Let's say you have a system that has a 99.9% accuracy rate. What that means is, 99.9% of the time, it catches the terrorist if s/he goes across your magic line. And let's say you have 1 terrorist per million. What this means is that for every million people that cross the line, 1,000 people will be pulled aside for interrogation. Your 99.9% accurate profiling system is 99.9% inaccurate when it comes to discriminating the terrorist from the 9,999 look-alikes.
Why is the Internet not on the list?! Over half of it, anyway. FreeBSD. Linux. Apache. PHP. Embedded devices, routers, switches, wifi; A lot of this is open source too. They keep the networks running, and without their contributions it wouldn't exist. But who cares about infrastructure when--Oooh look, a kitty!
When the evening news is "brought to you by Amalgamated Profits, Inc.!", don't expect to see any coverage of that company's shady dealings.
I believe the problem may be with your expectations rather than reality. Wiki is not a slave to the lost revenue should one of several hundred of its advertisers get its panties in a knot.
Why does everyone think as soon as you start to throw up billboards and advertisements that the organization in question has become unethical? Wiki provides a service to the community. Do you think those services are free? The internet has many services that are free except for advertising, simply because publishing information is very cheap (but not free). Even this website you're reading this comment on is supported by advertising. I don't think wikipedia should be any different from a million other websites that are supported by advertisements.
There are only a few other options here;
Micro-payments. Hahahaha! lolz. Great idea, but where's the infrastructure? In other news, where are those fleets of alternative-fuel cars? Oh yeah... On the drawing board, waiting for the infrastructure to be built.
Fee-based. Sure, charge maybe $12 a year for access to wikipedia... aaaaand 95% of their userbase says "Oh screw that" and the site tanks. This is pretty much committing suicide online to attempt this; Very few websites have survived the transition.
Subsidized. You know, like the BBC. Quality content, paid for by your tax dollars. Ah, wait... This is the United States and we ere hates dem dar communist bullshiat.
Clearly, advertisements is the best way to go for wiki.
Oh, come on. This is from an organization that cut funding for terrorism just before 9/11 to add resources to software piracy. Do you really think if they had the brains do do cryptanalysis they'd...
Ah, at least on the Motorola RAZR v2, if you remove the SIM card, the phone will not be able to dial or perform any functions. It will simply stall at "Insert SIM card," and not boot.
Speaking on behalf of the poor bastards that have played with Notes: Please don't put him on our team. Really, Notes is like the last kid to get picked when we're making teams. He drops the ball lots and he cries even when we play tag only. We only let him play at all because the teacher makes us.
The problem isn't the cell phone network per-se, but rather the inability of these providers to peer with each other. AT&T may have been down, but what about T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the United States? When a major failure like this occurs that locks out only some cell phone users in a given area, the problem is not technology but politics.
Why, given how critical cell phones are during an emergency, this is allowed to continue is beyond me. Congress seems to care more about protecting corporate profits and reputation than providing a robust cellular network for its citizens. Hey, homeland security, are you listening? Fix this.
The reason linux keeps finding niche applications and not being a major player hasn't changed in 8 years: Applications. Users don't care about the operating system. Linux can be hacked fairly easily to emulate or include the UI features of any other major operating systems currently in use. It comes down to application support. When Microsoft Office comes to linux, when games are routinely released with linux binaries, and when software like Adobe Illustrator and internet plugins "just work" under linux, then you'll have a linux desktop.
Linux could have all the functionality and intuitiveness of Windows 3.1 and people would still use it if it had the application support. And please don't tell me that The GIMP = Photoshop, or that many of the free software replacements are "just as good". It doesn't matter! All that matters is the users' comfort level. And they stick with what they're used to, even if it costs a lot more and isn't as good.
But people keep pinning their hopes on the hardware, or the security robustness, or the feature set, or whatever else they have control over. Face it-- If you want Linux on the desktop the community needs to make a concession that it ideologically cannot afford to make -- which is to start marching to the tune of the large businesses that design these killer apps. When you convince Adobe to release all their products on Linux, and Blizzard to release their games on Linux, etc., then we'll be getting somewhere. But the community won't, because those companies have already made it clear what their terms and conditions are and we won't compromise.
You have read the recall notice on that, right? It seems every ACME device ever made fails spectacularly when used. The only thing that keeps them in business is a large legal and marketing department. I'd suggest you get a refund ASAP.
Your last few arguments are valid, but with the right monitoring software, you CAN lock a system down. It starts at the BIOS level. If the system admin sees that one of the computers is doing something that it shouldn't be doing, then the admin can lock the BIOS, preventing the computer from booting.
I've said it a million times before, but I'll say it again: If I have physical access to the machine, it's mine. All your magic tricks will only slow me down. At that point it's just a question of who knows more.
The geeks in the classes will make a killing doing clean installs for those who can't figure out how to do it themselves. It will also install a very healthy antipathy for authority, what isn't already created by the school officials' other, similarly misguided, actions.
Yeah, until it breaks and they take it to their computer aide to fix, and they notice the machine's been wiped clean. "Hello, Mrs. Johnson? This is the computer aide..." That road ends in tears.
... And yet just two posts ago you were saying that I should go play with my dolls if I noticed any of this. O_o You're going to give us all whiplash if you keep it up.
My mom recently caught my kid sister (age 12) visiting some "inappropriate sites", and immediately went off the deep end, asking about filtering, auditing, locking the system down, the works. So we talked about it, and I let it sit for a few days, then invited my friend over and we had a "big sister" chat. And then I showed her how to delete entries from her browsing history.
Let me tell you right now -- there's no way to lock a system down. There's no way to filter, audit, etc., to a kid. Besides, kids are bored most of the time anyway and all you're giving them is a challenge. So the way I see it, you've got two options -- either you act as the gatekeeper, or you act as the guide. You can't be both.
The gatekeeper is the filters, the auditing, the monitoring -- in short, the parent. Is this a role you want to play as school administrators? Are you prepared for the legal responsibility? I know you're going to be catching flack from people like my mom who are going to throw a knipshit the moment their precious snowflake gets busted reading harry potter slashfic, or realize that google image search for hentai or eucci brings up cartoon-depicted sex acts. They'll be at your school board meetings, on your voice mail, and holding the ears of everyone they can get a hold of. Visualize that for a minute. The state of the art in filtering and monitoring cannot and never will fully succeed in its stated goals, if only because it's a shifting target and defining "appropriate for minors" is about as useful an excercise as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Your second role is equally perilous. You be the guide -- which means educating those students. This is the computer equivalent of sex ed classes. You need to tell them what's online (and I mean what's really out there), what the risks are, and how they can protect themselves. You need to instill in them the ability to make moral and ethical decisions about their conduct online, with the explicit understanding that you can't stop them from going where they shouldn't -- only that they know what the consequences are (or could be). And here again, the parents are going to throw a knipshit and want your head over religious matters, etc., and flying spaghetti monster we go.
My advice is to offer some limited education to the students about what's out there, how to stay safe, and offer filtering and monitoring software for the parents to use. Ultimately you need to get the responsibility for how the students use these systems off your shoulders, or you will find yourself in a very special kind of hell that will do neither your school district nor your career any good. The key words here is "informed consent." You make a good faith effort to educate, cover your ass with disclaimers, and leave the final decision to the parents. Do not give these people any way to wiggle out of responsibility for their darling little crotch-fruit. It's blunt, but there it is -- you have to look out for yourself here first.
If you go see the shuttle up close and your first thought is that it has a bad paint job, maybe you should just stick to playing with dolls.
Or maybe you should be less of a douchebag. The fact that something is an engineering marvel doesn't mean much to some people, but that doesn't mean that lessens the impact it has for them. Who hasn't looked up at a bird in the sky and wanted to journey? Who hasn't seen the stars and wished upon them? When I look at the shuttle, I don't see an engineering marvel. I see the realization of over twenty thousand years of human beings dreaming of having their own wings and flying through the heavens. And you know what -- I think I'm allowed to say it does have a bad paint job, and I could care less about the mechanical guts of it. That's not why it's beautiful.
Tanks, bombers, subs, and all that jazz you like--You can love them if you want, call them awesome. They're not special to me, they're just made so some people can kill other people. I'll stick with my dolls, and if you don't mind terribly, I'll be doing it in that badly painted bird over there that was built with hopes and dreams, instead of fears and insecurities.
Most military and government equipment only looks cool from afar. Up close, it looks like hammered dog meat.
Maybe it'll get some proper respect to the risks those people took climbing into it with several thousand tons of rocket fuel burning at their ass. I rather doubt many people would have the guts to fly the first airplane either once they realized they could put their foot through the wing without any effort.
Or maybe he did catch it and thinks that sort of thing belongs on Reddit?
Highly doubtful. People who post comments to the effect of "but this doesn't belong on slashdot!" aren't terribly bright. If it doesn't belong here, then the moderators will rank it accordingly. Moving on...
I am Government Man, sent from the Government. There is nothing to see here. Please move along. Pay no attention to the man being arrested behind me for disclosing how to build a supercomputer using gaming consoles and beaten by the fine men and women of the LAPD. That man is, in fact, a terrorist, conspiring against the great monied corporations of this country and placing advanced (giggle) technology into the hands of people who could use this to create a nucul--nucle--nuculu--big bad device. I am Government Man, and I thank you citizen.
Disclaimer: Exportation of supercomputers is prohibited by federal law. Some restrictions may apply. For full rules and details, visit our website at www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/wa09_smith/991027sp.html. Your computer will now self destruct in 10..9..8..
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you have a system that has a 99.9% accuracy rate. What that means is, 99.9% of the time, it catches the terrorist if s/he goes across your magic line. And let's say you have 1 terrorist per million. What this means is that for every million people that cross the line, 1,000 people will be pulled aside for interrogation. Your 99.9% accurate profiling system is 99.9% inaccurate when it comes to discriminating the terrorist from the 9,999 look-alikes.
Oops.
Why is the Internet not on the list?! Over half of it, anyway. FreeBSD. Linux. Apache. PHP. Embedded devices, routers, switches, wifi; A lot of this is open source too. They keep the networks running, and without their contributions it wouldn't exist. But who cares about infrastructure when--Oooh look, a kitty!
When the evening news is "brought to you by Amalgamated Profits, Inc.!", don't expect to see any coverage of that company's shady dealings.
I believe the problem may be with your expectations rather than reality. Wiki is not a slave to the lost revenue should one of several hundred of its advertisers get its panties in a knot.
Why does everyone think as soon as you start to throw up billboards and advertisements that the organization in question has become unethical? Wiki provides a service to the community. Do you think those services are free? The internet has many services that are free except for advertising, simply because publishing information is very cheap (but not free). Even this website you're reading this comment on is supported by advertising. I don't think wikipedia should be any different from a million other websites that are supported by advertisements.
There are only a few other options here;
Micro-payments. Hahahaha! lolz. Great idea, but where's the infrastructure? In other news, where are those fleets of alternative-fuel cars? Oh yeah... On the drawing board, waiting for the infrastructure to be built.
Fee-based. Sure, charge maybe $12 a year for access to wikipedia... aaaaand 95% of their userbase says "Oh screw that" and the site tanks. This is pretty much committing suicide online to attempt this; Very few websites have survived the transition.
Subsidized. You know, like the BBC. Quality content, paid for by your tax dollars. Ah, wait... This is the United States and we ere hates dem dar communist bullshiat.
Clearly, advertisements is the best way to go for wiki.
I would buy you a pint if I could, you poor bastard.
Six months of AI programming will make you think there is a God. Six months of tech support and you'll know there isn't.
Oh, come on. This is from an organization that cut funding for terrorism just before 9/11 to add resources to software piracy. Do you really think if they had the brains do do cryptanalysis they'd...
oh wait.
I suppose they are looking for brains, huh.
Ah, at least on the Motorola RAZR v2, if you remove the SIM card, the phone will not be able to dial or perform any functions. It will simply stall at "Insert SIM card," and not boot.
Speaking on behalf of the poor bastards that have played with Notes: Please don't put him on our team. Really, Notes is like the last kid to get picked when we're making teams. He drops the ball lots and he cries even when we play tag only. We only let him play at all because the teacher makes us.
The problem isn't the cell phone network per-se, but rather the inability of these providers to peer with each other. AT&T may have been down, but what about T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the United States? When a major failure like this occurs that locks out only some cell phone users in a given area, the problem is not technology but politics.
Why, given how critical cell phones are during an emergency, this is allowed to continue is beyond me. Congress seems to care more about protecting corporate profits and reputation than providing a robust cellular network for its citizens. Hey, homeland security, are you listening? Fix this.
The reason linux keeps finding niche applications and not being a major player hasn't changed in 8 years: Applications. Users don't care about the operating system. Linux can be hacked fairly easily to emulate or include the UI features of any other major operating systems currently in use. It comes down to application support. When Microsoft Office comes to linux, when games are routinely released with linux binaries, and when software like Adobe Illustrator and internet plugins "just work" under linux, then you'll have a linux desktop.
Linux could have all the functionality and intuitiveness of Windows 3.1 and people would still use it if it had the application support. And please don't tell me that The GIMP = Photoshop, or that many of the free software replacements are "just as good". It doesn't matter! All that matters is the users' comfort level. And they stick with what they're used to, even if it costs a lot more and isn't as good.
But people keep pinning their hopes on the hardware, or the security robustness, or the feature set, or whatever else they have control over. Face it-- If you want Linux on the desktop the community needs to make a concession that it ideologically cannot afford to make -- which is to start marching to the tune of the large businesses that design these killer apps. When you convince Adobe to release all their products on Linux, and Blizzard to release their games on Linux, etc., then we'll be getting somewhere. But the community won't, because those companies have already made it clear what their terms and conditions are and we won't compromise.
...ACME Megalaser of Doom plugged in overnight...
You have read the recall notice on that, right? It seems every ACME device ever made fails spectacularly when used. The only thing that keeps them in business is a large legal and marketing department. I'd suggest you get a refund ASAP.
Your last few arguments are valid, but with the right monitoring software, you CAN lock a system down. It starts at the BIOS level. If the system admin sees that one of the computers is doing something that it shouldn't be doing, then the admin can lock the BIOS, preventing the computer from booting.
I've said it a million times before, but I'll say it again: If I have physical access to the machine, it's mine. All your magic tricks will only slow me down. At that point it's just a question of who knows more.
Those tanks and bombers are the reason we don't have to stop being douchebags. As someone said "An MLRS means never having to say you're sorry".
Those tanks and bombers are also the reason you can only afford Budweiser, ramen noodles, and live in your mother's basement.
The geeks in the classes will make a killing doing clean installs for those who can't figure out how to do it themselves. It will also install a very healthy antipathy for authority, what isn't already created by the school officials' other, similarly misguided, actions.
Yeah, until it breaks and they take it to their computer aide to fix, and they notice the machine's been wiped clean. "Hello, Mrs. Johnson? This is the computer aide..." That road ends in tears.
... And yet just two posts ago you were saying that I should go play with my dolls if I noticed any of this. O_o You're going to give us all whiplash if you keep it up.
My mom recently caught my kid sister (age 12) visiting some "inappropriate sites", and immediately went off the deep end, asking about filtering, auditing, locking the system down, the works. So we talked about it, and I let it sit for a few days, then invited my friend over and we had a "big sister" chat. And then I showed her how to delete entries from her browsing history.
Let me tell you right now -- there's no way to lock a system down. There's no way to filter, audit, etc., to a kid. Besides, kids are bored most of the time anyway and all you're giving them is a challenge. So the way I see it, you've got two options -- either you act as the gatekeeper, or you act as the guide. You can't be both.
The gatekeeper is the filters, the auditing, the monitoring -- in short, the parent. Is this a role you want to play as school administrators? Are you prepared for the legal responsibility? I know you're going to be catching flack from people like my mom who are going to throw a knipshit the moment their precious snowflake gets busted reading harry potter slashfic, or realize that google image search for hentai or eucci brings up cartoon-depicted sex acts. They'll be at your school board meetings, on your voice mail, and holding the ears of everyone they can get a hold of. Visualize that for a minute. The state of the art in filtering and monitoring cannot and never will fully succeed in its stated goals, if only because it's a shifting target and defining "appropriate for minors" is about as useful an excercise as re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Your second role is equally perilous. You be the guide -- which means educating those students. This is the computer equivalent of sex ed classes. You need to tell them what's online (and I mean what's really out there), what the risks are, and how they can protect themselves. You need to instill in them the ability to make moral and ethical decisions about their conduct online, with the explicit understanding that you can't stop them from going where they shouldn't -- only that they know what the consequences are (or could be). And here again, the parents are going to throw a knipshit and want your head over religious matters, etc., and flying spaghetti monster we go.
My advice is to offer some limited education to the students about what's out there, how to stay safe, and offer filtering and monitoring software for the parents to use. Ultimately you need to get the responsibility for how the students use these systems off your shoulders, or you will find yourself in a very special kind of hell that will do neither your school district nor your career any good. The key words here is "informed consent." You make a good faith effort to educate, cover your ass with disclaimers, and leave the final decision to the parents. Do not give these people any way to wiggle out of responsibility for their darling little crotch-fruit. It's blunt, but there it is -- you have to look out for yourself here first.
That's the expense to put it in orbit. It wouldn't cost as much to just to fly the thing.
"flight" is a relative term when dealing with the shuttle. It doesn't fly so much as fall in a controlled fashion.
If you go see the shuttle up close and your first thought is that it has a bad paint job, maybe you should just stick to playing with dolls.
Or maybe you should be less of a douchebag. The fact that something is an engineering marvel doesn't mean much to some people, but that doesn't mean that lessens the impact it has for them. Who hasn't looked up at a bird in the sky and wanted to journey? Who hasn't seen the stars and wished upon them? When I look at the shuttle, I don't see an engineering marvel. I see the realization of over twenty thousand years of human beings dreaming of having their own wings and flying through the heavens. And you know what -- I think I'm allowed to say it does have a bad paint job, and I could care less about the mechanical guts of it. That's not why it's beautiful.
Tanks, bombers, subs, and all that jazz you like--You can love them if you want, call them awesome. They're not special to me, they're just made so some people can kill other people. I'll stick with my dolls, and if you don't mind terribly, I'll be doing it in that badly painted bird over there that was built with hopes and dreams, instead of fears and insecurities.
Most military and government equipment only looks cool from afar. Up close, it looks like hammered dog meat.
Maybe it'll get some proper respect to the risks those people took climbing into it with several thousand tons of rocket fuel burning at their ass. I rather doubt many people would have the guts to fly the first airplane either once they realized they could put their foot through the wing without any effort.
They're selling the space shuttle--But why? There's already a glut of novelty ashtrays on the market. They won't get much for it.
Or maybe he did catch it and thinks that sort of thing belongs on Reddit?
Highly doubtful. People who post comments to the effect of "but this doesn't belong on slashdot!" aren't terribly bright. If it doesn't belong here, then the moderators will rank it accordingly. Moving on...
Automatic address assignment on IPv6 turns the 48-bit MAC address into a portion of the IPv6 address.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Please....please go back to reddit.
You first. :P It's not my fault you didn't catch the Invader Zim reference.
I am Government Man, sent from the Government. There is nothing to see here. Please move along. Pay no attention to the man being arrested behind me for disclosing how to build a supercomputer using gaming consoles and beaten by the fine men and women of the LAPD. That man is, in fact, a terrorist, conspiring against the great monied corporations of this country and placing advanced (giggle) technology into the hands of people who could use this to create a nucul--nucle--nuculu--big bad device. I am Government Man, and I thank you citizen.
Disclaimer: Exportation of supercomputers is prohibited by federal law. Some restrictions may apply. For full rules and details, visit our website at www.house.gov/apps/list/speech/wa09_smith/991027sp.html. Your computer will now self destruct in 10..9..8..