Live responsibly within your means and these are not critical problems. Live a lifestyle that is only sustainable through borrowed money and just about everything is a crisis. It doesn't take vast riches to live without borrowing money, it just takes an attitude adjustment, and the earlier you make it the easier it is.
Come talk to me after you've had a major life reversal. Perhaps unemployment for a long period of time. Perhaps a serious illness that, even with insurance, drains your savings (you do have insurance, don't you?). Perhaps an ugly divorce where you lose a significant portion of savings, real estate, etc. Certainly many people live beyond their means, but this is not always the case, and your simplistic pronouncement is, in many cases, without merit.
Admitted collusion to retaliate against an individual by an organized group? I think that's against some law somewhere, isn't it? Nah -- I must be mistaken -- it must be legit, or surely the kind, gentle, and benevolent music industry wouldn't even consider it!
to a collection agency. Let the agency buy the loan at a discount and then harrangue state officials until they ante up. It would be good for the officials to experience the same kind of pressure and hectoring that they allow consumers to endure...
Now the phone and Wi-Fi industries can tout their offerings as "medical devices" and jack up the selling price. Meanwhile, aluminum futures will crater is it can be "proven" that tin-foil hats block "beneficial" radio frequencies...
If the grammar of the posters on the ICQ message board is any indication I'd say that their ICQ accounts were deleted because AOL was ashamed to have such illiterate messages on its network...
Sure, you can't know everything - but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't know the difference between a bit and a byte, a chainsaw and a drill press, a cell and an organ, an oak tree and a pine tree, limestone and granite, diesel fuel and gasoline, an assault rifle and a machine gun, etc.
At that level of granularity I'd agree. But that's not the point of Schneier's article. His point is that you can't know enough about a class of products to make an informed decision. To use your example, yes, I'm perfectly aware of the difference between a chainsaw and a drillpress. But if I were to try to make a decision about whether drillpress "A" is technically superior to drillpress "B", I'm simply out of my league. Sure -- I can ask around, but outside of hard-core hobbyists (or people who make their living as drillpress operators), there just isn't that much general knowlege of drillpresses floating around. Schneir even makes the point that if he, as a security professional, can't make an informed decision on certain classes of products, how can the layman be expected to do better? Or maybe it's just me.
Maybe if we stopped calling people lazy and taught them just the basics (what RAM does, what a hard drive does etc.) they would understand marketing for the bullshit it is and see through it. But instead we sit here going "lol idiots, too lazy! idiots!" and end up having to slave over their mistakes.
I agree with you to a certain extent, but let's face it -- no one can be a "Renaissance Man" (or woman) any more -- there just isn't time. That's why we have a division of labor -- so that you can do what you do, I can do what I do, and, hopefully, someone will pay us to do it so that they can do what they do. We make our living trading our expertise, not doing everything ourselves. It's easy to be informed about your field, less so to be adequately informed about, say, 5 fields external to yours, and impossible to be informed about every field, even to some minimum degree. That's why the marketers win...
Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science. At one time, she said, admission to the program depended on high overall achievement and programming experience. The criteria now, she said, are high overall achievement and broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders.
Sure -- let's kill the emphasis on programming proficiency. Who cares if the program works or not so long as you feel good about it. Please!
Also, though I think this particular hypothetical situation works out okay, I'm not at all convinced that there are no situations where this would be damaging. Nor am I convinced that this hypothetical situation would be especially ethical on walmart's part just because in my opinion the damage wouldn't be that bad (the cost-benefit tradeoff is also unfortunate: if I'm right, nothing happens, fine. If I'm wrong, trademark abuse just forced a small vendor out of business. Whoops.)...
You're likely right, but please tell me -- what situations or constructs you can think of that are universally fair? Regardless of legislative zeal, once cannot mandate "fairness". There will always be something situation that someone considers unfair.
Either there is some serious wrong doing by MSFT like bribing IT managers and giving kick backs to PC vendors. Or these people are really dumb. Still I think the time to celebrate is when corporate America decides not lock up their data in a format owned by someone else. Politicians are fickle. A few thousand in campaign contributions they will sing MSFT anthem and betray their voters.
Sorry, but you have it exactly backwards. I spent 12 years working for various government contractors. Contractors need to be able to read bidding specifications, supply documents for bids, pose questions regarding bidding specs, provide cost analysis data, etc. to the Government. If the Government uses Word and Excel, for example, so does the contractor. If you have a prime/subcontractor relationship, then all of the subs will use Word and Excel as well, as that is what the prime uses to communicate with the Government. OTOH, if the Government breaks the mold and begins to use ODF, then the Government's supply chain will as well. The Government is big enough to pull this off, but no single company can do the same.
I'm just saying that logically, if you look past the hubris and near-sightedness of our race we are most likely not alone.
Actually, we probably are. Gort and his robot buddies likely finished off all the other races because there was no one there to scream "Klattu baradda nictu" before the laser beams went off. Sheesh!
We find a way to induce global cooling. A glacier a mile or so thick sitting atop Yellowstone ought to be enough to contain the blast, don't you think?
I've recorded from nerve cells in the classical manner and run the parametrics on different ionic concentrations and it would take quite a solid argument backed up by data for me to displace any of the credibility built on the classic Hodgkin and Huxley work.
But, like, we could all still be like, a skin cell under God's fingernail though. Right? Right? [takes another toke]
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Now the states will have to give back all that money to RJ Reynolds. Cigarettes are theraputic, just like they always claimed!
I thought that's how /. worked???
Admitted collusion to retaliate against an individual by an organized group? I think that's against some law somewhere, isn't it? Nah -- I must be mistaken -- it must be legit, or surely the kind, gentle, and benevolent music industry wouldn't even consider it!
So that's what really killed off the dinosaurs!
how well a John Deere combine fits into one of those things...
to a collection agency. Let the agency buy the loan at a discount and then harrangue state officials until they ante up. It would be good for the officials to experience the same kind of pressure and hectoring that they allow consumers to endure...
Data! Is that you? "I am fully functional and skilled in various methods of pleasuring"
Now the phone and Wi-Fi industries can tout their offerings as "medical devices" and jack up the selling price. Meanwhile, aluminum futures will crater is it can be "proven" that tin-foil hats block "beneficial" radio frequencies...
If the grammar of the posters on the ICQ message board is any indication I'd say that their ICQ accounts were deleted because AOL was ashamed to have such illiterate messages on its network...
It's the aliens!!
We find a way to induce global cooling. A glacier a mile or so thick sitting atop Yellowstone ought to be enough to contain the blast, don't you think?