Any systematically generated (non-random) password suffers from this weakness. Once you figure out the system, all the extra passwords provide no real additional security.
This is why password aging provides no security benefit. When a hacker finds out that I've stopped using the password "loser15" they'll try "loser16" and get in on the next attempt. I imagine that 90% of people with accounts with password aging use such a system, making the aging itself useless.
Apple's dock connector is an example of the best solution so far. Not perfect, but obviously the most successful.
I think this was only successful because the iPod itself was successful and has such a large market share.
Imagine if the iPod's market share were 5% and not 75%. Nobody would make peripherals for it (well, there would be the odd one or two, but that's about it) - just as nobody makes dedicated peripherals for the NoCo GX1325 cell phone, except for a $25 charger made in taiwan for 50 cents (the rest of the cost pays for the shelf it sits on rusting while it isn't selling).
In such a market the dock would become an anti-feature - nobody would want it because it would mean that they'd have to buy all kinds of expensive peripherals - all two of them and couldn't use anything that actually follows a standard.
The dock is only successful because Apple has a monopoly. Oh, and that monopoly has led to all the usual abuses associated with proprietary connectors - you need to licence the rights to use many of its features.
I suspect that smartphones will fall somewhere between computers and TVs. TVs are the perfect fit for Apple - nobody even knows what OS their TV runs - they just buy one they like for the features it has. In the TV world Apple would be like Sony. And, just like Sony they'll be a big player that owns 15% of the market. The rest of the market will be the likes of HTC, LG, Samsung, Nokia, Motorolla, and the rest - and they'll probably all be churning out android phones (eventually).
It is hard for a hardware maker to capture a majority of any market. The world's most popular car probably has 5% market share. Even the ipod which is unusual in its dominance only has 76% of the market (and I suspect that the mp3 player market is doomed long term as smartphones become cheaper and are decoupled from data plans).
Apple has chosen to go it alone, and it is very hard for a single company going it alone to capture the majority of the market. Since software has a network effect that is going to hurt them in the long term I think.
Even the typical DSLR doesn't come with a lens that truly performs at the pixel level - at least not for consumer DSLRs.
If you spend $300 or so on a prime lens, or $1500+ on a zoom lens then you can probably get a lens that will give you a real 12MP of quality (give or take). Those lenses of course are anything but compact.
Now, if you wanted to build a camera with a prime lens that was fully integrated (no support for interchangable lenses) I'm sure you could get real 8MP quality in a smaller and cheaper package than a DSLR. However, such a camera would probably be bigger even than the typical compact point-and-shoot camera, let alone what you find in a cell phone (what, is that lens even 5mm across, or more than 3mm from the sensor?).
I'm pretty impressed with the camera on my android phone - it is great by cell phone standards. I'm even more impressed with a $120 point and shoot I just got as a portable (semi-disposable) camera. They are great for what they are. However, both have sensors built more for marketing than practicality, and neither is going to even remotely come close to performing as well as my (relatively cheap) DSLR - even on a sunny day.
The implication here is that motor vehicles kill more lives than they save, which is demonstrably false.
You're comparing cars to no cars. The comparison everybody is making here is between manual cars and automated cars. With the exception of perhaps off-road rescue vehicles manual cars will certainly kill more lives than they save compared to automated cars.
Imagine if some doctor were caught practicing medicine from the middle ages. You could argue that medicine in the middle ages had a net benefit compared to providing no care at all, but we're really interested in the standard of care, which today is clearly far better than that practiced in the middle ages.
Once upon a time losing a sibling in childhood was a fairly ordinary thing. Today it is a rare tragedy. That is progress.
When auto accidents happen with the frequency of plane crashes, finding out that somebody was driving a car manually will be like finding out today that a pilot was flying drunk.
Ok, it is in the nation's best interest to prevent 34,950 deaths a year from auto-accidents.
A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be great.
Oh, and cars that drive themselves would eliminate road rage, the need for parking lots (which are horrible for the environment), handicapped parking spots, and in many cases would allow families to get by with fewer cars (if the car can drop people off at work and return you can get more utilization out of it). It would also make on-demand rental fairly straightforward, which would greatly cut down on urban car use.
You also don't need to paint streets with markings, have road signs, traffic control devices, etc. Road construction will be greatly simplified - cars will just detour themselves and make use of lanes as needed. Idle traffic would be a thing of the past - no need for cars to stop at all really, or at least not much. The average commute time will be much shorter, and you can nap or read or work while you commute.
Great for the environment too - cars would travel in convoys and massively increase their mileage. If you could nap or otherwise occupy yourself you might be willing to drive more slowly as well. Or, you could take a small passenger car quickly to your destination (or fly), and have a larger car ferry your luggage at a slower speed and arrive later. I could see a new type of freight - load your stuff into standard-sized packages, your car ferries it to a delivery terminal where it is unloaded, and then a rental car picks it up wherever it is going and does the last mile.
Automated cars would greatly change everybody's life - it is hard to predict exactly how. The benefits will almost certainly outweigh the costs, however.
Uh, nobody can make a perfect car. It is virtually guaranteed that some people will die in these cars. These deaths will be shocking to the public, and will garner huge verdicts. Manufacturers won't bother to make cars as a result.
This is why childhood vaccine manufacturers are shielded from general liability (there is a government-regulated pool to reimburse victims of vaccine side effects). If you give 100M people a shot, you'll probably save 30M lives, and be certain to kill a few thousand or whatever. You can't let the threat of lawsuits from the few thousand (which could be VERY expensive - grieving parents make great plaintiffs, and the vaccines are KNOWN to cause deaths), put at risk the supply when it is known to save a far greater number of lives.
Suppose a car manufacturer KNOWS that their design will prevent 100k accidents, and cause 10. Should we really punish them for the 10? I'd only consider this valid if you could also sue a car manufacturer for equipping a car with a steering wheel and gas pedal - features guaranteed to kill thousands of people per year.
As soon as the first plaintiff lawyer explains to the jury that the company was counting on a $10B lawsuit and figures it is just the cost of doing business, the jury will hand down a $1T verdict. Punitive awards are meant to be punitive. If a company won't be hurt by the verdict then juries will just come up with a bigger one.
A better solution is for government to simply mandate, regulate, and certify the designs, and then shield manufacturers from liability as long as they submit to periodic inspections or whatever. It is in the interest of the country to pursue these kinds of technologies, and we can't let fear cause us to do more harm by not letting them take root.
Feel free to provide links to informed explanations from people who do have insight into the current status at Fukushima.
People want to know what is going on. Those with access to this information choose to withold it. It isn't surprising then that people turn to experts who can at least offer conjecture.
Your post seems analogous to complaining about all those physicists throwing around wild guesses about the Big Bang without having been there. Clearly if we had eyewitnesses to the Big Bang then everybody would agree that their observations would carry great weight. Likewise, if somebody who has actual data from Fukushima wants to post it, I'm sure it will receive the attention it deserves...
Corporate IT security is like a slot machine that costs 25 cents to play, with a payout schedule that pays $1 on average, but one out of every 1M pulls you lose $10M.
The IT manager who ultra-secures their systems gets tons of complaints, and the company becomes less nimble than their competition who don't bother to secure (there is a real cost when you make it harder for your employees to communicate and work together).
So, if you're an IT manager who promotes strong security you quickly lose your job to somebody who doesn't.
Then every once in a while one of these insecure managers pulls the lever and loses the company a lot of money. The manager is blamed for lax security and fired. The replacement will start out being more secure, and once the spotlight is off they'll go back to doing exactly what their predecessor did, and they'll get bonuses because there isn't a repeat of the huge loss and things are just as efficient as before. That must mean he is doing his job right, right?
I've been finding that successful executives these days really are just lucky. They enact risky policies that have short term gains, pocket bonuses from these gains, and try to move on before it comes back to hurt them. Many get terminated, but those who don't shoot way up the ladder. What passes for due diligence at the CxO level isn't about preventing problems, but instead punishing whoever was left standing without a chair when the music stopped.
Ok, so let's assume a CC "only" makes $100k in real money. They also have to suffer with only eating at restaurants that cost $50+/meal. Oh, and that's after paying for their residence in DC since you included that in the cost (and it can't be too shabby at rents that exceed many average mortgages - $30k/yr!).
I'm sure the average resident in any state would be more than happy to trade lifestyles with this guy.
Fortunately line-out was standardized with the 1/8" jack sometime back when I was in diapers, and before many here were conceived.
Plus, bluetooth has made a lot of that stuff irrelevant. When I get in my car I plug in a micro-usb charger, and hit play on the radio.
I have no problem with a standard connector that includes power, audio, usb, and video. The problem is that everybody always comes out with their own standard, it makes it harder to use one device to charge and another to playback audio, and another to playback video, and whatever anybody comes out with will almost be certainly filled with so much DRM that nobody will use it for ten years anyway.
While we're at it, can we get an option to remove all the hyperlinks from summaries? None of us follow them anyway and they tend to distract from the flaming.
Bell Labs was an interesting byproduct of regulatory loopholes.
As a monopoly Bell was allowed to charge costs+x%. The x% was their profit. What is the best way to maximize profit in such a scenario when people will pay any price? Simple: maximize costs.
Bell Labs was given great funding because it could be argued that it was related to providing phone service and thus should count towards the x% calculation.
We could have had the same thing if we just funded the NSF the same amount of money, except then we wouldn't have had to pay the extra x% on top of that for executive bonuses...
Yup. The way the system works was made quite evident for me when I was sitting in the court room being voir dired. They always ask "does anybody have a reason they couldn't sit on a trial of n days?" It is made fairly obvious that work is not generally considered a valid excuse (since on paper you can't be fired for being selected, though if like most professionals you're just paid to get a job done then you end up working weekends or whatever to make it up).
However, it became clear that there is one profession for which work is a valid excuse. One man stood up and said that he had to prepare for a client's trial, and that he was a lawyer. Excuse accepted. Can't have other trials delayed because a lawyer had to serve on a jury (not that any lawyer would have selected him anyway once they knew he was a lawyer). I doubt the cost of that trial was even a consideration, since simply citing a business loss to my employer in excess of the cost of a trial would not make my excuse any more likely to be accepted. Instead, this is just a professional courtesy to other judges, kind of like looking the other way when a cop beats his wife.
Yes but they are brought in because they supposedly understand a field well. If they aren't suitable expert witnesses the lawyers should be objecting.
So, lawyer messes up, and client goes to jail? That hardly seems like justice to me. Are we punishing people for their crimes, or for failing to hire the right lawyer or not being able to argue their case pro se?
And that is the problem. Human beings are use to making decisions on incomplete data. It's against our nature not to. In evolutionary terms those who froze were eaten, squashed, or otherwise killed. Asking a juror to disengage their curiosity but still engage their ability to think critically is ridiculous.
Agree. I think the underlying root problem here is that those involved with courts would prefer that the jury weren't there at all. Trials are almost designed to force the jury to come to a conclusion pre-ordained by principles of law and precedent and willingness to spend more to buy the verdict you want.
The problem is that there is this whole constitution thing, where a bunch of crazy revolutionaries decided a few hundred years ago (well, before that in Europe really) that government officials who knew what they're doing shouldn't have the final word on whether somebody rots in jail for the rest of their life. The result is that we have jurors who are far less qualified to be doing their jobs, but who are far more sympathetic to ordinary people.
And yet, we basically treat them like cattle. Gee, if jurors knew this they would actually follow their consciences and would not come to the legally mandated conclusion - better make sure they don't find out! Well, perhaps if the legally mandated conclusions are impossible for a person of good conscience (who isn't being compensated well enough to ignore it) to follow there is something wrong with the law.
I think the whole reason we're having all these financial meltdowns is that the financial system is fundamentally broken.
What creates value?: Companies building factories and making things. Researchers creating new knowledge that leads to new products also creates value. The bottom line is that value is created when real people do tangible work.
The financial system is about moving numbers from one account to another, and getting paid to do it. It only creates value insofar as it gives money to the people doing tangible work when they wouldn't have been able to get it otherwise, or making this transfer of money more efficient. If a middleman saves investors and companies time trying to find each other then they can actually make things more efficient. However, having 14 middlemen each trading a derivative in-between just sucks out the gains. Does a barrel of oil need to be traded 50 times between the time it is mined and the time the ship arrives in New Orleans or wherever?
What does this have to do with retirement? Everything. People want to retire, so they have to save money. However, what this translates into is doing work now so that you can be paid later. The problem is that with inflation your money won't be worth as much in 30 years, and so you need investments to make up the difference. However, the US economy can only handle so much investment (honestly). If I go to my local gas station and offer them a billion dollars to expand their operations, are they going to give me some kind of return by doing actual work? They could build a 300 acre gas station and serve every car within 50 miles, and still not generate enough revenue to bring a real return on a billion dollar investment. Well, the world is just one really big gas station, and it can only take so much investment. If you want 10% annual return on investment sustained, and every person working today wants to get that kind of return on a substantial part of their income, pretty quickly you're going to run out of companies generating real products and knowledge.
But, that's not a problem since we have hedge funds and financial services. With a little magic in excel we can make $1 into $1.10, and lookie here, if you plug $1E11 into the same cell you get $1.1E11! All our problems are solved! Well, at least until we re-balance the checkbooks and find only $1E9 in our accounts.
I think the real wakeup is going to be when all those baby-boomers start retiring and collecting on their 401ks, and they find out that since the labor pool just got massively reduced everybody is making a LOT more money, and the pricetags on everything are 2-3x higher than before they retired. Suddenly that $1M 401k starts acting more like a $100k 401k, and boomers will be going back to work where they can get pay that keeps pace with inflation.
The whole concept of saving for 30 years and then retiring for 30 years only works if the population is growing so quickly that the next generation is willing to sustain your work-free lifecycle at a level you can accept. When population is flat or declines, somebody has to do the work, and those willing to do it can command a lot more pay.
For the average person, their greatest asset isn't their 401k, but their ability to work. What society needs is not a solution to financial meltdowns, but rather a cure for Alzheimers. The whole concept of retirement just doesn't make sense any longer - not for the lengths of time that people want it to last and levels of consumption people want to sustain.
I would agree that this aspect of GPLv3 might be contrary to US Copyright Law in the same way that 99% of EULAs are contrary to the law.
However, US courts have generally upheld EULAs, which means that like it or not they probably would uphold the GPLv3.
Oh, and if an IT-oriented company like Apple were to argue against the GPLv3 on those grounds to defend a license violation, they could find their arguments turned around the next time they try to sue somebody for running a legally-purchased copy of OSX on non-Apple hardware, or selling devices running said configuration. If Apple actually won against GPLv3 they could set a precedent that actually fundamentally damages their own business model.
For this reason, Apple would never challenge the GPL v3.
They don't need to make it easy, and the average user need not be aware the feature even exists.
How many casual OSX users run an xterm or whatever? And yet, the capability exists, as it should.
GPLv3 doesn't require that software distributors make it EASY to modify their software, only that they make it possible without having to brute-force RSA or whatever.
Well, they could just use a different signing key for Samba, so that there is no general harm in disclosing it.
But yes, GPLv3 was specifically designed to interfere with companies that treat software modified by the end-user differently than that provided by a vendor/etc.
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Any systematically generated (non-random) password suffers from this weakness. Once you figure out the system, all the extra passwords provide no real additional security.
This is why password aging provides no security benefit. When a hacker finds out that I've stopped using the password "loser15" they'll try "loser16" and get in on the next attempt. I imagine that 90% of people with accounts with password aging use such a system, making the aging itself useless.
Apple's dock connector is an example of the best solution so far. Not perfect, but obviously the most successful.
I think this was only successful because the iPod itself was successful and has such a large market share.
Imagine if the iPod's market share were 5% and not 75%. Nobody would make peripherals for it (well, there would be the odd one or two, but that's about it) - just as nobody makes dedicated peripherals for the NoCo GX1325 cell phone, except for a $25 charger made in taiwan for 50 cents (the rest of the cost pays for the shelf it sits on rusting while it isn't selling).
In such a market the dock would become an anti-feature - nobody would want it because it would mean that they'd have to buy all kinds of expensive peripherals - all two of them and couldn't use anything that actually follows a standard.
The dock is only successful because Apple has a monopoly. Oh, and that monopoly has led to all the usual abuses associated with proprietary connectors - you need to licence the rights to use many of its features.
Ok, so phones are appliances.
What percent of the refrigerator market does Maytag or whatever own?
Appliances rarely are dominated by a single vendor - especially in the long term.
I suspect that smartphones will fall somewhere between computers and TVs. TVs are the perfect fit for Apple - nobody even knows what OS their TV runs - they just buy one they like for the features it has. In the TV world Apple would be like Sony. And, just like Sony they'll be a big player that owns 15% of the market. The rest of the market will be the likes of HTC, LG, Samsung, Nokia, Motorolla, and the rest - and they'll probably all be churning out android phones (eventually).
It is hard for a hardware maker to capture a majority of any market. The world's most popular car probably has 5% market share. Even the ipod which is unusual in its dominance only has 76% of the market (and I suspect that the mp3 player market is doomed long term as smartphones become cheaper and are decoupled from data plans).
Apple has chosen to go it alone, and it is very hard for a single company going it alone to capture the majority of the market. Since software has a network effect that is going to hurt them in the long term I think.
Well, in my state the penalties for giving alcohol to a minor include:
1. Fine for the parent of $2500 per minor served after the first (the first one is "only" $1000). Those are the minimum fines
2. If the minor injures somebody, the person who served them is liable.
3. A bartender is liable for $5k and prison for 3-12 months. The bar can lose its license as well.
The US has a history that includes the puritans, prohibition, and MADD - these are largely the reasons for these kinds of laws.
Even the typical DSLR doesn't come with a lens that truly performs at the pixel level - at least not for consumer DSLRs.
If you spend $300 or so on a prime lens, or $1500+ on a zoom lens then you can probably get a lens that will give you a real 12MP of quality (give or take). Those lenses of course are anything but compact.
Now, if you wanted to build a camera with a prime lens that was fully integrated (no support for interchangable lenses) I'm sure you could get real 8MP quality in a smaller and cheaper package than a DSLR. However, such a camera would probably be bigger even than the typical compact point-and-shoot camera, let alone what you find in a cell phone (what, is that lens even 5mm across, or more than 3mm from the sensor?).
I'm pretty impressed with the camera on my android phone - it is great by cell phone standards. I'm even more impressed with a $120 point and shoot I just got as a portable (semi-disposable) camera. They are great for what they are. However, both have sensors built more for marketing than practicality, and neither is going to even remotely come close to performing as well as my (relatively cheap) DSLR - even on a sunny day.
The implication here is that motor vehicles kill more lives than they save, which is demonstrably false.
You're comparing cars to no cars. The comparison everybody is making here is between manual cars and automated cars. With the exception of perhaps off-road rescue vehicles manual cars will certainly kill more lives than they save compared to automated cars.
Imagine if some doctor were caught practicing medicine from the middle ages. You could argue that medicine in the middle ages had a net benefit compared to providing no care at all, but we're really interested in the standard of care, which today is clearly far better than that practiced in the middle ages.
Once upon a time losing a sibling in childhood was a fairly ordinary thing. Today it is a rare tragedy. That is progress.
When auto accidents happen with the frequency of plane crashes, finding out that somebody was driving a car manually will be like finding out today that a pilot was flying drunk.
Ok, it is in the nation's best interest to prevent 34,950 deaths a year from auto-accidents.
A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be great.
Oh, and cars that drive themselves would eliminate road rage, the need for parking lots (which are horrible for the environment), handicapped parking spots, and in many cases would allow families to get by with fewer cars (if the car can drop people off at work and return you can get more utilization out of it). It would also make on-demand rental fairly straightforward, which would greatly cut down on urban car use.
You also don't need to paint streets with markings, have road signs, traffic control devices, etc. Road construction will be greatly simplified - cars will just detour themselves and make use of lanes as needed. Idle traffic would be a thing of the past - no need for cars to stop at all really, or at least not much. The average commute time will be much shorter, and you can nap or read or work while you commute.
Great for the environment too - cars would travel in convoys and massively increase their mileage. If you could nap or otherwise occupy yourself you might be willing to drive more slowly as well. Or, you could take a small passenger car quickly to your destination (or fly), and have a larger car ferry your luggage at a slower speed and arrive later. I could see a new type of freight - load your stuff into standard-sized packages, your car ferries it to a delivery terminal where it is unloaded, and then a rental car picks it up wherever it is going and does the last mile.
Automated cars would greatly change everybody's life - it is hard to predict exactly how. The benefits will almost certainly outweigh the costs, however.
The whole thing just makes a whole lot of sense.
Uh, nobody can make a perfect car. It is virtually guaranteed that some people will die in these cars. These deaths will be shocking to the public, and will garner huge verdicts. Manufacturers won't bother to make cars as a result.
This is why childhood vaccine manufacturers are shielded from general liability (there is a government-regulated pool to reimburse victims of vaccine side effects). If you give 100M people a shot, you'll probably save 30M lives, and be certain to kill a few thousand or whatever. You can't let the threat of lawsuits from the few thousand (which could be VERY expensive - grieving parents make great plaintiffs, and the vaccines are KNOWN to cause deaths), put at risk the supply when it is known to save a far greater number of lives.
Suppose a car manufacturer KNOWS that their design will prevent 100k accidents, and cause 10. Should we really punish them for the 10? I'd only consider this valid if you could also sue a car manufacturer for equipping a car with a steering wheel and gas pedal - features guaranteed to kill thousands of people per year.
The insurance would be prohibitively expensive.
As soon as the first plaintiff lawyer explains to the jury that the company was counting on a $10B lawsuit and figures it is just the cost of doing business, the jury will hand down a $1T verdict. Punitive awards are meant to be punitive. If a company won't be hurt by the verdict then juries will just come up with a bigger one.
A better solution is for government to simply mandate, regulate, and certify the designs, and then shield manufacturers from liability as long as they submit to periodic inspections or whatever. It is in the interest of the country to pursue these kinds of technologies, and we can't let fear cause us to do more harm by not letting them take root.
Feel free to provide links to informed explanations from people who do have insight into the current status at Fukushima.
People want to know what is going on. Those with access to this information choose to withold it. It isn't surprising then that people turn to experts who can at least offer conjecture.
Your post seems analogous to complaining about all those physicists throwing around wild guesses about the Big Bang without having been there. Clearly if we had eyewitnesses to the Big Bang then everybody would agree that their observations would carry great weight. Likewise, if somebody who has actual data from Fukushima wants to post it, I'm sure it will receive the attention it deserves...
Corporate IT security is like a slot machine that costs 25 cents to play, with a payout schedule that pays $1 on average, but one out of every 1M pulls you lose $10M.
The IT manager who ultra-secures their systems gets tons of complaints, and the company becomes less nimble than their competition who don't bother to secure (there is a real cost when you make it harder for your employees to communicate and work together).
So, if you're an IT manager who promotes strong security you quickly lose your job to somebody who doesn't.
Then every once in a while one of these insecure managers pulls the lever and loses the company a lot of money. The manager is blamed for lax security and fired. The replacement will start out being more secure, and once the spotlight is off they'll go back to doing exactly what their predecessor did, and they'll get bonuses because there isn't a repeat of the huge loss and things are just as efficient as before. That must mean he is doing his job right, right?
I've been finding that successful executives these days really are just lucky. They enact risky policies that have short term gains, pocket bonuses from these gains, and try to move on before it comes back to hurt them. Many get terminated, but those who don't shoot way up the ladder. What passes for due diligence at the CxO level isn't about preventing problems, but instead punishing whoever was left standing without a chair when the music stopped.
Ok, so let's assume a CC "only" makes $100k in real money. They also have to suffer with only eating at restaurants that cost $50+/meal. Oh, and that's after paying for their residence in DC since you included that in the cost (and it can't be too shabby at rents that exceed many average mortgages - $30k/yr!).
I'm sure the average resident in any state would be more than happy to trade lifestyles with this guy.
Fortunately line-out was standardized with the 1/8" jack sometime back when I was in diapers, and before many here were conceived.
Plus, bluetooth has made a lot of that stuff irrelevant. When I get in my car I plug in a micro-usb charger, and hit play on the radio.
I have no problem with a standard connector that includes power, audio, usb, and video. The problem is that everybody always comes out with their own standard, it makes it harder to use one device to charge and another to playback audio, and another to playback video, and whatever anybody comes out with will almost be certainly filled with so much DRM that nobody will use it for ten years anyway.
And half of their front-pages as well...
While we're at it, can we get an option to remove all the hyperlinks from summaries? None of us follow them anyway and they tend to distract from the flaming.
Bell Labs was an interesting byproduct of regulatory loopholes.
As a monopoly Bell was allowed to charge costs+x%. The x% was their profit. What is the best way to maximize profit in such a scenario when people will pay any price? Simple: maximize costs.
Bell Labs was given great funding because it could be argued that it was related to providing phone service and thus should count towards the x% calculation.
We could have had the same thing if we just funded the NSF the same amount of money, except then we wouldn't have had to pay the extra x% on top of that for executive bonuses...
Yup. The way the system works was made quite evident for me when I was sitting in the court room being voir dired. They always ask "does anybody have a reason they couldn't sit on a trial of n days?" It is made fairly obvious that work is not generally considered a valid excuse (since on paper you can't be fired for being selected, though if like most professionals you're just paid to get a job done then you end up working weekends or whatever to make it up).
However, it became clear that there is one profession for which work is a valid excuse. One man stood up and said that he had to prepare for a client's trial, and that he was a lawyer. Excuse accepted. Can't have other trials delayed because a lawyer had to serve on a jury (not that any lawyer would have selected him anyway once they knew he was a lawyer). I doubt the cost of that trial was even a consideration, since simply citing a business loss to my employer in excess of the cost of a trial would not make my excuse any more likely to be accepted. Instead, this is just a professional courtesy to other judges, kind of like looking the other way when a cop beats his wife.
Yes but they are brought in because they supposedly understand a field well. If they aren't suitable expert witnesses the lawyers should be objecting.
So, lawyer messes up, and client goes to jail? That hardly seems like justice to me. Are we punishing people for their crimes, or for failing to hire the right lawyer or not being able to argue their case pro se?
And that is the problem. Human beings are use to making decisions on incomplete data. It's against our nature not to. In evolutionary terms those who froze were eaten, squashed, or otherwise killed. Asking a juror to disengage their curiosity but still engage their ability to think critically is ridiculous.
Agree. I think the underlying root problem here is that those involved with courts would prefer that the jury weren't there at all. Trials are almost designed to force the jury to come to a conclusion pre-ordained by principles of law and precedent and willingness to spend more to buy the verdict you want.
The problem is that there is this whole constitution thing, where a bunch of crazy revolutionaries decided a few hundred years ago (well, before that in Europe really) that government officials who knew what they're doing shouldn't have the final word on whether somebody rots in jail for the rest of their life. The result is that we have jurors who are far less qualified to be doing their jobs, but who are far more sympathetic to ordinary people.
And yet, we basically treat them like cattle. Gee, if jurors knew this they would actually follow their consciences and would not come to the legally mandated conclusion - better make sure they don't find out! Well, perhaps if the legally mandated conclusions are impossible for a person of good conscience (who isn't being compensated well enough to ignore it) to follow there is something wrong with the law.
I think the whole reason we're having all these financial meltdowns is that the financial system is fundamentally broken.
What creates value?: Companies building factories and making things. Researchers creating new knowledge that leads to new products also creates value. The bottom line is that value is created when real people do tangible work.
The financial system is about moving numbers from one account to another, and getting paid to do it. It only creates value insofar as it gives money to the people doing tangible work when they wouldn't have been able to get it otherwise, or making this transfer of money more efficient. If a middleman saves investors and companies time trying to find each other then they can actually make things more efficient. However, having 14 middlemen each trading a derivative in-between just sucks out the gains. Does a barrel of oil need to be traded 50 times between the time it is mined and the time the ship arrives in New Orleans or wherever?
What does this have to do with retirement? Everything. People want to retire, so they have to save money. However, what this translates into is doing work now so that you can be paid later. The problem is that with inflation your money won't be worth as much in 30 years, and so you need investments to make up the difference. However, the US economy can only handle so much investment (honestly). If I go to my local gas station and offer them a billion dollars to expand their operations, are they going to give me some kind of return by doing actual work? They could build a 300 acre gas station and serve every car within 50 miles, and still not generate enough revenue to bring a real return on a billion dollar investment. Well, the world is just one really big gas station, and it can only take so much investment. If you want 10% annual return on investment sustained, and every person working today wants to get that kind of return on a substantial part of their income, pretty quickly you're going to run out of companies generating real products and knowledge.
But, that's not a problem since we have hedge funds and financial services. With a little magic in excel we can make $1 into $1.10, and lookie here, if you plug $1E11 into the same cell you get $1.1E11! All our problems are solved! Well, at least until we re-balance the checkbooks and find only $1E9 in our accounts.
I think the real wakeup is going to be when all those baby-boomers start retiring and collecting on their 401ks, and they find out that since the labor pool just got massively reduced everybody is making a LOT more money, and the pricetags on everything are 2-3x higher than before they retired. Suddenly that $1M 401k starts acting more like a $100k 401k, and boomers will be going back to work where they can get pay that keeps pace with inflation.
The whole concept of saving for 30 years and then retiring for 30 years only works if the population is growing so quickly that the next generation is willing to sustain your work-free lifecycle at a level you can accept. When population is flat or declines, somebody has to do the work, and those willing to do it can command a lot more pay.
For the average person, their greatest asset isn't their 401k, but their ability to work. What society needs is not a solution to financial meltdowns, but rather a cure for Alzheimers. The whole concept of retirement just doesn't make sense any longer - not for the lengths of time that people want it to last and levels of consumption people want to sustain.
I would agree that this aspect of GPLv3 might be contrary to US Copyright Law in the same way that 99% of EULAs are contrary to the law.
However, US courts have generally upheld EULAs, which means that like it or not they probably would uphold the GPLv3.
Oh, and if an IT-oriented company like Apple were to argue against the GPLv3 on those grounds to defend a license violation, they could find their arguments turned around the next time they try to sue somebody for running a legally-purchased copy of OSX on non-Apple hardware, or selling devices running said configuration. If Apple actually won against GPLv3 they could set a precedent that actually fundamentally damages their own business model.
For this reason, Apple would never challenge the GPL v3.
They don't need to make it easy, and the average user need not be aware the feature even exists.
How many casual OSX users run an xterm or whatever? And yet, the capability exists, as it should.
GPLv3 doesn't require that software distributors make it EASY to modify their software, only that they make it possible without having to brute-force RSA or whatever.
Well, they could just use a different signing key for Samba, so that there is no general harm in disclosing it.
But yes, GPLv3 was specifically designed to interfere with companies that treat software modified by the end-user differently than that provided by a vendor/etc.
Anybody who buys a tablet. Of course, the obligation is not on Google, but whoever sold them the tablet.
And as others have stated only GPL'ed code on the tablet need be disclosed.
Upgrade to what? ATT has lousy smarthphone selection. They tend to be even more locked down than the other carriers and not nearly as innovative.