You forget one possibility: what if the situation this station would describe, the straight dope gathered right where shit happens down there, emphasizes Washington's ineptitude faced with this crisis even more?
A bit of "unexpected" red tape to force the new radio station to shut the hell up, at least temporarily, might be very welcome by the administration and the FEMA...
That's what's being done in France and Belgium. But there's a simple reason why it works there and not in the US: it's easy for people to recognize a cell phone number. In France, a cellphone number starts with 06, in Belgium, a cellphone number has 10 digits instead of 9. This means that someone who dials such a number knows he's calling a cellphone number, and therefore knows he's gonna be hit with a higher rate.
In the US, if you charged people more to dial a number that looks exactly like a landline phone number, you'd quickly have a slew of lawsuits from people who stayed on the phone for hours, only to discover it wasn't a normal phone number and they're broke or something. That's why the cost is shared in the US: the caller pays for whatever is normally paid to call a landline phone, and you pay the difference.
You think all the owners who buy sports cars, whether it's a base-model ford mustang or a top-end ferrari, are going to be satisfied "turning over all control" of their car and just reading the newspaper or watching a movie on the way to work?
Maybe it's high time to realize that pony cars and "sport" cars (whatever that means, the driver doesn't do any sport in them), as well as SUVs, with the manlyhood people think they get out of them, are a thing from a past where gasoline was cheap and inexhaustible.
My generation thinks a '69 Charger is cool. Today's teens are starting to seriously think hybrids, electrics and hydrogen-powered cars are cool. Their children will probably think the more ecological a car, the more hip it is. When people finally stop equating engine size and penis size, then manual overrides of futuristic sport cars will not be a problem, because people won't think in those terms, and there won't be sport cars. Cars will finally drop to the status of mere people transportation devices, which they are, no more, no less.
That is true only if all the cars on the freeway are driving on automatic. As long as you have human beings driving anywhere in the "train of cars", you can't maintain short bumper-to-bumper distances required for the throughput increase, and you'll have accidents.
What I mean to say is, either you mandate overnight that all cars have freeway autopilots to enter the freeway, and mandate that cars forcibly wrestle controls from stubborn drivers when entering the freeway, or the system will never work at all. Not to mention the issues of failed autopilots, and hacked ones (think rice-boy "modified timing ignition chip that gives 10 more hp but isn't reliable" sort of hack)...
In short, it's gonna be a long time until that solution gets implemented:-)
If there is money and power involved there is sure to be lies as well. That's why it is such a good thing that GNU/Linux is *FREE*
You are such a Slashbot... Linux is free as in SPEECH, not BEER. Do you think IBM, RH or other Linux powerhouses never spew crap about free software? They make money out of free software, therefore they'll say any old thing that can pass OSS enthusiasts' (fortunately low) bullshit radar to promote it. Stop dreaming...
Geeks like to do things differently. They're also early adopters. When blogs become the universal tool for 13 year olds to post about their feelings about becoming a woman, random guys posting about their new cars, all manners of Roland Piquepailles making a fat buck out of it, and any old idiot raving and ranting about things nobody gives a shit about, geeks get tired of it, disillusioned and move on to the next New Cool thing[tm] that's probably there already, just still under the radar.
Suppose Microsoft demonstrates with a (real) independant study that Windows is, say, 30% less expensive than any other OS. Is it really all that counts? What if 5 years from now Microsoft pulls another one of its format-change trick and my company can't read the documents it produced 5 years ago reliably?
I'd say having control of your software, giving you better control over the data that is produced and a fighting chance against malware, as opposed to being enslaved to a software manufacturer, benevolent as it might appear to be, is a big part of the decision too. The problem can't be presented simply as a pure immediate or mid-term savings proposition. Possible loss of data, loss of services, and loss of business due to them are a big part of the equation, but of course it's not as easy to sell as "look, this costs less".
UPS is a commercial venture, they may have grave problems, but it's not a matter of national security.
The DHS on the other hand, given the important task of securing the homeland that they've been given, if they can't be trusted to use something other than Windows connected directly to the net to do their job, they should be kicked in the butt.
My suspicion however is that they're not that stupid, they probably do have secure systems and networks, and that's what leads me to deduce that the statement in TFA about kids half-way around the globe being able to disable airport security is a crock of shit. Either way, the DHS should be investigated, either for negligence, or for misleading the public.
It is interesting that the U.S. government's FBI agency has become a world-wide police force.
Yes, especially considering how very careful all the other US administrations have been of not butting in other countries' affairs since the end of WWII...
The worm also is thought to have temporarily disabled the systems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to screen airline passengers entering the United States.
Oh so the airport screening machines are on the internet, are they? I feel safer in the hands of people as competent as the DHS already...
Or more likely, this is just another piece of DHS propaganda designed to enphasize how dangerous those virus writers are. So dangerous they can disable our precious airport security systems! Terrorists!!
- Organize adult-supervised bicycle rides for kids who live within 3 miles of their schools
- Stop buying computers for primary schools that provide little educational value compared to cheap books and good teachers. The savings could pay for school bus
- Replace old school bus with efficient new ones. Perhaps even a hybrid concept or something similar. Very high cost upfront, but gas savings.
- Raise taxes. Gap! yes! raise *YOUR* taxes so that *YOUR* children may go to school and have a chance at a good education and a good future, a concept America as a whole has completely forgotten for some reason.
Well, the AC got modded as troll, probably because of his wording. But I'll rephrase his point of view and present the opposite as well:
Pro-electronic music: synthesizer and samplers are instruments, just like a harpsichord or a bassoon. Instruments are just tools that channel the creativity of composers and performers. Therefore you still have to be a good composer or performer to make good music with electronics.
Against electronic music: synthesizer and samplers sounds very good with little to no effort or talent. Therefore, a whole generation of people without talent, or the ability or patience to learn to play an instrument through years or practice, started to spew out what they think is music, but really isn't much more than a cold, soulless collection of sounds at best.
This is a good thing, now if only the pharmaceutical companies would make alot of their stuff open to the public, maybe we'd all not suffer nearly as badly due to our wallets not being fat enough.
Methink you're talking bollocks for the sake of plugging "open source" somewhere...
What "stuff" is it that pharmaceutical companies need to "open to the public"?
New medicines must be fully disclosed when they undergo FDA approval, and they always end up completely open because they're patented, and a patent describe the invention/innovation completely. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how it is that countries like India or Brazil manage to copy the very latest in AIDS therapies.
The reason you pay dearly for medicines that haven't fallen in the public domain is because yoy purchase them from the patent holders, which hold a temporary monopoly on said medicines, and therefore make you pay whatever the hell they want, to recoup their development costs and to pay for their villas in Switzerland.
In short, it's nothing to do with being open, and all to do with patents. Wrong Slashdot meme there bubba...
Gotta love it when the critics come out of the woodwork. Even if the mission was completely flawless, they would still find something to carp about.
The mission wasn't flawless. If it had been, nobody would have had to stop work and spacewalk bits of things out of the heatshield. An hour of astronaut work up there is very, *very* costly. The time they took to make extra-sure the shuttle returns safely was a total waste of money.
It's also a useful tool for advocates who try to convince people to switch from Windows to another OS (no, not just Linux), the argument being "look, you wonder if Windows is insecure? how about a whole friggin book, with an ISBN and all, about how to do nasty things in Windows despite A/V software and anti-spywares!"
Slashdot Mirror
You forget one possibility: what if the situation this station would describe, the straight dope gathered right where shit happens down there, emphasizes Washington's ineptitude faced with this crisis even more?
A bit of "unexpected" red tape to force the new radio station to shut the hell up, at least temporarily, might be very welcome by the administration and the FEMA...
In addition to seeking a cease and desist, they are also apparently seeking "monetary damages."
Verizon will certainly redistribute the "monetary damages" to spammed customers, right? </sarcasm>
That's what's being done in France and Belgium. But there's a simple reason why it works there and not in the US: it's easy for people to recognize a cell phone number. In France, a cellphone number starts with 06, in Belgium, a cellphone number has 10 digits instead of 9. This means that someone who dials such a number knows he's calling a cellphone number, and therefore knows he's gonna be hit with a higher rate.
In the US, if you charged people more to dial a number that looks exactly like a landline phone number, you'd quickly have a slew of lawsuits from people who stayed on the phone for hours, only to discover it wasn't a normal phone number and they're broke or something. That's why the cost is shared in the US: the caller pays for whatever is normally paid to call a landline phone, and you pay the difference.
Every USB drive I've ever owned has started to get a little flaky after a bit
After only one bit? it really isn't reliable...
but don't like the Slashdot whore-link: clickey
You think all the owners who buy sports cars, whether it's a base-model ford mustang or a top-end ferrari, are going to be satisfied "turning over all control" of their car and just reading the newspaper or watching a movie on the way to work?
Maybe it's high time to realize that pony cars and "sport" cars (whatever that means, the driver doesn't do any sport in them), as well as SUVs, with the manlyhood people think they get out of them, are a thing from a past where gasoline was cheap and inexhaustible.
My generation thinks a '69 Charger is cool. Today's teens are starting to seriously think hybrids, electrics and hydrogen-powered cars are cool. Their children will probably think the more ecological a car, the more hip it is. When people finally stop equating engine size and penis size, then manual overrides of futuristic sport cars will not be a problem, because people won't think in those terms, and there won't be sport cars. Cars will finally drop to the status of mere people transportation devices, which they are, no more, no less.
That is true only if all the cars on the freeway are driving on automatic. As long as you have human beings driving anywhere in the "train of cars", you can't maintain short bumper-to-bumper distances required for the throughput increase, and you'll have accidents.
:-)
What I mean to say is, either you mandate overnight that all cars have freeway autopilots to enter the freeway, and mandate that cars forcibly wrestle controls from stubborn drivers when entering the freeway, or the system will never work at all. Not to mention the issues of failed autopilots, and hacked ones (think rice-boy "modified timing ignition chip that gives 10 more hp but isn't reliable" sort of hack)...
In short, it's gonna be a long time until that solution gets implemented
Neither. He was from Byzantium...
At LSU, he hopes to develop the next generation of high-performance computers that will give birth to true artificial intelligence.
In short, he has been given a job for life to do research almost nobody expects anything from anymore.
Wake me up when one of his high-performance computers pass the Turing test, if I didn't die of old age before...
If there is money and power involved there is sure to be lies as well. That's why it is such a good thing that GNU/Linux is *FREE*
You are such a Slashbot... Linux is free as in SPEECH, not BEER. Do you think IBM, RH or other Linux powerhouses never spew crap about free software? They make money out of free software, therefore they'll say any old thing that can pass OSS enthusiasts' (fortunately low) bullshit radar to promote it. Stop dreaming...
Geeks like to do things differently. They're also early adopters. When blogs become the universal tool for 13 year olds to post about their feelings about becoming a woman, random guys posting about their new cars, all manners of Roland Piquepailles making a fat buck out of it, and any old idiot raving and ranting about things nobody gives a shit about, geeks get tired of it, disillusioned and move on to the next New Cool thing[tm] that's probably there already, just still under the radar.
Suppose Microsoft demonstrates with a (real) independant study that Windows is, say, 30% less expensive than any other OS. Is it really all that counts? What if 5 years from now Microsoft pulls another one of its format-change trick and my company can't read the documents it produced 5 years ago reliably?
I'd say having control of your software, giving you better control over the data that is produced and a fighting chance against malware, as opposed to being enslaved to a software manufacturer, benevolent as it might appear to be, is a big part of the decision too. The problem can't be presented simply as a pure immediate or mid-term savings proposition. Possible loss of data, loss of services, and loss of business due to them are a big part of the equation, but of course it's not as easy to sell as "look, this costs less".
UPS != DHS
UPS is a commercial venture, they may have grave problems, but it's not a matter of national security.
The DHS on the other hand, given the important task of securing the homeland that they've been given, if they can't be trusted to use something other than Windows connected directly to the net to do their job, they should be kicked in the butt.
My suspicion however is that they're not that stupid, they probably do have secure systems and networks, and that's what leads me to deduce that the statement in TFA about kids half-way around the globe being able to disable airport security is a crock of shit. Either way, the DHS should be investigated, either for negligence, or for misleading the public.
It is interesting that the U.S. government's FBI agency has become a world-wide police force.
Yes, especially considering how very careful all the other US administrations have been of not butting in other countries' affairs since the end of WWII...
The worm also is thought to have temporarily disabled the systems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to screen airline passengers entering the United States.
Oh so the airport screening machines are on the internet, are they? I feel safer in the hands of people as competent as the DHS already...
Or more likely, this is just another piece of DHS propaganda designed to enphasize how dangerous those virus writers are. So dangerous they can disable our precious airport security systems! Terrorists!!
- Organize adult-supervised bicycle rides for kids who live within 3 miles of their schools
- Stop buying computers for primary schools that provide little educational value compared to cheap books and good teachers. The savings could pay for school bus
- Replace old school bus with efficient new ones. Perhaps even a hybrid concept or something similar. Very high cost upfront, but gas savings.
- Raise taxes. Gap! yes! raise *YOUR* taxes so that *YOUR* children may go to school and have a chance at a good education and a good future, a concept America as a whole has completely forgotten for some reason.
but don't like the Slashdot whore link: Clickey
Well, the AC got modded as troll, probably because of his wording. But I'll rephrase his point of view and present the opposite as well:
Pro-electronic music: synthesizer and samplers are instruments, just like a harpsichord or a bassoon. Instruments are just tools that channel the creativity of composers and performers. Therefore you still have to be a good composer or performer to make good music with electronics.
Against electronic music: synthesizer and samplers sounds very good with little to no effort or talent. Therefore, a whole generation of people without talent, or the ability or patience to learn to play an instrument through years or practice, started to spew out what they think is music, but really isn't much more than a cold, soulless collection of sounds at best.
My opinion is: yes, both.
This is a good thing, now if only the pharmaceutical companies would make alot of their stuff open to the public, maybe we'd all not suffer nearly as badly due to our wallets not being fat enough.
Methink you're talking bollocks for the sake of plugging "open source" somewhere...
What "stuff" is it that pharmaceutical companies need to "open to the public"?
New medicines must be fully disclosed when they undergo FDA approval, and they always end up completely open because they're patented, and a patent describe the invention/innovation completely. If you don't believe me, ask yourself how it is that countries like India or Brazil manage to copy the very latest in AIDS therapies.
The reason you pay dearly for medicines that haven't fallen in the public domain is because yoy purchase them from the patent holders, which hold a temporary monopoly on said medicines, and therefore make you pay whatever the hell they want, to recoup their development costs and to pay for their villas in Switzerland.
In short, it's nothing to do with being open, and all to do with patents. Wrong Slashdot meme there bubba...
This doesn't belong on Slashdot.
Of course it does. Given the sedentary lifestyle of many Slashdotters, it concerns them most directly.
Something tells me there was a carrier loss when they transmitted your DNA...
Gotta love it when the critics come out of the woodwork. Even if the mission was completely flawless, they would still find something to carp about.
The mission wasn't flawless. If it had been, nobody would have had to stop work and spacewalk bits of things out of the heatshield. An hour of astronaut work up there is very, *very* costly. The time they took to make extra-sure the shuttle returns safely was a total waste of money.
The suits are defensive, yes, they have to be. But pinheaded? I'd that that's a pretty big pin...
It's also a useful tool for advocates who try to convince people to switch from Windows to another OS (no, not just Linux), the argument being "look, you wonder if Windows is insecure? how about a whole friggin book, with an ISBN and all, about how to do nasty things in Windows despite A/V software and anti-spywares!"
Duh... You can't make a book about, say, subverting the NetBSD kernel. You have to have something to write to make a book you know.