I agree that it's overly simplistic, but it's not always wrong.
If you're smart and knowledgeable enough to know the cases where the comparison is correct, you didn't need the comparison in the first place. try explaining the difference between 2^n and n^3 to the general population.
Don't. Simply say it fundamentally changes the way computers solve problems, and can make some problems that were nearly insolvable ones into ones that can be solved. Telling them it's 1000 times faster makes it sound like they might be playing Doom 1000 times faster some day.
I really hate it when people come up with the simple "Quantum computer 1000 times faster than conventional computer". It's not just overly simplistic, it's wrong.
Quantum computers can turn some problems that require exponential time to solve into a polynomial time. So instead of taking 2^n time, it might take n^3 time. That's cannot in any realistic way be described as being "X times faster".
Or in short, everything is inferior about "green revolution" farming save for profit.
How about price? When I've priced organic foods vs. non-organic foods, it's often times about twice the price. That may be all well and good for IT people who tend to make good wages, but for most people a 2 times jump in price isn't affordable.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
Ever heard of TV streaming? It's here, and it's cool. You don't have to be a techno-nerd to use a lot of bandwidth. I've got netflix streaming, and it chews up about 900 megabytes/hour. Even "Grandma" might want when her son buys her a cheap streaming device for Christmas. This internet thing isn't going away, and bandwith usage will only increase rather quickly. Your 30 gigabytes/month will look like 640k of memory in about 10 years. Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Bandwidth is an ever expanding resource. It's finite in the same sense that processing power is finite. Someday the increase will be over, but that's unlikely to happen for quite some time.
Frankly, I was more comfortable with the concept that the DOW could drop 1000 points in one afternoon due to some obscure overseas debt concerns than I am the idea that the DOW can drop 1000 points in one afternoon because of a fucking typo.
Welcome to reality. The "market" is essentially insane people following a heard, and always will be. It's far better modeled after heards of elk running into a stampede when one gets spooked than it is on rational people making decisions based on facts and reasonable assumptions.
You really shouldn't be more comfortable with one crazy reason for a sudden drop than a different crazy reason. Attempting to think that people are "rational" and making informed decisions isn't anywhere near reality. I'm certain there's a few level headed people making loads of cash off of the herds insanity. Might be time to invest my money in something a little more solid, like canned food and ammunition.
Heh. Markets are still down, and the herd is still scared. If you've got the money you can afford to lose you should probably put it in the stock market. Honestly, where else are you going to put it now, with interest rates so low?
International politics, game theory, and good old fashion lying is fun too. Those numbers of "260 billion barrels" are the numbers reported by Saudi Arabia, without any independent auditing. From wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
The case of Saudi Arabia is also striking, with proven reserves estimated at between 260 and 264 billion barrels (4.20×1010 m3) in the past 18 years, a variation of less than 2%[18] while extracting approximately 60 billion barrels (9.5×109 m3) during this period.
How much do you believe the country with little oversight and an incentive to keep the world from pursuing other energy sources?
Unit changes. The flow is probably a modest 5K BPD. That doesn't sound as cool, so a couple days ago the journalists switched to gallons per day.
Are you serious? I don't know about you, but I don't know off the top of my head how much a barrel of oil is. I expect the vast majority of people don't either. Using gallons makes sense, since everyone is familiar with how much a gallon is. (BTW, I've consistently heard 200,000 gallons a day from NPR, which corresponds to your 5000 barrels/day figure, so not everyone is a liar). Flow rate exaggeration. 5K BPD is like a firehose, vaguely.
How about comparisons to a well known oil spill, like say Exon-Valdez? That spill was around 10.8 million gallons. At 200,000 gallons/day, we'll match that massive disaster in just 54 days. We're currently on day 14.
I'm not buying your attempt to downplay this because of how the media has portrayed this event. It's obvious to anyone with a calculator and wikipedia that this is a big deal, and not a minor event. Using the low estimates of 200,000 gallons/day, and "early next week" being Tuesday perhaps, that's 20 days at 200,000 gallons/day for a total of 4 million gallons of oil. A pretty good percentage of the Exxon-Valdez. And that's if the thing works, and before you count the 15% they think will still leak.
How are you going to steal my bytes when I don't pub my SSID?
I believe both Netstumbler and Kismet reveal hidden SSIDs. Every wireless node on your network broadcasts the SSID of your network, even if the AP doesn't. If you believe you're safe because you're a sUp3r 3l33t h/-\x0r who hid his SSID, think again. These are entirely trivial and free programs to run that quickly grab your "hidden" SSID.
Still there needs to be some safety to prevent a VBA macro from using unknowing users' computers from flooding the Internet with useless traffic
Yes, it's called a sandbox. Let the VBA code run in a very limited environment, specifically don't let it access the filesystem or the internet. What's so hard about that? and the solution is pretty simple: If an Office doc contains VBA code, a warning is shown to the user asking them if they trust the source of the file
You've never actually watched people other than computer experts use a computer, have you? If you had you'd realize they ignore those long, boring, cryptic messages unknowing programmers such as yourself put up in front of them. They don't care, and they just want to get their work done. By relying on this approach that "the user will know what to do in this situation!" (when in fact they have no idea and are just confused) you've trained people to simply click through these messages in hopes that the program will work anyway (which sometimes it does).
So.. that's the solution being employed here. They're effectively saying "Hey, this PDF is using network functionality, do you trust it to do that?"
What the hell happened to the approach of my document just being a damn document, and not having to try to have all these whizz-bang features of accessing the internet? The fill in forms are neat and useful, but that doesn't require anything but a sandbox. Putting a scripting language in a format people commonly exchange is just stupid, and will only lead to more security problems. The shit adobe has pulled off has lead me to stop trusting reader entirely, and just use alternative PDF readers in hopes they're not programmed by idiots who just want to add more gold plating and whizz-bang features to an application that was essentially "done" about 10 years ago.
As an aside, I'll call BS on the "Little uses multiple cores." Games these days are heavily going at least dual core, some even more.
I'd say games qualify for "little uses". Believe it or not, most people don't use their computers for high end gaming.
Even for games, are you really certain that the extra cores are used much? Sure, the game can say it uses multiple cores, and I'm sure it actually does. But how much does it really improve performance? The PS3 has a weak CPU attached to 7 powerful SPUs.
Heh. The PS3 is known to be notoriously difficult to program as well. How many tasks can really be split up into 7 relatively equal, independent parts?
If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout.
It could? I've no doubt a refinery could catch fire, but my experience of fire is that the smoke generally dilutes into the atmosphere and largely does local damage. Why do you think it could produce damage 20 miles away rivaling nuclear fallout from Chernobyl?
but if they did something crazy like, throw rocks at a tree for 2 hours, everyday, for 3 yrs, someone might notice. I think this guy needs professional help.
Throwing rocks at a tree is crazy? Talking to a tree and hearing a response is crazy. Throwing rocks at it might just be a new sport.
Why is it you seem to think something you don't understand is crazy? I don't understand anyone that watches their local news on TV every night. The sensationalist simplistic nonsense that comes out of it makes me want to throw rocks at my television when I see glimpses of it. But I don't think people that do watch and enjoy it are crazy. Badly informed and prone to fear everything yes, but crazy?
but I think a lot of people thought Gopher could have become the internet had Beners-Lee not released a free for public use implementation of the hypertext concept.
Nonsense.
HTML won because Gopher had a very poor layout of elements in it. Mark McCahill thought that the more free-form layout type of HTML was too hard, so he stuck with the more simple layout of whatever gopher provided. I remember using gopher circa 1992 and thinking it was pretty cool (though difficult to navigate). I also remember seeing the web around early 1994, and realizing how far superior it was in about every way to what gopher had to offer at the time.
The licensing fees didn't help any (and were only for commercial use). But ignoring the technical failings of gopher in preference to some licensing is ignoring the major reason why gopher failed.
That's crazy -- who wants a system administrator who isn't paranoid?
I don't want system administrators who are paranoid. I want system administrators who understand what risk is, what the real risks are, and are able to weigh one risk against another. Being paranoid usually entails the inability to weigh risks, since you think "everyone is out to get me". Anyone who can't weigh risks against another is a fool.
Childs wasn't dragged in just because he refused to give a password, he was convicted because of a series of arrogant and illegal decisions he made over a period of time.
Please be specific. What were these illegal decisions he made over a period of time? Childs designed the system. He designed it to the people who actually paid for it didn't have ownership of it.
Pure nonsense. Nobody else knew what a password was? Nobody else understood the concept of multiple people having access? Sorry, but this is just pure bullshit. It's 2010, not 1950. The systems Childs used are all well known, and well understood. Everyone understands what a password is, and what only one person knowing a critical password means. The idea that Childs is soley responsible for knowing the failures of the system is just patently ridiculous on multiple levels. Oh come on, the undisputed facts are pretty clear. They didn't call the law right away, they called it after they couldn't figure what else to do.
You do realize that the law isn't written specifically about this case, right? So why then, do you bring up every single detail of the case as a means to exclude the other ways the law could be interpreted to apply to?
The meat of it is about his refusing to provide passwords for 12 days. From what I hear the network remained up during that time. I think it's telling that when pressed, the people who want him in jail seem to focus on him being a dick (which he is), but fail to provide any real explanation as to what harm came to anyone during this period. The law is supposed to protect people from harm, right? Not just be an arbitrary set of rules set down from on high.
If this was so incredibly harmful that passwords weren't available for 12 days because ONE person was a being a dickweed control freak.. aren't the people who designed and approved such a crazy system at fault as well? Why aren't those people liable for such egregious incompetence? I don't agree with what Childs did, think he's a huge dick, should have been fired, tarred and feathered. But sicking the law after him was just a power play by the city, and had nothing to do with protecting the public, property, or anything but some elected officials reputations.
Re:It should read 'stoopid people hath spoken'
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Terry Childs Found Guilty
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's a valuble lesson; intelligent people are no more immune to self-deception. They might even be better at it.
Very true. Richard Feynman noticed this when he saw several otherwise intelligent people be tricked by Uri Geller and his spoon bending and various other tricks. "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb" is one of my favorite quotes.
In this case, I don't think it's self deception though. The guy is a nob, control freak, should have just given over the passwords, and should have been canned. That doesn't mean it's a crime though. The city essentially went insane with the crazy charges brought against him (3 of which were thrown out). The idea that not telling someone a password for 12 days is a felony and deserving of 2-5 years in jail is just completely ridiculous.
The fact that the city also controls prosecutors, this was a major national news story, and the DAs office is generally elected only served to escalate this case. If the city had backed down after they realized he hadn't hacked anything, they'd have lost face.
(Oh, and I thought Reiser was guilty as sin as soon as the evidence against him came out, so I really don't give a shit if someone is a geek or not)
I guess it's the whole hysterical global warming contingent, that likes to blame everything on global warming. Too many hurricanes? Global warming. Too few hurricanes? Global warming. Heat wave? Global warming. Cold snap? Global warming.
That's the media trying to sell some eyeballs. Over simplification, simple answers, and fear sells. It isn't science. Plus, many actual environmentalists I've met tend to be trying to use it as a cover for some sort of Marxism, and generally appear to me, at least, favor words over action.
Democracy starts with words, and leads to action. What would you have people do? You can't really stop the whole population from burning coal to make power through the actions of a few people. I imagine, similarly, there are a great many people more turned off of religion by fanatics and fundamentalists than by the actual doctrines.
This is true.. but it doesn't make you doubt that rape, murder, and theft are all wrong just because any sane religion opposes it, does it?
The truth is you don't need to listen to all the fanatics, politicians, talk show hosts, or newspapers. That's what science is for, to cut through all that shit and rely on the evidence. Do you really think the people against global warming don't have their own fanatics, politicians, talk show hosts, and newspapers trying to influence you their own way? The people who study global warming are in agreement as much as scientists agree about anything, that is that humans are causing the earth to get warmer by releasing greenhouse gasses. What's not agreed upon is how quickly, or how much.
Stiction, i.e. stuck heads or dried out bearings, often cured by freezing the drive or banging it appropriately carefully.
A problem solved around 15 or 20 years ago by parking the read/write heads in a special landing zone. I've only tried two that old.
Well, then...:-)
I still stand by my statement. There's really no reason a hard drive is suddenly going to "go bad" sitting on a shelf somewhere. Meanwhile I've seen many floppy disks spontaneously have unreadable sectors from one day to the next. Hard drives sit and operate for YEARS powered up 24/7 is hot environments and operate flawlessly Sitting on a shelf somewhere unpowered is such a tame environment compared to what they normally operate in, it's very unlikely you'll ever experience data loss.
What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
Homes or offices that've bought a computer in the past say 7-10 years when floppy drives started not appearing in computers. The last time I used a floppy was to flash a BIOS maybe circa 2003. Even that need has disappeared as MB makers have within the last 5 years or so finally realized they can't require people to flash a BIOS from a floppy. 1. How many hard drives have you spun up and read from successfully after 20+ years ("decades") of being powered off?
At least one. What makes you think an unpowered hard drive is suddenly going to go bad? I've only tried two that old. The other one didn't work when it was powered off so it's not surprising it didn't work 20 years later. But what were people with lab access doing as recently as 15 years ago keeping their only copy of data on floppy?
I don't know. People that didn't understand how volatile the things were? 3. Straight USB floppy BIOS support has IME been better than USB mass storage boot
Every PC built in the last 15 years has had the ability to boot from CD-ROM. There's also far more boot discs on CD than their are on floppy.
Your points would have had some relevance 7-10 years ago, but the era of the floppy drives is long since passed.
Who needs a subscription when these guys are leaking easily gotten information in their HTML?
I find the figure of 5.6 times inflation since just 1988 ridiculous. I remember 1988, and goods+services aren't 5+ times as expensive today as they were then. You're right about education and health care costs rising, and lowering prices of a DVD player compared to a VCR seems crazy as well.
1. Give-away-able - if I want to give someone a file, I can hand them a floppy with it on.
And what happens when your friend looks at you like you're crazy and says "I don't think my computer even has a floppy drive!"? Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable. Can't say the same for hard drives
I've had largely the opposite experience. Floppy disks have lost data for me from one day to the next. They're a terrible storage medium. 15 years ago I worked in a computer lab, and people complaining about losing data on floppy drives was an every day experience. Hard drives on the other hand retain data for decades if you leave them powered off.
Strangely though, the old 5 1/4 disks were a lot more robust for me than the 3 1/2. I was able to recover data from them 20 years after the data was stored, and the disks were in extremely poor storage condition. 3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
Much like a USB drive. 3. Everything boots from them. USB booting seems to be hit and miss on many motherboards, and software to support USB booting is more scarce.
Which is true if your computer actually HAS a floppy drive in it (most don't), and the thing you want to boot actually fits on a floppy disk.
I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
Special training? WTF? He's a nurse, not a shrink. What kind of "special training" does a nurse receive to manipulate emotions and ideations of others? Is psych 101 really considered "special training"?
The lengths people are going in this discussion to make this guy into some sort of special evil doer rather than just a huge dick weed is incredible. The world is full of dick weeds that try to make others feel bad for their own pleasure. Why is this one some sort of "super dick weed" with special powers because he used to be a nurse?
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I agree that it's overly simplistic, but it's not always wrong.
If you're smart and knowledgeable enough to know the cases where the comparison is correct, you didn't need the comparison in the first place.
try explaining the difference between 2^n and n^3 to the general population.
Don't. Simply say it fundamentally changes the way computers solve problems, and can make some problems that were nearly insolvable ones into ones that can be solved. Telling them it's 1000 times faster makes it sound like they might be playing Doom 1000 times faster some day.
I really hate it when people come up with the simple "Quantum computer 1000 times faster than conventional computer". It's not just overly simplistic, it's wrong.
Quantum computers can turn some problems that require exponential time to solve into a polynomial time. So instead of taking 2^n time, it might take n^3 time. That's cannot in any realistic way be described as being "X times faster".
Or in short, everything is inferior about "green revolution" farming save for profit.
How about price? When I've priced organic foods vs. non-organic foods, it's often times about twice the price. That may be all well and good for IT people who tend to make good wages, but for most people a 2 times jump in price isn't affordable.
A friend works at a local ISP and he tells me that 0.1% of the customers use as much bandwidth as I do. That's a very tiny percentage.
Ever heard of TV streaming? It's here, and it's cool. You don't have to be a techno-nerd to use a lot of bandwidth. I've got netflix streaming, and it chews up about 900 megabytes/hour. Even "Grandma" might want when her son buys her a cheap streaming device for Christmas. This internet thing isn't going away, and bandwith usage will only increase rather quickly. Your 30 gigabytes/month will look like 640k of memory in about 10 years.
Bandwidth is a finite resource, even if we don't believe it.
Bandwidth is an ever expanding resource. It's finite in the same sense that processing power is finite. Someday the increase will be over, but that's unlikely to happen for quite some time.
Most utilities (even some PPTs) sell metered service: the more you use, the more you pay.
Let's put that to the test.
Electricity: Check
Natural Gas: Check
Local phone: No.
Cable/Satellite TV: No.
Internet: No.
So no, most utilities don't sell metered service.
Frankly, I was more comfortable with the concept that the DOW could drop 1000 points in one afternoon due to some obscure overseas debt concerns than I am the idea that the DOW can drop 1000 points in one afternoon because of a fucking typo.
Welcome to reality. The "market" is essentially insane people following a heard, and always will be. It's far better modeled after heards of elk running into a stampede when one gets spooked than it is on rational people making decisions based on facts and reasonable assumptions.
You really shouldn't be more comfortable with one crazy reason for a sudden drop than a different crazy reason. Attempting to think that people are "rational" and making informed decisions isn't anywhere near reality. I'm certain there's a few level headed people making loads of cash off of the herds insanity.
Might be time to invest my money in something a little more solid, like canned food and ammunition.
Heh. Markets are still down, and the herd is still scared. If you've got the money you can afford to lose you should probably put it in the stock market. Honestly, where else are you going to put it now, with interest rates so low?
International politics, game theory, and good old fashion lying is fun too. Those numbers of "260 billion barrels" are the numbers reported by Saudi Arabia, without any independent auditing. From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves
How much do you believe the country with little oversight and an incentive to keep the world from pursuing other energy sources?
Unit changes. The flow is probably a modest 5K BPD. That doesn't sound as cool, so a couple days ago the journalists switched to gallons per day.
Are you serious? I don't know about you, but I don't know off the top of my head how much a barrel of oil is. I expect the vast majority of people don't either. Using gallons makes sense, since everyone is familiar with how much a gallon is. (BTW, I've consistently heard 200,000 gallons a day from NPR, which corresponds to your 5000 barrels/day figure, so not everyone is a liar).
Flow rate exaggeration. 5K BPD is like a firehose, vaguely.
How about comparisons to a well known oil spill, like say Exon-Valdez? That spill was around 10.8 million gallons. At 200,000 gallons/day, we'll match that massive disaster in just 54 days. We're currently on day 14.
I'm not buying your attempt to downplay this because of how the media has portrayed this event. It's obvious to anyone with a calculator and wikipedia that this is a big deal, and not a minor event. Using the low estimates of 200,000 gallons/day, and "early next week" being Tuesday perhaps, that's 20 days at 200,000 gallons/day for a total of 4 million gallons of oil. A pretty good percentage of the Exxon-Valdez. And that's if the thing works, and before you count the 15% they think will still leak.
How are you going to steal my bytes when I don't pub my SSID?
I believe both Netstumbler and Kismet reveal hidden SSIDs. Every wireless node on your network broadcasts the SSID of your network, even if the AP doesn't. If you believe you're safe because you're a sUp3r 3l33t h/-\x0r who hid his SSID, think again. These are entirely trivial and free programs to run that quickly grab your "hidden" SSID.
Still there needs to be some safety to prevent a VBA macro from using unknowing users' computers from flooding the Internet with useless traffic
Yes, it's called a sandbox. Let the VBA code run in a very limited environment, specifically don't let it access the filesystem or the internet. What's so hard about that?
and the solution is pretty simple: If an Office doc contains VBA code, a warning is shown to the user asking them if they trust the source of the file
You've never actually watched people other than computer experts use a computer, have you? If you had you'd realize they ignore those long, boring, cryptic messages unknowing programmers such as yourself put up in front of them. They don't care, and they just want to get their work done. By relying on this approach that "the user will know what to do in this situation!" (when in fact they have no idea and are just confused) you've trained people to simply click through these messages in hopes that the program will work anyway (which sometimes it does).
So.. that's the solution being employed here. They're effectively saying "Hey, this PDF is using network functionality, do you trust it to do that?"
What the hell happened to the approach of my document just being a damn document, and not having to try to have all these whizz-bang features of accessing the internet? The fill in forms are neat and useful, but that doesn't require anything but a sandbox. Putting a scripting language in a format people commonly exchange is just stupid, and will only lead to more security problems. The shit adobe has pulled off has lead me to stop trusting reader entirely, and just use alternative PDF readers in hopes they're not programmed by idiots who just want to add more gold plating and whizz-bang features to an application that was essentially "done" about 10 years ago.
As an aside, I'll call BS on the "Little uses multiple cores." Games these days are heavily going at least dual core, some even more.
I'd say games qualify for "little uses". Believe it or not, most people don't use their computers for high end gaming.
Even for games, are you really certain that the extra cores are used much? Sure, the game can say it uses multiple cores, and I'm sure it actually does. But how much does it really improve performance?
The PS3 has a weak CPU attached to 7 powerful SPUs.
Heh. The PS3 is known to be notoriously difficult to program as well. How many tasks can really be split up into 7 relatively equal, independent parts?
If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout.
It could? I've no doubt a refinery could catch fire, but my experience of fire is that the smoke generally dilutes into the atmosphere and largely does local damage. Why do you think it could produce damage 20 miles away rivaling nuclear fallout from Chernobyl?
I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling.
Seriously? Why? Putting together a oil consumption and offshore production from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Oil_consumption and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_oil_and_gas_in_the_United_States it's pretty easy to figure out offshore drilling in the U.S. accounts for about 6% of domestic oil consumption. Is that really worth it?
but if they did something crazy like, throw rocks at a tree for 2 hours, everyday, for 3 yrs, someone might notice. I think this guy needs professional help.
Throwing rocks at a tree is crazy? Talking to a tree and hearing a response is crazy. Throwing rocks at it might just be a new sport.
Why is it you seem to think something you don't understand is crazy? I don't understand anyone that watches their local news on TV every night. The sensationalist simplistic nonsense that comes out of it makes me want to throw rocks at my television when I see glimpses of it. But I don't think people that do watch and enjoy it are crazy. Badly informed and prone to fear everything yes, but crazy?
but I think a lot of people thought Gopher could have become the internet had Beners-Lee not released a free for public use implementation of the hypertext concept.
Nonsense.
HTML won because Gopher had a very poor layout of elements in it. Mark McCahill thought that the more free-form layout type of HTML was too hard, so he stuck with the more simple layout of whatever gopher provided. I remember using gopher circa 1992 and thinking it was pretty cool (though difficult to navigate). I also remember seeing the web around early 1994, and realizing how far superior it was in about every way to what gopher had to offer at the time.
The licensing fees didn't help any (and were only for commercial use). But ignoring the technical failings of gopher in preference to some licensing is ignoring the major reason why gopher failed.
I guess I don't find it funny because I know paranoid system administrators, and they do indeed suck at what they do.
That's crazy -- who wants a system administrator who isn't paranoid?
I don't want system administrators who are paranoid. I want system administrators who understand what risk is, what the real risks are, and are able to weigh one risk against another. Being paranoid usually entails the inability to weigh risks, since you think "everyone is out to get me". Anyone who can't weigh risks against another is a fool.
Childs wasn't dragged in just because he refused to give a password, he was convicted because of a series of arrogant and illegal decisions he made over a period of time.
Please be specific. What were these illegal decisions he made over a period of time?
Childs designed the system. He designed it to the people who actually paid for it didn't have ownership of it.
Pure nonsense. Nobody else knew what a password was? Nobody else understood the concept of multiple people having access? Sorry, but this is just pure bullshit. It's 2010, not 1950. The systems Childs used are all well known, and well understood. Everyone understands what a password is, and what only one person knowing a critical password means. The idea that Childs is soley responsible for knowing the failures of the system is just patently ridiculous on multiple levels.
Oh come on, the undisputed facts are pretty clear. They didn't call the law right away, they called it after they couldn't figure what else to do.
Which doesn't make it right.
You do realize that the law isn't written specifically about this case, right? So why then, do you bring up every single detail of the case as a means to exclude the other ways the law could be interpreted to apply to?
The meat of it is about his refusing to provide passwords for 12 days. From what I hear the network remained up during that time. I think it's telling that when pressed, the people who want him in jail seem to focus on him being a dick (which he is), but fail to provide any real explanation as to what harm came to anyone during this period. The law is supposed to protect people from harm, right? Not just be an arbitrary set of rules set down from on high.
If this was so incredibly harmful that passwords weren't available for 12 days because ONE person was a being a dickweed control freak.. aren't the people who designed and approved such a crazy system at fault as well? Why aren't those people liable for such egregious incompetence? I don't agree with what Childs did, think he's a huge dick, should have been fired, tarred and feathered. But sicking the law after him was just a power play by the city, and had nothing to do with protecting the public, property, or anything but some elected officials reputations.
It's a valuble lesson; intelligent people are no more immune to self-deception. They might even be better at it.
Very true. Richard Feynman noticed this when he saw several otherwise intelligent people be tricked by Uri Geller and his spoon bending and various other tricks. "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb" is one of my favorite quotes.
In this case, I don't think it's self deception though. The guy is a nob, control freak, should have just given over the passwords, and should have been canned. That doesn't mean it's a crime though. The city essentially went insane with the crazy charges brought against him (3 of which were thrown out). The idea that not telling someone a password for 12 days is a felony and deserving of 2-5 years in jail is just completely ridiculous.
The fact that the city also controls prosecutors, this was a major national news story, and the DAs office is generally elected only served to escalate this case. If the city had backed down after they realized he hadn't hacked anything, they'd have lost face.
(Oh, and I thought Reiser was guilty as sin as soon as the evidence against him came out, so I really don't give a shit if someone is a geek or not)
I guess it's the whole hysterical global warming contingent, that likes to blame everything on global warming. Too many hurricanes? Global warming. Too few hurricanes? Global warming. Heat wave? Global warming. Cold snap? Global warming.
That's the media trying to sell some eyeballs. Over simplification, simple answers, and fear sells. It isn't science.
Plus, many actual environmentalists I've met tend to be trying to use it as a cover for some sort of Marxism, and generally appear to me, at least, favor words over action.
Democracy starts with words, and leads to action. What would you have people do? You can't really stop the whole population from burning coal to make power through the actions of a few people.
I imagine, similarly, there are a great many people more turned off of religion by fanatics and fundamentalists than by the actual doctrines.
This is true.. but it doesn't make you doubt that rape, murder, and theft are all wrong just because any sane religion opposes it, does it?
The truth is you don't need to listen to all the fanatics, politicians, talk show hosts, or newspapers. That's what science is for, to cut through all that shit and rely on the evidence. Do you really think the people against global warming don't have their own fanatics, politicians, talk show hosts, and newspapers trying to influence you their own way? The people who study global warming are in agreement as much as scientists agree about anything, that is that humans are causing the earth to get warmer by releasing greenhouse gasses. What's not agreed upon is how quickly, or how much.
Stiction, i.e. stuck heads or dried out bearings, often cured by freezing the drive or banging it appropriately carefully.
A problem solved around 15 or 20 years ago by parking the read/write heads in a special landing zone.
I've only tried two that old.
Well, then... :-)
I still stand by my statement. There's really no reason a hard drive is suddenly going to "go bad" sitting on a shelf somewhere. Meanwhile I've seen many floppy disks spontaneously have unreadable sectors from one day to the next. Hard drives sit and operate for YEARS powered up 24/7 is hot environments and operate flawlessly Sitting on a shelf somewhere unpowered is such a tame environment compared to what they normally operate in, it's very unlikely you'll ever experience data loss.
What home office or business wouldn't have the ability to read the most common data transfer medium across the past 30 years?
Homes or offices that've bought a computer in the past say 7-10 years when floppy drives started not appearing in computers. The last time I used a floppy was to flash a BIOS maybe circa 2003. Even that need has disappeared as MB makers have within the last 5 years or so finally realized they can't require people to flash a BIOS from a floppy.
1. How many hard drives have you spun up and read from successfully after 20+ years ("decades") of being powered off?
At least one. What makes you think an unpowered hard drive is suddenly going to go bad? I've only tried two that old. The other one didn't work when it was powered off so it's not surprising it didn't work 20 years later.
But what were people with lab access doing as recently as 15 years ago keeping their only copy of data on floppy?
I don't know. People that didn't understand how volatile the things were?
3. Straight USB floppy BIOS support has IME been better than USB mass storage boot
Every PC built in the last 15 years has had the ability to boot from CD-ROM. There's also far more boot discs on CD than their are on floppy.
Your points would have had some relevance 7-10 years ago, but the era of the floppy drives is long since passed.
Without a subscription, it requires Photoshop to measure the bar heights, but I've measured that $1.00 in 1988 is over $5.00 today.
Or you can cheat, and look at the HTML and compare the bar chart heights (the website designer leaked the information in the html)
1988: height="14.3024381783758"
2010 BLS: height="26.7179366588835"
2010 ShadowStats: height="80"
80/14.30 = 5.59 2010 dollars/1988 ShadowStat dollar.
26.719/14.30 = 1.87 2010 dollars/ 1988 BLS dollar.
Who needs a subscription when these guys are leaking easily gotten information in their HTML?
I find the figure of 5.6 times inflation since just 1988 ridiculous. I remember 1988, and goods+services aren't 5+ times as expensive today as they were then. You're right about education and health care costs rising, and lowering prices of a DVD player compared to a VCR seems crazy as well.
1. Give-away-able - if I want to give someone a file, I can hand them a floppy with it on.
And what happens when your friend looks at you like you're crazy and says "I don't think my computer even has a floppy drive!"?
Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable. Can't say the same for hard drives
I've had largely the opposite experience. Floppy disks have lost data for me from one day to the next. They're a terrible storage medium. 15 years ago I worked in a computer lab, and people complaining about losing data on floppy drives was an every day experience. Hard drives on the other hand retain data for decades if you leave them powered off.
Strangely though, the old 5 1/4 disks were a lot more robust for me than the 3 1/2. I was able to recover data from them 20 years after the data was stored, and the disks were in extremely poor storage condition.
3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
Much like a USB drive.
3. Everything boots from them. USB booting seems to be hit and miss on many motherboards, and software to support USB booting is more scarce.
Which is true if your computer actually HAS a floppy drive in it (most don't), and the thing you want to boot actually fits on a floppy disk.
I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
Special training? WTF? He's a nurse, not a shrink. What kind of "special training" does a nurse receive to manipulate emotions and ideations of others? Is psych 101 really considered "special training"?
The lengths people are going in this discussion to make this guy into some sort of special evil doer rather than just a huge dick weed is incredible. The world is full of dick weeds that try to make others feel bad for their own pleasure. Why is this one some sort of "super dick weed" with special powers because he used to be a nurse?