You probably wouldn't want to cap salaries at the median income of their constituents, because the effect that would have would just be to ensure that no average person would ever be able to (or want to) go into politics. Instead only the independently wealthy who had gotten bored with accruing money and decided to try accruing power would be able to run for office, because they'd be able to support themselves.
That's the reason why full-time politicial jobs are paid to begin with. If they weren't, only the rich would have them. This was a pretty common practice in other countries in the past as a way of keeping the riffraff out of powerful offices -- make sure that it cost a lot of money to inhabit that office, and don't pay them anything. (Here in the United States we've basically gone down that road, just with campaign donations instead of direct salary.)
Note that I'm not saying that rich people can't make good politicians -- people who've made their money honestly may in fact be quite bright, and may have a lot to bring to the table. But making money a requirement in order to hold office probably isn't going to help make the system representative.
The nice thing about writing a paper letter is that generally you get a paper response back, which I have yet to get from the numerous emails I've ever written. At least with my paper letters, I know some junior staffer's intern's assistant actually opened the envelope and skimmed enough of what I wrote to determine the issue at hand, pick the form letter response out of the pile, and mail it back to me. (Naturally not paying for the postage, but that's government for you.)
What gets me about this issue is that we apparently only noticed it a day before it's going into committee for discussion. That seems rather odd -- most bills have a longer period of public comment before they make it to a committee.
I'm not sure whether this means that the bill is on a fast track or not, and if it is, whether it's on the fast track to passage, or if somebody is trying to bury it in committee extra-quick as a way of deep-sixing it.
Just out of curiosity, and because I'm in the market for one, what kayak did you buy? And what do you think of it, compared to the more standard fiberglass/plastic ones?
Why stop there? Why not just build a VMWare plugin for Firefox?
Why stop at being a web browser when you can be a hypervisor too?
Re:Almost makes you feel sorry for IE users
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Firefox VoIP Client
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· Score: 5, Funny
He doesn't know. That's the beauty of IE "extensions"... they just show up on your computer, by magic!
It's the state-of-the-art in software distribution. They install it on your computer before you even know you want it there. Microsoft has always been ahead of the curve here.
I would argue that your differentiation is artificial.
Sure, you can write in the dirt with a stick. But that writing isn't very useful, it's not like writing a book. Useful writing -- producing something that can be passed from one person down to another and easily read, and stored, requires a substantial investment in technology. It's not what we think of when we think "high tech" today, but think of when writing was introduced.
Even training people to write is a big challenge or risk: during the time when you're teaching some kid to write, they could have been doing more useful work, like gathering food or working on the farm (or learning those skills). Teaching your child to read at the expense of teaching them something else was probably a pretty big gamble in the early days of writing.
Not to mention the physical materials for writing: either paper or hides/vellum or tablets, all of which take time to prepare, time that could have been used for something more important (and in many cases consume materials that could have been used for other things).
There's nothing "intrinisic" about the ability to write. It's something you do after substantial amounts of training, and generally do with tools -- ones you either manufacture yourself or have someone else manufacture for you -- and nothing about it is cheap or free. Until fairly recently, paper was an exceptionally expensive commodity in itself. If you spent a lot of time learning to write, and then couldn't find a supply of paper, that skill was basically wasted. And if you were a professional writer or scribe and couldn't find materials, you'd best be seeking an alternate career (guess you should have taken your mother's advice and become a miller after all).
Just as a parallel, I (and probably a lot of other people reading this) make their living working with computers. I don't build computers per se, I just use them. If I wasn't able to find a computer to use, I'd be in just as much trouble as the scribe who couldn't find any papyrus to write on. We're both dependent on "high technology," relative to our societies.
So to say that 'lower technology' is lower risk, is only true from the perspective of a particular high technology society. What qualifies as 'high tech' changes over time, and being on the cutting edge always involves some risk. As societies become dependent on new technologies for maintaining their daily lives (and quality of living), it effectively means that they can't ever move back to a previous stage on the historical timeline.
When the storytellers of Greece first decided to write down their stories and stop trying to pass them along verbally, they were taking a huge risk on the future availibility of this (then new) writing technology. They were making themselves dependent on it, as they forgot what they had memorized (or were replaced by people who were used to reading and not memorizing and reciting). Likewise, every day as we get used to new inventions, we become dependent on them. The gamble we take is the same gamble that people have taken throughout the ages, and generally it's been a good bet.
Chances are, the only events that could cause that dependency on technology to become a problem (i.e., if we forgot how to make computer chips), would occur after a breakdown of our civilization anyway, and we'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. (Like 'how long will the nuclear winter last?')
However, I do think the new attack vectors that come with technology, as avenues that our lives could be meddled in by the government or corporations or just generally malicious individuals, should be carefully weighed as one of the hazards of adopting anything new. Further down in this thread I wrote about how I'm uncomfortable with the idea of software that isn't open source or hasn't been audited by a neutral party, being used in biomedical or bioinformatics or human-augmentation applications, because when you have that element of dependency on technology, people have a right to know wh
Ultimately, their political opponents are going to do that anyway. It wouldn't matter if they were called the "People For the Reformation of Copyright Law with Respect and Attention Paid to the Rights of Artists and Their Corporate Masters (PFTROCLWRAAPTTROAATCM)," at the end of the day the RIAA/MPAA/BSA is going to paint them with the criminal brush. Anyone who opposes their party line is going to be called a criminal, period. That's how they work. You're either with them 100%, or eventually they're going to call you an evil pirate and you'd better have a good response.
At least this way, they get to have the piracy argument first, potentially on their terms, rather than making it something that they seemed ashamed of, and get blindsided by it later.
If you know someone is going to call you on something, it can be advantageous just to "out yourself" at the beginning, and start working on your public perception, rather than letting it linger as some dirty secret, or as something you constantly have to downplay (like the EFF has to).
I don't know if the maneuver will work, but at this point I'd be willing to try anything. "We're here, we're pirates, get used to it" might be the best answer to the 'piracy is stealing and stealing is a crime!!!!' rhetoric from the other camp.
I don't know where you were 30 years ago, but the oceans weren't exactly lousy with bloodthirsty buccaneers back in 1976, either. It's only going to be some rather geriatric folks that actually associate "pirate" with people who capture ships and execute their crews on the high seas -- or the very small minority of people who are from areas of the world where that still happens. It's been a long time since pirates were anything but clownish semi-villians in the public consiousness here in America, more than just the youngest generation here today.
Just remember -- the original Peter Pan, the one that spawned the image of Captain Hook as the evil-but-neurotic guy who's scared of crocodiles, was released in 1953. There are probably more kids in today's generation that haven't seen it than there are adults.
So... You'll give them money to defend your ability to not pay for stuff?
Why not? It sure beats buying stuff 'legitimately,' and thus giving your money to somebody who is going to use it to twist your government into taking more rights away from you than they already have.
Sounds great. One thing though: we're going to need to fire Darl McBride and replace him with Ozzy Ozborne. And Hulk Hogan will be the CFO... do you think we could get Paris Hilton as head of HR?
Actually, we'd better be careful; the company might not go into the ground as quickly that way.
It's Shrewsbury, actually. Although I doubt there's anyone there anymore to get offended. I don't know what's in Digital's old building, but they're long gone from that area, as are most of the old Boston-based minicomputer companies. (Data General, Prime...so many others.)
I don't want to sound like the party-line OSS fanboy here, but that seems like a perfect argument for why you shouldn't allow code that you haven't audited yourself, or had audited by a trusted entity, in any sort of biomedical or communications application.
I certainly wouldn't want to have some sort of device either implanted in me, or worn on my person all the time and collecting a lot of personal information, which might be phoning home to its masters without my knowledge.
Especially when you get into the realm of systems designed to augment one's memory, there's a lot of creepiness potential. In order for something like that to be useful, you have to trust it. You have to be able to ask it "when was the last time I saw this person?" and for it to search its records and pull up a result. Because of that trust of the device, which is required for it to be useful, there's the potential for abuse. I.e., a company could modify the data and cause you to 'remember' things that didn't happen, or to feel differently about things. For example, you might ask 'when is the last time I had [competitor's brand] soda?' and the machine might tell you the last time you had it was when you went to that Indian restaurant where you got food poisoning. That's not very subtle -- I'm sure the Madison Avenue boys could come up with all sorts of ways to bias data without factually altering it -- but you get the point.
With these things on the horizon, although I'm generally a non-believer in government intervention, I think it might be time to step in and require that companies marketing software for implantable or human-augmentation (or any other kind of biomedical or semi-biomedical) application, either make their code open, or have it reviewed by an impartial body. (This latter case I'm not sure is possible, since I believe that everybody has a price, thus there is no such thing as an always impartial body.)
In another post in this thread I wrote that I thought that the risk of becoming dependent on technology is usually offset by the benefits that the technology brings to people who use it. I think that's true; however, "black boxes" that are not widely understood make the risks of dependency on that technology far greater, since it means you are implicitly trusting a very small number of people with great responsibility and power, and great power and responsibility are not things that small numbers of people handle very well.
I'm sure people probably said similar things when writing was invented: 'what of the human ability to memorize a thousand-line epic poem and recite it verbatim? Won't we become dependent on writing things down?'
Short answer: yes, we will be dependent on technology. But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Sometimes there is a net benefit from becoming dependent on a "crutch." We're obviously dependent right now on writing; there are lots of things that we all really don't know but really just know where they can be found in writing someplace.
If we all forgot how to write tomorrow, we'd be in very tough shape. All the information that we've stored using that technology would suddenly become inaccessible.
Likewise, if we became dependent on neural implants or something, and they suddenly stopped working, it wouldn't be much fun. However, the risk of that happening must be weighed against the benefits that the technology offers. And of course, it has to be weighted against the circumstances in which the technology might stop working: if the only way that the neural implant is going to stop working is if somebody detonates an EMP near your head, then it's probably an acceptable risk (because if someone does do that, you're probably going to have bigger problems than the implant working/not working).
Anytime a new technology comes into widespread use, there's a risk that we might at some point in the future forget how to maintain it, and have to figure how how to live without -- and that would be an uncomfortable transition, undoubtedly. However, history has shown that we're pretty good about retaining developments once we become dependent on them.
Overall, the risk/benefit analysis is something that individiual people are going to have to do for themselves, when new technologies become available. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't think I'd get a v0.09-alpha neural implant put in, but there's a certain point where I could see the benefits outweighing the risks (heck, just something to tell me people's names at dinner parties would be worth it). Others are going to make that determination differently.
They have small digital recorders. I have one, which I used to use to record lectures and (during a period when I couldn't type due to RSI) do dictation.
I have one made by Olympus, and it's OK. Not wonderful, but OK. It uses some strange proprietary way of talking to the recorder (it's not Mass Storage class), so you have to use their software to get the files off of it, but luckily they have software for Mac and it doesn't suck too hard. It records things into an odd format as well, called DSS (Digital Speech "Standard," I suspect it's patented eight ways from Sunday). However their software will happily convert to AIFF if you tell it to. The upside is that you can get something like 5 hours of low quality (ok for dictation) recording on a machine that only has about 16MB of storage. Mine also has a 1/8" minijack for attaching an external microphone, so you can use it to get fairly high-quality recordings of lectures if you use a directional microphone and set it to high quality.
Mine's several years old (it's the DS-330) so I don't know how much they've improved or degraded the newer ones; it seems like they now use xD cards, which is an improvment over fixed memory but it's still unfortunate they they didn't go with CF or MMC/SD cards. And they still use that bizarro DSS format.
I'm not sure what the legality of wiring yourself up with a recorder continuously would be (I thought you only had to have one party's permission?), but the technology to do it is certainly available. If you can get 5 hours of low quality on a 16MB recorder, than you can defintely record for longer than your batteries will hold out by using a big xD card on the modern ones. Get a mini lapel mic and hide it under your tie ('speak directly into the flower...'), put the recorder in the small of your back, and you're ready to be the next Linda Tripp.
Although having a 3-d record of everything that you've seen or looked at would undoubtedly be very cool, there are other reasons why the device might have two cameras: it might just be that's the only way to get decent coverage of the human field of vision, without putting a big fisheye lens on your forehead or something. This seems pretty likely: it's fairly easy to take two recordings and sew them together to make one big panorama (maybe not computationally easy, but it's possible to do this), and it may be economical to use two cheap cameras with limited fields of view, rather than using a wide-field camera, or a very high-resolution camera with expensive optics to give it a wide field.
It might be possible in software though to replace the interpolation (that makes the panorama from the two video feeds) into a 3-d source for playback later, although you might end up storing a lot more data this way. If currently it makes it into a single image and then compresses this, instead you'd have to store the two cameras' outputs seperately, and that could give away a lot of your compression gains (if you were using something like JPEG or MPEG on the sewn-together output).
Well, over at the usual place, I found some values for the specific energy (potential chemical energy per unit mass) in a variety of fuels. A better source would probably be the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but I left it in my other coat today.
Gasoline is quoted at being around 44 megajoules per kilogram. (More sources here.)
Under ideal conditions, neglecting irreversible losses like wind and rolling resistance, you'd only have to burn fuel when you wanted to change your vehicle's speed -- because without friction it would just roll along all day -- and the energy required is a pretty trivial Newtonian mechanics problem. The work to accelerate it is just (1/2)mv^2, where m is the mass and v is the velocity. Then of course you add the 'real work' to change its position: going uphill 'costs' you mgh, where g is acceleration due to gravity and h is the height upwards moved.
If you had a perfect regenerative braking system, then theoretically you'd never need to use any more gas at all (except when going to a higher altitude then you'd gone before); you'd just stop using the regenerative brakes, then turn that energy right back out and use it to start moving again. Without regenerative brakes, you just waste the input energy whenever you stop (except whatever energy you've stored by virtue of the car's position, i.e. by parking it at the top of a hill).
Of course in real life that doesn't happen: the regenerative brakes are going to have losses, there's non-trivial rolling resistance and wind resistance that grows (I think) proportionally to the square of your forward speed.
I'm not going to go through all the math right now, but basically it's a very simple problem that boils down to what simplifying assumptions you want to make. If you add in rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag and make realistic assumptions about the brakes and transmission, at a certain point all you're asking is "what is the fuel economy of an average car, if it had a perfectly efficient engine?" If that's the question, there are easier ways to solve it: you can just figure out the "thermal efficiency" of an internal-combustion engine (not hard: put an engine on a dyno and measure the energy output at the same time as you're measuring the fuel going in) and calculate what the fuel consumption would have been, if it were 100% efficient.
The accepted figure for thermal efficiency of an ICE seems to be around 25-26%, so the short answer is that if the engine in your car right now was a perfect converter of the energy stored in gasoline to mechanical movement, you'd get around four times the gas mileage that you do right now.
Shhhh, you're destroying the manufactured controversy.
In reality, nobody is pointing fingers at telecommuters -- in fact, in the incidents that I've heard in the news lately, there wasn't any real "telecommuting" going on. Somebody just copied an assload of data off of the server to their local machine, and then took the machine home with them. I'd call that 'working from home,' not 'telecommuting.' And the copying of the data onto the local machine was just inappropriate to begin with. That's mostly a user-training issue and not a technological one.
Sure, there are measures that could have been put in place to allow the behavior to happen without creating such a huge problem in the event the laptop was stolen: the drive could have been encrypted, etc. But ultimately, if you don't train your employees to follow the security procedures, there are always going to be problems. (Use encrypted HDs and don't tell people not to use USB sticks, you're going to get data loss. Say 'no USB sticks,' and they'll use CD-RWs. Or email. Or whatever. My point is, the problem at that point is not technology, but your users.)
I doubt that the data loss events will cause anyone who's legitimately telecommuting or even working from home to do anything differently. The only thing it should do is serve as a wake-up call to managers who are allowing employees to do things that they're not really supposed to do (like take large amounts of sensitive data home with them). In the long run, it'll probably make the new encryption features in Win Vista more popular, but that's neither here nor there.
All in all, I think the controversy was manufactured. It was obvious enough to anyone watching on CNN that the fault of the VA incident lay with the employee who took the data home on the laptop when they weren't supposed to; it wasn't a failure of some telework scheme, just user error / bad judgement.
Agreed. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone into a supposedly "secure" facility and really wondered where they were getting their security people. Unlike all the bad 80s and 90s movies you've ever seen, most "corporate security" people that I've met are not scary ex-mil types, they're just your basic hourly wage slaves looking for something that's easier than working the retail floor at your local big box.
Actual government facilities are different, but I can't imagine it would cost a whole lot just to toss cash at some of those brand-name facilities security people until they let you in the front door. If you're actually going after information (worth millions or billions) and not just equipment, giving one of those guys his annual salary in a paper bag is chump change.
Or alternately, I can't imagine that the personnell retention rate of those security firms is very good: doesn't seem like it would be very hard to get someone on the inside to help you out a little bit.
It used to be the case that physical security was much tighter; there was a time when a wall safe was a common feature of executive offices -- when's the last time anybody saw one of those? I know I haven't. As we're concentrating so much on information and data security, we have to be careful not to neglect physical security, because it's getting to the point where if a well-dressed person can't just walk in the door at a lot of places, they could probably buy their way in without too much trouble. If you're paying your security people minimum wage, don't be surprised when one of them disappears the day after all your data gets ripped off, never to be seen again.
Doesn't really matter: if you take possession of a physical device, no matter what the chain of custody is, it could concievably betray your physical position. Just think, it could have inside it, in addition to some flash memory, a GPS receiver and a cellular modem/transmitter, and just report your location, or some kind of beacon transmitter. Cleverly designed, it could be pretty hard for you to detect (burst transmission, etc.).
Granted, there are probably not too many adversaries in the world that have the capability of fabricating and using something like that, but it all depends how paranoid you want to be.
I think before we attempt to stockpile tractors and food (which is perishable, and would therefore need to be re-stocked every few years) and fertilizer and such to feed people in a major city for an entire year in case of a major disaster, we should perhaps focus first on feeding the starving people found all over the world.
Why? Let me play the Devil's Advocate for a second: saving starving people in Africa now doesn't help preserve the culture of the people who are considering the seed storage. Ultimately, there's an aspect of cultural as well as species survival in here.
People are going to do whatever it takes to make sure that they themselves (and their families) survive, before they do anything for their neighbors. They're going to do whatever they can to help their neighbors and other people that they know personally survive, before they do anything for people they don't know. And they're going to do whatever they can to ensure that people who look like them, speak the same language as them, and have basically the same set of beliefs as them survive, before they do anything about people who are a different color, language, culture, and religion. It's a hierarchy of social and physical closeness, and one's own culture is always going to take precedence over another's. (I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed, the Zaireians would be building bunkers for doomsday, even if it meant diverting funds away from those starving sops in the Americas -- it's mostly luck and geography that things ended up the way they are. I am certainly not making an argument of any inherent cultural superiority either way. Everyone protects their own when the shit hits the fan.)
People are always going to ensure the surivival of themselves, their families, and their own culture -- for as long as they can possibly envision -- before they move on to helping other people who they don't have any connection to right now. That's why people in developed countries build bunkers for a nuclear holocaust that might never happen, rather than send food to other places. Building the bunkers is a justifiable, even necessary expense, because it ensures the preservation of your own culture.
Just as our biological programming drives us to pass on our genes through procreation and protecting our offspring, our social programming drives us to protect our society and culture, even when that comes at the expense of other people -- who, since we don't know them, are just abstract concepts.
Google: Uh, I don't think so. I think we'll just make google.com inaccessible altogether to your pipes, and buy a few ads supporting your competitors who provide full service at normal prices. Take a minute to think about how your customers might react to that before you try to throw your weight around against us.
So if you waste 5 minutes each from 5 or 10 million people, can we just say you're guilty of murder and execute you?
Because if so, there are a whole lot of people on American Idol that I want to make sure are first up against the wall. Then we'll start on spammers and the guy who wrote the Llama Song.
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You probably wouldn't want to cap salaries at the median income of their constituents, because the effect that would have would just be to ensure that no average person would ever be able to (or want to) go into politics. Instead only the independently wealthy who had gotten bored with accruing money and decided to try accruing power would be able to run for office, because they'd be able to support themselves.
That's the reason why full-time politicial jobs are paid to begin with. If they weren't, only the rich would have them. This was a pretty common practice in other countries in the past as a way of keeping the riffraff out of powerful offices -- make sure that it cost a lot of money to inhabit that office, and don't pay them anything. (Here in the United States we've basically gone down that road, just with campaign donations instead of direct salary.)
Note that I'm not saying that rich people can't make good politicians -- people who've made their money honestly may in fact be quite bright, and may have a lot to bring to the table. But making money a requirement in order to hold office probably isn't going to help make the system representative.
The nice thing about writing a paper letter is that generally you get a paper response back, which I have yet to get from the numerous emails I've ever written. At least with my paper letters, I know some junior staffer's intern's assistant actually opened the envelope and skimmed enough of what I wrote to determine the issue at hand, pick the form letter response out of the pile, and mail it back to me. (Naturally not paying for the postage, but that's government for you.)
What gets me about this issue is that we apparently only noticed it a day before it's going into committee for discussion. That seems rather odd -- most bills have a longer period of public comment before they make it to a committee.
I'm not sure whether this means that the bill is on a fast track or not, and if it is, whether it's on the fast track to passage, or if somebody is trying to bury it in committee extra-quick as a way of deep-sixing it.
Just out of curiosity, and because I'm in the market for one, what kayak did you buy? And what do you think of it, compared to the more standard fiberglass/plastic ones?
Why stop there? Why not just build a VMWare plugin for Firefox?
Why stop at being a web browser when you can be a hypervisor too?
He doesn't know. That's the beauty of IE "extensions" ... they just show up on your computer, by magic!
It's the state-of-the-art in software distribution. They install it on your computer before you even know you want it there. Microsoft has always been ahead of the curve here.
I can see it now on the ECG readout:
"Netcraft confirms it -- you are dead."
I would argue that your differentiation is artificial.
Sure, you can write in the dirt with a stick. But that writing isn't very useful, it's not like writing a book. Useful writing -- producing something that can be passed from one person down to another and easily read, and stored, requires a substantial investment in technology. It's not what we think of when we think "high tech" today, but think of when writing was introduced.
Even training people to write is a big challenge or risk: during the time when you're teaching some kid to write, they could have been doing more useful work, like gathering food or working on the farm (or learning those skills). Teaching your child to read at the expense of teaching them something else was probably a pretty big gamble in the early days of writing.
Not to mention the physical materials for writing: either paper or hides/vellum or tablets, all of which take time to prepare, time that could have been used for something more important (and in many cases consume materials that could have been used for other things).
There's nothing "intrinisic" about the ability to write. It's something you do after substantial amounts of training, and generally do with tools -- ones you either manufacture yourself or have someone else manufacture for you -- and nothing about it is cheap or free. Until fairly recently, paper was an exceptionally expensive commodity in itself. If you spent a lot of time learning to write, and then couldn't find a supply of paper, that skill was basically wasted. And if you were a professional writer or scribe and couldn't find materials, you'd best be seeking an alternate career (guess you should have taken your mother's advice and become a miller after all).
Just as a parallel, I (and probably a lot of other people reading this) make their living working with computers. I don't build computers per se, I just use them. If I wasn't able to find a computer to use, I'd be in just as much trouble as the scribe who couldn't find any papyrus to write on. We're both dependent on "high technology," relative to our societies.
So to say that 'lower technology' is lower risk, is only true from the perspective of a particular high technology society. What qualifies as 'high tech' changes over time, and being on the cutting edge always involves some risk. As societies become dependent on new technologies for maintaining their daily lives (and quality of living), it effectively means that they can't ever move back to a previous stage on the historical timeline.
When the storytellers of Greece first decided to write down their stories and stop trying to pass them along verbally, they were taking a huge risk on the future availibility of this (then new) writing technology. They were making themselves dependent on it, as they forgot what they had memorized (or were replaced by people who were used to reading and not memorizing and reciting). Likewise, every day as we get used to new inventions, we become dependent on them. The gamble we take is the same gamble that people have taken throughout the ages, and generally it's been a good bet.
Chances are, the only events that could cause that dependency on technology to become a problem (i.e., if we forgot how to make computer chips), would occur after a breakdown of our civilization anyway, and we'd have a lot bigger problems to worry about. (Like 'how long will the nuclear winter last?')
However, I do think the new attack vectors that come with technology, as avenues that our lives could be meddled in by the government or corporations or just generally malicious individuals, should be carefully weighed as one of the hazards of adopting anything new. Further down in this thread I wrote about how I'm uncomfortable with the idea of software that isn't open source or hasn't been audited by a neutral party, being used in biomedical or bioinformatics or human-augmentation applications, because when you have that element of dependency on technology, people have a right to know wh
Ultimately, their political opponents are going to do that anyway. It wouldn't matter if they were called the "People For the Reformation of Copyright Law with Respect and Attention Paid to the Rights of Artists and Their Corporate Masters (PFTROCLWRAAPTTROAATCM)," at the end of the day the RIAA/MPAA/BSA is going to paint them with the criminal brush. Anyone who opposes their party line is going to be called a criminal, period. That's how they work. You're either with them 100%, or eventually they're going to call you an evil pirate and you'd better have a good response.
At least this way, they get to have the piracy argument first, potentially on their terms, rather than making it something that they seemed ashamed of, and get blindsided by it later.
If you know someone is going to call you on something, it can be advantageous just to "out yourself" at the beginning, and start working on your public perception, rather than letting it linger as some dirty secret, or as something you constantly have to downplay (like the EFF has to).
I don't know if the maneuver will work, but at this point I'd be willing to try anything. "We're here, we're pirates, get used to it" might be the best answer to the 'piracy is stealing and stealing is a crime!!!!' rhetoric from the other camp.
I don't know where you were 30 years ago, but the oceans weren't exactly lousy with bloodthirsty buccaneers back in 1976, either. It's only going to be some rather geriatric folks that actually associate "pirate" with people who capture ships and execute their crews on the high seas -- or the very small minority of people who are from areas of the world where that still happens. It's been a long time since pirates were anything but clownish semi-villians in the public consiousness here in America, more than just the youngest generation here today.
Just remember -- the original Peter Pan, the one that spawned the image of Captain Hook as the evil-but-neurotic guy who's scared of crocodiles, was released in 1953. There are probably more kids in today's generation that haven't seen it than there are adults.
Sounds great. One thing though: we're going to need to fire Darl McBride and replace him with Ozzy Ozborne. And Hulk Hogan will be the CFO ... do you think we could get Paris Hilton as head of HR?
Actually, we'd better be careful; the company might not go into the ground as quickly that way.
It's Shrewsbury, actually. Although I doubt there's anyone there anymore to get offended. I don't know what's in Digital's old building, but they're long gone from that area, as are most of the old Boston-based minicomputer companies. (Data General, Prime...so many others.)
I don't want to sound like the party-line OSS fanboy here, but that seems like a perfect argument for why you shouldn't allow code that you haven't audited yourself, or had audited by a trusted entity, in any sort of biomedical or communications application.
I certainly wouldn't want to have some sort of device either implanted in me, or worn on my person all the time and collecting a lot of personal information, which might be phoning home to its masters without my knowledge.
Especially when you get into the realm of systems designed to augment one's memory, there's a lot of creepiness potential. In order for something like that to be useful, you have to trust it. You have to be able to ask it "when was the last time I saw this person?" and for it to search its records and pull up a result. Because of that trust of the device, which is required for it to be useful, there's the potential for abuse. I.e., a company could modify the data and cause you to 'remember' things that didn't happen, or to feel differently about things. For example, you might ask 'when is the last time I had [competitor's brand] soda?' and the machine might tell you the last time you had it was when you went to that Indian restaurant where you got food poisoning. That's not very subtle -- I'm sure the Madison Avenue boys could come up with all sorts of ways to bias data without factually altering it -- but you get the point.
With these things on the horizon, although I'm generally a non-believer in government intervention, I think it might be time to step in and require that companies marketing software for implantable or human-augmentation (or any other kind of biomedical or semi-biomedical) application, either make their code open, or have it reviewed by an impartial body. (This latter case I'm not sure is possible, since I believe that everybody has a price, thus there is no such thing as an always impartial body.)
In another post in this thread I wrote that I thought that the risk of becoming dependent on technology is usually offset by the benefits that the technology brings to people who use it. I think that's true; however, "black boxes" that are not widely understood make the risks of dependency on that technology far greater, since it means you are implicitly trusting a very small number of people with great responsibility and power, and great power and responsibility are not things that small numbers of people handle very well.
I'm sure people probably said similar things when writing was invented: 'what of the human ability to memorize a thousand-line epic poem and recite it verbatim? Won't we become dependent on writing things down?'
Short answer: yes, we will be dependent on technology. But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. Sometimes there is a net benefit from becoming dependent on a "crutch." We're obviously dependent right now on writing; there are lots of things that we all really don't know but really just know where they can be found in writing someplace.
If we all forgot how to write tomorrow, we'd be in very tough shape. All the information that we've stored using that technology would suddenly become inaccessible.
Likewise, if we became dependent on neural implants or something, and they suddenly stopped working, it wouldn't be much fun. However, the risk of that happening must be weighed against the benefits that the technology offers. And of course, it has to be weighted against the circumstances in which the technology might stop working: if the only way that the neural implant is going to stop working is if somebody detonates an EMP near your head, then it's probably an acceptable risk (because if someone does do that, you're probably going to have bigger problems than the implant working/not working).
Anytime a new technology comes into widespread use, there's a risk that we might at some point in the future forget how to maintain it, and have to figure how how to live without -- and that would be an uncomfortable transition, undoubtedly. However, history has shown that we're pretty good about retaining developments once we become dependent on them.
Overall, the risk/benefit analysis is something that individiual people are going to have to do for themselves, when new technologies become available. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't think I'd get a v0.09-alpha neural implant put in, but there's a certain point where I could see the benefits outweighing the risks (heck, just something to tell me people's names at dinner parties would be worth it). Others are going to make that determination differently.
They have small digital recorders. I have one, which I used to use to record lectures and (during a period when I couldn't type due to RSI) do dictation.
I have one made by Olympus, and it's OK. Not wonderful, but OK. It uses some strange proprietary way of talking to the recorder (it's not Mass Storage class), so you have to use their software to get the files off of it, but luckily they have software for Mac and it doesn't suck too hard. It records things into an odd format as well, called DSS (Digital Speech "Standard," I suspect it's patented eight ways from Sunday). However their software will happily convert to AIFF if you tell it to. The upside is that you can get something like 5 hours of low quality (ok for dictation) recording on a machine that only has about 16MB of storage. Mine also has a 1/8" minijack for attaching an external microphone, so you can use it to get fairly high-quality recordings of lectures if you use a directional microphone and set it to high quality.
Mine's several years old (it's the DS-330) so I don't know how much they've improved or degraded the newer ones; it seems like they now use xD cards, which is an improvment over fixed memory but it's still unfortunate they they didn't go with CF or MMC/SD cards. And they still use that bizarro DSS format.
I'm not sure what the legality of wiring yourself up with a recorder continuously would be (I thought you only had to have one party's permission?), but the technology to do it is certainly available. If you can get 5 hours of low quality on a 16MB recorder, than you can defintely record for longer than your batteries will hold out by using a big xD card on the modern ones. Get a mini lapel mic and hide it under your tie ('speak directly into the flower...'), put the recorder in the small of your back, and you're ready to be the next Linda Tripp.
Olympus' Digital Recorders
The now obsolete DS-330 that I've used
Although having a 3-d record of everything that you've seen or looked at would undoubtedly be very cool, there are other reasons why the device might have two cameras: it might just be that's the only way to get decent coverage of the human field of vision, without putting a big fisheye lens on your forehead or something. This seems pretty likely: it's fairly easy to take two recordings and sew them together to make one big panorama (maybe not computationally easy, but it's possible to do this), and it may be economical to use two cheap cameras with limited fields of view, rather than using a wide-field camera, or a very high-resolution camera with expensive optics to give it a wide field.
It might be possible in software though to replace the interpolation (that makes the panorama from the two video feeds) into a 3-d source for playback later, although you might end up storing a lot more data this way. If currently it makes it into a single image and then compresses this, instead you'd have to store the two cameras' outputs seperately, and that could give away a lot of your compression gains (if you were using something like JPEG or MPEG on the sewn-together output).
Well, over at the usual place, I found some values for the specific energy (potential chemical energy per unit mass) in a variety of fuels. A better source would probably be the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, but I left it in my other coat today.
Gasoline is quoted at being around 44 megajoules per kilogram. (More sources here.)
Under ideal conditions, neglecting irreversible losses like wind and rolling resistance, you'd only have to burn fuel when you wanted to change your vehicle's speed -- because without friction it would just roll along all day -- and the energy required is a pretty trivial Newtonian mechanics problem. The work to accelerate it is just (1/2)mv^2, where m is the mass and v is the velocity. Then of course you add the 'real work' to change its position: going uphill 'costs' you mgh, where g is acceleration due to gravity and h is the height upwards moved.
If you had a perfect regenerative braking system, then theoretically you'd never need to use any more gas at all (except when going to a higher altitude then you'd gone before); you'd just stop using the regenerative brakes, then turn that energy right back out and use it to start moving again. Without regenerative brakes, you just waste the input energy whenever you stop (except whatever energy you've stored by virtue of the car's position, i.e. by parking it at the top of a hill).
Of course in real life that doesn't happen: the regenerative brakes are going to have losses, there's non-trivial rolling resistance and wind resistance that grows (I think) proportionally to the square of your forward speed.
I'm not going to go through all the math right now, but basically it's a very simple problem that boils down to what simplifying assumptions you want to make. If you add in rolling resistance and aerodynamic drag and make realistic assumptions about the brakes and transmission, at a certain point all you're asking is "what is the fuel economy of an average car, if it had a perfectly efficient engine?" If that's the question, there are easier ways to solve it: you can just figure out the "thermal efficiency" of an internal-combustion engine (not hard: put an engine on a dyno and measure the energy output at the same time as you're measuring the fuel going in) and calculate what the fuel consumption would have been, if it were 100% efficient.
The accepted figure for thermal efficiency of an ICE seems to be around 25-26%, so the short answer is that if the engine in your car right now was a perfect converter of the energy stored in gasoline to mechanical movement, you'd get around four times the gas mileage that you do right now.
Shhhh, you're destroying the manufactured controversy.
In reality, nobody is pointing fingers at telecommuters -- in fact, in the incidents that I've heard in the news lately, there wasn't any real "telecommuting" going on. Somebody just copied an assload of data off of the server to their local machine, and then took the machine home with them. I'd call that 'working from home,' not 'telecommuting.' And the copying of the data onto the local machine was just inappropriate to begin with. That's mostly a user-training issue and not a technological one.
Sure, there are measures that could have been put in place to allow the behavior to happen without creating such a huge problem in the event the laptop was stolen: the drive could have been encrypted, etc. But ultimately, if you don't train your employees to follow the security procedures, there are always going to be problems. (Use encrypted HDs and don't tell people not to use USB sticks, you're going to get data loss. Say 'no USB sticks,' and they'll use CD-RWs. Or email. Or whatever. My point is, the problem at that point is not technology, but your users.)
I doubt that the data loss events will cause anyone who's legitimately telecommuting or even working from home to do anything differently. The only thing it should do is serve as a wake-up call to managers who are allowing employees to do things that they're not really supposed to do (like take large amounts of sensitive data home with them). In the long run, it'll probably make the new encryption features in Win Vista more popular, but that's neither here nor there.
All in all, I think the controversy was manufactured. It was obvious enough to anyone watching on CNN that the fault of the VA incident lay with the employee who took the data home on the laptop when they weren't supposed to; it wasn't a failure of some telework scheme, just user error / bad judgement.
Agreed. I can't tell you the number of times I've gone into a supposedly "secure" facility and really wondered where they were getting their security people. Unlike all the bad 80s and 90s movies you've ever seen, most "corporate security" people that I've met are not scary ex-mil types, they're just your basic hourly wage slaves looking for something that's easier than working the retail floor at your local big box.
Actual government facilities are different, but I can't imagine it would cost a whole lot just to toss cash at some of those brand-name facilities security people until they let you in the front door. If you're actually going after information (worth millions or billions) and not just equipment, giving one of those guys his annual salary in a paper bag is chump change.
Or alternately, I can't imagine that the personnell retention rate of those security firms is very good: doesn't seem like it would be very hard to get someone on the inside to help you out a little bit.
It used to be the case that physical security was much tighter; there was a time when a wall safe was a common feature of executive offices -- when's the last time anybody saw one of those? I know I haven't. As we're concentrating so much on information and data security, we have to be careful not to neglect physical security, because it's getting to the point where if a well-dressed person can't just walk in the door at a lot of places, they could probably buy their way in without too much trouble. If you're paying your security people minimum wage, don't be surprised when one of them disappears the day after all your data gets ripped off, never to be seen again.
Doesn't really matter: if you take possession of a physical device, no matter what the chain of custody is, it could concievably betray your physical position. Just think, it could have inside it, in addition to some flash memory, a GPS receiver and a cellular modem/transmitter, and just report your location, or some kind of beacon transmitter. Cleverly designed, it could be pretty hard for you to detect (burst transmission, etc.).
Granted, there are probably not too many adversaries in the world that have the capability of fabricating and using something like that, but it all depends how paranoid you want to be.
People are going to do whatever it takes to make sure that they themselves (and their families) survive, before they do anything for their neighbors. They're going to do whatever they can to help their neighbors and other people that they know personally survive, before they do anything for people they don't know. And they're going to do whatever they can to ensure that people who look like them, speak the same language as them, and have basically the same set of beliefs as them survive, before they do anything about people who are a different color, language, culture, and religion. It's a hierarchy of social and physical closeness, and one's own culture is always going to take precedence over another's. (I have no doubt that if the situation were reversed, the Zaireians would be building bunkers for doomsday, even if it meant diverting funds away from those starving sops in the Americas -- it's mostly luck and geography that things ended up the way they are. I am certainly not making an argument of any inherent cultural superiority either way. Everyone protects their own when the shit hits the fan.)
People are always going to ensure the surivival of themselves, their families, and their own culture -- for as long as they can possibly envision -- before they move on to helping other people who they don't have any connection to right now. That's why people in developed countries build bunkers for a nuclear holocaust that might never happen, rather than send food to other places. Building the bunkers is a justifiable, even necessary expense, because it ensures the preservation of your own culture.
Just as our biological programming drives us to pass on our genes through procreation and protecting our offspring, our social programming drives us to protect our society and culture, even when that comes at the expense of other people -- who, since we don't know them, are just abstract concepts.
Google: Uh, I don't think so. I think we'll just make google.com inaccessible altogether to your pipes, and buy a few ads supporting your competitors who provide full service at normal prices. Take a minute to think about how your customers might react to that before you try to throw your weight around against us.
Telco: We don't have any competitors.
Google: Oh.
Telco: Pay up, bitches.
So if you waste 5 minutes each from 5 or 10 million people, can we just say you're guilty of murder and execute you?
Because if so, there are a whole lot of people on American Idol that I want to make sure are first up against the wall. Then we'll start on spammers and the guy who wrote the Llama Song.