If you feel that you're smart but easily bored and have a hard time sticking with something, find yourself a smallish college rather than a large university. There are way too many distractions at large schools, and much less support structure.
At a smaller school, your professors might actually a) teach your classes; b) learn your name; c) take some sort of interest in you. Just knowing that your professors know you might help keep you on the right path. You won't so easily blow off classes and/or assignments.
If you find that you're having trouble with something (academic or personal), and you will, it's more likely that you'll either seek help or someone will notice and offer a little help before a small problem becomes a big one.
A small school may offer more chances to develop strong and lasting friendships, too. You'll have more interaction with a smaller group of people, and some of those will become close friends.
You may be taller than your parents these days, but you've still got some emotional and intellectual growing to do. College is a good place for that, and it's often fun, but it's not always easy. Go find a place where you can get the support you need to work on the things that are hard for you.
As far as I can see, the paper fails to consider liability issues resulting from failing to patch security-related flaws. If an ISP, for example, fails to actively work to protect its systems from intrusion, it would seem likely that they'd be found negligent in cases where harm comes to its customers as a result of such intrusion. If, on the other hand, the same ISP endeavors to keep abreast of security warnings and to do as much as it is able to lock out intruders, one would think they'd be protected to at least some degree from claims of negligence.
On a microscopic level, individual system administrators have a strong personal interest in avoiding having to tell a CIO something like: "I've heard rumors that attacks like the one that just devastated our system might be possible, but nobody ever discovered a particular hole, so I ignored the issue. But look, here's a paper which says that searching for security flaws is probably just a waste of time and money. See? Even though this attack will cost us millions, think of the money we saved in not having to look for holes!"
If they did this in my home town. Sure, criminal activities will no longer take place under the watchful eye of the camera. They will just take place elsewhere.
On the other hand, I'll bet you'd be pretty pissed off if the cops came to your house and told you that you are no longer allowed to point your web cam out the window at the street below. You, of course, use it with some motion detection software to discourage miscreants from destroying your mailbox for the fifth time this month, and you firmly believe that you have more of a right to protect yourself and your property than those hoodlums have to destroy your stuff in privacy.
But these cameras interfere with my right to go wherever I goddamn please without someone knowing where I went, and where I went from there, and what I did while there, etc etc.
Can you point to the section of the Constitution that grants you that right?
I agree that we do have some sort of right to privacy, and apparently so do the courts. But that right is not so extensive that you can expect to go wherever you want without being seen.
Privacy IS important, because it means having the right to live life like you want it to
I'm not sure you have that right, either. For example, I'd certainly like to live out the rest of my life without ever again visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles. But if my chosen lifestyle includes driving on public roads, I'm obliged to visit my friendly neighborhood DMV every so often. You can stay home and shut yourself off from the rest of the world and be mostly anonymous if you want, but if you choose to live part of your life in public, you should expect that part of your life to be something other than unseen and anonymous.
Perhaps the real problem is not so much the cameras, but the fact that we criminalize certain victimless, consensual activities. I'd hate to see these cameras used to harass some shmoe who's sipping Thunderbird from a brown paper bag around the Inner Harbor at 3am. I don't mind so much if they're used to prevent a suspicious boat from attacking Baltimore's World Trade Center (which, for those that haven't been to the Inner Harbor, is built literally right on the water.
Hell, the Jacquard Loom had a stored program, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a computer.
It's possible to build a calculator using a microprocessor, meaning that they really would be a computer running a specific program, but it's cheaper to use an IC that does nothing but basic calculator functions.
It's not just possible, it's also pretty common for anything more than a basic four-function calculator.
In order to be a computer you need input, output, memory for code and data, and conditionals. Otherwise it's just a fancy calculator.
Your definition is both arbitrary and unnecessarily narrow. I suppose you think that all computers are digital? And that all digital computers are binary?
If you want a formal definition to make the argument more concrete, say that a computer must meet the requirements of a Turing machine, i.e. it must have:
- a set of states, including an input state - an alphabet - an input alphabet (subset of the alphabet above) - a set of state transitions
I haven't tried it myself, but I'd bet a dollar that you could implement the above in a PROM with a latch or two and some switches and lights.
I may be naive seeing as I'm only 20 years old and just getting started in the coding field (at my first job programming, I've been here just over a year), but it definitely seems to me that advanced degress != coding ability/work output.
Right, that's a pretty common mistake, and I see a lot of newbies make it. In fact, the actual relation is thus:
I haven't yet seen anyone comment on AdTI's namesake. Alexis de Tocqueville was the 19th century French author of Democracy in America, an influential examination of American government, politics, and society. Highly educated, he deeply valued truth, knowledge, and freedom.
A hypocrite, according to Webster, is someone who "puts on a false appearance of virtue." Kenneth Brown, by naming his organization after Alexis de Tocqueville, does exactly that: he's trying to pass off his loathesome tripe as scholarly research. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look beneath the surface that AdTI is a sham, but it's still a crime against that which de Tocqueville loved that Brown insists on dragging the name Alexis de Tocqueville through the mud.
Apparently Apple release the world's first PDA (even before Palm).
Indeed, Newton was a really interesting platform. I think it tried to do too much too soon... the handwriting recognition was cool, but not nearly good enough to be useful. Graffiti worked on the Newton, and that made it easier to use, but every Newton model ever released was too large to fit in a pocket. Palm PDA's were and are more successful because they do less better, and because they're small.
Also, to program on Newton you mostly had to use Dylan, which was very cool but very new and full of interesting but strange new ideas like "soup." You write apps for Palm in more traditional languages, so its easier for programmers to get into Palm development.
Newton was not a mistake, but a lot of mistakes were made in the product design for Newton. I'd guess that Palm was the main beneficiary of the lessons learned from Newton. But Newton always seemed to have a lot of potential, and the technology just wasn't quite there yet.
Finally, Newton was John Scully's pet project. Scully was an interesting guy, but he wasn't Jobs. Jobs is back now, and he obviously has a knack for understanding both the technology and the marketplace. I don't expect Apple to move into the PDA market anytime soon, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the iPod line start to fulfill a bit of the Newton potential.
Not really surprising since Apple designed and marketed the iPod as a music player. Personally, calling an iPod a music player isn't any more surprising than a person calling a Honda sedan a car. Sure, you can use that Honda as a place to sleep every night, but it's understood that sleeping was not what the Honda was designed for.
On the other hand, the Honda Civic is marketted as a relatively inexpensive economy car and not as a very fast sports car. One day someone with a little vision came along and realized that the Civic (certain versions, at least, like the '98 si) could be something very different from what the marketing folks said. A few suspension tweaks here, a chip there, and maybe some intake and exhaust work, and you get one hell of a speedy car.
iPod is a battery powered storage device that's tuned to play music and carry files from one place to another. There's no reason it has to remain in it's as-sold configuration, and the real question is whether it'll be Apple or creative third parties that soup it up first.
I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?
It's amazing how narrowly people seem to need to define the iPod. And I'm surprised that so many slashdotters can't seem to see past the "iPod == music player" shortsightedness.
iPod is a great music player, but it's also a great way to carry around a LOT of data of any kind.
iPod is also a hardware platform. That fact is emphasized by Apple's recent reorganization into a Macintosh group and an iPod group. At the moment it seems to be a relatively closed platform, but it has a processor, plenty of memory, a big disk, power, and I/O. It remains to be seen how Apple will use that platform, and when, but it's a pretty good guess that they'll do something interesting with it.
Backup purposes? Why backup onto an iPod? Hell, I don't see why you wouldn't install all the tools you need to work and carry your office around in your pocket, ready to go at home, at the office, or wherever you find a Mac. In short, the iPod gives you a lot of the portability of a laptop in a much more portable form factor.
The fact that it's a great music player too is almost a fringe benefit.
Yes, there are other small FireWire drives on the market, such as the FireLite drives. They're cheaper than an iPod, but they're larger, not as comfortable in the pocket, and they're lousy music players.
Why is it that every time an article links to the New York Times web site, the link is followed by some moronic blather about the NYT registration requirement. When articles from Fortune or Business 2.0 are linked, no such comment, despite the fact that NYT registration costs $0.00 while others require either a full-on magazine subscription or a monthly or daily fee.
If you object to the NYT requirement, you can register under an assumed name and stop complaining. You can't do that with the Fortune site, since you have to pay them somehow. It's not just the money, you have to give up your anonymity as well.
Please,/. editors, at least be consistant and warn us when you link to site that requires a paid subscription and doesn't offer an anonymous option.
i can't count how often something i've tried in the kitchen that chemically and scientifically should have worked fine, but in the end came out curdled, or tasteless, or fallen.
I've objected to the 'all cooking is science' theme myself here, so I agree with you to some extent. However, if your sauce curdles or your meat is tasteless or your souflé falls and you think it's because you left out "that certain artists' touch," then you're not a very good chef, and you probably ought to try watching Good Eats. There's no mystery as to why those things go wrong, and as a chef you damn well ought to understand that. When it happens, you sure as hell ought to know exactly why it happened, or at least understand that there is a reason it happened beyond dumb luck or the number of stripes on your toque.
Now, if your plate is ugly, or if the pomegranite reduction doesn't quite fit with the garlic mashed potatoes, I'd say you could use a bit more of the artist's touch. But I'll bet you a meal for two at the French Laundry that Thomas Keller relies at least as much on his technical prowess as he does on his artistic flair.
There's plenty of science in cooking, but there's plenty of art, too. You can't create a great bronze statue without knowing (or working with someone who knows) a hell of a lot about the casting process, and about how bronze flows and how it cools and like that. But you also can't create a great bronze statue without an appreciation for form and design.
Cooking is just the same. To cook well, you need to know what's going on, what happens when you do something, and what you need to do in order to achieve the desired effect. That's the science and the technology of cooking. But to cook well you also need to have an appreciation of where you want to go, what you're trying to create. You need to have an appreciation for food. You need to understand what's "good" and what's "bad." The science really doesn't speak to that. And it's not just flavors and textures... food is a visual thing, so a good cook makes food that looks good.
I'm a big fan of Good Eats, and I think AB has done a huge service to the world by demystifying cooking for zillions of people. The important thrust of Good Eats is that cooking is something that you can learn and understand and control. It's rational, not magical or mysterious.
The problem isn't so much that APE framework code is broken or buggy in the sense that the framework itself causes crashes. The problem seems to be that the APE framework is unsafe in that it allows other code (APE modules) to cause problems for other apps. I suppose you could say that the APE framework correctly implements a flawed or dangerous design.
1) Unless you encrypt them, your emails are not private. No encryption == no privacy. It's that simple. The ignorance of the masses regarding this fact does not make it any less true.
When you go out in public, you're out there for all to see and hear. Yet Slashdotters routinely rail against facial recognition software used in airports, stadia, and other public places for security, and they fear and disdain use of such software with data mining systems such as the thankfully defunct TIA. Furthermore, although we know we might be photographed or otherwise recorded when we appear in public, we also require that those recordings must not be used for most commercial purposes unless we sign a release.
So like I said, there's a gray area between total privacy and a complete openness.
) Laws like this have a way of coming back to bite us in the ass. Suppose you want your emails scanned and routinely data-mined, for example. In such a case, there is no victim, so what good is the law?
You should read the bill. And let's be clear here, this is currently a bill and is not yet a law. The bill mostly just prohibits e-mail providers from scanning mail for the purposes of compiling information about you and selling it to third parties. Scanning your mail in order to enable "...address book, calendar, and other user-initiated functions..." is okay, as is scanning your e-mail to filter out spam and viruses. As I read the bill, building an index of messages is probably okay, so long as they don't give or sell the index info to third parties.
Basically, the bill seems pretty reasonable and wouldn't seem to interfere with a company that's trying to legitimately provide a service to users. It would seem prevent unscrupulous providers from doing (some) unscrupulous things.
There are even a few amusing tidbits in the bill. For one thing, it talks about preventing employees and other "natural persons" from reading a user's e-mail under most circumstances. I can only assume that computers are therefore "artificial persons," which means that we're making some serious progress toward living in the world of Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad."
And what if that new cellular service became so profitable that all the other cellular service providers also adopted that as their only business model? How would you like it if you never had to pay for a call again, but you couldn't find a provider who offered ad-free service, or who promised not to listen in on your calls? After all, if 90% of the market loves the free service and doesn't care about the privacy issues, who are you to say they shouldn't have it? And who are you to demand that the service providers go out of their way to deal with your antiquated notion of what their service *ought* to be? Presto, you no longer have a right to choose what kind of service you want, because the service you want is no longer available.
There's a grey area here. The net is infrastructure just like the phone system or the highway system or the mail system. As such, the government (federal government at least, and perhaps the state government too) has not only a right, but also a responsibility to regulate to some degree how it works and what we should be able to expect from it.
E-mail is one of the most widely used services on the net, even if you toss out all the spam. The general public uses it without necessarily knowing how it works, and there's a widespread presumption that even if e-mail isn't exactly guaranteed to be private, it's also generally not parsed and analyzed by the service providers. Given that, it seems reasonable for a government to try to protect that expectation.
I don't know if it'll work or not -- it seems like there's probably plenty of room for a legal challenge. But it also doesn't seem like a huge obstacle, and I can think of a dozen ways to abide by the regulation and still implement exactly the same sort of advertising model that Google is trying to use.
It's not that one shouldn't keep an open mind. It's just that it's a little late to presume that Novell is "innocent," because a judge found that they did in fact have this secret arrangement with Caldera.
It's nice that you want to keep an open mind, but paragraphs 3, 4, and 5 of Judge Jackson's findings, Novell did indeed arrange secretly for Caldera to sue Microsoft, essentially on Novell's behalf. I think that qualifies as "proven guilty."
I'd say that at least 30% of the physical mail I receive on a typical day is junk mail, which is just the real world version of spam. On some days, it's a lot more than 30% junk.
An interesting point about physical junk mail, by the way, is that it costs money to produce and it costs money to send. And yet, continue to get the same crap day after day. There are a lot of people out there who think that the key to stopping spam is going to be charging the sender for sending mail. But real world experience shows us that it just ain't so... physical mail costs a lot more to produce and send than anyone has proposed charging for e-mail, and we still get plenty of junk mail.
I think the real key is going to be something akin to the national do-not-call list. In fact, it could be an extension of it. You could register an address (street or e-mail) and say that you choose not to receive unsolicited commercial mail. That, combined with better regulations requring accurate sender information, could really help.
Slashdot Mirror
I like working at home in the nude, but that's not something other people need to be exposed to!
Sadly, it's now too late.
If you feel that you're smart but easily bored and have a hard time sticking with something, find yourself a smallish college rather than a large university. There are way too many distractions at large schools, and much less support structure.
At a smaller school, your professors might actually a) teach your classes; b) learn your name; c) take some sort of interest in you. Just knowing that your professors know you might help keep you on the right path. You won't so easily blow off classes and/or assignments.
If you find that you're having trouble with something (academic or personal), and you will, it's more likely that you'll either seek help or someone will notice and offer a little help before a small problem becomes a big one.
A small school may offer more chances to develop strong and lasting friendships, too. You'll have more interaction with a smaller group of people, and some of those will become close friends.
You may be taller than your parents these days, but you've still got some emotional and intellectual growing to do. College is a good place for that, and it's often fun, but it's not always easy. Go find a place where you can get the support you need to work on the things that are hard for you.
As far as I can see, the paper fails to consider liability issues resulting from failing to patch security-related flaws. If an ISP, for example, fails to actively work to protect its systems from intrusion, it would seem likely that they'd be found negligent in cases where harm comes to its customers as a result of such intrusion. If, on the other hand, the same ISP endeavors to keep abreast of security warnings and to do as much as it is able to lock out intruders, one would think they'd be protected to at least some degree from claims of negligence.
On a microscopic level, individual system administrators have a strong personal interest in avoiding having to tell a CIO something like: "I've heard rumors that attacks like the one that just devastated our system might be possible, but nobody ever discovered a particular hole, so I ignored the issue. But look, here's a paper which says that searching for security flaws is probably just a waste of time and money. See? Even though this attack will cost us millions, think of the money we saved in not having to look for holes!"
If they did this in my home town. Sure, criminal activities will no longer take place under the watchful eye of the camera. They will just take place elsewhere.
On the other hand, I'll bet you'd be pretty pissed off if the cops came to your house and told you that you are no longer allowed to point your web cam out the window at the street below. You, of course, use it with some motion detection software to discourage miscreants from destroying your mailbox for the fifth time this month, and you firmly believe that you have more of a right to protect yourself and your property than those hoodlums have to destroy your stuff in privacy.
But these cameras interfere with my right to go wherever I goddamn please without someone knowing where I went, and where I went from there, and what I did while there, etc etc.
Can you point to the section of the Constitution that grants you that right?
I agree that we do have some sort of right to privacy, and apparently so do the courts. But that right is not so extensive that you can expect to go wherever you want without being seen.
Privacy IS important, because it means having the right to live life like you want it to
I'm not sure you have that right, either. For example, I'd certainly like to live out the rest of my life without ever again visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles. But if my chosen lifestyle includes driving on public roads, I'm obliged to visit my friendly neighborhood DMV every so often. You can stay home and shut yourself off from the rest of the world and be mostly anonymous if you want, but if you choose to live part of your life in public, you should expect that part of your life to be something other than unseen and anonymous.
Perhaps the real problem is not so much the cameras, but the fact that we criminalize certain victimless, consensual activities. I'd hate to see these cameras used to harass some shmoe who's sipping Thunderbird from a brown paper bag around the Inner Harbor at 3am. I don't mind so much if they're used to prevent a suspicious boat from attacking Baltimore's World Trade Center (which, for those that haven't been to the Inner Harbor, is built literally right on the water.
It does not have a stored program.
Hell, the Jacquard Loom had a stored program, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a computer.
It's possible to build a calculator using a microprocessor, meaning that they really would be a computer running a specific program, but it's cheaper to use an IC that does nothing but basic calculator functions.
It's not just possible, it's also pretty common for anything more than a basic four-function calculator.
In order to be a computer you need input, output, memory for code and data, and conditionals. Otherwise it's just a fancy calculator.
Your definition is both arbitrary and unnecessarily narrow. I suppose you think that all computers are digital? And that all digital computers are binary?
If you want a formal definition to make the argument more concrete, say that a computer must meet the requirements of a Turing machine, i.e. it must have:
- a set of states, including an input state
- an alphabet
- an input alphabet (subset of the alphabet above)
- a set of state transitions
I haven't tried it myself, but I'd bet a dollar that you could implement the above in a PROM with a latch or two and some switches and lights.
Right, that's a pretty common mistake, and I see a lot of newbies make it. In fact, the actual relation is thus:
I haven't yet seen anyone comment on AdTI's namesake. Alexis de Tocqueville was the 19th century French author of Democracy in America , an influential examination of American government, politics, and society. Highly educated, he deeply valued truth, knowledge, and freedom.
A hypocrite, according to Webster, is someone who "puts on a false appearance of virtue." Kenneth Brown, by naming his organization after Alexis de Tocqueville, does exactly that: he's trying to pass off his loathesome tripe as scholarly research. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look beneath the surface that AdTI is a sham, but it's still a crime against that which de Tocqueville loved that Brown insists on dragging the name Alexis de Tocqueville through the mud.
Apparently Apple release the world's first PDA (even before Palm).
Indeed, Newton was a really interesting platform. I think it tried to do too much too soon... the handwriting recognition was cool, but not nearly good enough to be useful. Graffiti worked on the Newton, and that made it easier to use, but every Newton model ever released was too large to fit in a pocket. Palm PDA's were and are more successful because they do less better, and because they're small.
Also, to program on Newton you mostly had to use Dylan, which was very cool but very new and full of interesting but strange new ideas like "soup." You write apps for Palm in more traditional languages, so its easier for programmers to get into Palm development.
Newton was not a mistake, but a lot of mistakes were made in the product design for Newton. I'd guess that Palm was the main beneficiary of the lessons learned from Newton. But Newton always seemed to have a lot of potential, and the technology just wasn't quite there yet.
Finally, Newton was John Scully's pet project. Scully was an interesting guy, but he wasn't Jobs. Jobs is back now, and he obviously has a knack for understanding both the technology and the marketplace. I don't expect Apple to move into the PDA market anytime soon, but I wouldn't be surprised at all to see the iPod line start to fulfill a bit of the Newton potential.
Not really surprising since Apple designed and marketed the iPod as a music player. Personally, calling an iPod a music player isn't any more surprising than a person calling a Honda sedan a car. Sure, you can use that Honda as a place to sleep every night, but it's understood that sleeping was not what the Honda was designed for.
On the other hand, the Honda Civic is marketted as a relatively inexpensive economy car and not as a very fast sports car. One day someone with a little vision came along and realized that the Civic (certain versions, at least, like the '98 si) could be something very different from what the marketing folks said. A few suspension tweaks here, a chip there, and maybe some intake and exhaust work, and you get one hell of a speedy car.
iPod is a battery powered storage device that's tuned to play music and carry files from one place to another. There's no reason it has to remain in it's as-sold configuration, and the real question is whether it'll be Apple or creative third parties that soup it up first.
I can;t even fill my 30Gb Nomad. What the hell are you going to do with 60Gb?
It's amazing how narrowly people seem to need to define the iPod. And I'm surprised that so many slashdotters can't seem to see past the "iPod == music player" shortsightedness.
iPod is a great music player, but it's also a great way to carry around a LOT of data of any kind.
iPod is also a hardware platform. That fact is emphasized by Apple's recent reorganization into a Macintosh group and an iPod group. At the moment it seems to be a relatively closed platform, but it has a processor, plenty of memory, a big disk, power, and I/O. It remains to be seen how Apple will use that platform, and when, but it's a pretty good guess that they'll do something interesting with it.
Yes it can be used for backup purposes. But...
Backup purposes? Why backup onto an iPod? Hell, I don't see why you wouldn't install all the tools you need to work and carry your office around in your pocket, ready to go at home, at the office, or wherever you find a Mac. In short, the iPod gives you a lot of the portability of a laptop in a much more portable form factor.
The fact that it's a great music player too is almost a fringe benefit.
Yes, there are other small FireWire drives on the market, such as the FireLite drives. They're cheaper than an iPod, but they're larger, not as comfortable in the pocket, and they're lousy music players.
Why is it that every time an article links to the New York Times web site, the link is followed by some moronic blather about the NYT registration requirement. When articles from Fortune or Business 2.0 are linked, no such comment, despite the fact that NYT registration costs $0.00 while others require either a full-on magazine subscription or a monthly or daily fee.
/. editors, at least be consistant and warn us when you link to site that requires a paid subscription and doesn't offer an anonymous option.
If you object to the NYT requirement, you can register under an assumed name and stop complaining. You can't do that with the Fortune site, since you have to pay them somehow. It's not just the money, you have to give up your anonymity as well.
Please,
i can't count how often something i've tried in the kitchen that chemically and scientifically should have worked fine, but in the end came out curdled, or tasteless, or fallen.
I've objected to the 'all cooking is science' theme myself here, so I agree with you to some extent. However, if your sauce curdles or your meat is tasteless or your souflé falls and you think it's because you left out "that certain artists' touch," then you're not a very good chef, and you probably ought to try watching Good Eats. There's no mystery as to why those things go wrong, and as a chef you damn well ought to understand that. When it happens, you sure as hell ought to know exactly why it happened, or at least understand that there is a reason it happened beyond dumb luck or the number of stripes on your toque.
Now, if your plate is ugly, or if the pomegranite reduction doesn't quite fit with the garlic mashed potatoes, I'd say you could use a bit more of the artist's touch. But I'll bet you a meal for two at the French Laundry that Thomas Keller relies at least as much on his technical prowess as he does on his artistic flair.
"The only subjective part is when you eat it."
There's plenty of science in cooking, but there's plenty of art, too. You can't create a great bronze statue without knowing (or working with someone who knows) a hell of a lot about the casting process, and about how bronze flows and how it cools and like that. But you also can't create a great bronze statue without an appreciation for form and design.
Cooking is just the same. To cook well, you need to know what's going on, what happens when you do something, and what you need to do in order to achieve the desired effect. That's the science and the technology of cooking. But to cook well you also need to have an appreciation of where you want to go, what you're trying to create. You need to have an appreciation for food. You need to understand what's "good" and what's "bad." The science really doesn't speak to that. And it's not just flavors and textures... food is a visual thing, so a good cook makes food that looks good.
I'm a big fan of Good Eats, and I think AB has done a huge service to the world by demystifying cooking for zillions of people. The important thrust of Good Eats is that cooking is something that you can learn and understand and control. It's rational, not magical or mysterious.
The problem isn't so much that APE framework code is broken or buggy in the sense that the framework itself causes crashes. The problem seems to be that the APE framework is unsafe in that it allows other code (APE modules) to cause problems for other apps. I suppose you could say that the APE framework correctly implements a flawed or dangerous design.
1) Unless you encrypt them, your emails are not private. No encryption == no privacy. It's that simple. The ignorance of the masses regarding this fact does not make it any less true.
When you go out in public, you're out there for all to see and hear. Yet Slashdotters routinely rail against facial recognition software used in airports, stadia, and other public places for security, and they fear and disdain use of such software with data mining systems such as the thankfully defunct TIA. Furthermore, although we know we might be photographed or otherwise recorded when we appear in public, we also require that those recordings must not be used for most commercial purposes unless we sign a release.
So like I said, there's a gray area between total privacy and a complete openness.
) Laws like this have a way of coming back to bite us in the ass. Suppose you want your emails scanned and routinely data-mined, for example. In such a case, there is no victim, so what good is the law?
You should read the bill. And let's be clear here, this is currently a bill and is not yet a law. The bill mostly just prohibits e-mail providers from scanning mail for the purposes of compiling information about you and selling it to third parties. Scanning your mail in order to enable "...address book, calendar, and other user-initiated
functions..." is okay, as is scanning your e-mail to filter out spam and viruses. As I read the bill, building an index of messages is probably okay, so long as they don't give or sell the index info to third parties.
Basically, the bill seems pretty reasonable and wouldn't seem to interfere with a company that's trying to legitimately provide a service to users. It would seem prevent unscrupulous providers from doing (some) unscrupulous things.
There are even a few amusing tidbits in the bill. For one thing, it talks about preventing employees and other "natural persons" from reading a user's e-mail under most circumstances. I can only assume that computers are therefore "artificial persons," which means that we're making some serious progress toward living in the world of Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad."
And what if that new cellular service became so profitable that all the other cellular service providers also adopted that as their only business model? How would you like it if you never had to pay for a call again, but you couldn't find a provider who offered ad-free service, or who promised not to listen in on your calls? After all, if 90% of the market loves the free service and doesn't care about the privacy issues, who are you to say they shouldn't have it? And who are you to demand that the service providers go out of their way to deal with your antiquated notion of what their service *ought* to be? Presto, you no longer have a right to choose what kind of service you want, because the service you want is no longer available.
There's a grey area here. The net is infrastructure just like the phone system or the highway system or the mail system. As such, the government (federal government at least, and perhaps the state government too) has not only a right, but also a responsibility to regulate to some degree how it works and what we should be able to expect from it.
E-mail is one of the most widely used services on the net, even if you toss out all the spam. The general public uses it without necessarily knowing how it works, and there's a widespread presumption that even if e-mail isn't exactly guaranteed to be private, it's also generally not parsed and analyzed by the service providers. Given that, it seems reasonable for a government to try to protect that expectation.
I don't know if it'll work or not -- it seems like there's probably plenty of room for a legal challenge. But it also doesn't seem like a huge obstacle, and I can think of a dozen ways to abide by the regulation and still implement exactly the same sort of advertising model that Google is trying to use.
It'd be nice if it turned out that all these projects are intended to do things like:
- locate areas where increases in education, public health, and crime prevention spending would have a large positive impact
- identify major sources of pollution
- find patterns of police brutality
- predict and avoid major traffic problems
Somehow, I don't get the feeling that these are the goals of most of these projects.
when i have to choose between the big three (Tully's, Seattle's Best, and Starbucks)
If I'm not mistaken, Starbucks now owns Seattle's Best. So it's really more like "big two," or perhaps "enormous one" and "nice try."
It's not that one shouldn't keep an open mind. It's just that it's a little late to presume that Novell is "innocent," because a judge found that they did in fact have this secret arrangement with Caldera.
it has to be said, innocent until proven guilty
It's nice that you want to keep an open mind, but paragraphs 3, 4, and 5 of Judge Jackson's findings, Novell did indeed arrange secretly for Caldera to sue Microsoft, essentially on Novell's behalf. I think that qualifies as "proven guilty."
So, if I send 1 bit per second for a year, is that more okay than sending 100 kbits per second for 1 second?
Also, if I send 1 bit every 100 seconds, can I round off and just call it 0 bits per second?
I don't think we need to worry too much about Diebold setting up any sort of trusted computing platform correctly.
I'd say that at least 30% of the physical mail I receive on a typical day is junk mail, which is just the real world version of spam. On some days, it's a lot more than 30% junk.
An interesting point about physical junk mail, by the way, is that it costs money to produce and it costs money to send. And yet, continue to get the same crap day after day. There are a lot of people out there who think that the key to stopping spam is going to be charging the sender for sending mail. But real world experience shows us that it just ain't so... physical mail costs a lot more to produce and send than anyone has proposed charging for e-mail, and we still get plenty of junk mail.
I think the real key is going to be something akin to the national do-not-call list. In fact, it could be an extension of it. You could register an address (street or e-mail) and say that you choose not to receive unsolicited commercial mail. That, combined with better regulations requring accurate sender information, could really help.
I guess some people see constant litigation as cheap advertisement....
And that's as much an abuse of the legal system as SCO's litigation-as-business model strategy.