Somewhat offtopic, but related. I have a similar question but with respect to a USB stick. It seems that over time and with repeated use, my USB stick has gotten slower and slower. There was an article here a while ago about such a slowdown with SSDs.
So is there a utility/tool (for windows) that can test/restore USB memory stick performance?
The researchers have identified that a "halfalogue" is confusing, but I'd like to share another aspect I did not see addressed in the article. It's not just what is being said, it's also how it's being said.
In polite conversation there is a protocol, if you will, of how I speak to someone else. Tone of voice, intonation, and the like provide information in addition to the words that I use. When I have a question and ask someone for an answer, there's a change in the tone of my voice at the end and then a pause while I await the other person's answer. Kind of an out-of-band signaling system.
To complicate matters, there are times when I've daydreamed while someone was talking to me, and then all of a sudden I realize that I
have been asked a question and they are waiting for my answer.
So, when I'm only hearing part of a conversation, and then there's this... pause... there's a part of me that thinks "OMG, did I zone out and they are waiting for me to respond?" Since I do NOT hear the other side of the conversation, I get confusing inputs. Audio inputs suggest I should say something; visual inputs say it's not for me.
That reminds me of an article by Nelson Repenning, "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened". It's quite an interesting read... The guy who "saves the day" during an emergency always seems to get credit and reward, but what about the guy who keeps the emergency from ever happening?
Thanks for the correction. Now that I see it in writing, I recall that's what they said during the program. Unfortunately, I was trying to write from memory and obviously got things backwards. Much obliged.
As such, though the leverage ratio was officially 12.5, somebody who held nothing but mortgages could be levered up 35:1. And if you owned some bank issues, you could get nearly infinite.
But I'm wondering... what makes you think that these limits were going to be further increased?
You obviously know more about these details than I. What I was working from was what I heard in the second program:
Another Frightening Show About the Economy. You can download it for free at the moment from: here.
Here's the summary for part 2:
Act Two. Out of the Hedges and Into the Woods.
One more confusing financial product that's bringing down the global economy. And one of way to think about this product is this: If bad mortgages got the financial system sick, this next thing you're about to hear about, helped spread the sickness into an epidemic. These are "credit default swaps." Alex explains. (19 minutes)
The segment was so well done, it's hard to summarize, but I'll do my best. In essence, "Credit Default Swaps" (CDS) were presented as a form of insurance that a lender could by so as to minimize the risk that a loan would default. So far, so good. Then, somebody realized they could by a CDS for a loan they did not even own. So what? It got out of hand when someone realized they could make money by buying a CDS for something that was questionable. How so? Like buying life insurance. Like buying life insurance on somebody ELSE. Who is old and feeble. I have an opportunity to buy a policy for, say, $1M on this person. And YOU have an opportunity to buy the same kind of policy from your agent. The sicker the person, the more of an incentive there is to buy in.
Now, replace "old and feeble person" with "Lehman Brothers". And for "insurance company", try "AIG". And multiply just You and Me with hundreds or thousands of CDSs in play. With many, many other companies. As I understand it, there was no regulatory limit on how many CDSs could be purchased on the exact same debt issue. And, because there was no mandatory reporting or the like on what CDSs were out there, we really don't know just how many of these are out there. With all the repackaging of these as securities, sliced and diced and sold as yet more instruments, we don't know just how bad the situation is.
Again, I cannot do the show justice. Listen to the podcast. I'd love to hear your take on it once you have done so.
If you haven't listened to that show, I heavily recommend it (no matter where you live, if you speak English). That one episode was so insanely popular that Ira Glass was pushed to do another on the same topic and that lead to last week's This American Life. From credit default swaps to the paper market drying up to NINA loans, these two episodes gave me more information in two hours than I could gather watching every single major TV news show for weeks.
YES! I whole-heartedly agree. I do not claim to be a financial maven, but I have been following the markets for a number of years and have some familiarity with the terms that have been bandied about as of late. But, these two shows did an INCREDIBLE job of taking arcane financial products and bringing them into focus with concrete examples. They showed how this crisis built up and is now unwinding.
As painful as this is, I do take some comfort in the crisis happening now rather than a year or two from now when even more leverage would have been injected into the system. That would make things FAR WORSE. Don't believe me? Let me repeat the links that eldavojohn provided:
The first episode sets the stage extremely well and explains how the mortgage crisis got going.
The second episode built upon the first and so clearly explains how the leveraging of these financial instruments got us into the credit crisis we are in today.
Listen to those. If you do nothing else today, LISTEN TO THEM.
6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night
<nit>
That's 6.7 Meter effective diameter Telescope. The primary mirror has a diameter of 8.4m but the tertiary mirror (5.2m diameter) sits right in the middle of the primary, so its area needs to be subtracted from the primary. The area of the primary is pi*(8.4/2)^2 which is 55.4m^2 and the area of the tertiary is pi*(5.2/2)^2 which is 21.2m^2; a single mirror of that area would have a diameter of about 6.7m. </nit>
6.7 Meter Telescope To Capture 30 Terabytes Per Night
<grin>
Hey!! I thought information wanted to be free! And here they plan to go off and capture 30 TERAbytes? Each night? OMG!!!!11Eleventy!! Say it ain't so!! </grin>
Neither interview nor Link provides much information about the kind of attack. Between the lines they seem to be doing something with the ressource usage by manipulating tcp session parameters. But that's idle speculation for now.
I did not see a link in the article to put it all one page. I understand the temptation to garner additional ad revenue for laying out the article this way, but I appreciate even more when they provide a "print this article" or "show on one page" link for those of us who. don't. like. interrupted. reading.
Here's a plug for the Firefox addon:
Re-pagination. Just right click on the "Next" link at the top of the article and then select "Re-Pagination > All". Not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Alternatively, here are direct links to each of the pages in the article:
your statements defy all the setups in concerts that are being performed around the world even as of this moment.
It's the INPUTs! Having mixed a concert or two in my day, I can attest that there is a very big difference between the controls I have available at a mixing console and what I can do with previously-recorded music.
Consider a concert setup: EACH channel is the input from a single microphone on stage. There is no need to separate one singer's vocals from another; they are already separate! See:
mixing console.
Want the lead vocalist to be a little louder? No problem! Just boost the volume for THAT input. S/he is standing left of center? Adjust the pan and send more of the mix to the left output than to the right.
That kind of MIX is what gets put together and recorded to a CD. And once it is put together, it's much harder to get everything separated back again. That's why the mixer has all those separate inputs to begin with.
As to why there is an array of speakers, that's another matter. We had two active crossovers that split out low, mid, and highs that came out of the mixing console. One for the left and one for the right. From the active crossover, the bass went
to its own amplifier which, in turn, fed the bass bins. The mids went to their own amp which fed the horns. Lastly, the highs
went to its own amp which fed the tweeters. IIRC, we used a 300W amp for bass; 200W for horns, and 80W for the tweeters. On each side.
That kind of setup allowed us to use the speakers best able to reproduce certain parts of the audio spectrum and feed them the amount of power they needed. If we suddenly had available a larger venue, we could have taken the same mix as input, replaced the amps with more powerful ones, and added additional speakers.
Hey, this is awesome! Screw electronic voting. Screw pre-printed ballots in general! Just think -- if candidates were forced to rely on a write-in only process, voting participation would drop like a stone because the average American couldn't be bothered. Only the activists would show up, and the polls wouldn't be tainted by idiots who know nothing other than the contents of TV ads.(emphasis added)
That could be quite interesting! Here are my predictions on the names of some of the write-in candidates:
Barrack Obama
Barak Obama
Bareack Obama
Barack O'bama
Barack Omama
Barack O. Bama
John McKain
John MacCain
Jon McCain
Johann McCain
John McCane
John Mack Cain
As not even one of the above is the name of a candidate, all Bob Barr needs is for more people to be able to spell his
name correctly than they could the other candidates.
For a prank, Bob Barr could have a few people at each polling place who carried signs encouraging people to vote for the above, misspelled candidates. That couldn't possibly work. Could it?
However, one of the features of a Yahoo Mail account is the ability to download a backup copy of your mailbox as a single file. I believe the file format is the one used by Outlook Express, rather than the more universal.mbox format, but still, if the "hackers" didn't think to grab everything, I would be shocked.
OT: I know this is off-topic, but I've been looking for just such a tool for a while. I use "Classic Yahoo! Mail".
Yes, I know. There's better out there, but I've had it for so long, it's been easier to keep using it than to change.
And, fear of irrecoverably destroying e-mails when I do try to switch over.
I just took a spin through the available screens and tabs (again) and did not see anything that would allow me to download my entire Yahoo mailbox to my local PC. If I could do THAT (and do a restore from the D/L, too), then I'd feel more comfortable about exploring other e-mail apps.
Ideally, I'd like to download everything: e-mails, address book, folders, and the like.
So, how DO I download a copy of my Yahoo mailbox? What have you used and what problems, if any, did you run into?
Actually, no; I should have been clearer in my original post. I got a 403 (forbidden) error instead of the usual 404 (file not found) error when I tried to follow the Wiki link. I took a guess that the publicity from this PC Magazine article might have caused load issues.
If it were up to me, the easiest way to deal with it would be to change the permissions, temporarily. Later, when the load drops off, I'd just restore the permissions. So, assuming that's the case, the best thing would be to leave the Wiki link as-is and hope it clears up later.
As it stands, because the link was NOT fixed, knowing where it USED to be allowed me to use Google to locate another copy of it. "Fixing" the Wiki link would prevent that workaround.
<GrayBeardMode>
I was working at PR1ME when the Morris Worm hit. Nobody really new what was going on at first. Then word was getting out that there was something running rampant over the internet and our feed was taken down. Later it was learned that our systems had the wrong architecture and we were safe from the attack, but the impact on the net was so great that everything was glacially slow.
</GrayBeardMode>
There's a great write-up by Don Seeley, Department of Computer Science, University of Utah that (as posted by Francis Litterio). (I used to work with Fran - Hi there!) Anyway, the link to it from wikipedia
(Morris Worm)
is broken, but I found a copy in Google's cache at
"A Tour of the Worm".
There are other links available (e.g. to a pdf) if you search Google for this title, but I don't want to unnecessarily bog down someone's server. Highly recommended!!
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery.
Excellent post, but I'd like to comment specifically on the above excerpt.
Why does EACH PERSON who signs one of these contracts have to INDEPENDENTLY vet it for gotchas? The company has its team of lawyers construct ONE contract that is then read by thousands (millions?) of users. The cost to the company, per user, is minimal compared to what it would cost EACH USER to investigate the contract in all its ramifications.
What if there were a centralized means for users to share and comment on these contracts? After a few people have reviewed an agreement and shared the gotchas they have found, other users could benefit from that investigation, too, without having to start from scratch every single time.
Consider EULAs. I've seen well-reasoned discussions about them here. It seems to me that THIS discussion is of a similar nature. I cannot recall where I heard of it, but I've taken to using
EULAlyzer to review every EULA that I encounter. It helps point out aspects that I might otherwise overlook. I am aware of the risk of encountering a false negative (it might not notice something significant). Still, I'm a very happy user and have declined installing some apps on a number of occasions because of onerous terms it has brought to my attention.
Hmmm... Here's an opportunity for someone to start "ContractDot", based on the slashcode base (or roll your own from scratch). Any takers?
You have distance, rate of change of distance (speed) and rate of change of speed (acceleration). Gravity provides an acceleration, which is dependent on distance (meaning that you have a rate of change of acceleration due to gravity, which is what makes orbital calculations tricky). If two objects are moving away from each other, they have an initial speed. Gravity will be applying a force on them, which will be decreasing their speed, but their distance will keep increasing. As the distance increases, the effect of gravity decreases (it's proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance). As such, objects can continue to move away from each other (i.e. the volume encompassed by the distance between them will expand) without any reduction in gravity. The question is whether the initial impulse was enough to allow them to keep moving away from each other (continual expansion theory) or whether they will eventually start moving back towards each other and then collapse (big crunch theory).
Please mod parent up! This is the single, best explanation of this concept that I have ever seen. My hat is off to you!
Hmmm. Thinking of what you wrote, and at the risk of an over-simplification, would this be a viable analogy:
Imagine magnets with an explosive between them:
Two refrigerator magnets with a stick of TNT between them... they'll never recombine.
Two multi-ton superconducting electromagnets with a firecracker between them... they'll barely separate.
Several multi-ton superconducting electromagnets with some tens (hundreds, thousands) of pounds of TNT... well, it depends.
I'm trying to reconcile this with what I've read about dark matter/energy... would that be akin to adding some invisible magnets to the above?
Any story can be written so it comes out meaning something completely different to what really happens even if what you write isn't a lie per se.
Agreed. Slightly OT, but I'd like to elaborate on what you wrote; it reminds me of a definition I'd heard:
Honesty: The absence of the intent to deceive.
I can be utterly truthful but still be dishonest. For example:
"Sorry I'm late getting to work, boss. I'm not feeling well. You know there's some kind of nasty bug going around."
One would be excused for THINKING I had some kind of "nasty bug", but that WAS NOT stated. A hangover from heavy and late drinking the night before could also be covered by this example. So, just because each sentence in the example was *true* does not mean that the entire comment was *honest*.
Uncanny valley in a nutshell: Is it a "Good Robot" or a "Bad Human"?
But, there is an assumption about what is acceptable... what is the norm? At the moment, we're in a rapid transition phase. There are relatively few human-enough-like examples within our day-to-day existence. I would suggest that as these emulants (to coin a term) become more prevalent and pervasive, their familiarity will reduce the perception of their being bad.
We've come a long ways in the 35+ years since I used an ASR-33 Teletype over a 110-baud modem to a time-shared 8KB minicomputer. That sounds like a long time, and in some respects, it is. Today's generation has seen rapid advancements in game consoles, and even now, the best still appear really good, but still unreal. My guess is that in 5-10-20 years, when the visuals become even better, AND THERE HAS BEEN AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF FAMILIARITY, there will be less of a gap to leap. Not just because the visuals got better, but because we have become more familiar with them.
An aside: Look into the eyes of a young baby. Watch how they make eye contact, and don't let go. Watch how intently they examine you. That's setting up neurons and patterns of what is safe, good, bad, and everything else.
P.S. I wonder if the transition from the old black and white TVs to today's HDTV sets has run through a similar perception challenge?
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty simple at first; but what about transplants?
For example, would this ban using a pig's heart valve from being transplanted into a person? I had a family member who had this done!
Where do you draw the line? A whole heart? A heart AND a liver AND a lung?
Who decides where the line is? And what's to keep the line from moving? And do we even want to keep it from moving?
I can think of arguments for all of these.
Somewhat offtopic, but related. I have a similar question but with respect to a USB stick. It seems that over time and with repeated use, my USB stick has gotten slower and slower. There was an article here a while ago about such a slowdown with SSDs.
So is there a utility/tool (for windows) that can test/restore USB memory stick performance?
The researchers have identified that a "halfalogue" is confusing, but I'd like to share another aspect I did not see addressed in the article. It's not just what is being said, it's also how it's being said.
In polite conversation there is a protocol, if you will, of how I speak to someone else. Tone of voice, intonation, and the like provide information in addition to the words that I use. When I have a question and ask someone for an answer, there's a change in the tone of my voice at the end and then a pause while I await the other person's answer. Kind of an out-of-band signaling system.
To complicate matters, there are times when I've daydreamed while someone was talking to me, and then all of a sudden I realize that I have been asked a question and they are waiting for my answer.
So, when I'm only hearing part of a conversation, and then there's this ... pause ... there's a part of me that thinks "OMG, did I zone out and they are waiting for me to respond?" Since I do NOT hear the other side of the conversation, I get confusing inputs. Audio inputs suggest I should say something; visual inputs say it's not for me.
Hey! Thanks for that!!!!!
I'd heard variations on it several times but assumed it was just folklore or [un]conventional wisdom. Your post prompted me to search and find the article you mentioned: here's the abstract: Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement and here's a link to the full pdf document.
Thanks for the correction. Now that I see it in writing, I recall that's what they said during the program. Unfortunately, I was trying to write from memory and obviously got things backwards. Much obliged.
You obviously know more about these details than I. What I was working from was what I heard in the second program: Another Frightening Show About the Economy. You can download it for free at the moment from: here.
Here's the summary for part 2:
The segment was so well done, it's hard to summarize, but I'll do my best. In essence, "Credit Default Swaps" (CDS) were presented as a form of insurance that a lender could by so as to minimize the risk that a loan would default. So far, so good. Then, somebody realized they could by a CDS for a loan they did not even own. So what? It got out of hand when someone realized they could make money by buying a CDS for something that was questionable. How so? Like buying life insurance. Like buying life insurance on somebody ELSE. Who is old and feeble. I have an opportunity to buy a policy for, say, $1M on this person. And YOU have an opportunity to buy the same kind of policy from your agent. The sicker the person, the more of an incentive there is to buy in.
Now, replace "old and feeble person" with "Lehman Brothers". And for "insurance company", try "AIG". And multiply just You and Me with hundreds or thousands of CDSs in play. With many, many other companies. As I understand it, there was no regulatory limit on how many CDSs could be purchased on the exact same debt issue. And, because there was no mandatory reporting or the like on what CDSs were out there, we really don't know just how many of these are out there. With all the repackaging of these as securities, sliced and diced and sold as yet more instruments, we don't know just how bad the situation is.
Again, I cannot do the show justice. Listen to the podcast. I'd love to hear your take on it once you have done so.
YES! I whole-heartedly agree. I do not claim to be a financial maven, but I have been following the markets for a number of years and have some familiarity with the terms that have been bandied about as of late. But, these two shows did an INCREDIBLE job of taking arcane financial products and bringing them into focus with concrete examples. They showed how this crisis built up and is now unwinding.
As painful as this is, I do take some comfort in the crisis happening now rather than a year or two from now when even more leverage would have been injected into the system. That would make things FAR WORSE. Don't believe me? Let me repeat the links that eldavojohn provided: The first episode sets the stage extremely well and explains how the mortgage crisis got going. The second episode built upon the first and so clearly explains how the leveraging of these financial instruments got us into the credit crisis we are in today.
Listen to those. If you do nothing else today, LISTEN TO THEM.
From TFA title: (emphasis added)
<nit>
That's 6.7 Meter effective diameter Telescope. The primary mirror has a diameter of 8.4m but the tertiary mirror (5.2m diameter) sits right in the middle of the primary, so its area needs to be subtracted from the primary. The area of the primary is pi*(8.4/2)^2 which is 55.4m^2 and the area of the tertiary is pi*(5.2/2)^2 which is 21.2m^2; a single mirror of that area would have a diameter of about 6.7m.
</nit>
<grin>
Hey!! I thought information wanted to be free! And here they plan to go off and capture 30 TERAbytes? Each night? OMG!!!!11Eleventy!! Say it ain't so!!
</grin>
The title to the linked article is: 'Static' Blamed for D.C.'s Extra Votes Snafu
<Inigo_Montoya_mode>
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</Inigo_Montoya_mode>
Looks like you may be onto something; found this writeup with a bit more detail: New attacks reveal fundamental problems with TCP
Don't know enough about TCP/IP to comment, but maybe someone else here could elucidate or elaborate?
I'll take a stab at that one: the decryption key! <grin>
I did not see a link in the article to put it all one page. I understand the temptation to garner additional ad revenue for laying out the article this way, but I appreciate even more when they provide a "print this article" or "show on one page" link for those of us who. don't. like. interrupted. reading.
Here's a plug for the Firefox addon: Re-pagination. Just right click on the "Next" link at the top of the article and then select "Re-Pagination > All". Not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Alternatively, here are direct links to each of the pages in the article:
Chapter 1) In the Beginning
Chapter 2) Wiring the Web
Chapter 3) All About Email
Chapter 4) Welcome to the Social
Chapter 5) Online Media
Chapter 6) Web Property
Chapter 7) Web 1.0
Chapter 8) Web 2.0
Chapter 9) Law and Order
Chapter 10) Most Epic Fails
They gave credit at the end to some of the notable mentions that didn't make the final list.
It's the INPUTs! Having mixed a concert or two in my day, I can attest that there is a very big difference between the controls I have available at a mixing console and what I can do with previously-recorded music.
Consider a concert setup: EACH channel is the input from a single microphone on stage. There is no need to separate one singer's vocals from another; they are already separate! See: mixing console. Want the lead vocalist to be a little louder? No problem! Just boost the volume for THAT input. S/he is standing left of center? Adjust the pan and send more of the mix to the left output than to the right.
That kind of MIX is what gets put together and recorded to a CD. And once it is put together, it's much harder to get everything separated back again. That's why the mixer has all those separate inputs to begin with.
As to why there is an array of speakers, that's another matter. We had two active crossovers that split out low, mid, and highs that came out of the mixing console. One for the left and one for the right. From the active crossover, the bass went to its own amplifier which, in turn, fed the bass bins. The mids went to their own amp which fed the horns. Lastly, the highs went to its own amp which fed the tweeters. IIRC, we used a 300W amp for bass; 200W for horns, and 80W for the tweeters. On each side.
That kind of setup allowed us to use the speakers best able to reproduce certain parts of the audio spectrum and feed them the amount of power they needed. If we suddenly had available a larger venue, we could have taken the same mix as input, replaced the amps with more powerful ones, and added additional speakers.
That could be quite interesting! Here are my predictions on the names of some of the write-in candidates:
As not even one of the above is the name of a candidate, all Bob Barr needs is for more people to be able to spell his name correctly than they could the other candidates.
For a prank, Bob Barr could have a few people at each polling place who carried signs encouraging people to vote for the above, misspelled candidates. That couldn't possibly work. Could it?
OT: I know this is off-topic, but I've been looking for just such a tool for a while. I use "Classic Yahoo! Mail". Yes, I know. There's better out there, but I've had it for so long, it's been easier to keep using it than to change. And, fear of irrecoverably destroying e-mails when I do try to switch over.
I just took a spin through the available screens and tabs (again) and did not see anything that would allow me to download my entire Yahoo mailbox to my local PC. If I could do THAT (and do a restore from the D/L, too), then I'd feel more comfortable about exploring other e-mail apps.
Ideally, I'd like to download everything: e-mails, address book, folders, and the like.
So, how DO I download a copy of my Yahoo mailbox? What have you used and what problems, if any, did you run into?
I found a link on Thomas for the actual bill: Border Security Search Accountability Act of 2008 (Introduced in House). Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but hopefully it can clear up questions as to whether it applies only to U.S. Citizens, or to *anyone* who is crossing the border.
BTW: This is the PROPOSED text of the bill. It's by no means a law, yet, and is certainly subject to amendment before/if it ever it gets voted on.
Actually, no; I should have been clearer in my original post. I got a 403 (forbidden) error instead of the usual 404 (file not found) error when I tried to follow the Wiki link. I took a guess that the publicity from this PC Magazine article might have caused load issues.
If it were up to me, the easiest way to deal with it would be to change the permissions, temporarily. Later, when the load drops off, I'd just restore the permissions. So, assuming that's the case, the best thing would be to leave the Wiki link as-is and hope it clears up later.
As it stands, because the link was NOT fixed, knowing where it USED to be allowed me to use Google to locate another copy of it. "Fixing" the Wiki link would prevent that workaround.
<GrayBeardMode> I was working at PR1ME when the Morris Worm hit. Nobody really new what was going on at first. Then word was getting out that there was something running rampant over the internet and our feed was taken down. Later it was learned that our systems had the wrong architecture and we were safe from the attack, but the impact on the net was so great that everything was glacially slow. </GrayBeardMode>
There's a great write-up by Don Seeley, Department of Computer Science, University of Utah that (as posted by Francis Litterio). (I used to work with Fran - Hi there!) Anyway, the link to it from wikipedia (Morris Worm) is broken, but I found a copy in Google's cache at "A Tour of the Worm". There are other links available (e.g. to a pdf) if you search Google for this title, but I don't want to unnecessarily bog down someone's server. Highly recommended!!
Me, too... except those were my wisdom teeth. I cut my teeth on TSS-8 which ran on a PDP-8.
Now get off my lawn!! <grin>
Excellent post, but I'd like to comment specifically on the above excerpt.
Why does EACH PERSON who signs one of these contracts have to INDEPENDENTLY vet it for gotchas? The company has its team of lawyers construct ONE contract that is then read by thousands (millions?) of users. The cost to the company, per user, is minimal compared to what it would cost EACH USER to investigate the contract in all its ramifications.
What if there were a centralized means for users to share and comment on these contracts? After a few people have reviewed an agreement and shared the gotchas they have found, other users could benefit from that investigation, too, without having to start from scratch every single time.
Consider EULAs. I've seen well-reasoned discussions about them here. It seems to me that THIS discussion is of a similar nature. I cannot recall where I heard of it, but I've taken to using EULAlyzer to review every EULA that I encounter. It helps point out aspects that I might otherwise overlook. I am aware of the risk of encountering a false negative (it might not notice something significant). Still, I'm a very happy user and have declined installing some apps on a number of occasions because of onerous terms it has brought to my attention.
Hmmm... Here's an opportunity for someone to start "ContractDot", based on the slashcode base (or roll your own from scratch). Any takers?
Please mod parent up! This is the single, best explanation of this concept that I have ever seen. My hat is off to you!
Hmmm. Thinking of what you wrote, and at the risk of an over-simplification, would this be a viable analogy:
Imagine magnets with an explosive between them:
I'm trying to reconcile this with what I've read about dark matter/energy... would that be akin to adding some invisible magnets to the above?
That seems much safer than a Tolkein Ring!
Agreed. Slightly OT, but I'd like to elaborate on what you wrote; it reminds me of a definition I'd heard:
Honesty: The absence of the intent to deceive.
I can be utterly truthful but still be dishonest. For example:
One would be excused for THINKING I had some kind of "nasty bug", but that WAS NOT stated. A hangover from heavy and late drinking the night before could also be covered by this example. So, just because each sentence in the example was *true* does not mean that the entire comment was *honest*.
I RTFA, but I *still* don't know what Microsoft's and Google's server farms used for seeds! ;)
Uncanny valley in a nutshell: Is it a "Good Robot" or a "Bad Human"?
But, there is an assumption about what is acceptable... what is the norm? At the moment, we're in a rapid transition phase. There are relatively few human-enough-like examples within our day-to-day existence. I would suggest that as these emulants (to coin a term) become more prevalent and pervasive, their familiarity will reduce the perception of their being bad.
We've come a long ways in the 35+ years since I used an ASR-33 Teletype over a 110-baud modem to a time-shared 8KB minicomputer. That sounds like a long time, and in some respects, it is. Today's generation has seen rapid advancements in game consoles, and even now, the best still appear really good, but still unreal. My guess is that in 5-10-20 years, when the visuals become even better, AND THERE HAS BEEN AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF FAMILIARITY, there will be less of a gap to leap. Not just because the visuals got better, but because we have become more familiar with them.
An aside: Look into the eyes of a young baby. Watch how they make eye contact, and don't let go. Watch how intently they examine you. That's setting up neurons and patterns of what is safe, good, bad, and everything else.
P.S. I wonder if the transition from the old black and white TVs to today's HDTV sets has run through a similar perception challenge?