You're right, the technology may be great, but the people operating it will ruin it. I'm sure most/.ers are picturing many lanes of traffic in multiple dimensions all moving along happily. There's a problem with that picture. People won't _stay_ in those lanes. It doesn't matter how many individual "lanes" you designate.
You want an example? Go sit on the far end of a parking lot and just WATCH. There's like 50 "designated lanes" of traffic. And, for pretty much NO reason whatsoever, people have a tendency to go the wrong way in 1-way lanes and/or cut across multiple lanes (often without really looking).
I'm trying not to flame this whole discussion too much, but I feel very strongly about NOT wanting flying cars. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing any drunken idiot can come crashing through my ceiling.
Combine maintenance problems with the general public's inability to drive safely and we can all look forward to living in a world where 1/2-ton balls of steel and glass routinely fall out of the sky.
I see this a lot on/. and I just have to comment. Think about it, do you REALLY want flying cars? Consider how horrible people are at driving on a 2-dimensional plane of road. And you want to add another axis to this? I'm really comfortable with the fact that, on a highway accident, there's a barrier between the accident and oncoming traffic. Having a car that can simply hop over that cement barrier and take out dozens of innocent people frightens me.
Seriously, flying cars are fun to imagine and all, but think about the general public. Would you really want to be _under_ flying traffic? Do you really want to live in a world where 1/2-ton balls of steel and glass routinely fall out of the sky? When something goes wrong in your car (mechanical failure of some sort), would you rather be 2 lanes from the breakdown lane or 50+ feet above it?
We have alot of problems to solve before we can worry about the "make the car fly" problem.
The added security does nothing but placate the sheeple.
Amen. Also, no matter what the government mandates to try to make people feel safe, it all comes down to Mr. John Q. Agent working at the airport to actually make it work. And he often fails.
I can give several examples of (post-9/11) experiences in an airport where I used to live (Missoula, Montana). I once boarded a plane with nobody at the gate to check passes (I still have the complete, unchecked boarding pass). I've walked right into almost every "restricted" area, including the machine room in the basement, the offices behind the airline counters, and even right out the back door to where the planes are.
My only comfort was knowing the strategic choices of planes on 9/11 was related to their high fuel content and proximity to specific targets. By the time any plane from Montana gets to a terrorist target, it's time to re-fuel.
Bogging a site down due to page loads isn't illegal. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion because Slashdot wouldn't exist...
The difference is intent. Posting a link to an interesting website on a public forum with intent to share the information contained within that site is legal. It may annoy the occasional webmaster, but server load is their problem.
A DDOS attack is clearly different. The pages are not being "viewed" by anybody except the software, which is doing nothing with the information. It is a blatant attempt to dramatically increase server load for no other reason than to deny other people from accessing the server.
THAT was the great and historic 10,000,000th post. Beautiful. I'm reminded of the "I don't know" written on the chalkboard in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.
You're right though, if a customer's complete lack of preparation is part of the problem then it's going to cost them.
I remember introducing this concept to a small company I used to work for (putting small networks in local businesses). My boss thought that partitioning the drive on a machine we install was "more complicated than it needs to be." No, spending 8 hours at the client's office "fixing" a computer instead of Ghosting an image (we had a license for Ghost, why weren't we using it?) was "more complicated than it needs to be."
If there were a United Caucasian College Fund, these same people would be crying racist.
Good point. I wonder what the average member of any given racial minority in the US would feel if we somehow magically eliminated this dichotomy. On the one hand, they would gain full equality in the minds of everyone around them. On the other hand, they would lose all social programs geared towards helping them for other other reason than they are a minority.
I work in an office building which houses many state programs (I won't name the state) and see on a daily basis the countless people who come through here filing for this and applying for that. I see a lot of money going to do (I hope) a lot of good. The social issue at large is a nice thing to discuss and/or complain about, but would that be of any consolation to Mr. John Q. Public in his unending quest to feed his family?
I found myself in this exact situation once a while back. And when I'd call the ISP I'd usually be on the phone with "tech support" people who didn't even know what an IP was. After a lot of frusteration from not having a real IP, I later discovered that I actually _did_ but it was behind a 1:1 ratio NAT built into the ISP's modem device. I went to http://www.whatismyip.com to discover the public IP that my destinations _thought_ I had, tried to connect to it from an off-site host, and it worked. Maybe you've already tried this, but if you haven't it might be worth a shot.
It's implied from the post (which I suggest you actually read) that such a course of action would require moving again. While not impossible, the circumstances surrounding one's residence (local employment, affordability, etc.) are a lot to weigh against having a public IP.
Unless you're suggesting that the poster go with dial-up, though that's not much of an option either...
But even "standard" code can render differently in different browsers on different platforms. Depending on the complexity of the website/application, small differences can be a big problem.
At my last job I kept a log of browsers/platforms that hit the webserver. From the vast majority (at the time, IE5 on Win9x) down through the percentages, I would run what I could for testing. For example, using whatever tool of choice (VMWare on my home network was what I used), I tested my sites in IE5 on Win9x, IE5 on Win2K, Netscape, Mozilla, etc, etc. I think I was regularly testing on maybe the top 6 percentages in the log, capturing about 99.5% of the hits.
There will always be a percentage of browsers in the world you can't test, be they either little-used browsers on little-used platforms or widely-used browsers with some strange configuration that messes things up. But if you can identify the majority of the variations that are hitting your site(s), then just test as many of those as you can before you feel confident that it's "as compliant as it's going to get."
Solely in terms of Disaster Recovery, I'd have to agree with the parent and suggest that any money that would go towards such insurance be better spent ensuring a good recovery plan. If something were to happen to the company's data, an insurance payoff is of little consolation when all it can do is replace damaged hardware, not recover lost data. If that same money is put towards a better recovery plan, then management can rest assured that, in the event of a loss of data, they can get it back quickly and with minimum interruption to the business.
As for the legal protection aspects of the insurance (lawsuits, copyright issues, etc.), I'd be skeptical that they may just be tossing out some buzz words to attract fearful managers who want to shield themselves from the evils of the modern Internet. If your company is at risk of being sued for such things, an insurance policy is not the answer. Fixing whatever is causing the risk would be a better approach.
Amen. One of my favorites in the recent super-realistic-graphics days is the very unrealistic Zelda: Windwaker. The gameplay was fantastic. And, as for the emotion factor, I wanted to strangle Ganon with my bare hands by the end of that game.
Graphics are great, don't get me wrong. But I've seen too many games that boast fantastically realistic video sequences interlaced with terrible gameplay. Sure, the characters and objects and backgrounds looked great independantly of one another, but their actions and motions were terrible.
Exactly. A big advantage of Windows is that anyone (even your grandmother) can be a sysadmin. A big disadvantage of Windows is that anyone (even your grandmother) thinks they can be a sysadmin.
At least I'd know it's in the pile, which is a hell of a lot better than being told it's "probably on another flight" and "should be here within a few days." Followed, of course, by the unspoken: "and we might deliver it to the address you just gave us that we might have written down. Maybe."
Married couples can spend days cramped in a pressurized tube and still get along? Geez, I must be doing something wrong then. My wife and I can't get along when we spend days cramped in a 2-bedroom apartment.
Same goes for the folks who paid the SCO invoices for Linux
An SCO invoice is _alot_ more affordable than any legal battle, short of perhaps an episode of Judge Judy or something. There's a difference between being sheep and having the economic sense to go with the cheaper/easier solution so you can just get on with your life/business.
The article says some of the settlements were as low as $2500. Again, not terribly expensive when compared to attorney fees (remember, these are civil cases and so the defendant is not entitled to free representation like with criminal cases) coupled with the time and effort (missed work, time away from family, etc.) required to battle the RIAA in court.
You'll notice also, in the article, that the settlements "do not include any admission of wrongdoing." Loosely translated, the court case as a whole basically resulted with, "Ok, you didn't necessarily do anything wrong. but the rich guys think you did and want some money from you. You hereby agree to give them money if for no other reason than to make them leave you alone."
The moral of the story: It's often easier to just pay the extortionist than to have him break your knees.
targeting kids for extra help instead of punishment
Amen. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but I have to support anything that's geared to help rather than to punish. If they can avoid suspending Troublemaker Jimmy and, oh I don't know, talk to him, then maybe they're onto something.
your school gets flagged as low performing and you lose money that way
Boy, good thing they send all the money to the schools that get by fine with the amount they already have, rather than the ones that, you know, need a little more help. God bless America (forgive the geographic assumption if you're not talking about US schools).
"Let me get this straight... we're already behind the class, and we're supposed to catch up to them by going slower than them?" -Bart Simpson
If they have your fingerprint stored in a computer, then they can just go fingerprint all the soda cans or whatever thrown out after that anti-IMF rally and produce a list of everyone who was there.
Ya. They could also tear gas the rally and execute everyone in attendance on the spot. But they don't. Seriously, why is it so bad that they know who was there? Is the cause for which you're rallying so unimportant to you that you don't want anyone to know you're rallying for it? Personally, I can't take anyone seriously when they're shouting from behind the bleachers. If you don't want to be counted, don't go.
Roughly the same idea holds true for these passports. Nobody is forcing you to get one. If absolute privacy is the most important thing in your life then don't get a passport. But don't expect to be able to walk across international borders easily. It's a choice. You can't have it both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably fast as hell too!
Not when you're towing something that weights 100x more than your car.
I wish I could mod you above +5.
/.ers are picturing many lanes of traffic in multiple dimensions all moving along happily. There's a problem with that picture. People won't _stay_ in those lanes. It doesn't matter how many individual "lanes" you designate.
You're right, the technology may be great, but the people operating it will ruin it. I'm sure most
You want an example? Go sit on the far end of a parking lot and just WATCH. There's like 50 "designated lanes" of traffic. And, for pretty much NO reason whatsoever, people have a tendency to go the wrong way in 1-way lanes and/or cut across multiple lanes (often without really looking).
I'm trying not to flame this whole discussion too much, but I feel very strongly about NOT wanting flying cars. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing any drunken idiot can come crashing through my ceiling.
Combine maintenance problems with the general public's inability to drive safely and we can all look forward to living in a world where 1/2-ton balls of steel and glass routinely fall out of the sky.
The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.
flying car
/. and I just have to comment. Think about it, do you REALLY want flying cars? Consider how horrible people are at driving on a 2-dimensional plane of road. And you want to add another axis to this? I'm really comfortable with the fact that, on a highway accident, there's a barrier between the accident and oncoming traffic. Having a car that can simply hop over that cement barrier and take out dozens of innocent people frightens me.
I see this a lot on
Seriously, flying cars are fun to imagine and all, but think about the general public. Would you really want to be _under_ flying traffic? Do you really want to live in a world where 1/2-ton balls of steel and glass routinely fall out of the sky? When something goes wrong in your car (mechanical failure of some sort), would you rather be 2 lanes from the breakdown lane or 50+ feet above it?
We have alot of problems to solve before we can worry about the "make the car fly" problem.
The added security does nothing but placate the sheeple.
Amen. Also, no matter what the government mandates to try to make people feel safe, it all comes down to Mr. John Q. Agent working at the airport to actually make it work. And he often fails.
I can give several examples of (post-9/11) experiences in an airport where I used to live (Missoula, Montana). I once boarded a plane with nobody at the gate to check passes (I still have the complete, unchecked boarding pass). I've walked right into almost every "restricted" area, including the machine room in the basement, the offices behind the airline counters, and even right out the back door to where the planes are.
My only comfort was knowing the strategic choices of planes on 9/11 was related to their high fuel content and proximity to specific targets. By the time any plane from Montana gets to a terrorist target, it's time to re-fuel.
Bogging a site down due to page loads isn't illegal. If it were, we wouldn't be having this discussion because Slashdot wouldn't exist...
The difference is intent. Posting a link to an interesting website on a public forum with intent to share the information contained within that site is legal. It may annoy the occasional webmaster, but server load is their problem.
A DDOS attack is clearly different. The pages are not being "viewed" by anybody except the software, which is doing nothing with the information. It is a blatant attempt to dramatically increase server load for no other reason than to deny other people from accessing the server.
I don't get it.
THAT was the great and historic 10,000,000th post. Beautiful. I'm reminded of the "I don't know" written on the chalkboard in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.
root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh
Don't you ever let me see you type something like that again, you hear me?
Ummm.. maybe idiots would...
That's what he said... "people."
...you're going to have to do it the hard way
Hence charging by the hour.
You're right though, if a customer's complete lack of preparation is part of the problem then it's going to cost them.
I remember introducing this concept to a small company I used to work for (putting small networks in local businesses). My boss thought that partitioning the drive on a machine we install was "more complicated than it needs to be." No, spending 8 hours at the client's office "fixing" a computer instead of Ghosting an image (we had a license for Ghost, why weren't we using it?) was "more complicated than it needs to be."
I think that actually tends to be a worse accident.
I won't claim to know much about it myself, but I just found http://www.safecarguide.com/exp/iihs/idx.htm and it seems like a good place to start.
If there were a United Caucasian College Fund, these same people would be crying racist.
Good point. I wonder what the average member of any given racial minority in the US would feel if we somehow magically eliminated this dichotomy. On the one hand, they would gain full equality in the minds of everyone around them. On the other hand, they would lose all social programs geared towards helping them for other other reason than they are a minority.
I work in an office building which houses many state programs (I won't name the state) and see on a daily basis the countless people who come through here filing for this and applying for that. I see a lot of money going to do (I hope) a lot of good. The social issue at large is a nice thing to discuss and/or complain about, but would that be of any consolation to Mr. John Q. Public in his unending quest to feed his family?
I found myself in this exact situation once a while back. And when I'd call the ISP I'd usually be on the phone with "tech support" people who didn't even know what an IP was. After a lot of frusteration from not having a real IP, I later discovered that I actually _did_ but it was behind a 1:1 ratio NAT built into the ISP's modem device. I went to http://www.whatismyip.com to discover the public IP that my destinations _thought_ I had, tried to connect to it from an off-site host, and it worked. Maybe you've already tried this, but if you haven't it might be worth a shot.
Just switch providers.
It's implied from the post (which I suggest you actually read) that such a course of action would require moving again. While not impossible, the circumstances surrounding one's residence (local employment, affordability, etc.) are a lot to weigh against having a public IP.
Unless you're suggesting that the poster go with dial-up, though that's not much of an option either...
But even "standard" code can render differently in different browsers on different platforms. Depending on the complexity of the website/application, small differences can be a big problem.
At my last job I kept a log of browsers/platforms that hit the webserver. From the vast majority (at the time, IE5 on Win9x) down through the percentages, I would run what I could for testing. For example, using whatever tool of choice (VMWare on my home network was what I used), I tested my sites in IE5 on Win9x, IE5 on Win2K, Netscape, Mozilla, etc, etc. I think I was regularly testing on maybe the top 6 percentages in the log, capturing about 99.5% of the hits.
There will always be a percentage of browsers in the world you can't test, be they either little-used browsers on little-used platforms or widely-used browsers with some strange configuration that messes things up. But if you can identify the majority of the variations that are hitting your site(s), then just test as many of those as you can before you feel confident that it's "as compliant as it's going to get."
Solely in terms of Disaster Recovery, I'd have to agree with the parent and suggest that any money that would go towards such insurance be better spent ensuring a good recovery plan. If something were to happen to the company's data, an insurance payoff is of little consolation when all it can do is replace damaged hardware, not recover lost data. If that same money is put towards a better recovery plan, then management can rest assured that, in the event of a loss of data, they can get it back quickly and with minimum interruption to the business.
As for the legal protection aspects of the insurance (lawsuits, copyright issues, etc.), I'd be skeptical that they may just be tossing out some buzz words to attract fearful managers who want to shield themselves from the evils of the modern Internet. If your company is at risk of being sued for such things, an insurance policy is not the answer. Fixing whatever is causing the risk would be a better approach.
It has to be referenced...
2 -14&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-1
Amen. One of my favorites in the recent super-realistic-graphics days is the very unrealistic Zelda: Windwaker. The gameplay was fantastic. And, as for the emotion factor, I wanted to strangle Ganon with my bare hands by the end of that game.
Graphics are great, don't get me wrong. But I've seen too many games that boast fantastically realistic video sequences interlaced with terrible gameplay. Sure, the characters and objects and backgrounds looked great independantly of one another, but their actions and motions were terrible.
Exactly. A big advantage of Windows is that anyone (even your grandmother) can be a sysadmin. A big disadvantage of Windows is that anyone (even your grandmother) thinks they can be a sysadmin.
...still only limiting it to a pile of 800.
At least I'd know it's in the pile, which is a hell of a lot better than being told it's "probably on another flight" and "should be here within a few days." Followed, of course, by the unspoken: "and we might deliver it to the address you just gave us that we might have written down. Maybe."
...or be married couples...
Married couples can spend days cramped in a pressurized tube and still get along? Geez, I must be doing something wrong then. My wife and I can't get along when we spend days cramped in a 2-bedroom apartment.
Same goes for the folks who paid the SCO invoices for Linux
An SCO invoice is _alot_ more affordable than any legal battle, short of perhaps an episode of Judge Judy or something. There's a difference between being sheep and having the economic sense to go with the cheaper/easier solution so you can just get on with your life/business.
The article says some of the settlements were as low as $2500. Again, not terribly expensive when compared to attorney fees (remember, these are civil cases and so the defendant is not entitled to free representation like with criminal cases) coupled with the time and effort (missed work, time away from family, etc.) required to battle the RIAA in court.
You'll notice also, in the article, that the settlements "do not include any admission of wrongdoing." Loosely translated, the court case as a whole basically resulted with, "Ok, you didn't necessarily do anything wrong. but the rich guys think you did and want some money from you. You hereby agree to give them money if for no other reason than to make them leave you alone."
The moral of the story: It's often easier to just pay the extortionist than to have him break your knees.
targeting kids for extra help instead of punishment
Amen. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but I have to support anything that's geared to help rather than to punish. If they can avoid suspending Troublemaker Jimmy and, oh I don't know, talk to him, then maybe they're onto something.
your school gets flagged as low performing and you lose money that way
Boy, good thing they send all the money to the schools that get by fine with the amount they already have, rather than the ones that, you know, need a little more help. God bless America (forgive the geographic assumption if you're not talking about US schools).
"Let me get this straight... we're already behind the class, and we're supposed to catch up to them by going slower than them?" -Bart Simpson
If they have your fingerprint stored in a computer, then they can just go fingerprint all the soda cans or whatever thrown out after that anti-IMF rally and produce a list of everyone who was there.
Ya. They could also tear gas the rally and execute everyone in attendance on the spot. But they don't. Seriously, why is it so bad that they know who was there? Is the cause for which you're rallying so unimportant to you that you don't want anyone to know you're rallying for it? Personally, I can't take anyone seriously when they're shouting from behind the bleachers. If you don't want to be counted, don't go.
Roughly the same idea holds true for these passports. Nobody is forcing you to get one. If absolute privacy is the most important thing in your life then don't get a passport. But don't expect to be able to walk across international borders easily. It's a choice. You can't have it both ways.