Good for you. I still think it's completely appropriate - it's exaggerated to make the point, but it's very easy to understand. You've got to be able to understand it's not a direct 1:1 comparison. It simply makes the point.
Yeah, thanks, I know what an analogy is. I'm not saying you can't use it, just that it doesn't sway me because I don't think it's a valid reductio ad absurdum of the position I'm taking. I don't think it makes the point at all.
I challenge your analogy because it is materially different from the case at hand. It is more than just exaggerating the specifics, and I contend it is so different that it leads to false conclusions. And, actually, I did spend a paragraph in that last post trying to explain why I think it's invalid, and identified a material difference (the pilot knows when he needs to use his specialized emergency training, whereas the screener has no way to know that the next bag is the one that can't possibly be let through). Here are a couple more.
If you cut the power to an engine, you are directly putting the passengers at risk. You have created a SERIOUS emergency situation from which you're hoping that the pilot can recover and save these people. The pilot (or, if he fails, the automated system) must now rescue these people from otherwise certain death. He can do everything by the book and the plane may still go down. Further, note that no failures of any of the systems controlling the drill are required. As soon as the drill begins, the lives of these passengers are SERIOUSLY at risk, according to the plan.
Now consider the actual situation in a security check line. First of all, if all goes according to plan, the operator is alerted that it was a drill before any armed personnel are even brought into the situation (the TSA guy watching the screen is not armed). So unless there's a system failure or protocol is breached, there is never any direct risk to any travelers. That's a material difference from your analogy.
Further, suppose that the system DOES fail and armed personnel are brought in to contain the situation. These people have been trained NOT to kill people. If they do their jobs, no one is placed in danger. Now there is risk to the travelers that someone with a gun makes a lethal error, that's true. However, these armed personnel are not in a position where they need to save people from a system failure. They just have to not shoot them. That is another material difference.
You use an offline drill by simulating a sufficient period that the person is caught off guard if they're not paying attention. Guess what though - it costs more.
If you know you're going to lose your job if you fail a test, you will focus really hard and find a way to pass. Despite your (just as baseless as mine) assertions to the contrary, I still don't think you can train offline to stay focussed at the real job. You've got to have something to keep you alert in real time. Your brain is just too good at blocking out monotonous stimuli and monotony causes accidents and errors. That fact is well documented.
Using some other object as a drill target won't work very well either, since you'll just spend your time looking for stuffed animals instead of bombs.
I don't disagree with you that it's bad to bring armed personnel into a situation where they're not required because, obviously, that increases the risk of an accident. However, I don't think that risk elevation is so great that it will always outweigh the benefit of increasing the risk that that risk elevation occurs. Obviously you should minimize the chance that these people are brought in -- if you go back to my first post on this thread (I think, it was so long ago... it's in there somewhere), I suggested a few ways to do this. The operator should not be the only one who gets notice in real-time that a drill event occurred. There should be coordination with people higher in t
Ok, if you're going to accuse me of trolling, try to remember which of us called the other "ignorant."
I still think your airline pilot analogy is completely inappropriate to this situation. When an airplane engine fails, it's a massive event that you can't possibly miss. Lights go off, the plane goes crazy, and the pilot knows that he's got to go into emergency mode. He can switch into emergency mode and save the day using the experience from the simulators.
How do you use an offline drill to prepare someone for an event that will be silently slipped in among countless monotonous hours staring at image after image? How do you train them, day in, day out, not to zone out. I honestly don't believe it can be done. Really, I'm not trolling, I simply disagree with you very strongly.
Ok, maybe you're not advocating no drilling at all, but what I meant is you're suggesting no effective drilling. I don't believe that a pre-arranged drill achieves the necessary goal here.
In a job where you're staring at a monitor for hours at a time with nothing to find, you are going to lose your concentration if every single bag you ever look at in your entire life doesn't contain a bomb. If you always know when you're in a drill situation, then whether you like it or not, you will pay more attention when you're in the drills. The only way to be sure you're checking every package thoroughly and correctly is to have a real non-negligible chance that any package contains something you need to identify. That way, it's a game for every package -- you have to play it correctly or you'll lose.
I am not trying to be rhetorical here, I really believe that live drills like this are a good, necessary practice. I would not advocate live practice involving armed personnel -- and it seems evident to me (and now, I'm sure, everyone who's involved in this program) that this system needs additional safeguards to prevent escalation to a point where they are involved. Still, given a 99.9% chance that an overlooked bomb kills 150 people and a 0.1% chance that someone is killed in a false attack, I think it's wise to err on the side of safety.
Finally, getting rid of these drills won't get rid of these false alarms. The fact that people called in to deal with these situations can make mistakes should be considered, but not blown out of proportion.
The only real benefit of changing your password that I can think of was raised earlier in the discussion here -- it limits the amount of time that someone can surreptitiously use your account. Depending on what sort of system it is, that's possibly of some value. In any case, if security is important, you've got to have a good method for detecting unauthorized use quickly. Changing your password doesn't do this...
I think you're right -- even if you assume it takes a month for the systematic password search on the mainframe to try every password combination, changing your password doesn't help much.
It does buy you a tiny bit, if they are actually trying every combination. Suppose it takes them two months to try every combo and after one month, your password is still unknown. They are now guaranteed to have it within the next month if you do not change it. If you do change it, then there's a 50% probability that you change it to something in the half they've already run tried. It's not hard to work out the expected time to compromise, and you will find that there is some way to maximize it by changing your password at just the right rate.
However, it's a pretty minor benefit. Furthermore, if they are doing anything less than checking every single password, then I'd bet it actually buys you nothing at all. The difference is because in that case, they're not guaranteed to guess your password after a fixed time interval.
Actually, yeah, that's what I would normally do. It doesn't help much in nasty weather, though. There is (or at least, used to be) a shuttle from Kendall Sq to the Galleria. I never found it to be very useful, since I never really knew the hours of operation and it was usually easier just to walk. From Porter, though, I still usually found that public transport was enough trouble that driving seemed pretty attractive. Especially if you were buying anything that wouldn't fit in a back pack.
Exactly. In my defense, this was in the SF Bay Area at about the height of the frenzy, less than a year before the fit hit the shan. It took me over a month to find *anywhere* to live, let alone somewhere close to work. Fortunately, a coworker got married and moved out of an apartment less than 2 miles from the office and I took over his room (it was shared with a couple roommates). Much nicer after that.
Porter Square to the Galleria is not real easy to do efficiently via public transportation. You have to use the busses, which are just as subject to traffic and (worse) snowstorms. To do that run on the subway, you have to go all the way down in to Boston, switch lines, and then run back out to Cambridge again.
While the basic result is pretty obvious, some of the details are interesting. In particular, the asymmetry between leaving earlier and leaving later. That's not obviously the case... Of course, it's also not obvious that these results have any general validity, since it probably depends very heavily on your route.
I spent about 8 months with a 15-20 mile (one-way) commute and thought about gathering data and doing a similar analysis. The basic collection and plotting wouldn't take long. When you spend 1.5-2.5 hours a day in your car (only going 35 miles total), you start to think some funny things are worthwhile...
So because a drill might not be properly identified, we shouldn't have them? That is what you are suggesting, and that's absurd.
These people need to be able to do their job in a situation where it's *not* a drill. What do you suggest, they flash a little sign "this image is a test and contains a bomb" over the test images?
I just don't like reading things, especially reference material, on a laptop. I typically jump back and forth between a few places in the book, and I find it a lot easier to keep track of what info is where using physical book marks on a physical book than I do using the electronic equivalents. Additionally, for making my own notes, I find it much easier to write on a piece of scrap paper or in a notebook, or on my printout of the original material.
You can also sell them directly to someone else, you don't have to go through the book store. MIT had a book swap at the beginning of each year where you could drop off books and ask whatever price you wanted. They'd keep them on display for a few days and collect the money for you. It worked pretty well for everyone -- you got better than the joke of a price from the bookstores and the buyer got better than the jacked up used price as well.
It depends on exactly how that is punctuated. It could also mean: "They did so for one reason... it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" (i.e., they did it for one reason, but it turned out to be important for something else too). This has the benefit of actually being plausibly correct and is probably what he meant to say.
It's not just a matter of what you're most concerned about, it's a matter of putting things in perspective. I'm MOST concerned about the next breath I take containing enough oxygen to sustain life. That's generally so certain that I don't bring it up. Obviously, I would post my credit card numbers on Slashdot if it would prevent a child from being raped -- I don't think there are very many people who are truly more concerned about their privacy than bodily harm being inflicted on a child.
It's all about perspective. Will this law have enough of an effect protecting children (or insert whatever issue you want to discuss) to warrant the risks it poses to my privacy. That is where the widest disagreement arises, IMO. I think you understand this, because that's what studies on efficacy would actually let people evaluate.
Frankly, from the numbers I've seen, I would say that the rate of crimes against children is quite low. It's tragic that it's nonzero, but it's low enough that a measure would have to be EXTREMELY effective to affect a substantial number of cases. That's why, in general, I am very suspicious of laws that are put forth purporting to "save the children."
As someone suggested above, if that's really the reason for the need for a broad search power, then limit the use of evidence discovered through that power to the prosecution of child pornography/molestation crimes. That will make it very hard for the law to be misused. Sure, some crimes will go unpunished, but one of the founding principles of our justice system is that we must accept guilty going free to protect the innocent from wrongful prosecution.
I would say that you should generally stop when you've given up enough that your web site is no longer capable of serving its purpose. If you are building a site to share photographs, then there's no real need to handle the case where the user can't render an image because your site will be worthless anyway. If, however, you're a news site with photos alongside articles, then you really ought to take the time to support text-only users.
Also, you need to separate "backward-compatibility" from "downward-compatibility." The latter is, IMO, the more important of the two. The difference I am getting at is that backward-compatibility concerns a protocol change that breaks or is not supported by older browsers, whereas downward-compatibility concerns an interface capability requirement that can't be worked around by a software upgrade.
There are users who can't use nifty features for a lot of reasons. Blind users have a hard time with web pages that don't render well in text mode for a screen reader or Braille "display." Users on a handheld device have limited screen area and processing power. I myself often use a text mode browser on a brand new PC before I get X up and running. If your web site can be useful to these people, then it's worth being downward compatible.
Backward compatibility is, IMO, a bit less of a must-have, but I still would advocate maintaining it unless it's a serious hardship. Not many web sites need or are even improved by these new technologies. There are exceptions, but I find that advanced HTML rendering techniques often make sites *less* usable to me. Arguing "upgrade or die" to support something that's "cool" rather than something that's "useful" seems like a poor policy.
Your examples of gasoline and Polaroid film fall into this backward-compatibility category. Gasoline is not a great example for this discussion because there is good reason to actively discourage people from using the older more dangerous formulations. Still, pragmatically, at some point there just isn't enough demand for something to warrant continuing to provide it. I think it's worth trying to keep things compatible if you can.
And I don't know that I've seen many cases of people "bending over backwards" for compatibility. Most places, IMO, don't do nearly enough of it.
I don't think this works. I've not professionally produced CDs or DVDs, but I have made a lot of electronics. The economics of production are similar.
Basically, you have a huge design and production set-up cost. This covers an engineer designing and prototyping, plus technicians determining the best processes for production, etc. This is done once and after that, you can produce items at a low cost-per-item. If you're doing a small run of boards, you can use a process with a relatively high cost per item but lower design and set-up costs. If you're going for huge volumes, you put more expense in the up front costs because you need the lowest per-item costs.
The analogy to movie (or music) disc production is tight. Design costs are production costs, and are probably the highest of the up front costs. After that, you have to go through the set-up to determine how to produce the final product. Finally, you start cranking out products -- if it's low volume, you might use recordable media to reduce the set-up costs, but for a high-volume situation, you get the lowest price with a dedicated stamping process.
The problem with low-volume production is that you have to recover the start-up costs and these are dominated by production. You figure out how much your movie cost, divide by the expected number of sales, and that's what you have to add to the media cost to break even. Economy of production scale doesn't help you with this. If you've got to sell DVDs at $1.50 each, it gets harder to take a risk that a particular movie won't sell well. What'll end up happening is that major label DVDs will be $1.50, but true indie movies will still cost $10-$20. That makes it even harder for them to stay afloat.
Wow, it's amazing what logical leaps you can accomplish if you don't limit yourself to valid or appropriate analogies.
This is a drill that, if misinterpreted, causes part of the airport to be evacuated and closed down for a couple hours. An appropriate analogy is an unexpected fire drill. I've been in plenty of those and I'm sometimes annoyed at the inconvenience, but happy to know that the building has a functioning safety system that gives an unnecessary alarm rather than silently ignoring a real emergency situation.
They shot a suspected terrorist who was acting in a threatening manner after being warned of the threat of force. If you've got a reference to someone being shot while cooperatively waiting for their bag at a security checkpoint, then maybe you've got a point.
My HP/Compaq Presario laptop seems to have come with a real Windows CD. It's definitely real in the sense that it doesn't need anything on the HD (I reformatted completely when I received it). I haven't tried installing on a different PC with it, but it didn't have any obvious Compaq customization to it...
There's no indication of how often these false images are injected, so it's not clear they're being "bombarded" with false events. If it's too many and there's no penalty for missing a few, then it's a bad move. However, 99.99% or more of all airport screeners will never see a real event. It's not something you're going to get experience seeing or handling if there are not drills.
The only way to test the screeners and keep them alert is to give them events to respond to. The problem with the system as described in the article is that it sounds like only the machine knows that a fake event was generated until an audit later. Really, the people who the screener would call should be notified ahead of time that there is a fake event. That would prevent escalation. If this is done, though, there must also be an identifier of some sort attached to every image so that they don't mistake a real event report for an anticipated false one.
As long as the screeners are seriously penalized for failing to respond to any false event, this is not a bad thing. It's absolutely nothing like your "live ammo" analogy. A false positive event like that which occurred is acceptable. A few people were inconvenienced by an airport shutdown and nobody gets hurt. Imagine the consequences of a false negative.
Ok -- well, I think you're still not understanding the reason for the way units are typically represented (and you're not at all alone on this since, as you point out, people do it inversely all the time). The division versus multiplication is not really a prescription for how to use the number -- when I say 5 km divided by hours, that is not an instruction to divide by the number of hours. It is because when I measure speed, I really measure distance in km and time in hours. Then, I divide the distance by the time to get the speed. Say I measured that you ran 10 km in 2 hours. What was your speed? It was
(10 km) / (2 hr) = (10 / 2) (km / hr) = 5 km/hr
You're right when you say that "per" means you need to multiply by what it's "per" to get the quantity you want. However, that means that the "per unit" has to go in the denominator so that the unit cancels when you do that multiplication. For a discussion of things as simple as speeds or other simple ratios, your line of reasoning works. However, it starts to get confusing when you're talking about things like Joules per second per Hertz per Kelvin per meter squared per steradian. You've just got to take the algebraic approach to keep things straight, which is why the standard conventions are as they are.
Anyway... I think this thread is long dead. Have a nice day.:-)
I agree that this doesn't sound much like discrimination, unless as others have pointed out, the boss gives out paper apps to those he "likes" when the electronic terminal fails.
However, I don't agree that you should just go away if you are discriminated against. Discrimination should be vigorously opposed. In the case of discriminatory hiring, sue (or do whatever it takes) to punish the person or company who's discriminating. You're not required to accept the job afterwards, but this is still not a pointless exercise. This is the only way these laws can be enforced. It may not help you with this employer, but it will help the next person who comes along.
That's a fine perspective, but doesn't LiveJournal have the right to decide that they aren't willing to give you service if you're not going to be one of the sheep who will look at the ads? IMO, it's an ethical breach to violate the TOS and still use the service (assuming we're talking about a service like an online journal and not, e.g., lifesaving equipment where the ethical landscape is obviously different).
Don't underestimate the subconscious impact of ads, though. Even if you're not clicking on them, you're seeing them. Everybody is a sheep, just to varying degrees.:-)
No, but I think this all started because when someone writes $2.5B:g, it's not immediately obvious that the B:g is an abbreviation rather than a typo or some weird emoticon.:-D:-) X^o
You seem to think I'm complaining about LiveJournal, ranting against some horrible change they're making, or something. I don't know how you got that idea -- reread what I wrote, because it's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. No, I'm not familiar with the specifics of LiveJournal, but I'm not really commenting on the details of the case, either.
The grandparent post asked a rhetorical question about what the situation would be had they started trying to charge an exorbitant fee without giving notice. What I was trying to say is that, in that case, the change would require more than just unilaterally deciding to start collecting the fee. I know that is not what they're doing, but if they did, they would have to provide more meaningful notice.
I'm arguing that they probably have a lot less legal responsibility to be up front and accommodating than it seems that they are being. Kudos to them for providing better service than they have to.
Finally, your comments about lack of perspective are just way off base. First of all, any website may go out of business at any time. Hell, banks fail without warning, skyscrapers come tumbling down. Servers crash and backups are lost, you just don't know what's going to happen. If you have data of any value, back it up yourself. If you can't do that, then pay someone to guarantee it will be backed up. There is no way anyone should be using a free service provider as the sole storage for data of any value at all. If you're doing that, then either you're a moron or the data isn't really that valuable to you and you can afford to lose it.
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Yeah, thanks, I know what an analogy is. I'm not saying you can't use it, just that it doesn't sway me because I don't think it's a valid reductio ad absurdum of the position I'm taking. I don't think it makes the point at all.
I challenge your analogy because it is materially different from the case at hand. It is more than just exaggerating the specifics, and I contend it is so different that it leads to false conclusions. And, actually, I did spend a paragraph in that last post trying to explain why I think it's invalid, and identified a material difference (the pilot knows when he needs to use his specialized emergency training, whereas the screener has no way to know that the next bag is the one that can't possibly be let through). Here are a couple more.
If you cut the power to an engine, you are directly putting the passengers at risk. You have created a SERIOUS emergency situation from which you're hoping that the pilot can recover and save these people. The pilot (or, if he fails, the automated system) must now rescue these people from otherwise certain death. He can do everything by the book and the plane may still go down. Further, note that no failures of any of the systems controlling the drill are required. As soon as the drill begins, the lives of these passengers are SERIOUSLY at risk, according to the plan.
Now consider the actual situation in a security check line. First of all, if all goes according to plan, the operator is alerted that it was a drill before any armed personnel are even brought into the situation (the TSA guy watching the screen is not armed). So unless there's a system failure or protocol is breached, there is never any direct risk to any travelers. That's a material difference from your analogy.
Further, suppose that the system DOES fail and armed personnel are brought in to contain the situation. These people have been trained NOT to kill people. If they do their jobs, no one is placed in danger. Now there is risk to the travelers that someone with a gun makes a lethal error, that's true. However, these armed personnel are not in a position where they need to save people from a system failure. They just have to not shoot them. That is another material difference.
If you know you're going to lose your job if you fail a test, you will focus really hard and find a way to pass. Despite your (just as baseless as mine) assertions to the contrary, I still don't think you can train offline to stay focussed at the real job. You've got to have something to keep you alert in real time. Your brain is just too good at blocking out monotonous stimuli and monotony causes accidents and errors. That fact is well documented.
Using some other object as a drill target won't work very well either, since you'll just spend your time looking for stuffed animals instead of bombs.
I don't disagree with you that it's bad to bring armed personnel into a situation where they're not required because, obviously, that increases the risk of an accident. However, I don't think that risk elevation is so great that it will always outweigh the benefit of increasing the risk that that risk elevation occurs. Obviously you should minimize the chance that these people are brought in -- if you go back to my first post on this thread (I think, it was so long ago... it's in there somewhere), I suggested a few ways to do this. The operator should not be the only one who gets notice in real-time that a drill event occurred. There should be coordination with people higher in t
Ok, if you're going to accuse me of trolling, try to remember which of us called the other "ignorant."
I still think your airline pilot analogy is completely inappropriate to this situation. When an airplane engine fails, it's a massive event that you can't possibly miss. Lights go off, the plane goes crazy, and the pilot knows that he's got to go into emergency mode. He can switch into emergency mode and save the day using the experience from the simulators.
How do you use an offline drill to prepare someone for an event that will be silently slipped in among countless monotonous hours staring at image after image? How do you train them, day in, day out, not to zone out. I honestly don't believe it can be done. Really, I'm not trolling, I simply disagree with you very strongly.
Ok, maybe you're not advocating no drilling at all, but what I meant is you're suggesting no effective drilling. I don't believe that a pre-arranged drill achieves the necessary goal here.
In a job where you're staring at a monitor for hours at a time with nothing to find, you are going to lose your concentration if every single bag you ever look at in your entire life doesn't contain a bomb. If you always know when you're in a drill situation, then whether you like it or not, you will pay more attention when you're in the drills. The only way to be sure you're checking every package thoroughly and correctly is to have a real non-negligible chance that any package contains something you need to identify. That way, it's a game for every package -- you have to play it correctly or you'll lose.
I am not trying to be rhetorical here, I really believe that live drills like this are a good, necessary practice. I would not advocate live practice involving armed personnel -- and it seems evident to me (and now, I'm sure, everyone who's involved in this program) that this system needs additional safeguards to prevent escalation to a point where they are involved. Still, given a 99.9% chance that an overlooked bomb kills 150 people and a 0.1% chance that someone is killed in a false attack, I think it's wise to err on the side of safety.
Finally, getting rid of these drills won't get rid of these false alarms. The fact that people called in to deal with these situations can make mistakes should be considered, but not blown out of proportion.
Yep.
The only real benefit of changing your password that I can think of was raised earlier in the discussion here -- it limits the amount of time that someone can surreptitiously use your account. Depending on what sort of system it is, that's possibly of some value. In any case, if security is important, you've got to have a good method for detecting unauthorized use quickly. Changing your password doesn't do this...
I think you're right -- even if you assume it takes a month for the systematic password search on the mainframe to try every password combination, changing your password doesn't help much.
It does buy you a tiny bit, if they are actually trying every combination. Suppose it takes them two months to try every combo and after one month, your password is still unknown. They are now guaranteed to have it within the next month if you do not change it. If you do change it, then there's a 50% probability that you change it to something in the half they've already run tried. It's not hard to work out the expected time to compromise, and you will find that there is some way to maximize it by changing your password at just the right rate.
However, it's a pretty minor benefit. Furthermore, if they are doing anything less than checking every single password, then I'd bet it actually buys you nothing at all. The difference is because in that case, they're not guaranteed to guess your password after a fixed time interval.
Actually, yeah, that's what I would normally do. It doesn't help much in nasty weather, though. There is (or at least, used to be) a shuttle from Kendall Sq to the Galleria. I never found it to be very useful, since I never really knew the hours of operation and it was usually easier just to walk. From Porter, though, I still usually found that public transport was enough trouble that driving seemed pretty attractive. Especially if you were buying anything that wouldn't fit in a back pack.
Exactly. In my defense, this was in the SF Bay Area at about the height of the frenzy, less than a year before the fit hit the shan. It took me over a month to find *anywhere* to live, let alone somewhere close to work. Fortunately, a coworker got married and moved out of an apartment less than 2 miles from the office and I took over his room (it was shared with a couple roommates). Much nicer after that.
Porter Square to the Galleria is not real easy to do efficiently via public transportation. You have to use the busses, which are just as subject to traffic and (worse) snowstorms. To do that run on the subway, you have to go all the way down in to Boston, switch lines, and then run back out to Cambridge again.
While the basic result is pretty obvious, some of the details are interesting. In particular, the asymmetry between leaving earlier and leaving later. That's not obviously the case... Of course, it's also not obvious that these results have any general validity, since it probably depends very heavily on your route.
I spent about 8 months with a 15-20 mile (one-way) commute and thought about gathering data and doing a similar analysis. The basic collection and plotting wouldn't take long. When you spend 1.5-2.5 hours a day in your car (only going 35 miles total), you start to think some funny things are worthwhile...
So because a drill might not be properly identified, we shouldn't have them? That is what you are suggesting, and that's absurd.
These people need to be able to do their job in a situation where it's *not* a drill. What do you suggest, they flash a little sign "this image is a test and contains a bomb" over the test images?
I just don't like reading things, especially reference material, on a laptop. I typically jump back and forth between a few places in the book, and I find it a lot easier to keep track of what info is where using physical book marks on a physical book than I do using the electronic equivalents. Additionally, for making my own notes, I find it much easier to write on a piece of scrap paper or in a notebook, or on my printout of the original material.
You can also sell them directly to someone else, you don't have to go through the book store. MIT had a book swap at the beginning of each year where you could drop off books and ask whatever price you wanted. They'd keep them on display for a few days and collect the money for you. It worked pretty well for everyone -- you got better than the joke of a price from the bookstores and the buyer got better than the jacked up used price as well.
It depends on exactly how that is punctuated. It could also mean:
"They did so for one reason... it turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" (i.e., they did it for one reason, but it turned out to be important for something else too). This has the benefit of actually being plausibly correct and is probably what he meant to say.
It's not just a matter of what you're most concerned about, it's a matter of putting things in perspective. I'm MOST concerned about the next breath I take containing enough oxygen to sustain life. That's generally so certain that I don't bring it up. Obviously, I would post my credit card numbers on Slashdot if it would prevent a child from being raped -- I don't think there are very many people who are truly more concerned about their privacy than bodily harm being inflicted on a child.
It's all about perspective. Will this law have enough of an effect protecting children (or insert whatever issue you want to discuss) to warrant the risks it poses to my privacy. That is where the widest disagreement arises, IMO. I think you understand this, because that's what studies on efficacy would actually let people evaluate.
Frankly, from the numbers I've seen, I would say that the rate of crimes against children is quite low. It's tragic that it's nonzero, but it's low enough that a measure would have to be EXTREMELY effective to affect a substantial number of cases. That's why, in general, I am very suspicious of laws that are put forth purporting to "save the children."
As someone suggested above, if that's really the reason for the need for a broad search power, then limit the use of evidence discovered through that power to the prosecution of child pornography/molestation crimes. That will make it very hard for the law to be misused. Sure, some crimes will go unpunished, but one of the founding principles of our justice system is that we must accept guilty going free to protect the innocent from wrongful prosecution.
I would say that you should generally stop when you've given up enough that your web site is no longer capable of serving its purpose. If you are building a site to share photographs, then there's no real need to handle the case where the user can't render an image because your site will be worthless anyway. If, however, you're a news site with photos alongside articles, then you really ought to take the time to support text-only users.
Also, you need to separate "backward-compatibility" from "downward-compatibility." The latter is, IMO, the more important of the two. The difference I am getting at is that backward-compatibility concerns a protocol change that breaks or is not supported by older browsers, whereas downward-compatibility concerns an interface capability requirement that can't be worked around by a software upgrade.
There are users who can't use nifty features for a lot of reasons. Blind users have a hard time with web pages that don't render well in text mode for a screen reader or Braille "display." Users on a handheld device have limited screen area and processing power. I myself often use a text mode browser on a brand new PC before I get X up and running. If your web site can be useful to these people, then it's worth being downward compatible.
Backward compatibility is, IMO, a bit less of a must-have, but I still would advocate maintaining it unless it's a serious hardship. Not many web sites need or are even improved by these new technologies. There are exceptions, but I find that advanced HTML rendering techniques often make sites *less* usable to me. Arguing "upgrade or die" to support something that's "cool" rather than something that's "useful" seems like a poor policy.
Your examples of gasoline and Polaroid film fall into this backward-compatibility category. Gasoline is not a great example for this discussion because there is good reason to actively discourage people from using the older more dangerous formulations. Still, pragmatically, at some point there just isn't enough demand for something to warrant continuing to provide it. I think it's worth trying to keep things compatible if you can.
And I don't know that I've seen many cases of people "bending over backwards" for compatibility. Most places, IMO, don't do nearly enough of it.
I don't think this works. I've not professionally produced CDs or DVDs, but I have made a lot of electronics. The economics of production are similar.
Basically, you have a huge design and production set-up cost. This covers an engineer designing and prototyping, plus technicians determining the best processes for production, etc. This is done once and after that, you can produce items at a low cost-per-item. If you're doing a small run of boards, you can use a process with a relatively high cost per item but lower design and set-up costs. If you're going for huge volumes, you put more expense in the up front costs because you need the lowest per-item costs.
The analogy to movie (or music) disc production is tight. Design costs are production costs, and are probably the highest of the up front costs. After that, you have to go through the set-up to determine how to produce the final product. Finally, you start cranking out products -- if it's low volume, you might use recordable media to reduce the set-up costs, but for a high-volume situation, you get the lowest price with a dedicated stamping process.
The problem with low-volume production is that you have to recover the start-up costs and these are dominated by production. You figure out how much your movie cost, divide by the expected number of sales, and that's what you have to add to the media cost to break even. Economy of production scale doesn't help you with this. If you've got to sell DVDs at $1.50 each, it gets harder to take a risk that a particular movie won't sell well. What'll end up happening is that major label DVDs will be $1.50, but true indie movies will still cost $10-$20. That makes it even harder for them to stay afloat.
Wow, it's amazing what logical leaps you can accomplish if you don't limit yourself to valid or appropriate analogies.
This is a drill that, if misinterpreted, causes part of the airport to be evacuated and closed down for a couple hours. An appropriate analogy is an unexpected fire drill. I've been in plenty of those and I'm sometimes annoyed at the inconvenience, but happy to know that the building has a functioning safety system that gives an unnecessary alarm rather than silently ignoring a real emergency situation.
They shot a suspected terrorist who was acting in a threatening manner after being warned of the threat of force. If you've got a reference to someone being shot while cooperatively waiting for their bag at a security checkpoint, then maybe you've got a point.
My HP/Compaq Presario laptop seems to have come with a real Windows CD. It's definitely real in the sense that it doesn't need anything on the HD (I reformatted completely when I received it). I haven't tried installing on a different PC with it, but it didn't have any obvious Compaq customization to it...
There's no indication of how often these false images are injected, so it's not clear they're being "bombarded" with false events. If it's too many and there's no penalty for missing a few, then it's a bad move. However, 99.99% or more of all airport screeners will never see a real event. It's not something you're going to get experience seeing or handling if there are not drills.
The only way to test the screeners and keep them alert is to give them events to respond to. The problem with the system as described in the article is that it sounds like only the machine knows that a fake event was generated until an audit later. Really, the people who the screener would call should be notified ahead of time that there is a fake event. That would prevent escalation. If this is done, though, there must also be an identifier of some sort attached to every image so that they don't mistake a real event report for an anticipated false one.
As long as the screeners are seriously penalized for failing to respond to any false event, this is not a bad thing. It's absolutely nothing like your "live ammo" analogy. A false positive event like that which occurred is acceptable. A few people were inconvenienced by an airport shutdown and nobody gets hurt. Imagine the consequences of a false negative.
Anyway... I think this thread is long dead. Have a nice day.
I agree that this doesn't sound much like discrimination, unless as others have pointed out, the boss gives out paper apps to those he "likes" when the electronic terminal fails.
However, I don't agree that you should just go away if you are discriminated against. Discrimination should be vigorously opposed. In the case of discriminatory hiring, sue (or do whatever it takes) to punish the person or company who's discriminating. You're not required to accept the job afterwards, but this is still not a pointless exercise. This is the only way these laws can be enforced. It may not help you with this employer, but it will help the next person who comes along.
That's a fine perspective, but doesn't LiveJournal have the right to decide that they aren't willing to give you service if you're not going to be one of the sheep who will look at the ads? IMO, it's an ethical breach to violate the TOS and still use the service (assuming we're talking about a service like an online journal and not, e.g., lifesaving equipment where the ethical landscape is obviously different).
:-)
Don't underestimate the subconscious impact of ads, though. Even if you're not clicking on them, you're seeing them. Everybody is a sheep, just to varying degrees.
The AC hit it right on the head here...
No, but I think this all started because when someone writes $2.5B:g, it's not immediately obvious that the B:g is an abbreviation rather than a typo or some weird emoticon. :-D :-) X^o
You seem to think I'm complaining about LiveJournal, ranting against some horrible change they're making, or something. I don't know how you got that idea -- reread what I wrote, because it's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. No, I'm not familiar with the specifics of LiveJournal, but I'm not really commenting on the details of the case, either.
The grandparent post asked a rhetorical question about what the situation would be had they started trying to charge an exorbitant fee without giving notice. What I was trying to say is that, in that case, the change would require more than just unilaterally deciding to start collecting the fee. I know that is not what they're doing, but if they did, they would have to provide more meaningful notice.
I'm arguing that they probably have a lot less legal responsibility to be up front and accommodating than it seems that they are being. Kudos to them for providing better service than they have to.
Finally, your comments about lack of perspective are just way off base. First of all, any website may go out of business at any time. Hell, banks fail without warning, skyscrapers come tumbling down. Servers crash and backups are lost, you just don't know what's going to happen. If you have data of any value, back it up yourself. If you can't do that, then pay someone to guarantee it will be backed up. There is no way anyone should be using a free service provider as the sole storage for data of any value at all. If you're doing that, then either you're a moron or the data isn't really that valuable to you and you can afford to lose it.