Then there's the time where my team intentionally bypassed security layers to view other personal (protected) numbers, because we needed to see what they looked like to understand a production-only bug...
The correct procedure here is to incorporate test users in the production database, carefully marked and maintained by testing staff acting within prescribed limits as regular users, not to randomly select a customer as a guinea pig for fixing your bugs. Developers are by policy permitted special access to these records alone.
My point is that storing recorded information is ridiculously easy
Indeed. But storing information ethically and legally is hard. If your ability ends at "I can store information" then someone made a grave mistake when employing you.
In a previous life I worked with a firm providing support software to four of the Big 5 (then) accountancy firms. Making sure
(i) all clients / data subjects agree to whatever you do with their data; and
(ii) they're aware of absolutely anything you did which they may not have been agreed to or expected
was a key part of the trust maintained between us and our clients. Maybe it's harder in the litigious US, but an honest firm which is able to admit (to the appropriate parties) when it's fucked up makes for a far healthier business environment than one which hides its problems. No?
The contentious act is recording personal data relating to millions of people across the world without implied or express permission from those people.
It is not reasonable for Google to say, "They couldn't reasonably expect privacy!" Instead, the onus is on Google to explain how WiFi users gave Google permission to collect this data.
Having the ability to eavesdrop is not receiving permission to eavesdrop.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm, competition can only work if the incentive is provided on achievement of part of the goal.
There is no incentive for Wikipedia editors to produce an encyclopedia. Ssimilar applies to any Wikipedia-style project (though not necessarily any project using a Wiki: it's quite possible to have editorial oversight).
Yahoo had its directory back in '94. Lists of lists would be good, where the source of each list is very clear and can be filtered on. Then I don't get an ever-increasing list of biased sources, but can stick to lists prepared by academics, professional organisations, recognised hobbyist groups, etc.
Wikipedia's done a lot to damage the 'net. It used to be that autonomous entities acting under often well-known editorial control would be first ports of call for various subjects, but now everyone wastes their time in the edit war game that is Wikipedia. It's the worst example of centralisation of Internet control - Facebook may be larger, but it is primarily an entertainment service. Google's flawed popularity ranking algorithm (does anyone remember when nerds used to point out that popular does not imply best?) always leads people to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia won't die, but we are at least progressively seeing fewer people take it seriously. May the next decade see it turn into something perceived as valuable to humanity as Facebook.
Awwww yeah.
That post was a whole lot of appeal to emotion (ignored) plus half a dozen examples (quoted below) of corruption and incompetence which are nothing to do with communism and everything to do with typical behaviour of humans in power.
a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them.
So, is your argument that similar inefficiencies and corruptions cannot be found in Western governments and corporations? Or what exactly are you trying to say?
Note that I didn't say "Soviet communism was great; capitalism sucks!" I asked whether the people of Russia are any better off now than before the Soviet Union. I've asked it lots of times to many people. I've heard lots of "yeah it's much better!" from those who have prospered financially, and lots of "no it sucks!" from those who have lost various securities. I've never been provided with a well-researched answer which tries to make an objective study of the change in quality of life throughout the country. Surely someone, somewhere has been interested in answering the question from a sociological/psychological/anthropological point of view rather than taking the opportunity to start a political rant.
Any evidence that 141 million people spied on each other? I'm happy to compare and contrast Soviet surveillance in the 1980s with US surveillance today, if it puts things into context.
Perhaps you're thinking of the GDR? We're not talking about whether Soviet satellite states are better off today.
Were there any advantages to the Russian people of the fall of the Soviet Union? Ignore the half a dozen oligarchs whose limits on greedy and corrupt behaviour were lifted. Consider the other 141 million people.
Although the landscape has changed slightly in the UK over the past decade as government has prodded banks to provide basic accounts, there were/are a shocking number of people which banks won't open accounts for: at the one end we have illegal immigrants, then people in financial trouble (and not everyone who gets into debt managed money poorly!), then people who were victims of ID fraud, then those for whom computer repeatedly says no - some faceless algorithm (e.g. National Hunter) has wrongly decided that they're some risk. Oh, and make sure you have paid for a full passport or driver's licence.
Then, over the past decade, you have anti-money-laundering regulations meaning automated algorithms flagging people up for non-standard banking activity. The response by banks when the accounts owner hasn't got large deposits or is otherwise profitable is simply to close the accounts with ~30 days' notice. HSBC had a fairly well-known spate of this a few years ago, but Natwest and Barclays do it too (and probably Lloyds - I don't really pay attention to them).
I'm lucky never to have experienced any of the above problems, and I'm in a position where it probably wouldn't affect me. But I'm very much aware of what can go wrong.
And everything assumes that you are prepared to accept the government's system of money to the extent that you have spare cash lying around to pay for usable Internet access. Now you could try working outside the system cash-in-hand, and if you're sufficiently successful and sneaky then you can still have what you want - but the same applies anywhere. For the average person, however, this means a "legal" job, i.e. paying your taxes. At this point you're "in the regime" no matter how free you feel. How high up you are is labelled perhaps as Party affiliation in Soviet style, and labelled worker/middle/upper class in the Western style. It's true that the West still has a larger (dwindling) middle tier than NK, but the principle's the same.
Strictly speaking, the same thing applies in the West. Those who choose not to follow their government's system of money/tax/etc aren't going to be getting Internet access any time soon.
As always, it's leaders and followers of the local regime who get access to the resources which in turn make them feel free. The rest are either marginalised or incarcerated. It's just harder for people in the West to accept how limited they are in how they may interact in order for them to enjoy the benefits of modern life.
The irony is that a slideshow is one of the most time-consuming ways of absorbing information.
as the necessary result of supporting a wide array of capabilities (not necessarily hardware)
Explain.
BIOSes (especially RAID) are the slowest part these days, and UEFI is hopefully going to combat that.
Many modern BIOS implementations are just a UEFI implementation with a translation layer. The "problem" is the firmware self-testing and doing lots of patient device detection/initialisation - there's no inherent reason UEFI would improve that.
...booted in about 5 seconds, and that was to a general desktop.
And my toy homebrew OS boots to a primitive UI in under 2 seconds after BIOS, and much of that is running interpreted bytecode.
The fact is that a full BIOS + Linux / Windows system is a horrible fucking mess of bloat, but part of it is the price you pay finding and initialising all those millions of third party devices your old/embedded device isn't going to need to worry about.
Still, as always, I believe any engineer's claim not before I get to test it myself.
"Release candidate" means "release this version if it's good enough, otherwise produce another RC", not "something random to put out before a deadline".
It's enough to make me miss IE5. Sleek, simple, didn't have any notion of the unnecessary Web2.0 shit. Optimising the browsing of a web of information was always a lofty goal for a web browser, I guess.
No, not really. For a population to even maintain its size requires every couple to produce over 2 two children.
The average number of children is already more than two per couple, so that's been satisfied. The world's population is increasing.
With the social programs in place in nearly every country in the first world, we need the population to continue growing in order to support our aged.
No, we "need" government and private pension schemes to stop regarding money reserved for old age as something to invest in pork and yachts. We "need" to acknowledge that we're living longer and can work for longer. Don't trot out the third world absurdity of children being needed to look after the grandparents.
So, unless you're big on human extinction or ageism or something,
I'm not assuming that there's any imperative to cause the human race to continue. Or any need to cause it to become extinct. But no currently living human need suffer.
If you choose not to have kids, FINE. There's no need to attack others to affirm your own opinion.
An attack involves knives and such. I was offering an argument using the same tone provided by tehcyder to TheGratefulNet.
Having a child is the most selfish thing anyone can do.
When there are so many others who are in need, and when you have acknowledged that you have the resources to help another helppless human, you create a new one to use resources instead. And you leave existing humans to suffer.
While I have as much concern for a missing child as any other human in need, the parent is almost certainly a cunt. And you're castigating TheGratefulNet for not opening his door to someone he knew he couldn't help (maybe he is actively helping many of the other 6.9 billion) and who was demonstrably violent. You're a cunt too.
Yes, quite.
The world is full of liberals/socialists/workers/puritans/humanists who live by their beliefs. You usually don't hear them in the media because they're too busy living off a worker's wage, possibly playing a part in a local union, looking after people in the family and community, etc. to have the money to make their voice sufficiently loud.
Unfortunately, like the undergrad banner-waving protester who says "capitalists r evil hypocrites look at Bush/Hitler!", we have childlike Randroids with the idential "librals r evil hypocrites look at Gore/Stalin!" A nice balance of idealists from every faction seems to make for a nice outcome, with pragmatists acting as the glue to keep everyone stuck together.
My experience with C++ developers in the late 90's was that 99% of them knew only a tiny, tiny percentage of the language.
My experience is that 99% of people muddle through life with a combination of hubris and clandestine effort.
A similar proportion express that their knowledge and talent is well above average and insist that almost every challenge is trivial.
This group is overrepresented on Slashdot.
If I was an alien, I'd invade the US first, and only the US.
You appear to be considering UK law.
(1) Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 5(b)(i). By default, no wireless telegraphy may be intercepted. This is the opposite to US tradition (although this was modified for certain bands), but the basic principle is that UK wireless users get privacy unless they give express permission otherwise.
(2) However you'd like the law to be is irrelevant. And properly securing your home systems and network against a determined eavesdropper is very hard. Hell, until recently simply choosing a moderately secure WiFi protocol required a degree of knowledge far beyond the average user's. The law should not enforce a technocracy.
(3) Yes, EU directives are deliberately and annoyingly vague. But recording of the whole packet was not incidental and you can't just record anything then claim you're only going to use it for statistical purposes.
You're calling me an idiot and the centrepiece of your argument is that I don't trust Google's story.
Google wrote software, gslite, to log a packet provided by kismet along with time and GPS location. They admit this much. Their claim is that they accidentally put their software into production around the world without testing or monitoring of results as they came in. This is hilarious.
Or maybe they found out that an anonymous/ex-employee was about to release the information. Or maybe they wanted to stimulate debate with a carefully engineered announcement of bullshit. Who knows? Without proof, I can't come to the conclusion that Google are honest simpletons - especially given so much evidence to the contrary.
In the real world the messenger bearing bad news gets shot.
Certain mature business environments understand that mistakes are made and know that it is far healthier and more productive for cooperating individuals/departments/firms to be open than to cover up mistakes.
If you're that sceptical, why are you even bothering to ask these questions anyway? How can you trust his answers?
I can't trust his answers, but anyone who is open and honest (and ultimately, if I am a business partner, allows me to inspect his processes and systems) is more likely to be telling the truth.
The real problem is believing people are who they claim they are just because those people can give an SSN and other easily obtainable stuff.
That's a problem, but a separate one. There is no silver bulllet technological solution to the social problem of identity theft, only an arms race.
It doesn't matter if I did or not (though I did), because in my company had contracts authorizing us to use the data however we wanted.
1. "Only following contract/orders" is no excuse, as every single professional organisation will tell you;
2. SSNs/local equivalents are subject to regulation in many jurisdictions. The law trumps your contract.
All the logs were stored on encrypted volumes anyway, in known locations. Since the information never (because of preexisting security) left the company, no reporting was needed.
I see. So I'm supposed to trust your competence here even though you're demonstrably incompetent when it comes to the simpler task of correct logging.
The correct procedure is to issue a notice to anyone whose data you are handling of: (i) what you did wrong; (ii) what you believe the impact was and why; (iii) and how it was corrected. This applies even when your hubris makes you 100% sure that nothing could possibly have gone wrong. Then people have something to work with in the event that you were wrong and data was leaked.
Then there's the time where my team intentionally bypassed security layers to view other personal (protected) numbers, because we needed to see what they looked like to understand a production-only bug...
The correct procedure here is to incorporate test users in the production database, carefully marked and maintained by testing staff acting within prescribed limits as regular users, not to randomly select a customer as a guinea pig for fixing your bugs. Developers are by policy permitted special access to these records alone.
My point is that storing recorded information is ridiculously easy
Indeed. But storing information ethically and legally is hard. If your ability ends at "I can store information" then someone made a grave mistake when employing you.
In a previous life I worked with a firm providing support software to four of the Big 5 (then) accountancy firms. Making sure
(i) all clients / data subjects agree to whatever you do with their data; and
(ii) they're aware of absolutely anything you did which they may not have been agreed to or expected
was a key part of the trust maintained between us and our clients. Maybe it's harder in the litigious US, but an honest firm which is able to admit (to the appropriate parties) when it's fucked up makes for a far healthier business environment than one which hides its problems. No?
The contentious act is recording personal data relating to millions of people across the world without implied or express permission from those people.
It is not reasonable for Google to say, "They couldn't reasonably expect privacy!" Instead, the onus is on Google to explain how WiFi users gave Google permission to collect this data.
Having the ability to eavesdrop is not receiving permission to eavesdrop.