The problem is that when those fools refuse to learn, they hurt those of us who do learn. Whether it is allowing their machines to become part of a DDOS attack, or leaking all their stored data (which can include our private data), or becoming penetration points for our networks, or whatever. There's a need for some sort of "herd immunity", to borrow a concept from vaccinations. I don't know what that looks like, but the phones are much more secure, and I've often wished desktops had some security rails like the phones. Something like training wheels that you have to consciously remove.
Now... more serious than my last reply.
I'm good at computer security, competent enough to protect my home and ask probing questions before questionable devices are allowed on my home network. For some devices, I run a separate home network.
I know nothing about medical insurance. I am minimally competent at financial investing, but I certainly don't have the time to research all the options my 401K plan offers. I pay experts to identify good products for me. That is in keeping with the libertarian ethos.
The problem is that it is expensive. I cannot afford to pay experts for all the services required of modern life. Cannot. Which police force should I hire to protect my home? Which energy company should I be using? Which currency should I be using? Which medicines are safe? Which restaurants are doing a good enough job with health safety that I can risk eating there?
Government exists for force compliance so that everyone, regardless of financial income, has a guaranteed basic standard of living. We do this because none of us can guarantee where we will end up on the financial ladder. It's the great flaw in libertarianism -- that philosophy assumes each of us a) has resources and b) has a choice about whether to fritter those resources away or not. But resources aren't infinite and shit happens -- one major medical bill is all it takes. Suddenly you can't be self-sufficient, and that's either the end of you or the end of libertarianism.
I know many people who have suffered security breeches who say, "Yes, I should have done more to protect myself." But should is not the same as could. Security costs money. Lots of money. And it is in aggregate cheaper to secure the environment than to secure my corner of the environment. That is what governments are for.
Galt's life in the Gulch was awful -- no janitors, secretaries, or others content to operate at the level life gave them. He took only high achievers into utopia, and as a result spent most of his time preparing food, cleaning, and other survival tasks. But he did have stimulating conversations with his other high achievers about how to design an education program for a high-achieving menial. And so he wrote Brave New World, later published under the pen name "Aldus Huxley".
People suffering gentrification would love to control the process. Are the major corporations going to let them? No? Then they're already at someone else's mercy. So the only hope they have is protest. You can't say "do it yourself," if you aren't giving them the resources to do it themselves AND you're actively eroding the few resources they do have. That's the problem with gentrification.
Increasing the number of tech workers might help, but there's also a scale problem -- one tech worker's work can generate income far in excess of other professions. Google can afford to pay high wages to tech workers because the return on investment is also high. Even if there were lots of tech workers and Google could go cheaper, it might not do so because it would still be wash with cash and might generously reward its employees anyway. There is certainly some of that happening in tech. It's the industry income itself, not just the salaries of the employees, that is causing the displacement. To balance that, you would need some way to restrain Google's profits vis-a-vis the profits of the other companies in the city... taxation or some other force to redistribute wealth. I leave the question of whether such redistribution is desirable or not for other discussion.
No, it was not redesigned. This is a completely new invention that happens to serve the same purpose. The term "reinvented" is absolutely applicable in this case.
The article starts out zoomed in on the connected 48 states. Zoom out to see Hawaii and Alaska. Hawaii has a giant red dot -- you may not be going far on a small island, but getting there is apparently slow.
I expect the various copyright groups will now begin lobbying for a law requiring ISPs to use the device cameras to take a photo of whoever is at the terminal before allowing any sizeable file to be downloaded. Or perhaps just continuous video surveillance while you're connected to the ISP. As we've seen many times, anything that provides plausible deniability to copyright infringement becomes a major target of legislation by the major content providers.
Apple still sells lots of 5SE phones, brand new, because of the number of people who just don't want or can't hold comfortably the larger phones. I wish they'd take those brisk sales numbers as a hint and make an updated phone with those dimensions.
How many "Wall Street" firms are actually on Wall St. in NYC? Many but not all. Wall Street is a phrase for banks and stock traders. Similarly, "Silicon Valley" long ago moved from being strictly a physical denotation to also including a spiritual connotation for the core tech industry.
So... let's see... a computer virus that wipes out all the computers globally. Then some fast-growing trees that grow along political boundaries and grow so thick [and strong and fireproof] that they form effective walls between communities. They're also made of metal to interfere with EM signals, and their roots destroy buried cables. Now, cut into tiny groups, maybe individual cities, every location builds their own network. The trees proactively prevent interference for 20 years, then mysteriously die, allowing all the disparate protocols developed to interact again.
I can't even see it plausible as science fiction.:-)
> Why do you keep conflating technical availability and consumption preferences?
Because people tend to use the defaults of their software. Many tech companies have systems to measure how many of their users ever change default options settings... it's pretty small. Whatever the settings are when the software ships out, that's the settings most people will use, even when those settings are suboptimal or undesirable for a particular user. Therefore, however we [software writers] set up the initial preferences, that's how the web will look to the general public.
> and then restricting video players to only display content from white-listed sources
Who establishes that whitelist's initial value? LG and Samsung who make the TV? Google or Microsoft or Apple who make the browser? Or are you prompted when you first set up your system to "Pick from one of these third-party list maintainers: TotC*, 4Chan, US Clear List,.gov Standard, or [enter URL]..." See the problem? Even when the lists are open to be plugged in by anyone, there's a finite list of initial lists that get promoted by whoever owns the network. At every level, technical availability and consumption preferences are tied together. So unless the list creation is decentralized and automatically built as you browse, you run right back into the centralized control problem.
I donâ(TM)t know about Nestle, but in the two food industries Iâ(TM)ve got family members working in (dairy and beef) that is exactly how it works. Itâ(TM)s why I suspect Nestle is interested in adding this tracing.
This is a vendor-facing system. The blockchain helps with the tracking across companies. If an aggrigator (pun intended) wants to sell Nestle some vegetables, they have to show that they got those vegetables from a set of known organic farmers. There's a transaction in the blockchain -- irrefutable, traceable -- that shows the acquisition of those vegetables. Bonus points if the transaction signs some biomarker of the vegetables themselves.
The concern is that the ones you purchase can be limited at point of sale from being purchased by people not allowed to have guns -- convicted felons, various mental disabilities, children. With home printing, those restrictions cannot be enforced. I agree that those restrictions cannot be enforced. And that does worry me. But I don't see how this information is going to be contained without creating bigger problems.
Incorrect. The Supreme Court has ruled (repeatedly) that the Fourteenth Amendment caused all the original Bill of Rights to apply to state and local governments.
Gravis Zero: The Anarchists' Cookbook details how to build many kinds of explosives. No, not nuclear, but it's a heavily litigated example. Attempting to limit its distribution is highly problematic because so much of it covers basic chemistry, and limiting publication would result in government control of who can learn chemistry. Similar arguments have been applied to publication of various physics papers on nuclear physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Some things are kept secret for the good of humanity.
Contrariwise, if we had more publicity about what people were doing with their information, we wouldn't have to keep this kind of information secret. Freedom, privacy, safety: pick two.
Slashdot Mirror
In the context of the conversation, "PC" == "desktop". That's how the term is used both colloquially and in the story summary that set up the dialog.
The problem is that when those fools refuse to learn, they hurt those of us who do learn. Whether it is allowing their machines to become part of a DDOS attack, or leaking all their stored data (which can include our private data), or becoming penetration points for our networks, or whatever. There's a need for some sort of "herd immunity", to borrow a concept from vaccinations. I don't know what that looks like, but the phones are much more secure, and I've often wished desktops had some security rails like the phones. Something like training wheels that you have to consciously remove.
Specifically a chicken? Would iguana be ok? Our AI's customer opinion research needs to know!
Now... more serious than my last reply.
I'm good at computer security, competent enough to protect my home and ask probing questions before questionable devices are allowed on my home network. For some devices, I run a separate home network.
I know nothing about medical insurance. I am minimally competent at financial investing, but I certainly don't have the time to research all the options my 401K plan offers. I pay experts to identify good products for me. That is in keeping with the libertarian ethos.
The problem is that it is expensive. I cannot afford to pay experts for all the services required of modern life. Cannot. Which police force should I hire to protect my home? Which energy company should I be using? Which currency should I be using? Which medicines are safe? Which restaurants are doing a good enough job with health safety that I can risk eating there?
Government exists for force compliance so that everyone, regardless of financial income, has a guaranteed basic standard of living. We do this because none of us can guarantee where we will end up on the financial ladder. It's the great flaw in libertarianism -- that philosophy assumes each of us a) has resources and b) has a choice about whether to fritter those resources away or not. But resources aren't infinite and shit happens -- one major medical bill is all it takes. Suddenly you can't be self-sufficient, and that's either the end of you or the end of libertarianism.
I know many people who have suffered security breeches who say, "Yes, I should have done more to protect myself." But should is not the same as could. Security costs money. Lots of money. And it is in aggregate cheaper to secure the environment than to secure my corner of the environment. That is what governments are for.
Galt's life in the Gulch was awful -- no janitors, secretaries, or others content to operate at the level life gave them. He took only high achievers into utopia, and as a result spent most of his time preparing food, cleaning, and other survival tasks. But he did have stimulating conversations with his other high achievers about how to design an education program for a high-achieving menial. And so he wrote Brave New World, later published under the pen name "Aldus Huxley".
People suffering gentrification would love to control the process. Are the major corporations going to let them? No? Then they're already at someone else's mercy. So the only hope they have is protest. You can't say "do it yourself," if you aren't giving them the resources to do it themselves AND you're actively eroding the few resources they do have. That's the problem with gentrification.
Increasing the number of tech workers might help, but there's also a scale problem -- one tech worker's work can generate income far in excess of other professions. Google can afford to pay high wages to tech workers because the return on investment is also high. Even if there were lots of tech workers and Google could go cheaper, it might not do so because it would still be wash with cash and might generously reward its employees anyway. There is certainly some of that happening in tech. It's the industry income itself, not just the salaries of the employees, that is causing the displacement. To balance that, you would need some way to restrain Google's profits vis-a-vis the profits of the other companies in the city... taxation or some other force to redistribute wealth. I leave the question of whether such redistribution is desirable or not for other discussion.
No, it was not redesigned. This is a completely new invention that happens to serve the same purpose. The term "reinvented" is absolutely applicable in this case.
The article starts out zoomed in on the connected 48 states. Zoom out to see Hawaii and Alaska. Hawaii has a giant red dot -- you may not be going far on a small island, but getting there is apparently slow.
I expect the various copyright groups will now begin lobbying for a law requiring ISPs to use the device cameras to take a photo of whoever is at the terminal before allowing any sizeable file to be downloaded. Or perhaps just continuous video surveillance while you're connected to the ISP. As we've seen many times, anything that provides plausible deniability to copyright infringement becomes a major target of legislation by the major content providers.
mod parent up!
Apple still sells lots of 5SE phones, brand new, because of the number of people who just don't want or can't hold comfortably the larger phones. I wish they'd take those brisk sales numbers as a hint and make an updated phone with those dimensions.
Or ARM. Or AMD. Really, with advice like that, perhaps you should just not use a computer.
Have you ever tried to break a stick of pasta under water? It gets a bit floppy.
Editor appears to have fixed the link.
How many "Wall Street" firms are actually on Wall St. in NYC? Many but not all. Wall Street is a phrase for banks and stock traders. Similarly, "Silicon Valley" long ago moved from being strictly a physical denotation to also including a spiritual connotation for the core tech industry.
So... let's see... a computer virus that wipes out all the computers globally. Then some fast-growing trees that grow along political boundaries and grow so thick [and strong and fireproof] that they form effective walls between communities. They're also made of metal to interfere with EM signals, and their roots destroy buried cables. Now, cut into tiny groups, maybe individual cities, every location builds their own network. The trees proactively prevent interference for 20 years, then mysteriously die, allowing all the disparate protocols developed to interact again.
:-)
I can't even see it plausible as science fiction.
> Why do you keep conflating technical availability and consumption preferences?
.gov Standard, or [enter URL]..." See the problem? Even when the lists are open to be plugged in by anyone, there's a finite list of initial lists that get promoted by whoever owns the network. At every level, technical availability and consumption preferences are tied together. So unless the list creation is decentralized and automatically built as you browse, you run right back into the centralized control problem.
Because people tend to use the defaults of their software. Many tech companies have systems to measure how many of their users ever change default options settings... it's pretty small. Whatever the settings are when the software ships out, that's the settings most people will use, even when those settings are suboptimal or undesirable for a particular user. Therefore, however we [software writers] set up the initial preferences, that's how the web will look to the general public.
> and then restricting video players to only display content from white-listed sources
Who establishes that whitelist's initial value? LG and Samsung who make the TV? Google or Microsoft or Apple who make the browser? Or are you prompted when you first set up your system to "Pick from one of these third-party list maintainers: TotC*, 4Chan, US Clear List,
* Think of the Children
Privacy, security, freedom: pick two.
It's an old triad that we are having to balance in new ways.
Sounds like the grand poobah wasn't a software architect, just a programmer promoted too far.
I donâ(TM)t know about Nestle, but in the two food industries Iâ(TM)ve got family members working in (dairy and beef) that is exactly how it works. Itâ(TM)s why I suspect Nestle is interested in adding this tracing.
This is a vendor-facing system. The blockchain helps with the tracking across companies. If an aggrigator (pun intended) wants to sell Nestle some vegetables, they have to show that they got those vegetables from a set of known organic farmers. There's a transaction in the blockchain -- irrefutable, traceable -- that shows the acquisition of those vegetables. Bonus points if the transaction signs some biomarker of the vegetables themselves.
The concern is that the ones you purchase can be limited at point of sale from being purchased by people not allowed to have guns -- convicted felons, various mental disabilities, children. With home printing, those restrictions cannot be enforced. I agree that those restrictions cannot be enforced. And that does worry me. But I don't see how this information is going to be contained without creating bigger problems.
Incorrect. The Supreme Court has ruled (repeatedly) that the Fourteenth Amendment caused all the original Bill of Rights to apply to state and local governments.
Gravis Zero: The Anarchists' Cookbook details how to build many kinds of explosives. No, not nuclear, but it's a heavily litigated example. Attempting to limit its distribution is highly problematic because so much of it covers basic chemistry, and limiting publication would result in government control of who can learn chemistry. Similar arguments have been applied to publication of various physics papers on nuclear physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> Some things are kept secret for the good of humanity.
Contrariwise, if we had more publicity about what people were doing with their information, we wouldn't have to keep this kind of information secret. Freedom, privacy, safety: pick two.