GM is functionally incompetent when it comes to the internet. Tesla is new, small, agile, and responsive to the market. GM is still stuck on the couch with its hand in the chip bag, bitching about how easy kids have it these days.
Get off the couch GM, lose 50 pounds, and divorce yourself from the idea that you're owed something. Keep it up and this new generation that seems to have little interest in cars, preferring to bike everywhere and sees no particular status in owning a new car will put your fat ass outta business.
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
While this is true, I think the author was pointing out one of the 'flaws' of capitalism; Technology and infrastructure makes offering such amenities a very cheap proposition. And yet, you wind up paying through the nose for them in certain situations; It is basically a misrepresentation of the true cost of the good or service being provided. They can say the hotel room with everything a "less price sensitive" customer is looking for is offered at a competitive room rate, but the room rate quoted, and which is being compared against with other providers, is not the actual cost you will pay for it. This makes straight comparisons between different offerings difficult; It does not encourage a truly competitive marketplace, because it hides costs. It's sortof like the old axiom "Give away the razor, charge for the blades", except in this case, you can only see the cost of the razor, not the blades.
This is fundamentally anti-competitive and is not a truly 'free' marketplace, because price comparison is made very difficult in an effort to trap the less savvy agent. While "caveat emptor" may be a nice rebuttal in theory, in practice those uttering this phrase are making a far-reaching assumption: That the buyer is capable of being aware. Uttering these words is like saying "Oh, there's a minefield over there" after you've already stepped on a mine. If one truly supports the free market, then such predatory pricing tactics cannot be endorsed.
A true free market system works best when all the agents have equal access to the data needed to make informed decisions; This ensures true competition, which is the driver of innovation. By obscuring these details and attaching hidden fees, it contributes to market inefficiency and hinders competition -- you can't be sure what you're paying for is at a competitive price, and thus, competition is less prevalent. Less competition means greater inefficiency. It means less trade. Those dollars aren't working as hard, and while it may benefit the individual vendors participating in such deception, it harms the entire economy.
Read the summary: they expected this but the tablets that were delivered turned out not to have the toughened screens that the contract required them to have so it's the vendor that screwed up.
It wouldn't have helped; Gorilla glass protects against scratches. If you drop the device onto a concrete floor, it's just as dead no matter what kind of covering you put over the LCD.
go with the lowest bidder. If you're going to make notebooks for school, make them so they can withstand those things found in schools -- students.
Umm, these are tablets not notebooks. From my experience with my little sister, teenagers do not treat their electronics very well -- Gorilla glass wouldn't help much. All the glass does is keep the display from being scratched. It won't help if you drop the device, or if it is subjected to tortion stress (twisted). Both of these will deform the case, and in turn the LCD. It doesn't take much to destroy an LCD. Sitting on it. Dropping it onto a hardwood or concrete floor. The list goes on. And teenagers don't just kill the devices through these simple physical forces...
My sister routinely drags her iPad into the bathroom to listen to music while she takes a shower. I die a little inside thinking of all that humidity corroding the insides. And I can't tell you how many times she's yanked the power adapter out by the cord, or grabbed it, and forgetting it was still plugged in, tore the adapter right out of the wall socket. Without inspecting one of these Amplify tablets, I don't know if this is the case, but with ipads the connector has a spring to hold it in place -- which means the cord and the connector in the device gets bent and mangled after doing this a few times. I've replaced the power adapter for her about 5 times now. She hasn't even had it two years. Her current one is held together with electrical tape and numerous warnings that this will be the last one. She still comes to me every few weeks after it shorts out and dies from the latest careless act.
But god help you if you tell slashdot this. It's a hanging offense to state the obvious around here...:/
If you actually read the message, you'll see what it is. It isn't a demand, thus fails the test of "legal demand".
*facepalm* (re-reads) *facepalm*
we believe that someone you are providing registration services for is doing something illegal and has invalid registration data." Then it makes a request. "Please investigate whether your customer is violating your terms of service
Legal, def.: of, based on, or concerned with the law. Demand, def:.1. ask authoritatively or brusquely. 2. an insistent and peremptory request, made as if by right.
No, I dare say, it meets the literal and true definition of a legal demand.
In short, someone in big business has been crying to their rent-a-cop again.
Why not? It costs nothing to file a complaint and give some bluster. It's not like they're going to be fined for submitting a false report, engaging in mob-style business tactics, etc. Every business should do this, not just big ones. Now, back to the article...
Who decides what is illegal?
People who are above the law.
What makes somebody a criminal?
Anyone who is upsetting the status quo.
...if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question.
No, it is a trivial question. You're just young and naive. Sorry; I wish I had better news, and could tell you life was fair, but to quote the Man in Black in Princess Bride, "Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.â
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law,
ICANN was established in 1998, and gained limited international participation in 2005. There has never been a court of law to decide who gets to own a name on the internet. It's far worse than a court; This shit gets decided by committee.
...as opposed to 'some guy on the internet' sending emails.
This isn't an e-mail. This is a business making a legal demand. You may be unaware of this, but anyone can make almost any legal demand in the United States, and indeed most westernized countries, without any substantial liability. You can be sued for anything as well -- color of your hair, look of your face, body fat content... and you have to show up to contest it. Now in those examples, it would be declared a frivolous action (in the USA) because it's obviously and patently absurd, but if you give it even the slightest hint of legitimacy, you can avoid that. My point is that the legal system is massively balanced to favor people who have wealth. You can abuse and harass the crap out of people, practically indefinately, if you're willing to kick a few schekles into the system. And... some wealthy individuals and businesses opt to do exactly that.
Now, winning your case... that's a whole 'nother can of worms. But when there's no penalty for losing save the filing fee and associated legal costs of retaining counsel, and a financial incentive if you win, then the equation is quite simple: If your costs divided by the risk is less than the benefit multiplied by the risk... it's good business.
While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here."
Except that's exactly how ICANN is structured to operate. Is it unfair? Yup. Anti-competitive? Certainly. Corrupt? Arguments can be made. US-centric? Nailed. Hopelessly incompetent? Arguments can be made. Your tax dollars at work.:/
Wait until one of the aggrieved nations decides to do a 'limited kinetic action' on this facility - only to cripple the capabilities of a program that's being run in violation of international law.
You'll be waiting a very long time. The last time we were bombed was during WWII, by Japan. It was called Pearl Harbor. The only military attacks on the mainland were also during the same timeframe by what could lovingly be called "fail balloons" launched by Japan with incendiary devices and carried over the mainland, where they would land and cause fires. Only about a half-dozen of these were reported or suspected to have actually landed, and none of them landed on anything of any value... A tree here. A cow there.
You may well recall what happened to Japan after they creamed the pacific fleet: We built, tested, and then detonated a nuclear weapon their head. Nobody has tried since. And that was just a firecracker compared to what we have today sitting on launchpads all over the country.
One thing worth noting though is that often these systems use ancient control schemes.
The control systems were state of the art when it was built: In the early 80s. These reactors have a life expectancy of 50 years. They generally don't get a refit until halfway through that service life, when many of its non-structural components like pipes, tubing, turbines, and pumps, have degraded to the point that the ongoing maintenance cost exceeds the replacement cost.
I have no doubt that they are reliable and have failsafes, but a physical switch doesn't have a "are you sure" dialog or stop to ask for an admin password.
No, it has about a year's worth of training, and time in a simulator ensuring that every plant operator has a full and complete understanding of the machine they'll be working with. It also has multiple people checking each others' work. It also has ongoing training and random inspections by an independent government body, as well as regular inspections by management, to ensure operational safety and compliance with the protocols they were trained in.
You're right that a switch doesn't have a dialog box that pops up when you push it... but these buttons aren't being pushed by Joe Average just following a three ring binder. There has been only a handful of cases in which this training failed, and it took numerous failures at all levels to allow it to happen; And the systems these events happened at were immediately pulled from active service or retrofitted so that it couldn't happen again.
The nuclear industry's safety record is unmatched in the larger industry of energy production. Every year we tolerate a major oil spill. Every year we hear about gas stations experiencing catastrophic failure of safety systems leading to massive neighborhood-sized fireballs. We only hear about nuclear accidents about once every decade or so, and the majority of them result in a big mess and lots of costs for the plant operators, but do not endanger public safety or harm the environment.
All that said... Fukishima has been mismanaged from day one, and a lot of the failure is down to Japanese culture; An inability to be transparent and admit when there's a problem. This retiscence to work the problem is what led to the disaster, and what has since amplified the failure enormously.
The international community in the hours and days following the disaster repeatedly offered assistance, including the US Army Corp of Engineers, who were dispatched to an aircraft carrier who was sitting about 200 miles off the coast in international waters with a full team prepped and on standby, ready to assist in evacuation and containment efforts. These were some of the most highly trained people on the planet; They had each spent years training for it. They were a phone call and 30 minutes away by helicopter from being on the scene and ready to assist.
The phone never rang.
To this very day, the plant managers continue to underfund the cleanup and containment efforts. They continue to keep insufficient equipment and personnel onsite. They have no published plan on how they plan on cleaning up the affected area. Even the Russians, after Chernobyl, put their entire military into containment and isolation of the area... and while many people died, and they were not adequately trained, or equipped, they sent people in by the busload to try and stop it from getting worse. Now I'm not saying Japan should have done that... thrown away thousands of lives to a radiological inferno, like the Russians did... especially not when state of the art equipment and well-trained personnel were ready to assist and knew how to minimize the risk to life.
But I am saying this disaster has been made needlessly worse, much worse, because the Japanese government, their culture, and the corporate culture within TEPCO, are functionally incompetent. And there's no equipment on the planet that can fix what is essentially a problem between the ears of TEPCO management and Japanese government leaders.
Antibiotics, antibacterial, antidepressants, shampoo, shaving cream, blood and heart medication, birth control... all of these are of great benefit to society as a whole and the majority of people reading these will have needed them at one point or another either to improve quality of life, or flat out save it. And they were tested on animals before people, because a human life is worth more than an animal life.
This may be ethically inconvenient for you, and if that's the case, please stop taking all of the medications listed above. Forever. In fact, skip the aspirin and just bear the pain of a headache. Skip the cold medication when you get sick, because you don't want to miss work. Forego all modern medicine, because the overwhelming majority of it came to market because it passed testing on animals. But I should warn you: Your average life expectancy after doing this will be about 15 years.
Now, if that's a trade you want to make, I applaud your steadfast devotion to your high ethical standards. I also applaud your rejection of over 20,000 years of human evolution that put us at the top of the food chain. We kill and eat them, and they're delicious and go good with ketchsup and rosemary. And if we're willing to do that, is using them for experiments really so bad?
When someone fubars a server it tends not to release nuclear waste. On top of which they get fired, unlike TEPCO.
No, but the underlying psychology is the same; We want computers and equipment that do what we say without questioning it. Asking for confirmation insults our intelligence, whether you're a system administrator, or a nuclear engineer. This isn't about getting people fired, or slamming your religion of choice; This is about human nature, and where we draw the line between computers doing what we say and computers doing what's safe.
The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools,
Did you also notice that this is pretty much how the Linux command line and programming is? One single button push can ruin your whole week. Yet, everyone here calls that a feature and blanches at Windows when it says "Are you sure you want to do this?"
I bet the engineer who pushed the button was a slashdotter... "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CAUSE A MAJOR NUCLEAR EVENT? y/N? _"... oh fuck you, NukeOS, I know what I'm doing!
So which is it? Are you too stupid to figure this out for yourself? Or are you a liar, intending to deceive the people reading this site?
Well, there's three kinds of lies; Lies, damned lies, and statistics. You can quote yours, he can quote his, and nobody will be any better informed when you two are done pissing in the wind while yelling at each other.
On a very basic level, Obamacare supporters have the position that poor people, who don't have enough money to afford health care, should be forced into buying health care plus the costs of program administration overhead from the government. On it's face, it seems pretty obvious this will mean that people will be worse off; If they couldn't afford it before, how are they going to afford it now?
The flip of this is though that health care costs aren't a simple x + y = z equation. The reason a lot of health care is so high is because people are uninsured or underinsured and so they only go to the hospital when the symptoms become severe enough to qualify as an emergency. Emergency room visits aren't just expensive because of labor and resource costs... they're expensive because you have to have enough spare capacity to handle the very worst case scenario -- in other words, you're paying for excess capacity to have a safety margin. And many of those visits wouldn't be necessary if people were having proper, planned, preventative care instead.
If people could go to the doctor whenever they needed to, on a flat rate system (not per visit, not with deductibles, not with all this complicated bullshit), you'd probably see costs drop off by a significant portion. Obamacare may accomplish this change in patient behavior. If it does... the aggregate healthcare costs will drop.
The second part of the equation, and the part Obamacare doesn't address, is that the current system we have with health insurance, auditing, billing records -- an absolutely massive and complex system that covers up a lot of flaws and makes investigation incredibly time consuming and difficult to the point you need a forensic accountant to break down the average person's bill, means that the administrative costs make up a huge portion of health care. Do you really think it costs $250 to run a urinalysis? Or to do bloodwork? No, it doesn't. The supplies and labor is much less than that. But because of a massive billing system, combined with over a dozen layers of auditing and reporting, means that administrative costs take a big bite out.
It is this second problem that will get worse under Obamacare. How much worse, we won't know until the system is deployed, and the initial kinks worked out so we have a stable baseline to draw comparisons from (You never judge a system based on it's initial performance -- there will be lots of bugs and training costs up front that simply can't be anticipated. You have to look at it once it enters the maintenance phase to evaluate the true cost of it correctly).
As you can see, the problem is much more complex than just pulling some numbers out your ass (You, and Forbes magazine, both guilty as charged). We don't have the numbers yet to know whether this is going to save money, or cost money.
All we can really debate at this moment in time is the ethics of having a national healthcare system. For my part; I think it's long overdue. We need it. I'm not sure this is the best implimentation, but... whether it succeeds or fails, it will tell us a lot about what we need to know to make better decisions about health care as a country down the line. It is a good experiment. It should be carried out without delay, and the results published.
I'd be more concerned with a bunch of cell phones, each with a GPS receiver built in, interfering with the aircraft's GPS based systems.
Erm, for a guy who managed to get most of the technical detail right, you flubbed this one pretty bad; a GPS receiver is just that, a receiver. With the exception of the RF front end, it's all processed inside a chunk of silicon. So there should be very, very little interference from one, or even fifty, of them, unless there's a defect in the cell phone itself that is causing EMI -- something unintentionally functioning as an antenna.
All electronic devices emit EMI, but suggesting that the GPS receiver portion of a cell phone is any more or less capable of causing interference to the GPS signal absent any testing to support this, is flat out bogus. Anything can interfere with a GPS signal; A GPS receiver is no more or less likely to do so -- they don't have crystals in them that oscillate at the same frequency like old shortwave radios. Unless you can provide some documentation that the design of all cell phone GPS receivers has some flaw that causes it to emit enough EMI to disrupt the same signals its designed to receive, I have to call this myth busted.
You missed the point. Reemul is making an oblique reference to the 1972 Olympics where 11 Jewish athletes were murdered; look up "Munich massacre" on wikipedia.
You know, it's considered poor form to make an oblique reference to something that happened before most of the people on the site were likely born. The only point being made here is that he's gotten so old and senile that he's forgotten we have these things called hyperlinks now to help members of the audience who may not be aware of a cultural reference to an incident from over forty years ago. Having read details of the incident now, it would seem this already vague reference may have been to the IOC's handling of the PR post-incident.
They apparently didn't want to mention the people who were captured and murdered at the hands of their captors, and allowed 10 of the Arab countries who were present at the games to fly their flags at full mast, while the remaining countries opted for half-mast to honor the dead. This is apparently the source of the old guy's anger; Which, having read news reports, seems unwarranted. When you run an international event, you cannot possibly cover a political crisis in a way that satisfies everyone. The IOC played Switzerland (figuratively, not literally) -- it didn't take sides. Naturally, some people can't understand why this is the right move, and get angry. Like this old guy.
I do not see how this was anti-semetic in any way. The IOC did not endorse the terrorist attack. In all reports I found online, it seems they tried to remain as neutral as possible, treating the games as 'neutral territory'. They honored as many of the requests of the participants as they reasonably could, without giving up their neutrality.
I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.
Meanwhile, Balmer was seen walking nearby, complaining about how this stairway never seemed to end, and how poorly designed it was because the banister was so low.
Name one that didn't just collect tiny pieces at a time but actually used floating point errors.
Y2K; A lot of time variables use floating point (decimal) instead of integer. As I understand it, that was an expensive fix that caused financial chaos. As well, there's a detailed explanation about exactly why floating point should never be used in financial transactions, regardless of the number of decimal points the library can be accurate to. And here's the wiki explaining how these problems simply cannot be overcome, it's a theoretical impossibility.
then it would be handled uniformly and that won't be an issue.
A computer that consistently gets the wrong answer is not any less wrong because it does so uniformly.
Explain. And don't just shit out a wall of text that evades the subject like you usually do.
I try to be as specific as possible to avoid confusion, but in the future, to honor your request, I will simply say "Fuck you, you're wrong, good day sir." Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Face it, the IOC is perfectly OK with corruption, oppression, censorship, and spying, as long as committee members get their payoffs, a pleasant facade is maintained while cameras are rolling, and nobody but Jews get killed.
You know, Slashdot really has taken a dive lately. We've got an anti-semetic comment hiding in plain sight, and yet this racist asshole got upmodded not once, but twice so far. And the kicker is there's no evidence presented that the IOC is anti-semetic. Of course, there's plenty of evidence about corruption and censorship, and committee members getting paid off. That's all legit; And the rest is on the level with them being an accomplice to it.
But the conclusion is also bogus. Russia doesn't "wish" they could have the "all encompassing monitoring that Beijing" had. They're allies with China. China produces tons of telecom; And I'm sure they'd be only too happy to help their ally to the west with that problem if Russia really was putting that on a 'wish list'.
Small problem though -- Russia does have the money. And they are building that surveillance network right now. Without help. Worse, while your tin foil hat "They're monitoring all the things!" might be somewhat accurate... you're utterly lacking in a good conclusion as to why. I mean, besides being evil for the sake of being evil, because it's, you know, fun and shit.
The real reason why Russia is building this network up is because historically Russia has been hyper-paranoid about foreigners. You know, that whole business with Stalin, and the USSR, and the cold war... it had a small effect on their psyche. But also, Russia doesn't have free speech; And right now it's dealing with large numbers of people protesting over Putin's one man crusade against the gay community, and the Olympics has been named as a primary target for these protesters to get the word out about Russia's oppression of these people.
So they're preparing the nets, setting the traps, and building nearby warehouses that will become jails with the flip of a switch, in anticipation of having to move a groundswell of its own citizens trying to ram their way into public view at the event. And Putin... oooh, he doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit.
So cool it with the anti-semetic crap -- this isn't about the jews, it's about the gays, and while the IOC may be a morally corrupt piece of shit for an organization, they haven't yet turned terrorist, and there is no evidence they're planning on crossing that line anytime soon. If nothing else, it would hurt their profits.
This news doesn't come as a shock to me. Actually, I halfway respect the fact that they admit it flat out.
Yeah, but would you still feel that way once you knew the reasons for it?
They're concerned that people might try that "free speech" thing, which has been a problem ever since Putin decided to wage a private war on gay people... and many are calling for a boycott of the olympics or protesting at the scene to raise awareness of the problem. That surveillance, which includes filtering technology and location awareness on cell phones, as well as deep state inspection, exists for but one purpose:
To make sure everything looks just peachy for the press cameras, while the 10,000 other cameras hunt for anything that could spoil that rosey worldview... like protesters.
Judging from what you're saying, you'd probably enjoy Breaking Bad. You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the way it handles its subject matter.
I don't think so. If there was a TV show that showed how actual drug production worked in sufficient detail, it would be shut down by the government because it would essentially be a handbook on how to do it, being delivered to millions of televisions during prime time. I'm sorry, but common sense trumps your understanding of a fictional TV show.
Slashdot Mirror
GM is functionally incompetent when it comes to the internet. Tesla is new, small, agile, and responsive to the market. GM is still stuck on the couch with its hand in the chip bag, bitching about how easy kids have it these days.
Get off the couch GM, lose 50 pounds, and divorce yourself from the idea that you're owed something. Keep it up and this new generation that seems to have little interest in cars, preferring to bike everywhere and sees no particular status in owning a new car will put your fat ass outta business.
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
While this is true, I think the author was pointing out one of the 'flaws' of capitalism; Technology and infrastructure makes offering such amenities a very cheap proposition. And yet, you wind up paying through the nose for them in certain situations; It is basically a misrepresentation of the true cost of the good or service being provided. They can say the hotel room with everything a "less price sensitive" customer is looking for is offered at a competitive room rate, but the room rate quoted, and which is being compared against with other providers, is not the actual cost you will pay for it. This makes straight comparisons between different offerings difficult; It does not encourage a truly competitive marketplace, because it hides costs. It's sortof like the old axiom "Give away the razor, charge for the blades", except in this case, you can only see the cost of the razor, not the blades.
This is fundamentally anti-competitive and is not a truly 'free' marketplace, because price comparison is made very difficult in an effort to trap the less savvy agent. While "caveat emptor" may be a nice rebuttal in theory, in practice those uttering this phrase are making a far-reaching assumption: That the buyer is capable of being aware. Uttering these words is like saying "Oh, there's a minefield over there" after you've already stepped on a mine. If one truly supports the free market, then such predatory pricing tactics cannot be endorsed.
A true free market system works best when all the agents have equal access to the data needed to make informed decisions; This ensures true competition, which is the driver of innovation. By obscuring these details and attaching hidden fees, it contributes to market inefficiency and hinders competition -- you can't be sure what you're paying for is at a competitive price, and thus, competition is less prevalent. Less competition means greater inefficiency. It means less trade. Those dollars aren't working as hard, and while it may benefit the individual vendors participating in such deception, it harms the entire economy.
...the United States still has the world's fugliest currency.
What, you got a problem with Olmec heads and vague references to the illuminati? :3
I read the summary and now know all of the details of the two cases and will now give you my strong, educated opinion of the matter.
You forgot your strong, educated opinion of the matter. In lieu of yours, I submit my own.
Why are you supporting your sister in her bad habits?
Ever lived with a teenager? You pick and choose your battles carefully.
Read the summary: they expected this but the tablets that were delivered turned out not to have the toughened screens that the contract required them to have so it's the vendor that screwed up.
It wouldn't have helped; Gorilla glass protects against scratches. If you drop the device onto a concrete floor, it's just as dead no matter what kind of covering you put over the LCD.
go with the lowest bidder. If you're going to make notebooks for school, make them so they can withstand those things found in schools -- students.
Umm, these are tablets not notebooks. From my experience with my little sister, teenagers do not treat their electronics very well -- Gorilla glass wouldn't help much. All the glass does is keep the display from being scratched. It won't help if you drop the device, or if it is subjected to tortion stress (twisted). Both of these will deform the case, and in turn the LCD. It doesn't take much to destroy an LCD. Sitting on it. Dropping it onto a hardwood or concrete floor. The list goes on. And teenagers don't just kill the devices through these simple physical forces...
My sister routinely drags her iPad into the bathroom to listen to music while she takes a shower. I die a little inside thinking of all that humidity corroding the insides. And I can't tell you how many times she's yanked the power adapter out by the cord, or grabbed it, and forgetting it was still plugged in, tore the adapter right out of the wall socket. Without inspecting one of these Amplify tablets, I don't know if this is the case, but with ipads the connector has a spring to hold it in place -- which means the cord and the connector in the device gets bent and mangled after doing this a few times. I've replaced the power adapter for her about 5 times now. She hasn't even had it two years. Her current one is held together with electrical tape and numerous warnings that this will be the last one. She still comes to me every few weeks after it shorts out and dies from the latest careless act.
But god help you if you tell slashdot this. It's a hanging offense to state the obvious around here... :/
This is news, how exactly?
Raise your hand if you know that teenagers tend to break shit. A lot. Move along, nothing to see here.
If you actually read the message, you'll see what it is. It isn't a demand, thus fails the test of "legal demand".
*facepalm*
(re-reads)
*facepalm*
we believe that someone you are providing registration services for is doing something illegal and has invalid registration data." Then it makes a request. "Please investigate whether your customer is violating your terms of service
Legal, def.: of, based on, or concerned with the law. .1. ask authoritatively or brusquely. 2. an insistent and peremptory request, made as if by right.
Demand, def:
No, I dare say, it meets the literal and true definition of a legal demand.
In short, someone in big business has been crying to their rent-a-cop again.
Why not? It costs nothing to file a complaint and give some bluster. It's not like they're going to be fined for submitting a false report, engaging in mob-style business tactics, etc. Every business should do this, not just big ones. Now, back to the article...
Who decides what is illegal?
People who are above the law.
What makes somebody a criminal?
Anyone who is upsetting the status quo.
...if we don't play along, this is a non-trivial question.
No, it is a trivial question. You're just young and naive. Sorry; I wish I had better news, and could tell you life was fair, but to quote the Man in Black in Princess Bride, "Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.â
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought it was something that gets decided in a court of law,
ICANN was established in 1998, and gained limited international participation in 2005. There has never been a court of law to decide who gets to own a name on the internet. It's far worse than a court; This shit gets decided by committee.
...as opposed to 'some guy on the internet' sending emails.
This isn't an e-mail. This is a business making a legal demand. You may be unaware of this, but anyone can make almost any legal demand in the United States, and indeed most westernized countries, without any substantial liability. You can be sued for anything as well -- color of your hair, look of your face, body fat content... and you have to show up to contest it. Now in those examples, it would be declared a frivolous action (in the USA) because it's obviously and patently absurd, but if you give it even the slightest hint of legitimacy, you can avoid that. My point is that the legal system is massively balanced to favor people who have wealth. You can abuse and harass the crap out of people, practically indefinately, if you're willing to kick a few schekles into the system. And... some wealthy individuals and businesses opt to do exactly that.
Now, winning your case... that's a whole 'nother can of worms. But when there's no penalty for losing save the filing fee and associated legal costs of retaining counsel, and a financial incentive if you win, then the equation is quite simple: If your costs divided by the risk is less than the benefit multiplied by the risk... it's good business.
While that's plenty reason enough for some registrars to take down domain names, it doesn't fly here."
Except that's exactly how ICANN is structured to operate. Is it unfair? Yup. Anti-competitive? Certainly. Corrupt? Arguments can be made. US-centric? Nailed. Hopelessly incompetent? Arguments can be made. Your tax dollars at work. :/
Wait until one of the aggrieved nations decides to do a 'limited kinetic action' on this facility - only to cripple the capabilities of a program that's being run in violation of international law.
You'll be waiting a very long time. The last time we were bombed was during WWII, by Japan. It was called Pearl Harbor. The only military attacks on the mainland were also during the same timeframe by what could lovingly be called "fail balloons" launched by Japan with incendiary devices and carried over the mainland, where they would land and cause fires. Only about a half-dozen of these were reported or suspected to have actually landed, and none of them landed on anything of any value... A tree here. A cow there.
You may well recall what happened to Japan after they creamed the pacific fleet: We built, tested, and then detonated a nuclear weapon their head. Nobody has tried since. And that was just a firecracker compared to what we have today sitting on launchpads all over the country.
One thing worth noting though is that often these systems use ancient control schemes.
The control systems were state of the art when it was built: In the early 80s. These reactors have a life expectancy of 50 years. They generally don't get a refit until halfway through that service life, when many of its non-structural components like pipes, tubing, turbines, and pumps, have degraded to the point that the ongoing maintenance cost exceeds the replacement cost.
I have no doubt that they are reliable and have failsafes, but a physical switch doesn't have a "are you sure" dialog or stop to ask for an admin password.
No, it has about a year's worth of training, and time in a simulator ensuring that every plant operator has a full and complete understanding of the machine they'll be working with. It also has multiple people checking each others' work. It also has ongoing training and random inspections by an independent government body, as well as regular inspections by management, to ensure operational safety and compliance with the protocols they were trained in.
You're right that a switch doesn't have a dialog box that pops up when you push it... but these buttons aren't being pushed by Joe Average just following a three ring binder. There has been only a handful of cases in which this training failed, and it took numerous failures at all levels to allow it to happen; And the systems these events happened at were immediately pulled from active service or retrofitted so that it couldn't happen again.
The nuclear industry's safety record is unmatched in the larger industry of energy production. Every year we tolerate a major oil spill. Every year we hear about gas stations experiencing catastrophic failure of safety systems leading to massive neighborhood-sized fireballs. We only hear about nuclear accidents about once every decade or so, and the majority of them result in a big mess and lots of costs for the plant operators, but do not endanger public safety or harm the environment.
All that said... Fukishima has been mismanaged from day one, and a lot of the failure is down to Japanese culture; An inability to be transparent and admit when there's a problem. This retiscence to work the problem is what led to the disaster, and what has since amplified the failure enormously.
The international community in the hours and days following the disaster repeatedly offered assistance, including the US Army Corp of Engineers, who were dispatched to an aircraft carrier who was sitting about 200 miles off the coast in international waters with a full team prepped and on standby, ready to assist in evacuation and containment efforts. These were some of the most highly trained people on the planet; They had each spent years training for it. They were a phone call and 30 minutes away by helicopter from being on the scene and ready to assist.
The phone never rang.
To this very day, the plant managers continue to underfund the cleanup and containment efforts. They continue to keep insufficient equipment and personnel onsite. They have no published plan on how they plan on cleaning up the affected area. Even the Russians, after Chernobyl, put their entire military into containment and isolation of the area... and while many people died, and they were not adequately trained, or equipped, they sent people in by the busload to try and stop it from getting worse. Now I'm not saying Japan should have done that... thrown away thousands of lives to a radiological inferno, like the Russians did... especially not when state of the art equipment and well-trained personnel were ready to assist and knew how to minimize the risk to life.
But I am saying this disaster has been made needlessly worse, much worse, because the Japanese government, their culture, and the corporate culture within TEPCO, are functionally incompetent. And there's no equipment on the planet that can fix what is essentially a problem between the ears of TEPCO management and Japanese government leaders.
Can you really not see a problem with that?
Antibiotics, antibacterial, antidepressants, shampoo, shaving cream, blood and heart medication, birth control... all of these are of great benefit to society as a whole and the majority of people reading these will have needed them at one point or another either to improve quality of life, or flat out save it. And they were tested on animals before people, because a human life is worth more than an animal life.
This may be ethically inconvenient for you, and if that's the case, please stop taking all of the medications listed above. Forever. In fact, skip the aspirin and just bear the pain of a headache. Skip the cold medication when you get sick, because you don't want to miss work. Forego all modern medicine, because the overwhelming majority of it came to market because it passed testing on animals. But I should warn you: Your average life expectancy after doing this will be about 15 years.
Now, if that's a trade you want to make, I applaud your steadfast devotion to your high ethical standards. I also applaud your rejection of over 20,000 years of human evolution that put us at the top of the food chain. We kill and eat them, and they're delicious and go good with ketchsup and rosemary. And if we're willing to do that, is using them for experiments really so bad?
When someone fubars a server it tends not to release nuclear waste. On top of which they get fired, unlike TEPCO.
No, but the underlying psychology is the same; We want computers and equipment that do what we say without questioning it. Asking for confirmation insults our intelligence, whether you're a system administrator, or a nuclear engineer. This isn't about getting people fired, or slamming your religion of choice; This is about human nature, and where we draw the line between computers doing what we say and computers doing what's safe.
The question remains just how vulnerable to simple mistakes (such as a single button push) are these spent fuel pools,
Did you also notice that this is pretty much how the Linux command line and programming is? One single button push can ruin your whole week. Yet, everyone here calls that a feature and blanches at Windows when it says "Are you sure you want to do this?"
I bet the engineer who pushed the button was a slashdotter... "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO CAUSE A MAJOR NUCLEAR EVENT? y/N? _" ... oh fuck you, NukeOS, I know what I'm doing!
How secure are Cochlear implants and their processors? Any chance I'm going to hear the voice of God (without the tooth implant, ala Real Genius?)
That depends: Did you recently vote Republican?
So which is it? Are you too stupid to figure this out for yourself? Or are you a liar, intending to deceive the people reading this site?
Well, there's three kinds of lies; Lies, damned lies, and statistics. You can quote yours, he can quote his, and nobody will be any better informed when you two are done pissing in the wind while yelling at each other.
On a very basic level, Obamacare supporters have the position that poor people, who don't have enough money to afford health care, should be forced into buying health care plus the costs of program administration overhead from the government. On it's face, it seems pretty obvious this will mean that people will be worse off; If they couldn't afford it before, how are they going to afford it now?
The flip of this is though that health care costs aren't a simple x + y = z equation. The reason a lot of health care is so high is because people are uninsured or underinsured and so they only go to the hospital when the symptoms become severe enough to qualify as an emergency. Emergency room visits aren't just expensive because of labor and resource costs... they're expensive because you have to have enough spare capacity to handle the very worst case scenario -- in other words, you're paying for excess capacity to have a safety margin. And many of those visits wouldn't be necessary if people were having proper, planned, preventative care instead.
If people could go to the doctor whenever they needed to, on a flat rate system (not per visit, not with deductibles, not with all this complicated bullshit), you'd probably see costs drop off by a significant portion. Obamacare may accomplish this change in patient behavior. If it does... the aggregate healthcare costs will drop.
The second part of the equation, and the part Obamacare doesn't address, is that the current system we have with health insurance, auditing, billing records -- an absolutely massive and complex system that covers up a lot of flaws and makes investigation incredibly time consuming and difficult to the point you need a forensic accountant to break down the average person's bill, means that the administrative costs make up a huge portion of health care. Do you really think it costs $250 to run a urinalysis? Or to do bloodwork? No, it doesn't. The supplies and labor is much less than that. But because of a massive billing system, combined with over a dozen layers of auditing and reporting, means that administrative costs take a big bite out.
It is this second problem that will get worse under Obamacare. How much worse, we won't know until the system is deployed, and the initial kinks worked out so we have a stable baseline to draw comparisons from (You never judge a system based on it's initial performance -- there will be lots of bugs and training costs up front that simply can't be anticipated. You have to look at it once it enters the maintenance phase to evaluate the true cost of it correctly).
As you can see, the problem is much more complex than just pulling some numbers out your ass (You, and Forbes magazine, both guilty as charged). We don't have the numbers yet to know whether this is going to save money, or cost money.
All we can really debate at this moment in time is the ethics of having a national healthcare system. For my part; I think it's long overdue. We need it. I'm not sure this is the best implimentation, but... whether it succeeds or fails, it will tell us a lot about what we need to know to make better decisions about health care as a country down the line. It is a good experiment. It should be carried out without delay, and the results published.
I'd be more concerned with a bunch of cell phones, each with a GPS receiver built in, interfering with the aircraft's GPS based systems.
Erm, for a guy who managed to get most of the technical detail right, you flubbed this one pretty bad; a GPS receiver is just that, a receiver. With the exception of the RF front end, it's all processed inside a chunk of silicon. So there should be very, very little interference from one, or even fifty, of them, unless there's a defect in the cell phone itself that is causing EMI -- something unintentionally functioning as an antenna.
All electronic devices emit EMI, but suggesting that the GPS receiver portion of a cell phone is any more or less capable of causing interference to the GPS signal absent any testing to support this, is flat out bogus. Anything can interfere with a GPS signal; A GPS receiver is no more or less likely to do so -- they don't have crystals in them that oscillate at the same frequency like old shortwave radios. Unless you can provide some documentation that the design of all cell phone GPS receivers has some flaw that causes it to emit enough EMI to disrupt the same signals its designed to receive, I have to call this myth busted.
You missed the point. Reemul is making an oblique reference to the 1972 Olympics where 11 Jewish athletes were murdered; look up "Munich massacre" on wikipedia.
You know, it's considered poor form to make an oblique reference to something that happened before most of the people on the site were likely born. The only point being made here is that he's gotten so old and senile that he's forgotten we have these things called hyperlinks now to help members of the audience who may not be aware of a cultural reference to an incident from over forty years ago. Having read details of the incident now, it would seem this already vague reference may have been to the IOC's handling of the PR post-incident.
They apparently didn't want to mention the people who were captured and murdered at the hands of their captors, and allowed 10 of the Arab countries who were present at the games to fly their flags at full mast, while the remaining countries opted for half-mast to honor the dead. This is apparently the source of the old guy's anger; Which, having read news reports, seems unwarranted. When you run an international event, you cannot possibly cover a political crisis in a way that satisfies everyone. The IOC played Switzerland (figuratively, not literally) -- it didn't take sides. Naturally, some people can't understand why this is the right move, and get angry. Like this old guy.
I do not see how this was anti-semetic in any way. The IOC did not endorse the terrorist attack. In all reports I found online, it seems they tried to remain as neutral as possible, treating the games as 'neutral territory'. They honored as many of the requests of the participants as they reasonably could, without giving up their neutrality.
I'm not sure, but the end of the line must be coming soon.
Meanwhile, Balmer was seen walking nearby, complaining about how this stairway never seemed to end, and how poorly designed it was because the banister was so low.
As you have indicated a preference for brevity in your sarcastic fuck you, I shall in turn be brief in my own.
This isn't a weather simulator where the numbers are going to be raised to the hundredth power, it's basic, linear algebra here.
False, and False.
Name one that didn't just collect tiny pieces at a time but actually used floating point errors.
Y2K; A lot of time variables use floating point (decimal) instead of integer. As I understand it, that was an expensive fix that caused financial chaos. As well, there's a detailed explanation about exactly why floating point should never be used in financial transactions, regardless of the number of decimal points the library can be accurate to. And here's the wiki explaining how these problems simply cannot be overcome, it's a theoretical impossibility.
then it would be handled uniformly and that won't be an issue.
A computer that consistently gets the wrong answer is not any less wrong because it does so uniformly.
Explain. And don't just shit out a wall of text that evades the subject like you usually do.
I try to be as specific as possible to avoid confusion, but in the future, to honor your request, I will simply say "Fuck you, you're wrong, good day sir." Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
Fuck you. You're wrong. Good day sir.
Face it, the IOC is perfectly OK with corruption, oppression, censorship, and spying, as long as committee members get their payoffs, a pleasant facade is maintained while cameras are rolling, and nobody but Jews get killed.
You know, Slashdot really has taken a dive lately. We've got an anti-semetic comment hiding in plain sight, and yet this racist asshole got upmodded not once, but twice so far. And the kicker is there's no evidence presented that the IOC is anti-semetic. Of course, there's plenty of evidence about corruption and censorship, and committee members getting paid off. That's all legit; And the rest is on the level with them being an accomplice to it.
But the conclusion is also bogus. Russia doesn't "wish" they could have the "all encompassing monitoring that Beijing" had. They're allies with China. China produces tons of telecom; And I'm sure they'd be only too happy to help their ally to the west with that problem if Russia really was putting that on a 'wish list'.
Small problem though -- Russia does have the money. And they are building that surveillance network right now. Without help. Worse, while your tin foil hat "They're monitoring all the things!" might be somewhat accurate... you're utterly lacking in a good conclusion as to why. I mean, besides being evil for the sake of being evil, because it's, you know, fun and shit.
The real reason why Russia is building this network up is because historically Russia has been hyper-paranoid about foreigners. You know, that whole business with Stalin, and the USSR, and the cold war... it had a small effect on their psyche. But also, Russia doesn't have free speech; And right now it's dealing with large numbers of people protesting over Putin's one man crusade against the gay community, and the Olympics has been named as a primary target for these protesters to get the word out about Russia's oppression of these people.
So they're preparing the nets, setting the traps, and building nearby warehouses that will become jails with the flip of a switch, in anticipation of having to move a groundswell of its own citizens trying to ram their way into public view at the event. And Putin... oooh, he doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit.
So cool it with the anti-semetic crap -- this isn't about the jews, it's about the gays, and while the IOC may be a morally corrupt piece of shit for an organization, they haven't yet turned terrorist, and there is no evidence they're planning on crossing that line anytime soon. If nothing else, it would hurt their profits.
This news doesn't come as a shock to me. Actually, I halfway respect the fact that they admit it flat out.
Yeah, but would you still feel that way once you knew the reasons for it?
They're concerned that people might try that "free speech" thing, which has been a problem ever since Putin decided to wage a private war on gay people... and many are calling for a boycott of the olympics or protesting at the scene to raise awareness of the problem. That surveillance, which includes filtering technology and location awareness on cell phones, as well as deep state inspection, exists for but one purpose:
To make sure everything looks just peachy for the press cameras, while the 10,000 other cameras hunt for anything that could spoil that rosey worldview... like protesters.
Microsoft's train of thought is still boarding at the station.
I'm not sure their thinking process qualifies as a train. I'd say that looks more like the rail equivalent of the short bus.
Judging from what you're saying, you'd probably enjoy Breaking Bad. You're making a lot of incorrect assumptions about the way it handles its subject matter.
I don't think so. If there was a TV show that showed how actual drug production worked in sufficient detail, it would be shut down by the government because it would essentially be a handbook on how to do it, being delivered to millions of televisions during prime time. I'm sorry, but common sense trumps your understanding of a fictional TV show.