On the other slide of the coin, globalization is a symptom as much as it is a cause. If we didn't consistently demand new and cheaper ("green" or not) cell phones, cars, PCs, t-shirts, etc. to replace our perfectly functional ones of those every 6-18 months, it wouldn't be necessary for China specifically to commission a new coal electric plant or two every week. They specifically would not need to build a new factory city of a million people every month. There wouldn't need to be 80-year-old ladies melting down electronics waste to recover metal scraps without protective equipment.
Surely, dumping waste from all of those activities directly into their fresh waterways will have no negative consequences on any of their grain production in the future, since the country can just keep on increasing its import quotas. And the drive to produce ever more and ever cheaper goods for both domestic and international markets have only resulted in fatal tainted and fake food scandals every six months or so for the last decade, only affecting hundreds of thousands of people each. The last time the Yangtze River did something funny and caught international attention a decade ago, only 20 million people (roughly the size of the urban population of Canada) were at imminent risk of starvation, while only 80 million had to overwinter with food shortages. Progress.
But hey, as long as we don't have to see or directly deal with all the human sacrifice that goes into our current lifestyles, it's morally acceptable, right?
Of course, it's unfair to blame the West alone for China's situation since their culture's desire to westernize have created more middle-class people with western consumption patterns than the US or EU have people. But why should we care if they don't shed a tear for their own rural population of 200 million living in a 19th century lifestyle whose families must choose between literacy and education for their children or sending them to the factory six hours away so that they can afford to put food on the table.
Trade barriers aren't a solution here since, as you point out, the domestic and regional first worlds within Asia are already much larger than the US and European markets.
Don't be so hard on them. The current mode of global resource allocation requires a Greenpeace to permit us to continue to consume at unsustainable rates. If the consumptive "first world" were faced with how to redress the the vast injustices we cause through consumption, instead of simply buying indulgences through slightly more expensive environmentally-friendly labeled goods, we might slow down to think about why 2/3 of the world's population must struggle through inhumane living conditions so that we can enjoy our dozens of Energy Star appliances.
Also, I don't think the glitter-starved masses would pay attention to lifecycle analyses, total energy equations, comprehensive resource requirements and all that science which would rationally price our disposables based on their impact on fellow humans, as opposed to what some database thinks we're worth.
In what ways does it make sense to ship flavorless but dent- and parasite (life!) resistant fruit from nutrition-deprived regions half way across the world for routine daily consumption, regardless of how its transported when most parts of the world have provided adequate nutrition for hundreds of thousands of years?
That's great. If you're right and halos are completely explained by historical pragmatic industrial design, glowing faces doesn't tell us much that's new. However, if there could be a physiological basis for some of the spiritual things for which we don't yet have a fully satisfying explanation--potentially individuals like shamans, diviners, etc.--we'll have gained some important insights into the human religions which have shaped so much of our world. We might also learn more about how we sense and perceive other people, which would be useful for such things as clinical and behavioral psychology, the treatment of mental illness, and the performance arts industries.
While your old tech explanation is cool, I'd get more new tech toys out of understanding if and why human faces glow (and also, what else glows?).
While most cows aren't spherical in real life, within a species the height of cows, their mass, horn length, volume of milk production, girth, colour, etc. all vary within known ranges, with most members of the population being distributed about the middle. It's also possible that the luminescence phenomena is mostly quantized--cows have a whole number of legs and not 3.6 +/- 0.4 legs, nor 1.1 +/- 0.1 brains--but the fact that luminescence appears to vary within each day (at least within their sample) in individuals of a species with a lifespan of 10e5 days suggests that it's not a binary or quantized trait.
So, this isn't assuming a spherical cow as much as assuming (until we have better evidence) for this discussion that this instance of a previously unobserved kind of animal (new physiological trait or process) fits into the same pattern in which the vast majority of all other known traits also fit. Scientists have been wrong in the past on this kind of confirmation bias assumption (see ring species, for example) but we always have to start with what we know and can show from available evidence.
If you have evidence that we need a new sub-field of biochemistry or physiology or genetics to deal with dimly glowing human faces which offers a more robust model of the intensity of glowing faces and/or ocular light sensitivity than we have in this discussion (for which we have really big piles of circumstantial evidence from many different circumstances and models which seem to have worked for the last few decades at least) please present it so that we may discuss your new model instead. Otherwise, your attempted counterpoint amounts to a claim without evidence that much of what we know about evolutionary biology is wrong (possible, but you didn't specify why you think that).
At least not to most people. Assuming that light sensitivity and light emission are independently normally distributed in the population, it's entirely possible that extremely sensitive individuals can see the light coming off the extremely bright individuals. Further, it is possible for genetically isolated populations to have gained extreme sensitivity or extreme brightness through the usual biological mechanisms, or if such traits were selected for through cultural or religious practices. Also, consider that relatively unstressed young Japanese men may not be fully activating whatever metabolism or physiology issues the light. There may be something to metabolism around "afterglow", women glowing when they're pregnant, unusual mental capacity, etc. which could easily generate 10 or 100 x the intensity observed in this study, and thus be observable by many people. (All sorts of biological processes span several orders of magnitude in concentration, intensity, energy, etc., and plenty of other bio-luminescent organisms show that the energy levels required to emit naked eye visible light are mostly not harmful to the organism.)
Whether we are consciously aware of the brightness of others, or if we do anything with that information are topics for future study.
It's also disingenuous to both complain that the government doesn't consult with constituents, and then to complain about the speculative output of the consultation before you have seen it.
I'm not sure why you've attempted to change the argument to summary judgment out of the blue, but maximizing total justice in society (if that could somehow be quantified) is almost certainly not equivalent to maximizing the number of jury trials when resources, time and the number of involved parties are considered.
Trying contempt before a full court may be more just for the relatively small number of contempters as compared to the total number of accused, but the delays it would cause would certainly be less just for the hundreds or thousands of non-contempters already detained and waiting to get to a trial at all, along with all other parties to the trial in which the contempt is alleged to have occurred if the contempt trial and its appeals have to complete before the contempt interrupt is resolved in the original trial. An important reason we use the contempt construct in the first place is they they are an effective tool to reduce delays to trial proceedings.
If an admitted but not convicted murderer contempts her way through every justice in the state, and then dies before the original murder trial, then no justice would have been served, save the murderer's own with respect to the contempt trials. Even if contempt trials are non-blocking, their availability do nothing to help the original trial since they do not plausibly increase compliance with orders in any way.
The Sixth Amendment requires a speedy trial as much as it does fair trials for those accused of crimes, in recognition that justice delayed is justice denied. A special court could be established for contempt cases if that is the wish of the citizenry. But within the current infrastructure, simply criminalizing contempt would unjustly affect a greater number of people to lesser extents (more accused and victims would have to wait for available prosecutors and defenders and trial dates, there would be a greater number of accused and victims in the form of contempters and justices, and the amount of time available for individual justices to preside over trials would be reduced) than those involved in unjust exceptions such as the one in this story.
If incarceration for contempt did not satisfice what we want out of that part of the justice system, we'd be more actively stumbling around for new alternatives.
The current justice system could do with less volume. For that reason, we don't bring lawn care violations to court by default. Running every contempt incident through the courts will recurse destructively when someone who hates courts in general becomes an input and is held in contempt...
Really? I would think that US currency would fall under federal jurisdiction since it issues from the federal reserve and is policed by the Secret Service. Alternatively, does the flexible money now contain enough interesting stuff that it's combustion products would fall under state EPAs?
If there are several known incompatibilities in the management interface which have the effect of producing misleading outputs, letting the browser through would require that specific checks be put in place around each part of the app which could be misleading. For instance, clicking a submit button on a form will usually cause the current page to change in location (if we follow the HTML spec, a form action is required), but intervening Javascript, CSS, and other fun stuff may or may not cause the page to change in appearance in a reliable way if there are browser incompatibilities. If an incompatible browser is let through, would returning a generic page after submitting a significant action such as "backup this" mean that the action has succeeded or failed, and could the user of the incompatible browser rely on that always to be the case? Would the user know (how) to look for secondary verification in the interface that their use of the slightly broken interface produced the desired results, and would they be able to trust that the indicator panel is updating correctly?
Who would be liable (or in the wrong) if the user makes a costly decision based on a UI that's wrong because one browser doesn't deal with the app's data in the intended manner, when the app vendor said specifically not to use that browser? (If we do not like click-through licenses/contracts, we also should not like click-through disclaimers of liability in case of incompatible browser use.)
For both infrastructure vendors and users, "GTFO" can be much more appropriate than "watch for landmines" when a series of incompatibilities is likely to cause a data loss or an unplanned workflow discontinuity event, especially if the trouble indicators are subtle. There maybe other cases with less at stake (such as things which are not core business operations infrastructure) in which a higher risk of loss or discontinuity are acceptable, in which case "watch for landmines" is a sufficient warning.
This story is also notable because this could be a study of expressed vs revealed preferences in which the subject has unintentionally exposed that part of their decision-making regarding corporate expenditures is highly based on emotional rather than rational criteria.
The mature thing to have done would have been to call up the vendor to ask if they knew that their widget did not meet spec, and to ask if the oversight could be trivially rectified. Presumably (because the summary omits this detail), Opera Software had included compatibility with the Opera browser if it was a legitimate operating requirement, otherwise one or more of the following are likely to be true: 1) The person who wrote Opera Software's requirements did a shoddy incomplete job; 2) The person unpacking the test system was not sufficiently trained to realize that distracting people all the way up to the CTO for several minutes over a non-management issue would destroy several hundred dollars in company value; 3) Everyone in between the person unpacking the test system also thought it was worthwhile to the company to escalate the issue; 4) The company's procurement policies provide sufficient wiggle room for purchasers to make personal choices as opposed to choices best for the company or the shareholders.
Given the healthy appetite for standards in this community, I'm surprised that Opera Software is not being called on not fully specifying its full requirements, or on having C-level rage as part of its try catch throw routine, neither of which is good standard practice.
In short, the guy looks like a dick because he's gloating (perhaps unknowingly) about his company's inadequacies as pointed out above.
Like it or not, each release of IE sets a standard in that it specifies a series of technical requirements for interoperability which can empirically be demonstrated to have been met or not. The right to make and promulgate standards is not exclusive to standards-making bodies.
My preference is for the W3 standard and the IE standard and the Mozilla standard and the Opera standard and the WebKit etc. for parsing HTML to converge onto at least one standard which is adopted by everybody, which is happening, but to call something which meets the technical and operational definitions to be a standard, something less than a standard, demonstrates ignorance or contempt, or a desire for a world in which some browsers are more equal than others.
Of course there are many CC photos, and sites like morguefile have even more great photos licensed more permissively than CC. _And they should be exploited if possible and appropriate._ However, photos which were not taken for documentary or journalistic purposes often lack sufficient meta-information to ensure that they depict a true or representative likeness of their subjects.
Did you take a photo of that bridge/park/animal/etc because there was something remarkable going on at the time, or because it was new to you? In either case, how would a user of that photo know if it is a representation of the pertinent features of the subject if the photographer doesn't know or didn't document the relevant parameters of the photograph? (date/time, controlled scene, with knowledge/consent of the subject [which affects attitude and disposition], social and cultural context [civic holiday? do we show foreigners this? was there an exceptional crime there this week?], etc.)
I have no specific opinions about the two positions which you've seen fit to ascribe to me, and I'm not sure how you've deduced those from my comment.
I've only had a few hundred journalistic photos published, which by no means makes me a professional photographer. My primary point is that the photographic production process is far less amenable to a collaborative workflow which seems integral to the intent of how other kinds of more easily revisable CC works and Wikipedia content become improved. Current examples of popular photography seem to trend toward a different aesthetic than in the past.
In a world where meta-data is much more readily accessible than before, it may be that we're coming to value the social content and implications of photos more than the technical or documentary content which have been standards of quality in the past. That's a reasonable progression but if true, but it would also have to shift the idea of quality into a different space which is not adequately defined by this story (a photo would be "bad" not because it fails to follow traditional aesthetic guidelines but because it lacks #undefined).
With respect to markets, most professionals I work with in the attention business (publishing, marketing, entertainment) operate as though attention is a more scarce resource than finances, in that money is nice but insufficient for success, while attention is absolutely necessary and more difficult to come by.
That's a very American-centric point of view. In significant other parts of the world (think HK, France, England, Brazil), grainy cellphone photos or midnight 600mm telephotos are cover material on a daily or weekly basis. I suspect parts of those markets value substantive content matters more than superficial shiny things as is the case in the U.S. where pretty packaging is king.
Obvious downside to having a PD photo of yourself available: 4-inch story about entering drug rehab gets at least 50% more readership if it includes a 1"x1" thumbnail. PR (like photography) isn't just about always getting exposure, but about getting the right exposure and timing. CC and other permissive licenses were designed explicitly to prevent permissions from ever being rescinded, so it's mostly a non-starter for any purpose requiring public image and reputation management.
It's also somewhat amusing that few seem to realize the difference between the highly personal and instantaneous creative act of composing and capturing a good photo, versus the group iterative process which generates software and music. And unlike textual and illustrative compositions, where anyone can try their hand as an editor or writer on the best or worst of starting materials and plausibly make an improved version, it's blatantly obvious from the starting materials provided that most people with cameras don't know much about lighting or composition or exposure.
I suppose we could de-professionalize that art also by waiting for the global expectation of photographic quality to decrease as thumbnails on twitter and random cell phone images on Facebook become the acceptable standard of quality.
Your statements are logically consistent, but I respectfully agree with Mr. Coward for the following reasons.
1) Main features of backups non-exhaustively include the ability to restore files and to restore functionality. You might be able to restore functionality by ripping from a commercial disc, but the resulting byte stream will almost certainly be different from the original. Even with respect to restoring functionality, ripping from a commercial disc will almost certainly take longer than copying an encoded file with the same human level content. And that does not include important meta-data such as ratings, access times, album organization/collections, album covers, etc.
2) Clearly the intent of this entire story is to discuss best practices with respect to backing up user generated data, of which one special case is audio-visual content, of which one special case is content which is available commercially as pressed discs.
In short, you have presented one relatively expensive solution for one special case of a special case, which as you have acknowledged, is not generalizable as you've described it to the problem being discussed in the story. Pressed discs as a backup solution fit neither the spirit nor the letter of the problem described.
About the only way to discuss pressed discs with relevance to a home backup method would be to point out the costs of getting a disc pressed for really irreplaceable data (currently around $10^3 to $10^4 per disc), or the relative merits of the various optical disc formats with respect to the probable availability of devices to read them at various points in the future (signals from a CD-* can be read with a flatbed scanner, but blue laser devices which can record at a higher density are more likely to be relevant for data storage in two decades than red laser devices).
Containment and context: There are different threats on the local machine and on the network. For the pros, this is another way to implement the different colored phones/terminals idea.
For the masses, an AV icon in the systray is fast becoming an analogue to the security theater at modern airports: The indicator of apparent security has become much more psychologically important than the actual state of security. But unlike modern airports which know that they will become compromised regardless of deploying all practical security measures and have other tools to deal with the breech, regular PC users are not aware that their AV will likely fail and also lack any contingency plans to address the failure.
Since the current structural power relations are such that there will always be more particular bugs and classes of vulnerabilities to exploit than resources to detect the bugs, and since there will always be many more ways to exploit bugs than there are bugs, and since the commercial AV vendors can only respond to particular malwares once they've been implemented, malware will always have the first strike advantage. Costs/benefits also favour the malware offers taken together, since a one time attack can gain thousands of nodes in the span of hours and be discarded, while AV vendors have to distribute protection to every one of millions of nodes to protect against each new attack while forever maintaining defenses against every previous attack. Unless some of the cloud AV solutions gain traction commercially and change the relationship between detection, bugs and malware, the AV faction will always be in the less favourable position in devoting almost all AV resources to addressing the symptoms of unsafe computing practices (infection), rather than causes, which are socially rooted (education and trust).
So I would view keeping an ever growing population of users in ignorance about how to properly use and secure their computers and data while devoting exponentially increasing resources to fixing the symptoms to be a less preferable long-term strategy than abandoning the current AV paradigm and putting those resources toward operator education about how to understand and interact with various information sources. It shouldn't take more than a generation to socially indoctrinate the idea of thinking before clicking, just as the Mr. Yuk campaign has curtailed the widespread ingestion of household chemicals by children in the 1980s. Admittedly, computers as a class of technologies have yet to develop the ease of use a bleach bottle or manuscripts which have integral affordances against harmful misuse, but that shouldn't be much of a challenge if the industry is as advanced as it makes itself out to be.
You may wish to re-read the part of the interview where she explains how running additional programs--such as AV containing exploitable flaws not found in the absence of the operating system--in the same context as the viruses and the kernel results at best in a draw in the long term (the usual two-sided arms race to find/exploit/patch), but a potential short term win for malware in terms of data loss and reliability. Since a new malware works on the scale of minutes to hours, whereas the countermeasures respond on the timescale of hours to days, AV programs running in the same ring as everything else, including the malware, will almost always be in the lagging defensive position.
As a well learned expert who implements security solutions regularly, I'm sure you recall various incidents where AV products have detected legitimate OS/AV/etc components as the result of bad automatic signature updates, and how the resolutions required lowering the security of the overall system at least temporarily. Also, you must already be familiar with the human factors of security, wherein our perception of risk strongly influences our behaviour with respect to risky activities, especially when safety devices are perceived to provide greater mitigation than they actually do.
NComputing and ThinSoft already have thin clients in the ~$70 range per station. But it's mostly Windows XP (RDP with some TS DLL fudging) and (not NX) X hacks, and for local networks only.
Facebook's Application Verification Program is an optional program designed to provide applications with a way to stand out and reassure users that they will provide a good experience. Users of verified applications can feel confident that these applications strive to be transparent about how they work and respect social expectations between friends. Verified applications will prominently appear in the Application Directory where a green check mark will signal to users that an application has been verified.
Since most of the apps' functionality is hosted on the developers servers, at most this verification is about a moment in time, as opposed to what happens with the app or the data presently.
It reminds me of the Nintendo Seal, originally of quality, but later of no feature in particular...
What would that solve? That would result in a credit of $12.50, or a credit in the amount charged, returning the balance to $0, $0 plus ~2% interest on $23e15, or $23e15 less $12.50. There's no normal outcome of returning the item that isn't a zero or substantially very negative balance.
Google has gained enough tacit knowledge about the protocol and issues to reimplement a cleaner version of the server. NoMachine won't starve, but it's time for them to take all the knowledge they've accumulated about the remote desktop market and implement their next big thing. NoMachine is also in a reasonable position to offer consulting/support services now that Google is making remote desktops more mainstream.
Eh? I thought PETA got taken over by the only marginally good satire writers from the Onion and MAD.
This group needs to hire a good copy/PR writer to explain what "exploit", "disclosure", "script kiddie", "whitehats", and "rm'd" mean, and also how their proposed technical solution of targeting individuals for removal purports to solve the problem of socially motivated script kiddies, and what this technical demonstration has to do with their business objectives.
In short, this group has successfully met all the criteria to be a typical late '90s dot-com company.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other slide of the coin, globalization is a symptom as much as it is a cause. If we didn't consistently demand new and cheaper ("green" or not) cell phones, cars, PCs, t-shirts, etc. to replace our perfectly functional ones of those every 6-18 months, it wouldn't be necessary for China specifically to commission a new coal electric plant or two every week. They specifically would not need to build a new factory city of a million people every month. There wouldn't need to be 80-year-old ladies melting down electronics waste to recover metal scraps without protective equipment.
Surely, dumping waste from all of those activities directly into their fresh waterways will have no negative consequences on any of their grain production in the future, since the country can just keep on increasing its import quotas. And the drive to produce ever more and ever cheaper goods for both domestic and international markets have only resulted in fatal tainted and fake food scandals every six months or so for the last decade, only affecting hundreds of thousands of people each. The last time the Yangtze River did something funny and caught international attention a decade ago, only 20 million people (roughly the size of the urban population of Canada) were at imminent risk of starvation, while only 80 million had to overwinter with food shortages. Progress.
But hey, as long as we don't have to see or directly deal with all the human sacrifice that goes into our current lifestyles, it's morally acceptable, right?
Of course, it's unfair to blame the West alone for China's situation since their culture's desire to westernize have created more middle-class people with western consumption patterns than the US or EU have people. But why should we care if they don't shed a tear for their own rural population of 200 million living in a 19th century lifestyle whose families must choose between literacy and education for their children or sending them to the factory six hours away so that they can afford to put food on the table.
Trade barriers aren't a solution here since, as you point out, the domestic and regional first worlds within Asia are already much larger than the US and European markets.
Don't be so hard on them. The current mode of global resource allocation requires a Greenpeace to permit us to continue to consume at unsustainable rates. If the consumptive "first world" were faced with how to redress the the vast injustices we cause through consumption, instead of simply buying indulgences through slightly more expensive environmentally-friendly labeled goods, we might slow down to think about why 2/3 of the world's population must struggle through inhumane living conditions so that we can enjoy our dozens of Energy Star appliances.
Also, I don't think the glitter-starved masses would pay attention to lifecycle analyses, total energy equations, comprehensive resource requirements and all that science which would rationally price our disposables based on their impact on fellow humans, as opposed to what some database thinks we're worth.
In what ways does it make sense to ship flavorless but dent- and parasite (life!) resistant fruit from nutrition-deprived regions half way across the world for routine daily consumption, regardless of how its transported when most parts of the world have provided adequate nutrition for hundreds of thousands of years?
That's great. If you're right and halos are completely explained by historical pragmatic industrial design, glowing faces doesn't tell us much that's new. However, if there could be a physiological basis for some of the spiritual things for which we don't yet have a fully satisfying explanation--potentially individuals like shamans, diviners, etc.--we'll have gained some important insights into the human religions which have shaped so much of our world. We might also learn more about how we sense and perceive other people, which would be useful for such things as clinical and behavioral psychology, the treatment of mental illness, and the performance arts industries.
While your old tech explanation is cool, I'd get more new tech toys out of understanding if and why human faces glow (and also, what else glows?).
While most cows aren't spherical in real life, within a species the height of cows, their mass, horn length, volume of milk production, girth, colour, etc. all vary within known ranges, with most members of the population being distributed about the middle. It's also possible that the luminescence phenomena is mostly quantized--cows have a whole number of legs and not 3.6 +/- 0.4 legs, nor 1.1 +/- 0.1 brains--but the fact that luminescence appears to vary within each day (at least within their sample) in individuals of a species with a lifespan of 10e5 days suggests that it's not a binary or quantized trait.
So, this isn't assuming a spherical cow as much as assuming (until we have better evidence) for this discussion that this instance of a previously unobserved kind of animal (new physiological trait or process) fits into the same pattern in which the vast majority of all other known traits also fit. Scientists have been wrong in the past on this kind of confirmation bias assumption (see ring species, for example) but we always have to start with what we know and can show from available evidence.
If you have evidence that we need a new sub-field of biochemistry or physiology or genetics to deal with dimly glowing human faces which offers a more robust model of the intensity of glowing faces and/or ocular light sensitivity than we have in this discussion (for which we have really big piles of circumstantial evidence from many different circumstances and models which seem to have worked for the last few decades at least) please present it so that we may discuss your new model instead. Otherwise, your attempted counterpoint amounts to a claim without evidence that much of what we know about evolutionary biology is wrong (possible, but you didn't specify why you think that).
Not really a halo...
At least not to most people. Assuming that light sensitivity and light emission are independently normally distributed in the population, it's entirely possible that extremely sensitive individuals can see the light coming off the extremely bright individuals. Further, it is possible for genetically isolated populations to have gained extreme sensitivity or extreme brightness through the usual biological mechanisms, or if such traits were selected for through cultural or religious practices. Also, consider that relatively unstressed young Japanese men may not be fully activating whatever metabolism or physiology issues the light. There may be something to metabolism around "afterglow", women glowing when they're pregnant, unusual mental capacity, etc. which could easily generate 10 or 100 x the intensity observed in this study, and thus be observable by many people. (All sorts of biological processes span several orders of magnitude in concentration, intensity, energy, etc., and plenty of other bio-luminescent organisms show that the energy levels required to emit naked eye visible light are mostly not harmful to the organism.)
Whether we are consciously aware of the brightness of others, or if we do anything with that information are topics for future study.
[citation needed]
It's also disingenuous to both complain that the government doesn't consult with constituents, and then to complain about the speculative output of the consultation before you have seen it.
I'm not sure why you've attempted to change the argument to summary judgment out of the blue, but maximizing total justice in society (if that could somehow be quantified) is almost certainly not equivalent to maximizing the number of jury trials when resources, time and the number of involved parties are considered.
Trying contempt before a full court may be more just for the relatively small number of contempters as compared to the total number of accused, but the delays it would cause would certainly be less just for the hundreds or thousands of non-contempters already detained and waiting to get to a trial at all, along with all other parties to the trial in which the contempt is alleged to have occurred if the contempt trial and its appeals have to complete before the contempt interrupt is resolved in the original trial. An important reason we use the contempt construct in the first place is they they are an effective tool to reduce delays to trial proceedings.
If an admitted but not convicted murderer contempts her way through every justice in the state, and then dies before the original murder trial, then no justice would have been served, save the murderer's own with respect to the contempt trials. Even if contempt trials are non-blocking, their availability do nothing to help the original trial since they do not plausibly increase compliance with orders in any way.
The Sixth Amendment requires a speedy trial as much as it does fair trials for those accused of crimes, in recognition that justice delayed is justice denied. A special court could be established for contempt cases if that is the wish of the citizenry. But within the current infrastructure, simply criminalizing contempt would unjustly affect a greater number of people to lesser extents (more accused and victims would have to wait for available prosecutors and defenders and trial dates, there would be a greater number of accused and victims in the form of contempters and justices, and the amount of time available for individual justices to preside over trials would be reduced) than those involved in unjust exceptions such as the one in this story.
If incarceration for contempt did not satisfice what we want out of that part of the justice system, we'd be more actively stumbling around for new alternatives.
The current justice system could do with less volume. For that reason, we don't bring lawn care violations to court by default. Running every contempt incident through the courts will recurse destructively when someone who hates courts in general becomes an input and is held in contempt...
Really? I would think that US currency would fall under federal jurisdiction since it issues from the federal reserve and is policed by the Secret Service. Alternatively, does the flexible money now contain enough interesting stuff that it's combustion products would fall under state EPAs?
If there are several known incompatibilities in the management interface which have the effect of producing misleading outputs, letting the browser through would require that specific checks be put in place around each part of the app which could be misleading. For instance, clicking a submit button on a form will usually cause the current page to change in location (if we follow the HTML spec, a form action is required), but intervening Javascript, CSS, and other fun stuff may or may not cause the page to change in appearance in a reliable way if there are browser incompatibilities. If an incompatible browser is let through, would returning a generic page after submitting a significant action such as "backup this" mean that the action has succeeded or failed, and could the user of the incompatible browser rely on that always to be the case? Would the user know (how) to look for secondary verification in the interface that their use of the slightly broken interface produced the desired results, and would they be able to trust that the indicator panel is updating correctly?
Who would be liable (or in the wrong) if the user makes a costly decision based on a UI that's wrong because one browser doesn't deal with the app's data in the intended manner, when the app vendor said specifically not to use that browser? (If we do not like click-through licenses/contracts, we also should not like click-through disclaimers of liability in case of incompatible browser use.)
For both infrastructure vendors and users, "GTFO" can be much more appropriate than "watch for landmines" when a series of incompatibilities is likely to cause a data loss or an unplanned workflow discontinuity event, especially if the trouble indicators are subtle. There maybe other cases with less at stake (such as things which are not core business operations infrastructure) in which a higher risk of loss or discontinuity are acceptable, in which case "watch for landmines" is a sufficient warning.
This story is also notable because this could be a study of expressed vs revealed preferences in which the subject has unintentionally exposed that part of their decision-making regarding corporate expenditures is highly based on emotional rather than rational criteria.
The mature thing to have done would have been to call up the vendor to ask if they knew that their widget did not meet spec, and to ask if the oversight could be trivially rectified. Presumably (because the summary omits this detail), Opera Software had included compatibility with the Opera browser if it was a legitimate operating requirement, otherwise one or more of the following are likely to be true: 1) The person who wrote Opera Software's requirements did a shoddy incomplete job; 2) The person unpacking the test system was not sufficiently trained to realize that distracting people all the way up to the CTO for several minutes over a non-management issue would destroy several hundred dollars in company value; 3) Everyone in between the person unpacking the test system also thought it was worthwhile to the company to escalate the issue; 4) The company's procurement policies provide sufficient wiggle room for purchasers to make personal choices as opposed to choices best for the company or the shareholders.
Given the healthy appetite for standards in this community, I'm surprised that Opera Software is not being called on not fully specifying its full requirements, or on having C-level rage as part of its try catch throw routine, neither of which is good standard practice.
In short, the guy looks like a dick because he's gloating (perhaps unknowingly) about his company's inadequacies as pointed out above.
Like it or not, each release of IE sets a standard in that it specifies a series of technical requirements for interoperability which can empirically be demonstrated to have been met or not. The right to make and promulgate standards is not exclusive to standards-making bodies.
My preference is for the W3 standard and the IE standard and the Mozilla standard and the Opera standard and the WebKit etc. for parsing HTML to converge onto at least one standard which is adopted by everybody, which is happening, but to call something which meets the technical and operational definitions to be a standard, something less than a standard, demonstrates ignorance or contempt, or a desire for a world in which some browsers are more equal than others.
Of course there are many CC photos, and sites like morguefile have even more great photos licensed more permissively than CC. _And they should be exploited if possible and appropriate._ However, photos which were not taken for documentary or journalistic purposes often lack sufficient meta-information to ensure that they depict a true or representative likeness of their subjects.
Did you take a photo of that bridge/park/animal/etc because there was something remarkable going on at the time, or because it was new to you? In either case, how would a user of that photo know if it is a representation of the pertinent features of the subject if the photographer doesn't know or didn't document the relevant parameters of the photograph? (date/time, controlled scene, with knowledge/consent of the subject [which affects attitude and disposition], social and cultural context [civic holiday? do we show foreigners this? was there an exceptional crime there this week?], etc.)
I have no specific opinions about the two positions which you've seen fit to ascribe to me, and I'm not sure how you've deduced those from my comment.
I've only had a few hundred journalistic photos published, which by no means makes me a professional photographer. My primary point is that the photographic production process is far less amenable to a collaborative workflow which seems integral to the intent of how other kinds of more easily revisable CC works and Wikipedia content become improved. Current examples of popular photography seem to trend toward a different aesthetic than in the past.
In a world where meta-data is much more readily accessible than before, it may be that we're coming to value the social content and implications of photos more than the technical or documentary content which have been standards of quality in the past. That's a reasonable progression but if true, but it would also have to shift the idea of quality into a different space which is not adequately defined by this story (a photo would be "bad" not because it fails to follow traditional aesthetic guidelines but because it lacks #undefined).
With respect to markets, most professionals I work with in the attention business (publishing, marketing, entertainment) operate as though attention is a more scarce resource than finances, in that money is nice but insufficient for success, while attention is absolutely necessary and more difficult to come by.
That's a very American-centric point of view. In significant other parts of the world (think HK, France, England, Brazil), grainy cellphone photos or midnight 600mm telephotos are cover material on a daily or weekly basis. I suspect parts of those markets value substantive content matters more than superficial shiny things as is the case in the U.S. where pretty packaging is king.
Obvious downside to having a PD photo of yourself available: 4-inch story about entering drug rehab gets at least 50% more readership if it includes a 1"x1" thumbnail. PR (like photography) isn't just about always getting exposure, but about getting the right exposure and timing. CC and other permissive licenses were designed explicitly to prevent permissions from ever being rescinded, so it's mostly a non-starter for any purpose requiring public image and reputation management.
It's also somewhat amusing that few seem to realize the difference between the highly personal and instantaneous creative act of composing and capturing a good photo, versus the group iterative process which generates software and music. And unlike textual and illustrative compositions, where anyone can try their hand as an editor or writer on the best or worst of starting materials and plausibly make an improved version, it's blatantly obvious from the starting materials provided that most people with cameras don't know much about lighting or composition or exposure.
I suppose we could de-professionalize that art also by waiting for the global expectation of photographic quality to decrease as thumbnails on twitter and random cell phone images on Facebook become the acceptable standard of quality.
Your statements are logically consistent, but I respectfully agree with Mr. Coward for the following reasons.
1) Main features of backups non-exhaustively include the ability to restore files and to restore functionality. You might be able to restore functionality by ripping from a commercial disc, but the resulting byte stream will almost certainly be different from the original. Even with respect to restoring functionality, ripping from a commercial disc will almost certainly take longer than copying an encoded file with the same human level content. And that does not include important meta-data such as ratings, access times, album organization/collections, album covers, etc.
2) Clearly the intent of this entire story is to discuss best practices with respect to backing up user generated data, of which one special case is audio-visual content, of which one special case is content which is available commercially as pressed discs.
In short, you have presented one relatively expensive solution for one special case of a special case, which as you have acknowledged, is not generalizable as you've described it to the problem being discussed in the story. Pressed discs as a backup solution fit neither the spirit nor the letter of the problem described.
About the only way to discuss pressed discs with relevance to a home backup method would be to point out the costs of getting a disc pressed for really irreplaceable data (currently around $10^3 to $10^4 per disc), or the relative merits of the various optical disc formats with respect to the probable availability of devices to read them at various points in the future (signals from a CD-* can be read with a flatbed scanner, but blue laser devices which can record at a higher density are more likely to be relevant for data storage in two decades than red laser devices).
Containment and context: There are different threats on the local machine and on the network. For the pros, this is another way to implement the different colored phones/terminals idea.
For the masses, an AV icon in the systray is fast becoming an analogue to the security theater at modern airports: The indicator of apparent security has become much more psychologically important than the actual state of security. But unlike modern airports which know that they will become compromised regardless of deploying all practical security measures and have other tools to deal with the breech, regular PC users are not aware that their AV will likely fail and also lack any contingency plans to address the failure.
Since the current structural power relations are such that there will always be more particular bugs and classes of vulnerabilities to exploit than resources to detect the bugs, and since there will always be many more ways to exploit bugs than there are bugs, and since the commercial AV vendors can only respond to particular malwares once they've been implemented, malware will always have the first strike advantage. Costs/benefits also favour the malware offers taken together, since a one time attack can gain thousands of nodes in the span of hours and be discarded, while AV vendors have to distribute protection to every one of millions of nodes to protect against each new attack while forever maintaining defenses against every previous attack. Unless some of the cloud AV solutions gain traction commercially and change the relationship between detection, bugs and malware, the AV faction will always be in the less favourable position in devoting almost all AV resources to addressing the symptoms of unsafe computing practices (infection), rather than causes, which are socially rooted (education and trust).
So I would view keeping an ever growing population of users in ignorance about how to properly use and secure their computers and data while devoting exponentially increasing resources to fixing the symptoms to be a less preferable long-term strategy than abandoning the current AV paradigm and putting those resources toward operator education about how to understand and interact with various information sources. It shouldn't take more than a generation to socially indoctrinate the idea of thinking before clicking, just as the Mr. Yuk campaign has curtailed the widespread ingestion of household chemicals by children in the 1980s. Admittedly, computers as a class of technologies have yet to develop the ease of use a bleach bottle or manuscripts which have integral affordances against harmful misuse, but that shouldn't be much of a challenge if the industry is as advanced as it makes itself out to be.
You may wish to re-read the part of the interview where she explains how running additional programs--such as AV containing exploitable flaws not found in the absence of the operating system--in the same context as the viruses and the kernel results at best in a draw in the long term (the usual two-sided arms race to find/exploit/patch), but a potential short term win for malware in terms of data loss and reliability. Since a new malware works on the scale of minutes to hours, whereas the countermeasures respond on the timescale of hours to days, AV programs running in the same ring as everything else, including the malware, will almost always be in the lagging defensive position.
As a well learned expert who implements security solutions regularly, I'm sure you recall various incidents where AV products have detected legitimate OS/AV/etc components as the result of bad automatic signature updates, and how the resolutions required lowering the security of the overall system at least temporarily. Also, you must already be familiar with the human factors of security, wherein our perception of risk strongly influences our behaviour with respect to risky activities, especially when safety devices are perceived to provide greater mitigation than they actually do.
NComputing and ThinSoft already have thin clients in the ~$70 range per station. But it's mostly Windows XP (RDP with some TS DLL fudging) and (not NX) X hacks, and for local networks only.
They try...
http://developers.facebook.com/verification.php
Since most of the apps' functionality is hosted on the developers servers, at most this verification is about a moment in time, as opposed to what happens with the app or the data presently.
It reminds me of the Nintendo Seal, originally of quality, but later of no feature in particular...
I agree, per the Yahoo! and Belgium issue. But:
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/cgi-bin/sc_mrksv/corpdir/dataOnline/corpns_re?company_select=4496906
What would that solve? That would result in a credit of $12.50, or a credit in the amount charged, returning the balance to $0, $0 plus ~2% interest on $23e15, or $23e15 less $12.50. There's no normal outcome of returning the item that isn't a zero or substantially very negative balance.
Google has gained enough tacit knowledge about the protocol and issues to reimplement a cleaner version of the server. NoMachine won't starve, but it's time for them to take all the knowledge they've accumulated about the remote desktop market and implement their next big thing. NoMachine is also in a reasonable position to offer consulting/support services now that Google is making remote desktops more mainstream.
Eh? I thought PETA got taken over by the only marginally good satire writers from the Onion and MAD.
This group needs to hire a good copy/PR writer to explain what "exploit", "disclosure", "script kiddie", "whitehats", and "rm'd" mean, and also how their proposed technical solution of targeting individuals for removal purports to solve the problem of socially motivated script kiddies, and what this technical demonstration has to do with their business objectives.
In short, this group has successfully met all the criteria to be a typical late '90s dot-com company.