We know that a pre-condition for intelligence is simply life, right? Life should be far more common than intelligence, though possibly harder to detect. So instead of looking for intelligence, why not look for life? Call it SETL. The search would consist of looking for things that only life produces. (Certain chemicals are one example).
So.. what would it take to be able to detect the signs of life on other planets? Highly sensitive spectrometers? What is it that life produces that's distinguishable from long distances?
If you run with the default numbers (Aerocibo sized receiver+transmitter) the range is around 23 light years. The real numbers are going to be a bit different however, since our transmissions are usually not directional, but the transmit power is also higher.
I'm just saying that there are quite a lot of people who can't come up with that kind of money, regardless of the long-term economics. Most people, at least in the US, would find that a substantial hardship.
Which is the reason I suggested finding alternate ways to get a quality hearing aid through a charity. I'll bet you there's a lot of people who's had a family member with a hearing aid die, and have no use for it. The only cost would be in getting it adjusted properly, and the right ear canal insert. That's got to be a lot lot less than $3700.
Once GPS came in, suddenly they are being expected to make 11 stops (because the gps showed they were sitting around for 20 minutes) and work 100% while on. But the pay is still 8x dollars.
Without them I can't function. My Insurance, for which I pay a nice premium, said I was covered up to $4k, but every audiologist I went to "IN" network said they wouldn't take insurance. That I had to pay for the hearing aids in full and file a claim to get reimbursed. After contacting the insurance company again and telling them this the insurance company said, "No, you dont have to pay anything out of pocket. The audiologist just has to submit the paperwork." None of the hearing aid dispensers wanted to do it this way. I don't have $4200 sitting around to just blow on hearing aids.
What a horrible story. It's hard to say who's at fault, though it's probably everyone involved but yourself. I do know that insurance companies are notoriously difficult for everyone to work with. They almost exclusively have negotiated rates for goods and services far below the "sticker price". They're also difficult to work with, and have any number of different coding systems. Doctors offices often have to have an entire person devoted to JUST insurance. It's no wonder that sellers don't want to deal with insurance.
I just dont see a plausible scenario for this type of transition, certainly not with the current structure, ownership and division of the internet, internet names, trademarks, copyrights etc. As you mention yourself, this is or will be an international endeavour. And getting the current 174 countries (or there abouts) to agree on simple stuff like national borders, official languages etc. has taken the better part of 10.000 years
Why would you have to get ALL 174 countries to agree? Sure, the internet is international, but having a presence in a country isn't. You think Amazon is just going to pull up stakes and move to Canada just so they can sell some dildos? Often times having a physical presence is a country makes you subject to the laws in that country. The point being that the way commerce and business work are far more involved than just looking at the laws of any particular country. I'm betting if only a few key countries passed such laws, it wouldn't really matter than the other 160 didn't have them
$3700 doesn't sound so bad for something that improves your quality of life so much. Comparing the price to a laptop is so beyond what's reasonable it's pointless to even discuss why. Let's move beyond that.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter if you can't afford it. So what are your alternatives? Buy something cheap that's likely to not work as well, or try to find some benevolent entity that will pay for all or part of your hearing aid. Government aid? Private charities? I don't know what's available, but others do. I'd start by dialing 211 (most of the country this will hook you up with United Way volunteers) and see if they can help you.
I agree with much of your general statements, but they seem to based on stereotypes, hero worship, and personal bias rather than actual facts. It's no wonder you get crucified since those are generally weak arguments around here.
To play devils advocate to anyone wishing to respond, does a fly-by-wire system (specifically in an airplane) offer any safety advantages over a mechanical or hydraulic system? The whole system is what matters, not individual components.
But BANNING domains on that note, would as far as I can see only lead to the downfall of the toplevel domain, as porn providers would stop using it as it's not good business.
Until countries make laws requiring "all websites with adult content in them are required to register under the.xxx domain". No big deal you say. I certainly don't go to sites like that.
Ever go to Amazon? Amazon sells adult videos. They also list a wide variety of sex toys, vibrators, etc that many people object to. Amazon doesn't sell this directly, but they do sell it through another company that lists on Amazon. Does that make Amazon belong under.xxx? Should the stuff that some people don't like be moved to a special amazon.xxx?
Creating the domain is but one step in the process of segregating the internet into various categories. Once you require everything to be in neat little categories you can start to control access to those categories, track them, etc. More insidious is creating these dividing lines is an attempt to make adult products which are already mainstream and have been for at least 40 years if not more into something not mainstream.
The question is: can you be extorted? It's a valid question. It needs to be addressed.
No, it's not a valid question. Extorted for what? These guys work for JPL, which works on such projects such as the Mars Rover.
"Tell me the composition of rock 153 on mars... or I'll tell the world you're a fagot!" "Tell me the composition of the Jovian moon Titan... or I'll tell the world you're a former alcoholic!" "Give me pictures of the nursery nebula taken by the wild field camera on Hubble... or I'll tell the world you and your wife are into wife swapping!"
No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire.
I think that's a good solution, I just don't think it's the _only_ solution. Video codecs are fighting the same war image codes fought 20 years ago. Ever heard of an AIFF, or a HAM image type? No? How often have you seen TIFF before? Never? That's because those formats lost the format wars, and people settled on GIF, jpeg, and the 14 year old "newcomer" png. Unless you're a crazy person, you post images on the web in one of those three formats. There's no "image format of the week" requiring some new dumb plugin. Hell, even PNG was an uphill battle.
I predict that something similar will happen with video codecs, and the constant "new format of the week" wars will end with a handful of codecs will be supported in major browsers. The compression gravy train simply has to run out at some point. It's an information theory certainty.
I actually DO remember when browsers didn't even support some image formats without a plugin (Mosaic comes to mind). The big selling point of Netscape was it supported displaying either gifs or jpgs (I forget which) "inline" (wow! Inline graphics!)
This study shows that we have no idea which parts of the body are infected and which are not. So the only logical conclusion is that likely all cells are infected, but do not commonly produce viruses.
It always amazes me that people such as yourself make such wild eyed speculation based on one article written by some random AP reporter. Where you got the idea that "we have no idea which part of the body are infected and which are not" I can't fathom. Do you not realize that not knowing everything isn't the same thing as not knowing anything?
If we have to feed $Y millions this year, and 1.1 * $Y millions the next, and so on, we're not making any progress.
If population growth is the only thing that improves, I might agree with you. Is that really the case though? What about measuring the amount of sick people that need treatment? You act as if people is merely a burden rather than a resource. For instance, the massive amount of donated clothes destroys the clothing industry in those places.
Only if all the following conditions exist:
There actually IS a clothing industry in whatever place we're talking about. The clothing is actually donated rather than someone just buying clothing locally. The people who can't afford clothing would have somehow went out and bought it rather than continue to wear rags. A significant portion of the clothing in the theoretical clothing industry is sold internally rather than exported
Given that we're talking about economically depressed region, I'd say at least one of those conditions isn't going to apply.
Feed people once, then make sure they can keep feeding themselves without further intervention.
How long is once? And what makes you think progress hasn't been made? The world is a big place, and expecting everything everywhere to just turn around in a few decades isn't realistic. If you really think no progress has been made in these countries, I'd suggest taking a look over at gap minder
True, it's horrendously expensive. But that money pays for research, and that research will allow people to stay alive or even get cured a lot cheaper later.
Some of it pays for research. More of it goes to marketing though. How much is pure profit? I'd rather not try to address the complexities of public funded drugs vs "free market" funded drugs, but suffice it to say the picture is far more complicated, and has many more options than what you're saying.
Incidentally, I believe that paying for the "vaccine for nearly a quarter million children in developing countries" is on the long term a rather pointless thing.
Infra-structure doesn't help so much when everyone is dying of some easily preventable disease. Infra-structure is important, but you have to start with getting people relatively healthy first. Sick people ain't so productive, and are obviously very expensive. Is it really smart to build a factory, educate the workers, train them.. and then have a large portion of the people you just spent a lot of money on dying of malaria, or some other cheap to prevent disease? A healthy society is the base of productivity. In a very real sense it IS infra-structure.
I own a small Web development studio that specializes in open source software, primarily Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla
Right off the bat, you're far too focused on the security of least concern, ssh. Unless you set an idiotic password, it's not going to be guessed. It sounds like you have that covered.
But.. the part you've missed is your FAR more vulnerable applications. You say your ISP is "actively managing" your security, but how certain are you they're doing a decent job of it? Do they have experts in each of these different CMS systems?
If you're serious about security, find experts to manage the security settings and versions of each of your chosen applications. I know for a fact that Joomla has historically had some issues with it. The others you mentioned wouldn't be terribly surprising to find problems as well. We're not talking a lot of money here. A good price would be in the neighborhood of $200 per application/site for an assessment of your configuration. Look for people that are reputable, not some fly-by-night "I know all applications" joker who just runs a security scanner and charges you $200.
And no, scanners aren't going to replace expert human beings that know what to look for.
Wedding photography has a very well established business plan where the base fee covers the basic costs of the photographer, and the prints supply the profit.
The modern world has since stepped in, and this business model is very likely going the way of the dodo. It worked when "copying" photographs was difficult, expensive, and uncommon. The modern age of digital photography has changed all three of those, so customers have entirely different expectations now.
As it is not exactly an uncompetitive industry, and you don't see many wedding photogs turning up in Porsches, i'd say the pricing and model were pretty fair.
Heh. This kind of reasoning just has to make me laugh. It's fair because photographers don't drive Porshes? You've got a lot to learn about business and economics. It was "fair" because the photographers could get away with it. Now they can't. Fair I won't get into since that's far to value driven of a word to have any meaninful conversation about. It's obvious to me that the old business model isn't sustainable.
You *could* argue it is an outdated model now, with the rise of electronic media, but most couples still want prints, and the same problem actually still remains - giving out jpg's and letting people print at home or from a cheap online outlet is going to result in exactly the same quality/reputation problem as in the film days.
What a lot of malarkey. This is exactly the case of the photographers seeing the whole world as a set of photographers sitting around worrying about print quality. The truth is people buying prints aren't experts at print quality. The LAST thing they think of when looking at a photograph is the photographer who took the picture. It's also an after-the-fact justification for a business practice that benefits photographers. The REAL deal is the business practice, the print quality thing is just a mask to hide that.
The key factor is the rights of the employer to control the manner in which the work is done; employees are told HOW to do the job, contractors are told what results are wanted and THE CONTRACTOR decides how to accomplish that result.
If that's the determining factor for "employee vs. contractor", then most professionals in the world are contractors, not professionals. Not all employees work in factories where there's a pre-defined set of tasks to do day in and day out. You either completely don't understand the modern workplace, or have some extremely specialized definitions of "how" and "results are wanted".
Most of the responses here are arguing legalities. That's nice and all, but most of how business works in the real world doesn't wind up in the court system, but by people just making decisions. So I think it's valuable to present the perspective of a customer.
From my perspective, it MIGHT be acceptable to not get the source code for the work, given one of three possible conditions:
1. I never expect to modify or maintain the application in any way whatsoever during it's lifetime. (We all know this is relatively unlikely) or 2. I completely trust the contractor to do good work, charge me reasonable competitive rates, and provide some exit strategy should the developer retire, die, etc. or 3. The program is largely of very limited value, and is highly unlikely to ever be of any great value.
In all other cases, source code is largely a must. Imagine a plumber replacing your old steel pipes with copper, but somehow locking all the pipework down so only HE could work on the pipes. Nobody would stand for that, as pipes are basic infra-structure that survive longer than you or the plumber. Code doesn't always survive that long.. but sometimes it just sits and works for decades (I know I've written code for the short term I never expected to still be used 7 years later).
The case of custom libraries owned by the developer are a special case. Everyone who's done software development for any length of time has bought 3rd party libraries without source code. This case is _mostly_ the same as that, but with some additional risks involved. Contractors aren't in the business of selling 3rd party libraries, so it's likely there's:
No documentation, or at best poor documentation (why write documentation when you're the only one who uses it?) The API is poor, and not for general usage. I'd expect the library to be more buggy, since it hasn't gone through testing by multiple different developers trying to do things the author didn't think of.
The above all lead towards greater lock-in to the original author. That's great for the author, but not so great for me, the customer. If the application didn't meet one of my above three cases I'd likely insist on very good documentation of the functions the contractor used from his custom library.
Just for the sake of argument, I'll state that the vast majority of people hiring contractors for software development aren't going to have any clue about any of the above. If you do try to advise them most will not understand how few applications fall into category 1. Not enough people think of code as essentially custom built machines with many many custom built parts inside it. If you told them that, they might start understanding why getting the "design documents" is so important "should the machine ever break down". Then again, most people aren't imaginative enough to understand why they'd ever want to change anything in the application, or how the changing software eco-system will eventually obsolete that program designed 10 years ago to run on Windows 98.
if it was medical records i'd be storing 5 copies in 5 geographically distinct locations, each with their own backup for the backup. i'd be checking the MD5's each day on all the backups to ensure they can be accessed when i need them
I can about guarantee you that nobody stores medical records in this way. And realistically, why should they? 5 different locations is insane for just about any piece of data.
Geeks tend to go overboard when it comes to data paranoia and worry too much about technology, but then forget about all the human problems that go on. Most data loss doesn't occur from some geographic catastrophe where a super volcano destroys half a continent. More often someone changes some critical path of the backup scheme and the whole she-bang comes crashing down. Super-redundant geographic co-location can't save you from one idiot that didn't understand changing one critical name silently took down the backup scheme.
The fact that you can "learn to be relaxed, focused. You improve." means that you're changing the frequency and wavelength of your brain's electrical output to comply with the requirements of this device.
WTF? You don't think you do exactly the same thing every time you have a thought? It's amazing to me that anyone would worry about "medical testing" for anything as simple as a device that asks you to think about something.
Maybe your post should have to undergo medical testing because "we don't know the long term effects of it".
You're storing relatively fragile hard drives in a raid5 configuration in a lock box?
Relatively fragile sitting in a temperature controlled safety deposit box, completely unpowered? Uhh.. No.
Hard drives are physical devices that fail because of physical problems. They'll easily sit for years in an unpowered state and you'll lose no data. A couple years ago I powered up a drive from 1991 that I stopped using in 1995. The drive sat idle for 13 years through various moves, sitting in my basement, in hot un-airconditioned rooms, tossed around through multiple moves. It powered up just fine, and I recovered all the data off it without incident. There's actually another wrinkle to all this. The filesystem was an ancient Amiga FFS, which was recognized and mounted quite nicely by Linux (amazing really). So this idea that the data on your HD is essentially going to suddenly rot is silly. I'd trust a unpowered HD over anything but SSD any day (and maybe even over SSD).
If anything, powering up the drive to make sure it's OK is only going to make it more likely to fail. Frankly I'd forgo the RAID5, as you're just asking for some technological change to happen and have some incompatibility happen between kernel versions. If you're REALLY that paranoid about losing the data, copy it to two different hard drives formatted with straight EXT3. That ought to be supported for decades.
I doubt it. Your computer being infected with crap isn't particularly scary.. probably because it happens so often that most people are already familiar with how un-scary (but obviously annoying) it really is. The media picks subjects that are NOT common. Man bites dog, not dog bites man. They'll continue on spreading fear about uncommon events on the internet like sexual predators and stalkers. People fear things they don't know about. Since this is a JS vulnerability
The "javascript vulnerability" just redirects you to a known malware site. Going to a website isn't in itself much of a threat.
The real vulnerabilities (the ones that can infect your computer) exist in largely Adobe Flash, Microsoft Internet Explorer, somewhat in Adobe PDF Reader, and people just being stupid and running an executable because "the computer" told them to.
The last item is probably the hardest one to fix, and likely can't be fixed with technology (the authoritarians of the world like Kaspersky want to try to solve this through idiotic internet licensing schemes). The other three most certainly are technology problems, and can be fixed with technology. Adobe and Microsoft aren't too keen on actually fixing the problems however.
Nah. You're a skeptic, and that's great, but you're unwilling to do your own research
So in other words, you have no idea what the applications are, and just chose platinum because it's expensive. Bluff called. so this conversation is over.
There's plenty of applications where it is simply too expensive to use but is unquestionably the best material to use.
Please list those applications. (Simply assuming they exist because platinum is expensive is dishonest).
For a similar analogy, think about the Enterprise.. the whole thing was made of titanium..
Uhh. Actually it was made of a mythical alloy called "tritanium", with similar mythical properties. I do think it's a great analogy though since it points out how you've not actually based your argument on reality, but on fiction.
I read the article, and I see _some_ value in it, but it misses the mark by praising slums too much, and not connecting them well to the world people able to read the article live in. How many people want to live in a space of less than 30 square feet? (which is how much space you get with a million people per square mile).
We actually already do quite of bit of recycling and re-use. I shop at thrift stores relatively often, and you can find some incredible bargains if you're willing to look. Over a period of a year or so for I bought an entire collection of around 10 pieces of old Revere Ware (steel and copper pots and pans) that was probably already 40 years old and in great condition that'll easily last another 30-40 years. It easily cost less than $40. You can find similar deals for construction materials at places like Habitat for Humanity re-use centers. To many people think old=bad, and new=good.
I think much of the point is, we can already make better use of the "waste" we produce instead of producing more and disposing of the old. To some degree I'll bet Craiglist and Ebay have only increased re-use. I know I've certainly bought a lot of used items on both sites that I wouldn't have had they not existed. The point being that we don't have to live like people do in slums. We can learn something from people that are forced to be efficient though.
Slashdot Mirror
We know that a pre-condition for intelligence is simply life, right? Life should be far more common than intelligence, though possibly harder to detect. So instead of looking for intelligence, why not look for life? Call it SETL. The search would consist of looking for things that only life produces. (Certain chemicals are one example).
So.. what would it take to be able to detect the signs of life on other planets? Highly sensitive spectrometers? What is it that life produces that's distinguishable from long distances?
Here's a calculator someone cooked up that might be able to answer the question.
http://www.satsig.net/seticalc.htm
If you run with the default numbers (Aerocibo sized receiver+transmitter) the range is around 23 light years. The real numbers are going to be a bit different however, since our transmissions are usually not directional, but the transmit power is also higher.
I'm just saying that there are quite a lot of people who can't come up with that kind of money, regardless of the long-term economics. Most people, at least in the US, would find that a substantial hardship.
Which is the reason I suggested finding alternate ways to get a quality hearing aid through a charity. I'll bet you there's a lot of people who's had a family member with a hearing aid die, and have no use for it. The only cost would be in getting it adjusted properly, and the right ear canal insert. That's got to be a lot lot less than $3700.
Once GPS came in, suddenly they are being expected to make 11 stops (because the gps showed they were sitting around for 20 minutes) and work 100% while on. But the pay is still 8x dollars.
What that leads to is drivers that can't afford to stop to take a piss. So what do they do? Piss in a plastic jug and throw it out the window. There's more to life than money.
Without them I can't function. My Insurance, for which I pay a nice premium, said I was covered up to $4k, but every audiologist I went to "IN" network said they wouldn't take insurance. That I had to pay for the hearing aids in full and file a claim to get reimbursed. After contacting the insurance company again and telling them this the insurance company said, "No, you dont have to pay anything out of pocket. The audiologist just has to submit the paperwork." None of the hearing aid dispensers wanted to do it this way. I don't have $4200 sitting around to just blow on hearing aids.
What a horrible story. It's hard to say who's at fault, though it's probably everyone involved but yourself. I do know that insurance companies are notoriously difficult for everyone to work with. They almost exclusively have negotiated rates for goods and services far below the "sticker price". They're also difficult to work with, and have any number of different coding systems. Doctors offices often have to have an entire person devoted to JUST insurance. It's no wonder that sellers don't want to deal with insurance.
I just dont see a plausible scenario for this type of transition, certainly not with the current structure, ownership and division of the internet, internet names, trademarks, copyrights etc. As you mention yourself, this is or will be an international endeavour. And getting the current 174 countries (or there abouts) to agree on simple stuff like national borders, official languages etc. has taken the better part of 10.000 years
Why would you have to get ALL 174 countries to agree? Sure, the internet is international, but having a presence in a country isn't. You think Amazon is just going to pull up stakes and move to Canada just so they can sell some dildos? Often times having a physical presence is a country makes you subject to the laws in that country. The point being that the way commerce and business work are far more involved than just looking at the laws of any particular country. I'm betting if only a few key countries passed such laws, it wouldn't really matter than the other 160 didn't have them
$3700 doesn't sound so bad for something that improves your quality of life so much. Comparing the price to a laptop is so beyond what's reasonable it's pointless to even discuss why. Let's move beyond that.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter if you can't afford it. So what are your alternatives? Buy something cheap that's likely to not work as well, or try to find some benevolent entity that will pay for all or part of your hearing aid. Government aid? Private charities? I don't know what's available, but others do. I'd start by dialing 211 (most of the country this will hook you up with United Way volunteers) and see if they can help you.
I agree with much of your general statements, but they seem to based on stereotypes, hero worship, and personal bias rather than actual facts. It's no wonder you get crucified since those are generally weak arguments around here.
To play devils advocate to anyone wishing to respond, does a fly-by-wire system (specifically in an airplane) offer any safety advantages over a mechanical or hydraulic system? The whole system is what matters, not individual components.
But BANNING domains on that note, would as far as I can see only lead to the downfall of the toplevel domain, as porn providers would stop using it as it's not good business.
Until countries make laws requiring "all websites with adult content in them are required to register under the
Ever go to Amazon? Amazon sells adult videos. They also list a wide variety of sex toys, vibrators, etc that many people object to. Amazon doesn't sell this directly, but they do sell it through another company that lists on Amazon. Does that make Amazon belong under .xxx? Should the stuff that some people don't like be moved to a special amazon.xxx?
Creating the domain is but one step in the process of segregating the internet into various categories. Once you require everything to be in neat little categories you can start to control access to those categories, track them, etc. More insidious is creating these dividing lines is an attempt to make adult products which are already mainstream and have been for at least 40 years if not more into something not mainstream.
The question is: can you be extorted? It's a valid question. It needs to be addressed.
No, it's not a valid question. Extorted for what? These guys work for JPL, which works on such projects such as the Mars Rover.
"Tell me the composition of rock 153 on mars... or I'll tell the world you're a fagot!"
"Tell me the composition of the Jovian moon Titan... or I'll tell the world you're a former alcoholic!"
"Give me pictures of the nursery nebula taken by the wild field camera on Hubble... or I'll tell the world you and your wife are into wife swapping!"
No, the only solution is to specify *one* baseline codec that must be supported to comply with the standard, but leave web devs able to specify their own alternative if they so desire.
I think that's a good solution, I just don't think it's the _only_ solution. Video codecs are fighting the same war image codes fought 20 years ago. Ever heard of an AIFF, or a HAM image type? No? How often have you seen TIFF before? Never? That's because those formats lost the format wars, and people settled on GIF, jpeg, and the 14 year old "newcomer" png. Unless you're a crazy person, you post images on the web in one of those three formats. There's no "image format of the week" requiring some new dumb plugin. Hell, even PNG was an uphill battle.
I predict that something similar will happen with video codecs, and the constant "new format of the week" wars will end with a handful of codecs will be supported in major browsers. The compression gravy train simply has to run out at some point. It's an information theory certainty.
I actually DO remember when browsers didn't even support some image formats without a plugin (Mosaic comes to mind). The big selling point of Netscape was it supported displaying either gifs or jpgs (I forget which) "inline" (wow! Inline graphics!)
This study shows that we have no idea which parts of the body are infected and which are not. So the only logical conclusion is that likely all cells are infected, but do not commonly produce viruses.
It always amazes me that people such as yourself make such wild eyed speculation based on one article written by some random AP reporter. Where you got the idea that "we have no idea which part of the body are infected and which are not" I can't fathom. Do you not realize that not knowing everything isn't the same thing as not knowing anything?
If we have to feed $Y millions this year, and 1.1 * $Y millions the next, and so on, we're not making any progress.
If population growth is the only thing that improves, I might agree with you. Is that really the case though? What about measuring the amount of sick people that need treatment? You act as if people is merely a burden rather than a resource.
For instance, the massive amount of donated clothes destroys the clothing industry in those places.
Only if all the following conditions exist:
There actually IS a clothing industry in whatever place we're talking about.
The clothing is actually donated rather than someone just buying clothing locally.
The people who can't afford clothing would have somehow went out and bought it rather than continue to wear rags.
A significant portion of the clothing in the theoretical clothing industry is sold internally rather than exported
Given that we're talking about economically depressed region, I'd say at least one of those conditions isn't going to apply.
Feed people once, then make sure they can keep feeding themselves without further intervention.
How long is once? And what makes you think progress hasn't been made? The world is a big place, and expecting everything everywhere to just turn around in a few decades isn't realistic. If you really think no progress has been made in these countries, I'd suggest taking a look over at gap minder
True, it's horrendously expensive. But that money pays for research, and that research will allow people to stay alive or even get cured a lot cheaper later.
Some of it pays for research. More of it goes to marketing though. How much is pure profit? I'd rather not try to address the complexities of public funded drugs vs "free market" funded drugs, but suffice it to say the picture is far more complicated, and has many more options than what you're saying.
Incidentally, I believe that paying for the "vaccine for nearly a quarter million children in developing countries" is on the long term a rather pointless thing.
Infra-structure doesn't help so much when everyone is dying of some easily preventable disease. Infra-structure is important, but you have to start with getting people relatively healthy first. Sick people ain't so productive, and are obviously very expensive. Is it really smart to build a factory, educate the workers, train them.. and then have a large portion of the people you just spent a lot of money on dying of malaria, or some other cheap to prevent disease? A healthy society is the base of productivity. In a very real sense it IS infra-structure.
I own a small Web development studio that specializes in open source software, primarily Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla
Right off the bat, you're far too focused on the security of least concern, ssh. Unless you set an idiotic password, it's not going to be guessed. It sounds like you have that covered.
But.. the part you've missed is your FAR more vulnerable applications. You say your ISP is "actively managing" your security, but how certain are you they're doing a decent job of it? Do they have experts in each of these different CMS systems?
If you're serious about security, find experts to manage the security settings and versions of each of your chosen applications. I know for a fact that Joomla has historically had some issues with it. The others you mentioned wouldn't be terribly surprising to find problems as well. We're not talking a lot of money here. A good price would be in the neighborhood of $200 per application/site for an assessment of your configuration. Look for people that are reputable, not some fly-by-night "I know all applications" joker who just runs a security scanner and charges you $200.
And no, scanners aren't going to replace expert human beings that know what to look for.
Wedding photography has a very well established business plan where the base fee covers the basic costs of the photographer, and the prints supply the profit.
The modern world has since stepped in, and this business model is very likely going the way of the dodo. It worked when "copying" photographs was difficult, expensive, and uncommon. The modern age of digital photography has changed all three of those, so customers have entirely different expectations now.
As it is not exactly an uncompetitive industry, and you don't see many wedding photogs turning up in Porsches, i'd say the pricing and model were pretty fair.
Heh. This kind of reasoning just has to make me laugh. It's fair because photographers don't drive Porshes? You've got a lot to learn about business and economics. It was "fair" because the photographers could get away with it. Now they can't. Fair I won't get into since that's far to value driven of a word to have any meaninful conversation about. It's obvious to me that the old business model isn't sustainable.
You *could* argue it is an outdated model now, with the rise of electronic media, but most couples still want prints, and the same problem actually still remains - giving out jpg's and letting people print at home or from a cheap online outlet is going to result in exactly the same quality/reputation problem as in the film days.
What a lot of malarkey. This is exactly the case of the photographers seeing the whole world as a set of photographers sitting around worrying about print quality. The truth is people buying prints aren't experts at print quality. The LAST thing they think of when looking at a photograph is the photographer who took the picture. It's also an after-the-fact justification for a business practice that benefits photographers. The REAL deal is the business practice, the print quality thing is just a mask to hide that.
The key factor is the rights of the employer to control the manner in which the work is done; employees are told HOW to do the job, contractors are told what results are wanted and THE CONTRACTOR decides how to accomplish that result.
If that's the determining factor for "employee vs. contractor", then most professionals in the world are contractors, not professionals. Not all employees work in factories where there's a pre-defined set of tasks to do day in and day out. You either completely don't understand the modern workplace, or have some extremely specialized definitions of "how" and "results are wanted".
Most of the responses here are arguing legalities. That's nice and all, but most of how business works in the real world doesn't wind up in the court system, but by people just making decisions. So I think it's valuable to present the perspective of a customer.
From my perspective, it MIGHT be acceptable to not get the source code for the work, given one of three possible conditions:
1. I never expect to modify or maintain the application in any way whatsoever during it's lifetime. (We all know this is relatively unlikely)
or
2. I completely trust the contractor to do good work, charge me reasonable competitive rates, and provide some exit strategy should the developer retire, die, etc.
or
3. The program is largely of very limited value, and is highly unlikely to ever be of any great value.
In all other cases, source code is largely a must. Imagine a plumber replacing your old steel pipes with copper, but somehow locking all the pipework down so only HE could work on the pipes. Nobody would stand for that, as pipes are basic infra-structure that survive longer than you or the plumber. Code doesn't always survive that long.. but sometimes it just sits and works for decades (I know I've written code for the short term I never expected to still be used 7 years later).
The case of custom libraries owned by the developer are a special case. Everyone who's done software development for any length of time has bought 3rd party libraries without source code. This case is _mostly_ the same as that, but with some additional risks involved. Contractors aren't in the business of selling 3rd party libraries, so it's likely there's:
No documentation, or at best poor documentation (why write documentation when you're the only one who uses it?)
The API is poor, and not for general usage.
I'd expect the library to be more buggy, since it hasn't gone through testing by multiple different developers trying to do things the author didn't think of.
The above all lead towards greater lock-in to the original author. That's great for the author, but not so great for me, the customer. If the application didn't meet one of my above three cases I'd likely insist on very good documentation of the functions the contractor used from his custom library.
Just for the sake of argument, I'll state that the vast majority of people hiring contractors for software development aren't going to have any clue about any of the above. If you do try to advise them most will not understand how few applications fall into category 1. Not enough people think of code as essentially custom built machines with many many custom built parts inside it. If you told them that, they might start understanding why getting the "design documents" is so important "should the machine ever break down". Then again, most people aren't imaginative enough to understand why they'd ever want to change anything in the application, or how the changing software eco-system will eventually obsolete that program designed 10 years ago to run on Windows 98.
if it was medical records i'd be storing 5 copies in 5 geographically distinct locations, each with their own backup for the backup. i'd be checking the MD5's each day on all the backups to ensure they can be accessed when i need them
I can about guarantee you that nobody stores medical records in this way. And realistically, why should they? 5 different locations is insane for just about any piece of data.
Geeks tend to go overboard when it comes to data paranoia and worry too much about technology, but then forget about all the human problems that go on. Most data loss doesn't occur from some geographic catastrophe where a super volcano destroys half a continent. More often someone changes some critical path of the backup scheme and the whole she-bang comes crashing down. Super-redundant geographic co-location can't save you from one idiot that didn't understand changing one critical name silently took down the backup scheme.
The fact that you can "learn to be relaxed, focused. You improve." means that you're changing the frequency and wavelength of your brain's electrical output to comply with the requirements of this device.
WTF? You don't think you do exactly the same thing every time you have a thought? It's amazing to me that anyone would worry about "medical testing" for anything as simple as a device that asks you to think about something.
Maybe your post should have to undergo medical testing because "we don't know the long term effects of it".
You're storing relatively fragile hard drives in a raid5 configuration in a lock box?
Relatively fragile sitting in a temperature controlled safety deposit box, completely unpowered? Uhh.. No.
Hard drives are physical devices that fail because of physical problems. They'll easily sit for years in an unpowered state and you'll lose no data. A couple years ago I powered up a drive from 1991 that I stopped using in 1995. The drive sat idle for 13 years through various moves, sitting in my basement, in hot un-airconditioned rooms, tossed around through multiple moves. It powered up just fine, and I recovered all the data off it without incident. There's actually another wrinkle to all this. The filesystem was an ancient Amiga FFS, which was recognized and mounted quite nicely by Linux (amazing really). So this idea that the data on your HD is essentially going to suddenly rot is silly. I'd trust a unpowered HD over anything but SSD any day (and maybe even over SSD).
If anything, powering up the drive to make sure it's OK is only going to make it more likely to fail. Frankly I'd forgo the RAID5, as you're just asking for some technological change to happen and have some incompatibility happen between kernel versions. If you're REALLY that paranoid about losing the data, copy it to two different hard drives formatted with straight EXT3. That ought to be supported for decades.
Firstly, are the media going to pick up on this
I doubt it. Your computer being infected with crap isn't particularly scary.. probably because it happens so often that most people are already familiar with how un-scary (but obviously annoying) it really is. The media picks subjects that are NOT common. Man bites dog, not dog bites man. They'll continue on spreading fear about uncommon events on the internet like sexual predators and stalkers. People fear things they don't know about.
Since this is a JS vulnerability
The "javascript vulnerability" just redirects you to a known malware site. Going to a website isn't in itself much of a threat.
The real vulnerabilities (the ones that can infect your computer) exist in largely Adobe Flash, Microsoft Internet Explorer, somewhat in Adobe PDF Reader, and people just being stupid and running an executable because "the computer" told them to.
The last item is probably the hardest one to fix, and likely can't be fixed with technology (the authoritarians of the world like Kaspersky want to try to solve this through idiotic internet licensing schemes). The other three most certainly are technology problems, and can be fixed with technology. Adobe and Microsoft aren't too keen on actually fixing the problems however.
Nah. You're a skeptic, and that's great, but you're unwilling to do your own research
So in other words, you have no idea what the applications are, and just chose platinum because it's expensive. Bluff called.
so this conversation is over.
Most certainly.
There's plenty of applications where it is simply too expensive to use but is unquestionably the best material to use.
Please list those applications. (Simply assuming they exist because platinum is expensive is dishonest).
For a similar analogy, think about the Enterprise.. the whole thing was made of titanium..
Uhh. Actually it was made of a mythical alloy called "tritanium", with similar mythical properties. I do think it's a great analogy though since it points out how you've not actually based your argument on reality, but on fiction.
I read the article, and I see _some_ value in it, but it misses the mark by praising slums too much, and not connecting them well to the world people able to read the article live in. How many people want to live in a space of less than 30 square feet? (which is how much space you get with a million people per square mile).
We actually already do quite of bit of recycling and re-use. I shop at thrift stores relatively often, and you can find some incredible bargains if you're willing to look. Over a period of a year or so for I bought an entire collection of around 10 pieces of old Revere Ware (steel and copper pots and pans) that was probably already 40 years old and in great condition that'll easily last another 30-40 years. It easily cost less than $40. You can find similar deals for construction materials at places like Habitat for Humanity re-use centers. To many people think old=bad, and new=good.
I think much of the point is, we can already make better use of the "waste" we produce instead of producing more and disposing of the old. To some degree I'll bet Craiglist and Ebay have only increased re-use. I know I've certainly bought a lot of used items on both sites that I wouldn't have had they not existed. The point being that we don't have to live like people do in slums. We can learn something from people that are forced to be efficient though.