as any IT nut knows, no matter how sophisticated your data protection now, something else will eventually come along to break it
This is simply not true, or at best extremely misleading. That's like saying "no matter how sophisticated your physical security, someone will be able to break it". I'm sure you could break into the bank vault too with infinite resources and time, but that doesn't mean it's trivial.
The attacks here ARE trivial. Sniffing some passwords on an ethernet switch is easy. The tools are readily available. Anyone with a small amount of IT knowledge could learn how to do it in a week tops. Breaking encryption is a LOT more difficult. No one has broken any strong cryptography, and even if they did it'd be a simple matter to replace the encryption scheme with something else. "hack in the box" isn't magic, and it doesn't work if you've set up a secure infra-structure.
Training the first line of defense, i.e. the non-techie employees who might not even be able to spell DHCP, against letting the human factor of the equation is far more important in a situation like this than defending against this intruder's particular hack-in-the-box.
Ridiculous. This guy was already authorized by someone at the bank to service the printers. Your solution doesn't even address the problem of insiders doing these same attacks. Anyone working in the office can perform this attack without raising any suspicion at all. Who's to say someone on the cleaning staff couldn't perform the same attack during the night? Hide a network sniffer one night, come back the next to retrieve them.
Educating employees might help a little. It's cheap to implement, and makes people feel like something has been done to fix the problem. But it doesn't mean the problem has been solved.
The article seems to indicate the problem was that they guy was let into the building.
I explained to him this type of problem can be fixed by sharing the results with his employees, and that no one person should be targeted as a single point of failure.
That's certainly a problem, but the larger problem is that they have a trivial point of entry into their network where passwords can be sniffed. Why aren't all authentication mechanisms on the network encrypted so sniffing passwords will accompish nothing? Maybe you can prevent SOME of the trivial cases of outsiders gaining entry to the network.. but this kind of thing does nothing to protect from an insider doing the same thing.
Some people here have suggested secured ethernet switches that only allow connections from certain MAC addresses. That'll help a little, but MAC addresses are trivial to spoof. What you should be doing is making sure that any authentication to a bank system that goes over the network (fileserver, IMAP, pop, etc) is encrypted and protected from Man in The Middle attacks.
So he was a vocal opponent of the Russian government. And? So is the rest of Russia.
Yah, but the rest of Russia isn't a former KGB agent that's written two books critical of Putin's government. Perhaps Putin is afraid that others will do the same thing at this guy. Killing him in a spy vs spy kind of way sends that message I was talking about.
Don't tell me you forgot that you're on Slashdot!?
Actually Slashdot is a LOT better than most other web forums. If you've ever read any of those the reactionary, non-critical thinkers outnumber anyone with half a brain by 10 to 1, sometimes 100 to 1. The result is that there's really no learning that can be accomplished by anyone, since the garbage completely overwhelms the non-garbage. From what I've seen on slashdot the ratio is more like 1-1, sometimes 2-1. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. But it's at least likely that you could come back from reading the comments and actually learn something.
Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons (most being much more effective) even in our own homes. Heck, mix some radiator fluid into his starbucks mocha and he'd never know the difference!
From what I've heard it was terribly hard to find that the poison was Polonium. Since it's an alpha emitter, he won't show up as particularly radioactive. The only way they found it was the doctors somehow found there was helium in his urine. You'll also note he died of heart failure. Not exactly something that screams POISON! The only thing I can figure is that they were hoping that he'd get cancer and no one would question why.
The KGB may not have been able to have any "plausible deniability" here, but they aren't so stupid that they thought he'd just get cancer. The quantity they gave him killed him in a very short period of time. It's quite clear that they wanted him to die quickly.
It does kind of make me wonder what the hell is up with the KGB now. They've been caught at least three times in the last couple years trying to poison people. Either they're extremely incompetent, or they want to send a message to the world to watch out. My guess is "watch out", (especially to any KGB agents reading this post).
It isn't. It's only available in very tiny quantities. Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort?
It is. Maybe you should read the article, or at least think a bit more critically that perhaps both Slashdot and Information Week are just trying to sell eyeballs here and are willing to overlook the fact that the amount available in incredibly tiny. It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).
I'm curious. Are you always so reactionary to news stories, assume the worst, and don't bother thinking critically, or only when the word "nuclear" or "radiation" is in the article?
It's aimed at the NK elite, dumbass. Piss them off and maybe they'll be open to a palace coup
See above where the poster talks about "smuggling" in this stuff from another country. You could probbably have an effect on getting a few million of anything. It's going to be about impossible to stop the flow of a few hundred or a thousand iPods or Plasma TVs into NK.
What will get his attention is if the influential North Korean upper-classmen get pissed off at him over his policies.
It's a nice theory, but the US banning sales directly to North Korea will likely have zero impact on the 600 or so families ability to get luxury goods. Does the US government think it can really stop the flow of a very small number of common items like this? 600 families isn't a whole lot, and it doesn't take a lot of people working in the black or grey markets to supply them with whatever they need. The only thing you might do is raise the price of this stuff, and encourage growth of the black and grey market a little.
Does anyone have a link to that study where people were asked to press a button to "electrocute" other people, and how many were willing to do it as long as they were told by an authority figure it was ok?
I saw that experiment conducted on youtube. Turns out the cops will push the button at least 5 times.
I'm currently working for a VERY large bank and it doesn't seem to be significantly impacted. From my admittedly biased view they seem to be putting a lot more resources into expanding their IT based offerings than fighting bad guys.
Are you sure about that? The effects of crime aren't always totally obvious. Maybe you wind up getting less IT commerce business than you would if there wasn't a lot of cybercrime. In some ways the Internet is like a bad neighborhood. There's a lot of people that won't go into that neighborhood for fear of being robbed.
My point is, you don't see the people that aren't doing business with you because of cybercrime unless you actively start looking for them.
The other possibility is, maybe you just haven't gotten hit yet? I hear stories every week about a business having tens of thousands of customer records stolen. How many of those companies said the same thing "We haven't been impacted yet".
It doesn't matter what your credentials are, either your facts and conclusions are right or they are not. You don't agree with Lomborg? show us when and where he rushed to conclusions (in fact, some others have).
Your post is a classic example of why credentials DO matter to the 99.99% of us that aren't climate scientists. I really don't have the time to listen to people that have no training in the field they're talking about. 99% of the time people that have no training in the subject they talking about are going to make simple mistakes that I'm not experienced enough to spot. So why should I listen to this person, over say the crazy guy with a tinfoil hat? Sorry, but reputation matters. Sure I could read his book, try to research every little theory he has and find out why it's wrong. I'll take the shortcut though and assume he doesn't know what he's talking about because.. well he has no background in the thing he's talking about. Having read his book I think he puts forward a cogent, well researched argument that deserves a likewise response from the experts that be.
It's pretty easy to make cogent, well researched arguments to a crowd of laymen, but at the same time it's obvious to anyone educated in the field that you're wrong. That's why science should be filtered through peer review, not put forth in mass-market books.
the vortex core, which has been predicted in theory for forty years, but which experiments revealed only four years ago.
So scientists have been trying to detect it for 36 years, and only were able to do so 4 years ago? Something tells me that we won't be finding this in use for data storage anytime soon.
Anyone know how they can detect these vortex cores? It's great that they've found a "relatively" inexpensive way to reverse the core, but if you still need a magnetic force atomic microscope to "read" the thing, I don't see much practical use to it.
Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening?
I'm not really familiar with this guy, but it looks like he's a political scientist with some background in statistics that's published a book in the popular press critical of global warming. I guess it was my impression that science was done by people trained in the field, not by political scientists that've lectured on statistics before, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals rather than mass-market books.
When I went and bought a new washing machine for myself 5 years ago, I was expecting it to last for at least 10 years.It lasted 3! And I'm single, have no kids, etc...
I've known plenty of people that buy washing machines in the last few years that have had no problems at all. Maybe you're just unlucky, or bought a cheap/crappy washing machine? I've almost given up on cell-phones. Even if I buy one specifically marketed as sturdy (e.g. Nokia 514), it is almost guaranteed to fail within two years (usually within a year). I would be willing to pay a lot more to get a phone where I don't have to worry about random breakage any time I fall on it.
My first phone was a nokia 5190 that I replaced after 5 1/2 years. It was heavily abused by being constantly dropped. That was mostly my fault, but it still mostly worked even after 5 1/2 years of abuse. I bought a used nokia 3595 after that that was probbably 1 1/2-2 years old at the time and is now easily 3 years old. It has no problems at all. If I buy a mobile phone, it's because I want to bring it with me to become mobile, not to keep it inside original packaging with temperatures between 15-25 celcius and low air humidity.
Strange, I've not followed any of those suggestions and had minimal problems with my phone. It's regularly left in my car at temperatures that can go from -10 c to 35 c. It survives in high humidity during the summer. If I buy a car, I want it to keep driving, not require expensive maintenance
Depends on what you consider expensive maintenance. I change the oil on my car, change the filters, change the spark plugs, and expect to change the timing belt at 100,000 miles. Cars do require maintenance, but I don't consider the above very expensive, just a normal part of owning a car. And if I buy a laptop, it should survive a little rain, being dropped on concrete, being dropped in salt water, having someone fall on it, etc, all common things happening to transportable items.
Then you're clearly buying the wrong laptops, since most aren't designed to be dropped in frickin salt water or have someone fall on them and still work. There ARE laptops designed for this, but they're for special purposes and not generally for sale at your local retailer.
I'll rephrase: whats the downside to a free release, other than cutting into profits?
You seem to think that the only one affected by a free release is the movie producers. If you release the movie for free, it becomes less attractive for the content distributors. They really don't give a rats ass about everyone seeing the movie, they just want to make money by selling advertising.
So say you release the movie on some free distribution channels outside the normal mass-markets. Let's say 20% of your target market sees it via these free distribution channels. If you then wanted to distribute it via a more mass-market channel like ABC, CBS, etc, you just reduced your market segment by 20%. It also might be a market segment advertisers really LOVE (higher tech people that can watch via YouTube or Bittorent tend to be younger and have higher incomes). What you really wanted was to get the other 80%, not the 20%. By distributing it free on a limited channel you just made it that much harder to get the mass-market channel.
Sony got screwed royally, and everyone else won the lottery.
Console developers need to get their shit together and learn what a Dutch Auction is.
Console makers have lost money on the first few iterations of consoles for at least a decade. They plan on losing that money because they figure they'll make it back in game sales.
Sony decided they could afford to lose even MORE than normal in an attempt to push Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. I think they're idiots and this will only backfire on them, but that's a different argument.
The point is that there's only few people that're willing to spend BIG bucks to get this console right away. Everyone else would rather just wait and pay the normal price, or thinks the normal price is too high already. For the PS3 the high-price gang was about 15,000. Assuming Sony could have sold these units for $1500 each, that's about 15 million dollars in lost profit (1000 a unit). If some numbers are to be believed, Sony sold about 300,000 units so far. If they lost $300 that's 90 million lost total so far. See how the 15 million is really starting to look like chump change?
Sure, Sony could auction all these things off and let the market decide. The first units would go for $1500, the next for less, etc. But I'm guessing it's going to be hard to move 300,000 units via auction. Sure there's a bunch of kids and college students willing to wait around in the cold for them for a day or two, but the vast majority of people aren't willing to even do this auction nonsense. They just want to buy the thing at the local Target. Most markets are highly segmented and consist of buyers with very different attitudes.
Also, the retailers play an important role for Sony. They help market the console by having in-store demos, they have displays that people walk buy and see. They feature the consoles in advertising. In short, the retailers help Sony move these units.
but if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around
Actually what's more likely is that the people sending out junk mail would likely be a lot more selective in who they send out junk mail too.
As far as the environmental thing is concerned, if that's your only concern in life you should probbably just shoot yourself in the middle of a forrest full of hungry bears. You'll quickly be re-cycled and won't contribute to any further useage of energy, paper, emissions of CO2, etc. Just be sure to use bullets without lead, wouldn't want to pollute the forrest.
That's exactly the point, actually. just seems like a poor mans email with its pathetic 196 character limit and hopeless word entry system on a numeric keypad.
No, it's MOBILE email. The 196 character limit is kind of stupid, I'll agree. I find SMS messages very usefull for sending short messages that don't require a full conversation, or an immediate reply. Asking someone if they want to go out for lunch, when they'll be home, etc. It's a more polite way to communicate when you don't want to interrupt someone for just a quick question. using SMS is best left to socially inept tweenies and teens who can't actually come out with sentences of more than 3 words at a time anyway
Well, I think part of the problem is just that most of the people who actually know how to send an SMS message, or have their cell phone with them at all times are the tweenies. I'm far from the tweenie, but SMS is of limited use to me mostly because a lot of the people I know won't know how to send a reply, or just don't carry their phone with them.
If you think about it, telling people how to reach you (i.e. telling them which medium, like "call me on my cell") is somewhat "old think". Imagine a world where all anyone needs to know is your unique identifier - the "network cloud" figures out how to complete the connection.
That kind of thinking is just so 21st century, grandpa. Imagine a world where you just think what you want to say, and who you want to send it to, and it's instantly transmitted to the other persons brain. You wouldn't have any kind of device, since it'd all be implanted in your skull at birth.
We're so close to this technology already. They've already done MRI scans of people watching ads and figured out if the ad was effective or not. It's not that far to shrinking down the MRI to implantable size.
Hell, even this is pre-pre-old thinking, as in the 23rd century we'll all be part of the borg collective, and any thoughts of transmitting a message to someone, or even the concept of someone will be obsolete.
I actually think there's a reason for this, at least in the US. Before Cellular phones there were car-phones for the ultra-rich. They didn't use a cellular system, and thus there was a very small limit on the number of calls that could be placed at the same time (something like 23). Cellular service wasn't established commercially in the US until 1982. The companies selling the service probbably wanted to distinguish cellular service from the old car/briefcase phones (since I'm guessing cellular service was a LOT cheaper), so they came up with a new name.
We need the EPA to OK the use of nanoparticles in cleaning agents, and yet, diesel engines spew out metric tons of organic nanoparticles on a daily basis.
I'm with ya brother. These bastards at EPA have been doing the same thing for YEARS with macro-particles. Lead is all regulated up the ass.. You can't put it in paint, it's been taken out of gasoline, etc. And yet every winter the city is allowed to just dump sand around the streets!
I mean, all macro-particles are equal right? We all know that when two things are the same in one way, they're the same in every single other way.
Why are there these people that feel like every other living soul in the world HAS to accept what they believe, otherwise they should be killed/crucified/outcasted/suffer for eternity in the afterlife?
It's an idea that has a strong ability to self-sustain itself. Fear is a good motivator, and an unknown fear is an even better one. Aren't these the people that killed thousands during the Crusades? Aren't these the people that are killing thousands now in the name of Allah?
I don't think that's quite fair to say they're "the same people". I do think it's fair to say that this kind of intolerance is the same kind of intolerance that drives the fundamentalist muslims to kill thousands of people. All you really need to turn some of these people into terrorists is an issue to drive them. Some people (Eric Rudolph) have already taken that path. I just don't understand why people can't accept that others can believe different things than they do.
I'm not sure I do either. Maybe dissent makes them question their own beliefs?
Such people are as much Christians as are scientists who believe the world is flat.
I dunno, they believe in the divinity of Christ, they believe in the trinity, etc. They don't believe in the divinity of any other strange books like the Mormons (not saying the mormons aren't christians, but that might be at least a valid argument). I'd say they're christians. Please do not judge us Christians by the actions of these radicals.
Obviously most christians aren't the "you're all going to hell if you don't accept jesus!" ranting types. These nutjobs have just become more vocal over the past 10 years or so. But it's not as if they're a totally insignificant part of the population either. The numbers I've heard for fundamentalists is anywhere from 10-20% of the population. I've known some current ones, and a few "recovering" ones, so in my own personal experience they aren't all that rare.
The point being, like it or not they're a of the spectrum of christianity (at least in the United States). You don't have to like them, or agree with them, but they're still part of the "christian family" that you have to acknowledge.
So your entire argument is essentially "Some things in Wikipedia are misleading or unclear, so you obviously there's no controversy about whether the appendix is vestigial." Kind of a funny argument.
Maybe you missed the point that I wasn't try to make any kind of statement about the cecum, where the appendix came from, etc. If you'll pay just a little context to the conversation you'll realize the entire argument was to point out that the function of the appendix is under scientific dispute. Several posts ago there was an AC who claimed that the whole thing was settled, and the appendix did serve a purpose, wasn't vestigial, and the parent post to his was completely and utterly wrong.
Your quibbles with the accuracy of some minor parts of Wikipedia really don't change the fact that there IS controversy about the function of the appendix, which is the original point I was trying to make.
Slashdot Mirror
as any IT nut knows, no matter how sophisticated your data protection now, something else will eventually come along to break it
This is simply not true, or at best extremely misleading. That's like saying "no matter how sophisticated your physical security, someone will be able to break it". I'm sure you could break into the bank vault too with infinite resources and time, but that doesn't mean it's trivial.
The attacks here ARE trivial. Sniffing some passwords on an ethernet switch is easy. The tools are readily available. Anyone with a small amount of IT knowledge could learn how to do it in a week tops. Breaking encryption is a LOT more difficult. No one has broken any strong cryptography, and even if they did it'd be a simple matter to replace the encryption scheme with something else. "hack in the box" isn't magic, and it doesn't work if you've set up a secure infra-structure.
Training the first line of defense, i.e. the non-techie employees who might not even be able to spell DHCP, against letting the human factor of the equation is far more important in a situation like this than defending against this intruder's particular hack-in-the-box.
Ridiculous. This guy was already authorized by someone at the bank to service the printers. Your solution doesn't even address the problem of insiders doing these same attacks. Anyone working in the office can perform this attack without raising any suspicion at all. Who's to say someone on the cleaning staff couldn't perform the same attack during the night? Hide a network sniffer one night, come back the next to retrieve them.
Educating employees might help a little. It's cheap to implement, and makes people feel like something has been done to fix the problem. But it doesn't mean the problem has been solved.
That's certainly a problem, but the larger problem is that they have a trivial point of entry into their network where passwords can be sniffed. Why aren't all authentication mechanisms on the network encrypted so sniffing passwords will accompish nothing? Maybe you can prevent SOME of the trivial cases of outsiders gaining entry to the network.. but this kind of thing does nothing to protect from an insider doing the same thing.
Some people here have suggested secured ethernet switches that only allow connections from certain MAC addresses. That'll help a little, but MAC addresses are trivial to spoof. What you should be doing is making sure that any authentication to a bank system that goes over the network (fileserver, IMAP, pop, etc) is encrypted and protected from Man in The Middle attacks.
So he was a vocal opponent of the Russian government. And? So is the rest of Russia.
Yah, but the rest of Russia isn't a former KGB agent that's written two books critical of Putin's government. Perhaps Putin is afraid that others will do the same thing at this guy. Killing him in a spy vs spy kind of way sends that message I was talking about.
Don't tell me you forgot that you're on Slashdot!?
Actually Slashdot is a LOT better than most other web forums. If you've ever read any of those the reactionary, non-critical thinkers outnumber anyone with half a brain by 10 to 1, sometimes 100 to 1. The result is that there's really no learning that can be accomplished by anyone, since the garbage completely overwhelms the non-garbage. From what I've seen on slashdot the ratio is more like 1-1, sometimes 2-1. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. But it's at least likely that you could come back from reading the comments and actually learn something.
Honestly, it's kind of odd that someone would have poisoned the guy with polonium. I mean, there are so many other types of poisons (most being much more effective) even in our own homes. Heck, mix some radiator fluid into his starbucks mocha and he'd never know the difference!
From what I've heard it was terribly hard to find that the poison was Polonium. Since it's an alpha emitter, he won't show up as particularly radioactive. The only way they found it was the doctors somehow found there was helium in his urine. You'll also note he died of heart failure. Not exactly something that screams POISON!
The only thing I can figure is that they were hoping that he'd get cancer and no one would question why.
The KGB may not have been able to have any "plausible deniability" here, but they aren't so stupid that they thought he'd just get cancer. The quantity they gave him killed him in a very short period of time. It's quite clear that they wanted him to die quickly.
It does kind of make me wonder what the hell is up with the KGB now. They've been caught at least three times in the last couple years trying to poison people. Either they're extremely incompetent, or they want to send a message to the world to watch out. My guess is "watch out", (especially to any KGB agents reading this post).
But *WHY* is this stuff freely available?
It isn't. It's only available in very tiny quantities.
Shouldn't it be a controlled substance of some sort?
It is. Maybe you should read the article, or at least think a bit more critically that perhaps both Slashdot and Information Week are just trying to sell eyeballs here and are willing to overlook the fact that the amount available in incredibly tiny.
It almost seems that there are drugs and booze that have tighter restrictions.
Funny, I don't recall being able to buy arbitrary quantities of Polonium down the street from my local drug dealer (liquor stores included).
I'm curious. Are you always so reactionary to news stories, assume the worst, and don't bother thinking critically, or only when the word "nuclear" or "radiation" is in the article?
It's aimed at the NK elite, dumbass. Piss them off and maybe they'll be open to a palace coup
See above where the poster talks about "smuggling" in this stuff from another country. You could probbably have an effect on getting a few million of anything. It's going to be about impossible to stop the flow of a few hundred or a thousand iPods or Plasma TVs into NK.
What will get his attention is if the influential North Korean upper-classmen get pissed off at him over his policies.
It's a nice theory, but the US banning sales directly to North Korea will likely have zero impact on the 600 or so families ability to get luxury goods. Does the US government think it can really stop the flow of a very small number of common items like this? 600 families isn't a whole lot, and it doesn't take a lot of people working in the black or grey markets to supply them with whatever they need. The only thing you might do is raise the price of this stuff, and encourage growth of the black and grey market a little.
Does anyone have a link to that study where people were asked to press a button to "electrocute" other people, and how many were willing to do it as long as they were told by an authority figure it was ok?
I saw that experiment conducted on youtube. Turns out the cops will push the button at least 5 times.
I'm currently working for a VERY large bank and it doesn't seem to be significantly impacted. From my admittedly biased view they seem to be putting a lot more resources into expanding their IT based offerings than fighting bad guys.
Are you sure about that? The effects of crime aren't always totally obvious. Maybe you wind up getting less IT commerce business than you would if there wasn't a lot of cybercrime. In some ways the Internet is like a bad neighborhood. There's a lot of people that won't go into that neighborhood for fear of being robbed.
My point is, you don't see the people that aren't doing business with you because of cybercrime unless you actively start looking for them.
The other possibility is, maybe you just haven't gotten hit yet? I hear stories every week about a business having tens of thousands of customer records stolen. How many of those companies said the same thing "We haven't been impacted yet".
It doesn't matter what your credentials are, either your facts and conclusions are right or they are not. You don't agree with Lomborg? show us when and where he rushed to conclusions (in fact, some others have).
Your post is a classic example of why credentials DO matter to the 99.99% of us that aren't climate scientists. I really don't have the time to listen to people that have no training in the field they're talking about. 99% of the time people that have no training in the subject they talking about are going to make simple mistakes that I'm not experienced enough to spot. So why should I listen to this person, over say the crazy guy with a tinfoil hat? Sorry, but reputation matters. Sure I could read his book, try to research every little theory he has and find out why it's wrong. I'll take the shortcut though and assume he doesn't know what he's talking about because.. well he has no background in the thing he's talking about.
Having read his book I think he puts forward a cogent, well researched argument that deserves a likewise response from the experts that be.
It's pretty easy to make cogent, well researched arguments to a crowd of laymen, but at the same time it's obvious to anyone educated in the field that you're wrong. That's why science should be filtered through peer review, not put forth in mass-market books.
So scientists have been trying to detect it for 36 years, and only were able to do so 4 years ago? Something tells me that we won't be finding this in use for data storage anytime soon.
Anyone know how they can detect these vortex cores? It's great that they've found a "relatively" inexpensive way to reverse the core, but if you still need a magnetic force atomic microscope to "read" the thing, I don't see much practical use to it.
Think it's not the problem with even science? Why do so many people attack Bjorn Lomborg with a fanatical ferocity for daring to raise scientific questions about how, why and if global warming is happening?
I'm not really familiar with this guy, but it looks like he's a political scientist with some background in statistics that's published a book in the popular press critical of global warming. I guess it was my impression that science was done by people trained in the field, not by political scientists that've lectured on statistics before, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals rather than mass-market books.
When I went and bought a new washing machine for myself 5 years ago, I was expecting it to last for at least 10 years.It lasted 3! And I'm single, have no kids, etc...
I've known plenty of people that buy washing machines in the last few years that have had no problems at all. Maybe you're just unlucky, or bought a cheap/crappy washing machine?
I've almost given up on cell-phones. Even if I buy one specifically marketed as sturdy (e.g. Nokia 514), it is almost guaranteed to fail within two years (usually within a year). I would be willing to pay a lot more to get a phone where I don't have to worry about random breakage any time I fall on it.
My first phone was a nokia 5190 that I replaced after 5 1/2 years. It was heavily abused by being constantly dropped. That was mostly my fault, but it still mostly worked even after 5 1/2 years of abuse. I bought a used nokia 3595 after that that was probbably 1 1/2-2 years old at the time and is now easily 3 years old. It has no problems at all.
If I buy a mobile phone, it's because I want to bring it with me to become mobile, not to keep it inside original packaging with temperatures between 15-25 celcius and low air humidity.
Strange, I've not followed any of those suggestions and had minimal problems with my phone. It's regularly left in my car at temperatures that can go from -10 c to 35 c. It survives in high humidity during the summer.
If I buy a car, I want it to keep driving, not require expensive maintenance
Depends on what you consider expensive maintenance. I change the oil on my car, change the filters, change the spark plugs, and expect to change the timing belt at 100,000 miles. Cars do require maintenance, but I don't consider the above very expensive, just a normal part of owning a car.
And if I buy a laptop, it should survive a little rain, being dropped on concrete, being dropped in salt water, having someone fall on it, etc, all common things happening to transportable items.
Then you're clearly buying the wrong laptops, since most aren't designed to be dropped in frickin salt water or have someone fall on them and still work. There ARE laptops designed for this, but they're for special purposes and not generally for sale at your local retailer.
I'll rephrase: whats the downside to a free release, other than cutting into profits?
You seem to think that the only one affected by a free release is the movie producers. If you release the movie for free, it becomes less attractive for the content distributors. They really don't give a rats ass about everyone seeing the movie, they just want to make money by selling advertising.
So say you release the movie on some free distribution channels outside the normal mass-markets. Let's say 20% of your target market sees it via these free distribution channels. If you then wanted to distribute it via a more mass-market channel like ABC, CBS, etc, you just reduced your market segment by 20%. It also might be a market segment advertisers really LOVE (higher tech people that can watch via YouTube or Bittorent tend to be younger and have higher incomes). What you really wanted was to get the other 80%, not the 20%. By distributing it free on a limited channel you just made it that much harder to get the mass-market channel.
Sony got screwed royally, and everyone else won the lottery.
Console developers need to get their shit together and learn what a Dutch Auction is.
Console makers have lost money on the first few iterations of consoles for at least a decade. They plan on losing that money because they figure they'll make it back in game sales.
Sony decided they could afford to lose even MORE than normal in an attempt to push Blu-Ray over HD-DVD. I think they're idiots and this will only backfire on them, but that's a different argument.
The point is that there's only few people that're willing to spend BIG bucks to get this console right away. Everyone else would rather just wait and pay the normal price, or thinks the normal price is too high already. For the PS3 the high-price gang was about 15,000. Assuming Sony could have sold these units for $1500 each, that's about 15 million dollars in lost profit (1000 a unit). If some numbers are to be believed, Sony sold about 300,000 units so far. If they lost $300 that's 90 million lost total so far. See how the 15 million is really starting to look like chump change?
Sure, Sony could auction all these things off and let the market decide. The first units would go for $1500, the next for less, etc. But I'm guessing it's going to be hard to move 300,000 units via auction. Sure there's a bunch of kids and college students willing to wait around in the cold for them for a day or two, but the vast majority of people aren't willing to even do this auction nonsense. They just want to buy the thing at the local Target. Most markets are highly segmented and consist of buyers with very different attitudes.
Also, the retailers play an important role for Sony. They help market the console by having in-store demos, they have displays that people walk buy and see. They feature the consoles in advertising. In short, the retailers help Sony move these units.
but if everyone started taking your suggestion, the post office would waste a *lot* of fuel delivering unnecessary mail around
Actually what's more likely is that the people sending out junk mail would likely be a lot more selective in who they send out junk mail too.
As far as the environmental thing is concerned, if that's your only concern in life you should probbably just shoot yourself in the middle of a forrest full of hungry bears. You'll quickly be re-cycled and won't contribute to any further useage of energy, paper, emissions of CO2, etc. Just be sure to use bullets without lead, wouldn't want to pollute the forrest.
Not really "talk" is it?
That's exactly the point, actually.
just seems like a poor mans email with its pathetic 196 character limit and hopeless word entry system on a numeric keypad.
No, it's MOBILE email. The 196 character limit is kind of stupid, I'll agree. I find SMS messages very usefull for sending short messages that don't require a full conversation, or an immediate reply. Asking someone if they want to go out for lunch, when they'll be home, etc. It's a more polite way to communicate when you don't want to interrupt someone for just a quick question.
using SMS is best left to socially inept tweenies and teens who can't actually come out with sentences of more than 3 words at a time anyway
Well, I think part of the problem is just that most of the people who actually know how to send an SMS message, or have their cell phone with them at all times are the tweenies. I'm far from the tweenie, but SMS is of limited use to me mostly because a lot of the people I know won't know how to send a reply, or just don't carry their phone with them.
If you think about it, telling people how to reach you (i.e. telling them which medium, like "call me on my cell") is somewhat "old think". Imagine a world where all anyone needs to know is your unique identifier - the "network cloud" figures out how to complete the connection.
That kind of thinking is just so 21st century, grandpa. Imagine a world where you just think what you want to say, and who you want to send it to, and it's instantly transmitted to the other persons brain. You wouldn't have any kind of device, since it'd all be implanted in your skull at birth.
We're so close to this technology already. They've already done MRI scans of people watching ads and figured out if the ad was effective or not. It's not that far to shrinking down the MRI to implantable size.
Hell, even this is pre-pre-old thinking, as in the 23rd century we'll all be part of the borg collective, and any thoughts of transmitting a message to someone, or even the concept of someone will be obsolete.
I actually think there's a reason for this, at least in the US. Before Cellular phones there were car-phones for the ultra-rich. They didn't use a cellular system, and thus there was a very small limit on the number of calls that could be placed at the same time (something like 23). Cellular service wasn't established commercially in the US until 1982. The companies selling the service probbably wanted to distinguish cellular service from the old car/briefcase phones (since I'm guessing cellular service was a LOT cheaper), so they came up with a new name.
We need the EPA to OK the use of nanoparticles in cleaning agents, and yet, diesel engines spew out metric tons of organic nanoparticles on a daily basis.
I'm with ya brother. These bastards at EPA have been doing the same thing for YEARS with macro-particles. Lead is all regulated up the ass.. You can't put it in paint, it's been taken out of gasoline, etc. And yet every winter the city is allowed to just dump sand around the streets!
I mean, all macro-particles are equal right? We all know that when two things are the same in one way, they're the same in every single other way.
So, no matter how you arrange it, if you're doing work it'll be less efficient.
Assuming that's true, you only need to design a heat sink or radiator or whatever to be better than the old thing at removing heat.
In your analogy, you just find a guy that's stronger. Now do you get it?
Why are there these people that feel like every other living soul in the world HAS to accept what they believe, otherwise they should be killed/crucified/outcasted/suffer for eternity in the afterlife?
It's an idea that has a strong ability to self-sustain itself. Fear is a good motivator, and an unknown fear is an even better one.
Aren't these the people that killed thousands during the Crusades? Aren't these the people that are killing thousands now in the name of Allah?
I don't think that's quite fair to say they're "the same people". I do think it's fair to say that this kind of intolerance is the same kind of intolerance that drives the fundamentalist muslims to kill thousands of people. All you really need to turn some of these people into terrorists is an issue to drive them. Some people (Eric Rudolph) have already taken that path.
I just don't understand why people can't accept that others can believe different things than they do.
I'm not sure I do either. Maybe dissent makes them question their own beliefs?
Such people are as much Christians as are scientists who believe the world is flat.
I dunno, they believe in the divinity of Christ, they believe in the trinity, etc. They don't believe in the divinity of any other strange books like the Mormons (not saying the mormons aren't christians, but that might be at least a valid argument). I'd say they're christians.
Please do not judge us Christians by the actions of these radicals.
Obviously most christians aren't the "you're all going to hell if you don't accept jesus!" ranting types. These nutjobs have just become more vocal over the past 10 years or so. But it's not as if they're a totally insignificant part of the population either. The numbers I've heard for fundamentalists is anywhere from 10-20% of the population. I've known some current ones, and a few "recovering" ones, so in my own personal experience they aren't all that rare.
The point being, like it or not they're a of the spectrum of christianity (at least in the United States). You don't have to like them, or agree with them, but they're still part of the "christian family" that you have to acknowledge.
So your entire argument is essentially "Some things in Wikipedia are misleading or unclear, so you obviously there's no controversy about whether the appendix is vestigial." Kind of a funny argument.
Maybe you missed the point that I wasn't try to make any kind of statement about the cecum, where the appendix came from, etc. If you'll pay just a little context to the conversation you'll realize the entire argument was to point out that the function of the appendix is under scientific dispute. Several posts ago there was an AC who claimed that the whole thing was settled, and the appendix did serve a purpose, wasn't vestigial, and the parent post to his was completely and utterly wrong.
Your quibbles with the accuracy of some minor parts of Wikipedia really don't change the fact that there IS controversy about the function of the appendix, which is the original point I was trying to make.