I didn't see any mention on the web site of them actually building any of these things yet.
I'll eat my words if someone can show me that one's actually working somewhere or demonstrate to me the physics of why it's not an unworkable idea, but I don't think this can work as described.
Anyway, laminar flow through most of the area of a 20 foot diameter pipe would be quite a lot of discharge, don't you think?
Sure it would--if you can do it. I'm fairly confident the answer is that you can't for any significant distance. Meters, maybe. Miles? I don't think so.
I have to ask. Are you serious? That's very little energy (a few millibars over a 20' diameter circle) and a hell of a lot of drag (the entire interior surface of a 100 mile long pipe, not to mention turbulence within the pipe if the air actually moved).
Health care and employment shouldn't be joined because the set of people who need or have them is not the same.
Everyone needs health care. Not everyone has a job. A small set of people can't get or hold a job. A larger set of people won't be bothered to get a decent job, but that's a whole other problem. Most commonly, someone has a job with health care and loses it. Losing access to health care because one loses his or her job seems rather arbitrary. It's not a good idea, it's just what happens.
All this points to socialized health care, which would be a great idea, if only it weren't such a bad one.
There's a large difference between a filesystem format that can support a lot of data and having a collection of spinning disks that comprise a 1.6 petabyte filesystem.
Sony shouldn't be able to weasel out of this at all cheaply. I want the value of my time per hour x the amount of time it would have cost me to deal with it, if I wasted my money on their crap.
Once the financial harm is erased, someone needs to go to jail for this obvious breach of federal law. No slap on the wrist, no couple dollar fine, no free music. Somebody spends a few years behind bars.
Whereas before, organisms with genetic defects were simply unfit to survive, now they are denied employement.
Speaking of unfit for employment, the attitude that people should conform to an interface rather than making the interface conform to people deserves immediate ejection from the employment gene pool.
Keyboards are fairly poor interfaces. I can talk a lot faster than I type, and I can break 100 wpm. Why to I have to express ideas through my fingers? Why do I have to read someone else's voice off a screen when sometimes it's not at all convenient to do so?
The answer is to create better technology rather than relegating the significant fraction of the population for whom current interfaces are inadequate to unemployment or underemployment. My work requires a body of knowledge and a decently functioning brain. That it also requires the ability to operate a keyboard is an artifact of technology, not the actual work I do.
Not writing down your passwords isn't always good advice. Though it pains me to say it, Microsoft is right on this one.
People often pick awful passwords or pick the same password for unrelated uses, like they use their SuperSekrit company password that accesses all our financial data as their webmail password because two good passwords are hard to remember. I'd much rather people write two good passwords down than use a bad one, or use an important one in an insecure way. Just protect whatever you write it down on, and if it ever does get lost, change it!
Finding a neighbor with a phone can take a few minutes. Sometimes (like during the middle of the day) not many people are home. During the middle of the night, not many are awake and some who are will not answer. A few minutes is a lifetime (or the end of one) when someone's not breathing.
Information security has a major black eye because too many people absolutely don't understand that security is NOT the goal and never should be.
Accomplishing whatever your business is is the goal. Doing it efficiently and profitably is the goal. Serving your customers is the goal. Helping and not harming them is the goal.
Every bit of information security which does NOT serve those ends should get a rapid ejection from any institution. Those bits that do serve those ends should be promoted not because they're "security" or policy, but because they're good business.
Where did you hear or get the impression that that was the MS "approach" to QA ?
My tongue was firmly in my cheek when I posted that.
My point is precisely that delivering a product to the end users is NOT testing. That's the fundamental flaw of the "many eyeballs" theory. Many can. Few do. Still fewer do it well.
Advertising exploits a coincidence. It is not an obligation on the viewer. I don't enter into any agreement, implied or otherwise, with/. when I come here looking for content. That I happen to look at the ad on the top of the page as a consequence is a side effect that slashdot and other web sites choose to capitalize on them. Good for them. If and when most or all users start blocking ads, they'll have to find another means to survive, or just close up shop.
It isn't your customers obligation to fund your business. It's your obligation to satisfy your customers sufficiently well that they fund your business. Not many companies seem to remember that.
That's a rather naive way of looking at it. It isn't a matter of someone willing to work for less, it's a matter of differences in cost of living. Software developers in the US are generally paid well. Software developers in India are also generally paid well. "Paid well" means something very different in India because the cost of living is so much lower.
It's hard to compete on a cost basis with an Indian developer making under $20,000 who lives well on that sum. That would put me well below median income where I live, and I doubt very seriously that I could live on it at all.
I've always been against tariffs and unions and the like, but I do have to ask myself who benefits by sending the jobs to India. Prices are only tightly tied to production costs when the product is a commodity. Microsoft stuff is an excellent example. Most of it is sold at a loss while Windows and Orifice are sold at a big profit. Now, when Bill moves all the software development overseas, which do you think will happen: fatter bottom line or lower prices? In contrast, hire a U.S. developer and that money flows back into the U.S. economy.
I remain undecided, but convinced it is not as simple as most would like it to be.
Somehow I don't think the bank is going to digitize the scan and put it on the card. The benefit there is basically all for the consumer, and this consumer hasn't noticed much of anyone doing anything that benefits the consumer unless it also benefits the corporation.
There's also a little problem that the identifier and the supposed master copy are in the hands of the customer. What's to keep me from making my own cards? Encrypt the stored scan, you say? And do you think that'll be done with properly strong encryption, or something weak and crappy coupled with a DMCA threat?
There's a big difference. Signing a "contract" is no big deal because it's necessary for the store to authenticate you provably ("Is this your signature?"). It's closer to the mandatory arbitration agreements credit cards have. People who think about it object, but don't have a choice because they are now universal. "Don't like it? Don't use credit cards." is possibly not entirely unreasonable. "Don't like it? Don't shop anywhere, ever." is unconscionable.
I think that believing the will of the marketplace will always make everything right requires a much greater faith in the will of the sheeple than history justifies.
Not a problem. Leaving is what I'm trying to do in this case.:)
In fairness, I'm not out to be a "privacy zealot". I'm out to make sure the poorly trained people they put at the front of the store, who are not poorly trained through any fault of their own, understand what THEIR rights are and are not. I don't mind the fact that MOST people consent to the search and as a result, my prices stay lower. I'll even admit *gasp* that I not too long ago, probably within the last 3 times I've been asked (somehow it doesn't happen very often) when the stupid alarm went off when I was going IN to a store, that I just handed my stuff to the person, told 'em to check it out and bring it to me when they were done while I went browsing through the store. They found the errant tag, a piece of merchandise from another store which had been mistakenly double-tagged, fixed it, and brought it to me. I couldn't tell you why, on that particular day, I didn't mind at all, but I didn't. The important point, as far as I'm concerned, is that it was my choice to make, and I made it. On a different day I might have said no, they might have asked me to leave, and I would have smiled, knowing that for the time being there's still enough competition in retail for me to avoid patronizing stores that I don't enjoy shopping in for whatever reason.
I do think it's critically important that enough people remember that they are not obligated to consent to J. Random MinimumWageGuy pawing through their stuff that it not become a defacto obligation. As it is now, if you don't play jellyfish, they at least act like they understand this. I'm not willing to get to a point where random employees actually believe they can stop me and search me without my consent.
We might get to the point where "privacy zealot" does need to become a protected class, though. What choice will there be if (if not when) every store decides to search your stuff on the way out? You have a theoretical right to refuse, but if that meeans in practice you can't walk in, buy stuff, and carry your property out the door, it's meaningless. A balance between the security rights of the store and privacy rights of the individual is necessary.
Most of the time stores I patronize don't ask. When they do, I say "No" and keep on going. Some day I'm sure it'll get interesting, but so far the industry stuff I've read seems to indicate that you'd better be pretty damn sure your "suspect" is a shoplifter before you detain them. Detaining me for telling them I'm not going to let them inspect the merchandise I've *already paid for* is likely to cost them more than the merchandise cost me. In any case, I'm more than willing to force the issue and tell 'em to get out of the way or call the police. I'd love to see what they'd charge me with. Failure to prove I paid for the stuff I just paid for at another store employee 30 seconds ago?
I do have a right to privacy when patronizing their store. They can't strip search me, they can't search through my property, they can't search my bags from other stores even if they put up signs saying they can. Such signs are unenforceable and serve no purpose other than to dupe the ignorant into thinking the store has a right to treat them like cattle. Rights, you see, are largely things which someone in the past has had the backbone to stand up for and insist upon.
No, Windows bites for productivity. The applications, as you allude to later, are better. Heresy, sure, but I tired pretty quickly of StarOffice or OpenOffice being a dog. Getting GnuCash working was enough to make me go back to paper and pencil.
I think the real question is not whether Microsoft is good or evil, but rather, does the good MS produces balance the evil of the company?
No, it doesn't. I hear this a lot, though. The argument seems to be that because MS produces some good and useful things, that they're either good after all or we're no worse off with them. Let me illustrate the failure of that with an analogy. It's as if Microsoft cornered the market on bronze and issued in a glorious Bronze Age of increasingly complicated and useful stuff. Hey, great! Look at all this stuff we can do! Nobody knows where we'd be if those guys who thought iron, electricity, and industrialization weren't cool ideas too hadn't been crushed. Since that world was never realized, we don't see what we've lost.
We're just not capable, nor is Bill Gates, of looking around today and picking which ideas are the best for the consumer 20 (or 28) years down the road. Bill can wield Microsoft's market power to insure they win in the market and become effectively the only choice, but that's a very different thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Cite?
I didn't see any mention on the web site of them actually building any of these things yet.
I'll eat my words if someone can show me that one's actually working somewhere or demonstrate to me the physics of why it's not an unworkable idea, but I don't think this can work as described.
Sure it would--if you can do it. I'm fairly confident the answer is that you can't for any significant distance. Meters, maybe. Miles? I don't think so.
I have to ask. Are you serious? That's very little energy (a few millibars over a 20' diameter circle) and a hell of a lot of drag (the entire interior surface of a 100 mile long pipe, not to mention turbulence within the pipe if the air actually moved).
Health care and employment shouldn't be joined because the set of people who need or have them is not the same.
Everyone needs health care. Not everyone has a job. A small set of people can't get or hold a job. A larger set of people won't be bothered to get a decent job, but that's a whole other problem. Most commonly, someone has a job with health care and loses it. Losing access to health care because one loses his or her job seems rather arbitrary. It's not a good idea, it's just what happens.
All this points to socialized health care, which would be a great idea, if only it weren't such a bad one.
There's a large difference between a filesystem format that can support a lot of data and having a collection of spinning disks that comprise a 1.6 petabyte filesystem.
...is a simple one.
Training paid for by my employer is to make me more valuable for the company, and will allow me to contribute at a higher level in coming years.
Training paid for by myself is to get a better job.
Either way, I'll come out ahead.
Sony shouldn't be able to weasel out of this at all cheaply. I want the value of my time per hour x the amount of time it would have cost me to deal with it, if I wasted my money on their crap.
Once the financial harm is erased, someone needs to go to jail for this obvious breach of federal law. No slap on the wrist, no couple dollar fine, no free music. Somebody spends a few years behind bars.
SecurityGuy
Speaking of unfit for employment, the attitude that people should conform to an interface rather than making the interface conform to people deserves immediate ejection from the employment gene pool.
Keyboards are fairly poor interfaces. I can talk a lot faster than I type, and I can break 100 wpm. Why to I have to express ideas through my fingers? Why do I have to read someone else's voice off a screen when sometimes it's not at all convenient to do so?
The answer is to create better technology rather than relegating the significant fraction of the population for whom current interfaces are inadequate to unemployment or underemployment. My work requires a body of knowledge and a decently functioning brain. That it also requires the ability to operate a keyboard is an artifact of technology, not the actual work I do.
So do I, and I'm working on getting pointy hair, too.
I'll probably have to resort to self mutiliation to cope with my self loathing.
I dream of a life so untroubled that I can actually care what font someone uses. :)
Not writing down your passwords isn't always good advice. Though it pains me to say it, Microsoft is right on this one.
People often pick awful passwords or pick the same password for unrelated uses, like they use their SuperSekrit company password that accesses all our financial data as their webmail password because two good passwords are hard to remember. I'd much rather people write two good passwords down than use a bad one, or use an important one in an insecure way. Just protect whatever you write it down on, and if it ever does get lost, change it!
RTFA. She did.
Finding a neighbor with a phone can take a few minutes. Sometimes (like during the middle of the day) not many people are home. During the middle of the night, not many are awake and some who are will not answer. A few minutes is a lifetime (or the end of one) when someone's not breathing.
There's a fantastic business model waiting for exploitation here.
I'm going to patent it and call it "Don't treat your customers like crap".
I'm going to corner the market! It's so obvious, and yet NOBODY is doing it!
Unfortunately the user interface for the relevant hardware has a very intuitive point and shoot interface.
Information security has a major black eye because too many people absolutely don't understand that security is NOT the goal and never should be.
Accomplishing whatever your business is is the goal. Doing it efficiently and profitably is the goal. Serving your customers is the goal. Helping and not harming them is the goal.
Every bit of information security which does NOT serve those ends should get a rapid ejection from any institution. Those bits that do serve those ends should be promoted not because they're "security" or policy, but because they're good business.
My tongue was firmly in my cheek when I posted that.
My point is precisely that delivering a product to the end users is NOT testing. That's the fundamental flaw of the "many eyeballs" theory. Many can. Few do. Still fewer do it well.
Isn't that the essence of Microsoft's QA?
Should we be doing what we rightly criticise them for?
Advertising exploits a coincidence. It is not an obligation on the viewer. I don't enter into any agreement, implied or otherwise, with /. when I come here looking for content. That I happen to look at the ad on the top of the page as a consequence is a side effect that slashdot and other web sites choose to capitalize on them. Good for them. If and when most or all users start blocking ads, they'll have to find another means to survive, or just close up shop.
It isn't your customers obligation to fund your business. It's your obligation to satisfy your customers sufficiently well that they fund your business. Not many companies seem to remember that.
It's hard to compete on a cost basis with an Indian developer making under $20,000 who lives well on that sum. That would put me well below median income where I live, and I doubt very seriously that I could live on it at all.
I've always been against tariffs and unions and the like, but I do have to ask myself who benefits by sending the jobs to India. Prices are only tightly tied to production costs when the product is a commodity. Microsoft stuff is an excellent example. Most of it is sold at a loss while Windows and Orifice are sold at a big profit. Now, when Bill moves all the software development overseas, which do you think will happen: fatter bottom line or lower prices? In contrast, hire a U.S. developer and that money flows back into the U.S. economy.
I remain undecided, but convinced it is not as simple as most would like it to be.
There's also a little problem that the identifier and the supposed master copy are in the hands of the customer. What's to keep me from making my own cards? Encrypt the stored scan, you say? And do you think that'll be done with properly strong encryption, or something weak and crappy coupled with a DMCA threat?
I think that believing the will of the marketplace will always make everything right requires a much greater faith in the will of the sheeple than history justifies.
In fairness, I'm not out to be a "privacy zealot". I'm out to make sure the poorly trained people they put at the front of the store, who are not poorly trained through any fault of their own, understand what THEIR rights are and are not. I don't mind the fact that MOST people consent to the search and as a result, my prices stay lower. I'll even admit *gasp* that I not too long ago, probably within the last 3 times I've been asked (somehow it doesn't happen very often) when the stupid alarm went off when I was going IN to a store, that I just handed my stuff to the person, told 'em to check it out and bring it to me when they were done while I went browsing through the store. They found the errant tag, a piece of merchandise from another store which had been mistakenly double-tagged, fixed it, and brought it to me. I couldn't tell you why, on that particular day, I didn't mind at all, but I didn't. The important point, as far as I'm concerned, is that it was my choice to make, and I made it. On a different day I might have said no, they might have asked me to leave, and I would have smiled, knowing that for the time being there's still enough competition in retail for me to avoid patronizing stores that I don't enjoy shopping in for whatever reason.
I do think it's critically important that enough people remember that they are not obligated to consent to J. Random MinimumWageGuy pawing through their stuff that it not become a defacto obligation. As it is now, if you don't play jellyfish, they at least act like they understand this. I'm not willing to get to a point where random employees actually believe they can stop me and search me without my consent.
We might get to the point where "privacy zealot" does need to become a protected class, though. What choice will there be if (if not when) every store decides to search your stuff on the way out? You have a theoretical right to refuse, but if that meeans in practice you can't walk in, buy stuff, and carry your property out the door, it's meaningless. A balance between the security rights of the store and privacy rights of the individual is necessary.
I do have a right to privacy when patronizing their store. They can't strip search me, they can't search through my property, they can't search my bags from other stores even if they put up signs saying they can. Such signs are unenforceable and serve no purpose other than to dupe the ignorant into thinking the store has a right to treat them like cattle. Rights, you see, are largely things which someone in the past has had the backbone to stand up for and insist upon.
No, it doesn't. I hear this a lot, though. The argument seems to be that because MS produces some good and useful things, that they're either good after all or we're no worse off with them. Let me illustrate the failure of that with an analogy. It's as if Microsoft cornered the market on bronze and issued in a glorious Bronze Age of increasingly complicated and useful stuff. Hey, great! Look at all this stuff we can do! Nobody knows where we'd be if those guys who thought iron, electricity, and industrialization weren't cool ideas too hadn't been crushed. Since that world was never realized, we don't see what we've lost.
We're just not capable, nor is Bill Gates, of looking around today and picking which ideas are the best for the consumer 20 (or 28) years down the road. Bill can wield Microsoft's market power to insure they win in the market and become effectively the only choice, but that's a very different thing.