I'm by no means a hopeless optimist, but I think the arguments he's making here don't really make much sense. He's focusing exclusively on one aspect -- the increase in speed / computation power -- and saying that when that stops developing, everything will stop and die massively.
That doesn't make any sense. Cars got faster between 1910 and 1930. But after they reached "as fast as humans can actually control them safely", they stopped getting faster, by and large. Did that cause a collapse of the industry? Did everyone completely stop buying cars? Consider airplanes -- between 1900 when the first flight happened, to WW2 where they were a critical part of strategy, they got faster. But once they reached the limits of speed / air resistance economics, they stopped getting significantly faster -- at least as far as most consumers are concerned. Now the main difference in passenger experience between a plane made 30 years ago and one made 10 years ago is whether the in-flight entertainment is on one shared screen, or each person has their own screen. This lack of increase in airplane speed has somehow failed to destroy the airline economy.
When transistors hit their limit, there will still be huge amounts of transforming to do. Even within technology, there are things to do: there's a whole avenue of domain-specific chips to pursue. With the exception of GPUs (and possibly cryptography), there has been until now no point in making chips to do one specific thing; by the time you made it, Intel's CPUs would be more powerful at doing whatever it was you were going to do anyway. When we really hit the limit of silicon, that will become a rich avenue to explore.
Outside of technology, there's even more. Culturally, we don't even know what to do with all the computing we could have. If my sink or table or door or wall isn't as smart as it could be, it's not because there aren't enough transistors, it's because we don't know what to do with the transistors. I'd say that the biggest limitation right now to ubiquitous computing isn't so much number of transistors, as what to do with the transistors. Will there ever be a task that my microwave will perform that will require 4 cores of an i7 supplemented with GPUs? User interfaces, techniques, and all kinds of other things are still wide-open. I'd go so far as to say that computing power isn't nearly the biggest difference between the computers of today and the computers of five years ago.
The main point is, there's still a lot of innovation that can be done that will not somehow fail if chips don't get faster.
This is part of the problem -- there's a wide range of potential meanings. Literally "Creationist" just means you think that God created stuff. This could be anywhere from, "He initiated the Big Bang, and only influenced things within what looks like the normal laws of physics", to "He instantly pulled the earth, as-is, out of nothing 10,000 years ago", to a wide range of things in between. It's been a long time since I looked at this, but I believe some people think that the "punctuated equilibria" effect is God introducing things by divine intervention, for example.
Of course, this law would be completely unnecessary for those whose view of the universe's history closely mirrors that of the scientific majority...
The GPL relies on copyright law; without copyright there would be no need for GPL.
Not so. The whole point of the GPL is to implement Richard Stallman's "coined" ethical maxim, that it's immoral to give someone a program but keep the source code from them. That's why the GPL doesn't say you have to give the source code to everyone; you only have to give the source code to those to whom you have distributed a binary. (Of course, they may give it to everyone, so you might as well do it yourself.)
Without copyright, you'd just have Public Domain -- anyone could just take the code, improve it, then sell it as a proprietary product; but no one would be forced to give back to the community, or even give credit where it's due (as is required by BSD licenses).
It's hard to say. It's definitely not the kind of "pulp" sci-fi GP is complaining about (e.g., the recent "Star Trek: Reboot" movie). It was certainly attempting to be serious sci-fi. It had a lot of really good qualities about it, and while in the theater, I definitely felt moved by it; it had the "spell" that a good movie has.
However, the "spell" didn't last more than half an hour of reflection after the movie was over. Just too many things didn't add up. If the aliens were ferried from the ship to the ground by humans, where did they get the weapons they were selling to the gangs? Did the rescue workers see the guns lying around and say, "Hey, looks like you might need these -- let's bring some"? And what's with the super-concentrated space-ship fuel that takes weeks to make a drop, modifying the guy's genetics? That just doesn't make sense -- if humans had sprayed an alien with some gasoline, would they have turned human? Not to mention that the one "smart" alien was carefully waiting, counting every drop that was necessary to make it back home; but how many years was he set back when the main character sprayed it on himself? And in the end scene, when the "smart" alien's kid controls the mech -- he's obviously really good at it, and can do things like catch bullets in midair. Why didn't he just keep using it, instead of letting the (then) half-human, who obviously doesn't know anything about its technology, use it?
This kind of thing -- ignoring internal logic to make cheap "epic" scenes -- is right in line with what I saw in the only other movies I've seen directed by Peter Jackson, the LoTR series. There's enough good there to make it worth watching, but it's just got too much lacking to be classified under "great SciFi".
Or at very least, stop taking away value. Why should I pay $30 for a DVD, then have to deal with ten minutes of commercials at the beginning, and evil scary FBI warnings? Especially if there's a hassle with taking it overseas with me, or lending it to my international friends (who can't watch it on their laptop because they have a different region code)? The fact is that a pirated copy of a movie is not only cheaper, it's more valuable than most DVDs.
I'm with you -- the last 5 movies I've bought were good ones that happened to be on the 4- or 5-quid rack at the supermarket. I can't imagine spending 15 pounds for a DVD anymore.:-)
Stop jailing people for grams of pot and start jailing people for ((( some smart saying I can't think of that means investment people who steal money))).
Yeah, when all of this "too big to fail" stuff was going on, I thought: If an action has such an impact that the government has to bail you out, then that action should be criminal. People should be going to jail for this.
Then I thought, ideally, the shareholders of the corporation, because it was for their benefit ("maximize shareholder value") that all of this evil was done. If that was the law, then the company's goal would consist of two things: (1) maximize shareholder value, while (2) not sending the shareholders to jail.
OK, I realize this is too extreme to be practical. But it would change an awful lot in our system.
Canonical began implementing the spec way before it was formally drafted
I'd say this is the right way to do things. Before deciding on a "spec" that everyone's going to try to use, you should actually build something and try it out, to see if it's actually as useful as you think it is, and to work out any kinks.
Of course, if you're doing that, you have to still be open to your idea being changed significantly when it encounters other people.
I'd buy a paper copy of a good book for more than an e-book, because it's more valuable. There's no way I'd buy an e-book for anything more than half of what I'd pay for a dead-tree copy.
Still cheating. It's massively deceptive to intentionally lead somebody on by trying to trick them with words based on common expectations.
It was deceptive, absolutely. And in most contexts, I'd say that there's no moral difference between saying something which is strictly true but which you intend to be misleading and just lying.
But I think in that situation -- a "battle of wits, for the princess, to the death", deception should be expected to be part of the rules. After all, Vencini himself used deception when he switched the cups. If he'd respected the intellect of his opponent, he'd have been on the lookout for exactly this kind of deception.
I think Douglas Adams said it best, when a character in one of his novels says to another one: "You're a clever man, [Dirk Gently], I grant you that; but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid."
The game was entirely random, but Westley won by cheating, he poisoned both cups.
He wasn't cheating -- he never said only one was poisoned. He asked, "Where is the poison? The game ends when you choose and we both drink."
If Vencini wasn't so full of himself, he might have reasoned that there were four possibilities:
Poison in the cup in front of me
Poison in the cup in front of the masked man
Poison in neither cup
Poison in both.
Once you realize that, you can reason about it. Poison in neither cup would be compeltely pointless -- we both drink, and then we're in the same position we were before. Poison in one of the cups? Very risky. Essentially random, with a 50% chance of him dying. At any rate, it's certainly only a game of chance, not a game of wits. Poison in both cups? Seems pretty crazy -- then we both die. Ah -- but do we both die? What if he has an immunity or an antidote? Then if I fall for his trick, it's 100% -- I die no matter what I pick, and he lives. No, you bastard -- the poison is in both cups; I'm not drinking. I win the battle of wits by not falling for your trick.
you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your local community college
But don't underestimate the value of being in a really smart peer-group at a high-quality university. I might have covered the same material if I'd gone to a community college, but man, finally being with people who were both really smart and really motivated academically was an awesome change and an awesome challenge.
I'd be interested to find out where the PhDs are getting all their money. PhDs in engineering fields are useful, especially for R&D arms of companies. (I have my PhD in CompSci, and am doing advanced OS development.) But where to PhDs in history / classics get their money? Are they really paid more than people who just have an undergrad degree?
It referred to a specific new phenomenon (mostly) unique to online conversation, which was desperately in need of a name.
Actually that's not true -- if "to troll" means "to say something, not because you think it's true, but to see the emotional response of another person", trolling has been with us forever. It's just that in real life, trolling has real consequences for the troll. The internet took away a lot of the "cost" of trolling, allowing people to perfect the art.
What are the costs of trolling IRL? First, there's negative social consequences. Ever noticed that many people who are abrasive and aggressive online or over e-mail are actually quite tame in person? Because for most people, electronic vitriol is easy to deal with; but having a real living person in front of you being unhappy with you is actually very unpleasant. You generally have to deal with a comparatively small group of people in your everyday life, so even if you don't care about their feelings personally, their feeling unhappy about you has other negative effects. So to troll in real life, you need to not only be able to deal with face-to-face anger, you also need to either find a continual source of new people to troll, or do it in a moderate enough way that it doesn't alienate people too much. Actually going and finding a situation in real life where you can troll effectively takes a lot of effort. You could imagine some people doing it (e.g., a bunch of wankers showing up to an AA meeting or something like that to start trouble), but overall it's a lot more effort for the reward.
Online, there are an unlimited number of people and contexts whom you can troll at little cost, and with absolutely no impact on your "real life". So this thing that people have been doing for millennia suddenly flourished like never before.
And I agree -- it definitely needs its own name. The reason people mistake what the word "troll" means is the same reason that trolling still works -- people just can't conceive the idea of people saying something just to get a rise out of someone, and so respond as if the person is genuine. Once you realize that someone is just trying to "push your buttons", you know instinctively that the best thing to do is just not respond.
Consider the restaurant "Cafeteria", as well as "The Container Store" and "Staples".
If a restaurant named "Cafeteria" started suing every school, hospital, or building that advertises "Cafeteria inside", I'd side with the (generic) cafeterias. If Staples started suing every office supply store that advertized sales for staples, I'd side with the office supply stores. If a store called "The Container Store" started suing other stores that said they were a "container store", or started suing the yellow pages for having a category called "Container stores" which listed other businesses that sell containers, I'd side with the yellow pages / other stores.
In Staple's case, they're using a word related to office suppy stores to describe an office supply stores. If they chose to name their store "Office supply store", and then sued the yellow pages for having an "office supply store" section, I'd side with the yellow pages as well. ("The UPS Store" is different, because UPS is already a trademarked name.)
Academic study is too expensive to be used as a glorified training course.
I think you're missing a category for things in the middle. You might be able to give someone a "training course" in how to set up a specific type of web page. Here, use this code here, put the company logo here, blah blah blah, done. Now you have one web-page template you can apply to lots of companies, go to it. It's not good University-level stuff because it's too specific. You want a different type of web-page, or in a different language, you have to start from the beginning. In other words, the knowledge is in a sense "practical" (since you come out actually knowing how to do something) none of the knowledge is transferrable.
On the other end, there's theoretical background. Here's algorithmic complexity, here's a Karnaugh map. Here's the necessary conditions for a deadlock; take one a way, and you don't have deadlock. Completely technology agnostic and transferrable.
But there are things which are practical, and yet transferrable. Learning how / why to comment code, learning how to test code, learning how to debug code. The basic process of finding out what went wrong is very similar, whether you're using lisp or assembler. There are a host of things you learn by creating a large project (big enough that you can't keep it all in your head), working with other programmers on a team, reading other people's code, &c. How to play around with learning stuff on your own, before asking for help.
If you have *both* a strong theoretical background *and* a strong handle on the transferrable "practical" stuff, then you're basically ready to go. Doesn't matter if you don't know C# or the.Net framework or Oracle SQL or bash; you'll get up to speed really quick.
The problem is a huge number of people come out of a CS program knowing only theoretical stuff. Sometimes they've never compiled a single program. They're not only behind on the practical stuff; they may actually be capable of doing the practical stuff at all. The first thing you have to do in a job interview is figure out can this person actually code. That's not really something that employers should have to wonder.
Wait, are you saying that distribution of labour, social decision making, and rewards / benefits have always been exactly as well made / fair / just / optimal / whatever as they are now -- from the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, Feudalism, &c until now?
If not, and if socialism and capitalism are better than feudalism (for some definition of "better"), are you saying that current socialist and capitalist societies have come to respective local optimums, and can't be made any better?
If not, then we should keep looking for what's better yet. I realize that there aren't really compelling alternatives out there ATM; but it sounds like you're giving up, and saying we've gotten as good as we're ever going to get. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet.
Something strange has been going on at Redmond, WA lately.
Nothing strange at all. MS never cared or made any money on IE; they only cared about tying users to Windows. The only purpose of IE was to make sure that the web worked on Windows, not on Linux (or other operating systems). They don't control the browser market thanks to Google and Firefox. But that doesn't matter if there are tons of embedded video clips out there that only view on Windows.
Making a plugin for Chrome and Firefox is acknowledging that, de facto, they don't control the browser market. But by enabling this plug-in on Windows and not on Linux, they're still promoting a web that only works on Windows. They're still playing the exact same game they have been for three decades now.
Teach not "what is the right answer?" but "Why is this answer right?" Teach not "what is X?" but "How does X change when Y is introduced?"
OK, how do you measure whether you've succeeded in teaching / the student has succeeded in learning those things in a way that is neither arbitrary, nor allows cheating?
Hmm, looks like Sony already tried something similar but screwed it up. Google for "Sony fresh start" and you'll see a bunch of headlines from 2008 about a feature Sony introduced that allowed you to buy a PC without bloatware. But unfortunately, it came off as "Pay $50 to remove bloatware". Further headlines say, Sony shamed into making FreshStart free. So it looks like a bit of a PR fiasco -- they were forced to keep the lower price, but not get the bloatware subsidy. As there are no results after July 2008 (two months after it was first introduced), I can only assume that they got rid of the option as soon as they possibly could.
So to answer the original question: At the moment, there is absolutely no advantage for not installing bloatware. If you don't include it, people get pissed at you for charging more. So you're in a real no-win situation.
I still think the "CleanBoot certified" is a good idea, but it would take some care to make sure it was positioned properly.
...and there's no way for a consumer to tell the difference, when shopping for prices, between a crap-laden install and a clean one. All they see is, "Hey, Dell has this machine with identical specs for $50 cheaper!"
This actually could be a market opportunity: come up with a label for non-crapware-laden (for example, "CleanBoot"), trademark it, define it precisely, and certify vendors to use it. Then instead of only seeing identical specs, they can see that the $50 one extra is "CleanBoot certified!" And if they look into what that means, they'll have your website describing the problem. Then even if they buy the Dell, they'll notice it's slow and think "I should have bought that clean-boot certified one. Next time..."
"Short on specifics" is pretty typical of journalism. There's a summary of the actual report on the Arbor Networks website. Key quote:
Increasingly sophisticated attacks expose IPS and firewall shortcomings
In an effort to achieve DDoS protection, many operators have deployed stateful firewalls and intrusion prevention system (IPS) devices to protect data center infrastructure. In actuality, these devices can render networks more susceptible to attacks as the state tables on even the most scalable versions available can be overwhelmed with a moderate size DDoS attack. Nearly 49 percent of IDC respondents reported a firewall or IPS outage due to DDoS.
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing.:-)
"Short on specifics" is pretty typical of journalism. There's a summary of the actual report on the Arbor Networks website. Key quote:
Increasingly sophisticated attacks expose IPS and firewall shortcomings
In an effort to achieve DDoS protection, many operators have deployed stateful firewalls and intrusion prevention system (IPS) devices to protect data center infrastructure. In actuality, these devices can render networks more susceptible to attacks as the state tables on even the most scalable versions available can be overwhelmed with a moderate size DDoS attack. Nearly 49 percent of IDC respondents reported a firewall or IPS outage due to DDoS.
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing.:-)
"Short on specifics" is pretty typical of journalism. There's a summary of the actual report on the Arbor Networks website. Key quote:
Increasingly sophisticated attacks expose IPS and firewall shortcomings
In an effort to achieve DDoS protection, many operators have deployed stateful firewalls and intrusion prevention system (IPS) devices to protect data center infrastructure. In actuality, these devices can render networks more susceptible to attacks as the state tables on even the most scalable versions available can be overwhelmed with a moderate size DDoS attack. Nearly 49 percent of IDC respondents reported a firewall or IPS outage due to DDoS.
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing.:-)
Pretty typical for journalism. A summary of the actual report can be found here; pertinent quote:
Increasingly sophisticated attacks expose IPS and firewall shortcomings
In an effort to achieve DDoS protection, many operators have deployed stateful firewalls and intrusion prevention system (IPS) devices to protect data center infrastructure. In actuality, these devices can render networks more susceptible to attacks as the state tables on even the most scalable versions available can be overwhelmed with a moderate size DDoS attack. Nearly 49 percent of IDC respondents reported a firewall or IPS outage due to DDoS.
So the key statistic backing up the claim that poorly-configured firewalls make a DDoS work is that half of the respondents said their firewall went down as a result of a DDoS.
Unfortunately to get the actual report you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm by no means a hopeless optimist, but I think the arguments he's making here don't really make much sense. He's focusing exclusively on one aspect -- the increase in speed / computation power -- and saying that when that stops developing, everything will stop and die massively.
That doesn't make any sense. Cars got faster between 1910 and 1930. But after they reached "as fast as humans can actually control them safely", they stopped getting faster, by and large. Did that cause a collapse of the industry? Did everyone completely stop buying cars? Consider airplanes -- between 1900 when the first flight happened, to WW2 where they were a critical part of strategy, they got faster. But once they reached the limits of speed / air resistance economics, they stopped getting significantly faster -- at least as far as most consumers are concerned. Now the main difference in passenger experience between a plane made 30 years ago and one made 10 years ago is whether the in-flight entertainment is on one shared screen, or each person has their own screen. This lack of increase in airplane speed has somehow failed to destroy the airline economy.
When transistors hit their limit, there will still be huge amounts of transforming to do. Even within technology, there are things to do: there's a whole avenue of domain-specific chips to pursue. With the exception of GPUs (and possibly cryptography), there has been until now no point in making chips to do one specific thing; by the time you made it, Intel's CPUs would be more powerful at doing whatever it was you were going to do anyway. When we really hit the limit of silicon, that will become a rich avenue to explore.
Outside of technology, there's even more. Culturally, we don't even know what to do with all the computing we could have. If my sink or table or door or wall isn't as smart as it could be, it's not because there aren't enough transistors, it's because we don't know what to do with the transistors. I'd say that the biggest limitation right now to ubiquitous computing isn't so much number of transistors, as what to do with the transistors. Will there ever be a task that my microwave will perform that will require 4 cores of an i7 supplemented with GPUs? User interfaces, techniques, and all kinds of other things are still wide-open. I'd go so far as to say that computing power isn't nearly the biggest difference between the computers of today and the computers of five years ago.
The main point is, there's still a lot of innovation that can be done that will not somehow fail if chips don't get faster.
This is part of the problem -- there's a wide range of potential meanings. Literally "Creationist" just means you think that God created stuff. This could be anywhere from, "He initiated the Big Bang, and only influenced things within what looks like the normal laws of physics", to "He instantly pulled the earth, as-is, out of nothing 10,000 years ago", to a wide range of things in between. It's been a long time since I looked at this, but I believe some people think that the "punctuated equilibria" effect is God introducing things by divine intervention, for example.
Of course, this law would be completely unnecessary for those whose view of the universe's history closely mirrors that of the scientific majority...
Not so. The whole point of the GPL is to implement Richard Stallman's "coined" ethical maxim, that it's immoral to give someone a program but keep the source code from them. That's why the GPL doesn't say you have to give the source code to everyone; you only have to give the source code to those to whom you have distributed a binary. (Of course, they may give it to everyone, so you might as well do it yourself.)
Without copyright, you'd just have Public Domain -- anyone could just take the code, improve it, then sell it as a proprietary product; but no one would be forced to give back to the community, or even give credit where it's due (as is required by BSD licenses).
It's hard to say. It's definitely not the kind of "pulp" sci-fi GP is complaining about (e.g., the recent "Star Trek: Reboot" movie). It was certainly attempting to be serious sci-fi. It had a lot of really good qualities about it, and while in the theater, I definitely felt moved by it; it had the "spell" that a good movie has.
However, the "spell" didn't last more than half an hour of reflection after the movie was over. Just too many things didn't add up. If the aliens were ferried from the ship to the ground by humans, where did they get the weapons they were selling to the gangs? Did the rescue workers see the guns lying around and say, "Hey, looks like you might need these -- let's bring some"? And what's with the super-concentrated space-ship fuel that takes weeks to make a drop, modifying the guy's genetics? That just doesn't make sense -- if humans had sprayed an alien with some gasoline, would they have turned human? Not to mention that the one "smart" alien was carefully waiting, counting every drop that was necessary to make it back home; but how many years was he set back when the main character sprayed it on himself? And in the end scene, when the "smart" alien's kid controls the mech -- he's obviously really good at it, and can do things like catch bullets in midair. Why didn't he just keep using it, instead of letting the (then) half-human, who obviously doesn't know anything about its technology, use it?
This kind of thing -- ignoring internal logic to make cheap "epic" scenes -- is right in line with what I saw in the only other movies I've seen directed by Peter Jackson, the LoTR series. There's enough good there to make it worth watching, but it's just got too much lacking to be classified under "great SciFi".
Or at very least, stop taking away value. Why should I pay $30 for a DVD, then have to deal with ten minutes of commercials at the beginning, and evil scary FBI warnings? Especially if there's a hassle with taking it overseas with me, or lending it to my international friends (who can't watch it on their laptop because they have a different region code)? The fact is that a pirated copy of a movie is not only cheaper, it's more valuable than most DVDs.
I'm with you -- the last 5 movies I've bought were good ones that happened to be on the 4- or 5-quid rack at the supermarket. I can't imagine spending 15 pounds for a DVD anymore. :-)
Yeah, when all of this "too big to fail" stuff was going on, I thought: If an action has such an impact that the government has to bail you out, then that action should be criminal. People should be going to jail for this.
Then I thought, ideally, the shareholders of the corporation, because it was for their benefit ("maximize shareholder value") that all of this evil was done. If that was the law, then the company's goal would consist of two things: (1) maximize shareholder value, while (2) not sending the shareholders to jail.
OK, I realize this is too extreme to be practical. But it would change an awful lot in our system.
I'd say this is the right way to do things. Before deciding on a "spec" that everyone's going to try to use, you should actually build something and try it out, to see if it's actually as useful as you think it is, and to work out any kinks.
Of course, if you're doing that, you have to still be open to your idea being changed significantly when it encounters other people.
I'd buy a paper copy of a good book for more than an e-book, because it's more valuable. There's no way I'd buy an e-book for anything more than half of what I'd pay for a dead-tree copy.
It was deceptive, absolutely. And in most contexts, I'd say that there's no moral difference between saying something which is strictly true but which you intend to be misleading and just lying.
But I think in that situation -- a "battle of wits, for the princess, to the death", deception should be expected to be part of the rules. After all, Vencini himself used deception when he switched the cups. If he'd respected the intellect of his opponent, he'd have been on the lookout for exactly this kind of deception.
I think Douglas Adams said it best, when a character in one of his novels says to another one: "You're a clever man, [Dirk Gently], I grant you that; but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid."
He wasn't cheating -- he never said only one was poisoned. He asked, "Where is the poison? The game ends when you choose and we both drink."
If Vencini wasn't so full of himself, he might have reasoned that there were four possibilities:
Once you realize that, you can reason about it. Poison in neither cup would be compeltely pointless -- we both drink, and then we're in the same position we were before. Poison in one of the cups? Very risky. Essentially random, with a 50% chance of him dying. At any rate, it's certainly only a game of chance, not a game of wits. Poison in both cups? Seems pretty crazy -- then we both die. Ah -- but do we both die? What if he has an immunity or an antidote? Then if I fall for his trick, it's 100% -- I die no matter what I pick, and he lives. No, you bastard -- the poison is in both cups; I'm not drinking. I win the battle of wits by not falling for your trick.
But don't underestimate the value of being in a really smart peer-group at a high-quality university. I might have covered the same material if I'd gone to a community college, but man, finally being with people who were both really smart and really motivated academically was an awesome change and an awesome challenge.
I'd be interested to find out where the PhDs are getting all their money. PhDs in engineering fields are useful, especially for R&D arms of companies. (I have my PhD in CompSci, and am doing advanced OS development.) But where to PhDs in history / classics get their money? Are they really paid more than people who just have an undergrad degree?
Actually that's not true -- if "to troll" means "to say something, not because you think it's true, but to see the emotional response of another person", trolling has been with us forever. It's just that in real life, trolling has real consequences for the troll. The internet took away a lot of the "cost" of trolling, allowing people to perfect the art.
What are the costs of trolling IRL? First, there's negative social consequences. Ever noticed that many people who are abrasive and aggressive online or over e-mail are actually quite tame in person? Because for most people, electronic vitriol is easy to deal with; but having a real living person in front of you being unhappy with you is actually very unpleasant. You generally have to deal with a comparatively small group of people in your everyday life, so even if you don't care about their feelings personally, their feeling unhappy about you has other negative effects. So to troll in real life, you need to not only be able to deal with face-to-face anger, you also need to either find a continual source of new people to troll, or do it in a moderate enough way that it doesn't alienate people too much. Actually going and finding a situation in real life where you can troll effectively takes a lot of effort. You could imagine some people doing it (e.g., a bunch of wankers showing up to an AA meeting or something like that to start trouble), but overall it's a lot more effort for the reward.
Online, there are an unlimited number of people and contexts whom you can troll at little cost, and with absolutely no impact on your "real life". So this thing that people have been doing for millennia suddenly flourished like never before.
And I agree -- it definitely needs its own name. The reason people mistake what the word "troll" means is the same reason that trolling still works -- people just can't conceive the idea of people saying something just to get a rise out of someone, and so respond as if the person is genuine. Once you realize that someone is just trying to "push your buttons", you know instinctively that the best thing to do is just not respond.
If a restaurant named "Cafeteria" started suing every school, hospital, or building that advertises "Cafeteria inside", I'd side with the (generic) cafeterias. If Staples started suing every office supply store that advertized sales for staples, I'd side with the office supply stores. If a store called "The Container Store" started suing other stores that said they were a "container store", or started suing the yellow pages for having a category called "Container stores" which listed other businesses that sell containers, I'd side with the yellow pages / other stores.
In Staple's case, they're using a word related to office suppy stores to describe an office supply stores. If they chose to name their store "Office supply store", and then sued the yellow pages for having an "office supply store" section, I'd side with the yellow pages as well. ("The UPS Store" is different, because UPS is already a trademarked name.)
I think you're missing a category for things in the middle. You might be able to give someone a "training course" in how to set up a specific type of web page. Here, use this code here, put the company logo here, blah blah blah, done. Now you have one web-page template you can apply to lots of companies, go to it. It's not good University-level stuff because it's too specific. You want a different type of web-page, or in a different language, you have to start from the beginning. In other words, the knowledge is in a sense "practical" (since you come out actually knowing how to do something) none of the knowledge is transferrable.
On the other end, there's theoretical background. Here's algorithmic complexity, here's a Karnaugh map. Here's the necessary conditions for a deadlock; take one a way, and you don't have deadlock. Completely technology agnostic and transferrable.
But there are things which are practical, and yet transferrable. Learning how / why to comment code, learning how to test code, learning how to debug code. The basic process of finding out what went wrong is very similar, whether you're using lisp or assembler. There are a host of things you learn by creating a large project (big enough that you can't keep it all in your head), working with other programmers on a team, reading other people's code, &c. How to play around with learning stuff on your own, before asking for help.
If you have *both* a strong theoretical background *and* a strong handle on the transferrable "practical" stuff, then you're basically ready to go. Doesn't matter if you don't know C# or the .Net framework or Oracle SQL or bash; you'll get up to speed really quick.
The problem is a huge number of people come out of a CS program knowing only theoretical stuff. Sometimes they've never compiled a single program. They're not only behind on the practical stuff; they may actually be capable of doing the practical stuff at all. The first thing you have to do in a job interview is figure out can this person actually code. That's not really something that employers should have to wonder.
Wait, are you saying that distribution of labour, social decision making, and rewards / benefits have always been exactly as well made / fair / just / optimal / whatever as they are now -- from the Roman empire, the Middle Ages, Feudalism, &c until now?
If not, and if socialism and capitalism are better than feudalism (for some definition of "better"), are you saying that current socialist and capitalist societies have come to respective local optimums, and can't be made any better?
If not, then we should keep looking for what's better yet. I realize that there aren't really compelling alternatives out there ATM; but it sounds like you're giving up, and saying we've gotten as good as we're ever going to get. I don't think we're anywhere near there yet.
Nothing strange at all. MS never cared or made any money on IE; they only cared about tying users to Windows. The only purpose of IE was to make sure that the web worked on Windows, not on Linux (or other operating systems). They don't control the browser market thanks to Google and Firefox. But that doesn't matter if there are tons of embedded video clips out there that only view on Windows.
Making a plugin for Chrome and Firefox is acknowledging that, de facto, they don't control the browser market. But by enabling this plug-in on Windows and not on Linux, they're still promoting a web that only works on Windows. They're still playing the exact same game they have been for three decades now.
OK, how do you measure whether you've succeeded in teaching / the student has succeeded in learning those things in a way that is neither arbitrary, nor allows cheating?
Hmm, looks like Sony already tried something similar but screwed it up. Google for "Sony fresh start" and you'll see a bunch of headlines from 2008 about a feature Sony introduced that allowed you to buy a PC without bloatware. But unfortunately, it came off as "Pay $50 to remove bloatware". Further headlines say, Sony shamed into making FreshStart free. So it looks like a bit of a PR fiasco -- they were forced to keep the lower price, but not get the bloatware subsidy. As there are no results after July 2008 (two months after it was first introduced), I can only assume that they got rid of the option as soon as they possibly could.
So to answer the original question: At the moment, there is absolutely no advantage for not installing bloatware. If you don't include it, people get pissed at you for charging more. So you're in a real no-win situation.
I still think the "CleanBoot certified" is a good idea, but it would take some care to make sure it was positioned properly.
...and there's no way for a consumer to tell the difference, when shopping for prices, between a crap-laden install and a clean one. All they see is, "Hey, Dell has this machine with identical specs for $50 cheaper!"
This actually could be a market opportunity: come up with a label for non-crapware-laden (for example, "CleanBoot"), trademark it, define it precisely, and certify vendors to use it. Then instead of only seeing identical specs, they can see that the $50 one extra is "CleanBoot certified!" And if they look into what that means, they'll have your website describing the problem. Then even if they buy the Dell, they'll notice it's slow and think "I should have bought that clean-boot certified one. Next time..."
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing. :-)
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing. :-)
So the key datum supporting the argument that firewalls make DDoS attacks worse is that half of the respondents said that their firewall failed during a DDoS.
The full report is available for free, but you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing. :-)
So the key statistic backing up the claim that poorly-configured firewalls make a DDoS work is that half of the respondents said their firewall went down as a result of a DDoS.
Unfortunately to get the actual report you have to enter in a bunch of information, which I didn't feel like doing.
Funny, but Chinese have an "L" sound. You're thinking other asian languages, like Japanese / Thai. [/nitpick]