Israel has, on numerous occasions in the past, demonstrated that it's quite willing to act independently of, and sometimes contrary to the wishes and interests of, the United States. I have no idea what the actors or circumstances behind stuxnet were. But it's definitely conceivable that the IDF took the action without consulting the US. It is certainly in their best interests to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons; considering it is the publicly-stated policy and goal of the latter state to: "wipe the jews off the map"*.
And yes, before you jump on me for it, I'm quite aware that there is some debate as to whether Ahmadinejad's statement most accurately translates to "off the map" or "out of history". But either way, the meaning of the euphemism is quite clear.
And really... considering the fact that Israel has nukes of it's own and likely would not be willing to just be slaughtered without a fight... Until the world's technology advances past the need for oil, the global economic consequences of nuclear war in the middle east make it pretty much it in the best interest of everyone but Iran to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons... and therefore to sabotage or destroy their facilities by any means necessary. And plenty of countries besides the US and Israel have hackers.
Well, there was allofmp3, for example, which sold music at a significant discount off the price the RIAA was asking. That's not a perfect case though; as it wasn't actually piracy or infringement by the laws at the time of the jurisdiction where they operated. But the RIAA would have you believe it was piracy; and, IIRC, got the cooperation of the credit card processors in that case as well.
WTFH?!? If my muffler was broken and making undue and disturbing noise; I'd get a fix-it ticket and have to quite the thing down. Actually I wish they'd be more stringent on this; and especially to crack down on the jackasses who purposely disable their mufflers so as to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. (Fairly common, it seems, among motorcycle riders... ugh.)
But now we actually finally have cars that are going to put out LESS noise pollution, and make the city a more pleasant place to be... give us MORE peace and quiet... and the government wants to screw it up and require cars to make MORE noise.
hatehatehate...
> Want your green car to rev like a Ferrari or BMW? > Just buy the right drivetone and crank up the exterior > volume.
I weep at the thought. I really do. I, for one, keep my car well-maintained, including the muffler. And I'll bloody well find a way to disable any artificial noisemakers added to any car *I* ever drive.
> You'd think at some point these companies would realize they're never > going to be able to throw enough programming hours at a device to > keep literally tens of thousands of basement tinkers from eventually hijacking it.
That's not the point. If that were the point, Apple could go all RIAA/MPAA DMCA-anti-circumvention on the authors of the jailbreak tools (and individual jailbreakers, for that matter). None of them are hard to find, after all. But Apple is still primarily a hardware company. And they get their money on said hardware whether you jailbreak or not. And even jailbreakers usually have a decent amount of AppStore purchases on their iPhones as well. After all, aside from Backgrounder and SBSettings, Cydia is pretty much a vast sea of crap.
The point is to keep the barrier to entry for jailbreaking high enough that the Genius Bars don't have to deal with morons who do things like install openSSH, don't bother to set passwords, and get their phones rickrolled.
To wit: Observe the reaction of the MPAA to DVD-Jon and deCSS vs Apple's reaction to him and PlayFair.
MPAA: Sue, sue, and sue some more. Who cares if he's Swedish and US law doesn't apply there? Sue anyway. Also sue journalists for mentioning the existence of deCSS. Try to get Jon extradited and/or prosecuted under everything from the Berne Convention to the Treaty of Versailles.
Apple: Ignore him until the RIAA squawks at them about the cracked DRM and do a minor point release to iTunes which breaks PlayFair which is, in turn, updated within 48 hours to work again. Carry on ignoring Jon until the RIAA squawks at them again.
What legitimate, sparing, or specialized use do you actually put caps lock to use for? Personally, I hate the stupid thing and I say good riddance to bad rubbish. One of the first things I do whenever I'm setting up a new computer is remap the thing to be a control key, as was always the proper use for the key in that space.
I do agree that aol-ers will always find some way to be stupid and annoying. Too bad no one ever thought to just drop all traffic from their netblock.
The government should be giving this guy a medal, not prosecuting him. By sending those designs and documents to China, he single-handedly set their automotive industry back by at lease a decade.
Really? So harassing someone and stealing their kit in the airport is "legitimate and competent"?
If someone *really* wanted to smuggle "illegal" data of some kind into the country, they wouldn't be daft enough to travel with it on their laptop. They'd encrypt it and email it to themselves; or upload it to a cloud storage service, or have a file server of their own to FTP it into; or dump it into some random usenet group; or any of probably a dozen other ways to move data without physically carrying anything incriminating with them. The fact that this is lost on these thugs kind of blows "competent" out of the water.
That just leaves "legitimate". And I guess that depend on whether or not you believe in the fourth amendment to the constitution or not.
Oh, I'm well aware of the reputation for utter bastardry of the airport securitygoons in Israel. It's not the only, or even the main, reason I don't ever plan on visiting (I simply have no interest in the region.), but it's no mark in their favor.
I agree that poverty and despair, and let's not forget oppression, are what lead to extremism. For example, you don't see the muslim population of Singapore producing many terrorists. But until dubya decided to get his jollies by launching himself a couple o' wars; Iraquis and Afghans were not, by and large, killing Americans. The 9/11 crowd were all Saudis.
Sure... they were hiding out in Afghanistan so you can make the argument that we had to go there to get them. But they could just of easily been in Yemen or Somalia, or Syria or wherever. But Iraq? They were safely contained and no threat. (The WMDs turned out to a lie, remember?)
> I have no problem answering a few questions about where I was and where I'm going
I do.
Where I've been, where I'm going, and why; are my business, not yours. And unless I, myself, am a suspect of a specific crime; it's no business of law enforcement* either. And if I AM a suspect in that crime, they damn well better cough up a lawyer for me before asking their questions. You remember things like "probable cause" and "presumed innocent until proven guilty" and your Miranda rights?
(*And let's not forget that the airport security goonsquad aren't even real law enforcement officers. They're just glorified rent-a-cops wearing a fake uniform.)
To be fair though, Adobe has taken their share of potshots at Apple as well: naming the PC their preferred platform for CS and the no 64-bit CS for Mac but we'll make it for the PC incident come to mind immediately. And they rather cravenly fired that last one while Steve's health was particularly precarious.
The fact that Flash really is a steaming pile of dog-poo that's really only useful at all for watching YouTube videos, and even then only sparingly lest you bog down your machine or crash the browser, is icing on the cake.
And YouTube is working their way towards HTML 5. Once they finish switching over, why would I want Flash on any machine, Mac *or* OC?
> The seller finds that correcting the information balance by limiting > information access to the buyer is easier than correcting it by having > to access that information themselves.
Easier than having access? The only ease of access that PDA guy has in his favor is the laser barcode scanner; which saves him all of five seconds of typing the UPC into a search engine. We're not talking about information asymmetry here. We're talking about a guy who's willing to put in a modicum of effort vs. the sheer laziness of others.
I comparison shop with my iPhone all the time. And the closest thing to flack I've ever gotten from a brick and mortar store is a polite request to let them try to match the offer if I find a better price online. Informed consumers via always-on portable internet access are a fact of life in this day and age. Businesses need to adapt or die.
San Francisco. I guess transit here must be better than DC, even though I could catalog a long list of complaints. And the link I was originally replying to doesn't mention MUNI, but I can't imagine them being anywhere near as competent as Japan Rail, or even New York.
The bright spot, though, is that the busses are tracked by GPS and post real-time locations and ETAs to the web. So I can walk out my door, go 5 minutes to the bus stop, and be there pretty much just as the next bus is getting there. Then it's a fifteen minute ride downtown, and another five minute walk to the office. Without that GPS, I'd have to allow for another 10 minutes, give or take.
My monthly fastpass, good for unlimited in-town transit, costs me $70. Just how much does a Tesla run for?
And no, I don't live in New York or Japan. So yeah, by your numbers, it might be more energy-efficent to drive. (Though it'd be slower and I'd have the additional expense and headache of parking... no thanks.) What that says to me still though; is that the solution is not to abandon transit in favor my car, but to fire the people running it and hire the people who know how to run it correctly to build out a proper network.
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
What I get out of that link if that we're just doing it wrong. And if you put in more than a half-assed token effort and actually build out a proper mass-transit system, it DOES beat the car. Sure, galveston's transit is a POS. In texas, that doesn't surprise me.
New York looks like they know what they're doing. But the stand-out on that list is JR-East... beating out even motorcycles. The lesson I see there is that we should fire all the nimrods at amtrack, BART, and etc., then hire the Japanese to do it right.
> Is "I don't recall" credible if the police have reason to think you've > been using it day-in day-out, as I do, for example, on my porn drive?
I don't see why not. There are a couple of passwords I use almost everyday myself that I know by muscle memory, not by the actual string. I can type them in under a second. But if you were to ask me what they are, I could 100% honestly tell you that I do not recall. I'd have to stop, think for a minute, look at my keyboard, and trace the path of my fingers.
Likewise, if I use a different keyboard I also mistype them a couple of times before I slow down and get it right.
To be fair, Sagan was being quite the asshat himself. The whole "Butt-Head Astronomer" hullabaloo didn't come about until Sagan sued Apple after the Macintosh rumor mill leaked that Apple was using "Sagan" as an internal codename (Not an actual product name, not a marketing or advertising campaign that would have capitalized on his name, image, or reputation.) for an upcoming product.
And more to the point, seeing as there are usually no crops or livestock within city limits; almost no one is firing a gun in the city to shoot varmints. Regardless of the law and regardless of the safety issues downrange; gunfire in an urban area pretty much always means very bad things, which the police need to go put a stop to, are happening.
I still don't think it really matters which metric you use.
You've got two completely different markets here. The sort of person who's shopping for the jacked-up hulk of an SUV that gets 10mpg doesn't give a flying crap about mileage or the environment. He cares about which one looks manly enough to make him feel like his penis is larger. And he's never ever going to but any of those wimpy little girly-man cars that get 33 or 45 mpg.
And the sort of person who cares about his impact on the rest of the world, and is looking to make the most responsible choice, is not in the market for a hummer, suburban, or excursion; no matter which one gets marginally better mpg or l/100km than the other.
I think being knowledgable and conversant on a wide variety of topics is an important part of being a well-rounded, educated, and functional member of society. We don't need savants, we need people who can think critically and apply their knowledge to fields outside their speciality.
To take your own example: While I agree that it's not necessary to know all of the exact details and maths; a working knowledge of nuclear bomb design gives insight into why our own government wiggs out so much when Iran... a nation which has publicly threatened to wipe another nation in the region off the map (or to wipe them out of history depending on how, exactly, you translate)... starts enriching uranium; especially when if generation of nuclear energy strictly for peaceful uses were really the goal, the CANDU reactor design operates on natural unenriched uranium.
Or, to work geography into the picture, geographic knowledge combined with knowledge of the chemistry of rechargeable batteries would lead one to understand why Bolivia is set to become a fairly major economic layer in the future. (Lithium salts in high-elevation dry lake beds.)
> It'd go up like paper in a fire. In a quake, I bet they just wiggle. > Where do people end up living right after a quake? In tents! Why > not just cut out the middle man and go straight to living in a > very nice tent, which is essentially what a yurt is?
You answered your own question. Because... What happens pretty much immediately after an earthquake? The fires start. And, unless you live on fill that undergoes liquefaction, the fires tend to be significantly more destructive than the earthquake itself. The fact that there's so much wood construction, instead of concrete or stone masonry, is bad enough. Your hypothetical yurt would, as you say, probably just shake around a bit during the quake itself. But when it goes up like paper in the fire; not only do you lose your own home, it act as kindling for your neighbors' homes as well.
I would expect that the battering and deep-frying in hot oil procedure is fairly effective at killing off germs... including the ones that cause zombiefication. That just leaves sushi as a problem. And one would hope that the sushi chef would recognize and discard any zombified sashimi, after all.
To me, anything in title of a game resembling: Online, Arena, World of, Tournament, and so on, is actually just a code word for:
We ran out of development time before we could / we are too in competent to / we just couldn't be bothered to develop decent AI, levels, or storyline for the game; so we'll cheap out, say "it's all about the multiplayer", release an incomplete game, and charge you extra for the privilege.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh?
Israel has, on numerous occasions in the past, demonstrated that it's quite willing to act independently of, and sometimes contrary to the wishes and interests of, the United States. I have no idea what the actors or circumstances behind stuxnet were. But it's definitely conceivable that the IDF took the action without consulting the US. It is certainly in their best interests to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons; considering it is the publicly-stated policy and goal of the latter state to: "wipe the jews off the map"*.
And yes, before you jump on me for it, I'm quite aware that there is some debate as to whether Ahmadinejad's statement most accurately translates to "off the map" or "out of history". But either way, the meaning of the euphemism is quite clear.
And really... considering the fact that Israel has nukes of it's own and likely would not be willing to just be slaughtered without a fight... Until the world's technology advances past the need for oil, the global economic consequences of nuclear war in the middle east make it pretty much it in the best interest of everyone but Iran to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons... and therefore to sabotage or destroy their facilities by any means necessary. And plenty of countries besides the US and Israel have hackers.
Well, there was allofmp3, for example, which sold music at a significant discount off the price the RIAA was asking. That's not a perfect case though; as it wasn't actually piracy or infringement by the laws at the time of the jurisdiction where they operated. But the RIAA would have you believe it was piracy; and, IIRC, got the cooperation of the credit card processors in that case as well.
WTFH?!? If my muffler was broken and making undue and disturbing noise; I'd get a fix-it ticket and have to quite the thing down. Actually I wish they'd be more stringent on this; and especially to crack down on the jackasses who purposely disable their mufflers so as to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. (Fairly common, it seems, among motorcycle riders... ugh.)
But now we actually finally have cars that are going to put out LESS noise pollution, and make the city a more pleasant place to be... give us MORE peace and quiet... and the government wants to screw it up and require cars to make MORE noise.
hatehatehate...
> Want your green car to rev like a Ferrari or BMW?
> Just buy the right drivetone and crank up the exterior
> volume.
I weep at the thought. I really do. I, for one, keep my car well-maintained, including the muffler. And I'll bloody well find a way to disable any artificial noisemakers added to any car *I* ever drive.
> You'd think at some point these companies would realize they're never
> going to be able to throw enough programming hours at a device to
> keep literally tens of thousands of basement tinkers from eventually hijacking it.
That's not the point. If that were the point, Apple could go all RIAA/MPAA DMCA-anti-circumvention on the authors of the jailbreak tools (and individual jailbreakers, for that matter). None of them are hard to find, after all. But Apple is still primarily a hardware company. And they get their money on said hardware whether you jailbreak or not. And even jailbreakers usually have a decent amount of AppStore purchases on their iPhones as well. After all, aside from Backgrounder and SBSettings, Cydia is pretty much a vast sea of crap.
The point is to keep the barrier to entry for jailbreaking high enough that the Genius Bars don't have to deal with morons who do things like install openSSH, don't bother to set passwords, and get their phones rickrolled.
To wit: Observe the reaction of the MPAA to DVD-Jon and deCSS vs Apple's reaction to him and PlayFair.
MPAA: Sue, sue, and sue some more. Who cares if he's Swedish and US law doesn't apply there? Sue anyway. Also sue journalists for mentioning the existence of deCSS. Try to get Jon extradited and/or prosecuted under everything from the Berne Convention to the Treaty of Versailles.
Apple: Ignore him until the RIAA squawks at them about the cracked DRM and do a minor point release to iTunes which breaks PlayFair which is, in turn, updated within 48 hours to work again. Carry on ignoring Jon until the RIAA squawks at them again.
Honest question there...
What legitimate, sparing, or specialized use do you actually put caps lock to use for? Personally, I hate the stupid thing and I say good riddance to bad rubbish. One of the first things I do whenever I'm setting up a new computer is remap the thing to be a control key, as was always the proper use for the key in that space.
I do agree that aol-ers will always find some way to be stupid and annoying. Too bad no one ever thought to just drop all traffic from their netblock.
The government should be giving this guy a medal, not prosecuting him. By sending those designs and documents to China, he single-handedly set their automotive industry back by at lease a decade.
> legitimate and competent
Really? So harassing someone and stealing their kit in the airport is "legitimate and competent"?
If someone *really* wanted to smuggle "illegal" data of some kind into the country, they wouldn't be daft enough to travel with it on their laptop. They'd encrypt it and email it to themselves; or upload it to a cloud storage service, or have a file server of their own to FTP it into; or dump it into some random usenet group; or any of probably a dozen other ways to move data without physically carrying anything incriminating with them. The fact that this is lost on these thugs kind of blows "competent" out of the water.
That just leaves "legitimate". And I guess that depend on whether or not you believe in the fourth amendment to the constitution or not.
Oh, I'm well aware of the reputation for utter bastardry of the airport securitygoons in Israel. It's not the only, or even the main, reason I don't ever plan on visiting (I simply have no interest in the region.), but it's no mark in their favor.
I agree that poverty and despair, and let's not forget oppression, are what lead to extremism. For example, you don't see the muslim population of Singapore producing many terrorists. But until dubya decided to get his jollies by launching himself a couple o' wars; Iraquis and Afghans were not, by and large, killing Americans. The 9/11 crowd were all Saudis.
Sure... they were hiding out in Afghanistan so you can make the argument that we had to go there to get them. But they could just of easily been in Yemen or Somalia, or Syria or wherever. But Iraq? They were safely contained and no threat. (The WMDs turned out to a lie, remember?)
> I have no problem answering a few questions about where I was and where I'm going
I do.
Where I've been, where I'm going, and why; are my business, not yours. And unless I, myself, am a suspect of a specific crime; it's no business of law enforcement* either. And if I AM a suspect in that crime, they damn well better cough up a lawyer for me before asking their questions. You remember things like "probable cause" and "presumed innocent until proven guilty" and your Miranda rights?
(*And let's not forget that the airport security goonsquad aren't even real law enforcement officers. They're just glorified rent-a-cops wearing a fake uniform.)
To be fair though, Adobe has taken their share of potshots at Apple as well: naming the PC their preferred platform for CS and the no 64-bit CS for Mac but we'll make it for the PC incident come to mind immediately. And they rather cravenly fired that last one while Steve's health was particularly precarious.
The fact that Flash really is a steaming pile of dog-poo that's really only useful at all for watching YouTube videos, and even then only sparingly lest you bog down your machine or crash the browser, is icing on the cake.
And YouTube is working their way towards HTML 5. Once they finish switching over, why would I want Flash on any machine, Mac *or* OC?
> The seller finds that correcting the information balance by limiting
> information access to the buyer is easier than correcting it by having
> to access that information themselves.
Easier than having access? The only ease of access that PDA guy has in his favor is the laser barcode scanner; which saves him all of five seconds of typing the UPC into a search engine. We're not talking about information asymmetry here. We're talking about a guy who's willing to put in a modicum of effort vs. the sheer laziness of others.
I comparison shop with my iPhone all the time. And the closest thing to flack I've ever gotten from a brick and mortar store is a polite request to let them try to match the offer if I find a better price online. Informed consumers via always-on portable internet access are a fact of life in this day and age. Businesses need to adapt or die.
San Francisco. I guess transit here must be better than DC, even though I could catalog a long list of complaints. And the link I was originally replying to doesn't mention MUNI, but I can't imagine them being anywhere near as competent as Japan Rail, or even New York.
The bright spot, though, is that the busses are tracked by GPS and post real-time locations and ETAs to the web. So I can walk out my door, go 5 minutes to the bus stop, and be there pretty much just as the next bus is getting there. Then it's a fifteen minute ride downtown, and another five minute walk to the office. Without that GPS, I'd have to allow for another 10 minutes, give or take.
There is a slight problem with that.
My monthly fastpass, good for unlimited in-town transit, costs me $70. Just how much does a Tesla run for?
And no, I don't live in New York or Japan. So yeah, by your numbers, it might be more energy-efficent to drive. (Though it'd be slower and I'd have the additional expense and headache of parking... no thanks.) What that says to me still though; is that the solution is not to abandon transit in favor my car, but to fire the people running it and hire the people who know how to run it correctly to build out a proper network.
I take public transit to and from work every day, thanks. It takes me 25 minutes door to door if I don't stop for coffee on my way in. And no, I don't live in New York.
What I get out of that link if that we're just doing it wrong. And if you put in more than a half-assed token effort and actually build out a proper mass-transit system, it DOES beat the car. Sure, galveston's transit is a POS. In texas, that doesn't surprise me.
New York looks like they know what they're doing. But the stand-out on that list is JR-East... beating out even motorcycles. The lesson I see there is that we should fire all the nimrods at amtrack, BART, and etc., then hire the Japanese to do it right.
> Is "I don't recall" credible if the police have reason to think you've
> been using it day-in day-out, as I do, for example, on my porn drive?
I don't see why not. There are a couple of passwords I use almost everyday myself that I know by muscle memory, not by the actual string. I can type them in under a second. But if you were to ask me what they are, I could 100% honestly tell you that I do not recall. I'd have to stop, think for a minute, look at my keyboard, and trace the path of my fingers.
Likewise, if I use a different keyboard I also mistype them a couple of times before I slow down and get it right.
To be fair, Sagan was being quite the asshat himself. The whole "Butt-Head Astronomer" hullabaloo didn't come about until Sagan sued Apple after the Macintosh rumor mill leaked that Apple was using "Sagan" as an internal codename (Not an actual product name, not a marketing or advertising campaign that would have capitalized on his name, image, or reputation.) for an upcoming product.
And more to the point, seeing as there are usually no crops or livestock within city limits; almost no one is firing a gun in the city to shoot varmints. Regardless of the law and regardless of the safety issues downrange; gunfire in an urban area pretty much always means very bad things, which the police need to go put a stop to, are happening.
I still don't think it really matters which metric you use.
You've got two completely different markets here. The sort of person who's shopping for the jacked-up hulk of an SUV that gets 10mpg doesn't give a flying crap about mileage or the environment. He cares about which one looks manly enough to make him feel like his penis is larger. And he's never ever going to but any of those wimpy little girly-man cars that get 33 or 45 mpg.
And the sort of person who cares about his impact on the rest of the world, and is looking to make the most responsible choice, is not in the market for a hummer, suburban, or excursion; no matter which one gets marginally better mpg or l/100km than the other.
I disagree.
I think being knowledgable and conversant on a wide variety of topics is an important part of being a well-rounded, educated, and functional member of society. We don't need savants, we need people who can think critically and apply their knowledge to fields outside their speciality.
To take your own example: While I agree that it's not necessary to know all of the exact details and maths; a working knowledge of nuclear bomb design gives insight into why our own government wiggs out so much when Iran... a nation which has publicly threatened to wipe another nation in the region off the map (or to wipe them out of history depending on how, exactly, you translate)... starts enriching uranium; especially when if generation of nuclear energy strictly for peaceful uses were really the goal, the CANDU reactor design operates on natural unenriched uranium.
Or, to work geography into the picture, geographic knowledge combined with knowledge of the chemistry of rechargeable batteries would lead one to understand why Bolivia is set to become a fairly major economic layer in the future. (Lithium salts in high-elevation dry lake beds.)
> It'd go up like paper in a fire. In a quake, I bet they just wiggle.
> Where do people end up living right after a quake? In tents! Why
> not just cut out the middle man and go straight to living in a
> very nice tent, which is essentially what a yurt is?
You answered your own question. Because... What happens pretty much immediately after an earthquake? The fires start. And, unless you live on fill that undergoes liquefaction, the fires tend to be significantly more destructive than the earthquake itself. The fact that there's so much wood construction, instead of concrete or stone masonry, is bad enough. Your hypothetical yurt would, as you say, probably just shake around a bit during the quake itself. But when it goes up like paper in the fire; not only do you lose your own home, it act as kindling for your neighbors' homes as well.
I would expect that the battering and deep-frying in hot oil procedure is fairly effective at killing off germs... including the ones that cause zombiefication. That just leaves sushi as a problem. And one would hope that the sushi chef would recognize and discard any zombified sashimi, after all.
... I won't have to dodge chocobo droppings, I'm all for it.
Yup.
To me, anything in title of a game resembling: Online, Arena, World of, Tournament, and so on, is actually just a code word for:
We ran out of development time before we could / we are too in competent to / we just couldn't be bothered to develop decent AI, levels, or storyline for the game; so we'll cheap out, say "it's all about the multiplayer", release an incomplete game, and charge you extra for the privilege.