As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive
Maybe. We still buy our oil with dollars though, and oil prices are rising now mostly because the dollar is becoming devalued. As people have to spend more on gasoline, they have less money to spend on widgets. I don't know how much of the US economy is internal, and how much is export, but I'd bet a LOT is internal. The gains by a cheaper dollar might not be made up by the losses incurred by high oil prices.
Also, your examples of tires is a poor one. The US government spent a LOT of money on making artificial rubber, and they didn't care how much it cost since we were trying to fight a war. It wasn't "the economy" that created artificial rubber, it was a government that needed it and price was no object. Price IS a concern with oil.
You're probably right we'll never "run out" of oil. But that doesn't mean we'll just automatically find an alternative, or that many people won't be adversely affected. Energy COULD become so expensive that no one can produce anything cheaply anymore. It's pretty easy to think the US is going to continue to be the economic power it's always been when it's been that way for the majority of everyone now alive. The UK was once an economic and political power as well, but now the vast empire has crumbled.
Economists seem to think that alternatives are created out of thin air, as if by magic. The reality is that we're bound by the laws of physics, and the amount of stuff that actually exists on this planet. It might still be the case we'll find a way out of the problem, but it won't happen just because there's an economic need for it.
I just think it's a poor way of stating it...It lets people off the hook. It's not their fault, they're insufficiently evolved.
That's a value judgement you made, not an inherent part of the argument. I don't that viewpoint being expressed anywhere but in your post. the reason for this is that the body has an instinctive risk-response for things that pose immanent danger, and it doesn't have an instinct for things that pose potential or hypothetical threats.
I strongly disagree. What's not potential or hypothetical about the risk of walking around alone at night in a bad area of town? All risks are potential or hypothetical until they actually happen.
The evolution argument is disproven by Schneier himself; how could he be thinking about it if we hadn't already evolved to make it possible?
Schneiere isn't humanity, he's just Schniere. One guy can have the skills and ability to do something, while the vast majority of others do not. Anyway, I think he's really trying to say that risk assessment of the modern world doesn't come naturally to people, like it did to risk assessment of being eaten by a tiger 100,000 years ago.
I don't know if the evolutionary theory about risk assessment is right, but I really doubt you do either. Neither of us have any data to show much of anything.
Anyway, I think you're trying to take his comments too far. It seems to me Schneire's ideas are really more of a way of thinking about why people are bad at assessing risk rather than a predictive theory that can be picked apart and examined. The ideas aren't really well developed enough for that kind of assessment.
Wow, just... wow. I'm not even a biologist but I know that's a terrible analogy. You can't compare the brain to software.
You can't compare anything to anything else if you take it to far. The analogy was only to illustrate that the human brain isn't fully adapted to the modern world yet, just like beta software isn't quite ready yet. You're really trying to draw too much out of the analogy. Maybe because everyone involved in an air plane crash usually dies.
I'd be willing to be you have a much higher chance of dying in an auto crash than in a plane crash, time wise. People think plane travel is risky because the media reports on every plane crash for days on end, but hardly ever reports on car crashes. So our brain gets stuffed with emotion laden pictures of planes on fire, sobbing relatives, etc, all connected to plane travel (and not car travel). Is it any wonder a lot of people are afraid to fly? Please elaborate, I know of the John Lee Malvo incident but I have no idea how this relates to IT security.
The article was rather poorly written and far too brief. I don't know what Schneier thinks the connection is, but my own assessment is that people assess risk by what the hear about. The media went crazy-time mad about the dumb sniper guy, to the point where millions of people were afraid of buying gasoline. How does that relate to IT security? Well, the media does the same thing with IT stuff too. You hear about viruses viruses viruses, so people clamp down and buy anti-virus software. Is that the big threat to your information? I don't know, but I'd guess that more money is wasted from simple hard drive crashes and failed backups than viruses. Viruses certainly are a threat, but personally I've lost data to a lot more HD crashes than any viruses.
I have a basic disagreement with much of your argument. Much of it seems to rely on the assumption that consumers are rational actors and will find the information on "good apples vs bad apples". In general people aren't rational actors, they're driven by desire.
For cars in particular, you only need to spend a couple bucks on a Consumer Reports subscription to find that many luxury cars are extremely unreliable. So in this case, those luxury cars are really "bad apples" as far as reliability goes. I happen to be a subscriber, and it only took me about 2 minutes to find out what the "bad apples" are.
So why do people buy luxury cars (or any unreliable car)? Because they're buying an image, not transportation. Luxury car makers understand this. They don't make cheap versions to avoid the chance of creating a "bad apple" (a trip over to consumer reports reveals there's plenty of really crappy luxury cars), they don't make cheap versions because they know it will dilute the "I'm a really cool rich guy in a great luxury Cadillac" image that people are buying.
Cellular and Internet providers advertise the low-low price because they want to get over that initial psychological barrier of price that people have, and get them to start WANTING the cell service. Once they actually want it, they'll be more willing to accept the REAL price later.
The other guys who advertise the "real price" and "no hidden fees" are appealing to a different segment of the market, either those people who've gotten tired of the crappy price they're now paying (and have caught on to the whole "low-low-prices" racket), or who are already jaded about those kind of services through friends/family experience.
So the examples you gave have really little to do with bad apples or good apples, and everything to do with psychology.
I suspect the "get your luggage first" is really more of the same thing. The first class passengers get to feel they're more important than the other passengers (and will keep buying first class tickets), while other people will be able to buy that same importance. In reality, you're probably only buying 5-10 minutes of time. Not really a hell of a lot of value to anyone when plane travel takes hours.
Is about 3 days away from a 20 year old kid who creates a filter to get around the identification system.
It's only about 10 times easier if the system is well understood and published.
I have a very hard time believing that an uncrackable system like this is even theoretically possible. Anything even remotely good would have to be some kind of sophisticated computer vision system, that could automatically identify the face of say Steven Colbert. Even the good face identifications have large amounts of false positives.
Even that's not unbreakable. Figure out what the parameters for face identification are, and go any slightly modify those parameters.
The underlying problem here is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to create an identification system, and a correspondingly small amount of effort to break it. The whole idea is just the content producers wish upon wish that this is possible. The only reason Google is doing it is to show that it will fail. Then they can hold up all the brilliant programmers that made the system and say "well, we tried, but it's not possible"
b) How do you know that the restoration has returned the item to it's original luster.
You don't. What we DO know is that todays version is wrong and faded. You seem to think there's only two states, right and wrong. In reality we can likely get closer to that original state. What if it was originally painted in dull tones, but today's experts say they used bright tones back then.
What if todays experts said they used cheese instead of paint, and decided to cover it with cheese wiz? You can make up a lot of nonsense about something you don't know anything about. c) If the restoration is screwed up the item is lost. Forever.
The thing is already "lost", in that it's not the way it was originally. If you can clean it up and not do any harm, what's the problem?
Until you have any evidence that cleaning it up will do damage to it, kindly keep your mouth shut. Speculation based on speculation tells us nothing.
I was at Wal-Mart yesterday, and they had Windows Vista notebooks for $300.
This is really in a different class of devices than a notebook. You can't carry around a notebook in your pocket for instance.
For me the price is likely a bit steep to be useful. But for a lot of people, having a real computer/pda/wifi phone all the time is worth that kind of money. If this thing got down to the $300 level, I'd likely buy one.
People no longer pay for processing power, they pay for connections. Thus the Intarweb...
I completely agree, and I'm glad to hear someone talk about it. I'm not sure a lot of people really realize this yet. I know of at least once instance where a boss wanted to upgrade an employees computer because they thought the computer was "slow". The machine in question was maybe 4 years old, and did everything it needed to. The "slowness" was because the machine was still on dialup, and the boss sent him a large attachment. The employee in question was out in the boonies, and DSL is only recently available.
I've come to the same conclusion myself recently. I really wait more for downloads to finish than the processor to do something. After trying to install Centos 5 and DLing 5 freaking CDs on a 1.5 megabit DSL line, I broke down and upgraded my DSL connection to 7 megabits. Large downloads are obviously much snappier now. My machine is 6 years old or so, and I rarely wait for the processor, it's always the internet.
I was going to post an article with the same sentiment. I couldn't agree more though. We live in an age where people want instant gratification, and over-estimate what each product will bring us.
I tend to try to get bargains on everything. It doesn't work all the time with everything you want, but it does more often than not. I've only bought one cell phone new (my first one), the other two I've bought used on Ebay for 1/5th of the original price. I think your dads advice applies to any market, not just the technology market. Anyone that wants something brand new NOW is going to pay through the nose to get it. Anyone willing to wait for the big rush to die down and buy something used or second generation is going to get the same or better experience at a much smaller price. It's funny, but patience and restraint pays off a lot.
The fun number of "people who want to run 3rd party apps on their iPhones" is 2%.
So you don't think that has something to do with the fact that almost every phone out their is either closed, or only has really crappy apps available for it?
People DO want to run 3rd party apps. Look no further than the PC market, the PDA market, etc for evidence of that.
The problem is that cell phones are all tied in with the cell-phone providers, who want to sell you all kinds of extra services. They don't see it to their advantage to let anyone run 3rd party apps because they think it'll cut into profits. Historically it's not a lot different from Ma Bell, who didn't allow 3rd party phones to be attached to "their" phone network until sometime in the late 70s/early 80s.
I acknowledge your right to freedom, but at the same time I have no wish to fund your care while you spend 30 years fading to black in a vegetative state because your brain got scrambled in a relatively minor accident.
Then you'd agree that we should ban skydiving, rock climbing, bull riding, car racing, and anything else you might have to "fund your care for 30 years".
What makes you think people having health care gives you the right to start controlling what they do, simply because you also pay for health care? Not wearing a seatbelt is pretty dumb, or at best self destructive. But why don't people have the right to be dumb or self destructive?
Die due to running out of blood. Survive because someone donated blood.
Or the third possibility, which this article is likely addressing:
Receive a nitric oxide injection that's packaged along with the blood in addition to the blood transfusion, and have an even better chance of surviving than blood alone.
Does it really take 13 freaking years to dig up the notes from Apollo program, dust off/refresh the equipment and relaunch?
You can't be serious. You want to re-implement 40 year old technology? What would be the point, we've already done that? Hell, we already canceled missions to the moon using Apollo technology 35 years ago or so.
Going back to the moon is completely pointless if all you're going to do is use the same technology. We've already got the moon rocks, and we don't need more. I'm not a big fan of spending the money in the first place to go back to the moon. But it's doubly stupid to just dust off some Apollo technology to do it.
Security cannot be quantified in hard numbers, since security is always relative to the resources the adversary has.
I don't think anyone is asking for hard numbers for some general case. I think people are just asking for numbers for some specific cases. Lots of things in computing vary with one factor or another. I fail to see why one or many factors changing the outcome of what "best" is means you can't supply hard numbers.
Not that I think that hard numbers on which security model is really possible. I think security is a soft science because you can't really run any controlled experiments. Those kind of situations are vulnerable to "But X is better, I SWEAR!" "NO! Y IS BETTER!" since there's no way of finding out in any objective way what the right answer is.
These people should better stay far away from security-relevant decisions and let people that at least understand present technology in that area make the decisions.
I guess I see that as the height of arrogance. If you can't demonstrate why one approach is better than another to someone as technically capable as Linus, I think he's taking exactly the right approach. Maybe there is some kind of true wizardry going on here, and we should just trust you all. But I've never been comfortable with simply the "trust us!" approach to anything.
But being theoretically able to measure something doesn't mean it's practical or the the results are always useful.
The thing is that Linus isn't talking about the general case here, he's referring specifically to these two cases. If you've got some kind of performance consideration for scheduling that's not being measured, or have good evidence that the current measurements aren't relevant to the user experience, you should bring it up. If you're just speaking in a general philosophic way, that's nice and all but I don't see how it's relevant.
The purpose of a company is generally to make money, not to crusade for some political stance. The investors want a good return on their investment, not a philosophy.
What I got out of "truly believe in openness" is the company execs actually think that's a good business model rather than simply a good marketing campaign.
Investors want a good return on investment, that's true. But all companies have a business philosophy. Without a strategy to compete and a general view of the business world you're dead in the water. Any kind of 'belief' about open or closed source etc is very much a secondary concern, and always will be
I disagree. "Making Money" isn't a strategy, a business model, or even a philosophy. It's just a goal. You can't really base anything off of just thinking "let's make a lot of money" all day. So I think the way in which any company operates is really the primary concern of the company. Obviously the driving force behind a company is to make money, but that's not really saying a lot.
That's the name which signifies that you don't accept the legitimacy of the murders who have stolen the country and ruled over it for all these years.
Bah. Countries are as countries do. If you have the ability to act like a government, you're a government. It's pointless and counter-productive to play some dumb name game where you close your eyes and pretend reality isn't reality.
is exactly why you don't want to destroy the utility of the HF radio spectrum to sell it to broadband-over-power-line Internet providers.
Right. Because we all know an oppressive government that's willing and able to cut off internet access to an entire country won't be able to send a couple soldiers to gun down the guy down the street blasting HF in his ham shack.
I think violating government spectrum policy would be the last thing such a person would be worried about.
We've become a race of fat, dull-witted warriors who barely blink when civilians are murdered by our troops. Our reaction to the present events going on in the world would have been very, very different in the 80's.
Why does every generation have to have some kind of Golden Age? I'll readily admit that the television landscape has changed drastically, mostly from the specialization and diversity offered by cable. But if you think there was some great age in the past where people stood up for injustice, defended liberty, blah blah blah, I don't think you've paid much attention.
I've never heard much about anyone protesting the Korean War in the late 40s, early 50s. It was certainly uppopular and made Truman a disliked president at the end of his term. Most people wanted to get out of Korea by the 1952 presidential race, and in fact Eisenhower ran on just that ticket. Sound familiar?
The Vietnam war dragged on for years, and obviously we all know there were some students and others who didn't like it and protested it. But the big difference is that those kids and families had a big stake in it from the potential to get drafted and killed. Do you really think that many people cared that much about what happened a half a world away unless they, or a family member might be affected by it?
I just don't see that peoples reactions to military action has changed all that much. You're right that demands for quality entertainment have gone up as there's become more and more channels for entertainment. Everyone has to appeal less and less to the least common denominator.
Of course.. there's still utter crap. I see there's still a "Survivor" series on television. One of the networks brought back "The Bionic Woman". So it's not entirely inconceivable that a "Knight Rider" remake will fail. There's still plenty of kids that want to watch crap television.
This is a legal agreement ("Agreement" and/or "TOS") between you and the AT&T company providing your Internet Access. FastAccess DSL and FastAccess Business DSL
I suspect AT&T knows they'll run afoul of the public utilities commission if they try to do this kind of the thing with a POTS telephone line.
To me that suggests that, while the actual event at the location it occurs can be reasonably said to have lasted less than five milliseconds, the actual recording of data lasted longer than that period of time, and there are certain identifiable characteristics in the data that an astronomer would expect to find, both of which seem to strongly suggest that the event really did occur.
No, what happened first was the astronomers analyzed a piece of data (actually a large mass of data). They were looking specifically for a specific signature. They then found one piece of data in that mass of data that had that signature. They went looking for a signature and found it. How do we know that piece of data was real, and not just an accident?
The thing you have to realize is that all experiments have flaws, and all experiments have errors. With only one piece of data it's likely that this is an error. The fact that there's an explanation for the data doesn't really count. They went looking for that signature in the first place.
So its not just a burst of noise. It has characteristics which say something about where it came from.
Can you say with certainty that an equipment malfunction, radio frequency interference, or some other terrestrial source of this signal couldn't produce the same characteristic?
You can derive a lot of meaning from a single random number if you look hard enough too.
I'd be more convinced if someone expert in RFI said that this particular signal couldn't have been produced by RFI, couldn't have been been a transistor blowing in the receiver, etc.
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I thought apples iPhone was insane at $500, and this thing is/was $200 more than that? No wonder it was a failure.
The $300 neo 1973 replacement is still a bit steep for me, but at least it's in the ballpark.
As the dollar deflates past a certain point, American goods will become "cheaper" and Chinese goods more expensive
Maybe. We still buy our oil with dollars though, and oil prices are rising now mostly because the dollar is becoming devalued. As people have to spend more on gasoline, they have less money to spend on widgets. I don't know how much of the US economy is internal, and how much is export, but I'd bet a LOT is internal. The gains by a cheaper dollar might not be made up by the losses incurred by high oil prices.
Also, your examples of tires is a poor one. The US government spent a LOT of money on making artificial rubber, and they didn't care how much it cost since we were trying to fight a war. It wasn't "the economy" that created artificial rubber, it was a government that needed it and price was no object. Price IS a concern with oil.
You're probably right we'll never "run out" of oil. But that doesn't mean we'll just automatically find an alternative, or that many people won't be adversely affected. Energy COULD become so expensive that no one can produce anything cheaply anymore. It's pretty easy to think the US is going to continue to be the economic power it's always been when it's been that way for the majority of everyone now alive. The UK was once an economic and political power as well, but now the vast empire has crumbled.
Economists seem to think that alternatives are created out of thin air, as if by magic. The reality is that we're bound by the laws of physics, and the amount of stuff that actually exists on this planet. It might still be the case we'll find a way out of the problem, but it won't happen just because there's an economic need for it.
I just think it's a poor way of stating it...It lets people off the hook. It's not their fault, they're insufficiently evolved.
That's a value judgement you made, not an inherent part of the argument. I don't that viewpoint being expressed anywhere but in your post.
the reason for this is that the body has an instinctive risk-response for things that pose immanent danger, and it doesn't have an instinct for things that pose potential or hypothetical threats.
I strongly disagree. What's not potential or hypothetical about the risk of walking around alone at night in a bad area of town? All risks are potential or hypothetical until they actually happen.
The evolution argument is disproven by Schneier himself; how could he be thinking about it if we hadn't already evolved to make it possible?
Schneiere isn't humanity, he's just Schniere. One guy can have the skills and ability to do something, while the vast majority of others do not. Anyway, I think he's really trying to say that risk assessment of the modern world doesn't come naturally to people, like it did to risk assessment of being eaten by a tiger 100,000 years ago.
I don't know if the evolutionary theory about risk assessment is right, but I really doubt you do either. Neither of us have any data to show much of anything.
Anyway, I think you're trying to take his comments too far. It seems to me Schneire's ideas are really more of a way of thinking about why people are bad at assessing risk rather than a predictive theory that can be picked apart and examined. The ideas aren't really well developed enough for that kind of assessment.
Wow, just
You can't compare anything to anything else if you take it to far. The analogy was only to illustrate that the human brain isn't fully adapted to the modern world yet, just like beta software isn't quite ready yet. You're really trying to draw too much out of the analogy.
Maybe because everyone involved in an air plane crash usually dies.
I'd be willing to be you have a much higher chance of dying in an auto crash than in a plane crash, time wise. People think plane travel is risky because the media reports on every plane crash for days on end, but hardly ever reports on car crashes. So our brain gets stuffed with emotion laden pictures of planes on fire, sobbing relatives, etc, all connected to plane travel (and not car travel). Is it any wonder a lot of people are afraid to fly?
Please elaborate, I know of the John Lee Malvo incident but I have no idea how this relates to IT security.
The article was rather poorly written and far too brief. I don't know what Schneier thinks the connection is, but my own assessment is that people assess risk by what the hear about. The media went crazy-time mad about the dumb sniper guy, to the point where millions of people were afraid of buying gasoline. How does that relate to IT security? Well, the media does the same thing with IT stuff too. You hear about viruses viruses viruses, so people clamp down and buy anti-virus software. Is that the big threat to your information? I don't know, but I'd guess that more money is wasted from simple hard drive crashes and failed backups than viruses. Viruses certainly are a threat, but personally I've lost data to a lot more HD crashes than any viruses.
I have a basic disagreement with much of your argument. Much of it seems to rely on the assumption that consumers are rational actors and will find the information on "good apples vs bad apples". In general people aren't rational actors, they're driven by desire.
For cars in particular, you only need to spend a couple bucks on a Consumer Reports subscription to find that many luxury cars are extremely unreliable. So in this case, those luxury cars are really "bad apples" as far as reliability goes. I happen to be a subscriber, and it only took me about 2 minutes to find out what the "bad apples" are.
So why do people buy luxury cars (or any unreliable car)? Because they're buying an image, not transportation. Luxury car makers understand this. They don't make cheap versions to avoid the chance of creating a "bad apple" (a trip over to consumer reports reveals there's plenty of really crappy luxury cars), they don't make cheap versions because they know it will dilute the "I'm a really cool rich guy in a great luxury Cadillac" image that people are buying.
Cellular and Internet providers advertise the low-low price because they want to get over that initial psychological barrier of price that people have, and get them to start WANTING the cell service. Once they actually want it, they'll be more willing to accept the REAL price later.
The other guys who advertise the "real price" and "no hidden fees" are appealing to a different segment of the market, either those people who've gotten tired of the crappy price they're now paying (and have caught on to the whole "low-low-prices" racket), or who are already jaded about those kind of services through friends/family experience.
So the examples you gave have really little to do with bad apples or good apples, and everything to do with psychology.
I suspect the "get your luggage first" is really more of the same thing. The first class passengers get to feel they're more important than the other passengers (and will keep buying first class tickets), while other people will be able to buy that same importance. In reality, you're probably only buying 5-10 minutes of time. Not really a hell of a lot of value to anyone when plane travel takes hours.
Is about 3 days away from a 20 year old kid who creates a filter to get around the identification system.
It's only about 10 times easier if the system is well understood and published.
I have a very hard time believing that an uncrackable system like this is even theoretically possible. Anything even remotely good would have to be some kind of sophisticated computer vision system, that could automatically identify the face of say Steven Colbert. Even the good face identifications have large amounts of false positives.
Even that's not unbreakable. Figure out what the parameters for face identification are, and go any slightly modify those parameters.
The underlying problem here is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to create an identification system, and a correspondingly small amount of effort to break it. The whole idea is just the content producers wish upon wish that this is possible. The only reason Google is doing it is to show that it will fail. Then they can hold up all the brilliant programmers that made the system and say "well, we tried, but it's not possible"
Strange how little cats and dogs are protected on TV
Strange that people like yourself can't tell the difference between a cockroach and a dog.
Do you hate antibiotics as well, because it kills bacteria? Exactly how far down the scale do you draw your line?
b) How do you know that the restoration has returned the item to it's original luster.
You don't. What we DO know is that todays version is wrong and faded. You seem to think there's only two states, right and wrong. In reality we can likely get closer to that original state.
What if it was originally painted in dull tones, but today's experts say they used bright tones back then.
What if todays experts said they used cheese instead of paint, and decided to cover it with cheese wiz? You can make up a lot of nonsense about something you don't know anything about.
c) If the restoration is screwed up the item is lost. Forever.
The thing is already "lost", in that it's not the way it was originally. If you can clean it up and not do any harm, what's the problem?
Until you have any evidence that cleaning it up will do damage to it, kindly keep your mouth shut. Speculation based on speculation tells us nothing.
I was at Wal-Mart yesterday, and they had Windows Vista notebooks for $300.
This is really in a different class of devices than a notebook. You can't carry around a notebook in your pocket for instance.
For me the price is likely a bit steep to be useful. But for a lot of people, having a real computer/pda/wifi phone all the time is worth that kind of money. If this thing got down to the $300 level, I'd likely buy one.
People no longer pay for processing power, they pay for connections. Thus the Intarweb...
I completely agree, and I'm glad to hear someone talk about it. I'm not sure a lot of people really realize this yet. I know of at least once instance where a boss wanted to upgrade an employees computer because they thought the computer was "slow". The machine in question was maybe 4 years old, and did everything it needed to. The "slowness" was because the machine was still on dialup, and the boss sent him a large attachment. The employee in question was out in the boonies, and DSL is only recently available.
I've come to the same conclusion myself recently. I really wait more for downloads to finish than the processor to do something. After trying to install Centos 5 and DLing 5 freaking CDs on a 1.5 megabit DSL line, I broke down and upgraded my DSL connection to 7 megabits. Large downloads are obviously much snappier now. My machine is 6 years old or so, and I rarely wait for the processor, it's always the internet.
I was going to post an article with the same sentiment. I couldn't agree more though. We live in an age where people want instant gratification, and over-estimate what each product will bring us.
I tend to try to get bargains on everything. It doesn't work all the time with everything you want, but it does more often than not. I've only bought one cell phone new (my first one), the other two I've bought used on Ebay for 1/5th of the original price. I think your dads advice applies to any market, not just the technology market. Anyone that wants something brand new NOW is going to pay through the nose to get it. Anyone willing to wait for the big rush to die down and buy something used or second generation is going to get the same or better experience at a much smaller price. It's funny, but patience and restraint pays off a lot.
The fun number of "people who want to run 3rd party apps on their iPhones" is 2%.
So you don't think that has something to do with the fact that almost every phone out their is either closed, or only has really crappy apps available for it?
People DO want to run 3rd party apps. Look no further than the PC market, the PDA market, etc for evidence of that.
The problem is that cell phones are all tied in with the cell-phone providers, who want to sell you all kinds of extra services. They don't see it to their advantage to let anyone run 3rd party apps because they think it'll cut into profits. Historically it's not a lot different from Ma Bell, who didn't allow 3rd party phones to be attached to "their" phone network until sometime in the late 70s/early 80s.
I acknowledge your right to freedom, but at the same time I have no wish to fund your care while you spend 30 years fading to black in a vegetative state because your brain got scrambled in a relatively minor accident.
Then you'd agree that we should ban skydiving, rock climbing, bull riding, car racing, and anything else you might have to "fund your care for 30 years".
What makes you think people having health care gives you the right to start controlling what they do, simply because you also pay for health care? Not wearing a seatbelt is pretty dumb, or at best self destructive. But why don't people have the right to be dumb or self destructive?
Let me weigh up the situation here:
Die due to running out of blood.
Survive because someone donated blood.
Or the third possibility, which this article is likely addressing:
Receive a nitric oxide injection that's packaged along with the blood in addition to the blood transfusion, and have an even better chance of surviving than blood alone.
Why do you think there's only two possibilities?
Does it really take 13 freaking years to dig up the notes from Apollo program, dust off/refresh the equipment and relaunch?
You can't be serious. You want to re-implement 40 year old technology? What would be the point, we've already done that? Hell, we already canceled missions to the moon using Apollo technology 35 years ago or so.
Going back to the moon is completely pointless if all you're going to do is use the same technology. We've already got the moon rocks, and we don't need more. I'm not a big fan of spending the money in the first place to go back to the moon. But it's doubly stupid to just dust off some Apollo technology to do it.
Security cannot be quantified in hard numbers, since security is always relative to the resources the adversary has.
I don't think anyone is asking for hard numbers for some general case. I think people are just asking for numbers for some specific cases. Lots of things in computing vary with one factor or another. I fail to see why one or many factors changing the outcome of what "best" is means you can't supply hard numbers.
Not that I think that hard numbers on which security model is really possible. I think security is a soft science because you can't really run any controlled experiments. Those kind of situations are vulnerable to "But X is better, I SWEAR!" "NO! Y IS BETTER!" since there's no way of finding out in any objective way what the right answer is.
These people should better stay far away from security-relevant decisions and let people that at least understand present technology in that area make the decisions.
I guess I see that as the height of arrogance. If you can't demonstrate why one approach is better than another to someone as technically capable as Linus, I think he's taking exactly the right approach. Maybe there is some kind of true wizardry going on here, and we should just trust you all. But I've never been comfortable with simply the "trust us!" approach to anything.
But being theoretically able to measure something doesn't mean it's practical or the the results are always useful.
The thing is that Linus isn't talking about the general case here, he's referring specifically to these two cases. If you've got some kind of performance consideration for scheduling that's not being measured, or have good evidence that the current measurements aren't relevant to the user experience, you should bring it up. If you're just speaking in a general philosophic way, that's nice and all but I don't see how it's relevant.
The purpose of a company is generally to make money, not to crusade for some political stance. The investors want a good return on their investment, not a philosophy.
What I got out of "truly believe in openness" is the company execs actually think that's a good business model rather than simply a good marketing campaign.
Investors want a good return on investment, that's true. But all companies have a business philosophy. Without a strategy to compete and a general view of the business world you're dead in the water.
Any kind of 'belief' about open or closed source etc is very much a secondary concern, and always will be
I disagree. "Making Money" isn't a strategy, a business model, or even a philosophy. It's just a goal. You can't really base anything off of just thinking "let's make a lot of money" all day. So I think the way in which any company operates is really the primary concern of the company. Obviously the driving force behind a company is to make money, but that's not really saying a lot.
That's the name which signifies that you don't accept the legitimacy of the murders who have stolen the country and ruled over it for all these years.
Bah. Countries are as countries do. If you have the ability to act like a government, you're a government. It's pointless and counter-productive to play some dumb name game where you close your eyes and pretend reality isn't reality.
is exactly why you don't want to destroy the utility of the HF radio spectrum to sell it to broadband-over-power-line Internet providers.
Right. Because we all know an oppressive government that's willing and able to cut off internet access to an entire country won't be able to send a couple soldiers to gun down the guy down the street blasting HF in his ham shack.
I think violating government spectrum policy would be the last thing such a person would be worried about.
We've become a race of fat, dull-witted warriors who barely blink when civilians are murdered by our troops. Our reaction to the present events going on in the world would have been very, very different in the 80's.
Why does every generation have to have some kind of Golden Age? I'll readily admit that the television landscape has changed drastically, mostly from the specialization and diversity offered by cable. But if you think there was some great age in the past where people stood up for injustice, defended liberty, blah blah blah, I don't think you've paid much attention.
I've never heard much about anyone protesting the Korean War in the late 40s, early 50s. It was certainly uppopular and made Truman a disliked president at the end of his term. Most people wanted to get out of Korea by the 1952 presidential race, and in fact Eisenhower ran on just that ticket. Sound familiar?
The Vietnam war dragged on for years, and obviously we all know there were some students and others who didn't like it and protested it. But the big difference is that those kids and families had a big stake in it from the potential to get drafted and killed. Do you really think that many people cared that much about what happened a half a world away unless they, or a family member might be affected by it?
I just don't see that peoples reactions to military action has changed all that much. You're right that demands for quality entertainment have gone up as there's become more and more channels for entertainment. Everyone has to appeal less and less to the least common denominator.
Of course.. there's still utter crap. I see there's still a "Survivor" series on television. One of the networks brought back "The Bionic Woman". So it's not entirely inconceivable that a "Knight Rider" remake will fail. There's still plenty of kids that want to watch crap television.
I suspect AT&T knows they'll run afoul of the public utilities commission if they try to do this kind of the thing with a POTS telephone line.
To me that suggests that, while the actual event at the location it occurs can be reasonably said to have lasted less than five milliseconds, the actual recording of data lasted longer than that period of time, and there are certain identifiable characteristics in the data that an astronomer would expect to find, both of which seem to strongly suggest that the event really did occur.
No, what happened first was the astronomers analyzed a piece of data (actually a large mass of data). They were looking specifically for a specific signature. They then found one piece of data in that mass of data that had that signature. They went looking for a signature and found it. How do we know that piece of data was real, and not just an accident?
The thing you have to realize is that all experiments have flaws, and all experiments have errors. With only one piece of data it's likely that this is an error. The fact that there's an explanation for the data doesn't really count. They went looking for that signature in the first place.
So its not just a burst of noise. It has characteristics which say something about where it came from.
Can you say with certainty that an equipment malfunction, radio frequency interference, or some other terrestrial source of this signal couldn't produce the same characteristic?
You can derive a lot of meaning from a single random number if you look hard enough too.
I'd be more convinced if someone expert in RFI said that this particular signal couldn't have been produced by RFI, couldn't have been been a transistor blowing in the receiver, etc.