Okay, I do think that caching is a nice idea. However, I can think of very few people that are interested in doing it under this sort of scenerio -- essentially, their privacy goes entirely out the window. The one public ircache node has a log of *everyone* using the damn thing, and even if not, it's very easy to watch what people are doing.
If latency ever improves on the Freenet, I could see running a cache through there...
While I agree that the thesis is BS, they do infact cover both of these (in Ch7). I'm actually reading through them just for the summaries of other explosions, which are pretty interesting.
I do have to say one thing, though -- they have a *lot* of filler material and quoted crap.
Japan was who eventually got the shaft, but the original intent of the US nuclear weapons program was the Germans. Unfortunately, the development of a working bomb and the production of enough weapons-grade uranium took too long, and Germany had fallen before the bomb was ready to be employed..
Also, modern historians tend to doubt that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did much to end the war with Japan. Japan was already starting to break up and looking for an exit. The Soviets announcing war would have pretty much clinched it.
The most significant benefit that the demonstration of nuclear power likely bought the United States was a trump card for use in post-war negotiations with the USSR.
do you really think you would see just one cent of this money???
Yes. That's what competition is for, and insurance is quite fungible and price-competitive.
Why do you think prices drop on *anything* you buy?
in the case of a crash logs should be just accessible to the police to prevent manipulation by garagists or manufacturers
I very, very strongly doubt that a manufacturer would ever risk tampering with data like that. The auto industry is quite PR-sensitive, and the damage caused by one person getting in a crash (which at the *very* worst can be spun to look much more minor by PR flacks) is nothing compared to the kind of a scandal that a manufacturer would get in if anyone discovered that they were falisfying crash data. That sort of thing looks very sweet for investigative reporters who want to drag someone through the mud to make their career. You really don't even need to consider the civil and criminal penalties a court would hand down for tampering with evidence. It's simply not worth it in terms of dollars risked in sales by a company.
this means there has to be an open standart or it will be to expensive
I'm dubious about this, though I'm definitely with you in desiring an open standard.
privacy reasons the logs of the crash-relevant data shoul be submitted anonymous to manufacturers
I really don't see the need for privacy here, and I'm quite privacy-conscious when it comes to my data.
and all saved data should be accessible by the car owner in a noncrash case =)))
That would be nice, though I doubt it would be legally mandated or even actually done.
Sure, you could have vehicle monitoring that might be intrusive. GPS monitoring everywhere could be quite intrusive. Cell phones provide a wonderful location marker on you, that provides a fantastic data source for telecom companies to profit from (and actively are, finding high traffic areas to let store owners build shops and the like). But read the article. These things are pretty simple, cheap data recorders. It looks pretty much like the manufacturers really want to collect some data for their own internal engineering use (and actually aren't too thrilled about it getting out of their hands at all). There's really almost nothing on the table besides crash data. Oh, your car alread records odometer readings, and some record things like miles per gallon you're getting.
There is no such thing as "driving safely" on a road with more than one vehicle on it.
There is a commonly accepted meaning to "driving safely" which does not imply 100% assurance that you will not get injured -- just the absence of particularly unsafe actions.
Have you done much driving in the US?
I'm not a race car driver, nor do I drive as a profession, but I certainly do drive in the US.
If you are going the speed limit, you are not driving safely
Potentially, yes. If it's snowing heavily and you have 30' maximum visibility and you're doing 45 MPH on a 45 MPH road, you could well get warned or even cited for reckless driving. It's quite rare that this happens, though.
On a road with traffic flowing at 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, you can, quite seriously, be ticketed for "reckless driving" for driving the speed limit.
No, you can not. Feel free to link to a state DoT resource or reputable legal source that says so.
The system is designed so that you are, simply by being on the road, acting outside the law
I disagree.
It is also designed with the assumption that traffic laws will be enforced by a reasonable human being, so that conflicting laws will be properly applied.
I think you're operating on a misconception of what the laws are, rather than under a conflict of law.
Congratulations, your insurance company probably has no liability when you are not "driving safely".
And you know who's the final arbiter of that? A judge. Who is "human", as you mentioned above.
My best friend's father was mowed down by a drunken driver when he was six. I have absolutely no tolerance for people who have been fortunate enough to never hit anyone and somehow feel that they are justified in breaking the speed limit or breaking traffic laws. They were put in place for a reason, not arbitrarily.
This also goes along with the problem of technology giving the ability to actually enforce all laws all the time. Most law wasn't designed with that in mind.
That's somewhat true. Penalties can probably be reduced if the rate of successful enforcement grows significantly, since sentences are partly set to have deterrent value to those who manage to slip by the system a few times.
Most non-felony law would be truly awful if it were actually completely enforced all the time.
I really cannot agree. There are a few outdated laws on using profanity that are at issue, and I think that laws should probably be altered so that a 15 year old that mows his neighbor's lawn doesn't need a business license. So there are some exceptions. But as for traffic violations...no, I don't think that they're out of line at all. More young people are killed by car accidents each year than from anything else. It's great that you've never been involved in an accident, but other people are.
Wow, a hugely complex scripting environment with hooks into every aspect of the OS. Virus writers - here is your big chance to spread like wildfire through windows machines!.... Again!
I wish CIOs would figure out that when MS says "integrated" they generally also mean "insecure"...
Love those environments where you say that "a product is perfectly capable of doing this" and then turn around and admit that you have to shell out more money to do so.
Windows remote administration? Development? File serving? Sure, we can do that...as long as you're willing to keep forking out.
Lack of games, and those that do run perform for sh*t.
You're certainly right about the lack, but on my system, which has run both Linux and NT 4.0, Starcraft and Alpha Centauri run more smoothly in (Starcraft in WINE, obviously) than NT 4.0 (and doesn't hit the never-fixed "looping sound" bug that NT's DirectSound implementation has), Quake 2 runs more smoothly in Windows, and Quake 3 runs more smoothly in Linux.
(of course, I can immediately type in "zsh" and be in a more friendly environment, but such workarounds should not be needed)
Try "chsh -s zsh [username]".
Zsh is a nice shell, but the whole sh syntax is *still* over-convoluted. I could go for a new shell system, frankly. Doesn't mean that MS is gonna do it, but I've looked at alternatives like rc, and there really isn't anything as usable but a bit more modern than zsh.
Not only that, "coherent and well-integrated" is just stupid in this context.
Okay, if someone whips up a Linux system with a mixture of KDE apps and GNOME apps (and doesn't use null) and uses some Athena apps too...then things aren't going to be that consistent from a UI perspective. MS has their own UI consistency warts, like one-of-a-kind widgets in Outlook, non-OS-derived widgets in Office, and the Start menu and task bar. However, this is all in the GUI. Once you move to the CLI, MS's degree of consistency is really, really, really bad. The current collection of CLI utilities that MS ships sometimes uses UNIX switches (-), sometimes MS ones (\). Ping uses -, dir uses \. There are a few fairly standardized switches in the UNIX world -- -h for help, -v for verbose. MS's software doesn't have even this.
As for "well-integrated"...well, "integration" usually refers to non-modularly engineered software, with a dose of MS hype about why this is good. It also doesn't really penetrate the CLI world, where utilities pretty much stand on their own.
The Twilight Zone is some of the most enjoyable entertainment I've ever had the pleasure of watching. Brilliantly done, didn't require a huge budget, and looks gorgeous.
Of course, I've only seen "old" ones, but it's one of the very few TV shows that I really enjoy.
As far as some evil plan by the dealers to do something devious with data, I think it is giving them too much credit
The parent poster makes an excellent point. The original article poster wrote with an extremely opinionated, anti-technology viewpoint. They were bound and certain that allowing data to become public would do nothing but hurt people.
I have to disagree. Generally, I'd say that making more data available helps a system as a whole.
For example, in the original post:
The automakers want to avoid standardization because they can then sell access to the proprietary data format
This may be legitimate, and if so, it's a good point. But it's the only one.
The story mentions privacy issues but dismisses them as solved, yet notes that there are no privacy protections whatsoever for this data
I just don't seem to see a big privacy issue here. I don't think that there's any big benefit to society in keeping secret exactly what someone was doing when they rammed into another car.
and you can expect it to be used against you in any incident
Or for you. It all depends on what you were doing, doesn't it? If you were doing fifteen miles over the speed limit and the roads are slick, and you run someone down, then you're probably going to get in hot water. OTOH, if you were driving safely, hit the brakes to avoid the other guy (who was going well over the speed limit), and was hit in the side, then his insurance company is going to be paying out to you. Having crash data available benefits the honest people that *aren't* misusing their cars. Sounds fine to me, frankly.
perhaps other times: wait until service under your warranty is refused because your car reported your bad driving habits to the dealer
Well...yes. Again, if you've been abusing your car, like drag racing it, and if your warranty doesn't cover that, then it'll be found out and service refused. Again, results in lower prices to those of us that *aren't* thrashing our cars -- we don't have to subsidize your bad habits.
Speculation about ambulance crews using crash data is just hype - no ambulance is equipped to do that
As others have pointed out, this is ludicrous. Yes, these things are not fully deployed yet. Granted, I don't see them being used much by ambulance crews -- they'd be almost useless to them. Their real value comes in court.
nor would I want an EMT to spend time decoding the crash data instead of, say, saving my life
That would happen in a blue moon. Blatant alarmism.
The article repeatedly suggests that crash data would be used to enhance safety, without ever specifying how that is supposed to occur.
Um...I'd image that it's pretty straightforward, not even worth spellingout explicitly. Someone gets in a crash at a weird angle and gets exposed to stronger forces than is desired. the front of a car rips apart in a collision -- why? Exactly what got hit? A car catches on fire in a collision...what type of impact would cause that? It's *far* easier for an engineer to go about fixing problems if they have actual disaster data to work on, not just speculation and some attempted simulations of what might happen, plus a few plain-vanilla crash logs.
To be honest, from the NYT article, it sounds mostly like the only reason the car manufacturers were dragging their feet on releasing the data was because they didn't want hard data available that might expose *them* to liability (like that the occupuant was hit with more Gs in a head-on collision than they should have been). That's the only benefit I see to auto manufacturers in not allowing the data to be publically distributed.
I also feel the same way. There is little legitimate reason to link to NYT stories when other sources almost always have an equivalent story.
I'd like to see a Slashdot moratorium on links (in articles, not in comments, obviously) to sites that require registration or hoop-jumping to see the article.
Now you're starting to see, those steelers might know a thing or two you didn't, having been through many a down-turn as a collective.
While it's an interesting statistic, I'm not sure you can derive that from it.
I was talking about absolute pay -- I wasn't including union dues and the like.
In addition, West Virginia tends to not have the highest echelon software engineers around. You aren't going to find many compiler developers or image recognition specialists.
Still, unless I was on a pretty darn low traffic webserver, I'd argue for sorting first...
Re:And fond memories they are!
on
New Phrack
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You know, I hate to say it, but internships pretty much exist to build experience and get some good recommendations. A lot of times, it's your only work experience when hitting industry. Doing anything that could get you a black mark from the company you interned with is...uh...ballsy, to say the least.
I mean, it seems to have not backfired on you, but...
And I agree, people do ask, "What do you do?". I started truly hearing that when I was unemployed, and it finally started to click with me that for most people, their jobs are their lives, whether or not they like those jobs. That's truly, literally, sad.
I have to disagree. The question is a good, legitimate one.
If you know what someone's job is, you know what they spend eight hours a day -- much of their waking life -- doing. You have some idea where their interests lie, as they're probably working in a field that they don't despise (or they would have switched). You have some idea of their socioeconomic status. You know where their field of knowledge is, and you may have a good idea of what their schedule is (a consultant may have to travel randomly, and a secretary probably has pretty regular hours). All that from just a few words "I'm a neurologist," or "I'm a file critic." Can people draw too much from this? Sure. But I'd argue that it's a pretty good starting point, and a pretty concise way to get information to make a lot of rough predictions about the person. It also gives people an area for small talk, since they can ask about your work.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I do think that caching is a nice idea. However, I can think of very few people that are interested in doing it under this sort of scenerio -- essentially, their privacy goes entirely out the window. The one public ircache node has a log of *everyone* using the damn thing, and even if not, it's very easy to watch what people are doing.
If latency ever improves on the Freenet, I could see running a cache through there...
[confused] You're right, but the moment I saw this article, I looked specifically for source. I even remember seeing the binary there.
:-)
I guess I could have somehow missed it, or the page was revised (the packages were at least, because the README contains a reference to this story).
Oh, well. Life is good.
It's not Free software. The guy didn't hand out the source (which is a shame, or else Linux folks could be reading eBooks right now).
While I agree that the thesis is BS, they do infact cover both of these (in Ch7). I'm actually reading through them just for the summaries of other explosions, which are pretty interesting.
I do have to say one thing, though -- they have a *lot* of filler material and quoted crap.
I believe that is incorrect.
Japan was who eventually got the shaft, but the original intent of the US nuclear weapons program was the Germans. Unfortunately, the development of a working bomb and the production of enough weapons-grade uranium took too long, and Germany had fallen before the bomb was ready to be employed..
Also, modern historians tend to doubt that Hiroshima and Nagasaki did much to end the war with Japan. Japan was already starting to break up and looking for an exit. The Soviets announcing war would have pretty much clinched it.
The most significant benefit that the demonstration of nuclear power likely bought the United States was a trump card for use in post-war negotiations with the USSR.
do you really think you would see just one cent of this money???
Yes. That's what competition is for, and insurance is quite fungible and price-competitive.
Why do you think prices drop on *anything* you buy?
in the case of a crash logs should be just accessible to the police to prevent manipulation by garagists or manufacturers
I very, very strongly doubt that a manufacturer would ever risk tampering with data like that. The auto industry is quite PR-sensitive, and the damage caused by one person getting in a crash (which at the *very* worst can be spun to look much more minor by PR flacks) is nothing compared to the kind of a scandal that a manufacturer would get in if anyone discovered that they were falisfying crash data. That sort of thing looks very sweet for investigative reporters who want to drag someone through the mud to make their career. You really don't even need to consider the civil and criminal penalties a court would hand down for tampering with evidence. It's simply not worth it in terms of dollars risked in sales by a company.
this means there has to be an open standart or it will be to expensive
I'm dubious about this, though I'm definitely with you in desiring an open standard.
privacy reasons the logs of the crash-relevant data shoul be submitted anonymous to manufacturers
I really don't see the need for privacy here, and I'm quite privacy-conscious when it comes to my data.
and all saved data should be accessible by the car owner in a noncrash case =)))
That would be nice, though I doubt it would be legally mandated or even actually done.
Sure, you could have vehicle monitoring that might be intrusive. GPS monitoring everywhere could be quite intrusive. Cell phones provide a wonderful location marker on you, that provides a fantastic data source for telecom companies to profit from (and actively are, finding high traffic areas to let store owners build shops and the like). But read the article. These things are pretty simple, cheap data recorders. It looks pretty much like the manufacturers really want to collect some data for their own internal engineering use (and actually aren't too thrilled about it getting out of their hands at all). There's really almost nothing on the table besides crash data. Oh, your car alread records odometer readings, and some record things like miles per gallon you're getting.
There is no such thing as "driving safely" on a road with more than one vehicle on it.
There is a commonly accepted meaning to "driving safely" which does not imply 100% assurance that you will not get injured -- just the absence of particularly unsafe actions.
Have you done much driving in the US?
I'm not a race car driver, nor do I drive as a profession, but I certainly do drive in the US.
If you are going the speed limit, you are not driving safely
Potentially, yes. If it's snowing heavily and you have 30' maximum visibility and you're doing 45 MPH on a 45 MPH road, you could well get warned or even cited for reckless driving. It's quite rare that this happens, though.
On a road with traffic flowing at 15 miles per hour over the speed limit, you can, quite seriously, be ticketed for "reckless driving" for driving the speed limit.
No, you can not. Feel free to link to a state DoT resource or reputable legal source that says so.
The system is designed so that you are, simply by being on the road, acting outside the law
I disagree.
It is also designed with the assumption that traffic laws will be enforced by a reasonable human being, so that conflicting laws will be properly applied.
I think you're operating on a misconception of what the laws are, rather than under a conflict of law.
Congratulations, your insurance company probably has no liability when you are not "driving safely".
And you know who's the final arbiter of that? A judge. Who is "human", as you mentioned above.
My best friend's father was mowed down by a drunken driver when he was six. I have absolutely no tolerance for people who have been fortunate enough to never hit anyone and somehow feel that they are justified in breaking the speed limit or breaking traffic laws. They were put in place for a reason, not arbitrarily.
This also goes along with the problem of technology giving the ability to actually enforce all laws all the time. Most law wasn't designed with that in mind.
That's somewhat true. Penalties can probably be reduced if the rate of successful enforcement grows significantly, since sentences are partly set to have deterrent value to those who manage to slip by the system a few times.
Most non-felony law would be truly awful if it were actually completely enforced all the time.
I really cannot agree. There are a few outdated laws on using profanity that are at issue, and I think that laws should probably be altered so that a 15 year old that mows his neighbor's lawn doesn't need a business license. So there are some exceptions. But as for traffic violations...no, I don't think that they're out of line at all. More young people are killed by car accidents each year than from anything else. It's great that you've never been involved in an accident, but other people are.
Or UnixUtils (mingw ports of lots of posix utils...without the performance and dependency issues of cygwin).
Wow, a hugely complex scripting environment with hooks into every aspect of the OS. .... Again!
Virus writers - here is your big chance to spread like wildfire through windows machines!
I wish CIOs would figure out that when MS says "integrated" they generally also mean "insecure"...
Love those environments where you say that "a product is perfectly capable of doing this" and then turn around and admit that you have to shell out more money to do so.
Windows remote administration? Development? File serving? Sure, we can do that...as long as you're willing to keep forking out.
Lack of games, and those that do run perform for sh*t.
You're certainly right about the lack, but on my system, which has run both Linux and NT 4.0, Starcraft and Alpha Centauri run more smoothly in (Starcraft in WINE, obviously) than NT 4.0 (and doesn't hit the never-fixed "looping sound" bug that NT's DirectSound implementation has), Quake 2 runs more smoothly in Windows, and Quake 3 runs more smoothly in Linux.
(of course, I can immediately type in "zsh" and be in a more friendly environment, but such workarounds should not be needed)
Try "chsh -s zsh [username]".
Zsh is a nice shell, but the whole sh syntax is *still* over-convoluted. I could go for a new shell system, frankly. Doesn't mean that MS is gonna do it, but I've looked at alternatives like rc, and there really isn't anything as usable but a bit more modern than zsh.
Uh, there's the NUL reserved word...
:-)
Yes, but the difference is that
cat NUL/NUL doesn't bluescreen a UNIX box like it does an unpatched 9X box.
Not only that, "coherent and well-integrated" is just stupid in this context.
Okay, if someone whips up a Linux system with a mixture of KDE apps and GNOME apps (and doesn't use null) and uses some Athena apps too...then things aren't going to be that consistent from a UI perspective. MS has their own UI consistency warts, like one-of-a-kind widgets in Outlook, non-OS-derived widgets in Office, and the Start menu and task bar. However, this is all in the GUI. Once you move to the CLI, MS's degree of consistency is really, really, really bad. The current collection of CLI utilities that MS ships sometimes uses UNIX switches (-), sometimes MS ones (\). Ping uses -, dir uses \. There are a few fairly standardized switches in the UNIX world -- -h for help, -v for verbose. MS's software doesn't have even this.
As for "well-integrated"...well, "integration" usually refers to non-modularly engineered software, with a dose of MS hype about why this is good. It also doesn't really penetrate the CLI world, where utilities pretty much stand on their own.
Those unix people who use cygwin under Windows think it is so cool to list files in a 'ls' type format.
I certainly prefer ls's default format to dir's default format, yes.
The Twilight Zone is some of the most enjoyable entertainment I've ever had the pleasure of watching. Brilliantly done, didn't require a huge budget, and looks gorgeous.
Of course, I've only seen "old" ones, but it's one of the very few TV shows that I really enjoy.
As far as some evil plan by the dealers to do something devious with data, I think it is giving them too much credit
The parent poster makes an excellent point. The original article poster wrote with an extremely opinionated, anti-technology viewpoint. They were bound and certain that allowing data to become public would do nothing but hurt people.
I have to disagree. Generally, I'd say that making more data available helps a system as a whole.
For example, in the original post:
The automakers want to avoid standardization because they can then sell access to the proprietary data format
This may be legitimate, and if so, it's a good point. But it's the only one.
The story mentions privacy issues but dismisses them as solved, yet notes that there are no privacy protections whatsoever for this data
I just don't seem to see a big privacy issue here. I don't think that there's any big benefit to society in keeping secret exactly what someone was doing when they rammed into another car.
and you can expect it to be used against you in any incident
Or for you. It all depends on what you were doing, doesn't it? If you were doing fifteen miles over the speed limit and the roads are slick, and you run someone down, then you're probably going to get in hot water. OTOH, if you were driving safely, hit the brakes to avoid the other guy (who was going well over the speed limit), and was hit in the side, then his insurance company is going to be paying out to you. Having crash data available benefits the honest people that *aren't* misusing their cars. Sounds fine to me, frankly.
perhaps other times: wait until service under your warranty is refused because your car reported your bad driving habits to the dealer
Well...yes. Again, if you've been abusing your car, like drag racing it, and if your warranty doesn't cover that, then it'll be found out and service refused. Again, results in lower prices to those of us that *aren't* thrashing our cars -- we don't have to subsidize your bad habits.
Speculation about ambulance crews using crash data is just hype - no ambulance is equipped to do that
As others have pointed out, this is ludicrous. Yes, these things are not fully deployed yet. Granted, I don't see them being used much by ambulance crews -- they'd be almost useless to them. Their real value comes in court.
nor would I want an EMT to spend time decoding the crash data instead of, say, saving my life
That would happen in a blue moon. Blatant alarmism.
The article repeatedly suggests that crash data would be used to enhance safety, without ever specifying how that is supposed to occur.
Um...I'd image that it's pretty straightforward, not even worth spellingout explicitly. Someone gets in a crash at a weird angle and gets exposed to stronger forces than is desired. the front of a car rips apart in a collision -- why? Exactly what got hit? A car catches on fire in a collision...what type of impact would cause that? It's *far* easier for an engineer to go about fixing problems if they have actual disaster data to work on, not just speculation and some attempted simulations of what might happen, plus a few plain-vanilla crash logs.
To be honest, from the NYT article, it sounds mostly like the only reason the car manufacturers were dragging their feet on releasing the data was because they didn't want hard data available that might expose *them* to liability (like that the occupuant was hit with more Gs in a head-on collision than they should have been). That's the only benefit I see to auto manufacturers in not allowing the data to be publically distributed.
I also feel the same way. There is little legitimate reason to link to NYT stories when other sources almost always have an equivalent story.
I'd like to see a Slashdot moratorium on links (in articles, not in comments, obviously) to sites that require registration or hoop-jumping to see the article.
Now you're starting to see, those steelers might know a thing or two you didn't, having been through many a down-turn as a collective.
While it's an interesting statistic, I'm not sure you can derive that from it.
I was talking about absolute pay -- I wasn't including union dues and the like.
In addition, West Virginia tends to not have the highest echelon software engineers around. You aren't going to find many compiler developers or image recognition specialists.
Still, unless I was on a pretty darn low traffic webserver, I'd argue for sorting first...
You know, I hate to say it, but internships pretty much exist to build experience and get some good recommendations. A lot of times, it's your only work experience when hitting industry. Doing anything that could get you a black mark from the company you interned with is...uh...ballsy, to say the least.
I mean, it seems to have not backfired on you, but...
What do other slashdotters think?
This is so going to generate tons of anecdotal counterexamples but not a lot of useful data...
And I agree, people do ask, "What do you do?". I started truly hearing that when I was unemployed, and it finally started to click with me that for most people, their jobs are their lives, whether or not they like those jobs. That's truly, literally, sad.
I have to disagree. The question is a good, legitimate one.
If you know what someone's job is, you know what they spend eight hours a day -- much of their waking life -- doing. You have some idea where their interests lie, as they're probably working in a field that they don't despise (or they would have switched). You have some idea of their socioeconomic status. You know where their field of knowledge is, and you may have a good idea of what their schedule is (a consultant may have to travel randomly, and a secretary probably has pretty regular hours). All that from just a few words "I'm a neurologist," or "I'm a file critic." Can people draw too much from this? Sure. But I'd argue that it's a pretty good starting point, and a pretty concise way to get information to make a lot of rough predictions about the person. It also gives people an area for small talk, since they can ask about your work.
...processor in the house is a 600Mhz PII.
You have a ridiculous cooling system on that, I would imagine.