I agree fully. Part of the problem is that people in this country just don't think of it as a disease. Just like homosexuality, they consider it to be a choice. I don't think that there's been very much research done to try to support one viewpoint over another, unfortunately.
Another part of the problem has to do with the criminal "justice" system in the country. Prisons are almost purely punitive now. They should be rehabilitative.
Here's the question: what should you do for the person who doesn't seem to be able to get over their disease, even with therapy?
You're conflating benchmarking games vs. benchmarking graphics cards. If you're looking for raw power for an arbitrary amount of money, you'd want to get the graphics card which has the maximum frame rate at that price. If you're looking to play a specific game, you'd look for a graphics card which most people (quite subjectively, obviously) say plays the game well.
The point is that you can't use a standard game (plus FPS meter) played by a human player to judge a graphics card's raw capabilities. To reduce subjectivity and error, you need a consistency in what is being rendered.
So it just takes a really long time for an online transaction to take place? Is the transaction complete when the goods are sent, or when the goods are received?
Note that I'm talking legal terms, here, not lay terms. I assume that you are, too.
The problem is that it's hard to objectively score performance by "running things on it." Benchmarks are nice because they run the exact same tests every time. You can't just turn on FPS display and walk around in the game to measure performance--your actions may not be the same each time, and slight variations could cause drastically different results.
Benchmarking provides potential customers with a metric to compare potential purchases.
I'm in the "Amazon didn't do much wrong here" camp, but I do think that the definition of a transaction is nebulous in the on-line realm. The reason is that Amazon has set up an agent (a computer) to do business with me. The computer and I have completed the transaction--I don't have to do anything once I click "Submit Order." The computer and the credit card company have not completed the transaction.
Imagine being in a brick-and-mortar store. You bring the item to the front and hand them your credit card. They take an imprint of your card and tell you that after they've done an extensive price check on the item, they'll ship it to you. They won't send the imprint off until they've done all the checks, so you don't have to worry about being charged if an error occurred.
From a legal standpoint, it's all very unclear. Analogies help us to understand what's going on, but they don't correspond perfectly. First of all, the primary reason for the delay from placing the order to Amazon shipping it is not (presumably) to check the price. That is, however, something that they often do with the time.
To stop all of these sensationalist stories, there needs to be a clear, legal understanding of what's going on here, and some terms may need to be defined explicitly for the new domain.
I've been following this thread for a while, and I think that it's hilarious. I have one (admittedly off-topic, but I don't mind burning a little karma on this one) question for Jah-Wren Ryel: are you pro-life?
I mostly ask because you seem to think that there should be consequences for your actions, and that's one of the hidden tenets of the pro-life movement--it's a bunch of people who think that sex is immoral, and that there should be some consequence to it, so anything which prevents a birth (including birth control and abortion) should be banned.
It's still a bad summary. The awful, awful summary posits that Amazon did not notify their customers because it violated their policy to cancel the order. Clearly it does not violate their policy to cancel the order--the only policy violation was, in fact, failing to notify the customer's about it. The submitter is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.
In other words, the submitter thinks that Amazon violated its own policy, and tried to cover it up by silently deleting the orders. Based on that policy snippet, that does not seem to be the case.
People have different opinions on how things should be. When it's their license and their code, they get to decide. Nonetheless, maybe you should contact the Open Source Initiative. They're an organization which collects licenses and "certifies" them as to their openness. BSD's license is listed as open source.
The implications of vendor responsibility extend far beyond just large companies. The Linux kernel has had flaws, too. If someone was accountable for them, those people probably wouldn't continue writing software.
I've rethought things, though, and I think that what would really happen is that only large software houses would exist, and they'd have to carry insurance on their products. That's effectively how they'd deal with being responsible for flaws. Software prices would be higher because of this, and free software would be virtually non-existant.
Anything can be built into the kernel--that doesn't mean that it's a good thing, or that it any more affects the hardware devices on the machine. Microsoft has, in the past, built GUI hooks directly into the kernel. By your logic, then, Windows ME would be one big kernel that the user directly interacts with?
I've posted this before, but I like the term "Operating Environment" to cover kernel, drivers (which may not be a part of the kernel, but almost certainly would be considered part of the operating system), and GUI.
Enter your PIN on the fob, get a code. Swipe your card, enter your card's PIN, enter the PIN from your fob, and you're in. To make it easier on the user, allow them to enter the PINs in any order.
Most users will use the same PIN for both devices--that's their fault. Some users will enter their fob PIN in full view of the security camera--again, their fault. At least people who care about their information will be capable of doing it securely, unlike the current system.
I do this. My right hand types in my PIN, while my left hand provides cover. I get funny looks from people who are nearby, but that just justifies me.
Then again, I'm pretty paranoid about ATM use. Typically, I only go to the one at my bank, and I check it for signs of tampering before I use it. I'm familiar with the machine, so I'm hoping that if an outer casing was placed on top of it, I'd notice.
The studios weren't making as much money due to the strike. It's pretty reasonable for them to cut back on the budget. Now that the writers are willing to write again, they get to deal with the budget.
I was pulling for the writers from the beginning, but we can't pretend that money just grows on trees like the government likes to think.
The problem is similar at other social networking sites, Digg, for example, where a comment is modded up or down without explanation (and without me being able to ignore a particular moderation, like on Slashdot) is notorious for having comments which espouse opinions outside of the groupthink majority being "dugg down" into oblivion. You know what? I can still read them. You just click "show comment."
What it ultimately does is ensure that only the people who have similar opinions to everyone else will post. There's a word for that, but it's too early for me to be thinking. Anyway, it's how they want the site to be run, so that's how it's run. I don't mind it so much since it's quite possible to read all of the comments, if you so choose.
The security landscape is definitely changing, though, and not for the better.
The ubiquity of encryption, fast processors, and fat pipes has lead to malware which is harder to corral. Storm Worm is a perfect example--it uses encryption so that the traffic from the worm is hard to detect. It's all just random chatter on UDP ports. The binaries themselves are encrypted and they auto-update in order to avoid detection from anti-virus software. I haven't seen heuristics engines detect it with any consistency, either.
More and more malware will move to this sort of tactic, and education is just about the only way to fight it. Unfortunately, it's hard to sell education. I've seen people walk out of a computer security training class and get infected, because they couldn't apply even simple concepts (like not opening unexpected attachments) to their real, day-to-day work.
What does feedback even mean? These days, mediocre service is expected to be awarded with positive feedback. It's just like tipping in the US--15% has become a bare minimum expected tip for the privilege of taking your order and bringing you food. Get a refill on your drink? Bump up that tip.
If the seller had been interested in good service, they should have combined shipping. They were not interested in good service, so they did not get good feedback.
Combined with violating eBay policy on handling charges, I think that the buyer was in the right, and the seller was quite in the wrong. The buyer would have been justified in leaving negative feedback.
I don't see how this matters. eBay doesn't care about having a lot of users. They care about having a lot of sales, and specifically high-value sales. That person who went away "put off" wasn't going to buy anything once it got past a certain point, anyway.
Regardless, we have no idea what the other measures to protect sellers will be--it could be something quite reasonable. If it's not, they'll lose customers, and if that's REALLY what they want, then good for them.
The problem is that it's the same logic and methodology that lets fundamentalist Christians abuse gays and reject evolution. Take a portion of the Bible literally, throw out anything that contradicts it (for these purposes), and raise a stink.
The Bible clearly shows the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3. Your talk of significant digits is just trying to draw worship away from God.
I'd love to have bandwidth usage reports, but then, I could do this myself with a box inline between my wireless router and my DSL modem.
I bet most people don't care until they have to pay for it, though. They might care about an infection, but they probably wouldn't realize that there was anything wrong. Ask your average Internet user how much bandwidth they use, and they'll probably have no clue. Without a baseline (each e-mail averages this much, each youtube averages this much, etc.) the numbers will be fairly meaningless.
But when the ISP says, "This is how much most people use, so this is how much you get. You've gone over by 3 gigs." people might perk up and ask how they went over.
There's a dialog box that pops up when you try to copy files. It says, "Calculating time to copy files." It's letting you know that it's calculating the time so that it can let you know how long it will take. Sometimes it takes so long to calculate that the copy finishes, the dialog closes, and you wonder why they couldn't have just said that they were copying the file. Sometimes it finishes the calculation, thinks that it will take a long time, and then finishes quickly. Sometimes it's the reverse. It's a horribly inconsistent and useless dialog.
Dialog boxes which show you that something is going on are useful. This one doesn't really do that.
Fixing things is good. Arbitrarily changing things is not. There are people who run older versions of the Linux kernel because they have a system which works, and they don't want to risk disrupting that. Pushing out a major change is not "enterprisey." It's not the way you do things, whether on Linux or on Windows.
I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu kernel updates fix security issues, but don't add features. I certainly may be mistaken, but I thought that this was the purpose of the new kernel numbering scheme.
Of course, I don't know the scope of the Microsoft changes. If it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.6.20.2, I don't think it's a big deal. If it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.6.21.0, it's bigger. And of course, if it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.8.0.0, I'd be pretty upset with Microsoft (if I used their operating systems.)
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I agree fully. Part of the problem is that people in this country just don't think of it as a disease. Just like homosexuality, they consider it to be a choice. I don't think that there's been very much research done to try to support one viewpoint over another, unfortunately.
Another part of the problem has to do with the criminal "justice" system in the country. Prisons are almost purely punitive now. They should be rehabilitative.
Here's the question: what should you do for the person who doesn't seem to be able to get over their disease, even with therapy?
You're conflating benchmarking games vs. benchmarking graphics cards. If you're looking for raw power for an arbitrary amount of money, you'd want to get the graphics card which has the maximum frame rate at that price. If you're looking to play a specific game, you'd look for a graphics card which most people (quite subjectively, obviously) say plays the game well.
The point is that you can't use a standard game (plus FPS meter) played by a human player to judge a graphics card's raw capabilities. To reduce subjectivity and error, you need a consistency in what is being rendered.
So it just takes a really long time for an online transaction to take place? Is the transaction complete when the goods are sent, or when the goods are received?
Note that I'm talking legal terms, here, not lay terms. I assume that you are, too.
The problem is that it's hard to objectively score performance by "running things on it." Benchmarks are nice because they run the exact same tests every time. You can't just turn on FPS display and walk around in the game to measure performance--your actions may not be the same each time, and slight variations could cause drastically different results.
Benchmarking provides potential customers with a metric to compare potential purchases.
I'm in the "Amazon didn't do much wrong here" camp, but I do think that the definition of a transaction is nebulous in the on-line realm. The reason is that Amazon has set up an agent (a computer) to do business with me. The computer and I have completed the transaction--I don't have to do anything once I click "Submit Order." The computer and the credit card company have not completed the transaction.
Imagine being in a brick-and-mortar store. You bring the item to the front and hand them your credit card. They take an imprint of your card and tell you that after they've done an extensive price check on the item, they'll ship it to you. They won't send the imprint off until they've done all the checks, so you don't have to worry about being charged if an error occurred.
From a legal standpoint, it's all very unclear. Analogies help us to understand what's going on, but they don't correspond perfectly. First of all, the primary reason for the delay from placing the order to Amazon shipping it is not (presumably) to check the price. That is, however, something that they often do with the time.
To stop all of these sensationalist stories, there needs to be a clear, legal understanding of what's going on here, and some terms may need to be defined explicitly for the new domain.
I've been following this thread for a while, and I think that it's hilarious. I have one (admittedly off-topic, but I don't mind burning a little karma on this one) question for Jah-Wren Ryel: are you pro-life?
I mostly ask because you seem to think that there should be consequences for your actions, and that's one of the hidden tenets of the pro-life movement--it's a bunch of people who think that sex is immoral, and that there should be some consequence to it, so anything which prevents a birth (including birth control and abortion) should be banned.
It's still a bad summary. The awful, awful summary posits that Amazon did not notify their customers because it violated their policy to cancel the order. Clearly it does not violate their policy to cancel the order--the only policy violation was, in fact, failing to notify the customer's about it. The submitter is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.
In other words, the submitter thinks that Amazon violated its own policy, and tried to cover it up by silently deleting the orders. Based on that policy snippet, that does not seem to be the case.
People have different opinions on how things should be. When it's their license and their code, they get to decide. Nonetheless, maybe you should contact the Open Source Initiative. They're an organization which collects licenses and "certifies" them as to their openness. BSD's license is listed as open source.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
Aren't Firefox plugins just Javascript? As I understand it, that's one of the major reasons that Firefox can get bogged down.
The implications of vendor responsibility extend far beyond just large companies. The Linux kernel has had flaws, too. If someone was accountable for them, those people probably wouldn't continue writing software.
I've rethought things, though, and I think that what would really happen is that only large software houses would exist, and they'd have to carry insurance on their products. That's effectively how they'd deal with being responsible for flaws. Software prices would be higher because of this, and free software would be virtually non-existant.
There would effectively be no software, and thus no computers.
A luddite might think that's ok....
Anything can be built into the kernel--that doesn't mean that it's a good thing, or that it any more affects the hardware devices on the machine. Microsoft has, in the past, built GUI hooks directly into the kernel. By your logic, then, Windows ME would be one big kernel that the user directly interacts with?
I've posted this before, but I like the term "Operating Environment" to cover kernel, drivers (which may not be a part of the kernel, but almost certainly would be considered part of the operating system), and GUI.
This is why a security fob would be useful.
Enter your PIN on the fob, get a code. Swipe your card, enter your card's PIN, enter the PIN from your fob, and you're in. To make it easier on the user, allow them to enter the PINs in any order.
Most users will use the same PIN for both devices--that's their fault. Some users will enter their fob PIN in full view of the security camera--again, their fault. At least people who care about their information will be capable of doing it securely, unlike the current system.
I do this. My right hand types in my PIN, while my left hand provides cover. I get funny looks from people who are nearby, but that just justifies me.
Then again, I'm pretty paranoid about ATM use. Typically, I only go to the one at my bank, and I check it for signs of tampering before I use it. I'm familiar with the machine, so I'm hoping that if an outer casing was placed on top of it, I'd notice.
The studios weren't making as much money due to the strike. It's pretty reasonable for them to cut back on the budget. Now that the writers are willing to write again, they get to deal with the budget.
I was pulling for the writers from the beginning, but we can't pretend that money just grows on trees like the government likes to think.
The problem is similar at other social networking sites, Digg, for example, where a comment is modded up or down without explanation (and without me being able to ignore a particular moderation, like on Slashdot) is notorious for having comments which espouse opinions outside of the groupthink majority being "dugg down" into oblivion. You know what? I can still read them. You just click "show comment."
What it ultimately does is ensure that only the people who have similar opinions to everyone else will post. There's a word for that, but it's too early for me to be thinking. Anyway, it's how they want the site to be run, so that's how it's run. I don't mind it so much since it's quite possible to read all of the comments, if you so choose.
Hope they never shut down the business. Or stop supporting a specific game that you want to play.
The security landscape is definitely changing, though, and not for the better.
The ubiquity of encryption, fast processors, and fat pipes has lead to malware which is harder to corral. Storm Worm is a perfect example--it uses encryption so that the traffic from the worm is hard to detect. It's all just random chatter on UDP ports. The binaries themselves are encrypted and they auto-update in order to avoid detection from anti-virus software. I haven't seen heuristics engines detect it with any consistency, either.
More and more malware will move to this sort of tactic, and education is just about the only way to fight it. Unfortunately, it's hard to sell education. I've seen people walk out of a computer security training class and get infected, because they couldn't apply even simple concepts (like not opening unexpected attachments) to their real, day-to-day work.
What does feedback even mean? These days, mediocre service is expected to be awarded with positive feedback. It's just like tipping in the US--15% has become a bare minimum expected tip for the privilege of taking your order and bringing you food. Get a refill on your drink? Bump up that tip.
If the seller had been interested in good service, they should have combined shipping. They were not interested in good service, so they did not get good feedback.
Combined with violating eBay policy on handling charges, I think that the buyer was in the right, and the seller was quite in the wrong. The buyer would have been justified in leaving negative feedback.
I don't see how this matters. eBay doesn't care about having a lot of users. They care about having a lot of sales, and specifically high-value sales. That person who went away "put off" wasn't going to buy anything once it got past a certain point, anyway.
Regardless, we have no idea what the other measures to protect sellers will be--it could be something quite reasonable. If it's not, they'll lose customers, and if that's REALLY what they want, then good for them.
The problem is that it's the same logic and methodology that lets fundamentalist Christians abuse gays and reject evolution. Take a portion of the Bible literally, throw out anything that contradicts it (for these purposes), and raise a stink.
The Bible clearly shows the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3. Your talk of significant digits is just trying to draw worship away from God.
I didn't come from no monkey.
I'd love to have bandwidth usage reports, but then, I could do this myself with a box inline between my wireless router and my DSL modem.
I bet most people don't care until they have to pay for it, though. They might care about an infection, but they probably wouldn't realize that there was anything wrong. Ask your average Internet user how much bandwidth they use, and they'll probably have no clue. Without a baseline (each e-mail averages this much, each youtube averages this much, etc.) the numbers will be fairly meaningless.
But when the ISP says, "This is how much most people use, so this is how much you get. You've gone over by 3 gigs." people might perk up and ask how they went over.
Haven't used Vista much, have you?
There's a dialog box that pops up when you try to copy files. It says, "Calculating time to copy files." It's letting you know that it's calculating the time so that it can let you know how long it will take. Sometimes it takes so long to calculate that the copy finishes, the dialog closes, and you wonder why they couldn't have just said that they were copying the file. Sometimes it finishes the calculation, thinks that it will take a long time, and then finishes quickly. Sometimes it's the reverse. It's a horribly inconsistent and useless dialog.
Dialog boxes which show you that something is going on are useful. This one doesn't really do that.
Fixing things is good. Arbitrarily changing things is not. There are people who run older versions of the Linux kernel because they have a system which works, and they don't want to risk disrupting that. Pushing out a major change is not "enterprisey." It's not the way you do things, whether on Linux or on Windows.
I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu kernel updates fix security issues, but don't add features. I certainly may be mistaken, but I thought that this was the purpose of the new kernel numbering scheme.
Of course, I don't know the scope of the Microsoft changes. If it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.6.20.2, I don't think it's a big deal. If it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.6.21.0, it's bigger. And of course, if it's like going from 2.6.20.1 to 2.8.0.0, I'd be pretty upset with Microsoft (if I used their operating systems.)