Gold has intrinsic value in that it is useful. It's used in industry, for example. That, incidentally, makes it a terrible thing to back a currency on. Anyone with half a brain would know that backing a currency on oil, for example, would be foolish.
Of course, the panels don't last forever. Over time, they degrade. I've heard something in-and-around the 20 year range. That's about as long as most mortgages, and since it's not easy to flip a house anymore, it's reasonable to expect that people will start actually paying off their loans and owning a house rather than just upgrading every few years.
4) $200 US does not seem overpriced to me. As for overhyped, most people don't have this weird reaction where they feel that they are obligated to dislike anything that's popular.
You hit the nail on the head.
Most Windows Mobile smart phones cost more than the iPhone, have comparable data plans, and require third-party applications in order to be usable. The iPhone is quite usable all on its own (though some of the applications are nifty, so far I've only looked at the free ones.)
You're also right on the popularity thing. The truth is, some people get their kicks by being a part of the in-crowd, and some people get their kicks by scoffing at the in-crowd. There's no doubt that Apple targets the former. Despite the fact that Apple produces quality products (well, usually--they've definitely had their share of boner moves), there will always be people in the latter category.
I owned a Windows Mobile smart phone for two-and-a-half years. I originally purchased it planning to use it as a media player, to read e-mail, and to do light web surfing. When the original iPhone came out, I started profiling my usage of the device. In order, this is what I used it for: 1) Web surfing. 2) E-mail. 3) SMS 4) Phone calls 5) SSH.
That's it. I'd ended up foregoing media on the device because, simply, it was a pain to use. I didn't expect to use the device primarily for browsing the web, but I did.
But when you get right down to it, web and e-mail are horrible experiences on Windows Mobile. With 6.1 (not available at the time that I bought my phone) SMS is finally a pleasant experience. The phone application works, for the most part, though on the device I was using (and others made by the same manufacturer) the phone would miss a couple of seconds of the attempted connection, meaning I had about 2 rings to answer the phone before it went to voice mail. SSH.. well, it was great, but it was a third party application.
I played with an iPhone at the store and found the web browser to be great. Far and away better than Pocket Internet Explorer, and still quite a bit better than the next best browser on the platform, Opera Mobile (which, incidentally, does cost money.) E-mail is not as great as it could be, but better than Pocket Exchange (at least you can put in an IMAP prefix, and the resolution on the iPhone is good enough to make it easy to read.)
SMS... well, I don't care for SMS on the iPhone quite as much, but it's quite usable. I'd like timestamps for every message.
Phone calls--I didn't have a chance to play with phone calls on the iPhone at the store, but it couldn't be worse than Windows Mobile.
And lastly, SSH. Well, right now, that requires Jailbreaking.
But with an iPhone, I could almost certainly add in media player back into the mix of things I'd do with the device, since Apple's proven themselves quite capable of writing usable players.
So that's why I like the iPhone. It does the things that I want to do very well, with one glaring exception. I chose function--in fact, that's why I didn't buy the first generation iPhone--because even with all of the usability improvements over Windows Mobile, EDGE data rates just suck.
What's the real price of the Open Moko? It doesn't even support EDGE speeds. How much is your time worth when you're trying to get to a webpage over GPRS?
And it will go to the owner of last@gmail.com too. There's a lot of accounts with simple names like richards@gmail.com or gonzales@gmail.com which get ALL e-mail sent to owners of a dotted mail, for example: juan.gonzales@gmail.com, john.richards@gmail.com.
The survivaltime is calculated as the average time between reports for an average target IP address. If you are assuming that most of these reports are generated by worms that attempt to propagate, an unpatched system would be infected by such a probe.... With the help of honeypots, we can measure the survival time. For example, we can use low-interaction honeypot such as nepenthes or amun that emulate common network-based vulnerabilities and deploy them at different locations. The average time it takes to download the first binary is an estimation of the survival time: The honeypots emulate known vulnerabilities and are thus exploited by different kinds of autonomous spreading malware - similar to an unpatched system.
Honestly, this is FUD. They weren't putting a live Windows system on the net, they were putting a honeypot and counting any attack traffic. Default Windows defensive measures (such as the firewall) wouldn't count in this experiment, nor would new OS releases. An unpatched SP2 is a lot more secure, even with the firewall off, than an unpatched SP0.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to add a patch CD to the box, or when patches are released to ship patch CDs to retail outlets like Best Buy and Circut City for their existing stock? AOL used to send me coasters every damned week, why can't Microsoft?
You can request CDs with patches, but I don't know if that includes the whole OS. Microsoft does ship out SP2 to vendors, now, and vendors can slipstream their own patches. Also, if you do a network install, you can slipstream whatever you want.
Ebay is trying to move away from 'auction' and towards 'online store front'. Meh.
Online auctions without verification are lousy. On a site like eBay, someone's bound to get screwed. Either the buyer (by getting ripped off) or the seller (getting scammed by buyers disputing legitimate auctions.) I've had friends on each side of that. Every time, people partially blame eBay for the issue.
If I were in charge of eBay, I'd be doing my damnedest to get away from auctions, too. That may be what got them started, but it's not the way of the future. There's just no trust, and virtually no way of avoiding scams.
I was unimpressed with the original Hellboy. I've never really been able to put my finger on why this is, but something about it just really turned me off. However, being a fan of the director and expecting amazing visuals, I went ahead and saw Hellboy 2. I thought it was far and away better than the first film, possibly due to a much understated main character. Someone else pointed out that it seemed like the movie just had Hellboy in it, but didn't really feature him--I couldn't agree more.
Regardless, if the sample set is indicative, it sounds like you just don't care for the superhero genre?
Which is stupid. When you browse to the Slashdot front page and see a story entitled, "Hellboy II review," you should assume that there will be details about Hellboy 2. If you're that sensitive to spoilers, you don't click. We should save the "contains spoilers" tag for serious discussions about plot points, not "may contain information about the subject matter."
At-will employment is also part of the problem. Because I can just jump ship if I want to (many parts of employee contracts are unenforceable) the company has little incentive to train me. Why spend the money to train me when another company can then hire me for slightly higher wages and reap the benefits of the other guys sending me to school?
How do you deal with the problem of being blacklisted as a spammer if you end up forwarding lots of spam mail off of your domain? Remember, SPF itself doesn't address the problem of spam, so the fact that you're checking SPF doesn't matter a lot in this regard.
Actually, the term "forwarding" applies both to client-forwarding (remailing the mail with all of the headers) and server-forwarding (what you call bouncing.) It's the difference between clicking forward and using a.forward file (hey, why do you think they called it that?)
There are always unintended consequences. The law is written in human language (constantly changing) in an attempt to stop specific and nonspecific actions. Programmers, geeks, and pedants don't like the ambiguity in the law because it doesn't make clear what we can and can't do, the way computers (ostensibly) do. Unfortunately, what usually happens is that the "I'll know it if I see it" test is applied, and then the law is itself is tried alongside the defendant in a court of law. I think that things could be a little bit better, but in the end, we're always going to have these sorts of problems.
1) How is "related" defined? Is it "within the scope of a specific case" or the more lay definition which would almost be synonymous with similarity?
2) Context is key. Mediasentry connects to the network as any other Limewire (or whatever) user would, however they may have expertise in the field of computing.
Ultimately, this seems to be similar to the recent Texas law requiring a PI license to do investigative work relating to computers (often mis-construed as requiring a PI license to do computer repair.) Unless I misread the article, it seems that Mediasentry were trying to play down their investigative components in order to pass the "needed a PI license" test. Presumably, if it is something anyone could have seen, their testimony wouldn't be much different from a person on the street witnessing a crime being committed.
Of course, how the court weights the testimony is going to differ in each case.
First of all, this law was pretty clearly intended to target specifically people doing investigative and forensic work in relation to evidence-gathering. In fact, if you read through the text of the bill, that's all it actually does. Mom and pop repair shops will not be affected.
Secondly, in this context, the bill is entirely appropriate. If someone's investigating my computer for evidence of a crime, you can bet that I want them to know what they're doing. I want them to know the proper procedures for data handling, so that there's no question of my innocence when the time comes. If someone puts an infected USB drive into my computer to create an image, thereby putting a virus on the machine, that's going to be a pain. If that virus then downloads illegal data, that could be my life.
These are thieves. They're likely already using stolen credit card/identities. Taking that data and posting it publicly would probably just harm an innocent person.
And that doesn't count the lawsuit value (they now have IP information on every person who has ever watched a copyrighted video on Youtube, after all)
Unless explicitly placed in the public domain, every video on Youtube is copyrighted. By placing the video on Youtube, you are asserting copyright over the video and granting Youtube a license to publish the video. I can't see any judge anywhere in the US ruling that viewing a video on Youtube violates copyright.
There's a difference. MediaSentry are doing investigative work. PC Repair techs are doing repair work. It's slashdot, so we need a car analogy--would you demand that a automobile mechanic have a PI license so that they can properly handle any potential evidence found in the car during routine repairs?
Property and rent tend to be higher in the city, too. And for the people who don't live in the city already, the costs to move may be too great.
As gas prices increase, demand for in-city living will increase, further driving up the cost of property and rent in those places. It's great for rent-controlled areas--and pretty devestating for everywhere else.
What it boils down to is that we, as a society, need transportation in order to function. Instead of relying on other countries for our transportation, we should start looking at things we can do here (in America.)
There are multiple schools of thought. Here's another.
Think about utilities. There are plenty of places where the utilities are privately owned. There are places where there is a virtual monopoly. Do you see these places raising the costs of the services that they provide past the point where most customers complain? No. And utilities, arguably, are even more necessary to more people than gasoline. By all rights, they should be capable of gouging. They don't.
Now whatever the reason is for not gouging, apply it to Big Oil. Is it laws which prevent such a necessary part of the infrastructure from becoming too expensive? Is it that the utilities are content with the profits they make? Is it something else entirely? It's probably a question that we should be asking. What exactly makes utilities different from gasoline? And before anyone says it, absurd oil prices aren't just due to scarcity in the middle east.
Slashdot Mirror
Gold has intrinsic value in that it is useful. It's used in industry, for example. That, incidentally, makes it a terrible thing to back a currency on. Anyone with half a brain would know that backing a currency on oil, for example, would be foolish.
Paper money is only intrinsically useful to burn.
Of course, the panels don't last forever. Over time, they degrade. I've heard something in-and-around the 20 year range. That's about as long as most mortgages, and since it's not easy to flip a house anymore, it's reasonable to expect that people will start actually paying off their loans and owning a house rather than just upgrading every few years.
4) $200 US does not seem overpriced to me. As for overhyped, most people don't have this weird reaction where they feel that they are obligated to dislike anything that's popular.
You hit the nail on the head.
Most Windows Mobile smart phones cost more than the iPhone, have comparable data plans, and require third-party applications in order to be usable. The iPhone is quite usable all on its own (though some of the applications are nifty, so far I've only looked at the free ones.)
You're also right on the popularity thing. The truth is, some people get their kicks by being a part of the in-crowd, and some people get their kicks by scoffing at the in-crowd. There's no doubt that Apple targets the former. Despite the fact that Apple produces quality products (well, usually--they've definitely had their share of boner moves), there will always be people in the latter category.
I owned a Windows Mobile smart phone for two-and-a-half years. I originally purchased it planning to use it as a media player, to read e-mail, and to do light web surfing. When the original iPhone came out, I started profiling my usage of the device. In order, this is what I used it for:
1) Web surfing.
2) E-mail.
3) SMS
4) Phone calls
5) SSH.
That's it. I'd ended up foregoing media on the device because, simply, it was a pain to use. I didn't expect to use the device primarily for browsing the web, but I did.
But when you get right down to it, web and e-mail are horrible experiences on Windows Mobile. With 6.1 (not available at the time that I bought my phone) SMS is finally a pleasant experience. The phone application works, for the most part, though on the device I was using (and others made by the same manufacturer) the phone would miss a couple of seconds of the attempted connection, meaning I had about 2 rings to answer the phone before it went to voice mail. SSH.. well, it was great, but it was a third party application.
I played with an iPhone at the store and found the web browser to be great. Far and away better than Pocket Internet Explorer, and still quite a bit better than the next best browser on the platform, Opera Mobile (which, incidentally, does cost money.) E-mail is not as great as it could be, but better than Pocket Exchange (at least you can put in an IMAP prefix, and the resolution on the iPhone is good enough to make it easy to read.)
SMS... well, I don't care for SMS on the iPhone quite as much, but it's quite usable. I'd like timestamps for every message.
Phone calls--I didn't have a chance to play with phone calls on the iPhone at the store, but it couldn't be worse than Windows Mobile.
And lastly, SSH. Well, right now, that requires Jailbreaking.
But with an iPhone, I could almost certainly add in media player back into the mix of things I'd do with the device, since Apple's proven themselves quite capable of writing usable players.
So that's why I like the iPhone. It does the things that I want to do very well, with one glaring exception. I chose function--in fact, that's why I didn't buy the first generation iPhone--because even with all of the usability improvements over Windows Mobile, EDGE data rates just suck.
What's the real price of the Open Moko? It doesn't even support EDGE speeds. How much is your time worth when you're trying to get to a webpage over GPRS?
From http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=616555&cid=24221601
And it will go to the owner of last@gmail.com too. There's a lot of accounts with simple names like richards@gmail.com or gonzales@gmail.com which get ALL e-mail sent to owners of a dotted mail, for example: juan.gonzales@gmail.com, john.richards@gmail.com.
How far up your ass did you have to reach to get that 3% number? I'm not being rude, but you had to have pretty much made that up.
From the first bit of the first article:
The survivaltime is calculated as the average time between reports for an average target IP address. If you are assuming that most of these reports are generated by worms that attempt to propagate, an unpatched system would be infected by such a probe. ...
With the help of honeypots, we can measure the survival time. For example, we can use low-interaction honeypot such as nepenthes or amun that emulate common network-based vulnerabilities and deploy them at different locations. The average time it takes to download the first binary is an estimation of the survival time: The honeypots emulate known vulnerabilities and are thus exploited by different kinds of autonomous spreading malware - similar to an unpatched system.
Honestly, this is FUD. They weren't putting a live Windows system on the net, they were putting a honeypot and counting any attack traffic. Default Windows defensive measures (such as the firewall) wouldn't count in this experiment, nor would new OS releases. An unpatched SP2 is a lot more secure, even with the firewall off, than an unpatched SP0.
How hard would it be for Microsoft to add a patch CD to the box, or when patches are released to ship patch CDs to retail outlets like Best Buy and Circut City for their existing stock? AOL used to send me coasters every damned week, why can't Microsoft?
You can request CDs with patches, but I don't know if that includes the whole OS. Microsoft does ship out SP2 to vendors, now, and vendors can slipstream their own patches. Also, if you do a network install, you can slipstream whatever you want.
Seems that it's an unfortunate oversight, and they'll have it fixed soon. At least in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_compiler
Ebay is trying to move away from 'auction' and towards 'online store front'. Meh.
Online auctions without verification are lousy. On a site like eBay, someone's bound to get screwed. Either the buyer (by getting ripped off) or the seller (getting scammed by buyers disputing legitimate auctions.) I've had friends on each side of that. Every time, people partially blame eBay for the issue.
If I were in charge of eBay, I'd be doing my damnedest to get away from auctions, too. That may be what got them started, but it's not the way of the future. There's just no trust, and virtually no way of avoiding scams.
I was unimpressed with the original Hellboy. I've never really been able to put my finger on why this is, but something about it just really turned me off. However, being a fan of the director and expecting amazing visuals, I went ahead and saw Hellboy 2. I thought it was far and away better than the first film, possibly due to a much understated main character. Someone else pointed out that it seemed like the movie just had Hellboy in it, but didn't really feature him--I couldn't agree more.
Regardless, if the sample set is indicative, it sounds like you just don't care for the superhero genre?
Which is stupid. When you browse to the Slashdot front page and see a story entitled, "Hellboy II review," you should assume that there will be details about Hellboy 2. If you're that sensitive to spoilers, you don't click. We should save the "contains spoilers" tag for serious discussions about plot points, not "may contain information about the subject matter."
At-will employment is also part of the problem. Because I can just jump ship if I want to (many parts of employee contracts are unenforceable) the company has little incentive to train me. Why spend the money to train me when another company can then hire me for slightly higher wages and reap the benefits of the other guys sending me to school?
How do you deal with the problem of being blacklisted as a spammer if you end up forwarding lots of spam mail off of your domain? Remember, SPF itself doesn't address the problem of spam, so the fact that you're checking SPF doesn't matter a lot in this regard.
Actually, the term "forwarding" applies both to client-forwarding (remailing the mail with all of the headers) and server-forwarding (what you call bouncing.) It's the difference between clicking forward and using a .forward file (hey, why do you think they called it that?)
There are always unintended consequences. The law is written in human language (constantly changing) in an attempt to stop specific and nonspecific actions. Programmers, geeks, and pedants don't like the ambiguity in the law because it doesn't make clear what we can and can't do, the way computers (ostensibly) do. Unfortunately, what usually happens is that the "I'll know it if I see it" test is applied, and then the law is itself is tried alongside the defendant in a court of law. I think that things could be a little bit better, but in the end, we're always going to have these sorts of problems.
Only if the judge/jury is allowed to consider the previous opinion. If it's in another jurisdiction, that's almost certainly not the case.
There are a few things which muddle the issue.
1) How is "related" defined? Is it "within the scope of a specific case" or the more lay definition which would almost be synonymous with similarity?
2) Context is key. Mediasentry connects to the network as any other Limewire (or whatever) user would, however they may have expertise in the field of computing.
Ultimately, this seems to be similar to the recent Texas law requiring a PI license to do investigative work relating to computers (often mis-construed as requiring a PI license to do computer repair.) Unless I misread the article, it seems that Mediasentry were trying to play down their investigative components in order to pass the "needed a PI license" test. Presumably, if it is something anyone could have seen, their testimony wouldn't be much different from a person on the street witnessing a crime being committed.
Of course, how the court weights the testimony is going to differ in each case.
First of all, this law was pretty clearly intended to target specifically people doing investigative and forensic work in relation to evidence-gathering. In fact, if you read through the text of the bill, that's all it actually does. Mom and pop repair shops will not be affected.
Secondly, in this context, the bill is entirely appropriate. If someone's investigating my computer for evidence of a crime, you can bet that I want them to know what they're doing. I want them to know the proper procedures for data handling, so that there's no question of my innocence when the time comes. If someone puts an infected USB drive into my computer to create an image, thereby putting a virus on the machine, that's going to be a pain. If that virus then downloads illegal data, that could be my life.
These are thieves. They're likely already using stolen credit card/identities. Taking that data and posting it publicly would probably just harm an innocent person.
And that doesn't count the lawsuit value (they now have IP information on every person who has ever watched a copyrighted video on Youtube, after all)
Unless explicitly placed in the public domain, every video on Youtube is copyrighted. By placing the video on Youtube, you are asserting copyright over the video and granting Youtube a license to publish the video. I can't see any judge anywhere in the US ruling that viewing a video on Youtube violates copyright.
There's a difference. MediaSentry are doing investigative work. PC Repair techs are doing repair work. It's slashdot, so we need a car analogy--would you demand that a automobile mechanic have a PI license so that they can properly handle any potential evidence found in the car during routine repairs?
Property and rent tend to be higher in the city, too. And for the people who don't live in the city already, the costs to move may be too great.
As gas prices increase, demand for in-city living will increase, further driving up the cost of property and rent in those places. It's great for rent-controlled areas--and pretty devestating for everywhere else.
What it boils down to is that we, as a society, need transportation in order to function. Instead of relying on other countries for our transportation, we should start looking at things we can do here (in America.)
There are multiple schools of thought. Here's another.
Think about utilities. There are plenty of places where the utilities are privately owned. There are places where there is a virtual monopoly. Do you see these places raising the costs of the services that they provide past the point where most customers complain? No. And utilities, arguably, are even more necessary to more people than gasoline. By all rights, they should be capable of gouging. They don't.
Now whatever the reason is for not gouging, apply it to Big Oil. Is it laws which prevent such a necessary part of the infrastructure from becoming too expensive? Is it that the utilities are content with the profits they make? Is it something else entirely? It's probably a question that we should be asking. What exactly makes utilities different from gasoline? And before anyone says it, absurd oil prices aren't just due to scarcity in the middle east.