... but democracy is essentially 'majority wins'.. nobody's been able to come up with a better system yet. And it isn't for lack of trying.
Actually, those revolutionaries that the Americans call their Founding Fathers did understand the problems with this, and came up with a marginally better system. They set up some basic laws in the Constitution, and changing those laws takes a lot more than a simple majority vote. The courts can and do toss out laws that conflict with the Constitution.
This isn't perfect, of course, since a sufficiently successful demagogue can get a 2/3 majority and stomp all over the minority. And the courts are notorious for selective enforcement of all the laws, including parts of the Constitution. Thus, no court has yet ruled on warrantless wiretapping or "extraordinary rendition" (i.e., indefinite detention without trial and torture), despite the obvious Constitutional problems. But the fact remains that the system is a lot more stable than a straightforward majority-rule system would be.
What I noticed most was the portion at the very bottom:
20.1 These terms in this section apply if you install extensions on your copy of Google Chrome. Extensions are small software programs, developed by Google or third parties, that can modify and enhance the functionality of Google Chrome. Extensions may have greater privileges to access your browser or your computer than regular webpages, including the ability to read and modify your private data.
20.2 From time to time, Google Chrome may check with remote servers (hosted by Google or by third parties) for available updates to extensions, including but not limited to bug fixes or enhanced functionality. You agree that such updates will be automatically requested, downloaded, and installed without further notice to you.
20.3 From time to time, Google may discover an extension that violates Google developer terms or other legal agreements, laws, regulations or policies. Google Chrome will periodically download a list of such extensions from Google's servers. You agree that Google may remotely disable or remove any such extension from user systems in its sole discretion.
In other words, if you install chrome, you agree that chrome or its extensions may read or write any file on your computer, google may update it at any time without telling you to add new features (such as reading or writing arbitrary files), and google may disable anything you add to chrome.
Sounds a lot like you're agreeing that they pwn your computer and can do anything they like with it. Maybe you'd want to make sure that there's nothing on your computer that you wouldn't want copied to google's database. Such as the contents of your.ssh directory, which chrome will be able to read because it's running under your permissions..
And THIS is why Linux will always stay a niche! Did you ever think that maybe,...just maybe, your potential customer frankly doesn't give a shit what YOU think "real computing" is?
The traditional metaphorical term for this reasoning is "dog in the manger". The image is a farm dog who has decided that a manger full of hay is his (or her) territory, and viciously defends it from a cow that wants the hay, despite the fact that the hay is of no value to the dog.
Saying that Joe Sixpack or Granny Gertrude won't use linux because it has a CLI and they want a GUI is the same false reasoning. None of the CLI users are suggesting that the GUI should be eliminated. They want both interfaces to work well. Having a good CLI shouldn't bother the GUI users at all; they should just ignore it. But for some reason, they like to argue that they won't use a GUI if the machine also has a good CLI, because they don't want to learn the CLI. In fact, they don't even want to hear that it exists, and as long as it's even there for the people who like CLIs, they will refuse to use the GUI.
The CLI users generally understand why it's usually a more productive interface for what they're doing. Most operations are faster with the CLI, and some things can only be done that way. But they generally also use the GUI, understanding that some things can be done more easily that way.
Maybe what we need is a scheme that "interviews" users, and if they are the sort that not only want to use the GUI, but also have a strong objection to other people using a CLI, the system will flag them as such users, and will hide the evidence of the CLI from them. Then maybe they'll be happy to use the system, since they won't be aware that it also caters to those weirdo geeks who prefer the CLI.
Perhaps when this discussion comes up in the future, we should talk up this idea, to get people working on it. Maybe it would help eliminate the objections of the folks who are offended by the thought of other people using a CLI, and they'd stop using the very existence of the CLI as an excuse to avoid linux-based computer systems.
Does this mean that IT people are generally incompetent? Or is it just the IT managers who are incompetent? Or...
Well, I'd guess it's mostly an example of the old observation that, while a person can be very smart, people are stupid. Human intelligence isn't additive; it's some inverse function of the number of brains involved.
Most software is developed by teams, and the more important management thinks a software project is, the more people they assign to it. This means that the most important products are developed by the stupidest teams. Also, the bigger the company, the more people they have to assign to a project (or move from project to project, as often happens). So the bigger companies tend to have the stupidest development methods.
I've worked on several projects that produced some high-quality products. In each case, it was done by a small team, and the team found ways to chop up the work into pieces that could each be done by a single person (with well-documented interfaces between the pieces). So each piece was done by the smartest human team, a single person. But big companies generally don't permit this approach (though a couple of these projects were for some big companies with a few smart managers).
Well, yeah; you'd expect that people have better memories than that. But consider: The marketers long ago learned that a price like $29.95 sells a lot better than $30.00, and it's because almost everyone truncates the former to $20, i.e. to one significant digit. People shown prices and then asked to compare the prices of things from memory will judge $29.95 and $21.95 products as being about the same price, while $29.95 and $30.95 are remembered as having a large price difference.
There are lots of examples of people behaving this way. The TV-channel one is interesting, but I've actually watched people looking for shows, and it usually becomes obvious from their search pattern that they usually don't remember the channel numbers. A few people do remember a handful of channels that they watch a lot, true, but in most cases, they just remember things like "It's 60-something" and have to search for the second digit.
I wish I were being overly cynical, but there's a lot of market-psychology research saying that it really is this bad.
OTOH, there is a fairly wide range in how human brains work, and we know pretty well that "intelligence" isn't a 1-dimensional quantity that's totally characterized by a single "IQ" number. There are people who routinely handle 4, 6, or 10-digit numbers without error. There are others who can't do this, but can remember the names and faces of hundreds of people. There are lots of intelligence "modules", and many people have one or more that works well. So the real problem is talking about a single such module, and treating it as a person's "intelligence". We're really not as dumb as that might indicate; we're each sorta dumb at a lot of things and sort smart at others. A forum like this would tend to attract people with good number and logic modules. Though I do get dubious about this at times when reading at 0 or -1.
Heh. You're fighting a losing battle. 99% of the human population is unable to handle numbers with more than one significant digit. The tech crowd is a little better, i.e., most of us can handle two digits most of the time.
Yes, you might observe that 4.096 rounds to 4.1, but that doesn't matter, because computer types always truncate. So 4.096 truncates to 4.0 and the final ".0" is dropped because it's the default.
If you want people to distinguish numbers that differ in the 3rd digit, you have to talk to engineers. They're less than 10^-5 of the population, and you can't expect such fine distinctions in anything outside of technical journals.
(Actually, I just made up that 10^-5 number. I wonder what the real order-of-magnitude estimate is. Yeah, google knows, but it knows several estimates that differ by several OoMs.;-)
... one of the fundamental rules of the Internet which is often ignore:, don't put anything on a Net accessible computer that you would be afraid of it ending up linked off of 4chan.
Well, since most of my files are online right now, the ones I'd worry about being linked to 4chan are mostly the ones that I got from 4chan.
so in other words, we are looking at a piece of technology that in the long run will have to force some kind of one world government, or else the net will be basically undone by the mess of laws and regulations that makes up the nations of this planet?
I think you've got it. But we should add that, although that global "government" (or more likely, a treaty association) may pass laws that protect your data from prying corporate eyes, it certainly won't pass laws that protect your data from prying government eyes. And even if you've done nothing to offend that government, the fact remains that it'll only take a small under-the-table payment to convince many of the underpaid international data bureaucrats to deliver your data to anyone who wants to pay their very reasonable price.
So the "cloud" may lead to a morass of international data-handling laws that you'll have to attempt (probably unsuccessfully) to abide by, but the resulting system will be no safer than the mess we have now.
... in the case of the Mustangs, we killed off all the Buffalo all by ourselves.. the horses fill much of the same niche roaming the plains.
That's fairly accurate, but it's common for zoologists to phrase it somewhat differently. Horses evolved in North America, and moved west across the Bering land bridge about the same time that humans were moving east. Horses died out in North America soon thereafter, and this is generally attributed to the humans, who considered them food. Then some time later, a new bunch of invading humans reintroduced horses, some of whom escaped and simply filled their original niche in the North American ecosystem. They were helped by the fact that those new humans also wiped out most of the bison, producing a deficit of large grazers, which the horses were able to partly fill.
Of course, this is really just a more detailed explanation, and the two-line summary is good enough for non-technical language such as the media and lower-level school books. The main extra point the more long-winded explanation makes is that horses aren't an alien species in North America; they were merely reintroduced to their native range. Of course, they were escapees from domestication, so they probably aren't quite as good at it as were their earlier relatives. But they have successfully maintained a wild population in North America, despite the efforts of ranchers who consider them competition for our cattle.
Well, that would be funny to read about. But I haven't read about it happening. I have read a number of stories of ISPs raiding their customers' "private" files for material that could be used in advertising or otherwise commercialized.
Some years ago, I read a funny story about this. Some medical researchers were testing a new drug for treating some medical condition (which I've forgotten). One of the serious side effects was rapid, total loss of all body hair. The hair roots weren't damaged; the drug just produced a weak spot so that the slightest tug would break a hair. After the initial "Oh, no!" reaction, someone realized they might have something with a totally unrelated market. They tried giving the drug to sheep, and sure enough, a few days later they could pull all the sheep's wool off with their hands.
Not being a sheep rancher, I don't know how successful this has been commercially. I have seen sheep shearing demos since then, so it obviously hasn't totally taken over the "market" and supplanted shears. But it is available. It's not a cream, like Nair; it's a drug taken internally. Supposedly a single dose isn't harmful to the sheep.
... if there are painless ways of growing beef, there must be painless ways of growing fur.
Hey, maybe someone should ask the people who raise sheep whether they've ever heard of such an idea. We humans raise a lot of sheep for their wool. It's possible that someone might have stumbled across a way to get the wool off of a sheep without killing it. Has anyone heard whether this is possible?
I've heard rumors that people in South America have found ways to remove the fur from their llamas and related animals without harming them. But I suppose we in the advanced societies wouldn't want to learn from such primitive, backward folks, so we'll probably never know.;-)
Where else in the world is someone required to pay a tax to a corporation? Required, as in you will go to jail if you don't give a corporation money for a service you might not need or want.
Hmmm... That was obviously written by someone who believes that there's a real difference between "corporations" and "governments". That's the only way to explain why someone would ask such a question.
The city I live in is incorporated. That is, it's a corporation. All of them around here, down to the smallest town, are corporations. And if you live in the jurisdiction of such an incorporated town/city/state/whatever, you do have to pay taxes to that corporation or go to jail. The only way out of it is to find some remote island not (yet) controlled by any incorporated government body, and move there. There aren't many such places left on this planet these days.
The US government is right now in the process of passing "health" laws that require citizens to pay money to private, non-governmental corporations, the health-insurance corporations. It's not the first government to do this. Thus, it's easy to find cases where one might have to pay "taxes" to private corporations that aren't legally governments. Your friendly local government (at some level) has colluded with those corporations, and given them the power to collect taxes. It's a reasonable thing to do if much of the population is voting against (governmental) taxes. It just amounts to delegating the tax collection to the private corporation, rather than the government collecting the taxes and handing part of them over to the corporation.
Years ago, I lived in a small neighborhood that was accessible only by two roads, both of them toll roads run by "independent" transport agencies. So to get out and go to work, I had to pay what was obviously a sort of tax to that corporation. This is a bit of an unusual situation, since there are usually local streets that can avoid the toll roads, which are usually just main highways. But there are a few places in the US where this situation exists, and I'd guess it happens in some other countries, too. A likely place to look is islands accessible only by ferry. Usually, the ferry system is run by a private corporation, and the government strictly controls who can run ferries. So the ferry fee would qualify as a government-enforced "tax" paid directly to the private corporation.
(The real world is more complex than most political theories.;-)
If you didn't agree to them having root access in the contract, they are illegally accessing your hardware, which is a felony.
Hmmm... I wonder how many ISPs have carefully worded their TOS "agreement" so that a passage that sounds innocent (or meaningless) to the typical legal "layman" actually says that they have your permission to access any equipment plugged into their lines. I can see and ISP, especially one with a local monopoly, deciding that they can probably get away with doing this to their customers.
Do we actually have to hire a lawyer to go over such "agreements" to verify that we haven't signed away all rights to them in exchange for service? Or are there likely to be laws that would classify such terms as unconscionable? And since IANAL, how would I recognize such terms hidden out in the legalese?
Note that we have had a number of stories in recent years that were based on a clause in an ISP's TOS doc saying that anything you put on their machines was legally their property. Remember when msn.com used this defense when they were caught extracting images of customers' kids from their email and web sites and using them in advertising? There have been a number of warnings to musicians that putting your music on a "personal web site" that's on an ISP's machine may constitute assigning your copyright to the ISP, as could emailing your own creations via an email server that belongs to your ISP. So some ISPs do have a history of making legal claims on their customers' property, often basing the claim on TOS phrases that most people without legal training wouldn't understand.
Somehow I think that Bill may have had a slight "edge" over other applicants for the chief software architect position.
This is made clearer if you investigate his full name, William Henry Gates III. His father, William Henry Gates II, was a fairly successful businessman who had the money to send him to Harvard, where he made the contacts needed to start a business with inside access into IMB's management level. Yes, he was a geeky kid who got into the new small-computer stuff, and he even learned a bit of programming. But his real background was business management, and he was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He cultivated the computer-geek image, while developing his insider-to-upper-management-levels reality.
Of course, lots of people in the computer biz know all this. But it's surprising how many in both the computer industry and the MSM have fallen for the computer-geek-who-made-it-big public image.
(I've also seen the claim that his given name actually is "Bill", not "William", but I've never seen verification of this. Not that it matters much. It's not too unusual in American society to have nicknames as given names on birth certificates.)
I wrote a C-subset compiler that used less memory than that
I once wrote a demo C-subset compiler that was really small. It implemented the null subset of C (and of many other languages;-). It was provably correct. It accepted only a null program (i.e., the/bin/true program), and produced syntax-error messages for anything else.
Actually, this wasn't a joke. I also had a number of "extended" versions of the compiler, each of which accepted only a very tiny subset of constructs. The purpose was educational. They were essentially intended as demos of how to do each of the tasks, and could be used as the basis of more useful compilers for more complex input languages.
But each of them compiled into only a few kilobytes of binary code, and did their translation task correctly. I couldn't say the same of some of their offspring.
The thanks never comes down to the programmers. When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
Actually, this is the way that "creative" professions have generally worked. Consider the typical sculptor or painter. Even those that reached a level of fame have usually been paid only once for each creation. It is then owned by the client, who can resell it and not give the creator any part of the sale. There are a few countries that have dabbled with royalties for resale, but this is rare, and the royalties are typically small. The real profit from art goes to the sponsors and investors.
Authors and musicians have had some small success in getting royalties for their work. But this is most often "honored in the breach". It's well known that recording artists don't get any royalties at all, and may lose money, unless the recording sells around 1.5 to 2 million copies. Before that, all the income goes to the owner of the recording, which is the corporation that produced and marketed it. Even after a recording reaches the profitable stage, the artist typically gets only a few percent of each sale. The situation is similar with authors, who may be paid a small "advance" before production, but rarely makes a profit until several million copies have been sold. Most writers have worked for corporations such as newspapers or other periodicals, who pay a salary and claim all income from sales.
The movie industry has a few showcase stars who have made a small fortune in royalties. But most actors are "starving artists" who have to work at part-time jobs to get rent and food money. Movies are owned by the producers, not the actors. The few stars are held out as bait to attract the many workers who will never be stars and will never make a decent living from their creativity.
Software programmers like to think that they're something new that the world has never seen. But in reality they are merely creators in a new medium, and they are treated as the commercial world has always treated creative types. They're workers who can be paid a small salary to produce, and when they produce something that sells, the corporation can claim the profits. A few stars can be paid some royalties (still only a few percent of sales) and held up as public examples to attract the many workers that the industry needs.
President Obama: Good afternoon Mr. Schmidt, could you tell us who you worked for previous[sic] in cyber-security?
Howard A. Schmidt: Microsoft...
Yeah, I'd guess a lot of us are thinking that. Funny that the summary didn't mention that little fact. One of the guys who was responsible for the "security" measures that brought us the botnet phenomenon is now the one responsible for the government's computer-security policies.
So does this mean that the US government will be mandating changes that make all other OSs part of the botnets?
Yesterday's story about the botnet masters buying into the ISPs' businesses and "going legit" was just just to soften us up for today's computer security story.
google does the exact same thing and has for a while
As far as I can tell, their deals don't include blocking access to the other search sites. Verizon is making bing the only search site usable by Verizon customers. Google seems to merely pay for placement as the default server. My (up-to-date) copies of seamonkey and firefox default to google, but the search widget has a menu of other search sites, and I typing in the URLs of other search sites also works. Nothing is blocked.
So it's not at all the "same thing" as what the Verizon/Microsoft coalition has done.
The abovethecrowd.com article seems to confirm this. Google's nefarious plot has be based on positioning themself as the default "less than free" alternative, by giving kickbacks from their ad revenue to their partners. But so far they don't seem to have actually managed to restrict customers' access as Verizon is doing. They merely make their stuff available at a better price for everyone, to gain the "default" position.
The article goes into the related GPS navigation story in some detail. I saw a good example of google's approach a few days ago, when I needed to be at an event about 90 miles away shortly after local rush hour. I have a Garmin GPS gadget in my car, and I also had my T-Mobile G1 Android phone in my pocket. The Garmin gave me a route that the G1's google maps app told me had a serious traffic congestion. So I took a slightly longer alternate route that google said wasn't congested, and got there well before the estimated arrival time of either GPS gadget.
The interesting thing about this is that I've taken to pitting the G1 and the Garmin nav stuff against each other, out of interest in how they compare. The main problem with Garmin's GPS is that it doesn't have "live" net access to anything. Its maps are now incorrect for a couple of local areas due to recent new highway construction, and it would cost me $160 to "upgrade" my maps to the latest version. The G1 uses google maps, so it's constantly downloading the current maps from the Net, but its downside is that when I'm out of cell-tower range, it can't get the maps. In this case, though, it showed off the real strength of google's nav stuff: It gets current traffic reports from its traveling phones and can warn you when there are problems ahead. Most of the time, its warnings are even accurate. If Garmin and the other GPS vendors can't move onto the Net in the same way, they're going to be out of business soon. On that trip, I ended up ignoring the Garmin routing, and followed the G1's suggestions.
It should be noted that google isn't just supplying their nav software on Android "google" phones. My wife has an iPhone (which she loves), and it has the same google maps software. We've had a bit of fun comparing how google's stuff works on the two phones. There's no clear winner in that contest.
(And I expect that google will soon be pre-fetching maps over a larger area, as memory becomes cheaper and phones can store more maps. This will ameliorate the out-of-cell-contact problems a lot. They'll also probably figure out how to make their UI better, by copying things that the GPS companies have done right.;-)
Is the search engine the default option on new devices, or is it the only option forced on existing customers who didn't know something like this could happen when they signed up?
According to the summary, it was done to the writer's phone that had been using google; he found that google was no longer an allowed search engine and he had to use bing.
It does seem like this sort of arrogant restriction should be legal ground for abrogating the contract. It should also be additional evidence in the "Net Neutrality" debate, since it's a good example of how current internet providers are blocking net access to prevent you from dealing with companies that haven't paid them for access to customers.
I wonder if any Verizon customers are discussing a class-action suit yet...
Authority tells me that cars can hurt human bodies, as a result I avoid walking in front of them.
Well, now; I can definitely say that I've never seen a person get hit by a car, so that's just hearsay unsupported by the evidence. I hereby call on all people who reject "argument from authority" to reject this bogus claim. Who are you going to believe, those supposed "authorities" who haven't answered any counterclaims like this one, or people like me who have never seen a person injured by a car? The true skeptics and deniers of the "autos are dangerous" theory should all go out and walk freely in front of cars on the roads, secure in the belief that those cars don't hurt people.
(Actually, some years back, I heard some screeching tires and some thumps from the front of the house, ran out, and saw a couple of fairly old people lying in the street, with a car stopped next to them, and several people frantically calling on their cell phones. But I didn't personally see what happened, so I don't know that the car hit those people. However, I did make a call myself. Maybe I was just taking part in a bit of performance art? I suppose I'll never know.)
Go ahead and ask a scientist studying evolution how he feels with regard to creationists for instance. "Oh, I love discussing my work with them" is one answer you will *NOT* find, trust me.
Oh, I dunno about that; I've known a number of biologists who seem to enjoy the game of "debating" creationists (though "baiting" might be a better term). Their usual tactic is to briefly comment on some obscure technical detail of whatever they're working on, and innocently ask the creationist for advice on understanding what their data is saying. Of course, the creationists are generally incapable of dealing with things at this level of detail.
I remember one whose horticultural studies included a lot of data on the growth patterns of a number of "weed" plants that were agriculturally important. The data showed a lot of cases of apparent adaptations that counteracted the weed-control technology used by growers in different areas. A famous case is the widespread adaptation of dandelions in suburban lawn to mowing, with flowers on stems that are short enough to be below mower blades, but which then grow longer as the seeds ripen so that the mowers help distribute the seeds. There are a lot of examples like this. He liked to describe one of these adaptations, and ask for alternate hypotheses explaining why such apparent evolutionary change would be happening so fast, and only in areas where it was to the weed's advantage. He got a bit of enjoyment out of the flustered responses from the religious types. (Saying "God's doing it" was obviously not the right answer, because why would God help out a weed when we know that we're His favorite species?;-)
OTOH, trying to deal with pesky harassers when you're trying to get work done can be a bother. It's easy to understand why a working scientist might not want to drop what s/he is doing to answer dumb questions from people who can't even use the technical language correctly. Occasional questions asked in a friendly manner, yes, of course. But not people who are antagonistic and obviously trying to interfere with your work.
But, these are lowest bidder contractors we are talking about here so who knows!
And those contractors probably subcontract the software to firms in southeast Asia.
Note that "The Defense Dept won't allow that" isn't a valid answer here. The software in question seems to not be military software; it's commercial software that more or less accidentally has military application. Chances are very small that it was done on a military contract. (It could be interesting to verify this though, because if it turns out that it was developed with DoD funds, it would add greatly to the humor of the situation.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... but democracy is essentially 'majority wins'.. nobody's been able to come up with a better system yet. And it isn't for lack of trying.
Actually, those revolutionaries that the Americans call their Founding Fathers did understand the problems with this, and came up with a marginally better system. They set up some basic laws in the Constitution, and changing those laws takes a lot more than a simple majority vote. The courts can and do toss out laws that conflict with the Constitution.
This isn't perfect, of course, since a sufficiently successful demagogue can get a 2/3 majority and stomp all over the minority. And the courts are notorious for selective enforcement of all the laws, including parts of the Constitution. Thus, no court has yet ruled on warrantless wiretapping or "extraordinary rendition" (i.e., indefinite detention without trial and torture), despite the obvious Constitutional problems. But the fact remains that the system is a lot more stable than a straightforward majority-rule system would be.
What I noticed most was the portion at the very bottom:
In other words, if you install chrome, you agree that chrome or its extensions may read or write any file on your computer, google may update it at any time without telling you to add new features (such as reading or writing arbitrary files), and google may disable anything you add to chrome.
Sounds a lot like you're agreeing that they pwn your computer and can do anything they like with it. Maybe you'd want to make sure that there's nothing on your computer that you wouldn't want copied to google's database. Such as the contents of your .ssh directory, which chrome will be able to read because it's running under your permissions..
And THIS is why Linux will always stay a niche! Did you ever think that maybe,...just maybe, your potential customer frankly doesn't give a shit what YOU think "real computing" is?
The traditional metaphorical term for this reasoning is "dog in the manger". The image is a farm dog who has decided that a manger full of hay is his (or her) territory, and viciously defends it from a cow that wants the hay, despite the fact that the hay is of no value to the dog.
Saying that Joe Sixpack or Granny Gertrude won't use linux because it has a CLI and they want a GUI is the same false reasoning. None of the CLI users are suggesting that the GUI should be eliminated. They want both interfaces to work well. Having a good CLI shouldn't bother the GUI users at all; they should just ignore it. But for some reason, they like to argue that they won't use a GUI if the machine also has a good CLI, because they don't want to learn the CLI. In fact, they don't even want to hear that it exists, and as long as it's even there for the people who like CLIs, they will refuse to use the GUI.
The CLI users generally understand why it's usually a more productive interface for what they're doing. Most operations are faster with the CLI, and some things can only be done that way. But they generally also use the GUI, understanding that some things can be done more easily that way.
Maybe what we need is a scheme that "interviews" users, and if they are the sort that not only want to use the GUI, but also have a strong objection to other people using a CLI, the system will flag them as such users, and will hide the evidence of the CLI from them. Then maybe they'll be happy to use the system, since they won't be aware that it also caters to those weirdo geeks who prefer the CLI.
Perhaps when this discussion comes up in the future, we should talk up this idea, to get people working on it. Maybe it would help eliminate the objections of the folks who are offended by the thought of other people using a CLI, and they'd stop using the very existence of the CLI as an excuse to avoid linux-based computer systems.
A 128-bit code has twice as many ones and zeroes as a 64-bit code. Wow!
Well, maybe eventually. But at first, they have the same number of ones; the 128-bit code just has 64 more zeroes.
And apparently, if you're a cell-phone carrier, it stays that way for years, until some "evil hacker" tells the world what you've been doing.
Does this mean that IT people are generally incompetent? Or is it just the IT managers who are incompetent? Or ...
Well, I'd guess it's mostly an example of the old observation that, while a person can be very smart, people are stupid. Human intelligence isn't additive; it's some inverse function of the number of brains involved.
Most software is developed by teams, and the more important management thinks a software project is, the more people they assign to it. This means that the most important products are developed by the stupidest teams. Also, the bigger the company, the more people they have to assign to a project (or move from project to project, as often happens). So the bigger companies tend to have the stupidest development methods.
I've worked on several projects that produced some high-quality products. In each case, it was done by a small team, and the team found ways to chop up the work into pieces that could each be done by a single person (with well-documented interfaces between the pieces). So each piece was done by the smartest human team, a single person. But big companies generally don't permit this approach (though a couple of these projects were for some big companies with a few smart managers).
Well, yeah; you'd expect that people have better memories than that. But consider: The marketers long ago learned that a price like $29.95 sells a lot better than $30.00, and it's because almost everyone truncates the former to $20, i.e. to one significant digit. People shown prices and then asked to compare the prices of things from memory will judge $29.95 and $21.95 products as being about the same price, while $29.95 and $30.95 are remembered as having a large price difference.
There are lots of examples of people behaving this way. The TV-channel one is interesting, but I've actually watched people looking for shows, and it usually becomes obvious from their search pattern that they usually don't remember the channel numbers. A few people do remember a handful of channels that they watch a lot, true, but in most cases, they just remember things like "It's 60-something" and have to search for the second digit.
I wish I were being overly cynical, but there's a lot of market-psychology research saying that it really is this bad.
OTOH, there is a fairly wide range in how human brains work, and we know pretty well that "intelligence" isn't a 1-dimensional quantity that's totally characterized by a single "IQ" number. There are people who routinely handle 4, 6, or 10-digit numbers without error. There are others who can't do this, but can remember the names and faces of hundreds of people. There are lots of intelligence "modules", and many people have one or more that works well. So the real problem is talking about a single such module, and treating it as a person's "intelligence". We're really not as dumb as that might indicate; we're each sorta dumb at a lot of things and sort smart at others. A forum like this would tend to attract people with good number and logic modules. Though I do get dubious about this at times when reading at 0 or -1.
Heh. You're fighting a losing battle. 99% of the human population is unable to handle numbers with more than one significant digit. The tech crowd is a little better, i.e., most of us can handle two digits most of the time.
Yes, you might observe that 4.096 rounds to 4.1, but that doesn't matter, because computer types always truncate. So 4.096 truncates to 4.0 and the final ".0" is dropped because it's the default.
If you want people to distinguish numbers that differ in the 3rd digit, you have to talk to engineers. They're less than 10^-5 of the population, and you can't expect such fine distinctions in anything outside of technical journals.
(Actually, I just made up that 10^-5 number. I wonder what the real order-of-magnitude estimate is. Yeah, google knows, but it knows several estimates that differ by several OoMs. ;-)
... one of the fundamental rules of the Internet which is often ignore:, don't put anything on a Net accessible computer that you would be afraid of it ending up linked off of 4chan.
Well, since most of my files are online right now, the ones I'd worry about being linked to 4chan are mostly the ones that I got from 4chan.
so in other words, we are looking at a piece of technology that in the long run will have to force some kind of one world government, or else the net will be basically undone by the mess of laws and regulations that makes up the nations of this planet?
I think you've got it. But we should add that, although that global "government" (or more likely, a treaty association) may pass laws that protect your data from prying corporate eyes, it certainly won't pass laws that protect your data from prying government eyes. And even if you've done nothing to offend that government, the fact remains that it'll only take a small under-the-table payment to convince many of the underpaid international data bureaucrats to deliver your data to anyone who wants to pay their very reasonable price.
So the "cloud" may lead to a morass of international data-handling laws that you'll have to attempt (probably unsuccessfully) to abide by, but the resulting system will be no safer than the mess we have now.
... in the case of the Mustangs, we killed off all the Buffalo all by ourselves.. the horses fill much of the same niche roaming the plains.
That's fairly accurate, but it's common for zoologists to phrase it somewhat differently. Horses evolved in North America, and moved west across the Bering land bridge about the same time that humans were moving east. Horses died out in North America soon thereafter, and this is generally attributed to the humans, who considered them food. Then some time later, a new bunch of invading humans reintroduced horses, some of whom escaped and simply filled their original niche in the North American ecosystem. They were helped by the fact that those new humans also wiped out most of the bison, producing a deficit of large grazers, which the horses were able to partly fill.
Of course, this is really just a more detailed explanation, and the two-line summary is good enough for non-technical language such as the media and lower-level school books. The main extra point the more long-winded explanation makes is that horses aren't an alien species in North America; they were merely reintroduced to their native range. Of course, they were escapees from domestication, so they probably aren't quite as good at it as were their earlier relatives. But they have successfully maintained a wild population in North America, despite the efforts of ranchers who consider them competition for our cattle.
Well, that would be funny to read about. But I haven't read about it happening. I have read a number of stories of ISPs raiding their customers' "private" files for material that could be used in advertising or otherwise commercialized.
Some years ago, I read a funny story about this. Some medical researchers were testing a new drug for treating some medical condition (which I've forgotten). One of the serious side effects was rapid, total loss of all body hair. The hair roots weren't damaged; the drug just produced a weak spot so that the slightest tug would break a hair. After the initial "Oh, no!" reaction, someone realized they might have something with a totally unrelated market. They tried giving the drug to sheep, and sure enough, a few days later they could pull all the sheep's wool off with their hands.
Not being a sheep rancher, I don't know how successful this has been commercially. I have seen sheep shearing demos since then, so it obviously hasn't totally taken over the "market" and supplanted shears. But it is available. It's not a cream, like Nair; it's a drug taken internally. Supposedly a single dose isn't harmful to the sheep.
... if there are painless ways of growing beef, there must be painless ways of growing fur.
Hey, maybe someone should ask the people who raise sheep whether they've ever heard of such an idea. We humans raise a lot of sheep for their wool. It's possible that someone might have stumbled across a way to get the wool off of a sheep without killing it. Has anyone heard whether this is possible?
I've heard rumors that people in South America have found ways to remove the fur from their llamas and related animals without harming them. But I suppose we in the advanced societies wouldn't want to learn from such primitive, backward folks, so we'll probably never know. ;-)
Where else in the world is someone required to pay a tax to a corporation? Required, as in you will go to jail if you don't give a corporation money for a service you might not need or want.
Hmmm ... That was obviously written by someone who believes that there's a real difference between "corporations" and "governments". That's the only way to explain why someone would ask such a question.
The city I live in is incorporated. That is, it's a corporation. All of them around here, down to the smallest town, are corporations. And if you live in the jurisdiction of such an incorporated town/city/state/whatever, you do have to pay taxes to that corporation or go to jail. The only way out of it is to find some remote island not (yet) controlled by any incorporated government body, and move there. There aren't many such places left on this planet these days.
The US government is right now in the process of passing "health" laws that require citizens to pay money to private, non-governmental corporations, the health-insurance corporations. It's not the first government to do this. Thus, it's easy to find cases where one might have to pay "taxes" to private corporations that aren't legally governments. Your friendly local government (at some level) has colluded with those corporations, and given them the power to collect taxes. It's a reasonable thing to do if much of the population is voting against (governmental) taxes. It just amounts to delegating the tax collection to the private corporation, rather than the government collecting the taxes and handing part of them over to the corporation.
Years ago, I lived in a small neighborhood that was accessible only by two roads, both of them toll roads run by "independent" transport agencies. So to get out and go to work, I had to pay what was obviously a sort of tax to that corporation. This is a bit of an unusual situation, since there are usually local streets that can avoid the toll roads, which are usually just main highways. But there are a few places in the US where this situation exists, and I'd guess it happens in some other countries, too. A likely place to look is islands accessible only by ferry. Usually, the ferry system is run by a private corporation, and the government strictly controls who can run ferries. So the ferry fee would qualify as a government-enforced "tax" paid directly to the private corporation.
(The real world is more complex than most political theories. ;-)
If you didn't agree to them having root access in the contract, they are illegally accessing your hardware, which is a felony.
Hmmm ... I wonder how many ISPs have carefully worded their TOS "agreement" so that a passage that sounds innocent (or meaningless) to the typical legal "layman" actually says that they have your permission to access any equipment plugged into their lines. I can see and ISP, especially one with a local monopoly, deciding that they can probably get away with doing this to their customers.
Do we actually have to hire a lawyer to go over such "agreements" to verify that we haven't signed away all rights to them in exchange for service? Or are there likely to be laws that would classify such terms as unconscionable? And since IANAL, how would I recognize such terms hidden out in the legalese?
Note that we have had a number of stories in recent years that were based on a clause in an ISP's TOS doc saying that anything you put on their machines was legally their property. Remember when msn.com used this defense when they were caught extracting images of customers' kids from their email and web sites and using them in advertising? There have been a number of warnings to musicians that putting your music on a "personal web site" that's on an ISP's machine may constitute assigning your copyright to the ISP, as could emailing your own creations via an email server that belongs to your ISP. So some ISPs do have a history of making legal claims on their customers' property, often basing the claim on TOS phrases that most people without legal training wouldn't understand.
Somehow I think that Bill may have had a slight "edge" over other applicants for the chief software architect position.
This is made clearer if you investigate his full name, William Henry Gates III. His father, William Henry Gates II, was a fairly successful businessman who had the money to send him to Harvard, where he made the contacts needed to start a business with inside access into IMB's management level. Yes, he was a geeky kid who got into the new small-computer stuff, and he even learned a bit of programming. But his real background was business management, and he was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He cultivated the computer-geek image, while developing his insider-to-upper-management-levels reality.
Of course, lots of people in the computer biz know all this. But it's surprising how many in both the computer industry and the MSM have fallen for the computer-geek-who-made-it-big public image.
(I've also seen the claim that his given name actually is "Bill", not "William", but I've never seen verification of this. Not that it matters much. It's not too unusual in American society to have nicknames as given names on birth certificates.)
I wrote a C-subset compiler that used less memory than that
I once wrote a demo C-subset compiler that was really small. It implemented the null subset of C (and of many other languages ;-). It was provably correct. It accepted only a null program (i.e., the /bin/true program), and produced syntax-error messages for anything else.
Actually, this wasn't a joke. I also had a number of "extended" versions of the compiler, each of which accepted only a very tiny subset of constructs. The purpose was educational. They were essentially intended as demos of how to do each of the tasks, and could be used as the basis of more useful compilers for more complex input languages.
But each of them compiled into only a few kilobytes of binary code, and did their translation task correctly. I couldn't say the same of some of their offspring.
The thanks never comes down to the programmers. When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
Actually, this is the way that "creative" professions have generally worked. Consider the typical sculptor or painter. Even those that reached a level of fame have usually been paid only once for each creation. It is then owned by the client, who can resell it and not give the creator any part of the sale. There are a few countries that have dabbled with royalties for resale, but this is rare, and the royalties are typically small. The real profit from art goes to the sponsors and investors.
Authors and musicians have had some small success in getting royalties for their work. But this is most often "honored in the breach". It's well known that recording artists don't get any royalties at all, and may lose money, unless the recording sells around 1.5 to 2 million copies. Before that, all the income goes to the owner of the recording, which is the corporation that produced and marketed it. Even after a recording reaches the profitable stage, the artist typically gets only a few percent of each sale. The situation is similar with authors, who may be paid a small "advance" before production, but rarely makes a profit until several million copies have been sold. Most writers have worked for corporations such as newspapers or other periodicals, who pay a salary and claim all income from sales.
The movie industry has a few showcase stars who have made a small fortune in royalties. But most actors are "starving artists" who have to work at part-time jobs to get rent and food money. Movies are owned by the producers, not the actors. The few stars are held out as bait to attract the many workers who will never be stars and will never make a decent living from their creativity.
Software programmers like to think that they're something new that the world has never seen. But in reality they are merely creators in a new medium, and they are treated as the commercial world has always treated creative types. They're workers who can be paid a small salary to produce, and when they produce something that sells, the corporation can claim the profits. A few stars can be paid some royalties (still only a few percent of sales) and held up as public examples to attract the many workers that the industry needs.
Don't expect to see this change in your lifetime.
President Obama: Good afternoon Mr. Schmidt, could you tell us who you worked for previous[sic] in cyber-security?
Howard A. Schmidt: Microsoft ...
Yeah, I'd guess a lot of us are thinking that. Funny that the summary didn't mention that little fact. One of the guys who was responsible for the "security" measures that brought us the botnet phenomenon is now the one responsible for the government's computer-security policies.
So does this mean that the US government will be mandating changes that make all other OSs part of the botnets?
Yesterday's story about the botnet masters buying into the ISPs' businesses and "going legit" was just just to soften us up for today's computer security story.
google does the exact same thing and has for a while
As far as I can tell, their deals don't include blocking access to the other search sites. Verizon is making bing the only search site usable by Verizon customers. Google seems to merely pay for placement as the default server. My (up-to-date) copies of seamonkey and firefox default to google, but the search widget has a menu of other search sites, and I typing in the URLs of other search sites also works. Nothing is blocked.
So it's not at all the "same thing" as what the Verizon/Microsoft coalition has done.
The abovethecrowd.com article seems to confirm this. Google's nefarious plot has be based on positioning themself as the default "less than free" alternative, by giving kickbacks from their ad revenue to their partners. But so far they don't seem to have actually managed to restrict customers' access as Verizon is doing. They merely make their stuff available at a better price for everyone, to gain the "default" position.
The article goes into the related GPS navigation story in some detail. I saw a good example of google's approach a few days ago, when I needed to be at an event about 90 miles away shortly after local rush hour. I have a Garmin GPS gadget in my car, and I also had my T-Mobile G1 Android phone in my pocket. The Garmin gave me a route that the G1's google maps app told me had a serious traffic congestion. So I took a slightly longer alternate route that google said wasn't congested, and got there well before the estimated arrival time of either GPS gadget.
The interesting thing about this is that I've taken to pitting the G1 and the Garmin nav stuff against each other, out of interest in how they compare. The main problem with Garmin's GPS is that it doesn't have "live" net access to anything. Its maps are now incorrect for a couple of local areas due to recent new highway construction, and it would cost me $160 to "upgrade" my maps to the latest version. The G1 uses google maps, so it's constantly downloading the current maps from the Net, but its downside is that when I'm out of cell-tower range, it can't get the maps. In this case, though, it showed off the real strength of google's nav stuff: It gets current traffic reports from its traveling phones and can warn you when there are problems ahead. Most of the time, its warnings are even accurate. If Garmin and the other GPS vendors can't move onto the Net in the same way, they're going to be out of business soon. On that trip, I ended up ignoring the Garmin routing, and followed the G1's suggestions.
It should be noted that google isn't just supplying their nav software on Android "google" phones. My wife has an iPhone (which she loves), and it has the same google maps software. We've had a bit of fun comparing how google's stuff works on the two phones. There's no clear winner in that contest.
(And I expect that google will soon be pre-fetching maps over a larger area, as memory becomes cheaper and phones can store more maps. This will ameliorate the out-of-cell-contact problems a lot. They'll also probably figure out how to make their UI better, by copying things that the GPS companies have done right. ;-)
Is the search engine the default option on new devices, or is it the only option forced on existing customers who didn't know something like this could happen when they signed up?
According to the summary, it was done to the writer's phone that had been using google; he found that google was no longer an allowed search engine and he had to use bing.
It does seem like this sort of arrogant restriction should be legal ground for abrogating the contract. It should also be additional evidence in the "Net Neutrality" debate, since it's a good example of how current internet providers are blocking net access to prevent you from dealing with companies that haven't paid them for access to customers.
I wonder if any Verizon customers are discussing a class-action suit yet ...
Authority tells me that cars can hurt human bodies, as a result I avoid walking in front of them.
Well, now; I can definitely say that I've never seen a person get hit by a car, so that's just hearsay unsupported by the evidence. I hereby call on all people who reject "argument from authority" to reject this bogus claim. Who are you going to believe, those supposed "authorities" who haven't answered any counterclaims like this one, or people like me who have never seen a person injured by a car? The true skeptics and deniers of the "autos are dangerous" theory should all go out and walk freely in front of cars on the roads, secure in the belief that those cars don't hurt people.
(Actually, some years back, I heard some screeching tires and some thumps from the front of the house, ran out, and saw a couple of fairly old people lying in the street, with a car stopped next to them, and several people frantically calling on their cell phones. But I didn't personally see what happened, so I don't know that the car hit those people. However, I did make a call myself. Maybe I was just taking part in a bit of performance art? I suppose I'll never know.)
Go ahead and ask a scientist studying evolution how he feels with regard to creationists for instance. "Oh, I love discussing my work with them" is one answer you will *NOT* find, trust me.
Oh, I dunno about that; I've known a number of biologists who seem to enjoy the game of "debating" creationists (though "baiting" might be a better term). Their usual tactic is to briefly comment on some obscure technical detail of whatever they're working on, and innocently ask the creationist for advice on understanding what their data is saying. Of course, the creationists are generally incapable of dealing with things at this level of detail.
I remember one whose horticultural studies included a lot of data on the growth patterns of a number of "weed" plants that were agriculturally important. The data showed a lot of cases of apparent adaptations that counteracted the weed-control technology used by growers in different areas. A famous case is the widespread adaptation of dandelions in suburban lawn to mowing, with flowers on stems that are short enough to be below mower blades, but which then grow longer as the seeds ripen so that the mowers help distribute the seeds. There are a lot of examples like this. He liked to describe one of these adaptations, and ask for alternate hypotheses explaining why such apparent evolutionary change would be happening so fast, and only in areas where it was to the weed's advantage. He got a bit of enjoyment out of the flustered responses from the religious types. (Saying "God's doing it" was obviously not the right answer, because why would God help out a weed when we know that we're His favorite species? ;-)
OTOH, trying to deal with pesky harassers when you're trying to get work done can be a bother. It's easy to understand why a working scientist might not want to drop what s/he is doing to answer dumb questions from people who can't even use the technical language correctly. Occasional questions asked in a friendly manner, yes, of course. But not people who are antagonistic and obviously trying to interfere with your work.
But, these are lowest bidder contractors we are talking about here so who knows!
And those contractors probably subcontract the software to firms in southeast Asia.
Note that "The Defense Dept won't allow that" isn't a valid answer here. The software in question seems to not be military software; it's commercial software that more or less accidentally has military application. Chances are very small that it was done on a military contract. (It could be interesting to verify this though, because if it turns out that it was developed with DoD funds, it would add greatly to the humor of the situation. ;-)
Don't tell the DoD. They've been paying $7,000 per license for that software.