Consuming green products isn't the answer - reduction of consumption is the answer...
...if the US spent the equivalent of what they are about to drop on Syria on renewable power, and declare wars on nouns like renewable energy rather than terrorism and drugs...
You know that you just suggested that we focus on consuming green products, right?
If samzenpus had bothered to read the article, he would know that it explains, very clearly, that Galileo was right on the question of why ice floats. He was apparently wrong in some of the reasoning that he used to explain another effect (a disc of ebony floating on water due to surface tension).
Maybe samzenpus should go back to posting more science fiction...
I bet you could get a lot of investors on board with a plan to use solar power to convert atmospheric CO2 into building materials. Just don't tell them that the super-secret device that does so is called a "tree."
I'd keep it expanded all the time. Why not. Are you ever going to have that little space? Unlikely.
If people started buying these, I would expect businesses that deal with parking problems to reserve some extra-small spaces for these cars -- most likely desirably-located spaces, in order to encourage people to use them. That's why you'd use it.
So they factored in the costs for extra support, downtime, conversion, training and lower productivity, and the end sum is a 12,50 change in price per pc.
That's not what the article or the summary said. It said "The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences."
Now, one thing that's obviously being missed in the (1.5 million euro / 120k PCs) calculation is that the article says that it's 1.5 million euro per year. I'm not sure how they would do their licensing (if they pay Microsoft a yearly fee of 1.5 million for all their office installations, or if that's the average cost of required upgrades each year, or whatever), but obviously you can't just assume that they get each copy of office for 12.50.
Then why stop at harvesting organs? Why not use the dead as food?
I wouldn't consider it morally wrong to eat the dead, assuming that the rights of the person weren't violated while they were alive. There are several practical reasons why doing so is a bad idea, of course, but "that hunk of flesh used to be a person" really isn't one of them.
Why bother following a person's will, and just let the living do what they want with a person's estate?
That's actually a valid question. My response is that you follow someone's will because the living have made a promise to do so. Keeping your word is important (or, at least, it should be); regardless of whether or not the person you gave it to is dead.
On the other hand, I definitely do not believe in doing something just because "that's what dear old dead Dad would have wanted," or similar. Life is for the living, not the dead.
Yeah, obviously I had a brainfart on translating "1500s" to a century.
As far as the societal-level changes that you mention go -- there are still a lot of places in the world where attitudes and culture are a lot closer to 1500s Europe than they are to modern society in the US or Europe. But people can and do come from those places and manage to assimilate reasonably well.
I don't think that the comparison with "elderly" people is completely relevant, given that the original statement was that they wouldn't be able to hold down a job. Elderly people, for the most part, don't hold jobs either. It's fair to assume that someone who chooses to be put to sleep for five hundred years expects that they have a fair amount of time remaining to them, and so we're probably looking at people that are capable of learning new skills and using them.
(Yes, the whole "freeze Dad after he's dead" scenario doesn't really fit there -- but that's kind of a silly idea in the first place; I don't think that's really going to catch on.)
There are a lot of jobs that people do that don't necessarily require much, if any, use of modern technology; most obviously many jobs that involve manual labor. For that matter, how many non-elderly people really keep up with "technology" in more than a superficial way?
Depending on their walk of life, I would not be at all surprised if they had a better work ethic than the average American. There's no reason why a curious and motivated 14th-century person couldn't learn enough to get along in modern society, especially if they get some initial help.
If somebody was offering one-way trips to 2500 right now -- assuming that I was convinced that the technology involved would actually work -- I'd do it without hesitation. There's plenty of us without any particularly strong ties who would go for something like that -- and many reasons beyond the whole "uncurable disease" one.
And if we start expanding into space, resource contention ceases to be an issue, at least for a few million years.
Only if you're able to send people out at the rate that people are being added to the population.
At current birth/death rates, that's in the neighborhood of 200,000 people per day. Given that it's very difficult to imagine a technological leap anytime in the foreseeable future that would allow a migration on that scale, we're going to have to get a handle on our population growth -- one way or another -- long before mass migration will be an option.
... the white community--a 27,425 square-mile region that covers portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico...
It is obvious that this is really about providing internet service to a particular geographical area; not specifically because of anyone's race. I'm not much of a fan of the reservation system, but there are many areas that are predominately populated by people of one ethnicity or another; it's not "racist" to provide them with services.
Here's the real story: Nobody wants to have a nuclear waste disposal site in their backyard.
This is mostly because it hasn't been handled and presented right. If the people of Nevada actually engaged their brains, what they should have done is just demanded money. By adding 1% to the cost of building the facility, they could give every single household in Nevada over $1000 -- and by charging other states to store their waste there, they could continue to pay the citizens back.
Make a proposal like that, and it's guaranteed that the people will vote in someone who will make it happen. No way the NIMBYs would be able to stop it.
The drivers will be extremely upset by it, needing counselling and often quitting their job afterwards, many passengers may be similarly scarred,
Only a problem until people adjust. The "emotional scarring" is a side effect of people being completely detached from the reality that people's actions have consequences. Once they realize that it's no big deal when an idiot snuffs it due to their own choices, we'll be better off.
and in the short term the time and money costs of the damage to the train/track and delays
Sounds to me like maybe we should invest in research into high-speed cowcatchers.
agreed. To this day, I've never actually seen a nerd consume a twinkie.
I think it just comes from some gross prerojitave that if someone is fat they must eat twinkies.
Good grief
Anyone else find it amusing that someone would be more embarrassed that people might assume they eat Twinkies than they are about being fat?
Although I'm not even sure where this supposed "all nerds love Twinkies" stereotype is even coming from. The only time I've heard of it is in the Slashdot summary for every Twinkie story. It makes me wonder if it's actually samzenpus who is addicted to Twinkies, and he's just assuming that all other nerds are too.
I suppose that method may work -- it's still breakable if a local attacker compromises the browser so they can intercept the decrypted passwords, but that's probably going to be a lot more difficult -- but at least I certainly would not be willing to give Google the ability to decrypt and view all of my sensitive passwords. So that would kind of limit this scheme to only non-sensitive/unimportant passwords.. and then I'd kind of have to ask, why bother with that if they're not important anyway?
Would you suggest buying a high-security door lock if there's an easily-broken window right next to the door that a thief could use?
The best analogy for the "door lock" in this scenario... is the physical lock on my front door. That's what keeps the easily-deterred thieves away from my physical items, and it also keeps them from taking my computer and looking up the passwords stored by my browser.
Comparing the built-in browser security to the lock on my front door is not a particularly good analogy. My computer isn't anywhere where casual thieves could access it anyway.
Yes, I use a password vault for any passwords that would be worth stealing. I agree, storing your email, financial or similar passwords using any method that can be accessed by an unauthorized local user -- whether that's plain text, or obfuscated by an easily-bypassed encryption scheme -- is a bad idea. If that is how your browser stores passwords (which applies to chrome, firefox without a master password, etc.) then you shouldn't be using it for anything where a compromised password would be harmful.
On the other hand, I allow chrome to remember my slashdot password and other unimportant ones. The ease of use outweighs any security risks there.
I can see an argument for including password vault-type support in Chrome -- although I would personally prefer a cross-platform, standardized interface for storing and encrypting passwords that any browser could access. But I don't see much point in including obfuscation of unprotected passwords -- if anything, that just lends a false sense of security.
You can't, but I wouldn't expect a local user to have the time to install a hex editor and decompilers on a machine that I use to extract a private key from the executable.
If you assume that the local users on your machine are potentially going to try to steal your passwords, you should also assume that they are going to potentially put in the required effort to get around a scheme like this. Perhaps you're not very well versed in what it would take to extract the key when using this scheme -- take it from someone who is; it's going to be fairly trivial.
If you want to prevent that sort of attack, you need a way to only allow decryption of the passwords by the person who is authorized to use them. For instance, using a tool like KeePassX with a master password works; apparently the Firefox master password uses the same scheme. But that doesn't give the same ease of use as the automated password entry. If you want it automatic, then you have to accept that the database can be accessed by anyone, not just your web browser.
But to make it simple for you, a password can be encrypted with a public key, and then decrypted with Chrome's private key.
How do you intend to keep a local user from being able to extract the private key that Chrome is using? (Note that in your scenario, asymmetric key encryption is kind of pointless in the first place.)
There's nothing morally wrong with eating something lower than yourself on the food chain, that's they way nature made all of us animals.
Hm... wouldn't that mean that there's nothing morally wrong with eating anything -- including another human? After all, if you ate them, then they're lower on the food chain than you, by definition.
Even scarier is the acceptance of NSA monitoring as evidenced by the last line:
I took that last line as being sarcastic. Maybe professionals should have been in scare quotes.
Perhaps the scary part is how so many supposedly intelligent people lose their capacity for comprehension of sarcasm and irony when they get on the internet?
It sounds to me like you're more interested in revenge than in implementing a copyright policy that benefits society as a whole.
Back to my original point: calling for a complete end to copyright is not likely to lead to any real policy changes, because as a policy that has very little support. If you're fighting a "war", the approach to take is probably not the one that has no chance of success.
Are you going to still be appeasing when they extend copyright again?
Just because I support a position that is not 100% in opposition to those who want to take copyright to extreme levels does not make it "appeasing." That word would only apply if I was taking a position that I do not agree with in order to placate them, which is not the case.
In the case of the inevitable attempt to extend the period of copyright again, I will of course be against it, as I support a much more limited term of copyright. I don't have to oppose copyright completely in order to oppose unreasonable copyright terms.
Im not saying abolishment is the right or correct thing to do, but it shouldn't be off the table completely, given the nature and actions of its supporters.
The law should be set based on what is most beneficial for society, not as an attempt to punish those that you believe deserve to be punished. If abolishment is not the right thing to do, then it should be off the table.
Slashdot Mirror
Consuming green products isn't the answer - reduction of consumption is the answer...
...if the US spent the equivalent of what they are about to drop on Syria on renewable power, and declare wars on nouns like renewable energy rather than terrorism and drugs...
You know that you just suggested that we focus on consuming green products, right?
If samzenpus had bothered to read the article, he would know that it explains, very clearly, that Galileo was right on the question of why ice floats. He was apparently wrong in some of the reasoning that he used to explain another effect (a disc of ebony floating on water due to surface tension).
Maybe samzenpus should go back to posting more science fiction...
I bet you could get a lot of investors on board with a plan to use solar power to convert atmospheric CO2 into building materials. Just don't tell them that the super-secret device that does so is called a "tree."
I'd keep it expanded all the time. Why not. Are you ever going to have that little space? Unlikely.
If people started buying these, I would expect businesses that deal with parking problems to reserve some extra-small spaces for these cars -- most likely desirably-located spaces, in order to encourage people to use them. That's why you'd use it.
Nothing is stopping you from writing one either, except time and desire.
On the other hand, XxtraLarGe isn't the one that keeps promising to do stuff that is beyond his power and authority to do.
So they factored in the costs for extra support, downtime, conversion, training and lower productivity, and the end sum is a 12,50 change in price per pc.
That's not what the article or the summary said. It said "The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences."
Now, one thing that's obviously being missed in the (1.5 million euro / 120k PCs) calculation is that the article says that it's 1.5 million euro per year. I'm not sure how they would do their licensing (if they pay Microsoft a yearly fee of 1.5 million for all their office installations, or if that's the average cost of required upgrades each year, or whatever), but obviously you can't just assume that they get each copy of office for 12.50.
Then why stop at harvesting organs? Why not use the dead as food?
I wouldn't consider it morally wrong to eat the dead, assuming that the rights of the person weren't violated while they were alive. There are several practical reasons why doing so is a bad idea, of course, but "that hunk of flesh used to be a person" really isn't one of them.
Why bother following a person's will, and just let the living do what they want with a person's estate?
That's actually a valid question. My response is that you follow someone's will because the living have made a promise to do so. Keeping your word is important (or, at least, it should be); regardless of whether or not the person you gave it to is dead.
On the other hand, I definitely do not believe in doing something just because "that's what dear old dead Dad would have wanted," or similar. Life is for the living, not the dead.
Yeah, obviously I had a brainfart on translating "1500s" to a century.
As far as the societal-level changes that you mention go -- there are still a lot of places in the world where attitudes and culture are a lot closer to 1500s Europe than they are to modern society in the US or Europe. But people can and do come from those places and manage to assimilate reasonably well.
I don't think that the comparison with "elderly" people is completely relevant, given that the original statement was that they wouldn't be able to hold down a job. Elderly people, for the most part, don't hold jobs either. It's fair to assume that someone who chooses to be put to sleep for five hundred years expects that they have a fair amount of time remaining to them, and so we're probably looking at people that are capable of learning new skills and using them.
(Yes, the whole "freeze Dad after he's dead" scenario doesn't really fit there -- but that's kind of a silly idea in the first place; I don't think that's really going to catch on.)
There are a lot of jobs that people do that don't necessarily require much, if any, use of modern technology; most obviously many jobs that involve manual labor. For that matter, how many non-elderly people really keep up with "technology" in more than a superficial way?
Imagine someone from the 1500s waking up now.
Depending on their walk of life, I would not be at all surprised if they had a better work ethic than the average American. There's no reason why a curious and motivated 14th-century person couldn't learn enough to get along in modern society, especially if they get some initial help.
If somebody was offering one-way trips to 2500 right now -- assuming that I was convinced that the technology involved would actually work -- I'd do it without hesitation. There's plenty of us without any particularly strong ties who would go for something like that -- and many reasons beyond the whole "uncurable disease" one.
And if we start expanding into space, resource contention ceases to be an issue, at least for a few million years.
Only if you're able to send people out at the rate that people are being added to the population.
At current birth/death rates, that's in the neighborhood of 200,000 people per day. Given that it's very difficult to imagine a technological leap anytime in the foreseeable future that would allow a migration on that scale, we're going to have to get a handle on our population growth -- one way or another -- long before mass migration will be an option.
... the white community--a 27,425 square-mile region that covers portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico ...
It is obvious that this is really about providing internet service to a particular geographical area; not specifically because of anyone's race. I'm not much of a fan of the reservation system, but there are many areas that are predominately populated by people of one ethnicity or another; it's not "racist" to provide them with services.
Here's the real story: Nobody wants to have a nuclear waste disposal site in their backyard.
This is mostly because it hasn't been handled and presented right. If the people of Nevada actually engaged their brains, what they should have done is just demanded money. By adding 1% to the cost of building the facility, they could give every single household in Nevada over $1000 -- and by charging other states to store their waste there, they could continue to pay the citizens back.
Make a proposal like that, and it's guaranteed that the people will vote in someone who will make it happen. No way the NIMBYs would be able to stop it.
Totally agree, PENCIL + PAPER is the answer.
Pencils are for people that make mistakes.
The drivers will be extremely upset by it, needing counselling and often quitting their job afterwards, many passengers may be similarly scarred,
Only a problem until people adjust. The "emotional scarring" is a side effect of people being completely detached from the reality that people's actions have consequences. Once they realize that it's no big deal when an idiot snuffs it due to their own choices, we'll be better off.
and in the short term the time and money costs of the damage to the train/track and delays
Sounds to me like maybe we should invest in research into high-speed cowcatchers.
agreed. To this day, I've never actually seen a nerd consume a twinkie.
I think it just comes from some gross prerojitave that if someone is fat they must eat twinkies.
Good grief
Anyone else find it amusing that someone would be more embarrassed that people might assume they eat Twinkies than they are about being fat?
Although I'm not even sure where this supposed "all nerds love Twinkies" stereotype is even coming from. The only time I've heard of it is in the Slashdot summary for every Twinkie story. It makes me wonder if it's actually samzenpus who is addicted to Twinkies, and he's just assuming that all other nerds are too.
I suppose that method may work -- it's still breakable if a local attacker compromises the browser so they can intercept the decrypted passwords, but that's probably going to be a lot more difficult -- but at least I certainly would not be willing to give Google the ability to decrypt and view all of my sensitive passwords. So that would kind of limit this scheme to only non-sensitive/unimportant passwords .. and then I'd kind of have to ask, why bother with that if they're not important anyway?
Would you suggest buying a high-security door lock if there's an easily-broken window right next to the door that a thief could use?
The best analogy for the "door lock" in this scenario ... is the physical lock on my front door. That's what keeps the easily-deterred thieves away from my physical items, and it also keeps them from taking my computer and looking up the passwords stored by my browser.
Comparing the built-in browser security to the lock on my front door is not a particularly good analogy. My computer isn't anywhere where casual thieves could access it anyway.
Yes, I use a password vault for any passwords that would be worth stealing. I agree, storing your email, financial or similar passwords using any method that can be accessed by an unauthorized local user -- whether that's plain text, or obfuscated by an easily-bypassed encryption scheme -- is a bad idea. If that is how your browser stores passwords (which applies to chrome, firefox without a master password, etc.) then you shouldn't be using it for anything where a compromised password would be harmful.
On the other hand, I allow chrome to remember my slashdot password and other unimportant ones. The ease of use outweighs any security risks there.
I can see an argument for including password vault-type support in Chrome -- although I would personally prefer a cross-platform, standardized interface for storing and encrypting passwords that any browser could access. But I don't see much point in including obfuscation of unprotected passwords -- if anything, that just lends a false sense of security.
You can't, but I wouldn't expect a local user to have the time to install a hex editor and decompilers on a machine that I use to extract a private key from the executable.
If you assume that the local users on your machine are potentially going to try to steal your passwords, you should also assume that they are going to potentially put in the required effort to get around a scheme like this. Perhaps you're not very well versed in what it would take to extract the key when using this scheme -- take it from someone who is; it's going to be fairly trivial.
If you want to prevent that sort of attack, you need a way to only allow decryption of the passwords by the person who is authorized to use them. For instance, using a tool like KeePassX with a master password works; apparently the Firefox master password uses the same scheme. But that doesn't give the same ease of use as the automated password entry. If you want it automatic, then you have to accept that the database can be accessed by anyone, not just your web browser.
But to make it simple for you, a password can be encrypted with a public key, and then decrypted with Chrome's private key.
How do you intend to keep a local user from being able to extract the private key that Chrome is using? (Note that in your scenario, asymmetric key encryption is kind of pointless in the first place.)
See: why DRM doesn't work either.
There's nothing morally wrong with eating something lower than yourself on the food chain, that's they way nature made all of us animals.
Hm ... wouldn't that mean that there's nothing morally wrong with eating anything -- including another human? After all, if you ate them, then they're lower on the food chain than you, by definition.
I understand that spam is a problem, but if you run a website, it's *YOUR* problem. CAPTCHAs make it *MY* problem and that's just stupid.
If the website you use is overrun by spam to the point of being unusable, then it's your problem as well.
Even scarier is the acceptance of NSA monitoring as evidenced by the last line:
I took that last line as being sarcastic. Maybe professionals should have been in scare quotes.
Perhaps the scary part is how so many supposedly intelligent people lose their capacity for comprehension of sarcasm and irony when they get on the internet?
It sounds to me like you're more interested in revenge than in implementing a copyright policy that benefits society as a whole.
Back to my original point: calling for a complete end to copyright is not likely to lead to any real policy changes, because as a policy that has very little support. If you're fighting a "war", the approach to take is probably not the one that has no chance of success.
Are you going to still be appeasing when they extend copyright again?
Just because I support a position that is not 100% in opposition to those who want to take copyright to extreme levels does not make it "appeasing." That word would only apply if I was taking a position that I do not agree with in order to placate them, which is not the case.
In the case of the inevitable attempt to extend the period of copyright again, I will of course be against it, as I support a much more limited term of copyright. I don't have to oppose copyright completely in order to oppose unreasonable copyright terms.
Im not saying abolishment is the right or correct thing to do, but it shouldn't be off the table completely, given the nature and actions of its supporters.
The law should be set based on what is most beneficial for society, not as an attempt to punish those that you believe deserve to be punished. If abolishment is not the right thing to do, then it should be off the table.