I'm actually surprised that, so far, no one has misinterpreted this as "all your Google Docs are belong to our search engine" along with a few jihaddist vows to delete all data from Google immediately. Instead, everyone seems to have read the article and understand that these documents already should have been indexed, because the users published them on a web site the public has access to.
Who are all of you people, and what have you done with my Slashdot????
I think the design of the device fits in quite logically with human thinking, but so does Mutually Assured Destruction.
Remember (apologies for the history lesson), the deterrent factor that has probably prevented at least one, and possibly two or three additional World Wars by now was the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). "You don't dare fire missiles at me because you know I'll fire everything I've got at you, and the planet's pretty much done for." "Game over, man! Game over!" On the surface, it seems illogical, but it's actually EXTREMELY logical. MAD ties our survival inexorably with that of our enemies. A war, once started, is assured to be death for both sides with almost no exception. It sets the price barrier far beyond what any sane country would be willing to pay from the get-go. No one wants to start a war with that much of an assured outcome. "A strange game - the only way to win is not to play."
Traditional shooting wars, on the other hand, can start small and slowly grow, turning rapidly into self-justifications like "we can't pull out now or the hundreds of our people who have died so far will have died meaningless lives! Honor their sacrifice! Fight on!" That logic, which is very typical during a shooting war, leads to the loss of thousands, then the same argument allows escalation to the loss of tens of thousands, and so on until you are counting in the millions. Surrender becomes impossible except under the threat of an obviously overwhelming loss, and maybe not even then. Surrender or compromise is seen as invalidating the sacrifice of the people who died during the fighting. It's not right, but it's human.
MAD pretty much eliminates that. If any country has MAD capability, then we won't attack them. So the nuclear-holders of the world cannot attack each other directly, but of course they can involve other countries indirectly. The best MAD scenario would logically be for everyone to have MAD capability, but those that already have it would be deeply loath to let any of the countries they've been beating up on into the game. Anyway..
Back to "Perimeter":
Given the rules/logic behind MAD, the real risk is not that a decisionmaker would want to destroy the enemy at the cost of his own country - there are enough decisionmakers to pretty much (but not completely, of course) ensure that actual MAD would never be knowingly implemented. The real risk is that he might think the enemy has already committed to destroying him, and that he has nothing to lose and must implement his destructive capabilities before the enemy destroys his capability to retaliate.
The only thing worse than a false negative (you die but don't manage to kill your enemy) in MAD is a false positive (you end up attacking your enemy by mistake, and you both die). The possibility of false negatives is proportional to the chances of a false positive (the more you feel you need to act preemptively, the more likely it is that someone will). "Perimeter" reduced the possibility of a false negative by assuring generals that they could wait and make DAMNED SURE it was an attack before retaliating. Therefore, it significantly reduced the possibility of a false positive (preemptive strike when the side that launched first thought it was retaliating).
"Perimeter" is arguably one of the most logical things Mankind has ever built. It was a well-designed solution that significantly mitigated the problem.
This is a useful, easy, and consistent label both for the consumer and the factory. It gives a relatively accurate count of the allergens, and a pretty rational level of detail as to how likely contamination is. Bravo!
With all honesty, while I admire that level of detail, what company in their right mind is going to put anything on the "Ingredients:" line but "Cannot guarantee nut free". The instant you put "guarantee" on a legally-required bit of labeling, corporate lawyers are going to make damned sure the words "Can Not" appear in front of it.
Food manufacturers who **DO NOT** process peanuts or tree nuts are starting to label their product... (emphasis added).
In other words, at some point as more severe peanut allergies develop or are alleged or simply come to light, every product sold will have that label. Either that, or you'll have the rare company that either takes the risk, or completely and utterly bans peanut/tree nut products from their organization, even employees at home.
When the labeling started, it was "this product contains nuts" and even though I giggled when I saw it on a bag or jar of actual peanuts or peanut butter, it made sense to me.
Then it became "is processed in a plant that processes nuts" or "may contain trace amounts of nuts" which tells me that, even though nuts are not a primary ingredient, there's a chance of contamination. So if a nut allergy is minor, the affected person can eat it with relative safety.
But now we have the really REALLY allergic people who can't enter a room that has had something in it at all. One of the classes at my daughter's school is like that - they have a "life and death" tree nut allergy that is severe, they had to spend a good chunk of the summer cleaning the heck out of the room because even traces of tree nut oil on the coat rack could do her in, and the rest of the class has been asked to eliminate all tree nuts (almonds, etc) from their homes for fear that oil might get on their clothing and survive a washing.
Given that people like that exist, and I'm NOT blaming the little girl - it's an inconvenience the rest of the school just deals with - the food companies now have to basically assume that EVERY product is contaminated with any product that can cause this severity of allergy.
So the label that it "may contain traces" has lost all useful meaning. The chances of it containing traces are unknown, and the amount meant by traces is also unknown.
Label everything, and the label becomes meaningless because you can no longer differentiate between "we also run peanuts through the machine that made your almond butter, so the chances of contamination are relatively high" versus "we hermetically seal our almond butter making machine and all employees are under a death sentence never to own or see a peanut in their lives, but one of them might accidentally eat Pad Thai on vacation and spill some on their shirt then brush up against a machine a week later"
Can't say as I completely disagree, though the degree to which they've oversold may eliminate the possibility of doing that without $PIPE_SIZE being small enough that most users would scream blue bloody murder.
In many cases, I suspect the capacity was oversold by VERY significant margins in order to keep costs down (which in turn allowed them to promise a very large $PIPE_SIZE number knowing 99% of people would never use it). Unfortunately, when it reached the point where 90% of people never used it, suddenly they had a capacity crisis.
What's a dictated monopoly to do? They can't raise prices immediately, they can't tell their stakeholders that the Lear is out this month so they can expand capacity, and they can't lower the $PIPE_SIZE number because they've already promised it.
So they try to blame the people who use their entire $PIPE_SIZE. And, for the most part, even as a P2P user I would have been OK with that - during peak, throttle my P2P to something you can support and keep my VoIP and web surfing (and everyone else's) running smoothly while you work out how you will deliver what you promised.
In return, at night when no one is using the pipes, I want my bulk transfers to run like greased lightning.
Not gonna happen, though. The companies will continue to blame their customers for using what they were promised, rather than the marketing department for making promises they knew they could never keep.
No, it's with the level of labeling laws. I don't have a solution, though...
Food manufacturers who do not process peanuts or tree nuts are starting to label their product "warning, may contain traces of peanuts or tree nuts", because if it turns out that something goes wrong later on, they're covered. Some people are reportedly so allergic to peanuts that being in the same room with someone who has handled a peanut sometime in the last day emanates enough peanut fumes to kill or significantly harm them.
So if a lineworker at the non-peanut-related-food plant has a BP&J for lunch and burps while operating the machinery, it could potentially contaminate a 1,000 gallon vat of soy milk enough to kill someone. So they put the disclaimer on there to cover themselves.
I won't be surprised to find the same warning sticker on a ladder soon. "Warning: Product may be contaminated with traces of peanuts or tree nuts or phenylalanine or whatever. Wash thoroughly with your choice of strong detergent Warning: Read warning labels on detergent prior to use. Warning: This label may contain offensive content (graphic description of death and/or violence by inanimate objects), parental guidance suggested Warning: This label, while in visual text and braille, does not meet Equal Access requirements because it is not available in audio form, Mexifornia law requires that all salespersons read this and all labels to the consumer. Warning: Overlabeling may have offended some, we're terribly sorry if we hurt your feelings" Then someone with a vegetable dye allergy will sue because they are allergic to the label.
I understand the reason for labeling, and I'm not against it, but manufacturers don't have the refined level of control over their suppliers they once did (if they ever did, frankly), so who's to say that the fried chicken you buy today that is cooked in canola oil might not use peanut oil next week? Better to just pre-print the warning label for every possible risk on ALL of your product so you can say "I did warn you" in case something happens and you get blamed for it.
Which carcinogens are in the hotel? Gawd, who knows? It's a freaking HOTEL with guests coming in and out carrying all manner of toxic crap, and furniture and linens being replaced all the time, and cleaning products being used, and walls being painted with whatever was on special that week at Joe's Paint Emporium, selling snacks that contain peanuts at the snack bar and serving bread that contains wheat and milk that contains dairy products. Change anything from your favored brand of fabric softener to your Ethernet cables, and you potentially introduce a new carcinogen or toxin that's among a list of thousands that'll surely kill SOMEONE.
Lawyer-man sez: Put up a sign that says "WARNING: This building will probably kill you in a violent, bloody, horrible way the moment you enter. Welcome!" and if it does, you've been warned! If it doesn't, hotel exceeds expectations, everyone wins.
One important side note in all of this. At no point am I espousing any of the four options. If people continue to treat newsgathering as a "free enterprise" that has no costs, it will become that, and we'll end up with option #4 as a default option.
Then we'll end up with news organizations supported entirely by advertisers, beholden to their patrons instead of their readers and the truth they demand. And newsgathering will consist largely of reading the only sources that can be freely (or very cheaply) be milked. Social media.
News will drop from full-time reporters on staff in Washington reporting the daily grind in Congress to reprints of people tweeting about how cool America's Got Talent was last night.
In a way, we're already headed in that direction. People gripe about how the quality of news has dropped below the point where they are willing to pay for it, but it's largely BECAUSE people are unwilling to pay for it that quality newsgathering is going away.
News companies are for-profit companies. If they continue their craft, they must be paid by someone and make a profit.
Sure, assuming you're buying a newspaper. But you're assuming that changing the container eliminates the cost of the content too.
The newspaper is the container, and the news is the content.
If you read an article online, the web page is the container and the news is still the content.
If you remove the container or switch to a cheaper one, there's still a cost to make the content, and the company that develops that content either makes money developing it or they stop developing it.
Of the cost of a $1 newspaper, at least 25 cents of that, if not more, is going into content (reporters, editors, office workers, computers and office space, cameras, electricity, etc). Some of it goes into printing and paper, some into distribution, and some into retail markup so stores will carry it.
Even if the container (newspaper) can be reprinted and distributed for free, there is a cost for the content that went into it. The news company wants to sell a certain number of copies of that content at their asking price. Remove the container and you've removed that portion of the cost. But there's still a cost of developing it which ends up dictating the price the content developer charges to recoup their costs and make a profit.
If they sell enough copies or more, then 3. Profit.
If they don't sell enough, they have one of four choices:
1. Tighten their subscription model so everyone who reads needs to pay - prevent copying through DRM of some type. Currently, this DRM is handled by the fact that you are buying an expensive-to-copy dead tree edition. Sure, you can share it, and a lot of people do, but there are still enough copies sold that profit ensues.
2. Lower the price in the hopes of selling more units to make up for it (which scales well since the container is practically free on this model, but assumes that more than 1,000,000 people will pay a penny instead of 100,000 paying ten cents each).
3. Raise the price hoping to extract more money from their loyal customer base (reverse the math in #2).
4. Lay off employees (including reporters) or hire less experienced reporters or outsource all reporting. In any of these cases, there's a good chance either the quantity or quality of generated news stories will be reduced.
True, but this is the core kernel upon which all distros are built. You can fork the kernel, of course, as with anything, but you lose the ongoing community development of the kernel that way.
Sorry, you've lost me. Must be time for my medications (sips coffee) ahh, better.
If you can't determine the value of news until after you read it, isn't any system based on pay-by-value voluntary?
Or are you referring to a system where you'd be obliged to pay, say, 10 cents per article you read no matter what the quality, but you were allowed to specify where the money went? So if you felt one article was worthless and another was worth 20 cents, you could pay the good writer 20 cents?
If so, and given the average laziness of most, you'll end up with a GEMA system by default - people will give all of their money to the one outlet they find the most useful because splitting up the funds is, like, work.
Torvalds' use of the term "Bloated" in this case refers specifically to a loss of performance and an increase in size and memory usage, not of confusion.
I think there are two (competing) goals for the Linux kernel as a whole (well, there are as many goals as there are developers, of course, so the two competing goals are more of a continuum).
On one side, there is a desire for the Linux kernel to support more features so distros can be built to be more like popular mainstream operating systems like Windows and Mac. Ease-of-use, a pleasant user experience, separation/insulation from the dreaded Command Line, pretty graphics, massive hardware support, and support for more "oddball" configurations like multiple screens, etc. So it's desirable to have lots of driver support and lots of hooks into the operating system to support fancy stuff.
On the other, there is a desire for Linux to be small, sleek, and fast, particularly for embedded projects.
The former has been running the show for a while, and I think that's healthy and positive, but the kernel has gotten larger and slower at its basic job. For desktop users, this is good news since a lot of things that had to be done at "higher" levels can now be accomplished directly in the kernel, so they might actually have a faster user experience, and they've got resources to burn since most PCs are specced out for Windows, so Linux has a lot of spare growing room in that hardware.
But for embedded/minimalist supporters, it means they need to add more hardware to their machines to support the now-larger kernel, chock full of features they'll never need or want.
Eventually, some portion of what you are paying for the container goes to pay for the content. In the case of newspapers, it's actually a significant portion. A newspaper costs a few pennies to print, and even with delivery and markup, the bulk of the money the newspaper company is paid is for content, not the printing of hieroglyphs on thinly-pounded dead trees.
Also, digital distribution is far cheaper, but it isn't free.
I agree that digital music and other information sources are more expensive than they seemingly should be. But micropayments might help solve that problem. Headlines and a brief summary are either free or available on a really dirt cheap subscription (a dollar a month, say). If you want to read a full article, you pay a penny. Read an entire newspaper's worth of articles of interest to you, it'll cost you a quarter or so. Compare that to the 75 cents to a dollar that a newspaper costs today on paper, and that's probably a pretty accurate reflection of how much of your money today goes into content.
A lot of the free news sites are actually making money on ad revenues, and hopefully that will support decent journalism, but I know my local paper is laying off people (including reporters) left and right because they aren't being paid enough to reprint their news, and print subscriptions are down. Someone's gotta pay a reporter to go out and collect the news, and analyze it, and write it up. Someone's gotta be paid to fact-check, and spell-check, and digitize photos. Someon'e gotta get paid for decent layout (whether it be print or web). Someone's gotta get paid to maintain the web servers and the Internet connection.
No, the carriers are all going to respond in the way they already have. Monthly caps with significant overage charges, and an excuse of "excessive users" when their network capacity is overloaded and people can't use the network anywhere near reasonable speeds.
Trouble is that many (for example) BitTorrent clients will specify a high-priority ToS so they can get more upload and download bandwidth. In fact, given the choice, ANY software vendor is going to choose a ToS that gives them the lowest latency and highest bandwidth possible.
So, in order to determine which packets are P2P or other "latency tolerant bandwidth hogs", ISPs started implementing deep packet inspection, where they actually went into the contents of the payload to determine what was there. If it smelled P2P-ish, it was reassigned a "proper" ToS (or in the case of Comcast, merely dropped for a while, which is what started the whole neutrality brouhaha).
I think most people, even a lot of P2P users, would be OK with traffic prioritization if it was implemented properly - eg, if it was implemented so it saturated your allocated pipe most of the time, but differentiated your VoIP packets from your P2P ones and made sure your VoIP line worked even when you were running P2P. I, for one, would welcome that sort of prioritization. Even if it meant that during peak periods my P2P dropped considerably in speed due to overall network traffic, as long as I knew my ISP would do some upgrades within a reasonable time period to handle the traffic.
Unfortunately, Comcast's solution was too draconian, and by denying P2P traffic altogether they went too far and soured public opinion on any kind of rational Quality-of-Service (QoS) prioritization and traffic shaping.
If you buy into this technology, you'd at least know what building they entered, and when. That could be useful if your kid lost signal in the local brothel instead of the library where you thought they were going. You don't necessarily need to know WHERE in the brothel they are, you just know that unless they are probably not studying geometry. Well, OK, they probably are, but it's not the kind of curves that will allow them to pass their next math test.:)
Seriously, a device like this will give you:
1. When the signal was lost. 2. Where the signal was lost. 3. An immediate alert that the signal was lost.
If you're HeliMom, you'll be watching the screen anyway and tracking their location. So if that location shifts suddenly from the local playground to a spot on the road next to the playground, then signal is lost a few seconds later, you can pretty much call the cops and scream "Amber Alert" right then unless you know someone is supposed to be picking HeliKid up. Even if the device is forcibly removed and left behind, you shave hours off the notification time and can narrow the search perimeter.
And if you are using this because you want to keep tabs on an older kid, and kid is somewhere they are not supposed to be, chances are you'll be able to figure out something based on last-known-location.
And, yes, I recognize that the kid who wants to go to the brothel instead of the library would simply:
1. Go to library. 2. Wrap arm in tinfoil then put long-sleeved shirt over arm. 3. Go to brothel. 4. Profit! (for brothel) 5. Re-wrap arm in tinfoil 6. Return to library.
Even so, losing GPS signal doesn't mean a complete loss of location data. I'm sure this uploads data on the cellular network, so if GPS is lost the device can still fall back on the nearest cell tower to report a really rough location, so if it gets even the weakest of cell signals it can report location within a few miles. Even if junior wrapped their arm, there's still a chance of getting a cell signal at some point placing them clearly away from the library (and in the case of a kidnapping you might at least get a rough idea of where they are going, narrowing the search parameters further).
Side note: Now that everyone knows what these devices look like, I'm thinking I'll start a business selling fake ones. They LOOK like the GPS tracking thingamajiggies, but in reality they are simple watches with some extra empty space.
Then, in the one in a million chance that a stranger pedophile decides to grab a kid off the playground, the pedophile will see the watch on your kid's wrist and pick another target.
After all, the last thing a pedo wants to do is deal with another layer of security. Even if he manages to block it or take it off, there'll still be a record of the most likely place the abduction took place, and a faster response time until someone notices that the kid is missing and initiates Amber Alert. If you know your kid is at the playground and you get an alarm that the device stopped reporting, chances are you'll be at the playground in a few minutes, have determined your child is missing, and have Amber Alert active within another 1/2 hour. Compare that to only noticing the kid was missing when he/she fails to show up for a meal on time.
Pedo sees one of these gizmos, or (important bit) something that LOOKS like one, he's almost surely going to pick an easier target without Kid-LoJack installed.
Heck, the market on fake security cameras is good... This is pretty much the same thing.
I don't know. This might enable some people to feel comfortable HAVING free-range kids (or, as we called them when we were growing up, "kids", because helicopter parents were the oddity back then and not the norm).
I'm sure someone who is already comfortable having free-range kids would look at this with horror, but this could be a useful crutch for some to get comfortable with the idea of making their kids free-range. It depends on the circumstances - if you already trust your kid to go out and do their thing, then you're already happy with it and you'll see this as a threat. However, if you are a free-range advocate trying to make HeliMom (who already had their child grow up in the comforting glow of a baby monitor power light or a night-vision camera in their room) comfortable with the idea of trying out free-range, then this could be a really valuable "baby step" tool.
WHATEVER IT TAKES to get the kids separated from their parents and engaging in independent free play is, by definition, a good thing for so-called "free range" parenting as a movement.
With respect, you just un-did your entire post with your last paragraph: "If my kid one day gives me a reason to drop the e-Leash hammer, then so be it, but I'd like to think I will be a better parent..."
So, you can imagine circumstances where a device like this would come in handy. Shouldn't you be glad it's out there in case your kid "gives you a reason to drop the e-Leash hammer", as you put it?
There are two reasons why a tool like this could be useful, and you've cited one of them.
The other is for "helicopter parental unit" (aka the Hovering Parent) to be able to allow their child some perceived and experienced independence. Copter Mom or Copter Dad might be watching the child, but the child has some of that vitally-important "alone time" so they can engage in free play. They don't have to check back with Copter Unit every 3 seconds to make sure their play is "Helicopter Approved (tm)" before they can move the next rung up the ladder. They can just play, like kids should.
Most copter parents are that way because of an irrational fear of having their kids kidnapped by strangers. Yes, it's statistically insignificant, but society is kept at a high fear level right now and you *are not* going to win a rational argument to eliminate an irrational fear. So you add a useless safeguard to counter the irrational fear, and the parent can then act rationally again.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang synonyms. I meant "good" instead of "correct". Heh. Silly human, me.
Excellently painted image, sir! LOL!
If you don't remember the date, you can always Bing it on Yahoo!
I'm actually surprised that, so far, no one has misinterpreted this as "all your Google Docs are belong to our search engine" along with a few jihaddist vows to delete all data from Google immediately. Instead, everyone seems to have read the article and understand that these documents already should have been indexed, because the users published them on a web site the public has access to.
Who are all of you people, and what have you done with my Slashdot????
I think the design of the device fits in quite logically with human thinking, but so does Mutually Assured Destruction.
Remember (apologies for the history lesson), the deterrent factor that has probably prevented at least one, and possibly two or three additional World Wars by now was the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). "You don't dare fire missiles at me because you know I'll fire everything I've got at you, and the planet's pretty much done for." "Game over, man! Game over!" On the surface, it seems illogical, but it's actually EXTREMELY logical. MAD ties our survival inexorably with that of our enemies. A war, once started, is assured to be death for both sides with almost no exception. It sets the price barrier far beyond what any sane country would be willing to pay from the get-go. No one wants to start a war with that much of an assured outcome. "A strange game - the only way to win is not to play."
Traditional shooting wars, on the other hand, can start small and slowly grow, turning rapidly into self-justifications like "we can't pull out now or the hundreds of our people who have died so far will have died meaningless lives! Honor their sacrifice! Fight on!" That logic, which is very typical during a shooting war, leads to the loss of thousands, then the same argument allows escalation to the loss of tens of thousands, and so on until you are counting in the millions. Surrender becomes impossible except under the threat of an obviously overwhelming loss, and maybe not even then. Surrender or compromise is seen as invalidating the sacrifice of the people who died during the fighting. It's not right, but it's human.
MAD pretty much eliminates that. If any country has MAD capability, then we won't attack them. So the nuclear-holders of the world cannot attack each other directly, but of course they can involve other countries indirectly. The best MAD scenario would logically be for everyone to have MAD capability, but those that already have it would be deeply loath to let any of the countries they've been beating up on into the game. Anyway..
Back to "Perimeter":
Given the rules/logic behind MAD, the real risk is not that a decisionmaker would want to destroy the enemy at the cost of his own country - there are enough decisionmakers to pretty much (but not completely, of course) ensure that actual MAD would never be knowingly implemented. The real risk is that he might think the enemy has already committed to destroying him, and that he has nothing to lose and must implement his destructive capabilities before the enemy destroys his capability to retaliate.
The only thing worse than a false negative (you die but don't manage to kill your enemy) in MAD is a false positive (you end up attacking your enemy by mistake, and you both die). The possibility of false negatives is proportional to the chances of a false positive (the more you feel you need to act preemptively, the more likely it is that someone will). "Perimeter" reduced the possibility of a false negative by assuring generals that they could wait and make DAMNED SURE it was an attack before retaliating. Therefore, it significantly reduced the possibility of a false positive (preemptive strike when the side that launched first thought it was retaliating).
"Perimeter" is arguably one of the most logical things Mankind has ever built. It was a well-designed solution that significantly mitigated the problem.
Logic != Morality or Correctness.
This is a useful, easy, and consistent label both for the consumer and the factory. It gives a relatively accurate count of the allergens, and a pretty rational level of detail as to how likely contamination is. Bravo!
With all honesty, while I admire that level of detail, what company in their right mind is going to put anything on the "Ingredients:" line but "Cannot guarantee nut free". The instant you put "guarantee" on a legally-required bit of labeling, corporate lawyers are going to make damned sure the words "Can Not" appear in front of it.
I think you missed my point.
Food manufacturers who **DO NOT** process peanuts or tree nuts are starting to label their product... (emphasis added).
In other words, at some point as more severe peanut allergies develop or are alleged or simply come to light, every product sold will have that label. Either that, or you'll have the rare company that either takes the risk, or completely and utterly bans peanut/tree nut products from their organization, even employees at home.
When the labeling started, it was "this product contains nuts" and even though I giggled when I saw it on a bag or jar of actual peanuts or peanut butter, it made sense to me.
Then it became "is processed in a plant that processes nuts" or "may contain trace amounts of nuts" which tells me that, even though nuts are not a primary ingredient, there's a chance of contamination. So if a nut allergy is minor, the affected person can eat it with relative safety.
But now we have the really REALLY allergic people who can't enter a room that has had something in it at all. One of the classes at my daughter's school is like that - they have a "life and death" tree nut allergy that is severe, they had to spend a good chunk of the summer cleaning the heck out of the room because even traces of tree nut oil on the coat rack could do her in, and the rest of the class has been asked to eliminate all tree nuts (almonds, etc) from their homes for fear that oil might get on their clothing and survive a washing.
Given that people like that exist, and I'm NOT blaming the little girl - it's an inconvenience the rest of the school just deals with - the food companies now have to basically assume that EVERY product is contaminated with any product that can cause this severity of allergy.
So the label that it "may contain traces" has lost all useful meaning. The chances of it containing traces are unknown, and the amount meant by traces is also unknown.
Label everything, and the label becomes meaningless because you can no longer differentiate between "we also run peanuts through the machine that made your almond butter, so the chances of contamination are relatively high" versus "we hermetically seal our almond butter making machine and all employees are under a death sentence never to own or see a peanut in their lives, but one of them might accidentally eat Pad Thai on vacation and spill some on their shirt then brush up against a machine a week later"
Can't say as I completely disagree, though the degree to which they've oversold may eliminate the possibility of doing that without $PIPE_SIZE being small enough that most users would scream blue bloody murder.
In many cases, I suspect the capacity was oversold by VERY significant margins in order to keep costs down (which in turn allowed them to promise a very large $PIPE_SIZE number knowing 99% of people would never use it). Unfortunately, when it reached the point where 90% of people never used it, suddenly they had a capacity crisis.
What's a dictated monopoly to do? They can't raise prices immediately, they can't tell their stakeholders that the Lear is out this month so they can expand capacity, and they can't lower the $PIPE_SIZE number because they've already promised it.
So they try to blame the people who use their entire $PIPE_SIZE. And, for the most part, even as a P2P user I would have been OK with that - during peak, throttle my P2P to something you can support and keep my VoIP and web surfing (and everyone else's) running smoothly while you work out how you will deliver what you promised.
In return, at night when no one is using the pipes, I want my bulk transfers to run like greased lightning.
Not gonna happen, though. The companies will continue to blame their customers for using what they were promised, rather than the marketing department for making promises they knew they could never keep.
LOL!!! Touche'.
And if we're talking porn, the free hand is probably useful...
>>cheese that is actually plastic,
That portion of it, at least, needs to be done to adhere to truth-in-advertising laws. You can't photograph REAL CHEESE unless you use it.
No, it's with the level of labeling laws. I don't have a solution, though...
Food manufacturers who do not process peanuts or tree nuts are starting to label their product "warning, may contain traces of peanuts or tree nuts", because if it turns out that something goes wrong later on, they're covered. Some people are reportedly so allergic to peanuts that being in the same room with someone who has handled a peanut sometime in the last day emanates enough peanut fumes to kill or significantly harm them.
So if a lineworker at the non-peanut-related-food plant has a BP&J for lunch and burps while operating the machinery, it could potentially contaminate a 1,000 gallon vat of soy milk enough to kill someone. So they put the disclaimer on there to cover themselves.
I won't be surprised to find the same warning sticker on a ladder soon. "Warning: Product may be contaminated with traces of peanuts or tree nuts or phenylalanine or whatever. Wash thoroughly with your choice of strong detergent Warning: Read warning labels on detergent prior to use. Warning: This label may contain offensive content (graphic description of death and/or violence by inanimate objects), parental guidance suggested Warning: This label, while in visual text and braille, does not meet Equal Access requirements because it is not available in audio form, Mexifornia law requires that all salespersons read this and all labels to the consumer. Warning: Overlabeling may have offended some, we're terribly sorry if we hurt your feelings" Then someone with a vegetable dye allergy will sue because they are allergic to the label.
I understand the reason for labeling, and I'm not against it, but manufacturers don't have the refined level of control over their suppliers they once did (if they ever did, frankly), so who's to say that the fried chicken you buy today that is cooked in canola oil might not use peanut oil next week? Better to just pre-print the warning label for every possible risk on ALL of your product so you can say "I did warn you" in case something happens and you get blamed for it.
Which carcinogens are in the hotel? Gawd, who knows? It's a freaking HOTEL with guests coming in and out carrying all manner of toxic crap, and furniture and linens being replaced all the time, and cleaning products being used, and walls being painted with whatever was on special that week at Joe's Paint Emporium, selling snacks that contain peanuts at the snack bar and serving bread that contains wheat and milk that contains dairy products. Change anything from your favored brand of fabric softener to your Ethernet cables, and you potentially introduce a new carcinogen or toxin that's among a list of thousands that'll surely kill SOMEONE.
Lawyer-man sez: Put up a sign that says "WARNING: This building will probably kill you in a violent, bloody, horrible way the moment you enter. Welcome!" and if it does, you've been warned! If it doesn't, hotel exceeds expectations, everyone wins.
One important side note in all of this. At no point am I espousing any of the four options. If people continue to treat newsgathering as a "free enterprise" that has no costs, it will become that, and we'll end up with option #4 as a default option.
Then we'll end up with news organizations supported entirely by advertisers, beholden to their patrons instead of their readers and the truth they demand. And newsgathering will consist largely of reading the only sources that can be freely (or very cheaply) be milked. Social media.
News will drop from full-time reporters on staff in Washington reporting the daily grind in Congress to reprints of people tweeting about how cool America's Got Talent was last night.
In a way, we're already headed in that direction. People gripe about how the quality of news has dropped below the point where they are willing to pay for it, but it's largely BECAUSE people are unwilling to pay for it that quality newsgathering is going away.
News companies are for-profit companies. If they continue their craft, they must be paid by someone and make a profit.
Sure, assuming you're buying a newspaper. But you're assuming that changing the container eliminates the cost of the content too.
The newspaper is the container, and the news is the content.
If you read an article online, the web page is the container and the news is still the content.
If you remove the container or switch to a cheaper one, there's still a cost to make the content, and the company that develops that content either makes money developing it or they stop developing it.
Of the cost of a $1 newspaper, at least 25 cents of that, if not more, is going into content (reporters, editors, office workers, computers and office space, cameras, electricity, etc). Some of it goes into printing and paper, some into distribution, and some into retail markup so stores will carry it.
Even if the container (newspaper) can be reprinted and distributed for free, there is a cost for the content that went into it. The news company wants to sell a certain number of copies of that content at their asking price. Remove the container and you've removed that portion of the cost. But there's still a cost of developing it which ends up dictating the price the content developer charges to recoup their costs and make a profit.
If they sell enough copies or more, then 3. Profit.
If they don't sell enough, they have one of four choices:
1. Tighten their subscription model so everyone who reads needs to pay - prevent copying through DRM of some type. Currently, this DRM is handled by the fact that you are buying an expensive-to-copy dead tree edition. Sure, you can share it, and a lot of people do, but there are still enough copies sold that profit ensues.
2. Lower the price in the hopes of selling more units to make up for it (which scales well since the container is practically free on this model, but assumes that more than 1,000,000 people will pay a penny instead of 100,000 paying ten cents each).
3. Raise the price hoping to extract more money from their loyal customer base (reverse the math in #2).
4. Lay off employees (including reporters) or hire less experienced reporters or outsource all reporting. In any of these cases, there's a good chance either the quantity or quality of generated news stories will be reduced.
True, but this is the core kernel upon which all distros are built. You can fork the kernel, of course, as with anything, but you lose the ongoing community development of the kernel that way.
Sorry, you've lost me. Must be time for my medications (sips coffee) ahh, better.
If you can't determine the value of news until after you read it, isn't any system based on pay-by-value voluntary?
Or are you referring to a system where you'd be obliged to pay, say, 10 cents per article you read no matter what the quality, but you were allowed to specify where the money went? So if you felt one article was worthless and another was worth 20 cents, you could pay the good writer 20 cents?
If so, and given the average laziness of most, you'll end up with a GEMA system by default - people will give all of their money to the one outlet they find the most useful because splitting up the funds is, like, work.
Torvalds' use of the term "Bloated" in this case refers specifically to a loss of performance and an increase in size and memory usage, not of confusion.
I think there are two (competing) goals for the Linux kernel as a whole (well, there are as many goals as there are developers, of course, so the two competing goals are more of a continuum).
On one side, there is a desire for the Linux kernel to support more features so distros can be built to be more like popular mainstream operating systems like Windows and Mac. Ease-of-use, a pleasant user experience, separation/insulation from the dreaded Command Line, pretty graphics, massive hardware support, and support for more "oddball" configurations like multiple screens, etc. So it's desirable to have lots of driver support and lots of hooks into the operating system to support fancy stuff.
On the other, there is a desire for Linux to be small, sleek, and fast, particularly for embedded projects.
The former has been running the show for a while, and I think that's healthy and positive, but the kernel has gotten larger and slower at its basic job. For desktop users, this is good news since a lot of things that had to be done at "higher" levels can now be accomplished directly in the kernel, so they might actually have a faster user experience, and they've got resources to burn since most PCs are specced out for Windows, so Linux has a lot of spare growing room in that hardware.
But for embedded/minimalist supporters, it means they need to add more hardware to their machines to support the now-larger kernel, chock full of features they'll never need or want.
Trouble is, too few would pay after-the-fact. Unfortunately, donation-driven systems just don't work for something as costly as gathering news.
Eventually, some portion of what you are paying for the container goes to pay for the content. In the case of newspapers, it's actually a significant portion. A newspaper costs a few pennies to print, and even with delivery and markup, the bulk of the money the newspaper company is paid is for content, not the printing of hieroglyphs on thinly-pounded dead trees.
Also, digital distribution is far cheaper, but it isn't free.
I agree that digital music and other information sources are more expensive than they seemingly should be. But micropayments might help solve that problem. Headlines and a brief summary are either free or available on a really dirt cheap subscription (a dollar a month, say). If you want to read a full article, you pay a penny. Read an entire newspaper's worth of articles of interest to you, it'll cost you a quarter or so. Compare that to the 75 cents to a dollar that a newspaper costs today on paper, and that's probably a pretty accurate reflection of how much of your money today goes into content.
A lot of the free news sites are actually making money on ad revenues, and hopefully that will support decent journalism, but I know my local paper is laying off people (including reporters) left and right because they aren't being paid enough to reprint their news, and print subscriptions are down. Someone's gotta pay a reporter to go out and collect the news, and analyze it, and write it up. Someone's gotta be paid to fact-check, and spell-check, and digitize photos. Someon'e gotta get paid for decent layout (whether it be print or web). Someone's gotta get paid to maintain the web servers and the Internet connection.
No, the carriers are all going to respond in the way they already have. Monthly caps with significant overage charges, and an excuse of "excessive users" when their network capacity is overloaded and people can't use the network anywhere near reasonable speeds.
In other words, no changes...
Trouble is that many (for example) BitTorrent clients will specify a high-priority ToS so they can get more upload and download bandwidth. In fact, given the choice, ANY software vendor is going to choose a ToS that gives them the lowest latency and highest bandwidth possible.
So, in order to determine which packets are P2P or other "latency tolerant bandwidth hogs", ISPs started implementing deep packet inspection, where they actually went into the contents of the payload to determine what was there. If it smelled P2P-ish, it was reassigned a "proper" ToS (or in the case of Comcast, merely dropped for a while, which is what started the whole neutrality brouhaha).
I think most people, even a lot of P2P users, would be OK with traffic prioritization if it was implemented properly - eg, if it was implemented so it saturated your allocated pipe most of the time, but differentiated your VoIP packets from your P2P ones and made sure your VoIP line worked even when you were running P2P. I, for one, would welcome that sort of prioritization. Even if it meant that during peak periods my P2P dropped considerably in speed due to overall network traffic, as long as I knew my ISP would do some upgrades within a reasonable time period to handle the traffic.
Unfortunately, Comcast's solution was too draconian, and by denying P2P traffic altogether they went too far and soured public opinion on any kind of rational Quality-of-Service (QoS) prioritization and traffic shaping.
If you buy into this technology, you'd at least know what building they entered, and when. That could be useful if your kid lost signal in the local brothel instead of the library where you thought they were going. You don't necessarily need to know WHERE in the brothel they are, you just know that unless they are probably not studying geometry. Well, OK, they probably are, but it's not the kind of curves that will allow them to pass their next math test. :)
Seriously, a device like this will give you:
1. When the signal was lost.
2. Where the signal was lost.
3. An immediate alert that the signal was lost.
If you're HeliMom, you'll be watching the screen anyway and tracking their location. So if that location shifts suddenly from the local playground to a spot on the road next to the playground, then signal is lost a few seconds later, you can pretty much call the cops and scream "Amber Alert" right then unless you know someone is supposed to be picking HeliKid up. Even if the device is forcibly removed and left behind, you shave hours off the notification time and can narrow the search perimeter.
And if you are using this because you want to keep tabs on an older kid, and kid is somewhere they are not supposed to be, chances are you'll be able to figure out something based on last-known-location.
And, yes, I recognize that the kid who wants to go to the brothel instead of the library would simply:
1. Go to library.
2. Wrap arm in tinfoil then put long-sleeved shirt over arm.
3. Go to brothel.
4. Profit! (for brothel)
5. Re-wrap arm in tinfoil
6. Return to library.
Even so, losing GPS signal doesn't mean a complete loss of location data. I'm sure this uploads data on the cellular network, so if GPS is lost the device can still fall back on the nearest cell tower to report a really rough location, so if it gets even the weakest of cell signals it can report location within a few miles. Even if junior wrapped their arm, there's still a chance of getting a cell signal at some point placing them clearly away from the library (and in the case of a kidnapping you might at least get a rough idea of where they are going, narrowing the search parameters further).
Side note: Now that everyone knows what these devices look like, I'm thinking I'll start a business selling fake ones. They LOOK like the GPS tracking thingamajiggies, but in reality they are simple watches with some extra empty space.
Then, in the one in a million chance that a stranger pedophile decides to grab a kid off the playground, the pedophile will see the watch on your kid's wrist and pick another target.
After all, the last thing a pedo wants to do is deal with another layer of security. Even if he manages to block it or take it off, there'll still be a record of the most likely place the abduction took place, and a faster response time until someone notices that the kid is missing and initiates Amber Alert. If you know your kid is at the playground and you get an alarm that the device stopped reporting, chances are you'll be at the playground in a few minutes, have determined your child is missing, and have Amber Alert active within another 1/2 hour. Compare that to only noticing the kid was missing when he/she fails to show up for a meal on time.
Pedo sees one of these gizmos, or (important bit) something that LOOKS like one, he's almost surely going to pick an easier target without Kid-LoJack installed.
Heck, the market on fake security cameras is good... This is pretty much the same thing.
I don't know. This might enable some people to feel comfortable HAVING free-range kids (or, as we called them when we were growing up, "kids", because helicopter parents were the oddity back then and not the norm).
I'm sure someone who is already comfortable having free-range kids would look at this with horror, but this could be a useful crutch for some to get comfortable with the idea of making their kids free-range. It depends on the circumstances - if you already trust your kid to go out and do their thing, then you're already happy with it and you'll see this as a threat. However, if you are a free-range advocate trying to make HeliMom (who already had their child grow up in the comforting glow of a baby monitor power light or a night-vision camera in their room) comfortable with the idea of trying out free-range, then this could be a really valuable "baby step" tool.
WHATEVER IT TAKES to get the kids separated from their parents and engaging in independent free play is, by definition, a good thing for so-called "free range" parenting as a movement.
With respect, you just un-did your entire post with your last paragraph: "If my kid one day gives me a reason to drop the e-Leash hammer, then so be it, but I'd like to think I will be a better parent..."
So, you can imagine circumstances where a device like this would come in handy. Shouldn't you be glad it's out there in case your kid "gives you a reason to drop the e-Leash hammer", as you put it?
There are two reasons why a tool like this could be useful, and you've cited one of them.
The other is for "helicopter parental unit" (aka the Hovering Parent) to be able to allow their child some perceived and experienced independence. Copter Mom or Copter Dad might be watching the child, but the child has some of that vitally-important "alone time" so they can engage in free play. They don't have to check back with Copter Unit every 3 seconds to make sure their play is "Helicopter Approved (tm)" before they can move the next rung up the ladder. They can just play, like kids should.
Most copter parents are that way because of an irrational fear of having their kids kidnapped by strangers. Yes, it's statistically insignificant, but society is kept at a high fear level right now and you *are not* going to win a rational argument to eliminate an irrational fear. So you add a useless safeguard to counter the irrational fear, and the parent can then act rationally again.
Ideal solution? Hell, no! But it is a solution...