So by those numbers we're releasing a couple kilotons of radioactive material into the air every year from our coal power plants. And nobody cares.
But a small bit of radioactive material gets into the atmosphere in Sendai and all of a sudden my father-in-law wants me to cancel my trip to Japan in May.
I may cancel it anyway if Japan hasn't recovered by then, but we were planning on spending most of our time in the Osaka region anyway.
>>You can still be in the background of a picture, as "noise" as it were, but if you're the actual *subject* of the picture, then they need permission to publish.
Err, no. I took a class on this subject. (For the US.)
If you're out in public, you have no expectation of privacy. I can photograph you smiling in front of the Eiffel Tower, and it's perfectly legal for me to put it up on my Flickr page. If you're indoors, I can't snap your photo without your permission.
Though journalists will often ask for consent or releases anyway, of anyone they can identify in a photo, just for safety's sake. But, strictly speaking, they don't need to do it if the subjects are in a public place.
There's a LOT of complicating factors, such as endorsement/misappropriation, false light, eavesdropping/wire tapping, etc., etc.
If the facebook photo was indoors in a private setting, the target should have had the right to request it taken down.
Yeah, asshole admins basically drove me away from contributing to Wikipedia. Not like I was a major contributor, but I'd put some time in.
Getting into a spat with an admin who was automatically reverting any changes made to 'his' article was enough to make me quit trying. His admin buddies backed him up on it, when all I was trying to do was add ISBN numbers to the biography section, and his second-long revert times meant he wasn't even reading what he was reverting.
>>Microsoft doesn't have market dominance in operating systems where they make Bing the default?
Does Win7 make Bing the default now? I didn't know that.
>>And on top of that, product search doesn't put Google in the top slot for everything -- search for "camera" and I get Ritz Camera, followed by the Wikipedia entry for Camera, followed by Google products.
So should they be third? That's the question.
I'm not saying they're necessarily guilty, but it *is* an area worth investigating.
>>So either Microsoft is breaking the law or Google isn't.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance. Google does. That's the important distinction.
And yes, the law *is* set up to punish winners.
>>I could see the problem if they were manually altering the algorithmic search results so that a competitor that should have been result number 3 by algorithm is instead result number 2500,
How is that any different from returning Youtube videos as all of the top results, and pushing Metacafe or whatever down the list?
>>So I guess what I'm asking is, what do you expect them to do?
In particular, I believe they're investigating the use of Google Shopping. They care a lot more about these things when actual money is being exchanged. If it's unfairly prioritizing their own online stores, then they should probably stop doing that and just let the results play how however they fall.
>>Not in the last few years you haven't. Indiana switched to DST in 2005.
Heh, I've been going out to Indiana once or twice a year for a while now. Looking up the changelog for their time zone insanity, it looks like it was 2006, not 2005. And they shuffle counties around, too:
Effective April 2, 2006 - all of Indiana observes daylight saving time. Effective April 2, 2006 - the eight Indiana counties of Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, Perry, Pike, Pulaski and Starke moved from the Eastern to Central Time Zones. Effective March 11, 2007 - Pulaski County moved back to the Eastern Time Zone. Previously Pulaski County had moved from Eastern to Central Time effective Effective November 4, 2007 - The five counties of Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, and Pike moved from Central to Eastern Time effective when Daylight Saving Time ended.
So... yeah. It's been a total PITA whenever I go out to Jasper (in Dubois County). Evansville Airport is on the other side of the line... and they keep moving the line.
>>Microsoft is still doing it today. Are their lawyers incompetent?
Haven't been following that story, then? Microsoft now has to offer a choice of browsers in the EU. This would have happened in America, too, except Microsoft started making a lot of campaign contributions and the suit got more or less dropped. (Well, they had to give out "10% off regular price" coupons to schools, which was meaningless, since schools already got better discounts).
>>Taken literally this means that Fox News can't run ads for the Wall Street Journal because they're the same company and Fox has market domination in the conservative TV news market. Is that what you're arguing?
They can run ads, but they can't prioritize WSJ ads over any other. That's what they're investigating with Google.
>>People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight"
They are. People that aren't farmers don't care about daylight in the morning time, but they do care about it when they get off work. So it's exactly like getting a free hour of daylight from a utility point of view.
>>Try working on the border between Illinois and Indiana, not only is there a timezone changeover, Illinois uses DST while Indiana does not. If I'm not mistaken part of the year their clocks match, and part of the year they're three hours different.
I do work in central Indiana, and it's really really annoying. Not only do they not use DST, but their time zone splits the state in half, so an airport 20 miles away might be an hour ahead or behind your time at the hotel.
I would have missed a flight once because of this, but fortunately(?) it worked the other way and I showed up at the airport at 4AM, before anyone was even there.
>>Can you address this point? If this guy is such a goody-goody, why is he going after Google
If you read the article, they want to investigate if Google's domination over the search business gives them an unfair advantage in other areas by prioritizing their own companies in search results.
Which is an entirely reasonable thing to investigate./shrug
>>Ethics play a role in everything we do, even by their absence.
Yeah, he sounds like the nuts on Slashdot who claim that "philosophy has no relevance" to their lives, and then go on to say how they hate Corporatism, and think that everyone should be left alone by the government unless they violate someone's natural rights to life liberty and property.
I was going to make a post exactly along those lines. Well done.
Taking discrete math was probably the one single thing in college that improved my code the most, once you get past the "forgetting a semicolon" stage. Even though I never use proofs to show my loops will always work correctly, learning inductive logic and being able to do proofs enough times to let the lessons sink in is tremendously valuable.
Calculus, linear algebra are also useful, differential equations, maybe a bit less so.
At the high school level, good algebra skills are essential.
>>Right, because an advanced, military-based race that subsists on destroying other civilizations would not have a "mindset for security". Makes perfect sense.
Don't be stupid. ARPAnet was funded by and built for the military and had incredibly shoddy security.
Remember trusted hosts? Or why we allow people to spoof IP addresses even now? It all came from the too-trusting model of security.
>>Right, because why would their thread model include the civilization they are planning to conquer?
If they'd never been hacked before, there's no reason why it should be. We only moved away from the trust-based model only slowly, and after intrusion after intrusion occurred. Other alien targets might also not have been forewarned by a crashed alien ship.
As a hive race, they might have a different threat model than we do. It's kind of silly to assume that they'd have perfect security when we all know how hard it is to secure things. There's plenty of ways Goldblum could have destroyed their network, once he knew how to interface with it.
>>Jeff Goldblum only needed a couple of hours to slap together a virus that can completely shut down an alien civilization. Even if he spent years doing nothing else, it's still ridiculous.
I know people that are really, really good at reverse engineering code. Now combine that with an alien species that might not have the mindset needed for security, and you'll see that it's somewhat plausible. The summary actually has it right for once - getting an interface in the first part is the hard part.
I just wanted to chime in and say that my friends and I always found your talks and papers to be awesome. =) I attended your DOS backscatter talk (in the old AP&M building) when I was getting my Masters at UCSD. (I worked with Scott Baden, and Fran Berman a bit.)
If consumers had any say in automobile design, we wouldn't have all this bullshit in the first place. They charge us thousands for a factory stereo worth less than an hundred. They sell us all these proprietary navigation systems that get trounced by an iPhone or Android. They oh-so-cleverly forget to put in a drain plug so you have to pay the dealer $150 for an oil change.
Pfft. You're stuck in the 80s.
My Nissan and my wife's Honda dealership both charge ~$24 for an oil change. I actually bought a lifetime (for the ownership of the car) all-you-can-eat oil change plan (with Synthetic) for $400, which includes oil filters, air filters, etc. It cost me $18 to have my wheels rotated, which I guess is a bit more than Walmart./shrug.
I just put in an aftermarket stereo system (I drive 25k miles a year, and a good audio system with XM radio has become essential to me). Putting in four good speakers + head unit + XM radio + integration with steering wheel audio controls cost about $900. I quite like the result I got, but I'd have preferred getting the factory installed package. Better integration with XM radio, better reception, and a 9-speaker system. Most dealerships charge about $1000 for this, and it comes factory installed.
But my car only had XM radio installed in a mega-package that included leather heated seats, moonroof, etc., so I just did it myself.
>>cheap - not really; subsidies are usually needed. but then, subsidies are needed for practically all power generation that isn't coal or gas.
Nuclear has the lowest subsidy rate of any green technology (including 'clean' coal and gas). Normal coal and gas aren't generally subsidized at the power plant level.
I've posted the subsidy rates for various sources of energy on here before. IIRC, it's something like 10-20% for nuclear, vs. 40-50% for other green technologies.
>>Wonder how many of the usual "Nuclear Energy is cheap, safe, clean and does the dishes AND the laundry" posts we get today.
I'm more concerned with the terrible track record of reportage on the subject. The news is already reporting that there is 1000x times normal radiation in the town. (http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-3) with my friends on Facebook writing posts about Godzilla and whatnot.
It's 1000x normal *inside the containment building*, which is exactly what those things are there for.
I'd much rather have been living next to the nuclear plant than the Chiba oil refinery during the earthquake.
Hackers and Blowfish (err, Swordfish) stand out the most as appallingly bad. Though I have to admit it's the rare TV or movie that gets computer science in even the ballpark of plausibility.
I'd go through a lot of TVs and monitors if I acted on my impulse to throw bottles at the screen every time a 3D UI or infinite-zoom-and-enhance camera or other horrible Hollywood trope involving computers is used.
You keep posting this same moronic crap on every story about natural disasters. Where is this magical place on Earth that is free from natural disasters (earthquake, tsunami, volcano, flood, drought, extreme cold, extreme heat, hurricane, tornado, blizzard, typhoon, mudslide, avalanche, wild fire,...)?
Fresno.
Depends on your definition of extreme heat and cold, I guess, but the area is as devoid of natural disasters as they come.
>>And he would win, because EA don't want the 'you're only buying a license, na-na' excuse tested in court for the sake of $60.
Small claims courts don't set precedent.
I doubt random_user is going to throw money at EA to get a test case. The EFF might, though. This is perfectly in line with their stance against EULAs.
For example, in California, EULA's are not recognized as a Valid Contract, thus EA is now liable for Breach of the First Sale Doctrine, Computer Hacking and Misrepresentation of Product, meaing that in California he'd have EA by the Balls and could rip them off, teaching them a lesson while getting a very nice payout for his trouble.
If only the DA2 EULA stated that all lawsuits in America had to be settled in California.
Oh wait, that's exactly what it says. =)
But then again, their EULA also claims that you can't sue them, and your only recourse is to uninstall the software, and delete your EA account. I presume they didn't also add "...and shoot yourself in the head" because that might make it a little too obvious how unenforceable their claims are.
Slashdot Mirror
So by those numbers we're releasing a couple kilotons of radioactive material into the air every year from our coal power plants. And nobody cares.
But a small bit of radioactive material gets into the atmosphere in Sendai and all of a sudden my father-in-law wants me to cancel my trip to Japan in May.
I may cancel it anyway if Japan hasn't recovered by then, but we were planning on spending most of our time in the Osaka region anyway.
>>You can still be in the background of a picture, as "noise" as it were, but if you're the actual *subject* of the picture, then they need permission to publish.
Err, no. I took a class on this subject. (For the US.)
If you're out in public, you have no expectation of privacy. I can photograph you smiling in front of the Eiffel Tower, and it's perfectly legal for me to put it up on my Flickr page. If you're indoors, I can't snap your photo without your permission.
Though journalists will often ask for consent or releases anyway, of anyone they can identify in a photo, just for safety's sake. But, strictly speaking, they don't need to do it if the subjects are in a public place.
There's a LOT of complicating factors, such as endorsement/misappropriation, false light, eavesdropping/wire tapping, etc., etc.
If the facebook photo was indoors in a private setting, the target should have had the right to request it taken down.
Yeah, asshole admins basically drove me away from contributing to Wikipedia. Not like I was a major contributor, but I'd put some time in.
Getting into a spat with an admin who was automatically reverting any changes made to 'his' article was enough to make me quit trying. His admin buddies backed him up on it, when all I was trying to do was add ISBN numbers to the biography section, and his second-long revert times meant he wasn't even reading what he was reverting.
>>Microsoft doesn't have market dominance in operating systems where they make Bing the default?
Does Win7 make Bing the default now? I didn't know that.
>>And on top of that, product search doesn't put Google in the top slot for everything -- search for "camera" and I get Ritz Camera, followed by the Wikipedia entry for Camera, followed by Google products.
So should they be third? That's the question.
I'm not saying they're necessarily guilty, but it *is* an area worth investigating.
>>So either Microsoft is breaking the law or Google isn't.
Microsoft doesn't have market dominance. Google does. That's the important distinction.
And yes, the law *is* set up to punish winners.
>>I could see the problem if they were manually altering the algorithmic search results so that a competitor that should have been result number 3 by algorithm is instead result number 2500,
How is that any different from returning Youtube videos as all of the top results, and pushing Metacafe or whatever down the list?
>>So I guess what I'm asking is, what do you expect them to do?
In particular, I believe they're investigating the use of Google Shopping. They care a lot more about these things when actual money is being exchanged. If it's unfairly prioritizing their own online stores, then they should probably stop doing that and just let the results play how however they fall.
>>Not in the last few years you haven't. Indiana switched to DST in 2005.
Heh, I've been going out to Indiana once or twice a year for a while now. Looking up the changelog for their time zone insanity, it looks like it was 2006, not 2005. And they shuffle counties around, too:
Effective April 2, 2006 - all of Indiana observes daylight saving time.
Effective April 2, 2006 - the eight Indiana counties of Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, Perry, Pike, Pulaski and Starke moved from the Eastern to Central Time Zones.
Effective March 11, 2007 - Pulaski County moved back to the Eastern Time Zone. Previously Pulaski County had moved from Eastern to Central Time effective
Effective November 4, 2007 - The five counties of Daviess, Dubois, Knox, Martin, and Pike moved from Central to Eastern Time effective when Daylight Saving Time ended.
So... yeah. It's been a total PITA whenever I go out to Jasper (in Dubois County). Evansville Airport is on the other side of the line... and they keep moving the line.
>>Microsoft is still doing it today. Are their lawyers incompetent?
Haven't been following that story, then? Microsoft now has to offer a choice of browsers in the EU. This would have happened in America, too, except Microsoft started making a lot of campaign contributions and the suit got more or less dropped. (Well, they had to give out "10% off regular price" coupons to schools, which was meaningless, since schools already got better discounts).
>>Taken literally this means that Fox News can't run ads for the Wall Street Journal because they're the same company and Fox has market domination in the conservative TV news market. Is that what you're arguing?
They can run ads, but they can't prioritize WSJ ads over any other. That's what they're investigating with Google.
>>People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight"
They are. People that aren't farmers don't care about daylight in the morning time, but they do care about it when they get off work. So it's exactly like getting a free hour of daylight from a utility point of view.
DST should be made permanent.
>>Try working on the border between Illinois and Indiana, not only is there a timezone changeover, Illinois uses DST while Indiana does not. If I'm not mistaken part of the year their clocks match, and part of the year they're three hours different.
I do work in central Indiana, and it's really really annoying. Not only do they not use DST, but their time zone splits the state in half, so an airport 20 miles away might be an hour ahead or behind your time at the hotel.
I would have missed a flight once because of this, but fortunately(?) it worked the other way and I showed up at the airport at 4AM, before anyone was even there.
>>So if there is any sort of investigation then why does Microsoft get a free pass?
You should read up on antitrust laws. This was exactly what got Microsoft in hot water during the 90s.
Or read about how American Airlines manipulated airline search results from their dominance via owning the Sabre reservation system (the first real online ticketing system):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)#Controversy
You can't use market domination in one segment to gain domination in another.
>>Can you address this point? If this guy is such a goody-goody, why is he going after Google
If you read the article, they want to investigate if Google's domination over the search business gives them an unfair advantage in other areas by prioritizing their own companies in search results.
Which is an entirely reasonable thing to investigate. /shrug
>>Ethics play a role in everything we do, even by their absence.
Yeah, he sounds like the nuts on Slashdot who claim that "philosophy has no relevance" to their lives, and then go on to say how they hate Corporatism, and think that everyone should be left alone by the government unless they violate someone's natural rights to life liberty and property.
I was going to make a post exactly along those lines. Well done.
Taking discrete math was probably the one single thing in college that improved my code the most, once you get past the "forgetting a semicolon" stage. Even though I never use proofs to show my loops will always work correctly, learning inductive logic and being able to do proofs enough times to let the lessons sink in is tremendously valuable.
Calculus, linear algebra are also useful, differential equations, maybe a bit less so.
At the high school level, good algebra skills are essential.
>>Right, because an advanced, military-based race that subsists on destroying other civilizations would not have a "mindset for security". Makes perfect sense.
Don't be stupid. ARPAnet was funded by and built for the military and had incredibly shoddy security.
Remember trusted hosts? Or why we allow people to spoof IP addresses even now? It all came from the too-trusting model of security.
>>Right, because why would their thread model include the civilization they are planning to conquer?
If they'd never been hacked before, there's no reason why it should be. We only moved away from the trust-based model only slowly, and after intrusion after intrusion occurred. Other alien targets might also not have been forewarned by a crashed alien ship.
>>You actually think it's reasonable that a stereo should cost more than a computer? Snap out of it.
The head unit costs a few hundred bucks, a XM radio costs more money, and good speakers cost even more.
The point the GGP was trying to make was that dealerships screw you on car audio systems, but I found they were reasonably comparative with DIY.
Though there are pros and cons on each side, I could see a reasonable person choosing to do it either way.
As a hive race, they might have a different threat model than we do. It's kind of silly to assume that they'd have perfect security when we all know how hard it is to secure things. There's plenty of ways Goldblum could have destroyed their network, once he knew how to interface with it.
>>Jeff Goldblum only needed a couple of hours to slap together a virus that can completely shut down an alien civilization. Even if he spent years doing nothing else, it's still ridiculous.
I know people that are really, really good at reverse engineering code. Now combine that with an alien species that might not have the mindset needed for security, and you'll see that it's somewhat plausible. The summary actually has it right for once - getting an interface in the first part is the hard part.
I just wanted to chime in and say that my friends and I always found your talks and papers to be awesome. =) I attended your DOS backscatter talk (in the old AP&M building) when I was getting my Masters at UCSD. (I worked with Scott Baden, and Fran Berman a bit.)
Pfft. You're stuck in the 80s.
My Nissan and my wife's Honda dealership both charge ~$24 for an oil change. I actually bought a lifetime (for the ownership of the car) all-you-can-eat oil change plan (with Synthetic) for $400, which includes oil filters, air filters, etc. It cost me $18 to have my wheels rotated, which I guess is a bit more than Walmart. /shrug.
I just put in an aftermarket stereo system (I drive 25k miles a year, and a good audio system with XM radio has become essential to me). Putting in four good speakers + head unit + XM radio + integration with steering wheel audio controls cost about $900. I quite like the result I got, but I'd have preferred getting the factory installed package. Better integration with XM radio, better reception, and a 9-speaker system. Most dealerships charge about $1000 for this, and it comes factory installed.
But my car only had XM radio installed in a mega-package that included leather heated seats, moonroof, etc., so I just did it myself.
>>cheap - not really; subsidies are usually needed. but then, subsidies are needed for practically all power generation that isn't coal or gas.
Nuclear has the lowest subsidy rate of any green technology (including 'clean' coal and gas). Normal coal and gas aren't generally subsidized at the power plant level.
I've posted the subsidy rates for various sources of energy on here before. IIRC, it's something like 10-20% for nuclear, vs. 40-50% for other green technologies.
>>Wonder how many of the usual "Nuclear Energy is cheap, safe, clean and does the dishes AND the laundry" posts we get today.
I'm more concerned with the terrible track record of reportage on the subject. The news is already reporting that there is 1000x times normal radiation in the town. (http://www.businessinsider.com/fukushima-nuclear-plant-2011-3) with my friends on Facebook writing posts about Godzilla and whatnot.
It's 1000x normal *inside the containment building*, which is exactly what those things are there for.
I'd much rather have been living next to the nuclear plant than the Chiba oil refinery during the earthquake.
As that very article you linked to said, they insisted at first it was in accordance with policies.
The fact they backpedaled after the internet exploded on them, while a good thing, doesn't mean it wasn't working-as-intended at the time.
Hackers and Blowfish (err, Swordfish) stand out the most as appallingly bad. Though I have to admit it's the rare TV or movie that gets computer science in even the ballpark of plausibility.
I'd go through a lot of TVs and monitors if I acted on my impulse to throw bottles at the screen every time a 3D UI or infinite-zoom-and-enhance camera or other horrible Hollywood trope involving computers is used.
Fresno.
Depends on your definition of extreme heat and cold, I guess, but the area is as devoid of natural disasters as they come.
>>And he would win, because EA don't want the 'you're only buying a license, na-na' excuse tested in court for the sake of $60.
Small claims courts don't set precedent.
I doubt random_user is going to throw money at EA to get a test case. The EFF might, though. This is perfectly in line with their stance against EULAs.
If only the DA2 EULA stated that all lawsuits in America had to be settled in California.
Oh wait, that's exactly what it says. =)
But then again, their EULA also claims that you can't sue them, and your only recourse is to uninstall the software, and delete your EA account. I presume they didn't also add "...and shoot yourself in the head" because that might make it a little too obvious how unenforceable their claims are.