Agreed: watching this a small number of times is OK, after that it grates. However: if these guys can produce the ads for $1,500 then the car company could afford to have many of them, all different; that would retain interest. If the series of adverts told some sort of story people would look forwards to them and maybe actively watch them.
This is what I wrote. Do not copy this word for word, write it your way.
Dear sir,
I was aghast to learn that Russia has sought to stifle political dissent by
blocking news sites and closing these sites. This is very much against the
spirit of glasnost that the great Mikhail Gorbachev used some 25 years ago when
he brought the Soviet Union into the modern world.
To be healthy a society needs its citizens to be able to speak freely, otherwise
it will stagnate: innovation will suffer if new ideas are frowned upon, we live
in a changing world, if we do not change then we slowly decline.
This is as much about science & technology as it is about politics. If you
stifle political thought then you chill all thought and the country will suffer.
Mr Putin is putting his short term comfort before the long term health of Russia.
Please tell him this this is neither good for Russia nor the rest of the world.
Commenting here is great, but Putin does not read Slashdot. Write to your country's Russian ambassador, tell him what you think. OK: what you say will be ignored, but if 10,000 of you write - then Putin may hear of it... maybe no more than 2 lines at the bottom of some report, but that is better than nothing.
Just to make it easier for you: the UK Russian embassy contact page (I would suggest Russia-UK relations queries); the USA Russian embassy contact page, post & 'phone only, unless someone can dig better than I can. Also feel free to reply to this comment with contact info for the Russian embassy in your country.
If you say nothing, then you will be ignored. Saying something cannot be worse than that !
I just can't see why you would need this ? If the car needs an Internet connection to, say, update street maps then just give it your home WiFi password.
The driver should not have much need since he is supposed to have his eyes on the road, I suppose streaming music might be nice - but the radio/cd-player does me fine. Passengers: if they want the net then they just fire up their 'phone/tablet/...
Or are they grabbing it during maintenance work on the vehicle?
Sounds like another reason to use an independent motor mechanic. I have been using one for a decade, he is cheaper and generally gets the job done with less hassle than I remember when going to a main dealer.
Also more convenient: I book him, he arrives, leaves is car at my house while he takes mine to be serviced - this is great since I often work from home I don't need to waste time driving to/from a main dealer.
Agreed. The slashdot summary is badly worded; the phrase don't like is ambiguous, it can either mean want it to stop or it does not speak to them (how the original article words it).
You use the different meaning than the article when you talk about is 'popular music'. In that I agree with you as, to my ears, most modern 'music' is not worth listening to and often grates my ears. I like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, etc, in the main but also trad jazz, some rock is OK. I get wound up by what I consider noise being blasted at me in some shops, swimming pools & other public places. I do realise that some people must like modern/pop stuff, but I do wonder how much of it will still be played in 20 years let alone 200.
Sorry: I did not explain myself adequately. My point is that even if we assume that what they are doing is reasonable, moral,... does it justify the cost ? I suspect that it does not, so why is it happening ? I am trying to argue from the point of view of those who think that it is a good idea, ie: even within their parameters it is not an overall benefit.
Assume that this report is true (I note that this is not the first time that we have heard this sort of thing) and take the NSA/GCHQ aims at face value and desirable: ie that they are acting to prevent harm to people in their respective countries.
What they appear to be doing is to damage some innocent people to prevent harm to some other people. I can understand that this might be a trade off that is worth paying - paid by the innocent people. I am far from convinced that this trade off is right or moral; but for the sake of this argument - I will accept it.
So: we have an equation, it is worth it if: Number-of-people-protected > Number-of-people-harmed.
It is, of course, more complicated. The above assumes that the amount of harm is the same in each case, this will not be true. Arguably the worst harm is someone being killed. There are lesser harms to individuals: financial loss, loss of reputation, damage to personal relationships (estrangement from families, divorce,...), loss of liberty - these all seem to be results of the sort of tactics that the article talks about.
The difficult part is ranking the harms, so how much financial loss is equivalent to loss of liberty or death ? Cleverer people that me might be able to come up with a rough ranking.
There is also the general harm to society that is caused by gumming up free discussion and exchange of information.
Once we have done all of the equations: are we, as a society, better or worse off ? This is the big question.
The other question is: who is better off ? I said ''society'', but is that who this is really who benefits, might it not be politicians, powerful business people, those who work at NSA/GCHQ ? If those who suffer from these actions are different from those who gain - the cost equation changes depending on which camp you find yourself.
I note that some of these same tactics are also used by some large corporates who wish to protect their profits or confine knowledge of their wrong doing.
So: can anyone come up with a cost/benefit analysis, please ?
A lot of programming is about understanding a problem, seeing what the real needs are - not the ones that the users think they need. You then need strategic planning on how to meet those needs, a lot of that will be about understanding how the new program will fit into the existing ecosystem. Next comes the translation of that strategy into a programming language (or more: you may also need some SQL, HTML, shell,...) and the completely different skills of debugging. Finally: documentation for the users and also the programmers [actually: I find that doing the first draft of the documentation before writing the code is a really good idea].
So: programming is much more than just language skills.
Some here have asserted that programming is a branch of maths. This may be true for some sorts of programs (or some subroutines), but it is not true for most of what I do -- although an understanding of maths does help some parts.
Summary: please don't be simplistic, programming is a complex skill that requires many different brain subsystems, language is just one of them.
Some 6 months after I bought it HTC decided to not produce any more updates - the bullshit excuse was that what I had was optimal. The reality was that they considered it end of life and so could not be bothered -- they got the money from the sale, so why bother ? Well: it will cost them since I won't buy another HTC.
generate a small amounts of finite improbability.... to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
It was never a crisis to begin with? This is why you don't listen to chicken littles.
I don't know where you live, but at a guess I would put you in a country such as the USA or in United Kingdom. If you look at how many IP addresses there are per 1,000 population you will see that the USA has about 5,000, the UK 2,000 but that India has 29. So it might not be a problem for you, but for for some it is. It is not just 1st vs 3rd world, overall the EU has 19 per 1,000.
Many people use more than one IP address (think: office, home, mobile 'phone). Yes NAT can help, but it is not the complete answer.
How do they stop it spoiling ? Bacteria need 3 things to grow: moisture, time and nutrients (something to digest to provide energy). The article says that they keep it moist and try hard to remove oxygen, but things like Anaerobic bacteria don't need oxygen. They make it slighly acidic which might help, but too acidic and it will damage soldiers' teeth. The other way of stopping things growing in it is to remove nutritional content -- which is presumably the reason that soliders need to eat it. Hmmmm.
It is not all clear. If someone ''helped'' then they, in some way, knew what Snowden was about and so sharing-passwords/what-ever was a kind of tacit approval. If they simply acted to a job related request from a co-worker and did not know what Snowden was doing - can that be called helping ?
Whatever: this story still has the wrong focus, it is about Snowden. Snowden should not be the story. The story should be about the illegal activities of the NSA.
to Rahinah Ibrahim, not only for the financial loss that this has caused her but the inconvenience, emotional anguish, etc, etc. This should be paid by the individuals who acted to cover this up - not the organisations that they worked for, where the fine would just be added to the national tax bill. The fine must be high enough so that it really hurts all the individuals who contribute to the fine.
The fine should not be paid by the FBI agent who made the original error, he screwed up (we all do occasionally) and I doubt that he made the mistake maliciously. The fine should be paid by the individuals who were asked to review the case and who conspired to pervert the law of the USA, those who thought it more important to protect a decision by a government department than to see the right thing done. If these individuals are allowed to get away with it then expect this sort of thing to continue.
A bad analogy: if I take a bottle of milk from the refrigerator then it is no longer in it.
If I copy some pages from a web server they are still there for someone else to look at.
A better analogy would be that I looked into the refrigerator and told the world what sort of cheeses you liked.
Once the USA government asks for bids on this, you will get many companies wanting a share on this juicy contract. This is supposed to be with the intention of increasing security, but just wait a couple of years and stories will start to pop up as to how corners have been cut to turn a few extra dollars with the result that this data becomes available to all sorts.
that poor people die because they cannot buy the cheap drugs that may save their lives than a few rich western pharma lose any profit.:-(
Let them produce cheap drugs for local consumption. OK don't allow them to be imported to the west where (most) people can afford them. But condemning people to die just to protect your profits is, frankly, sick. Maybe not much different from tobacco companies, but still sick.
The key word in your comment is basics. So: yes everyone should learn how to write a few simple programs, I do not expect everyone to be a kernel hacker. They will forget the details but what will remain is the rough idea of loops, conditionals, variables, types (numbers & strings is good enough),.... The long term value is that computing devices will be understood to not be magical devices but dumb machines that follow simple rules (== programs) and do so very quickly.
How to operate and use a computer is a separate skill, one this is very badly taught today. This involves ideas like: menu systems, file types (PDF, Image, word processing document,...), file size (something that most people do not seem to have a clue), how to write an email,...
In our age programming is a basic concept in in much the same way as is: geography, physics, history, chemistry, art,... I expect everyone to master the basic skills of the 3 Rs: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic.
Oh, by everyone I mean 95%+. I accept that some will never get it just as some never learn to read or to add up.
He says that he was told to say things that they knew were not true, eg:
We were also ordered to tell the public that the machines were 100 percent effective, security-wise, in the event that any citizens caught wind of rumors to the contrary.
Yes: an employer can tell you how to spend your time when at your place of employment, but do they have the right to make you tell lies ? What about the managers who ask others to tell lies, do they care that they know that they are doing wrong ? If you do care, then why do it ? I know that in practice if you do not lie your job may be at risk, but can you be fired for not wanting to be dishonest ? It seems, somehow, that when you work for an organisation that many people feel that they must support ''their team'', even when it is doing wrong. Mr Harrington has at least come clean after the event, but how many employees at other organisation do not have the balls to do so ?
This does not just happen at the TSA, it happens in many organisations: salesmen making exaggerated product claims, banks screwing customers, NSA employees claiming that they obey the law,... If and when these calumnies are found out the organisation might get a knock, but rarely the individual. We need to bring back personal accountability for what individuals do, we then might see a reduction in ''corporate lying'' and the world would be a better place.
I know that I am an idealist, but is this a deam too far ?
I do occasional web development. Opera's dragonfly is a great compliment to Firefox Web Developer toolbar. If Opera were to go, it would be a great loss.
Seeing to move the focus of debate elsewhere is another common strategy. Thus attempts to make Snowden/Assange/Manning the story rather than what they exposed or helped to expose.
If there are features that open/libre office lack that would cause some parts of the UK government a problem then the obvious solution is for the government to pay someone to implement those features. If some requirements are really hard it might cost a few £million - but then the features are free forever.
They have spent £200 million on MS Office in the last 3 years -- that sort of money would pay for a big heap of new features!
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed: watching this a small number of times is OK, after that it grates. However: if these guys can produce the ads for $1,500 then the car company could afford to have many of them, all different; that would retain interest. If the series of adverts told some sort of story people would look forwards to them and maybe actively watch them.
This is what I wrote. Do not copy this word for word, write it your way.
Dear sir,
I was aghast to learn that Russia has sought to stifle political dissent by blocking news sites and closing these sites. This is very much against the spirit of glasnost that the great Mikhail Gorbachev used some 25 years ago when he brought the Soviet Union into the modern world.
To be healthy a society needs its citizens to be able to speak freely, otherwise it will stagnate: innovation will suffer if new ideas are frowned upon, we live in a changing world, if we do not change then we slowly decline.
This is as much about science & technology as it is about politics. If you stifle political thought then you chill all thought and the country will suffer.
Mr Putin is putting his short term comfort before the long term health of Russia. Please tell him this this is neither good for Russia nor the rest of the world.
Please convey this email to the ambassador.
If you are not aware of what I talk about, please read: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/russia-blocks-access-major-independent-news-sites
Commenting here is great, but Putin does not read Slashdot. Write to your country's Russian ambassador, tell him what you think. OK: what you say will be ignored, but if 10,000 of you write - then Putin may hear of it ... maybe no more than 2 lines at the bottom of some report, but that is better than nothing.
Just to make it easier for you: the UK Russian embassy contact page (I would suggest Russia-UK relations queries); the USA Russian embassy contact page, post & 'phone only, unless someone can dig better than I can. Also feel free to reply to this comment with contact info for the Russian embassy in your country.
If you say nothing, then you will be ignored. Saying something cannot be worse than that !
I just can't see why you would need this ? If the car needs an Internet connection to, say, update street maps then just give it your home WiFi password.
The driver should not have much need since he is supposed to have his eyes on the road, I suppose streaming music might be nice - but the radio/cd-player does me fine. Passengers: if they want the net then they just fire up their 'phone/tablet/...
So why ? Or am I incredibly unimaginative ?
Or are they grabbing it during maintenance work on the vehicle?
Sounds like another reason to use an independent motor mechanic. I have been using one for a decade, he is cheaper and generally gets the job done with less hassle than I remember when going to a main dealer.
Also more convenient: I book him, he arrives, leaves is car at my house while he takes mine to be serviced - this is great since I often work from home I don't need to waste time driving to/from a main dealer.
Agreed. The slashdot summary is badly worded; the phrase don't like is ambiguous, it can either mean want it to stop or it does not speak to them (how the original article words it).
You use the different meaning than the article when you talk about is 'popular music'. In that I agree with you as, to my ears, most modern 'music' is not worth listening to and often grates my ears. I like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, etc, in the main but also trad jazz, some rock is OK. I get wound up by what I consider noise being blasted at me in some shops, swimming pools & other public places. I do realise that some people must like modern/pop stuff, but I do wonder how much of it will still be played in 20 years let alone 200.
Sorry: I did not explain myself adequately. My point is that even if we assume that what they are doing is reasonable, moral, ... does it justify the cost ? I suspect that it does not, so why is it happening ? I am trying to argue from the point of view of those who think that it is a good idea, ie: even within their parameters it is not an overall benefit.
Assume that this report is true (I note that this is not the first time that we have heard this sort of thing) and take the NSA/GCHQ aims at face value and desirable: ie that they are acting to prevent harm to people in their respective countries.
What they appear to be doing is to damage some innocent people to prevent harm to some other people. I can understand that this might be a trade off that is worth paying - paid by the innocent people. I am far from convinced that this trade off is right or moral; but for the sake of this argument - I will accept it.
So: we have an equation, it is worth it if: Number-of-people-protected > Number-of-people-harmed.
It is, of course, more complicated. The above assumes that the amount of harm is the same in each case, this will not be true. Arguably the worst harm is someone being killed. There are lesser harms to individuals: financial loss, loss of reputation, damage to personal relationships (estrangement from families, divorce, ...), loss of liberty - these all seem to be results of the sort of tactics that the article talks about.
The difficult part is ranking the harms, so how much financial loss is equivalent to loss of liberty or death ? Cleverer people that me might be able to come up with a rough ranking.
There is also the general harm to society that is caused by gumming up free discussion and exchange of information.
Once we have done all of the equations: are we, as a society, better or worse off ? This is the big question.
The other question is: who is better off ? I said ''society'', but is that who this is really who benefits, might it not be politicians, powerful business people, those who work at NSA/GCHQ ? If those who suffer from these actions are different from those who gain - the cost equation changes depending on which camp you find yourself.
I note that some of these same tactics are also used by some large corporates who wish to protect their profits or confine knowledge of their wrong doing.
So: can anyone come up with a cost/benefit analysis, please ?
A lot of programming is about understanding a problem, seeing what the real needs are - not the ones that the users think they need. You then need strategic planning on how to meet those needs, a lot of that will be about understanding how the new program will fit into the existing ecosystem. Next comes the translation of that strategy into a programming language (or more: you may also need some SQL, HTML, shell, ...) and the completely different skills of debugging. Finally: documentation for the users and also the programmers [actually: I find that doing the first draft of the documentation before writing the code is a really good idea].
So: programming is much more than just language skills.
Some here have asserted that programming is a branch of maths. This may be true for some sorts of programs (or some subroutines), but it is not true for most of what I do -- although an understanding of maths does help some parts.
Summary: please don't be simplistic, programming is a complex skill that requires many different brain subsystems, language is just one of them.
Some 6 months after I bought it HTC decided to not produce any more updates - the bullshit excuse was that what I had was optimal. The reality was that they considered it end of life and so could not be bothered -- they got the money from the sale, so why bother ? Well: it will cost them since I won't buy another HTC.
generate a small amounts of finite improbability .... to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
It was never a crisis to begin with? This is why you don't listen to chicken littles.
I don't know where you live, but at a guess I would put you in a country such as the USA or in United Kingdom. If you look at how many IP addresses there are per 1,000 population you will see that the USA has about 5,000, the UK 2,000 but that India has 29. So it might not be a problem for you, but for for some it is. It is not just 1st vs 3rd world, overall the EU has 19 per 1,000.
Many people use more than one IP address (think: office, home, mobile 'phone). Yes NAT can help, but it is not the complete answer.
How do they stop it spoiling ? Bacteria need 3 things to grow: moisture, time and nutrients (something to digest to provide energy). The article says that they keep it moist and try hard to remove oxygen, but things like Anaerobic bacteria don't need oxygen. They make it slighly acidic which might help, but too acidic and it will damage soldiers' teeth. The other way of stopping things growing in it is to remove nutritional content -- which is presumably the reason that soliders need to eat it. Hmmmm.
It is not all clear. If someone ''helped'' then they, in some way, knew what Snowden was about and so sharing-passwords/what-ever was a kind of tacit approval. If they simply acted to a job related request from a co-worker and did not know what Snowden was doing - can that be called helping ?
Whatever: this story still has the wrong focus, it is about Snowden. Snowden should not be the story. The story should be about the illegal activities of the NSA.
to Rahinah Ibrahim, not only for the financial loss that this has caused her but the inconvenience, emotional anguish, etc, etc. This should be paid by the individuals who acted to cover this up - not the organisations that they worked for, where the fine would just be added to the national tax bill. The fine must be high enough so that it really hurts all the individuals who contribute to the fine.
The fine should not be paid by the FBI agent who made the original error, he screwed up (we all do occasionally) and I doubt that he made the mistake maliciously. The fine should be paid by the individuals who were asked to review the case and who conspired to pervert the law of the USA, those who thought it more important to protect a decision by a government department than to see the right thing done. If these individuals are allowed to get away with it then expect this sort of thing to continue.
A bad analogy: if I take a bottle of milk from the refrigerator then it is no longer in it. If I copy some pages from a web server they are still there for someone else to look at.
A better analogy would be that I looked into the refrigerator and told the world what sort of cheeses you liked.
though they can't file bugs
Yes they can. RedHat will deal with the bugs in their own time, ie prioritise paying customers over anyone else.
Given enough money.
Once the USA government asks for bids on this, you will get many companies wanting a share on this juicy contract. This is supposed to be with the intention of increasing security, but just wait a couple of years and stories will start to pop up as to how corners have been cut to turn a few extra dollars with the result that this data becomes available to all sorts.
that poor people die because they cannot buy the cheap drugs that may save their lives than a few rich western pharma lose any profit. :-(
Let them produce cheap drugs for local consumption. OK don't allow them to be imported to the west where (most) people can afford them. But condemning people to die just to protect your profits is, frankly, sick. Maybe not much different from tobacco companies, but still sick.
The key word in your comment is basics. So: yes everyone should learn how to write a few simple programs, I do not expect everyone to be a kernel hacker. They will forget the details but what will remain is the rough idea of loops, conditionals, variables, types (numbers & strings is good enough), .... The long term value is that computing devices will be understood to not be magical devices but dumb machines that follow simple rules (== programs) and do so very quickly.
How to operate and use a computer is a separate skill, one this is very badly taught today. This involves ideas like: menu systems, file types (PDF, Image, word processing document, ...), file size (something that most people do not seem to have a clue), how to write an email, ...
In our age programming is a basic concept in in much the same way as is: geography, physics, history, chemistry, art, ... I expect everyone to master the basic skills of the 3 Rs: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic.
Oh, by everyone I mean 95%+. I accept that some will never get it just as some never learn to read or to add up.
He says that he was told to say things that they knew were not true, eg:
Yes: an employer can tell you how to spend your time when at your place of employment, but do they have the right to make you tell lies ? What about the managers who ask others to tell lies, do they care that they know that they are doing wrong ? If you do care, then why do it ? I know that in practice if you do not lie your job may be at risk, but can you be fired for not wanting to be dishonest ? It seems, somehow, that when you work for an organisation that many people feel that they must support ''their team'', even when it is doing wrong. Mr Harrington has at least come clean after the event, but how many employees at other organisation do not have the balls to do so ?
This does not just happen at the TSA, it happens in many organisations: salesmen making exaggerated product claims, banks screwing customers, NSA employees claiming that they obey the law, ... If and when these calumnies are found out the organisation might get a knock, but rarely the individual. We need to bring back personal accountability for what individuals do, we then might see a reduction in ''corporate lying'' and the world would be a better place.
I know that I am an idealist, but is this a deam too far ?
I do occasional web development. Opera's dragonfly is a great compliment to Firefox Web Developer toolbar. If Opera were to go, it would be a great loss.
Seeing to move the focus of debate elsewhere is another common strategy. Thus attempts to make Snowden/Assange/Manning the story rather than what they exposed or helped to expose.
If there are features that open/libre office lack that would cause some parts of the UK government a problem then the obvious solution is for the government to pay someone to implement those features. If some requirements are really hard it might cost a few £million - but then the features are free forever. They have spent £200 million on MS Office in the last 3 years -- that sort of money would pay for a big heap of new features!
Time for Postgres to release a European Edition that does implement the concurrency features. Software patents are not enforcable here (yet).