You know have noticed the internet acronym "IMHO" in my post. Not exactly a common internet acronym i guess, though you see it fairly often on slashdot etc. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imho (in short, in my humble opinion). Emphasis on the opinion. I'd be fascinated by any statistics, but I don't have any. I'll google around a little bit, but it's hard to track this kind of thing.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for the Democratic Party in NC, and a number of years ago they briefly stopped selling bumper stickers, only to face a lot of popular discontent from people who were big fans of the bumper stickers (and reversed their decision). ~shrug~
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.
That's true to a degree, but ultimately, whether you consider yourself "pro-choice," "pro-life," whatever, you're arguing over one action--aborting a fetus. And those on one side want that to be legal, and the other want it to be illegal. The rest is just semantics.
"Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter" seems to me a bit disingenuous. I don't see many (and I'll bow to your preferences and use the term "pro-choice") pro-choice people arguing against the government's vital role in funding Planned Parenthood for instance. If you're really taking a libertarian view, one should probably argue against planned parenthood's dependent relationship. Not trying to put words in your mouth here, maybe you're consistent in your position, but most people I've met haven't made that argument.
I don't disagree with you at all. Using your car to proclaim your political beliefs doesn't know any partisan boundaries.
HOWEVER, I've actually kept track at times, and I think my estimate of 99% liberal is not that off (at least in some of the places I've lined in the past 5 years--Chicago (duh), VA/DC (duh), North Carolina (not exactly "blue state")). Not at all arguing that nobody conservative puts on bumperstickers (my favorite example "Hippie Peace -- More dangerous that nuclear war") but that they do so in much, much smaller number than liberals. Furthermore I can't remember the last time I saw a car with:
a) multiple conservative bumper stickers (there's one with multiple liberal bumper stickers parked across te street from me right now!) b) anti-liberal politican bumper sticker (on the contrary, I see many that specifically target bush, or cheney, etc)
Also, I've noticed, purely anecdotal imho, but anybody with multiple bumper stickers (even if they're non-partisan stickers) seems much more likely to be a bad driver:-P
"Conservative" means nothing anymore... .... "conservatives" are nothing more but against taxes... embrace war against drugs/crime/poverty/nations... and lastly, wear their religion on their sleeve yet none of it in their hearts except when convenient.
Not to (borrowing your term) pidgeonhole anyone or anything...
wear their religion on their sleeve yet none of it in their hearts except when convenient.
You know, that's how I feel whenever I see people with bumper stickers slathered all over their cars (who are, imho, 99% of the time liberal). Why is it so important that other people know that you're a vegan, are pro-abortion, etc, or, my personal favorite, are mad that the US was "One pretzel away from getting rid of Bush." ~shrug~
Not arguing that many of the early Communists were... at the very least, very optimistic. I personally find that Marx created a really excellent critique of the capital system of his day. I think he and many others faltered when it came to finding solutions. But that's really neither here nor there:-)
Now what they seem to think will happen is that everyone will turn to the betterment of themselves given no constraints upon their resources. What I think they skip over is the century or two where they gave all the undesirables unlimited holodeck access until they keeled over dead.
It's the same narrative as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Narrative, Ibn Khaldun's muqaddimah, etc. Empires rise, become decadent (ie, turn themselves to the arts, consumption, etc) and fall, to be replaced by more.. vivacious peoples.
I don't think the definition of a software patch means a problem necessarily HAS to be solved. Afterall, even if ineffective, you're still patching new code/functionality/whatever into an existing program's binary or source code (think patching as in patching a quilt or clothes, etc, rather than as a bandage)
Why? Because changing the label from Beta to Finished would magically make them better? Everything i've used from Google has been free so far, so why the hell do i care what the 'state' of the product is. I'd rather 'beta' some product for free than wait until it's 'finish' before using it for free.
That's great for some people. For instance, with google for domains--I've been using it on my perosnal domain and its perfect for that. On the other hand, I don't know the roadmap and longterm plans, stability guarantees etc that I would require to recommend it for businesses I've worked with.
Which do you expect to be more secure, an app running natively on your local machine, with access to all of your operating system's system calls, or one running in a sandbox designed for untrusted code?
Web apps and the browers IE, Firefox, Safari, etc don't exactly have a great track record of being secure (css, etc!). I can jail, firewall, etc and control everything that runs on my own computer. If I'm using open source, I can compile it myself. Don't generally have that freedom with webapps.
Privacy is only a concern if someone else is hosting the web app - if it's on your own server then it's often more convenient than carrying a laptop around.
By separating the "correct" answer from the human judge you are, I think, describing a subtly different game. The umpire matters fundamentally in the game, and cannot be ignored. Certainly, tennis would be rather different if every decision were mechanical.
The umpire isn't critical to the game--after all, 99% of tennis games are called by the players themselves. How would tennis be "rather different" if every decision were mechanical? Well, it would remove cheating and human inconsistency, that's all I can think of--am I missing anything?
When you refer to the correct answer, you're effectively claiming that no judge is needed since the answer already exists (in some kind of Platonic ideal) and can always be calculated in principle.
Interesting, but one doesn't have to resort to theory/philosophy/etc -- there IS a correct answer. The ball is in, or it's out.
I assume you're one of the authors? Just thought I'd add a comment that the performance must be fairly variable between OS/browsers at the current stage. I have absolutely no complaints under Safari and Webkit nightlies (which stands to reason I suppose)--seems fast.
Win2k3 IE7 took substantially longer to load initially, but then seemed fairly fast (not quite as fast as safari it seems)
Win2k3 FF2 was in between IE7 and Safari.
Really awesome app--I'm inspired to finally pick up some more Cocoa!
I'm willing to concede that you are talking theory at some level I don't fully grok. What I think you're completely missing in this discussion stems from your original statement that"system such as Hawkeye CANNOT BE MORE ACCURATE than humans", which does not seem to be possibly true by any standard definition of these words that I am familiar with.
You can talk about "error criterions" and odd offtopic tangents about targeting algorithms etc, but the bottom line is, your original statement is completely wrong.
You say "So Hawkeye has to complement the equations with an ARBITRARY rule, eg least squares, and this arbitrariness makes the Hawkeye estimate neither more accurate nor less accurate than humans".
That's both wrong and illogical. Yes, Hawkeye is estimating a solution, and using a "arbitrary" (again, this is utterly bizarre and incorrect word choice--the makers of Hawkeye have presumably done a great deal of testing to pick an algorithm, which is NOT arbitrary) method to estimate. However, if Hawkeye ESTIMATES the correct answer more often than a human judge then, Hawkeye is more accurate than a human judge. The methods it uses are really completely irrelevant to the final answer.
So in short, it seems that this is a discussion in your usages of "accurate," "error," "arbitrary," etc are different than the rest of the people in the thread.. Please let me know if I'm misinterpreting something though!
*sigh* I've apparently found out that such guys don't exist on European servers.
That's actually interesting. Would be nice to know more than just one person's experiences though.
It's likely that Europeans being less sex-retentive than us don't provide such fundamental benefits to females that we enjoy here in America that they don't see a benefit to acting like girls to get stuff.
Or maybe European women/girls don't play as many video games as females in the US, throwing things off. Maybe US males are more secure in their sexuality and don't have a problem playing as female characters. Who knows, I'm sure I (and others) could come up with some more equally weird (and probably wrong) theories if I kept trying!
If you want to be accurate, the Trojan War is a legend, not a myth. A legend starts as a true story handed down by word of mouth, and gradually gathers additional details, incidents and other accretions before finally being written down. Behind every legend is a core of truth if you can but find it. The Voyage of the Golden Fleece, as an example, probably started out as the story of a trading and raiding expedition to the Black Sea. Bunk. Behind every legend is a core of truth if you can but find it. -- is that supposed to be like "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur" (that which is said in Latin sounds profound).
There is a reason the stories--myths and legends--of ancient greece are collectively called "Greek Mythology"--they are so intertwined as to be one. The distinction is largely meaningless.
I mean, by your standard, what do you do, go through each story and take a stab in the dark the story was based on something real or not? You hypothesis that Jason and the Argonauts is based on actual events while Persephone was just made up is a fine one--it's interesting, but it's a total guess, thousands of years after the fact at that!
What about myths about Heracles? Fighting with Gods, doing impossible things, yet possibly based on a real person, so is that a myth or a legend? You state that a myth is "an invented story created to explain how things came to be." Pillars of Hercules? The myth goes that massive land structures were put into place by Hercules. Is heracles a myth or legend? Or he is both?
No, there is not a "core" of truth behind every legend. Sure, some stories might be based upon actual events, some myths too. All--no.
A myth is an invented story created to explain how things came to be, or illustrate a moral or religious point. Thus, the myth of Persephone having to spend six months out of every year in the Underworld was an attempt to explain the changing of the seasons. Completely arbitrary... If the people telling and hearing the stories believes in all of their realities, your point is irrelevant. Do you think during the high classical age that your average hellene sat around saying "Ah, well I'll pray to Heracles for xyz, realizing that the stories of his accomplishments are based upon real events, and I'm also fully aware that Zeus is just made up to explain thunder" (or whatever).
I also do not see why you say Mail.app is wholly carbon, it makes use after all of CoreData and Quartz2D and QTKit and a few other things like that. I think you may be misreading the library use to some extent. You're entirely correct about this--I misremembered about Mail.app.
btw, replying again, if you want to check out which frameworks Mac programs use, open a command line (thats in Applications/Utilities) and cd to the application direction. For instance:
Most programming done on other systems for higher level OS and application stuff, is C or C++.
In OS X, it is Objective C.
Ach, enough with the blatant fanboism! Yes, Cocoa/Objective C is ONE way of programming for OSX, and indeed Apple's stated preferred method. But...
Looking at a couple of my currently running programs..Firefox. Photoshop. Microsoft Word. Azureus. None are written in Objective C, none use Cocoa.
Ok, admittedly, those are non-Apple applications. Let's take a look at some Apple applications--that come with the OS even. iTunes--uses Carbon. Quicktime--Carbon. Safari--partially Carbon. Mail.app -- all carbon. Finder, added some cocoa features in Leopard, but is primarily carbon.
Finder..iTunes...Quicktime...Mail...Safari. All use that horribly unsafe C/C++ and Carbon "legacy" API. Good job buying into the hype though...
Drive by downloads under Windows are installed thanks to Internet Explorer bugs. IE is capable of installing operating system updates and so it automatically has the access needed to do so. Do you have any information about what IE bugs are exploited for "drive by" downloads? In my experience, IE bugs have not been responsible for the vast majority of spyware etc in years...does your experience differ?
If users CHOOSE to download and CHOOSE to run software, that is different, and Windows and Mac both query you about running unsafe software now.
(*) Safari has no special operating system privileges and so it cannot install software on its own without user intervention. I'm confused--are you talkig about IE's ACtiveX abilities?
So as far as I know, the major ways to distribute spyware don't exist on the Mac and probably never will. Thus, Apple is likely to be spared the spyware phenomenon, at least to the dreadful extent it occurs on Windows machines. Maybe I'm just lucky and missing out, but it's literally been years since I've seen a PC decked out with spyware. If you don't install junk on your computer, nowadays you are very unlikely to get spyware. If you're willing to install junk on PC, chances are, you're willing to install it on your Mac as well..
What you say is all well and good (and I agree with your definition of remote exploit), but that is by no means fits the definition of "physical access" which was what I replied to, so I'm not really sure what the point of your post was?
Physical access means... physical access by the attacker (this is how I've always seen and used the term at the very least...). Physical access is not to be confused with local access (is that what you meant?)
Shell access, malicious webpage, malicious attachment, random buffer overrun, samba security hole (unpatched afaik)--any exploit that can run a process, start a script, etc, just got a lot more dangerous.
Don't understand why you and others are so quick to defend Apple here--an easily exploitable suid binary? Msft would be (righlty) chastised for this...
Wonder how remote apple events would work for this.
With CD-Rs you're lucky if they last 5 years I don't agree with this. Where I work currently used to use burned CDs to backup projects. We don't do that anymore and have copied all the data off them, however there are still a lot of CDs sitting around that were burned years ago. I just grabbed the oldest one which was burned sometime in 1998 and copied all the files off of it--all ok. I also just read three other disks from the same year, though I did not copy all of the files off.
I'm not saying CD-Rs going bad isn't a problem, but four disks I've just now looked at from 10 years+ ago are fine. So either we are really lucky, or it's not as bad a problem as you make it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
You know have noticed the internet acronym "IMHO" in my post. Not exactly a common internet acronym i guess, though you see it fairly often on slashdot etc. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/imho (in short, in my humble opinion). Emphasis on the opinion. I'd be fascinated by any statistics, but I don't have any. I'll google around a little bit, but it's hard to track this kind of thing.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for the Democratic Party in NC, and a number of years ago they briefly stopped selling bumper stickers, only to face a lot of popular discontent from people who were big fans of the bumper stickers (and reversed their decision). ~shrug~
I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many people who are "pro-abortion." Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter is a far cry from jumping for joy each time a poor girl in a terrible situation walks into a clinic.
That's true to a degree, but ultimately, whether you consider yourself "pro-choice," "pro-life," whatever, you're arguing over one action--aborting a fetus. And those on one side want that to be legal, and the other want it to be illegal. The rest is just semantics.
"Not wanting the government to be in charge of such a personal matter" seems to me a bit disingenuous. I don't see many (and I'll bow to your preferences and use the term "pro-choice") pro-choice people arguing against the government's vital role in funding Planned Parenthood for instance. If you're really taking a libertarian view, one should probably argue against planned parenthood's dependent relationship. Not trying to put words in your mouth here, maybe you're consistent in your position, but most people I've met haven't made that argument.
I don't disagree with you at all. Using your car to proclaim your political beliefs doesn't know any partisan boundaries.
HOWEVER, I've actually kept track at times, and I think my estimate of 99% liberal is not that off (at least in some of the places I've lined in the past 5 years--Chicago (duh), VA/DC (duh), North Carolina (not exactly "blue state")). Not at all arguing that nobody conservative puts on bumperstickers (my favorite example "Hippie Peace -- More dangerous that nuclear war") but that they do so in much, much smaller number than liberals. Furthermore I can't remember the last time I saw a car with:
a) multiple conservative bumper stickers (there's one with multiple liberal bumper stickers parked across te street from me right now!)
b) anti-liberal politican bumper sticker (on the contrary, I see many that specifically target bush, or cheney, etc)
Also, I've noticed, purely anecdotal imho, but anybody with multiple bumper stickers (even if they're non-partisan stickers) seems much more likely to be a bad driver :-P
I dunno, you'd think they'd find one pretzel away from a President Cheney kinda scarey.
That was my first thought as well :)
"Conservative" means nothing anymore ... . ... "conservatives" are nothing more but against taxes ... embrace war against drugs/crime/poverty/nations ... and lastly, wear their religion on their sleeve yet none of it in their hearts except when convenient.
Not to (borrowing your term) pidgeonhole anyone or anything...
wear their religion on their sleeve yet none of it in their hearts except when convenient.
You know, that's how I feel whenever I see people with bumper stickers slathered all over their cars (who are, imho, 99% of the time liberal). Why is it so important that other people know that you're a vegan, are pro-abortion, etc, or, my personal favorite, are mad that the US was "One pretzel away from getting rid of Bush." ~shrug~
Not arguing that many of the early Communists were ... at the very least, very optimistic. I personally find that Marx created a really excellent critique of the capital system of his day. I think he and many others faltered when it came to finding solutions. But that's really neither here nor there :-)
Now what they seem to think will happen is that everyone will turn to the betterment of themselves given no constraints upon their resources. What I think they skip over is the century or two where they gave all the undesirables unlimited holodeck access until they keeled over dead.
Yet TNG also warns against the dangers and pitfalls of such a future (episode http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/When_The_Bough_Breaks )
It's the same narrative as The Decline and Fall of the Roman Narrative, Ibn Khaldun's muqaddimah, etc. Empires rise, become decadent (ie, turn themselves to the arts, consumption, etc) and fall, to be replaced by more.. vivacious peoples.
Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved"
You may laugh, but that's exactly what many of the early Russian communists thought would happen.
I don't think the definition of a software patch means a problem necessarily HAS to be solved. Afterall, even if ineffective, you're still patching new code/functionality/whatever into an existing program's binary or source code (think patching as in patching a quilt or clothes, etc, rather than as a bandage)
And, no, long distance transmission lines are most decidedly NOT DC in the U.S.
I think you're wrong about this--maybe not the majority of the lines, but there ARE some HVDC lines in the US. Example:
http://www.abb.com/cawp/seitp202/A4CA486DE1BF9C18C1257368002B05E1.aspx
Why? Because changing the label from Beta to Finished would magically make them better? Everything i've used from Google has been free so far, so why the hell do i care what the 'state' of the product is. I'd rather 'beta' some product for free than wait until it's 'finish' before using it for free.
That's great for some people. For instance, with google for domains--I've been using it on my perosnal domain and its perfect for that. On the other hand, I don't know the roadmap and longterm plans, stability guarantees etc that I would require to recommend it for businesses I've worked with.
Great for hobbiest, not so good for serious use!
Which do you expect to be more secure, an app running natively on your local machine, with access to all of your operating system's system calls, or one running in a sandbox designed for untrusted code?
Web apps and the browers IE, Firefox, Safari, etc don't exactly have a great track record of being secure (css, etc!). I can jail, firewall, etc and control everything that runs on my own computer. If I'm using open source, I can compile it myself. Don't generally have that freedom with webapps.
Privacy is only a concern if someone else is hosting the web app - if it's on your own server then it's often more convenient than carrying a laptop around.
Yes, that is EXACTLY the privacy concern.
Nonetheless scholars like to make distinction and both the words "myth" and "legend" refer to different concepts and have different meanings.
Ahh, I see, I think I misinterpreted what the OP was saying and perhaps responded unjustly!
Thanks for clarifying and explaining in more detail, interesting!
By separating the "correct" answer from the human judge you are, I think, describing a subtly different game. The umpire matters fundamentally in the game, and cannot be ignored. Certainly, tennis would be rather different if every decision were mechanical.
The umpire isn't critical to the game--after all, 99% of tennis games are called by the players themselves. How would tennis be "rather different" if every decision were mechanical? Well, it would remove cheating and human inconsistency, that's all I can think of--am I missing anything?
When you refer to the correct answer, you're effectively claiming that no judge is needed since the answer already exists (in some kind of Platonic ideal) and can always be calculated in principle.
Interesting, but one doesn't have to resort to theory/philosophy/etc -- there IS a correct answer. The ball is in, or it's out.
I assume you're one of the authors? Just thought I'd add a comment that the performance must be fairly variable between OS/browsers at the current stage. I have absolutely no complaints under Safari and Webkit nightlies (which stands to reason I suppose)--seems fast.
Win2k3 IE7 took substantially longer to load initially, but then seemed fairly fast (not quite as fast as safari it seems)
Win2k3 FF2 was in between IE7 and Safari.
Really awesome app--I'm inspired to finally pick up some more Cocoa!
What about privacy/security concerns?
I'm willing to concede that you are talking theory at some level I don't fully grok. What I think you're completely missing in this discussion stems from your original statement that"system such as Hawkeye CANNOT BE MORE ACCURATE than humans", which does not seem to be possibly true by any standard definition of these words that I am familiar with.
You can talk about "error criterions" and odd offtopic tangents about targeting algorithms etc, but the bottom line is, your original statement is completely wrong.
You say "So Hawkeye has to complement the equations with an ARBITRARY rule, eg least squares, and this arbitrariness makes the Hawkeye estimate neither more accurate nor less accurate than humans".
That's both wrong and illogical. Yes, Hawkeye is estimating a solution, and using a "arbitrary" (again, this is utterly bizarre and incorrect word choice--the makers of Hawkeye have presumably done a great deal of testing to pick an algorithm, which is NOT arbitrary) method to estimate. However, if Hawkeye ESTIMATES the correct answer more often than a human judge then, Hawkeye is more accurate than a human judge. The methods it uses are really completely irrelevant to the final answer.
So in short, it seems that this is a discussion in your usages of "accurate," "error," "arbitrary," etc are different than the rest of the people in the thread.. Please let me know if I'm misinterpreting something though!
*sigh* I've apparently found out that such guys don't exist on European servers.
That's actually interesting. Would be nice to know more than just one person's experiences though.
It's likely that Europeans being less sex-retentive than us don't provide such fundamental benefits to females that we enjoy here in America that they don't see a benefit to acting like girls to get stuff.
Or maybe European women/girls don't play as many video games as females in the US, throwing things off. Maybe US males are more secure in their sexuality and don't have a problem playing as female characters. Who knows, I'm sure I (and others) could come up with some more equally weird (and probably wrong) theories if I kept trying!
There is a reason the stories--myths and legends--of ancient greece are collectively called "Greek Mythology"--they are so intertwined as to be one. The distinction is largely meaningless.
I mean, by your standard, what do you do, go through each story and take a stab in the dark the story was based on something real or not? You hypothesis that Jason and the Argonauts is based on actual events while Persephone was just made up is a fine one--it's interesting, but it's a total guess, thousands of years after the fact at that!
What about myths about Heracles? Fighting with Gods, doing impossible things, yet possibly based on a real person, so is that a myth or a legend? You state that a myth is "an invented story created to explain how things came to be." Pillars of Hercules? The myth goes that massive land structures were put into place by Hercules. Is heracles a myth or legend? Or he is both?
No, there is not a "core" of truth behind every legend. Sure, some stories might be based upon actual events, some myths too. All--no.
A myth is an invented story created to explain how things came to be, or illustrate a moral or religious point. Thus, the myth of Persephone having to spend six months out of every year in the Underworld was an attempt to explain the changing of the seasons. Completely arbitraryThanks for the reply and the info re: Cocoa/Carbon in application development. I've unfortunately only dabbled in Objective C.
btw, replying again, if you want to check out which frameworks Mac programs use, open a command line (thats in Applications/Utilities) and cd to the application direction. For instance:
% cd /Applications/Mail.app/
Then go to the binary--
% cd /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS
and run the otool command:
% otool -L Mail
In OS X, it is Objective C.
Ach, enough with the blatant fanboism! Yes, Cocoa/Objective C is ONE way of programming for OSX, and indeed Apple's stated preferred method. But...Looking at a couple of my currently running programs..Firefox. Photoshop. Microsoft Word. Azureus. None are written in Objective C, none use Cocoa.
Ok, admittedly, those are non-Apple applications. Let's take a look at some Apple applications--that come with the OS even. iTunes--uses Carbon. Quicktime--Carbon. Safari--partially Carbon. Mail.app -- all carbon. Finder, added some cocoa features in Leopard, but is primarily carbon.
Finder..iTunes...Quicktime...Mail...Safari. All use that horribly unsafe C/C++ and Carbon "legacy" API. Good job buying into the hype though...
If users CHOOSE to download and CHOOSE to run software, that is different, and Windows and Mac both query you about running unsafe software now.
(*) Safari has no special operating system privileges and so it cannot install software on its own without user intervention. I'm confused--are you talkig about IE's ACtiveX abilities? So as far as I know, the major ways to distribute spyware don't exist on the Mac and probably never will. Thus, Apple is likely to be spared the spyware phenomenon, at least to the dreadful extent it occurs on Windows machines. Maybe I'm just lucky and missing out, but it's literally been years since I've seen a PC decked out with spyware. If you don't install junk on your computer, nowadays you are very unlikely to get spyware. If you're willing to install junk on PC, chances are, you're willing to install it on your Mac as well..What you say is all well and good (and I agree with your definition of remote exploit), but that is by no means fits the definition of "physical access" which was what I replied to, so I'm not really sure what the point of your post was?
Physical access means ... physical access by the attacker (this is how I've always seen and used the term at the very least...). Physical access is not to be confused with local access (is that what you meant?)
Shell access, malicious webpage, malicious attachment, random buffer overrun, samba security hole (unpatched afaik)--any exploit that can run a process, start a script, etc, just got a lot more dangerous.
Don't understand why you and others are so quick to defend Apple here--an easily exploitable suid binary? Msft would be (righlty) chastised for this...
Wonder how remote apple events would work for this.
That's not true at all. I sshed to my laptop and remotely triggered the exploit.
The user currently has to be logged in graphically, but the exploit can certainly be pulled off remotely. Compromised account, you're good to go.
I'm not saying CD-Rs going bad isn't a problem, but four disks I've just now looked at from 10 years+ ago are fine. So either we are really lucky, or it's not as bad a problem as you make it out to be.