Sorry, it is exactly like the door example: someone rings me, I have zero control over that, all I can do is choose to answer it or not. Someone rings my door bell, I have zero control over that (walking up to someone's front door is not trespassing, in the UK or the US) and all I can do is choose to answer it or not.
The reason paying for phone calls is so barbaric is that it's so completely ripe for abuse. How's that problem with robo callers working out for you over there in the US?
Other countries zoned their cell/mobile numbers so the caller knows what they are calling and can choose to ring or not. This means the caller pays for the entire call, since it is *their choice* to make the call.
If someone came to my doorstep and I opened the door and was immediately presented with a bill/charge for opening the door then I'd be bloody pissed off. Yet that's exactly how cell phones work in the US. You can claim all you like that I "chose" to open the door but that's just being silly.
This will mitigate scenarios where the device has an open Telnet port for "factory testing" that is not turned off once it goes out in the field.
However, a lot of exploits are in the semi-custom protocols these IoT makers are hacking up themselves. Those vulnerabilities are not mitigated by firewall protection in any way.
I love the sound of this, but the problem is maintenance and security.
Right now: yes, we could sit down and spec out an appropriate PC, choose from FOSS and put together a gnarly software distribution that does what we want and we could start selling these things.
But what happens in 12 months? 24 months? The distribution needs to be maintained and updated and that takes resources and costs money. The business model will become stretched to include that indefinitely, so the only practical way is to use subscriptions, which many don't like. The fundamental problem is, however: anyone savvy enough to want this is also smart/capable enough to roll their own, while everyone else doesn't give a shit and will stick with "free" Google services. The customer is a relatively experienced privacy conscious professional who is too busy to maintain their own. Sure, there's a market there, but I worry it's too small to allow for any scaling that the product will need to reach a reasonable price point.
Not sure if you're in the US, but I thought it was standard practice in the USA (and Canada, anywhere else?) that mobile phone users had to also pay to receive calls. There was some logic to it: cell phones are issued with local regional numbers, so just by looking at a number there is no way to know whether it is a cell or a fixed line. The logic is that why should the caller be penalised for calling a cell when they expected to call a fixed line. The receiver paid the difference. This is exactly how international roaming works pretty much everywhere: the caller doesn't know the recipient is abroad, so they pay the normal rate, and the recipient pays the difference to route the call internationally (of course the reality is everyone is still getting fleeced since there will be practically zero difference to the way the calls are routed in practice).
And that's why you pay to receive cell calls in the US. In contrast to other countries it is a barbaric practice.
"Remember all those "journalists" who kept claiming that Hillary Clinton is going to win by "landslide"?"
It's not that they were smart or stupid: in the weeks before the election there was a lot of "Hillary is going to win" reporting going on everywhere. There was even a fair amount of it here on Slashdot, just mindless posts stating "Hillary is going to win". I am confident that was all part of the Hillary PR campaign.
I saw this story on Slashdot yesterday (Thursday) and it's now Friday morning (10am in England) and there is nothing on the BBC and no update to the parliament.uk page regarding the bill.
OK, so searching with Google News I can now see a few UK papers picking this up today: The Independent, Digital Trends, Out-Law, and Press Gazetta but they are not what you'd consider main-stream.
Diamonds (and most gems) have very little resale value. The jewelry business has never offered decent prices on second hand gems, and in my experience will only offer between 1/20 and 1/10 the market value. The opportunity to directly sell second hand gems via eBay allows individuals to recover some value from their old stones, and allow new purchasers to gain a good deal without the jeweler middle-man, yet my own experiences on eBay (as both a buyer and seller) have been very mixed. The market there is flooded with scams as well as cheap stones from overseas (mostly India) and no one seems to be paying fair prices on anything.
Perhaps there is a market opportunity here? Some online tool to align those selling second hand jewelry with those looking to buy some. However the fundamental problem is trust, and I doubt that can be solved with a website. Ultimately you need someone who knows what they're doing to grade and price items, which gives them too much power/influence over the sale, and before long you migrate towards what we have today.
As I wrote in my post above. While my partner has been conditioned to expect a diamond as an engagement offering, I refuse to take part. If more men made a similar stand for their principles then the market will probably collapse, or at least correct to some extent.
"I tried to talk her out of it, but the marketing is strong and she wouldn't accept all the reasonable arguments against them"
As a young man on the verge of proposing I feel your pain. The marketing is *ridiculously* strong and my partner has been heavily indoctrinated by her social experience to expect a diamond engagement ring.
It's turned me off the entire thing and I doubt I'll ever propose, even though I would personally do quite well out of the arrangement: she has more assets than I do and it's the easiest way for me to become a legal guardian of our children*.
De Beers can go to hell.
*Here in the UK fathers do not automatically become a legal guardian of children if the parents are not married.
You are right to lament the lack of confidence in the UK academic community, yet it's hardly surprising when the UK already offers one of the lowest postdoc wages in the EU. For the younger scientists, their position was already on shaky ground any way, and Brexit is just a nail in the coffin. The more senior academics will probably stay the course, but with less grant money they will fire their postdocs and not take on any more students and their research groups will wallow until the grant money can flow again.
As for foreign pension investments benefiting from a weaker pound, you are absolutely correct. I am possibly incorrect in my assessment, but I am expecting the lower value of the pound to reflect a general decrease in perceived value in the UK economy. Surprisingly the FTSE 100 has grown consistently throughout 2016, so perhaps the economy is not recoiling from Brexit as much as I had thought. Of course the full ramifications are hard to predict, since it will be years before the full effects will come to light. As a scientist with only passing economic experience but who is widely read and tries to keep up with the business news, my impression is that actually leaving the EU will be bad for the UK in the short to medium term. Long-term is anyone's guess, but my national pride does lead me to believe that long-term things will recover. That is perhaps quite irrational, but no-one's perfect.
Doubly so considering that the tech for this patch already exists, and I must point out, *already exists* within other Mozilla packages! You know that thing in Thunderbird where the email client can save all of your email passwords and encrypt them using a single password? Well, doesn't it seem similar to that other thing in Firefox where the browser can save all your passwords and encrypt them using a single password? Right. So all the Filezilla devs had to do was take the same code and apply it to Filezilla so it can do the same thing. Yet they haven't.
I'm perfectly confident that nearly any half-competent dev could have done this, which is why I would trust this patch. However...
There have been numerous problems with Filezilla over the years and I truly don't know why it's become such a train wreck of a program.
"It has world class academic and research institutions."
Research funding in the UK was a strong net recipient of funding from the EU. Without any clear mandate from the UK government to guarantee that funding levels will be maintained post Brexit, by the time the dust has settled most "world class academics" will have fucked off to greener pastures in countries where their contributions are actually valued. Hopefully the UK will eventually realise its mistake and re-supply the funding for research, but we're looking forward to a 10-20 year slump until things are back on track.
I work at one of these "world class institutions" and the mood is very sombre and most colleagues are already looking for work elsewhere. Certainly there have already been reports of EU grants being denied to UK researchers due to the uncertainty of Brexit.
Anyway, as the sibling posters here point out: those with the best education and prospects will simply go elsewhere. It will eventually self-correct, but it will put the country back decades. Is that really what everyone wants? The pound is down 18% already and nothing has even happened yet. The irony is most of the older (50+) people who voted leave have just shot themselves in the foot as by the time they retire their pensions will be quite literally, fucked.
Sorry mate, if you actually look at the demographic breakdown of the vote, you'll find the statement "masses of elderly or uneducated or poor English people" to be mostly correct. Your anecdote about knowing other people who voted differently is interesting, but not significant.
Each year we ship about a dozen PCs that control research instruments and W10 is not suitable for running them*. While we have started migrating to Linux we will need a stop-gap solution until the end of next year. W7 should fill that gap, but if our supplier suddenly cuts us off we'll be stuck.
Are there restrictions on the physical location of PCs running Enterprise Windows? Can I, for example, buy 10 Enterprise licenses and then install them on PCs and then ship those PCs to the far corners of the globe and expect them to continue to work and be legal? Since these will be running at customer sites no one wants to be paying an annual fee for these computers, and in some cases they can't. The instrument is a one off purchase price and all parts of it must continue to operate for 10-20 years without intervention. I don't buy the argument that paying again for the OS software should qualify as annual maintenance.
I'm also under the impression that most EAs contain a clause forbidding the customer from discussing/disclosing the purchase price? Can anyone comment to the cost of Enterprise? Are we talking USD$500 per seat? USD$1000?
*Quite simply (but among other things) the forced updates and forced restart are complete show stoppers. My understanding is these can be disabled in the Enterprise version.
This difference is huge, in that W7 was actually pretty good. The early resistance was as you say, resistance to change itself, but once people started using it and found it to be stable and straight forward, the quirks (Network and Sharing Centre, for example, is a bit of a mess) weren't show stoppers and they eventually upgraded.
W10 is fundamentally different in that the OS contains elements that many users DO NOT WANT or are no longer fit for purpose. I have also had many conversations with active W10 users who are sick of it and regret the "upgrade" occurring. These comments have come from users, power users, and IT admins.
"The moon's surface, however, leaves a great deal to be desired as a habitation location versus Mars."
Rei, I like your posts and you are well read/educated in rocketry and planetary science. But what are you basing this on? The 6 mbar CO2 atmosphere on Mars may as well be hard vacuum. Exposure to cosmic rays will be similar in either location. And it's a tough call between the abrasive dust on the moon and the perchlorate-laced soil on Mars. Neither is going to grow you some potatoes. No actual hard evidence for water has been discovered in either place, and until a robotic rover actually picks up a chunk of ice and melts it into water, no one in their right mind is going to travel there on the assumption that they can find water and use it in some way. OK, I'll concede, the gravity on Mars will feel more normal for the astronauts.
The moon is closer, which makes it much easier to get to.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, it is exactly like the door example: someone rings me, I have zero control over that, all I can do is choose to answer it or not. Someone rings my door bell, I have zero control over that (walking up to someone's front door is not trespassing, in the UK or the US) and all I can do is choose to answer it or not.
The reason paying for phone calls is so barbaric is that it's so completely ripe for abuse. How's that problem with robo callers working out for you over there in the US?
Other countries zoned their cell/mobile numbers so the caller knows what they are calling and can choose to ring or not. This means the caller pays for the entire call, since it is *their choice* to make the call.
If someone came to my doorstep and I opened the door and was immediately presented with a bill/charge for opening the door then I'd be bloody pissed off. Yet that's exactly how cell phones work in the US. You can claim all you like that I "chose" to open the door but that's just being silly.
This will mitigate scenarios where the device has an open Telnet port for "factory testing" that is not turned off once it goes out in the field.
However, a lot of exploits are in the semi-custom protocols these IoT makers are hacking up themselves. Those vulnerabilities are not mitigated by firewall protection in any way.
This is also a good argument against bio-metrics. What the fuck do you do when your eye scan is rejected?
"easily deployable mini-personal-cloud-server-in-a-box distributions"
I love the sound of this, but the problem is maintenance and security.
Right now: yes, we could sit down and spec out an appropriate PC, choose from FOSS and put together a gnarly software distribution that does what we want and we could start selling these things.
But what happens in 12 months? 24 months? The distribution needs to be maintained and updated and that takes resources and costs money. The business model will become stretched to include that indefinitely, so the only practical way is to use subscriptions, which many don't like. The fundamental problem is, however: anyone savvy enough to want this is also smart/capable enough to roll their own, while everyone else doesn't give a shit and will stick with "free" Google services. The customer is a relatively experienced privacy conscious professional who is too busy to maintain their own. Sure, there's a market there, but I worry it's too small to allow for any scaling that the product will need to reach a reasonable price point.
Not sure if you're in the US, but I thought it was standard practice in the USA (and Canada, anywhere else?) that mobile phone users had to also pay to receive calls. There was some logic to it: cell phones are issued with local regional numbers, so just by looking at a number there is no way to know whether it is a cell or a fixed line. The logic is that why should the caller be penalised for calling a cell when they expected to call a fixed line. The receiver paid the difference. This is exactly how international roaming works pretty much everywhere: the caller doesn't know the recipient is abroad, so they pay the normal rate, and the recipient pays the difference to route the call internationally (of course the reality is everyone is still getting fleeced since there will be practically zero difference to the way the calls are routed in practice).
And that's why you pay to receive cell calls in the US. In contrast to other countries it is a barbaric practice.
He he, nice one dickhead.
"Remember all those "journalists" who kept claiming that Hillary Clinton is going to win by "landslide"?"
It's not that they were smart or stupid: in the weeks before the election there was a lot of "Hillary is going to win" reporting going on everywhere. There was even a fair amount of it here on Slashdot, just mindless posts stating "Hillary is going to win". I am confident that was all part of the Hillary PR campaign.
Has it actually been passed?
I saw this story on Slashdot yesterday (Thursday) and it's now Friday morning (10am in England) and there is nothing on the BBC and no update to the parliament.uk page regarding the bill.
Is there a chance this hasn't actually been passed which is why it's not being reported? The BBC has no recent (within last week) news on this.
OK, so searching with Google News I can now see a few UK papers picking this up today: The Independent, Digital Trends, Out-Law, and Press Gazetta but they are not what you'd consider main-stream.
Fuck the main-stream media.
Fuck the UK government.
The very same feature is already in Thunderbird and Firefox: both are Mozilla packages.
Diamonds (and most gems) have very little resale value. The jewelry business has never offered decent prices on second hand gems, and in my experience will only offer between 1/20 and 1/10 the market value. The opportunity to directly sell second hand gems via eBay allows individuals to recover some value from their old stones, and allow new purchasers to gain a good deal without the jeweler middle-man, yet my own experiences on eBay (as both a buyer and seller) have been very mixed. The market there is flooded with scams as well as cheap stones from overseas (mostly India) and no one seems to be paying fair prices on anything.
Perhaps there is a market opportunity here? Some online tool to align those selling second hand jewelry with those looking to buy some. However the fundamental problem is trust, and I doubt that can be solved with a website. Ultimately you need someone who knows what they're doing to grade and price items, which gives them too much power/influence over the sale, and before long you migrate towards what we have today.
As I wrote in my post above. While my partner has been conditioned to expect a diamond as an engagement offering, I refuse to take part. If more men made a similar stand for their principles then the market will probably collapse, or at least correct to some extent.
"I tried to talk her out of it, but the marketing is strong and she wouldn't accept all the reasonable arguments against them"
As a young man on the verge of proposing I feel your pain. The marketing is *ridiculously* strong and my partner has been heavily indoctrinated by her social experience to expect a diamond engagement ring.
It's turned me off the entire thing and I doubt I'll ever propose, even though I would personally do quite well out of the arrangement: she has more assets than I do and it's the easiest way for me to become a legal guardian of our children*.
De Beers can go to hell.
*Here in the UK fathers do not automatically become a legal guardian of children if the parents are not married.
Great post, thanks.
You are right to lament the lack of confidence in the UK academic community, yet it's hardly surprising when the UK already offers one of the lowest postdoc wages in the EU. For the younger scientists, their position was already on shaky ground any way, and Brexit is just a nail in the coffin. The more senior academics will probably stay the course, but with less grant money they will fire their postdocs and not take on any more students and their research groups will wallow until the grant money can flow again.
As for foreign pension investments benefiting from a weaker pound, you are absolutely correct. I am possibly incorrect in my assessment, but I am expecting the lower value of the pound to reflect a general decrease in perceived value in the UK economy. Surprisingly the FTSE 100 has grown consistently throughout 2016, so perhaps the economy is not recoiling from Brexit as much as I had thought. Of course the full ramifications are hard to predict, since it will be years before the full effects will come to light. As a scientist with only passing economic experience but who is widely read and tries to keep up with the business news, my impression is that actually leaving the EU will be bad for the UK in the short to medium term. Long-term is anyone's guess, but my national pride does lead me to believe that long-term things will recover. That is perhaps quite irrational, but no-one's perfect.
I would.
Doubly so considering that the tech for this patch already exists, and I must point out, *already exists* within other Mozilla packages! You know that thing in Thunderbird where the email client can save all of your email passwords and encrypt them using a single password? Well, doesn't it seem similar to that other thing in Firefox where the browser can save all your passwords and encrypt them using a single password? Right. So all the Filezilla devs had to do was take the same code and apply it to Filezilla so it can do the same thing. Yet they haven't.
I'm perfectly confident that nearly any half-competent dev could have done this, which is why I would trust this patch. However...
There have been numerous problems with Filezilla over the years and I truly don't know why it's become such a train wreck of a program.
WinSCP is a much better alternative.
Done and done. It's a really good program.
95%?
Try 99.999%
"It has world class academic and research institutions."
Research funding in the UK was a strong net recipient of funding from the EU. Without any clear mandate from the UK government to guarantee that funding levels will be maintained post Brexit, by the time the dust has settled most "world class academics" will have fucked off to greener pastures in countries where their contributions are actually valued. Hopefully the UK will eventually realise its mistake and re-supply the funding for research, but we're looking forward to a 10-20 year slump until things are back on track.
I work at one of these "world class institutions" and the mood is very sombre and most colleagues are already looking for work elsewhere. Certainly there have already been reports of EU grants being denied to UK researchers due to the uncertainty of Brexit.
Anyway, as the sibling posters here point out: those with the best education and prospects will simply go elsewhere. It will eventually self-correct, but it will put the country back decades. Is that really what everyone wants? The pound is down 18% already and nothing has even happened yet. The irony is most of the older (50+) people who voted leave have just shot themselves in the foot as by the time they retire their pensions will be quite literally, fucked.
Sorry mate, if you actually look at the demographic breakdown of the vote, you'll find the statement "masses of elderly or uneducated or poor English people" to be mostly correct. Your anecdote about knowing other people who voted differently is interesting, but not significant.
Go home idiot.
"The main goal is to grab as much land as possible"
Why?
Can anyone elaborate on this some more?
Each year we ship about a dozen PCs that control research instruments and W10 is not suitable for running them*. While we have started migrating to Linux we will need a stop-gap solution until the end of next year. W7 should fill that gap, but if our supplier suddenly cuts us off we'll be stuck.
Are there restrictions on the physical location of PCs running Enterprise Windows? Can I, for example, buy 10 Enterprise licenses and then install them on PCs and then ship those PCs to the far corners of the globe and expect them to continue to work and be legal? Since these will be running at customer sites no one wants to be paying an annual fee for these computers, and in some cases they can't. The instrument is a one off purchase price and all parts of it must continue to operate for 10-20 years without intervention. I don't buy the argument that paying again for the OS software should qualify as annual maintenance.
I'm also under the impression that most EAs contain a clause forbidding the customer from discussing/disclosing the purchase price? Can anyone comment to the cost of Enterprise? Are we talking USD$500 per seat? USD$1000?
*Quite simply (but among other things) the forced updates and forced restart are complete show stoppers. My understanding is these can be disabled in the Enterprise version.
This difference is huge, in that W7 was actually pretty good. The early resistance was as you say, resistance to change itself, but once people started using it and found it to be stable and straight forward, the quirks (Network and Sharing Centre, for example, is a bit of a mess) weren't show stoppers and they eventually upgraded.
W10 is fundamentally different in that the OS contains elements that many users DO NOT WANT or are no longer fit for purpose. I have also had many conversations with active W10 users who are sick of it and regret the "upgrade" occurring. These comments have come from users, power users, and IT admins.
"The moon's surface, however, leaves a great deal to be desired as a habitation location versus Mars."
Rei, I like your posts and you are well read/educated in rocketry and planetary science. But what are you basing this on? The 6 mbar CO2 atmosphere on Mars may as well be hard vacuum. Exposure to cosmic rays will be similar in either location. And it's a tough call between the abrasive dust on the moon and the perchlorate-laced soil on Mars. Neither is going to grow you some potatoes. No actual hard evidence for water has been discovered in either place, and until a robotic rover actually picks up a chunk of ice and melts it into water, no one in their right mind is going to travel there on the assumption that they can find water and use it in some way. OK, I'll concede, the gravity on Mars will feel more normal for the astronauts.
The moon is closer, which makes it much easier to get to.
"I used to work in a quiet open-plan floor and the guy two seats over had a Mac and I could hear his fan more than mine."
I think he was doing more work than you!
Respect. Australia is still getting shafted...