the birthday announcement is nice, and I know you all don't have much choice in stories, but it seems like a story discussing a company engaging in self-destructive stupidity isn't quite the best gift I could have imagined...
on the other hand, lots of people will see it, so maybe it balances in the end?
Problem: hasn't Verisign already copyrighted this? Verisign managed to hijack something (the pool of unassigned domain names) for their benefit, and to the detriment of nearly anyone who actually has to manage a server. At least Belkin only tried to nail its own customers - that way there's not as much collateral damage while they eliminate themselves from the business gene pool.
How about "Belkinsign" (verb)? use: "I downloaded a security program, but it belkinsigned my computer and pointed me at a penis-enlargement site because the security folks thought I might need it. How nice of them." An alternative term might be "Verikin".
These people need to be embarrassed with extreme prejudice.
I wouldn't argue that someone who travels to Nigeria to pick up money from a well-known scam is not either stupid, greedy, or very, very naive - I just meant it as an illustration that the scam artists haven't exactly been restrained by their consciences in doing whatever it takes to get their victims' money. I dislike stupidity, but I dislike evil even more. Pursuing evil requires risks in most cases - there are worse things to do than to harrass scammers into nervous breakdowns or exhaustion.
Ohio doesn't have CC - our governor said he would if the police chiefs said it was good, knowing that it would not happen on his watch. Besides, the scammer's lucky only the police caught him - if any of his victims caught him, he might have gotten to see what a sharp stick and a determined person can do to someone's body.... A gun's much too quick for what he deserves.
This has already been done (see a Wired article about two years back - don't have a reference). I think the Wired article ended up luring the scammer to Amsterdam or some central, neutral place where he felt safe enough to travel. There is however the caveat that the 419 people are not nice and could potentially be violent. People who have gone to Nigeria to collect "their" money have been kidnapped or killed. As a time sink for the scammers, it might work, but there are lots of them and they have lots of time and no consciences.
You have the right to manage your website however you wish - if you feel ad views are the best way to generate revenue, you have the right to lock out the people who refuse to view them. If you have content that is unique and valuable, then people will probably accept your constraints and deal with it. If, however, that content is available elsewhere under different conditions, then people will choose to get from the site that generates the fewest or the least onerous restraints - this is likely to spiral downwards towards sites with the fewest constraints.
We are all selfish. You put out content at least in part for your own needs, and desire to be rewarded for it. People want to view your content and pay as little as possible for it. You can put banner ads to pay for it, and block those who refuse to load/view them, but it's not the job of the viewer to view them for your benefit. If you provide something unavailable elsewhere, then you have the upper hand, but most times that's not the case. If you want people to view your content, you have to give them a reason not to go somewhere else - fewer restrictions, better interface, etc. This isn't a common that all own and all are responsible for - this is your website with your material and your money. You can make your own rules, but if those rules don't work, it is not my obligation to support them.
You don't have to make an exception for anyone. It's your playground and you can make the rules. I am not obligated to play there, however, and neither is anyone else. If your rules are disliked, no one will play there, and you will lose. If you want content that pays for itself, you play by the market's rules, not your own, because the desire to have content pay for itself restricts what you can do, and thus by your choice of actions is the superior motive. It is not the market's job to change on your behalf, but your job to change on behalf of the market. If banner ads don't work (people won't view them), then forcing them on people is counterproductive. Maybe subscription or partial subscription (restricted content) will work better, or a donation-based model, or something else not around yet. If you want to make money, someone has to give it to you, and you have to give them a reason to do so. If you don't want to make money, then you are answerable to whatever your motives are in making the site - those will determine what you should do. In any case, as long as others are necessary to what you want to achieve (whether it's making money or converts to a belief, or something else), putting constraints others don't like on your content will not achieve your ends.
MS Customer Support with the Psychic Friends Network - a link to an article comparing the two was referred to in a post on Slashdot probably about two weeks ago. Surprise! MS didn't do so well...
I know your letter is done, but the above comparison doesn't exactly support his preference for professional closed-source support over "amateur" open-source alternatives.
When this goes through (or if), the digital cable/satellite providers who are now advertising digital control of their media via TiVo and similar digital management schemes will be hurting. Why do I want to pay each month for digital cable and a set-top box when I can't time-shift or save programming, or skip commercials, while broadcast TV has the same resolution? The answer would be that I don't, and I would assume for most people as well. Get this across to the companies making their money from this and they might complain to Congress/the FCC with some effect.
Of course, if worse comes to worse, I could always be glad that broadcast TV is shooting itself in the head - once people have to sit through commercials and programming at the network's convenience, those networks will die. The people with short attention spans that TV desperately wants will go elsewhere, and the people who might tolerate the new restrictions are pushed out by the requirement for new equipment. The long arm of Darwin is a beautiful thing...
The big problem with ID is reliance on probability as proof of existence of God. Improbable things happen on regularly, or at least improbable sequences (take lottery winners over a fairly short period (1-2 yr.) in a single state); the probability of a single sequence of lottery winners is on the order of the probabilities quoted for the development of organs such as the eye. Instead of many slightly improbably events, there are a few highly improbable ones - both situations reduce to the same thing. Ultimately, in many situations, all of the events are improbable, so an improbable event must occur. Probability (even of highly improbable events) doesn't distinguish between the existence or absence of God - either the argument becomes circular (highly improbable events are done by God) or falsifiable (how do you distinguish between improbable events facilitated by God and events not facilitated by God?). In addition, the cutoffs for "probable" events are arbitrary - again enters circularity.
Of course, this becomes irrelevant in a religious sense. If God means what science can't explain, you get the "God of the gaps" (see Wired - 2002 -article about the Vatican chief astronomer). Faith isn't determined by proof - if so, it's fact, not faith. ID is an attempt to mandate God - either to support a faith that is weak and needs proof or to force others to believe in a god of your choosing. It is not necessarily Luddite - people want power over others, power that comes from asserting absolute right, although this is destructive to the means (faith) and the ends (choice of individuals to believe and achievement of the results of that belief). I don't think the people asserting ID neceesarily want people to go back - a technologically advanced world might be OK if they could control it. The difficulty in controlling technology makes this hard to do - so they try to get rid of what they can't control, which is ultimately everything.
I think you forgot some things, such as 1) the FL Sec. of State who controlled the recounts working for the campaign of Bush or 2) relatives of two Supreme Court justices (Thomas and Rehnquist, I think) working for Bush's campaign while they decided the outcome of the election. #2 is in (I think) Vincent Bugliosi's commentary on the 2000 presidential election. I'm not certain of #1, although I am pretty certain she got a nice ambassadorship (suprise!). Then again, it's bad form for Republicans or their institutions to let facts get in the way of a good argument - an example would be the Patriot Act website, which, not suprisingly, doesn't get its facts right either.
if you're going to AC post, posting the EXACT SAME MESSAGE in two different places (one of which is not AC) is not a good idea. Better to refer them to your previous post (#7379858).
remember the law of unintended consequences
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Neil Gaiman Responds
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My guess (from what he says) is not that he was afraid of criticism for his viewpoint (as PC usually implies) but that he was afraid that what he wrote and thought would be misused. I don't think this is cowardice, but a matter of thinking of the consequences of his actions and deciding that whatever good might be done from the story might be undone by others who use what he says to achieve ends inconsistent with those he intended the story to support.
An extreme example - what if the men that made the atomic bomb had decided not to do so because they believed that its potential uses (or rather its uses in the hands of potential enemies) would do more harm than good? Perhaps they would be wrong, but I would not call them cowards. A more moderate example would be the soundtrack for the movie Bob Roberts - the people who made the movie were liberal and feared that the songs they wrote to parody conservatives would instead be used by conservatives for their benefit. The people that made the movie decided that releasing the soundtrack would have been couterproductive to what they believed, so they chose not to release one. I don't believe this was cowardice - they made an estimate of the likely consequences or releasing a soundtrack to what they believed and decided that the consequences were negative.
I don't believe that Neil Gaiman's choosing not to write this story is cowardice, but an awareness of the potential uses of the story and his belief that the consequence of publishing the story would be negative - not necessarily to himself but to others and (probably) overall. If he knew the consequences of his story, recognized them as bad, and wrote them anyway, he could more easily be accused of cowardice because he recognized the consequences of his action but was unwilling to stop them - even this, however, is not certain - he could have simply have judged the consequences good and gone on with it.
Ultimately, he is responsible to himself. PC works by intimidating someone into not saying something. I don't think that a system that implies cowardice from those who choose not to speak either unpopular or easily misconstrued opinions is much of an improvement.
...except BG doesn't kill people who diagree with him or send them to "reeducation camps" for ten or so years of hard labor. The/. stories on Diebold and their suppression of memos discussing their insecure^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriendly voting system is a little more like this, but....
Microsoft might act like this if you gave them absolute power and an army to enforce it - that why the US constitution is designed to protect the people from their government. I am liberal, and believe in gov't doing a lot of things other people think it shouldn't, but this is a legitimate argument for limited government. (there is of course a balance of power with other entities as well which partly explains my beliefs). People will take as much power as they can get - this aspect of human nature hasn't changed. China's government thinks that with enough guns and money they can keep the lid on their people - problem is they need someone to make the money, and usually the one making the money makes the rules. This does not speak well for long term stability, and the more force it takes to hold the lid on, the less margin that the Chinese government has for error.
Users want software that works, that does the job it's supposed to do. What should users be expected to know and do? Basic security, such as updates and securing against somewhat standard threats (such as Outlook attachments) might be reasonable, but I was under the impression that the documentation for changing these features was less than outstanding. In some cases, the updates may either not work or may come with onerous EULA (WMP 9.0).
I didn't RTA, but BG seems to expect users to know as much as the virus/script writers and perhaps more than his own engineers to secure their computers. While there is a lot of avoidance of responsibility on the part of users for security flaws, it seems unreasonable to have to spend significant amounts of time to know the inner workings of their system to use it, particularly when Microsoft seems more interested in adding "features" such as "trusted computing" than to write correct code and patches.
In order to drive, I have to look at the oil, gas, and tire pressure to keep it OK, and I have to know how to drive competently, but I don't have to understand my transmission much to run the car. It would be harder for lots of people to secure their cars if, in addition to the locks, the engine had multiple overrides to allow other users access which would either be listed on p.600 of the Advanced Mechanics' Maintenance Manual for your car or available by downloading from the manufacturers' website along with great features such as a governor that limits you to 55 mph or which rejects non-Exxon gas. MS sells its OS to people solely interested in using it, yet it neither is willing to clarify the requirements for maintaining security nor to write working software or patches. Instead, MS is better at blaming or hindering its users than in actually achieving the "security" they trumpet so loudly.
If you want users' help in improving security, BG, a good start might be to work with your users rather than against them. Whatever legitimate points you make are diluted by your cavalier attitude about the flaws of MS software and the antagonistic attitude of MS towards the users of its software with respect to security (trusted computing again) - improvements at security seem to secure software from use by legitimate agents rather than from use by illegitimate agents (virus writers and crackers). Users should be your customers, not the enemy. If you believe that users should behave differently, than clarifying the correct behavior to users without a BS in EE/CS would help; setting insecure features to default off might help too.. Then if users want to shoot themselves in the foot, they might have to learn something (and thus might learn not to do that). MS warnings about user security sound like "don't engage in unsafe sex" talks from condom makers who make defective products.
...but what would you get if someone mods you down? A small discreet electric shock, perhaps, or a sensation somewhat like a kick in the nether regions? Depending on the submitter and/or submission, one could end up very happy or very unhappy...
if the quotation from the articles and the other posts in this thread are correct (I neither RTA nor AAL), it seems as if the printer manufacturers have to prove that 3rd party cartridges will not work work with the printer or that they cause a significant number of mishaps in order to mandate ceasing warranty coverage with the use of other cartridges. Saying that 3rd party cartridges could have caused damage doesn't appear to be sufficient - they have to prove that damages are caused by 3rd party components (and that the damage isn't user error but cartridge damage or bad cartridge design), or go home empty. The threat of losing the warranty will diminish the use of 3rd party cartridges until someone sues, at which point either the warranty statements will be invalidated (even for a single alternative cartridge to be allowed costs the printer manufacturer money) or prove that all alternative cartridges available cause damage (or at least that a particular one does so). While the potential for 3rd party damage might invalidate a warranty, once the user has sued, the use of the consumer protection law is a likely and effective defense unless the manufacturer can show that 3rd party cartridges damage the printer, not just that they could.
I thought that Lexmark printers are mainly used by home users looking for a cheap printer (or getting one bundled with their computers). This set of people could probably care less about voiding the warranty - the printer is disposable anyway, so if the cartridges fail, they'll buy another printer, and if they work, they save some money. The businesses who care about printer warranties and maintenance are more likely to use higher-end printers and are less likely to buy third party products to save money for fear of hurting themselves either in print quality or service. The Lexmark decision affects the low end in a big way, because the factors you cite are unlikely to influence them - at the high end, the factors you cite are operative and should inhibit use of 3rd party cartridges. There may be factors I don't know here - I don't work in the field, and you have.
This has the feel of some loser trying to claim all of the women at the bar for himself while not really talking to any of them, hoping that any of the attractive men in the bar will think that they are dating him and so won't approach the women. Not only is Microsoft hoping to keep their users from defecting to Linux or Mac, they're also probably hoping to keep their big business customers on the hook for updates while they get around to writing their OS.
Here's a better idea. Why doesn't MS integrate security features into the updates/service packs issued for their OSs? Customers might actually believe MS when it says that it cares about security, while the users won't have to stay with an obsolete OS while waiting for MS to put out Longhorn RSN.
On the other hand, maybe it's better if MS doesn't do this - more room and market shares for other OS companies that don't think their customers are the problem, not the solution, as MS and its partners in the MPAA and RIAA think with Palladium and their "Trusted Computing Initiative".
and you have zero-tolerance policies for authority
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Reading, Writing, RFID
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· Score: 1
good news, bad news... I don't think that kids will be unable to bear responsibility, because for the things they actually care about, they will have to. The problem here is that the rules are so controlling that they will are likely to be flagrantly disobeyed. The continued presence of stupid rules only means that the students will have less respect for rules (in general) in the future. When everything is forbidden, everyone becomes a criminal, and then nothing is forbidden because no one cares anymore. If you want to end constructive authority, rules like this are an effective way to do it.
Any measure intrusive to be effective will be intrusive enough that no one will want it. This use of RFIDs can be negated, particularly by those it is designed to work against, such as kidnappers; thus it gives away the privacy of children while providing very little gain in safety or security (the children might get lost - then the tags would be useful). It is however, a wonderful way to spend all that extra money the schools seem to have...oh wait, they don't have much of that...my bad.
....the Enron executives already paid for their "get-out-of-jail-and-maintain-physical-integrity" cards - isn't that what "campaign contributions" are for?
Flaw: Using Windows RPC, an attacker can gain remote access to a machine equipped with the Versalaser peripheral, allowing the attacker to turn the device on and to control its operating rate and output.
Consequences: potential blindness or fires may result from this exploit. Victims have been found with "Bill Sux!" or penguin tattoos spontaneously applied to extremities; unfortunately, secondary infections and scarring rendered most of them unreadable.
Patching: a patch for this exploit will be available with one year.
It's one thing when security flaws can simply spread spam all over the Internet, but physical injury might present more of a problem. It might be good for security if bad security resulted in users losing body parts...on the other hand, the benefit of any added security is likely to be countered by the consequences of thoughtless people accessing and using high-powered lasers. I think I can see the long arm of Darwin here...
I had intended to argue that the chemical engineering (or environmental engineering) of handling, processing, and removing toxic wastes is more advanced than the corresponding processes for high-level nuclear waste. While there are ways to reprocess spent fuel or to store the waste, there aren't very many methods for the disposal or reprocessing of the waste, and the technology is less widespread than chemical processing and disposal of toxic agents. This contention may be incorrect; while I am pretty sure that nuclear technology is known by fewer people than chemical technology, I don't know for certain that there are fewer methods to deal with it. I implied more strongly than I should have that there were no good means to deal with the waste, which may be incorrect. I'm sorry about that.
Once Yucca Mountain is established, storage there is likely to constitute a safe method for disposal of high- and medium-level nuclear waste. However, I don't think that it is taking waste yet. In addition, when YM starts to take waste, it is likely to be filled quickly; there may be multiple sites nearby to handle the waste, which would negate this problem. Transport security may be a problem, but the site would be more secure than current on site storage (a thousand smaller souces of waste are likely to be more difficult to secure than a single isolated site - moving the waste is a security issue, but the time of vulnerability for waste in transit is less than while stored in thousands of sites). On site disposal (in addition to security against people pursuing nuclear material) has the problem of what to do with the waste once the plant is no longer in use; the plants last at least forty years while the spent cores are likely to be radioactive for longer than that. On site disposal only constitutes a temporary solution to the problem of nuclear waste disposal, not a permanent one.
1) I can make arsenic salts insoluble - once I do that, I can put them in barrels, bind them up in glass, etc. If I can find something useful in coal waste, I can even retrieve it if the cost is reasonable. The technologies for doing all these things are available from lots of sources - egineering and waste-disposal are well-developed fields with lots of open research. What options do you have for high-level nuclear waste? The only option is to put it somewhere where no one can get at it. (Some fission products can be retrieved, but the means are probably even less efficient than the corresponding transformations in coal waste). This doesn't count the effects of radiation, heat, and corrosives on materials. Fewer people and organizations have the means to deal with or improve the methods of dealing with nuclear waste than conventional toxic waste. Arsenic isn't good for me, but I have many more disposal of usage options for it than for medium- to high-level nuclear waste.
2) The isotopes present in reactor cores (and other high-level waste) are substantially different than those present in coal waste. U-235 and -238 aren't very hot (although they are toxic - as are the polonium, lead, and thorium isotopes). Most of the likely fission products from a reactor core are much more highly radioactive - Cs-137 and Sr-90 being two. Fission also has the potential to generate transuranic elements such as plutonium and curium which are more highly radioactive than the radioactive elements in coal waste. There is, after all, a reason all the cores are still sitting is pools of water, glowing from Cerenkov radiation - they're still really radioactive, both in concentration and radiation output.
minor point - in nuclear fission, most of the energy from fission comes from a very small fraction of the mass of the fissioning substrate. Does the article take this into account? Also, most of the elements in coal can't fission - U-235 is the only one of the list that can.
3) Plutonium is the most toxic element - I misstated myself. Ricin is toxic at very low levels as well (it takes one molecule to kill a cell - in theory that comes to femtomoles/kg toxicity, or probably low micrograms/kg). Also, I am incorrect about the radiation from it. I am sorry for the error. It's not harmless - but people need to handle plutonium-containing weapons on a regular basis, and they need to last a long time - radioactivity has weakening effects on some metals, and so is inconsistent with long term handling. I didn't think enough about it - also in a another response post, I made the same mistake.
The point I was trying to make is not that coal power is better than nuclear - I would be happier with nuclear if the issues around waste disposal could be effective mitigated. High- and medium-level nuclear waste, however is a significant problem in development for nuclear power, and the means to deal with it are far less developed than those for dealing with simple toxic or corrosive wastes. Toxicity can be mitigated by chemical means, or toxic substances can be stored securely in a variety of places. The means to either recycle or safely dispose of high- and medium-level nuclear waste are more limited and not as well developed.
That isn't necessarily true... plutonium (half-life 24,000 years), iodine-131 (half-life 8 days), cobalt-60 (half-life 5 years), cesium-137 (30 years), and strontium-90 (half-life 29 years) are all at least fairly dangerous. As a matter of fact, plutonium is the most dangerous of the set though its half-life is far longer - and not just because of its toxicity. Part of the toxicity is biological, but part is also radioactivity and its consequences. Curium is used as a heat source for space probes (half life 3 d - 8000 years - don't know which isotope) but is radioactive enough to glow. Other than plutonium and curium, most of the above elements are byproducts of fission - meaning that they are likely to be present in high-level nuclear waste.
Chemical means can detoxify wastes; chemical means are already used in the recovery of sulfur from coal-fired power plants. With nuclear power you have a far smaller amount of waste, but time is the only way to detoxify it. It requires more storage and shielding than even toxic coal waste, requires the permanent (10 half lives - so 300 years) use of land, and can only be dealt with in a limited number of ways. Part of the lack of a waste site for nuclear waste is fear and ignorance, but part of the problem is the stringent long-term requirements for such a site, requirements absent in the disposal of coal waste.
Many methods are available to deal with toxic waste, and it is easier to come up with new ones. (Since the mass of waste is much larger, there is also a greater need to do so). The technologies required to decrease the costs of coal waste (or at least to come up with new ones) exist and are widely available - the chemical industry is big business and lots of engineers are dealing with similar problems. Contrast to dealing with nuclear waste, in which the techniques and research are narrowly distributed and not as widely available. The scale can also be a benefit - if you can find useful things in coal waste, the scale means that byproducts found to be useful can be generated on large scale. Scale also may help in the ecomomics of simple disposal.
Nuclear wastes can only be dealt with by time - there is no other way. Their containment requires a lot of resources and security - exploding a bomb laced with coal waste will probably make people sick, but it can be cleaned up much more readily, and without city blocks being condemned as unlivable for years. Add to that the fact that some of the wastes are also going to be toxic (while graphite isn't toxic, heavy water is, and is likely to be one of the more innocuous components of high-level waste) and you have the toxicity issue, albeit on a much smaller scale. The toxicity of these wastes is likely to derive at least in part from heavy metals, also present in coal waste and hard to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
the birthday announcement is nice, and I know you all don't have much choice in stories, but it seems like a story discussing a company engaging in self-destructive stupidity isn't quite the best gift I could have imagined...
on the other hand, lots of people will see it, so maybe it balances in the end?
Problem: hasn't Verisign already copyrighted this? Verisign managed to hijack something (the pool of unassigned domain names) for their benefit, and to the detriment of nearly anyone who actually has to manage a server. At least Belkin only tried to nail its own customers - that way there's not as much collateral damage while they eliminate themselves from the business gene pool.
How about "Belkinsign" (verb)? use: "I downloaded a security program, but it belkinsigned my computer and pointed me at a penis-enlargement site because the security folks thought I might need it. How nice of them." An alternative term might be "Verikin".
These people need to be embarrassed with extreme prejudice.
I wouldn't argue that someone who travels to Nigeria to pick up money from a well-known scam is not either stupid, greedy, or very, very naive - I just meant it as an illustration that the scam artists haven't exactly been restrained by their consciences in doing whatever it takes to get their victims' money. I dislike stupidity, but I dislike evil even more. Pursuing evil requires risks in most cases - there are worse things to do than to harrass scammers into nervous breakdowns or exhaustion.
Ohio doesn't have CC - our governor said he would if the police chiefs said it was good, knowing that it would not happen on his watch. Besides, the scammer's lucky only the police caught him - if any of his victims caught him, he might have gotten to see what a sharp stick and a determined person can do to someone's body.... A gun's much too quick for what he deserves.
This has already been done (see a Wired article about two years back - don't have a reference). I think the Wired article ended up luring the scammer to Amsterdam or some central, neutral place where he felt safe enough to travel. There is however the caveat that the 419 people are not nice and could potentially be violent. People who have gone to Nigeria to collect "their" money have been kidnapped or killed. As a time sink for the scammers, it might work, but there are lots of them and they have lots of time and no consciences.
You have the right to manage your website however you wish - if you feel ad views are the best way to generate revenue, you have the right to lock out the people who refuse to view them. If you have content that is unique and valuable, then people will probably accept your constraints and deal with it. If, however, that content is available elsewhere under different conditions, then people will choose to get from the site that generates the fewest or the least onerous restraints - this is likely to spiral downwards towards sites with the fewest constraints.
We are all selfish. You put out content at least in part for your own needs, and desire to be rewarded for it. People want to view your content and pay as little as possible for it. You can put banner ads to pay for it, and block those who refuse to load/view them, but it's not the job of the viewer to view them for your benefit. If you provide something unavailable elsewhere, then you have the upper hand, but most times that's not the case. If you want people to view your content, you have to give them a reason not to go somewhere else - fewer restrictions, better interface, etc. This isn't a common that all own and all are responsible for - this is your website with your material and your money. You can make your own rules, but if those rules don't work, it is not my obligation to support them.
You don't have to make an exception for anyone. It's your playground and you can make the rules. I am not obligated to play there, however, and neither is anyone else. If your rules are disliked, no one will play there, and you will lose. If you want content that pays for itself, you play by the market's rules, not your own, because the desire to have content pay for itself restricts what you can do, and thus by your choice of actions is the superior motive. It is not the market's job to change on your behalf, but your job to change on behalf of the market. If banner ads don't work (people won't view them), then forcing them on people is counterproductive. Maybe subscription or partial subscription (restricted content) will work better, or a donation-based model, or something else not around yet. If you want to make money, someone has to give it to you, and you have to give them a reason to do so. If you don't want to make money, then you are answerable to whatever your motives are in making the site - those will determine what you should do. In any case, as long as others are necessary to what you want to achieve (whether it's making money or converts to a belief, or something else), putting constraints others don't like on your content will not achieve your ends.
doesn't that make FF the most expensive pr0n film in history?
MS Customer Support with the Psychic Friends Network - a link to an article comparing the two was referred to in a post on Slashdot probably about two weeks ago. Surprise! MS didn't do so well...
I know your letter is done, but the above comparison doesn't exactly support his preference for professional closed-source support over "amateur" open-source alternatives.
When this goes through (or if), the digital cable/satellite providers who are now advertising digital control of their media via TiVo and similar digital management schemes will be hurting. Why do I want to pay each month for digital cable and a set-top box when I can't time-shift or save programming, or skip commercials, while broadcast TV has the same resolution? The answer would be that I don't, and I would assume for most people as well. Get this across to the companies making their money from this and they might complain to Congress/the FCC with some effect.
Of course, if worse comes to worse, I could always be glad that broadcast TV is shooting itself in the head - once people have to sit through commercials and programming at the network's convenience, those networks will die. The people with short attention spans that TV desperately wants will go elsewhere, and the people who might tolerate the new restrictions are pushed out by the requirement for new equipment. The long arm of Darwin is a beautiful thing...
sorry...I thought so but wasn't sure. Thank you.
The big problem with ID is reliance on probability as proof of existence of God. Improbable things happen on regularly, or at least improbable sequences (take lottery winners over a fairly short period (1-2 yr.) in a single state); the probability of a single sequence of lottery winners is on the order of the probabilities quoted for the development of organs such as the eye. Instead of many slightly improbably events, there are a few highly improbable ones - both situations reduce to the same thing. Ultimately, in many situations, all of the events are improbable, so an improbable event must occur. Probability (even of highly improbable events) doesn't distinguish between the existence or absence of God - either the argument becomes circular (highly improbable events are done by God) or falsifiable (how do you distinguish between improbable events facilitated by God and events not facilitated by God?). In addition, the cutoffs for "probable" events are arbitrary - again enters circularity.
Of course, this becomes irrelevant in a religious sense. If God means what science can't explain, you get the "God of the gaps" (see Wired - 2002 -article about the Vatican chief astronomer). Faith isn't determined by proof - if so, it's fact, not faith. ID is an attempt to mandate God - either to support a faith that is weak and needs proof or to force others to believe in a god of your choosing. It is not necessarily Luddite - people want power over others, power that comes from asserting absolute right, although this is destructive to the means (faith) and the ends (choice of individuals to believe and achievement of the results of that belief). I don't think the people asserting ID neceesarily want people to go back - a technologically advanced world might be OK if they could control it. The difficulty in controlling technology makes this hard to do - so they try to get rid of what they can't control, which is ultimately everything.
ID is bad science and worse theology.
I think you forgot some things, such as 1) the FL Sec. of State who controlled the recounts working for the campaign of Bush or 2) relatives of two Supreme Court justices (Thomas and Rehnquist, I think) working for Bush's campaign while they decided the outcome of the election. #2 is in (I think) Vincent Bugliosi's commentary on the 2000 presidential election. I'm not certain of #1, although I am pretty certain she got a nice ambassadorship (suprise!). Then again, it's bad form for Republicans or their institutions to let facts get in the way of a good argument - an example would be the Patriot Act website, which, not suprisingly, doesn't get its facts right either.
Dear Mr. UngroundedLightning,
if you're going to AC post, posting the EXACT SAME MESSAGE in two different places (one of which is not AC) is not a good idea. Better to refer them to your previous post (#7379858).
My guess (from what he says) is not that he was afraid of criticism for his viewpoint (as PC usually implies) but that he was afraid that what he wrote and thought would be misused. I don't think this is cowardice, but a matter of thinking of the consequences of his actions and deciding that whatever good might be done from the story might be undone by others who use what he says to achieve ends inconsistent with those he intended the story to support.
An extreme example - what if the men that made the atomic bomb had decided not to do so because they believed that its potential uses (or rather its uses in the hands of potential enemies) would do more harm than good? Perhaps they would be wrong, but I would not call them cowards. A more moderate example would be the soundtrack for the movie Bob Roberts - the people who made the movie were liberal and feared that the songs they wrote to parody conservatives would instead be used by conservatives for their benefit. The people that made the movie decided that releasing the soundtrack would have been couterproductive to what they believed, so they chose not to release one. I don't believe this was cowardice - they made an estimate of the likely consequences or releasing a soundtrack to what they believed and decided that the consequences were negative.
I don't believe that Neil Gaiman's choosing not to write this story is cowardice, but an awareness of the potential uses of the story and his belief that the consequence of publishing the story would be negative - not necessarily to himself but to others and (probably) overall. If he knew the consequences of his story, recognized them as bad, and wrote them anyway, he could more easily be accused of cowardice because he recognized the consequences of his action but was unwilling to stop them - even this, however, is not certain - he could have simply have judged the consequences good and gone on with it.
Ultimately, he is responsible to himself. PC works by intimidating someone into not saying something. I don't think that a system that implies cowardice from those who choose not to speak either unpopular or easily misconstrued opinions is much of an improvement.
...except BG doesn't kill people who diagree with him or send them to "reeducation camps" for ten or so years of hard labor. The /. stories on Diebold and their suppression of memos discussing their insecure^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfriendly voting system is a little more like this, but....
Microsoft might act like this if you gave them absolute power and an army to enforce it - that why the US constitution is designed to protect the people from their government. I am liberal, and believe in gov't doing a lot of things other people think it shouldn't, but this is a legitimate argument for limited government. (there is of course a balance of power with other entities as well which partly explains my beliefs). People will take as much power as they can get - this aspect of human nature hasn't changed. China's government thinks that with enough guns and money they can keep the lid on their people - problem is they need someone to make the money, and usually the one making the money makes the rules. This does not speak well for long term stability, and the more force it takes to hold the lid on, the less margin that the Chinese government has for error.
Users want software that works, that does the job it's supposed to do. What should users be expected to know and do? Basic security, such as updates and securing against somewhat standard threats (such as Outlook attachments) might be reasonable, but I was under the impression that the documentation for changing these features was less than outstanding. In some cases, the updates may either not work or may come with onerous EULA (WMP 9.0).
I didn't RTA, but BG seems to expect users to know as much as the virus/script writers and perhaps more than his own engineers to secure their computers. While there is a lot of avoidance of responsibility on the part of users for security flaws, it seems unreasonable to have to spend significant amounts of time to know the inner workings of their system to use it, particularly when Microsoft seems more interested in adding "features" such as "trusted computing" than to write correct code and patches.
In order to drive, I have to look at the oil, gas, and tire pressure to keep it OK, and I have to know how to drive competently, but I don't have to understand my transmission much to run the car. It would be harder for lots of people to secure their cars if, in addition to the locks, the engine had multiple overrides to allow other users access which would either be listed on p.600 of the Advanced Mechanics' Maintenance Manual for your car or available by downloading from the manufacturers' website along with great features such as a governor that limits you to 55 mph or which rejects non-Exxon gas. MS sells its OS to people solely interested in using it, yet it neither is willing to clarify the requirements for maintaining security nor to write working software or patches. Instead, MS is better at blaming or hindering its users than in actually achieving the "security" they trumpet so loudly.
If you want users' help in improving security, BG, a good start might be to work with your users rather than against them. Whatever legitimate points you make are diluted by your cavalier attitude about the flaws of MS software and the antagonistic attitude of MS towards the users of its software with respect to security (trusted computing again) - improvements at security seem to secure software from use by legitimate agents rather than from use by illegitimate agents (virus writers and crackers). Users should be your customers, not the enemy. If you believe that users should behave differently, than clarifying the correct behavior to users without a BS in EE/CS would help; setting insecure features to default off might help too.. Then if users want to shoot themselves in the foot, they might have to learn something (and thus might learn not to do that). MS warnings about user security sound like "don't engage in unsafe sex" talks from condom makers who make defective products.
...or claim that your commentary is really "entertainment". That works too.
...but what would you get if someone mods you down? A small discreet electric shock, perhaps, or a sensation somewhat like a kick in the nether regions? Depending on the submitter and/or submission, one could end up very happy or very unhappy...
if the quotation from the articles and the other posts in this thread are correct (I neither RTA nor AAL), it seems as if the printer manufacturers have to prove that 3rd party cartridges will not work work with the printer or that they cause a significant number of mishaps in order to mandate ceasing warranty coverage with the use of other cartridges. Saying that 3rd party cartridges could have caused damage doesn't appear to be sufficient - they have to prove that damages are caused by 3rd party components (and that the damage isn't user error but cartridge damage or bad cartridge design), or go home empty. The threat of losing the warranty will diminish the use of 3rd party cartridges until someone sues, at which point either the warranty statements will be invalidated (even for a single alternative cartridge to be allowed costs the printer manufacturer money) or prove that all alternative cartridges available cause damage (or at least that a particular one does so). While the potential for 3rd party damage might invalidate a warranty, once the user has sued, the use of the consumer protection law is a likely and effective defense unless the manufacturer can show that 3rd party cartridges damage the printer, not just that they could.
I thought that Lexmark printers are mainly used by home users looking for a cheap printer (or getting one bundled with their computers). This set of people could probably care less about voiding the warranty - the printer is disposable anyway, so if the cartridges fail, they'll buy another printer, and if they work, they save some money. The businesses who care about printer warranties and maintenance are more likely to use higher-end printers and are less likely to buy third party products to save money for fear of hurting themselves either in print quality or service. The Lexmark decision affects the low end in a big way, because the factors you cite are unlikely to influence them - at the high end, the factors you cite are operative and should inhibit use of 3rd party cartridges. There may be factors I don't know here - I don't work in the field, and you have.
This has the feel of some loser trying to claim all of the women at the bar for himself while not really talking to any of them, hoping that any of the attractive men in the bar will think that they are dating him and so won't approach the women. Not only is Microsoft hoping to keep their users from defecting to Linux or Mac, they're also probably hoping to keep their big business customers on the hook for updates while they get around to writing their OS.
Here's a better idea. Why doesn't MS integrate security features into the updates/service packs issued for their OSs? Customers might actually believe MS when it says that it cares about security, while the users won't have to stay with an obsolete OS while waiting for MS to put out Longhorn RSN.
On the other hand, maybe it's better if MS doesn't do this - more room and market shares for other OS companies that don't think their customers are the problem, not the solution, as MS and its partners in the MPAA and RIAA think with Palladium and their "Trusted Computing Initiative".
good news, bad news... I don't think that kids will be unable to bear responsibility, because for the things they actually care about, they will have to. The problem here is that the rules are so controlling that they will are likely to be flagrantly disobeyed. The continued presence of stupid rules only means that the students will have less respect for rules (in general) in the future. When everything is forbidden, everyone becomes a criminal, and then nothing is forbidden because no one cares anymore. If you want to end constructive authority, rules like this are an effective way to do it.
Any measure intrusive to be effective will be intrusive enough that no one will want it. This use of RFIDs can be negated, particularly by those it is designed to work against, such as kidnappers; thus it gives away the privacy of children while providing very little gain in safety or security (the children might get lost - then the tags would be useful). It is however, a wonderful way to spend all that extra money the schools seem to have...oh wait, they don't have much of that...my bad.
....the Enron executives already paid for their "get-out-of-jail-and-maintain-physical-integrity" cards - isn't that what "campaign contributions" are for?
I can see a new Windows exploit....
Rating: Critical
Flaw: Using Windows RPC, an attacker can gain remote access to a machine equipped with the Versalaser peripheral, allowing the attacker to turn the device on and to control its operating rate and output.
Consequences: potential blindness or fires may result from this exploit. Victims have been found with "Bill Sux!" or penguin tattoos spontaneously applied to extremities; unfortunately, secondary infections and scarring rendered most of them unreadable.
Patching: a patch for this exploit will be available with one year.
It's one thing when security flaws can simply spread spam all over the Internet, but physical injury might present more of a problem. It might be good for security if bad security resulted in users losing body parts...on the other hand, the benefit of any added security is likely to be countered by the consequences of thoughtless people accessing and using high-powered lasers. I think I can see the long arm of Darwin here...
I had intended to argue that the chemical engineering (or environmental engineering) of handling, processing, and removing toxic wastes is more advanced than the corresponding processes for high-level nuclear waste. While there are ways to reprocess spent fuel or to store the waste, there aren't very many methods for the disposal or reprocessing of the waste, and the technology is less widespread than chemical processing and disposal of toxic agents. This contention may be incorrect; while I am pretty sure that nuclear technology is known by fewer people than chemical technology, I don't know for certain that there are fewer methods to deal with it. I implied more strongly than I should have that there were no good means to deal with the waste, which may be incorrect. I'm sorry about that.
Once Yucca Mountain is established, storage there is likely to constitute a safe method for disposal of high- and medium-level nuclear waste. However, I don't think that it is taking waste yet. In addition, when YM starts to take waste, it is likely to be filled quickly; there may be multiple sites nearby to handle the waste, which would negate this problem. Transport security may be a problem, but the site would be more secure than current on site storage (a thousand smaller souces of waste are likely to be more difficult to secure than a single isolated site - moving the waste is a security issue, but the time of vulnerability for waste in transit is less than while stored in thousands of sites). On site disposal (in addition to security against people pursuing nuclear material) has the problem of what to do with the waste once the plant is no longer in use; the plants last at least forty years while the spent cores are likely to be radioactive for longer than that. On site disposal only constitutes a temporary solution to the problem of nuclear waste disposal, not a permanent one.
1) I can make arsenic salts insoluble - once I do that, I can put them in barrels, bind them up in glass, etc. If I can find something useful in coal waste, I can even retrieve it if the cost is reasonable. The technologies for doing all these things are available from lots of sources - egineering and waste-disposal are well-developed fields with lots of open research. What options do you have for high-level nuclear waste? The only option is to put it somewhere where no one can get at it. (Some fission products can be retrieved, but the means are probably even less efficient than the corresponding transformations in coal waste). This doesn't count the effects of radiation, heat, and corrosives on materials. Fewer people and organizations have the means to deal with or improve the methods of dealing with nuclear waste than conventional toxic waste. Arsenic isn't good for me, but I have many more disposal of usage options for it than for medium- to high-level nuclear waste.
2) The isotopes present in reactor cores (and other high-level waste) are substantially different than those present in coal waste. U-235 and -238 aren't very hot (although they are toxic - as are the polonium, lead, and thorium isotopes). Most of the likely fission products from a reactor core are much more highly radioactive - Cs-137 and Sr-90 being two. Fission also has the potential to generate transuranic elements such as plutonium and curium which are more highly radioactive than the radioactive elements in coal waste. There is, after all, a reason all the cores are still sitting is pools of water, glowing from Cerenkov radiation - they're still really radioactive, both in concentration and radiation output.
minor point - in nuclear fission, most of the energy from fission comes from a very small fraction of the mass of the fissioning substrate. Does the article take this into account? Also, most of the elements in coal can't fission - U-235 is the only one of the list that can.
3) Plutonium is the most toxic element - I misstated myself. Ricin is toxic at very low levels as well (it takes one molecule to kill a cell - in theory that comes to femtomoles/kg toxicity, or probably low micrograms/kg). Also, I am incorrect about the radiation from it. I am sorry for the error. It's not harmless - but people need to handle plutonium-containing weapons on a regular basis, and they need to last a long time - radioactivity has weakening effects on some metals, and so is inconsistent with long term handling. I didn't think enough about it - also in a another response post, I made the same mistake.
The point I was trying to make is not that coal power is better than nuclear - I would be happier with nuclear if the issues around waste disposal could be effective mitigated. High- and medium-level nuclear waste, however is a significant problem in development for nuclear power, and the means to deal with it are far less developed than those for dealing with simple toxic or corrosive wastes. Toxicity can be mitigated by chemical means, or toxic substances can be stored securely in a variety of places. The means to either recycle or safely dispose of high- and medium-level nuclear waste are more limited and not as well developed.
That isn't necessarily true... plutonium (half-life 24,000 years), iodine-131 (half-life 8 days), cobalt-60 (half-life 5 years), cesium-137 (30 years), and strontium-90 (half-life 29 years) are all at least fairly dangerous. As a matter of fact, plutonium is the most dangerous of the set though its half-life is far longer - and not just because of its toxicity. Part of the toxicity is biological, but part is also radioactivity and its consequences. Curium is used as a heat source for space probes (half life 3 d - 8000 years - don't know which isotope) but is radioactive enough to glow. Other than plutonium and curium, most of the above elements are byproducts of fission - meaning that they are likely to be present in high-level nuclear waste.
Chemical means can detoxify wastes; chemical means are already used in the recovery of sulfur from coal-fired power plants. With nuclear power you have a far smaller amount of waste, but time is the only way to detoxify it. It requires more storage and shielding than even toxic coal waste, requires the permanent (10 half lives - so 300 years) use of land, and can only be dealt with in a limited number of ways. Part of the lack of a waste site for nuclear waste is fear and ignorance, but part of the problem is the stringent long-term requirements for such a site, requirements absent in the disposal of coal waste.
Many methods are available to deal with toxic waste, and it is easier to come up with new ones. (Since the mass of waste is much larger, there is also a greater need to do so). The technologies required to decrease the costs of coal waste (or at least to come up with new ones) exist and are widely available - the chemical industry is big business and lots of engineers are dealing with similar problems. Contrast to dealing with nuclear waste, in which the techniques and research are narrowly distributed and not as widely available. The scale can also be a benefit - if you can find useful things in coal waste, the scale means that byproducts found to be useful can be generated on large scale. Scale also may help in the ecomomics of simple disposal.
Nuclear wastes can only be dealt with by time - there is no other way. Their containment requires a lot of resources and security - exploding a bomb laced with coal waste will probably make people sick, but it can be cleaned up much more readily, and without city blocks being condemned as unlivable for years. Add to that the fact that some of the wastes are also going to be toxic (while graphite isn't toxic, heavy water is, and is likely to be one of the more innocuous components of high-level waste) and you have the toxicity issue, albeit on a much smaller scale. The toxicity of these wastes is likely to derive at least in part from heavy metals, also present in coal waste and hard to deal with.