Misleading language is possible. If you don't agree to their license, I find it difficult if not impossible that you couldn't play the CD. If it works in a consumer CD player, I'd be willing to bet that it'll work in your PC regardless of you saying yes or not to the software.
First of all, my earlier post was right: Only works on Windows-Compatable PCs. Second, the privacy risk here isn't all that great:
Bandlink Support
Bandlink is designed to be run simply by inserting the CD into a Windows Compatible PC.
The first time you insert the CD you will need to agree to the Bandlink User License and download the remaining program files. Bandlink should do the rest from then on.
As you can see, there's a consumer agreement component here. It's not an unimpeded, unstoppable invasion of privacy, like what TiVO was doing. You have to agree as well. In which case, if you don't really care about your privacy (and you like push content, which some people do) it might actually be seen as pretty cool.
Re:"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
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Touche. If you haven't seen Mike Moore's latest movie, Bowling for Columbine, I highly reccommend it -- it makes essentially the same argument in the arena of violent computer games and gun control.
Like I said, I agree with your original point. And this particular line of reasoning can be used for a wide variety of subjects -- for instance, most of Europe has a lower drinking age than the US, but Europe has much lower incidents of teen deaths due to alcohol. Teens in Scandinavian countries are twice as sexually active as american teens, but pregnancy rates are lower. Canadians own as many or more guns (per capita) as Americans but have less than 1/10th our rate of murder with a firearm. Ingrained cultural attidudes about things effect statistics and behavior much more than the accessibility of related hardware or media.
So the counterargument is that, in Japan, rape is just that much more unnacceptable... And the counterargument to that is that rape is much more culturally unacceptable in Japan, in spite of the media -- and therefore our policies should deal with what is ingrained in our culture, and not what is ingrained in Japanese culture. The feminazis would say that maybe the Japanese can handle themselves, but we American men are about half as civilized...
Like I said... The means, when they are justified, are justified by the ends (otherwise, what else justifies the means? some arbitrary judeochristian moral sense?) -- the means are always justified by the ends does not mean that the means are always justified.
The examples you gave are ones in which the means are not justified. Alternatively, is it okay for you to kill someone to prevent them from killing you, when you know that they will stop at nothing to kill you? Yes. Are there some acts for which we cannot concieve of justifiable ends (such as rape)? Yes. Does that make those acts inherently evil? No. Because we are not an infinite number of human beings conceiving of an infinite number of situations, we cannot possibily make absolutist moral judgements about what is and isn't wrong given any situation. In any given set of circumstances, each set being unique, we have but one tool available to justify our actions, and that is their end.
Is it okay for you to rob me to feed your family? What else is welfare except that on a broad scale? The only difference between robbery and taxes is that taxes are conceived of as robbery for the common good. Are taxes inherently evil? Well, I suppose that's a more loaded question...
I absolutely disagree. Of course it makes those "ugly things" right. Otherwise how could you justify war? Or imprisonment?
There is no "greater good." There is only the good. The means are always justified by the ends (which is not to be confused with the ends are always justified by the means).
Re:"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
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Like I said, I still completely agree, but I'll continue playing DA because I think that there is some controversy, and there is evidence to support both sides of this argument.
The "scientific" evidence for the "cycle of violence" statement occurs mostly in the arena of general cleanup. Time Square is normally used. When Rudy G. went about "cleaning up" Times Square, shutting down porn shops, etc., the mid-town area, particularly that around TS, noticed a DRAMATIC decrease in the number of rapes and violent sexual crime in the area. Sexual harassment complaints from office workers in the area also dropped over the same period.
I'm inclined to believe that this represents a general cleaning up of society, and not anything linked explicitly to the strip shows and porn shops. But it does make for interesting data.
I firmly don't believe that pornography is inherently degrading to women (it can be, but most of it isn't).
This makes a couple of interesting assumptions:
1) Women do not like sex
2) All porn involves multiple-penetration
3) Pornography inherently involves children
4) All pornography is forced
Let's consider a few other arguments. Women usually make 10 times as much, and up to 100 times as much, per sex scene as the male actors do. Female porn stars are some of the richest people in Los Angeles. On top of that, many use their income to pursue higher education, and often return as executives in the industry. Pornography is not forced upon women any more than casinos are forced upon gamblers. The economic boom of the 1990s and the drop in unemployment means that most women can find other forms of work, like waitressing. The truth of the matter is that waiting tables, bartending, or working in retail -- the two most accessible jobs for young women without a college education -- pay far, far less money than the porn industry does. Why shouldn't women be given that opportunity? Forced pornography, like forced prostitution, is a thing of the past. Women might be led to believe that they don't have other choices, but that's their fault, not ours.
The argument put forth by kedi is the same feminist argument set forth in the 1970s. The world has changed since then. Though pornography remains potentially exploitative (and therefore "evil"), tobacco is intrinsically exploitative.
Re:Google, porn, alcohol, smoking
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I'm not sure about the validity of the statement "porn exploits women," and much less the idea that "porn exploits kids" (although sicko-wacko-child-porn might). Doesn't the relative argument here seem to be: tobacco exploits everbody, therefore tobacco is worse than porn (even if porn exploits women and kids, which is debatable).
It's interesting to note that pornography in the 1970s-1980s arguably exploited women -- there's a bit of debate that could go on about that. But welcome to the new millenium! Dozens of the executives of pornography companies and film houses are women. Women are the ones getting rich off of pornography. Not to mention the women who use pornography as an effect, high-income means of paying for a higher education.
Pornography is potentially exploitative, that's true. But tobacco is intrinsically exploitative -- its only purpose is to exploit people's biochemical processes (i.e., addiction) so that they buy more.
Re:Censorship is Evil
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You've got an interesting point, and I see where you are coming from -- I believe in unrestricted free speech myself -- but I also firmly believe that there are no moral absolutes. Pretty much no one-word action -- censorship included -- can be considered completely evil.
That said, Google has a right to decide advertising as it sees fit. The decision to allow or disallow certain types of advertising is indeed censoring material, and Google has every right to do so.
They also have a right to block from their search engine whatever material they find objectionable. However, in that case, the censorship is indeed evil -- unless Google makes it explicity clear that the information is filtered.
In summation: filtering of advertising, not evil. Filtering of information: evil. Anybody who confuses advertising with information: needs to think about what planet they're living on.
Re:"Moral" problems are often the commenter's
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I completely agree, but I feel the need to play Devil's Advocate...
What about the argument that porn inherently degrading to women and helps to contribute to the cycle of violence in our society. There's a lot of evidence for and against that argument, and it is controversial (I, for one, tend to think that pornography is harmless) -- but we should acknowledge the argument nonetheless...
Like everything on Slashdot, the Win2k/Linux Angle
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Part of Andreeeson's argument is for simplicity and standardization. The current generation of OSes (Win2k, modern Linux Kerns, and Solaris 8/9), all pretty much hit the mark equally on the reliability front (it's true; having consulted for all three extensively, Win2k server, Linux, and Solaris all fail about the same and close to zero if they're set up properly). So the real question here is in terms of simplicity and standardization.
If Linux and the "completely" (i.e. GPL) open source community wants to thrive in the business world, they've got a lot of work to do. Though a more than fair argument can be made for Linux in terms of stablity and speed, Linux does still lag Win2k in terms of ease of maintanence and use (this goes right back to the TCO article on Slashdot a while back).
Most of the work I do is for companies that have a small or nonexistant IT department. Though patches for our clients running Win2k might be more frequent, they rarely require us to visit the site. In fact, we've never had to visit a client in order to help them update Win2k servers or workstations. The ease-of-use of the graphical environment makes system updates fairly idiot-proof. This simply isn't true (most of the time) on Linux -- it would be great if it were, but it isn't (hint to developers).
On the other hand, Linux does have a sizeable advantage at the web applications end. We often partner with another company that designs accounting and web-order systems (our firm is strictly hardware and sysadmin/sysint). If they need to do an update to web-end software, it's much easier for them to SSH into a server and upload the necessary changes. For desktop applications (in particular the non-web front end to an SQL database), however, Win2k still has the advantage -- when updating the front end, it's easy to create a single executable, burn to CD, and mail to client. All of the updating can be done by the user and not by IT, which ultimately reduces the problem that Andreeson discusses.
Even given the SSH advantage in Linux, commercial, closed source software has the advantage in that it is completely and totally standardized -- even if that standard is proprietary. The marketplace itself has shown that, at the moment, Win2k (and OS X, for that matter) reduce the total amount of sysadmin time required per machine. Applying a major service pack to 100 Win2k machine requires little or no expertise -- just download, double-click, and repeat. Applying an update that requires a kernel recompilation, on the other hand, takes somebody with substantially more expertise.
So, honestly... How many of you, in college, fudged footnotes and works cited every once in a while? That totally doesn't make it right, and I'm certainly not advocating doing so, but generally speaking my professors never checked up on stuff like that -- and who can blame them, in a class of 100 or more they certainly don't have the time. But it does foster the same thing down the line, which might be what we're seeing here...
I'm going to question exactly what vendors have to gain by having a product with all good reviews. This is less true with books, but particularly so when concerning items -- like electric razors, irons, stereo receivers, speaker systems, household appliances, etc -- which have a wide range of brand and product choices for very functionally similar items.
I took a really interesting college class entitled "Consumer Psychology" that dealt with exactly that. As a final project, we had to come up with our own study related to the cirriculum. One of the other students in the class focused on consumer-reports type reviews and their impact on purchasing behavior. He had two different sets of reviews of stereo recievers -- one gave four glowing reviews to four recievers, the other gave three mediocre/average reviews, and one glowing review. He had different sets of people read the reviews. Before and after reading the reviews, he gave them a brief set of questions about their likelihood of buying a new stereo receiver. Among those who on the first survey answered that they weren't planning on buying a stereo reciever, the three mediocre/one glowing review was more than three times as likely to stimulate a desire to purchase any stereo reciever than the four glowing reviews. Additionally, among those who were already in the market for a stereo reciever, the four glowing reviews left the consumer more confused and less likely to buy.
The rationale is that a glowing review among poor reviews creates the appearance of a "diamond in the rough," as he termed it. People think that they've stumbled on to a great product (that has advantages over others) and they want to buy it. By giving people a clear choice, instead of blanket positive reviews, those people are more likely to overcome indecision and actually buy the product. The truth of the matter is, good
Amazon knows that people use their reviews system to comparison shop. Not only that, but Amazon's cross-link and categories features make it really, really easy to comparison shop. If we could find an example of some top reviewers giving consistently negative reviews, then perhaps we could support the sort of conspiracy-theory arguments made in this forum. If, on the other hand, we could find that compulsive-reviewers rated high marks for particular items when there were otherwise lackluster reviews within the category. A cursory examination of the top 100 reviewers, and some of their reviews, has indicated that this probably isn't the case; maybe somebody else has time to do more in-depth research.
In the meantime, however, speculation on the ulterior motives of apparently innocent reviewers appears to me to be both paranoid and degrading to the reviewers themselves. Innocent until proven guilty...
In the interest of fairness and curiosity (two qualities I feel are embodied in Slashdot), I figured it might be prudent to ask Mr./Ms. Cooke directly. With that in mind, I have obtained his/her e-mail address from his/her Amazon.com profile. The following is the text of an e-mail I sent:
Mr./Ms. Cooke,
I thought that it would be polite to tell you that a discussion concerning the validity of your Amazon.com reviews is taking place on Slashdot.org, a popular bulletin board web site about the Internet and other aspects of computing.
The post, and corresponding discussion, can be accessed at the following URL:
Though I have not taken part in the discussion, most of the comments are negative, and I thought that if you were aware of the situation you might be able to defend yourself or offer an explanation. A copy of this correspondence will be posted to the bulletin board, and in the interest of dialogue, fairness, and curiosity, it is my hope that you will reply by posting directly to Slashdot. If you would prefer not to post directly to Slashdot, I would be happy to act as courier for any statements you would like to make in that forum.
A place I've done some consulting at has put Linux on all of their laptops (the desktops are in-house and ran Linux from the get-go). They peeled the "Sticker/Certificate of Authenticity" off of the bottom (using an X-acto knife) and are planning on sellingthe CDs and certificates on eBay. Totally legal, and they expect to get about 80% of the retail price of the software (which is a good bit of money). I bet it'd be even easier when the sticker/certificate is on a users guide and not on the case.
I don't know if anybody else has tried this, but it would be great to know if other people have had success.
This raises a good question about the digital age: how do we deal with long-term archival? Ancient documents have come down to us on paper, or through papyrus. What civilization 2000 years hence will be able to read off of a CD-ROM? How can we preserve our Rosetta Stones, scraps of papyrus, Dead Sea Scrolls, and such for analysis and discovery by some far-off human culture?
IDE backups might work for short term archival; particulary if you backing up daily work and overwriting the next day. Case in point: one of the companies I've done some consluting for needed a way to back up their 10 gig accounting database each night. All they really wanted protection against was a fire; the accouting database was pretty much the cornerstone on which this company (a wholesaler) ran. The solution was simple: buy an external 20 gig firewire drive, back up entire data drive from server, place drive in fire safe.
However, for long-term archival backups, IDE might not be the best idea. Drives do tend to get corrupted, and if you're not careful about letting them spin down completely each time before you remove them, or they get a little too much shock in transit, you could lose all your data. If you're looking for 1-2 year archival, IDE should probably work, but not much longer than that.
The next option would be tape backups. If you have the money, I would spring for one -- an autoloader if you can -- mainly because it will be more reliable than IDE. Recent experience suggests that tape media (at least the old TRAVAN kind, and some older 8mm DAT) has a shelf life of about 4 years after you write it. I recently tried to recover, for a client, some monthly non-incremental backups for the period 1995-1998 (they are the subject of an IRS audit). The tapes were a mix of older tape (TRAVAN and compat. earlier standards) and DAT media, depending on which of two servers they came from (and how old). Only one (a DAT) of the 24 tapes from 1995 (12 DAT, 12 TRAVAN) gave us 100% of the backed up data. 20 gave us partial, and 3 were completely unusable. The 96 tapes were a little better (12 complete data, 1 unreadable, 11 partial). 97 saw 20 complete, 4 partial; in 1998 all the data was fine. After 1998, the company switched completely to DAT; all the tapes later than '98 worked fine. So DAT isn't the best long-term storage medium. It is also worth noting that the tapes weren't kept in climate-controlled conditions, but instead in an shielded box in a cabinet in a manager's office. The office was air-conditioned, and the temp rarely got above 74, but company is in NYC and it can get pretty humid in the summertime. From talking with some colleagues, don't expect more than 5 years from tape unless you've got it in a climate-controlled environment.
One solution, however, is to backup to tape and then restore and backup to new tape once a year. After their debacle with the IRS, the aforementioned company is going to start doing that in the future.
Another good question is, what are you backing up? If its documents, and you're looking for long-term storage, the best solution is to print the documents out on acid-free paper, put them all in a box, and archive them at a storage facility. Although with 220 gigs of data it sounds like you've got quite a bit more than just documents...
I think that the a good Linux TV ads would be to show an ordinary Joe User using his Linux machine, and a geeky type getting mad at his XP box for always crashing.
Other than that, the Apple Switch Ads have been quite effective on the desktop level, as have the IBM e-Business ads (particular the one with the Universal Business Adapter).
I think it would be great if somehow the Linux community could muster some financial resources and put some TV ads together. That would be cool.
First of all, I know that a lot of people will read this and never get to the bottom, because its long and they might be outraged. So to counter that possibility, let me copy part of my last paragraph and put it up top:
I think that rather than fighting the validity of the results, the Linux community should view this as a wake-up call. There's a huge demand for cheaper, easier Linux. So go build it!
First of all, I think its perfectly reasonable to believe that this study took data for one year, or two years, or three years, or however many years since Win2k's inception, and used it to extrapolate a 5-year period. That's done all the time, and its a perfectly valid method of data analysis.
So, that given, let's think about this for a moment. IDC obviously looked at Windows 2000 implementations, and Linux implementations, and calculated how much they'd cost five years down the line. I find it very unlikely (and somebody reply if they know for certain otherwise) that the TCO prediction included the retro cost of OS upgrades (ie, upgrading from NT 4.0 when Win2k came out, upgrading the Linux kernel, etc.). So instead, it assumes that a server purchased today will be in place in 5 years. While programmers, workstation users, and some sysadmins might disagree, as a network administrator, responsible for a certain level of TCO decisions, five years is not a short amount of time for a single server-cycle. If you think about it, there's a reason why so many new server applications still support NT 4: there are a lot of people out there still using NT 4. The cost of upgrading a mission-critical server, whether it be a Linux or a Windows box, is huge, both in dollar value and in terms of time. So mission-critical servers tend to stay the same, without upgrades, until either a mission-critical app comes along that requires better hardware, or until an enterprise grows to the point where they need higher capacity.
That being said, its not at all surprising that the TCO of a Windows box is lower than a Linux box. Where I work, where we use computers primarily for high-end content creation, we have Linux, 2000/NT, Sun, and OS X servers and workstations. Though we pay all of our sysadmins the same hourly wage -- the amount of which is more than competitive for sysadmins in our area -- we do have separate groups working on the Wintel boxes, Sun boxes, and Linux boxes. On a per seat and per server basis, the Linux boxes are by far the most expensive to administrate. Recently we upgraded both Apache (to 2.0) and PHP. Our web server runs Linux, our intranet server runs Wintel, and an http streaming media test server runs on a Sun. Linux was by far -- nearly double, in fact -- the most expensive of the servers to upgrade in terms of man-hours; the Sun box was 2nd, Wintel the cheapest. We had Apache 2.0, and the new (and compatable) version of PHP, up and running within an hour. For Sun, Apache was up in about two hours. Upgrading our Linux server took two days, and not only cost us the manpower but also cost an unmeasurable amount of money for the time we were off-line. In fact, after the first day, we spent twenty minutes setting up the Wintel box to handle web traffic. That's just one example, but the situation has repeated itself countless times.
I will add that one of our server set-ups has caused us no trouble at all, and in fact has been nearly maintanence-free since we set it up. We have a rack of 6 X-serve, OS X-based servers. Since all of our video editing workstations use the MacOS, it made sense to set up our in-house shared media server as an OS X rack. This server was so cheap to administer, in fact, that when we were laying off people last month we had no problem firing the only member of our sysadmin team with substantial OS X experience.
I love Linux and open-source software, and as a self-professed Geek I'm proud to run Linux and GPL software on one of my home computers. But at the enterprise level, Windows is still cheaper. Not that I don't want that to change...
I can't dispute this study, and I think that rather than fighting the validity of the results, the Linux community should view this as a wake-up call. There's a huge demand for cheaper, easier Linux. So go build it!
An interesting idea. But ultimately one that probably wouldn't work. Retina images, like most biological imprints, have fractal-like resolution. Retina images aren't simple images. They are complex biological patterns whose level of resolution approaches the cellular level. Impossible to replicate? Probably not. But throw in a spectrometer and a thermometer along with the optical scanner, and you're pretty much guaranteed a counterfeit-free solution. You can't fake an eyeball, anymore than you can fake a stomach, or a heart, or any other human organ, to be identical to another.
Basically, what B.D. Mills fails to realize is that biological systems -- and biological imprints -- have a level of detail that is nearly (though not totally) impossible to replicate mechanically. Biological systems are, by their very nature, pseudodigital, and not analog (like an inkjet print on a piece of paper). It is this pseudodigital nature that makes them so appealing.
Which, as I'm sure pessimists will be quick to point out, does not make them perfect. But neither is any other system of identification that we, as human beings, have managed to devise. Even passwords are susceptible to truth serums -- or even just a fair bit of alcohol and a "trusted" friend. Like any system of identification, it is foolish to assume that biometic systems are completely reliable -- perfect -- because no system is or can be.
I think that the anology used in the original post is pretty good. I mean, alternatively, McDonald's could also put a biometric fingerprint scanner on the door handle. If you're worried you could wear gloves. If you're worried, you could wear sunglasses. Or just regular clear glasses, with a coating that blocks whatever wavelength radiation the scanners use (it ain't gonna be in the visible spectrum, too much interference).
Somebody let me know if there's a major difference in the technology required to match fingerprints vs. the technology required to match retinas. Everything I've read -- and a dual professor in computer science/biomedical engineering I asked -- says that there really isn't much of one.
The problems you raised with retinal scans as a means of proof-positive ID are completely valid. And precisely the reason that we don't, and aren't planning, on using fingerprinting (a technology thats been around for a little while) as a reliable form of IDing. Could the sort of retinal IDing in Minority Report become a reality? I doubt it. It's a sort of science fiction fantasy. Rewind to 1950, and note how fingerprints and fingerprint databases were used in the way scifi uses retinal scans nowadays.
Summa argumentum, don't worry. Or start walking around with gloves and sunglasses whenever you leave your house.
The post office analogy is not valid; the postal service is a public entity maintained by the Federal Government. We live in a Democracy in which it is a violation of 1st amendment rights for the government not to deliver your mail (way back in the day the Postal Service tried to prevent the mailing of pornography or "obscene material" but couldn't). The postal service is for that reason obligated to deliver whatever you put in the mail, provided that its not a controlled substance, dangerous, a bomb, etc.
However, private carriers -- UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. -- are under no obligation to do the same. They can return packages to sender (along with a refund) at their discretion. Packages sent via private carrier are the property of the sender until recieved (and often signed for) by the recipient.
The private carrier analogy is a much better one for ISPs. Provided that they are returning the sent e-mail to the sender (or simply notifying them), ISPs are fully within their rights to reject mail on any basis they see fit. Take it up with your ISP, threaten to leave them, etc., but I don't think they're under any obligation to deliver your e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
Misleading language is possible. If you don't agree to their license, I find it difficult if not impossible that you couldn't play the CD. If it works in a consumer CD player, I'd be willing to bet that it'll work in your PC regardless of you saying yes or not to the software.
Bandlink Support
Bandlink is designed to be run simply by inserting the CD into a Windows Compatible PC. The first time you insert the CD you will need to agree to the Bandlink User License and download the remaining program files. Bandlink should do the rest from then on.
As you can see, there's a consumer agreement component here. It's not an unimpeded, unstoppable invasion of privacy, like what TiVO was doing. You have to agree as well. In which case, if you don't really care about your privacy (and you like push content, which some people do) it might actually be seen as pretty cool.
Like I said, I agree with your original point. And this particular line of reasoning can be used for a wide variety of subjects -- for instance, most of Europe has a lower drinking age than the US, but Europe has much lower incidents of teen deaths due to alcohol. Teens in Scandinavian countries are twice as sexually active as american teens, but pregnancy rates are lower. Canadians own as many or more guns (per capita) as Americans but have less than 1/10th our rate of murder with a firearm. Ingrained cultural attidudes about things effect statistics and behavior much more than the accessibility of related hardware or media.
So the counterargument is that, in Japan, rape is just that much more unnacceptable... And the counterargument to that is that rape is much more culturally unacceptable in Japan, in spite of the media -- and therefore our policies should deal with what is ingrained in our culture, and not what is ingrained in Japanese culture. The feminazis would say that maybe the Japanese can handle themselves, but we American men are about half as civilized...
The examples you gave are ones in which the means are not justified. Alternatively, is it okay for you to kill someone to prevent them from killing you, when you know that they will stop at nothing to kill you? Yes. Are there some acts for which we cannot concieve of justifiable ends (such as rape)? Yes. Does that make those acts inherently evil? No. Because we are not an infinite number of human beings conceiving of an infinite number of situations, we cannot possibily make absolutist moral judgements about what is and isn't wrong given any situation. In any given set of circumstances, each set being unique, we have but one tool available to justify our actions, and that is their end.
Is it okay for you to rob me to feed your family? What else is welfare except that on a broad scale? The only difference between robbery and taxes is that taxes are conceived of as robbery for the common good. Are taxes inherently evil? Well, I suppose that's a more loaded question...
There is no "greater good." There is only the good. The means are always justified by the ends (which is not to be confused with the ends are always justified by the means).
The "scientific" evidence for the "cycle of violence" statement occurs mostly in the arena of general cleanup. Time Square is normally used. When Rudy G. went about "cleaning up" Times Square, shutting down porn shops, etc., the mid-town area, particularly that around TS, noticed a DRAMATIC decrease in the number of rapes and violent sexual crime in the area. Sexual harassment complaints from office workers in the area also dropped over the same period.
I'm inclined to believe that this represents a general cleaning up of society, and not anything linked explicitly to the strip shows and porn shops. But it does make for interesting data.
I firmly don't believe that pornography is inherently degrading to women (it can be, but most of it isn't).
1) Women do not like sex
2) All porn involves multiple-penetration
3) Pornography inherently involves children
4) All pornography is forced
Let's consider a few other arguments. Women usually make 10 times as much, and up to 100 times as much, per sex scene as the male actors do. Female porn stars are some of the richest people in Los Angeles. On top of that, many use their income to pursue higher education, and often return as executives in the industry. Pornography is not forced upon women any more than casinos are forced upon gamblers. The economic boom of the 1990s and the drop in unemployment means that most women can find other forms of work, like waitressing. The truth of the matter is that waiting tables, bartending, or working in retail -- the two most accessible jobs for young women without a college education -- pay far, far less money than the porn industry does. Why shouldn't women be given that opportunity? Forced pornography, like forced prostitution, is a thing of the past. Women might be led to believe that they don't have other choices, but that's their fault, not ours.
The argument put forth by kedi is the same feminist argument set forth in the 1970s. The world has changed since then. Though pornography remains potentially exploitative (and therefore "evil"), tobacco is intrinsically exploitative.
It's interesting to note that pornography in the 1970s-1980s arguably exploited women -- there's a bit of debate that could go on about that. But welcome to the new millenium! Dozens of the executives of pornography companies and film houses are women. Women are the ones getting rich off of pornography. Not to mention the women who use pornography as an effect, high-income means of paying for a higher education.
Pornography is potentially exploitative, that's true. But tobacco is intrinsically exploitative -- its only purpose is to exploit people's biochemical processes (i.e., addiction) so that they buy more.
That said, Google has a right to decide advertising as it sees fit. The decision to allow or disallow certain types of advertising is indeed censoring material, and Google has every right to do so.
They also have a right to block from their search engine whatever material they find objectionable. However, in that case, the censorship is indeed evil -- unless Google makes it explicity clear that the information is filtered.
In summation: filtering of advertising, not evil. Filtering of information: evil. Anybody who confuses advertising with information: needs to think about what planet they're living on.
What about the argument that porn inherently degrading to women and helps to contribute to the cycle of violence in our society. There's a lot of evidence for and against that argument, and it is controversial (I, for one, tend to think that pornography is harmless) -- but we should acknowledge the argument nonetheless...
If Linux and the "completely" (i.e. GPL) open source community wants to thrive in the business world, they've got a lot of work to do. Though a more than fair argument can be made for Linux in terms of stablity and speed, Linux does still lag Win2k in terms of ease of maintanence and use (this goes right back to the TCO article on Slashdot a while back).
Most of the work I do is for companies that have a small or nonexistant IT department. Though patches for our clients running Win2k might be more frequent, they rarely require us to visit the site. In fact, we've never had to visit a client in order to help them update Win2k servers or workstations. The ease-of-use of the graphical environment makes system updates fairly idiot-proof. This simply isn't true (most of the time) on Linux -- it would be great if it were, but it isn't (hint to developers).
On the other hand, Linux does have a sizeable advantage at the web applications end. We often partner with another company that designs accounting and web-order systems (our firm is strictly hardware and sysadmin/sysint). If they need to do an update to web-end software, it's much easier for them to SSH into a server and upload the necessary changes. For desktop applications (in particular the non-web front end to an SQL database), however, Win2k still has the advantage -- when updating the front end, it's easy to create a single executable, burn to CD, and mail to client. All of the updating can be done by the user and not by IT, which ultimately reduces the problem that Andreeson discusses.
Even given the SSH advantage in Linux, commercial, closed source software has the advantage in that it is completely and totally standardized -- even if that standard is proprietary. The marketplace itself has shown that, at the moment, Win2k (and OS X, for that matter) reduce the total amount of sysadmin time required per machine. Applying a major service pack to 100 Win2k machine requires little or no expertise -- just download, double-click, and repeat. Applying an update that requires a kernel recompilation, on the other hand, takes somebody with substantially more expertise.
So, honestly... How many of you, in college, fudged footnotes and works cited every once in a while? That totally doesn't make it right, and I'm certainly not advocating doing so, but generally speaking my professors never checked up on stuff like that -- and who can blame them, in a class of 100 or more they certainly don't have the time. But it does foster the same thing down the line, which might be what we're seeing here...
I took a really interesting college class entitled "Consumer Psychology" that dealt with exactly that. As a final project, we had to come up with our own study related to the cirriculum. One of the other students in the class focused on consumer-reports type reviews and their impact on purchasing behavior. He had two different sets of reviews of stereo recievers -- one gave four glowing reviews to four recievers, the other gave three mediocre/average reviews, and one glowing review. He had different sets of people read the reviews. Before and after reading the reviews, he gave them a brief set of questions about their likelihood of buying a new stereo receiver. Among those who on the first survey answered that they weren't planning on buying a stereo reciever, the three mediocre/one glowing review was more than three times as likely to stimulate a desire to purchase any stereo reciever than the four glowing reviews. Additionally, among those who were already in the market for a stereo reciever, the four glowing reviews left the consumer more confused and less likely to buy.
The rationale is that a glowing review among poor reviews creates the appearance of a "diamond in the rough," as he termed it. People think that they've stumbled on to a great product (that has advantages over others) and they want to buy it. By giving people a clear choice, instead of blanket positive reviews, those people are more likely to overcome indecision and actually buy the product. The truth of the matter is, good
Amazon knows that people use their reviews system to comparison shop. Not only that, but Amazon's cross-link and categories features make it really, really easy to comparison shop. If we could find an example of some top reviewers giving consistently negative reviews, then perhaps we could support the sort of conspiracy-theory arguments made in this forum. If, on the other hand, we could find that compulsive-reviewers rated high marks for particular items when there were otherwise lackluster reviews within the category. A cursory examination of the top 100 reviewers, and some of their reviews, has indicated that this probably isn't the case; maybe somebody else has time to do more in-depth research.
In the meantime, however, speculation on the ulterior motives of apparently innocent reviewers appears to me to be both paranoid and degrading to the reviewers themselves. Innocent until proven guilty...
Questions welcome. Comments invited.
-Shylock
Mr./Ms. Cooke,
I thought that it would be polite to tell you that a discussion concerning the validity of your Amazon.com reviews is taking place on Slashdot.org, a popular bulletin board web site about the Internet and other aspects of computing.
The post, and corresponding discussion, can be accessed at the following URL:
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/11/22 45234&mode=thread&tid=95
Though I have not taken part in the discussion, most of the comments are negative, and I thought that if you were aware of the situation you might be able to defend yourself or offer an explanation. A copy of this correspondence will be posted to the bulletin board, and in the interest of dialogue, fairness, and curiosity, it is my hope that you will reply by posting directly to Slashdot. If you would prefer not to post directly to Slashdot, I would be happy to act as courier for any statements you would like to make in that forum.
Regards,
emailaddressedremoved@domain.com; Slashdot name: shylock0
I don't know if anybody else has tried this, but it would be great to know if other people have had success.
This raises a good question about the digital age: how do we deal with long-term archival? Ancient documents have come down to us on paper, or through papyrus. What civilization 2000 years hence will be able to read off of a CD-ROM? How can we preserve our Rosetta Stones, scraps of papyrus, Dead Sea Scrolls, and such for analysis and discovery by some far-off human culture?
However, for long-term archival backups, IDE might not be the best idea. Drives do tend to get corrupted, and if you're not careful about letting them spin down completely each time before you remove them, or they get a little too much shock in transit, you could lose all your data. If you're looking for 1-2 year archival, IDE should probably work, but not much longer than that.
The next option would be tape backups. If you have the money, I would spring for one -- an autoloader if you can -- mainly because it will be more reliable than IDE. Recent experience suggests that tape media (at least the old TRAVAN kind, and some older 8mm DAT) has a shelf life of about 4 years after you write it. I recently tried to recover, for a client, some monthly non-incremental backups for the period 1995-1998 (they are the subject of an IRS audit). The tapes were a mix of older tape (TRAVAN and compat. earlier standards) and DAT media, depending on which of two servers they came from (and how old). Only one (a DAT) of the 24 tapes from 1995 (12 DAT, 12 TRAVAN) gave us 100% of the backed up data. 20 gave us partial, and 3 were completely unusable. The 96 tapes were a little better (12 complete data, 1 unreadable, 11 partial). 97 saw 20 complete, 4 partial; in 1998 all the data was fine. After 1998, the company switched completely to DAT; all the tapes later than '98 worked fine. So DAT isn't the best long-term storage medium. It is also worth noting that the tapes weren't kept in climate-controlled conditions, but instead in an shielded box in a cabinet in a manager's office. The office was air-conditioned, and the temp rarely got above 74, but company is in NYC and it can get pretty humid in the summertime. From talking with some colleagues, don't expect more than 5 years from tape unless you've got it in a climate-controlled environment.
One solution, however, is to backup to tape and then restore and backup to new tape once a year. After their debacle with the IRS, the aforementioned company is going to start doing that in the future.
Another good question is, what are you backing up? If its documents, and you're looking for long-term storage, the best solution is to print the documents out on acid-free paper, put them all in a box, and archive them at a storage facility. Although with 220 gigs of data it sounds like you've got quite a bit more than just documents...
Other than that, the Apple Switch Ads have been quite effective on the desktop level, as have the IBM e-Business ads (particular the one with the Universal Business Adapter).
I think it would be great if somehow the Linux community could muster some financial resources and put some TV ads together. That would be cool.
I think that rather than fighting the validity of the results, the Linux community should view this as a wake-up call. There's a huge demand for cheaper, easier Linux. So go build it!
First of all, I think its perfectly reasonable to believe that this study took data for one year, or two years, or three years, or however many years since Win2k's inception, and used it to extrapolate a 5-year period. That's done all the time, and its a perfectly valid method of data analysis.
So, that given, let's think about this for a moment. IDC obviously looked at Windows 2000 implementations, and Linux implementations, and calculated how much they'd cost five years down the line. I find it very unlikely (and somebody reply if they know for certain otherwise) that the TCO prediction included the retro cost of OS upgrades (ie, upgrading from NT 4.0 when Win2k came out, upgrading the Linux kernel, etc.). So instead, it assumes that a server purchased today will be in place in 5 years. While programmers, workstation users, and some sysadmins might disagree, as a network administrator, responsible for a certain level of TCO decisions, five years is not a short amount of time for a single server-cycle. If you think about it, there's a reason why so many new server applications still support NT 4: there are a lot of people out there still using NT 4. The cost of upgrading a mission-critical server, whether it be a Linux or a Windows box, is huge, both in dollar value and in terms of time. So mission-critical servers tend to stay the same, without upgrades, until either a mission-critical app comes along that requires better hardware, or until an enterprise grows to the point where they need higher capacity.
That being said, its not at all surprising that the TCO of a Windows box is lower than a Linux box. Where I work, where we use computers primarily for high-end content creation, we have Linux, 2000/NT, Sun, and OS X servers and workstations. Though we pay all of our sysadmins the same hourly wage -- the amount of which is more than competitive for sysadmins in our area -- we do have separate groups working on the Wintel boxes, Sun boxes, and Linux boxes. On a per seat and per server basis, the Linux boxes are by far the most expensive to administrate. Recently we upgraded both Apache (to 2.0) and PHP. Our web server runs Linux, our intranet server runs Wintel, and an http streaming media test server runs on a Sun. Linux was by far -- nearly double, in fact -- the most expensive of the servers to upgrade in terms of man-hours; the Sun box was 2nd, Wintel the cheapest. We had Apache 2.0, and the new (and compatable) version of PHP, up and running within an hour. For Sun, Apache was up in about two hours. Upgrading our Linux server took two days, and not only cost us the manpower but also cost an unmeasurable amount of money for the time we were off-line. In fact, after the first day, we spent twenty minutes setting up the Wintel box to handle web traffic. That's just one example, but the situation has repeated itself countless times.
I will add that one of our server set-ups has caused us no trouble at all, and in fact has been nearly maintanence-free since we set it up. We have a rack of 6 X-serve, OS X-based servers. Since all of our video editing workstations use the MacOS, it made sense to set up our in-house shared media server as an OS X rack. This server was so cheap to administer, in fact, that when we were laying off people last month we had no problem firing the only member of our sysadmin team with substantial OS X experience.
I love Linux and open-source software, and as a self-professed Geek I'm proud to run Linux and GPL software on one of my home computers. But at the enterprise level, Windows is still cheaper. Not that I don't want that to change...
I can't dispute this study, and I think that rather than fighting the validity of the results, the Linux community should view this as a wake-up call. There's a huge demand for cheaper, easier Linux. So go build it!
Basically, what B.D. Mills fails to realize is that biological systems -- and biological imprints -- have a level of detail that is nearly (though not totally) impossible to replicate mechanically. Biological systems are, by their very nature, pseudodigital, and not analog (like an inkjet print on a piece of paper). It is this pseudodigital nature that makes them so appealing.
Which, as I'm sure pessimists will be quick to point out, does not make them perfect. But neither is any other system of identification that we, as human beings, have managed to devise. Even passwords are susceptible to truth serums -- or even just a fair bit of alcohol and a "trusted" friend. Like any system of identification, it is foolish to assume that biometic systems are completely reliable -- perfect -- because no system is or can be.
Somebody let me know if there's a major difference in the technology required to match fingerprints vs. the technology required to match retinas. Everything I've read -- and a dual professor in computer science/biomedical engineering I asked -- says that there really isn't much of one.
The problems you raised with retinal scans as a means of proof-positive ID are completely valid. And precisely the reason that we don't, and aren't planning, on using fingerprinting (a technology thats been around for a little while) as a reliable form of IDing. Could the sort of retinal IDing in Minority Report become a reality? I doubt it. It's a sort of science fiction fantasy. Rewind to 1950, and note how fingerprints and fingerprint databases were used in the way scifi uses retinal scans nowadays.
Summa argumentum, don't worry. Or start walking around with gloves and sunglasses whenever you leave your house.
However, private carriers -- UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. -- are under no obligation to do the same. They can return packages to sender (along with a refund) at their discretion. Packages sent via private carrier are the property of the sender until recieved (and often signed for) by the recipient.
The private carrier analogy is a much better one for ISPs. Provided that they are returning the sent e-mail to the sender (or simply notifying them), ISPs are fully within their rights to reject mail on any basis they see fit. Take it up with your ISP, threaten to leave them, etc., but I don't think they're under any obligation to deliver your e-mail.
Comments welcome,
Shylock