No one fixes infrastructure until it's broken. That's pretty standard everywhere.
Sometimes not even after it's broken. Or more commonly, when it's broken, there's a half-assed temporary repair that becomes the permanent repair until it breaks again.
The biggest reason for doing this is short-term-ism: If a politician manages to save money now, it doesn't matter to him that somebody else 10 years down the line will have to spend far more money to clean up the mess after the system failed. So each administration (at any level: state, county, and municipal governments are far from immune to this) tends to do it's best to pass the buck on to the next guy, and the easiest way to do that is to simply not do repairs until something breaks.
Wow, I got to say I'm impressed with the/. editors. After hastily submitting this story at work, I only had links to the Unity3D- and UDK- sites in there. Whereas the text is still the same as I submitted it, the editors done a great job in actually providing some extra informative links in there. Well done!
After that statement, I had to check my URLs and DNS cache to make sure I wasn't on some Bizarro Slashdot.
Just kidding, editors. I actually appreciate what you guys do for us here.
approach to fighting phishing. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Phishers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate Internet uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop phishing for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of the Internet will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many Internet users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Phishers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (X) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack (X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of phishing (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with phishers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of phishers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation (X) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck (X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (X) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Oh and Hawaii is out because the culture is less American than many other countries.
How can a part of America be "less American"? Yes, it's culturally different than, say, Florida, but it is part of the United States, and thus by definition Hawaiian culture is American culture.
Or in the immortal words of Dan Quayle: "Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here."
They've done research on this, and found that passengers are nowhere near as dangerous as cell phones, and may even be a net benefit. Most passengers can see (or at the very least hear) the road too, and have a vested interest in staying alive, so when the driver is handling a difficult bit of driving, they tend to at the very least shut up and/or help the driver out to the best of their ability. In addition, passengers often take care of tasks that distract drivers, like tuning the radio, adjusting the heater or AC, checking maps, and so on.
1.) They hang on to the idea that a cell phone is a luxury and, thus, anyone using one while driving is flaunting theirs
No, they hang onto the idea that using a cell phone is always an optional activity. Doctors on call, where it really is life-or-death, pull over to take a call, you can too.
2.) They ignore how many distractions come from the radio in the car - they would never move to ban radios
The radio doesn't ask you to answer their questions (causing you to focus on something other than driving).
3.) They ignore how many distractions come from passengers/pets - they would never move to ban passengers/pets
Passengers have eyes and tend to shut up when you are in a difficult situation. They also act as another set of eyes on the road sometimes, and take care of tasks that the driver would otherwise have to. So passengers are actually a net plus.
Pets are a different story, because they aren't as smart as humans. I think some folks would consider instituting a law requiring pets to be crated if there were evidence that they were causing significant numbers of accidents.
4.) They hold on to the idea that if a phone was in the car, it caused the accident, no matter what the actual cause was
Correlation does not equal causation, but there is a strong correlation between drivers actively using the phone and getting into accidents. It's the best evidence you can get for this sort of thing.
5.) To such people, the citing of a couple of personal examples shows what all of humankind is like
No, the citing of personal examples argues that the statistics that numerous studies have found matches up with their understanding of reality.
6.) They fit into the general pattern of those who want to tell others what to do
I for one want to tell others what they can't do if what they want to do can kill me, and the restriction I want to put on their behavior isn't terrifically onerous. For instance, I think it's reasonable to argue that having laws that attempt to ensure that 16 year olds have some clue how to drive before we let them get behind the wheel and head down the highway (unlicensed teenagers can drive on private land, but not on public roads under most circumstances). They're called laws, some of them exist for a reason, and they're the price you pay for living in a civilized society.
Supporting copyright is far more important to me than supporting fair-use, and I'd certainly sacrifice the latter entirely in order to improve the former.
I'm not a corporate owner, but I am a musician, and I have to disagree with you on your view.
Here's why: most musicians don't make their money from CD sales. Paul McCartney might, but for every Paul McCartney there are thousands of good musicians who make their money from performing, and use recordings primarily as a way to get recognition and more gigs. So in the case of recorded music at least, musicians have a very viable alternative to a strong copyright system. The Grateful Dead in particular did quite well for themselves despite actively encouraging their audience to tape their shows, while hip-hop artists are regularly taking small snippets of each others' work to make something completely new.
Musical composers who aren't also performers also frequently make far more by teaching, commissions, and awards than they ever earn via royalties. And most also do quite a bit of performing as well. I'll put it this way: my grandfather was a fairly prolific and successful composer in his day, with several hundred works still under copyright and performed every once in a while, and as a result my family gets about $25 a year of royalty payments.
Careful there, mate. Yes, it could. It could be a lot worse.
For instance, pretend the FDIC and credit union equivalent didn't exist. What would happen if the news broke that the bank / credit union you have your checking and savings account either went bust or was at risk of going bust? Here's a hint: we don't have to guess at this, because that's exactly what happened in 1929.
He's a smart guy, he now has all the information possible
No he doesn't: he simply wouldn't have the time to process it. The information he now has is whatever the various TLAs (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc) are giving him about their activities. These agencies have been known to lie to Congress, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out they were lying to the president as well. Heck, in the CIA's case there was a recent spat in which the director found out about a longstanding program for the first time and immediately shut it down, which might have motivated the agents who were doing things they shouldn't have been to hide their programs from their own agency director.
One thing to note about all this: The "Obamessiah" types actually are pretty livid about him doing this sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised to see a candidacy from, say, Ralph Nader, if this sort of thing continues and the Republican candidate looks weak enough against Obama.
Your cynical comment actually turns out not to be true. A few exceptions off the top of my head: Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10) - Son of a truck driver, won his first political office right after graduating college, and has worked in politics ever since. Howard Dean (former governor of VT, former DNC chair) - His career was in medicine. Ron Paul (R-TX 14) - Another doctor who like Kucinich got into politics early Bernie Sanders (S-VT) - son of immigrants, worked as a carpenter and journalist before entering politics. Al Franken (D-MN) - Earned most of his fame and fortune via his comedy work. Arnold Schwarzenegger - Bodybuilder, then actor.
Reproductive selection will always operate, it is just that the ''selection criteria'' may change, physical fitness may no longer be so important, supplanted by taking advantage of social security/... to enable them to have more children than they can support by the ''sweat of their own brows'', the government picks up the bill.
To quote Monty Python: "Look at them bloody Catholics, filling up the bloody world with children they can't afford to bloody feed." At least, I assume that's what you were referring to.
But seriously, the idea of a "welfare queen" is a myth (and typically a racist one at that). The vast majority of welfare recipients are trying to work, are unable to, but find work within about 2 years. Among other things, the per-child benefit that is given via WIC, TANF, and food stamps doesn't completely cover the cost of having the extra child, so having more kids makes even welfare recipients poorer.
Pay them the average employee's wage + bonus in stock, therefore they are only sabotaging themselves if they drive the company into the ground, or increase customer resentment.
That causes a different sort of problem, namely attempting to artificially inflate the stock price for a little while before the CEO sells his share. There are lots of ways of doing that, which Ken Lay in particular can tell you all about.
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.)
Not to worry: nowadays we have much more efficient methods to convert tax dollars into personal assets: no-bid military contracts, bank bailouts, tax breaks nestled into unrelated bills, and bridges to nowhere, to name a few.
Depending on the product, the private monopoly can be far far worse.
For instance, if the product in question is absolutely necessary for your survival, and there are no substitutes available. So your choices are either (a) do whatever the private monopoly wants, or (b) die. In that instance, with a government monopoly you at least get a vote.
Al Franken wasn't elected because of his comedy work exactly. Starting with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot he used his comedy celebrity to engage in political advocacy. You may disagree with his politics, but he does actually stand for something, and if you read his books and listen to his speeches he'll let you know exactly what he stands for.
I mean, if we're going to have a "no celebrities in politics" rule, then obviously Ronald Reagan should never have been president, but often the same folks who vilify Senator Franken for being an ill-informed celebrity are the same folks who wanted to name an airport after Reagan.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, the nice young men in their clean white coats are coming to take you away. Ha-haaaaaah!
Signed,
Napoleon the XIV
No one fixes infrastructure until it's broken. That's pretty standard everywhere.
Sometimes not even after it's broken. Or more commonly, when it's broken, there's a half-assed temporary repair that becomes the permanent repair until it breaks again.
The biggest reason for doing this is short-term-ism: If a politician manages to save money now, it doesn't matter to him that somebody else 10 years down the line will have to spend far more money to clean up the mess after the system failed. So each administration (at any level: state, county, and municipal governments are far from immune to this) tends to do it's best to pass the buck on to the next guy, and the easiest way to do that is to simply not do repairs until something breaks.
Wow, I got to say I'm impressed with the /. editors. After hastily submitting this story at work, I only had links to the Unity3D- and UDK- sites in there. Whereas the text is still the same as I submitted it, the editors done a great job in actually providing some extra informative links in there.
Well done!
After that statement, I had to check my URLs and DNS cache to make sure I wasn't on some Bizarro Slashdot.
Just kidding, editors. I actually appreciate what you guys do for us here.
Congressman Kanjorski advocates a
( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting phishing. His idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Phishers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate Internet uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop phishing for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of the Internet will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many Internet users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Phishers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(X) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of phishing
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with phishers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of phishers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
(X) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(X) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Oh and Hawaii is out because the culture is less American than many other countries.
How can a part of America be "less American"? Yes, it's culturally different than, say, Florida, but it is part of the United States, and thus by definition Hawaiian culture is American culture.
Or in the immortal words of Dan Quayle: "Hawaii has always been a very pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States that is an island that is right here."
I was thinking I'd much rather see them fight it out in real life, with a stadium full of raucous fans: 2 bureaucrats enter, 1 bureaucrat leaves!
They've done research on this, and found that passengers are nowhere near as dangerous as cell phones, and may even be a net benefit. Most passengers can see (or at the very least hear) the road too, and have a vested interest in staying alive, so when the driver is handling a difficult bit of driving, they tend to at the very least shut up and/or help the driver out to the best of their ability. In addition, passengers often take care of tasks that distract drivers, like tuning the radio, adjusting the heater or AC, checking maps, and so on.
1.) They hang on to the idea that a cell phone is a luxury and, thus, anyone using one while driving is flaunting theirs
No, they hang onto the idea that using a cell phone is always an optional activity. Doctors on call, where it really is life-or-death, pull over to take a call, you can too.
2.) They ignore how many distractions come from the radio in the car - they would never move to ban radios
The radio doesn't ask you to answer their questions (causing you to focus on something other than driving).
3.) They ignore how many distractions come from passengers/pets - they would never move to ban passengers/pets
Passengers have eyes and tend to shut up when you are in a difficult situation. They also act as another set of eyes on the road sometimes, and take care of tasks that the driver would otherwise have to. So passengers are actually a net plus.
Pets are a different story, because they aren't as smart as humans. I think some folks would consider instituting a law requiring pets to be crated if there were evidence that they were causing significant numbers of accidents.
4.) They hold on to the idea that if a phone was in the car, it caused the accident, no matter what the actual cause was
Correlation does not equal causation, but there is a strong correlation between drivers actively using the phone and getting into accidents. It's the best evidence you can get for this sort of thing.
5.) To such people, the citing of a couple of personal examples shows what all of humankind is like
No, the citing of personal examples argues that the statistics that numerous studies have found matches up with their understanding of reality.
6.) They fit into the general pattern of those who want to tell others what to do
I for one want to tell others what they can't do if what they want to do can kill me, and the restriction I want to put on their behavior isn't terrifically onerous. For instance, I think it's reasonable to argue that having laws that attempt to ensure that 16 year olds have some clue how to drive before we let them get behind the wheel and head down the highway (unlicensed teenagers can drive on private land, but not on public roads under most circumstances). They're called laws, some of them exist for a reason, and they're the price you pay for living in a civilized society.
Supporting copyright is far more important to me than supporting fair-use, and I'd certainly sacrifice the latter entirely in order to improve the former.
I'm not a corporate owner, but I am a musician, and I have to disagree with you on your view.
Here's why: most musicians don't make their money from CD sales. Paul McCartney might, but for every Paul McCartney there are thousands of good musicians who make their money from performing, and use recordings primarily as a way to get recognition and more gigs. So in the case of recorded music at least, musicians have a very viable alternative to a strong copyright system. The Grateful Dead in particular did quite well for themselves despite actively encouraging their audience to tape their shows, while hip-hop artists are regularly taking small snippets of each others' work to make something completely new.
Musical composers who aren't also performers also frequently make far more by teaching, commissions, and awards than they ever earn via royalties. And most also do quite a bit of performing as well. I'll put it this way: my grandfather was a fairly prolific and successful composer in his day, with several hundred works still under copyright and performed every once in a while, and as a result my family gets about $25 a year of royalty payments.
""Lesson learned? Don't run Windows 7."
Oh, wait, that would challenge the iron law of commercial software reviews, of not considering alternatives.
Not if they're only voting to make sure the wrong lizard doesn't get in.
Yes, but what are our prioritized action items to move forward on implementing this paradigm?
It couldn't be any worse than what we have now.
Careful there, mate. Yes, it could. It could be a lot worse.
For instance, pretend the FDIC and credit union equivalent didn't exist. What would happen if the news broke that the bank / credit union you have your checking and savings account either went bust or was at risk of going bust? Here's a hint: we don't have to guess at this, because that's exactly what happened in 1929.
He's a smart guy, he now has all the information possible
No he doesn't: he simply wouldn't have the time to process it. The information he now has is whatever the various TLAs (CIA, FBI, NSA, etc) are giving him about their activities. These agencies have been known to lie to Congress, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find out they were lying to the president as well. Heck, in the CIA's case there was a recent spat in which the director found out about a longstanding program for the first time and immediately shut it down, which might have motivated the agents who were doing things they shouldn't have been to hide their programs from their own agency director.
One thing to note about all this: The "Obamessiah" types actually are pretty livid about him doing this sort of thing. I wouldn't be surprised to see a candidacy from, say, Ralph Nader, if this sort of thing continues and the Republican candidate looks weak enough against Obama.
Your cynical comment actually turns out not to be true. A few exceptions off the top of my head:
Dennis Kucinich (D-OH 10) - Son of a truck driver, won his first political office right after graduating college, and has worked in politics ever since.
Howard Dean (former governor of VT, former DNC chair) - His career was in medicine.
Ron Paul (R-TX 14) - Another doctor who like Kucinich got into politics early
Bernie Sanders (S-VT) - son of immigrants, worked as a carpenter and journalist before entering politics.
Al Franken (D-MN) - Earned most of his fame and fortune via his comedy work.
Arnold Schwarzenegger - Bodybuilder, then actor.
Reproductive selection will always operate, it is just that the ''selection criteria'' may change, physical fitness may no longer be so important, supplanted by taking advantage of social security/... to enable them to have more children than they can support by the ''sweat of their own brows'', the government picks up the bill.
To quote Monty Python: "Look at them bloody Catholics, filling up the bloody world with children they can't afford to bloody feed." At least, I assume that's what you were referring to.
But seriously, the idea of a "welfare queen" is a myth (and typically a racist one at that). The vast majority of welfare recipients are trying to work, are unable to, but find work within about 2 years. Among other things, the per-child benefit that is given via WIC, TANF, and food stamps doesn't completely cover the cost of having the extra child, so having more kids makes even welfare recipients poorer.
Pay them the average employee's wage + bonus in stock, therefore they are only sabotaging themselves if they drive the company into the ground, or increase customer resentment.
That causes a different sort of problem, namely attempting to artificially inflate the stock price for a little while before the CEO sells his share. There are lots of ways of doing that, which Ken Lay in particular can tell you all about.
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.)
Not to worry: nowadays we have much more efficient methods to convert tax dollars into personal assets: no-bid military contracts, bank bailouts, tax breaks nestled into unrelated bills, and bridges to nowhere, to name a few.
What about fahrvergnugen.vw?
I suggest "Slim" Pickens.
Depending on the product, the private monopoly can be far far worse.
For instance, if the product in question is absolutely necessary for your survival, and there are no substitutes available. So your choices are either (a) do whatever the private monopoly wants, or (b) die. In that instance, with a government monopoly you at least get a vote.
Al Franken wasn't elected because of his comedy work exactly. Starting with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot he used his comedy celebrity to engage in political advocacy. You may disagree with his politics, but he does actually stand for something, and if you read his books and listen to his speeches he'll let you know exactly what he stands for.
I mean, if we're going to have a "no celebrities in politics" rule, then obviously Ronald Reagan should never have been president, but often the same folks who vilify Senator Franken for being an ill-informed celebrity are the same folks who wanted to name an airport after Reagan.
That's alright, I just want to see how well it translates "Dear Aunt, Let’s set so double the killer delete select all."
Forget that: I want a nuclear-powered beer helmet.