It's not a question of paranoia. It's a question of what makes sense, and what's true historically.
From the point of view of the organisations...
It makes sense for insurers to try to deny claims whenever they can, and they've done so in the past. It makes sense for governments to want increased control over its citizenry, and historically control almost always increases, especially with technology enabling it. It makes sense that law enforcement tends to make mistakes because they're tasked with a lot and usually under-resourced. Corruption also historically does occur despite best efforts - it's human nature.
It's easy to dismiss someone as a nutjob and make offhand stereotypical comments about tinfoil hats. It's a lot harder to make a reasonable, sensible rational argument that requires neither paranoid dillusion or blind faith in a set of systems that have been shown to be flawed.
Or, just possibly, they are rational individuals who lack the privacy fetish and extremism so common on Slashdot.
Fetish eh?
Call me a fetishist when health insurance companies aren't rubbing their hands waiting to use such data to bump up premiums or refuse claims. Or perhaps when law enforcement understands that with over 6.7 billion people on the planet a 1 in 1 million chance of DNA data being incorrectly administered isn't good enough - that could put over 6700 people in jail. Or wake me when we've completely eliminated any threat of a government deciding who can and can't breed based on what's in their genes.
I have a "fetish" for privacy just as I have a fetish for air and water. I need to secure these things to guarantee my survival.
Why is censorship of illegal material bad? If the material is illegal, why shouldn't it be censored?
Can anyone make this argument? Because if the material is illegal in the first place, meaning you would normally get in trouble for accessing it, period, then a preemptive measure shouldn't harm you, logically.
Two very good reasons:
- The filtering is never perfect, therefore legitimate sites get blocked, which affects individuals and businesses.
- Such censorship allows a government to seize nearly absolute power - anything they don't like they declare illegal and block access.
Please link to some news stories of Christian suicide bombings.
Christians have traditionally preferred a different kind of insanity. In the not too distant past "Taming" the savages (usually by stealing their children and indoctrinating them into the religion, optionally killing or enslaving the parents), torturing people for "witchcraft", placing someone under house arrest officially because he dared to say the Earth wasn't the centre of the universe. Hell there are some people who still believe that Slavery is okay and base their beliefs on the bible. Also more recently convincing people in under developed 3rd world AIDS infested countries that using condoms will make you go to hell.
ALL religion is a poison. Moderate religion is just smaller amounts of poison. The problem is that if you base your morality on religion, you're basing it on myths and legends that any high schooler with a rudimentary understanding of science knows can't possibly be literally true. Morality has to be based on as close to reality and critical thinking as possible, other wise it's dangerous because it can be twisted, and tends to be exclusionary and devisive.
.. however if I were a big-shot with an important news source, I'd have my secretary call all of the relevant people on my contacts list to let them know that the email was down.
You're clearly a sensible person. Not everyone the CEO must deal with can be trusted to be sensible.
Take a step back for a moment... Your email is down for a day. So what? For most people, this is really no big deal. Especially if it only happens once in a blue moon.
Personally I'd just be annoyed. For the CEO of a company on the other hand this could be the difference between sealing an important deal in time, getting data that's vital to his or her decision making process, perhaps even the difference between saving the company and not. Yes, for anything that urgent there's still fax and other forms of communication, but people tend to assume email is always up and may not notify someone of vital information in a second way just to be sure.
I'm not sure why you scoff at this and not other business webmail applications.
I'm not the GP but Lack of a SLA perhaps? In any case I scoff at the idea of trusting a third party with any important data. If you can't afford to lose it, and if you can't afford the service outage, you shouldn't be using a 3rd party if at all possible.
My point remains...if they paid for it, Google owes them an explanation.
They agreed to pay Google for a service that explicitly does not include support. Google owes them nothing.
I had no idea that I would end up loving Leonardo DiCaprio as much as I do now when I saw him in Titanic. But after seeing movies like Catch Me if You Can and The Aviator, you'll understand how simply being a good actor can negate these kinds of labels.
Clearly the film "Titanic" turn your brain to mush! I hated the aviator, and I'm a big fan of all things that fly. ("Catch Me If You Can" was passable as light entertainment, but that man's a lousy actor).
The ".torrent" file contains a list of hashes. They don't even need to look at the file contents.
So that gives them hashes of ub3rhaxx0rz.rar, ub3rhaxx0rz.r01... ub3rhaxx0rz.r73 - when they're blocked the script kiddies just archive their files differently and away they go again. I bet they can do this faster than any company updates a list of hashes.
Seriously, have you seen the garbage on bittorent? You don't have to download the files or break any laws either to see how prolific it is. There's always some newbie posting to the torrent sites asking how to unarchive some esoteric format (or even the common ones because they don't know how). Abusing these guys as amusingly as possible seems to be about the level of entertainment that file sharers enjoy.
Using that rationale, banking itself should not exist. The principle behind a bank is that they take deposits and make loans to make a profit. The loan is made using depositor money.
Congrats you win the best straw man of the year so far.
Banks do not lend money they don't already have. If it's on loan, that's fine. When people deposit money they know it's used to finance other people's loans. If a bank started lending money they didn't have, solely because they were expecting to get it one day, that'd be a closer analogy.
As for suspended trading, in that scenario, the person who is long the shares cannot cash out their position, so there is no need to buy back shares during that period to return them. Besides, suspension should not occur, as that violates basic principles of the market.
Suspensions of trade can and do occur to give the market pause and prevent panic selling. Without them viable companies would go bust.
There is no such thing as shares not being sold. In an illiquid market, the price just rises until someone sells.
I don't agree with you. Sometimes people hold onto things and choose not to sell them at any price.
With naked shorting there's also the possibility that more shares are sold than exist in the first place. Eg. A company has a total of 100 shares but 130 shares are sold short.
Can you find a single case where anybody has actually been harmed by the issues you've presented?
I'd be one of a minority, but I play my games on my commute to and from work. Where I am I'd be looking at a minimum spend of $15 a month for shoddy wireless that wouldn't work on the train. Better wireless costs by the kilobyte. (Yes I'm in Australia). I can't justify that to play a game or two when I feel like it. Any piece of software that requires Internet connectivity isn't going to get a look in.
Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies.
In my experience the standard marketing/sales answer here is that versions 1 through 4 were internal, and that no version information is publicly available for internal versions. All questions can be met with a similar wall of nothing. Sales/marketing can be slippery and have been practising their deceit for a very long time.
Your employer basically just admitted to you that they're trying to deceive and mislead the customer.
The reason people feel more comfortable with higher version numbers is that they assume the code is more mature at version 5 than the first cut would be at version 1. Anyone with a serious interest who heavily depends on the software will see past this and look into the history of the software, especially where large amounts of money are changing hands to aquire the software. Your company on the other hand is hunting for schmucks who'll give them money without doing proper research. Not a good sign. That is not how you gain long term customers and cement a relationship that will result in further sales and on-selling. Your sales/marketting people probably already have their CV ready. So should you.
If it's not available to buy back, it has dropped to zero value. Why is it an issue if you can't buy back worthless shares?
Stock dropping to zero value is only one scenario. Usually if a company goes bust the shares are no longer traded. Ignoring that for a moment, what happens if there are no shares being sold? What happens if trading is suspended? The fundamental thing is that you don't own what you're selling in the first place. In my opinion you shouldn't ever be permitted to sell something you don't own.
That hole in the analogy is irrelevant. (No analogy is perfect). My entire point is that the shares may not necessarily be available to buy at a later point in time.
As long as you have your X shares when you want to sell them
My understanding is that short selling means you don't have the shares (you're "short") but plan to buy them cheaply at a later date because you believe their price will go down. If the price goes up you actually lose money, but what if you can't get them at all? The company goes bust for (an admittedly extreme) instance.
It's like having 2 friends (I know unimaginable for slashdot). One has a car and the other wants to buy it. You tell the one that wants to buy it that you can get it for him for $5000. He accepts and you take the cash. Now you go over to the one who actually owns it and tell him you can sell it for $4000 (hoping to pocket $1000 yourself for nothing more than arranging the deal). Now the owner may have crashed the car, may refuse to sell it etc. So you've sold someone something you don't own on the gamble that you'll be allowed to own it. Now you're forced to offer $8000 to get your friend to sell it just to meet your legal obligation. He's under no obligation to oblige.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be half a century before we're able to tell enough about a person that it could be considered an invasion of privacy.
So what you're saying is that it's their children and grandchildren that will be refused medical insurance thanks to this "selfless" act.
BTW, I wouldn't suggest you compare your sweetheart to a very slow, dim-witted pupil. Certainly not to her face.
He's got multiple businesses. She would stay with him for the money :-)
Does your tinfoil hat chafe much?
It's not a question of paranoia. It's a question of what makes sense, and what's true historically.
From the point of view of the organisations...
It makes sense for insurers to try to deny claims whenever they can, and they've done so in the past.
It makes sense for governments to want increased control over its citizenry, and historically control almost always increases, especially with technology enabling it.
It makes sense that law enforcement tends to make mistakes because they're tasked with a lot and usually under-resourced. Corruption also historically does occur despite best efforts - it's human nature.
It's easy to dismiss someone as a nutjob and make offhand stereotypical comments about tinfoil hats. It's a lot harder to make a reasonable, sensible rational argument that requires neither paranoid dillusion or blind faith in a set of systems that have been shown to be flawed.
Or, just possibly, they are rational individuals who lack the privacy fetish and extremism so common on Slashdot.
Fetish eh?
Call me a fetishist when health insurance companies aren't rubbing their hands waiting to use such data to bump up premiums or refuse claims. Or perhaps when law enforcement understands that with over 6.7 billion people on the planet a 1 in 1 million chance of DNA data being incorrectly administered isn't good enough - that could put over 6700 people in jail. Or wake me when we've completely eliminated any threat of a government deciding who can and can't breed based on what's in their genes.
I have a "fetish" for privacy just as I have a fetish for air and water. I need to secure these things to guarantee my survival.
What is next? "Microsoft wants to eat your babies"?
Netcraft confirms it!
I'm not going to judge this paper - I haven't read it thoroughly
Chances are it's false.
If it's right the chance of it being wrong and claiming to solve more than it can is high, since surely the finding applies to itself.
If it's wrong, it's wrong.
Therefore chances are it's wrong.
All this circular logic is making me thirsty.
...and Paypal makes all your transactions safe and worry free.
Pull the other one.
Why is censorship of illegal material bad? If the material is illegal, why shouldn't it be censored?
Can anyone make this argument? Because if the material is illegal in the first place, meaning you would normally get in trouble for accessing it, period, then a preemptive measure shouldn't harm you, logically.
Two very good reasons:
- The filtering is never perfect, therefore legitimate sites get blocked, which affects individuals and businesses.
- Such censorship allows a government to seize nearly absolute power - anything they don't like they declare illegal and block access.
Please link to some news stories of Christian suicide bombings.
Christians have traditionally preferred a different kind of insanity. In the not too distant past "Taming" the savages (usually by stealing their children and indoctrinating them into the religion, optionally killing or enslaving the parents), torturing people for "witchcraft", placing someone under house arrest officially because he dared to say the Earth wasn't the centre of the universe. Hell there are some people who still believe that Slavery is okay and base their beliefs on the bible. Also more recently convincing people in under developed 3rd world AIDS infested countries that using condoms will make you go to hell.
ALL religion is a poison. Moderate religion is just smaller amounts of poison. The problem is that if you base your morality on religion, you're basing it on myths and legends that any high schooler with a rudimentary understanding of science knows can't possibly be literally true. Morality has to be based on as close to reality and critical thinking as possible, other wise it's dangerous because it can be twisted, and tends to be exclusionary and devisive.
.. however if I were a big-shot with an important news source, I'd have my secretary call all of the relevant people on my contacts list to let them know that the email was down.
You're clearly a sensible person. Not everyone the CEO must deal with can be trusted to be sensible.
Take a step back for a moment... Your email is down for a day. So what? For most people, this is really no big deal. Especially if it only happens once in a blue moon.
Personally I'd just be annoyed. For the CEO of a company on the other hand this could be the difference between sealing an important deal in time, getting data that's vital to his or her decision making process, perhaps even the difference between saving the company and not. Yes, for anything that urgent there's still fax and other forms of communication, but people tend to assume email is always up and may not notify someone of vital information in a second way just to be sure.
I'm not sure why you scoff at this and not other business webmail applications.
I'm not the GP but Lack of a SLA perhaps? In any case I scoff at the idea of trusting a third party with any important data. If you can't afford to lose it, and if you can't afford the service outage, you shouldn't be using a 3rd party if at all possible.
My point remains...if they paid for it, Google owes them an explanation.
They agreed to pay Google for a service that explicitly does not include support. Google owes them nothing.
I had no idea that I would end up loving Leonardo DiCaprio as much as I do now when I saw him in Titanic. But after seeing movies like Catch Me if You Can and The Aviator, you'll understand how simply being a good actor can negate these kinds of labels.
Clearly the film "Titanic" turn your brain to mush! I hated the aviator, and I'm a big fan of all things that fly. ("Catch Me If You Can" was passable as light entertainment, but that man's a lousy actor).
The ".torrent" file contains a list of hashes. They don't even need to look at the file contents.
So that gives them hashes of ub3rhaxx0rz.rar, ub3rhaxx0rz.r01 ... ub3rhaxx0rz.r73 - when they're blocked the script kiddies just archive their files differently and away they go again. I bet they can do this faster than any company updates a list of hashes.
Seriously, have you seen the garbage on bittorent? You don't have to download the files or break any laws either to see how prolific it is. There's always some newbie posting to the torrent sites asking how to unarchive some esoteric format (or even the common ones because they don't know how). Abusing these guys as amusingly as possible seems to be about the level of entertainment that file sharers enjoy.
Using that rationale, banking itself should not exist. The principle behind a bank is that they take deposits and make loans to make a profit. The loan is made using depositor money.
Congrats you win the best straw man of the year so far.
Banks do not lend money they don't already have. If it's on loan, that's fine. When people deposit money they know it's used to finance other people's loans. If a bank started lending money they didn't have, solely because they were expecting to get it one day, that'd be a closer analogy.
As for suspended trading, in that scenario, the person who is long the shares cannot cash out their position, so there is no need to buy back shares during that period to return them. Besides, suspension should not occur, as that violates basic principles of the market.
Suspensions of trade can and do occur to give the market pause and prevent panic selling. Without them viable companies would go bust.
There is no such thing as shares not being sold. In an illiquid market, the price just rises until someone sells.
I don't agree with you. Sometimes people hold onto things and choose not to sell them at any price.
With naked shorting there's also the possibility that more shares are sold than exist in the first place. Eg. A company has a total of 100 shares but 130 shares are sold short.
Can you find a single case where anybody has actually been harmed by the issues you've presented?
Are you serious??? Read the f'ing newspaper.
I'd be one of a minority, but I play my games on my commute to and from work. Where I am I'd be looking at a minimum spend of $15 a month for shoddy wireless that wouldn't work on the train. Better wireless costs by the kilobyte. (Yes I'm in Australia). I can't justify that to play a game or two when I feel like it. Any piece of software that requires Internet connectivity isn't going to get a look in.
Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies.
In my experience the standard marketing/sales answer here is that versions 1 through 4 were internal, and that no version information is publicly available for internal versions. All questions can be met with a similar wall of nothing. Sales/marketing can be slippery and have been practising their deceit for a very long time.
Your employer basically just admitted to you that they're trying to deceive and mislead the customer.
The reason people feel more comfortable with higher version numbers is that they assume the code is more mature at version 5 than the first cut would be at version 1. Anyone with a serious interest who heavily depends on the software will see past this and look into the history of the software, especially where large amounts of money are changing hands to aquire the software. Your company on the other hand is hunting for schmucks who'll give them money without doing proper research. Not a good sign. That is not how you gain long term customers and cement a relationship that will result in further sales and on-selling. Your sales/marketting people probably already have their CV ready. So should you.
If you give it to one patient who wakes up you've got nothing but an interesting story.
Unfortunately there's money to be made from an interesting story.
He must have been shitting himself...
New meaning to the term prairie doggin'
If it's not available to buy back, it has dropped to zero value. Why is it an issue if you can't buy back worthless shares?
Stock dropping to zero value is only one scenario. Usually if a company goes bust the shares are no longer traded. Ignoring that for a moment, what happens if there are no shares being sold? What happens if trading is suspended? The fundamental thing is that you don't own what you're selling in the first place. In my opinion you shouldn't ever be permitted to sell something you don't own.
My entire point is that the shares may not necessarily be available to buy at a later point in time.
That hole in the analogy is irrelevant. (No analogy is perfect). My entire point is that the shares may not necessarily be available to buy at a later point in time.
As long as you have your X shares when you want to sell them
My understanding is that short selling means you don't have the shares (you're "short") but plan to buy them cheaply at a later date because you believe their price will go down. If the price goes up you actually lose money, but what if you can't get them at all? The company goes bust for (an admittedly extreme) instance.
It's like having 2 friends (I know unimaginable for slashdot). One has a car and the other wants to buy it. You tell the one that wants to buy it that you can get it for him for $5000. He accepts and you take the cash. Now you go over to the one who actually owns it and tell him you can sell it for $4000 (hoping to pocket $1000 yourself for nothing more than arranging the deal). Now the owner may have crashed the car, may refuse to sell it etc. So you've sold someone something you don't own on the gamble that you'll be allowed to own it. Now you're forced to offer $8000 to get your friend to sell it just to meet your legal obligation. He's under no obligation to oblige.
those that cover only the eyepiece are dangerous as fuck.
It is possible to have safe sex you know.