Insurance companies are good at managing risk. They know how to estimate it, how to mitigate it, and how to charge for taking it on so that they don't lose money.
Businesses are good at managing costs, so when it comes to risks like security breaches which aren't well-understood, their tendency is to accept risk in order to cut costs. Forcing them to disclose what they're doing with respect to computer security risks will prompt a lot of concern from investors who want to see the risks mitigated, which will force businesses to get insurance. That will create a booming market for the insurance industry, but it will also prompt a lot of risk mitigation -- i.e. companies starting to do what they should have been doing to begin with -- in order to keep their insurance premiums down.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's another effect of widespread information security insurance policies: more financial liability for breaches. The combination of better-established best practices for security and the availability of deep-pockets insurance companies to sue will likely enable and motivate bigger awards. If so, more liability will further increase the attention paid to security risks. That's a good thing.
One approach to work/life balance is to strictly segregate them: Be at work, working, from 8-5, then be at home, not working.
That's fine for people who want to do that, but it's not the only way to maintain a reasonable balance. I'm generally in the office from 7-4, but I'm not necessarily working all of that time. On average I spend 1-2 hours of each work day dealing with personal stuff -- keeping up with my bills, fielding phone calls about my kids at school (I have one daughter who is really challenging), out running errands for my wife. I probably spend another hour screwing around on-line: slashdot, G+, etc. Once in a while I even leave the office entirely for a two or three hours because I want to go to a kid's production at school, or because I feel like working out, or whatever. As a result, I don't feel in the slightest that I'm giving "my time" away to the company when I check e-mail in the evening. Heck sometimes I'm working on some particularly interesting bit of code and I even decide to work on it at night after the family is in bed... not because I feel obligated but because it's fun.
For me, strictly segregating work and not-work would be a poorer work/life balance than having the flexibility to do non-work stuff during business hours and work stuff during non-business hours.
I'd rather manage the balance myself than have the company mandate it one way or another. I understand that for people with driving personalities this can lead to excessive work, and I understand that some managers can see this as a way to wring every last minute from their employees. I don't have the first problem and the times I've had the second, I've fixed it by getting a different manager, one way or another.
Beyond my personal preferences, I think the "strict segregation" approach is rather unnatural. It wasn't really even possible as a widespread lifestyle until the Industrial Revolution. Throughout human history, work and non-work have largely been inseparably mixed, both just parts of "life". I like it that way.
Sorry, but we're not going to work around cases like your father-in-law's because they're so rare. As another poster said:
Extreme Edge Case, WONTFIX
I don't think they're really that rare. In some parts of the country they're really common, because there just isn't any option other than dialup available. Perhaps they're rare among the demographics of your users. Or maybe they're not all that rare there, either. Do you actually monitor user download rates?
You are missing the point of making it illegal for them to posses. If someone is a violent criminal and they can legally posses, they can't be punished again until they commit another violent crime. If, however, it is illegal for them to have the gun because of their record, then if they are found to have a gun, it can be assumed that it is for no good purpose and they can be sent back to prison since they are clearly not reformed. It won't stop every case, but it does make society safer.
I didn't miss the point, I just don't see there is much value in it. It makes felons who have criminal plans be a little more careful about hiding their guns well, that's all. If you look at the statistics for your state, I'm sure you'll find that very few felons are arrested and prosecuted for firearm possession, except as an additional charge on top of some other serious crime. Mostly, the only way possession crimes are discovered is when the possessor is arrested for something else. The FBI did a study on criminals and weapons a few years ago and found that criminals do not see the gun ban as a deterrent, nor are they particularly concerned about being caught. Instead they just focus on making sure their guns are easily hidden, easily discarded and not traceable to them.
IMO, the felony gun ban provides very little value to society, and I think the real-world statistics support my point of view. What little value it does offer is a poor trade for restricting the rights of a significant number of law-abiding citizens. Your own wording really highlights this, I think: "if they are found to have a gun, it can be assumed that it is for no good purpose and they can be sent back to prison since they are clearly not reformed". I don't think that assumption follows at all.
As to the idea to have ban length be variable and have it be at a judges discretion, I was actually thinking about that as an option when responding to you earlier and would agree that that could be a good option as well. There could also be the equivalent of a parole hearing to allow the ban to be lifted then if conditions changed. (For example lets say ex-violent felon is helping out with the city mission and needs to be able to bring the money to the bank at the end of the day.)
Or just feels he needs to be able to protect himself from his former associates. I had a couple of would-be students who were in that category.
What helps even more from a user's perspective is combining files; basically, in the backend we combine all our Javascript and CSS (or as much as is reasonable) into one file instead of serving it as multiple, separate files linked to the current page.
That only helps users with broadband. It does almost nothing for users who are on slow Internet connections.
Yes, you're reducing latency by eliminating some round trip times, but for users with slow Internet connections, that's irrelevant. Their page load time is dominated by the time it takes to actually load the content. For someone like my father-in-law who is on a 26 Kbps dialup, that means that 1 MB of page content is going to take ~3 minutes to download -- or twice that if compression isn't configured.
On the pragmatic issue, just because we can't make it so they can't get a gun illegally doesn't mean we should make it so that they can get one legally.
Meh. That's just a feel-good measure that doesn't do any real good. The only real restriction we can make is to prevent them from buying from licensed dealers, and criminals are going to prefer to avoid such paper trails anyway. Requiring private party sellers to know how to check the buyer's legal status isn't realistic, and banning private party sales unduly affects law-abiding citizens.
As far as removing someone's right being equivalent to another form of perpetual punishment, to an extent it is, but it is to a lesser degree than removing their right to freedom in general.
Yes, it's a lesser perpetual punishment, but still a perpetual punishment that permits no redemption no matter how thoroughly the person proves themselves to be an upstanding citizen. Lifetime prison sentences exist, but only for such severe crimes that we don't believe the criminals can ever be trusted to walk free.
Losing the right to bear arms (or at least hand guns) seems like it is at least as constitutional a penalty for a crime as putting someone in prison for life is.
That depends on the crime. Check forgery? Joyriding? Animal cruelty? But even if you restrict loss of rights only to violent felonies, continuing to restrict someone who has been straight for 30 years, for something that a judge didn't feel warranted more than a few months in prison even when the incident was fresh is just ridiculous.
Note that this isn't a personal issue with me. My record is clean. However, I am a concealed firearm permit instructor and I've had multiple people come to me with similar stories... men and women in their 50s and 60s who would like to be able to keep and carry defensive tools but because of some incident that happened when they were 19, they're subject to a lifetime ban.
If you wanted to make it a ten or fifteen year ban, fine. I still wouldn't agree that it serves any real purpose with respect to making society a safer place, but I could be convinced that it's a reasonable punishment. Even better, it should be subject to judicial discretion, just another part of the sentencing options available to the judge tasked with finding a punishment to fit the crime, rather than an automatic restriction.
I think the idea behind not trusting someone with a gun is if they have violent tendencies. Someone who gets in a heated argument and tends to be violent that has a gun may use it where as someone who gets in a heated argument and tends to be violent but doesn't have a gun only breaks some noses and maybe cuts someone up a bit.
Or run them over with a car, or hit them on the head with a hammer, or...
Guns don't make violent people violent, and they don't really enable violence given all of the other deadly weapons at hand. The "but they'll flip out and start shooting people" is a common argument, but about the only context in which you'll find any significant evidence to support it is domestic violence. That's the one area where I do support long-term restrictions, though I think the status quo is a bit excessive there as well.
There is also the question of whether we have the right to imprison someone for something they may or may not do. If someone did an armed robbery once, they might do it again. We can't hold them forever because they might rob a bank, but making it so they can't legally be armed seems like a prudent step.
IMO, permanently removing someone's constitutionally-guaranteed right is just another form of perpetual imprisonment. If there's a problem with the one there's a problem with the other.
I think your argument also fails on pragmatic grounds. If someone who committed armed robbery once decides to do it again, is a law that says they can't have a gun really going to deter them? When you get to that level of disregard for the law, gun control is useless. You might be able to do some good if you could really make it hard for a violent felon to get a gun, but there's no way to do that short of severely curtailing the rights of the law-abiding -- and even then it probably wouldn't work. c.f. The War on Drugs.
I am firmly in support of gun control to the extent of making sure that those who should not have guns don't (ie, criminals).
I'm not so sure I agree with this, at least the way we do it now. In particular, the notion that anyone who is ever convicted of any felony deserves a lifetime restriction seems excessively punitive. I know a few people who did some really stupid things in their youth, mostly related to drugs, but later cleaned up their act and turned their lives around. I think these people are more trustworthy than the average person, not less.
If we feel that a person is sufficiently dangerous to society that he or she shouldn't be allowed to have a gun, why are we allowing that person to walk around free where all sorts of weapons are available, many of them far, far deadlier than guns? On the flip side, if we feel that a person is sufficiently rehabilitated that it's safe to return them to society, how is it just or reasonable to deprive them of the right to the tools of self-defense?
That's more than twice the ENTIRE budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2011. So, metaphorically equivalent to curing cancer.
Yeah, like curing cancer is anywhere near as cool as doing mach 2 with your hair on fire in a plane with the radar cross-section of a sparrow and the armament to single-handedly take out a small city.
I mean, really, which one can you make better video games and movies about? Same thing for big particle accelerators (well, unless they're man-portable and can be used to blow stuff up; think BFG) and Mars rovers (though those are a little bit cool, 1/130th of an F-22 is about right). A manned Mars expedition might be as cool as an F-22 if it turned out there were Martians or something like that, but it'd probably be like watching the goofy astronauts make faces at the camera in the ISS. Big whoop. Watching F-22s blow up today's Designated Bad Guys on prime-time TV is guaranteed to be good, and you know that whoever is in the White House will give us that, since there's no way we'll elect that isolationist doofus Ron Paul.
I've been working around advanced security technologies for the last 15 years, and this is what I always tell people about biometrics: Biometrics have two major use cases. In those contexts they are valuable. Outside of them, not so much.
First, they're great as highly-convenient low-security access controls for stuff that doesn't matter very much. Fingerprint scanner to get into the gym? Great! Face scan to unlock your phone? Great, because the phone's camera is pretty much always going to be pointed at your face when you need to dial a number anyway, so the convenience factor is awesome -- but only as long as it only unlocks relatively unimportant stuff. The really important data on your phone should be protected with a good password.
Second they're great in very high-security contexts where lots of money is spent to make the acquisition and verification secure. Biometrics, done properly, are highly unique and so a good authenticator of the individual as long as they're not spoofed, or replayed. So they can be relied upon in contexts where replay is impossible (because the scanning devices, template storage, comparison engine and paths between them are all well-secured) and where spoofing is impossible (because someone is actively watching you to verify you're not doing anything to fake out the scanners).
So biometrics are good at securing stuff that doesn't matter much at all, and stuff that matters so much that significant investment can be applied to make them actually secure. In between? Nope.
Oh, and most of the 15 years I worked around this stuff was while I was employed by IBM. I gave this mini-lecture to countless IBM execs. I'm not at all surprised to see how little good it did.
This is actually usually controlled at the state level (unless you enter a federal highway/interstate). Most states have it *very* well specified what it should be.
Colorado is a little bit unusual in this respect. The state laws are looser and less well-defined in many respects than in most states, leaving more to counties and cities to decide. There's even a notion of "Home Rule" in Colorado which I haven't yet researched, but which I know has allowed Denver to actually override state law in one instance: Colorado passed a law a few years ago "pre-empting" local firearms regulations. Lots of states have done this to avoid a patchwork quilt of gun laws. But Denver chose to ban openly-carried sidearms, even though state law allowed them. The state tried to crack down, but Denver took it to the Colorado Supreme Court, arguing "Home Rule", and won.
I recently moved from Utah, where the state laws are not particularly restrictive but crisply-defined and there's no question about counties or cities being able to override the state legislature, to Colorado, where the state laws are in some ways more restrictive, but are generally less well-defined and "looser".
So it doesn't surprise me that Colorado law leaves this up to the localities. I really doubt your supposition that the state law is simply being ignored, though.
If the encryption/decryption is performed by google, then how does that protect you in the slightest from ISP's?
Your connection to Google is SSL-encrypted anyway. But unless your recipient is also using GMail, your message will be delivered via SMTP to some other mail service provider. The channel between Google and that mail service provider may or may not be encrypted, and the delivery from that mail service provider to the recipient may or may not be encrypted. Assuming any of those links are unencrypted, GMail-provided PGP would give you some added privacy. It would also give you authentication, assuming your recipient somehow verified your PGP key, and your GMail account didn't get hacked, and Google didn't try to impersonate you.
Yes, there are a lot of caveats and ifs in the above, but I think GMail's PGP lab could have provided value if enough people had used it.
I don't. I use GMail. I might as well use "1234" as a password.
GMail actually had a labs feature for a while that enabled PGP signed and encrypted e-mail. Obviously, since the encryption/decryption was done on Google's servers it didn't provide privacy against Google -- but it did provide security against snooping by ISPs, backbone operators, people who might gain access to the recipients e-mail inbox (but not his PGP keys), etc.
It was discontinued because, I assume, not enough people used it to be worth bothering with. I used it, and configured it to encrypt e-mails whenever possible (and always sign). I don't think I ever sent an encrypted e-mail, though.
With Javascript engines (and machines) getting as fast as they are, it wouldn't be unreasonable to implement PGP in Javascript and do it all client-side on the browser. Then Google wouldn't be able to read your e-mail, either, assuming it was done right.
I've participated in such studies, and they mistake "ease of learning for a complete newbie" with "usability". They are not the same.
But neither are they completely different.
Usability encompasses not just newbie experience and not just expert experience, but the whole range.
Because of that, I found this particular article's conclusions very interesting: KDE has long held the position of most scriptable, most configurable, most integrable, etc. In short, it's been a power-user's desktop (well, out of the major options, anyway). Now it is apparently the most newbie-friendy desktop as well.
I simply can't understand how a browser with such a godawful interface could get so popular.
Because only a small percentage of users are like you. The vast majority really like Chrome's interface.
Why? A big part is that it removes a lot of clutter that didn't ever mean anything to them anyway. Just yesterday I watched my brother-in-law using Firefox; he went to google.com and searched for gmail to get to his e-mail. I asked him why he didn't type gmail.com into the location bar, or gmail into the search bar. He responded that he'd never quite understood the difference between them, and had found that just typing what he wants into Google worked best.
Now, this is a man in his 40s, who's been playing with computers for about 15 years now (since his early 30s), is something of a gamer, understands something about the internals of his computer and has upgraded video cards, processors, hard drives, etc., and done it by himself. He uses Windows (reinstalling it every few months, seems like), but has experimented with Linux, dual-booting Ubuntu for a while. He's not a geek, but he's a moderately-knowledgeable computer user.
Next time I have a chance, I'm going to have him install Chrome, and I guarantee you he will love it. The unibar is perfect: "Just type whatever in here". The lack of status bar won't bother him in the slightest; I noticed yesterday that when a site was a little slow, he didn't even bother looking at the status bar to see what was happening: The icon on the tab was still moving, so he knew to keep waiting. He may or may not like the fact that the bookmarks bar only shows on a new tab. If he doesn't, it's easily changed. I'm sure he'll really like the default home page, with its display of commonly-visited sites. I know he'll love Chrome Sync, since he has three computers he uses regularly. And I know he'll like the speed.
IMO, people try Chrome for the speed. But not only does the UI not drive them away, the vast majority like it better. It gets rid of stuff they didn't understand anyway, and makes the browser easier to use.
Another data point: while typing this I asked my wife what she thinks. She's a heavy web user, but not at all technical, at least not in the way slashdotters would interpret the word. Lots of people ask her computer questions. Her comments on FF UI vs Chrome UI:
She thinks the unibar is fantastic. Much better than the divided location and search bars.
She really likes the Chrome startup page, with the thumbnails of her favorite sites.
She really likes that the "+ is always there", meaning the icon to open a new tab. FF uses the same plus icon but because it hides the tab bar when there's only a single page open, the "+" isn't always there.
She didn't know what I meant by "status" bar until I showed her. She said she never looked at that, except to look for the lock icon for secure web sites, and that's in the location bar on Chrome.
She doesn't know why anyone would care to see the URL protocol.
Chrome automatically updates all old versions to their newest one while IE doesn't.
So basically, it does the exact opposite of what Google does for Android.
Google does update the Google Experience phones (the Nexus line) to new versions of Android. There was a/. article day before yesterday about how Nexus S phones are all getting ICS.
Google does not force the carriers to update the phones which the carriers configure and manage, because Google has no way to do that. One of the downsides of choosing an open source model.
West Germany is still paying for the shitty management of the commies (in the form of a solidarity fee, used to bring the former GDR states up to speed).
It is all of Germany that pays the solidarity fee, not just the western states.
True, but it's a progressive percentage surcharge on top of a progressive income tax, so higher-income areas pay nearly all of it. Which means the west pays a lot more than the east because, due to the aforementioned communist management, it's taking a long time for the economy of the east to ramp up to match that of the west.
But then as noted, all of it was short-term, and none of it chronic. Likewise, all of them were well justified pain prescriptions.
That's the key.
My mother-in-law has severe scoliosis and has been in terrible pain for almost 20 years. She also gets lots of narcotics, but both she and her doctor have to jump through a lot of hoops. I had my appendix removed last year and they gave me a prescription without blinking. It actually makes perfect sense, if you buy the whole War on Drugs theory.
The original MacOS died a well-deserved but slow death because it was closed, but not in that it was closed to software products: rather, because Windows was more open to hardware, while MacOS was restricted to Apple hardware.
Which is one of the ways in which Android is more open than iOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Insurance companies are good at managing risk. They know how to estimate it, how to mitigate it, and how to charge for taking it on so that they don't lose money.
Businesses are good at managing costs, so when it comes to risks like security breaches which aren't well-understood, their tendency is to accept risk in order to cut costs. Forcing them to disclose what they're doing with respect to computer security risks will prompt a lot of concern from investors who want to see the risks mitigated, which will force businesses to get insurance. That will create a booming market for the insurance industry, but it will also prompt a lot of risk mitigation -- i.e. companies starting to do what they should have been doing to begin with -- in order to keep their insurance premiums down.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's another effect of widespread information security insurance policies: more financial liability for breaches. The combination of better-established best practices for security and the availability of deep-pockets insurance companies to sue will likely enable and motivate bigger awards. If so, more liability will further increase the attention paid to security risks. That's a good thing.
I like that much better than being the 99%.
One approach to work/life balance is to strictly segregate them: Be at work, working, from 8-5, then be at home, not working.
That's fine for people who want to do that, but it's not the only way to maintain a reasonable balance. I'm generally in the office from 7-4, but I'm not necessarily working all of that time. On average I spend 1-2 hours of each work day dealing with personal stuff -- keeping up with my bills, fielding phone calls about my kids at school (I have one daughter who is really challenging), out running errands for my wife. I probably spend another hour screwing around on-line: slashdot, G+, etc. Once in a while I even leave the office entirely for a two or three hours because I want to go to a kid's production at school, or because I feel like working out, or whatever. As a result, I don't feel in the slightest that I'm giving "my time" away to the company when I check e-mail in the evening. Heck sometimes I'm working on some particularly interesting bit of code and I even decide to work on it at night after the family is in bed... not because I feel obligated but because it's fun.
For me, strictly segregating work and not-work would be a poorer work/life balance than having the flexibility to do non-work stuff during business hours and work stuff during non-business hours.
I'd rather manage the balance myself than have the company mandate it one way or another. I understand that for people with driving personalities this can lead to excessive work, and I understand that some managers can see this as a way to wring every last minute from their employees. I don't have the first problem and the times I've had the second, I've fixed it by getting a different manager, one way or another.
Beyond my personal preferences, I think the "strict segregation" approach is rather unnatural. It wasn't really even possible as a widespread lifestyle until the Industrial Revolution. Throughout human history, work and non-work have largely been inseparably mixed, both just parts of "life". I like it that way.
Sorry, but we're not going to work around cases like your father-in-law's because they're so rare. As another poster said:
Extreme Edge Case, WONTFIX
I don't think they're really that rare. In some parts of the country they're really common, because there just isn't any option other than dialup available. Perhaps they're rare among the demographics of your users. Or maybe they're not all that rare there, either. Do you actually monitor user download rates?
You are missing the point of making it illegal for them to posses. If someone is a violent criminal and they can legally posses, they can't be punished again until they commit another violent crime. If, however, it is illegal for them to have the gun because of their record, then if they are found to have a gun, it can be assumed that it is for no good purpose and they can be sent back to prison since they are clearly not reformed. It won't stop every case, but it does make society safer.
I didn't miss the point, I just don't see there is much value in it. It makes felons who have criminal plans be a little more careful about hiding their guns well, that's all. If you look at the statistics for your state, I'm sure you'll find that very few felons are arrested and prosecuted for firearm possession, except as an additional charge on top of some other serious crime. Mostly, the only way possession crimes are discovered is when the possessor is arrested for something else. The FBI did a study on criminals and weapons a few years ago and found that criminals do not see the gun ban as a deterrent, nor are they particularly concerned about being caught. Instead they just focus on making sure their guns are easily hidden, easily discarded and not traceable to them.
IMO, the felony gun ban provides very little value to society, and I think the real-world statistics support my point of view. What little value it does offer is a poor trade for restricting the rights of a significant number of law-abiding citizens. Your own wording really highlights this, I think: "if they are found to have a gun, it can be assumed that it is for no good purpose and they can be sent back to prison since they are clearly not reformed". I don't think that assumption follows at all.
As to the idea to have ban length be variable and have it be at a judges discretion, I was actually thinking about that as an option when responding to you earlier and would agree that that could be a good option as well. There could also be the equivalent of a parole hearing to allow the ban to be lifted then if conditions changed. (For example lets say ex-violent felon is helping out with the city mission and needs to be able to bring the money to the bank at the end of the day.)
Or just feels he needs to be able to protect himself from his former associates. I had a couple of would-be students who were in that category.
Not really.
You may have had 2 Mbps in 2003, but in 2003 the median US Internet user's speed was less than 56 Kbps, i.e. dialup.
What helps even more from a user's perspective is combining files; basically, in the backend we combine all our Javascript and CSS (or as much as is reasonable) into one file instead of serving it as multiple, separate files linked to the current page.
That only helps users with broadband. It does almost nothing for users who are on slow Internet connections.
Yes, you're reducing latency by eliminating some round trip times, but for users with slow Internet connections, that's irrelevant. Their page load time is dominated by the time it takes to actually load the content. For someone like my father-in-law who is on a 26 Kbps dialup, that means that 1 MB of page content is going to take ~3 minutes to download -- or twice that if compression isn't configured.
On the pragmatic issue, just because we can't make it so they can't get a gun illegally doesn't mean we should make it so that they can get one legally.
Meh. That's just a feel-good measure that doesn't do any real good. The only real restriction we can make is to prevent them from buying from licensed dealers, and criminals are going to prefer to avoid such paper trails anyway. Requiring private party sellers to know how to check the buyer's legal status isn't realistic, and banning private party sales unduly affects law-abiding citizens.
As far as removing someone's right being equivalent to another form of perpetual punishment, to an extent it is, but it is to a lesser degree than removing their right to freedom in general.
Yes, it's a lesser perpetual punishment, but still a perpetual punishment that permits no redemption no matter how thoroughly the person proves themselves to be an upstanding citizen. Lifetime prison sentences exist, but only for such severe crimes that we don't believe the criminals can ever be trusted to walk free.
Losing the right to bear arms (or at least hand guns) seems like it is at least as constitutional a penalty for a crime as putting someone in prison for life is.
That depends on the crime. Check forgery? Joyriding? Animal cruelty? But even if you restrict loss of rights only to violent felonies, continuing to restrict someone who has been straight for 30 years, for something that a judge didn't feel warranted more than a few months in prison even when the incident was fresh is just ridiculous.
Note that this isn't a personal issue with me. My record is clean. However, I am a concealed firearm permit instructor and I've had multiple people come to me with similar stories... men and women in their 50s and 60s who would like to be able to keep and carry defensive tools but because of some incident that happened when they were 19, they're subject to a lifetime ban.
If you wanted to make it a ten or fifteen year ban, fine. I still wouldn't agree that it serves any real purpose with respect to making society a safer place, but I could be convinced that it's a reasonable punishment. Even better, it should be subject to judicial discretion, just another part of the sentencing options available to the judge tasked with finding a punishment to fit the crime, rather than an automatic restriction.
I think the idea behind not trusting someone with a gun is if they have violent tendencies. Someone who gets in a heated argument and tends to be violent that has a gun may use it where as someone who gets in a heated argument and tends to be violent but doesn't have a gun only breaks some noses and maybe cuts someone up a bit.
Or run them over with a car, or hit them on the head with a hammer, or...
Guns don't make violent people violent, and they don't really enable violence given all of the other deadly weapons at hand. The "but they'll flip out and start shooting people" is a common argument, but about the only context in which you'll find any significant evidence to support it is domestic violence. That's the one area where I do support long-term restrictions, though I think the status quo is a bit excessive there as well.
There is also the question of whether we have the right to imprison someone for something they may or may not do. If someone did an armed robbery once, they might do it again. We can't hold them forever because they might rob a bank, but making it so they can't legally be armed seems like a prudent step.
IMO, permanently removing someone's constitutionally-guaranteed right is just another form of perpetual imprisonment. If there's a problem with the one there's a problem with the other.
I think your argument also fails on pragmatic grounds. If someone who committed armed robbery once decides to do it again, is a law that says they can't have a gun really going to deter them? When you get to that level of disregard for the law, gun control is useless. You might be able to do some good if you could really make it hard for a violent felon to get a gun, but there's no way to do that short of severely curtailing the rights of the law-abiding -- and even then it probably wouldn't work. c.f. The War on Drugs.
I am firmly in support of gun control to the extent of making sure that those who should not have guns don't (ie, criminals).
I'm not so sure I agree with this, at least the way we do it now. In particular, the notion that anyone who is ever convicted of any felony deserves a lifetime restriction seems excessively punitive. I know a few people who did some really stupid things in their youth, mostly related to drugs, but later cleaned up their act and turned their lives around. I think these people are more trustworthy than the average person, not less.
If we feel that a person is sufficiently dangerous to society that he or she shouldn't be allowed to have a gun, why are we allowing that person to walk around free where all sorts of weapons are available, many of them far, far deadlier than guns? On the flip side, if we feel that a person is sufficiently rehabilitated that it's safe to return them to society, how is it just or reasonable to deprive them of the right to the tools of self-defense?
its worse. he just admitted to the senate his company has a monopoly. under oath. idiot
Meh. The CEO's opinion of whether or not his company has a monopoly is legally meaningless anyway. Which is exactly what Schmidt pointed out.
Try to use Android without Google.
That's what monopoly abuse looks like.
So... it looks like a Nook or a Kindle Fire?
The device we are discussing here is a book reader.
Making Stallman's "Right to Read" story particularly appropriate.
Interesting. There are many more Home Rule states than I realized.
That's more than twice the ENTIRE budget of the National Institutes of Health for 2011. So, metaphorically equivalent to curing cancer.
Yeah, like curing cancer is anywhere near as cool as doing mach 2 with your hair on fire in a plane with the radar cross-section of a sparrow and the armament to single-handedly take out a small city.
I mean, really, which one can you make better video games and movies about? Same thing for big particle accelerators (well, unless they're man-portable and can be used to blow stuff up; think BFG) and Mars rovers (though those are a little bit cool, 1/130th of an F-22 is about right). A manned Mars expedition might be as cool as an F-22 if it turned out there were Martians or something like that, but it'd probably be like watching the goofy astronauts make faces at the camera in the ISS. Big whoop. Watching F-22s blow up today's Designated Bad Guys on prime-time TV is guaranteed to be good, and you know that whoever is in the White House will give us that, since there's no way we'll elect that isolationist doofus Ron Paul.
</sarcasm>
I've been working around advanced security technologies for the last 15 years, and this is what I always tell people about biometrics: Biometrics have two major use cases. In those contexts they are valuable. Outside of them, not so much.
First, they're great as highly-convenient low-security access controls for stuff that doesn't matter very much. Fingerprint scanner to get into the gym? Great! Face scan to unlock your phone? Great, because the phone's camera is pretty much always going to be pointed at your face when you need to dial a number anyway, so the convenience factor is awesome -- but only as long as it only unlocks relatively unimportant stuff. The really important data on your phone should be protected with a good password.
Second they're great in very high-security contexts where lots of money is spent to make the acquisition and verification secure. Biometrics, done properly, are highly unique and so a good authenticator of the individual as long as they're not spoofed, or replayed. So they can be relied upon in contexts where replay is impossible (because the scanning devices, template storage, comparison engine and paths between them are all well-secured) and where spoofing is impossible (because someone is actively watching you to verify you're not doing anything to fake out the scanners).
So biometrics are good at securing stuff that doesn't matter much at all, and stuff that matters so much that significant investment can be applied to make them actually secure. In between? Nope.
Oh, and most of the 15 years I worked around this stuff was while I was employed by IBM. I gave this mini-lecture to countless IBM execs. I'm not at all surprised to see how little good it did.
This is actually usually controlled at the state level (unless you enter a federal highway/interstate). Most states have it *very* well specified what it should be.
Colorado is a little bit unusual in this respect. The state laws are looser and less well-defined in many respects than in most states, leaving more to counties and cities to decide. There's even a notion of "Home Rule" in Colorado which I haven't yet researched, but which I know has allowed Denver to actually override state law in one instance: Colorado passed a law a few years ago "pre-empting" local firearms regulations. Lots of states have done this to avoid a patchwork quilt of gun laws. But Denver chose to ban openly-carried sidearms, even though state law allowed them. The state tried to crack down, but Denver took it to the Colorado Supreme Court, arguing "Home Rule", and won.
I recently moved from Utah, where the state laws are not particularly restrictive but crisply-defined and there's no question about counties or cities being able to override the state legislature, to Colorado, where the state laws are in some ways more restrictive, but are generally less well-defined and "looser".
So it doesn't surprise me that Colorado law leaves this up to the localities. I really doubt your supposition that the state law is simply being ignored, though.
If the encryption/decryption is performed by google, then how does that protect you in the slightest from ISP's?
Your connection to Google is SSL-encrypted anyway. But unless your recipient is also using GMail, your message will be delivered via SMTP to some other mail service provider. The channel between Google and that mail service provider may or may not be encrypted, and the delivery from that mail service provider to the recipient may or may not be encrypted. Assuming any of those links are unencrypted, GMail-provided PGP would give you some added privacy. It would also give you authentication, assuming your recipient somehow verified your PGP key, and your GMail account didn't get hacked, and Google didn't try to impersonate you.
Yes, there are a lot of caveats and ifs in the above, but I think GMail's PGP lab could have provided value if enough people had used it.
I don't. I use GMail. I might as well use "1234" as a password.
GMail actually had a labs feature for a while that enabled PGP signed and encrypted e-mail. Obviously, since the encryption/decryption was done on Google's servers it didn't provide privacy against Google -- but it did provide security against snooping by ISPs, backbone operators, people who might gain access to the recipients e-mail inbox (but not his PGP keys), etc.
It was discontinued because, I assume, not enough people used it to be worth bothering with. I used it, and configured it to encrypt e-mails whenever possible (and always sign). I don't think I ever sent an encrypted e-mail, though.
With Javascript engines (and machines) getting as fast as they are, it wouldn't be unreasonable to implement PGP in Javascript and do it all client-side on the browser. Then Google wouldn't be able to read your e-mail, either, assuming it was done right.
A quick Google search turned up this: http://www.hanewin.net/encrypt/
I've participated in such studies, and they mistake "ease of learning for a complete newbie" with "usability". They are not the same.
But neither are they completely different.
Usability encompasses not just newbie experience and not just expert experience, but the whole range.
Because of that, I found this particular article's conclusions very interesting: KDE has long held the position of most scriptable, most configurable, most integrable, etc. In short, it's been a power-user's desktop (well, out of the major options, anyway). Now it is apparently the most newbie-friendy desktop as well.
I simply can't understand how a browser with such a godawful interface could get so popular.
Because only a small percentage of users are like you. The vast majority really like Chrome's interface.
Why? A big part is that it removes a lot of clutter that didn't ever mean anything to them anyway. Just yesterday I watched my brother-in-law using Firefox; he went to google.com and searched for gmail to get to his e-mail. I asked him why he didn't type gmail.com into the location bar, or gmail into the search bar. He responded that he'd never quite understood the difference between them, and had found that just typing what he wants into Google worked best.
Now, this is a man in his 40s, who's been playing with computers for about 15 years now (since his early 30s), is something of a gamer, understands something about the internals of his computer and has upgraded video cards, processors, hard drives, etc., and done it by himself. He uses Windows (reinstalling it every few months, seems like), but has experimented with Linux, dual-booting Ubuntu for a while. He's not a geek, but he's a moderately-knowledgeable computer user.
Next time I have a chance, I'm going to have him install Chrome, and I guarantee you he will love it. The unibar is perfect: "Just type whatever in here". The lack of status bar won't bother him in the slightest; I noticed yesterday that when a site was a little slow, he didn't even bother looking at the status bar to see what was happening: The icon on the tab was still moving, so he knew to keep waiting. He may or may not like the fact that the bookmarks bar only shows on a new tab. If he doesn't, it's easily changed. I'm sure he'll really like the default home page, with its display of commonly-visited sites. I know he'll love Chrome Sync, since he has three computers he uses regularly. And I know he'll like the speed.
IMO, people try Chrome for the speed. But not only does the UI not drive them away, the vast majority like it better. It gets rid of stuff they didn't understand anyway, and makes the browser easier to use.
Another data point: while typing this I asked my wife what she thinks. She's a heavy web user, but not at all technical, at least not in the way slashdotters would interpret the word. Lots of people ask her computer questions. Her comments on FF UI vs Chrome UI:
Chrome automatically updates all old versions to their newest one while IE doesn't.
So basically, it does the exact opposite of what Google does for Android.
Google does update the Google Experience phones (the Nexus line) to new versions of Android. There was a /. article day before yesterday about how Nexus S phones are all getting ICS.
Google does not force the carriers to update the phones which the carriers configure and manage, because Google has no way to do that. One of the downsides of choosing an open source model.
West Germany is still paying for the shitty management of the commies (in the form of a solidarity fee, used to bring the former GDR states up to speed).
It is all of Germany that pays the solidarity fee, not just the western states.
True, but it's a progressive percentage surcharge on top of a progressive income tax, so higher-income areas pay nearly all of it. Which means the west pays a lot more than the east because, due to the aforementioned communist management, it's taking a long time for the economy of the east to ramp up to match that of the west.
But then as noted, all of it was short-term, and none of it chronic. Likewise, all of them were well justified pain prescriptions.
That's the key.
My mother-in-law has severe scoliosis and has been in terrible pain for almost 20 years. She also gets lots of narcotics, but both she and her doctor have to jump through a lot of hoops. I had my appendix removed last year and they gave me a prescription without blinking. It actually makes perfect sense, if you buy the whole War on Drugs theory.
The original MacOS died a well-deserved but slow death because it was closed, but not in that it was closed to software products: rather, because Windows was more open to hardware, while MacOS was restricted to Apple hardware.
Which is one of the ways in which Android is more open than iOS.