On of the major benefits is spectral efficiency: LTE can deliver reasonable good service to more people on the same frequency allocation. This is why Verizon is so keen on getting as many data-heavy users off their overloaded EVDO network and onto LTE. Now, the extent to which a technology can provide consistent service to more people in a given geographical area within a given chunk of spectrum is a tricky thing to benchmark. Ultimately, however, user experience is going to be determined much more by such average numbers than by the maximum burst capacity of the network in a non-overloaded case.
So yeah, to be a big win, LTE doesn't need to be faster in the fastest case (although that's a cool benefit) but more consistent and more forgiving under load. Hard to benchmark, hard to quote in an ad ("Up to 15 Bits / Hz on the amazing new phone!" just doesn't sell), hard to quantify to a user ("this phone is not just much faster, but will disappoint you less and ultimately let us provide service for more users in the 700Mhz band).
... fwiw, one of the most competent engineers that I know is a home-schooled dyed-in-the-wool creationist, has a gaggle of kids, goes to Church on Sundays. And not just regular-old-competent but rather a go-to guy for building stuff and solving problems whose ability to understand the interactions of a dozen complex systems is beyond question. That doesn't prove much, but working with a person like that reminds me on a daily basis that theology and engineering can be (at least for one person) completely orthogonal areas of life.
This reminds me of one of the planks of Mark Graber's post at Balkinization on amending the American People. Read the whole thing, but I've excerpted one relevant bit:
Constitutional democracies function best when citizens have substantial cross-cutting relationships or what Robert Putnam calls bridging capital. Notwithstanding any other provision in the Constitution, therefore, the American people are hereby amended so that all citizens have friends and associates who they recognize to be reasonable and morally decent individuals, even though they disagree with them on the fundamental political issues of the day. Provided, all Americans are allowed one issue (abortion, aid to foreign countries, the designated hitter rule) in which they may deem all opponents to be either intellectual morons or moral cretins.
I think all/.ers have known this since about age 15. I used to go into a phase where I'd be up every night later and later until I was going to sleep at 6AM and waking up at 2PM. Eventually I'd lose a day and "reset" to a normal time only to inch back later...
Anyway, here's a plug for the awesomesuace that is f.lux, which removes the blue hues from your monitor (since blue light is more associated with circadian rhythm than red) when it's supposed to be night. I am not associated with the makers of f.lux in any way except being a hopeless devotee and mentioning them to anyone within earshot that mentions difficult keeping a normal sleep cycle.
Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.
"Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining" -- Presuming the conclusion. You are supposed to convince us why it's wasted effort, not just label it such.
"a wider set of conflicting licenses" -- the licenses don't conflict just to conflict but rather because they embody different and incompatible ways of licensing the same work.
"Creative Common as an organization" -- as opposed to Creative Commons as a giant lizard-robot, very important.
"should focus on providing better and more consistent support" -- they don't provide good and consistent support? Since when?!
" for the licenses that really make sense" -- where 'really' here is a synonym for 'to me' because we know that no content creator could possibly want to use a license whose terms conflict with the ones that I would chose.
Since VNC is notoriously insecure, it's good practice to only run it over ssh on an untrusted network. So, the answer is both.
No, the solution is to have server initiated connections to a listening client that is launched on demand, which has the amazing added benefit that the techie is the one to configure his firewall/NAT appropriate rather than the noob. Consider the following secure handshake done over the telephone:
(Noob) Hi, can you help me with WinFooBarTunesExtreme? (Techie) Sure, let me fire up my listening client and open a port on my local firewall and router (Noob) I like turtles! (Techie) Click on the little VNC icon near the clock, click "Connect to Listening Viewer" and type www.techiedomainname.com" then click OK (Noob) Derp, OK, w-w-w-dot-t-e-c-h-i-e-d-o-m-a-i-n-n-a-m-e-dot-c-o-m, OK (Techie) Cool, now I can see your screen, please reproduce the error while explaining to me what you are trying to do.... (Techie) Let's make sure that VNC is not set to accept connections, OK good, looks nice.
When the session is done, the noob drops the server connection and all is well. VNC server is not set to accept remote-initiated connections (trivial to configure right) so there's zero risk from that end. The techie closes the listening client and disables his port mappings (I hope).
Even the setup is easy, since the noob only has to click "Next" a bunch of time through the VNC server setup and then the techie can adjust the settings once he's connected. There's zero persistent open connections and so zero persistent attack surface. Since there's no passwords exchange, there's no risk of eavesdroppers stealing any credentials.
If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.
Agree to the premise, disagree to the conclusion unless you add a second premise that we have the power to price emissions uniformly across jurisdictions, or at least the ability to prevent substitution of emissions from one jurisdiction to the next.
If you increase the cost of emissions only in the US, the rational thing for emitters to do will be to substitute emissions somewhere else. A lot of steel gets made in China (with no pollution controls to speak of) and shipped to Europe (ironically, in dirty diesel powered freighters) because CO2 targets (and hence costs) vary across borders.
Washington State is planning a giant terminal so that coal can be shipped by train to the Pacific, loaded in a freighter, hauled to China and then burned, again with no scrubbers or controls. Is that really better for the environment than burning it in Montana where we can save absurd transit costs and the EPA can regulate at least somewhat?
I want to do something about AGW, but the economics of it strongly suggest to me that taxing emissions will not work without some (impossible to imagine) international power that can coerce (yes, coerce) nations to adopt them uniformly (leaving aside that many developing nations do not believe they should cut CO2 uniformly to the west anyway). Hence, I've pretty much put all my stock in active geo-engineering technology that obviates the need for coercive global implementation.
The government is doling out £530m to boost UK broadband, but needs European Commission approval first.
No, they don't. The UK is a sovereign nation whose government does not need permission from Brussels to engage in the normal domestic functions of government such as rolling out basic services to their citizens. This isn't some matter of foreign or trade policy for which EU buyin would be critical. Nor is it some matter with broader continental repercussions.
The UK should just go ahead and do it, the EC will not pick a fight for no reason -- I credit them with far more sense than that.
[ And no, I'm not a rabid anti-internationalist, hence the distinction between foreign policy that requires cooperation/consensus and domestic policy that is best dealt with by the democratically elected and accountable national government. ]
Another thing I don't like about Python is the use of TABS and white space as code block separators. Really? Why??
You don't have to use tabs, you can indent your blocks with any number of spaces as well -- so long as you are consistent within each particular scope.
As to why, easy -- it allows Python to reclaim two high value delimiters ({,}) for another function (dictionaries).
If you've got a morbidly obese mother, compare your enthusiasm for "I'm going to stop drinking an exponentially increasing amount of soda every day." With your enthusiasm for "I'm going to attempt to alter my metabolism so I burn 10,000 calories a day, necessitating that I continue to drink an exponentially increasing amount of soda every day.". (with appologies to Cory Doctorow)
If it were my mother and she was in immediate risk of dying, I would tell the Doctors to try anything and everything to keep her alive.
I don't understand this. If you believe that the consequences of AGW are on the scale of catastrophic mass extinction events then you should be very enthusiastic about geoengineering. If the entire species is going to die, I'd be pretty enthusiastic about anything that might help.
What I guess I'm saying is that there is a disconnect (or at least I perceive one) between the urgency of AGW when it comes to pleas for emissions reductions on the one hand, and the tepid response to these sorts of projects. I do believe AGW is an immediate problem for our species, which is why I don't think it's fair to bandy about the dire consequences with respect to one set of solutions but not another -- the gravity of the situation ought not to turn on the nature of the solution proposed but on the expected timeline of the consequences.
One innocent person spied on, arrested or charged with the help of Google to advance this "don't be evil" agenda is one too many. You can't be evil to fight evil. You're passing ones and zeroes back and forth for crying out loud...
This is absurd. Obviously every human system for making decisions is going to make errors; those errors will be both type I (false positive) and type II (false negative). While it's up for debate what the acceptable ratio of those errors is when making laws or punishing lawbreakers, it's pretty clearly false that even one false positive is more evil than any number of false negatives. For a tongue-in-cheek historical overview of the arguments over *what* the ratio is, see N Guilty Men.
None of this is to impute that we are giving criminal defendants a fair shake or that the system as a whole could do better (which I think, by the way, there are reforms that would reduce both type I and type II errors simultaneously, thus convicting more of the guilty and acquitting more of the innocent). Nor do I dispute that we should err very strongly on the side of acquitting the guilty rather than punishing the innocent -- the magnitude of the error is not nearly the same. But to get any useful traction on the problem, you can't start with "it's evil to have a system that convicts even a single innocent suspect" because that ignores that such a system would have to acquit so many guilty suspects to get the 0% error rate (if not all of them). Instead, you have to do the hard work of looking at each particular policy and judge whether, taken as a whole and including the effect of wrongful conviction, unpunished crime, criminals that go on after one offense to violate the rights of more victims and so forth, the policy is a net positive or a net negative.
The same extends to Google's program here -- maybe it's evil, maybe it's not, but it certainly doesn't merit such a judgment based on the existence of even a single false positive.
. Moreover, given that most modern governments guarantee deposits up to a certain level (100k CHF in this case), much of the depository risk is borne by the government and ultimately the tax payer, not the bank.
Banks pay premiums for that insurance based on how many deposits the government has to take over. The reason government does it is that it's the only counterparty big enough to assume that risk -- no private insurer has enough assets to make it a credible backstop.
So the inconvenient facts here are the same as in any insurance scheme -- a small trickle of cash in exchange for a assuming the risk of large but rare events. The taxpayer here is not being had any more than any other insurer in this arrangement.
Then purge out of law any benefits or tax considerations based on material status and just people as individuals.
A considerable fraction of the electorate supports tax benefits for married couples. Whether or not you or I like it, I think it's pretty well established that the people should determine what does and does not qualify for a tax break.
So your definition of interstate commerce includes anything that happens on the internet, because the internet is interstate? That's kind of a stretch. The business still operates in one spot, just because the consumer is coming in from somewhere else doesn't make it interstate.
How is selling from Vermont to California not interstate? It's certainly not intrastate -- it obviously crosses state lines...
What's more, the internet itself is fundamentally interstate and so Congress ought to have the power to regulate it in a comprehensive manner such as the Stored Communication Act (which prohibits the release of private communications) but obviously not in contradiction to the express limitations on Congress (see Reno v. ACLU).
.... but PER THE 10th AMENDMENT do not have authority over businesses that exist wholly *inside* a state. Like a private store. Or a private office. Or a private school. Or a private farm.
How in the name of Zeus are you going to operate Netflix without using an interstate telecommunication systems?
More to the point, these rules would apply to all similar services, presumably, so if the content providers don't solve the problem, they'll lose most of their digital distribution.
No, they will apply to those services that have enough assets or presence in the US to be subject to US courts. Like offshore gambling, the DoJ might make it somewhat more of a pain to access, but in the end, anyone that wants to play poker online does so.
The idea that we can regulate internet services as though they are physical venues like casinos or movie theaters is absurd. I wish more of the big companies would just tell (after moving everything valuable out) meddling regulators to just shove it.
But the oft-repeated claim is that corporations have no Constitutional rights, presumably including the freedom of the press bit that's included in the First Amendment. If they do, then it's hard to understand how they could have some elements of a list but not others, given the structure of the amendment: "Congress shall make no law {V, W, X, Y, Z}" but only Y applies to corporations? I know English sometimes has funky grammar but that's a syntactic absurdity.
What of the other amendments? Who is going to decide whether they apply fully, partially or not at all? Maybe Rick Perry will march the Texas State Police into the ACLU's branch office because the ACLU (as a corporation) has no right not to be deprived of their property without due process. Heck, maybe he'll shut down Planned Parenthood for performing abortions since abortion is a human right and PP is not a human.
The same logic seems to suggest that the printing pressess at the New York Times aren't entitled to publish news that the government would rather they didn't (and anyway, the NYT is a corporation that can't have any First Amendment rights). Hey, I'm not saying anything about people's speech -- I'm only restricting what the inanimate printing press can do! Or transistor radio amps for that matter.
If I'm exercising my right to free speech, it doesn't matter whether I'm using a printing press or slashcode to deliver my expressive message (although the former might be more effective). Heck, the courts have even recognized the right to expressive conduct in which various symbolic actions are considered protected. And yet here law profs are seriously arguing that if you use a computer to express something, it loses protection along the way?
Moreover, the idea that Facebook computers might "decide to share your personal data" is an entirely ridiculous abuse of language. Facebook management might decide that, but the computers cannot decide anything -- they are programmed to spec. And if that decision is contrary to law, there's nothing about free speech that makes a whit of difference. I've never heard of a colluder, price-fixer or blackmailer getting out of the charge because their crime is essentially one carried out by expressive conduct. Sure, you blackmail someone by expressing something to them and threatening to express something else more publicly, and yet blackmail is not somehow magically protected even though the crime consists entirely of speech. In short, this criticism -- that somehow we need this new magical technological de-protection because it's required to enforce the law -- is nonsensical.
No, it's been superb for the middleman, the famous MAFIAA.
Two wrongs still don't make a right. I'm very much in favor of a lot of the reforms that you might propose to limit the power of the record companies and many of their abusive relationships with artists. That is entirely orthogonal to my views on the ethics of copyright (and I'm a mushy moderate on those anyway).
If you want this claim to make sense, you'd have to show that not only is our copyright system empowering greedy middlemen that add nothing productive, but that every such system must inevitably do so. To that claim, I disagree -- I think we can design a system that does not allow such abuses.
address the greater issue of biblical retribution as drug policy i dont see science being able to contribute anything meaningful. Occams razor would suggest the simple solution to whatever the hell OP means by "synthetic marijuana" is just to legalize marijuana itself.
Science doesn't care whether the drugs being tested are for draconian legal policy (btw, I likely agree with you on that) or for ensuring that cheaters don't get ahead in athletic competitions. And in the latter case, I think it's absolutely abhorrent that the effective message that athletes get from the implicit tolerance in many sports is that they have to take provably harmful drugs or else be beaten by someone willing to trash their body for extra performance*. That's not fair to the athletes, effectively pressuring them to sacrifice their health for their careers, nor is it faithful to the spirit of the game.
Of course, cheating can never be perfectly eliminated from any competition with real stakes but neither science nor simplicity says we need to tolerate that or give up development of better ways to detect and punish them.
* In the spirit of this article, I suppose I'd be fine with having parallel medals/records for those that want to see what the limit of human performance under heavy doses of steroids and HGH might be. If they rage out and commit suicide or suffer a massive heart attack, at least I can say 'well, they could have chosen to stay in the no-drug league and competed on their own merits'.
In cases like these, I feel like whoever is in charge of security over there needs to be held responsible for not following best practices and salting the damn password hashes. This has been security standard since PKCS #5 v2.0 -- and you know security professionals don't publish these standards just for their own health. And this is not a new fangled thing, it was finalized in 2000 12 years ago.
how they market speak that shared plan people are "allowed to pool" their network usage. Rather than the more accurate "forced to share usage". It puts people on family plans at the mercy of their teenage daughter. DOOOOOOoooommmmm.....
I would love to pool the data on one plan between my phone and mifi router. If I got a tablet, I wouldn't want to pay another $30 for a different plant for it if I could just tack it on.
So yeah, I think I like being given that option...
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
Actually, this is a happy fact -- it means that our productivity, the value of our time, has increased relative to the goods we consume. So while my grandmother used to knit together socks with holes in them, for my mother, this was no longer a sensible use of her time; this wasn't because socks were less valuable but because her time and skills were far more valuable than her mother's (of course, not due to any intrinsic difference in aptitude but rather opportunity to be educated in a technical field due to changing social mores regarding women). This strikes me as a fantastic thing -- that this repair was a waste of time because of how much more she was really capable of.
This is related to the fact that repair is a skilled job, one has to understand the system well enough to be able to diagnose what's wrong and make a determination of whether it's worth fixing. Assembly, meanwhile, is an unskilled job that can be "thought through" once, written in an SOP, and then requires only unskilled labor. So when you lament that it's cheaper to buy a new one, you are lamenting the productivity of skilled labor -- a very bad position if you ask me. Repair is expensive because we have better use for people with technical aptitude than working on individual units!
Finally, I want to note that this line of reasoning has no bearing on tinkering for its own sake. I still assemble and repair my own computers despite knowing for a clear fact that it makes no sense. Heck, I grow vegetables in a garden (well, used to) despite it being ridiculously inefficient. But I'm glad as fuck that my labor is so productive that I could buy a computer or vegetables for far less input than doing it myself.
Almost all are related to Java security bugs that have been patched for months (or longer),' Grimes writes. 'The bottom line is that we aren't addressing the real problems. It isn't a security bug here and there in a particular piece of software; that's a problem we'll never get rid of.
And so the appropriate thing is to see why in the heck we don't have all software always patched up to date. And the reason for that in Java is that it's bloody stupid updater takes 5 minutes and 10 clicks. Change it to be like Chrome -- background auto-update itself silently* with zero user input (or one click) -- and you'll have 99% of the installs up to date without issue.
To be clear, for the control-freak BOFHs, enterprisey people and hobbyists that actually enjoy computer maintenance, there should be a checkbox in options that says "Disable All Automatic Updating until I uncheck this box". If the user checks it, turn on the webcam and require them to raise their right hand and swear "I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR KEEPING THIS SOFTWARE UPDATED, ANY ILL THAT BEFALLS ME FROM NOT PATCHING IS MY OWN DAMNED FAULT AND I DESERVE IT". Make sure that preference persist between installs.
IOW, I'm not saying everyone has to do automatic silent updating, I'm saying that it should be the default setting unless the user expresses a desire to maintain it updated himself and is appraised of the risk of doing so. Let the user decide, but provide a better default behavior that's appropriate for most users.
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On of the major benefits is spectral efficiency: LTE can deliver reasonable good service to more people on the same frequency allocation. This is why Verizon is so keen on getting as many data-heavy users off their overloaded EVDO network and onto LTE. Now, the extent to which a technology can provide consistent service to more people in a given geographical area within a given chunk of spectrum is a tricky thing to benchmark. Ultimately, however, user experience is going to be determined much more by such average numbers than by the maximum burst capacity of the network in a non-overloaded case.
So yeah, to be a big win, LTE doesn't need to be faster in the fastest case (although that's a cool benefit) but more consistent and more forgiving under load. Hard to benchmark, hard to quote in an ad ("Up to 15 Bits / Hz on the amazing new phone!" just doesn't sell), hard to quantify to a user ("this phone is not just much faster, but will disappoint you less and ultimately let us provide service for more users in the 700Mhz band).
... fwiw, one of the most competent engineers that I know is a home-schooled dyed-in-the-wool creationist, has a gaggle of kids, goes to Church on Sundays. And not just regular-old-competent but rather a go-to guy for building stuff and solving problems whose ability to understand the interactions of a dozen complex systems is beyond question. That doesn't prove much, but working with a person like that reminds me on a daily basis that theology and engineering can be (at least for one person) completely orthogonal areas of life.
This reminds me of one of the planks of Mark Graber's post at Balkinization on amending the American People. Read the whole thing, but I've excerpted one relevant bit:
I think all /.ers have known this since about age 15. I used to go into a phase where I'd be up every night later and later until I was going to sleep at 6AM and waking up at 2PM. Eventually I'd lose a day and "reset" to a normal time only to inch back later ...
Anyway, here's a plug for the awesomesuace that is f.lux, which removes the blue hues from your monitor (since blue light is more associated with circadian rhythm than red) when it's supposed to be night. I am not associated with the makers of f.lux in any way except being a hopeless devotee and mentioning them to anyone within earshot that mentions difficult keeping a normal sleep cycle.
Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining a wider set of conflicting licenses, Creative Commons as an organization should focus on providing better and more consistent support for the licenses that really make sense.
"Instead of wasting effort maintaining and explaining" -- Presuming the conclusion. You are supposed to convince us why it's wasted effort, not just label it such.
"a wider set of conflicting licenses" -- the licenses don't conflict just to conflict but rather because they embody different and incompatible ways of licensing the same work.
"Creative Common as an organization" -- as opposed to Creative Commons as a giant lizard-robot, very important.
"should focus on providing better and more consistent support" -- they don't provide good and consistent support? Since when?!
" for the licenses that really make sense" -- where 'really' here is a synonym for 'to me' because we know that no content creator could possibly want to use a license whose terms conflict with the ones that I would chose.
Since VNC is notoriously insecure, it's good practice to only run it over ssh on an untrusted network.
So, the answer is both.
No, the solution is to have server initiated connections to a listening client that is launched on demand, which has the amazing added benefit that the techie is the one to configure his firewall/NAT appropriate rather than the noob. Consider the following secure handshake done over the telephone:
(Noob) Hi, can you help me with WinFooBarTunesExtreme? ...
(Techie) Sure, let me fire up my listening client and open a port on my local firewall and router
(Noob) I like turtles!
(Techie) Click on the little VNC icon near the clock, click "Connect to Listening Viewer" and type www.techiedomainname.com" then click OK
(Noob) Derp, OK, w-w-w-dot-t-e-c-h-i-e-d-o-m-a-i-n-n-a-m-e-dot-c-o-m, OK
(Techie) Cool, now I can see your screen, please reproduce the error while explaining to me what you are trying to do.
(Techie) Let's make sure that VNC is not set to accept connections, OK good, looks nice.
When the session is done, the noob drops the server connection and all is well. VNC server is not set to accept remote-initiated connections (trivial to configure right) so there's zero risk from that end. The techie closes the listening client and disables his port mappings (I hope).
Even the setup is easy, since the noob only has to click "Next" a bunch of time through the VNC server setup and then the techie can adjust the settings once he's connected. There's zero persistent open connections and so zero persistent attack surface. Since there's no passwords exchange, there's no risk of eavesdroppers stealing any credentials.
If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.
Agree to the premise, disagree to the conclusion unless you add a second premise that we have the power to price emissions uniformly across jurisdictions, or at least the ability to prevent substitution of emissions from one jurisdiction to the next.
If you increase the cost of emissions only in the US, the rational thing for emitters to do will be to substitute emissions somewhere else. A lot of steel gets made in China (with no pollution controls to speak of) and shipped to Europe (ironically, in dirty diesel powered freighters) because CO2 targets (and hence costs) vary across borders.
Washington State is planning a giant terminal so that coal can be shipped by train to the Pacific, loaded in a freighter, hauled to China and then burned, again with no scrubbers or controls. Is that really better for the environment than burning it in Montana where we can save absurd transit costs and the EPA can regulate at least somewhat?
I want to do something about AGW, but the economics of it strongly suggest to me that taxing emissions will not work without some (impossible to imagine) international power that can coerce (yes, coerce) nations to adopt them uniformly (leaving aside that many developing nations do not believe they should cut CO2 uniformly to the west anyway). Hence, I've pretty much put all my stock in active geo-engineering technology that obviates the need for coercive global implementation.
The government is doling out £530m to boost UK broadband, but needs European Commission approval first.
No, they don't. The UK is a sovereign nation whose government does not need permission from Brussels to engage in the normal domestic functions of government such as rolling out basic services to their citizens. This isn't some matter of foreign or trade policy for which EU buyin would be critical. Nor is it some matter with broader continental repercussions.
The UK should just go ahead and do it, the EC will not pick a fight for no reason -- I credit them with far more sense than that.
[ And no, I'm not a rabid anti-internationalist, hence the distinction between foreign policy that requires cooperation/consensus and domestic policy that is best dealt with by the democratically elected and accountable national government. ]
Another thing I don't like about Python is the use of TABS and white space as code block separators. Really? Why??
You don't have to use tabs, you can indent your blocks with any number of spaces as well -- so long as you are consistent within each particular scope.
As to why, easy -- it allows Python to reclaim two high value delimiters ({,}) for another function (dictionaries).
If you've got a morbidly obese mother, compare your enthusiasm for "I'm going to stop drinking an exponentially increasing amount of soda every day." With your enthusiasm for "I'm going to attempt to alter my metabolism so I burn 10,000 calories a day, necessitating that I continue to drink an exponentially increasing amount of soda every day.". (with appologies to Cory Doctorow)
If it were my mother and she was in immediate risk of dying, I would tell the Doctors to try anything and everything to keep her alive.
I don't understand this. If you believe that the consequences of AGW are on the scale of catastrophic mass extinction events then you should be very enthusiastic about geoengineering. If the entire species is going to die, I'd be pretty enthusiastic about anything that might help.
What I guess I'm saying is that there is a disconnect (or at least I perceive one) between the urgency of AGW when it comes to pleas for emissions reductions on the one hand, and the tepid response to these sorts of projects. I do believe AGW is an immediate problem for our species, which is why I don't think it's fair to bandy about the dire consequences with respect to one set of solutions but not another -- the gravity of the situation ought not to turn on the nature of the solution proposed but on the expected timeline of the consequences.
One innocent person spied on, arrested or charged with the help of Google to advance this "don't be evil" agenda is one too many.
You can't be evil to fight evil. You're passing ones and zeroes back and forth for crying out loud...
This is absurd. Obviously every human system for making decisions is going to make errors; those errors will be both type I (false positive) and type II (false negative). While it's up for debate what the acceptable ratio of those errors is when making laws or punishing lawbreakers, it's pretty clearly false that even one false positive is more evil than any number of false negatives. For a tongue-in-cheek historical overview of the arguments over *what* the ratio is, see N Guilty Men.
None of this is to impute that we are giving criminal defendants a fair shake or that the system as a whole could do better (which I think, by the way, there are reforms that would reduce both type I and type II errors simultaneously, thus convicting more of the guilty and acquitting more of the innocent). Nor do I dispute that we should err very strongly on the side of acquitting the guilty rather than punishing the innocent -- the magnitude of the error is not nearly the same. But to get any useful traction on the problem, you can't start with "it's evil to have a system that convicts even a single innocent suspect" because that ignores that such a system would have to acquit so many guilty suspects to get the 0% error rate (if not all of them). Instead, you have to do the hard work of looking at each particular policy and judge whether, taken as a whole and including the effect of wrongful conviction, unpunished crime, criminals that go on after one offense to violate the rights of more victims and so forth, the policy is a net positive or a net negative.
The same extends to Google's program here -- maybe it's evil, maybe it's not, but it certainly doesn't merit such a judgment based on the existence of even a single false positive.
You don't need to give express permission to be filmed in public for noncommercial reasons.
But you do need express permission to install software on a computer belonging to someone else.
. Moreover, given that most modern governments guarantee deposits up to a certain level (100k CHF in this case), much of the depository risk is borne by the government and ultimately the tax payer, not the bank.
Banks pay premiums for that insurance based on how many deposits the government has to take over. The reason government does it is that it's the only counterparty big enough to assume that risk -- no private insurer has enough assets to make it a credible backstop.
So the inconvenient facts here are the same as in any insurance scheme -- a small trickle of cash in exchange for a assuming the risk of large but rare events. The taxpayer here is not being had any more than any other insurer in this arrangement.
A considerable fraction of the electorate supports tax benefits for married couples. Whether or not you or I like it, I think it's pretty well established that the people should determine what does and does not qualify for a tax break.
So your definition of interstate commerce includes anything that happens on the internet, because the internet is interstate? That's kind of a stretch. The business still operates in one spot, just because the consumer is coming in from somewhere else doesn't make it interstate.
How is selling from Vermont to California not interstate? It's certainly not intrastate -- it obviously crosses state lines ...
What's more, the internet itself is fundamentally interstate and so Congress ought to have the power to regulate it in a comprehensive manner such as the Stored Communication Act (which prohibits the release of private communications) but obviously not in contradiction to the express limitations on Congress (see Reno v. ACLU).
How in the name of Zeus are you going to operate Netflix without using an interstate telecommunication systems?
No, they will apply to those services that have enough assets or presence in the US to be subject to US courts. Like offshore gambling, the DoJ might make it somewhat more of a pain to access, but in the end, anyone that wants to play poker online does so.
The idea that we can regulate internet services as though they are physical venues like casinos or movie theaters is absurd. I wish more of the big companies would just tell (after moving everything valuable out) meddling regulators to just shove it.
Exactly. That's why there's freedom of the press.
But the oft-repeated claim is that corporations have no Constitutional rights, presumably including the freedom of the press bit that's included in the First Amendment. If they do, then it's hard to understand how they could have some elements of a list but not others, given the structure of the amendment: "Congress shall make no law {V, W, X, Y, Z}" but only Y applies to corporations? I know English sometimes has funky grammar but that's a syntactic absurdity.
What of the other amendments? Who is going to decide whether they apply fully, partially or not at all? Maybe Rick Perry will march the Texas State Police into the ACLU's branch office because the ACLU (as a corporation) has no right not to be deprived of their property without due process. Heck, maybe he'll shut down Planned Parenthood for performing abortions since abortion is a human right and PP is not a human.
The same logic seems to suggest that the printing pressess at the New York Times aren't entitled to publish news that the government would rather they didn't (and anyway, the NYT is a corporation that can't have any First Amendment rights). Hey, I'm not saying anything about people's speech -- I'm only restricting what the inanimate printing press can do! Or transistor radio amps for that matter.
If I'm exercising my right to free speech, it doesn't matter whether I'm using a printing press or slashcode to deliver my expressive message (although the former might be more effective). Heck, the courts have even recognized the right to expressive conduct in which various symbolic actions are considered protected. And yet here law profs are seriously arguing that if you use a computer to express something, it loses protection along the way?
Moreover, the idea that Facebook computers might "decide to share your personal data" is an entirely ridiculous abuse of language. Facebook management might decide that, but the computers cannot decide anything -- they are programmed to spec. And if that decision is contrary to law, there's nothing about free speech that makes a whit of difference. I've never heard of a colluder, price-fixer or blackmailer getting out of the charge because their crime is essentially one carried out by expressive conduct. Sure, you blackmail someone by expressing something to them and threatening to express something else more publicly, and yet blackmail is not somehow magically protected even though the crime consists entirely of speech. In short, this criticism -- that somehow we need this new magical technological de-protection because it's required to enforce the law -- is nonsensical.
Two wrongs still don't make a right. I'm very much in favor of a lot of the reforms that you might propose to limit the power of the record companies and many of their abusive relationships with artists. That is entirely orthogonal to my views on the ethics of copyright (and I'm a mushy moderate on those anyway).
If you want this claim to make sense, you'd have to show that not only is our copyright system empowering greedy middlemen that add nothing productive, but that every such system must inevitably do so. To that claim, I disagree -- I think we can design a system that does not allow such abuses.
Science doesn't care whether the drugs being tested are for draconian legal policy (btw, I likely agree with you on that) or for ensuring that cheaters don't get ahead in athletic competitions. And in the latter case, I think it's absolutely abhorrent that the effective message that athletes get from the implicit tolerance in many sports is that they have to take provably harmful drugs or else be beaten by someone willing to trash their body for extra performance*. That's not fair to the athletes, effectively pressuring them to sacrifice their health for their careers, nor is it faithful to the spirit of the game.
Of course, cheating can never be perfectly eliminated from any competition with real stakes but neither science nor simplicity says we need to tolerate that or give up development of better ways to detect and punish them.
* In the spirit of this article, I suppose I'd be fine with having parallel medals/records for those that want to see what the limit of human performance under heavy doses of steroids and HGH might be. If they rage out and commit suicide or suffer a massive heart attack, at least I can say 'well, they could have chosen to stay in the no-drug league and competed on their own merits'.
In cases like these, I feel like whoever is in charge of security over there needs to be held responsible for not following best practices and salting the damn password hashes. This has been security standard since PKCS #5 v2.0 -- and you know security professionals don't publish these standards just for their own health. And this is not a new fangled thing, it was finalized in 2000 12 years ago.
Failure to do so is malpractice ...
how they market speak that shared plan people are "allowed to pool" their network usage. Rather than the more accurate "forced to share usage". It puts people on family plans at the mercy of their teenage daughter. DOOOOOOoooommmmm.....
I would love to pool the data on one plan between my phone and mifi router. If I got a tablet, I wouldn't want to pay another $30 for a different plant for it if I could just tack it on.
So yeah, I think I like being given that option ...
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
Actually, this is a happy fact -- it means that our productivity, the value of our time, has increased relative to the goods we consume. So while my grandmother used to knit together socks with holes in them, for my mother, this was no longer a sensible use of her time; this wasn't because socks were less valuable but because her time and skills were far more valuable than her mother's (of course, not due to any intrinsic difference in aptitude but rather opportunity to be educated in a technical field due to changing social mores regarding women). This strikes me as a fantastic thing -- that this repair was a waste of time because of how much more she was really capable of.
This is related to the fact that repair is a skilled job, one has to understand the system well enough to be able to diagnose what's wrong and make a determination of whether it's worth fixing. Assembly, meanwhile, is an unskilled job that can be "thought through" once, written in an SOP, and then requires only unskilled labor. So when you lament that it's cheaper to buy a new one, you are lamenting the productivity of skilled labor -- a very bad position if you ask me. Repair is expensive because we have better use for people with technical aptitude than working on individual units!
Finally, I want to note that this line of reasoning has no bearing on tinkering for its own sake. I still assemble and repair my own computers despite knowing for a clear fact that it makes no sense. Heck, I grow vegetables in a garden (well, used to) despite it being ridiculously inefficient. But I'm glad as fuck that my labor is so productive that I could buy a computer or vegetables for far less input than doing it myself.
Almost all are related to Java security bugs that have been patched for months (or longer),' Grimes writes. 'The bottom line is that we aren't addressing the real problems. It isn't a security bug here and there in a particular piece of software; that's a problem we'll never get rid of.
And so the appropriate thing is to see why in the heck we don't have all software always patched up to date. And the reason for that in Java is that it's bloody stupid updater takes 5 minutes and 10 clicks. Change it to be like Chrome -- background auto-update itself silently* with zero user input (or one click) -- and you'll have 99% of the installs up to date without issue.
To be clear, for the control-freak BOFHs, enterprisey people and hobbyists that actually enjoy computer maintenance, there should be a checkbox in options that says "Disable All Automatic Updating until I uncheck this box". If the user checks it, turn on the webcam and require them to raise their right hand and swear "I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR KEEPING THIS SOFTWARE UPDATED, ANY ILL THAT BEFALLS ME FROM NOT PATCHING IS MY OWN DAMNED FAULT AND I DESERVE IT". Make sure that preference persist between installs.
IOW, I'm not saying everyone has to do automatic silent updating, I'm saying that it should be the default setting unless the user expresses a desire to maintain it updated himself and is appraised of the risk of doing so. Let the user decide, but provide a better default behavior that's appropriate for most users.