What noone seems to have pointed out yet is that if they are caught breaking this proposed law by the police, they can be punished - without having to prove intent to molest etc.
Except, how are they going to catch them breaking it? This is nothing but an invitation to let the police construct some sort of invasive monitoring scheme, once they find out that it's unenforceable given the infrastructure presently in use.
Once unenforceable laws get passed, it's rare for the politicians to just give up and admit they did something dumb; inevitably, they attempt to patch things up with more laws, and try to bring reality around to the point where the original law is enforceable.
In this case, it'll probably go something like, after it's clear that sex offenders are getting away with registering for free email addresses, requiring that free email services collect the real names of users, so that they can be checked against the sex offender database. And when it becomes apparent that sex offenders are just using false names, then require the email providers to collect some sort of secret unique identifier (whatever the UK equivalent of an SSN is). And when that fails, it'll be requiring them to send a postcard via mail to your address of record, that you have to sign and return, etc.
Creating unenforceable laws, just to make law enforcement's job easier, is an inherently bad idea. If you don't create laws that are enforceable in reality, then the alternative is to create a reality that's easily enforceable by the laws that have been created -- and personally, I would rather make the police do some extra work, than starting to put society over the authorities' collective knee, in order to make their job easier.
I don't know what you're talking about. In TFA it's quite clear that the top graph is Apache on Linux, and the bottom is IIS on Windows, both serving the same page. So there are two factors (at least) between them, a different OS and a different webserver. It's not fair, as much as I'd like to, to attribute the increase in calls purely to the design of Windows -- that would only be possible if it was Apache vs. Apache (and even then, there would be other things to control for).
If you accept that more system calls are inherently bad, than the graphs might indicate that "IIS on Windows" is less secure than "Apache on Linux," but it says nothing about Apache on Windows, or Windows as a platform inherently.
I think you'd have to resort to a lot of trickery, like stacking vertices on top of each other with zero-length edges, to make the Windows graph appear less complicated than the Linux one. Provided that you model them in the same way, it ought to be pretty apparent that one just has a lot more vertices and edges than the other, even if you did it in a multidimensional space.
Really, the graphs are just a way of artfully showing a simple fact, which is that Windows requires more system calls than Linux, to complete a particular task. If you assume that each system call is a potential vulnerability, and that less calls are inherently better and more secure, than the result is a foregone conclusion. But those are pretty big "ifs," and it seems like someone who was pro-Windows would do better to attack those premises, rather than trying to dispute the graph, if it's indeed representative of the true number of system calls.
There are a number of business models existing on unsustainable business models; in short, they rely on selling a piece of information many times over, in order to stay afloat, when the nature of information is inherently nonconservative. It's only been the case historically that such business models were feasible, because of the difficulty in losslessly copying information. As this is no longer the case, it is also no long really feasible to make money by selling a plastic disc full of bits, at a price that exceeds both the marginal cost of the bits, and of the disc.
However, this doesn't mean that there isn't a market for entertainment. There is, has always been, and will always be, a vast market for entertainment of all forms. So it's idiotic to assume that no DRM means the death of the movie, music, or software industries. Those industries will continue, as long as a market for their products exists -- however, they will have to find new business models that don't rely on pretending that information is aspirin tablets, can can be turned out in factories and sold, over and over and over again.
The market for entertainment is probably quite inflated right now; I suspect that during this switch of business models, to something that's more sustainable and doesn't require draconian consumer restrictions, that the size of the movie industry, in particular, would contract dramatically. But that's the way of things -- a huge studio empire isn't required to produce a good film, and thus there's a lot of redundant overhead there, which needs to go. This change sucks if you make your living right now as a middleman in a movie studio, but it probably sucked being a buggy-whip manufacturer, too.
You cannot destroy the entirety of the entertainment industry, so long as there are people with free time and disposable income, who want to be entertained. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry as we know it today has grown fat and lazy; it has resisted change at every opportunity, even when such change has eventually benefited it (e.g. VCRs, online music sales). Either it will refuse to change, and go down with its failing business model, or it will stop fighting the inevitable, and rethink how entertainment is produced and sold. Either way, people will still be entertained.
It's a casual game. 30 minutes of play-time sounds about right.
A whole lot of people are just looking for something to play for a few minutes at a time, and that doesn't require them to download or copy gigabytes of stuff to their computers.
flOw has nice enough graphics, neat music, and gameplay that's easy to learn and start playing. Plus, all you need is a computer with internet access to play it.
Not everybody wants Half Life; a whole lot of people just want something interesting to do for a few minutes while they're in between other tasks.
Just remember: arguably the most popular computer game ever created is Windows' Solitaire. How much "play time" does it really have?
The idea is that it would let Microsoft Word users do the conversion, and save their documents in ODF, rather than leaving them in DOC and requiring OpenOffice users to do the conversion.
The big difference is which format the documents get stored in. If they're being stored in DOC, then you're still mostly at the mercy of Microsoft; it's easy for someone to open the document in some new version of Word, save it, and silently move it into some new MS-created "binary blob" format, breaking backwards compatibility.
So basically, a converter would let states like Massachusetts start to move away from DOC as the de facto standard format for electronic documents. They'd probably still use it as an editing format, because I don't see them tossing Word for OO.org anytime soon, but it would help get rid of the huge "silos" of DOC stuff that's sitting around, getting silent migrated from one version of Microsoft's formats to the next.
It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default, and most users will never change that. I don't even think that OS X ships with sshd running by default. It's a very minimalist configuration, in terms of enabled services.
It's not a totally fair comparison; saying that some of the installed software on Mac OS X has vulnerabilities, is like saying, if you turn off Windows' firewall, and run these services, you can get rooted. Well, duh, in both cases. What's really important is the default configuration, (or the 'minimal configuration necessary to get real work done') because that's what 90% of users will ever have running.
There are a lot of solid-state DC to DC converters available today. Zeners are probably the easiest to understand conceptually, but there are discrete chips that you can run out and purchase today that will take a wide range of DC input voltages, and put out and lower voltage that you want. Some of them are fairly efficient, too. (I'm not sure how efficient they are compared to using discrete Zeners.)
There are even ones that will go from a low voltage to a higher DC voltage (obviously drawing more current from the supply side, they don't break any laws of physics). I think they do this by converting to high-frequency AC internally, and then using a very small switching power supply to produce the desired output voltage. But the power they produce is pretty clean.
I've been told that modern motherboards have quite a variety of DC-to-DC converters on them as it is today, so it really wouldn't be that hard to build a board that ran off of a single supply voltage, and then produced whatever other voltages it needed using its own power circuitry. Obviously you'd want to reduce the number of different voltages (to keep parts count down, particularly of heat-producing converters), but there's no new technology required there. Getting 3.3V, or whatever the RAM and PCI require, or 5V for USB, from 12V is pretty simple; it's mostly an exercise in optimization for cost or power consumption.
I think it's entirely possible that free accounts, of which there could be millions, offer no form of protection. Think logically the amount of storage that that would require for a small company like Lycos, and the likely small staff they have. I just can't imagine them having a massive backup system.
Except that, if I'm understanding what happened correctly, at one point after her email got deleted, they offered to restore it... but only if she upgraded to the $20 premium service.
That was the beginning of the whole argument. She got mad because she felt that this was extortionate, and Lycos' Customer Service Manager basically revoked the offer and said "haha -- now you can't get it back even if you pay!"
So there was clearly a backup there at some point. Or not even a backup; they could have just logically deleted the data, but not physically deleted it yet. It wouldn't have appeared in her account, but it would have still be there on the servers somewhere. (A lot of web hosting companies do similar stuff; if you don't pay your bill, your site will disappear, but if you cough up it will reappear instantly. It wasn't actually deleted, just deactivated.) So it wouldn't be necessary for them to have much additional storage; they wouldn't need to keep a totally redundant backup system (though they probably would), just some feature in their email system that would let them render messages invisible to the user, but allow an admin or DBA to put them back later if the customer upgraded.
Well, from what I understand of what happened, that was Lycos' policy. She didn't log in for two weeks, and her email got "deleted." I put that in quotes, because it sounds like it really got put into hiding, or escrow, or something. (Basically, a logical delete but without a physical delete, or something like it.) Then they offered to give it back to her, IF she upgraded to the $19.95 "Premium" service.
The customer got pissed, because to her, this looked like extortion (although, it's probably legit), and apparently said as such to the Customer Service Asshole.
The Asshole, rather than just toeing the company line and saying "well, I'm sorry, but that's our policy -- now cough up the $20 if you want your email back, peasant" decided to go on a power trip, and said that her email was now permanently, irrevocably deleted, and that nothing -- even upgrading -- would ever bring it back.
So they did make her the offer to restore it at one point, for a fee, but then something happened (whether it was the Asshole actually deleting it, or something else, like a deadline to re-up) and the offer went away.
It's the taking-back of the offer to recover the emails that's so suspicious. Requiring you to pay a fee to get your expired emails back is sleazy, but not that unexpected. As you point out, a lot of places do it. But what's far sketchier, is when they say they can recover it for a fee, but then abruptly change their story and claim that it's physically deleted.
An idea I've always thought about is converting to DC supplies indoors. AC has an advantage in terms of long-distance transmission, but in this day and age a HUGE part of our electric use is in devices that require DC power. Hell, many of the things that run AC (like lights) can in fact run DC with nary a problem. It's always boggled my mind why we have a bajillion power bricks sitting around, each venting heat like mad converting AC/DC, when in fact we could have a much more efficient "main" transformer installed in the house that does it on a larger scale and feeds our devices directly.
I imagine this would be even more useful for heavy power using environments like server farms - imagine if you can do with the huge boxy PSUs in every single box and just have a unified DC power source that can FAR more efficient than what's in the average beige boxen.
It is a good idea; in fact it's such a good idea that people have been thinking about ways to try and implement it in datacenters for a while. Unfortunately one of the bigger problems is that most motherboards don't run off of a single voltage; they have +5, -5, +3.3, +12, and so on. There has been a push by some big server-farm operators, Google in particular, to encourage board makers to produce mobos that only require a single +12V supply, because then you could do exactly what you say: have a big AC to DC converter somewhere (probably running from a medium-voltage AC main) and then distribute the 12VDC around to the racks.
Problem is that it's not actually illegal to crack DRM in most other countries.
They're working on that. Check back in five years. Software patents are at the top of the priority list, as is copyright in general (e.g. AllOfMP3.com), but once they get those foisted off on the rest of the world, "anti-circumvention" will be the order of the day.
The people pushing these things, both within government and industry -- both in the U.S. and abroad -- have incredibly deep pockets, and lots of patience. The public certainly lacks the latter; they'll just keep trying to force through their measures, over and over, until eventually one of them sticks, because nobody was looking. (That's how we ended up with the DMCA: hell, we don't even know who voted for the damn thing, the way it was done, and that's exactly how they wanted.)
I was with you up until: Very similar to the concept of a government security clearance.
How do you mean? Speaking as someone who had a security clearance, it doesn't entitle you to free stock tips on the golf course, or really anything else particularly interesting. It's more just a prerequisite for employment; the biggest benefit is that it makes you look like a more attractive employee when certain companies are looking for staff.
One of the easiest ways that the Ethernet people could encourage energy efficiency would be by promoting greater use of Power Over Ethernet. By moving networked devices away from each having an individual wall wart, which are typically inefficient (as well as inconvenient), PoE lets you concentrate the AC to DC conversion in one place, for greater efficiency. As long as you don't have terribly long cable runs, I think there would be a significant net savings overall.
The number of networked devices people are going to have in their homes is only going to grow. I think a big segment could be in "Micro NAS" devices, basically single HD boxes that plug in to a home network and add storage that's accessible from any computer in the home. They're smaller and cheaper than RAIDed NAS solutions, but more convenient for people who have multiple computers than a FireWire or USB2.0 hard drive. And then you have routers, WiFi APs, network cameras, set-top-boxes for playing back video and audio, etc. All of those light-draw devices could be powered over the network connection instead of each having a wall wart.
You'd use a touchscreen to enter your vote, on nice, big buttons, because apparently a large percentage of people in this country are too retarded to fill in a bubble correctly. Notwithstanding my opinions as to whether such folks should actually be voting, they seem to find electronic screens easier to use.
The electronic kiosk would then print out a paper ballot. The electronic kiosk would be ENTIRELY ISOLATED from the network, in all other respects. It would not count votes. At the end of the day, it would be taken down and put away, and serve no purpose in the tallying. Its sole function is to serve as a sort of glorified pencil, making it easier for people to make a machine-readable mark on a sheet of paper.
The printout that it produces, would show the votes cast by the user, in a form that was simultaneously human and machine-readable. That is, it could not have (say) English printing, and a bar code, because then there is no way for the user to be sure that the bar code doesn't contain something different than their vote. But it could have their vote, written in an easily OCR-ed font, with suitable registration marks around the edges so that it could be easily scanned.
This paper ballot would be taken by the voter, from the kiosk and printer, over to a central tabulating table, where it would be scanned. The paper ballots would then be kept, and would be the official record in the event of a recount.
The only "electronic" part is the means for actually making the marks on the ballots. Frankly, I think this is overkill; I think a well-designed paper ballot could be marked using something like a big bingo-blotter and not give too many people much trouble, but I have in general very little sympathy for people (aside from those with bona fide physical impairments) who just can't figure out how to vote. But if we must make a system that's idiot-usable (not really 'idiot proof,' since it hardly keeps out the idiots), using touchscreens and printers to mark the ballots, rather than pens or punch-outs, might reduce the error rate.
Gotta be better the POS WebCT stuff we're using now.
As someone who was once forced to use WebCT, I can say, without reservations, that having homework assignments transmitted into your brain by having a midget repeatedly hammer Morse Code messages on a rusty screwdriver in your eye socket, would be a far preferable system, and probably more user friendly.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
I think you hit the nail on the head. But you need to look beyond Microsoft. The U.S. Government is -- or fancies itself, anyway -- much bigger than even the largest corporations. They're going to protect Microsoft, because they see MS as a modern U.S. Steel or General Motors; it's a huge part of the national industry.
Moreover, DRM in general is going to be pushed heavily by the USG, for the "national interest." Even though it will punish consumers here, it's a way of protecting one of the only things that the U.S. exports anymore: "intellectual property." We don't make stuff anymore; we "manufacture" IP. DRM is a way, in the minds of some folks in DC, of protecting that whole category of exports, and maintaining our dominance in one area, at least. Without DRM, the whole idea of commoditizing and selling "IP" on a retail-like market doesn't work; if you can't tie down information to physical artifacts, or make it behave conservatively (even though information is naturally nonconservative), then it's devilishly hard to sell multiple times. And if you can't take one Hollywood blockbuster and sell it 100 million times over, like it's some sort of aspirin tablet that you're turning out, how do you keep the economy going, when nobody wants to buy anything else we make here anymore?
You make good points, but I think you should be more careful about your examples. Saying that you have a 1 in 100 chance of being 'framed and sent to prison,' is hardly supportable; saying that you have a 1 in 100 chance of going to prison might be (if on average 1 in 100 people end up there).
But that's still a poor example, because that's a controllable risk. People don't get as upset about it as they do plane crashes or terrorism, because they feel like they have some level of control over the outcome. "Well, hey, I'm not going to prison, because I'm not going to [commit any crimes|get caught]." Therefore, they minimize that (very real) risk, and concentrate on slimmer ones which appear to be outside their control.
As other people have pointed out, there is a compromise position: you could have electronic consoles to actually enter the vote, but which produce a paper receipt that's then put into a scanner to be counted. That way you get basically all the advantages of e-voting, with the benefits of optical-scan, but without having to have voters actually write anything on the cards. (Because, apparently, as a society we are incapable of writing and following simple instructions anymore. Not that this surprises me.)
Paperless voting was a huge mistake, but touchscreen voting itself wasn't a bad idea. There's no need to get rid of the things from this very expensive experiment that we apparently conducted that worked, just the parts that didn't.
I think everything you say is true, but a big part of the problem is that most people's mail-user-agents are set up with encryption as an afterthought, rather than as a core feature. When users have their email set up to use encryption from the very beginning, from the moment that they're issued their computers by their employer, they use it.
The environments where I've seen the heaviest use of encryption are Lotus Notes shops, because Notes was basically designed around encryption. Granted, it uses some strange proprietary public-key scheme (although Steven Levy in "Crypto" alluded that it was developed with some support by the NSA, as one of the earliest commercial ones), but it's totally transparent to the user. Public keys are all managed by the Domino server, and all the user has to do to send an encrypted or signed message is check a box.
Now, there's some sample bias there; most of the places I've seen that use Notes, are also the kind of places that are interested in encryption, and tend to have more technically-oriented employees that are more comfortable with encryption (anecdotally, I've heard that the CIA is a big Notes shop, as are some other USG agencies), but I think how the MUA is designed has a big impact.
It won't be until MUAs are designed around encryption that people will want to use it, but it's not until people want to use encryption, that most MUAs will really pay attention and make encryption a seamless, core feature -- and more importantly, that corporate sysadmins will roll out encryption and key management right along with their mail servers.
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors.
The best investor-focused ad I've ever seen was when American Standard started printing their stock ticker symbol next to their name on the top of their urinals.
I guess they just figured "hey... those guys on Wall Street have to take leaks occasionally, right? Let's put our ticker right where they're going to see it!"
So, everyone else in the universe got to see it, just because someone, somewhere, was hoping that some important trader would see and remember it.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know about easier, but maybe it'd be better to make sure they don't have access to children?
If the end is not practically achievable, it doesn't matter whether it's "better" or not.
What noone seems to have pointed out yet is that if they are caught breaking this proposed law by the police, they can be punished - without having to prove intent to molest etc.
Except, how are they going to catch them breaking it? This is nothing but an invitation to let the police construct some sort of invasive monitoring scheme, once they find out that it's unenforceable given the infrastructure presently in use.
Once unenforceable laws get passed, it's rare for the politicians to just give up and admit they did something dumb; inevitably, they attempt to patch things up with more laws, and try to bring reality around to the point where the original law is enforceable.
In this case, it'll probably go something like, after it's clear that sex offenders are getting away with registering for free email addresses, requiring that free email services collect the real names of users, so that they can be checked against the sex offender database. And when it becomes apparent that sex offenders are just using false names, then require the email providers to collect some sort of secret unique identifier (whatever the UK equivalent of an SSN is). And when that fails, it'll be requiring them to send a postcard via mail to your address of record, that you have to sign and return, etc.
Creating unenforceable laws, just to make law enforcement's job easier, is an inherently bad idea. If you don't create laws that are enforceable in reality, then the alternative is to create a reality that's easily enforceable by the laws that have been created -- and personally, I would rather make the police do some extra work, than starting to put society over the authorities' collective knee, in order to make their job easier.
I don't know what you're talking about. In TFA it's quite clear that the top graph is Apache on Linux, and the bottom is IIS on Windows, both serving the same page. So there are two factors (at least) between them, a different OS and a different webserver. It's not fair, as much as I'd like to, to attribute the increase in calls purely to the design of Windows -- that would only be possible if it was Apache vs. Apache (and even then, there would be other things to control for).
If you accept that more system calls are inherently bad, than the graphs might indicate that "IIS on Windows" is less secure than "Apache on Linux," but it says nothing about Apache on Windows, or Windows as a platform inherently.
I think you'd have to resort to a lot of trickery, like stacking vertices on top of each other with zero-length edges, to make the Windows graph appear less complicated than the Linux one. Provided that you model them in the same way, it ought to be pretty apparent that one just has a lot more vertices and edges than the other, even if you did it in a multidimensional space.
Really, the graphs are just a way of artfully showing a simple fact, which is that Windows requires more system calls than Linux, to complete a particular task. If you assume that each system call is a potential vulnerability, and that less calls are inherently better and more secure, than the result is a foregone conclusion. But those are pretty big "ifs," and it seems like someone who was pro-Windows would do better to attack those premises, rather than trying to dispute the graph, if it's indeed representative of the true number of system calls.
There are a number of business models existing on unsustainable business models; in short, they rely on selling a piece of information many times over, in order to stay afloat, when the nature of information is inherently nonconservative. It's only been the case historically that such business models were feasible, because of the difficulty in losslessly copying information. As this is no longer the case, it is also no long really feasible to make money by selling a plastic disc full of bits, at a price that exceeds both the marginal cost of the bits, and of the disc.
However, this doesn't mean that there isn't a market for entertainment. There is, has always been, and will always be, a vast market for entertainment of all forms. So it's idiotic to assume that no DRM means the death of the movie, music, or software industries. Those industries will continue, as long as a market for their products exists -- however, they will have to find new business models that don't rely on pretending that information is aspirin tablets, can can be turned out in factories and sold, over and over and over again.
The market for entertainment is probably quite inflated right now; I suspect that during this switch of business models, to something that's more sustainable and doesn't require draconian consumer restrictions, that the size of the movie industry, in particular, would contract dramatically. But that's the way of things -- a huge studio empire isn't required to produce a good film, and thus there's a lot of redundant overhead there, which needs to go. This change sucks if you make your living right now as a middleman in a movie studio, but it probably sucked being a buggy-whip manufacturer, too.
You cannot destroy the entirety of the entertainment industry, so long as there are people with free time and disposable income, who want to be entertained. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry as we know it today has grown fat and lazy; it has resisted change at every opportunity, even when such change has eventually benefited it (e.g. VCRs, online music sales). Either it will refuse to change, and go down with its failing business model, or it will stop fighting the inevitable, and rethink how entertainment is produced and sold. Either way, people will still be entertained.
.... All you need is love.
And $8.7 Billion USD in cash. But that's a lot harder to rhyme.
It's a casual game. 30 minutes of play-time sounds about right.
A whole lot of people are just looking for something to play for a few minutes at a time, and that doesn't require them to download or copy gigabytes of stuff to their computers.
flOw has nice enough graphics, neat music, and gameplay that's easy to learn and start playing. Plus, all you need is a computer with internet access to play it.
Not everybody wants Half Life; a whole lot of people just want something interesting to do for a few minutes while they're in between other tasks.
Just remember: arguably the most popular computer game ever created is Windows' Solitaire. How much "play time" does it really have?
The idea is that it would let Microsoft Word users do the conversion, and save their documents in ODF, rather than leaving them in DOC and requiring OpenOffice users to do the conversion.
The big difference is which format the documents get stored in. If they're being stored in DOC, then you're still mostly at the mercy of Microsoft; it's easy for someone to open the document in some new version of Word, save it, and silently move it into some new MS-created "binary blob" format, breaking backwards compatibility.
So basically, a converter would let states like Massachusetts start to move away from DOC as the de facto standard format for electronic documents. They'd probably still use it as an editing format, because I don't see them tossing Word for OO.org anytime soon, but it would help get rid of the huge "silos" of DOC stuff that's sitting around, getting silent migrated from one version of Microsoft's formats to the next.
It ships with a lot of stuff, but very little of it is turned on by default, and most users will never change that. I don't even think that OS X ships with sshd running by default. It's a very minimalist configuration, in terms of enabled services.
It's not a totally fair comparison; saying that some of the installed software on Mac OS X has vulnerabilities, is like saying, if you turn off Windows' firewall, and run these services, you can get rooted. Well, duh, in both cases. What's really important is the default configuration, (or the 'minimal configuration necessary to get real work done') because that's what 90% of users will ever have running.
There are a lot of solid-state DC to DC converters available today. Zeners are probably the easiest to understand conceptually, but there are discrete chips that you can run out and purchase today that will take a wide range of DC input voltages, and put out and lower voltage that you want. Some of them are fairly efficient, too. (I'm not sure how efficient they are compared to using discrete Zeners.)
There are even ones that will go from a low voltage to a higher DC voltage (obviously drawing more current from the supply side, they don't break any laws of physics). I think they do this by converting to high-frequency AC internally, and then using a very small switching power supply to produce the desired output voltage. But the power they produce is pretty clean.
I've been told that modern motherboards have quite a variety of DC-to-DC converters on them as it is today, so it really wouldn't be that hard to build a board that ran off of a single supply voltage, and then produced whatever other voltages it needed using its own power circuitry. Obviously you'd want to reduce the number of different voltages (to keep parts count down, particularly of heat-producing converters), but there's no new technology required there. Getting 3.3V, or whatever the RAM and PCI require, or 5V for USB, from 12V is pretty simple; it's mostly an exercise in optimization for cost or power consumption.
I think it's entirely possible that free accounts, of which there could be millions, offer no form of protection. Think logically the amount of storage that that would require for a small company like Lycos, and the likely small staff they have. I just can't imagine them having a massive backup system.
... but only if she upgraded to the $20 premium service.
Except that, if I'm understanding what happened correctly, at one point after her email got deleted, they offered to restore it
That was the beginning of the whole argument. She got mad because she felt that this was extortionate, and Lycos' Customer Service Manager basically revoked the offer and said "haha -- now you can't get it back even if you pay!"
So there was clearly a backup there at some point. Or not even a backup; they could have just logically deleted the data, but not physically deleted it yet. It wouldn't have appeared in her account, but it would have still be there on the servers somewhere. (A lot of web hosting companies do similar stuff; if you don't pay your bill, your site will disappear, but if you cough up it will reappear instantly. It wasn't actually deleted, just deactivated.) So it wouldn't be necessary for them to have much additional storage; they wouldn't need to keep a totally redundant backup system (though they probably would), just some feature in their email system that would let them render messages invisible to the user, but allow an admin or DBA to put them back later if the customer upgraded.
Well, from what I understand of what happened, that was Lycos' policy. She didn't log in for two weeks, and her email got "deleted." I put that in quotes, because it sounds like it really got put into hiding, or escrow, or something. (Basically, a logical delete but without a physical delete, or something like it.) Then they offered to give it back to her, IF she upgraded to the $19.95 "Premium" service.
The customer got pissed, because to her, this looked like extortion (although, it's probably legit), and apparently said as such to the Customer Service Asshole.
The Asshole, rather than just toeing the company line and saying "well, I'm sorry, but that's our policy -- now cough up the $20 if you want your email back, peasant" decided to go on a power trip, and said that her email was now permanently, irrevocably deleted, and that nothing -- even upgrading -- would ever bring it back.
So they did make her the offer to restore it at one point, for a fee, but then something happened (whether it was the Asshole actually deleting it, or something else, like a deadline to re-up) and the offer went away.
It's the taking-back of the offer to recover the emails that's so suspicious. Requiring you to pay a fee to get your expired emails back is sleazy, but not that unexpected. As you point out, a lot of places do it. But what's far sketchier, is when they say they can recover it for a fee, but then abruptly change their story and claim that it's physically deleted.
An idea I've always thought about is converting to DC supplies indoors. AC has an advantage in terms of long-distance transmission, but in this day and age a HUGE part of our electric use is in devices that require DC power. Hell, many of the things that run AC (like lights) can in fact run DC with nary a problem. It's always boggled my mind why we have a bajillion power bricks sitting around, each venting heat like mad converting AC/DC, when in fact we could have a much more efficient "main" transformer installed in the house that does it on a larger scale and feeds our devices directly.
I imagine this would be even more useful for heavy power using environments like server farms - imagine if you can do with the huge boxy PSUs in every single box and just have a unified DC power source that can FAR more efficient than what's in the average beige boxen.
It is a good idea; in fact it's such a good idea that people have been thinking about ways to try and implement it in datacenters for a while. Unfortunately one of the bigger problems is that most motherboards don't run off of a single voltage; they have +5, -5, +3.3, +12, and so on. There has been a push by some big server-farm operators, Google in particular, to encourage board makers to produce mobos that only require a single +12V supply, because then you could do exactly what you say: have a big AC to DC converter somewhere (probably running from a medium-voltage AC main) and then distribute the 12VDC around to the racks.
It was a Slashdot article back in September:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09
Problem is that it's not actually illegal to crack DRM in most other countries.
They're working on that. Check back in five years. Software patents are at the top of the priority list, as is copyright in general (e.g. AllOfMP3.com), but once they get those foisted off on the rest of the world, "anti-circumvention" will be the order of the day.
The people pushing these things, both within government and industry -- both in the U.S. and abroad -- have incredibly deep pockets, and lots of patience. The public certainly lacks the latter; they'll just keep trying to force through their measures, over and over, until eventually one of them sticks, because nobody was looking. (That's how we ended up with the DMCA: hell, we don't even know who voted for the damn thing, the way it was done, and that's exactly how they wanted.)
I was with you up until:
Very similar to the concept of a government security clearance.
How do you mean? Speaking as someone who had a security clearance, it doesn't entitle you to free stock tips on the golf course, or really anything else particularly interesting. It's more just a prerequisite for employment; the biggest benefit is that it makes you look like a more attractive employee when certain companies are looking for staff.
One of the easiest ways that the Ethernet people could encourage energy efficiency would be by promoting greater use of Power Over Ethernet. By moving networked devices away from each having an individual wall wart, which are typically inefficient (as well as inconvenient), PoE lets you concentrate the AC to DC conversion in one place, for greater efficiency. As long as you don't have terribly long cable runs, I think there would be a significant net savings overall.
The number of networked devices people are going to have in their homes is only going to grow. I think a big segment could be in "Micro NAS" devices, basically single HD boxes that plug in to a home network and add storage that's accessible from any computer in the home. They're smaller and cheaper than RAIDed NAS solutions, but more convenient for people who have multiple computers than a FireWire or USB2.0 hard drive. And then you have routers, WiFi APs, network cameras, set-top-boxes for playing back video and audio, etc. All of those light-draw devices could be powered over the network connection instead of each having a wall wart.
That's what I was advising.
You'd use a touchscreen to enter your vote, on nice, big buttons, because apparently a large percentage of people in this country are too retarded to fill in a bubble correctly. Notwithstanding my opinions as to whether such folks should actually be voting, they seem to find electronic screens easier to use.
The electronic kiosk would then print out a paper ballot. The electronic kiosk would be ENTIRELY ISOLATED from the network, in all other respects. It would not count votes. At the end of the day, it would be taken down and put away, and serve no purpose in the tallying. Its sole function is to serve as a sort of glorified pencil, making it easier for people to make a machine-readable mark on a sheet of paper.
The printout that it produces, would show the votes cast by the user, in a form that was simultaneously human and machine-readable. That is, it could not have (say) English printing, and a bar code, because then there is no way for the user to be sure that the bar code doesn't contain something different than their vote. But it could have their vote, written in an easily OCR-ed font, with suitable registration marks around the edges so that it could be easily scanned.
This paper ballot would be taken by the voter, from the kiosk and printer, over to a central tabulating table, where it would be scanned. The paper ballots would then be kept, and would be the official record in the event of a recount.
The only "electronic" part is the means for actually making the marks on the ballots. Frankly, I think this is overkill; I think a well-designed paper ballot could be marked using something like a big bingo-blotter and not give too many people much trouble, but I have in general very little sympathy for people (aside from those with bona fide physical impairments) who just can't figure out how to vote. But if we must make a system that's idiot-usable (not really 'idiot proof,' since it hardly keeps out the idiots), using touchscreens and printers to mark the ballots, rather than pens or punch-outs, might reduce the error rate.
Gotta be better the POS WebCT stuff we're using now.
As someone who was once forced to use WebCT, I can say, without reservations, that having homework assignments transmitted into your brain by having a midget repeatedly hammer Morse Code messages on a rusty screwdriver in your eye socket, would be a far preferable system, and probably more user friendly.
Before I go - there is one more thing I want to get off my chest here. One might hope and pray that it will be stopped by anti-trust laws before it goes too far, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Why did the courts not press for a breakup of Microsoft? I think they were leaned on by the US government - for a reason I have not seen articulated before. The fact is that Microsoft is a US corporation, one of America's finest. It brings in big bucks to the good ol' US of A. So from a local perspective, among fellow Americans, Microsoft's monopolistic practices are scandalous, but if an American - especially a Congressman - looks at it from a nationalistic perspective, it's good for America. In fact, the worse it becomes (the monopolistic practices) the better it is for USA. Bill Gates' age old dream of world domination happens to coincide with America's dream of world domination. That's why we can't count on the US courts to put a stop to this.
I think you hit the nail on the head. But you need to look beyond Microsoft. The U.S. Government is -- or fancies itself, anyway -- much bigger than even the largest corporations. They're going to protect Microsoft, because they see MS as a modern U.S. Steel or General Motors; it's a huge part of the national industry.
Moreover, DRM in general is going to be pushed heavily by the USG, for the "national interest." Even though it will punish consumers here, it's a way of protecting one of the only things that the U.S. exports anymore: "intellectual property." We don't make stuff anymore; we "manufacture" IP. DRM is a way, in the minds of some folks in DC, of protecting that whole category of exports, and maintaining our dominance in one area, at least. Without DRM, the whole idea of commoditizing and selling "IP" on a retail-like market doesn't work; if you can't tie down information to physical artifacts, or make it behave conservatively (even though information is naturally nonconservative), then it's devilishly hard to sell multiple times. And if you can't take one Hollywood blockbuster and sell it 100 million times over, like it's some sort of aspirin tablet that you're turning out, how do you keep the economy going, when nobody wants to buy anything else we make here anymore?
You make good points, but I think you should be more careful about your examples. Saying that you have a 1 in 100 chance of being 'framed and sent to prison,' is hardly supportable; saying that you have a 1 in 100 chance of going to prison might be (if on average 1 in 100 people end up there).
But that's still a poor example, because that's a controllable risk. People don't get as upset about it as they do plane crashes or terrorism, because they feel like they have some level of control over the outcome. "Well, hey, I'm not going to prison, because I'm not going to [commit any crimes|get caught]." Therefore, they minimize that (very real) risk, and concentrate on slimmer ones which appear to be outside their control.
As other people have pointed out, there is a compromise position: you could have electronic consoles to actually enter the vote, but which produce a paper receipt that's then put into a scanner to be counted. That way you get basically all the advantages of e-voting, with the benefits of optical-scan, but without having to have voters actually write anything on the cards. (Because, apparently, as a society we are incapable of writing and following simple instructions anymore. Not that this surprises me.)
Paperless voting was a huge mistake, but touchscreen voting itself wasn't a bad idea. There's no need to get rid of the things from this very expensive experiment that we apparently conducted that worked, just the parts that didn't.
The problem with the Harry Potter books is that my wife cheats ...
To be fair, I'm not sure why that's Harry Potter's problem.
I think everything you say is true, but a big part of the problem is that most people's mail-user-agents are set up with encryption as an afterthought, rather than as a core feature. When users have their email set up to use encryption from the very beginning, from the moment that they're issued their computers by their employer, they use it.
The environments where I've seen the heaviest use of encryption are Lotus Notes shops, because Notes was basically designed around encryption. Granted, it uses some strange proprietary public-key scheme (although Steven Levy in "Crypto" alluded that it was developed with some support by the NSA, as one of the earliest commercial ones), but it's totally transparent to the user. Public keys are all managed by the Domino server, and all the user has to do to send an encrypted or signed message is check a box.
Now, there's some sample bias there; most of the places I've seen that use Notes, are also the kind of places that are interested in encryption, and tend to have more technically-oriented employees that are more comfortable with encryption (anecdotally, I've heard that the CIA is a big Notes shop, as are some other USG agencies), but I think how the MUA is designed has a big impact.
It won't be until MUAs are designed around encryption that people will want to use it, but it's not until people want to use encryption, that most MUAs will really pay attention and make encryption a seamless, core feature -- and more importantly, that corporate sysadmins will roll out encryption and key management right along with their mail servers.
I'm sure the T-shirt printers are getting ready: "Harry Potter dies on page 573, I just saved you 15 hours and $29."
My thought when seeing those was it was more geared towards potential investors.
... those guys on Wall Street have to take leaks occasionally, right? Let's put our ticker right where they're going to see it!"
The best investor-focused ad I've ever seen was when American Standard started printing their stock ticker symbol next to their name on the top of their urinals.
I guess they just figured "hey
So, everyone else in the universe got to see it, just because someone, somewhere, was hoping that some important trader would see and remember it.