To be honest, there's enough ambiguity that I almost can't tell if you're meaning any of this as sarcasm. Lets hope not. After all, I only half-agree with the stuff I wrote.
I recognize that there's a LOT of good I get from slashdot. But the chaff/crap (dupe stories, sensationalism, etc) is horribly undermanaged. And comments modding needs a little love, since some cleverness there could make it stronger, too.
If the slashdot owners worked to fix these, they'd be a force to be reckoned with. Instead, they're coasting. How lame is that...
I hate to think one day slashdot will evaporate... but watching them glide along on inertia is almost as bad.
Will any USB drive work? That'd be great for self-duplicating keys, not so great when someone finds one of my 'put the carkeys on every usb-stick-I-own' drives and then steals my car.
Can I hook up my Maxtor 200gig drive? If more than one car key is on it, will all get scanned? Will this enable a library of keycodes that'll allow any compatible car to get boosted? Is the stored data that starts my car based on some published algorithm that is more secure than passwords on.doc files or Rot13?!
Is it possible to temporarily override this? Can I force the system to a key-only state?
Can I rekey the car if I think the keycode data is stolen and am worried about theft? Does this require $35 and a trip to the dealer?
Physical issue: is the tip of a USB stick able to sustain the weight of sixteen keys without falling out? If my keys fall out of the car while I'm driving, how catastrophic is the system shutdown?
I'm not responsible for the GP, but I'll play Devil's Advocate:
Last time I checked, I don't get reimbursed for slashdot comments I make. Slashdot gets a few thousand comments per day, so that's several hundred man-hours of donated content they get per day.
Meanwhile, half a dozen so-called editors have done very little to improve the site lately and only marginally more to improve editorial quality. There's the disconnect: They cover servers and bandwidth, we provide 99% of the content.
Barrier to entry: being the behemoth it is, slashdot (like Microsoft) is partly to blame for the lack of competition. A lot of competitors have tried, few can get critical mass because everyone still uses slashdot.
I paid (once!) for a subscription, but have watched slashdot editorial quality actually go down. Heck, even their new countermeasures suck: when I go out of my way to notify the editors of dupes or egregious factual errors, they make tabloid-caliber alterations ("WidgetCo is dead!" becomes "Is WidgetCo Dead?") rather than fix or cancel the news story outright.
To carry the Microsoft analogy a step further, being forced by circumstances into depending on Slashdot, I'll find ways to rebel. I go out of my way to avoid enriching Microsoft, whenever some small step is possible. This ranges from avoiding MSN and other Microsoft products, to advocating alternatives whenever company needs are flexible enough. Dialing down my subscription settings and bypassing Slashdot's ad revenue would be an equivalent protest against Slashdot editorial laziness.
Given the above, boycotting Slashdot stands a better chance of helping *my* situation than the alternatives.
Now, how am I'm selfish when I donate my writing without compensation? How am I being selfish when I punish a vendor that refuses to improve after an implicit contract for improvements was made with my donation? How exactly am I being selfish to deny that same vendor any additional income from advertising to me?
I AM being selfish to want slashdot to either fix itself or die, but it is a selfishness that is the utter essence of capitalism or evolution: things should have more than marketing or inertia as their means of existing.
If none of that sways you, it'll probably not matter if you reread your rant, changing context to Microsoft (or the RIAA) and adjust the circumstances:
" Are you seriously that self centered that you can't even leave your browser homepage on MSN, after all Microsoft and IE do for you? Nobody is asking you to use Microsoft by any means. I've never heard anyone bitch so much about something that is completely free to them."
or
"... but to be such an asshole as to listen to the radio and yet go out of your way to not support the RIAA labels, that's just bulls**t."
(disclosure: the above opinions weren't mine until 5 minutes ago, probably won't be 10 minutes from now. Why? See Devil's Advocate. I own 10 shares of Microsoft. I donated to Slashdot. Neither gives me any satisfaction.)
Yeah, sometimes they fail or (worse) fail in cascade fashion. But usually, if a large area goes brown, interlocks kick in to turn some zones off to regain the power needed.
IANA power expert. I can't even remember what the above interlocks are called... but the things that scare me about the grid don't include this. Craptabulous shoe-horned tiny tcp/ip stacks being stuffed into too many control points, protocols that have little more than security-by-obscurity preventing their abuse, fierce maintenance cutbacks by post-Enron beancounters, and more.
Sleep tight, indeed. The only thing that makes me shrug boredly is that if things go insanely wrong, I'll probably have some free time to go fishing...
About giving stuff up: am I the only one that sees an inverse-relationship between drug screening and paycheck? Starting out, I got tested repeatedly at early jobs. Now, I'm making twice as much and haven't had to in 5 years or more...
Or did someone just smack management up the head with a clue-stick? I mean, who cares an IT geek's drug history, if their work is good?
Good post, L. Even if I disagree with you 100%, it was interesting just to hear the industry's take.
Years ago, first week of semester, several of us were sitting in the Student Union, not far from the bookstore. A friend and her dad (who taught a class or two per semester) came by. He'd helped her buy her books, and was recovering from the sticker-shock he'd just gotten.
After he ranted a bit, we all agreed: Prices were horrible. Usury. Highway-freakin-robbery. And I chimed in: "In some fields, there's enough changing to merit a new edition every few years. Pharmacy or law or microbiology, for example. Some engineering courses. But for some, like physics, or lit or history it's a bit silly, considering how little changes. And professors don't pay attention to the costs, either. For example, did you compare prices on the books you assigned your students?! How much was it?"
He did something between a gasp and a scowl, said "I don't know, but I'll know in 5 minutes!", and stomped off to the bookstore. And he came back a sad, changed man.
My point:while prof's may give away their copy of a freebie text, they're sheltered from pricing info because of these free gifts. That is an effect that definitely breaks in favor of the publisher: one freebie earns 10-1000 captive sales. Calling professors slimy without admitting publisher's self-interest in all those freebies is the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?
A last thought: publishers aren't alone. Peer-reviewed journals, mass-market books, news, things easily resold onto ebay (even cars!), electronics, art, services... nearly everyone's getting hit by this. As much as it pains me to say, it isn't the world's fault that publishers' profit margin due to scarcity is being shot to hell. Well, it is (the world's fault), but wasn't intentional and it isn't wrong by itself. The tough puzzle nowadays is rediscovering a web-proof profit/business plan.
Oh, and if you think publishing's had it tough so far, brace yourself for screencasts, video-on-demand, open-source texts, ebooks, etc. Luckily, there's good news: fact-checking, materials, and other big fixed publishing costs can be just as easily driven toward zero. And I believe sales of books continues to climb, so the medium itself isn't dying.
Um, given the zillion ways that a mars mission currently could/would become a death-trap, I think that
doing this research, then
launching a few unmanned craft that plant usable stuff on part of Mars
seems a helluva lot easier than the prospect of watching/hearing the next Niel Armstrong whisper his dying words from 100M miles away.
(now, let me my science and ethics hats back on, since I took 'em off to completely ignore the 'but what about the bad science or bad ethics of lazily overwriting an entire planet of exotic lifeforms just because we got all Johnny Appleseed on it'.)
How about we work on both of them. I mean, instead of billions on better killing machines.
Heh, perhaps this is being done so that the Government can cause a catastrophic security event so big it'll make Cisco's looming problem look trivial.
After all (and I do government security work), Uncle Sam usually does mediocre to terrible infosec...
Seriously, this idea is terminally stupid to the point where I doubt it'll succeed. Even if we dodge the risk (hah!), and the letter of the rule is implemented, grunts like me will just be required to implement secure tunnels to hide stuff that is too important to risk (they add a key, so we add another lock).
I'm thinking reggae would do the trick personally...
Yes! Certain varieties of cannabis are very hardy. We could crash a satellite full of genetically-modified extremophile marijuana seeds on Mars. Then, when we finally get people there, paradise will surely await them! Brilliant! Sign me up!
... and the astronauts won't care if they're stranded.
... and astronaut-volunteer rates will soar.
... ensuring mars will *never* attack us.
... the planet's residents will promptly petition for a namechange, from Mars to Eros.
... upon the colonial-ship's arrival, all communication stops abruptly. When it restarts, only two words come to Earth, repeated ad infinitum: "Send Munchies!"
... a haze quickly forms planetwide, CO2 levels soar, greenhouse effects kick in, and Martians-For-Global-Warming cheers lazily.
... Bob Marley's headstone takes off earth, self-propelled, and navigates toward Mars. Very 2001, mon.
OK, so strikes one and two against me are that I'm uncivil to evil people and I mistook a creationist for an Idiot. Still, thanks for confirming that you're a nutjob.
A: Anyone that consistently insists on ignoring evidence that opposes their view is an idealogue. B: you qualify for A. C: you're an idealogue.
A: an idealogue that demands the world accept their views is a dangerous person at worst, a nutjob at best. B: Hey, look, it's you again!!! C: You're a nutjob. Possibly evil. You pick.
Look past the insults, learn the scientific method, learn to avoid sophistry... then spend the rest of your life trying to undo the crap you're inflicting. I'll be over here pretending to care. And thanks for the kind invitation to visit crazy joodahs hotblog, but... nah, I've got a whole case of nutso I'll never eat from some hollow earth crazies, and a sixpack of wingnut from some zero-point dude that's also past its expiration. Why bother.
My arguments, between the insults, were better-reasoned and based on careful logic than any screed you're capable of... oh, and my apologies to judas... I didn't waste time surfing to your site and your url wandered offscreen by the time I wrote the comparison. Judah loses the irony. That'd be three strikes, and I'm out of here...
If not, you're a troll. And running from your opinions so quickly tells me that JudasWhatever.com was an apt name for you to choose.
The astroturfing of Idiotic Design is a serious problem, and you're helping it along. Your first post carefully painted nutjobs as sensible moderates, via fallacies and outright bullshit. You also misuse several terms in a way that convinces me that your opinion is too uniformed to matter. That sways my vote from evil to 'tool'. So, you're a tool and a troll. Laters, double-T.
Idiotic Design hasn't earned the label 'Theory'. In fact, every claim put forth is easily DISPROVEN by nature, which (as a deeply religious person) I equate with God. So, the only postulate getting proven enough to earn the title 'Theory' seems to be: God doesn't like your half-assed contraption any more than I do.
That is the fundamental problem: Religious nutjobs and dumbasses get cranky every time God and science contradict their fragile li'l house of cards belief system.
By the way, every sentence of your earlier post has a fallacy. Some have 2.
Pollyanish tripe like this really doesn't belong in a serious discussion of risks.
Had we hit 1969 without the tech needed, we wouldn't have gone to the moon that year. Merely wishing and/or allocating a decade on a calendar isn't enough.
I only mutter like this because radiation shielding isn't uncharted territory where merely *researching* will turn up likely leads. We already study the hell out of the subject. Anything new is as unlikely/hard as coming up with new antibiotics or other well-studied hard problems.
That said, I don't see much difference between this and test pilot mortality, etc. I say publish the risks and sign up the brave.
If it is any consolation, the same crap happens everywhere. Do what you can to help your coworkers minimize their losses ('no good deed goes unpunished', so be careful here), and get far far away as fast as you can. Keep a fairly detailed logbook/journal in case you get falsely sued, too. And sit back while I tell my tale of karmic blowback:
A friend, web/graphics/artist wizard (I really don't know anyone half as good as he is on the nontech aspects), became the single go-to guy at a tiny company that did custom printing. Since he could do amazing graphics and design and knew how to program the press to do custom tricks, he was priceless to 'em.
They sold their service as a franchise, which made them a few millions. They had a half-dozen 'company-owned' vanity cars, vacation homes, and liked to live like they were billionaires. Meanwhile, he couldn't get a raise, and they'd do bizarre/insensitive stuff like 'forgetting' to do payroll or pay bills. His christmas bonus, where he was promised several thousand dollars, was a rodded-to-death porsche, which he resold on ebay for $5000. Literally 3 'owners' were living fat and happy off his work. Meanwhile, he worked mountains of unpaid overtime, had paychecks bounce, stood by while impound people took back office equipment whose leases weren't being paid, had to endure the phone getting disconnected, couldn't get reimbursed for expenses, etc.
Then at the beginning of holiday season (Thanksgiving in the US),... this was the kicker... he was given an ultimatum by his company: fire 'Bob' (a guy with the same job title, but less experience) or you're fired. Three weeks later, nearing Christmas, the boss's wife called him in and said: "Call Bob up, offer him his job back at half-pay. If he says no, let me know immediately so we can challenge his unemployment insurance payments and get them stopped."
Finally, he found a new job, and gave them notice. The evil wife literally burst into tears every time she saw him after that, probably realizing her days of easy money had just come to an end.
And then... after a lot of begging from them, they started paying him his full salary to come in 2 days a week as a consultant. He'd get paid upon arrival, accepted only certified checks or cash. Until the strain got to be too much, he had them utterly over a barrel, since they've got angry franchisees, clients, etc. Now, he's gone, lawsuits are flying, and they'll be lucky if all they get is bankruptcy court (since they have done more than a few fraudulent things).
Personally, I'd have let them sink into the swamp. Or offered to testify against them.
There are really some evil people in the world... why do a disproportionate amount of them have MBA's and law degrees?!
What do you think that 200-mile cable is going to be made out of? Steel!? If it isn't ceramic, it'll definitely be a polymer and an engineering design that will be spooky as hell until we've used it a lot.
And won't things be exciting the day that we learn that steady UV bombardment and ionic disturbances have caused the space elevator to age prematurely...
Man, listening to slashdotters talk about space exploration rates a step above reading about it in Wierd Science or a supermarket Tabloid. I keep waiting for someone to suggest we have bigfoot toss things into orbit off the freakin' pyramids.
Heh, wickedly slick use of the new meme, but fair warning to any newbies to subaquatic radio: Do the RF skin-depth calculations and weep.
I haven't done that sort of calc in years, but I remember skin-depth being an inverse-freq^2 equation, and even at megahertz levels, a fairly powerful signal would only go a few feet at best. This was why military subs use VLF or other tricks to send/receive data. By the time you get to 2.4ghz, I'd be shocked if this teensy transmitter can reach even a few feet below the surface.
If you're gonna trash-talk someone, at least do a few minutes of fact checking:
Gary Kurtz, producer of the first 2 star wars movies, put the items up for auction from HIS private collection, to raise money to open a public film archive.
No Lucas, no billionaire, no massive ego-trip. Just $2.6 million to someone's pet project (that even has the words 'public archive' in it!!!) The auction ended up netting $2.6 million. As for the lightsaber, after spending $200k on it, I'm betting the new owner isn't going to mistreat the prop.
And that is why I *cancelled* my paypal acct tied to my bank account, reopening one that is completely credit-card oriented. Lots of nagging, but no fscking way do I grant them permission to touch my bank account.
Years of usenet, classifieds2000, ebay activity with little problem (a buyer that refused an item he'd bought and had me send COD being the worst).
On the other hand, 3 yrs ago, someone created a bogus aol account, a bogus ebay account, and etc. in my name. Bought 2 used laptops using a visa of mine that was near it's limit (dumb luck!) and I got a call from VISA. I suspect the visa data came from buying VCD's from an international vendor (futurama before it came out on DVD).
Here's my scorecard:
AOL: refused to help in any way, disconnected the account, and regularly sends me CD's and 'rejoin today' offers tied to this bogus account. The only thing lamer than an AOL CD is one that reminds you of a prior identity theft.
eBay: put a stop on the account, but refused to reveal any details on the account in my name, since that'd violate their privacy agreement with... erm... *me*. Refused to capture any data, usage, IP's, etc, even when I suggested escrow so it could be retrieved as evidence, given a legal subpoena. Incidentally, AOL also was unwilling to capture/escrow evidence.
VISA: gave me seller information. I contacted them, they immediately *knew* which transaction was bogus ("man, I knew that one seemed wierd..."). Items had been shipped FedEx to Brunei.
FedEx: seller contacted fedex and told them the details. FedEx tracked package, found it was in their Nashville center, put a stop on it and returned the package to the seller. FOUR *FSCKING* STARS!!!!! OutSTANDING!
A few months later, someone tried the same thing, this time shipping crap to Rhode Island (Yeah, Brunei and Rhode Island, how wierd a juxtaposition is THAT?!). By then, I'd paranoidly cancelled every credit card # I had, changed bank account numbers, put passwords on my accounts, put holds on my credit data, etc. Thus, the visa bounced, end of story.
To this day, my respect for eBay, and AOL is still pretty much rock bottom. A tiger team dedicated to arresting and viciously prosecuting obvious frauds internationally would be dirt cheap and they'd get tons of positive PR. But why bother... it'd increase their liability for the unprosecuted frauds, and they're apparently not interested in the customer's financial protection. Just their own.
Most of my friends prefer a bar that has free munchies. Likewise, I know where the free AP's are and go there before I'll go somewhere and pay for access.
That's how 'just not a lot' 90% of us are. Sad, but true. Most folks arent' constantly scheming about improved net access like I am, either.
I saw this at a breakfast/lunch bistro with free wifi, downtown 2 nights ago: some guy sitting on the park bench outside, surfing. A tourist. He'd have been inside, if they'd been open at 8pm.
As it was, their net-published entry in a free wifi database probably gets a few dozen customers a month that they wouldn't otherwise get, since my town's on a major tourism route and they're off the main drag. And the bistro's owners (friends) are the type that wouldn't hesitate to walk up to an utter freeloader and say 'Um, buy something or beat it.' That's what I'd do, too. Rather than futz with all this angst and administrivia, just step up to the table and politely/firmly tell them to either buy something or vacate 'your' table for customers.
As for the other concerns (unruly gamers, wankers-seeking-porn, bandwidth hogs), more of the same... house rules and a willingness to politely deny service to people you don't want as customers are all that are needed.
An afterthought: Between the steering-wheel games' UI accuracy creating a strong linkage to these real-world skills (some pro auto racers can/do believe they're helped if they use xbox/playstation games for training). Likewise, each game gives you something. DDR and Flightsim: usable. Strategy or Logic games give you usable mental skills. Combat/Twitch games, not so much that's usable.
User Interface is important on whether games' physical skills map to real-world or not. If physical responses are the key thing needed, the UI needs to match the real world. Devise a real-life kickboxing UI, and I'll bet players would end up with real-world fighting skills.
Heh, and do you brag about your website being unhackable?!
Martial arts, like security, is all about avoiding risk, minimizing impact. You're not superman... bullets, enraged girlfriends in your blind-spot, assault charges, injury lawsuits, revenge (getting your ass beaten by that guy and his 3 friends, vandalism, having your family hurt because of it)...
What again was the upside to you swaggering thru dangers you used to fear?
The good teachers will disabuse you of this, if you'll listen. If you're not getting that message, either get a new attitude or get a new teacher, 'cuz you're gonna get your ass whupped someday, otherwise.
Now, we all probably misread your level of bravado. If so, I agree that, when circumstances sour, it's nice to not be frozen with fear. It's nice to be practiced. Reassuring as hell. It's nice to instinctively deflect that rather-unexpected first punch. And Nintendo 'Mortal Kombat', I agree, isn't gonna help your ass here. But I've had some experiences ripple over from gaming, and have heard this mentioned enough to not think I'm alone. The most recent was my brother commenting that some urban-racer XBox game (an earlier GTA?) made him feel like he could drive a car through a power-skid around a corner, and even to feel the urge to 'just try it...'
Disclaimer: I'm a Democrat, Hillary's a pandering twit that just lost my vote, and nothing in human nature is this black-or-white, whether it's football or GTA.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've been punked. Twice, if you count being gullible enough to post this to slashdot.
Speaking of which, I just noticed that wikipedia has the wrong definition for the word 'Gullible'?
Heh, make that three times...
To be honest, there's enough ambiguity that I almost can't tell if you're meaning any of this as sarcasm. Lets hope not. After all, I only half-agree with the stuff I wrote.
I recognize that there's a LOT of good I get from slashdot. But the chaff/crap (dupe stories, sensationalism, etc) is horribly undermanaged. And comments modding needs a little love, since some cleverness there could make it stronger, too.
If the slashdot owners worked to fix these, they'd be a force to be reckoned with. Instead, they're coasting. How lame is that...
I hate to think one day slashdot will evaporate... but watching them glide along on inertia is almost as bad.
Will any USB drive work? That'd be great for self-duplicating keys, not so great when someone finds one of my 'put the carkeys on every usb-stick-I-own' drives and then steals my car.
.doc files or Rot13?!
Can I hook up my Maxtor 200gig drive? If more than one car key is on it, will all get scanned? Will this enable a library of keycodes that'll allow any compatible car to get boosted? Is the stored data that starts my car based on some published algorithm that is more secure than passwords on
Is it possible to temporarily override this? Can I force the system to a key-only state?
Can I rekey the car if I think the keycode data is stolen and am worried about theft? Does this require $35 and a trip to the dealer?
Physical issue: is the tip of a USB stick able to sustain the weight of sixteen keys without falling out? If my keys fall out of the car while I'm driving, how catastrophic is the system shutdown?
Last time I checked, I don't get reimbursed for slashdot comments I make. Slashdot gets a few thousand comments per day, so that's several hundred man-hours of donated content they get per day.
Meanwhile, half a dozen so-called editors have done very little to improve the site lately and only marginally more to improve editorial quality. There's the disconnect: They cover servers and bandwidth, we provide 99% of the content.
Barrier to entry: being the behemoth it is, slashdot (like Microsoft) is partly to blame for the lack of competition. A lot of competitors have tried, few can get critical mass because everyone still uses slashdot.
I paid (once!) for a subscription, but have watched slashdot editorial quality actually go down. Heck, even their new countermeasures suck: when I go out of my way to notify the editors of dupes or egregious factual errors, they make tabloid-caliber alterations ("WidgetCo is dead!" becomes "Is WidgetCo Dead?") rather than fix or cancel the news story outright.
To carry the Microsoft analogy a step further, being forced by circumstances into depending on Slashdot, I'll find ways to rebel. I go out of my way to avoid enriching Microsoft, whenever some small step is possible. This ranges from avoiding MSN and other Microsoft products, to advocating alternatives whenever company needs are flexible enough. Dialing down my subscription settings and bypassing Slashdot's ad revenue would be an equivalent protest against Slashdot editorial laziness.
Given the above, boycotting Slashdot stands a better chance of helping *my* situation than the alternatives.
Now, how am I'm selfish when I donate my writing without compensation? How am I being selfish when I punish a vendor that refuses to improve after an implicit contract for improvements was made with my donation? How exactly am I being selfish to deny that same vendor any additional income from advertising to me? I AM being selfish to want slashdot to either fix itself or die, but it is a selfishness that is the utter essence of capitalism or evolution: things should have more than marketing or inertia as their means of existing.
If none of that sways you, it'll probably not matter if you reread your rant, changing context to Microsoft (or the RIAA) and adjust the circumstances:
or (disclosure: the above opinions weren't mine until 5 minutes ago, probably won't be 10 minutes from now. Why? See Devil's Advocate. I own 10 shares of Microsoft. I donated to Slashdot. Neither gives me any satisfaction.)The grid has mechanisms to prevent this.
Yeah, sometimes they fail or (worse) fail in cascade fashion. But usually, if a large area goes brown, interlocks kick in to turn some zones off to regain the power needed.
IANA power expert. I can't even remember what the above interlocks are called... but the things that scare me about the grid don't include this. Craptabulous shoe-horned tiny tcp/ip stacks being stuffed into too many control points, protocols that have little more than security-by-obscurity preventing their abuse, fierce maintenance cutbacks by post-Enron beancounters, and more.
Sleep tight, indeed. The only thing that makes me shrug boredly is that if things go insanely wrong, I'll probably have some free time to go fishing...
About giving stuff up: am I the only one that sees an inverse-relationship between drug screening and paycheck? Starting out, I got tested repeatedly at early jobs. Now, I'm making twice as much and haven't had to in 5 years or more...
Or did someone just smack management up the head with a clue-stick? I mean, who cares an IT geek's drug history, if their work is good?
Good post, L. Even if I disagree with you 100%, it was interesting just to hear the industry's take.
Years ago, first week of semester, several of us were sitting in the Student Union, not far from the bookstore. A friend and her dad (who taught a class or two per semester) came by. He'd helped her buy her books, and was recovering from the sticker-shock he'd just gotten.
After he ranted a bit, we all agreed: Prices were horrible. Usury. Highway-freakin-robbery. And I chimed in: "In some fields, there's enough changing to merit a new edition every few years. Pharmacy or law or microbiology, for example. Some engineering courses. But for some, like physics, or lit or history it's a bit silly, considering how little changes. And professors don't pay attention to the costs, either. For example, did you compare prices on the books you assigned your students?! How much was it?"
He did something between a gasp and a scowl, said "I don't know, but I'll know in 5 minutes!", and stomped off to the bookstore. And he came back a sad, changed man.
My point:while prof's may give away their copy of a freebie text, they're sheltered from pricing info because of these free gifts. That is an effect that definitely breaks in favor of the publisher: one freebie earns 10-1000 captive sales. Calling professors slimy without admitting publisher's self-interest in all those freebies is the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?
A last thought: publishers aren't alone. Peer-reviewed journals, mass-market books, news, things easily resold onto ebay (even cars!), electronics, art, services... nearly everyone's getting hit by this. As much as it pains me to say, it isn't the world's fault that publishers' profit margin due to scarcity is being shot to hell. Well, it is (the world's fault), but wasn't intentional and it isn't wrong by itself. The tough puzzle nowadays is rediscovering a web-proof profit/business plan.
Oh, and if you think publishing's had it tough so far, brace yourself for screencasts, video-on-demand, open-source texts, ebooks, etc. Luckily, there's good news: fact-checking, materials, and other big fixed publishing costs can be just as easily driven toward zero. And I believe sales of books continues to climb, so the medium itself isn't dying.
- doing this research, then
- launching a few unmanned craft that plant usable stuff on part of Mars
seems a helluva lot easier than the prospect of watching/hearing the next Niel Armstrong whisper his dying words from 100M miles away.(now, let me my science and ethics hats back on, since I took 'em off to completely ignore the 'but what about the bad science or bad ethics of lazily overwriting an entire planet of exotic lifeforms just because we got all Johnny Appleseed on it'.) How about we work on both of them. I mean, instead of billions on better killing machines.
Heh, perhaps this is being done so that the Government can cause a catastrophic security event so big it'll make Cisco's looming problem look trivial.
After all (and I do government security work), Uncle Sam usually does mediocre to terrible infosec...
Seriously, this idea is terminally stupid to the point where I doubt it'll succeed. Even if we dodge the risk (hah!), and the letter of the rule is implemented, grunts like me will just be required to implement secure tunnels to hide stuff that is too important to risk (they add a key, so we add another lock).
OK, so strikes one and two against me are that I'm uncivil to evil people and I mistook a creationist for an Idiot. Still, thanks for confirming that you're a nutjob.
A: Anyone that consistently insists on ignoring evidence that opposes their view is an idealogue.
B: you qualify for A.
C: you're an idealogue.
A: an idealogue that demands the world accept their views is a dangerous person at worst, a nutjob at best.
B: Hey, look, it's you again!!!
C: You're a nutjob. Possibly evil. You pick.
Look past the insults, learn the scientific method, learn to avoid sophistry... then spend the rest of your life trying to undo the crap you're inflicting. I'll be over here pretending to care. And thanks for the kind invitation to visit crazy joodahs hotblog, but... nah, I've got a whole case of nutso I'll never eat from some hollow earth crazies, and a sixpack of wingnut from some zero-point dude that's also past its expiration. Why bother.
My arguments, between the insults, were better-reasoned and based on careful logic than any screed you're capable of... oh, and my apologies to judas... I didn't waste time surfing to your site and your url wandered offscreen by the time I wrote the comparison. Judah loses the irony. That'd be three strikes, and I'm out of here...
-- I'm not an IDist.
If not, you're a troll. And running from your opinions so quickly tells me that JudasWhatever.com was an apt name for you to choose.
The astroturfing of Idiotic Design is a serious problem, and you're helping it along. Your first post carefully painted nutjobs as sensible moderates, via fallacies and outright bullshit. You also misuse several terms in a way that convinces me that your opinion is too uniformed to matter. That sways my vote from evil to 'tool'. So, you're a tool and a troll. Laters, double-T.
Idiotic Design hasn't earned the label 'Theory'. In fact, every claim put forth is easily DISPROVEN by nature, which (as a deeply religious person) I equate with God. So, the only postulate getting proven enough to earn the title 'Theory' seems to be: God doesn't like your half-assed contraption any more than I do.
That is the fundamental problem: Religious nutjobs and dumbasses get cranky every time God and science contradict their fragile li'l house of cards belief system.
By the way, every sentence of your earlier post has a fallacy. Some have 2.
Sorry in advance for the flamage:
Pollyanish tripe like this really doesn't belong in a serious discussion of risks.
Had we hit 1969 without the tech needed, we wouldn't have gone to the moon that year. Merely wishing and/or allocating a decade on a calendar isn't enough.
I only mutter like this because radiation shielding isn't uncharted territory where merely *researching* will turn up likely leads. We already study the hell out of the subject. Anything new is as unlikely/hard as coming up with new antibiotics or other well-studied hard problems.
That said, I don't see much difference between this and test pilot mortality, etc. I say publish the risks and sign up the brave.
If it is any consolation, the same crap happens everywhere. Do what you can to help your coworkers minimize their losses ('no good deed goes unpunished', so be careful here), and get far far away as fast as you can. Keep a fairly detailed logbook/journal in case you get falsely sued, too. And sit back while I tell my tale of karmic blowback:
... this was the kicker... he was given an ultimatum by his company: fire 'Bob' (a guy with the same job title, but less experience) or you're fired. Three weeks later, nearing Christmas, the boss's wife called him in and said: "Call Bob up, offer him his job back at half-pay. If he says no, let me know immediately so we can challenge his unemployment insurance payments and get them stopped."
A friend, web/graphics/artist wizard (I really don't know anyone half as good as he is on the nontech aspects), became the single go-to guy at a tiny company that did custom printing. Since he could do amazing graphics and design and knew how to program the press to do custom tricks, he was priceless to 'em.
They sold their service as a franchise, which made them a few millions. They had a half-dozen 'company-owned' vanity cars, vacation homes, and liked to live like they were billionaires. Meanwhile, he couldn't get a raise, and they'd do bizarre/insensitive stuff like 'forgetting' to do payroll or pay bills. His christmas bonus, where he was promised several thousand dollars, was a rodded-to-death porsche, which he resold on ebay for $5000. Literally 3 'owners' were living fat and happy off his work. Meanwhile, he worked mountains of unpaid overtime, had paychecks bounce, stood by while impound people took back office equipment whose leases weren't being paid, had to endure the phone getting disconnected, couldn't get reimbursed for expenses, etc.
Then at the beginning of holiday season (Thanksgiving in the US),
Finally, he found a new job, and gave them notice. The evil wife literally burst into tears every time she saw him after that, probably realizing her days of easy money had just come to an end.
And then... after a lot of begging from them, they started paying him his full salary to come in 2 days a week as a consultant. He'd get paid upon arrival, accepted only certified checks or cash. Until the strain got to be too much, he had them utterly over a barrel, since they've got angry franchisees, clients, etc. Now, he's gone, lawsuits are flying, and they'll be lucky if all they get is bankruptcy court (since they have done more than a few fraudulent things).
Personally, I'd have let them sink into the swamp. Or offered to testify against them.
There are really some evil people in the world... why do a disproportionate amount of them have MBA's and law degrees?!
no mucking about with funky ceramics...
What do you think that 200-mile cable is going to be made out of? Steel!? If it isn't ceramic, it'll definitely be a polymer and an engineering design that will be spooky as hell until we've used it a lot.
And won't things be exciting the day that we learn that steady UV bombardment and ionic disturbances have caused the space elevator to age prematurely...
Man, listening to slashdotters talk about space exploration rates a step above reading about it in Wierd Science or a supermarket Tabloid. I keep waiting for someone to suggest we have bigfoot toss things into orbit off the freakin' pyramids.
Heh, wickedly slick use of the new meme, but fair warning to any newbies to subaquatic radio: Do the RF skin-depth calculations and weep.
I haven't done that sort of calc in years, but I remember skin-depth being an inverse-freq^2 equation, and even at megahertz levels, a fairly powerful signal would only go a few feet at best. This was why military subs use VLF or other tricks to send/receive data. By the time you get to 2.4ghz, I'd be shocked if this teensy transmitter can reach even a few feet below the surface.
If you're gonna trash-talk someone, at least do a few minutes of
fact checking:
Gary Kurtz, producer of the first 2 star wars movies, put the items up for auction from HIS private collection, to raise money to open a public film archive.
No Lucas, no billionaire, no massive ego-trip. Just $2.6 million to someone's pet project (that even has the words 'public archive' in it!!!) The auction ended up netting $2.6 million. As for the lightsaber, after spending $200k on it, I'm betting the new owner isn't going to mistreat the prop.
And that is why I *cancelled* my paypal acct tied to my bank account, reopening one that is completely credit-card oriented. Lots of nagging, but no fscking way do I grant them permission to touch my bank account.
Same here.
... erm... *me*. Refused to capture any data, usage, IP's, etc, even when I suggested escrow so it could be retrieved as evidence, given a legal subpoena. Incidentally, AOL also was unwilling to capture/escrow evidence.
Years of usenet, classifieds2000, ebay activity with little problem (a buyer that refused an item he'd bought and had me send COD being the worst).
On the other hand, 3 yrs ago, someone created a bogus aol account, a bogus ebay account, and etc. in my name. Bought 2 used laptops using a visa of mine that was near it's limit (dumb luck!) and I got a call from VISA. I suspect the visa data came from buying VCD's from an international vendor (futurama before it came out on DVD).
Here's my scorecard:
AOL: refused to help in any way, disconnected the account, and regularly sends me CD's and 'rejoin today' offers tied to this bogus account. The only thing lamer than an AOL CD is one that reminds you of a prior identity theft.
eBay: put a stop on the account, but refused to reveal any details on the account in my name, since that'd violate their privacy agreement with
VISA: gave me seller information. I contacted them, they immediately *knew* which transaction was bogus ("man, I knew that one seemed wierd..."). Items had been shipped FedEx to Brunei.
FedEx: seller contacted fedex and told them the details. FedEx tracked package, found it was in their Nashville center, put a stop on it and returned the package to the seller. FOUR *FSCKING* STARS!!!!! OutSTANDING!
A few months later, someone tried the same thing, this time shipping crap to Rhode Island (Yeah, Brunei and Rhode Island, how wierd a juxtaposition is THAT?!). By then, I'd paranoidly cancelled every credit card # I had, changed bank account numbers, put passwords on my accounts, put holds on my credit data, etc. Thus, the visa bounced, end of story.
To this day, my respect for eBay, and AOL is still pretty much rock bottom. A tiger team dedicated to arresting and viciously prosecuting obvious frauds internationally would be dirt cheap and they'd get tons of positive PR. But why bother... it'd increase their liability for the unprosecuted frauds, and they're apparently not interested in the customer's financial protection. Just their own.
Considering he's a mac user, he probably doesn't care that you boycott his site.
Considering he's been slashdotted, he might even be grateful.
Most of my friends prefer a bar that has free munchies. Likewise, I know where the free AP's are and go there before I'll go somewhere and pay for access.
That's how 'just not a lot' 90% of us are. Sad, but true. Most folks arent' constantly scheming about improved net access like I am, either.
I saw this at a breakfast/lunch bistro with free wifi, downtown 2 nights ago: some guy sitting on the park bench outside, surfing. A tourist. He'd have been inside, if they'd been open at 8pm.
As it was, their net-published entry in a free wifi database probably gets a few dozen customers a month that they wouldn't otherwise get, since my town's on a major tourism route and they're off the main drag. And the bistro's owners (friends) are the type that wouldn't hesitate to walk up to an utter freeloader and say 'Um, buy something or beat it.' That's what I'd do, too. Rather than futz with all this angst and administrivia, just step up to the table and politely/firmly tell them to either buy something or vacate 'your' table for customers.
As for the other concerns (unruly gamers, wankers-seeking-porn, bandwidth hogs), more of the same... house rules and a willingness to politely deny service to people you don't want as customers are all that are needed.
An afterthought: Between the steering-wheel games' UI accuracy creating a strong linkage to these real-world skills (some pro auto racers can/do believe they're helped if they use xbox/playstation games for training). Likewise, each game gives you something. DDR and Flightsim: usable. Strategy or Logic games give you usable mental skills. Combat/Twitch games, not so much that's usable.
User Interface is important on whether games' physical skills map to real-world or not. If physical responses are the key thing needed, the UI needs to match the real world. Devise a real-life kickboxing UI, and I'll bet players would end up with real-world fighting skills.
Heh, and do you brag about your website being unhackable?!
Martial arts, like security, is all about avoiding risk, minimizing impact. You're not superman... bullets, enraged girlfriends in your blind-spot, assault charges, injury lawsuits, revenge (getting your ass beaten by that guy and his 3 friends, vandalism, having your family hurt because of it)...
What again was the upside to you swaggering thru dangers you used to fear?
The good teachers will disabuse you of this, if you'll listen. If you're not getting that message, either get a new attitude or get a new teacher, 'cuz you're gonna get your ass whupped someday, otherwise.
Now, we all probably misread your level of bravado. If so, I agree that, when circumstances sour, it's nice to not be frozen with fear. It's nice to be practiced. Reassuring as hell. It's nice to instinctively deflect that rather-unexpected first punch. And Nintendo 'Mortal Kombat', I agree, isn't gonna help your ass here. But I've had some experiences ripple over from gaming, and have heard this mentioned enough to not think I'm alone. The most recent was my brother commenting that some urban-racer XBox game (an earlier GTA?) made him feel like he could drive a car through a power-skid around a corner, and even to feel the urge to 'just try it...'
Disclaimer: I'm a Democrat, Hillary's a pandering twit that just lost my vote, and nothing in human nature is this black-or-white, whether it's football or GTA.