The normal word to use in this context is "disgruntled." Disgruntled employees are security risks because they may be out for revenge. No, that wouldn't include somebody unhappy because of a death in the family - unless I guess they were so distraught as to be demonstrably unhinged.
Obviously the summary (and the story) use the word "unhappy" to make it seem (more?) unreasonable than it is, as usual.
Extremist ideologies all end up the same. Remember near the end of Atlas Shrugged where the hero blows out the brains of some guard because he doesn't have any clue about the hero's ideology (or perhaps doesn't agree with it)?
There is a certain philosophical consistency to liking both "The Communist Manifesto" and "Mein Kampf", but Ayn Rand doesn't fit there anywhere.
I disagree. They are all consistent with a simpleton - a person attracted to simplistic solutions to complex real-world problems. But that's completely normal for a 20 year old.
That is disappointing. My other disappointment is that this will be taped and therefore perhaps edited before airing. This lowers the bar from "working every time" to "working sometimes." You roboticists know what I mean:)
That's a silly claim. Insider threats are impossible to defend against completely. After all, if nobody has access to the information, it is useless. Even the banking industry runs on the principle that you cannot stop employees from stealing, but you can usually make their actions auditable so you can catch them afterwards. Yes the DoD can be faulted for not following the principle of least privilege, on the other hand the US security apparatus was criticized after 911 for being too compartmentalized and thus failing to put all the pieces together. They can do better, but ultimately it is a difficult problem.
You had specialized viewers and clients for various data, then gradually the web became more mature and more and more data was simply put on a website. Now we are gradually going back to the specialized viewer mentality.
I agree, but I am hopeful, because apps are almost certainly a transitory phase.
There's been a lot of innovation in wireless handhelds in the last few years. There was a valid need to "break the mould" and explore new ways of doing things. Standardization comes later, once things settle down. As new UI idioms settle in, developers will notice increasing redundancy in all the apps and start developing standards that capture the commonality. In the end, just as how the web matured for PCs, you won't have to contend with a dozen slight variations on readers or players (or whatever end up being the killer apps), and there will be a way for most content producers to just focus on their content and not have to program applications. That said, it won't be a return to what the web circa 2007, either, it will be something that incorporates the best innovations of the apps.
The unspoken comparison here is that commercial, proprietary software represents Freedom and the American Way while FOSS is the product of greasy hippies who have once again sold out democracy in pursuit of their Leftist ideals.
I expected it to read that way. But for me, it didn't:
For ordinary Internet users, there is one silver lining: The embrace of open-source technology by governments may result in more intuitive software applications, written by a more diverse set of developers. The possible downside is that the era of globally oriented services like Skype may soon come to an end, as they are replaced by almost certainly less user-friendly domestic alternatives that would provide secret back-door access. As governments seek to assert control, companies will be providing fewer and fewer guarantees about both data security and access by third parties--such as governments.
The embrace of what will result in more intuitive software? Open-source technology.
Who will be providing fewer guarantees about security and privacy? Companies.
Tycoons and hippies (to use opposite caricatures) have something in common - distrust of government. That sentiment does pervade the article, but it's getting harder to find anybody who will take issue with it.
That may be true of the people who were eventually successful. But ever since the release of the console, there's been an incentive for crooks to break the security to use pirated games, or cheat in online gaming (which Other OS did not allow). Whatever the claims about PS3 DRM being flawed, it successfully thwarted piracy and cheating from Nov 2006 until now. And whatever GeoHot's personal motivations, the doors are now wide open for the less skilled crooks.
Perhaps the tour-guide's figures were already inflation-adjusted?
Anyways, it really didn't take a brain to rake in investment money in postwar America, whether by stocks, real estate, or even simply buying a home. The economy and population were mushrooming, so those who started with anything found it multiplied over and over. Now a lot of that unearned income is being repaid by people upside-down on their mortgages, the govt. bank bailouts, etc.
Solving Sudoku is easy compared to the visual processing they're doing to recognize the puzzle from an image in the first place. I wonder how robust it is.
But money talks, and people like low monthly bills. T-Mobile might drain off all the high-profit customers who don't want or need video, and not care to subsidize others' use of it.
Not even offering high-end plan (for a higher price) does relegate them to the low-rent district of mobile providers, though.
Is anybody using the videoconferencing support of the new 2-camera phones? (And not just over WiFi?) That would suck up some bandwidth.
I would like to be able to use a smartphone to stream netflix video (or amazon video etc...) onto the treadmill screen at the gym. (Currently I have to copy & recompress DVDs onto an iPod Video to do this, which is somewhat of a nuisance, especially since Linux can only play/rip probably 80% of DVDs).
We're lucky enough not to live in times of extreme scarcity, and most things are not zero sum. In the long run, seeing everybody as either an ally or an enemy in the grim struggle for... what exactly?... will get tiring. Go for a hike in the mountains, spend time with your loved ones. It's good to have some struggle, but not everything has to be a selfish competition.
Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?! No wonder the program has failed and is such a joke.
It is absurd to say that SS has failed or is a joke. Without it, millions of elderly would live in poverty, just as they did before the program was instituted, only moreso, since people live longer now.
When a nation's demographics skew older, it is overall less productive and so less wealthy. The effects of that are felt in many ways, including increased direct burden of supporting the elderly. Compared to other nations where the birth rate and immigration are lower, the US is actually in pretty good shape. Adjusting SS for the demographic changes is politically painful, but not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
It's not ironic. If you look at the PDF of the document itself, every page of the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified, it's not even Official Use Only, from scanning the document I didn't see anything indicating anybody was supposed to restrict its circulation.
If anything, it bothers me a little that techspot is treating this as a coup (it's not even on MSNBC's front page), since there's no reason this document should be kept secret, and thus it should not be, since the policy may affect many people and should therefore be a matter of public discussion. The default in government should be openness, not secrecy.
the caps are 20gb/month as per bells latest filing with the crtc. they used to be 60gb on bells network.
Yeow. The 20GB/mo plan better be cheap. If the webpage I just check is to be believed, Netflix streaming is almost 2 GB/hr (or 3 for HD). I just tallied my family's Netflix streaming for the last from Dec 9 through Jan 8 and got 22 hours, so figure 50 GB. And that's not counting Youtube (which my kids watch quite a bit) or the occasional paid streaming movie from Amazon. Then Internet phone (ooma). I suppose good old fashioned email and web browsing still add a little more too.
I grouse at Comcast for not lowering prices as networking technology improves, but our bandwidth usage probably went up by a factor of 5 when we got an Internet-enabled TV.
You mean the nut-case contingent? Yes. Probably they will feel a nasty backlash.
OK, I went and watched the shooter's youtube videos, such as this one. The guy really seems paranoid. Anti-government, yes; pro-gold-standard, yes; but mainly, paranoid - not even very coherent.
Not until the very last line of the article do we read, "Currently, only a small percentage of users download enough data to hit these new caps. But many fear these fees will soon apply to everyone as the internet becomes more video based."
This writeup isn't too useful without stating the caps, nor the percentage who currently exceed them.
As for the percentage who may exceed them in, say, 3 years... well, it's the future, a lot could change including the caps themselves.
Easier said than done. Always triggering the right alarm - and only the right alarm - amounts to creating a system that somehow knows exactly how to handle any situation, no matter how complex. Otherwise it will certainly trigger alarms for secondary problems without knowing they have a common cause, or trigger alarms for problems that would normally be serious enough to warrant attention, but don't rise to that level due to dire circumstances.
And if you could make a perfect detector like that, you'd hardly need to alert people. You'd just automate the whole thing.
I do feel bad for the individuals who were killed, on a personal level. And yet, this is also a very explicitly political event. She wasn't killed by a mugger too dumb to know who she was, it was at a rally. So far we don't know who it was or why they did it. But whichever side they're on is going to feel as nasty backlash.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the summary (and the story) use the word "unhappy" to make it seem (more?) unreasonable than it is, as usual.
You even have a month to buy in to the old plan if you so desire, which I find surprising.
Extremist ideologies all end up the same. Remember near the end of Atlas Shrugged where the hero blows out the brains of some guard because he doesn't have any clue about the hero's ideology (or perhaps doesn't agree with it)?
I disagree. They are all consistent with a simpleton - a person attracted to simplistic solutions to complex real-world problems. But that's completely normal for a 20 year old.
If his messages are anything like most of what I hear on XBox Live, they will be immensely useful in establishing his insanity.
That is disappointing. My other disappointment is that this will be taped and therefore perhaps edited before airing. This lowers the bar from "working every time" to "working sometimes." You roboticists know what I mean :)
That's a silly claim. Insider threats are impossible to defend against completely. After all, if nobody has access to the information, it is useless. Even the banking industry runs on the principle that you cannot stop employees from stealing, but you can usually make their actions auditable so you can catch them afterwards. Yes the DoD can be faulted for not following the principle of least privilege, on the other hand the US security apparatus was criticized after 911 for being too compartmentalized and thus failing to put all the pieces together. They can do better, but ultimately it is a difficult problem.
I agree, but I am hopeful, because apps are almost certainly a transitory phase.
There's been a lot of innovation in wireless handhelds in the last few years. There was a valid need to "break the mould" and explore new ways of doing things. Standardization comes later, once things settle down. As new UI idioms settle in, developers will notice increasing redundancy in all the apps and start developing standards that capture the commonality. In the end, just as how the web matured for PCs, you won't have to contend with a dozen slight variations on readers or players (or whatever end up being the killer apps), and there will be a way for most content producers to just focus on their content and not have to program applications. That said, it won't be a return to what the web circa 2007, either, it will be something that incorporates the best innovations of the apps.
I expected it to read that way. But for me, it didn't:
The embrace of what will result in more intuitive software? Open-source technology.
Who will be providing fewer guarantees about security and privacy? Companies.
Tycoons and hippies (to use opposite caricatures) have something in common - distrust of government. That sentiment does pervade the article, but it's getting harder to find anybody who will take issue with it.
That may be true of the people who were eventually successful. But ever since the release of the console, there's been an incentive for crooks to break the security to use pirated games, or cheat in online gaming (which Other OS did not allow). Whatever the claims about PS3 DRM being flawed, it successfully thwarted piracy and cheating from Nov 2006 until now. And whatever GeoHot's personal motivations, the doors are now wide open for the less skilled crooks.
Anyways, it really didn't take a brain to rake in investment money in postwar America, whether by stocks, real estate, or even simply buying a home. The economy and population were mushrooming, so those who started with anything found it multiplied over and over. Now a lot of that unearned income is being repaid by people upside-down on their mortgages, the govt. bank bailouts, etc.
Yeah, probably. But try implementing like that sometime, it isn't easy to make it really work well.
Solving Sudoku is easy compared to the visual processing they're doing to recognize the puzzle from an image in the first place. I wonder how robust it is.
Not even offering high-end plan (for a higher price) does relegate them to the low-rent district of mobile providers, though.
I would like to be able to use a smartphone to stream netflix video (or amazon video etc...) onto the treadmill screen at the gym. (Currently I have to copy & recompress DVDs onto an iPod Video to do this, which is somewhat of a nuisance, especially since Linux can only play/rip probably 80% of DVDs).
We're lucky enough not to live in times of extreme scarcity, and most things are not zero sum. In the long run, seeing everybody as either an ally or an enemy in the grim struggle for... what exactly?... will get tiring. Go for a hike in the mountains, spend time with your loved ones. It's good to have some struggle, but not everything has to be a selfish competition.
Congratulations, and welcome to the False Dichotomy Hall of Fame!
It is absurd to say that SS has failed or is a joke. Without it, millions of elderly would live in poverty, just as they did before the program was instituted, only moreso, since people live longer now.
When a nation's demographics skew older, it is overall less productive and so less wealthy. The effects of that are felt in many ways, including increased direct burden of supporting the elderly. Compared to other nations where the birth rate and immigration are lower, the US is actually in pretty good shape. Adjusting SS for the demographic changes is politically painful, but not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
If anything, it bothers me a little that techspot is treating this as a coup (it's not even on MSNBC's front page), since there's no reason this document should be kept secret, and thus it should not be, since the policy may affect many people and should therefore be a matter of public discussion. The default in government should be openness, not secrecy.
Yeow. The 20GB/mo plan better be cheap. If the webpage I just check is to be believed, Netflix streaming is almost 2 GB/hr (or 3 for HD). I just tallied my family's Netflix streaming for the last from Dec 9 through Jan 8 and got 22 hours, so figure 50 GB. And that's not counting Youtube (which my kids watch quite a bit) or the occasional paid streaming movie from Amazon. Then Internet phone (ooma). I suppose good old fashioned email and web browsing still add a little more too.
I grouse at Comcast for not lowering prices as networking technology improves, but our bandwidth usage probably went up by a factor of 5 when we got an Internet-enabled TV.
OK, I went and watched the shooter's youtube videos, such as this one. The guy really seems paranoid. Anti-government, yes; pro-gold-standard, yes; but mainly, paranoid - not even very coherent.
These things don't happen in a vacuum. They're culturally dependent. Look how many school shootings there have been since Columbine set the precedent.
This writeup isn't too useful without stating the caps, nor the percentage who currently exceed them.
As for the percentage who may exceed them in, say, 3 years... well, it's the future, a lot could change including the caps themselves.
And if you could make a perfect detector like that, you'd hardly need to alert people. You'd just automate the whole thing.
I do feel bad for the individuals who were killed, on a personal level. And yet, this is also a very explicitly political event. She wasn't killed by a mugger too dumb to know who she was, it was at a rally. So far we don't know who it was or why they did it. But whichever side they're on is going to feel as nasty backlash.