Re:no laughing matter (and how to avoid it)
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Merck's Deleted Data
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· Score: 1
I don't believe the 5th ammendment applies to corporations trying to hide knowledge of the danger of their products, at least not in civil court. The tobacco companies were crucified over the contents of their internal memos showing they knew nicotine was addictive. If Merck was proven to hide negative information about their drugs, maybe the 5th protects them from criminal prosecution (I don't know) but the ambulance chasing lawyers would have an absolute field day suing them into oblivion.
Instead they're more like special-purpose hardware for special-purpose software, something like the PDA you mention only marketed as a laptop.
It sounds fairly functional to me: a 12 inch screen, 500 mhz, and apparently 1 GB of flash memory to start.
1 GB isn't a lot to us, but ten years ago I was running linux on a 90 mhz computer with 1 GB hard drive and 16 megs of RAM, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. It had X and gcc, which opens the door to practically everything else.
I just think some of these skeptics have no vision. From the article:
"Most schools in the developing world don't even have textbooks," says Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute. "How the heck are they going to pay for Internet access?"
Well, if the kids have laptops they can stop spending tons of money on dead-tree textbooks, for one thing, and everybody can have all the up-to-date texts they want. There - one step closer to affording the Internet.
Besides, computers were already cool before the Internet came along.
What consumer media needs that much space right now?... Season one of Trek on one disc, now that would be nice.
Bingo! Consumers would go for that. But I don't think the content producers will be among the first to go for it, or maybe never. They want to control the format for themselves, and they're slow adopters.
1 TB may sound like a lot, but you'll see... it will end up with only 750GB formatted capacity, and won't be available for a couple years yet, and won't be affordable for a few more years after that. By then 2TB drives will be $150 and we'll all have HD camcorders and we'll say "sheesh, I wish these lousy HVDs were big enough to back up my whole hard drive."
Wait for a de facto standard or wait until somebody makes a player that can handle both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. It's what I did with the whole DVD+/- mess.
Me too. But you know what? It still hasn't worked out. I consider the DVD virtually a failure so far as a writable medium goes. The letters "DVD" on a device do NOT ensure compatibility. You burn a DVD, you never know whether it will work in another machine. It's a nightmare, like floppy disks.
With the success rate of mass-produced DVDs only 80%, to me that does not bode well for reliably creating these things with sub-$100 home burners. I hope I'm wrong.
FTFA "The sell order, which was more than the available shares, somehow went through the TSE system.
That to me is much more disturbing.
Only government gets to make money out of thin air just by printing more:)
Re:Everything since HTML has been too complex
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The Future of HTML
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· Score: 1
I'm still not convinced that CSS is very useful. The main advantage seems to be that you can change the appearance of a web page after the fact. Nobody cares about that. At least not enough people to make it fly. We've already been down this road with LaTeX, the ability to change the style or formatting around all the time just isn't worth the extra hassle up front. This is one of the main things leading to the pollution of HTML too: the idea behind HTML was to specify the semantics and let the end-user determine the appearance of pages. But the end-users didn't really want that control, and content producers all required control over the appearance of their product so they inevitably started abusing and extending HTML.
There has to be a common infrastructure; in this case the different IM backbones need to be connected, addressing needs to be tackled (I have the same alias on AIM and Yahoo, e.g.). For this to happen, a lot of the leaders are going to have to cooperate and conform to an open standard & directory.
But even there, things can go wrong. Vonage locks down their users' SIP boxes so they cannot receive direct VOIP calls, only over the Vonage POTS bridge. Bummer.
Sometimes I wonder how the Internet ever got big without getting strangled and destroyed by competing business interests. But I guess it's never too late for that.
I think you are 100% correct. If we're getting into the business of truly locking down computers, we have to be very careful about who ends up locked out, because it might be us. You can't make idiot-proof security without stripping the user of authority.
OTOH, the advisors are not going to be impartial, are they? They work for the school.
I would look at switching. If the *earliest* he could graduate is the very *last* semester they'll offer the degree, that sounds very risky. Many people don't end up graduating as soon as they thought they would.
Pat Schoonveld... Now I know who to be pissed at when a/. flash-based ad causes Firefox to munch CPU.
One Firefox feature I truly desire is a "stop" button that will stop all animations (and any other cpu-consuming tasks) within a window. Also I'd like the option to do that automatically for background tabs.
I'm not sure why anybody should be notified at all. Customers knew the risks when they signed up for a credit card, if they didn't know the risks they could have found out. And now nobody has an excuse for not knowing the risks involved.
You are the classic example of somebody who berates individuals for not taking responsibility (for things they have very little control over), while at the same time giving companies carte blanche for utterly reckless irresponsibility. It's bizarre.
Unless the companies who lost the information are willing to be liable for any and all damages caused by the identity theft, not limitted to damaged credit ratings, credibility damage, and all monetary losses, they should definitely inform consumers.
I'll go you one further, I think the law should *compel* them fess up. Most of the interest over identity theft has resulted from the California law which does just that. As a result, we started to hear about things that before would have been secret, and it has really blown the issue wide open. For markets to work well, people must have access to relevant information, such as which companies have bad track records for infosec.
What do you think they mean when they say "...help businesses... benefit from being listed in the major search engines"? I don't think they're implying anything other than the profit motive.
Too bad it wrecks the Internet for the rest of us though. I've found product research increasingly difficult lately. Searches for products lead straight to link farms such as eopinions.com. (I know they would claim legitimacy but 99% of the time their page says "be the first to leave a review..."
If I am a user, what I want is 100% confidence that I am connecting to the correct server. I'm trusting in the DNS chain all the way up to the root server and then on to the authoritative server. What's to keep an attacker from routing me somewhere that I don't want to go?
Secure protocols like ssl already solve the problem at a different level. DNS spoofing might get you connected to the wrong server, but when they fail the key-based challenge you'll know anyways. Even with secure DNS, those higher-level protocols would *still* have to carry out the checks they do now, since even after looking up the correct IP address, your IP packets could be misrouted. So what does secure DNS really buy you?
I'm not saying the authentication protocols already available (say in ssl) are entirely satisfactory, but duplicating them in DNS won't make them any better.
Most likely everyone who already has a.com,.de,.uk,.fr,.ch,.es, etc. tld will just be covering themselves and redirect to their existing site and have to pick these up to fend off another opportunity for cyber-squatting. Smells almost like some kind of tax.
Which is why the whole current scheme of having only a small number of designated top level domains accomplishes nothing..com doesn't really mean "company," it doesn't mean anything. They should just open it up so we can visit http://slashdot/
I don't think labor costs are a good explanation for it, because Microsoft doesn't spend that much on labor anyways. Their cash cow divisions have around 80% profit margins, and most of the remaining 20% probably goes to advertising. Their revenues are pushing $40BN, do you really think they're investing that much in R&D for Windows and Office?
I think this move to India is more akin to Toyota and Honda moving manufacturing to the US (quite a few Toyota and Honda cars are made here). From a narrow economic standpoint it may or may not make sense, but to have a real foothold somewhere you need to be there, paying salaries. It might culminate in what some will call political subversion, but I don't think it's reasonable to simply call it a bribe.
Interesting discussion. I wonder how much Indian IT workers make compared to Americans when adjusted for PPP? To what extent are we fat, overpaid, and lazy, and to what extent are we just victims of $2500 mortgage payments?
I was trying to tell whether the virus is really linked to Nazis, or whether VeriSign just looked up Jan 5 in a "this day in history" calendar and made up the connection. There are only 365 days in a year, so they're fairly crowded with anniversaries.
However, the article does say the virus sends "politically motivated" email. Anybody have more detail?
Criticism of IQ testing is almost irrelevant. Any genetic marker that can predict significant variation in a paper and pencil test is pretty amazing!
The practical value, I'm not quite sure. It's easier and cheaper to administer a paper and pencil test than a genetic test anyways. Unless of course you don't want somebody to know they're being tested...
We do it [slavery] every day, a little bit at a time, when we go to work.
Not me. I could quit at any time, without even getting lynched. The threat of quitting is quite an innovation in employment policy if I do say so myself. It really cuts down on the bullwhipping and employee rape and whatnot.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe the 5th ammendment applies to corporations trying to hide knowledge of the danger of their products, at least not in civil court. The tobacco companies were crucified over the contents of their internal memos showing they knew nicotine was addictive. If Merck was proven to hide negative information about their drugs, maybe the 5th protects them from criminal prosecution (I don't know) but the ambulance chasing lawyers would have an absolute field day suing them into oblivion.
1 GB isn't a lot to us, but ten years ago I was running linux on a 90 mhz computer with 1 GB hard drive and 16 megs of RAM, and thought it was the greatest thing ever. It had X and gcc, which opens the door to practically everything else.
I just think some of these skeptics have no vision. From the article:
Well, if the kids have laptops they can stop spending tons of money on dead-tree textbooks, for one thing, and everybody can have all the up-to-date texts they want. There - one step closer to affording the Internet.Besides, computers were already cool before the Internet came along.
Bart is a boy. If they'd started him out with a real boy's voice 15 years ago, it would be a little wierd by now.
1 TB may sound like a lot, but you'll see... it will end up with only 750GB formatted capacity, and won't be available for a couple years yet, and won't be affordable for a few more years after that. By then 2TB drives will be $150 and we'll all have HD camcorders and we'll say "sheesh, I wish these lousy HVDs were big enough to back up my whole hard drive."
With the success rate of mass-produced DVDs only 80%, to me that does not bode well for reliably creating these things with sub-$100 home burners. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm still not convinced that CSS is very useful. The main advantage seems to be that you can change the appearance of a web page after the fact. Nobody cares about that. At least not enough people to make it fly. We've already been down this road with LaTeX, the ability to change the style or formatting around all the time just isn't worth the extra hassle up front. This is one of the main things leading to the pollution of HTML too: the idea behind HTML was to specify the semantics and let the end-user determine the appearance of pages. But the end-users didn't really want that control, and content producers all required control over the appearance of their product so they inevitably started abusing and extending HTML.
But even there, things can go wrong. Vonage locks down their users' SIP boxes so they cannot receive direct VOIP calls, only over the Vonage POTS bridge. Bummer.
Sometimes I wonder how the Internet ever got big without getting strangled and destroyed by competing business interests. But I guess it's never too late for that.
I think you are 100% correct. If we're getting into the business of truly locking down computers, we have to be very careful about who ends up locked out, because it might be us. You can't make idiot-proof security without stripping the user of authority.
Gutting the medical school can't be good for the biomed program can it?
I would look at switching. If the *earliest* he could graduate is the very *last* semester they'll offer the degree, that sounds very risky. Many people don't end up graduating as soon as they thought they would.
Too bad it wrecks the Internet for the rest of us though. I've found product research increasingly difficult lately. Searches for products lead straight to link farms such as eopinions.com. (I know they would claim legitimacy but 99% of the time their page says "be the first to leave a review..."
I'm not saying the authentication protocols already available (say in ssl) are entirely satisfactory, but duplicating them in DNS won't make them any better.
I think this move to India is more akin to Toyota and Honda moving manufacturing to the US (quite a few Toyota and Honda cars are made here). From a narrow economic standpoint it may or may not make sense, but to have a real foothold somewhere you need to be there, paying salaries. It might culminate in what some will call political subversion, but I don't think it's reasonable to simply call it a bribe.
Interesting discussion. I wonder how much Indian IT workers make compared to Americans when adjusted for PPP? To what extent are we fat, overpaid, and lazy, and to what extent are we just victims of $2500 mortgage payments?
But all Microsoft needs is a controlling interest :)
However, the article does say the virus sends "politically motivated" email. Anybody have more detail?
The practical value, I'm not quite sure. It's easier and cheaper to administer a paper and pencil test than a genetic test anyways. Unless of course you don't want somebody to know they're being tested...