Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.
Many vendors, e.g. Microsoft's enterprise support; have an online support chat system, that enables a technician to not only
'see' logs or screen shots, but enables the customer to grant the support representative mouse and keyboard control,
so the support rep can look around, and either tell the customer what to do, or fix the issue for them.
However, perhaps their client software didn't actually re-send identical messages
I don't think it's necessarily safe to assume that it wasn't a human erroneously thinking they were "resubmitting" their order to the client software, and the client software dutifully generating a new unique client order identity each time.
If the system is down, don't keep submitting orders.
Exactly. Absence of a confirmation is not confirmation that there is no order.
In that case, the transactionally correct action would be to cancel the original order,
and receive confirmation of the cancel, before attempting to place another order.
Of course... if Facebook stock had gone up instead, then they would complain that more orders were cancelled and not resubmitted than they intended.
True, but the company wouldn't want to pay for those pre-scans either, right?
Perhaps they wouldn't want to. They may not have much of a choice, if there are hundreds of competitors willing to pay the same price.
The "bot clicks" consume resources of the ad servers, much like real clicks do.
If they pay for bandwidth based on monthly gigabytes of data transferred; I bet they don't want to pay for non-customers and bots visiting their site, and racking up transfer usage, either.
Surely those bots utilize 0 of the hosting provider's true bandwidth, memory, and CPU resources.
The question isn't whether or not a "bot" clicked the ad, the question is if a real person saw the ad.
The difference is if a bot clicked it, the 'click' is non-legitimate; an intentional act of deception.
If a human's legitimate user-agent clicked it without showing it --- then it's just a case of FB doesn't know if a human saw it or not, but you as advertiser pay for the clicks, regardless of how the user clicked it; whether they actually saw it or not is an academic matter then.
Why? This is a nonevent (even if it is true.) It's like proving that 80% of TV ads air when people are out of the room.
It's more like proving that 80% of some TV station's ads don't actually get through to the viewers, because a competitor uses special 'bot' technology to jam the signal.
Which has implications for the station, because they charge advertisers based on number of people viewing the ad (view count / click count).
If the advertisers are persuaded by this, they will demand a change of practices, demand a lower click price, to compensate for the problems, or just switch to a station that has the reputation for thwarting the jamming attempts.
The percentage of real users with javascript disabled is much lower than 80%...
Unless, for some reason there is a strong correlation between 'interest in your ad content' and
using NoScript (with a whitelist exception for Facebook)
Just because X% of users have characteristic Y, doesn't mean X% of the users visiting your site will have characteristic Y.
What happens when an antivirus scanner "pre-scans" the page at link to the Ad, in case the user clicks on it,
in order to speed up their browsing experience?
Technically, it's not a bot causing the page to be requested, it can just as well be a real person's user agent
It's a hard problem, and discussions like Marco's will ultimately contribute to a better solution, but "give up sandbox requirements" isn't an endgame I'd like to see.
No matter how you put it, ultimately there are apps that have to have exceptions to sandboxing.
Antivirus scanners need to be able to scan things outside their little sandbox.
Utilities for mounting a NTFS filesystem, so you can upload files to a USB stick and share with a windows computer, need the raw device access.
So, yes, absolutely.. Apple should stop the idea of "sandboxing" as a hard requirement for being on the app store.
They should have a procedure for getting exceptions, presumably a third-party audit to ensure the exception is
actually required, and some means to carve out exactly the required exception.
It's still short-sighted for them... If they don't charge something; the customer support costs will kill them.
Unless they're going to charge you per incident to call in to have your $300 "free for life", when you need support,
or repair of the line, that was damaged by ditch diggers or someone digging around.
Generally if they're within innser-stomach distance from each other, they connect instantly and would pass through the digestive track together since it takes significant force to pinch them apart.
Their safety guidance for medical professionals seems to suggest otherwise:
If more than one magnet was swallowed, it is highly unlikely that they will pass without surgical removal because of their tendency to bind together across membranes.
Radiographs will be definitive and will show small round spheres, linked together in the gastrointestinal tract.
Once the diagnosis is confirmed, urgent surgery is indicated to remove the magnets, repair any tissue damage and treat for infection. Patient follow-up is essential. Do not assume that they will pass through the gastrointestinal tract without treatment.
For more information, please download our complete Diagnosis and Treatment Service Announcement here
That doesn't mean that the child doesn't have a sibling that might swallow them.
Right. The child might also take them to school, where they have less-intelligent peers, or they might accidentally leave them in an unsafe place without an appreciation for the danger. The magnets are not for children, period; The warning on their site is very clear about the product Keep away from all children.
Which I consider to (basically) be anyone under the age of 16.
If you cannot be trusted to keep and use these magnets safely and responsibly,
then you don't belong behind the wheel of a car either.
I'd rather outlaw the existence of corporate speech; they can no longer hire lobbyists, else they lose their license to exist. Let the senators or congressmen talk to people one-as-one as individuals w/o a middleman. Stop my company from speaking for me, as if I automatically agree with the company's position just because I work here.
Corporations are legally persons; they are merely an organization of their shareholders' property, with administration entrusted to their executives. The shareholders and their corporation have constitutional 1st amendment protection, and you can't do that.
Specifically: It would be unconstitutional to attempt to restrict their speech.
And the shareholders of the corporation (and therefore the organization and executives to whom they have entrusted administration of their assets) have a right to peacefully assemble and a right to petition the government for redress of grievences.
Their rights do not cease to exist, when the shareholders pool their assets, organize under a legal name, and appoint representatives and delegates, to administer their assets.
So by one-size-fits-all, I mean that our receptionist has access to the same file set that our senior partner does - she has to
You have no need whatsoever to implement group policies or computer usage lockdown rules for certain workstations or users to improve security?
You don't have an HR or accounting department which owns files on the server that your receptionist has no business looking at without permission, and your organization has no need to have a capability of auditing file access at some point, in case you want to investigate possible abuse or or compromise of the network by an outside attacker?
That's unusual. Most business/do/ have a need to store at least some files, that only certain people need access to.
Consider you are essentially suggesting to downgrade from an AD environment with central authentication, authorization, and auditing capabilities, to a simplistic NAS environment with local credentials, more complex user management, and probably no security auditing capabilities.
It's a serious allegation.
And there's more coverage than one article in Japanese.
However... I wonder how "effective" that little bit of lead shielding would actually be at "hiding" radiation exposure.
A tiny little shielding that you can wear like that won't deflect a whole lot of certain kinds of radiation.
If you have a dosimeter reading from behind the shielding, it's likely possible that officials will "correct" the reading,
based on the radiation deflection characteristics of the shield, and the readings taken behind the shield, it will
be possible to estimate the radiation dosage that occurs without the shielding.
If a little bit of lead was that effective, the entire suit would be made out of the material.
To deflect a whole lot of radiation, you need 1" or greater thickness, which would be totally impractical
for a worker to wear, due to the excessive weight of the lead.
HTML is a W3C standard.
You can't have two competing parties developing new versions of a standard and both calling their work by the same name.
While what the W3C based the HTML5 standard on was WHATG's work.
The W3C "owns" this standard, and any extensions WHATWG makes, for now, will just be unofficial extensions.
A working group does not make a standards body.
You can't have a "living standard" per se.
You can standardize an options/extension mechanism, and make a provision for vendor-specific addons, or additional
options, but that's about it.
Ultimately you do have to have a snapshot, and set some things
in stone, so that developers can implement the standard, they're not going to rewrite their browser
every few months for you, and a "standards" body ignoring details like agreement among the vendors is not likely to succeed!
Also, it takes a long time for developers to implement new changes to standards, get the bugs out, AND meet compliancy levels.
Look how long it took to get anything close to an Acid3 compliant browser.
Finally Internet Explorer 10 will supposedly pass all the basic tests (and still doesn't guarantee compliance with the standard).
If climate change prompts world wide crop failures, and in causing climate change we deplete the world's fossil fuel supply we're just making the situation temporarily better before it gets much worse
Currently, fossil fuels are required for efficient farm production, and for distribution of food, so in the face of fossil fuel depletion, climate change is an irrelevant detail.
However... "charging blindly ahead" is what got us fossil fuels in the first place.
There is no reason to believe that human innovation stops with fossil fuel depletion.
The only thing that will get in the way of humans finding a better way, is other humans
trying to frivolously and vainly prevent the inevitable "climate change" and "depletion of fossil fuels".
The climate change, and eventual depletion are just facts that have to be accepted.
The climate change, humans have no real control of. Attempting to prevent depletion of fossils will just do more harm than good
And it's not nearly as catastrophic as you suggest
What is this deadly thing that is chasing humanity and necessitates the environmental destruction of the past 100-150 years?
Hunger for food, and a desire for the things necessary to live, and a desire for products that make life easier, reduce work, and extend quality of life.
Yes, but... how DMCA applies in this case? The manufacturer never made the 3D plans available, so there's nothing "copyrightable" to copy.
They never made plans available to the public, that doesn't mean there are no 3D plans; unpublished works still copyright,
possibly even if you can derive the plans by looking at the physical object.
Can a mass produced artifact - more than that, it is an accessory to something, not the something in itself - be subject to copyright laws?
Lock makers usually use patents, not copyrights, for control of manufacture of keys.
A "key" -- the physical object whose shape is dictated by its function (operating a lock) can't be copyrighted,
but the blueprints might be.
Patents prohibit unauthorized parties from making and selling a patented key.
Copyrights prohibit unauthorized parties from recreating and selling something derived from
and substantially similar to copyright-protected plans.
Ray plans to post the CAD file for the key on the 3D printing site Thingiverse after LockCon later this week."
If the lock maker is anything like other lock makers, it's likely to result in them sending in the lawyers
and somehow contriving DMCA-takedown notices
However, what does is that compression heats the air, while the ground will take it from it. That is where you lose your efficiency.
When the ground takes sufficient heat from the air, the pressure will drop, causing a reduction in the work required to compress more air,
and the pressure drop also makes the air less thermally conductive, so this is a self-correcting situation.
The air they are pumping in will probably be hot air.
The primary efficiency loss will likely be lost waste heat from the natural gas generators; not heat absorbed by the underground cavern.
I hope, at least, that using CAES is more efficient than just burning the natgas and twirling the turbines with that. (I doubt that but I'm no energy expert.)
It can be more efficient if wasted power generated is less, because power demand is highly variable.
Burning straight up natgas may lead to waste, if not all the power generated is required.
With CAES, all the output can be stored until needed, as long as there are no "leaks" in the underground cavern, and the rate of pressure loss
isn't too high.
With CAES, the power generation output can possibly be more easily reduced, during off-peak hours, to match the demand,
with less loss in efficiency, and without having to shutdown/fire up a certain number of natgas generators based on demand.
Slashdot Mirror
Similarly, 'I can't see your screen' is one of those problems that can be solved by technology... Your internet chat system doesn't have a way for me to upload screenshots, diagnostic logs, etc. to your support people why exactly? Yeah, you can't do that in phone support, so people make do; but you could do better in chat support.
Many vendors, e.g. Microsoft's enterprise support; have an online support chat system, that enables a technician to not only 'see' logs or screen shots, but enables the customer to grant the support representative mouse and keyboard control, so the support rep can look around, and either tell the customer what to do, or fix the issue for them.
However, perhaps their client software didn't actually re-send identical messages
I don't think it's necessarily safe to assume that it wasn't a human erroneously thinking they were "resubmitting" their order to the client software, and the client software dutifully generating a new unique client order identity each time.
If the system is down, don't keep submitting orders.
Exactly. Absence of a confirmation is not confirmation that there is no order.
In that case, the transactionally correct action would be to cancel the original order, and receive confirmation of the cancel, before attempting to place another order.
Of course... if Facebook stock had gone up instead, then they would complain that more orders were cancelled and not resubmitted than they intended.
True, but the company wouldn't want to pay for those pre-scans either, right?
Perhaps they wouldn't want to. They may not have much of a choice, if there are hundreds of competitors willing to pay the same price.
The "bot clicks" consume resources of the ad servers, much like real clicks do.
If they pay for bandwidth based on monthly gigabytes of data transferred; I bet they don't want to pay for non-customers and bots visiting their site, and racking up transfer usage, either.
Surely those bots utilize 0 of the hosting provider's true bandwidth, memory, and CPU resources.
The question isn't whether or not a "bot" clicked the ad, the question is if a real person saw the ad.
The difference is if a bot clicked it, the 'click' is non-legitimate; an intentional act of deception.
If a human's legitimate user-agent clicked it without showing it --- then it's just a case of FB doesn't know if a human saw it or not, but you as advertiser pay for the clicks, regardless of how the user clicked it; whether they actually saw it or not is an academic matter then.
Why? This is a nonevent (even if it is true.) It's like proving that 80% of TV ads air when people are out of the room.
It's more like proving that 80% of some TV station's ads don't actually get through to the viewers, because a competitor uses special 'bot' technology to jam the signal.
Which has implications for the station, because they charge advertisers based on number of people viewing the ad (view count / click count).
If the advertisers are persuaded by this, they will demand a change of practices, demand a lower click price, to compensate for the problems, or just switch to a station that has the reputation for thwarting the jamming attempts.
The percentage of real users with javascript disabled is much lower than 80%...
Unless, for some reason there is a strong correlation between 'interest in your ad content' and using NoScript (with a whitelist exception for Facebook)
Just because X% of users have characteristic Y, doesn't mean X% of the users visiting your site will have characteristic Y.
You (a human) wouldn't be able to click on the ads if you couldn't see them in the first place.
What about Humans running NoSCRIPT with Facebook on a scripting whitelist, but not the target site the ad directs to?
What happens when an antivirus scanner "pre-scans" the page at link to the Ad, in case the user clicks on it, in order to speed up their browsing experience?
Technically, it's not a bot causing the page to be requested, it can just as well be a real person's user agent
It's a hard problem, and discussions like Marco's will ultimately contribute to a better solution, but "give up sandbox requirements" isn't an endgame I'd like to see.
No matter how you put it, ultimately there are apps that have to have exceptions to sandboxing.
Antivirus scanners need to be able to scan things outside their little sandbox.
Utilities for mounting a NTFS filesystem, so you can upload files to a USB stick and share with a windows computer, need the raw device access.
So, yes, absolutely.. Apple should stop the idea of "sandboxing" as a hard requirement for being on the app store.
They should have a procedure for getting exceptions, presumably a third-party audit to ensure the exception is actually required, and some means to carve out exactly the required exception.
It's still short-sighted for them... If they don't charge something; the customer support costs will kill them. Unless they're going to charge you per incident to call in to have your $300 "free for life", when you need support, or repair of the line, that was damaged by ditch diggers or someone digging around.
And that legit supplier goes by the name eBay
According to the washington post: Ebay also agreed to take steps to remove listings of these items, according to the CPSC.
Generally if they're within innser-stomach distance from each other, they connect instantly and would pass through the digestive track together since it takes significant force to pinch them apart.
Their safety guidance for medical professionals seems to suggest otherwise:
That doesn't mean that the child doesn't have a sibling that might swallow them.
Right. The child might also take them to school, where they have less-intelligent peers, or they might accidentally leave them in an unsafe place without an appreciation for the danger. The magnets are not for children, period; The warning on their site is very clear about the product Keep away from all children.
Which I consider to (basically) be anyone under the age of 16.
If you cannot be trusted to keep and use these magnets safely and responsibly, then you don't belong behind the wheel of a car either.
I'd rather outlaw the existence of corporate speech; they can no longer hire lobbyists, else they lose their license to exist. Let the senators or congressmen talk to people one-as-one as individuals w/o a middleman. Stop my company from speaking for me, as if I automatically agree with the company's position just because I work here.
Corporations are legally persons; they are merely an organization of their shareholders' property, with administration entrusted to their executives. The shareholders and their corporation have constitutional 1st amendment protection, and you can't do that.
Specifically: It would be unconstitutional to attempt to restrict their speech.
And the shareholders of the corporation (and therefore the organization and executives to whom they have entrusted administration of their assets) have a right to peacefully assemble and a right to petition the government for redress of grievences.
Their rights do not cease to exist, when the shareholders pool their assets, organize under a legal name, and appoint representatives and delegates, to administer their assets.
So by one-size-fits-all, I mean that our receptionist has access to the same file set that our senior partner does - she has to
You have no need whatsoever to implement group policies or computer usage lockdown rules for certain workstations or users to improve security?
You don't have an HR or accounting department which owns files on the server that your receptionist has no business looking at without permission, and your organization has no need to have a capability of auditing file access at some point, in case you want to investigate possible abuse or or compromise of the network by an outside attacker?
That's unusual. Most business /do/ have a need to store at least some files, that only certain people need access to.
Consider you are essentially suggesting to downgrade from an AD environment with central authentication, authorization, and auditing capabilities, to a simplistic NAS environment with local credentials, more complex user management, and probably no security auditing capabilities.
It's a serious allegation. And there's more coverage than one article in Japanese.
However... I wonder how "effective" that little bit of lead shielding would actually be at "hiding" radiation exposure.
A tiny little shielding that you can wear like that won't deflect a whole lot of certain kinds of radiation. If you have a dosimeter reading from behind the shielding, it's likely possible that officials will "correct" the reading, based on the radiation deflection characteristics of the shield, and the readings taken behind the shield, it will be possible to estimate the radiation dosage that occurs without the shielding.
If a little bit of lead was that effective, the entire suit would be made out of the material.
To deflect a whole lot of radiation, you need 1" or greater thickness, which would be totally impractical for a worker to wear, due to the excessive weight of the lead.
HTML is a W3C standard. You can't have two competing parties developing new versions of a standard and both calling their work by the same name.
While what the W3C based the HTML5 standard on was WHATG's work. The W3C "owns" this standard, and any extensions WHATWG makes, for now, will just be unofficial extensions. A working group does not make a standards body.
You can't have a "living standard" per se.
You can standardize an options/extension mechanism, and make a provision for vendor-specific addons, or additional options, but that's about it.
Ultimately you do have to have a snapshot, and set some things in stone, so that developers can implement the standard, they're not going to rewrite their browser every few months for you, and a "standards" body ignoring details like agreement among the vendors is not likely to succeed!
Also, it takes a long time for developers to implement new changes to standards, get the bugs out, AND meet compliancy levels. Look how long it took to get anything close to an Acid3 compliant browser. Finally Internet Explorer 10 will supposedly pass all the basic tests (and still doesn't guarantee compliance with the standard).
If climate change prompts world wide crop failures, and in causing climate change we deplete the world's fossil fuel supply we're just making the situation temporarily better before it gets much worse
Currently, fossil fuels are required for efficient farm production, and for distribution of food, so in the face of fossil fuel depletion, climate change is an irrelevant detail.
However... "charging blindly ahead" is what got us fossil fuels in the first place.
There is no reason to believe that human innovation stops with fossil fuel depletion.
The only thing that will get in the way of humans finding a better way, is other humans trying to frivolously and vainly prevent the inevitable "climate change" and "depletion of fossil fuels".
The climate change, and eventual depletion are just facts that have to be accepted. The climate change, humans have no real control of. Attempting to prevent depletion of fossils will just do more harm than good
And it's not nearly as catastrophic as you suggest
What is this deadly thing that is chasing humanity and necessitates the environmental destruction of the past 100-150 years?
Hunger for food, and a desire for the things necessary to live, and a desire for products that make life easier, reduce work, and extend quality of life.
Without users Google has no "product" to sell.
The users are vendors, who deliver the eyes Google is selling, there are PLENTY of them, and they demand very little overall.
Yes, but... how DMCA applies in this case? The manufacturer never made the 3D plans available, so there's nothing "copyrightable" to copy.
They never made plans available to the public, that doesn't mean there are no 3D plans; unpublished works still copyright, possibly even if you can derive the plans by looking at the physical object.
Can a mass produced artifact - more than that, it is an accessory to something, not the something in itself - be subject to copyright laws?
Lock makers usually use patents, not copyrights, for control of manufacture of keys.
A "key" -- the physical object whose shape is dictated by its function (operating a lock) can't be copyrighted, but the blueprints might be.
Patents prohibit unauthorized parties from making and selling a patented key.
Copyrights prohibit unauthorized parties from recreating and selling something derived from and substantially similar to copyright-protected plans.
Ray plans to post the CAD file for the key on the 3D printing site Thingiverse after LockCon later this week."
If the lock maker is anything like other lock makers, it's likely to result in them sending in the lawyers and somehow contriving DMCA-takedown notices
However, what does is that compression heats the air, while the ground will take it from it. That is where you lose your efficiency.
When the ground takes sufficient heat from the air, the pressure will drop, causing a reduction in the work required to compress more air, and the pressure drop also makes the air less thermally conductive, so this is a self-correcting situation.
The air they are pumping in will probably be hot air.
The primary efficiency loss will likely be lost waste heat from the natural gas generators; not heat absorbed by the underground cavern.
I hope, at least, that using CAES is more efficient than just burning the natgas and twirling the turbines with that. (I doubt that but I'm no energy expert.)
It can be more efficient if wasted power generated is less, because power demand is highly variable. Burning straight up natgas may lead to waste, if not all the power generated is required. With CAES, all the output can be stored until needed, as long as there are no "leaks" in the underground cavern, and the rate of pressure loss isn't too high.
With CAES, the power generation output can possibly be more easily reduced, during off-peak hours, to match the demand, with less loss in efficiency, and without having to shutdown/fire up a certain number of natgas generators based on demand.