'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
I hear it all the time. Smart people who say they want to keep the bar-to-entry deliberately high to weed out stupid people. Generally they say this about programming and not about an operating system, but the overall attitude is the same: they like being in their own smart-kids club. Call it revenge of the nerds, or whatever. It's elitism, and it's very real.
The thing is that it's completely not the point. Shuttleworth believes that Unity is easier to use than GNOME, and regardless of whether he's right or wrong, he refuses to believe that he's wrong, he refuses to accept evidence that he's wrong, and he refuses to let anyone compile evidence that he might be wrong. And that's the part that makes him a horrible leader.
It should be trivial, but it's not. When you create one of those surveys, if you pay enough money they allow you to import a list of contacts, and the survey company will send out the official invitations to take the survey. So when you're looking at it the link is to takeoursurvey.com, the email is from takeoursurvey.com, and nothing in the process authenticates that it originated from mycompany.com other than the pasted-in name of a VIP (which is readily available from most companies public SEC filings.)
Now, am I worried about getting a drive-by from surveymonkey.com? Not really. But what about answering that last question: "Are there any building security issues that concern you?" Do you suppose anyone might answer with a helpful "I wish you'd fix the broken lock on the door by the parking lot"?
Not quite true. Your company might rely on "software as a service" companies (ironically companies just like phishme,) which means you will get a lot of false positives!
Consider Joe Lowlypeon getting an email from Jane Q. Important, the Senior VP of HR, asking them to take an employee satisfaction survey, and it contains a link to surveymonkey.com. The survey has their company logo on the top, it's done up in the company colors, and it's filled with mundane questions such as if the coffee in the break room is good, if the rest rooms are clean, are there any problems with building security that concern you? Did that survey really originate from someone within their company? Is Joe willing to risk sending a "is this for real?" email back to the Senior VP of I-Can-Fire-You? How can anyone tell if that's a phish or not?
Power transmission is the easy one to see a payoff for, though. I've seen various sources claiming power line losses run anywhere from 7% to 17%. Also consider the energy we use shipping trains full of coal from the mines across the country to the generating plants located near the consumers. Superconductive lines could enable them to build power plants near the mines and push the current over the grid.
Even if the tech was expensive to install on a per mile basis, if they could swap out the existing lines for superconducting lines, they wouldn't have to sign new land leasing deals for extra towers. Superconductors would enable them to shove 10X or 100X the power over the grid without having drastic changes elsewhere.
That's one of the biggest limiting factors to wind generation today, by the way. The grid across the sparsely populated windy plains was originally designed to carry just a few tens of megawatts into a region that doesn't have large industrial plants and doesn't see a high demand. It was never designed to carry gigawatts of power out of the area. New windmills are actually straining the existing grid. An efficient distribution network would let those prairie windmills sell power all the way out to the coasts.
Certain humans have had interchangeable head parts and posterior parts for years now. We call them "politicians".
I think they mostly talk out of their asses, though, and certainly not see out of them. They tend to even ignore crap that's right in front of their regular head-mounted eyes, so I'm not sure that gluing a set to their posteriors will change anything.
While the amount of lead in a CRT makes up a significant fraction of its weight, the lead is vitrified and not much will escape into the environment, even if the glass is shattered. More lead would likely enter the environment from the melon-destroying bullet shattering on a rock. That's still no excuse for littering the ground with broken shards of glass.
But everywhere you used the word "trash", the reader should infer the word "recycle". Many communities have recycling centers that will accept electronics for free.
For the adventurous among you, you might consider attempting to recover the precious metals yourself. I have a friend who recovers the gold from plated card-edge fingers. His last run of perhaps 14 old ISA bus cards yielded about 20 grams of gold. The drawback, of course, is that it uses corrosive chemicals, including nitric and hydrochloric acids, which have to be safely disposed of.
And I've spent 25 years in industry, and seen the coin of the realm is coin. People who lie, cheat, and steal to make money are rich, while people who play fairly are used, abused, and cast aside. Some companies play tricks with zoning boards, spending bribe money to get their initial advantage. They expect to get caught eventually and happily pay the fines as a cost of doing business, because they know they'll continue to operate long term with their ill-gotten advantage.
Dishonest academics may tweak some numbers to make a study go the way they want, but if they get caught it's academic death. They won't get a job teaching in a community college. And the rewards? A few thousand dollars in grant money.
The dishonesty in business is on a completely different measuring scale. Nothing is fair, because its deliberately manipulated and maintained to be confusing and unfair. The penalties are tiny while the rewards are great. If you think the "two sides of the controversy" are even remotely comparable, their system of confusing messages is working perfectly as designed.
I'd say that not all deniers are delusional. Many know perfectly well that the evidence is against their position. But they have another related interest that relies on the denial. The holocaust deniers want the return of bigotry under the National Socialism flag, but can't have it because of the war crimes, so they deny or downplay them. The climate change deniers don't care about polar bears and penguins, they just want to make billions off of oil, so they deny climate change is happening. It's a business decision, not a delusion.
So consider those "ideological objectives". Their root cause is not money - nobody makes money by being green (we can safely ignore the tiny little windmill and solar industries, as they're almost insignificant to the economic and political landscape.) Overall, the economy and country as a whole would be a lot better off financially letting the Koch brothers make their billions and taxing the hell out of them, letting Sarah Palin drill, baby, drill, and making personal gains and profits using the cheap energy.
No, the real objective of most people is to not live in a polluted craphole, with 50m visibility due to smog and 25% of people asthmatic (like Beijing is today), to not be struck with vast storm systems, to not have our shores coated in oil, to not have waterless croplands burned in the sun, and to keep the polar ice sequestered on top of the Antarctic continent so our coastal cities don't wash away. Since that objective doesn't translate into dollars, it's hard to present it as anything but a political viewpoint. Worse, because achieving it conflicts with the vast quantities of petrodollars, it doesn't have the overall resources to become a multi-million dollar ad campaign on equal footing with Exxon. Instead, it's adopted by moneyless groups like Greenpeace who are willing to do anything that lets them fly their freak flag.
So everything about this anti-money standpoint is being attacked by the petrochemical moguls. The freak aspect of groups like the Sea Shepherds is an easy target for ad hominem attacks. The science is something that half the people lack the education to understand, so they accept the words of their authorities instead. The simple answer is to buy those authorities (Fox News,) have them repeat words that resonate with their religious beliefs, and you own half the voters.
I talked to Alan about this a month ago. It's RF based detection of dermal layer blood vessels, not fingerprints. Living tissue is required for the hemoglobins to move.
That said, his interest is in the financial application of the technology. He's trying to replace the credit card, not simply to produce a hard to forge biometric device.
They are set to guard an area against any radar detectable objects, and most importantly, they do NOT have IFF. They have only trajectory and min/max target speeds, and anything traveling in the area that is heading in the wrong direction and is traveling within the set speed range is fired upon. I believe they already have shot down one friendly aircraft, which entered the kill zone while towing a target drone.
They're as close to indiscriminate killing machines as we have. They're self contained weapon systems requiring only electricity to operate. They operate a Vulcan M61 and hold over a thousand armor piercing or HE rounds.
The only good thing about them is that they're so large (5m tall, 6,000kg), They aren't stealthy, they're not deployed on front lines, they're primarily defensive weapons. But they're insanely lethal.
Pancreatic cancer has a very poor survival rate. Sometimes surgical, radiation, and chemotherapy treatment can increase the chances of surviving an extra five years from 10% to 20%. Joining hands with familly and singing Kum-by-yah would do about as much good - or harm.
And diet has not been shown to have any specific impact on the treatment of the cancer. Regarding prevention, heredity and smoking are the biggest risk factors. Other typical risks such as obesity, poor diet, inactivity, etc., factor into it but they are not specific to pancreatic cancer.
In other words, you are rude, ignorant, and callous. Your friends and family must be so proud of you.
- Is the email address in question visible to other people? e.g. registered forum members for the software in question? Sometimes people sign up for a forum just to be able to harvest the otherwise hidden addresses of other forum members
This is the first thing I thought of. I've seen small companies send out mass emails to blocks of people, sharing my name with the hundreds of other customers on the list. I've seen support postings with email addresses embedded as links behind the user names. Both of those are the faults of the companies that engaged in such behavior, but aren't quite the same as a "compromised" list.
Obviously, the author's intent was to leave himself in an anti-spam position, to be able to simply block the compromised address to stop further spam. I suggest he exercise that option and move on. He's notified them to the best of his ability. Further activity, such as trying to name-and-shame the company, could end up with their lawyers sending him cease-and-desist nastygrams. I'm not a lawyer so I can't tell him if those kinds of letters have legal merit, but if he has to hire a lawyer to get an answer to questions like thta, it could cost him money.
If you read a book that was on the list, you were influenced. Those ratings affect everything, including whether or not they showed up on the shelves at your local bookstore, on the end cap at your local grocery store, or in an airport convenience store.
It's the buyers for those businesses who use that list to make purchasing decisions. Those are the folks who put power in the list.
It's not quite enough. The problem is people remain convinced that they should continue to take the list seriously. The big publishing houses trumpet it on book jackets, other reviewers continue to reference it, TV shows continue to reference it. It's part of a self-referential promotional engine that shows no sign of collapsing.
That could be. I've seen videos of them flying in rooms lined with cotton netting, too, though, where the builders were obviously trying to minimize damage to the copters. But that might just be old footage. The autonomous drones have gotten a lot more trustworthy and reliable as of late, so maybe they don't worry as much about crashing anymore.
And flying in an isolated room, they don't seem too worried about incidental damage. The video of the drone assembling the brick tower in a crowded art gallery, though, that one made me wonder why they didn't have a bit more safety equipment around it.
People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.
Apples and oranges. A salesman is there to distill all the complexity that went into his product into a statement of benefits, not to give you the full education needed to understand either the problem or the solution. A good salesman is certainly capable of teaching you as much about the problems as well as their tools, but that's also not the same thing.
Consider: "Our Widget-O-Matic will power through your problems quickly, much easier and cheaper than your manual widgets. Our engineers put feedback from thousands of customers into this amazing device. Here's a chart that shows 95% of our customers saved ten times as much as the manual widget users." No actual understanding is needed to benefit from the education those engineers went through.
A good education, though, has to give you all those tiny details that make up the whole, and where to learn more, otherwise you're simply learning to be a parrot. Or a salesman. And that takes a lot of time and effort; much more than listening to a sales pitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell you what. You go and get yourself bit by a radioactive spider, then come back and tell us how that worked out for you in terms of "fun".
Now to get it working in humans.
Why? I don't know anyone who is so perfect they're worth making a clone of.
'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say.
He's right, you know,
Yes, he is. Only he's NOT, because the whole argument is a straw man. I haven't *ever* heard or read someone in the community say anything remotely similar. Except as an straw man, you know.
I hear it all the time. Smart people who say they want to keep the bar-to-entry deliberately high to weed out stupid people. Generally they say this about programming and not about an operating system, but the overall attitude is the same: they like being in their own smart-kids club. Call it revenge of the nerds, or whatever. It's elitism, and it's very real.
The thing is that it's completely not the point. Shuttleworth believes that Unity is easier to use than GNOME, and regardless of whether he's right or wrong, he refuses to believe that he's wrong, he refuses to accept evidence that he's wrong, and he refuses to let anyone compile evidence that he might be wrong. And that's the part that makes him a horrible leader.
It should be trivial, but it's not. When you create one of those surveys, if you pay enough money they allow you to import a list of contacts, and the survey company will send out the official invitations to take the survey. So when you're looking at it the link is to takeoursurvey.com, the email is from takeoursurvey.com, and nothing in the process authenticates that it originated from mycompany.com other than the pasted-in name of a VIP (which is readily available from most companies public SEC filings.)
Now, am I worried about getting a drive-by from surveymonkey.com? Not really. But what about answering that last question: "Are there any building security issues that concern you?" Do you suppose anyone might answer with a helpful "I wish you'd fix the broken lock on the door by the parking lot"?
Not quite true. Your company might rely on "software as a service" companies (ironically companies just like phishme,) which means you will get a lot of false positives!
Consider Joe Lowlypeon getting an email from Jane Q. Important, the Senior VP of HR, asking them to take an employee satisfaction survey, and it contains a link to surveymonkey.com. The survey has their company logo on the top, it's done up in the company colors, and it's filled with mundane questions such as if the coffee in the break room is good, if the rest rooms are clean, are there any problems with building security that concern you? Did that survey really originate from someone within their company? Is Joe willing to risk sending a "is this for real?" email back to the Senior VP of I-Can-Fire-You? How can anyone tell if that's a phish or not?
Power transmission is the easy one to see a payoff for, though. I've seen various sources claiming power line losses run anywhere from 7% to 17%. Also consider the energy we use shipping trains full of coal from the mines across the country to the generating plants located near the consumers. Superconductive lines could enable them to build power plants near the mines and push the current over the grid.
Even if the tech was expensive to install on a per mile basis, if they could swap out the existing lines for superconducting lines, they wouldn't have to sign new land leasing deals for extra towers. Superconductors would enable them to shove 10X or 100X the power over the grid without having drastic changes elsewhere.
That's one of the biggest limiting factors to wind generation today, by the way. The grid across the sparsely populated windy plains was originally designed to carry just a few tens of megawatts into a region that doesn't have large industrial plants and doesn't see a high demand. It was never designed to carry gigawatts of power out of the area. New windmills are actually straining the existing grid. An efficient distribution network would let those prairie windmills sell power all the way out to the coasts.
I read the title as "Texas Instruments ... "
And I thought the baseball team was getting training in forensics. That didn't scan too well either.
Certain humans have had interchangeable head parts and posterior parts for years now. We call them "politicians".
I think they mostly talk out of their asses, though, and certainly not see out of them. They tend to even ignore crap that's right in front of their regular head-mounted eyes, so I'm not sure that gluing a set to their posteriors will change anything.
While the amount of lead in a CRT makes up a significant fraction of its weight, the lead is vitrified and not much will escape into the environment, even if the glass is shattered. More lead would likely enter the environment from the melon-destroying bullet shattering on a rock. That's still no excuse for littering the ground with broken shards of glass.
Agreed completely.
But everywhere you used the word "trash", the reader should infer the word "recycle". Many communities have recycling centers that will accept electronics for free.
For the adventurous among you, you might consider attempting to recover the precious metals yourself. I have a friend who recovers the gold from plated card-edge fingers. His last run of perhaps 14 old ISA bus cards yielded about 20 grams of gold. The drawback, of course, is that it uses corrosive chemicals, including nitric and hydrochloric acids, which have to be safely disposed of.
And I've spent 25 years in industry, and seen the coin of the realm is coin. People who lie, cheat, and steal to make money are rich, while people who play fairly are used, abused, and cast aside. Some companies play tricks with zoning boards, spending bribe money to get their initial advantage. They expect to get caught eventually and happily pay the fines as a cost of doing business, because they know they'll continue to operate long term with their ill-gotten advantage.
Dishonest academics may tweak some numbers to make a study go the way they want, but if they get caught it's academic death. They won't get a job teaching in a community college. And the rewards? A few thousand dollars in grant money.
The dishonesty in business is on a completely different measuring scale. Nothing is fair, because its deliberately manipulated and maintained to be confusing and unfair. The penalties are tiny while the rewards are great. If you think the "two sides of the controversy" are even remotely comparable, their system of confusing messages is working perfectly as designed.
Follow the money. If you doubt both sides equally, who would benefit more financially from providing false science? Who could afford to?
I'd say that not all deniers are delusional. Many know perfectly well that the evidence is against their position. But they have another related interest that relies on the denial. The holocaust deniers want the return of bigotry under the National Socialism flag, but can't have it because of the war crimes, so they deny or downplay them. The climate change deniers don't care about polar bears and penguins, they just want to make billions off of oil, so they deny climate change is happening. It's a business decision, not a delusion.
So consider those "ideological objectives". Their root cause is not money - nobody makes money by being green (we can safely ignore the tiny little windmill and solar industries, as they're almost insignificant to the economic and political landscape.) Overall, the economy and country as a whole would be a lot better off financially letting the Koch brothers make their billions and taxing the hell out of them, letting Sarah Palin drill, baby, drill, and making personal gains and profits using the cheap energy.
No, the real objective of most people is to not live in a polluted craphole, with 50m visibility due to smog and 25% of people asthmatic (like Beijing is today), to not be struck with vast storm systems, to not have our shores coated in oil, to not have waterless croplands burned in the sun, and to keep the polar ice sequestered on top of the Antarctic continent so our coastal cities don't wash away. Since that objective doesn't translate into dollars, it's hard to present it as anything but a political viewpoint. Worse, because achieving it conflicts with the vast quantities of petrodollars, it doesn't have the overall resources to become a multi-million dollar ad campaign on equal footing with Exxon. Instead, it's adopted by moneyless groups like Greenpeace who are willing to do anything that lets them fly their freak flag.
So everything about this anti-money standpoint is being attacked by the petrochemical moguls. The freak aspect of groups like the Sea Shepherds is an easy target for ad hominem attacks. The science is something that half the people lack the education to understand, so they accept the words of their authorities instead. The simple answer is to buy those authorities (Fox News,) have them repeat words that resonate with their religious beliefs, and you own half the voters.
I talked to Alan about this a month ago. It's RF based detection of dermal layer blood vessels, not fingerprints. Living tissue is required for the hemoglobins to move.
That said, his interest is in the financial application of the technology. He's trying to replace the credit card, not simply to produce a hard to forge biometric device.
They are set to guard an area against any radar detectable objects, and most importantly, they do NOT have IFF. They have only trajectory and min/max target speeds, and anything traveling in the area that is heading in the wrong direction and is traveling within the set speed range is fired upon. I believe they already have shot down one friendly aircraft, which entered the kill zone while towing a target drone.
They're as close to indiscriminate killing machines as we have. They're self contained weapon systems requiring only electricity to operate. They operate a Vulcan M61 and hold over a thousand armor piercing or HE rounds.
The only good thing about them is that they're so large (5m tall, 6,000kg), They aren't stealthy, they're not deployed on front lines, they're primarily defensive weapons. But they're insanely lethal.
At least we know definitively that the trigger song isn't Margaritaville. That would have been a disaster.
Pancreatic cancer has a very poor survival rate. Sometimes surgical, radiation, and chemotherapy treatment can increase the chances of surviving an extra five years from 10% to 20%. Joining hands with familly and singing Kum-by-yah would do about as much good - or harm.
And diet has not been shown to have any specific impact on the treatment of the cancer. Regarding prevention, heredity and smoking are the biggest risk factors. Other typical risks such as obesity, poor diet, inactivity, etc., factor into it but they are not specific to pancreatic cancer.
In other words, you are rude, ignorant, and callous. Your friends and family must be so proud of you.
- Is the email address in question visible to other people? e.g. registered forum members for the software in question? Sometimes people sign up for a forum just to be able to harvest the otherwise hidden addresses of other forum members
This is the first thing I thought of. I've seen small companies send out mass emails to blocks of people, sharing my name with the hundreds of other customers on the list. I've seen support postings with email addresses embedded as links behind the user names. Both of those are the faults of the companies that engaged in such behavior, but aren't quite the same as a "compromised" list.
Obviously, the author's intent was to leave himself in an anti-spam position, to be able to simply block the compromised address to stop further spam. I suggest he exercise that option and move on. He's notified them to the best of his ability. Further activity, such as trying to name-and-shame the company, could end up with their lawyers sending him cease-and-desist nastygrams. I'm not a lawyer so I can't tell him if those kinds of letters have legal merit, but if he has to hire a lawyer to get an answer to questions like thta, it could cost him money.
tl;dr - "To the pain."
If you read a book that was on the list, you were influenced. Those ratings affect everything, including whether or not they showed up on the shelves at your local bookstore, on the end cap at your local grocery store, or in an airport convenience store.
It's the buyers for those businesses who use that list to make purchasing decisions. Those are the folks who put power in the list.
It's not quite enough. The problem is people remain convinced that they should continue to take the list seriously. The big publishing houses trumpet it on book jackets, other reviewers continue to reference it, TV shows continue to reference it. It's part of a self-referential promotional engine that shows no sign of collapsing.
That could be. I've seen videos of them flying in rooms lined with cotton netting, too, though, where the builders were obviously trying to minimize damage to the copters. But that might just be old footage. The autonomous drones have gotten a lot more trustworthy and reliable as of late, so maybe they don't worry as much about crashing anymore.
And flying in an isolated room, they don't seem too worried about incidental damage. The video of the drone assembling the brick tower in a crowded art gallery, though, that one made me wonder why they didn't have a bit more safety equipment around it.
Ubuntu Tycoons
You owe me a new keyboard.
People who give lectures for a living - public speakers, professional salesmen, life coaches, and so on - have this figured out. They *have* to, because their livelihood depends on it. Their presentation has to capture interest, have relevance, have value to the listener, and be easily understood.
Apples and oranges. A salesman is there to distill all the complexity that went into his product into a statement of benefits, not to give you the full education needed to understand either the problem or the solution. A good salesman is certainly capable of teaching you as much about the problems as well as their tools, but that's also not the same thing.
Consider: "Our Widget-O-Matic will power through your problems quickly, much easier and cheaper than your manual widgets. Our engineers put feedback from thousands of customers into this amazing device. Here's a chart that shows 95% of our customers saved ten times as much as the manual widget users." No actual understanding is needed to benefit from the education those engineers went through.
A good education, though, has to give you all those tiny details that make up the whole, and where to learn more, otherwise you're simply learning to be a parrot. Or a salesman. And that takes a lot of time and effort; much more than listening to a sales pitch.