What there is is a statement against being tracked
You have no such right. The police can still "tail" you without the little black box in your car. So can crooks. Anyone can sit and track your day to day movements with as much precision as they're willing to put the effort into obtaining.
Love your TBBA - zero risk of abuse? Really? So you won't mind that you're broadcasting to everyone exactly where you are every moment you're in your car?
I already am, via a technological marvel called a license plate. Combined with another technological marvel called the database, at any time anyone, friend or foe, can find the address belonging to this license plate. If you think this information is lawfully restricted only to police or other government agencies, you are mistaken. If you think the private companies that have access to it never abuse it, you're doubly mistaken.
In any event, it was a simple example of extrapolation. There is no call by anyone for the little black boxes to transmit anything. The interface will be hardwired (well until the geeks whip up a device to let you send the information to your iphone) and the data on it only available to people with physical access -- you know, like police or insurance adjusters doing an accident investigation. Or crooks with a slimjim.
Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
I don't think anyone thinks we can control *whether* coastal cities go underwater. We can just make it happen much more slowly by slowing the rate of warming. Many skeptics think that accepting AGW means thinking that we have complete and total control of the climate, which clearly isn't the case.
In my experience of layperson debates on the subject, like this one, that particular observation cuts both ways. Both sides *do* think we can, ultimately, decide if the coastlines (as they are now) are put under water or not. The skeptics think it's hubris to assume man has any impact besides a negligible one, while the alarmists claim the reverse -- that it's the natural course that has the negligible impact.
Likewise, you're going to die some day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about your health because you're going to die no matter what you do.
This is a very poor analogy. In the climate change argument, you can (with enough resources and determination) reduce the negative impact of the inescapable outcome to near zero. You cannot mitigate the effects of death. If you want to equate it to some healthcare scenario, it's more like the abstinance vs. protection argument. The alarmists are preaching abstinence, while I'm advocating for invention of the condom since abstinence is never going to work in the long run.
How much would it cost to protect (or move) NYC? An unimaginable amount of money. How much will it cost when it finally does go underwater, if unprotected? Even more.
At the very least, the two costs should be plotted vs. time so a sensible course of action can be taken, whereby we spend only as much to try and prevent the situation as is needed to ensure the preparations are completed before it happens with some amount of certainty.
I recognize that global climate is going to warm up no matter *what* we do, and suggest that we should prepare for it (while debunking the claim that it's bad for "life" or farmland), and that makes me a fool? Sorry, but no. The fools are the ones that think anything we do can *stop* the coastlines from being put underwater. It's going to happen, and it does not matter if mankind causes it or not. We should be spending our limited time and resources preparing for something that is inevitable rather than trying to prevent something that is inevitable.
You can believe every single climate scientist. All of them say the same thing : we are currently in an ice age. There is no debate on this topic, certainly not as much as there is on the topic of AGW or on the subject of AGW being "good" or "bad" in the long run.
I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind. The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.
On the other hand, just a tiny bit cooler than now and you're back in an ice age, decidedly unfriendly to life.
For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period.
Franklin said essential liberty. Anarchists continually forget or ignore that. Being able to lie to the police (or hell, your parents) about how fast you were going, if your foot was on the brake or gas, etc, is not an essential liberty. If you don't like speed limits, seatbelt laws, and so on -- fight for those to be repealed.
There is about zero risk of abuse from systems like these, even if the data is broadcast openly and unprotected, live, while you're driving. For the most part, in fact, that is already happening. None of the information these devices records is information that is unavailable otherwise, except perhaps things like the seatbelts being fastened.
Indeed. You need something other than an adapter -- something with a microcontroller and a driver (or that uses the built in driver but this can be problematic), that presents the ps/2 HID devices to the PC. The OPs comment is easily read to imply he "regularly" plugs an AT keyboard into an AT->PS/2 adapter which he then "stacks" with a purple PS/2->USB adapter, which is just not possible.
I regularly use keyboards from the mid 1980s, sometimes with stacked adapters to go from ATX to PS/2, and PS/2 to USB, and I'm sure that's not too unusual.
No, you don't.
Going from AT or PS/2 to USB with only an adapter is impossible. The PS/2 to USB adapters only work because modern keyboards know how to speak both protocols and can detect which kind of port they're plugged into. Old PS/2 only keyboards do not have USB controllers onboard and only work with a USB device (driver required) that provides the ps/2 port(s).
You cannot just plug an old AT or PS/2 keyboard into one of the purple PS/2 -> USB adapters and have it work, because it won't.
I can place limits on what they "can't" do, which is, "install software without my permission", the question as originally posed.
They can't do that. Full stop.
When I do give them permission to install something, I can expend the time and energy determining exactly what it is, if I so choose. Full stop.
In other words, you're still wrong on the face of it, no matter how asinine and paranoid the rabbithole you want to lead us down is, nor how empirically false your suppositions are when viewed in the context of conspiracies and game theory.
If you look at the link, you'll see that this is exactly where it failed. It's the same place the bushy carbon-15 rifles tend to fail as well. As another AR-15 aficionado, I must say, the risk of personal injury is pretty small and the severity of those risks is likely to be small as well.
They do actually spend more, not to say they're spending it better. For 2011, 2010, and 2009, companies spent:
(billions)
MS: $9.0, $8.7, $9.0
IBM: $6.0, $6.0, $6.0 (IBMs 10-K filings do not list specific numbers. Each year says "approximately six billion.")
AMD: $1.5, $1.4, $1.7
Intel: $8.4, $6.6, $5.7
It was an obvious mistake to include Intel in the list of "more than ______ combined". Both Intel and MS spend more than AMD and IBM combined, though.
How is this a 'troll'?? Good grief slashdot, pull your heads out.
I spent about 9 months living in Canada. The $1 and $2 coins were an unabashed nightmare. Walking around with pockets full of heavy coins is not fun. Neither is accidentally dropping a couple dollars into the charity/tip jar when you get your change.
Save four billion dollars? There are four billion other ways to save more in our outrageously wasteful government.
The closest there is to that, I believe, are DBWrench and PGAdmin. I haven't used either in a long time, but FWIW, I don't use those kinds of tools on my MSSQL databases either. I write all my SQL the same place I write the rest of my code : UltraEdit.
I do not recommend any "entry-level web hosts."
The lowest I'll go is a VPS, which means you can install PG yourself if they do not officially offer it. Entry level sites can get by just fine on SQLite for all it matters.
Agree. If you are going to help (or, damn, even use) an OSS DB, make it PG. MySQL is garbage. MSSQL is not bad though. It's still fast as hell and has great ACID compliance, just expensive.
What's wrong with the picture is the premise. The idea itself is immoral on its face. Programming mandatory morality into every vehicle means that somewhere, somebody decided your morality for you. To "get around" the problem their only choice is going to be value-weighting as the author suggests, which is so complex that you'll be lucky if the machine doesn't just crash into something random when presented with the dilemma.
You vs. schoolbus full of kids? What if you're the last EMT (Electronic Morality Technician) left in the world? What if you're a researcher seconds away from verifying the cure for cancer? Or perhaps, on the flipside, you're a wanted ax murderer. Should the vehicle intentionally drive you into a bridge abutment or to the nearest police station?
There will never be "morality onboard" because the decisions are too complex and subjective to be quantified, and any failure of the system will mean its immediate rejection by the population
Under any shared hosting, or control-panel-abstracted hosting, you're at the mercy of your provider for things like this. I realize they offer stuff on the cheap, but it's times like these when you realize you're getting what you've paid for. Many more hosting companies have hypervisors amongst their offerings than did just five years ago, and you can get a basic ESXi server for $50/month or thereabouts. Add memory, disk space, IPs, and bandwidth to suit.
You've taken a rather myopic view of the situation, wouldn't you say? There's plenty of blame to go around, and at the end of the day, it all comes down to two simple factors: capitalism at work, and the fact that there are no perfectly rational actors on either side.
Lets look at some of what you've put forward from an employers perspective.
1. You can't staff experts unless you're willing to pay expert rates.
Oh yes you can, in an economy like this one, unemployment what it is. You're selling your labor, and it's a buyers market.
2. Finding (and keeping) good employees is the single most important part of maintaining and growing a business
Wrong. This is something that the labor force at large would really like to be true, and it's as big a fallacy as the "They don't dare fire me, I'm an irreplaceable cog / this place would fall apart without me" attitude. Minimizing employee turnover enhances efficiency and profit margin, but it's not the "single most important" factor by a long shot. The single most important factor is that you can convince your market that they need or want your product or service. Just as important is that you can provide that product or service at a price they're willing to pay for it without taking a loss. Everything else is tertiary and simply a matter of efficiency and margins.
3. you're only going to get desperate people, not those who are capable
See point 1. In this economy there are plenty of people who are BOTH desperate and capable. The two states are not mutually exclusive. There is a simple three dimensional map you can mentally construct here. On the X axis, plot how your skills match up with the position. On the Y axis, your income if you take the job. On the Z axis, how much effort you're willing to put forward to get the job..
You must come to an agreement with the company in terms of the X and Y, but the Z is entirely up to you. Not responding to recruiters because they are emailing you blindly from a outsourced Indian firm is entirely a Z axis phenomenon. I won't make a value judgement on the wisdom of making that choice, because it's personal, and depends heavily on your current position on the Y axis -- if you're out of work and might end up homeless soon, it's a stupid idea. If you're comfortably employed and the Y axis bump wouldn't be much, then telling them to get stuffed (as I, too, often do) is not an irresponsible move on your part.
This is all partly practical, and partly playing devils advocate to someone who seems a bit heavy on the sanctimonious side. If the competent people you know are getting "stonewalled" there are simple reasons why, and almost all of them boil down to one thing: disagreements about this persons value to the company. Maybe the person is overvaluing their own skills or capabilities, or maybe they aren't doing a good job of demonstrating them to the employer. The only alternative is that the company doesn't need to hire someone right now, and are just testing the waters to see what kind of candidates are available. Several years ago I went on an interview and was told point blank about an hour in that they weren't *actually* looking to hire for another 6 months to a year. I was furious with them for wasting my time, but kept my temper in check and departed without burning any bridges. This has only happened to me once though, in almost 20 years in the field.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no such right. The police can still "tail" you without the little black box in your car. So can crooks. Anyone can sit and track your day to day movements with as much precision as they're willing to put the effort into obtaining.
I already am, via a technological marvel called a license plate. Combined with another technological marvel called the database, at any time anyone, friend or foe, can find the address belonging to this license plate. If you think this information is lawfully restricted only to police or other government agencies, you are mistaken. If you think the private companies that have access to it never abuse it, you're doubly mistaken.
In any event, it was a simple example of extrapolation. There is no call by anyone for the little black boxes to transmit anything. The interface will be hardwired (well until the geeks whip up a device to let you send the information to your iphone) and the data on it only available to people with physical access -- you know, like police or insurance adjusters doing an accident investigation. Or crooks with a slimjim.
How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.
The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.
The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.
In my experience of layperson debates on the subject, like this one, that particular observation cuts both ways. Both sides *do* think we can, ultimately, decide if the coastlines (as they are now) are put under water or not. The skeptics think it's hubris to assume man has any impact besides a negligible one, while the alarmists claim the reverse -- that it's the natural course that has the negligible impact.
This is a very poor analogy. In the climate change argument, you can (with enough resources and determination) reduce the negative impact of the inescapable outcome to near zero. You cannot mitigate the effects of death. If you want to equate it to some healthcare scenario, it's more like the abstinance vs. protection argument. The alarmists are preaching abstinence, while I'm advocating for invention of the condom since abstinence is never going to work in the long run.
How much would it cost to protect (or move) NYC? An unimaginable amount of money. How much will it cost when it finally does go underwater, if unprotected? Even more.
At the very least, the two costs should be plotted vs. time so a sensible course of action can be taken, whereby we spend only as much to try and prevent the situation as is needed to ensure the preparations are completed before it happens with some amount of certainty.
I recognize that global climate is going to warm up no matter *what* we do, and suggest that we should prepare for it (while debunking the claim that it's bad for "life" or farmland), and that makes me a fool? Sorry, but no. The fools are the ones that think anything we do can *stop* the coastlines from being put underwater. It's going to happen, and it does not matter if mankind causes it or not. We should be spending our limited time and resources preparing for something that is inevitable rather than trying to prevent something that is inevitable.
You can believe every single climate scientist. All of them say the same thing : we are currently in an ice age. There is no debate on this topic, certainly not as much as there is on the topic of AGW or on the subject of AGW being "good" or "bad" in the long run.
I will "keep that in mind" as I point out that during the Paleogene, when the average global temperature was the same or higher as during the Cretaceous, mammals flourished and came to dominate. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was indeed very good for mammals. Were it not for that time period, Plesiadapis would probably not have come to be so successful, and humans today would not exist as a result.
Nonsense.
I don't get how so many otherwise smart people think we're living on a world that has the absolutely perfect climate, and that any change warmer or cooler results in disaster for mankind. The fact is a warmer climate such as that found during the Cretaceous(~ +4C) is beneficial to life.
On the other hand, just a tiny bit cooler than now and you're back in an ice age, decidedly unfriendly to life.
For the record, we are *currently* in an interglacial period of the ice age that started 2.6M years ago. When/as we exit the current ice age, it's going to warm up, period.
Franklin said essential liberty. Anarchists continually forget or ignore that. Being able to lie to the police (or hell, your parents) about how fast you were going, if your foot was on the brake or gas, etc, is not an essential liberty. If you don't like speed limits, seatbelt laws, and so on -- fight for those to be repealed.
There is about zero risk of abuse from systems like these, even if the data is broadcast openly and unprotected, live, while you're driving. For the most part, in fact, that is already happening. None of the information these devices records is information that is unavailable otherwise, except perhaps things like the seatbelts being fastened.
Indeed. You need something other than an adapter -- something with a microcontroller and a driver (or that uses the built in driver but this can be problematic), that presents the ps/2 HID devices to the PC. The OPs comment is easily read to imply he "regularly" plugs an AT keyboard into an AT->PS/2 adapter which he then "stacks" with a purple PS/2->USB adapter, which is just not possible.
No, you don't.
Going from AT or PS/2 to USB with only an adapter is impossible. The PS/2 to USB adapters only work because modern keyboards know how to speak both protocols and can detect which kind of port they're plugged into. Old PS/2 only keyboards do not have USB controllers onboard and only work with a USB device (driver required) that provides the ps/2 port(s).
You cannot just plug an old AT or PS/2 keyboard into one of the purple PS/2 -> USB adapters and have it work, because it won't.
I can place limits on what they "can't" do, which is, "install software without my permission", the question as originally posed.
They can't do that. Full stop.
When I do give them permission to install something, I can expend the time and energy determining exactly what it is, if I so choose. Full stop.
In other words, you're still wrong on the face of it, no matter how asinine and paranoid the rabbithole you want to lead us down is, nor how empirically false your suppositions are when viewed in the context of conspiracies and game theory.
I suppose they could be using psychic waves rather than electromagnetic ones.
I have access to all my network traffic logs.
MS cannot "install software changes without asking permission" -- unless you give it permission to do so. Derp harder. After you take a bath.
If you look at the link, you'll see that this is exactly where it failed. It's the same place the bushy carbon-15 rifles tend to fail as well. As another AR-15 aficionado, I must say, the risk of personal injury is pretty small and the severity of those risks is likely to be small as well.
Yes, some of these data companies are getting a bit out of hand, but is it time for the government to step in? You, of all people, know better.
They do actually spend more, not to say they're spending it better. For 2011, 2010, and 2009, companies spent:
(billions)
MS: $9.0, $8.7, $9.0
IBM: $6.0, $6.0, $6.0 (IBMs 10-K filings do not list specific numbers. Each year says "approximately six billion.")
AMD: $1.5, $1.4, $1.7
Intel: $8.4, $6.6, $5.7
It was an obvious mistake to include Intel in the list of "more than ______ combined". Both Intel and MS spend more than AMD and IBM combined, though.
Only half true. DMCA explicitly grants exceptions for portability. You know, like, to write player software for unsupported platforms.
How is this a 'troll'?? Good grief slashdot, pull your heads out.
I spent about 9 months living in Canada. The $1 and $2 coins were an unabashed nightmare. Walking around with pockets full of heavy coins is not fun. Neither is accidentally dropping a couple dollars into the charity/tip jar when you get your change.
Save four billion dollars? There are four billion other ways to save more in our outrageously wasteful government.
The closest there is to that, I believe, are DBWrench and PGAdmin. I haven't used either in a long time, but FWIW, I don't use those kinds of tools on my MSSQL databases either. I write all my SQL the same place I write the rest of my code : UltraEdit.
I do not recommend any "entry-level web hosts." The lowest I'll go is a VPS, which means you can install PG yourself if they do not officially offer it. Entry level sites can get by just fine on SQLite for all it matters.
Agree. If you are going to help (or, damn, even use) an OSS DB, make it PG. MySQL is garbage. MSSQL is not bad though. It's still fast as hell and has great ACID compliance, just expensive.
What's wrong with the picture is the premise. The idea itself is immoral on its face. Programming mandatory morality into every vehicle means that somewhere, somebody decided your morality for you. To "get around" the problem their only choice is going to be value-weighting as the author suggests, which is so complex that you'll be lucky if the machine doesn't just crash into something random when presented with the dilemma.
You vs. schoolbus full of kids? What if you're the last EMT (Electronic Morality Technician) left in the world? What if you're a researcher seconds away from verifying the cure for cancer? Or perhaps, on the flipside, you're a wanted ax murderer. Should the vehicle intentionally drive you into a bridge abutment or to the nearest police station?
There will never be "morality onboard" because the decisions are too complex and subjective to be quantified, and any failure of the system will mean its immediate rejection by the population
Also.. ATMOS.
Under any shared hosting, or control-panel-abstracted hosting, you're at the mercy of your provider for things like this. I realize they offer stuff on the cheap, but it's times like these when you realize you're getting what you've paid for. Many more hosting companies have hypervisors amongst their offerings than did just five years ago, and you can get a basic ESXi server for $50/month or thereabouts. Add memory, disk space, IPs, and bandwidth to suit.
You've taken a rather myopic view of the situation, wouldn't you say? There's plenty of blame to go around, and at the end of the day, it all comes down to two simple factors: capitalism at work, and the fact that there are no perfectly rational actors on either side.
Lets look at some of what you've put forward from an employers perspective.
1. You can't staff experts unless you're willing to pay expert rates.
Oh yes you can, in an economy like this one, unemployment what it is. You're selling your labor, and it's a buyers market.
2. Finding (and keeping) good employees is the single most important part of maintaining and growing a business
Wrong. This is something that the labor force at large would really like to be true, and it's as big a fallacy as the "They don't dare fire me, I'm an irreplaceable cog / this place would fall apart without me" attitude. Minimizing employee turnover enhances efficiency and profit margin, but it's not the "single most important" factor by a long shot. The single most important factor is that you can convince your market that they need or want your product or service. Just as important is that you can provide that product or service at a price they're willing to pay for it without taking a loss. Everything else is tertiary and simply a matter of efficiency and margins.
3. you're only going to get desperate people, not those who are capable
See point 1. In this economy there are plenty of people who are BOTH desperate and capable. The two states are not mutually exclusive. There is a simple three dimensional map you can mentally construct here. On the X axis, plot how your skills match up with the position. On the Y axis, your income if you take the job. On the Z axis, how much effort you're willing to put forward to get the job..
You must come to an agreement with the company in terms of the X and Y, but the Z is entirely up to you. Not responding to recruiters because they are emailing you blindly from a outsourced Indian firm is entirely a Z axis phenomenon. I won't make a value judgement on the wisdom of making that choice, because it's personal, and depends heavily on your current position on the Y axis -- if you're out of work and might end up homeless soon, it's a stupid idea. If you're comfortably employed and the Y axis bump wouldn't be much, then telling them to get stuffed (as I, too, often do) is not an irresponsible move on your part.
This is all partly practical, and partly playing devils advocate to someone who seems a bit heavy on the sanctimonious side. If the competent people you know are getting "stonewalled" there are simple reasons why, and almost all of them boil down to one thing: disagreements about this persons value to the company. Maybe the person is overvaluing their own skills or capabilities, or maybe they aren't doing a good job of demonstrating them to the employer. The only alternative is that the company doesn't need to hire someone right now, and are just testing the waters to see what kind of candidates are available. Several years ago I went on an interview and was told point blank about an hour in that they weren't *actually* looking to hire for another 6 months to a year. I was furious with them for wasting my time, but kept my temper in check and departed without burning any bridges. This has only happened to me once though, in almost 20 years in the field.