Actually, I'm a very realistic European. The electoral system in most of continental Europe didn't degenerate into the two-party fuckup of the USA, and still makes politicians work for their votes.
Elections are as good as never won by any one party, but by an uneasy coalition of conflicting interests, most of which are just itching for an excuse or opportunity to shaft each other. You may think that party X won the elections, but literally it tends to be more of a case of party X has a 26% of the votes, party Y has 19% and they coopted party Z too which has 6% of the votes, to get a coalition that has 51%. But those alliances can vanish overnight, and coalitions can form the other way around overnight. Party X can go from being the leader of the winning coalition, to being the largest party of the opposition, as another 51% coalition formed without them.
Jerrymandering also doesn't work in this kind of an electoral system.
Now I'm not saying that the politicians here are honest or altruistic. They're... politicians, same as everywhere else. But they're not in a position to just be overtly corrupt and overtly in the pocket of some corporation or cartel. They'll get their bribes in a lot more secrecy, and be a lot more subtle about trying to favour their "benefactors".
What I'm saying is that, essentially, politicians have to be populist, with all the good and the bad that that involves. Overtly favouring corporate lobbies over the interests of the voters, tends to be a suicidal move. On the contrary, they'll fall over themselves to tell you what they'll do to make corporations respect your privacy, treat you right, etc. Antitrust is actually applied, and with a big mallet at that. Etc.
Essentially the funny part is that it's a system that works _because_ half the politicians are self-centered sociopaths. It just gives them the motivation to keep each other in check.
But anyway, there's nothing idealistic about believing in the rule of the law. Again, here it tends to actually work that way.
Now I wouldn't know if the system in the USA is as bad as you paint it, and I'll refrain from commenting on that. But _if_ it's that bad, why don't you change the way your government works? If so many people are disillusioned with the results of the current system, by all means, change it. Make a party whose sole platform is to change the electoral system. Convince enough people to vote for it. That's it. It _has_ happened before. The original Republican system was created pretty much around the sole issue of slavery, and had no trouble flipping the bird to the existing two parties and getting a majority in the congress. Exactly what's keeping you from pulling that stunt again? _If_ the system drifted so much and so obviously from representing the people, surely enough of those people could be persuaded to vote to change it to something more palatable.
Well, obviously greed is a motivation there, but the distinction I was trying to make was, briefly:
A. smart greed = actually makes some money
B. stupid greed = loses a $1000 sale to serve $0.01 worth of ads and marketing bullshit
C. plain stupidity = stuff that doesn't even serve that extra $0.01 worth of ads. It's there just because some retard thought it's "cool" or "exciting" to have different colours and fonts than everyone else, and more animations than anyone else, and a navigation that's a bad mini-game by itself, and God knows what other stupidity.
To give you an example of #3: back in the dot-com days I actually had to do a contract for a company whose site's navigation looked, basically, like a heap of cuts from newspapers. I don't even mean something like a neat menu which only happens to be tackily rendered as a each option being a scrap of paper. I mean those scraps were literally heaped in an ugly pile, and you had to search in that pile for the one you wanted.
It's stuff that wasn't even an ad, it didn't help serve more ads, and generally didn't earn them a cent, in any form or shape. It just made it not only inaccessible to blind people (since those slanted pieces of paper were images, and a screen reader can't do much with them), but a royal pain in the arse to use even with perfect eyesight.
It was simply the creation of a graphics artist turned PHB, so now he wasn't just free to do all the art for art's sake that he always wanted, but also had the authority to turn their navigation into such a work of art. Completely unusable, but artsy.
And using the law as just some excuse to jail someone you don't like, even via some convoluted fallacy, is not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. And not just from a moral right vs wrong point of view, but it also takes away quite a bit out of the deterrence factor of the law and police. After all, if you know that (A) whether you get convicted or not depends more on whims, friends, or being in the wrong time at the wrong place, and (B) whatever you did, chances are decent they'll find a scapegoat to make an example of, instead of finding you, just says you have more chances to get away with something genuinely criminal.
We tried using spectacular shows of making an example of some bystander, to scare the criminals. Heck, half of the medieval justice worked like that, and the communist block kept at it until the bitter end. It doesn't really work well.
And in this case it would also create the precedent that _any_ content you serve can get you in PMITA state prison. There's nothing to say that only ISP's inserted ads can be demonized and victimized in your setup. Any site, regardless of whether it's serving ads, or is a free forum like Slashdot, or sells stuff on the internet, or is some company's web presence on the net, etc, could be hacked to serve malware, adware, spam, phishing, redirects to other sites, etc. Some of which, yes, porn or to porn.
So what do you propose? That if your company's site can be hacked like that, the CEO goes to jail? Well then how about we take that to the logical end then and give some responsibility in it to the guys who programmed those vulnerabilities too? Or to the admins who didn't secure the servers right? To the security teams who didn't find some glaring vulnerabilities? To the PHB's and developers who had an "auugh, those security guys are just bullies, blowing stuff out of proportion to make me look bad!" attitude and pulled all sorts of strings to get the severity rating lowered? To the beancounters who got a bonus for slashing the budget for security? To the controlling guy who insisted on hiring only the cheapest burger-flippers who had a crash-course in Java, as a cost saving measure? To the level 1 support monkeys who advised someone to disable his firewall and/or disable his virus scanner, just to install a stupid game or access some vuln-laden site? To the idiot who wrote that canned list of answers? Etc.
I mean, if it counts as "endangering the children" if you have some vulnerability that _could_ be used against children, then, seriously, there are a _lot_ of people who had a hand in creating that vulnerability, not just the CEO. That's a lot of jails we'll need.
You'll also notice that it just doesn't say "stop tampering with the sites". It just says that if you can be hacked, you can go to jail. So if you're sure enough of your code and your admins to be on the internet at all, then you're sure enough to mangle the web pages too. E.g., if you're sure enough that your ad server is secure enough to use it on your web site, then you're sure enough to use it in other people's pages too. After all, if it were hacked to serve kiddie porn, it would serve it on your own site too.
No. If it has to be stopped, it has to be a clear law and applied uniformly. The idea isn't even new. Any country has laws against tampering with snail mail. Make it illegal to mess with someone's electronics communications, and apply it impartially and uniformly.
1. government / local government pages. Even skipping past the issue that they should set an example by obeying the rules they voted into law... Exactly how do those depend ad revenue?
2. I go to some manufacturer's web page, to buy something or get some drivers like the GP, and... some are really a bad case of flash overdose, and some are full of ads too. Bonus points when occasionally it's not even to their own products. But anyway, WTF? I'm there either to buy something they make, or because I _have_ bought something they make. Why should I be bombarded with ads there? No, seriously.
And even skipping the banner ads, I've seen a couple where I had to go through loops and plough through pages after pages of marketing gibberish, just to get to the page with the prices. In at least one case I gave up because I just couldn't find the price list.
And a some have horrible colours, fonts and layouts too, and make wrong use of graphics at that, just because aparently someone thought it's all the rage to look like the funky marketing brochure. Thankfully that became a lot more rare over the years, but sadly it's still not dead, and it keeps coming back like a vampire.
This isn't just a case of "bad design" as in page layout and technologies used. It's outright stupid. It's not even just a case of letting the marketing drones in charge, it's letting the _stupid_ marketing drones in charge. If you want to sell me something, don't annoy me first and don't make it hard to get to (A) the specs, and (B) the prices and/or online shop pages. No, I'm not interested in how many decades of buzzwords you leverage, nor in your synergies, nor in how award-winning/industry-standard/customer-centric/buzzword-driven you are. I'm not there to play Bullshit Bingo, so just let me know (A) exactly what you sell, and (B) for what price.
At any rate, the couple of cents they might get in ads there, sorry, just aren't worth losing a potential sale over, no matter how I want to look at it. And it feels _petty_ that when I'm looking to buy something that costs hundreds of bucks, someone tries to shaft a few cents out of me with their maze of ads. It's like meeting their sales guy and seeing him trying to steal my office pens. It just doesn't make a good impression, ya know?
3. (Or 2B.) Some game publishers' pages. E.g., dunno, I want to know what their latest game is all about. Or I bought it and need a patch. Or whatever, really. And I'm forced to sit and twiddle thumbs while their flash loads, then have to read the information in a tiny window, with a tiny font, split into a gazillion tiny pages, and with a shitty colour scheme to boot.
I mean, wtf? Either I'm looking to buy their game, or I already blew some money on their game. And especially in the latter case, let's make one thing clear: the whole market for unfinished buggy games exist only because of the promise that they'll make up by offering a free patch later. I'm already annoyed by that deal, don't push it. Making me essentially pay for the patch by watching ads, or worse yet by putting it on some shitty site that makes me wait an hour for the download unless I pay to subscribe, is just adding insult to injury.
And let's make another thing clear: I _paid_ for that game. Don't make me go through a mandatory form that wants to know even my exact street number, telephone number, birth date, and size of condoms I use. I'm looking at you, EA. I already paid, ok? I'm not your data-mining guinea pig too.
Admittedly, probably the blind don't play first person shooters or console RPGs much, but I find it just as annoying as a guy who doesn't even need glasses yet.
4. But perhaps the best way to say it is that I have been before one of the guys who programmed those shitty sites, or helped fix their performance problems. I still have nightmares about some colour schemes like orange on orange-ish yellow, or cyan on bright blue, that I had to implement during the dotcom years. Or the clas
Heh. Dude, it was a joke. I _know_ Mechs aren't a good idea for the military. Think "bloody huge, thinly armoured target" or "pressure on the feet" as even bigger problems than the centre of gravity. The centre of gravity can be worked around, as other posters pointed out, and evolved again and again in nature anyway. (All dinosaurs are descendant from a bipedal ancestor, for example.) So it can't be too horrible a disadvantage. Being a huge target with paper-thin armour (if you do the tons per surface maths for BattleTech mechs, for example), now that's bigger problem.
But anyway, it was just a silly joke. Trust me, I know they're not a viable weapon platform.
And it may blow your mind, but also when I spew wisecracks like "Valuable RL lessons from playing WoW: 1. keep your demon on passive in a group if you're a warlock", I'm kidding too. You don't need to tell me why it's a bad idea to summon demons IRL;)
Now what I want is a proper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mech. I mean, they just need to make this thing 10m tall and give it a nuclear reactor as a power source, right?
It kinda makes me wonder about a few things, though.
First of all, sure, we can collect the phonemes that humans can do, and which the Neanderthals couldn't possibly pronounce, but I wonder if there are examples of the opposite. You know, phonemes which came naturally to the Neanderthals, but which modern humans have a problem with.
Second, to which extent thing can be done differently. E.g., a cat's mouth can't do a "R" the way humans create that sound, but their larynx can purr, and that's good enough. They actually use it basically as a "R" in their simple "language." E.g., "mrrk" (sometimes transliterated as "mrrh"), which as far as anyone figured out, means "food", or more like "come to dinner". That's the "word", well, vocalization, they use when they caugh some mouse and are calling their kittens to dinner. Or when they bring you some dying bird.
(To get a bit off topic, most cats will not try to give you back the food you gave them, so if you have only one and/or it can't go hunt outside, you're likely to never hear it. On the other hand, if you spend enough time on a farm with cats, that's one of the first vocalizations you might learn.)
Second, again I'll use cats as an example, sometimes they use non-vocal signs. E.g., blinking slowly with both eyes is, as far as anyone can figure it out, a kind of "hello" or "I come in peace". You can try it too, on a stray cat or someone else's cat.
They also seem to have different ways to meow, sorta like an accent of sorts, so although the basic phoneme is the same, it seems to mean different things.
You know, just as an example of a simple creature with a very simple larynx, and it can still do more than you'd expect with it. Sure, it can't speak English, and it's not evolved enough to have a very complex language. But it can communicate what it needs to.
Neanderthals were pretty evolved critters, by comparison. They were a parallel branch to Homo Sapiens from the same ancestor, and they actually had a slightly larger brain. I'm guessing that that larynx couldn't have been that hideously huge a problem. They'd figure something out.
Even _if_ they had too few sounds, a language can get rid of, for example, inflexion and be left with plenty to have names for everything around them. They'd probably need more words instead, but even that isn't too huge a problem. Even if, to use the GP's example, they had to go "This is apple. Apple is red." that should be enough for what they needed.
That may be so, for other stuff, but we're talking coffee not some ancient arts. It never was some kind of "black arts".
Roasting it was pretty much already done on an industrial scale, no matter whether it's by hand or automated. They just take a big heap of beans and roast them. Don't think that there's any master using secret techniques there and carefully sampling and tuning the taste. It's just a bunch of underpaid, unskilled peons roasting a lot of beans by the heap, even in the most low tech setting. That's it.
And boiling it, well, there are basically just two techniques:
- either you do it in a kettle, which can get awfully messy, so virtually noone still does that
- or you put the ground coffee in some kind of sieve (filter paper is just that with smaller holes) and pour hot water over it
Whether you do it by hand or with a machine, don't think that there was some highly skilled chef doing some secret recipe handed over from father to son. I've actually seen both made by hand too, and it wasn't anything even remotely resembling highly-qualified chefs and haute cuisine.
Even with the kettle, it was an underpaid unqualified peon, doing the same thing over and over again. Put the same quantity of water in the kettle, put the same quantity of ground coffee in it, put it in the hot sand (less likely to make a mess than overheat it on a flame), wait until it looks like it's starting to boil, pour it into the cup. Repeat mechanically ad nauseam, all day long.
It's not at all like a chef preparing an exquisite meal. It's more akin to an unskilled apprentice hammering nails into boards with a hammer. That repetitive and unskilled labour.
If anything, a more high tech process tends to actually produce a better taste. E.g., modern grinding it by cutting it with blades into thin pieces, produces a better result than traditional low-tech grinding.
Heh. Dude, those Wikipedia pages are just, you know, a quick link to what I'm talking about.
But ok, let's discuss your book: a book written by a geography professor, with _no_ economic qualifications. And talking out of the arse most of the time.
E.g., to pick at just one of his examples, Easter Island is anything but that clear. Yes, it makes for a popular myth that those guys kept obliviously marching toward collapse as they cut tree after tree. But more recent research seems to indicate that they never actually had as much population or as many trees as previously thought. I.e., very probably there was _no_ collapse due to deforestation at all.
Yes, I've seen you point out that book half a dozen times in various messages. _That_ makes you less glib? Heh. You amuse me.
Well, if you're that curious what I base those beliefs on, check out for a start Keynesian Economics and the Phillips Curve. You know, the economics theory that the whole world has functioned by since the Great Depression.
The _fact_ is, mechanizing production and even automation haven't cost a single job yet. Every single western country has unemployment exactly where it wants it. Simply because it's tied to inflation via that curve, and we're pretty good at controlling inflation in the meantime.
And if it started going in some unwanted direction, again, we _know_ how to control inflation and thus job creation.
For seventy years straight, there's been _no_ sign of job creation becoming an unattractive proposition. Every single job lost in one place, has been a job created somewhere else. Every single manual job lost to those inhuman machines, has been replaced by a job in services, marketing, R&D, etc. It's that simple.
It may seem heartless that your government (or mine) actually wants to have a certain inflation and a certain percentage of unemployed people. And it's certainly not something they tell you during an election campaign. But we haven't figured out how to control both. If you push one too close to zero, the other raises through the roof, and viceversa. So we just pick a point on that curve that we can live with, and try to peg the economy there.
Do you really understand that? To the common guy it usually seems like a sign of the apocalypse and of how much the country goes down the drain, that we have those two "evils." In reality that's just how the economy works. We actually have them where we _want_ them. (Within the limits of what's possible.)
And they haven't moved much since we started applying modern economics. We used to let the economy fluctuate in whatever direction it wanted during the 19'th and early 20'th century, and it kinda flew off the hook in the Great Depression. Now we keep it where we want it instead. I'll take it as a sign that the theory actually works, since we haven't had the boom and crash cycles any more, that plagued the 19'th and early 20'th century.
But even before that, we've had those increasingly wild cycles, pretty much around the same baseline. All the mechanization in the 19'th century didn't cost any jobs in the long term either. The economy just fluctuated a lot more around that horizontal line. At one moment it would have almost noone unemployed, the next one it would lose a heck of a lot of jobs. Unpleasant business, no doubt, but what I'm trying to say is: taking an average there, there has been no trend of losing jobs to mechanization even then.
So, there we go. That's what I base that extrapolation on: real historical data, and real economics.
So I'm touched that you find that "not only depressing, but frightening." But, until given a damn compelling reason why I should start disbelieving almost a century of economic theory, I'll stick to that.
What do _you_ base your beliefs on? No, I'm curious. You enlighten me.
For a start, I'm nowhere near libertarian, and in fact I hate that ideology. But the world isn't that neatly divided. At any rate, what matters is whether my ideas are right or wrong, not what convenient label you can put on them.
There are not enough resources on the planet for there to be a middle-class in China proportionately as large and as consumerist as in the US.
So basically, someone else should be poor (and for no other fault or merit than being born in China) so you can be rich? It's such a self-centered egotistical attitude, it's not even funny. Most people at least pretend to have more empathy than that towards their fellow man.
Not enough metals, fuel, plastic feedstocks, lumber, wheat, etc.
Actually, there's certainly more than enough wheat around, and we the West have been working hard to get everyone else to destroy their agriculture to make them buy our subsidized crops. Wood can be produced as a _crop_, and mostly is. Metals, depending on which you mean, are everywhere and mostly limited by the energy to extract them. There's certainly no shortage of iron, at least. Etc.
E.g., the USA didn't get to depend on foreign ore and oil because it's poor in those, but because it simply was cheaper to buy them from third world countries than to pay someone to extract them at home. I fail to see how automation there could possibly make it worse.
Now I'm not saying that those resources are free, but there certainly is enough of them, so as not to justify that kind of "the Chinese should stay poor so we can stay rich" attitude.
Not to mention that even for that kind of blatant imperialism, maybe if China mechanizes, then it can dig up more ore for the West and sew shoes faster in those sweatshops. So even by that self-centered kind of view, what do you have to lose?
More automation will not magically reverse this, and would slow down the creation of acceptable jobs.
Acceptable by what criterion, pray tell? Ultimately the worth of any job is what you can buy with those money. Producing more stuff, including by mechanization, raises the worth of that job. "Creating jobs" by just making people cut the grass with scissors, just makes everyone poorer.
The standard of living of a country, or the "wealth of nations" as Adam Smith put it, is pretty much measured by how much you produce and how well that fits what the people want to buy. That's pretty much it. Of course, nowadays that means a lot more services too, but same idea. Just "creating jobs" for the sake of keeping people occupied doing things inefficiently, isn't really improving anyone's lot. It's just a way to push some resources off a cliff, for no benefit to anyone. Even if it were only human resources, it's nevertheless just shunting some work to/dev/null so to speak, instead of using it to improve the overall standard of living.
Having finite resources is already included in that. Yes, you have finite resources, including humans, which was always why you don't have an infinite production. But what matters is what you do with them. And even there we can do better.
Even if China would never get as many resources as the USA, mechanization can at least free more people to do more for society than working for subsistence. Maybe then they can afford more services for example. If less guys are needed to dig ore out and farm rice, maybe more guys can be used to, say, deliver pizza, or make movies, or be doctors and keep everyone healthier.
Eliminating all human labor is unwise and ultimately self-destructive. Delegating "black arts" to highly reproducible mechanical processes goes against esthetics and homogenizes into blandness the infinitely variable human process it replaces.
This is all just shallow thinking to maximize short-term profits. In that sense, it is just plain dumb, albeit in a spectacular bling-blingy sort of way.
Ah, a luddite. How cute.
I've got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.
E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There's been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19'th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn't self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you'd have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you'd stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.
E.g., the fact that they're clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn't be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.
E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it's only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.
E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB's demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.
E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don't think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a "highly reproducible mechanical process".
Etc, etc, etc.
Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.
What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.
Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.
But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.
It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.
To illustrate the fundamental difference:
- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.
- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.
But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.
Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.
I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.
I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?
1. It's not as cut and dry indeed: way too often I hear the "compromise" excuse for something that really _is_ just piss-poor practices.
Yes, sometimes you can have 3 layers of security in front of that mainframe to achieve the same effect.
But too often that's just window dressing and wishful thinking. E.g., is that emulator the _only_ way to access that legacy app? Because if someone can just use telnet on the internal network to bypass that, then all those funky layers in front of it are worth exactly squat.
Not saying that that's necessarily the case there, but I _have_ seen entirely too many places where exactly that was the case. They had layers upon layers of... show business and make-belief magical talismans. They were either routinely bypassed by everyone, or had opened holes in those defenses that you could drive a bus through, or didn't even bother configuring them to actually do anything.
And entirely too often I see this attitude of "auugh, those mean security people are just persecuting us", for stuff which was a genuine security hole. The biggest case I've seen had, among many other faults:
- checked roles only when generating the links, but not on each page. So you could ask to edit your own user's password (and dutifully it would check who you are and generate the link to edit your own user), but then you could edit the URL and change the super-user's password instead. Or see some other company's data. Or pretty much change any other parameter.
- SQL _and_ HTML/javascript injection. The guys were simply too stupid to quote a text, and when asked to, they quoted it twice. Then disabled it again, when asked to fix that.
- failure to keep a proper history. Asking to delete your user would indeed dutifully cause a cascaded delete through anything linked to it via a foreign key, so you and everything you've ever done would simply vanish from the system. Orders you placed, money you owed, posts you've posted, everything.
And a few other problems, not all related to security. The management reaction? It actually got leaked via everyone adding their comment to the top of an email, with everything quoted at the bottom. So when the resulting thread (which by now had branched into other stuff) was forwarded outside that group, buried 10 ft deep was a fragment of a discussion where the security team was painted as "don't listen to them, they're doing evil hacks like editing URLs, to discredit our friends from XYZ." (XYZ being the company supplying the contractors who programmed that catastrophe.)
So, again, _because_ it's not as cut and dry, make sure it doesn't end up painted cut and dry in the other direction. Before concluding that a security auditor is just some evil jerk beating his own drum, make damn sure that you did triple-check and it's not just a knee-jerk reaction.
2. I take particular offense to: "Money and resources are not in unlimited supply, and sometimes standards need to be compromised or worked-around so that business can continue." I'm sorry, but that's just a fancy way of saying that you have _no_ ethics or standards. If that business can't continue in a way that obeys the laws and protects people's privacy (which at least in Europe actually _is_ a legal requirement), then maybe it shouldn't continue at all.
I'm sorry, but noone has a sacred right to make money. So the excuse that sometimes you have to do the wrong thing, or even break the law (at least if you have any branch in Europe), to keep making money, again, is just a way to say that you have no morals. It's not a "compromise", it's lack of ethics. It's that simple.
I can even accept that sometimes compromises can provide the same level of security. I'm fine with that. But, basically, "we have to bend the rules to keep making money" is _not_ it. It just isn't and shouldn't be an excuse, ever. It didn't excuse Ken Lay, it didn't excuse the AOL DBA who exported their database and sold it to spammers (hey, it was for money too), and it doesn't excuse
What everyone seems to miss in this taking-sides contest is that we don't really _know_ what happened there. We have only this guy's side of the story, and a rather incomplete one at that. It's heavily slanted on the "boohoo, I'm a poor little victim, and the bully even greets me with 'you're an idiot' in the morning", but I wouldn't jump to take his side before I hear the other guy's side of the story too.
Just following a procedure doesn't necessarily absolve him of any further responsibility. And frankly I've seen it too often used as a generic arse-covering excuse. I've seen too many managers just forging ahead and doing the dumbest possible thing, because they (think they) found some policy which absolves them of any personal responsibility or of expectation of a working brain.
He _is_ (or was) upper management, he had a right to make a decision both before and after the incident. Or should have had. If he was there only to be called names when it goes wrong, but no power to actually take a decision to avoid it going wrong, then he should have quit long before. That's a bigger problem than dealing with a bully: it's a position of a scapegoat, and better run as far away as you can from it, before the time for the ritual sacrifice comes.
But we don't know even that. Was he in such a scapegoat position without power? Or maybe he just a yes-man. and didn't want to risk his cushy job by vetoing an untested and undocumented release? Or something in between? Or something completely different? We just don't know enough to give a verdict there.
We don't know _why_ Dirk was calling him an idiot. Was he just a bully, or maybe he had a damn good point? Without reading his side of the story too, we just don't know.
And again, I'd advise against taking a side just because someone can put up an emotional story. Too often that's used to just distract attention from the real issues. Maybe here too, or maybe not, but we don't know.
Even his, essentially, "but look, I tried to be friendly and he still didn't want to play ball!!" appeals on page two, look, well, unconvincing. If someone had fucked up one of _my_ releases, coming up with "Do you want to talk about SF on TV?" in the middle of the freaking meeting, well, let's just say that Dirk was still polite there. I mean, wth, they're talking about what went awfully wrong in a release. How the heck is that even relevant to what they were talking about? It looks to me, at best, as a lame attempt to derail the discussion in a totally off-topic direction.
_If_ he told me that three days later, when things calmed down, he tried to start a talk about SF with Dirk and still got just a snarl back... ok, then I'd be tempted to conclude that Dirk is just an arsehole. But in the middle of a pissing contest about who's to blame, and when tempers are already boiling? Heh. I'll call that rather unconclusive. _Maybe_ Dirk is an arsehole, but maybe, just maybe, he's already pissed off and doesn't take lightly to having a talk about a release fuck-up derailed into irrelevant topics. I couldn't really hold the latter against him.
1. Just as a counter-example: Blizzard may not be perfect on the whole, but I don't think there is even 1 documented case of anyone being banned for discussing a bug. You _can_ get banned for using bots, yes, but not discussing bots, for example.
Their internal policy, as documented repeatedly and even recently on Slashdot, is to rely on criticism and try to fix problems. It's a piss poor company who thinks that the "ban hammer" to silence bug-reports is a perfectly normal way to hold a conversation.
Heck, there's even been a whole photoshopped "yeah, well, gold can be duped in WoW too" storm in a kettle way back, and I don't think I even heard of anyone getting banned for asking about it. Turns out that shrugging and pointing out that it doesn't work, is a much better way to deal with it, than trying to cover up real bugs like some other companies do.
2. Excuse me? We're talking documented bugs and abuses, including the places in code where they happen. How about freaking just fixing them? Regardless of whether they're reported by a 13 year old, or even a 6 year old. Moaning about the age makes a piss-poor ad-hominem there.
"If the company "calmly addresses the issues", then they'll be flooded by complainers, cheaters and opportunists within no time."? Exactly how's fixing a bug going to get you flooded by those?
- Complainers: you can have the server generate statistics for you, to see if those have a point or not. (Again, it has been discussed about Blizzard fairly recently. They actually _rely_ on "complainers" and statistics to see what needs to be fixed or tweaked.) You _can_ sort out who has a legitimate complain and who doesn't. Trying to silence everyone who has a complaint, is the most piss-poor policy imaginable, especially when they're complaining about an actual provable exploit.
And how about putting things into perspective? If you get _flooded_ in reports of actual bugs you have, it's _you_ who's to blame, not the players. I'd want to see those issues fixed, not silenced.
- Cheaters. Exactly how's fixing a bug going to help those? On the contrary, if I ever actually wanted to cheat in a game, I'd rather look for a company that spent years trying to silence bug reports instead of fixing any of the exploits.
- Opportunists. Excuse me? Exactly what opportunity are we talking about there? The opportunity to help get the game fixed? Give those guys a freaking medal, then.
The opportunity to get a bit of short-lived forum fame in the process? Well, first of all, that's a very small price to pay for getting a thorough testing. Good testers are rare. So if as little as a bit of fame gets one to report the most obscure bugs to you, and do a free code review too apparently in this case, then by all means, give it to them. Post a "top 10 bug reporters" page on the official site. Give them a funny hat in the game, or a unique decal for their ship, or whatever. Whatever gets them to keep working for you for free.
Second, that fame is rather little and short lived if you have a reputation of fixing bugs promptly. You need to have quite a number of discontent players, for them to rally around the loudest guy. If they have no reason to be discontent with your handling bugs, they'll just naturally treat anyone as a troll if they raise a huge stink over some bug that's fixed in a week anyway.
In effect, if a company "calmly addresses the issues", on the contrary, that's the best way to _defuse_ any chronic complainers, cheaters and opportunists. It takes away the whole foundation for any "us vs them" movement. It says "we're on your side, we're all working together to make the game better for you." Starting banning people for just talking about you having bugs, is quite the opposite effect. Nothing says "us vs the players" as loudly as doing that.
Well, the mention of drag racing makes me think more of the car scene, and people tacking fake disc brakes (without calipers=, badly designed wings (my favourite are rear wings behind the rear wheels... on front drive cars;), and 5" exhausts (on a 1.1 non-turbo car), on a lemon and pretending that it makes it teh uber-racecar.
So, hmm, kinda makes me wonder... how long until we'll see people tacking fake rocket boosters on a second-hand crop-duster biplane?:P
Actually, it is at least possible that it was intended as a trick question. You know, one where if you say "yes" then you've just said "yep, I'm a con artist." Admittedly, it's a stupid one even as trick questions go, but still, there might be some purpose behind it.
To put things into perspective Babbage got funding for one machine, never finished it, decided he's rather begin designing the version 2 model, asked for more funding, repeat ad nauseam. Pretty much it was _the_ original computing vapourware. Pretty soon he got no more funding, but that never stopped him from asking for more and hyping his unproven creation to the parliament.
He also seems to have descended into a nerd-like bitterness, in which he took such questions out of context as proof that everyone else is a drooling idiot and that's why they don't see he's right. And in that he also included such questions as, basically, "well, what _can_ it do?" and "what's the business advantage for making one of these?" Stuff that you'd get asked by any business nowadays too. He took them as proof that his contemporary Englishmen were narrow minded and lacking in vision.
It may seem obvious in retrospect that his design was right, but at the time it was everything except obvious. It was a _monumental_ expense with the economy and technology at that time, even compared to paying armies of people to calculate those by hand. And it was anything but proven. Noone knew if it would even work at all. Again, the first round of funding he got, produced nothing tangible.
Also regarding the parliament at the time, they were not as obtuse as you (or Babbage) seem to think. They funded a lot of research, actually. The nautical clock, for example, was paid for by the parliament, and that was quite the iterative development. The first couple of versions not only were too inexact to be any use, but at least the first one didn't even compensate for the ship's rolling around. But nevertheless, that guy had _something_ working to show for his work, and kept getting more money to keep working. Babbage had nothing except his claims.
Now before I sound too damning to Babbage, it wasn't only his fault. He got into a conflict with the company actually building it, and that was the chief reason why the V1 was never completed. But, still, seen from outside, he never had anything working to show, and even more damning he just unilaterally scrapped the design in the middle of the project and began designing an even more overengineered V2 instead.
So, anyway, given that he was technically hyping vapourware, I can see a smart-arse member of the parliament trying to catch him with a trick question. Again, it _is_ a dumb one, but it's not the same class of dumb as actually thinking that a machine can magically guess the right answers when fed wrong data.
(But then again, I see a ton of PHBs and businesses nowadays believing just that about electronic computers, so maybe it was just a dumb question after all.)
I have. You just need to read through this thread to see how many people have no clue about what their eyes do or don't.
Consider this: Slashdot is a very mixed audience. For every great guru, there are at least two who aren't that great. There'll be people who only think they're great, people who got hired in first level tech support just because they could operate a phone and read a list (not all, but think of some of the first level support you must have called before), has-been PHBs who haven't had anything to do with technology since those teletypes you mentioned, and wannabes who think that reading Slashdot is some kind of building street cred.
Furthermore, even if you were the great expert in some domain, you're not on all. Just because you know how to use a teletype, doesn't mean you necessarily know about your eyes. The people I've mentioned who set their monitors all wrong, or leave dirt build up until you can barely see through, work in IT too. Obviously they haven't learned much about monitors.
But we also have people around whose expertise is in physics, graphics design, a few gamers, at least a few cops that mostly appear in the YRO threads, some medical doctors, a few lawyers interested in the IP threads, etc. Not everyone is an expert in the same field, briefly.
Some of us used to do our work on teletypes, for fuck's sake.
Really? Data entry clerk? Something tells me you don't have many achievements to brag about from that era, if your dose of daily jollies is trolling AC on Slashdot. Or is it just a case of "oh, how the mighty have fallen"?:P
The human eye is naturally lazy, and likes to look at things that do not cause it to send strong signals. To that end, a black background is essential for "easy on the eyes" formatting
Yes, the eyes like to minimize the use of optic nerve bandwidth, but that doesn't mean what you seem to think.
It means that the retina has built-in edge detection. The photoreceptors are wired to inhibit adjacent photoreceptors, so if they're seeing the same colour, it naturally get subtracted from the signal.
I.e., plain empty background doesn't cause more bandwidth use, regardless of whether it's white, black, green, pink, or anything else you can think of. A pure white screen is pretty much the minimum bandwidth scenario, _not_ the bandwidth overload one. (Though a lot of dirt on the screen might cause a bunch of extra signal there.)
Also that means that a "." costs less bandwidth than a "/" which in turn costs less than an "X".
But that's all irrelevant because:
1. If you can read the text, you already have enough bandwidth. In fact, heh, almost any text doesn't come even close to being bandwidth-capped there. A stroll through the park or watching a tabby cat run through grass, already have a lot more edges than reading this page in Slashdot.
I program mainly in Java since 1999. There's no excuse to _need_ tiny fonts to be able to read the source. In Java, C++, x86 Assembly, or even COBOL. Maybe if you had to program in Shakespeare, I could see the point. Otherwise, there's something awfully amiss with that code, if it's not (easily) comprehensible in a 25 row window.
Mind you, you can still have more rows than that just because you have an awful lot of screen estate, and there's no reason to go above an already easily readable font size anyway. But as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself going, "but with 25 rows I'd have to page down 4 times just to see where the loop ends" or worse "but I really need that 7 pixel font to read that source", then you have a pretty good case for refactoring.
... if black on white hurts your eyes, there's probably something else wrong there too. Not saying that black on white is optimal anyway, but it shouldn't be enough by itself to give you a headache or tire your eyes.
It generally boils down to: IMHO most people I've seen using computers are doing it wrong for their eyes.
For starters make sure you use a large enough, and clear enough, font so you don't have to squint. If you absolutely need 80 lines on the screen when editing sources, that's usually your clue that there's something wrong with your programming style (and I suspect for some people the short term memory too.) You shouldn't have methods that run over that many lines, unless they're truly trivial stuff. (Like, say, a long switch statement where each line does no more than delegate to a method of its own. Arguably there are better ways there too, but I don't find it to be the end of the world either.)
IDE's also offer a lot of tools to find the method you need, when you need it, and/or collaps/expand blocks so the don't take up screen estate when you don't need them. There's also stuff like showing you the parameters anyway, so you don't have to have a second window in which you look for the parameters to that method. And really lots of other stuff. Use those instead of cramming the absolute maximum lines of text on the screen.
When I see a couple of co-workers squinting at their 6 point Illegible Roman font in VI and doing greps manually in another illegible tiled window, heh, I'm just itching to tell them to move out of the stone age already. We even discovered this funky thing called the "wheel" in the meantime, ya know?
Clean your monitor regularly, especially if it's a CRT. CRT's have thick glass, and your eyes end up focusing back and forth between the dirt on the front side of it, and the letters on the back side of it. But it's distracting and tiresome on TFTs too. And if you need to squint because you're at the point of "is that a 'm' or a 'rn'? Or is it 'rh' behind that speck?" it's long overdue for a cleaning.
Do turn your contrast up, but turn your brightness down to a comfortable level. The monitor is not supposed to be an AA searchlight. Staring into very bright stuff, especially in a dark room, _is_ tiresome. Here especially the TFT's are the biggest offenders. The manufacturers got stuck on bragging about the brightness of their monitors, as if that's something good, and pre-set them to insanely bright levels. Turn that down to where you can live with the white for hours.
And it will be even more important when you have to focus on stuff that's the other way around: white on black. (Some websites love that scheme, for example.) On an ultra-bright monitors that will mean focusing on a mostly black screen, so your pupils are wide open, but some pieces of retina are getting to see some really bright letters. It's a recipe for a headache.
As a side-note, I'm genuinely surprised at how many people do the exact opposite. I've seen too many monitors which are turned to abysmal contrast, and as bright as halogen headlights. I mean, WTF? Some things are barely legible in that configuration.
Ok, so maybe it's good for PC games, where the average dev seems to think that every fucking thing must happen in nearly complete darkness. 'Cause, you know, we have 32 bit colours so we can display all the gamut of "black", "really dark", "dark grey", "room with a broken lightbulb" and "grey stone on a moonless night". But the brightness settings where you see in near dark in games, suck for work or even reading in a browser. If you use the same monitor for games, consider turning up the brightness or gamma up in those, instead of turning the monitor's brightness all the way to the right.
If you're stuck with a CRT, make sure it's a good one and properly tuned. Staring into an unfocused image, especially with small unfocused fonts, is a recipe for a headache.
Again, for CRT users, just because everything idiotically defaults to 60 Hz, is no
1. If they can do that kind of optimizations (which I highly doubt), then make it opt-in, not impossible to opt-out. If Sister Marion wants her bible searches optimized that thoroughly, or High Druid Matterson wants his searches free of the neighbours' puritan crap, then they can register and log in, you know.
There you go, it's an even easier way to track people who want to be tracked. More importantly, it's a responsible implementation. Just because you can do something, is no excuse to automatically do it to everyone without consent. (After all, you're probably perfectly equipped to fuck someone, but don't do it to everyone without consent either.)
I'm really genuinely tired of all sorts of stuff, ranging from nasty to irresponsible, being done under the blanket excuse, "but we tried to make it easier/better/etc for you!" Let me decide what good stuff I want, and which stuff I don't, ya know? Whether it's ads stuffed into my post box, or tracking my searches, or whatever... ask first. It's not that horribly alien a concept. You'd think most kids are taught to say "please" when they want something. At what point along becoming a big entrepreneur does one automatically forget all that?
2. More importantly: that way be the dragons.
To use your own example of a bible-belt town: There's more than one study which found that some of the most obnoxiously bible-thumping puritan communities, had some of the largest percentages of people who were into all sorts of perversions at home. Not that there's anything wrong with kinky stuff between consenting adults, mind you. But essentially a _lot_ of them do at home the same things they condemn as deadly sins in public.
Tracking it all to the point where you know exactly which searches are from Sister Marion, may well reveal that she didn't quite search for bible verses. Maybe she searched repeatedly for lesbian BDSM porn, plus for realistic vibrators and strap-ons. And maybe the stern fire-and-brimstone preacher, Pastor Brian, has been busily searching for gay porn, with a side-hobby of gay bestiality. And maybe the druid Matterson has done a search or two about prices on a sex change operation, so he can be a priestess of some nature goddess. Etc.
Nothing wrong with any of that, as such. But especially in that kind of a bible-thumping community, their lives could easily be ruined if that kind of info got leaked out, stolen, or just mis-used.
Even something as helpful-looking as just re-sorting their hits and adds based on who they are and what their personal search history is, can be essentially a leak waiting to happen. Think: pastor Brian gets his computer virused, the helpful neighbourhood nerd comes to have a look at it, has a search for "removing Stormbot", and the first ten pages of ads and links are variations of "18 year old boys sucking horse cock". You've essentially just told a stranger what the good pastor surfed for lately.
So, again, please make it opt in, if you want to provide that kind of a service.
Last year's data is extremely helpful in predicting this year's searches, and debugging any changes you've made before a season hits.
RTFA, lemming. The summary _again_ is inflammatory crap, yes, what else is new? But that's not what TFA says.
They're _not_ required to delete data completely, they're required to delete data that can identify you personally. Like IP, grouping between those searches, etc.
They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "WebSphere XA configuration" before, or "Fluffy tail buttplugs" or whatever. You can tune the search with just the search string. You don't need to track me for that.
_That_ is the friction between the EU and Google: that Google wants to keep that kind of identifiable information like the pair of IP and timestamp. Google has been playing bullshit handwaving games along the lines of "but we really need the IPs", then "but some people change IPs, so it won't identify them for ever", then "wait, would it be ok if we changed a bit or two of the IP?" along with a good helping of "but we'll keep it for 18 month before changing those bits anyway!"
And seeing Google protest at every step when they're told to stop tracking google, and, yes, exactly such bullshit fallacies as that they really need that IP to refine the search algorithm... is kinda funny. I guess "do no evil" was for when they were small and cuddly. Now that they're the 800 pound gorilla of the online advertising market, heh, turns out that they get as big a boner as any other PHBs out of trying to rape people's private data for a quick buck.
But, hey, I'm willing to be educated. _You_ tell me how deleting the IP information is gonna make search engines tank. Exactly which search algorithm relies on knowing my IP? No, seriously.
How well would financial markets work with only 6 months of history?
They can keep their statistic history for as long as they want to, but they can't keep your personal data. It's that simple, so let's stop handwaving strawman scenarios. They can (and should) keep information like "Shares of Moraelin Buttplugs Corp peaked at 1.50 Euro a share last year." But they have no reason to retain info like "Freddy Krueger lives on 22 Elm Street, and bought 2 shares of Dr Kevorkian's Suicide Clinic last year," just because he bought those 2 shares last year.
A financial advisor's or stock broker's job is to trade on the stock market. It's _not_ to collect your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. It's not their job to data-mine your private information. It's that simple: stick to selling those shares.
Mind you, even for data mining, there's a fine line between information and trivia. Stuff like "which team won the most games last year" is information. You can make an informed prediction for this year based on it. Stuff like "which team won the most games on a Wednesday, in rain, under artificial light" is trivia.
Similarly, "people from Germany buy more economic games than those in the USA" is information. Stuff like "people living on odd numbered houses, and on streets whose name ends in a 'e', and are born on a rainy thursay, buy more economic games" is useless trivia.
"50% of the gamers are between 25 and 50 years old" is information. You can decide a target demographic based on that. "People born on a Tuesday the 14'th have the most gamers, at a whole 0.01% of the total" is trivia. Even if you figured out how to make games especially fit for people born on a Tuesday the 14'th, it's too thin a slice to individually bother with. Etc.
Going too deep into details, slices your data too thin, and produces meaningless trivia.
There simply is _no_ sane justification for the kinds of personal information that especially the USA PHB's try to collect. Other than spamming you personally
Well, it's not that simple. On account of that monthly fee, you don't just get some stuff later, you also get a lot more stuff up front.
E.g., WoW is a lot larger a game than Diablo 2, or for a more modern comparison, than Oblivion. Even the game as published has maybe 10 times the landmass of Oblivion, and 20-30 times the number of quests. If you think it's economically feasible to give you 10 times more content for the same 50 bucks, dream on.
They can put a lot more work into the game up front, because they hope to get more money out of you later, via those monthly fees. That's something those fees get you right there.
That said, though, depending on the game, you might get some "freebies" for those 15$ per month too.
E.g., COH seems to be pretty much what you ask for. They never sold an expansion pack, they had about 11 mini-EPs for free. More than half the game as it is now, has come via expansion packs. All the hazard zones, Salamanca, Ouroboros, the new Faultline, all the PvP zones, etc, etc, etc, are from free EPs.
E.g., EQ2 on the other hand won't give you even the time of day for free, so to speak. As the GP said, they're really milking that teat for all they can. Their expansion packs have been really tiny, and all their EPs and Adventure Packs _combined_ so far, amount to less than WoW's one EP. But they were sold for more money on the whole. Their largest EP, "Echoes Of Faydweyr", adds two new races (fairies and evil fairies), and their newbie areas and capital cities, but that's it. As surface goes, each of the two islands is about as big as the Draenei and respectively Blood Elf newbie areas and cities in Blizzard's Burning Crusade EP, and even less as quests and scripts go. Sony's biggest EP was a tiny fraction of what Blizzard sold as their one EP.
Seriously, even when they have 1-2 dungeons they can't be arsed to stick in a whole EP, they sell it as an "Adventure Pack" for half the price.
E.g., WoW actually is somewhere in the middle. They added quite a few "free" stuff over the years, bundled with some patch. All the endgame grinding dungeons for example came for free later. Ditto IIRC for the battlegrounds. And a bunch of other stuff.
They did sell an EP, but, really, that's one big huge chunk of land and quests. It really has more of both than Oblivion, or for that matter, than a few Oblivions put together. Again, based on the assumption that they can recoup that partially via monthly fees too. (Might make some people stay longer, might make some people return to try it, etc.)
At any rate, do I regret buying that EP? Nope. As I was saying, I got more value for that money than from a couple of single-player games put together. Sure, I could start demanding that they give me all that for free, since I pay a monthly fee. Well, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say "no" if they wanted to give me a bunch of content for no extra cost. But from a pragmatic point of view, it was still money pretty well spent.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'm a very realistic European. The electoral system in most of continental Europe didn't degenerate into the two-party fuckup of the USA, and still makes politicians work for their votes. Elections are as good as never won by any one party, but by an uneasy coalition of conflicting interests, most of which are just itching for an excuse or opportunity to shaft each other. You may think that party X won the elections, but literally it tends to be more of a case of party X has a 26% of the votes, party Y has 19% and they coopted party Z too which has 6% of the votes, to get a coalition that has 51%. But those alliances can vanish overnight, and coalitions can form the other way around overnight. Party X can go from being the leader of the winning coalition, to being the largest party of the opposition, as another 51% coalition formed without them. Jerrymandering also doesn't work in this kind of an electoral system. Now I'm not saying that the politicians here are honest or altruistic. They're... politicians, same as everywhere else. But they're not in a position to just be overtly corrupt and overtly in the pocket of some corporation or cartel. They'll get their bribes in a lot more secrecy, and be a lot more subtle about trying to favour their "benefactors". What I'm saying is that, essentially, politicians have to be populist, with all the good and the bad that that involves. Overtly favouring corporate lobbies over the interests of the voters, tends to be a suicidal move. On the contrary, they'll fall over themselves to tell you what they'll do to make corporations respect your privacy, treat you right, etc. Antitrust is actually applied, and with a big mallet at that. Etc. Essentially the funny part is that it's a system that works _because_ half the politicians are self-centered sociopaths. It just gives them the motivation to keep each other in check. But anyway, there's nothing idealistic about believing in the rule of the law. Again, here it tends to actually work that way. Now I wouldn't know if the system in the USA is as bad as you paint it, and I'll refrain from commenting on that. But _if_ it's that bad, why don't you change the way your government works? If so many people are disillusioned with the results of the current system, by all means, change it. Make a party whose sole platform is to change the electoral system. Convince enough people to vote for it. That's it. It _has_ happened before. The original Republican system was created pretty much around the sole issue of slavery, and had no trouble flipping the bird to the existing two parties and getting a majority in the congress. Exactly what's keeping you from pulling that stunt again? _If_ the system drifted so much and so obviously from representing the people, surely enough of those people could be persuaded to vote to change it to something more palatable.
Well, obviously greed is a motivation there, but the distinction I was trying to make was, briefly:
A. smart greed = actually makes some money
B. stupid greed = loses a $1000 sale to serve $0.01 worth of ads and marketing bullshit
C. plain stupidity = stuff that doesn't even serve that extra $0.01 worth of ads. It's there just because some retard thought it's "cool" or "exciting" to have different colours and fonts than everyone else, and more animations than anyone else, and a navigation that's a bad mini-game by itself, and God knows what other stupidity.
To give you an example of #3: back in the dot-com days I actually had to do a contract for a company whose site's navigation looked, basically, like a heap of cuts from newspapers. I don't even mean something like a neat menu which only happens to be tackily rendered as a each option being a scrap of paper. I mean those scraps were literally heaped in an ugly pile, and you had to search in that pile for the one you wanted.
It's stuff that wasn't even an ad, it didn't help serve more ads, and generally didn't earn them a cent, in any form or shape. It just made it not only inaccessible to blind people (since those slanted pieces of paper were images, and a screen reader can't do much with them), but a royal pain in the arse to use even with perfect eyesight.
It was simply the creation of a graphics artist turned PHB, so now he wasn't just free to do all the art for art's sake that he always wanted, but also had the authority to turn their navigation into such a work of art. Completely unusable, but artsy.
Gah. Two wrongs don't make a right.
And using the law as just some excuse to jail someone you don't like, even via some convoluted fallacy, is not how the rule of the law was supposed to work. And not just from a moral right vs wrong point of view, but it also takes away quite a bit out of the deterrence factor of the law and police. After all, if you know that (A) whether you get convicted or not depends more on whims, friends, or being in the wrong time at the wrong place, and (B) whatever you did, chances are decent they'll find a scapegoat to make an example of, instead of finding you, just says you have more chances to get away with something genuinely criminal.
We tried using spectacular shows of making an example of some bystander, to scare the criminals. Heck, half of the medieval justice worked like that, and the communist block kept at it until the bitter end. It doesn't really work well.
And in this case it would also create the precedent that _any_ content you serve can get you in PMITA state prison. There's nothing to say that only ISP's inserted ads can be demonized and victimized in your setup. Any site, regardless of whether it's serving ads, or is a free forum like Slashdot, or sells stuff on the internet, or is some company's web presence on the net, etc, could be hacked to serve malware, adware, spam, phishing, redirects to other sites, etc. Some of which, yes, porn or to porn.
So what do you propose? That if your company's site can be hacked like that, the CEO goes to jail? Well then how about we take that to the logical end then and give some responsibility in it to the guys who programmed those vulnerabilities too? Or to the admins who didn't secure the servers right? To the security teams who didn't find some glaring vulnerabilities? To the PHB's and developers who had an "auugh, those security guys are just bullies, blowing stuff out of proportion to make me look bad!" attitude and pulled all sorts of strings to get the severity rating lowered? To the beancounters who got a bonus for slashing the budget for security? To the controlling guy who insisted on hiring only the cheapest burger-flippers who had a crash-course in Java, as a cost saving measure? To the level 1 support monkeys who advised someone to disable his firewall and/or disable his virus scanner, just to install a stupid game or access some vuln-laden site? To the idiot who wrote that canned list of answers? Etc.
I mean, if it counts as "endangering the children" if you have some vulnerability that _could_ be used against children, then, seriously, there are a _lot_ of people who had a hand in creating that vulnerability, not just the CEO. That's a lot of jails we'll need.
You'll also notice that it just doesn't say "stop tampering with the sites". It just says that if you can be hacked, you can go to jail. So if you're sure enough of your code and your admins to be on the internet at all, then you're sure enough to mangle the web pages too. E.g., if you're sure enough that your ad server is secure enough to use it on your web site, then you're sure enough to use it in other people's pages too. After all, if it were hacked to serve kiddie porn, it would serve it on your own site too.
No. If it has to be stopped, it has to be a clear law and applied uniformly. The idea isn't even new. Any country has laws against tampering with snail mail. Make it illegal to mess with someone's electronics communications, and apply it impartially and uniformly.
Sometimes it just has no excuse. E.g.,
1. government / local government pages. Even skipping past the issue that they should set an example by obeying the rules they voted into law... Exactly how do those depend ad revenue?
2. I go to some manufacturer's web page, to buy something or get some drivers like the GP, and... some are really a bad case of flash overdose, and some are full of ads too. Bonus points when occasionally it's not even to their own products. But anyway, WTF? I'm there either to buy something they make, or because I _have_ bought something they make. Why should I be bombarded with ads there? No, seriously.
And even skipping the banner ads, I've seen a couple where I had to go through loops and plough through pages after pages of marketing gibberish, just to get to the page with the prices. In at least one case I gave up because I just couldn't find the price list.
And a some have horrible colours, fonts and layouts too, and make wrong use of graphics at that, just because aparently someone thought it's all the rage to look like the funky marketing brochure. Thankfully that became a lot more rare over the years, but sadly it's still not dead, and it keeps coming back like a vampire.
This isn't just a case of "bad design" as in page layout and technologies used. It's outright stupid. It's not even just a case of letting the marketing drones in charge, it's letting the _stupid_ marketing drones in charge. If you want to sell me something, don't annoy me first and don't make it hard to get to (A) the specs, and (B) the prices and/or online shop pages. No, I'm not interested in how many decades of buzzwords you leverage, nor in your synergies, nor in how award-winning/industry-standard/customer-centric/buzzword-driven you are. I'm not there to play Bullshit Bingo, so just let me know (A) exactly what you sell, and (B) for what price.
At any rate, the couple of cents they might get in ads there, sorry, just aren't worth losing a potential sale over, no matter how I want to look at it. And it feels _petty_ that when I'm looking to buy something that costs hundreds of bucks, someone tries to shaft a few cents out of me with their maze of ads. It's like meeting their sales guy and seeing him trying to steal my office pens. It just doesn't make a good impression, ya know?
3. (Or 2B.) Some game publishers' pages. E.g., dunno, I want to know what their latest game is all about. Or I bought it and need a patch. Or whatever, really. And I'm forced to sit and twiddle thumbs while their flash loads, then have to read the information in a tiny window, with a tiny font, split into a gazillion tiny pages, and with a shitty colour scheme to boot.
I mean, wtf? Either I'm looking to buy their game, or I already blew some money on their game. And especially in the latter case, let's make one thing clear: the whole market for unfinished buggy games exist only because of the promise that they'll make up by offering a free patch later. I'm already annoyed by that deal, don't push it. Making me essentially pay for the patch by watching ads, or worse yet by putting it on some shitty site that makes me wait an hour for the download unless I pay to subscribe, is just adding insult to injury.
And let's make another thing clear: I _paid_ for that game. Don't make me go through a mandatory form that wants to know even my exact street number, telephone number, birth date, and size of condoms I use. I'm looking at you, EA. I already paid, ok? I'm not your data-mining guinea pig too.
Admittedly, probably the blind don't play first person shooters or console RPGs much, but I find it just as annoying as a guy who doesn't even need glasses yet.
4. But perhaps the best way to say it is that I have been before one of the guys who programmed those shitty sites, or helped fix their performance problems. I still have nightmares about some colour schemes like orange on orange-ish yellow, or cyan on bright blue, that I had to implement during the dotcom years. Or the clas
Heh. Dude, it was a joke. I _know_ Mechs aren't a good idea for the military. Think "bloody huge, thinly armoured target" or "pressure on the feet" as even bigger problems than the centre of gravity. The centre of gravity can be worked around, as other posters pointed out, and evolved again and again in nature anyway. (All dinosaurs are descendant from a bipedal ancestor, for example.) So it can't be too horrible a disadvantage. Being a huge target with paper-thin armour (if you do the tons per surface maths for BattleTech mechs, for example), now that's bigger problem.
;)
But anyway, it was just a silly joke. Trust me, I know they're not a viable weapon platform.
And it may blow your mind, but also when I spew wisecracks like "Valuable RL lessons from playing WoW: 1. keep your demon on passive in a group if you're a warlock", I'm kidding too. You don't need to tell me why it's a bad idea to summon demons IRL
Nah. This is clearly a BattleTech Elemental armour. Or will end up used as one.
Now what I want is a proper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mech. I mean, they just need to make this thing 10m tall and give it a nuclear reactor as a power source, right?
It kinda makes me wonder about a few things, though.
First of all, sure, we can collect the phonemes that humans can do, and which the Neanderthals couldn't possibly pronounce, but I wonder if there are examples of the opposite. You know, phonemes which came naturally to the Neanderthals, but which modern humans have a problem with.
Second, to which extent thing can be done differently. E.g., a cat's mouth can't do a "R" the way humans create that sound, but their larynx can purr, and that's good enough. They actually use it basically as a "R" in their simple "language." E.g., "mrrk" (sometimes transliterated as "mrrh"), which as far as anyone figured out, means "food", or more like "come to dinner". That's the "word", well, vocalization, they use when they caugh some mouse and are calling their kittens to dinner. Or when they bring you some dying bird.
(To get a bit off topic, most cats will not try to give you back the food you gave them, so if you have only one and/or it can't go hunt outside, you're likely to never hear it. On the other hand, if you spend enough time on a farm with cats, that's one of the first vocalizations you might learn.)
Second, again I'll use cats as an example, sometimes they use non-vocal signs. E.g., blinking slowly with both eyes is, as far as anyone can figure it out, a kind of "hello" or "I come in peace". You can try it too, on a stray cat or someone else's cat.
They also seem to have different ways to meow, sorta like an accent of sorts, so although the basic phoneme is the same, it seems to mean different things.
You know, just as an example of a simple creature with a very simple larynx, and it can still do more than you'd expect with it. Sure, it can't speak English, and it's not evolved enough to have a very complex language. But it can communicate what it needs to.
Neanderthals were pretty evolved critters, by comparison. They were a parallel branch to Homo Sapiens from the same ancestor, and they actually had a slightly larger brain. I'm guessing that that larynx couldn't have been that hideously huge a problem. They'd figure something out.
Even _if_ they had too few sounds, a language can get rid of, for example, inflexion and be left with plenty to have names for everything around them. They'd probably need more words instead, but even that isn't too huge a problem. Even if, to use the GP's example, they had to go "This is apple. Apple is red." that should be enough for what they needed.
That may be so, for other stuff, but we're talking coffee not some ancient arts. It never was some kind of "black arts".
Roasting it was pretty much already done on an industrial scale, no matter whether it's by hand or automated. They just take a big heap of beans and roast them. Don't think that there's any master using secret techniques there and carefully sampling and tuning the taste. It's just a bunch of underpaid, unskilled peons roasting a lot of beans by the heap, even in the most low tech setting. That's it.
And boiling it, well, there are basically just two techniques:
- either you do it in a kettle, which can get awfully messy, so virtually noone still does that
- or you put the ground coffee in some kind of sieve (filter paper is just that with smaller holes) and pour hot water over it
Whether you do it by hand or with a machine, don't think that there was some highly skilled chef doing some secret recipe handed over from father to son. I've actually seen both made by hand too, and it wasn't anything even remotely resembling highly-qualified chefs and haute cuisine.
Even with the kettle, it was an underpaid unqualified peon, doing the same thing over and over again. Put the same quantity of water in the kettle, put the same quantity of ground coffee in it, put it in the hot sand (less likely to make a mess than overheat it on a flame), wait until it looks like it's starting to boil, pour it into the cup. Repeat mechanically ad nauseam, all day long.
It's not at all like a chef preparing an exquisite meal. It's more akin to an unskilled apprentice hammering nails into boards with a hammer. That repetitive and unskilled labour.
If anything, a more high tech process tends to actually produce a better taste. E.g., modern grinding it by cutting it with blades into thin pieces, produces a better result than traditional low-tech grinding.
Sorry.
Heh. Dude, those Wikipedia pages are just, you know, a quick link to what I'm talking about.
But ok, let's discuss your book: a book written by a geography professor, with _no_ economic qualifications. And talking out of the arse most of the time.
E.g., to pick at just one of his examples, Easter Island is anything but that clear. Yes, it makes for a popular myth that those guys kept obliviously marching toward collapse as they cut tree after tree. But more recent research seems to indicate that they never actually had as much population or as many trees as previously thought. I.e., very probably there was _no_ collapse due to deforestation at all.
Yes, I've seen you point out that book half a dozen times in various messages. _That_ makes you less glib? Heh. You amuse me.
Well, if you're that curious what I base those beliefs on, check out for a start Keynesian Economics and the Phillips Curve. You know, the economics theory that the whole world has functioned by since the Great Depression.
The _fact_ is, mechanizing production and even automation haven't cost a single job yet. Every single western country has unemployment exactly where it wants it. Simply because it's tied to inflation via that curve, and we're pretty good at controlling inflation in the meantime.
And if it started going in some unwanted direction, again, we _know_ how to control inflation and thus job creation.
For seventy years straight, there's been _no_ sign of job creation becoming an unattractive proposition. Every single job lost in one place, has been a job created somewhere else. Every single manual job lost to those inhuman machines, has been replaced by a job in services, marketing, R&D, etc. It's that simple.
It may seem heartless that your government (or mine) actually wants to have a certain inflation and a certain percentage of unemployed people. And it's certainly not something they tell you during an election campaign. But we haven't figured out how to control both. If you push one too close to zero, the other raises through the roof, and viceversa. So we just pick a point on that curve that we can live with, and try to peg the economy there.
Do you really understand that? To the common guy it usually seems like a sign of the apocalypse and of how much the country goes down the drain, that we have those two "evils." In reality that's just how the economy works. We actually have them where we _want_ them. (Within the limits of what's possible.)
And they haven't moved much since we started applying modern economics. We used to let the economy fluctuate in whatever direction it wanted during the 19'th and early 20'th century, and it kinda flew off the hook in the Great Depression. Now we keep it where we want it instead. I'll take it as a sign that the theory actually works, since we haven't had the boom and crash cycles any more, that plagued the 19'th and early 20'th century.
But even before that, we've had those increasingly wild cycles, pretty much around the same baseline. All the mechanization in the 19'th century didn't cost any jobs in the long term either. The economy just fluctuated a lot more around that horizontal line. At one moment it would have almost noone unemployed, the next one it would lose a heck of a lot of jobs. Unpleasant business, no doubt, but what I'm trying to say is: taking an average there, there has been no trend of losing jobs to mechanization even then.
So, there we go. That's what I base that extrapolation on: real historical data, and real economics.
So I'm touched that you find that "not only depressing, but frightening." But, until given a damn compelling reason why I should start disbelieving almost a century of economic theory, I'll stick to that.
What do _you_ base your beliefs on? No, I'm curious. You enlighten me.
So basically, someone else should be poor (and for no other fault or merit than being born in China) so you can be rich? It's such a self-centered egotistical attitude, it's not even funny. Most people at least pretend to have more empathy than that towards their fellow man.
Actually, there's certainly more than enough wheat around, and we the West have been working hard to get everyone else to destroy their agriculture to make them buy our subsidized crops. Wood can be produced as a _crop_, and mostly is. Metals, depending on which you mean, are everywhere and mostly limited by the energy to extract them. There's certainly no shortage of iron, at least. Etc.
E.g., the USA didn't get to depend on foreign ore and oil because it's poor in those, but because it simply was cheaper to buy them from third world countries than to pay someone to extract them at home. I fail to see how automation there could possibly make it worse.
Now I'm not saying that those resources are free, but there certainly is enough of them, so as not to justify that kind of "the Chinese should stay poor so we can stay rich" attitude.
Not to mention that even for that kind of blatant imperialism, maybe if China mechanizes, then it can dig up more ore for the West and sew shoes faster in those sweatshops. So even by that self-centered kind of view, what do you have to lose?
Acceptable by what criterion, pray tell? Ultimately the worth of any job is what you can buy with those money. Producing more stuff, including by mechanization, raises the worth of that job. "Creating jobs" by just making people cut the grass with scissors, just makes everyone poorer.
The standard of living of a country, or the "wealth of nations" as Adam Smith put it, is pretty much measured by how much you produce and how well that fits what the people want to buy. That's pretty much it. Of course, nowadays that means a lot more services too, but same idea. Just "creating jobs" for the sake of keeping people occupied doing things inefficiently, isn't really improving anyone's lot. It's just a way to push some resources off a cliff, for no benefit to anyone. Even if it were only human resources, it's nevertheless just shunting some work to
Having finite resources is already included in that. Yes, you have finite resources, including humans, which was always why you don't have an infinite production. But what matters is what you do with them. And even there we can do better.
Even if China would never get as many resources as the USA, mechanization can at least free more people to do more for society than working for subsistence. Maybe then they can afford more services for example. If less guys are needed to dig ore out and farm rice, maybe more guys can be used to, say, deliver pizza, or make movies, or be doctors and keep everyone healthier.
Ah, a luddite. How cute.
I've got news for you. Your standard of living, or that you can afford to spew pretentious words on Slashdot instead of being out in the fields with an ox-drawn plough, is because things like that already happened.
E.g., look at the clothes you wear. There's been quite the movement against mechanical looms in the 19'th century. In fact, that was _the_ original luddite movement. Turns out that it wasn't self-destructive or short-term after all. Previously you'd have maybe one set of clothes, total, for a decade. And you'd stitch and patch them when they broke, because it would be too expensive to buy a new set.
E.g., the fact that they're clean. Previously washing the clothes was a very time-consuming manual process, and it wouldn't be done anywhere near daily. If you enjoy pulling a clean new t-shirt out of the drawer daily, or a pair of socks, or underwear, or whatever, then roll it around in your head that people used to just wear the same clothes through mud and dirt and whatnot for quite a while.
E.g., if you enjoy a nice office job with a computer, it's only because agriculture got heavily mechanized and a small number of farmers can feed the rest of society to do better stuff. We used to need 5 peasant families to support a knight. Maybe also add a burgher family, although those were a lot fewer than that actually. Almost three quarters of the population used to be out there ploughing dawn to dusk, just for subsistence, in the good old days of non-mechanized manual labour. By sheer probabilities, chances are that would be your lot in life, if we still were at that point.
E.g., for that matter, read that again: dawn to dusk. Literally, that was how the acre was defined: the surface that a peasant with one ox can plough in a day, from dusk to dawn. That would be your daily schedule, for 6 days a week. Not to keep some cushy office job by putting up with a PHB's demands for overtime. That would be the _normal_ schedule, and just for subsistence.
E.g., enjoy all that free TV and free content on the internet and whatnot? Well, that too is because society now makes enough of a surplus, that marketing can blow on subsidizing those in exchange for ads. Previously your only entertainment would be the pub, sitting and listening to the same stories around the fire, and maybe a village dance on sundays. Don't think even books, because those were quite the uber-expensive things before Gutenberg went and made it a "highly reproducible mechanical process".
Etc, etc, etc.
Turns out that none of that actually made us any poorer. We just end up producing more, and affording to divert more work into entertainment and services.
What worries me even more there, is that it seems to be rather called a "Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" of users. Seems to me more like they want to formalize the "thou shalt not actually use all the bandwidth we sold you, and thou art an evil spawn of Satan and, yeah, verily, a ruthless predator upon thy neighbours, if you actually use more than 1/100 of all that unlimited, unmettered usage we advertised" bullshit that disgusts me of ISPs already.
Now, I'm not a Comcast subscriber, and I'm not even a heavy user. Other than Slashdot and the like, and the mandatory gazillion banners on the average web page elsewhere, my biggest downloads are the occasional MMO patches. They're not that big, so actually I'd rather stop subsidizing the heavy downloaders.
But if I'm to look at it impartially, and through the glasses of whatever ethics my education stuck into my head, it smells like pure BS.
It's _not_ some shiny-hippy... err... happy communal sharing scheme. If it were, I could maybe see the point of trying to tar and feather anyone who's used more than his fair share. But that's not it. It's one company selling a service to a person. It's their job to see that they can actually provide the service they charge for.
To illustrate the fundamental difference:
- if me and the neighbours were to have a potluck dinner, then it's ok to be annoyed if someone eats ten times more than they brought to the table.
But if we go to an "all you can eat" restaurant, then it's the restaurant owner's problem to make sure he can provide what he advertised. If a particularly high-metabolism co-worker finishes half the buffet by himself, tough luck, you may even have my compassion, but it's _not_ ok to paint him as some ruthless predator upon the other patrons and kick him out. If other patrons end up hungry, it's not because of that guy, it's simply because the restaurant didn't provide enough food for the bargain they offered.
- if me and the co-workers pool out petty change and buy a Wii and a TV at the office, then it's a communal sharing thing. It's not nice to be the guy who hogs it full time. The others should get a chance at it too.
But if we go to some (hypothetical) arcade that advertises that you can play all day for the flat fee of a ticket, then that's it. It's their job to see that they have enough machines and space for that kind of offer. If I find an old Penetrator machine and hog it for the next 16 hours for nostalgia sake, well, that's what was advertised there. I'm just using what I paid for.
Etc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they _should_ provide free unlimited anything whatsoever. It's up to them to decide whether they can afford to do that or not. But if they decided to advertise it that way, then it's their problem to have enough of it.
Even briefer, I don't feel any _responsibility_ (since we're talking a "bill of responsibilities") to _not_ use a resource that was sold to me as an unlimited and unmetered resource. The users there paid for a service. They're not pooling their funds to create some communal internet scheme (and indeed ISPs have fought tooth and nail against municipal ISP ideas), they have paid fair and square for a service, and have _no_ duty or responsibility to leave enough bandwidth for the others. The contract isn't with any other users, it's with the ISP.
I honestly don't see why the ISPs are any different from any other service provider. If I buy a monthly ticket for the bus, then everywhere in the world I'd feel free to use it as much and as often as I need to. If I have to make 20 trips in a day, heck, that's exactly what such tickets are for. If the transport company doesn't have enough busses to serve everyone they sold tickets to, then it would be seen as their shortcoming. Not as, basically, "some evil, unscrupulous users use more than their fair share of bus trips, and we must tar and feather them." They don't get to draw up bills of customers' responsibilities, to weasel out of providing the service they sold.
I don't see what makes ISPs that special, basically. In the name of... exactly _what_, do they get to draw bills of customers' reponsibilities?
1. It's not as cut and dry indeed: way too often I hear the "compromise" excuse for something that really _is_ just piss-poor practices.
Yes, sometimes you can have 3 layers of security in front of that mainframe to achieve the same effect.
But too often that's just window dressing and wishful thinking. E.g., is that emulator the _only_ way to access that legacy app? Because if someone can just use telnet on the internal network to bypass that, then all those funky layers in front of it are worth exactly squat.
Not saying that that's necessarily the case there, but I _have_ seen entirely too many places where exactly that was the case. They had layers upon layers of... show business and make-belief magical talismans. They were either routinely bypassed by everyone, or had opened holes in those defenses that you could drive a bus through, or didn't even bother configuring them to actually do anything.
And entirely too often I see this attitude of "auugh, those mean security people are just persecuting us", for stuff which was a genuine security hole. The biggest case I've seen had, among many other faults:
- checked roles only when generating the links, but not on each page. So you could ask to edit your own user's password (and dutifully it would check who you are and generate the link to edit your own user), but then you could edit the URL and change the super-user's password instead. Or see some other company's data. Or pretty much change any other parameter.
- SQL _and_ HTML/javascript injection. The guys were simply too stupid to quote a text, and when asked to, they quoted it twice. Then disabled it again, when asked to fix that.
- failure to keep a proper history. Asking to delete your user would indeed dutifully cause a cascaded delete through anything linked to it via a foreign key, so you and everything you've ever done would simply vanish from the system. Orders you placed, money you owed, posts you've posted, everything.
And a few other problems, not all related to security. The management reaction? It actually got leaked via everyone adding their comment to the top of an email, with everything quoted at the bottom. So when the resulting thread (which by now had branched into other stuff) was forwarded outside that group, buried 10 ft deep was a fragment of a discussion where the security team was painted as "don't listen to them, they're doing evil hacks like editing URLs, to discredit our friends from XYZ." (XYZ being the company supplying the contractors who programmed that catastrophe.)
So, again, _because_ it's not as cut and dry, make sure it doesn't end up painted cut and dry in the other direction. Before concluding that a security auditor is just some evil jerk beating his own drum, make damn sure that you did triple-check and it's not just a knee-jerk reaction.
2. I take particular offense to: "Money and resources are not in unlimited supply, and sometimes standards need to be compromised or worked-around so that business can continue." I'm sorry, but that's just a fancy way of saying that you have _no_ ethics or standards. If that business can't continue in a way that obeys the laws and protects people's privacy (which at least in Europe actually _is_ a legal requirement), then maybe it shouldn't continue at all.
I'm sorry, but noone has a sacred right to make money. So the excuse that sometimes you have to do the wrong thing, or even break the law (at least if you have any branch in Europe), to keep making money, again, is just a way to say that you have no morals. It's not a "compromise", it's lack of ethics. It's that simple.
I can even accept that sometimes compromises can provide the same level of security. I'm fine with that. But, basically, "we have to bend the rules to keep making money" is _not_ it. It just isn't and shouldn't be an excuse, ever. It didn't excuse Ken Lay, it didn't excuse the AOL DBA who exported their database and sold it to spammers (hey, it was for money too), and it doesn't excuse
What everyone seems to miss in this taking-sides contest is that we don't really _know_ what happened there. We have only this guy's side of the story, and a rather incomplete one at that. It's heavily slanted on the "boohoo, I'm a poor little victim, and the bully even greets me with 'you're an idiot' in the morning", but I wouldn't jump to take his side before I hear the other guy's side of the story too.
Just following a procedure doesn't necessarily absolve him of any further responsibility. And frankly I've seen it too often used as a generic arse-covering excuse. I've seen too many managers just forging ahead and doing the dumbest possible thing, because they (think they) found some policy which absolves them of any personal responsibility or of expectation of a working brain.
He _is_ (or was) upper management, he had a right to make a decision both before and after the incident. Or should have had. If he was there only to be called names when it goes wrong, but no power to actually take a decision to avoid it going wrong, then he should have quit long before. That's a bigger problem than dealing with a bully: it's a position of a scapegoat, and better run as far away as you can from it, before the time for the ritual sacrifice comes.
But we don't know even that. Was he in such a scapegoat position without power? Or maybe he just a yes-man. and didn't want to risk his cushy job by vetoing an untested and undocumented release? Or something in between? Or something completely different? We just don't know enough to give a verdict there.
We don't know _why_ Dirk was calling him an idiot. Was he just a bully, or maybe he had a damn good point? Without reading his side of the story too, we just don't know.
And again, I'd advise against taking a side just because someone can put up an emotional story. Too often that's used to just distract attention from the real issues. Maybe here too, or maybe not, but we don't know.
Even his, essentially, "but look, I tried to be friendly and he still didn't want to play ball!!" appeals on page two, look, well, unconvincing. If someone had fucked up one of _my_ releases, coming up with "Do you want to talk about SF on TV?" in the middle of the freaking meeting, well, let's just say that Dirk was still polite there. I mean, wth, they're talking about what went awfully wrong in a release. How the heck is that even relevant to what they were talking about? It looks to me, at best, as a lame attempt to derail the discussion in a totally off-topic direction.
_If_ he told me that three days later, when things calmed down, he tried to start a talk about SF with Dirk and still got just a snarl back... ok, then I'd be tempted to conclude that Dirk is just an arsehole. But in the middle of a pissing contest about who's to blame, and when tempers are already boiling? Heh. I'll call that rather unconclusive. _Maybe_ Dirk is an arsehole, but maybe, just maybe, he's already pissed off and doesn't take lightly to having a talk about a release fuck-up derailed into irrelevant topics. I couldn't really hold the latter against him.
I'll call BS there.
1. Just as a counter-example: Blizzard may not be perfect on the whole, but I don't think there is even 1 documented case of anyone being banned for discussing a bug. You _can_ get banned for using bots, yes, but not discussing bots, for example.
Their internal policy, as documented repeatedly and even recently on Slashdot, is to rely on criticism and try to fix problems. It's a piss poor company who thinks that the "ban hammer" to silence bug-reports is a perfectly normal way to hold a conversation.
Heck, there's even been a whole photoshopped "yeah, well, gold can be duped in WoW too" storm in a kettle way back, and I don't think I even heard of anyone getting banned for asking about it. Turns out that shrugging and pointing out that it doesn't work, is a much better way to deal with it, than trying to cover up real bugs like some other companies do.
2. Excuse me? We're talking documented bugs and abuses, including the places in code where they happen. How about freaking just fixing them? Regardless of whether they're reported by a 13 year old, or even a 6 year old. Moaning about the age makes a piss-poor ad-hominem there.
"If the company "calmly addresses the issues", then they'll be flooded by complainers, cheaters and opportunists within no time."? Exactly how's fixing a bug going to get you flooded by those?
- Complainers: you can have the server generate statistics for you, to see if those have a point or not. (Again, it has been discussed about Blizzard fairly recently. They actually _rely_ on "complainers" and statistics to see what needs to be fixed or tweaked.) You _can_ sort out who has a legitimate complain and who doesn't. Trying to silence everyone who has a complaint, is the most piss-poor policy imaginable, especially when they're complaining about an actual provable exploit.
And how about putting things into perspective? If you get _flooded_ in reports of actual bugs you have, it's _you_ who's to blame, not the players. I'd want to see those issues fixed, not silenced.
- Cheaters. Exactly how's fixing a bug going to help those? On the contrary, if I ever actually wanted to cheat in a game, I'd rather look for a company that spent years trying to silence bug reports instead of fixing any of the exploits.
- Opportunists. Excuse me? Exactly what opportunity are we talking about there? The opportunity to help get the game fixed? Give those guys a freaking medal, then.
The opportunity to get a bit of short-lived forum fame in the process? Well, first of all, that's a very small price to pay for getting a thorough testing. Good testers are rare. So if as little as a bit of fame gets one to report the most obscure bugs to you, and do a free code review too apparently in this case, then by all means, give it to them. Post a "top 10 bug reporters" page on the official site. Give them a funny hat in the game, or a unique decal for their ship, or whatever. Whatever gets them to keep working for you for free.
Second, that fame is rather little and short lived if you have a reputation of fixing bugs promptly. You need to have quite a number of discontent players, for them to rally around the loudest guy. If they have no reason to be discontent with your handling bugs, they'll just naturally treat anyone as a troll if they raise a huge stink over some bug that's fixed in a week anyway.
In effect, if a company "calmly addresses the issues", on the contrary, that's the best way to _defuse_ any chronic complainers, cheaters and opportunists. It takes away the whole foundation for any "us vs them" movement. It says "we're on your side, we're all working together to make the game better for you." Starting banning people for just talking about you having bugs, is quite the opposite effect. Nothing says "us vs the players" as loudly as doing that.
Well, the mention of drag racing makes me think more of the car scene, and people tacking fake disc brakes (without calipers=, badly designed wings (my favourite are rear wings behind the rear wheels... on front drive cars;), and 5" exhausts (on a 1.1 non-turbo car), on a lemon and pretending that it makes it teh uber-racecar.
:P
So, hmm, kinda makes me wonder... how long until we'll see people tacking fake rocket boosters on a second-hand crop-duster biplane?
Actually, it is at least possible that it was intended as a trick question. You know, one where if you say "yes" then you've just said "yep, I'm a con artist." Admittedly, it's a stupid one even as trick questions go, but still, there might be some purpose behind it.
To put things into perspective Babbage got funding for one machine, never finished it, decided he's rather begin designing the version 2 model, asked for more funding, repeat ad nauseam. Pretty much it was _the_ original computing vapourware. Pretty soon he got no more funding, but that never stopped him from asking for more and hyping his unproven creation to the parliament.
He also seems to have descended into a nerd-like bitterness, in which he took such questions out of context as proof that everyone else is a drooling idiot and that's why they don't see he's right. And in that he also included such questions as, basically, "well, what _can_ it do?" and "what's the business advantage for making one of these?" Stuff that you'd get asked by any business nowadays too. He took them as proof that his contemporary Englishmen were narrow minded and lacking in vision.
It may seem obvious in retrospect that his design was right, but at the time it was everything except obvious. It was a _monumental_ expense with the economy and technology at that time, even compared to paying armies of people to calculate those by hand. And it was anything but proven. Noone knew if it would even work at all. Again, the first round of funding he got, produced nothing tangible.
Also regarding the parliament at the time, they were not as obtuse as you (or Babbage) seem to think. They funded a lot of research, actually. The nautical clock, for example, was paid for by the parliament, and that was quite the iterative development. The first couple of versions not only were too inexact to be any use, but at least the first one didn't even compensate for the ship's rolling around. But nevertheless, that guy had _something_ working to show for his work, and kept getting more money to keep working. Babbage had nothing except his claims.
Now before I sound too damning to Babbage, it wasn't only his fault. He got into a conflict with the company actually building it, and that was the chief reason why the V1 was never completed. But, still, seen from outside, he never had anything working to show, and even more damning he just unilaterally scrapped the design in the middle of the project and began designing an even more overengineered V2 instead.
So, anyway, given that he was technically hyping vapourware, I can see a smart-arse member of the parliament trying to catch him with a trick question. Again, it _is_ a dumb one, but it's not the same class of dumb as actually thinking that a machine can magically guess the right answers when fed wrong data.
(But then again, I see a ton of PHBs and businesses nowadays believing just that about electronic computers, so maybe it was just a dumb question after all.)
I have. You just need to read through this thread to see how many people have no clue about what their eyes do or don't.
Consider this: Slashdot is a very mixed audience. For every great guru, there are at least two who aren't that great. There'll be people who only think they're great, people who got hired in first level tech support just because they could operate a phone and read a list (not all, but think of some of the first level support you must have called before), has-been PHBs who haven't had anything to do with technology since those teletypes you mentioned, and wannabes who think that reading Slashdot is some kind of building street cred.
Furthermore, even if you were the great expert in some domain, you're not on all. Just because you know how to use a teletype, doesn't mean you necessarily know about your eyes. The people I've mentioned who set their monitors all wrong, or leave dirt build up until you can barely see through, work in IT too. Obviously they haven't learned much about monitors.
But we also have people around whose expertise is in physics, graphics design, a few gamers, at least a few cops that mostly appear in the YRO threads, some medical doctors, a few lawyers interested in the IP threads, etc. Not everyone is an expert in the same field, briefly.
Really? Data entry clerk? Something tells me you don't have many achievements to brag about from that era, if your dose of daily jollies is trolling AC on Slashdot. Or is it just a case of "oh, how the mighty have fallen"?
Yes, the eyes like to minimize the use of optic nerve bandwidth, but that doesn't mean what you seem to think.
It means that the retina has built-in edge detection. The photoreceptors are wired to inhibit adjacent photoreceptors, so if they're seeing the same colour, it naturally get subtracted from the signal.
I.e., plain empty background doesn't cause more bandwidth use, regardless of whether it's white, black, green, pink, or anything else you can think of. A pure white screen is pretty much the minimum bandwidth scenario, _not_ the bandwidth overload one. (Though a lot of dirt on the screen might cause a bunch of extra signal there.)
Also that means that a "." costs less bandwidth than a "/" which in turn costs less than an "X".
But that's all irrelevant because:
1. If you can read the text, you already have enough bandwidth. In fact, heh, almost any text doesn't come even close to being bandwidth-capped there. A stroll through the park or watching a tabby cat run through grass, already have a lot more edges than reading this page in Slashdot.
2. That's not what causes eye strain.
I program mainly in Java since 1999. There's no excuse to _need_ tiny fonts to be able to read the source. In Java, C++, x86 Assembly, or even COBOL. Maybe if you had to program in Shakespeare, I could see the point. Otherwise, there's something awfully amiss with that code, if it's not (easily) comprehensible in a 25 row window.
Mind you, you can still have more rows than that just because you have an awful lot of screen estate, and there's no reason to go above an already easily readable font size anyway. But as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself going, "but with 25 rows I'd have to page down 4 times just to see where the loop ends" or worse "but I really need that 7 pixel font to read that source", then you have a pretty good case for refactoring.
... if black on white hurts your eyes, there's probably something else wrong there too. Not saying that black on white is optimal anyway, but it shouldn't be enough by itself to give you a headache or tire your eyes.
It generally boils down to: IMHO most people I've seen using computers are doing it wrong for their eyes.
For starters make sure you use a large enough, and clear enough, font so you don't have to squint. If you absolutely need 80 lines on the screen when editing sources, that's usually your clue that there's something wrong with your programming style (and I suspect for some people the short term memory too.) You shouldn't have methods that run over that many lines, unless they're truly trivial stuff. (Like, say, a long switch statement where each line does no more than delegate to a method of its own. Arguably there are better ways there too, but I don't find it to be the end of the world either.)
IDE's also offer a lot of tools to find the method you need, when you need it, and/or collaps/expand blocks so the don't take up screen estate when you don't need them. There's also stuff like showing you the parameters anyway, so you don't have to have a second window in which you look for the parameters to that method. And really lots of other stuff. Use those instead of cramming the absolute maximum lines of text on the screen.
When I see a couple of co-workers squinting at their 6 point Illegible Roman font in VI and doing greps manually in another illegible tiled window, heh, I'm just itching to tell them to move out of the stone age already. We even discovered this funky thing called the "wheel" in the meantime, ya know?
Clean your monitor regularly, especially if it's a CRT. CRT's have thick glass, and your eyes end up focusing back and forth between the dirt on the front side of it, and the letters on the back side of it. But it's distracting and tiresome on TFTs too. And if you need to squint because you're at the point of "is that a 'm' or a 'rn'? Or is it 'rh' behind that speck?" it's long overdue for a cleaning.
Do turn your contrast up, but turn your brightness down to a comfortable level. The monitor is not supposed to be an AA searchlight. Staring into very bright stuff, especially in a dark room, _is_ tiresome. Here especially the TFT's are the biggest offenders. The manufacturers got stuck on bragging about the brightness of their monitors, as if that's something good, and pre-set them to insanely bright levels. Turn that down to where you can live with the white for hours.
And it will be even more important when you have to focus on stuff that's the other way around: white on black. (Some websites love that scheme, for example.) On an ultra-bright monitors that will mean focusing on a mostly black screen, so your pupils are wide open, but some pieces of retina are getting to see some really bright letters. It's a recipe for a headache.
As a side-note, I'm genuinely surprised at how many people do the exact opposite. I've seen too many monitors which are turned to abysmal contrast, and as bright as halogen headlights. I mean, WTF? Some things are barely legible in that configuration.
Ok, so maybe it's good for PC games, where the average dev seems to think that every fucking thing must happen in nearly complete darkness. 'Cause, you know, we have 32 bit colours so we can display all the gamut of "black", "really dark", "dark grey", "room with a broken lightbulb" and "grey stone on a moonless night". But the brightness settings where you see in near dark in games, suck for work or even reading in a browser. If you use the same monitor for games, consider turning up the brightness or gamma up in those, instead of turning the monitor's brightness all the way to the right.
If you're stuck with a CRT, make sure it's a good one and properly tuned. Staring into an unfocused image, especially with small unfocused fonts, is a recipe for a headache.
Again, for CRT users, just because everything idiotically defaults to 60 Hz, is no
Duly noted, but nevertheless:
1. If they can do that kind of optimizations (which I highly doubt), then make it opt-in, not impossible to opt-out. If Sister Marion wants her bible searches optimized that thoroughly, or High Druid Matterson wants his searches free of the neighbours' puritan crap, then they can register and log in, you know.
There you go, it's an even easier way to track people who want to be tracked. More importantly, it's a responsible implementation. Just because you can do something, is no excuse to automatically do it to everyone without consent. (After all, you're probably perfectly equipped to fuck someone, but don't do it to everyone without consent either.)
I'm really genuinely tired of all sorts of stuff, ranging from nasty to irresponsible, being done under the blanket excuse, "but we tried to make it easier/better/etc for you!" Let me decide what good stuff I want, and which stuff I don't, ya know? Whether it's ads stuffed into my post box, or tracking my searches, or whatever... ask first. It's not that horribly alien a concept. You'd think most kids are taught to say "please" when they want something. At what point along becoming a big entrepreneur does one automatically forget all that?
2. More importantly: that way be the dragons.
To use your own example of a bible-belt town: There's more than one study which found that some of the most obnoxiously bible-thumping puritan communities, had some of the largest percentages of people who were into all sorts of perversions at home. Not that there's anything wrong with kinky stuff between consenting adults, mind you. But essentially a _lot_ of them do at home the same things they condemn as deadly sins in public.
Tracking it all to the point where you know exactly which searches are from Sister Marion, may well reveal that she didn't quite search for bible verses. Maybe she searched repeatedly for lesbian BDSM porn, plus for realistic vibrators and strap-ons. And maybe the stern fire-and-brimstone preacher, Pastor Brian, has been busily searching for gay porn, with a side-hobby of gay bestiality. And maybe the druid Matterson has done a search or two about prices on a sex change operation, so he can be a priestess of some nature goddess. Etc.
Nothing wrong with any of that, as such. But especially in that kind of a bible-thumping community, their lives could easily be ruined if that kind of info got leaked out, stolen, or just mis-used.
Even something as helpful-looking as just re-sorting their hits and adds based on who they are and what their personal search history is, can be essentially a leak waiting to happen. Think: pastor Brian gets his computer virused, the helpful neighbourhood nerd comes to have a look at it, has a search for "removing Stormbot", and the first ten pages of ads and links are variations of "18 year old boys sucking horse cock". You've essentially just told a stranger what the good pastor surfed for lately.
So, again, please make it opt in, if you want to provide that kind of a service.
RTFA, lemming. The summary _again_ is inflammatory crap, yes, what else is new? But that's not what TFA says.
They're _not_ required to delete data completely, they're required to delete data that can identify you personally. Like IP, grouping between those searches, etc.
They do _not_ need that to refine their searches. If I search for, say, "Oracle auto-tuning", that's that. I expect the same result regardless of what my IP is, regardless of whether I searched for "WebSphere XA configuration" before, or "Fluffy tail buttplugs" or whatever. You can tune the search with just the search string. You don't need to track me for that.
_That_ is the friction between the EU and Google: that Google wants to keep that kind of identifiable information like the pair of IP and timestamp. Google has been playing bullshit handwaving games along the lines of "but we really need the IPs", then "but some people change IPs, so it won't identify them for ever", then "wait, would it be ok if we changed a bit or two of the IP?" along with a good helping of "but we'll keep it for 18 month before changing those bits anyway!"
And seeing Google protest at every step when they're told to stop tracking google, and, yes, exactly such bullshit fallacies as that they really need that IP to refine the search algorithm... is kinda funny. I guess "do no evil" was for when they were small and cuddly. Now that they're the 800 pound gorilla of the online advertising market, heh, turns out that they get as big a boner as any other PHBs out of trying to rape people's private data for a quick buck.
But, hey, I'm willing to be educated. _You_ tell me how deleting the IP information is gonna make search engines tank. Exactly which search algorithm relies on knowing my IP? No, seriously.
They can keep their statistic history for as long as they want to, but they can't keep your personal data. It's that simple, so let's stop handwaving strawman scenarios. They can (and should) keep information like "Shares of Moraelin Buttplugs Corp peaked at 1.50 Euro a share last year." But they have no reason to retain info like "Freddy Krueger lives on 22 Elm Street, and bought 2 shares of Dr Kevorkian's Suicide Clinic last year," just because he bought those 2 shares last year.
A financial advisor's or stock broker's job is to trade on the stock market. It's _not_ to collect your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. It's not their job to data-mine your private information. It's that simple: stick to selling those shares.
Mind you, even for data mining, there's a fine line between information and trivia. Stuff like "which team won the most games last year" is information. You can make an informed prediction for this year based on it. Stuff like "which team won the most games on a Wednesday, in rain, under artificial light" is trivia.
Similarly, "people from Germany buy more economic games than those in the USA" is information. Stuff like "people living on odd numbered houses, and on streets whose name ends in a 'e', and are born on a rainy thursay, buy more economic games" is useless trivia.
"50% of the gamers are between 25 and 50 years old" is information. You can decide a target demographic based on that. "People born on a Tuesday the 14'th have the most gamers, at a whole 0.01% of the total" is trivia. Even if you figured out how to make games especially fit for people born on a Tuesday the 14'th, it's too thin a slice to individually bother with. Etc.
Going too deep into details, slices your data too thin, and produces meaningless trivia.
There simply is _no_ sane justification for the kinds of personal information that especially the USA PHB's try to collect. Other than spamming you personally
Well, it's not that simple. On account of that monthly fee, you don't just get some stuff later, you also get a lot more stuff up front.
E.g., WoW is a lot larger a game than Diablo 2, or for a more modern comparison, than Oblivion. Even the game as published has maybe 10 times the landmass of Oblivion, and 20-30 times the number of quests. If you think it's economically feasible to give you 10 times more content for the same 50 bucks, dream on.
They can put a lot more work into the game up front, because they hope to get more money out of you later, via those monthly fees. That's something those fees get you right there.
That said, though, depending on the game, you might get some "freebies" for those 15$ per month too.
E.g., COH seems to be pretty much what you ask for. They never sold an expansion pack, they had about 11 mini-EPs for free. More than half the game as it is now, has come via expansion packs. All the hazard zones, Salamanca, Ouroboros, the new Faultline, all the PvP zones, etc, etc, etc, are from free EPs.
E.g., EQ2 on the other hand won't give you even the time of day for free, so to speak. As the GP said, they're really milking that teat for all they can. Their expansion packs have been really tiny, and all their EPs and Adventure Packs _combined_ so far, amount to less than WoW's one EP. But they were sold for more money on the whole. Their largest EP, "Echoes Of Faydweyr", adds two new races (fairies and evil fairies), and their newbie areas and capital cities, but that's it. As surface goes, each of the two islands is about as big as the Draenei and respectively Blood Elf newbie areas and cities in Blizzard's Burning Crusade EP, and even less as quests and scripts go. Sony's biggest EP was a tiny fraction of what Blizzard sold as their one EP.
Seriously, even when they have 1-2 dungeons they can't be arsed to stick in a whole EP, they sell it as an "Adventure Pack" for half the price.
E.g., WoW actually is somewhere in the middle. They added quite a few "free" stuff over the years, bundled with some patch. All the endgame grinding dungeons for example came for free later. Ditto IIRC for the battlegrounds. And a bunch of other stuff.
They did sell an EP, but, really, that's one big huge chunk of land and quests. It really has more of both than Oblivion, or for that matter, than a few Oblivions put together. Again, based on the assumption that they can recoup that partially via monthly fees too. (Might make some people stay longer, might make some people return to try it, etc.)
At any rate, do I regret buying that EP? Nope. As I was saying, I got more value for that money than from a couple of single-player games put together. Sure, I could start demanding that they give me all that for free, since I pay a monthly fee. Well, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't say "no" if they wanted to give me a bunch of content for no extra cost. But from a pragmatic point of view, it was still money pretty well spent.