If your security works, nothing happens. So it's easy to say that money is "wasted". If the security doesn't work, the problem is a little more obvious.
I read this story yesterday, and the quote is a little misleading. Here's the context:
"If patching and antivirus is where I spend my money, and I'm still getting infected and I still have to clean up computers and I still need to reload them and still have to recover the user's data and I still have to reinstall it, the entire cost equation of that is a waste."
"It's completely wasted money," Stewart told delegates. Exactly. If it does not work, the money spent on it is wasted. Not exactly controversial.
Second the recommendation of M. K. Wren's Phoenix Legacy. It may be a little bit space-opera-ish at times, but it is well-written and engaging. Probably best to read it in order. I didn't, because I could not find Sword of the Lamb in the late 1980s. By the time I did find it, I had forgotten enough of the second and third books that a full re-read worked well.:-) There's a 2000 edition (looks like trade paperback) on Amazon, so I may buy new copies (the old ones are starting to fall apart).
She's not British, though. American, born in Texas and living in Oregon (as of the latest reference that I found). Her website appears to be offline (one Google hit suggested that it was last updated in 2003), and I don't see many references to her in the last five years.
From what I've read about similar cases in the past, you would need a power of attorney from the individual in question to get access to things like gmail and hotmail accounts. If he had a will, his executor might be able to get in.
A subpoena would probably get you in, but a court is not going to issue one just because a person is dead and you want to make the family feel better. If there is some grounds to suspect some kind of criminal activity, or that his death might be murder, a subpoena might be issued - but it would get the police into those accounts, not his friend. If the friend could think of some grounds to sue his estate, discovery might require access to the accounts, and generate an appropriate court order. But for the case as stated, he's likely out of luck.
I've left passwords and relevant access information so that this is not an issue. I do not have a problem with my family getting into my mail accounts, for instance, and they might need to pay some final bills. Some people, on the other hand, would have a problem with this. The accounts should not just be open to anyone who can prove that they guy is dead.
Yeah, that subject line...:-) I think that the key point is that Apple took risks, and learned from them. Where Microsoft, in general, keeps trying to push the same thing in different incarnations - Bob and Clippy seemed to me to be instances of the same philosophy, and they only disappeared in the face of massive dislike. The point is that a company that is never hated is never taking risks. While not a Mac user myself, I can appreciate what Apple has brought to the table.
Good to see you around again. I enjoyed your last JE, and was hoping for more.
I was not trying to argue that gasoline-powered cars are good, or even better than (for instance) a car that stores its energy in compressed air. You're right that decoupling the vehicle from the means of generating the energy would be a good thing. I didn't consider that, but it would definitely be a positive step. We can't continue to burn non-renewable things.
My point was that we need to understand these alternatives as an end-to-end system. By decoupling energy generation from the vehicle itself, many of these technologies would increase the possibility of a technological solution.
Yes, that was intended as a facetious comment. Given your profession, I could understand why you might be sensitive on the subject. Given that ethyl mercaptan (correct name?) is added to natural gas as an olfactory marker, do you think that something similar might be done for hydrogen, should its use become more widespread?
Hydrogen actually seems like one of the more promising possibilities, from what I know. Part of that is because the greater effort and expense involved in storage and transport would lead to a more distributed support infrastructure, which would (at least to me) seem to greatly improve the environmental footprint of the whole thing, by avoiding transport inefficiencies and energy costs. As well as being economically preferable.
I remember reading a while ago about research in storing hydrogen dissolved in some solid material. Your comment seems to indicate that there has been some progress made in that area. Anywhere good that I could look for more information?
Probably no such thing. At the very least, there is waste heat from the mechanical processes of the automobile. The energy require to accelerate a vehicle to a certain speed will be roughly the same, regardless of the source. In the case of the "air-powered car", the energy used to compress the air could come from a coal-fired power plant. Is that better than burning gasoline? I don't know, and I would be very interested to see a comprehensive analysis.
In considering the environmental impact of a particular vehicle, there are a number of factors to consider:
How the energy is obtained in the first place. From petroleum drilled out of the ground, a coal mine, natural gas, solar power, nuclear power, and so on.
The efficiency of conveying the energy from the source to the user. Coal and petroleum products are relatively good for this (some loss to evaporation for gasoline, I imagine). For remotely-generated electricity, there would be transmission losses. If you charge your electric car from a solar panel on your roof, much less so.
How the energy is stored (or storage losses). This is one of the big issues with hydrogen. It tends to seep through containers. Compressed air would be a similar problem. A leak in your compressed air tank has an environmental effect just as a lead in your gas tank, and is harder to detect. It's more efficent to store a liquid than a compressed gas.
The efficiency of converting the stored energy into motion of the vehicle. What are the thermal losses for state changes? Friction in the engine?
There are probably more factors, some very difficult to isolate. And there are safety factors - gasoline is flammable, but easy to detect if it starts to leak. Hydrogen, on the other hand, you would not notice at all until your car decided to emulate the Hindenberg.:-)
Zero pollution is a good goal, but unless all of the factors are considered, it's just marketing hype.
This is a subject worthy of discussion, but the TechDirt article is pretty weak. It does not appear have much content aside from links to other TechDirt articles (and one to Wikipedia); the blog entry that apparently triggered it is on patent law blog, and does contain a good amount of information on exactly what is going on. Other reasonable current articles on patent law, in the area of software and business method patents:
Not to mention the fact that the Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville. That Saturn V thing? No way it could have actually reached space, it was designed in Alabama.
But this is Slashdot; it's useless to try rebut the groupthink (read: prejudice) with facts.
I think that it's not just people who want their new ideas to be heard. In a situation where you have a discussion being conducted by email involving more than two people (something for which email is not really well-suited, except perhaps as moderated by gmail, which seems to handle such things fairly well), many people feel the need to write emails just so that their "voice" is heard. A part of the social dynamic. That would be in addition to the people who really do have ideas that they want to contribute.
I think that the one-liners are driven by the same thing. Even for people who really ought to know how dumb they look.
Fear and appease the mighty systems administrator, lest he make thy coffee holder retract at random and spilleth thy coffee all over thy desk and thy pants, causing much consternation and stains that are really hard to get out.
It's not possible to do a controlled experiment in this context - to see if an otherwise similar group of individuals will buy more or fewer CDs if they do not have P2P access to music. So one cannot say whether or not such access reduces or enhances CD sales. It's quite plausible that the latter would happen, as a result of increasing immersion in the music culture, but it would seem to be very difficult to produce direct evidence.
However, this does reinforce the fairly obvious conclusion that the recording industry has chosen to use strongarm tactics on its best customers. It does not seem like the best of business models.
But Bruce Schneier, CTO of BT Counterpane, disagrees. He says steganography doesn't make sense as an insider threat. It's much easier to just suck the data off onto a USB thumb drive and walk out of the building. That seems to make a little more sense. They still don't quote Schneier directly, but his general conclusion seems valid. The purpose of steganography is to provide a clandestine channel, in part to avoid traffic analysis. If the data embedded through steganography is also encrypted, it would be very hard to detect. That's why this study is significant. I'll wait until it's farther along than its "early phases" before I draw any substantive conclusions, though.
Here's a counterpoint. While this is not really a "wisdom of crowds" application (being rather just a mass data aggregation scheme), it's worth noting that crowds are prone to fads and other mistaken behavior. Mass decision-making seems to work best with unconscious decisions, choices that everyone makes but does not think about a whole lot.
I could see this system working, though, at least reasonably well. If I see a lot of GPS units going to a particular area, and then slowing down and stopping, I might want to avoid that area. Unless, of course, I'm on the way to a football game or something like that.:-)
Your characterization of Prohibition is not correct. Part of the origin was religious, but it enjoyed support from denominations that would be characterized as liberal as well as conservative. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed by a Congress that had a slight Democratic majority, under a Democratic President (though by that time, IIRC, Wilson was mostly incapacitated). In Congress, prohibition enjoyed about two-to-one support among both Democrats and Republicans.
The historical political context is different from what we have now, as well. What we now see as the Religious Right did not exist. One could identify a certain segment of moralists who had much in common with that modern group, but they were not perceived as particularly conservative, and in fact were spread across both parties.
The Wikipedia article on Prohibition is fairly interesting reading, and matches pretty well with what I remember from the history I studied.
The associations between concepts change over time, and it's usually an error to map our own associations onto historical events.
I have Verizon. The service is good, but the prices are high. And I will most likely not renew with them once I have finished my current contract. The primary reason for that is how they intentionally crippled the Razr phones, so that (for instance) you have to use their service to transfer pictures from the phone to your computer. And the ObEx facility in BlueTooth is disabled on Verizon phones, so there is no just setting the phone near the computer to transfer pictures and MP3s. Not to mention the fact that their UI is just bad.
I have an older version of Motorola Phone Tools that lets me (with a small configuration hack) transfer pictures and MP3s, but I can't upgrade it or the capability would disappear. If I did not have that, I'd probably have paid the penalty and dropped Verizon a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I read this story yesterday, and the quote is a little misleading. Here's the context: "If patching and antivirus is where I spend my money, and I'm still getting infected and I still have to clean up computers and I still need to reload them and still have to recover the user's data and I still have to reinstall it, the entire cost equation of that is a waste."
"It's completely wasted money," Stewart told delegates. Exactly. If it does not work, the money spent on it is wasted. Not exactly controversial.
Second the recommendation of M. K. Wren's Phoenix Legacy. It may be a little bit space-opera-ish at times, but it is well-written and engaging. Probably best to read it in order. I didn't, because I could not find Sword of the Lamb in the late 1980s. By the time I did find it, I had forgotten enough of the second and third books that a full re-read worked well. :-) There's a 2000 edition (looks like trade paperback) on Amazon, so I may buy new copies (the old ones are starting to fall apart).
She's not British, though. American, born in Texas and living in Oregon (as of the latest reference that I found). Her website appears to be offline (one Google hit suggested that it was last updated in 2003), and I don't see many references to her in the last five years.
From what I've read about similar cases in the past, you would need a power of attorney from the individual in question to get access to things like gmail and hotmail accounts. If he had a will, his executor might be able to get in.
:-)
A subpoena would probably get you in, but a court is not going to issue one just because a person is dead and you want to make the family feel better. If there is some grounds to suspect some kind of criminal activity, or that his death might be murder, a subpoena might be issued - but it would get the police into those accounts, not his friend. If the friend could think of some grounds to sue his estate, discovery might require access to the accounts, and generate an appropriate court order. But for the case as stated, he's likely out of luck.
I've left passwords and relevant access information so that this is not an issue. I do not have a problem with my family getting into my mail accounts, for instance, and they might need to pay some final bills. Some people, on the other hand, would have a problem with this. The accounts should not just be open to anyone who can prove that they guy is dead.
I'm not a lawyer, of course.
Yeah, that subject line... :-) I think that the key point is that Apple took risks, and learned from them. Where Microsoft, in general, keeps trying to push the same thing in different incarnations - Bob and Clippy seemed to me to be instances of the same philosophy, and they only disappeared in the face of massive dislike. The point is that a company that is never hated is never taking risks. While not a Mac user myself, I can appreciate what Apple has brought to the table.
Good to see you around again. I enjoyed your last JE, and was hoping for more.
I was not trying to argue that gasoline-powered cars are good, or even better than (for instance) a car that stores its energy in compressed air. You're right that decoupling the vehicle from the means of generating the energy would be a good thing. I didn't consider that, but it would definitely be a positive step. We can't continue to burn non-renewable things.
My point was that we need to understand these alternatives as an end-to-end system. By decoupling energy generation from the vehicle itself, many of these technologies would increase the possibility of a technological solution.
Yes, that was intended as a facetious comment. Given your profession, I could understand why you might be sensitive on the subject. Given that ethyl mercaptan (correct name?) is added to natural gas as an olfactory marker, do you think that something similar might be done for hydrogen, should its use become more widespread?
Hydrogen actually seems like one of the more promising possibilities, from what I know. Part of that is because the greater effort and expense involved in storage and transport would lead to a more distributed support infrastructure, which would (at least to me) seem to greatly improve the environmental footprint of the whole thing, by avoiding transport inefficiencies and energy costs. As well as being economically preferable.
I remember reading a while ago about research in storing hydrogen dissolved in some solid material. Your comment seems to indicate that there has been some progress made in that area. Anywhere good that I could look for more information?
In considering the environmental impact of a particular vehicle, there are a number of factors to consider:
There are probably more factors, some very difficult to isolate. And there are safety factors - gasoline is flammable, but easy to detect if it starts to leak. Hydrogen, on the other hand, you would not notice at all until your car decided to emulate the Hindenberg.
Zero pollution is a good goal, but unless all of the factors are considered, it's just marketing hype.
Does this mean that Michael Sims loves Vista? Or maybe Michael Sims IS Vista! Just look at his initials.
Not to mention the fact that the Marshall Space Flight Center is in Huntsville. That Saturn V thing? No way it could have actually reached space, it was designed in Alabama.
But this is Slashdot; it's useless to try rebut the groupthink (read: prejudice) with facts.
I think that it's not just people who want their new ideas to be heard. In a situation where you have a discussion being conducted by email involving more than two people (something for which email is not really well-suited, except perhaps as moderated by gmail, which seems to handle such things fairly well), many people feel the need to write emails just so that their "voice" is heard. A part of the social dynamic. That would be in addition to the people who really do have ideas that they want to contribute.
I think that the one-liners are driven by the same thing. Even for people who really ought to know how dumb they look.
Fear and appease the mighty systems administrator, lest he make thy coffee holder retract at random and spilleth thy coffee all over thy desk and thy pants, causing much consternation and stains that are really hard to get out.
Rather than resorting to ecode, you could use < to give you < and > for >.
You want this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7120251.stm
The original Ender's Game was a novella in Analog magazine, published in 1977.
It's not possible to do a controlled experiment in this context - to see if an otherwise similar group of individuals will buy more or fewer CDs if they do not have P2P access to music. So one cannot say whether or not such access reduces or enhances CD sales. It's quite plausible that the latter would happen, as a result of increasing immersion in the music culture, but it would seem to be very difficult to produce direct evidence.
However, this does reinforce the fairly obvious conclusion that the recording industry has chosen to use strongarm tactics on its best customers. It does not seem like the best of business models.
Eighty dollars per person. That'll make a big impact. Take that, Verizon!
It's free as in beer and free as in speech. Really, really free.
Here's a counterpoint. While this is not really a "wisdom of crowds" application (being rather just a mass data aggregation scheme), it's worth noting that crowds are prone to fads and other mistaken behavior. Mass decision-making seems to work best with unconscious decisions, choices that everyone makes but does not think about a whole lot.
:-)
I could see this system working, though, at least reasonably well. If I see a lot of GPS units going to a particular area, and then slowing down and stopping, I might want to avoid that area. Unless, of course, I'm on the way to a football game or something like that.
Not only that, but it passed both houses with a majority well in excess of that required to override the veto.
:-D
Some of us no longer are.
I'm not sure about the training, though. My ex might have been happier were I less civil. I'd put more of the origin on my parents.
Your characterization of Prohibition is not correct. Part of the origin was religious, but it enjoyed support from denominations that would be characterized as liberal as well as conservative. The Eighteenth Amendment was passed by a Congress that had a slight Democratic majority, under a Democratic President (though by that time, IIRC, Wilson was mostly incapacitated). In Congress, prohibition enjoyed about two-to-one support among both Democrats and Republicans.
The historical political context is different from what we have now, as well. What we now see as the Religious Right did not exist. One could identify a certain segment of moralists who had much in common with that modern group, but they were not perceived as particularly conservative, and in fact were spread across both parties.
The Wikipedia article on Prohibition is fairly interesting reading, and matches pretty well with what I remember from the history I studied.
The associations between concepts change over time, and it's usually an error to map our own associations onto historical events.
Some of us have grown up.
I have Verizon. The service is good, but the prices are high. And I will most likely not renew with them once I have finished my current contract. The primary reason for that is how they intentionally crippled the Razr phones, so that (for instance) you have to use their service to transfer pictures from the phone to your computer. And the ObEx facility in BlueTooth is disabled on Verizon phones, so there is no just setting the phone near the computer to transfer pictures and MP3s. Not to mention the fact that their UI is just bad.
I have an older version of Motorola Phone Tools that lets me (with a small configuration hack) transfer pictures and MP3s, but I can't upgrade it or the capability would disappear. If I did not have that, I'd probably have paid the penalty and dropped Verizon a long time ago.