This has nothing to do with "gender bending" and everything to do with overuse of pronouns. The article would have had the same problem if her name was Susan. The parts that were confusing came after already referring to the women as "Ms. Hopkins" and "Ms. Monroe."
You have all rights that aren't explicitly removed from you by law.
"Right to repair" is a bit of a misnomer in a sense. Regardless of this law, there is nothing stopping you from from attempting to repair your equipment legally speaking. What there is is manufacturers making it very hard to do so without damaging things beyond repair.
"Right to repair"-type laws are actually removing the right from manufacturers to intentionally and unjustifiably make things difficult for the end user to repair themselves by for instance holding back critical repair information or using proprietary bolt styles and refusing to sell the necessary tools or other such methods.
At least for the hardware. Software is trickier since its potentially subject to copyright and EULAs and other things that don't apply to the physical machine. Not sure how deep these right to repair laws go into that type of thing, and there could even be divisions here -- for example changing your car's computer configuration may need to fall under different legislation than changing the software that reads and uses said configuration since the software is likely protected by EULA and/or copyright while the configuration settings probably aren't.
Why? You don't generally go to a public bath with the purpose of staring at other dudes' junk. And even if you do, those same guys might be on the beach tomorrow and other than a small part in the middle of their body you get to see the exact same scenery if that's what you want to look at. Or changing in the locker room at the local swimming pool. Or anywhere else that its common to see guys in little or no clothing.
I mean I don't see the point of going to a public bath when I have a perfectly good shower at home, but its not because I'm worried about seeing a few dongs (I've got the internet after all.. its not like you can avoid those.) For me, its purely a question of "why bother?" And well, doubly so given that I don't live in a place where public baths really exist (and if there are any, they wouldn't exactly announce themselves given the negative perception of well.. a bunch of naked dudes hanging out together.)
You sure as hell can. Or at least SCOTUS can. The text of the second specifically states that the right to bear arms was necessary in order to allow a militia to protect the free state. It says nothing about the current motto of guns for self-defense. Which was apparently not even made an official interpretation until 2008 (http://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/the-second-amendment-and-the-inalienable-right-self-defense even though it was common mantra long before that.
Not to mention any gun control laws of any sort (even "don't let convicted criminals have guns") is technically reinterpreting the second amendment. At least if the federal government tries to enact such a law (there's apparently some question whether states could enact such a law without technically violating the second. That same link talks about it a bit as well.)
Heck, SCOTUS can even repeal constitutional amendments if they feel like it, as was done with the 18th amendment (prohibition.)
Government "by the people" doesn't "reeducate" the people.
No, the people reeducate the people. I never said anything about the government. You have the NRA "educating" people about how awesome guns are. Why is there no massive organization of that scale to present the opposing side? In fact given how much the NRA contributes to campaigns, I would expect the government to be among the last places to promote gun reduction and safety. I mean how many times did Obama promise to do something after the string of mass shootings last year? And what was done? A bunch of squat because he was up against a Republican congress that was intentionally squashing anything he did out of spite, no matter whether it was good for the country or not. That's even before we start into how many of them are in the NRA's pockets.
And gun rights have majority support in the US
And there's the problem. As long as people want their crazyassed neighbor having the right to own firearms, nothing will change significantly.
Hence the need to reeducate people with modern facts and research rather than some one-liner law from two centuries ago that no longer really applies as it was intended (we don't see too many militias around) and was written at a time when gun technology was wholly different (they didn't have a lot of uzis, miniguns or rocket launchers to worry about in 1791.)
That's kind of the tricky part there. Not everyone's needs will match yours.
the data behind my websites stays off the Internet as well
So basically a backup that you can use to regenerate your internet-facing site. Always good to have more backups no matter what their form but again, other people might have different needs. In particular some dynamic sites actually need to be dynamic (frequently for business reasons more than technical ones, but that's beside the point. Needs are needs no matter where they're generated.)
And of course, I'm assuming you're transferring your data from the dynamic server/network to the internet-facing network using a clean flashdrive or equivalent every time? Because if the two are connected via a network link then you have a potential security risk. Perhaps a small risk but hey, even things like OpenSSL (where the entire point is security) have failed here and there.
It's been ten years since I lost any data due to a hard drive crashing on the file server
And motherboard, CPU, PSU, etc failures? RAID protects you from data loss but it does little for your uptime if some other component crashes (or even if an HDD crashes and you don't happen to be using a hot-swappable setup.) The only way to protect uptime is redundant servers and now we're talking into large investments in hardware and technical knowledge to get that kind of thing going.
Don't get me wrong, if your setup is sufficient for your needs then great. As I stated, I myself don't use cloud services because they don't suit my needs. But I still allow myself to recognize the benefit of such services for people who have different needs than I do. If you need solid uptime (recent issue notwithstanding) and more importantly if you need to support unpredictable scaling more than you need to worry about nosy Amazon employees, then AWS or its competitors can be great services.
I would guess it was something more along the lines of "TAKEDOWN server_subset *" when they meant "TAKEDOWN server_subset/*". The same kind of thing that you can accidentally do with say rm. Obviously I don't work in the bowels of AWS and don't know the real command syntax, but chances are it wasn't as obvious as pushing a big red button ie: not a "predefined" scenario but a simple typo that happened to pass syntax parsing and got run anyway even though it wasn't what the user wanted.
We've all done something like that. We've all kicked ourselves for it. Difference is, most of us weren't controlling major cloud hosting services at the time.
Yeah that sounds good. Because its absolutely certain that any random individual or small company would have strong or even reasonably decent data protection and retention policies, not to mention security policies.
And of course that doesn't get into the other benefits of AWS and other similar services -- namely the abundant access to large systems that scale under various load scenarios. The scaling in particular is something not even large companies could provide for themselves since doing so pretty much requires having a large number of players all scaling up at different times in order to maximize workload (and thus minimize wasted cycles/bandwidth/whatever measurement.)
If privacy is your utmost concern, then sure keep your data encrypted on a computer that never has and never will see a network connection and put it in a Faraday cage and whatnot.
But if you need it to be on the internet (say, you provide a website service,) then you may as well consider AWS and other services. At the very least, they'll have the knowledge and tools to secure their system a hell of a lot better than you just running updates and crossing your fingers.
And even with this recent crash, I can bet that they've also got better uptime than your off-the-shelf box that you wiped Windows off and installed Linux on because Linux is completely secure right?
Cloud services aren't a silver bullet to be sure. My own company doesn't use them because they don't suit our needs (we sell pure desktop apps.) But if they can suit your needs, there's a good chance that they'll be a far better long-term solution than anything you can throw together yourself for the vast majority of "you" (whether cheaper or not is another question..)
It is stupid, but mostly because of an excessively literal usage of the word "silent." Being legally "silent" doesn't mean you can't fart or ask to go to the washroom.
Likewise, vocalizing the phrase "I need to piss" doesn't necessarily count as "speech" as in the first amendment, because "speech" in that context is more about transfer of thoughts rather than strictly the act of using your mouth to form words.
Why should public servants expect a right to privacy in public places where I myself cannot expect it?
Or to put it in some of their own favorite words: If they've got nothing to hide, they've got nothing to fear. Given how deeply they believe that you should expect that their insistence against being recorded suggests that they do indeed have something to fear.
If they were really smart, they'd copyright the design of their uniforms and just prevent the distribution of such recordings under a DMCA claim.
Why does anyone have to die? Change (or reinterpret) the law to be something less permissive than "guns for everyone!" Then reeducate the public to change peoples' opinions and provide a safe way to surrender weapons for disposal.
It won't be fast or easy of course -- we're talking on the scale of a couple of generations since the "reeducate" part tends to mostly be picked up by the younger generations (us adults get pretty set in our ways no matter how stupid they are.)
There will always be holdouts of course, and there will obviously always be a need for a certain segment of the population to retain firearms (military and law enforcement) but you can go a long way by just not teaching kids stupid things.
We're already doing it for racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Of course nobody with a brain would claim those problems are "solved" by any stretch of the imagination, but if you compare today to say 1950 its pretty obvious that we're at least on the right track.
Or at least we were until January. Hopefully this recent derailment is temporary and we can get back to sanity again after 2020..
There's an even more correct side -- the side that goes along with the overwhelming amount of research (not to mention common sense) that suggests more guns = more gun accidents (and of course, more gun violence.)
The pro-shooter types will always love to drag out an anecdote of some woman about to be raped and her only solution apparently is to shoot the guy dead (and of course its usually a hypothetical story since few people actually know of any such cases, though I'm sure you could find one or two if you try hard enough. Even then, proving that there were no other options is not always straightforward.
Unfortunately we now live in a world where feelings matter more than facts not only in people's minds but in the office of the leader of the "free" world, so trying to convince anyone that their rare case anecdote is less useful on a large scale than actual scientific research requires a level of patience and eloquence few people can master.
But whatever.. I put up a post on/. once in a while hoping to convince someone somewhere that guns are actually dangerous but in the grand scheme of things I'm just a scrub behind a screen I don't expect that I'll be the one to change the world.
or for fewer people to do the same job as had been done before
Also known as taking over jobs. 3 people replaced by 1 person and a robot means 2 peoples' jobs have been taken over even if the overall task still has one person left.
I agree that we'll almost certainly adapt and invent new jobs that robots are unsuited for, but its going to be a long slow ugly process. Its been what? Over 20 years since the auto makers started moving factories to Mexico? And much of Michigan and other states involved in car production are still reeling from the blow.
Certainly that's pretty much only a generation which is a drop in the bucket of history, but if its looking like the next big job exodus, whether to offshoring or automatic, is going to affect your line of work in your generation.. that's a rather scary concept.
When we say "people" will find new areas of employment, we usually mean "kids that grow up in the changed world," rather than "people who currently have those jobs and soon no longer will." Its a lot easier to train kids than it is to re-train adults. Those adults and their families are the ones who suffer while the world changes around them.
The cost won't be zero of course, but with enough automation it could drop to the point where its close enough.
Assuming we can actually make robots smart enough to do all of this, there's pretty much two possibilities: - Utopian: Robots do everything for us, we just sit back and relax and do whatever interests us because money is a non-concept when you essentially have an entire planet of (hopefully not conscious) slaves to do all of the work.
- Dystopian: Basically the above, but the robots remain strictly in control of the elites (or themselves) and the unwashed masses effectively become the slaves.
Many many books, movies and TV shows have started out with what appears to be the utopian version but, for some reason or other (usually the greed of some elite) is shown to actually be the dystopian version of the future.
Sadly the movies are probably wrong in that there likely won't ever be a utopian period -- at least not for the majority of the planet. Even when money is a non-issue, the elites of our world tend to like retaining control over those of us who weren't lucky enough to be born into money or create the perfect business at exactly the right time in history.
Indians were chosen because they speak English (albeit with a fairly extreme accent in some cases) and people revolted massively against automated phone systems when companies first tried to roll those out. We still have a strong distaste against even simple directory services if they decide to make the recordings too long or the menus too detailed (and we also hate when they're not detailed enough since we don't always know exactly what terminology they're using for what we need.)
And of course India's other famous outsourcing target: software development. We're a long way from replacing knowledge workers with robots on any sort of large scale unless Cyberdyne has been keeping to them selves too much again.
Though we've been seeing a return of those jobs to the US since it turns out replacing skilled workers with a third party company (no matter where they're located) that has no care or investment in your future and tends to use the cheapest (ie: worst) local labor they can find turns out not to produce the best software. To borrow a meme from the MBA world, the total cost of development ends up far outstripping the up front savings.
Not saying those jobs won't eventually be taken over by robots, but they're a lot further off than say, replacing fast food outlets with vending machines that cook your burger exactly right 100% of the time with zero chance of it being spit in.
China, Mexico, and much of the local service industry are probably going to be the first to suffer as mindless, repetitive tasks such as those that get done in factories and burger joints and whatnot are far easier to automate than tasks which require critical thought and planning.
People will gladly give up privacy in exchange for a "free" price tag
Are you sure about that? Now people will sure give their name and address to some company for a free price tag -- but it comes with the expectation that it will only be used by the company they gave it to.
That's the disconnect of ignorance. People who haven't had reason to consider the issue in depth don't really expect that their data is being sold to 47 "partners" and stolen by hackers 3 times a year because the site is too lazy or incompetent to secure their system. We expect the data to be used for in-house things like product planning and flyer layout.
We've been told for centuries that business is the end-all-be-all and we tend to trust them until they break trust rather than requiring them to earn trust in the first place.
We're now in a state of willful ignorance
I don't know that I'm that pessimistic about people. I tend to believe more that the world is just too damned complex and its just not possible for busy people to know and understand every piece of technical information that comes along. Computer people should probably know better but I don't think we should require any random welder or burger flipper or fisherman to understand such details.
damn near everything comes with a EULA today, and yet no one actually reads them.
Yeah, because they're unreadable. Intentionally so. Your average EULA is several dozen pages of deep legalese that even lawyers take days to parse through in full. And we're asked to read several of these per week, if not per day for anyone who spends significant time on the Internet. Then there's EULA updates which are often "announced" on some hard-to-find page on their website (even if the EULA is for an offline program.)
Its just too much. Just like you can't expect the welder to understand the privacy implications of any particular website or piece of software, you really can't expect a him to understand the legal implications of dozens of absurdly long EULA documents. I have to click off a EULA to order a damned pizza these days!
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there isn't an answer. Certainly not an easy one if there is. But I can guarantee you that the answer is not going to be "just expect everybody to be a computer expert and a legal expert and have several hours per week to dedicate to parsing through all of the details AND savvy enough to know when the details are BS and they're actually dealing with someone shady."
I mean if you want to take that tack, we may as well shutdown repair shops -- everyone should be a master mechanic right? And the hospitals -- who needs one everyone's partner or friend or neighbor is a fully trained doctor? But of course that's not the way the real world works and we really shouldn't expect everyone to have specialized knowledge online either.
For all the rhetoric, very few people want full net neutrality. A VOIP packet and a BitTorrent packet just aren't the same and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who claims otherwise.
What people want is for equivalent traffic to be neutral. My VOIP packet shouldn't have priority over your VOIP packet, and your BitTorrent packet shouldn't have priority over my BitTorrent packet.
The rhetoric breaks down due to this kind of disconnect: - People claim they want full neutrality when what they really want is equivalence-based neutrality and shaping/prioritization applied between non-equivalent packets.
- While the ISPs claim they need to do shaping between non-equivalent packets but what they really mean is they want to do prioritization between equivalent packets based on external factors (ie: whether or not those packets are owned by someone who paid for the fast lane boost.)
So basically people don't say what they mean because they don't really understand what they're talking about, and ISPs don't say what they mean because its not politically cool to just outright say they want to double-dip on Google and Netflix' extreme traffic usage.
So you're saying that I, and you, and everyone else should pay higher fees to use the roads at all times and suffere even more congestion in the free lanes if we can't pay up, just because you're too cheap to pay your copay on the (hopefully small) chance that you may need to rush your son to the hospital some day?
And for that matter, are you really going to spend the extra time driving through traffic at (for argument's sake) the posted limit when your son is in critical enough condition to require an ambulance? Rather than calling an ambulance who have the legal right of way, the lights and sirens to tell other drivers to get out of the way, the training and experience to drive safely (or at least a lot closer to safely) at higher-than-posted speeds, AND have the staff and equipment on board to perform basic emergency treatment as needed.
But you'd rather save $200 on your copay? And make me suffer in the process? Thanks bud.
Taking the definition to your extreme, there's no such thing as a public good:
- Water you use is unusable by me. Sure there's lots of water (if you don't live in California..) but its still a rivalrous good.
- Oxygen you breath is unusable by me -- at least not until some plant recycles it but who knows how long that will be. Again, there's lots of it but its still something we can't share.
- A pretty view is rivalrous. If you're standing at the perfect spot at the same time I want to, we can't share (exactly the same) view.
It could go on and on. Obviously I'm intentionally choosing examples that are extreme to the point of dumb (though fresh water is only a matter of time the way we waste is..) But the point is still there.
90% of roads aren't even "rivalrous" to the same level as a good view when there's say a fireworks show going on. Most roads are empty most of the time -- the vast majority of people use the road in front of their house a bit over twice a day on average -- once to go to work and once to come home. So do we call residential roads as public goods and busy highways as not? What about not busy highways? Or roads that are only busy during rush hour? Are roads public goods from midnight-6am and commercial from 6am-midnight?
So you're saying that small ISPs don't have the resources to do things like know what their own damned pricing structure is? They don't have the ability to know/remember what data caps they themselves put in place?
Sorry but this is all just anti-consumer BS wrapped up in a "think of the little guys!" Given Trump's recent appointments, its also likely as an intentional step down the slippery slope with the full intention of seeing the big providers cry foul next year and having the requirements dropped completely.
Basically the "burden" here is printing an extra copy of data they already need to run their damned business and mailing it to the SEC once a year (or maybe 4 times a year if its a quarterly thing.)
Meanwhile we apparently don't see it as too burdensome to store and be able to retrieve on demand months of history of specific user accounts (or even en masse) and other such requests at any time on the whim of law enforcement.
It might be. I've not looked into it so just throwing out a theory, but I would assume that most people don't bother putting the time and money into appeals that they're guaranteed to lose, so you'll drop a significant number of cases that flat out wouldn't be overturned right off the bat, thus increasing the relative fraction of those that will be overturned.
If there's also some sort of pre-review to further knock off ones that the appealer thinks might have a chance but the court doesn't, again the ratio pushes in favor of cases that get overturned.
And finally, there's probably some bias when cases get settled out of court -- I would imagine that people who lost the original case are more likely to settle when things start going against them than the people who won the original case, since we generally tend to assume that the law is consistently applied (no matter how often we're shown otherwise.)
Like I said that's all theory and conjecture but the main point is that there could be very valid reasons for SCOTUS to overturn so many appeals coming up from the circuits -- mostly because we simply don't bother counting the ones that never get a judgement for one reason or another.
Get a botnet of ~80k computers and you have it in around a month. That's hardly "meaningless" when we're talking something as globally damaging as a root CA certificate, especially when its coming at a time that we're seeing botnets hitting millions of nodes.
The sane person who isn't given several days to investigate and implement their own algorithms (not to mention months of testing if you want to be sure you didn't fuck it up) when there's a 3-character function call sitting there waiting to be used.
Especially if they're not crypto experts and don't even know that doing the hash in the rdbms is bad, never mind why its bad. Which, for better or worse, is a large portion of the programming professionals, especially when you're including outsourcing companies that don't have much long-term interest in your project and hire the cheapest labor they can find who can do the bare minimum to make an application "work."
No, I'm saying that its impossible for any government to commit theft -- at least not if they decide to call it a tax.
People living in a democracy have the advantage because they've got (some) control over their government and thus some control over what the government is allowed to call a tax.
That's why the slogan for the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation" rather than "no thieving kings!" They were some smart people back then and they realized that using incorrect definitions of scary words isn't a strong argument for change. It just makes them sound like fear mongerers which might rouse the rabble but doesn't really accomplish much in serious discourse.
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This has nothing to do with "gender bending" and everything to do with overuse of pronouns. The article would have had the same problem if her name was Susan. The parts that were confusing came after already referring to the women as "Ms. Hopkins" and "Ms. Monroe."
You have all rights that aren't explicitly removed from you by law.
"Right to repair" is a bit of a misnomer in a sense. Regardless of this law, there is nothing stopping you from from attempting to repair your equipment legally speaking. What there is is manufacturers making it very hard to do so without damaging things beyond repair.
"Right to repair"-type laws are actually removing the right from manufacturers to intentionally and unjustifiably make things difficult for the end user to repair themselves by for instance holding back critical repair information or using proprietary bolt styles and refusing to sell the necessary tools or other such methods.
At least for the hardware. Software is trickier since its potentially subject to copyright and EULAs and other things that don't apply to the physical machine. Not sure how deep these right to repair laws go into that type of thing, and there could even be divisions here -- for example changing your car's computer configuration may need to fall under different legislation than changing the software that reads and uses said configuration since the software is likely protected by EULA and/or copyright while the configuration settings probably aren't.
Why? You don't generally go to a public bath with the purpose of staring at other dudes' junk. And even if you do, those same guys might be on the beach tomorrow and other than a small part in the middle of their body you get to see the exact same scenery if that's what you want to look at. Or changing in the locker room at the local swimming pool. Or anywhere else that its common to see guys in little or no clothing.
I mean I don't see the point of going to a public bath when I have a perfectly good shower at home, but its not because I'm worried about seeing a few dongs (I've got the internet after all.. its not like you can avoid those.) For me, its purely a question of "why bother?" And well, doubly so given that I don't live in a place where public baths really exist (and if there are any, they wouldn't exactly announce themselves given the negative perception of well.. a bunch of naked dudes hanging out together.)
You can't "reinterpret it" either
You sure as hell can. Or at least SCOTUS can. The text of the second specifically states that the right to bear arms was necessary in order to allow a militia to protect the free state. It says nothing about the current motto of guns for self-defense. Which was apparently not even made an official interpretation until 2008 (http://www.heritage.org/the-constitution/report/the-second-amendment-and-the-inalienable-right-self-defense even though it was common mantra long before that.
Not to mention any gun control laws of any sort (even "don't let convicted criminals have guns") is technically reinterpreting the second amendment. At least if the federal government tries to enact such a law (there's apparently some question whether states could enact such a law without technically violating the second. That same link talks about it a bit as well.)
Heck, SCOTUS can even repeal constitutional amendments if they feel like it, as was done with the 18th amendment (prohibition.)
Government "by the people" doesn't "reeducate" the people.
No, the people reeducate the people. I never said anything about the government. You have the NRA "educating" people about how awesome guns are. Why is there no massive organization of that scale to present the opposing side? In fact given how much the NRA contributes to campaigns, I would expect the government to be among the last places to promote gun reduction and safety. I mean how many times did Obama promise to do something after the string of mass shootings last year? And what was done? A bunch of squat because he was up against a Republican congress that was intentionally squashing anything he did out of spite, no matter whether it was good for the country or not. That's even before we start into how many of them are in the NRA's pockets.
And gun rights have majority support in the US
And there's the problem. As long as people want their crazyassed neighbor having the right to own firearms, nothing will change significantly.
Hence the need to reeducate people with modern facts and research rather than some one-liner law from two centuries ago that no longer really applies as it was intended (we don't see too many militias around) and was written at a time when gun technology was wholly different (they didn't have a lot of uzis, miniguns or rocket launchers to worry about in 1791.)
is adequate for my needs
That's kind of the tricky part there. Not everyone's needs will match yours.
the data behind my websites stays off the Internet as well
So basically a backup that you can use to regenerate your internet-facing site. Always good to have more backups no matter what their form but again, other people might have different needs. In particular some dynamic sites actually need to be dynamic (frequently for business reasons more than technical ones, but that's beside the point. Needs are needs no matter where they're generated.)
And of course, I'm assuming you're transferring your data from the dynamic server/network to the internet-facing network using a clean flashdrive or equivalent every time? Because if the two are connected via a network link then you have a potential security risk. Perhaps a small risk but hey, even things like OpenSSL (where the entire point is security) have failed here and there.
It's been ten years since I lost any data due to a hard drive crashing on the file server
And motherboard, CPU, PSU, etc failures? RAID protects you from data loss but it does little for your uptime if some other component crashes (or even if an HDD crashes and you don't happen to be using a hot-swappable setup.) The only way to protect uptime is redundant servers and now we're talking into large investments in hardware and technical knowledge to get that kind of thing going.
Don't get me wrong, if your setup is sufficient for your needs then great. As I stated, I myself don't use cloud services because they don't suit my needs. But I still allow myself to recognize the benefit of such services for people who have different needs than I do. If you need solid uptime (recent issue notwithstanding) and more importantly if you need to support unpredictable scaling more than you need to worry about nosy Amazon employees, then AWS or its competitors can be great services.
I would guess it was something more along the lines of "TAKEDOWN server_subset *" when they meant "TAKEDOWN server_subset/*". The same kind of thing that you can accidentally do with say rm. Obviously I don't work in the bowels of AWS and don't know the real command syntax, but chances are it wasn't as obvious as pushing a big red button ie: not a "predefined" scenario but a simple typo that happened to pass syntax parsing and got run anyway even though it wasn't what the user wanted.
We've all done something like that. We've all kicked ourselves for it. Difference is, most of us weren't controlling major cloud hosting services at the time.
Yeah that sounds good. Because its absolutely certain that any random individual or small company would have strong or even reasonably decent data protection and retention policies, not to mention security policies.
And of course that doesn't get into the other benefits of AWS and other similar services -- namely the abundant access to large systems that scale under various load scenarios. The scaling in particular is something not even large companies could provide for themselves since doing so pretty much requires having a large number of players all scaling up at different times in order to maximize workload (and thus minimize wasted cycles/bandwidth/whatever measurement.)
If privacy is your utmost concern, then sure keep your data encrypted on a computer that never has and never will see a network connection and put it in a Faraday cage and whatnot.
But if you need it to be on the internet (say, you provide a website service,) then you may as well consider AWS and other services. At the very least, they'll have the knowledge and tools to secure their system a hell of a lot better than you just running updates and crossing your fingers.
And even with this recent crash, I can bet that they've also got better uptime than your off-the-shelf box that you wiped Windows off and installed Linux on because Linux is completely secure right?
Cloud services aren't a silver bullet to be sure. My own company doesn't use them because they don't suit our needs (we sell pure desktop apps.) But if they can suit your needs, there's a good chance that they'll be a far better long-term solution than anything you can throw together yourself for the vast majority of "you" (whether cheaper or not is another question..)
It is stupid, but mostly because of an excessively literal usage of the word "silent." Being legally "silent" doesn't mean you can't fart or ask to go to the washroom.
Likewise, vocalizing the phrase "I need to piss" doesn't necessarily count as "speech" as in the first amendment, because "speech" in that context is more about transfer of thoughts rather than strictly the act of using your mouth to form words.
Why should public servants expect a right to privacy in public places where I myself cannot expect it?
Or to put it in some of their own favorite words: If they've got nothing to hide, they've got nothing to fear. Given how deeply they believe that you should expect that their insistence against being recorded suggests that they do indeed have something to fear.
If they were really smart, they'd copyright the design of their uniforms and just prevent the distribution of such recordings under a DMCA claim.
Hey now! There's very few instances of guns killing people!
Its generally the bullets that kill them.
Why does anyone have to die? Change (or reinterpret) the law to be something less permissive than "guns for everyone!" Then reeducate the public to change peoples' opinions and provide a safe way to surrender weapons for disposal.
It won't be fast or easy of course -- we're talking on the scale of a couple of generations since the "reeducate" part tends to mostly be picked up by the younger generations (us adults get pretty set in our ways no matter how stupid they are.)
There will always be holdouts of course, and there will obviously always be a need for a certain segment of the population to retain firearms (military and law enforcement) but you can go a long way by just not teaching kids stupid things.
We're already doing it for racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. Of course nobody with a brain would claim those problems are "solved" by any stretch of the imagination, but if you compare today to say 1950 its pretty obvious that we're at least on the right track.
Or at least we were until January. Hopefully this recent derailment is temporary and we can get back to sanity again after 2020..
There's an even more correct side -- the side that goes along with the overwhelming amount of research (not to mention common sense) that suggests more guns = more gun accidents (and of course, more gun violence.)
The pro-shooter types will always love to drag out an anecdote of some woman about to be raped and her only solution apparently is to shoot the guy dead (and of course its usually a hypothetical story since few people actually know of any such cases, though I'm sure you could find one or two if you try hard enough. Even then, proving that there were no other options is not always straightforward.
Unfortunately we now live in a world where feelings matter more than facts not only in people's minds but in the office of the leader of the "free" world, so trying to convince anyone that their rare case anecdote is less useful on a large scale than actual scientific research requires a level of patience and eloquence few people can master.
But whatever.. I put up a post on /. once in a while hoping to convince someone somewhere that guns are actually dangerous but in the grand scheme of things I'm just a scrub behind a screen I don't expect that I'll be the one to change the world.
or for fewer people to do the same job as had been done before
Also known as taking over jobs. 3 people replaced by 1 person and a robot means 2 peoples' jobs have been taken over even if the overall task still has one person left.
I agree that we'll almost certainly adapt and invent new jobs that robots are unsuited for, but its going to be a long slow ugly process. Its been what? Over 20 years since the auto makers started moving factories to Mexico? And much of Michigan and other states involved in car production are still reeling from the blow.
Certainly that's pretty much only a generation which is a drop in the bucket of history, but if its looking like the next big job exodus, whether to offshoring or automatic, is going to affect your line of work in your generation.. that's a rather scary concept.
When we say "people" will find new areas of employment, we usually mean "kids that grow up in the changed world," rather than "people who currently have those jobs and soon no longer will." Its a lot easier to train kids than it is to re-train adults. Those adults and their families are the ones who suffer while the world changes around them.
The cost won't be zero of course, but with enough automation it could drop to the point where its close enough.
Assuming we can actually make robots smart enough to do all of this, there's pretty much two possibilities:
- Utopian: Robots do everything for us, we just sit back and relax and do whatever interests us because money is a non-concept when you essentially have an entire planet of (hopefully not conscious) slaves to do all of the work.
- Dystopian: Basically the above, but the robots remain strictly in control of the elites (or themselves) and the unwashed masses effectively become the slaves.
Many many books, movies and TV shows have started out with what appears to be the utopian version but, for some reason or other (usually the greed of some elite) is shown to actually be the dystopian version of the future.
Sadly the movies are probably wrong in that there likely won't ever be a utopian period -- at least not for the majority of the planet. Even when money is a non-issue, the elites of our world tend to like retaining control over those of us who weren't lucky enough to be born into money or create the perfect business at exactly the right time in history.
Indians were chosen because they speak English (albeit with a fairly extreme accent in some cases) and people revolted massively against automated phone systems when companies first tried to roll those out. We still have a strong distaste against even simple directory services if they decide to make the recordings too long or the menus too detailed (and we also hate when they're not detailed enough since we don't always know exactly what terminology they're using for what we need.)
And of course India's other famous outsourcing target: software development. We're a long way from replacing knowledge workers with robots on any sort of large scale unless Cyberdyne has been keeping to them selves too much again.
Though we've been seeing a return of those jobs to the US since it turns out replacing skilled workers with a third party company (no matter where they're located) that has no care or investment in your future and tends to use the cheapest (ie: worst) local labor they can find turns out not to produce the best software. To borrow a meme from the MBA world, the total cost of development ends up far outstripping the up front savings.
Not saying those jobs won't eventually be taken over by robots, but they're a lot further off than say, replacing fast food outlets with vending machines that cook your burger exactly right 100% of the time with zero chance of it being spit in.
China, Mexico, and much of the local service industry are probably going to be the first to suffer as mindless, repetitive tasks such as those that get done in factories and burger joints and whatnot are far easier to automate than tasks which require critical thought and planning.
News at 1716!
People will gladly give up privacy in exchange for a "free" price tag
Are you sure about that? Now people will sure give their name and address to some company for a free price tag -- but it comes with the expectation that it will only be used by the company they gave it to.
That's the disconnect of ignorance. People who haven't had reason to consider the issue in depth don't really expect that their data is being sold to 47 "partners" and stolen by hackers 3 times a year because the site is too lazy or incompetent to secure their system. We expect the data to be used for in-house things like product planning and flyer layout.
We've been told for centuries that business is the end-all-be-all and we tend to trust them until they break trust rather than requiring them to earn trust in the first place.
We're now in a state of willful ignorance
I don't know that I'm that pessimistic about people. I tend to believe more that the world is just too damned complex and its just not possible for busy people to know and understand every piece of technical information that comes along. Computer people should probably know better but I don't think we should require any random welder or burger flipper or fisherman to understand such details.
damn near everything comes with a EULA today, and yet no one actually reads them.
Yeah, because they're unreadable. Intentionally so. Your average EULA is several dozen pages of deep legalese that even lawyers take days to parse through in full. And we're asked to read several of these per week, if not per day for anyone who spends significant time on the Internet. Then there's EULA updates which are often "announced" on some hard-to-find page on their website (even if the EULA is for an offline program.)
Its just too much. Just like you can't expect the welder to understand the privacy implications of any particular website or piece of software, you really can't expect a him to understand the legal implications of dozens of absurdly long EULA documents. I have to click off a EULA to order a damned pizza these days!
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe there isn't an answer. Certainly not an easy one if there is. But I can guarantee you that the answer is not going to be "just expect everybody to be a computer expert and a legal expert and have several hours per week to dedicate to parsing through all of the details AND savvy enough to know when the details are BS and they're actually dealing with someone shady."
I mean if you want to take that tack, we may as well shutdown repair shops -- everyone should be a master mechanic right? And the hospitals -- who needs one everyone's partner or friend or neighbor is a fully trained doctor? But of course that's not the way the real world works and we really shouldn't expect everyone to have specialized knowledge online either.
For all the rhetoric, very few people want full net neutrality. A VOIP packet and a BitTorrent packet just aren't the same and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who claims otherwise.
What people want is for equivalent traffic to be neutral. My VOIP packet shouldn't have priority over your VOIP packet, and your BitTorrent packet shouldn't have priority over my BitTorrent packet.
The rhetoric breaks down due to this kind of disconnect:
- People claim they want full neutrality when what they really want is equivalence-based neutrality and shaping/prioritization applied between non-equivalent packets.
- While the ISPs claim they need to do shaping between non-equivalent packets but what they really mean is they want to do prioritization between equivalent packets based on external factors (ie: whether or not those packets are owned by someone who paid for the fast lane boost.)
So basically people don't say what they mean because they don't really understand what they're talking about, and ISPs don't say what they mean because its not politically cool to just outright say they want to double-dip on Google and Netflix' extreme traffic usage.
So you're saying that I, and you, and everyone else should pay higher fees to use the roads at all times and suffere even more congestion in the free lanes if we can't pay up, just because you're too cheap to pay your copay on the (hopefully small) chance that you may need to rush your son to the hospital some day?
And for that matter, are you really going to spend the extra time driving through traffic at (for argument's sake) the posted limit when your son is in critical enough condition to require an ambulance? Rather than calling an ambulance who have the legal right of way, the lights and sirens to tell other drivers to get out of the way, the training and experience to drive safely (or at least a lot closer to safely) at higher-than-posted speeds, AND have the staff and equipment on board to perform basic emergency treatment as needed.
But you'd rather save $200 on your copay? And make me suffer in the process? Thanks bud.
Taking the definition to your extreme, there's no such thing as a public good:
- Water you use is unusable by me. Sure there's lots of water (if you don't live in California..) but its still a rivalrous good.
- Oxygen you breath is unusable by me -- at least not until some plant recycles it but who knows how long that will be. Again, there's lots of it but its still something we can't share.
- A pretty view is rivalrous. If you're standing at the perfect spot at the same time I want to, we can't share (exactly the same) view.
It could go on and on. Obviously I'm intentionally choosing examples that are extreme to the point of dumb (though fresh water is only a matter of time the way we waste is..) But the point is still there.
90% of roads aren't even "rivalrous" to the same level as a good view when there's say a fireworks show going on. Most roads are empty most of the time -- the vast majority of people use the road in front of their house a bit over twice a day on average -- once to go to work and once to come home. So do we call residential roads as public goods and busy highways as not? What about not busy highways? Or roads that are only busy during rush hour? Are roads public goods from midnight-6am and commercial from 6am-midnight?
So you're saying that small ISPs don't have the resources to do things like know what their own damned pricing structure is? They don't have the ability to know/remember what data caps they themselves put in place?
Sorry but this is all just anti-consumer BS wrapped up in a "think of the little guys!" Given Trump's recent appointments, its also likely as an intentional step down the slippery slope with the full intention of seeing the big providers cry foul next year and having the requirements dropped completely.
Basically the "burden" here is printing an extra copy of data they already need to run their damned business and mailing it to the SEC once a year (or maybe 4 times a year if its a quarterly thing.)
Meanwhile we apparently don't see it as too burdensome to store and be able to retrieve on demand months of history of specific user accounts (or even en masse) and other such requests at any time on the whim of law enforcement.
It might be. I've not looked into it so just throwing out a theory, but I would assume that most people don't bother putting the time and money into appeals that they're guaranteed to lose, so you'll drop a significant number of cases that flat out wouldn't be overturned right off the bat, thus increasing the relative fraction of those that will be overturned.
If there's also some sort of pre-review to further knock off ones that the appealer thinks might have a chance but the court doesn't, again the ratio pushes in favor of cases that get overturned.
And finally, there's probably some bias when cases get settled out of court -- I would imagine that people who lost the original case are more likely to settle when things start going against them than the people who won the original case, since we generally tend to assume that the law is consistently applied (no matter how often we're shown otherwise.)
Like I said that's all theory and conjecture but the main point is that there could be very valid reasons for SCOTUS to overturn so many appeals coming up from the circuits -- mostly because we simply don't bother counting the ones that never get a judgement for one reason or another.
TFS says a total of ~6600 computer years.
Get a botnet of ~80k computers and you have it in around a month. That's hardly "meaningless" when we're talking something as globally damaging as a root CA certificate, especially when its coming at a time that we're seeing botnets hitting millions of nodes.
The sane person who isn't given several days to investigate and implement their own algorithms (not to mention months of testing if you want to be sure you didn't fuck it up) when there's a 3-character function call sitting there waiting to be used.
Especially if they're not crypto experts and don't even know that doing the hash in the rdbms is bad, never mind why its bad. Which, for better or worse, is a large portion of the programming professionals, especially when you're including outsourcing companies that don't have much long-term interest in your project and hire the cheapest labor they can find who can do the bare minimum to make an application "work."
No, I'm saying that its impossible for any government to commit theft -- at least not if they decide to call it a tax.
People living in a democracy have the advantage because they've got (some) control over their government and thus some control over what the government is allowed to call a tax.
That's why the slogan for the American Revolution was "no taxation without representation" rather than "no thieving kings!" They were some smart people back then and they realized that using incorrect definitions of scary words isn't a strong argument for change. It just makes them sound like fear mongerers which might rouse the rabble but doesn't really accomplish much in serious discourse.