Crimes beginning with "attempted" are pretty common. If I spend weeks plotting a bank heist or a murder, but get caught beforehand, do you really think, "But no one was hurt yet!" is a good defense? One of my favorite charges was always, "Possession of [drug] with intent to distribute," which seems to apply to anyone in possession of more than a trace amount of drugs.
Yes, I hate the RIAA and wish they'd go away, but I don't really think they're taking too preposterous of a position here. If you make your files available for download, even if they can't prove anyone downloaded them, you're still making them available.
So you want 6-10 billion people to die even if we eventually found the technology to save every last one of them from death?
No. What he's saying is that, when someone dies, they're dead. If you're lying in a hospital bed dying, I hope they do everything possible to save your life. But when you die, well, you're dead. And I happen to think it should stay that way.
(It frightens me to think that, some day, this view might make me a conservative?)
And the question really is -- would society be better off with an aging man with a good knowledge from 250 years ago, or someone who has learned from the start to live in current societyy.
I'm not really into cryonics at all (see my other post in this thread), but you bring up an interesting point that I don't see mentioned much.
Imagine having Mr. Franklin come and give a lecture on what it was like back then. It might take him a while to learn, like, modern, like, English and stuff, but maybe it'd be better if he didn't.;)
Historians would love this. And I bet people would be willing to pay a lot to have someone as famous as Ben Franklin come and give a lecture.
Has anyone seen a population graph? It looks like a perfect exponential curve, and it skyrockets in the past century.
If we start bringing people back to life, we're only going to make the overcrowding problem much, much worse.
Two other thoughts:
What obligation do you have to unthaw people? Maybe I've got your frozen body from 150 years ago in my lab. But who would know if I just threw it out instead? Prepaying for it does you no good when you have no idea if the company will be around, and no one who was a witness to your contract.
And what does this do to religion? People struggle to reconcile evolution with the bible's stories of creation (well, mostly, people just argue with the other side, but some try to reconcile the two beliefs). What will the religious ever do when we start bringing people back to life?
It's not about the heat generated from occupants; it's about heat from outside.
During the summer, you open your doors and windows in the morning to let the cool air in, and then you shut them when it gets warmer, to keep the heat out. Yes, people (and electronics) will generate heat, but that's going to happen either way. Outdoor temperature changes matter, too.
If you can "take" the cold of the morning and save it when it gets warmer, you've saved on air conditioning costs.
I read a lot of books as a kid, and have been told I'm a fairly strong writer. I'd be interested in seeing statistics linking writing strength to levels of reading as a kid. (I've worked with some horrible writers, and, without consciously trying to, judged them based on their writing ability. I bet they don't read often.)
Nowadays, I don't do a lot of reading. (Besides the Internet, but I don't think that increases literacy.) I find myself making lots of braindead mistakes these days. While no one (sane) reads a novel and studies the intricacies of its grammar (and general writing style), if you spend your life reading good writing, I'd wager you're much more prone to write well, as it's all you've been exposed to.
That's what worries me about "Internet-speak," the sort of "shud" and "ur" type of stuff, and a lack of emphasis on proper nouns. (Why the hell would you not capitalize your own name?!) It's not that I can't readily understand them (although there've been times I couldn't.), but it's a concern that, if I read horrible writing all the time, I'll start writing like them. In an e-mail to a friend, it really doesn't matter if I make mistakes, but once I start writing in very poor English to friends, I'm liable to start doing it in important, formal documents as well. Having done a lot of groupwork, the writing (in)ability of my classmates is downright scary.
There's a strong argument that it doesn't matter. There are some cases where I agree, when pedants argue over obscure, petty details. (It's okay by me to end a sentence with a preposition if it makes sense.) But when people write things like, "matt u shud chk it out 2mrw," I want to cry.
Anyway, I think I've gotten way off-topic from your point. Your point hit close to home: as a kid, I read all the time, and loved to read. (Sometimes in excess: I was yelled at a few times for reading books during class.) But until a month or two ago, I hadn't read anything, and the thought of picking up a book for enjoyment almost seemed absurd. My mother is a first-grade teacher, and I've suggested to her that one of the most valuable things she can do is make her kids love reading.
I don't think you lose that ability, they just blink faster. Although my cable modem is two stories below me, I've got a small switch on top of one of my monitors. I can easily see sudden flurries of traffic. And while there's no switch to stop it (I suppose I could rig one up?), there's nothing stopping me from unplugging the uplink cable if I had to. (My cable modem itself has the same "Data" light that flashes nonstop. Try using a switch on the LAN side of your modem instead.)
And at night, the light on my NIC is bright enough to be seen, even though it's under my desk. So a flurry of traffic can be noticed that way, too.
The always-on thing is one of the bigger risks: worms, script kiddies, etc. have 24 hours a day to reach you, rather than the few hours you spend online. However, a good firewall would eliminate this problem anyway.
I'm either on a cable modem (home) or a T3 (school), and have never understood why people have such a problem with security. I usually leave boxes on 24/7, and I've never had a problem with worms, etc. It just takes basic common sense, and if you read Slashdot, you probably have what it takes to keep this crap at bay.
Not to sound spoiled, but I cannot imagine ever going back to dialup. Big downloads are faster, webpages load faster, my "wait" to get online is only limited by how quickly my web browser starts, and people can call me while I'm online. Get a firewall and get broadband, and you'll never look back.
Why are they two separate states? I always proposed that West Virginia and Virginia merge, along with North and South Dakota. Clearly, this would allow major federal budget cuts, saving taxpayers huge amounts!
A lot of people (myself included) have given you lots of ideas for what to cover.
There's something I think is important. Make it interesting. Make the beginning especially interesting. If you begin by explaining bits, and then bytes, and then files, and then programs, you're going to scare people away. If you begin with ancient computer history, you're going to scare people away. I'm honestly not sure how to begin, but can think of lots of ways not to begin. I've returned tons of library books because the first few pages weren't enough to pull me into them.
I think the best suggestion for keeping the book interesting was to have the first chapter be a very broad overview, and then branch out into details. A very brief overview, with lots of, "I'll discuss hard drives in more detail in Chapter 7" sort of stuff might be much better at holding interest.
I think you can draw lots of real-world analogies, too. Think of a folder as a manila file folder, except that it's common to put folders inside of other folders, often getting as many as a dozen nested folders. A "file" can range from a sheet of paper (a small text file) to a whole book. Some files can only be read (a letter someone sent you), some can be written on (a form), and some can be run (instructions). I think this can help people relate computer terms to things they already understand. Just make sure your analogies hold up: if you explain that the Recycle Bin is like your trash can, you should really talk more about "recycling" by erasing whatever's on the 'paper' and putting it back. (Which lets you discuss fragementation, too.)
Don't go crazy on the history, but you should probably go into it a little bit. People want to know how to work their current computer, not how ENIAC worked.
I'd thought for a while about trying to help put together an introductory Internet course, and had made some decisions I think are important. One of my teachers (thankfully, not in the CS department) once started talking about how your computer broadcasts its IP address to every computer on the Internet, and that's why you get so much spam. People will parrot back information they get, without really understanding what's going on. So lay a good framework. Explain IP addresses, but on a basic level. (Don't get into configuring a broadcast address or how BGP4 works.) The analogy of a phone number works decently, and can also be used to explain netblocks. Then introduce DNS.
I'd mention bits and bytes, and megabytes and gigabits, but on a more basic level. But if you explain it well, in layman's terms, I think you can have the average person understanding why their 60 GB hard drive holds less.
I'd devote a reasonable portion of the book to understanding how things work. Why is spam such a problem? How do people get spam? What can they do about spam? How do they protect against viruses? (You can mention various anti-virus programs, but also encourage basic (seemingly not-so) common sense. Don't open random attachments. Don't download random programs.) Explain how some common viruses have spread: especially those that could be prevented by user training. ("Hey, check out this.exe attachment!")
Cover wireless, and mention its security implications, as well as the potential for interference. (My 2.4 GHz cordless phone and my 802.11g router don't always play nicely.)
Current events are important, too, IMHO. What is "P2P," and why is this R-I-A-A making such a big deal about it? (Try not to be biased!) What's Linux? How is a Mac different from a PC?
Overall, I think it's important to cover a lot of topics, even some that the average user might not deal with everyday, as it helps to lay a good framework for actually understanding how things work. The most important thing, though, is to use a really clear, non-technical tone. In my experience, this is a "gift" some people have, and some don't, and it makes the difference between whether you just confuse people further, or whether it all makes sense when they hear you talk.
I've wanted to build a fileserver at home for a while, and move everything over there. Between all our computers, it'd probably have 3-400 GB.
I realized, though, that I'd be creating a single point of failure, and that routinely backing up 400 GB of data would be a royal pain. I know RAID is supposed to reduce the problem of disk failures, but in my experience, outside of big, professional setups, RAID is often poorly setup and is just asking for problems. Back when I was in high school, we lost our entire fileserver because one drive in the RAID array died. (Few people saw the irony?) RAID actually caused more problems. (But nightly backups saved the day.)
So my project of building a home fileserver has morphed a bit. I don't want to build a fileserver anymore. I want to build two, and keep them mirrored. (Or possibly, have a primary one that's a beefy system, and the second one a lower-end machine that I do a nightly rsync to. This solves the "rm -rf/*.... Oh shit!" problem.)
so this would triple the inbound volume to my co-lo.
For people paying per GB of transfer, it could be a big deal. These days, though, 1,000GB/month is the normal allocation for dedicated servers, so an extra 6GB of traffic would be nothing. (Assuming they weren't using 994 a month...) I'd be concerned about issues like server load instead.
If my computer (routinely synced via NTP) changes to, say, 12:00:00, and it takes ten seconds for my desk clock to changes from 11:59 to 12:00, I don't care at all.
But it's not uncommon to rack up 15-minute differences between clocks. That, I'd argue, is a very big problem.
I will continue to use my watch set 5 minutes fast.
I used to do that. The problem is that I'm not as dumb as I thought. I'd look at my watch and add five minutes. I knew I had until 3:05 for a 3:00 meeting, because my watch was five minutes fast fast.
I decided that a fast clock was doing me more harm than good. (And besides, I have mild OCD.) Now my watch is accurate, and periodically I adjust it so it's within a couple seconds of my computer. (Synced up via the pool.ntp.org, of course.) I know I have until 3:00 for a 3 o'clock meeting, but that I should really be there by 2:55 to be safe. (Not that your way is wrong, it just didn't work well for me at all.)
To me, the fact that Wine has it shows that this problem was not an intentional backdoor. I understand the suggestion that there's a major conspiracy (Microsoft and Wine were bought off), but I don't think that's all that realistic. (Besides, how do you buy off an OpenSource project?)
I think the fact that Wine reverse-engineered it, and managed to re-create the same bug, shows that, despite the "sinister" behavior, it's actually an easy mistake to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Create a virus that installs a P2P client/server on each machine
Just wait until the RIAA figures out who created it, and attempts to sue them for all the songs downloaded.
Of course, they would never do that. That would be evil. Oh, wait.
Crimes beginning with "attempted" are pretty common. If I spend weeks plotting a bank heist or a murder, but get caught beforehand, do you really think, "But no one was hurt yet!" is a good defense? One of my favorite charges was always, "Possession of [drug] with intent to distribute," which seems to apply to anyone in possession of more than a trace amount of drugs.
Yes, I hate the RIAA and wish they'd go away, but I don't really think they're taking too preposterous of a position here. If you make your files available for download, even if they can't prove anyone downloaded them, you're still making them available.
And please don't tell me to do it, I'm an embedded developer not a web developer... I have no idea where to even begin with it.
;)
But CGIs are embedded scripts!
I don't use privoxy or AdBlock, and couldn't see it.
So you want 6-10 billion people to die even if we eventually found the technology to save every last one of them from death?
No. What he's saying is that, when someone dies, they're dead. If you're lying in a hospital bed dying, I hope they do everything possible to save your life. But when you die, well, you're dead. And I happen to think it should stay that way.
(It frightens me to think that, some day, this view might make me a conservative?)
And the question really is -- would society be better off with an aging man with a good knowledge from 250 years ago, or someone who has learned from the start to live in current societyy.
;)
I'm not really into cryonics at all (see my other post in this thread), but you bring up an interesting point that I don't see mentioned much.
Imagine having Mr. Franklin come and give a lecture on what it was like back then. It might take him a while to learn, like, modern, like, English and stuff, but maybe it'd be better if he didn't.
Historians would love this. And I bet people would be willing to pay a lot to have someone as famous as Ben Franklin come and give a lecture.
Has anyone seen a population graph? It looks like a perfect exponential curve, and it skyrockets in the past century.
If we start bringing people back to life, we're only going to make the overcrowding problem much, much worse.
Two other thoughts:
What obligation do you have to unthaw people? Maybe I've got your frozen body from 150 years ago in my lab. But who would know if I just threw it out instead? Prepaying for it does you no good when you have no idea if the company will be around, and no one who was a witness to your contract.
And what does this do to religion? People struggle to reconcile evolution with the bible's stories of creation (well, mostly, people just argue with the other side, but some try to reconcile the two beliefs). What will the religious ever do when we start bringing people back to life?
It's not about the heat generated from occupants; it's about heat from outside.
During the summer, you open your doors and windows in the morning to let the cool air in, and then you shut them when it gets warmer, to keep the heat out. Yes, people (and electronics) will generate heat, but that's going to happen either way. Outdoor temperature changes matter, too.
If you can "take" the cold of the morning and save it when it gets warmer, you've saved on air conditioning costs.
I read a lot of books as a kid, and have been told I'm a fairly strong writer. I'd be interested in seeing statistics linking writing strength to levels of reading as a kid. (I've worked with some horrible writers, and, without consciously trying to, judged them based on their writing ability. I bet they don't read often.)
Nowadays, I don't do a lot of reading. (Besides the Internet, but I don't think that increases literacy.) I find myself making lots of braindead mistakes these days. While no one (sane) reads a novel and studies the intricacies of its grammar (and general writing style), if you spend your life reading good writing, I'd wager you're much more prone to write well, as it's all you've been exposed to.
That's what worries me about "Internet-speak," the sort of "shud" and "ur" type of stuff, and a lack of emphasis on proper nouns. (Why the hell would you not capitalize your own name?!) It's not that I can't readily understand them (although there've been times I couldn't.), but it's a concern that, if I read horrible writing all the time, I'll start writing like them. In an e-mail to a friend, it really doesn't matter if I make mistakes, but once I start writing in very poor English to friends, I'm liable to start doing it in important, formal documents as well. Having done a lot of groupwork, the writing (in)ability of my classmates is downright scary.
There's a strong argument that it doesn't matter. There are some cases where I agree, when pedants argue over obscure, petty details. (It's okay by me to end a sentence with a preposition if it makes sense.) But when people write things like, "matt u shud chk it out 2mrw," I want to cry.
Anyway, I think I've gotten way off-topic from your point. Your point hit close to home: as a kid, I read all the time, and loved to read. (Sometimes in excess: I was yelled at a few times for reading books during class.) But until a month or two ago, I hadn't read anything, and the thought of picking up a book for enjoyment almost seemed absurd. My mother is a first-grade teacher, and I've suggested to her that one of the most valuable things she can do is make her kids love reading.
why is cable always on? never switch off computers? electricity? energy? aaahh, i get it -> iraq
Mr. Bush? I didn't know you commented on Slashdot!
I don't think you lose that ability, they just blink faster. Although my cable modem is two stories below me, I've got a small switch on top of one of my monitors. I can easily see sudden flurries of traffic. And while there's no switch to stop it (I suppose I could rig one up?), there's nothing stopping me from unplugging the uplink cable if I had to. (My cable modem itself has the same "Data" light that flashes nonstop. Try using a switch on the LAN side of your modem instead.)
And at night, the light on my NIC is bright enough to be seen, even though it's under my desk. So a flurry of traffic can be noticed that way, too.
The always-on thing is one of the bigger risks: worms, script kiddies, etc. have 24 hours a day to reach you, rather than the few hours you spend online. However, a good firewall would eliminate this problem anyway.
I'm either on a cable modem (home) or a T3 (school), and have never understood why people have such a problem with security. I usually leave boxes on 24/7, and I've never had a problem with worms, etc. It just takes basic common sense, and if you read Slashdot, you probably have what it takes to keep this crap at bay.
Not to sound spoiled, but I cannot imagine ever going back to dialup. Big downloads are faster, webpages load faster, my "wait" to get online is only limited by how quickly my web browser starts, and people can call me while I'm online. Get a firewall and get broadband, and you'll never look back.
Or just a backhoe driver who's really bad at his job?
You just Slashdotted... an image of... a backhoe?! (The middle one is crawling... It's on some guy's Adelphia cable modem.)
Surely not the same place they paid $88,000 for the computer???
Why are they two separate states? I always proposed that West Virginia and Virginia merge, along with North and South Dakota. Clearly, this would allow major federal budget cuts, saving taxpayers huge amounts!
A lot of people (myself included) have given you lots of ideas for what to cover.
There's something I think is important. Make it interesting. Make the beginning especially interesting. If you begin by explaining bits, and then bytes, and then files, and then programs, you're going to scare people away. If you begin with ancient computer history, you're going to scare people away. I'm honestly not sure how to begin, but can think of lots of ways not to begin. I've returned tons of library books because the first few pages weren't enough to pull me into them.
I think the best suggestion for keeping the book interesting was to have the first chapter be a very broad overview, and then branch out into details. A very brief overview, with lots of, "I'll discuss hard drives in more detail in Chapter 7" sort of stuff might be much better at holding interest.
I think you can draw lots of real-world analogies, too. Think of a folder as a manila file folder, except that it's common to put folders inside of other folders, often getting as many as a dozen nested folders. A "file" can range from a sheet of paper (a small text file) to a whole book. Some files can only be read (a letter someone sent you), some can be written on (a form), and some can be run (instructions). I think this can help people relate computer terms to things they already understand. Just make sure your analogies hold up: if you explain that the Recycle Bin is like your trash can, you should really talk more about "recycling" by erasing whatever's on the 'paper' and putting it back. (Which lets you discuss fragementation, too.)
Don't go crazy on the history, but you should probably go into it a little bit. People want to know how to work their current computer, not how ENIAC worked.
.exe attachment!")
I'd thought for a while about trying to help put together an introductory Internet course, and had made some decisions I think are important. One of my teachers (thankfully, not in the CS department) once started talking about how your computer broadcasts its IP address to every computer on the Internet, and that's why you get so much spam. People will parrot back information they get, without really understanding what's going on. So lay a good framework. Explain IP addresses, but on a basic level. (Don't get into configuring a broadcast address or how BGP4 works.) The analogy of a phone number works decently, and can also be used to explain netblocks. Then introduce DNS.
I'd mention bits and bytes, and megabytes and gigabits, but on a more basic level. But if you explain it well, in layman's terms, I think you can have the average person understanding why their 60 GB hard drive holds less.
I'd devote a reasonable portion of the book to understanding how things work. Why is spam such a problem? How do people get spam? What can they do about spam? How do they protect against viruses? (You can mention various anti-virus programs, but also encourage basic (seemingly not-so) common sense. Don't open random attachments. Don't download random programs.) Explain how some common viruses have spread: especially those that could be prevented by user training. ("Hey, check out this
Cover wireless, and mention its security implications, as well as the potential for interference. (My 2.4 GHz cordless phone and my 802.11g router don't always play nicely.)
Current events are important, too, IMHO. What is "P2P," and why is this R-I-A-A making such a big deal about it? (Try not to be biased!) What's Linux? How is a Mac different from a PC?
Overall, I think it's important to cover a lot of topics, even some that the average user might not deal with everyday, as it helps to lay a good framework for actually understanding how things work. The most important thing, though, is to use a really clear, non-technical tone. In my experience, this is a "gift" some people have, and some don't, and it makes the difference between whether you just confuse people further, or whether it all makes sense when they hear you talk.
I've wanted to build a fileserver at home for a while, and move everything over there. Between all our computers, it'd probably have 3-400 GB.
/*.... Oh shit!" problem.)
I realized, though, that I'd be creating a single point of failure, and that routinely backing up 400 GB of data would be a royal pain. I know RAID is supposed to reduce the problem of disk failures, but in my experience, outside of big, professional setups, RAID is often poorly setup and is just asking for problems. Back when I was in high school, we lost our entire fileserver because one drive in the RAID array died. (Few people saw the irony?) RAID actually caused more problems. (But nightly backups saved the day.)
So my project of building a home fileserver has morphed a bit. I don't want to build a fileserver anymore. I want to build two, and keep them mirrored. (Or possibly, have a primary one that's a beefy system, and the second one a lower-end machine that I do a nightly rsync to. This solves the "rm -rf
so this would triple the inbound volume to my co-lo.
For people paying per GB of transfer, it could be a big deal. These days, though, 1,000GB/month is the normal allocation for dedicated servers, so an extra 6GB of traffic would be nothing. (Assuming they weren't using 994 a month...) I'd be concerned about issues like server load instead.
a couple of minutes here or there hardly matters.
If my computer (routinely synced via NTP) changes to, say, 12:00:00, and it takes ten seconds for my desk clock to changes from 11:59 to 12:00, I don't care at all.
But it's not uncommon to rack up 15-minute differences between clocks. That, I'd argue, is a very big problem.
I will continue to use my watch set 5 minutes fast.
I used to do that. The problem is that I'm not as dumb as I thought. I'd look at my watch and add five minutes. I knew I had until 3:05 for a 3:00 meeting, because my watch was five minutes fast fast.
I decided that a fast clock was doing me more harm than good. (And besides, I have mild OCD.) Now my watch is accurate, and periodically I adjust it so it's within a couple seconds of my computer. (Synced up via the pool.ntp.org, of course.) I know I have until 3:00 for a 3 o'clock meeting, but that I should really be there by 2:55 to be safe. (Not that your way is wrong, it just didn't work well for me at all.)
To me, the fact that Wine has it shows that this problem was not an intentional backdoor. I understand the suggestion that there's a major conspiracy (Microsoft and Wine were bought off), but I don't think that's all that realistic. (Besides, how do you buy off an OpenSource project?)
I think the fact that Wine reverse-engineered it, and managed to re-create the same bug, shows that, despite the "sinister" behavior, it's actually an easy mistake to make.
Could anyone suggest a better rhyme for spam?
Bam!
Clam?
Damn!
Ham?
Jam.
Ma'am
RAM
Sam
Yams?
IIRC, the Smoot was actually named after a kid of that last name, and one Smoot was equal to his height.