Was this article actually published in 2000?, because that's the user experience I remember from back then.
Installs were a nighmare where you had to know the exact details of your video card, the resolutions it supported, as well as the type of network card you had. Sound? Forget about sound. You'll probbably never get it working.
Software was available, but there's no decent office suite. Oh they're working on it, but it pretty much sucks right now. You want a web-browser? We've got one, but I hope you don't want to visit sites that use SSL, because that's an add-on. ALso 20% of the websites won't load properly.
Come back to 2006 and I'll tell you my experience with installing Ubuntu on a new laptop last month. All the hardware "just works", from the video to the sound, to the ethernet to even the frickin Wireless (which amazed even me). I even found NetworkManager and Network Manager Applet that actually configures and supports WEP and WPA without me having to screw around with learning crap about wpa_supplicant, the network initiation process, etc. I will say that NetworkManager could have been just installed by default. I had to hear about it from somewhere else.
It actually has a nice frontend to install more software. There's no need to "go to a store" and buy anything because everything I need is freely available. Remote desktop to a windows machine "just works", Eclipse was a bit of a pain in the ass as it defaults to gcj for the JVM (which sucks ass). But hey, we're already at the level of computer expert when you're delving into software development, so I'll forgive them. I can also connect to my fileserver and it "just works". I can even play MP3s from the fileserver without problem.
There's still room for improvement. I still can't play some video feeds on some websites. That's mostly because of the Microsoft monopoly and websights choosing windows-only formats. Even that I think is going to die because even Windows users have problems with that. There's too many options for wi-fi managers. NetworkManager and nm-applet works perfectly, and I could barely get the others to work. They also conflict with each other with little warning that they do.
The point is that this isn't a particularly strong bomb.
No, I think the original poster was trying to convey the idea that this is "no big deal". The OP was comparing this to much larger bombings that aren't really relevant.
Please learn something about computing and stop taking one unit of an entire system and assuming that's equal to overall performance. It's be like saying you're 10X smarter than someone else because you can complete those pattern matching puzzles 10X faster.
Only if you consider a console with more processing power than older Cray Supercomputers for a fraction of the energy cost to be "sloppy". Let me put that in context to explain what I mean.
No, the question is if this is an efficient use of power today. Comparing the power usage of a PS3 to a Cray is totally irrelavent. If I designed a solar panel that was 5% efficient would I say "No, it's SUPER DUPER efficient compared to the solar panels of 30 years ago"? No, I'd compare its efficiency with todays solar panels, and today 5% efficiency sucks. That's why the power usage of the PS3 is compared to an Xbox360, or a modern gaming rig and not a Cray.
Personally I think the extremely parallel nature of the PS3 is going to not pan out well. Parallel processing is difficult except for specialized tasks. Everything I've read about video games points to them not being particularly parallel tasks.
This strategy *might* have worked reasonably well if confidence in Sony was still high. But with people boycotting them over everything from rootkits to Lik-Sang, PLUS Sony's extremely poor E3 presentations, PLUS their general arrogance when handling the public, I seriously doubt that they're going far this generation.
Eh, none of that really matters to the gaming world. Your average gamer doesn't sit around and read about the rootkit crap, Lik-Sang, or whatever. Even if they did, who cares as long as the games are cool? What I think will ultimately doom the PS3 is the damn things costs too much. Sony chose to put a Blu-Ray drive in the thing to try to prop-up the Blu-Ray market. That drove up the price by quite a bit, likely beyond what most people will pay for a new rig.
Of course, I don't even need to rely on this, like I said last time. In the argument I made that you ignored, I pointed out that one person DOES make a difference TO ME. If ONE person burns wood, I can tell
Well I simply think your claim is ridiculous. One person burning wood with a fireplace and chimney doesn't significantly impact your health. If there's smoking coming into your house that's a different issue, and there ARE laws to control that. What's your issue here? I can imagine your reaction to "Ford's vehicles shutting down forever would make no difference in global warming, so Ford should be exempt from any carbon emissions standards."
Huh? You seem to think that individuals are the same as corporations. How are you possibly going to control and regulate the carbon emissions of 300 million people? Obviously you can't. But you can require car companies to raise average mileage standards. You can put regulations on emissions from power plants. The differences between an individual and a corporation are MANY, but the relevant one here is the ability to control them, and the impact each has on society.
Any large collection of power is going to be easier to control than a large number of individuals. If you want to control carbon emissions you go after the people who produce most of it, power plants, and cars. You can't make people buy more efficient cars, but you can make the companies that produce make more efficient cars. I suppose you could ban people from burning wood for pleasure fires, but the impact of that is minimal and rather pointless. They still have free reign to burn logs. That was my point.
Right, because the pollution from people burning logs doesn't impact anyones health in a significant manner. Thousands of people burning leaves every fall/spring does. If suddenly everyone and their dog started burning logs again to heat their homes you can bet there'd be laws designed to control this activity. What real benefit do you hope to gain by preventing people from burning logs? Right, because juries NEVER ignore the evidence and vote on envy, esp. with wealth corporations.
Well duh. Judges are then free to throw out these judgements. No system is perfect. What's your perfect alternative to the current system? Because of your childish envy -- the kind the rest of us grew out of at about six. Oh, I know, you cloak in terms of "power", but we all know what you're talking about.
Huh? Anyone with power needs checks and balances on that power. Anyone with more power needs more checks and balances. Why is that so hard to understand? Equality doesn't mean all actors in a society are the same.
It doesn't sound like this was a terribly powerfull bomb. But if you worked at paypal maybe you should be worried about the intent of this attack rather than the effects. This wasn't some kid setting off firecrackers, this was someone that took the time to construct a bomb that's powerfull enough to damage a window, and maybe seriously injure someone that was nearby. People like that might just make a much larger bomb next time.
Comparing this to the IRA simply isn't fair. Should someone that lived through Hiroshima poo-poo the IRA bombing campaign because it paled in comparison to the atomic bomb? Comparing this to the IRA bombing really misses the point. A more apt comparison would probbably be the Unabomber.
Following your line of thinking, your first lawsuit should be one where the other party is ordered to say "Hello world";-)
Actually, I'd make a bet that small claims court is the equivalent of "Hello World". It's filled with individuals suing other individuals. I don't think lawyers are even allowed to be involved.
Fallacy of composition -- I'm sure one small corporation's pollution wouldn't have much impact on anything either.
Reality has proved you wrong. Even small companies dumping toxic waste has a large impact on a large amount of people. Love Canal wasn't created by some huge multi-national. According to wikipedia:
n 1942, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation (a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum) expanded use of the site, and, by 1947, acquired the land for its own private use. In the subsequent five year period, the company buried 21,800 tons of toxic waste in the area. Once the site had been filled to capacity in 1952, Hooker closed the site to further disposal and back-filled the canal.
Even so, it's false. If even one person burns wood, that signficantly affects my personal air quality, more than any corporation, or all the autos in my city ever have. I understand that corporations now have regulations to comply with (your next point), but that misses the point! Why must they adhere to these regulations, but individuals are given free reign to pollute MY AIR with their stupid woodburning, without having to get anyone's by-your-leave
Well, it's simply not true that individuals have free reigh to pollute air. There ARE regulations on pollution that individuals have to comply with, just like I was saying about peoples backyard bonfires. It used to be legal for individuals to burn leaves in the summer in most cities, but the practice was banned due to air quality issues. Your argument is simply false. Individuals don't have free reign to do whatever they please to pollute the air. And what if the UPS driver's just an idiot? You think UPS is off the hook?
Maybe. If a jury can't be convinced that UPS was negligent, then they'll not be held liable. Of course a case where UPS isn't liable would likely never even get to a jury. Why can I get away with hiring someone repeatedly -- as contract labor and not have to worry about charges that I'm not paying the "benefits" that are supposed to accrue to regular employees, but corporations have to walk on eggshells when hiring the labor of others?
Well, because corporations have a lot more power than you do. Why do you think that power doesn't scale up from you to a multi-billion dollar corporation? Any entity with more power should be treated differently than some poor schlum. Why do you think individuals and huge corporations are equal? And again, inidividuals don't have free reign to do whatever they please. I seriously doubt you could hire a Nanny and treat him/her as an independant contractor when they're really acting as an employee. That's mostly a tax avoidance issue since generally I don't think you're required to give benefits when you're just one guy hiring a nanny, but I may be wrong.
Sorry to say- 10 seconds to send something is "okay". Nearly 2 minutes to send something, even if it's done in the background with a batch processing thread- it's stupid.
You consider 2 minutes to send an initial email to someone a long time? That's simply ridiculous. Email isn't intended to be a realtime communications protocol, so even a two minute wait for each email send wouldn't be unreasonable. What does it matter if you take 100 seconds to send the mail message if he/she has got thousands of machines doing his bidding to send it all out?
Because it becomes very difficult to send out 5 million spam emails when each bot in your botnet only sends out one email every 100 seconds. That's only 864 emails/day/bot. To send out 5 million emails a day would require almost 6000 compromised hosts. There's another article that says that spam goes for about $100 per million emails. That's only $500/day. Assuming you can get that many hosts (and not have them already compromised by another spammer) that puts a serious dent on potential income, and the amount of spam you can put out.
Someone suggested counter-warfare: I override THEIR FM with an even stronger burst that explains the problem. I don't feel that fighting fire with fire is going to help here.
Actually it probbably would help. The people with these transmitters probbably have NO IDEA that they're interferring with a real radio station. If you were to do something like that you'd probbably get them to change to a different, unallocated channel. These people really have no interest in interferring with your station, they just want to listen to to sat radio/ipod/whatever.
-Pollution is evil if corporations do it, but if you're burning wood in your fireplace, and impacting my life much more, that's okay.
One guy burning wood in his fireplace has very little impact on anything. If everyone started burning wood to heat their homes again, it'd start to be a problem. A large entity spewing out tons of extremely toxic pollutants into the air, water, soil is a much bigger deal. In many communities backyard bonfires have become a problem because there's no chimney to send the smoke high enough in the atmosphere to avoid sending smoke into neighbors homes. So pollution isn't just a problem with large entities, a collection of individuals can create problems as well. -If you kill someone wtih your car, you're on the hook for, what, $200,000? If a UPS driver does it, bump that up to a million.
Depends on if UPS is negligent and encouraging drivers to drive recklessly to make schedules, or knowingly employees someone that drives recklessly. It's called punitive damages. A $200,000 judgement against an individual is a huge amount and is an effective deterent. A $200,000 judgement against a large corporation like UPS is peanuts and does exactly nothing to prevent them from having these entirely made up policies (I don't think UPS does anything like this, it's just for illustrative purposes). Come to think of it I believe Dominoes was held liable for traffic accidents a number of years ago because of their "30 minutes or less" guarantee. They eventually had to drop it because it was causing too many accidents. -If a doctor botches an operation and kills someone, yep, $200,000. But if he has a big evil insurance corporation backing him, meh, they can afford a million or so, right?
Same thing as the UPS example. If the insurance company or HMO is at fault, they should have punitive damages against them otherwise they'll do little to correct the problem. If you want to hire someone to fix your toilet, you pay whatever they agree to. But if you're a corporation that wants to hire someoen to regularly fix toilets, well, that's just evil. You're going to have to pay his medical and dental, pay minimum wage, contribute to his social security account, be on the hook for discriminatory lawsuits, etc.
There's a difference between an independant contractor, and an employee. Corporations hire indendent contractors all the time to fix toilets or whatever. What they can't and shouldn't do is pretend an employee is an independant contractor just to avoid paying benefits, SS, and liability. -If a corporation annoys you to no end with autodialing, SHUT EM DOWN. But if it's "just" a non-profit organization doing the exact same thing, nah, let it slip.
Well, annoyance is a matter of perspective. Some people aren't annoyed by carpet cleaners calling them to sell them carpet cleaning. Other people don't mind being called by non-profit XYZ who wants to save the whales. If you're annoyed by them, they've wasted your time and you get pissed off. Personally I hate anyone calling me to sell me something or get me to believe something or want me to donate money to them. I disagree with the idea that non-profits should somehow be able to still call me. Other people seem to argue there's free speech at stake here. Frankly I think it's ridiculous that anyone with a political message should be able to ring my telephone in my own home anytime they please when I've explicitly requested that they not do so.
The basic thing here is that corporations shouldn't be treated like normal citizens because they're a lot more immune to damage. You can't put a company in jail, fine them a (relatively) small amount of money, etc. They have a lot more resources to defend themselves, so the punishment also needs to be more severe.
IANAL, but I still think that I'm qualified to point out that filing a lawsuit based on an essay posted to Slashdot is a really stupid thing to do.
Where does this attitude come from? Slashdot has a definite DIY community to it. Maybe your first lawsuit isn't going to suceed or make much money. But then again your first attempt at making pottery, or programming probbably won't be very good either. Of course you aren't qualified to file a lawsuit based on one essay. But that doesn't mean there's not something to be gained from starting the process.
Really, what are the risks involved here? You lose? All you've lost is some time. If you aren't prepared to lose that, then don't do it. The gains are feeling that you've accomplished some minor dig against a scumbag telemarketer, and maybe a little money.
It's not like you're building a bridge which could collapse and kill people, putting together a rocket that could explode, or duplicating the efforts of the MythBusters. Why not Try This At Home?
Here's a thought - do banks have a responsibility to register domain names related to themeselves? I think one could make that argument.
That's the wrong question, but you're close. Banks have a responsibility to authenticate themselves to users before users are allowed to make transactions. Right now that authentication is supposed to be done by the user looking at the website and recognizing the name. This is, and will always be a terrible form of authentication.
I've said it before, but banks should be using some kind of physical authentication device that contains crytographic keys that the device won't release until it confirms it's communicating with the bank. The password would only unlock the device so it can authenticate the user, and the bank.
Of course banks won't do this until there's an incentive to do so, and right now there isn't. Make banks responsible for losses from phishing attacks, and they'll implement something like this before the legislation becomes active.
The problem with using the MUA to factorize is that the spam spraying engines can do the same thing.
The point of the forced factorization wouldn't be to prevent a spam engine from being able to perform the same task. The point would be to make it financially infeasible for spam engines to do so. If it takes 10 seconds for an extremely fast processor to factorize the primes, it's going to be very difficult for a spammer to send out the 10 million emails that make him money. Make that 100 seconds and it's nearly impossible.
Right now I'm running FF 1.5.0.7 on Linux and I'm using up 200 megs of memory. I've seen the same behavior on Windows on my machine, and on a clients machine. The only plugin I've got running on the linux machine is dictionary, and the clients machine had no plugins installed.
Maybe the difference is you kill firefox and restart it every day. I leave it running days at a time.
So it's ok for her to risk her health, but not you?
The female contraceptive pill in one form or another has been in use for 46 years and the risks are well known and documented. Furthermore the risks associated with the pill are less than those of getting pregnant. In other words if you're having sex, you're actually safer on the pill than not. There's no equivalent health benefit for men on a male contraceptive pill, so the two situations aren't analogous.
Unless you're handing classified information, have employees take home thousands of credit cards on laptops, or thousands of medical records on laptops you're probbably not really the target for a drive like this.
If your company does handle this kind of data (or worse), maybe you should be re-examining your role as a sys-admin or manager. It's not all about making your life easier you know. There are of course risks and costs to maintaining a database of passwords, small performance costs for encrypting/decrypting the HD, and possible incompatibilities. There's also risks and costs associated with someone losing the laptop and the big headlines in the newspaper about how your company now looks like a bunch of ass-hats for losing 200,000 CC #s, 50,000 medical records, etc. Security and administration is about managing risk. If the overall risk is lower with this drive (and the price is right), you do it.
Mass is irrelevant when maintaining a constant angular momentum, all else (like coefficient of friction) equal. Once spinning, aerodynamics and friction are running the show.
Except mass is related to the frictional force stopping it. Directly proportional in fact. The only question is how much drag is created by friction, and how much is created by the air resistance? I don't know, but if most of the drag is created by friction than a much lighter platter is going to have a lot less drag on it, and thus use less power.
I have a beard now, but years ago I used to use a straight razor. It was a very close shave for about a year as long as you stropped it before use. After a year or two you should get it professionally sharpened because it starts to lose it's edge.
People seem to think that you'll cut your face apart, but as long as you pay attention and don't move the blade in a cutting motion across your face there's little danger. You get a much better feel for the smoothness than a disposable, and you don't have to worry about running out of blades all the time.
So if the FSF marks the Apache license as incompatible, does that mean Ubuntu does not include Apache, because it sure seems to be there in my install?
Well, I'd make the argument that a replacement for init is something that's a lot more integral to the system than Apache is. That likely means a lot more customization of it than you'd do with Apache, so more potential to interact with GPL code. Thus having a GPL compatible init replacement becomes a practical issue, not an idealogical one.
There's a very strange paranoia to this entire article. Is the next article going to be about how the cleaning staff have access to papers lying on executives desks? I'm sure all the exectives think that someone reading their "high level" email is some kind of worst case scenario. But I highly doubt anyone reading it would have much to gain. There's a lot more sensitive information in a business than some dumb executives new corporate strategy of outsourcing the IT department. Client lists for one thing, pricing information stored in databases, cost lists, etc. It's that low level information that if you found the right buyer (which is probbably a difficult task in itself) it'd be worth something. Admins generally have access to all that stuff, but they only get paranoid about someone reading their lunch plans meeting with Bob from Intel to discuss "strategic planning".
Sure, but why wouldn't you just use PostgreSQL at that point? It offers lower costs for the midrange server when Oracle wants you to pony up some cash, and if you really need a feature for it you can code it yourself and either try to get it included in the main development branch, or maintain your own custom version.
Having the entire stack is arguably more of an advantage to the application designers than it is to Oracle. Of course Oracle is getting into that themselves with the aquasition of Peoplesoft, so maybe that's one of the driving forces behind this.
Why do the above? Simple. Small 1-6 ppl companies do not spend the money for Oracle or their apps. But if you offer it to them free, then an industry will sprout up around it. More importantly, once the company is on it, after 6 seats, they have to pay. I would also guess that these companies will want support. At some point, they will pay. Finally, this shuts out MS.
It's not a bad idea, but I think there's a few problems with it. If you were setting up a database for a small company with 1-6 seats would you pick heavyweight Oracle with it's higher costs to maintain, administer, etc, or would you pick PostgreSQL or MySQL which is cheaper to maintain, and doesn't have a mid-range expansion cost associated with it? I know I'd pick an open-source free DB way before I'd pick Oracle.
The reason is that the guys that have 1-6 seat needs are a long ways from actually needing Oracle. The expansion stage from dinky buisiness with very small DB needs to small-medium size is a lot more important (at least initially) than the medium-> large scale transition you'll need when you need the heavyweight stuff from Oracle (and some would even argue that PostgreSQL and MySQL are well used in large-scale businesses as well).
As a result of this slow decline, the ozone hole is estimated to annually very slowly decrease in area by about 0.1 to 0.2 percent for the next five to 10 years. This slow decrease is masked by large year-to-year variations caused by Antarctic stratosphere weather fluctuations.
That sounds to me like this is an estimate predicted from a model, not actual measurements. Also, the problem here isn't the margin of error for measurement, it's the variability. The area the ozone hole takes up varies immensely due to weather. A.1% or.2% decrease from year to year would be impossible to measure if the area taken up varies by 20% due to weather conditions. You'd only be able to measure a decrease that small over a long period of time where the variability evens out.
Really the point of talking about the slowly decreasing size of the ozone hole is to dissuade any doubters that CFCs cause ozone depletion and the ozone hole. CFC use has been dramatically cut over the past 10 years, but yet the ozone hole is bigger now than it's ever been. Unless you understand the nature of the slow decrease over time, and the natural variability of the hole do to weather conditions, you might conclude that CFCs have nothing to do with ozone depletion.
Give everyone a gigabyte or more of online storage space. Provide multiple ways to access it. That should include ssh, webdav over SSL (very important IMO), and possibly crappy-old FTP though I'd personally try to avoid providing any non-secure protocols. Then provide simple instructions on how to use it, probbably primarily through webdav. Windows has built-in support for webdav since Win98, though I think 98 doesn't support HTTPS. You also might consider setting up SAMBA or NFS, though that's a bit more tricky to operate over a WAN.
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Was this article actually published in 2000?, because that's the user experience I remember from back then.
Installs were a nighmare where you had to know the exact details of your video card, the resolutions it supported, as well as the type of network card you had. Sound? Forget about sound. You'll probbably never get it working.
Software was available, but there's no decent office suite. Oh they're working on it, but it pretty much sucks right now. You want a web-browser? We've got one, but I hope you don't want to visit sites that use SSL, because that's an add-on. ALso 20% of the websites won't load properly.
Come back to 2006 and I'll tell you my experience with installing Ubuntu on a new laptop last month. All the hardware "just works", from the video to the sound, to the ethernet to even the frickin Wireless (which amazed even me). I even found NetworkManager and Network Manager Applet that actually configures and supports WEP and WPA without me having to screw around with learning crap about wpa_supplicant, the network initiation process, etc. I will say that NetworkManager could have been just installed by default. I had to hear about it from somewhere else.
It actually has a nice frontend to install more software. There's no need to "go to a store" and buy anything because everything I need is freely available. Remote desktop to a windows machine "just works", Eclipse was a bit of a pain in the ass as it defaults to gcj for the JVM (which sucks ass). But hey, we're already at the level of computer expert when you're delving into software development, so I'll forgive them. I can also connect to my fileserver and it "just works". I can even play MP3s from the fileserver without problem.
There's still room for improvement. I still can't play some video feeds on some websites. That's mostly because of the Microsoft monopoly and websights choosing windows-only formats. Even that I think is going to die because even Windows users have problems with that. There's too many options for wi-fi managers. NetworkManager and nm-applet works perfectly, and I could barely get the others to work. They also conflict with each other with little warning that they do.
The point is that this isn't a particularly strong bomb.
No, I think the original poster was trying to convey the idea that this is "no big deal". The OP was comparing this to much larger bombings that aren't really relevant.
Please learn something about computing and stop taking one unit of an entire system and assuming that's equal to overall performance. It's be like saying you're 10X smarter than someone else because you can complete those pattern matching puzzles 10X faster.
Only if you consider a console with more processing power than older Cray Supercomputers for a fraction of the energy cost to be "sloppy". Let me put that in context to explain what I mean.
No, the question is if this is an efficient use of power today. Comparing the power usage of a PS3 to a Cray is totally irrelavent. If I designed a solar panel that was 5% efficient would I say "No, it's SUPER DUPER efficient compared to the solar panels of 30 years ago"? No, I'd compare its efficiency with todays solar panels, and today 5% efficiency sucks. That's why the power usage of the PS3 is compared to an Xbox360, or a modern gaming rig and not a Cray.
Personally I think the extremely parallel nature of the PS3 is going to not pan out well. Parallel processing is difficult except for specialized tasks. Everything I've read about video games points to them not being particularly parallel tasks.
This strategy *might* have worked reasonably well if confidence in Sony was still high. But with people boycotting them over everything from rootkits to Lik-Sang, PLUS Sony's extremely poor E3 presentations, PLUS their general arrogance when handling the public, I seriously doubt that they're going far this generation.
Eh, none of that really matters to the gaming world. Your average gamer doesn't sit around and read about the rootkit crap, Lik-Sang, or whatever. Even if they did, who cares as long as the games are cool? What I think will ultimately doom the PS3 is the damn things costs too much. Sony chose to put a Blu-Ray drive in the thing to try to prop-up the Blu-Ray market. That drove up the price by quite a bit, likely beyond what most people will pay for a new rig.
Of course, I don't even need to rely on this, like I said last time. In the argument I made that you ignored, I pointed out that one person DOES make a difference TO ME. If ONE person burns wood, I can tell
Well I simply think your claim is ridiculous. One person burning wood with a fireplace and chimney doesn't significantly impact your health. If there's smoking coming into your house that's a different issue, and there ARE laws to control that. What's your issue here?
I can imagine your reaction to "Ford's vehicles shutting down forever would make no difference in global warming, so Ford should be exempt from any carbon emissions standards."
Huh? You seem to think that individuals are the same as corporations. How are you possibly going to control and regulate the carbon emissions of 300 million people? Obviously you can't. But you can require car companies to raise average mileage standards. You can put regulations on emissions from power plants. The differences between an individual and a corporation are MANY, but the relevant one here is the ability to control them, and the impact each has on society.
Any large collection of power is going to be easier to control than a large number of individuals. If you want to control carbon emissions you go after the people who produce most of it, power plants, and cars. You can't make people buy more efficient cars, but you can make the companies that produce make more efficient cars. I suppose you could ban people from burning wood for pleasure fires, but the impact of that is minimal and rather pointless.
They still have free reign to burn logs. That was my point.
Right, because the pollution from people burning logs doesn't impact anyones health in a significant manner. Thousands of people burning leaves every fall/spring does. If suddenly everyone and their dog started burning logs again to heat their homes you can bet there'd be laws designed to control this activity. What real benefit do you hope to gain by preventing people from burning logs?
Right, because juries NEVER ignore the evidence and vote on envy, esp. with wealth corporations.
Well duh. Judges are then free to throw out these judgements. No system is perfect. What's your perfect alternative to the current system?
Because of your childish envy -- the kind the rest of us grew out of at about six. Oh, I know, you cloak in terms of "power", but we all know what you're talking about.
Huh? Anyone with power needs checks and balances on that power. Anyone with more power needs more checks and balances. Why is that so hard to understand? Equality doesn't mean all actors in a society are the same.
It doesn't sound like this was a terribly powerfull bomb. But if you worked at paypal maybe you should be worried about the intent of this attack rather than the effects. This wasn't some kid setting off firecrackers, this was someone that took the time to construct a bomb that's powerfull enough to damage a window, and maybe seriously injure someone that was nearby. People like that might just make a much larger bomb next time.
Comparing this to the IRA simply isn't fair. Should someone that lived through Hiroshima poo-poo the IRA bombing campaign because it paled in comparison to the atomic bomb? Comparing this to the IRA bombing really misses the point. A more apt comparison would probbably be the Unabomber.
Following your line of thinking, your first lawsuit should be one where the other party is ordered to say "Hello world"
Actually, I'd make a bet that small claims court is the equivalent of "Hello World". It's filled with individuals suing other individuals. I don't think lawyers are even allowed to be involved.
Fallacy of composition -- I'm sure one small corporation's pollution wouldn't have much impact on anything either.
Reality has proved you wrong. Even small companies dumping toxic waste has a large impact on a large amount of people. Love Canal wasn't created by some huge multi-national. According to wikipedia:
Even so, it's false. If even one person burns wood, that signficantly affects my personal air quality, more than any corporation, or all the autos in my city ever have. I understand that corporations now have regulations to comply with (your next point), but that misses the point! Why must they adhere to these regulations, but individuals are given free reign to pollute MY AIR with their stupid woodburning, without having to get anyone's by-your-leave
Well, it's simply not true that individuals have free reigh to pollute air. There ARE regulations on pollution that individuals have to comply with, just like I was saying about peoples backyard bonfires. It used to be legal for individuals to burn leaves in the summer in most cities, but the practice was banned due to air quality issues. Your argument is simply false. Individuals don't have free reign to do whatever they please to pollute the air.
And what if the UPS driver's just an idiot? You think UPS is off the hook?
Maybe. If a jury can't be convinced that UPS was negligent, then they'll not be held liable. Of course a case where UPS isn't liable would likely never even get to a jury.
Why can I get away with hiring someone repeatedly -- as contract labor and not have to worry about charges that I'm not paying the "benefits" that are supposed to accrue to regular employees, but corporations have to walk on eggshells when hiring the labor of others?
Well, because corporations have a lot more power than you do. Why do you think that power doesn't scale up from you to a multi-billion dollar corporation? Any entity with more power should be treated differently than some poor schlum. Why do you think individuals and huge corporations are equal? And again, inidividuals don't have free reign to do whatever they please. I seriously doubt you could hire a Nanny and treat him/her as an independant contractor when they're really acting as an employee. That's mostly a tax avoidance issue since generally I don't think you're required to give benefits when you're just one guy hiring a nanny, but I may be wrong.
Sorry to say- 10 seconds to send something is "okay". Nearly 2 minutes to send something, even if it's
done in the background with a batch processing thread- it's stupid.
You consider 2 minutes to send an initial email to someone a long time? That's simply ridiculous. Email isn't intended to be a realtime communications protocol, so even a two minute wait for each email send wouldn't be unreasonable.
What does it matter if you take 100 seconds to send the mail message if he/she has got thousands of machines doing his bidding to send it all out?
Because it becomes very difficult to send out 5 million spam emails when each bot in your botnet only sends out one email every 100 seconds. That's only 864 emails/day/bot. To send out 5 million emails a day would require almost 6000 compromised hosts. There's another article that says that spam goes for about $100 per million emails. That's only $500/day. Assuming you can get that many hosts (and not have them already compromised by another spammer) that puts a serious dent on potential income, and the amount of spam you can put out.
Someone suggested counter-warfare: I override THEIR FM with an even stronger burst that explains the problem. I don't feel that fighting fire with fire is going to help here.
Actually it probbably would help. The people with these transmitters probbably have NO IDEA that they're interferring with a real radio station. If you were to do something like that you'd probbably get them to change to a different, unallocated channel. These people really have no interest in interferring with your station, they just want to listen to to sat radio/ipod/whatever.
-Pollution is evil if corporations do it, but if you're burning wood in your fireplace, and impacting my life much more, that's okay.
One guy burning wood in his fireplace has very little impact on anything. If everyone started burning wood to heat their homes again, it'd start to be a problem. A large entity spewing out tons of extremely toxic pollutants into the air, water, soil is a much bigger deal. In many communities backyard bonfires have become a problem because there's no chimney to send the smoke high enough in the atmosphere to avoid sending smoke into neighbors homes. So pollution isn't just a problem with large entities, a collection of individuals can create problems as well.
-If you kill someone wtih your car, you're on the hook for, what, $200,000? If a UPS driver does it, bump that up to a million.
Depends on if UPS is negligent and encouraging drivers to drive recklessly to make schedules, or knowingly employees someone that drives recklessly. It's called punitive damages. A $200,000 judgement against an individual is a huge amount and is an effective deterent. A $200,000 judgement against a large corporation like UPS is peanuts and does exactly nothing to prevent them from having these entirely made up policies (I don't think UPS does anything like this, it's just for illustrative purposes). Come to think of it I believe Dominoes was held liable for traffic accidents a number of years ago because of their "30 minutes or less" guarantee. They eventually had to drop it because it was causing too many accidents.
-If a doctor botches an operation and kills someone, yep, $200,000. But if he has a big evil insurance corporation backing him, meh, they can afford a million or so, right?
Same thing as the UPS example. If the insurance company or HMO is at fault, they should have punitive damages against them otherwise they'll do little to correct the problem.
If you want to hire someone to fix your toilet, you pay whatever they agree to. But if you're a corporation that wants to hire someoen to regularly fix toilets, well, that's just evil. You're going to have to pay his medical and dental, pay minimum wage, contribute to his social security account, be on the hook for discriminatory lawsuits, etc.
There's a difference between an independant contractor, and an employee. Corporations hire indendent contractors all the time to fix toilets or whatever. What they can't and shouldn't do is pretend an employee is an independant contractor just to avoid paying benefits, SS, and liability.
-If a corporation annoys you to no end with autodialing, SHUT EM DOWN. But if it's "just" a non-profit organization doing the exact same thing, nah, let it slip.
Well, annoyance is a matter of perspective. Some people aren't annoyed by carpet cleaners calling them to sell them carpet cleaning. Other people don't mind being called by non-profit XYZ who wants to save the whales. If you're annoyed by them, they've wasted your time and you get pissed off. Personally I hate anyone calling me to sell me something or get me to believe something or want me to donate money to them. I disagree with the idea that non-profits should somehow be able to still call me. Other people seem to argue there's free speech at stake here. Frankly I think it's ridiculous that anyone with a political message should be able to ring my telephone in my own home anytime they please when I've explicitly requested that they not do so.
The basic thing here is that corporations shouldn't be treated like normal citizens because they're a lot more immune to damage. You can't put a company in jail, fine them a (relatively) small amount of money, etc. They have a lot more resources to defend themselves, so the punishment also needs to be more severe.
IANAL, but I still think that I'm qualified to point out that filing a lawsuit based on an essay posted to Slashdot is a really stupid thing to do.
Where does this attitude come from? Slashdot has a definite DIY community to it. Maybe your first lawsuit isn't going to suceed or make much money. But then again your first attempt at making pottery, or programming probbably won't be very good either. Of course you aren't qualified to file a lawsuit based on one essay. But that doesn't mean there's not something to be gained from starting the process.
Really, what are the risks involved here? You lose? All you've lost is some time. If you aren't prepared to lose that, then don't do it. The gains are feeling that you've accomplished some minor dig against a scumbag telemarketer, and maybe a little money.
It's not like you're building a bridge which could collapse and kill people, putting together a rocket that could explode, or duplicating the efforts of the MythBusters. Why not Try This At Home?
Here's a thought - do banks have a responsibility to register domain names related to themeselves? I think one could make that argument.
That's the wrong question, but you're close. Banks have a responsibility to authenticate themselves to users before users are allowed to make transactions. Right now that authentication is supposed to be done by the user looking at the website and recognizing the name. This is, and will always be a terrible form of authentication.
I've said it before, but banks should be using some kind of physical authentication device that contains crytographic keys that the device won't release until it confirms it's communicating with the bank. The password would only unlock the device so it can authenticate the user, and the bank.
Of course banks won't do this until there's an incentive to do so, and right now there isn't. Make banks responsible for losses from phishing attacks, and they'll implement something like this before the legislation becomes active.
The problem with using the MUA to factorize is that the spam spraying engines can do the same thing.
The point of the forced factorization wouldn't be to prevent a spam engine from being able to perform the same task. The point would be to make it financially infeasible for spam engines to do so. If it takes 10 seconds for an extremely fast processor to factorize the primes, it's going to be very difficult for a spammer to send out the 10 million emails that make him money. Make that 100 seconds and it's nearly impossible.
Right now I'm running FF 1.5.0.7 on Linux and I'm using up 200 megs of memory. I've seen the same behavior on Windows on my machine, and on a clients machine. The only plugin I've got running on the linux machine is dictionary, and the clients machine had no plugins installed.
Maybe the difference is you kill firefox and restart it every day. I leave it running days at a time.
So it's ok for her to risk her health, but not you?
The female contraceptive pill in one form or another has been in use for 46 years and the risks are well known and documented. Furthermore the risks associated with the pill are less than those of getting pregnant. In other words if you're having sex, you're actually safer on the pill than not. There's no equivalent health benefit for men on a male contraceptive pill, so the two situations aren't analogous.
Unless you're handing classified information, have employees take home thousands of credit cards on laptops, or thousands of medical records on laptops you're probbably not really the target for a drive like this.
If your company does handle this kind of data (or worse), maybe you should be re-examining your role as a sys-admin or manager. It's not all about making your life easier you know. There are of course risks and costs to maintaining a database of passwords, small performance costs for encrypting/decrypting the HD, and possible incompatibilities. There's also risks and costs associated with someone losing the laptop and the big headlines in the newspaper about how your company now looks like a bunch of ass-hats for losing 200,000 CC #s, 50,000 medical records, etc. Security and administration is about managing risk. If the overall risk is lower with this drive (and the price is right), you do it.
Mass is irrelevant when maintaining a constant angular momentum, all else (like coefficient of friction) equal. Once spinning, aerodynamics and friction are running the show.
Except mass is related to the frictional force stopping it. Directly proportional in fact. The only question is how much drag is created by friction, and how much is created by the air resistance? I don't know, but if most of the drag is created by friction than a much lighter platter is going to have a lot less drag on it, and thus use less power.
I have a beard now, but years ago I used to use a straight razor. It was a very close shave for about a year as long as you stropped it before use. After a year or two you should get it professionally sharpened because it starts to lose it's edge.
People seem to think that you'll cut your face apart, but as long as you pay attention and don't move the blade in a cutting motion across your face there's little danger. You get a much better feel for the smoothness than a disposable, and you don't have to worry about running out of blades all the time.
So if the FSF marks the Apache license as incompatible, does that mean Ubuntu does not include Apache, because it sure seems to be there in my install?
Well, I'd make the argument that a replacement for init is something that's a lot more integral to the system than Apache is. That likely means a lot more customization of it than you'd do with Apache, so more potential to interact with GPL code. Thus having a GPL compatible init replacement becomes a practical issue, not an idealogical one.
There's a very strange paranoia to this entire article. Is the next article going to be about how the cleaning staff have access to papers lying on executives desks? I'm sure all the exectives think that someone reading their "high level" email is some kind of worst case scenario. But I highly doubt anyone reading it would have much to gain. There's a lot more sensitive information in a business than some dumb executives new corporate strategy of outsourcing the IT department. Client lists for one thing, pricing information stored in databases, cost lists, etc. It's that low level information that if you found the right buyer (which is probbably a difficult task in itself) it'd be worth something. Admins generally have access to all that stuff, but they only get paranoid about someone reading their lunch plans meeting with Bob from Intel to discuss "strategic planning".
Sure, but why wouldn't you just use PostgreSQL at that point? It offers lower costs for the midrange server when Oracle wants you to pony up some cash, and if you really need a feature for it you can code it yourself and either try to get it included in the main development branch, or maintain your own custom version.
Having the entire stack is arguably more of an advantage to the application designers than it is to Oracle. Of course Oracle is getting into that themselves with the aquasition of Peoplesoft, so maybe that's one of the driving forces behind this.
Why do the above? Simple. Small 1-6 ppl companies do not spend the money for Oracle or their apps. But if you offer it to them free, then an industry will sprout up around it. More importantly, once the company is on it, after 6 seats, they have to pay. I would also guess that these companies will want support. At some point, they will pay. Finally, this shuts out MS.
It's not a bad idea, but I think there's a few problems with it. If you were setting up a database for a small company with 1-6 seats would you pick heavyweight Oracle with it's higher costs to maintain, administer, etc, or would you pick PostgreSQL or MySQL which is cheaper to maintain, and doesn't have a mid-range expansion cost associated with it? I know I'd pick an open-source free DB way before I'd pick Oracle.
The reason is that the guys that have 1-6 seat needs are a long ways from actually needing Oracle. The expansion stage from dinky buisiness with very small DB needs to small-medium size is a lot more important (at least initially) than the medium-> large scale transition you'll need when you need the heavyweight stuff from Oracle (and some would even argue that PostgreSQL and MySQL are well used in large-scale businesses as well).
That sounds to me like this is an estimate predicted from a model, not actual measurements. Also, the problem here isn't the margin of error for measurement, it's the variability. The area the ozone hole takes up varies immensely due to weather. A
Really the point of talking about the slowly decreasing size of the ozone hole is to dissuade any doubters that CFCs cause ozone depletion and the ozone hole. CFC use has been dramatically cut over the past 10 years, but yet the ozone hole is bigger now than it's ever been. Unless you understand the nature of the slow decrease over time, and the natural variability of the hole do to weather conditions, you might conclude that CFCs have nothing to do with ozone depletion.
Give everyone a gigabyte or more of online storage space. Provide multiple ways to access it. That should include ssh, webdav over SSL (very important IMO), and possibly crappy-old FTP though I'd personally try to avoid providing any non-secure protocols. Then provide simple instructions on how to use it, probbably primarily through webdav. Windows has built-in support for webdav since Win98, though I think 98 doesn't support HTTPS. You also might consider setting up SAMBA or NFS, though that's a bit more tricky to operate over a WAN.