Many people predict the future, starting from now. What's different about that from predicting it from the past? Well, for one thing, when predicting from the past, we do know how one outcome actually came out, and some of the reasons it may have come out that way. We can compare this to alternate ways the event might have played out.
I wonder how much porn and illicit downloading goes through the military networks? In all the other computer networks I've seen, if no one is holding users accountable, the network will be abused.
So, tell me, again, how the virus got on the machines? A "thumb drive," you say? And, the virus keeps returning? Hrmmm...
Who thought this network infrastructure arrangement would be a good idea?
Texas has what is known as an "Improper Photography" law. Relax, those of you who couldn't take a good picture to save your life. This law is aimed squarely at people whose photography offends other people, generally the people who shoot photos of complete strangers. The message seems to be that we don't tolerate street photographers in Texas. Now, that isn't how the law is sold to the public. This is supposed to be an anti-unwitting porn star law. It was born of the need to stop people from photographing strangers in locker rooms, dressing rooms and other places where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, the law goes beyond that. If you stand at a children's football game and shoot photos of the children, you stand a good chance of an angry confrontation, followed by police investigation. One professional photographer was arrested because people thought he was shooting too many photos of women at a street festival (his case was dismissed). IOW, the people who are being arrested under this law aren't in private places; they are out in public. Most of those arrested people who are now reported in the press do seem seriously sketchy, but nothing in the law would discourage someone from pressing charges against any photographer who shoots photos of several strangers in public.
In theory, the Supreme Court says that I have the Constitutional right to shoot videos of anyone who is in a public place. In practice, several Texans have informed me that if they see me shooting photos of anyone's children, they will inflict on me significant bodily harm. This law is part of their justification that they are in their legal rights to do so.
You make a good point, but why stop just at photography? Why do people need to spend so much time, money and effort in sports events? Think of how much more advanced the human race would be if, instead of spending time and money watching a ball or an animal race around, we were to invest in new materials processes, science and exploration! A city near my home recently spent nearly a billion dollars (US) building a sports stadium. Why not build a rocket complex? Why not build a particle accelerator? Oh, speaking of which... my country just shut down its only large particle accelerator. But, we are building sports complexes all over the place!
Ironically, Britain is said to have more state-operated cameras than anywhere else on Earth (but it still cannot solve 80% of its crimes). It seems that the more cameras the state uses, the fewer it allows ordinary citizens to use. This may be a manifestation of a psychiatric illness on the part of the some administrators, who have placed cameras into a god-like position that only they are allowed to officiate.
I've been backing up my personal files for about 25 years, on everything from floppy to Iomega tape to CDs and DVDs to Flash to hard drives. I've also had several online accounts that store some of my files.
My all-around favorite data backup is hard drives. They are reasonably inexpensive, reliable, convenient and fast. I have several hard drives that are more than 10 years old and still fully readable. Even my 25 year-old, 20 MB Packard Bell hard drive still boots. Currently, I have about 4.5 TB of files that I maintain on several external hard drives. I like to get drives with eSATA and USB 2 (3 will be good, when prices drop).
My CDs and DVDs generally hold up OK, though other people sometimes say they have problems reading them. They are too small and inconvenient for large-scale backup.
Flash holds up quite well over time. You could probably toss a flash drive into a lake, then fish it out a year later and still read it just fine. The trouble is, they are 10 times more expensive than hard drives, aren't terribly fast and aren't all that large. I fill up 2 TB hard drives fairly quickly.
Storing files online is fairly reliable, as long as the company doing the storage doesn't go out of business or stop offering its services. I had many files on my AOL account, but they transferred my images to a third party (that has now transferred my images to yet another third party), and my Web pages simply vanished. My email may last forever. Regardless, transferring GB files, much less TB backups, over the Internet is not fast, and I don't trust the security on any of these systems.
Tape has not worked well for me. In fact, most companies that rely on tape would be surprised to learn that their files aren't really recoverable, should they ever need them. I had a few copies of a Ditto tape backup, but something went haywire with the hardware and it unspooled the tape off the spindle. I have 1 last tape copy, but the software for Iomega's hardware crashes any modern OS. I've never had so much trouble with a backup plan as I've had with tape.
My floppy drives were still readable, the last time I checked.
Oh, that's right; Germany is facing population collapse. I forgot about that. Those Germans have been running around naked all over the place, and for some reason, the women aren't getting pregnant very often. Now, Germany is facing a decline of 80% or so from its current population by the end of the century, unless immigrants make up the difference.
No point in building power plants in Germany; few will live there much longer.
Worse; it was the Japanese tsunami that dealt those nuclear plants their death blow. How many 100-foot tall tsunamis does Germany get? I can see why the German environmentalists are so afraid of them!
Oh, and 60 million euros for 5 MW comes out $12/watt. Contrast this with a nuclear power plant at about $2/watt. Then, there is the land use. Anything using 3 square miles is *huge*! And, for 5 MW?!?! You would have to be nuts to use this in place of conventional power sources.
I am trained in technology and power generation, among other things. That "vested interests" line is nonsense from the lunatic conspiracy fringe, and it's getting really old. No, the reason your technology hasn't gone anywhere is because it isn't viable for most people. You claim otherwise, but all you have are empty words and phony math. All you alternate energy people are desperate nuts.
Texas spent billions of dollars building windmills. "There will be no power when the wind doesn't blow," we were warned. The alternate energy people claimed that the wind always blows somewhere, so it was simply a matter of having windmills everywhere. Well, guess what? The wind doesn't always blow somewhere in significant amounts! Texas has more wind farms than anyone except China, spread out all over this huge state, but it had to fire up the old backup natural gas power plants because we had no wind and low capacity.
Right now, Germany exports energy. It's nuclear power allows it to do this, as they generate far more than the Germans need. That's about to change, quite likely with the German industrial base having to cut back, move or import energy from another country (the last option a problem, as they don't have long-distance distribution lines).
Yeah, tape is the traditional answer, and still gets a lot of support in the industry. Unfortunately, I have never seen a successful restore from tape. I understand that my experience is not unique. Many companies have made regular tape backups for years, but never tried to do a restore, until that day came when they needed it. Then, they found out that it didn't work.
I've been backing up data to hard drives for 20 years. I've rarely had a problem getting my data off a hard drive, and redundancy has been a big help. I maintain about 4.5 TB of data on about 7 TB of external HDDs.
I haven't tried American 'jelly' but I presume it's some form of jam or marmalade
In American, jelly, jam, and marmalade all refer to different fruit-based things that are spread on toast. Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.
Another important difference between Jell-O and jelly is that Jell-O is a protein and water-based sol, whereas jelly is a sugar and pectin-based gel.
Your post is particularly well-thought out, rational and fair. I see far too many people who advocate the idea that whatever the man with the money does is OK, that anything goes in business, that the ability to treat people as one wishes is its own justification. I am sick of people turning business into a Machiavellian slug-fest. It ultimately hurts everyone involved and is a big part of the reason for those so-called "inevitable" market downturns. Many of those downturns--such as the big one beginning around 2008--could be avoided, if companies were concerned about ethical behavior over self-aggrandizement.
It is unfortunate that I often work at a skill level in which my co-workers are willing to scrape the ground for crumbs, as it were. They will spend much of the money they earn just to keep a job, instead of requiring fair compensation for their work and expenses.
If they even exist. Even the author of the story admitted that no one has confirmed the authenticity of this story. This is just an urban legend, reported as news.
Although a multi-million dollar fraud is unusually large, it is not at all difficult to find frauds in the computer industry. It is so common, in fact, that it should be hurting business significantly, particularly for anyone who is honest. If people knew more about computers, they might realize the extent of it and demand action. We would probably be at war with a few more countries, in fact. There are that many scammers taking that much money.
I've been ripped off a few times, too, and I resent it very much. For example, I looked for an alternative to my music club (BMG). After searching through several options, I found one that offered me online music for a one-time fee. After I paid the fee, I discovered that all they were providing were instructions and shareware that wasn't theirs, that would access music that wasn't theirs, from people's torrents that wasn't theirs. When I complained, the person who took my money justified himself. It is evident that such people usually will justify their actions in their own minds, and so will continue their scamming as opportunity arises. The only way to stop them for certain is to kill them, which I wish we could do. If they won't stop, they deserve to die.
So, my take on the original story is, the potential 8- to 25-year sentence the suspects face is too light. How many other people have they conned? Will they actually change their behavior when they have future opportunities? They have the chance of doing it, again, and I suspect they will.
The article and some replies imply that widespread agreement means that we should make an appeal to authority our definition of scientific truth. The reality is, the facts speak for themselves, regardless of what anyone says about those facts. Unfortunately, most people are ill-equipped to evaluate the facts. At some point, everyone is ill-equipped, because the breadth of human knowledge is too great. Even so, it is a dangerous thing to place one's thinking in the hands of other people, no matter who they are.
I should hope that anything that flys, regardless of how popular it becomes, still requires a pilots license and that the skill needed to attain such a license remain quite high. Lay drivers manage to kill 43,443 people in 2007.
Absolutely correct! Most people are horrible pilots of anything they operate and make poor transportation decisions. They do whatever they want, with little regard for what the people around them are doing. Every region has different ways of driving poorly, but in my region of Texas, they don't know how to maintain speed while cornering or going up hills, they don't know how to merge or yield, they don't signal their lane changes or turns, they drive at night like they are night blind, they drive either 8 mph under the speed limit or 15 mph over the speed limit, they blare loud music out of their vehicles, they swerve across 3+ lanes of traffic at the last minute to take an exit or entrance ramp, they use all available space to make a turn (even breaking State law to make a right-hand turn across as many road lanes as are available), they tailgate, they sit at red lights blocking the right-turn lane from turning because they won't make the legally-allowed right-hand turn on red, they won't make a left turn on a solid green light (they have to have a green arrow, or they won't even attempt the turn), they pace vehicles, especially while driving in the other driver's blind spot. In the last few weeks, I've encountered several drivers who simply stop and remain in the middle of the road whenever they have a problem, even in a 45 mph zone. The concept of a free flow of traffic is alien to most Texas drivers, and many of them drive like they have spent their lives on a country road without having to consider other drivers.
Texas drivers are mostly annoying, and only somewhat hazardous. In Virginia, especially closer to D.C., the drivers are more ruthless, more vicious. If you signal a lane change, they usually will attempt to block you from changing lanes.
I've long said that when flying cars become marketable, I'm installing an anti-aircraft gun in my front yard.
Then take the middle of the Sahara. Or the Gobi desert. Or, slightly easier because of the water, somewher in the middle of the ocean. It'd be magnitudes easier to build a self-sustaining community there than it would be on Mars. Not to say that Mars isn't an interesting destination, but why don't we try for something a little more attainable first?
Welcome to Hotel Yasmina Merzouga"For leisure, business or party, Hotel Yasmina offer you choice and fantasy quality in the real Sahara Desert!
Of course, people usually colonize frontiers for other reasons than the luxury accomodations! Quite often, colonization is a side-effect of economic exploitation of the region. Several nations have manned colonies year-round in Antarctica, too. So, those arguments presented against colonizing Mars don't stand up to scrutiny. People don't have to want to colonize Mars for the pleasant environment of the Planet.
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Many people predict the future, starting from now. What's different about that from predicting it from the past? Well, for one thing, when predicting from the past, we do know how one outcome actually came out, and some of the reasons it may have come out that way. We can compare this to alternate ways the event might have played out.
I wonder how much porn and illicit downloading goes through the military networks? In all the other computer networks I've seen, if no one is holding users accountable, the network will be abused.
So, tell me, again, how the virus got on the machines? A "thumb drive," you say? And, the virus keeps returning? Hrmmm...
Who thought this network infrastructure arrangement would be a good idea?
Texas has what is known as an "Improper Photography" law. Relax, those of you who couldn't take a good picture to save your life. This law is aimed squarely at people whose photography offends other people, generally the people who shoot photos of complete strangers. The message seems to be that we don't tolerate street photographers in Texas. Now, that isn't how the law is sold to the public. This is supposed to be an anti-unwitting porn star law. It was born of the need to stop people from photographing strangers in locker rooms, dressing rooms and other places where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, the law goes beyond that. If you stand at a children's football game and shoot photos of the children, you stand a good chance of an angry confrontation, followed by police investigation. One professional photographer was arrested because people thought he was shooting too many photos of women at a street festival (his case was dismissed). IOW, the people who are being arrested under this law aren't in private places; they are out in public. Most of those arrested people who are now reported in the press do seem seriously sketchy, but nothing in the law would discourage someone from pressing charges against any photographer who shoots photos of several strangers in public.
In theory, the Supreme Court says that I have the Constitutional right to shoot videos of anyone who is in a public place. In practice, several Texans have informed me that if they see me shooting photos of anyone's children, they will inflict on me significant bodily harm. This law is part of their justification that they are in their legal rights to do so.
You make a good point, but why stop just at photography? Why do people need to spend so much time, money and effort in sports events? Think of how much more advanced the human race would be if, instead of spending time and money watching a ball or an animal race around, we were to invest in new materials processes, science and exploration! A city near my home recently spent nearly a billion dollars (US) building a sports stadium. Why not build a rocket complex? Why not build a particle accelerator? Oh, speaking of which... my country just shut down its only large particle accelerator. But, we are building sports complexes all over the place!
Funny, but the real irony is, how many pictures do you supposed the British government got of this man when he walked into this establishment?
Ironically, Britain is said to have more state-operated cameras than anywhere else on Earth (but it still cannot solve 80% of its crimes). It seems that the more cameras the state uses, the fewer it allows ordinary citizens to use. This may be a manifestation of a psychiatric illness on the part of the some administrators, who have placed cameras into a god-like position that only they are allowed to officiate.
I've been backing up my personal files for about 25 years, on everything from floppy to Iomega tape to CDs and DVDs to Flash to hard drives. I've also had several online accounts that store some of my files.
My all-around favorite data backup is hard drives. They are reasonably inexpensive, reliable, convenient and fast. I have several hard drives that are more than 10 years old and still fully readable. Even my 25 year-old, 20 MB Packard Bell hard drive still boots. Currently, I have about 4.5 TB of files that I maintain on several external hard drives. I like to get drives with eSATA and USB 2 (3 will be good, when prices drop).
My CDs and DVDs generally hold up OK, though other people sometimes say they have problems reading them. They are too small and inconvenient for large-scale backup.
Flash holds up quite well over time. You could probably toss a flash drive into a lake, then fish it out a year later and still read it just fine. The trouble is, they are 10 times more expensive than hard drives, aren't terribly fast and aren't all that large. I fill up 2 TB hard drives fairly quickly.
Storing files online is fairly reliable, as long as the company doing the storage doesn't go out of business or stop offering its services. I had many files on my AOL account, but they transferred my images to a third party (that has now transferred my images to yet another third party), and my Web pages simply vanished. My email may last forever. Regardless, transferring GB files, much less TB backups, over the Internet is not fast, and I don't trust the security on any of these systems.
Tape has not worked well for me. In fact, most companies that rely on tape would be surprised to learn that their files aren't really recoverable, should they ever need them. I had a few copies of a Ditto tape backup, but something went haywire with the hardware and it unspooled the tape off the spindle. I have 1 last tape copy, but the software for Iomega's hardware crashes any modern OS. I've never had so much trouble with a backup plan as I've had with tape.
My floppy drives were still readable, the last time I checked.
Oh, that's right; Germany is facing population collapse. I forgot about that. Those Germans have been running around naked all over the place, and for some reason, the women aren't getting pregnant very often. Now, Germany is facing a decline of 80% or so from its current population by the end of the century, unless immigrants make up the difference.
No point in building power plants in Germany; few will live there much longer.
Worse; it was the Japanese tsunami that dealt those nuclear plants their death blow. How many 100-foot tall tsunamis does Germany get? I can see why the German environmentalists are so afraid of them!
Phoenix, Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, might not agree with that assessment.
Oh, and 60 million euros for 5 MW comes out $12/watt. Contrast this with a nuclear power plant at about $2/watt. Then, there is the land use. Anything using 3 square miles is *huge*! And, for 5 MW?!?! You would have to be nuts to use this in place of conventional power sources.
The molten salt cools enough in 4 hours that it cannot generate significant power. It does not last all night.
I am trained in technology and power generation, among other things. That "vested interests" line is nonsense from the lunatic conspiracy fringe, and it's getting really old. No, the reason your technology hasn't gone anywhere is because it isn't viable for most people. You claim otherwise, but all you have are empty words and phony math. All you alternate energy people are desperate nuts.
Texas spent billions of dollars building windmills. "There will be no power when the wind doesn't blow," we were warned. The alternate energy people claimed that the wind always blows somewhere, so it was simply a matter of having windmills everywhere. Well, guess what? The wind doesn't always blow somewhere in significant amounts! Texas has more wind farms than anyone except China, spread out all over this huge state, but it had to fire up the old backup natural gas power plants because we had no wind and low capacity.
Right now, Germany exports energy. It's nuclear power allows it to do this, as they generate far more than the Germans need. That's about to change, quite likely with the German industrial base having to cut back, move or import energy from another country (the last option a problem, as they don't have long-distance distribution lines).
Just a few days ago, I was thinking about making a parody of "My Little Pony," and I wondered what the legal repercussions might be.
Yeah, tape is the traditional answer, and still gets a lot of support in the industry. Unfortunately, I have never seen a successful restore from tape. I understand that my experience is not unique. Many companies have made regular tape backups for years, but never tried to do a restore, until that day came when they needed it. Then, they found out that it didn't work.
I've been backing up data to hard drives for 20 years. I've rarely had a problem getting my data off a hard drive, and redundancy has been a big help. I maintain about 4.5 TB of data on about 7 TB of external HDDs.
I haven't tried American 'jelly' but I presume it's some form of jam or marmalade
In American, jelly, jam, and marmalade all refer to different fruit-based things that are spread on toast. Jelly is completely smooth, jam contains seeds, marmalade contains peel.
Another important difference between Jell-O and jelly is that Jell-O is a protein and water-based sol, whereas jelly is a sugar and pectin-based gel.
Your post is particularly well-thought out, rational and fair. I see far too many people who advocate the idea that whatever the man with the money does is OK, that anything goes in business, that the ability to treat people as one wishes is its own justification. I am sick of people turning business into a Machiavellian slug-fest. It ultimately hurts everyone involved and is a big part of the reason for those so-called "inevitable" market downturns. Many of those downturns--such as the big one beginning around 2008--could be avoided, if companies were concerned about ethical behavior over self-aggrandizement.
It is unfortunate that I often work at a skill level in which my co-workers are willing to scrape the ground for crumbs, as it were. They will spend much of the money they earn just to keep a job, instead of requiring fair compensation for their work and expenses.
"So yeah, this is just one group of nutcases..."
If they even exist. Even the author of the story admitted that no one has confirmed the authenticity of this story. This is just an urban legend, reported as news.
That's Catholics. These are reputedly Evangelicals.
The story is nonsensical, anyway, just another urban legend.
Although a multi-million dollar fraud is unusually large, it is not at all difficult to find frauds in the computer industry. It is so common, in fact, that it should be hurting business significantly, particularly for anyone who is honest. If people knew more about computers, they might realize the extent of it and demand action. We would probably be at war with a few more countries, in fact. There are that many scammers taking that much money.
I've been ripped off a few times, too, and I resent it very much. For example, I looked for an alternative to my music club (BMG). After searching through several options, I found one that offered me online music for a one-time fee. After I paid the fee, I discovered that all they were providing were instructions and shareware that wasn't theirs, that would access music that wasn't theirs, from people's torrents that wasn't theirs. When I complained, the person who took my money justified himself. It is evident that such people usually will justify their actions in their own minds, and so will continue their scamming as opportunity arises. The only way to stop them for certain is to kill them, which I wish we could do. If they won't stop, they deserve to die.
So, my take on the original story is, the potential 8- to 25-year sentence the suspects face is too light. How many other people have they conned? Will they actually change their behavior when they have future opportunities? They have the chance of doing it, again, and I suspect they will.
The article and some replies imply that widespread agreement means that we should make an appeal to authority our definition of scientific truth. The reality is, the facts speak for themselves, regardless of what anyone says about those facts. Unfortunately, most people are ill-equipped to evaluate the facts. At some point, everyone is ill-equipped, because the breadth of human knowledge is too great. Even so, it is a dangerous thing to place one's thinking in the hands of other people, no matter who they are.
Absolutely correct! Most people are horrible pilots of anything they operate and make poor transportation decisions. They do whatever they want, with little regard for what the people around them are doing. Every region has different ways of driving poorly, but in my region of Texas, they don't know how to maintain speed while cornering or going up hills, they don't know how to merge or yield, they don't signal their lane changes or turns, they drive at night like they are night blind, they drive either 8 mph under the speed limit or 15 mph over the speed limit, they blare loud music out of their vehicles, they swerve across 3+ lanes of traffic at the last minute to take an exit or entrance ramp, they use all available space to make a turn (even breaking State law to make a right-hand turn across as many road lanes as are available), they tailgate, they sit at red lights blocking the right-turn lane from turning because they won't make the legally-allowed right-hand turn on red, they won't make a left turn on a solid green light (they have to have a green arrow, or they won't even attempt the turn), they pace vehicles, especially while driving in the other driver's blind spot. In the last few weeks, I've encountered several drivers who simply stop and remain in the middle of the road whenever they have a problem, even in a 45 mph zone. The concept of a free flow of traffic is alien to most Texas drivers, and many of them drive like they have spent their lives on a country road without having to consider other drivers.
Texas drivers are mostly annoying, and only somewhat hazardous. In Virginia, especially closer to D.C., the drivers are more ruthless, more vicious. If you signal a lane change, they usually will attempt to block you from changing lanes.
I've long said that when flying cars become marketable, I'm installing an anti-aircraft gun in my front yard.
Welcome to Hotel Yasmina Merzouga"For leisure, business or party, Hotel Yasmina offer you choice and fantasy quality in the real Sahara Desert!
Review of Three Camel Lodge
Queen Mary 2 - the grandest, most magnificent ocean liner ever built.
Of course, people usually colonize frontiers for other reasons than the luxury accomodations! Quite often, colonization is a side-effect of economic exploitation of the region. Several nations have manned colonies year-round in Antarctica, too. So, those arguments presented against colonizing Mars don't stand up to scrutiny. People don't have to want to colonize Mars for the pleasant environment of the Planet.
I read "Between Planets" as a young teen. I enjoyed it a lot, and still enjoy recalling the storyline.
Five people per country is not a very large sample.
Incidentally, I get small but regular amount of spam in Russian, Spanish and Chinese.