I had an eye-opening experience the other day over at the Oil Drum, a blog run by folks associated with the industry. Not people you'd exactly think of as being against the consumption of fossil fuels. But the gist of this posting (which had nothing to do with climate change, and received a lot of favorable commentary) was that we're deeply, deeply fucked if we think we're going to continue burning fossil fuels into our old age. The argument was specifically related to the increasing cost of extraction. (In a nutshell, there's a reason we're now getting our oil from wells a mile underwater).
Now, the conclusion of that poster was pretty depressing, though I don't think he covered all of the options. But what struck me is that if you believe his arguments, it doesn't really matter whether you believe that humans are causing global warming. The actions we need to take now to ensure a reasonable standard of living in 40 years are exactly the same actions we need to take in order to deal with the global warming problem. Above all, to place a tax on fossil fuel consumption (and CO2 taxes do this pretty well) as a means to encourage the market to do something reasonable about the problem. The fact that we couldn't even pass the tiny little tax proposed in the recently defeated Waxman-Markey bill tells us something deeply frightening about our chances.
What kills me about the anti-global-warming argument is that its opponents think that it really matters whether AGW exists. It doesn't matter. For either reason we need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel consumption and develop alternative sources (efficient, cost-effective nuclear, wind, solar, etc._ just to ensure that we and our children have a chance at living a decent life in the future. There's nothing in the universe that guarantees we won't face terrible consequences for our bad decisions, just because we've had a pretty good run for the past few decades.
Aside from that, I'm not really interested in making comments on this anymore because I'm so sick and tired of the armchair idiocy that follows (and somehow gets moderated up). Prediction: Not even 300 scientists from 48 countries and NOAA are going to convince everyone that global warming is real. At this point, I think it's just going to get worse [slashdot.org].
I think, unfortunately, that's the goal of a lot of the posting you refer to --- to frustrate reasonable people and make them get out of the business of commenting. I'd be all in favor of a reasonable, fact-based debate, but the comments on Slashdot rarely make it to that level. (I also tend to think there's a lot of multiple-account posting/moderation nonsense going on, but only the Slashdot editors themselves could prove that.)
Um, they already know where I live. That would be the address where my phone bill arrives. It's also the billing address of the credit card I used to sign up with iTunes. But holy shit, now they know the same thing with GPS! It's like 1984 or something! AAAGGHHHH!!!
You seem to be missing the point. Apple specifically indicated to Congress that they anonymize location data by assigning a unique random ID every 24 hours. Presumably the goal is to disassociate your location information from the details that Apple already knows, i.e., your name and home address. That way Apple can claim they're not collecting data that would actively violate a user's privacy. More specifically, the theory is to prevent Apple (or someone malicious who obtains the database) from associating "a phone at some series of locations throughout the day" with "John K. Oodaloop at 4945 Spring Place". If this anonymization actually works, then customers can rest easy that they're not carrying an active tracking device with them all day that's recording their movements into a long-lived and possibly ill-secured database.
Clearly this is what Apple would like Congress to believe, anyway, and that's why they're "anonymizing" the data in the first place.
The grandparent poster is pointing out that Apple's anonymization really stinks, and that with some very minimal data mining you should be able to easily de-anonymize it and link those phone movements with the phone's owner. As you point out, Apple already has your billing address (which is likely to be your home or work), so this de-anonymization should be especially trivial. Therefore one can't really credit Apple with anything significant when they say they anonymize your data.
In my mind the fear is/not/ that Apple will track me and sell ads (hey, non-stupid advertising would be an improvement). It's that this data will never ever go away, and will eventually find its way into the hands of third parties who aren't so interested in my well being. For example, it might wind up someday being sold to third party "marketing" agencies, and then eventually to firms that do credit reporting, private investigation, background checks, etc. Mobile phone companies already seem perfectly content to sell my call logs this way, so this isn't without precedent. Or else it will be written to a hard drive that might someday be carelessly thrown away without being properly wiped (after all, the data is "anonymized", so why worry?). While my movements are generally pretty uninteresting, I don't love the idea that by carrying an iPhone I'll be constantly leaving a trail of potentially long-lived breadcrumbs that may never, ever go away.
And no, this isn't limited to Apple. Once it becomes accepted practice, you can be more or less certain that any device with an Internet connection and GPS (which will be a lot of devices in the future!) will be doing the same thing.
Florida has an answer to appeals trials. One is required to post the sum awarded by the lower court as well as a hefty fee to appear before an appeal court. Since it takes three or four years to get to trial as a rule the lost interest on the money as well as the build up of ongoing legal fees generally rules out any hope of an appeal trial giving relief. Then just to put the frosting on the cake the superior court often rules that the case must be kicked down to the first level and decided from scratch all over again. Then it takes another year to get back to court and get a ruling and there is no guarantee that the case will not be appealed a second time. This turns into a case lasting for fifteen years with expenses so great that the person fighting the uphill side of the battle will drown before it is over
First of all, any post beginning with "Florida has an answer" should send you running for the hills. I've dealt with the State of Florida on a few small issues, and it's how I'd like my justice dealt.
More seriously, the problem with this approach is that it has a condition that ensures that someone will "drown fighting the uphill side". In general, any time there's a condition where one party can be "drowned" fighting for their legal rights, you can be certain that the drowning will overwhelmingly be done by those least able to afford the lawyers. It won't necessarily correlate to justice. I think we'd all be better off trying to come up with legal systems that work better for everyone, rather than legal systems that shaft one party in various circumstances.
The only situation where I can see that your line of reasoning succeeds is if the banks are simply holding the money and doing nothing with it - i.e. the bank is putting the money it has in a mattress and that's it. Is that what is going on on a large scale?
If you define a mattress as "the least risky investments available" you'll basically have the shape of it. Of course there's some lending going on, just less then you'd hope for. Keep in mind that (in the US at least) the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to pump money into the banking system, with very unsatisfying results.
However, if you put it in a bank then the bank is going to invest the money which will move that money into the hands of someone who is doing something with it. That "doing something" is likely going to entail hiring someone at some point.
In 2010 the bank is going to loan it right back to the Treasury, since institutions currently perceive private investments to be too risky. Aren't you aware that we're experiencing terrifically low rates of private investment and a historically low rate of return on US government debt? People are calling it a "flight to safety".
Similarly, consumers aren't spending as much, they're saving more. Which means more money being put in the bank which then ultimately invests that cash in US treasuries, since the return on private loans sucks --- after all, consumers aren't spending. You can choose to do something about this dynamic or you can choose not to, but you should at least realize what's going on.
Your advice would have been timely in the early 1990s and maybe even in the early 2000s. It's completely useless right now.
That number seems high. I've seen many cases where a server is configured both at the correct address (say, www.foobar.com) and at another address which is not embedded in the cert (foobar.com). Depending on how you access the site you'll either get a perfectly valid cert or an invalid certificate message.
While a setup like this is improperly configured, it may not matter that much. If nearly all visitors access the site via the correct domain name, the SSL cert is probably doing its job.
What statements by me? Oh yeah, the ones you just made up. Go suck a lemon, you just claimed there were no suicides clusters for work related issues but Foxconn.
"In fact there have been one or two such examples over the past few decades and they were treated as exactly the unusual and horrifying event that they are."
I think the France Telecom example is extremely informative, and contrary to your statements it was treated as a major national crisis. The president of France became involved. Compare that to the Foxconn suicides which we're supposed to treat as a normal statistical occurrence. It's doubtful we'll ever ever have proof of anything, since neither Foxconn nor the Chinese government have any motivation to conduct the sort of detailed investigation you saw in the France Telecom case.
"Correlation != Causation" is overused. In this case we're trying to guess what's going on when valid information is being deliberately withheld. Since we have no choice but to guess, then I'm going to go with the only real evidence we have now: Foxconn's executives clearly felt that the suicides were work-related, as they initially increased worker's compensation to respond to them (and now they're moving their factories to other locations). It's possible that they're wrong, but my feeling is that they have more information than you or I do.
These suicides are well within the statistical expectations for a worker population that large. But People don't care about facts, just emotions.
Really? Is it statistically common for groups of people from the same workplace to throw themselves off the same rooftops in large numbers? I mean, keep in mind that these aren't unrelated people slitting their wrists or taking pills.
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but consider the last time you heard of a rooftop-suicide epidemic at a major corporation. Can't? That's because even given the huge number of people employed by corporations it's an unbelievably rare event. In fact there have been one or two such examples over the past few decades and they were treated as exactly the unusual and horrifying event that they are.
First they got control of the car companies under a financial emergency,
What, who? You mean a subset of the American car industry (excluding Ford) that was about to go out of business anyway. It's a huge political turkey and if the government could get rid of that "control" (sell the industries off to private bidders at a reasonable price) they damn well would.
next they went after control of health care because of a health care emergency
What? This is gibberish.
why would it surprise you that they are going after the internet
"They" being Joe Lieberman, a formerly Democratic senator who's now an Independent senator who campaigned vigorously for both George Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Did I mention Lieberman was a huge chearleader for the Iraq war and Bush's anti-terrorism policies, including PATRIOT? If by "they" you mean the misguided fuckers who ran the country into the ground from 2000-2008, you're very much in the right.
Jesus christ, it's sad to see this stuff on Slashdot rated +5, Interesting.
I think Apple's (valid) concern is that if the use of Flash tools for mobile app development becomes dominant, then there won't be iPhone and Android development anymore, there'll simply be Flash development. Period. And then the success or failure of any platform is going to depend on how Adobe feels that day. Let's see, should we get around to releasing an Android compiler update this year? Ditto for bugfixes. Ironically, smaller/less successful platforms are much more at risk if this happens than a successful platform like Apple.
This doesn't just affect the manufacturers. It'll affect any users unfortunate enough to invest in those platforms (poor Palm and Nokia owners). I was a Mac user back in the wilderness years when it wasn't always clear that there was going to be continuing software support, and I specifically remember when Apple switched over to Intel there was a huge delay in the availability of an Intel Photoshop port because Adobe didn't prioritize Mac business enough. And you can talk to any Linux user about how well Adobe supports Flash over there. Adobe will gladly use their market power in ways that work directly against the user.
Now I'm not crazy about the way Apple is handling this (and many other things Apple does). But I do understand it, and I think a world in which Adobe dominates mobile app development is a really terrible world for all of us to live in.
The iPad isn't particularly innovative, IMO; it's just likely well designed, well manufactured, well marketed, and has an extremely famous brand associated with it.
I'm no Apple fanboy and I don't own an iPad, but your analysis doesn't seem exactly fair. The iPad isn't purely a product of slick design and branding (though that sure hasn't hurt.) Remember that when the iPhone interface came out it revolutionized the mobile phone UI world. Since then nearly all of the major manufacturers have completely reworked their UIs to mimic the touch-based interface-- Microsoft even scrapped their existing Mobile OS and completely replaced it. Palm is about to go out of business. The idea of a capacitive, multi-touch based interface with software designed from the ground up may not have been strictly novel (i.e., the component pieces were all out there), but Apple's method of integrating them all was really was a huge advance.
Now it may seem reasonable to say that the iPad is just an iPhone scaled up to tablet size, so while the iPhone might count, the iPad is not a huge innovation. What this overlooks is that the iPad is just the second incarnation of the iPhone UI --- i.e., it's mostly the same innovation, but it's one that hasn't fully run its course. Taking that very successful UI approach up to tablet size may be an obvious step, but it's a worthy step that no competitors have been able to do convincingly. The tablet market was very close to zero right pre-iPad, and that's not all due to bad branding on the part of the existing tabletmakers. Mostly it's because the previous generation of tablets were very different animals and nobody wanted them (outside of a handful of specific fields). I'm guessing that if the iPad takes off (and a slew of Android/MS competitors succeed in its footsteps) it's not going to be due to good design and branding.
The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
I'm no fan of Goldman-Sachs, but since you raised the question: do you know how much money G-S has devoted to lobbying and funding pro-AGW research? I wonder if it's reached 1% of what the fossil fuel industry has spent. Or even.001%. To the best of my knowledge, G-S hasn't even been thinking about energy pricing for that long, let alone considering it a core part of their business. I certainly wasn't aware that they'd been a major player in developing our scientific understanding.
I don't mean to be argumentative but this sounds a lot like a talking point intended to try to make it look like both sides are equally incentivized by money (and therefore can't be trusted). Honestly, I've always wondered why a bunch of independent scientists and politicians would push for unpopular policies that derive them almost not personal benefit (and put them at substantial political risk) if there's really no reason to worry about the effects of AGW. It sounds to me like invoking the evil Goldman Sachs is a way to respond to this very important question in a kind of emotional "sounds good as long as you don't actually look at the sums involved" way.
Those that would understand it already have access via their university or company
This really isn't true, and it's pernicious. For example I finished by PhD a few years ago and started a small company. Once I left academia I lost access to a huge tranche of research material, all of which was --- like you say --- being produced and funded by my colleagues at no cost to the publishers. Even within my previous, rather large, university I would occasionally run into publications that weren't electronically available from our network. All of this is ridiculous and there's no justification for it.
In my field (CS) some of the top conferences and journal publish their materials online with no problems at all, while others go through Springer solely, as far as I can see, so they can put "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" on their publications. And Springer subsequently doles this stuff out through their extremely annoying paywall.** The Springer-published conferences I've refereed don't receive much compensation for this work if any (and where there is compensation, it could easily be replaced with University grants or a small contribution from industry). This persists solely due to institutional momentum and because a few rent-seeking private companies sit astride the most prestigious publications.
** Springer's paywall, for the record, seems expressly designed to fuck with legitimate users who come into the campus network through VPN. When you first navigate the a Springer publication from a non-authorized page it drops a cookie that basically persists until you close your browser. Any subsequent attempt to access a Springer resource from that browser gets rejected/even if/ it comes from a campus IP address (i.e., you change to the VPN or physically pick up your laptop and go to work.) Since VPN access to University networks is allowed by Springer's policies I can't really come up with an explanation for this behavior besides Springer wanting to make accessing their resources as painful as possible.
I sure hope Wall Street is utterly confident in the security of their operating systems, VMs, low-level peripheral firmware, etc. Because if they're not absolutely confident, they should treat all of those machines as potentially untrusted from the moment they open them up to the world. This holds even if they constantly re-image.
When you're talking about the kind of money Wall Street stands to lose from a clever security breach, no amount of paranoia is too ridiculous.
... which I think is tone-deaf and stupid, and will instantly be used by the truly rabid anti-climate-change "skeptic" types as evidence that the entire environmental movement is a secret plan to institute world government. The fact that this claim will be total horseshit won't stop them for a second --- it never does.
The guy is 90 years old, he's probably got a different perspective on things, and anyway he doesn't represent most people's feelings on the matter.
That said, there is one element of truth to what he's saying: namely that if the $hit really does hit the fan (e.g., a major climactic catastrophe, or confirmation that the clathrate feeback look really is happening), things like democracy and the healthy free market are going to be severely endangered. When a society is fighting for its survival, niceties like that are often the first thing to go. And in case you don't follow me, I'm saying that this is a bad thing, and the best way to avoid it is to deal with the problem in an intelligent, conservative way (cutting emissions now).
If nothing else, you can expect a massive decline in our standard of living if human-caused climate change is strongly confirmed in a couple of decades (and it will be, I suspect) and we have to come up with some crazy last-minute mitigation plan.
I would have a different feeling about this if the anti-climate-change side was offering some kind of reassuring science to counter what the majority of climate scientists are finding, but they're not. Mostly we're getting horseshit like misinterpreted emails. And if a movement with so many followers (and billions in fossil-fuel profits) can't offer anything better than that, you should be scared. Really scared.
If HR 676 were ever to work its way through Congress, and have a chance at getting majority votes (60 in the senate to break a Filibuster), you can be assured that it will swell into a 1000+ page monstrosity. The current HCR bills aren't large because they're supposed to be complicated, they're large because any bill that survives the legislative process is huge (and btw, I'm no advocate of this, just an observer).
The short, simple nature of HR 676 indicates that nobody even takes it seriously enough to consider, which is perhaps too bad. But it's hardly fair to compare a bill that's a hypothetical moonfart in someone's imagination to one that might actually become law very soon.
Selling across state lines is a bad bad idea
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and go with a more basic one that has things most everyone can agree on? Insurance sales across state lines (surely a real interstate commerce item)
Nobody agrees on this idea, because it's a rotten idea. Implemented the way it's usually been proposed, what it means is that insurance companies can move to whichever state offers them the sweetest regulatory and tax treatment, i.e., is small and hungry, and willing to rubber-stamp whatever laws the insurance companies propose. Their customers (i.e., residents of other states) don't get to vote on the regulation of those companies, and they don't get to ban them.
Ever wonder why so many credit card companies hail from South Dakota? Because it's a tiny state and they can more or less buy the rules they want. Ever wonder why the credit card industry is so completely unfair to the typical consumer? Same reason.
The fact that this is your number one suggestion, and you think everyone can agree on it, that worries me. I like some of your other ideas, but I definitely don't think we need to hash this out anymore. The plan in Congress is basically the Romney plan which passed in MA several years ago, and has been quite successful. We've been debating the plan for over a year now! It could use lots of tweaking, and I hope once it's passed the Republican party will help with those efforts.
If you don't like the plan, take it to the voters in November. Let's get Congress done with this and move on to other work.
This is a bad idea. Mainly because the iPhone doesn't have a very sophisticated security architecture, so any cryptographic keys and wallet information are fundamentally vulnerable to theft. This is best demonstrated by the recent attack where a handful of SMS messages was sufficient to give an attacker root on the device. If you're going to put something like this into widespread deployment you at very least want to include some sort of hardware security module to validate the software and store cryptographic secrets.
Right now I wouldn't want to use the iPhone (or any Android phone, for that matter) to store any kind of critical secrets.
Or how about the really easy answer. The last IPCC report included a prediction it labeled as most likely that the Earth would warm an average of one degree over the course of the next century. One degree. That's literally unnoticeable. It's lost in the noise of weather. The rain will continue to fall, the sun will continue to shine, clouds will form and dissipate, crops will continue to grow and be eaten, cattle will continue to grow and be eaten, winter will arrive and retreat, and life will continue without the least bit of difficulty.
You're absolutely right. The last IPCC report states that there's a large probability that things will be moderately ok. A smaller probability that things will be moderately bad (severely harming our economy and costing us a fortune to deal with). And a smaller probability that things will be catastrophic, devastating the global economy and killing hundreds of millions.
The normal approach to such a situation is to perform a cost/benefit analysis, where on the one hand you take the cost of doing something to prevent these outcomes, and on the other you take the benefits of doing something (well, really, the absence of paying the costs that might arise if we nothing). On the latter side you get (large probability * small cost) + (smaller probability * high cost) + (even smaller probability * enormous cost). Totaled up properly this indicates that we should probably be willing to spend a huge amount of resources dealing with the problem; even if the bad outcomes are low-probability, they're sufficiently bad so as to dominate the calculation.
And this is more or less the analysis that people are applying to the situation. As a result of this technical analysis, politicians are (quite reluctantly) arriving at the conclusion that we should do something about it, even if it is very politically unpopular (and personally risky) to do so. That doesn't make the argument political --- the argument is technical and scientific. The process by which scientists accept a technical/scientific argument and fight the uphill battle to make it policy is political.
Another way to do the analysis is to do as you suggest, which is to agree that the costs may be high on a global basis, but to be/personally/ sure that you won't pay most of them. I think this is a risky position to take, given that there is a real possibility that even the US will experience serious crop failures and that a bad outcome will significantly increase the probability of global nuclear war and economic depression. I also think it's somewhat immoral. But at least it's honest, and a whole lot better than the horseshit I hear on Slashdot about how scientists are faking their results because they've all invested in Green technology companies or whatever.
I do not, however, believe that our government has the skills, the lack of corruption, the honor, or the honesty to do it well. Much like health care.
Just to clarify, the government isn't proposing to offer health care--- it's proposing to mandate people to buy insurance policies from private insurers, who will in turn be limited in who they can reject. There will also be some subsidies involved.
Cyber security, on the other hand, requires the government to do a lot more than write a check.
I agree with you. That wasn't my argument at all. The "unfairness" I referred to was actually the part about semi-hiding that cost from employees. It distorts their perception of taxes. Sure, most intelligent people will get it sooner or later, but a lot of people won't understand until later, and you know as well as I do that some won't understand it at all.
I think we're agreed on this point. But for the purposes of a discussion that began with the thesis that taxes on small business are too high, my point is simply that I don't think it's fair to count payroll taxes as a prohibitive "tax on small business" since with only a limited number of exceptions the market is putting the burden almost entirely onto the employee.
And since it's unlikely that the American people are going to repeal Social Security and Medicare(aid), the taxes are going to have to be born by someone anyway.
I will have to disagree with you on that point. If putting the taxes where they actually belong would put the worker in the poorhouse, then by definition the tax is too high in that particular situation.
I think the worker already is in the poorhouse. Poverty level in the US is dangerously close to what a minimum wage worker earns for a full time job. Add a dependent to the mix and you're already below it. Any tax level is too high for these workers. But given the depth of your feelings as an example, I'm not sure that the rest of America is ready to subsidize them with even higher taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I had an eye-opening experience the other day over at the Oil Drum, a blog run by folks associated with the industry. Not people you'd exactly think of as being against the consumption of fossil fuels. But the gist of this posting (which had nothing to do with climate change, and received a lot of favorable commentary) was that we're deeply, deeply fucked if we think we're going to continue burning fossil fuels into our old age. The argument was specifically related to the increasing cost of extraction. (In a nutshell, there's a reason we're now getting our oil from wells a mile underwater).
Now, the conclusion of that poster was pretty depressing, though I don't think he covered all of the options. But what struck me is that if you believe his arguments, it doesn't really matter whether you believe that humans are causing global warming. The actions we need to take now to ensure a reasonable standard of living in 40 years are exactly the same actions we need to take in order to deal with the global warming problem. Above all, to place a tax on fossil fuel consumption (and CO2 taxes do this pretty well) as a means to encourage the market to do something reasonable about the problem. The fact that we couldn't even pass the tiny little tax proposed in the recently defeated Waxman-Markey bill tells us something deeply frightening about our chances.
What kills me about the anti-global-warming argument is that its opponents think that it really matters whether AGW exists. It doesn't matter. For either reason we need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel consumption and develop alternative sources (efficient, cost-effective nuclear, wind, solar, etc._ just to ensure that we and our children have a chance at living a decent life in the future. There's nothing in the universe that guarantees we won't face terrible consequences for our bad decisions, just because we've had a pretty good run for the past few decades.
Aside from that, I'm not really interested in making comments on this anymore because I'm so sick and tired of the armchair idiocy that follows (and somehow gets moderated up). Prediction: Not even 300 scientists from 48 countries and NOAA are going to convince everyone that global warming is real. At this point, I think it's just going to get worse [slashdot.org].
I think, unfortunately, that's the goal of a lot of the posting you refer to --- to frustrate reasonable people and make them get out of the business of commenting. I'd be all in favor of a reasonable, fact-based debate, but the comments on Slashdot rarely make it to that level. (I also tend to think there's a lot of multiple-account posting/moderation nonsense going on, but only the Slashdot editors themselves could prove that.)
Top of page 9?
Um, they already know where I live. That would be the address where my phone bill arrives. It's also the billing address of the credit card I used to sign up with iTunes. But holy shit, now they know the same thing with GPS! It's like 1984 or something! AAAGGHHHH!!!
You seem to be missing the point. Apple specifically indicated to Congress that they anonymize location data by assigning a unique random ID every 24 hours. Presumably the goal is to disassociate your location information from the details that Apple already knows, i.e., your name and home address. That way Apple can claim they're not collecting data that would actively violate a user's privacy. More specifically, the theory is to prevent Apple (or someone malicious who obtains the database) from associating "a phone at some series of locations throughout the day" with "John K. Oodaloop at 4945 Spring Place". If this anonymization actually works, then customers can rest easy that they're not carrying an active tracking device with them all day that's recording their movements into a long-lived and possibly ill-secured database.
Clearly this is what Apple would like Congress to believe, anyway, and that's why they're "anonymizing" the data in the first place.
The grandparent poster is pointing out that Apple's anonymization really stinks, and that with some very minimal data mining you should be able to easily de-anonymize it and link those phone movements with the phone's owner. As you point out, Apple already has your billing address (which is likely to be your home or work), so this de-anonymization should be especially trivial. Therefore one can't really credit Apple with anything significant when they say they anonymize your data.
In my mind the fear is /not/ that Apple will track me and sell ads (hey, non-stupid advertising would be an improvement). It's that this data will never ever go away, and will eventually find its way into the hands of third parties who aren't so interested in my well being. For example, it might wind up someday being sold to third party "marketing" agencies, and then eventually to firms that do credit reporting, private investigation, background checks, etc. Mobile phone companies already seem perfectly content to sell my call logs this way, so this isn't without precedent. Or else it will be written to a hard drive that might someday be carelessly thrown away without being properly wiped (after all, the data is "anonymized", so why worry?). While my movements are generally pretty uninteresting, I don't love the idea that by carrying an iPhone I'll be constantly leaving a trail of potentially long-lived breadcrumbs that may never, ever go away.
And no, this isn't limited to Apple. Once it becomes accepted practice, you can be more or less certain that any device with an Internet connection and GPS (which will be a lot of devices in the future!) will be doing the same thing.
Florida has an answer to appeals trials. One is required to post the sum awarded by the lower court as well as a hefty fee to appear before an appeal court. Since it takes three or four years to get to trial as a rule the lost interest on the money as well as the build up of ongoing legal fees generally rules out any hope of an appeal trial giving relief. Then just to put the frosting on the cake the superior court often rules that the case must be kicked down to the first level and decided from scratch all over again. Then it takes another year to get back to court and get a ruling and there is no guarantee that the case will not be appealed a second time. This turns into a case lasting for fifteen years with expenses so great that the person fighting the uphill side of the battle will drown before it is over
First of all, any post beginning with "Florida has an answer" should send you running for the hills. I've dealt with the State of Florida on a few small issues, and it's how I'd like my justice dealt.
More seriously, the problem with this approach is that it has a condition that ensures that someone will "drown fighting the uphill side". In general, any time there's a condition where one party can be "drowned" fighting for their legal rights, you can be certain that the drowning will overwhelmingly be done by those least able to afford the lawyers. It won't necessarily correlate to justice. I think we'd all be better off trying to come up with legal systems that work better for everyone, rather than legal systems that shaft one party in various circumstances.
The only situation where I can see that your line of reasoning succeeds is if the banks are simply holding the money and doing nothing with it - i.e. the bank is putting the money it has in a mattress and that's it. Is that what is going on on a large scale?
If you define a mattress as "the least risky investments available" you'll basically have the shape of it. Of course there's some lending going on, just less then you'd hope for. Keep in mind that (in the US at least) the government has gone to extraordinary lengths to pump money into the banking system, with very unsatisfying results.
However, if you put it in a bank then the bank is going to invest the money which will move that money into the hands of someone who is doing something with it. That "doing something" is likely going to entail hiring someone at some point.
In 2010 the bank is going to loan it right back to the Treasury, since institutions currently perceive private investments to be too risky. Aren't you aware that we're experiencing terrifically low rates of private investment and a historically low rate of return on US government debt? People are calling it a "flight to safety".
Similarly, consumers aren't spending as much, they're saving more. Which means more money being put in the bank which then ultimately invests that cash in US treasuries, since the return on private loans sucks --- after all, consumers aren't spending. You can choose to do something about this dynamic or you can choose not to, but you should at least realize what's going on.
Your advice would have been timely in the early 1990s and maybe even in the early 2000s. It's completely useless right now.
That number seems high. I've seen many cases where a server is configured both at the correct address (say, www.foobar.com) and at another address which is not embedded in the cert (foobar.com). Depending on how you access the site you'll either get a perfectly valid cert or an invalid certificate message.
While a setup like this is improperly configured, it may not matter that much. If nearly all visitors access the site via the correct domain name, the SSL cert is probably doing its job.
What statements by me? Oh yeah, the ones you just made up. Go suck a lemon, you just claimed there were no suicides clusters for work related issues but Foxconn.
Quoted from my original post:
Read my post again carefully.
I think the France Telecom example is extremely informative, and contrary to your statements it was treated as a major national crisis. The president of France became involved. Compare that to the Foxconn suicides which we're supposed to treat as a normal statistical occurrence. It's doubtful we'll ever ever have proof of anything, since neither Foxconn nor the Chinese government have any motivation to conduct the sort of detailed investigation you saw in the France Telecom case.
"Correlation != Causation" is overused. In this case we're trying to guess what's going on when valid information is being deliberately withheld. Since we have no choice but to guess, then I'm going to go with the only real evidence we have now: Foxconn's executives clearly felt that the suicides were work-related, as they initially increased worker's compensation to respond to them (and now they're moving their factories to other locations). It's possible that they're wrong, but my feeling is that they have more information than you or I do.
These suicides are well within the statistical expectations for a worker population that large. But People don't care about facts, just emotions.
Really? Is it statistically common for groups of people from the same workplace to throw themselves off the same rooftops in large numbers? I mean, keep in mind that these aren't unrelated people slitting their wrists or taking pills.
I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but consider the last time you heard of a rooftop-suicide epidemic at a major corporation. Can't? That's because even given the huge number of people employed by corporations it's an unbelievably rare event. In fact there have been one or two such examples over the past few decades and they were treated as exactly the unusual and horrifying event that they are.
First they got control of the car companies under a financial emergency,
What, who? You mean a subset of the American car industry (excluding Ford) that was about to go out of business anyway. It's a huge political turkey and if the government could get rid of that "control" (sell the industries off to private bidders at a reasonable price) they damn well would.
next they went after control of health care because of a health care emergency
What? This is gibberish.
why would it surprise you that they are going after the internet
"They" being Joe Lieberman, a formerly Democratic senator who's now an Independent senator who campaigned vigorously for both George Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Did I mention Lieberman was a huge chearleader for the Iraq war and Bush's anti-terrorism policies, including PATRIOT? If by "they" you mean the misguided fuckers who ran the country into the ground from 2000-2008, you're very much in the right.
Jesus christ, it's sad to see this stuff on Slashdot rated +5, Interesting.
I think Apple's (valid) concern is that if the use of Flash tools for mobile app development becomes dominant, then there won't be iPhone and Android development anymore, there'll simply be Flash development. Period. And then the success or failure of any platform is going to depend on how Adobe feels that day. Let's see, should we get around to releasing an Android compiler update this year? Ditto for bugfixes. Ironically, smaller/less successful platforms are much more at risk if this happens than a successful platform like Apple.
This doesn't just affect the manufacturers. It'll affect any users unfortunate enough to invest in those platforms (poor Palm and Nokia owners). I was a Mac user back in the wilderness years when it wasn't always clear that there was going to be continuing software support, and I specifically remember when Apple switched over to Intel there was a huge delay in the availability of an Intel Photoshop port because Adobe didn't prioritize Mac business enough. And you can talk to any Linux user about how well Adobe supports Flash over there. Adobe will gladly use their market power in ways that work directly against the user.
Now I'm not crazy about the way Apple is handling this (and many other things Apple does). But I do understand it, and I think a world in which Adobe dominates mobile app development is a really terrible world for all of us to live in.
The iPad isn't particularly innovative, IMO; it's just likely well designed, well manufactured, well marketed, and has an extremely famous brand associated with it.
I'm no Apple fanboy and I don't own an iPad, but your analysis doesn't seem exactly fair. The iPad isn't purely a product of slick design and branding (though that sure hasn't hurt.) Remember that when the iPhone interface came out it revolutionized the mobile phone UI world. Since then nearly all of the major manufacturers have completely reworked their UIs to mimic the touch-based interface-- Microsoft even scrapped their existing Mobile OS and completely replaced it. Palm is about to go out of business. The idea of a capacitive, multi-touch based interface with software designed from the ground up may not have been strictly novel (i.e., the component pieces were all out there), but Apple's method of integrating them all was really was a huge advance.
Now it may seem reasonable to say that the iPad is just an iPhone scaled up to tablet size, so while the iPhone might count, the iPad is not a huge innovation. What this overlooks is that the iPad is just the second incarnation of the iPhone UI --- i.e., it's mostly the same innovation, but it's one that hasn't fully run its course. Taking that very successful UI approach up to tablet size may be an obvious step, but it's a worthy step that no competitors have been able to do convincingly. The tablet market was very close to zero right pre-iPad, and that's not all due to bad branding on the part of the existing tabletmakers. Mostly it's because the previous generation of tablets were very different animals and nobody wanted them (outside of a handful of specific fields). I'm guessing that if the iPad takes off (and a slew of Android/MS competitors succeed in its footsteps) it's not going to be due to good design and branding.
The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
I'm no fan of Goldman-Sachs, but since you raised the question: do you know how much money G-S has devoted to lobbying and funding pro-AGW research? I wonder if it's reached 1% of what the fossil fuel industry has spent. Or even .001%. To the best of my knowledge, G-S hasn't even been thinking about energy pricing for that long, let alone considering it a core part of their business. I certainly wasn't aware that they'd been a major player in developing our scientific understanding.
I don't mean to be argumentative but this sounds a lot like a talking point intended to try to make it look like both sides are equally incentivized by money (and therefore can't be trusted). Honestly, I've always wondered why a bunch of independent scientists and politicians would push for unpopular policies that derive them almost not personal benefit (and put them at substantial political risk) if there's really no reason to worry about the effects of AGW. It sounds to me like invoking the evil Goldman Sachs is a way to respond to this very important question in a kind of emotional "sounds good as long as you don't actually look at the sums involved" way.
Those that would understand it already have access via their university or company
This really isn't true, and it's pernicious. For example I finished by PhD a few years ago and started a small company. Once I left academia I lost access to a huge tranche of research material, all of which was --- like you say --- being produced and funded by my colleagues at no cost to the publishers. Even within my previous, rather large, university I would occasionally run into publications that weren't electronically available from our network. All of this is ridiculous and there's no justification for it.
In my field (CS) some of the top conferences and journal publish their materials online with no problems at all, while others go through Springer solely, as far as I can see, so they can put "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" on their publications. And Springer subsequently doles this stuff out through their extremely annoying paywall.** The Springer-published conferences I've refereed don't receive much compensation for this work if any (and where there is compensation, it could easily be replaced with University grants or a small contribution from industry). This persists solely due to institutional momentum and because a few rent-seeking private companies sit astride the most prestigious publications.
** Springer's paywall, for the record, seems expressly designed to fuck with legitimate users who come into the campus network through VPN. When you first navigate the a Springer publication from a non-authorized page it drops a cookie that basically persists until you close your browser. Any subsequent attempt to access a Springer resource from that browser gets rejected /even if/ it comes from a campus IP address (i.e., you change to the VPN or physically pick up your laptop and go to work.) Since VPN access to University networks is allowed by Springer's policies I can't really come up with an explanation for this behavior besides Springer wanting to make accessing their resources as painful as possible.
I sure hope Wall Street is utterly confident in the security of their operating systems, VMs, low-level peripheral firmware, etc. Because if they're not absolutely confident, they should treat all of those machines as potentially untrusted from the moment they open them up to the world. This holds even if they constantly re-image.
When you're talking about the kind of money Wall Street stands to lose from a clever security breach, no amount of paranoia is too ridiculous.
... which I think is tone-deaf and stupid, and will instantly be used by the truly rabid anti-climate-change "skeptic" types as evidence that the entire environmental movement is a secret plan to institute world government. The fact that this claim will be total horseshit won't stop them for a second --- it never does.
The guy is 90 years old, he's probably got a different perspective on things, and anyway he doesn't represent most people's feelings on the matter.
That said, there is one element of truth to what he's saying: namely that if the $hit really does hit the fan (e.g., a major climactic catastrophe, or confirmation that the clathrate feeback look really is happening), things like democracy and the healthy free market are going to be severely endangered. When a society is fighting for its survival, niceties like that are often the first thing to go. And in case you don't follow me, I'm saying that this is a bad thing, and the best way to avoid it is to deal with the problem in an intelligent, conservative way (cutting emissions now).
If nothing else, you can expect a massive decline in our standard of living if human-caused climate change is strongly confirmed in a couple of decades (and it will be, I suspect) and we have to come up with some crazy last-minute mitigation plan.
I would have a different feeling about this if the anti-climate-change side was offering some kind of reassuring science to counter what the majority of climate scientists are finding, but they're not. Mostly we're getting horseshit like misinterpreted emails. And if a movement with so many followers (and billions in fossil-fuel profits) can't offer anything better than that, you should be scared. Really scared.
If HR 676 were ever to work its way through Congress, and have a chance at getting majority votes (60 in the senate to break a Filibuster), you can be assured that it will swell into a 1000+ page monstrosity. The current HCR bills aren't large because they're supposed to be complicated, they're large because any bill that survives the legislative process is huge (and btw, I'm no advocate of this, just an observer).
The short, simple nature of HR 676 indicates that nobody even takes it seriously enough to consider, which is perhaps too bad. But it's hardly fair to compare a bill that's a hypothetical moonfart in someone's imagination to one that might actually become law very soon.
and go with a more basic one that has things most everyone can agree on? Insurance sales across state lines (surely a real interstate commerce item)
Nobody agrees on this idea, because it's a rotten idea. Implemented the way it's usually been proposed, what it means is that insurance companies can move to whichever state offers them the sweetest regulatory and tax treatment, i.e., is small and hungry, and willing to rubber-stamp whatever laws the insurance companies propose. Their customers (i.e., residents of other states) don't get to vote on the regulation of those companies, and they don't get to ban them.
Ever wonder why so many credit card companies hail from South Dakota? Because it's a tiny state and they can more or less buy the rules they want. Ever wonder why the credit card industry is so completely unfair to the typical consumer? Same reason.
The fact that this is your number one suggestion, and you think everyone can agree on it, that worries me. I like some of your other ideas, but I definitely don't think we need to hash this out anymore. The plan in Congress is basically the Romney plan which passed in MA several years ago, and has been quite successful. We've been debating the plan for over a year now! It could use lots of tweaking, and I hope once it's passed the Republican party will help with those efforts.
If you don't like the plan, take it to the voters in November. Let's get Congress done with this and move on to other work.
This is a bad idea. Mainly because the iPhone doesn't have a very sophisticated security architecture, so any cryptographic keys and wallet information are fundamentally vulnerable to theft. This is best demonstrated by the recent attack where a handful of SMS messages was sufficient to give an attacker root on the device. If you're going to put something like this into widespread deployment you at very least want to include some sort of hardware security module to validate the software and store cryptographic secrets.
Right now I wouldn't want to use the iPhone (or any Android phone, for that matter) to store any kind of critical secrets.
Or how about the really easy answer. The last IPCC report included a prediction it labeled as most likely that the Earth would warm an average of one degree over the course of the next century. One degree. That's literally unnoticeable. It's lost in the noise of weather. The rain will continue to fall, the sun will continue to shine, clouds will form and dissipate, crops will continue to grow and be eaten, cattle will continue to grow and be eaten, winter will arrive and retreat, and life will continue without the least bit of difficulty.
You're absolutely right. The last IPCC report states that there's a large probability that things will be moderately ok. A smaller probability that things will be moderately bad (severely harming our economy and costing us a fortune to deal with). And a smaller probability that things will be catastrophic, devastating the global economy and killing hundreds of millions.
The normal approach to such a situation is to perform a cost/benefit analysis, where on the one hand you take the cost of doing something to prevent these outcomes, and on the other you take the benefits of doing something (well, really, the absence of paying the costs that might arise if we nothing). On the latter side you get (large probability * small cost) + (smaller probability * high cost) + (even smaller probability * enormous cost). Totaled up properly this indicates that we should probably be willing to spend a huge amount of resources dealing with the problem; even if the bad outcomes are low-probability, they're sufficiently bad so as to dominate the calculation.
And this is more or less the analysis that people are applying to the situation. As a result of this technical analysis, politicians are (quite reluctantly) arriving at the conclusion that we should do something about it, even if it is very politically unpopular (and personally risky) to do so. That doesn't make the argument political --- the argument is technical and scientific. The process by which scientists accept a technical/scientific argument and fight the uphill battle to make it policy is political.
Another way to do the analysis is to do as you suggest, which is to agree that the costs may be high on a global basis, but to be /personally/ sure that you won't pay most of them. I think this is a risky position to take, given that there is a real possibility that even the US will experience serious crop failures and that a bad outcome will significantly increase the probability of global nuclear war and economic depression. I also think it's somewhat immoral. But at least it's honest, and a whole lot better than the horseshit I hear on Slashdot about how scientists are faking their results because they've all invested in Green technology companies or whatever.
I do not, however, believe that our government has the skills, the lack of corruption, the honor, or the honesty to do it well. Much like health care.
Just to clarify, the government isn't proposing to offer health care--- it's proposing to mandate people to buy insurance policies from private insurers, who will in turn be limited in who they can reject. There will also be some subsidies involved.
Cyber security, on the other hand, requires the government to do a lot more than write a check.
I agree with you. That wasn't my argument at all. The "unfairness" I referred to was actually the part about semi-hiding that cost from employees. It distorts their perception of taxes. Sure, most intelligent people will get it sooner or later, but a lot of people won't understand until later, and you know as well as I do that some won't understand it at all.
I think we're agreed on this point. But for the purposes of a discussion that began with the thesis that taxes on small business are too high, my point is simply that I don't think it's fair to count payroll taxes as a prohibitive "tax on small business" since with only a limited number of exceptions the market is putting the burden almost entirely onto the employee.
And since it's unlikely that the American people are going to repeal Social Security and Medicare(aid), the taxes are going to have to be born by someone anyway.
I will have to disagree with you on that point. If putting the taxes where they actually belong would put the worker in the poorhouse, then by definition the tax is too high in that particular situation.
I think the worker already is in the poorhouse. Poverty level in the US is dangerously close to what a minimum wage worker earns for a full time job. Add a dependent to the mix and you're already below it. Any tax level is too high for these workers. But given the depth of your feelings as an example, I'm not sure that the rest of America is ready to subsidize them with even higher taxes.