1) It's definitely the students fault. He's at least intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his actions, and as a result, he should experience them. While blame for the action itself should lie squarely on this student's shoulders, that doesn't mean that on top of that, adware companies shouldn't be penalized for profitting from such a situation. Nor does it mean that society should not be self-critical and address behavior that it is, if not nurturing, at least allowing this kind of behavior to be profitable.
2) In this instance, I think your Colt example is not quite accurate for the adware business model. Look at it like this: say Colt gives out their guns for free (and, attempting to seem at least somewhat ethical, does the requisite background checks), and to each person who receives a Colt, the company offers them free ammunition and a dollar everytime they fire it when someone else is watching. So...some person gets his free Colt, walks into a crowded open space, and fires 100 bullets at passers by. Is Colt responsible for his actions? Not at all. Should Colt be allowed to give unqualified incentives such as this? Absolutely not. My problem with the modern "it's societies fault" blame game (and this classic response to it) is that all parties involved, including "society" share some extent of the responsibility, singling out a scapegoat does not change that.
3) Presuming that whatever he did actually "shut down" an intensive care unit, why in hell were machines so critical to the operation of an intensive care unit even connected to the internet? So that the nurses, while treating patients, can check their Hotmail? It seems to me that critical networks that certainly don't need access to the internet, especially if they're particularly vulnerable to being compromised (*cough*...windows...*cough*) should be connected only to their internal network. Certainly a hospital understands the concept of a clean space; after all, i'm sure they go to great lengths to keep biological baddies out of the intensive care unit.
You present a good analogy, but I think there's another ways to look at this. First of all, think of an online retailer such as Amazon. Say you buy a bunch of books (i.e. over $50 worth, or whatever the minimum is to get free shipping). Because of all the business Amazon does with companies like UPS and FedEx, they get bulk shipping discounts, in which case it becomes feasible for them to offer you free shipping (in 3-7 business days), they pay very little (per customer) to ship things to you and they get the added benefit of edging out the smaller retailers by cutting their customers' costs. Now, say you want those packages delivered tomorrow. In this case, while Amazon can get you a discount for the aforementioned reasons, they're certainly not going to give that to you for free, because that cuts more drastically into their bottom line, you end up essentially paying FedEx or UPS directly for your instant gratifcation.
Now, lets say you enjoy shopping online so much, that you decide to bypass the retailer's shipping fee by becoming part of a high speed FedEx route (purely hypothetical, of course). Now, Fedex guarantees that anything sent to you via FedEx will get to you at a rate of 7Mbps^H^H^H^H^H 1 business day. Now you (and you're massive budget) get totally hooked on Amazon, and you start using it like a library, spending thousands of dollars and having the packages pipelined to you overnight. Fedex, seeing you and others like you giving so much money to online retailers, gets jealous and decides that not only do the receivers have to pay to get in this pipeline, but so do the shippers. Now, Amazon certainly doesn't want to lose your business, because your package habit is bringing them lots of money; on the other hand, they don't want to lose money out of their bottom line to fedex. What happens? Amazon raises their prices, pays the pipeliner and passes the wonderful overhead of instant gratifcation right on to you, the consumer. But wait...aren't you already paying for instant gratification? Isn't that why you subscribed to the Fedex pipeline in the first place? In other words Fedex, by attempting to tap into Amazon's revenue stream, instead just reached deeper into your pockets. It's a classic macro economics problem....extra cost on the providers end is always passed on to the consumer, in whole or in part. And, in fact, the reverse is also true. We had a problem on a freshman econ midterm that basically asked what percentage of sales tax is payed by the consumer, and what part by the provider, the answer came out to exactly half was paid by each, because essentially the provider loses a certain chunk of sales because the extra 6-8% drives away potential sales.
I guess what I'm saying is that verizon's already siphoning off a chunk of google's revenues. Hell, if it weren't for google, which, in effect, brought the power of the internet to the masses (and yes, so did yahoo, etc.), a much larger chunk of the US population wouldn't even be interested in paying for consumer broadband - which is, i'm sure, becoming a much larger part of Verizon's revenue stream.
This is a classic example of using an economic incentive where all else seems to fail. Clearly if the economic onus of identity theft is (in large part) on the shoulders of the bank, they'll come up with better and better ways to secure their information that they had no will or reason to do before. Presumably they'll start using biometrics and the like (whether or not you think that's adequate security) and hopefully, if this is enacted in the States, they'll start to require more than a bloody SSN and birthdate to open a credit card account. It's an incredibly insecure means of identifying someone. I mean, really, how many doctors' office require that information along with your insurance info? Lots. And how many doctors have a security aware IT staff? Probably a much smaller number.
Along those lines, though, who gets the fiscal responsibility if a third party, like a doctor or a university, is responsible for the ID compromise?
I couldn't agree more. Ajax has its place - the web application. The problem with this article, as I see it, is that the author makes no mention of the web application - the data driven brother/sister of the website. Take - for example - gmail. Were it not ajax, i wouldn't even bother with it, i'd use my favorite mail program (mac os x mail, in my case) as a POP client. I personally hate most webmail, because it's slow and clunky - gmail does not have this problem only because it's an ajax application. So yes - while that dessert recipe website shouldn't use ajax (since I know you'd love to bookmark that creme brulee recipe), a recipe management website can and should use ajax - since it would allow for functionality that would be either impossible, or prohibitively clunky.
I'm a web developer, and after seeing what ajax could do, and seeing the many ways that people have used it, I started to integrate ajax elements into an education management web app that i've been working on. While, yes, ajax can be buggy, and yes, it can be hard to use, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. All it means is that you should develop your ajax applications carefully and revel in the fact that ajax has made a Flash-free stateful web application possible. Heaven forfend that web-application design move out of the hands of designers and back to the people who do software best: developers.
I set up a small voip system in our office in NJ (3 lines) using broadvoice paired with asterisk - and while the service (most notably broadvoice tech support) leaves some things to be desired - our phone system is much better in terms of its feature set than it was on our POTS pbx. That said, most of the reliability issues we've encountered were the fault of our service provider, and we're generally quite happy with the switch.
The website i found myself constantly referring to in terms of making phone, software, hardware and other choices - as well as finding out the quirks and perks of each and mountains of setup info is the voip wiki.
Cheers, and good luck - you may need some in the process.
This has a lot more than two good uses - but not for consumers. Microsoft - and the advertising agencies that would pay for such targetted adspace - would be getting hundreds of billions of good uses out of this ($$). I read somewhere that for your average hour long television show the tv companies make 64 cents per viewer. Now, given that a)internet style ads have lower apparent yields than tv ads and b) OS ads can be much more specifically targeted at the users (depending upon what kind of information they're collecting on you) and c) OS based advertising can be linked directly to actual advertising yields (much more so than standard banner advertising right now). This has the potential (without crunching any numbers, i'm lazy, what can i say) to be substantially more profitable (i'm thinking orders of magnitude, per user) than the revenue returned from the $199 per user (or whatever) yielded by XP Home sales.
So...in short - I would use it - but only if they paid me to choose an ad supported OS over a standard purchased license.
Windows certainly will run on Apple hardware. In fact - apple recently filed a patent application that looks like their own shot at a virtual machine environment. See this slashdot article. This is a far more interesting and worthwhile prediction of the implementation and possible intentions of apple's move to x86 than this ZDNet "review."
This article has an interesting perspective as to why iTunes doesn't have the things you want. Essentially, the tv companies, the advertising agencies that support them are reluctant to change a business model that's been a steady source of income for many, many years. So $1.99 per show, and a wimpy 320x240 res is more a move to limit the consumption of this particular format.
All the arguments that open source is more secure because there are more eyes to spot problems and more hands to fix them are starting to ring a bit hollow as I upgrade/patch my Firefox install on what seems like a monthly basis.
It seems to me that you've contradicted yourself - given that open source has so many eyes on the code itself, would you not therefore expect more/more frequent patches/upgrades? One of the benefits to open source is that, while there is a fairly stable group of developers responsible for something like firefox, you get many new developers coming into the picture at any given time - bringing new ideas and a fresh pairs of eyes to spot problems. So...on the one hand open source software is easily neglected - if the core group of developers gives up or moves on, and on the other hand there is the potential (and in the case of firefox, the reality) for many, many people to join the ranks of code contributors. This is not the case with closed source developers, as high turnover of employees is not generally considered good business practice; there are, therefore, far fewer new eyes looking for flaws in the closed source case.
As a totally non-factually founded side note, IMHO, i think that the number of flaws found in firefox, while spiking in the last few months, will eventually drop below that of IE, for precisely the reasons mentioned above. This seems especially true given MSFT's recent brain drain.
That is clear enough, but as a CS person, I personally tend to look at the structure, rather than the context. Thus, what the data being returned is, and who it's being returned to matters not as far as design is concerned. IMHO, this is how system/software patents should work - if someone has a structural idea that's the same as some "prior art" and all they did was change the values of the variable - that patent should not be issued.
Clearly. Is this not just a barcode scanner with a server connection? DHL, Fedex and UPS all have something like this. As far as I can tell, the only novel thing about this patent is that the "barcode scanner" doesn't have to be a dedicated scanner, just anything with a CCD.
I agree with darealpat - I wonder how much of the search for "prior art" involves string matching...
$result = query( "select * from patents where patent_text like '%portable imaging device to capture an image of identifying data%'");
num_rows($result)==0? issue_patent() : issue_lawsuit();
I disagree. It is a necessary business decision, given current patent law, to file a patent application for something as critical to your business model as the software interface for your primary revenue source. In other words, regardless of the motivations of those filing the patent, be it to "lock down" the technology as squiggleslash said, or simply to prevent other companies from locking it down (thus avoiding paying licensing fees) - the action of filing a (software) patent is essentially a defensive one.
That said, regardless of who is the infringer or the enforcer in any given patent situation, be it the Free Software and Open Source community or Big Bad Microsoft, survival in the market to which the patent applies requires defensive patents, which demonstrates only that the patent system is flawed, nothing more.
squiggleslash's statement that Apple is getting they're comeuppance because they're as guilty as Creative in trying to get a patent for their software is nonsense, Apple had no choice but to take move to prevent the inevitable legal action that will come from the (rightful or not) patent holder for the technology.
So where's the Department of Homeland Security's statement proclaiming users of alternative browsers to be un-american, and un-patriotic?
After all - if you've got nothing to hide, why are you using Firefox?
Arturia, for those of you with a few hundred bucks to spend, has a software model of the both the Minimoog and the wall sized Moog Modular. It's one of the best ways (that i've found) to get warm, analog synth goodness out of my machine. Bob Moog will surely be missed - and his contributions to the electronic world will live on, with or without the original, gargantuan equipment.
Personally, my strongest objections to the restriction of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is that at least thousands of fertilized human embryos are destroyed every day at fertility clinics across the country. A fertilized human embryo has a very limited shelf life in the freezer and unused embryos that go unused within a given period of time are sent to the furnace. Would not the scientific community benefit from the use of these otherwise doomed embryos?
So my question is: why is there no vehement right wing outcry? Isn't this just as bad as abortion or the destruction of embryo's for stem cell research? Or in this case do the ends (helping otherwise infertile people have babies) justify the means?
My experience with VoIP and Wifi has been that it functions very well without QoS. Your average sip phone call uses around 22KB/s up and down - our cable connection here at work is 10Mbs down and 1Mb up. I've used soft phones with my laptop over wireless, as well as hard phones using a shared connection through wifi. The only time i've ever experienced an issue was with Bittorrent - which is not suprising, bittorrent can hose even the best of connections.
Well said, however inflamatory it may be. I take issue with only one point - the presumption that people reading (and making) slashdot comments have a life to get on with:-P
Slashdot Mirror
I have a couple of responses -
1) It's definitely the students fault. He's at least intelligent enough to understand the consequences of his actions, and as a result, he should experience them. While blame for the action itself should lie squarely on this student's shoulders, that doesn't mean that on top of that, adware companies shouldn't be penalized for profitting from such a situation. Nor does it mean that society should not be self-critical and address behavior that it is, if not nurturing, at least allowing this kind of behavior to be profitable.2) In this instance, I think your Colt example is not quite accurate for the adware business model. Look at it like this: say Colt gives out their guns for free (and, attempting to seem at least somewhat ethical, does the requisite background checks), and to each person who receives a Colt, the company offers them free ammunition and a dollar everytime they fire it when someone else is watching. So...some person gets his free Colt, walks into a crowded open space, and fires 100 bullets at passers by. Is Colt responsible for his actions? Not at all. Should Colt be allowed to give unqualified incentives such as this? Absolutely not. My problem with the modern "it's societies fault" blame game (and this classic response to it) is that all parties involved, including "society" share some extent of the responsibility, singling out a scapegoat does not change that.
3) Presuming that whatever he did actually "shut down" an intensive care unit, why in hell were machines so critical to the operation of an intensive care unit even connected to the internet? So that the nurses, while treating patients, can check their Hotmail? It seems to me that critical networks that certainly don't need access to the internet, especially if they're particularly vulnerable to being compromised (*cough*...windows...*cough*) should be connected only to their internal network. Certainly a hospital understands the concept of a clean space; after all, i'm sure they go to great lengths to keep biological baddies out of the intensive care unit.
You present a good analogy, but I think there's another ways to look at this. First of all, think of an online retailer such as Amazon. Say you buy a bunch of books (i.e. over $50 worth, or whatever the minimum is to get free shipping). Because of all the business Amazon does with companies like UPS and FedEx, they get bulk shipping discounts, in which case it becomes feasible for them to offer you free shipping (in 3-7 business days), they pay very little (per customer) to ship things to you and they get the added benefit of edging out the smaller retailers by cutting their customers' costs. Now, say you want those packages delivered tomorrow. In this case, while Amazon can get you a discount for the aforementioned reasons, they're certainly not going to give that to you for free, because that cuts more drastically into their bottom line, you end up essentially paying FedEx or UPS directly for your instant gratifcation.
Now, lets say you enjoy shopping online so much, that you decide to bypass the retailer's shipping fee by becoming part of a high speed FedEx route (purely hypothetical, of course). Now, Fedex guarantees that anything sent to you via FedEx will get to you at a rate of 7Mbps^H^H^H^H^H 1 business day. Now you (and you're massive budget) get totally hooked on Amazon, and you start using it like a library, spending thousands of dollars and having the packages pipelined to you overnight. Fedex, seeing you and others like you giving so much money to online retailers, gets jealous and decides that not only do the receivers have to pay to get in this pipeline, but so do the shippers. Now, Amazon certainly doesn't want to lose your business, because your package habit is bringing them lots of money; on the other hand, they don't want to lose money out of their bottom line to fedex. What happens? Amazon raises their prices, pays the pipeliner and passes the wonderful overhead of instant gratifcation right on to you, the consumer. But wait...aren't you already paying for instant gratification? Isn't that why you subscribed to the Fedex pipeline in the first place? In other words Fedex, by attempting to tap into Amazon's revenue stream, instead just reached deeper into your pockets. It's a classic macro economics problem....extra cost on the providers end is always passed on to the consumer, in whole or in part. And, in fact, the reverse is also true. We had a problem on a freshman econ midterm that basically asked what percentage of sales tax is payed by the consumer, and what part by the provider, the answer came out to exactly half was paid by each, because essentially the provider loses a certain chunk of sales because the extra 6-8% drives away potential sales.
I guess what I'm saying is that verizon's already siphoning off a chunk of google's revenues. Hell, if it weren't for google, which, in effect, brought the power of the internet to the masses (and yes, so did yahoo, etc.), a much larger chunk of the US population wouldn't even be interested in paying for consumer broadband - which is, i'm sure, becoming a much larger part of Verizon's revenue stream.
This is a classic example of using an economic incentive where all else seems to fail. Clearly if the economic onus of identity theft is (in large part) on the shoulders of the bank, they'll come up with better and better ways to secure their information that they had no will or reason to do before. Presumably they'll start using biometrics and the like (whether or not you think that's adequate security) and hopefully, if this is enacted in the States, they'll start to require more than a bloody SSN and birthdate to open a credit card account. It's an incredibly insecure means of identifying someone. I mean, really, how many doctors' office require that information along with your insurance info? Lots. And how many doctors have a security aware IT staff? Probably a much smaller number.
Along those lines, though, who gets the fiscal responsibility if a third party, like a doctor or a university, is responsible for the ID compromise?
I couldn't agree more. Ajax has its place - the web application. The problem with this article, as I see it, is that the author makes no mention of the web application - the data driven brother/sister of the website. Take - for example - gmail. Were it not ajax, i wouldn't even bother with it, i'd use my favorite mail program (mac os x mail, in my case) as a POP client. I personally hate most webmail, because it's slow and clunky - gmail does not have this problem only because it's an ajax application. So yes - while that dessert recipe website shouldn't use ajax (since I know you'd love to bookmark that creme brulee recipe), a recipe management website can and should use ajax - since it would allow for functionality that would be either impossible, or prohibitively clunky.
I'm a web developer, and after seeing what ajax could do, and seeing the many ways that people have used it, I started to integrate ajax elements into an education management web app that i've been working on. While, yes, ajax can be buggy, and yes, it can be hard to use, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. All it means is that you should develop your ajax applications carefully and revel in the fact that ajax has made a Flash-free stateful web application possible. Heaven forfend that web-application design move out of the hands of designers and back to the people who do software best: developers.
I set up a small voip system in our office in NJ (3 lines) using broadvoice paired with asterisk - and while the service (most notably broadvoice tech support) leaves some things to be desired - our phone system is much better in terms of its feature set than it was on our POTS pbx. That said, most of the reliability issues we've encountered were the fault of our service provider, and we're generally quite happy with the switch.
The website i found myself constantly referring to in terms of making phone, software, hardware and other choices - as well as finding out the quirks and perks of each and mountains of setup info is the voip wiki.
Cheers, and good luck - you may need some in the process.
This has a lot more than two good uses - but not for consumers. Microsoft - and the advertising agencies that would pay for such targetted adspace - would be getting hundreds of billions of good uses out of this ($$). I read somewhere that for your average hour long television show the tv companies make 64 cents per viewer. Now, given that a)internet style ads have lower apparent yields than tv ads and b) OS ads can be much more specifically targeted at the users (depending upon what kind of information they're collecting on you) and c) OS based advertising can be linked directly to actual advertising yields (much more so than standard banner advertising right now). This has the potential (without crunching any numbers, i'm lazy, what can i say) to be substantially more profitable (i'm thinking orders of magnitude, per user) than the revenue returned from the $199 per user (or whatever) yielded by XP Home sales. So...in short - I would use it - but only if they paid me to choose an ad supported OS over a standard purchased license.
Windows certainly will run on Apple hardware. In fact - apple recently filed a patent application that looks like their own shot at a virtual machine environment. See this slashdot article. This is a far more interesting and worthwhile prediction of the implementation and possible intentions of apple's move to x86 than this ZDNet "review."
This article has an interesting perspective as to why iTunes doesn't have the things you want. Essentially, the tv companies, the advertising agencies that support them are reluctant to change a business model that's been a steady source of income for many, many years. So $1.99 per show, and a wimpy 320x240 res is more a move to limit the consumption of this particular format.
It seems to me that you've contradicted yourself - given that open source has so many eyes on the code itself, would you not therefore expect more/more frequent patches/upgrades? One of the benefits to open source is that, while there is a fairly stable group of developers responsible for something like firefox, you get many new developers coming into the picture at any given time - bringing new ideas and a fresh pairs of eyes to spot problems. So...on the one hand open source software is easily neglected - if the core group of developers gives up or moves on, and on the other hand there is the potential (and in the case of firefox, the reality) for many, many people to join the ranks of code contributors. This is not the case with closed source developers, as high turnover of employees is not generally considered good business practice; there are, therefore, far fewer new eyes looking for flaws in the closed source case.
As a totally non-factually founded side note, IMHO, i think that the number of flaws found in firefox, while spiking in the last few months, will eventually drop below that of IE, for precisely the reasons mentioned above. This seems especially true given MSFT's recent brain drain.
Clearly the modder didn't see my tongue firmly embedded in my cheek. Troll? Sheesh.
....this whole Iraq mess in the first place by nuking them all? After all they "did" have weapons of mass destruction and intended to use them, right?
I think they're more likely to get hired by Google than fired by Microsoft.
Couldn't agree with you more. It wasn't my intention to impugn your though processes.
That is clear enough, but as a CS person, I personally tend to look at the structure, rather than the context. Thus, what the data being returned is, and who it's being returned to matters not as far as design is concerned. IMHO, this is how system/software patents should work - if someone has a structural idea that's the same as some "prior art" and all they did was change the values of the variable - that patent should not be issued.
Is 7 watts enough to power a chick magnet?
Clearly. Is this not just a barcode scanner with a server connection? DHL, Fedex and UPS all have something like this. As far as I can tell, the only novel thing about this patent is that the "barcode scanner" doesn't have to be a dedicated scanner, just anything with a CCD.
I agree with darealpat - I wonder how much of the search for "prior art" involves string matching...
$result = query( "select * from patents where patent_text like '%portable imaging device to capture an image of identifying data%'");
num_rows($result)==0? issue_patent() : issue_lawsuit();
My point was that Apple's intentions in this matter don't make a lick of difference. The patent system is such that they had to get a patent.
I disagree. It is a necessary business decision, given current patent law, to file a patent application for something as critical to your business model as the software interface for your primary revenue source. In other words, regardless of the motivations of those filing the patent, be it to "lock down" the technology as squiggleslash said, or simply to prevent other companies from locking it down (thus avoiding paying licensing fees) - the action of filing a (software) patent is essentially a defensive one.
That said, regardless of who is the infringer or the enforcer in any given patent situation, be it the Free Software and Open Source community or Big Bad Microsoft, survival in the market to which the patent applies requires defensive patents, which demonstrates only that the patent system is flawed, nothing more.
squiggleslash's statement that Apple is getting they're comeuppance because they're as guilty as Creative in trying to get a patent for their software is nonsense, Apple had no choice but to take move to prevent the inevitable legal action that will come from the (rightful or not) patent holder for the technology.
So where's the Department of Homeland Security's statement proclaiming users of alternative browsers to be un-american, and un-patriotic? After all - if you've got nothing to hide, why are you using Firefox?
This way Flash can report to the system all the cookies a machine has held
Yeah, reporting every site that drops a cookie on my machine doesn't intrude on my privacy in the slightest.
Arturia, for those of you with a few hundred bucks to spend, has a software model of the both the Minimoog and the wall sized Moog Modular. It's one of the best ways (that i've found) to get warm, analog synth goodness out of my machine. Bob Moog will surely be missed - and his contributions to the electronic world will live on, with or without the original, gargantuan equipment.
Personally, my strongest objections to the restriction of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research is that at least thousands of fertilized human embryos are destroyed every day at fertility clinics across the country. A fertilized human embryo has a very limited shelf life in the freezer and unused embryos that go unused within a given period of time are sent to the furnace. Would not the scientific community benefit from the use of these otherwise doomed embryos?
So my question is: why is there no vehement right wing outcry? Isn't this just as bad as abortion or the destruction of embryo's for stem cell research? Or in this case do the ends (helping otherwise infertile people have babies) justify the means?
This is absurd. It seems like a beginner CS class exercise. "Find all the numbers and highlight them." I think I did this in high school.
My experience with VoIP and Wifi has been that it functions very well without QoS. Your average sip phone call uses around 22KB/s up and down - our cable connection here at work is 10Mbs down and 1Mb up. I've used soft phones with my laptop over wireless, as well as hard phones using a shared connection through wifi. The only time i've ever experienced an issue was with Bittorrent - which is not suprising, bittorrent can hose even the best of connections.
Well said, however inflamatory it may be. I take issue with only one point - the presumption that people reading (and making) slashdot comments have a life to get on with :-P