Fuel cells store as hydrogen, which is light and energetically dense. "Pure" electric cars store the energy in batteries which are heavy (reducing efficiency), not as energetically dense, and at least currently, use some pretty toxic compounds in them. Once the electricity is either generated by the fuel cell, or pulled from the battery then yes, the cars are pretty much the same.
I'm a bit skeptical that their model can really be scaled to any major, currently industrialized country for a couple reasons.
First, they have a relatively small population, with a weak economy (on a global scale), and an infrastructure that isn't yet as dependent on fossil fuels as other developed countries are. This means that the political momentum isn't driving nearly as hard towards the use of fossil fuels as somewhere like the US is. It's much easier to nimbly steer a small power boat than a fully laden oil-tanker.
Second, natural resource-wise, from the article at least, it appears that they have a significantly higher ratio of available energy density (through geothermal and hydro opportunities) per capita than most industrialized countries. Which would make them a significant exporter of energy, more like the Saudi Arabia of the post-fossil-fuel era than a country weaning itself from oil because it thinks it's the right thing to do for moral reasons.
Alternative energy and a hydrogen based economy is great and all, and this certainly won't hurt the argument, but let's not think that just because Iceland moves away from oil and into hydrogen that it will be a no-brainer to apply their model anywhere else.
I think the best we can hope for is that major manufacturers use them as a testbed to get more reliable, safer, and cheaper technologies developed for use in those countries that are currently more entrenched in the business of oil. Once those techs are developed, and the kinks are worked out, and a bigger country can use them to successfully transition away from petroleum, then there's a more reasonable discussion to be had about how ready the US is to go there.
Re:nothing particularly groundbreaking about it
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You're basically talking about jazz. Or, more generically, improvisation - which is not new or revolutionary, but definitely has been limited to certain genres.
Some modern rock bands are all about this kind of thing, and it's one of the primary reasons the Grateful Dead were so popular musically (admittedly though, the drug culture that accompanied them was pretty popular in its own right). If you want improvistaion, listen to basically any jazz recording, or any live recording of a jam-type band like Phish or the Dead, or even, like you said, a live recording of a decent DJ if electronica is more to your tastes. With the artist there to alter the themes, you get all kinds of spontaniety and creativity that you just don't get in pre-arranged compositions.
Somehow I don't get the feeling that this is what you are talking about though. If what you're talking about is having commercial radio vary what it plays each time it plays it, I think you're pretty much SOL. The artist would not only have to be present each time in order to customize the music, but they would need to get away from using pre-recorded music altogether, and rely on generated music. That would change the landscape for the demand of music recordings, and we all know what happens when you suggest change to the music industry's business model...
I'm all for the root message (that the moves to restrict our rights is a very, very bad thing), but this animation makes me cringe. To me, it seems like a very sensible message is wrapped up in the wrong packaging.
The problem is that our rights as consumers of media are being taken away from us. That by crippling the content we buy, and making it illegal for us to work around that crippling, or to even create something that could be used to get around that crippling, the entertainment industry is hamstringing the public's rights.
The way this cartoon portrays it though, this may as well be a WTO protest. The clip seems to be one that has a strong anti-capitalist tone, the "big bad corporations want to make money" kind of thing. But this will not only NOT get the true severity of the problem across to John Q Public, it will align the EFF with the left wing anti-globalization/anti-capitalist protesters, who are far from acceptance in the mainstream. I live in Berkeley, and it reminds me a lot of the "hey, let's go protest something - it doesn't really matter what" mentality I hear all the time here. This means that they aren't just not quite getting their message across effectively, they're actually detracting from their position.
I know plenty of people familiar with the situation find the clip funny, but the few people I sent it to who are not already involved all thought it was just being critical of Disney for being a big American company. Until I explained it to them, they weren't sure whether to dismiss it as radical propaganda or not.
I fully support the EFF's cause, and I wish they had done something a little less propagandistic, and a little more explanatory.
Actually, at MIT, the computer science version of the annual engineering design contest (course 2.70) is a similar robotics based contest using mindstorm kits (course 6.270), since they were designed at the MIT Media Lab. Or, at least it was when I was there 6 years ago.
I signed up to take the class but demand was so overwhelmingly high, I got lotteried out all four years.:(
You are absolutely correct, and I probably went a little far in my original post. Small cracks can indeed lead to larger cracks, and ideally you're better off preventing them all if you can. In addition, compromise of confidentiality is definitely not the only problem that can befall a hacked system.
I think I would probably have been better served if I had kept my writing concise, and stating only the two main points that I think people designing and enforcing password policies really need to consider:
1) Before you decide to arbitrarily enforce a policy, stop and actually think about how strict it really needs to be. Try to make an informed decision, rather than a knee jerk one. Fine if you err on the side of caution, but if you're going to piss off users, make it necessary.
and
2) If you're really worried about the total security of your computer systems, make sure that passwords are not your only safeguard. Patch your apps, close your open ports, remove default accounts, blah blah blah. Prevent those small cracks from bringing down the whole dam.
If you really do care, you should return the disc (like you're planning on doing), and write to Universal AND the artist.
Universal will probably shit-can it, but unless Vanessa Carlton is selling millions of copies (never heard of her, but I may just be out of touch), every fan/sale will make a difference to her. Make sure you explain the economics of the situation to her. If you can't play the disc, and none of your friends can, that's X people who would have contributed to her pocketbook. Multiply some percentage out by her fanbase and she will start to see what kind of money she's losing by allowing the record company to do this.
If artists start hearing from former fans en masse that they are losing sales due to their record companies' practices, and that they are pissing off these fans without any doing of their own, maybe Universal will start getting heat from their breadwinners. If their assets start complaining and maybe even walking out, there's a chance that this copy protection bullshit won't have to go to courts. Maybe good old economics will move it the way of DIVX.
Passwords are important. Fine. But why are they important? They protect sensitive information? They keep the infrastructure running? They will allow a web site to track who you are and pull up the appropriate marketing preferences? They will allow you to launch nuclear weapons?
Depending on who you are, and what context you're in, the answers could be totally different. And depending on that context, the strength of your password may matter a lot, or not at all.
If you're just some schmoe in marketing, with no access to change anything on your personal system, no access to anything on the company network except to alter files in a personal directory on one server, your company's network does not allow remote access, and your building requires a card to get inside and another one to get up the elevator, then the importance of you choosing a strong password is relatively small.
Making people choose strong passwords is a computer based version of a tradition risk-reward scenario. Users are going to hate keeping track of multiple passwords, with mixed case, numbers, special characters, and then throwing it all away and remembering a new one every 60 days. The reward of doing it has to outweigh that risk. Unfortunately I haven't gotten the feeling that either in this article or on many of the people here take into account the relative nature of computer security.
One of the key questions that need to be asked before a password policy is defined and implemented is what are we securing and how valuable is it? How devestating would it be if people got access to it, and how would one go about getting that access? In most of the cases that people have mentioned, the items being secured are potentially not that critical/confidential/valuable and therefore the importance of a strong password is significantly diminished.
Similarly, writing down passwords is more or less of a problem depending on where your threats are coming from, and what that password secures. I am not worried that the root password to my linux box at home is written down and taped to the box itself. Or even that it says "Root Password" right above it. It's securely formatted and difficult to guess, there's not a whole lot of important/critical info on the machine, and my main threat is coming from a random person on the network outside, not from someone specifically targeting me and breaking into my room to read the paper taped to my machine.
Memorizing multiple truly secure passwords on a rotating basis are a pain in the ass. Before you force everyone on your network to do it, sit down for a second, think about how your systems and permissions are set up, and make sure that that pain is truly necessary. If it is, you will have a solid, business based reason why, and will be easily able to explain and convince others of your position. But implementing it because it's what someone told you is the "right" way to secure a system is lazy, and because people won't see the value, they'll shortcut it anyway.
Popunders are definitely NOT the most annoying
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Not that I disagree with your main point - I actually am right there with you - but I hardly think this is the most annoying form of online advertising yet.
I have two things that personally I find much, much worse.
1) Popups on close. Window spawning hell is what initially made me get (slightly) serious about using a filtering program to weed out javascript.
2) The most annoying yet, in my mind, is what I've recently seen on Yahoo (and I'm sure other places). They now have started to adopt "floating" ads, which move around on the screen using either flash or DHTML and do not pop up a new window at all. Instead, they cover the content of the main window with moving animations and other crap. I know that these have been around for a few years, but haven't really caught on too well until now. Perusing some of the trade rags to see what the enemy is up to, it appears that they are starting to gain popularity and probably will continue to so long as the people doing the campaigns are the ones used to designing for television. They want your attention fixed on their product for a given amount of time, without any way of getting what you're really after before they're done promoting to you.
For an example of one company I found who creates these things (and a place where you can see what I'm talking about if you haven't seen them yet), see www.eyeblaster.com
But isn't that precisely why they're doing it across many, many machines (each one with different initial weightings), and each full model calculation is expected to take 8 months?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like they are expecting it to be complex, and they're attacking it in a way that still lets them get some useful result...
So, if their SDK uses GPL'ed software, and they use it internally, then there's a chance that some of the code that they end up putting in those things is also GPL'ed. If that's the case, are they required to release source? How does the GPL deal with software embedded in a physical product? If I buy the product with the compiled version of the software running on it, am I entitled to the source? Wouldn't that kill some of their DMCA claims about reverse engineering and circumvention?
How is contraception not murder on the whole when some forms of contraception do not prevent the egg from being inseminated but only kill it before it implants or develops fully? IUDs as well as things like norplant and ortho-tri-cyclen work like that. Are they not murder under the conception rule you lay out?
Come on, religion and science have been at odds forever. To say otherwise is to ignore a couple millenia worth of history. From the universe orbiting the earth to the current day where evolution is still denied in major parts of the US, religious fundamentalists are absolutely anti-science - some more than others. Now, most of the major religions have been pushed pretty hard to the center idealogically because of fairly incontrivertable public evidence proving them wrong, but there are still plenty of things they hold out on (creationists are probably the most obvious of these).
Assuming that no embryos have to be "killed" (I have trouble with using the word killed since the cells are still very much alive, their development path has just been redirected) in order to perform stem cell research using these fat cells, what do you think the reaction will be once the benefits of this research are elaborated upon? Do you think religious fundamentalists will NOT have problems once people start talking about growing replacement tissues? Organs? Bodies?
I hardly think that the objections to stem cell research are "contained", and as for consistency, well, it's based on religion so that will pretty much predetermine whether you find it consistent.
Ah, but the difference is obviously that with most software if is sucks you can fix it (sometimes in realtime with OSS) and reload it without physically swapping/manufacturing anything. With a processor problem, you've no only got to redesign around the problem, but then fire up the chip fab, and start up the process of replacing physical parts. In other words, software is easily replacable, hardware is not. It may suck, it may be unfair, but to a free market, one is forgivable, one is not.
I couldn't agree with you more that there are a whole host of things that programmers frequently write off as "features" or expected conditions or simply do not check for in their code. Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my original post. I am not trying to create an overly narrow definition of bug. I fully agree with your three precepts. Design flaws are on the fence for me depending on their severity, and aren't necessarily included in your three things.
As for the mass estimation being off, I did make an assumption from the little that I read that the estimation was an input to the software and that it wasn't off by orders of magnitude where the software should have caught it as not being reasonable. It could go either way, agreed.
The stock thing though, I'm not so sure I agree with. I think you're confusing the "we" who don't want a market crash (the exchanges and the general public) with the "we" who were running the software to get out of the market given an impending crash (the large brokers and institutions). From the point of view of the brokers who were running the software, it worked exactly as expected, and saved their asses in the market. The people who really lost out were the ones NOT running similar software. The market itself was the system that was shown to have vulnerabilities, not the software interacting with it, and the rules that were subsequently put in place in order to avoid this in the future didn't change the software running in the brokerages, but altered the behavior of the market system as a whole so that systematic trading on thresholds wouldn't have the same effect. If there were humans performing all the trades strictly in accordance to the same thresholds, a similar meltdown would have occurred. It's the equivalent of having software expose a flaw in your business and altering your business to get around that flaw more so than a problem in the software itself.
Honestly, I'm the most anal programmer I've ever worked with, and it bugs me to no end to look at or try to deal with sloppy formatting, poorly designed algorithms, etc., all in the name of "programming style". The more I work in the field, the stronger my belief that if you really care about writing good code, you can't at the same time care about branching out with your own "style". It's usually a euphamism for sloppiness/laziness.
A good number of these incidents are NOT due to bugs in software but in faulty assumptions input into that software.
If I misestimate the mass of a planet, is that a software bug?
If my software sells stock when a certain threshold is hit and yours does the same, and that least do a financial industry meltdown, did my software not work as planned, or is the issue more the dynamics of the market being somewhat unpredictable?
The tacoma narrows and london milennium bridges are both listed here, yet neither one is a software issue - hell the tacoma bridge collapsed in 1940!
That said, it is a pretty interesting list, but calling it a list of software bugs and using it to underscore the importance of regression testing software is a bit of a stretch. If anything, it underscores the importance of editing and proofreading your content.
Why anyone would really consider this "promising". Cool, yes. Geeky, yes. But come on, for the price of the hardware, you can buy a two or three generations old real machine on ebay and have a MUCH more funcitonal webserver without any of the do-it-yourself hassle. Can you really see someone going out and buying up a whole slew of dreamcasts and hard drives to build out a cheap server farm?
After all the "No Skateboarding/Bicycling/Rollerskating" signs I have seen around various towns, why would so many cities specifically allow these things on sidewalks by passing laws saying so?
Is it all just a load of local lobbyists pressing the city councils? It seems to me like there's enough hype/marketing here to choke a whole herd of horses.
The post you're ranting against was a reply to one that suggests filtering is not what we should do. That spam needs to be "killed at the source". Which means legally preventing someone from creating any mail in the first place.
Say what you will about spammers, but that IS censorship.
('Course there's plenty of people here who believe that censorship is fine in this case, but that's not what you're arguing, so I won't either.)
Fine, 75 watts per machine it is. But let's also assume that we're talking US, maybe California (where I happen to live). We're talking $0.13/kWhr on average. Let's also assume we're dealing with a "cluster in the garage" type setup here.
So, for Cringely's setup, we're looking at 6 machines, plus a 24 port switch (they seem to run from about 30 - 70 watts, so let's split the diff at 50). That's 500 watts, 24 hours a day.
So sure, for him to run his 6 machine cluster will only cost him about $50/mo. It's not an insane amount, but my point was just that it adds up and tends to be one of those ongoing expenses that people don't consider right off the bat.
The costs of a clustering setup go well beyond the initial hardware. At the level that Cringely is building (with only 6 machines), it may not be a huge problem, but running KLAT2 will cost you some dough just for the power.
A couple years ago I made a dumb mistake and bought a saltwater reef tank without realizing that it would end up costing me $150/mo. in electricity bills (it ain't cheap running 4000+ watts in lights and pumps 18 hours a day). I'm sure running 66 machines 24 hours a day ain't cheap either.
I had to hit the admin page on my Xsense (formerly MacSense) router and release and renew the IP, then do the same on my machine to refresh the DNS server entries locally, but after that, I'm all good to go.
All in all, I'm pretty happy that it only took 2 days to get me back. Sure, it's 2 more days than I was hoping for, but it could have been a lot worse.
While it may be true that the "feel" of TiVo would probably be lost if one were to hack it out on their own machine, there is a bigger problem with just buying hardware and DIY: where to get the listings and categorizations of all the shows.
TiVo itself is actually the software and the service - 3rd parties (Phillips in my case) make the box. At some point, getting up to date listings with the actors, genre, director, producer rating, similar shows, etc. gets to be extremely difficult for an individual, and as much as I love the web, it's not reasonable to expect to get exactly that info for free. This would be especially true should a lot of people catch on and start hacking their own PVR systems.
When it really comes down to it the old economic adage rings true - TINSTAAFL
The actual process of embedding info may not ever be that difficult to cut through (don't know enough about cryptographic algorithms to argue that point effectively), but you're arguing apples and oranges here.
A decent analogy here would be to camoflauge vs. heavy armor on tanks. Camo doesn't help avoid shells that much once the enemy knows you exist, but its purpose is to avoid detection in the first place. Once you're detected, that's when the armor, or crypto in this case, comes in.
To compare the two as if they're serving the same purpose is a mistake.
I am exactly the same, and totally agree with you on your approach. Hotmail fills an oh-so-necessary void in my life: that of spam collector. Work, alumni, and my personal address all get virtually no spam for the simple reason that I don't give them out to porn sites, or auction sites, or any other sites for that matter. Although I wish they didn't have to, for their own sake I really hope other people start using this kind of segmented approach to their electronic lives. Getting spam sucks, but saying there's no way to get around it is lazy at best, and a lie at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuel cells store as hydrogen, which is light and energetically dense. "Pure" electric cars store the energy in batteries which are heavy (reducing efficiency), not as energetically dense, and at least currently, use some pretty toxic compounds in them. Once the electricity is either generated by the fuel cell, or pulled from the battery then yes, the cars are pretty much the same.
First, they have a relatively small population, with a weak economy (on a global scale), and an infrastructure that isn't yet as dependent on fossil fuels as other developed countries are. This means that the political momentum isn't driving nearly as hard towards the use of fossil fuels as somewhere like the US is. It's much easier to nimbly steer a small power boat than a fully laden oil-tanker.
Second, natural resource-wise, from the article at least, it appears that they have a significantly higher ratio of available energy density (through geothermal and hydro opportunities) per capita than most industrialized countries. Which would make them a significant exporter of energy, more like the Saudi Arabia of the post-fossil-fuel era than a country weaning itself from oil because it thinks it's the right thing to do for moral reasons.
Alternative energy and a hydrogen based economy is great and all, and this certainly won't hurt the argument, but let's not think that just because Iceland moves away from oil and into hydrogen that it will be a no-brainer to apply their model anywhere else.
I think the best we can hope for is that major manufacturers use them as a testbed to get more reliable, safer, and cheaper technologies developed for use in those countries that are currently more entrenched in the business of oil. Once those techs are developed, and the kinks are worked out, and a bigger country can use them to successfully transition away from petroleum, then there's a more reasonable discussion to be had about how ready the US is to go there.
Some modern rock bands are all about this kind of thing, and it's one of the primary reasons the Grateful Dead were so popular musically (admittedly though, the drug culture that accompanied them was pretty popular in its own right). If you want improvistaion, listen to basically any jazz recording, or any live recording of a jam-type band like Phish or the Dead, or even, like you said, a live recording of a decent DJ if electronica is more to your tastes. With the artist there to alter the themes, you get all kinds of spontaniety and creativity that you just don't get in pre-arranged compositions.
Somehow I don't get the feeling that this is what you are talking about though. If what you're talking about is having commercial radio vary what it plays each time it plays it, I think you're pretty much SOL. The artist would not only have to be present each time in order to customize the music, but they would need to get away from using pre-recorded music altogether, and rely on generated music. That would change the landscape for the demand of music recordings, and we all know what happens when you suggest change to the music industry's business model...
The problem is that our rights as consumers of media are being taken away from us. That by crippling the content we buy, and making it illegal for us to work around that crippling, or to even create something that could be used to get around that crippling, the entertainment industry is hamstringing the public's rights.
The way this cartoon portrays it though, this may as well be a WTO protest. The clip seems to be one that has a strong anti-capitalist tone, the "big bad corporations want to make money" kind of thing. But this will not only NOT get the true severity of the problem across to John Q Public, it will align the EFF with the left wing anti-globalization/anti-capitalist protesters, who are far from acceptance in the mainstream. I live in Berkeley, and it reminds me a lot of the "hey, let's go protest something - it doesn't really matter what" mentality I hear all the time here. This means that they aren't just not quite getting their message across effectively, they're actually detracting from their position.
I know plenty of people familiar with the situation find the clip funny, but the few people I sent it to who are not already involved all thought it was just being critical of Disney for being a big American company. Until I explained it to them, they weren't sure whether to dismiss it as radical propaganda or not.
I fully support the EFF's cause, and I wish they had done something a little less propagandistic, and a little more explanatory.
I signed up to take the class but demand was so overwhelmingly high, I got lotteried out all four years. :(
I think I would probably have been better served if I had kept my writing concise, and stating only the two main points that I think people designing and enforcing password policies really need to consider:
1) Before you decide to arbitrarily enforce a policy, stop and actually think about how strict it really needs to be. Try to make an informed decision, rather than a knee jerk one. Fine if you err on the side of caution, but if you're going to piss off users, make it necessary.
and
2) If you're really worried about the total security of your computer systems, make sure that passwords are not your only safeguard. Patch your apps, close your open ports, remove default accounts, blah blah blah. Prevent those small cracks from bringing down the whole dam.
Universal will probably shit-can it, but unless Vanessa Carlton is selling millions of copies (never heard of her, but I may just be out of touch), every fan/sale will make a difference to her. Make sure you explain the economics of the situation to her. If you can't play the disc, and none of your friends can, that's X people who would have contributed to her pocketbook. Multiply some percentage out by her fanbase and she will start to see what kind of money she's losing by allowing the record company to do this.
If artists start hearing from former fans en masse that they are losing sales due to their record companies' practices, and that they are pissing off these fans without any doing of their own, maybe Universal will start getting heat from their breadwinners. If their assets start complaining and maybe even walking out, there's a chance that this copy protection bullshit won't have to go to courts. Maybe good old economics will move it the way of DIVX.
Depending on who you are, and what context you're in, the answers could be totally different. And depending on that context, the strength of your password may matter a lot, or not at all.
If you're just some schmoe in marketing, with no access to change anything on your personal system, no access to anything on the company network except to alter files in a personal directory on one server, your company's network does not allow remote access, and your building requires a card to get inside and another one to get up the elevator, then the importance of you choosing a strong password is relatively small.
Making people choose strong passwords is a computer based version of a tradition risk-reward scenario. Users are going to hate keeping track of multiple passwords, with mixed case, numbers, special characters, and then throwing it all away and remembering a new one every 60 days. The reward of doing it has to outweigh that risk. Unfortunately I haven't gotten the feeling that either in this article or on many of the people here take into account the relative nature of computer security.
One of the key questions that need to be asked before a password policy is defined and implemented is what are we securing and how valuable is it? How devestating would it be if people got access to it, and how would one go about getting that access? In most of the cases that people have mentioned, the items being secured are potentially not that critical/confidential/valuable and therefore the importance of a strong password is significantly diminished.
Similarly, writing down passwords is more or less of a problem depending on where your threats are coming from, and what that password secures. I am not worried that the root password to my linux box at home is written down and taped to the box itself. Or even that it says "Root Password" right above it. It's securely formatted and difficult to guess, there's not a whole lot of important/critical info on the machine, and my main threat is coming from a random person on the network outside, not from someone specifically targeting me and breaking into my room to read the paper taped to my machine.
Memorizing multiple truly secure passwords on a rotating basis are a pain in the ass. Before you force everyone on your network to do it, sit down for a second, think about how your systems and permissions are set up, and make sure that that pain is truly necessary. If it is, you will have a solid, business based reason why, and will be easily able to explain and convince others of your position. But implementing it because it's what someone told you is the "right" way to secure a system is lazy, and because people won't see the value, they'll shortcut it anyway.
I have two things that personally I find much, much worse.
1) Popups on close. Window spawning hell is what initially made me get (slightly) serious about using a filtering program to weed out javascript.
2) The most annoying yet, in my mind, is what I've recently seen on Yahoo (and I'm sure other places). They now have started to adopt "floating" ads, which move around on the screen using either flash or DHTML and do not pop up a new window at all. Instead, they cover the content of the main window with moving animations and other crap. I know that these have been around for a few years, but haven't really caught on too well until now. Perusing some of the trade rags to see what the enemy is up to, it appears that they are starting to gain popularity and probably will continue to so long as the people doing the campaigns are the ones used to designing for television. They want your attention fixed on their product for a given amount of time, without any way of getting what you're really after before they're done promoting to you.
For an example of one company I found who creates these things (and a place where you can see what I'm talking about if you haven't seen them yet), see www.eyeblaster.com
Maybe I'm missing something here, but it sounds like they are expecting it to be complex, and they're attacking it in a way that still lets them get some useful result...
So, if their SDK uses GPL'ed software, and they use it internally, then there's a chance that some of the code that they end up putting in those things is also GPL'ed. If that's the case, are they required to release source? How does the GPL deal with software embedded in a physical product? If I buy the product with the compiled version of the software running on it, am I entitled to the source? Wouldn't that kill some of their DMCA claims about reverse engineering and circumvention?
How is contraception not murder on the whole when some forms of contraception do not prevent the egg from being inseminated but only kill it before it implants or develops fully? IUDs as well as things like norplant and ortho-tri-cyclen work like that. Are they not murder under the conception rule you lay out?
Assuming that no embryos have to be "killed" (I have trouble with using the word killed since the cells are still very much alive, their development path has just been redirected) in order to perform stem cell research using these fat cells, what do you think the reaction will be once the benefits of this research are elaborated upon? Do you think religious fundamentalists will NOT have problems once people start talking about growing replacement tissues? Organs? Bodies?
I hardly think that the objections to stem cell research are "contained", and as for consistency, well, it's based on religion so that will pretty much predetermine whether you find it consistent.
Ah, but the difference is obviously that with most software if is sucks you can fix it (sometimes in realtime with OSS) and reload it without physically swapping/manufacturing anything. With a processor problem, you've no only got to redesign around the problem, but then fire up the chip fab, and start up the process of replacing physical parts. In other words, software is easily replacable, hardware is not. It may suck, it may be unfair, but to a free market, one is forgivable, one is not.
As for the mass estimation being off, I did make an assumption from the little that I read that the estimation was an input to the software and that it wasn't off by orders of magnitude where the software should have caught it as not being reasonable. It could go either way, agreed.
The stock thing though, I'm not so sure I agree with. I think you're confusing the "we" who don't want a market crash (the exchanges and the general public) with the "we" who were running the software to get out of the market given an impending crash (the large brokers and institutions). From the point of view of the brokers who were running the software, it worked exactly as expected, and saved their asses in the market. The people who really lost out were the ones NOT running similar software. The market itself was the system that was shown to have vulnerabilities, not the software interacting with it, and the rules that were subsequently put in place in order to avoid this in the future didn't change the software running in the brokerages, but altered the behavior of the market system as a whole so that systematic trading on thresholds wouldn't have the same effect. If there were humans performing all the trades strictly in accordance to the same thresholds, a similar meltdown would have occurred. It's the equivalent of having software expose a flaw in your business and altering your business to get around that flaw more so than a problem in the software itself.
Honestly, I'm the most anal programmer I've ever worked with, and it bugs me to no end to look at or try to deal with sloppy formatting, poorly designed algorithms, etc., all in the name of "programming style". The more I work in the field, the stronger my belief that if you really care about writing good code, you can't at the same time care about branching out with your own "style". It's usually a euphamism for sloppiness/laziness.
If I misestimate the mass of a planet, is that a software bug?
If my software sells stock when a certain threshold is hit and yours does the same, and that least do a financial industry meltdown, did my software not work as planned, or is the issue more the dynamics of the market being somewhat unpredictable?
The tacoma narrows and london milennium bridges are both listed here, yet neither one is a software issue - hell the tacoma bridge collapsed in 1940!
That said, it is a pretty interesting list, but calling it a list of software bugs and using it to underscore the importance of regression testing software is a bit of a stretch. If anything, it underscores the importance of editing and proofreading your content.
Why anyone would really consider this "promising". Cool, yes. Geeky, yes. But come on, for the price of the hardware, you can buy a two or three generations old real machine on ebay and have a MUCH more funcitonal webserver without any of the do-it-yourself hassle. Can you really see someone going out and buying up a whole slew of dreamcasts and hard drives to build out a cheap server farm?
Is it all just a load of local lobbyists pressing the city councils? It seems to me like there's enough hype/marketing here to choke a whole herd of horses.
The post you're ranting against was a reply to one that suggests filtering is not what we should do. That spam needs to be "killed at the source". Which means legally preventing someone from creating any mail in the first place.
Say what you will about spammers, but that IS censorship.
('Course there's plenty of people here who believe that censorship is fine in this case, but that's not what you're arguing, so I won't either.)
So, for Cringely's setup, we're looking at 6 machines, plus a 24 port switch (they seem to run from about 30 - 70 watts, so let's split the diff at 50). That's 500 watts, 24 hours a day.
So sure, for him to run his 6 machine cluster will only cost him about $50/mo. It's not an insane amount, but my point was just that it adds up and tends to be one of those ongoing expenses that people don't consider right off the bat.
The costs of a clustering setup go well beyond the initial hardware. At the level that Cringely is building (with only 6 machines), it may not be a huge problem, but running KLAT2 will cost you some dough just for the power.
A couple years ago I made a dumb mistake and bought a saltwater reef tank without realizing that it would end up costing me $150/mo. in electricity bills (it ain't cheap running 4000+ watts in lights and pumps 18 hours a day). I'm sure running 66 machines 24 hours a day ain't cheap either.
All in all, I'm pretty happy that it only took 2 days to get me back. Sure, it's 2 more days than I was hoping for, but it could have been a lot worse.
TiVo itself is actually the software and the service - 3rd parties (Phillips in my case) make the box. At some point, getting up to date listings with the actors, genre, director, producer rating, similar shows, etc. gets to be extremely difficult for an individual, and as much as I love the web, it's not reasonable to expect to get exactly that info for free. This would be especially true should a lot of people catch on and start hacking their own PVR systems.
When it really comes down to it the old economic adage rings true - TINSTAAFL
-A
A decent analogy here would be to camoflauge vs. heavy armor on tanks. Camo doesn't help avoid shells that much once the enemy knows you exist, but its purpose is to avoid detection in the first place. Once you're detected, that's when the armor, or crypto in this case, comes in.
To compare the two as if they're serving the same purpose is a mistake.
I am exactly the same, and totally agree with you on your approach. Hotmail fills an oh-so-necessary void in my life: that of spam collector. Work, alumni, and my personal address all get virtually no spam for the simple reason that I don't give them out to porn sites, or auction sites, or any other sites for that matter. Although I wish they didn't have to, for their own sake I really hope other people start using this kind of segmented approach to their electronic lives. Getting spam sucks, but saying there's no way to get around it is lazy at best, and a lie at worst.