I didn't even know vi had an editing mode for Emacs lisp code. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Out of curiosity, do they run vi directly on the bare metal, or from within Emacs?
> Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.
Kids these days, you don't know your history.
I still remember the first time I managed to get my hands on a pre-release Emacs source tarball and compile my own copy *before* it was officially available. Somebody had inadvertently let slip the ftp address where the developers were keeping it to someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut, and it got posted to usenet.
> but remember we're talking about thousands of *Americans* dying.
Thousands of Americans die every single day. And yet, somehow, the rest of us manage to go about our business most of the time, almost as if there were nothing spectacularly unusual about living in a world where everyone who is born dies sooner or later.
> so you can't even bring a handbag and a shopping > bag, or a handbag and a piece of luggage aboard > the plane (it does seem to unfairly target women).
It only targets women unfairly if you assume that women carry those items (handbags, shopping bags, diaper bags, whatever) more often than the rest of the population. Which, despite what you may actually have observed, would still be politically indiscreet to suggest, wouldn't it? Therefore, if the same rules apply to women as to men, the rules must be deemed fair.
Extreme political correctness cuts both ways, see.
> You needn't necessarily be concerned about the acts > of terrorism in Europe, but you may want to look to > them to see an alternative method of dealing with attacks.
Or look at Israel. They're the target of easily more terrorism than any other country (perhaps all other countries combined), so anything that's above and beyond the measures Israel takes is probably excessive.
Does Israel stop plane passengers from leaving their seats during the last hour of the flight? Do they confiscate bottled water? If they don't, then I'm betting we don't need to either.
> Terrorists don't attack the US because the US cause > X deaths a year...they attack us because we dropped > a bomb on their sister. Or tortured their cousin.
In the case of middle-eastern terrorists, I think it's mostly because we've maintained positive diplomatic relations with Israel since 1948 and consistently defended their right to exist as a sovereign nation. Other nations they've targeted (e.g., England) have historically been allies of Israel as well; whereas, nations that have *not* been allies of Israel have not been targeted, even if they have been involved in military actions in the region (Russia springs immediately to mind here).
And, for the US, most terrorists to date have either been middle-eastern or good old-fashioned homegrown domestic lunatics (like the Oklahoma City dude). I've seen movies about terrorists from other regions (like the Balkans) attacking the US because we were involved in wars that claimed their relatives, but in the real world I am not aware of any instance of this having actually happened. It sounds plausible, but as far as I know, it's fiction, at least so far.
> Thousands of people dying cannot reasonably > be described as a "minor annoyance."
I don't think you have any conception of how *big* the United States is. *Millions* of Americans die every year, normally, as a matter of course. (Even if nobody ever died of anything but old age, this would still be true.) For the nation as a whole, thousands of people dying is a *very* minor annoyance. If the same number of people had died at home in their beds that morning, you wouldn't have noticed. It only bothers you because you saw video footage of a big scary crash.
An appropriate response to the event, if Americans were all rational, would be to change the rules for what to do in the event of a hijacking from "give them whatever they want" to "keep them out of the cockpit no matter what". The only reason any additional measures are needed beyond that is because people are irrational and will be afraid to fly if something isn't done to reassure them -- even though these same people will happily get into a car and drive on the public roads, which is much more dangerous.
I agree with you about notability, for the most part. The original intention of the rule was to get rid of completely pointless articles written by college students about the guys across the hall, and that sort of nonsense. And that's all well and good. But sometimes it's applied too strictly. Breadth of coverage is Wikipedia's greatest strength. Excessively strict notability rules harm that.
The "citation needed" rule has also been applied far too pervasively. Citations *are* needed, but a typical article should have ten or twenty of them, not fifty or a hundred, and there is absolutely no reason to have citations on basic information that anyone educated in the relevant field would be expected to know. When the article says "rap is a style of music that arose in the second half of the twentieth century", there is no need for a citation on that.
However, I feel the opposite way about the original research rule. That one needs to be enforced more consistently. There are entire articles that are nothing more than the random musings of a couple of editors, with no meaningful citations at all. Occasionally such articles have even been featured on the front page (e.g., the Terraforming of Mars article). Such articles ought to be deleted so that a proper article on the topic can be created without bumping into namespace collisions.
Come on. Deploy twenty-three *thousand* cameras, on rotating stands so they each observe a wider swath, and you might be getting somewhat close to having enough resources to watch a good chunk of the border.
But I'm not sure what you gain by exposing the footage to the internet. If you don't have border patrol agents stationed close enough to each camera to respond promptly if someone is seen crossing there, there's not much point, and if you do have border patrol agents stationed, why can't they watch the (output of the) cameras while they wait for something to happen?
> You show me a naked terrorist on an airliner and > I'll show you an unarmed terrorist on an airliner.
Apparently you've never heard of an explosives mule. That's all we need, some terrorist pulling a bag of C4 out of his colon and regurgitating the detonator...
The correct solution is to chill just a little. If an educated and intelligent person is determined to blow up the plane and willing to die doing it, he'll find a way. Fortunately, most intelligent and educated people don't really want to blow up a plane while they're on it. (Those who are genuinely suicidal usually are depressed and want to be alone. "Suicidal" cases who seek out people are usually willing to be talked out of it.) It's not a big problem. Flying on a commercial jet is a good deal safer than riding in a car, so what's the big deal? The big deal is, (most) passengers don't fly on a plane every day like they ride in a car every day, so they're a little more easily unnerved. So basically we just need enough airplane security that people aren't too afraid to fly. That's it. That's all we need. We don't have to effectively prevent every possible attack scenario. It's neither necessary nor practical. Do we prevent every possible motor vehicle accident?
Schneier argues that a lot of the TSA's measures are security theater: they are designed to increase the *perception* of security, rather than to increase actual security. This is true. What he fails to note (or at least fails to emphasize) is that this is actually what's needed. Fear of flying on an airplane, when you're willing to ride in a car every day, is completely irrational, so measures taken to reassure people don't have to be strictly logical. They just have to reassure people.
Running everyone's shoes through the x-ray machine is an example of a good and appropriate measure. In the first place, it's only an extremely minor inconvenience (the carry-on baggage is going through anyway, as was the case even before 9/11; sending the shoes through too is no big deal), and in the second place it significantly allays the fear that someone might bring a shoe-bomb on. If the passengers were all rational this would make little sense: the x-ray machine isn't designed to notice plastic explosives, and the detonator is unlikely to be in the shoe. But rationally the chances of a shoe-bomb on your flight are negligible anyway, so that's not the point. The point is there was a scary story about a shoe bomb on a plane in the news a while back, and people who are nervous about flying remember it and can get jumpy (or jumpier). If you run all the shoes through the x-ray machine, they calm down a bit and realize that their flight probably won't be blown up by a shoe bomb after all.
The metal detectors are similarly appropriate. They won't in practice stop an educated, intelligent, determined person from bringing a weapon on board. You can make a knife or a blowgun out of any solid material, not just metal. But that's not the point. (To protect against that, you'd secure the cockpit door to prevent hijacking and *maybe* give an approved weapon to a trusted and trained person, such as an air marshal.) The point is, if everyone goes through the metal detector, grandma's somewhat less worried that the "shifty-looking" passenger over there might be an armed terrorist. See? He's going through the metal detector like everyone else. He doesn't have a gun. It's okay, grandma, now let's go find our gate. This is all well and good.
However, I do think some of the measures have been taken a little farther than is necessary. I mean, come on, water? Really, water? Is *anyone* afraid that the water might be a bomb? Anyone?
> Do people really care if their name is published on Twitter? > If they'd really want to embarrass drunk drivers, force them > to drive around with a pink license plate
Stop dorking around with them and just take away their driving privileges. Permanently, if they're over eighteen, or until they turn twenty-one, if they're not eighteen yet.
If they're caught driving again after having their privileges revoked for drunk driving, throw them in the slammer for ten years or so, and on repeat offenses just execute them. Stop mollycoddling the drunk drivers. They are not victims. They are, by choice, a public danger and a menace. Treat them as such.
Operating a motor vehicle on a public road is inherently dangerous, not just to yourself, but more importantly to others. *Most* people shouldn't be doing it in the first place, because most people aren't careful enough to be entrusted with the responsibility. But everyone wants to drive. Well, alright, if you want to drive, demonstrate that you can at least exercise a *minimal* amount of care by following basic safety rules, such as not driving while drunk. If you can't even manage that, well then you can just walk, or take the bus, or hire a qualified professional driver with the good sense to come to work sober.
Motor vehicle accidents cause more fatalities in this country than AIDS and terrorism combined. It is entirely appropriate to treat careless drivers as one of the biggest threats to public safety, because they are. Driving while drunk, driving while texting, driving while surfing the web, driving while drinking coffee, driving while reading a map, driving while getting dressed,... it's careless, and it's not okay, because you're being careless with the lives of everyone on the road. Hand over your driver's license, you cretinous selfish careless good-for-nothing loser. You have clearly demonstrated that you lack the good judgment needed to operate a motor vehicle on a public road. You are a danger to yourself and others.
You may not want to. The way it works for them is, the female captures a male, forces him into her reproductive organ, and clamps down, smothering him. As the male suffocates, his body convulses rapidly (which brings the female pleasure). When he is finally dead, the reproductive pods on his surface rupture, releasing his genetic material, which impregnates the female (if she is not using contraceptives). The pods also release a hormone which causes the female more pleasure. Her reproductive cavity then seals itself off to form a womb, and so she cannot have intercourse again for the duration of the thirty-year gestation period, but the hormone that causes libido continually builds up. When she finally gives birth (to a litter of thousands, most of them male), she can't take it any more and immediately goes looking for (adult) males again, sometimes stuffing three or four in there at once, thus impregnating herself again. By the time she gives birth to the new batch, the former batch of offspring are fully raised and have moved out on their own.
Of course, modern females use contraceptives most of the time, so they can suffocate a couple of males a day without becoming impregnated. This has really helped to even out the gender imbalance in the population.
> Contrary to what the article states, MEarth is not an amateur astronomy group. MEarth is > headed by the former Discover Magazine's Scientist of the Year, Harvard professor David Charbonneau.
Being headed by someone of high qualifications does not in any way preclude being an amateur group, especially in the older senses of the word "amateur".
> they estimate the surface temp. of the planet is 200 deg. C. how is that in the Goldilocks zone?
They're desperate.
You see, they want to find another planet besides Earth that's (at least potentially) capable of supporting life. If they found such a thing, even if there's no life actually on it, it would demonstrate the principle that inhabitable worlds exist besides Earth. This would help them to feel better about their belief that extra-terrestrial intelligent life must exist.
So they're desperate to find Earth-like planets, and desperation leads to lowered standards. A while ago there was one the size of Jupiter and closer to its primary than Mercury, which they were calling "Earth-like" just because it was rocky rather than a gas giant. This one is even better.
> I'd say 85% of infections are from user ignorance
I would have quoted a much higher percentage for infections that an educated user would have avoided. As a rule, people who know what they're doing can, with only a little luck, go *years* without being infected, while complete idiots get new infections every day. Most folks are somewhere in between.
> but the rest is luck and who you have contact with. > (Outlook address books, etc)
Outlook address books only matter if you use inherently unsafe email software (such as Outlook or Outlook Express). Switch to something safe and sane, like Pegasus Mail, and suddenly it won't matter whose address book you're in. Junk will still be sent to you, but there won't be any way for it to infect your computer. Until Outlook came along, the prospect of email-borne malware was purely theoretical. It had never happened. I used to tell users it was basically impossible, because your email software doesn't *execute* the contents of incoming messages, it only *displays* them for you to read. (Yes, theoretically there could be a buffer overflow. But I'm not aware of a single documented instance of a mailreader buffer overflow ever having been exploited in the wild.) Then Microsoft announced that, for convenience, Outlook would have this great new feature wherein it would automatically launch attachments. Everyone in the computer security community responded with lengthy commentary about why this was an incredibly bad idea, but Microsoft didn't listen. The rest is history. Now everyone just assumes you can get malware from reading email, but they forget the rest of the sentence. You can get malware from reading email *if* you use Outlook. So don't do that.
In the last five years or so, Microsoft has significantly improved Outlook's security, and its track record has improved considerably. But you'd still have to be an idiot to want to use it. Its security track record even over the last five years is still worse than any other mailreader in history bar none, and there are much better, much more user-friendly, and much more featureful mailreaders out there anyway.
You say 15% of malware infections are caused by bad luck and circumstances. I say people are making their own bad luck and circumstances.
> > Prohibit the outsourcing of this process > Why?
Given the rest of the discussion, why should be obvious. The thinking is, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of new creative works by providing funding to the artist, *not* to bind up forever large numbers of works that have already been created in the hands of a few large corporations created for the purpose. If only the artist who created the work can renew the copyright, whole categories of abuse (think: RIAA) just go away.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this reasoning, but the motivation behind such a (proposed) restriction is pretty obvious.
> And how does it apply to artists who sell their > copyrights? What if they sell to a company?
A large part of the point of the proposal was to restrict that.
> > This would stop the Disney-ish practice of copyright holders > > removing their their copyrighted works from the market to > > generate a artificial demand later on for their product. > > In what way is the demand artificial?
Now, that's actually a good question. It's understandable you wouldn't know this, if you don't happen to know anyone who's really into Disney movies.
The demand is artificial because they throw a lot of advertising and marketing behind it, announcing *months* ahead of time that stuff will no longer be available after a certain date, so if you *might* ever want it, you have to get it *now*. The first time they did it, they said the movies would not be available again until the year 2000, which at that time (circa 1997) sounded much further away to most people than it actually was. I actually knew a guy who went out and bought several of the movies, which he could not afford at the time (college student), just in case he someday had kids that he'd want to show them to. After he did it, I asked him, "How old would these kids need to be before they could really enjoy these movies?" Oh, he supposed, four or five. "If they were born today, they'd only be three when the movies become available again." "Oh. Yeah." But he wasn't making the decision to buy them with his brain, he was in full-bore emotional panic mode, due to the "you won't have a chance again for a long time" marketing campaign.
Marketing abuses aside, society is impoverished when desired material remains unavailable for long periods of time. Three years, like in the aforementioned Disney stunt, isn't that long. But current copyright law allows an item to remain unavailable for much longer if the copyright holder desires, which *has* been used to keep certain historically important works artificially unavailable for quite long periods of time due to political controversy, which is wholly against the spirit of the US constitution, IMO. I'm not sure I'm in favor of onerous filing fee requirements for renewal (more paperwork's going to make things better? I'm not so sure), but I *am* in favor of works automatically falling into the public domain if they are not available to the public for, say, ten years running.
In the first place, his idea gives you seven years up front for free. When was the last time you used seven-year-old software?
Additionally, while it would be a problem for restrictive open-source licenses (e.g., the GPL), there's plenty of great open-source software that uses attribution licenses, which in practice are only very slightly different from public domain anyway. As long as the project is active, there's still a strong incentive for changes to be contributed back, because otherwise you have to keep merging them with the upstream changes, which gets old real fast (or you can just plain fork, but then you have to re-implement the upstream new features yourself if you want your fork to have them, which isn't any better). Stallmanist dogma notwithstanding, I believe public domain would work just fine as an open-source "license".
This school of thought in economics is called "populism". The main problem with it is that, as a rule, it completely wrecks the economy. Typically, seizing the assets of the wealthy in order to redistribute them to the masses leads to majority unemployment and hyperinflation. Just like twentieth-century South America. Not an advisable course of action.
> The first movies didn't suck like the last three
You didn't *notice* their suckiness, because back then you were accustomed to the assumption that if it was sci-fi or took place in space, ipso facto it must Hoover like a Shop Vac. Up to that point most sci-fi featured cosmic rays as a major plot element, used actors straight out of drama school if you were lucky, and had robots and/or spaceships that were obviously made out of cardboard. So sci-fi audiences were prepared to cut Star Wars a little slack. When it had a real character-driven plot and real costumes and used real state-of-the-art (for the day) special effects and even featured a real professionally-composed sound track consisting of music written just for the film, we were sold. The acting was pretty lousy (especially Luke), but we'd expected that, so it didn't really stand out.
But by the time Episode I came out, sci-fi was a major established film genre, so you expected it to stack up and compare well against, well, anything.
> Luke was in his late teens/very early 20
Yes, Luke was in his late teens and at least twice as wangsty and annoying as little Anakin and teen Anakin combined. "Aw, come on, uncle Owen, I don't want to help around the farm for a whole nother year, I want to go off and have adventures now. Now, now, now!" Sheesh.
Then there's Han. Stop and think? Solve a problem? Nah, let's just argue loudly and incoherently all the time and then when we lose the argument we'll just blast everything.
Speaking of flat stereotype characters, two words: Princess Leia. At least the acting was okay there (not that it was a difficult role).
I'm not saying the prequel movies didn't have some problems. But I don't think they were objectively much worse than the first three. They seemed worse mostly because audience expectations had shifted.
> If it gets too cold, do something to turn it up. > If it gets to hot, do something to turn it down.
That kind of thinking can have unintended consequences. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The insects are a major nuissance, so you introduce a lizard that eats them. But the lizards, with no natural predators, start to take over, so you introduce cats. Now the introduced feral cats are killing off the local birds. When you mess with a system you don't understand, you can really screw things up.
If we understood climate change better, we might be better equipped to try to control it, but the fact is we don't understand it very well at all. For the time being, I think the wisest course of action is to adapt our society to live with whatever climate changes come down the pike (and of course to continue to collect as many data as possible, with a view toward eventually forming a more complete understanding of how stuff works).
> If you're using a lack of SPF records as a determinant > in whether or not a message is spam, then I can guarantee > you that you're losing mail to false positives.
Yeah, that's not how you're supposed to do it. No SPF record means "I don't know whether this is a valid sender for this domain or not", so you fall back to whatever other method you have for making the determination.
Traditionally, the "other method" generally meant accepting everything and letting the users sort it out in the inbox, but there are other things you can do, such as looking at stuff like whether the EHLO domain matches the sending IP, whether the envelope sender matches either of them, whether the From field matches any of the above, whether any of our users have sent mail to this domain in the last N days, and so on and so forth, each of which criteria can be assigned a weight, which can be used to determine whether to accept the message immediately, graylist it (and for how long), subject it to more rigorous (but computationally intensive) regex-based filtering, check for it on collaboratively-maintained blacklists, etc.
And if the domain *has* SPF records and the sending IP isn't in them, you have your choice of greylisting with a lengthy delay, going straight to teargrube mode, or just sending a 554 response immediately. And you can take note of the IP address for future reference.
> I use greylisting as my chief anti-spam weapon, and it's > far more reliable and far more effective than SPF.
Greylisting has problems too. Not least, it causes delays, which can run into multiple minutes. (In some situations, even a thirty-second delay will make the natives restless.) Additionally, if too many mail exchangers do greylisting, the spammers will just implement retries (it's not like it's hard; normal mail servers have been doing it forever). All of this doesn't mean greylisting isn't useful, but it's one tool in the toolbox, not the be-all and end-all. There are a lot of things a mail server can do to try to determine whether a message is spam. None of them individually is very reliable, but you don't have to do just one thing.
Slashdot Mirror
> Is, the code for EMACS is written in vi.
I didn't even know vi had an editing mode for Emacs lisp code. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Out of curiosity, do they run vi directly on the bare metal, or from within Emacs?
> Emacs development is not really very cathedral-y.
Kids these days, you don't know your history.
I still remember the first time I managed to get my hands on a pre-release Emacs source tarball and compile my own copy *before* it was officially available. Somebody had inadvertently let slip the ftp address where the developers were keeping it to someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut, and it got posted to usenet.
> but remember we're talking about thousands of *Americans* dying.
Thousands of Americans die every single day. And yet, somehow, the rest of us manage to go about our business most of the time, almost as if there were nothing spectacularly unusual about living in a world where everyone who is born dies sooner or later.
What if the targets were lawyers, or tax auditors?
> so you can't even bring a handbag and a shopping
> bag, or a handbag and a piece of luggage aboard
> the plane (it does seem to unfairly target women).
It only targets women unfairly if you assume that women carry those items (handbags, shopping bags, diaper bags, whatever) more often than the rest of the population. Which, despite what you may actually have observed, would still be politically indiscreet to suggest, wouldn't it? Therefore, if the same rules apply to women as to men, the rules must be deemed fair.
Extreme political correctness cuts both ways, see.
(Okay, yeah, I'm not entirely serious.)
> You needn't necessarily be concerned about the acts
> of terrorism in Europe, but you may want to look to
> them to see an alternative method of dealing with attacks.
Or look at Israel. They're the target of easily more terrorism than any other country (perhaps all other countries combined), so anything that's above and beyond the measures Israel takes is probably excessive.
Does Israel stop plane passengers from leaving their seats during the last hour of the flight? Do they confiscate bottled water? If they don't, then I'm betting we don't need to either.
> How do you determine someone is innocent?
Easy. Check their DNA to see if they're human. If they're human, they're not completely innocent, I guarantee it. HTH.HAND.
> Innocent of what?
Oh, well, yeah, that's another thing. People can be innocent of a particular offense, sure.
> Terrorists don't attack the US because the US cause
> X deaths a year...they attack us because we dropped
> a bomb on their sister. Or tortured their cousin.
In the case of middle-eastern terrorists, I think it's mostly because we've maintained positive diplomatic relations with Israel since 1948 and consistently defended their right to exist as a sovereign nation. Other nations they've targeted (e.g., England) have historically been allies of Israel as well; whereas, nations that have *not* been allies of Israel have not been targeted, even if they have been involved in military actions in the region (Russia springs immediately to mind here).
And, for the US, most terrorists to date have either been middle-eastern or good old-fashioned homegrown domestic lunatics (like the Oklahoma City dude). I've seen movies about terrorists from other regions (like the Balkans) attacking the US because we were involved in wars that claimed their relatives, but in the real world I am not aware of any instance of this having actually happened. It sounds plausible, but as far as I know, it's fiction, at least so far.
> Thousands of people dying cannot reasonably
> be described as a "minor annoyance."
I don't think you have any conception of how *big* the United States is. *Millions* of Americans die every year, normally, as a matter of course. (Even if nobody ever died of anything but old age, this would still be true.) For the nation as a whole, thousands of people dying is a *very* minor annoyance. If the same number of people had died at home in their beds that morning, you wouldn't have noticed. It only bothers you because you saw video footage of a big scary crash.
An appropriate response to the event, if Americans were all rational, would be to change the rules for what to do in the event of a hijacking from "give them whatever they want" to "keep them out of the cockpit no matter what". The only reason any additional measures are needed beyond that is because people are irrational and will be afraid to fly if something isn't done to reassure them -- even though these same people will happily get into a car and drive on the public roads, which is much more dangerous.
I agree with you about notability, for the most part. The original intention of the rule was to get rid of completely pointless articles written by college students about the guys across the hall, and that sort of nonsense. And that's all well and good. But sometimes it's applied too strictly. Breadth of coverage is Wikipedia's greatest strength. Excessively strict notability rules harm that.
The "citation needed" rule has also been applied far too pervasively. Citations *are* needed, but a typical article should have ten or twenty of them, not fifty or a hundred, and there is absolutely no reason to have citations on basic information that anyone educated in the relevant field would be expected to know. When the article says "rap is a style of music that arose in the second half of the twentieth century", there is no need for a citation on that.
However, I feel the opposite way about the original research rule. That one needs to be enforced more consistently. There are entire articles that are nothing more than the random musings of a couple of editors, with no meaningful citations at all. Occasionally such articles have even been featured on the front page (e.g., the Terraforming of Mars article). Such articles ought to be deleted so that a proper article on the topic can be created without bumping into namespace collisions.
23 cameras? For the US/Mexico border? Really?
Come on. Deploy twenty-three *thousand* cameras, on rotating stands so they each observe a wider swath, and you might be getting somewhat close to having enough resources to watch a good chunk of the border.
But I'm not sure what you gain by exposing the footage to the internet. If you don't have border patrol agents stationed close enough to each camera to respond promptly if someone is seen crossing there, there's not much point, and if you do have border patrol agents stationed, why can't they watch the (output of the) cameras while they wait for something to happen?
What's this stuff?
It is... [pause] [sniff] It is green.
> You show me a naked terrorist on an airliner and
> I'll show you an unarmed terrorist on an airliner.
Apparently you've never heard of an explosives mule. That's all we need, some terrorist pulling a bag of C4 out of his colon and regurgitating the detonator...
The correct solution is to chill just a little. If an educated and intelligent person is determined to blow up the plane and willing to die doing it, he'll find a way. Fortunately, most intelligent and educated people don't really want to blow up a plane while they're on it. (Those who are genuinely suicidal usually are depressed and want to be alone. "Suicidal" cases who seek out people are usually willing to be talked out of it.) It's not a big problem. Flying on a commercial jet is a good deal safer than riding in a car, so what's the big deal? The big deal is, (most) passengers don't fly on a plane every day like they ride in a car every day, so they're a little more easily unnerved. So basically we just need enough airplane security that people aren't too afraid to fly. That's it. That's all we need. We don't have to effectively prevent every possible attack scenario. It's neither necessary nor practical. Do we prevent every possible motor vehicle accident?
Schneier argues that a lot of the TSA's measures are security theater: they are designed to increase the *perception* of security, rather than to increase actual security. This is true. What he fails to note (or at least fails to emphasize) is that this is actually what's needed. Fear of flying on an airplane, when you're willing to ride in a car every day, is completely irrational, so measures taken to reassure people don't have to be strictly logical. They just have to reassure people.
Running everyone's shoes through the x-ray machine is an example of a good and appropriate measure. In the first place, it's only an extremely minor inconvenience (the carry-on baggage is going through anyway, as was the case even before 9/11; sending the shoes through too is no big deal), and in the second place it significantly allays the fear that someone might bring a shoe-bomb on. If the passengers were all rational this would make little sense: the x-ray machine isn't designed to notice plastic explosives, and the detonator is unlikely to be in the shoe. But rationally the chances of a shoe-bomb on your flight are negligible anyway, so that's not the point. The point is there was a scary story about a shoe bomb on a plane in the news a while back, and people who are nervous about flying remember it and can get jumpy (or jumpier). If you run all the shoes through the x-ray machine, they calm down a bit and realize that their flight probably won't be blown up by a shoe bomb after all.
The metal detectors are similarly appropriate. They won't in practice stop an educated, intelligent, determined person from bringing a weapon on board. You can make a knife or a blowgun out of any solid material, not just metal. But that's not the point. (To protect against that, you'd secure the cockpit door to prevent hijacking and *maybe* give an approved weapon to a trusted and trained person, such as an air marshal.) The point is, if everyone goes through the metal detector, grandma's somewhat less worried that the "shifty-looking" passenger over there might be an armed terrorist. See? He's going through the metal detector like everyone else. He doesn't have a gun. It's okay, grandma, now let's go find our gate. This is all well and good.
However, I do think some of the measures have been taken a little farther than is necessary. I mean, come on, water? Really, water? Is *anyone* afraid that the water might be a bomb? Anyone?
> Do people really care if their name is published on Twitter?
... it's careless, and it's not okay, because you're being careless with the lives of everyone on the road. Hand over your driver's license, you cretinous selfish careless good-for-nothing loser. You have clearly demonstrated that you lack the good judgment needed to operate a motor vehicle on a public road. You are a danger to yourself and others.
> If they'd really want to embarrass drunk drivers, force them
> to drive around with a pink license plate
Stop dorking around with them and just take away their driving privileges. Permanently, if they're over eighteen, or until they turn twenty-one, if they're not eighteen yet.
If they're caught driving again after having their privileges revoked for drunk driving, throw them in the slammer for ten years or so, and on repeat offenses just execute them. Stop mollycoddling the drunk drivers. They are not victims. They are, by choice, a public danger and a menace. Treat them as such.
Operating a motor vehicle on a public road is inherently dangerous, not just to yourself, but more importantly to others. *Most* people shouldn't be doing it in the first place, because most people aren't careful enough to be entrusted with the responsibility. But everyone wants to drive. Well, alright, if you want to drive, demonstrate that you can at least exercise a *minimal* amount of care by following basic safety rules, such as not driving while drunk. If you can't even manage that, well then you can just walk, or take the bus, or hire a qualified professional driver with the good sense to come to work sober.
Motor vehicle accidents cause more fatalities in this country than AIDS and terrorism combined. It is entirely appropriate to treat careless drivers as one of the biggest threats to public safety, because they are. Driving while drunk, driving while texting, driving while surfing the web, driving while drinking coffee, driving while reading a map, driving while getting dressed,
You may not want to. The way it works for them is, the female captures a male, forces him into her reproductive organ, and clamps down, smothering him. As the male suffocates, his body convulses rapidly (which brings the female pleasure). When he is finally dead, the reproductive pods on his surface rupture, releasing his genetic material, which impregnates the female (if she is not using contraceptives). The pods also release a hormone which causes the female more pleasure. Her reproductive cavity then seals itself off to form a womb, and so she cannot have intercourse again for the duration of the thirty-year gestation period, but the hormone that causes libido continually builds up. When she finally gives birth (to a litter of thousands, most of them male), she can't take it any more and immediately goes looking for (adult) males again, sometimes stuffing three or four in there at once, thus impregnating herself again. By the time she gives birth to the new batch, the former batch of offspring are fully raised and have moved out on their own.
Of course, modern females use contraceptives most of the time, so they can suffocate a couple of males a day without becoming impregnated. This has really helped to even out the gender imbalance in the population.
> Contrary to what the article states, MEarth is not an amateur astronomy group. MEarth is
> headed by the former Discover Magazine's Scientist of the Year, Harvard professor David Charbonneau.
Being headed by someone of high qualifications does not in any way preclude being an amateur group, especially in the older senses of the word "amateur".
These guys are scientists, so they'd consider beer to be a mixture (or possibly a solution) rather than a compound.
> they estimate the surface temp. of the planet is 200 deg. C. how is that in the Goldilocks zone?
They're desperate.
You see, they want to find another planet besides Earth that's (at least potentially) capable of supporting life. If they found such a thing, even if there's no life actually on it, it would demonstrate the principle that inhabitable worlds exist besides Earth. This would help them to feel better about their belief that extra-terrestrial intelligent life must exist.
So they're desperate to find Earth-like planets, and desperation leads to lowered standards. A while ago there was one the size of Jupiter and closer to its primary than Mercury, which they were calling "Earth-like" just because it was rocky rather than a gas giant. This one is even better.
> I'd say 85% of infections are from user ignorance
I would have quoted a much higher percentage for infections that an educated user would have avoided. As a rule, people who know what they're doing can, with only a little luck, go *years* without being infected, while complete idiots get new infections every day. Most folks are somewhere in between.
> but the rest is luck and who you have contact with.
> (Outlook address books, etc)
Outlook address books only matter if you use inherently unsafe email software (such as Outlook or Outlook Express). Switch to something safe and sane, like Pegasus Mail, and suddenly it won't matter whose address book you're in. Junk will still be sent to you, but there won't be any way for it to infect your computer. Until Outlook came along, the prospect of email-borne malware was purely theoretical. It had never happened. I used to tell users it was basically impossible, because your email software doesn't *execute* the contents of incoming messages, it only *displays* them for you to read. (Yes, theoretically there could be a buffer overflow. But I'm not aware of a single documented instance of a mailreader buffer overflow ever having been exploited in the wild.) Then Microsoft announced that, for convenience, Outlook would have this great new feature wherein it would automatically launch attachments. Everyone in the computer security community responded with lengthy commentary about why this was an incredibly bad idea, but Microsoft didn't listen. The rest is history. Now everyone just assumes you can get malware from reading email, but they forget the rest of the sentence. You can get malware from reading email *if* you use Outlook. So don't do that.
In the last five years or so, Microsoft has significantly improved Outlook's security, and its track record has improved considerably. But you'd still have to be an idiot to want to use it. Its security track record even over the last five years is still worse than any other mailreader in history bar none, and there are much better, much more user-friendly, and much more featureful mailreaders out there anyway.
You say 15% of malware infections are caused by bad luck and circumstances. I say people are making their own bad luck and circumstances.
> > Prohibit the outsourcing of this process
> Why?
Given the rest of the discussion, why should be obvious. The thinking is, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the production of new creative works by providing funding to the artist, *not* to bind up forever large numbers of works that have already been created in the hands of a few large corporations created for the purpose. If only the artist who created the work can renew the copyright, whole categories of abuse (think: RIAA) just go away.
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this reasoning, but the motivation behind such a (proposed) restriction is pretty obvious.
> And how does it apply to artists who sell their
> copyrights? What if they sell to a company?
A large part of the point of the proposal was to restrict that.
> > This would stop the Disney-ish practice of copyright holders
> > removing their their copyrighted works from the market to
> > generate a artificial demand later on for their product.
>
> In what way is the demand artificial?
Now, that's actually a good question. It's understandable you wouldn't know this, if you don't happen to know anyone who's really into Disney movies.
The demand is artificial because they throw a lot of advertising and marketing behind it, announcing *months* ahead of time that stuff will no longer be available after a certain date, so if you *might* ever want it, you have to get it *now*. The first time they did it, they said the movies would not be available again until the year 2000, which at that time (circa 1997) sounded much further away to most people than it actually was. I actually knew a guy who went out and bought several of the movies, which he could not afford at the time (college student), just in case he someday had kids that he'd want to show them to. After he did it, I asked him, "How old would these kids need to be before they could really enjoy these movies?" Oh, he supposed, four or five. "If they were born today, they'd only be three when the movies become available again." "Oh. Yeah." But he wasn't making the decision to buy them with his brain, he was in full-bore emotional panic mode, due to the "you won't have a chance again for a long time" marketing campaign.
Marketing abuses aside, society is impoverished when desired material remains unavailable for long periods of time. Three years, like in the aforementioned Disney stunt, isn't that long. But current copyright law allows an item to remain unavailable for much longer if the copyright holder desires, which *has* been used to keep certain historically important works artificially unavailable for quite long periods of time due to political controversy, which is wholly against the spirit of the US constitution, IMO. I'm not sure I'm in favor of onerous filing fee requirements for renewal (more paperwork's going to make things better? I'm not so sure), but I *am* in favor of works automatically falling into the public domain if they are not available to the public for, say, ten years running.
> With your idea open source dies.
Hardly.
In the first place, his idea gives you seven years up front for free. When was the last time you used seven-year-old software?
Additionally, while it would be a problem for restrictive open-source licenses (e.g., the GPL), there's plenty of great open-source software that uses attribution licenses, which in practice are only very slightly different from public domain anyway. As long as the project is active, there's still a strong incentive for changes to be contributed back, because otherwise you have to keep merging them with the upstream changes, which gets old real fast (or you can just plain fork, but then you have to re-implement the upstream new features yourself if you want your fork to have them, which isn't any better). Stallmanist dogma notwithstanding, I believe public domain would work just fine as an open-source "license".
This school of thought in economics is called "populism". The main problem with it is that, as a rule, it completely wrecks the economy. Typically, seizing the assets of the wealthy in order to redistribute them to the masses leads to majority unemployment and hyperinflation. Just like twentieth-century South America. Not an advisable course of action.
> The first movies didn't suck like the last three
You didn't *notice* their suckiness, because back then you were accustomed to the assumption that if it was sci-fi or took place in space, ipso facto it must Hoover like a Shop Vac. Up to that point most sci-fi featured cosmic rays as a major plot element, used actors straight out of drama school if you were lucky, and had robots and/or spaceships that were obviously made out of cardboard. So sci-fi audiences were prepared to cut Star Wars a little slack. When it had a real character-driven plot and real costumes and used real state-of-the-art (for the day) special effects and even featured a real professionally-composed sound track consisting of music written just for the film, we were sold. The acting was pretty lousy (especially Luke), but we'd expected that, so it didn't really stand out.
But by the time Episode I came out, sci-fi was a major established film genre, so you expected it to stack up and compare well against, well, anything.
> Luke was in his late teens/very early 20
Yes, Luke was in his late teens and at least twice as wangsty and annoying as little Anakin and teen Anakin combined. "Aw, come on, uncle Owen, I don't want to help around the farm for a whole nother year, I want to go off and have adventures now. Now, now, now!" Sheesh.
Then there's Han. Stop and think? Solve a problem? Nah, let's just argue loudly and incoherently all the time and then when we lose the argument we'll just blast everything.
Speaking of flat stereotype characters, two words: Princess Leia. At least the acting was okay there (not that it was a difficult role).
I'm not saying the prequel movies didn't have some problems. But I don't think they were objectively much worse than the first three. They seemed worse mostly because audience expectations had shifted.
> If it gets too cold, do something to turn it up.
> If it gets to hot, do something to turn it down.
That kind of thinking can have unintended consequences. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The insects are a major nuissance, so you introduce a lizard that eats them. But the lizards, with no natural predators, start to take over, so you introduce cats. Now the introduced feral cats are killing off the local birds. When you mess with a system you don't understand, you can really screw things up.
If we understood climate change better, we might be better equipped to try to control it, but the fact is we don't understand it very well at all. For the time being, I think the wisest course of action is to adapt our society to live with whatever climate changes come down the pike (and of course to continue to collect as many data as possible, with a view toward eventually forming a more complete understanding of how stuff works).
> If you're using a lack of SPF records as a determinant
> in whether or not a message is spam, then I can guarantee
> you that you're losing mail to false positives.
Yeah, that's not how you're supposed to do it. No SPF record means "I don't know whether this is a valid sender for this domain or not", so you fall back to whatever other method you have for making the determination.
Traditionally, the "other method" generally meant accepting everything and letting the users sort it out in the inbox, but there are other things you can do, such as looking at stuff like whether the EHLO domain matches the sending IP, whether the envelope sender matches either of them, whether the From field matches any of the above, whether any of our users have sent mail to this domain in the last N days, and so on and so forth, each of which criteria can be assigned a weight, which can be used to determine whether to accept the message immediately, graylist it (and for how long), subject it to more rigorous (but computationally intensive) regex-based filtering, check for it on collaboratively-maintained blacklists, etc.
And if the domain *has* SPF records and the sending IP isn't in them, you have your choice of greylisting with a lengthy delay, going straight to teargrube mode, or just sending a 554 response immediately. And you can take note of the IP address for future reference.
> I use greylisting as my chief anti-spam weapon, and it's
> far more reliable and far more effective than SPF.
Greylisting has problems too. Not least, it causes delays, which can run into multiple minutes. (In some situations, even a thirty-second delay will make the natives restless.) Additionally, if too many mail exchangers do greylisting, the spammers will just implement retries (it's not like it's hard; normal mail servers have been doing it forever). All of this doesn't mean greylisting isn't useful, but it's one tool in the toolbox, not the be-all and end-all. There are a lot of things a mail server can do to try to determine whether a message is spam. None of them individually is very reliable, but you don't have to do just one thing.