> all that anti terrorist legislation didn't work, so lets have more anti terrorist legislation.
Leaving off the subject of more anti-terror legislation, why do you say the anti-terror legislation isn't working? Because it failed to prevent an attack? I don't believe anyone looking at the situation rationally would expect -anything- to make attacks impossible, just as no barriers can absolutely secure computer systems. Security is a process, not a state of being.
Reducing the number and severity of instances is certainly possible, but most of the effort has been to improve responses. The emergency crews responded quite well in London, from all I have seen. The real test is still to come; will the expanded police and investigative powers lead to identifying and capturing those responsible?
BTW, I am -not- in favor of most of the anti-terror legislation in place now. I'm just sympathetic to the police and emergency forces, and even to the legislators; they have an impossible task to do. No matter -what- they do, a huge number of armchair quarterbacks will bitch about how they would have done it.
All I can say in my favor is that I -know- I'm an armchair quarterback, and couldn't do a better job myself.
> Hence requirements gathering as the first step in the development process.
No argument. However, deciding -what- is a requirement is a business process. In this case, did the coder fail to elicit range checking and supervisor confirmation requirements on transactions? Or did the business staff mandate that there were to be -no- checks and -no- confirmation steps?
In the last few years, I've seen this kind of thing a lot. A lot of business people are reacting against restrictive applications that prompt "Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you absolutely certain?" In the process, a lot of them are insisting on no restrictions. Until, of course, it blows up in their faces.
The first several replies were unanimous in stating that this is a developer failure. I was merely trying to point out the possibility that the responsibility may lie elsewhere.
-If- developers were really engineers, instead of engineers in name only, then I would agree that the buck should stop with the developer. But until businesses start paying for engineers instead of grunt coders, I feel we must look at the whole picture before assigning blame.
> The primary fault lies with the developer who failed to adeqautely validate input... Data > validation...includes sanity checking to make sure data are within reasonable ranges, and requiring > additional confirmation (ranging from "Whoa, dude! That much?" to supervisor approval) when input is outside that.
Have to disagree. -If- developers in such organizations were designers and architects, I would agree, and I certainly agree that such checks are needed on core financial systems.
However, confirmation and supervisor approval, and determining what is reasonable in terms of range checks is a business decision, not a coder decision. If software development in the business world was usually done right, then the developer would have the background and skills to do this. Typically, they don't even have the background to know to recommend such things.
IMHO, this is why neither the trader nor the developer (probably; this case may not be like the typical one I described) should be held accountable. The people in charge of the decisions that led to this deficiency in the software -and- the business processes it supports should be held responsible and forced to fix the problem.
> It's a matter of economics to a web publisher like ourselves. That said I'm very obsessed with the > brand image, and do not want to ruin people's experience so I am willing to take 1/16th less money > for a more succesfull less annoying site.
And that's both the more responsible and the more effective (long-term) view. Yeah, the money -today- from the evil ads is tempting, but it -will- cost those who take it in the long run.
If they are to grow a name for themselves. There are some who plan to take the money and run, and they will go to the dark side without a second thought.
I think that's pretty typical. I use the Adblock base filters, covering doubleclick and others, but I think I've only added 2 additional items to the list since I started using it many months ago.
If it's not intrusive or offensive, it's not worth the couple of clicks to add it to the blocklist.
Judging from the other replies you got, I'd say everyone agrees that: animated ads stink, flash ads stink, and pop-ups, -overs, -unders, etc. really stink.
> In fact, newspaper ads are often informative, or have cupons I might actually use.
Very true. A fair number of the ads in our local papers are notices about upcoming events, various sales, local government offers, etc.
In a given week there are ads covering nature walks, free and inexpensive concerts and fairs, seasonal sales at local retailers, etc.
I find out a about lot of good stuff that way.
Sunday papers are a traditional excellent example. A lot of people buy the Sunday papers largely -because- of the greater amount of advertising.
But you can skim it, and disregard the crap. Doubleclick, et al, want to remove the ability to rapidly get away from crap.
> However, the second the Boston Globe starts placing ads on the front page, over the content > I'm trying to read that move around, blink, play a store's jingle and tell me that it knows my > newspaper's IP address... you can bet I will stop reading it.
Absolutely. The newspapers have largely settled in to a comfortable arrangment. Not too intrusive. TV still wants more than their fair share of the viewers attention, and the flexibility of the Internet means advertisers there can try to be ridiculously aggressive.
Exactly. It's a jurisdictional issue as soon as the call center is even out-of-state.
But moving call centers offshore adds -enormous- complexity. I would tend to suspect (I have limited knowledge of foreign legal systems) that things become even more complex the farther the nation in question gets from the traditions of British common law. India, for example, might be significantly less complicated that China.
This is degenerating into a 'Did not! Did Too!' kind of thing; This will be my last reply on this.
> And you think that didn't happen ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago? It did, > but there wasn't a national or global news network to spread the stories around in minutes.
Yes, it did. But nowhere near as often 20 or 30 years ago. News coverage really isn't relevant to the cases I'm talking about. These are local happenings, that did not happen to anything near this frequency in this area 20 and 30 years ago.
> I'd argue that playing outside as a kid is safer now because criminals know just how quickly they can be tracked down.
That's probably where we're failing to agree; I am not evaluating the overall result and do not intend to. I'm looking at the raw inputs. I'm not balancing the increasing capabilities of law enforcement officials against the increasing brutality of the criminals.
We're not going to agree here; my way of looking at things appears to be very different from yours. You make some valid points, but in my worldview they aren't very significant. We agree on a lot of the details, we just weight them differently.
> Are you saying that doesn't happen today? I see kids playing in parks and lawns all the time.
So do I. But I see a lot more who don't and won't than I used to.
> I assume you have some kind of evidence to back up this claim? Seems to me that there's plenty of > complex problem solving in today's video games, and plotlines at least as complex as most books > these kids would be reading otherwise.
There are complex problems in a minority of video games, and simplistic books as well. I just feel books are better, on the whole, at stimulating complex thought. I like books; my preference.
Please understand, this is -not- intended to be an indictment of video games, computers, or television. It's intended to be a comment on attitudes in today's society. It's not just the kids; I see a frightening number of college-educated adults who do not read and do not exercise their minds anymore. It's not just that they don't -read-; it's that they don't -think-. They prefer television and computer games that don't require thought.
A disturbing number of people today can't or -won't- think.
> I see no evidence that the desire to be entertained is replacing the desire to make one's > own toys. They can and do coexist.
Not desire; expectation. The desire to be entertained is normal. The expectation that other people exist primarily to entertain you is the problem. I see a lot of that.
As far as evidence goes, I'm not providing any; this is my opinion, and I'm not going to make a research project of it. I didn't reply in order to argue; I just wanted to clarify a couple of things where it seems you saw some things I didn't intend.
> Whether you look at web pages from an untrusted source or whether you look at an email from an > untrusted source makes no difference from a security point of view.
While that's a logical and reasonable statement, there's a few problems with it.
1 - Most browsers recognize that different web sites should render at different levels of security, and allow the user to prohibit certain features based on the site you are at. What site is email? Determine from the headers? Headers are regularly spoofed. Make it all high security? How high? Allow the user to override?
2 - If a site is potentially hazardous, I can choose -not- to browse to it. There is currently no general way to verify the source of an email. It is difficult for a technically proficient user to determine whether it is safe to view or not. It is not reasonable to expect less knowledgable users to do so accurately.
These are not theoretical issues; both the above were exposed as concerns because of vulnerabilities in Microsoft's implementations, and Thunderbird implemented some security features based on lessons learned from the Microsoft vulnerabilities. There have been a number of vulnerabilities exposed in Outlook's rendering, more than a few in Netscape, and several on other clients.
> The header information is not in HTML; it is as vulnerable with HTML messages as without.
Not sure I follow; are you implying that issues of safe rendering can be determined accurately from email headers? If so, I must disagree. It is often impossible to determine whether a message is from a reliable source solely from the header/
If you were getting at something else, please clarify.
> And HTML rendering engines have lots of features for dealing with malicious HTML already.
Yes they do. With many flaws found, and more almost every week.
> And what is wrong with sending formatted text as email?
Nothing, really. The problem is that HTML is not just formatting. It'd formatting, and linking, and embedding, and spoofing, and framesets, and several kinds of code execution, and more. An email client that pays attention to a subset of the formatting rules only would be fine. But of course, of limited value when the sender uses other HTML features. The users would complain, not without merit, that the reader is broken.
> With a decent mail reader, this is not a problem either, since they disable remote images and > render HTML in a way that prevents phishing attacks.
Actually, I know of no mail readers that render HTML formatting reasonably fully that have not had problems. HTML is too rich to implement most of the capabilities safely in an email client. There are tricks you can pull with spoofing urls, and framesets, and there will -probably- be some identified next year that no one would think of now.
You mentioned remote images; local images embedded in the mail can be a security hazard as well.
> As someone pointed out earlier in this thread, Catweasel can do this. It will read any format, > provided you have a "driver" for it.
I looked it up; -very- cool.
>> you -do- have to move the data to new media formats periodically as >> needed, which imposes a fair amount of work on people to catalog and index the media.
> Actually, that takes a lot more work than you'd think. I'm having difficulty keeping up, just on > my own personal data.
Yeah, I can see where my post sounds like I'm underestimating the amount of work. It's a lot of work; I classified it as 'a fair amount' based on how I do things. I'm -really- anal about backups and whatnot. It's a 'fair' amount of work on top of that. Overall, it's a -lot- of work, as you say.
Not just degredation. A lot of older media depends on charactistics of the specific hardware used to store it. There's an FAQ regarding Commodore 64 emulators that mentions that the C64 floppy disks aren't compatible with PC floppy drives. Some people want to read the old media in PCs. The FAQ points out that it's easier to just copy the data off to an emulator file format via a serial interface using a C64 than to hack up a pure PC-based hardware solution.
Floppies aren't just floppies; they're floppies written using [blank hardware/encoding/format]; tapes aren't just tapes, they're tapes written using the [blank hardware/encoding/format], etc.
> The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you store it on a media that won't degrade > over time. Even CDs are thought to have a limited lifespan of possibly only up to 100 years.
> The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays > where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.
I wouldn't go that far. but you -do- have to move the data to new media formats periodically as needed, which imposes a fair amount of work on people to catalog and index the media.
People are tempted to burn to CD and forget it, and that isn't practical.
> Playing down at the woods/creek isn't any more dangerous now than it was when you were a kid. Let your kids play outside.
Well, actually, it is more dangerous. A lot of crimes are worse now, simply because the criminals know that it makes sense to kill all the witnesses. We've had a run of convenience-store robberies lately; the guy walks in, kills the clerk, and robs the joint, for less than $100 each time. Criminals didn't used to do that when I was a kid. They used a gun, but didn't kill unless someone resisted. Now they don't wait.
But you can't keep the kid in a bomb shelter forever, so you've got to teach the kids to be responsible, and let them play outside.
> My wife won't allow our daughter to play outside unless she can physically see her the whole time > because she is sooo worried about "pedophiles". Totally insane.
Eh, maybe. Maybe not. I don;t know anything about your daughter, wife, of the neighborhood. Eventually, though, she's going to have to take off the leash. If you have neighbors, does your wife know them? Does your daughter play with the neighbor kids? If the answer to those questions is 'no' then I'd suspect your wife needs to loosen up.
> Also, I've noticed that my kid has her own personality and interests. You will need to become > interested in things that interest your child as well as sharing your interests with him or her.
Yep. Even the stuff you hate, if only to have some input if it gets out of line (music choices, clothing choices, etc.)
> But I think the premise here is flawed to begin with. We don't have to worry about what kids might > have if we took away all their modern technology, because they do have modern technology.
There's a flaw in your thinking. It's not, 'what would they do without modern technology'; it's 'what -will- they do when it malfunctions or is insufficient'.
Every year or so where I live, we lose power to storms. I actually see educated people go -hungry- because they can't cope without a microwave, and others who are reduced to eating Cocoa Puffs three times a day. The abilities to: - start a wood fire - cook over an open fire - stay warn without a thermostat - orient yourself in unfamiliar territory - read a map - identify harmless and dangerous animals and a whole assortment of other skills have -intrinsic value-. Not true of the ability to program a VCR. That changes as soon as you buy a different brand of VCR.
In addition, people who are too dependent on TV and computers for entertainment have shorter attention spans, poorer communication skills and a lack of patience that makes it difficult for them to cope in any situation that takes longer to resolve than an episode of Friends.
It's not about being divorced from modern technology; it's about teaching the kids to recognize the difference between intrinsic values and transient values. About teaching them to strike a balance.
> But couldn't you have said the same thing 50 years ago about different technologies? "Take away > the bicycles, radios, BB guns, baseball bats, and mass-produced comic books, and what are kids left doing? Nothing."
Not true. Even only 20 and 30 years ago, take away the toys and kids went down to the park. I was just speaking to a few old friends a week or so ago, and reminiscing about our childhoods. We all remember playing in the park, swimming and running and whatnot. We played video games too, but we don't remember them fondly.
I see kids today who have -never- spent time in the park. They complain about having to walk on an outdoor surface other than concrete or asphalt. Kids who can't spend five minutes without TV or CD player without bitching up a storm about being -bored-.
> Kids have always used objects to entertain themselves - they're usually called toys. Sitting > around reading comics or novels wasn't any better than sitting around playing Halo.
Horse crap. Books -are- better, they exercise a different part of the mind. Video games produce an intellectual 'tunnel-vision' (so does the average classroom today, unfortunately). Kids learn to move along very limited paths and solve artificially simple problems. They grow up to be adults who can't cope with complex problems and questions where the answer isn't multiple-choice.
It takes a fundamentally more rounded mindset to pick up a stick and -make- a toy; make your own entertainment, than to pick up a video game and demand to -be entertained-.
The kid who can do the first is likely to grow up to be a great parent or teacher. The kid who can do the latter is likely to be on a future version of VH1's 'Where are they now?,' talking about how all the money went on toys and maintenance of a posse of court jesters expected to entertain 'the star'.
> 1) Buy a GPS....(Cheaper alternative: Map and compass).
Not just cheaper; also more fun and more generally useful, IMHO.
> 5) Remote control cars/boats/planes are great hobbies that get you out and about.
Cheaper alternative: kites. Also more fun, IMHO. And consider making the boats.
Also, don't limit it to big 'event trips' if possible. In my neck of the woods we have a massive parks system within spitting distance. Very good for trips without much planning or preparation.
> Point is if you think the real world is boring compared to the computer, you just haven't been > out in the real world enough. There is SO much out there. Most of the things you had as a kid are still out there.
Abso-flippin-lutely. Some excellent suggestions; in addition to birdwatching and animanl identification at the zoo, throw in entomology and geology. Some kids particularly dig bugs and rocks.
> The majority of times, cookies do things that are good for the end user.
-Ostensibly- good for the user. Whether something is good -for me- or not is something only I can decide.
> Cookies allow you to have a customized experience on a site, etc.
The assumption being that customization is always good. It's not. Customization, if put -completely- under the control of the user, -may- be a good thing always; -maybe-. How many sites actually allow you to select all the customizations? Only a minority, in my experience; usually only the ones that work fine with cookies blocked.
Microsoft Office's dynamic menus, for example, are a 'customization' that pisses off a lot of people.
> For ecommerce to work, a computer has to be able to track a session from product selection through payment.
And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of ecommerce sites I use. It's the wannabes that I block cookies from.
> A large number of sites use cookies for tracking people within their site. I contend that this type > of tracking is extremely valuable to web users and consumers. For example, if I see that no one > is interested in a given page, I might pull the page and put something better in its place.
As noted by others, cookies are not needed for this.
> The one and only bad area of cookie usage comes from the big web firms that are trying to build > massive data warehouses to track people across web sites. That means that there really is only > one major area of cookie abuse.
Not agreed. Certainly, that is a misuse, but hardly the only one. For instance, I do not -want- my browsing habits retained; and I mean that in the sense of browsing through products. Cookies allow a site to be like the hovering salesperson. In a brick and mortar establishment, I can tell the salesperson to back off and I'll call when I want help. On the web, there is no person to send away. Just intrusive and ill-advised code.
If you've ever read Alan Cooper's 'About Face' it's like the difference between a sovereign app and a utility. Most sites are utilities; I want quick, efficient, and most of all unobtrusive. Most sites are designed like sovereign apps; they want to be my everything, the center of my universe, and they suck at it.
* It _should_ be an event event. But the poor quality of the movie theaters, tiny seats (and I'm 5' 6"; I shudder to think how bad it is for a 6 footer), cell phones, and sound-bleed-through in multiplexes degrades the experience. * Screen size and _sound_ should be better. I haven't paid a fortune for my setup, and while the screen is much larger, the quality often isn't, and the sound is often terrible, in part due to poor sound-proofing. * Timeliness. Bluntly, most films aren't that good, and even among the good ones, relatively few have plot twists and surprises that can spoil it if you know in advance. Most of the good ones are the low-budget and indie productions. There are a small minority of films for which time matters that much; but only a small minority. * Concentration. Good point, but I've already been dealing with my concentration over the last few years; I can ignore those things much better these days.
I think _part_ of the issue may be where we live. Theaters have been let degrade badly where I am in the midwest, and that really screws it up as an event. I tend to gravitate toward live performances and other types of entertainment for the 'event' factor. Movie theaters suck, but lots of stage productions, concerts, fairs and other stuff are still a great time, usually cheaper than a movie.
Also, I tend to gravitate toward family-friendly entertainment. Hollywood has had a -really- poor record on that over the last couple of decades.
Purchased tapes and DVDs I own other than Disney stuff: Goldeneye, The Mummy Returns, The Great Escape, Rio Bravo, McClintock, and a handful of others. There are a several others I'd own if it weren't for the kind of stunts a few people have mentioned here, like disabling fast forward for 20 minutes of commercials.
One of my resolutions is to rent the DVD first, and see if they did anything stupid. If not, then I'll buy it.
Returning to the earlier automobile analogy, many of the files your browser caches are like the bugs your automobile windshield catches. Picked up inadvertently in the normal operation of the device.
> So now all my code is antiseptic, just because its not good to show "unprofessionalism" infront of the client.... > During the course of a demo, a pumping station turned red to show an alarm, followed by a small > mushroom cloud animation
That's the main reason I changed my commenting policies. I never used 'cute' comments (Start Trek characters, Tolkein references, game references), but I used to occasionally use 'indelicate' variable names, that occasionally showed up in error messages.
Comments don't need to be antiseptic; but if the comments have a lot of profanity, it often indicates a level of programmer frustration that may lead one to conclude that there are problems either in the code or the company that owns the code.
And often the decision is made to take some code or documentation that -used to be- for internal use only and make it public. That can be a bit embarassing, if the coders don't know ahead of time.
They're cheaper. Seriously, I can find VCRs for about the same price as -1- new DVD movie release. I have a number of tapes I've recorded, and they are still convenient for recording new TV programs.
A DVD recorder costs about three times as much as a comparable quality VCR at the low end. Now they are a -lot- cheaper than they used to be, but many people probably figure it this way; they're going to keep dropping in price. Why rush to buy?
The people expecting that VCR's should have disappeared by now make the same errors as the folks that said floppy disks were going to disappear. At $6 (last time I priced one), they're cheap insurance (it's been awhile; I bought three as emergency backups; if one dies, swap a new one in).
I have a DVD player sitting in my entertainment center; but I also have a VCR, right under it.
If the price of low-end VCRs continues to drop, they'll probably stick around even longer. Will there be lots of high-end models on the shelves? Nope. But enough generic cheapies to keep the format going.
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> all that anti terrorist legislation didn't work, so lets have more anti terrorist legislation.
Leaving off the subject of more anti-terror legislation, why do you say the anti-terror legislation isn't working? Because it failed to prevent an attack? I don't believe anyone looking at the situation rationally would expect -anything- to make attacks impossible, just as no barriers can absolutely secure computer systems. Security is a process, not a state of being.
Reducing the number and severity of instances is certainly possible, but most of the effort has been to improve responses. The emergency crews responded quite well in London, from all I have seen. The real test is still to come; will the expanded police and investigative powers lead to identifying and capturing those responsible?
BTW, I am -not- in favor of most of the anti-terror legislation in place now. I'm just sympathetic to the police and emergency forces, and even to the legislators; they have an impossible task to do. No matter -what- they do, a huge number of armchair quarterbacks will bitch about how they would have done it.
All I can say in my favor is that I -know- I'm an armchair quarterback, and couldn't do a better job myself.
> Hence requirements gathering as the first step in the development process.
No argument. However, deciding -what- is a requirement is a business process. In this case, did the coder fail to elicit range checking and supervisor confirmation requirements on transactions? Or did the business staff mandate that there were to be -no- checks and -no- confirmation steps?
In the last few years, I've seen this kind of thing a lot. A lot of business people are reacting against restrictive applications that prompt "Are you sure? Are you really sure? Are you absolutely certain?" In the process, a lot of them are insisting on no restrictions. Until, of course, it blows up in their faces.
The first several replies were unanimous in stating that this is a developer failure. I was merely trying to point out the possibility that the responsibility may lie elsewhere.
-If- developers were really engineers, instead of engineers in name only, then I would agree that the buck should stop with the developer. But until businesses start paying for engineers instead of grunt coders, I feel we must look at the whole picture before assigning blame.
Thanks for your comments.
> The primary fault lies with the developer who failed to adeqautely validate input... Data
> validation...includes sanity checking to make sure data are within reasonable ranges, and requiring
> additional confirmation (ranging from "Whoa, dude! That much?" to supervisor approval) when input is outside that.
Have to disagree. -If- developers in such organizations were designers and architects, I would agree, and I certainly agree that such checks are needed on core financial systems.
However, confirmation and supervisor approval, and determining what is reasonable in terms of range checks is a business decision, not a coder decision. If software development in the business world was usually done right, then the developer would have the background and skills to do this. Typically, they don't even have the background to know to recommend such things.
IMHO, this is why neither the trader nor the developer (probably; this case may not be like the typical one I described) should be held accountable. The people in charge of the decisions that led to this deficiency in the software -and- the business processes it supports should be held responsible and forced to fix the problem.
Just finished it; absolutely great read.
Of course, that link is to a proprietary Windows Installer Package... ;>
> It's a matter of economics to a web publisher like ourselves. That said I'm very obsessed with the
> brand image, and do not want to ruin people's experience so I am willing to take 1/16th less money
> for a more succesfull less annoying site.
And that's both the more responsible and the more effective (long-term) view. Yeah, the money -today- from the evil ads is tempting, but it -will- cost those who take it in the long run.
If they are to grow a name for themselves. There are some who plan to take the money and run, and they will go to the dark side without a second thought.
I think that's pretty typical. I use the Adblock base filters, covering doubleclick and others, but I think I've only added 2 additional items to the list since I started using it many months ago.
If it's not intrusive or offensive, it's not worth the couple of clicks to add it to the blocklist.
Judging from the other replies you got, I'd say everyone agrees that: animated ads stink, flash ads stink, and pop-ups, -overs, -unders, etc. really stink.
> In fact, newspaper ads are often informative, or have cupons I might actually use.
Very true. A fair number of the ads in our local papers are notices about upcoming events, various sales, local government offers, etc.
In a given week there are ads covering nature walks, free and inexpensive concerts and fairs, seasonal sales at local retailers, etc.
I find out a about lot of good stuff that way.
Sunday papers are a traditional excellent example. A lot of people buy the Sunday papers largely -because- of the greater amount of advertising.
But you can skim it, and disregard the crap. Doubleclick, et al, want to remove the ability to rapidly get away from crap.
> However, the second the Boston Globe starts placing ads on the front page, over the content
> I'm trying to read that move around, blink, play a store's jingle and tell me that it knows my
> newspaper's IP address... you can bet I will stop reading it.
Absolutely. The newspapers have largely settled in to a comfortable arrangment. Not too intrusive. TV still wants more than their fair share of the viewers attention, and the flexibility of the Internet means advertisers there can try to be ridiculously aggressive.
> It's more of a jurisdictional issue.
Exactly. It's a jurisdictional issue as soon as the call center is even out-of-state.
But moving call centers offshore adds -enormous- complexity. I would tend to suspect (I have limited knowledge of foreign legal systems) that things become even more complex the farther the nation in question gets from the traditions of British common law. India, for example, might be significantly less complicated that China.
This is degenerating into a 'Did not! Did Too!' kind of thing; This will be my last reply on this.
> And you think that didn't happen ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years ago? It did,
> but there wasn't a national or global news network to spread the stories around in minutes.
Yes, it did. But nowhere near as often 20 or 30 years ago. News coverage really isn't relevant to the cases I'm talking about. These are local happenings, that did not happen to anything near this frequency in this area 20 and 30 years ago.
> I'd argue that playing outside as a kid is safer now because criminals know just how quickly they can be tracked down.
That's probably where we're failing to agree; I am not evaluating the overall result and do not intend to. I'm looking at the raw inputs. I'm not balancing the increasing capabilities of law enforcement officials against the increasing brutality of the criminals.
We're not going to agree here; my way of looking at things appears to be very different from yours. You make some valid points, but in my worldview they aren't very significant. We agree on a lot of the details, we just weight them differently.
Good luck to you.
> Are you saying that doesn't happen today? I see kids playing in parks and lawns all the time.
So do I. But I see a lot more who don't and won't than I used to.
> I assume you have some kind of evidence to back up this claim? Seems to me that there's plenty of
> complex problem solving in today's video games, and plotlines at least as complex as most books
> these kids would be reading otherwise.
There are complex problems in a minority of video games, and simplistic books as well. I just feel books are better, on the whole, at stimulating complex thought. I like books; my preference.
Please understand, this is -not- intended to be an indictment of video games, computers, or television. It's intended to be a comment on attitudes in today's society. It's not just the kids; I see a frightening number of college-educated adults who do not read and do not exercise their minds anymore. It's not just that they don't -read-; it's that they don't -think-. They prefer television and computer games that don't require thought.
A disturbing number of people today can't or -won't- think.
> I see no evidence that the desire to be entertained is replacing the desire to make one's
> own toys. They can and do coexist.
Not desire; expectation. The desire to be entertained is normal. The expectation that other people exist primarily to entertain you is the problem. I see a lot of that.
As far as evidence goes, I'm not providing any; this is my opinion, and I'm not going to make a research project of it. I didn't reply in order to argue; I just wanted to clarify a couple of things where it seems you saw some things I didn't intend.
> Whether you look at web pages from an untrusted source or whether you look at an email from an
> untrusted source makes no difference from a security point of view.
While that's a logical and reasonable statement, there's a few problems with it.
1 - Most browsers recognize that different web sites should render at different levels of security, and allow the user to prohibit certain features based on the site you are at. What site is email? Determine from the headers? Headers are regularly spoofed. Make it all high security? How high? Allow the user to override?
2 - If a site is potentially hazardous, I can choose -not- to browse to it. There is currently no general way to verify the source of an email. It is difficult for a technically proficient user to determine whether it is safe to view or not. It is not reasonable to expect less knowledgable users to do so accurately.
These are not theoretical issues; both the above were exposed as concerns because of vulnerabilities in Microsoft's implementations, and Thunderbird implemented some security features based on lessons learned from the Microsoft vulnerabilities. There have been a number of vulnerabilities exposed in Outlook's rendering, more than a few in Netscape, and several on other clients.
> The header information is not in HTML; it is as vulnerable with HTML messages as without.
Not sure I follow; are you implying that issues of safe rendering can be determined accurately from email headers? If so, I must disagree. It is often impossible to determine whether a message is from a reliable source solely from the header/
If you were getting at something else, please clarify.
> And HTML rendering engines have lots of features for dealing with malicious HTML already.
Yes they do. With many flaws found, and more almost every week.
> And what is wrong with sending formatted text as email?
Nothing, really. The problem is that HTML is not just formatting. It'd formatting, and linking, and embedding, and spoofing, and framesets, and several kinds of code execution, and more. An email client that pays attention to a subset of the formatting rules only would be fine. But of course, of limited value when the sender uses other HTML features. The users would complain, not without merit, that the reader is broken.
> With a decent mail reader, this is not a problem either, since they disable remote images and
> render HTML in a way that prevents phishing attacks.
Actually, I know of no mail readers that render HTML formatting reasonably fully that have not had problems. HTML is too rich to implement most of the capabilities safely in an email client. There are tricks you can pull with spoofing urls, and framesets, and there will -probably- be some identified next year that no one would think of now.
You mentioned remote images; local images embedded in the mail can be a security hazard as well.
> As someone pointed out earlier in this thread, Catweasel can do this. It will read any format,
> provided you have a "driver" for it.
I looked it up; -very- cool.
>> you -do- have to move the data to new media formats periodically as
>> needed, which imposes a fair amount of work on people to catalog and index the media.
> Actually, that takes a lot more work than you'd think. I'm having difficulty keeping up, just on
> my own personal data.
Yeah, I can see where my post sounds like I'm underestimating the amount of work. It's a lot of work; I classified it as 'a fair amount' based on how I do things. I'm -really- anal about backups and whatnot. It's a 'fair' amount of work on top of that. Overall, it's a -lot- of work, as you say.
Not just degredation. A lot of older media depends on charactistics of the specific hardware used to store it. There's an FAQ regarding Commodore 64 emulators that mentions that the C64 floppy disks aren't compatible with PC floppy drives. Some people want to read the old media in PCs. The FAQ points out that it's easier to just copy the data off to an emulator file format via a serial interface using a C64 than to hack up a pure PC-based hardware solution.
Floppies aren't just floppies; they're floppies written using [blank hardware/encoding/format]; tapes aren't just tapes, they're tapes written using the [blank hardware/encoding/format], etc.
> The problem, once you've got the data off, is how you store it on a media that won't degrade
> over time. Even CDs are thought to have a limited lifespan of possibly only up to 100 years.
> The only practical solution for "permanent" data storage currently are huge RAID hard disk arrays
> where you can replace a drive as it goes faulty.
I wouldn't go that far. but you -do- have to move the data to new media formats periodically as needed, which imposes a fair amount of work on people to catalog and index the media.
People are tempted to burn to CD and forget it, and that isn't practical.
> Not necessarily cheaper, I have kites that cost quite a bit more than my RC car.
True. On average, probably cheaper. Certainly cheaper at the bottom end.
> Playing down at the woods/creek isn't any more dangerous now than it was when you were a kid. Let your kids play outside.
Well, actually, it is more dangerous. A lot of crimes are worse now, simply because the criminals know that it makes sense to kill all the witnesses. We've had a run of convenience-store robberies lately; the guy walks in, kills the clerk, and robs the joint, for less than $100 each time. Criminals didn't used to do that when I was a kid. They used a gun, but didn't kill unless someone resisted. Now they don't wait.
But you can't keep the kid in a bomb shelter forever, so you've got to teach the kids to be responsible, and let them play outside.
> My wife won't allow our daughter to play outside unless she can physically see her the whole time
> because she is sooo worried about "pedophiles". Totally insane.
Eh, maybe. Maybe not. I don;t know anything about your daughter, wife, of the neighborhood. Eventually, though, she's going to have to take off the leash. If you have neighbors, does your wife know them? Does your daughter play with the neighbor kids? If the answer to those questions is 'no' then I'd suspect your wife needs to loosen up.
> Also, I've noticed that my kid has her own personality and interests. You will need to become
> interested in things that interest your child as well as sharing your interests with him or her.
Yep. Even the stuff you hate, if only to have some input if it gets out of line (music choices, clothing choices, etc.)
> But I think the premise here is flawed to begin with. We don't have to worry about what kids might
> have if we took away all their modern technology, because they do have modern technology.
There's a flaw in your thinking. It's not, 'what would they do without modern technology'; it's 'what -will- they do when it malfunctions or is insufficient'.
Every year or so where I live, we lose power to storms. I actually see educated people go -hungry- because they can't cope without a microwave, and others who are reduced to eating Cocoa Puffs three times a day. The abilities to:
- start a wood fire
- cook over an open fire
- stay warn without a thermostat
- orient yourself in unfamiliar territory
- read a map
- identify harmless and dangerous animals
and a whole assortment of other skills have -intrinsic value-. Not true of the ability to program a VCR. That changes as soon as you buy a different brand of VCR.
In addition, people who are too dependent on TV and computers for entertainment have shorter attention spans, poorer communication skills and a lack of patience that makes it difficult for them to cope in any situation that takes longer to resolve than an episode of Friends.
It's not about being divorced from modern technology; it's about teaching the kids to recognize the difference between intrinsic values and transient values. About teaching them to strike a balance.
> But couldn't you have said the same thing 50 years ago about different technologies? "Take away
> the bicycles, radios, BB guns, baseball bats, and mass-produced comic books, and what are kids left doing? Nothing."
Not true. Even only 20 and 30 years ago, take away the toys and kids went down to the park. I was just speaking to a few old friends a week or so ago, and reminiscing about our childhoods. We all remember playing in the park, swimming and running and whatnot. We played video games too, but we don't remember them fondly.
I see kids today who have -never- spent time in the park. They complain about having to walk on an outdoor surface other than concrete or asphalt. Kids who can't spend five minutes without TV or CD player without bitching up a storm about being -bored-.
> Kids have always used objects to entertain themselves - they're usually called toys. Sitting
> around reading comics or novels wasn't any better than sitting around playing Halo.
Horse crap. Books -are- better, they exercise a different part of the mind. Video games produce an intellectual 'tunnel-vision' (so does the average classroom today, unfortunately). Kids learn to move along very limited paths and solve artificially simple problems. They grow up to be adults who can't cope with complex problems and questions where the answer isn't multiple-choice.
It takes a fundamentally more rounded mindset to pick up a stick and -make- a toy; make your own entertainment, than to pick up a video game and demand to -be entertained-.
The kid who can do the first is likely to grow up to be a great parent or teacher. The kid who can do the latter is likely to be on a future version of VH1's 'Where are they now?,' talking about how all the money went on toys and maintenance of a posse of court jesters expected to entertain 'the star'.
> 1) Buy a GPS. ...(Cheaper alternative: Map and compass).
Not just cheaper; also more fun and more generally useful, IMHO.
> 5) Remote control cars/boats/planes are great hobbies that get you out and about.
Cheaper alternative: kites. Also more fun, IMHO. And consider making the boats.
Also, don't limit it to big 'event trips' if possible. In my neck of the woods we have a massive parks system within spitting distance. Very good for trips without much planning or preparation.
> Point is if you think the real world is boring compared to the computer, you just haven't been
> out in the real world enough. There is SO much out there. Most of the things you had as a kid are still out there.
Abso-flippin-lutely. Some excellent suggestions; in addition to birdwatching and animanl identification at the zoo, throw in entomology and geology. Some kids particularly dig bugs and rocks.
> The majority of times, cookies do things that are good for the end user.
-Ostensibly- good for the user. Whether something is good -for me- or not is something only I can decide.
> Cookies allow you to have a customized experience on a site, etc.
The assumption being that customization is always good. It's not. Customization, if put -completely- under the control of the user, -may- be a good thing always; -maybe-. How many sites actually allow you to select all the customizations? Only a minority, in my experience; usually only the ones that work fine with cookies blocked.
Microsoft Office's dynamic menus, for example, are a 'customization' that pisses off a lot of people.
> For ecommerce to work, a computer has to be able to track a session from product selection through payment.
And I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of ecommerce sites I use. It's the wannabes that I block cookies from.
> A large number of sites use cookies for tracking people within their site. I contend that this type
> of tracking is extremely valuable to web users and consumers. For example, if I see that no one
> is interested in a given page, I might pull the page and put something better in its place.
As noted by others, cookies are not needed for this.
> The one and only bad area of cookie usage comes from the big web firms that are trying to build
> massive data warehouses to track people across web sites. That means that there really is only
> one major area of cookie abuse.
Not agreed. Certainly, that is a misuse, but hardly the only one. For instance, I do not -want- my browsing habits retained; and I mean that in the sense of browsing through products. Cookies allow a site to be like the hovering salesperson. In a brick and mortar establishment, I can tell the salesperson to back off and I'll call when I want help. On the web, there is no person to send away. Just intrusive and ill-advised code.
If you've ever read Alan Cooper's 'About Face' it's like the difference between a sovereign app and a utility. Most sites are utilities; I want quick, efficient, and most of all unobtrusive. Most sites are designed like sovereign apps; they want to be my everything, the center of my universe, and they suck at it.
Yeah, that name sucks. May as well call it Eunuchs. Oh, wait... ;>
Most names people make up for products are stupid. This one might not even make it into release.
I come down on the home viewing side because:
* It _should_ be an event event. But the poor quality of the movie theaters, tiny seats (and I'm 5' 6"; I shudder to think how bad it is for a 6 footer), cell phones, and sound-bleed-through in multiplexes degrades the experience.
* Screen size and _sound_ should be better. I haven't paid a fortune for my setup, and while the screen is much larger, the quality often isn't, and the sound is often terrible, in part due to poor sound-proofing.
* Timeliness. Bluntly, most films aren't that good, and even among the good ones, relatively few have plot twists and surprises that can spoil it if you know in advance. Most of the good ones are the low-budget and indie productions. There are a small minority of films for which time matters that much; but only a small minority.
* Concentration. Good point, but I've already been dealing with my concentration over the last few years; I can ignore those things much better these days.
I think _part_ of the issue may be where we live. Theaters have been let degrade badly where I am in the midwest, and that really screws it up as an event. I tend to gravitate toward live performances and other types of entertainment for the 'event' factor. Movie theaters suck, but lots of stage productions, concerts, fairs and other stuff are still a great time, usually cheaper than a movie.
Also, I tend to gravitate toward family-friendly entertainment. Hollywood has had a -really- poor record on that over the last couple of decades.
Purchased tapes and DVDs I own other than Disney stuff: Goldeneye, The Mummy Returns, The Great Escape, Rio Bravo, McClintock, and a handful of others. There are a several others I'd own if it weren't for the kind of stunts a few people have mentioned here, like disabling fast forward for 20 minutes of commercials.
One of my resolutions is to rent the DVD first, and see if they did anything stupid. If not, then I'll buy it.
Returning to the earlier automobile analogy, many of the files your browser caches are like the bugs your automobile windshield catches. Picked up inadvertently in the normal operation of the device.
> So now all my code is antiseptic, just because its not good to show "unprofessionalism" infront of the client. ...
> During the course of a demo, a pumping station turned red to show an alarm, followed by a small
> mushroom cloud animation
That's the main reason I changed my commenting policies. I never used 'cute' comments (Start Trek characters, Tolkein references, game references), but I used to occasionally use 'indelicate' variable names, that occasionally showed up in error messages.
Comments don't need to be antiseptic; but if the comments have a lot of profanity, it often indicates a level of programmer frustration that may lead one to conclude that there are problems either in the code or the company that owns the code.
And often the decision is made to take some code or documentation that -used to be- for internal use only and make it public. That can be a bit embarassing, if the coders don't know ahead of time.
They're cheaper. Seriously, I can find VCRs for about the same price as -1- new DVD movie release. I have a number of tapes I've recorded, and they are still convenient for recording new TV programs.
A DVD recorder costs about three times as much as a comparable quality VCR at the low end. Now they are a -lot- cheaper than they used to be, but many people probably figure it this way; they're going to keep dropping in price. Why rush to buy?
The people expecting that VCR's should have disappeared by now make the same errors as the folks that said floppy disks were going to disappear. At $6 (last time I priced one), they're cheap insurance (it's been awhile; I bought three as emergency backups; if one dies, swap a new one in).
I have a DVD player sitting in my entertainment center; but I also have a VCR, right under it.
If the price of low-end VCRs continues to drop, they'll probably stick around even longer. Will there be lots of high-end models on the shelves? Nope. But enough generic cheapies to keep the format going.