It is interesting that you think you don't have the right to shout fire in a theatre. You do have the right to do it, in fact you have the right to say anything you want to. But, you have to deal with the results too. With rights come responsibilities. Shout "Fire" in a theatre, and if there's no fire, bad things will likely happen to you. Say something about someone with malicious intent and you can be sued for libel. You're perfectly free to do those things, but there are consequences because we as a society have decided that some speech in certain cases is not acceptable and therefore, there will be consequences.
e360 is annoyed that they are identified as a spammer. Tough noogies. They have the right to send as much spam as they want; well, I have the right (and according to my boss, the responsibility) to shut them down. If e360 wanted to pay us for the time it would take our users to sort through their spam, I'm sure we could come to an acceptable agreement, but, unless they accept responsibility for their actions, I have to and the solution to that is to block their mail.
It may not be earthshaking news, but there's a lot of people who care - every person who owns MS stock. Microsoft has to keep pursuing new markets and Zune, like it or not, is one of their plays to get into a new market and keep the money flowing. (Of course, if they insist on losing money like they are with Xbox, that story may change.)
Microsoft's markets are largely saturated and under increasing pressure from FOSS and other products. And that's not a good story to tell investors. Microsoft hasn't had a killer product for a while and it's a company that thrives on growth. They need new brands badly because the ones they have are aging, and old brands, while good in financial and insurance markets, are not so good in consumer and high tech markets.
Evolution happens - not too many people - either creationist or secular dispute that because there is so much proof of it happening.
However, the controversial part is the mechanism that drives evolution. Did God/aliens/Flying Spaghetti Monsters cause the changes in organisms over time or did a natural, scientifically valid mechanism do it? Creationists say that there is no natural process that could adequately explain the mind boggling variety of life, while scientists say that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain it all.
Personally, I like to think that God set the rules and let it run - sort of like a cosmic version of Life (http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/), and our job is to figure it out.
I fail to see the point of the article. Tech changes, cops have to adapt. That's not news. Here's a related question - how do you wiretap a VOIP system? There's a problem we haven't heard much about, and I imagine we'll hear about that pretty soon.
If we start using real encryption more widely, that's going to make the lives of cops much tougher. I can only imagine a cop finally cracking an encrypted hard drive, and then being stymied by a non-default install.
Oh yeah. Built out an entire test Exchange messaging system. Snapshotted it, did Service Pack 2 installs, test backup/restores. Suuweeeet. I was actually able to document things properly for once since I wasn't playing in a production environment and was able to repeat the process to validate the docs. Of course, the question is - will people actually read the doc?
However, I've had some trouble with starting the VMs using the local system accounts and viewing the desktop. I think there's a fix for it, but I haven't worked too hard at it since I usually RDP to the server systems anyway.
Brin's The Transparent Society points out this counterintuitive idea. The important thing is to let the public have accees to the system. You cannot just let yourself be watched. You need to be able to watch the people watching you.
Though I personally find the concept of massive surveillance nets distastful, I think that the idea is basically sound. It does deter crime, and the idea that the cops will be watching all the time is (at this point at least) unlikely.
If I throw my wife's diamond ring into a fire, odd are pretty good I can just wait until the fires burns down to retrieve it. Just because one form of carbon burns well doesn't mean all forms of carbon burn well.
I gues my whole point is that before we go and start seriously producing this stuff, we should learn more about it and work through the questions. Maybe the answers are simple "Burn it" but maybe they aren't so simple. I'd like to think that we can learn from the lessons that other miracle technologies like DDT and cars have taught us. There's always unintended consequences, and maybe we can figure out a few of those before we start driving down the road.
I'm not saying the tool isn't goning to be useful, just that it would be wise to know more about it before we start using it. Sort of a RTFM for new tech.
From what I remember, the concern about nanotubes (as well as other nano-materials) is that we don't have a great deal of experience with them yet. Motor oil has been around for quite some time and isn't a truly "new" material, while nanotubes are. The unique properties of the material brings with it both benefits and possible problems. Given our history with cool, new stuff, it would be wise to see what possible issues might arise.
I'm no Luddite, but I don't think it's a bad idea to work through the lifecycle of this type of material. If it decays, how does it decay? What happens to it or its components when it does decay? Can we just just toss it into landfills or does it count as hazardous waste? Lots of questions, maybe they've been answered, but I don't recall there being a great deal of study on it.
That said though, it's a cool thing that we're gonna see this stuff in real life.
I agree that it's not good for people who don't know how to swim to dive into the deep end, but I disagree with your point that NAT is the right thing.
NAT was a kludge to get around a pressing problem. Just because it had a side benefit of effectively sealing idiots off from the rest of the world doesn't make it any less of a kludge. Plus it has the negative function of sealing off people who want the ability to do cool stuff who are less technical than you.
If we want people to use firewalls and secure their systems (which we do) we use and write applications and OSes that only talk to secure systems. Packets not signed? Tough. Application not authenticated? Tough. But the important thing is - we need to make it easy. NAT makes it hard. IPv6 makes it easy (or at least easier).
We don't want chaos, but IPv4 and NAT are not the right way. I hate that IPv6 is going to cause pain, but once we're there, life will be better - or at least, hopefully we'll have a different set of problems.
But the big question is: Did you do all that with a simple interface that Joe User could set up? You can work around NAT, but the mere fact that you have to is the annoying thing.
I understand that you can (usually) work around a problem, but most people either can't or won't. Since IPv4 and NAT require the workarounds, it prevents most people from being able to experience what you, by virtue of your technical skills, experience.
Maybe most people don't care, but they also don't have a real choice (unless they want l33t sk1llz) under IPv4/NAT. There's also the issue of control and so forth - if your ISP implements NAT you'd be SOL (I know, you can switch ISPs, but that's not the real point.), IPv6 might reduce that chance.
I think the worst conditions are psychological. If the company is gonna restructure, and everybody knows it, but your boss doesn't know what's going to happen or when and you don't know, and the execs aren't being too free with the info, so you don't have any clue what's up. Even though you're good at your job you still think, well, they shut down a whole department last year...
And you have to worry about a mortgage and doctor's appointments for your newborn...that's pretty bad.
I think that whether or not you think NAT is a horrible thing depends on how you see the world. The idea that the internet is a network composed of peers (each system on the net can freely talk to any other system on the net) is destroyed by NAT boxes since a NAT box doesn't allow systems on the outside of the NAT box to freely talk to the systems on the "inside"
However, whether this is a good or bad thing really depends on your point of view. Most users (clearly not the/. crowd) don't care about history and "proper" network architecture. They just want to share their broadband connection with all the systems in their house. To them, NAT is the greatest thing ever. It gives a little security, allows them to share, and lets them do everything they want. They don't understand that a true peer would allow other things, but what they don't know doesn't hurt right.
On the other hand, a true peer can freely accept connections from external system and this enables cool stuff (hosting, P2P apps, VoIP w/o central servers, etc). This is what NAT prevents. So it's bad from the perspective of people who want cool stuff. But, you do incur the cost of haveing to properly secure your system.
In the long term, their standard of living will rise, our will fall, and in the words (sort of) of Neal Stephenson, the global economy will be smashed flat by Adam Smith's merciless invisible hand.
Of course, I do hope that my standard of living doesn't fall too far before I croak, 'cuz I've seen "middle class" living conditions in 3rd world countries, and they don't look like too much fun.
But the problem with this sort of thing is that even though the birds killed in other ways is several orders of magnitude greater, people can understand thousands easier than millions.
It's too bad the report doesn't actually bring up the actual magnitude of the problem. IMHO, it's sort of dishonest to not do a comparison so people can see how little impact the windfarm actually has. Of course, that might be construed as having an opinion...
> My fan here has one so I can't put my fingers in.
If you put screens around the turbines, that'll just be an attractive nusiance, and you'll get sued by people who try sticking their hands or heads into the fans. We're better off with turbines that are only dangerous to birds.
So, perhaps the researchers who studied the statues should collaborate with the chicken researchers. Maybe the pigeons were avoiding the statue because it was ugly. I'm sure there's a grant in there somewhere.
on how you define smart. Just memorizing stuff doesn't make you smart, being able to synthesize stuff and use the information that they have memorized does. My computer has gigabytes of stuff memorized - better than a human probably, but it's still not smart.
If a cabbie knows the names and places of every street, but still doesn't know the shortest way through the city during rush hour is he/she still smart? (Of course this may be dependent on their honesty as well. Long taxi rides aren't cheap.)
Maybe so, but remeber a corp is only interested in one thing: the bottom line. The minute that they see profit to be made or it becomes cheaper to open up the logs, they'll do it.
It's a rare company that won't sell out its customers, and telecoms aren't renowned for their ethics. Slamming, routing dirty tricks, crappy service, etc.
So, what if an ISP has a policy of trashing any logs with personal information? Maybe this is a selling point for smaller ISPs. They could track traffic for performance purposes, but once the info's in the DB, trash the data.
I can see the ad now: "Use PrivCorp ISP. We don't care what you do, and the RIAA won't find out either. You just need to pay by the meg."
I think it's mostly a human interest story with a very misleading title. It's sort of like some kid creating a 4 bit microprocessor with a magnifying glass and a soldering iron. He wins the science project, but he didn't do anything really new. The cool factor is there, but ultimately, it doesn't matter too much.
On the other hand, you can't deny the coolness factor. Wish I'd had that sort of support when I was a kid. My mom said I read too much science fiction and told me to go outside and get some exercise.
You're not out in left field, but there is the concept of constants vs. variables in languages. Constants typically are set off in some fashion and they literally cannot change, while variables can change.
Using your example, you would declare G as a constant if you were going to stay on planet Earth. You might declare G as a variable if you wanted to move from Earth to a planet with a different gravity.
Of course, since 1G is usually seen as a standard unit, you could express the G as a constant and then express the gravity of other planets as x*G to get the gravity in terms of Earth. So, it'd probably be better to declare it as a constant and have variables for the actual gravities. (Even Earth's gravity varies slightly from point to point. I think)
Slashdot Mirror
It is interesting that you think you don't have the right to shout fire in a theatre. You do have the right to do it, in fact you have the right to say anything you want to. But, you have to deal with the results too. With rights come responsibilities. Shout "Fire" in a theatre, and if there's no fire, bad things will likely happen to you. Say something about someone with malicious intent and you can be sued for libel. You're perfectly free to do those things, but there are consequences because we as a society have decided that some speech in certain cases is not acceptable and therefore, there will be consequences.
e360 is annoyed that they are identified as a spammer. Tough noogies. They have the right to send as much spam as they want; well, I have the right (and according to my boss, the responsibility) to shut them down. If e360 wanted to pay us for the time it would take our users to sort through their spam, I'm sure we could come to an acceptable agreement, but, unless they accept responsibility for their actions, I have to and the solution to that is to block their mail.
It may not be earthshaking news, but there's a lot of people who care - every person who owns MS stock. Microsoft has to keep pursuing new markets and Zune, like it or not, is one of their plays to get into a new market and keep the money flowing. (Of course, if they insist on losing money like they are with Xbox, that story may change.)
Microsoft's markets are largely saturated and under increasing pressure from FOSS and other products. And that's not a good story to tell investors. Microsoft hasn't had a killer product for a while and it's a company that thrives on growth. They need new brands badly because the ones they have are aging, and old brands, while good in financial and insurance markets, are not so good in consumer and high tech markets.
Evolution happens - not too many people - either creationist or secular dispute that because there is so much proof of it happening.
However, the controversial part is the mechanism that drives evolution. Did God/aliens/Flying Spaghetti Monsters cause the changes in organisms over time or did a natural, scientifically valid mechanism do it? Creationists say that there is no natural process that could adequately explain the mind boggling variety of life, while scientists say that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain it all.
Personally, I like to think that God set the rules and let it run - sort of like a cosmic version of Life (http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/), and our job is to figure it out.
I fail to see the point of the article. Tech changes, cops have to adapt. That's not news. Here's a related question - how do you wiretap a VOIP system? There's a problem we haven't heard much about, and I imagine we'll hear about that pretty soon.
If we start using real encryption more widely, that's going to make the lives of cops much tougher. I can only imagine a cop finally cracking an encrypted hard drive, and then being stymied by a non-default install.
Oh yeah. Built out an entire test Exchange messaging system. Snapshotted it, did Service Pack 2 installs, test backup/restores. Suuweeeet. I was actually able to document things properly for once since I wasn't playing in a production environment and was able to repeat the process to validate the docs. Of course, the question is - will people actually read the doc?
However, I've had some trouble with starting the VMs using the local system accounts and viewing the desktop. I think there's a fix for it, but I haven't worked too hard at it since I usually RDP to the server systems anyway.
Brin's The Transparent Society points out this counterintuitive idea. The important thing is to let the public have accees to the system. You cannot just let yourself be watched. You need to be able to watch the people watching you.
Though I personally find the concept of massive surveillance nets distastful, I think that the idea is basically sound. It does deter crime, and the idea that the cops will be watching all the time is (at this point at least) unlikely.
If you want real privacy, go inside.
If I throw my wife's diamond ring into a fire, odd are pretty good I can just wait until the fires burns down to retrieve it. Just because one form of carbon burns well doesn't mean all forms of carbon burn well.
I gues my whole point is that before we go and start seriously producing this stuff, we should learn more about it and work through the questions. Maybe the answers are simple "Burn it" but maybe they aren't so simple. I'd like to think that we can learn from the lessons that other miracle technologies like DDT and cars have taught us. There's always unintended consequences, and maybe we can figure out a few of those before we start driving down the road.
I'm not saying the tool isn't goning to be useful, just that it would be wise to know more about it before we start using it. Sort of a RTFM for new tech.
From what I remember, the concern about nanotubes (as well as other nano-materials) is that we don't have a great deal of experience with them yet. Motor oil has been around for quite some time and isn't a truly "new" material, while nanotubes are. The unique properties of the material brings with it both benefits and possible problems. Given our history with cool, new stuff, it would be wise to see what possible issues might arise.
I'm no Luddite, but I don't think it's a bad idea to work through the lifecycle of this type of material. If it decays, how does it decay? What happens to it or its components when it does decay? Can we just just toss it into landfills or does it count as hazardous waste? Lots of questions, maybe they've been answered, but I don't recall there being a great deal of study on it.
That said though, it's a cool thing that we're gonna see this stuff in real life.
I agree that it's not good for people who don't know how to swim to dive into the deep end, but I disagree with your point that NAT is the right thing.
NAT was a kludge to get around a pressing problem. Just because it had a side benefit of effectively sealing idiots off from the rest of the world doesn't make it any less of a kludge. Plus it has the negative function of sealing off people who want the ability to do cool stuff who are less technical than you.
If we want people to use firewalls and secure their systems (which we do) we use and write applications and OSes that only talk to secure systems. Packets not signed? Tough. Application not authenticated? Tough. But the important thing is - we need to make it easy. NAT makes it hard. IPv6 makes it easy (or at least easier).
We don't want chaos, but IPv4 and NAT are not the right way. I hate that IPv6 is going to cause pain, but once we're there, life will be better - or at least, hopefully we'll have a different set of problems.
But the big question is: Did you do all that with a simple interface that Joe User could set up? You can work around NAT, but the mere fact that you have to is the annoying thing.
I understand that you can (usually) work around a problem, but most people either can't or won't. Since IPv4 and NAT require the workarounds, it prevents most people from being able to experience what you, by virtue of your technical skills, experience.
Maybe most people don't care, but they also don't have a real choice (unless they want l33t sk1llz) under IPv4/NAT. There's also the issue of control and so forth - if your ISP implements NAT you'd be SOL (I know, you can switch ISPs, but that's not the real point.), IPv6 might reduce that chance.
I think the worst conditions are psychological. If the company is gonna restructure, and everybody knows it, but your boss doesn't know what's going to happen or when and you don't know, and the execs aren't being too free with the info, so you don't have any clue what's up. Even though you're good at your job you still think, well, they shut down a whole department last year...
And you have to worry about a mortgage and doctor's appointments for your newborn...that's pretty bad.
Of course, this is not happening here.
I think that whether or not you think NAT is a horrible thing depends on how you see the world. The idea that the internet is a network composed of peers (each system on the net can freely talk to any other system on the net) is destroyed by NAT boxes since a NAT box doesn't allow systems on the outside of the NAT box to freely talk to the systems on the "inside"
/. crowd) don't care about history and "proper" network architecture. They just want to share their broadband connection with all the systems in their house. To them, NAT is the greatest thing ever. It gives a little security, allows them to share, and lets them do everything they want. They don't understand that a true peer would allow other things, but what they don't know doesn't hurt right.
.02.
However, whether this is a good or bad thing really depends on your point of view. Most users (clearly not the
On the other hand, a true peer can freely accept connections from external system and this enables cool stuff (hosting, P2P apps, VoIP w/o central servers, etc). This is what NAT prevents. So it's bad from the perspective of people who want cool stuff. But, you do incur the cost of haveing to properly secure your system.
Anyway, my
In the long term, their standard of living will rise, our will fall, and in the words (sort of) of Neal Stephenson, the global economy will be smashed flat by Adam Smith's merciless invisible hand.
Of course, I do hope that my standard of living doesn't fall too far before I croak, 'cuz I've seen "middle class" living conditions in 3rd world countries, and they don't look like too much fun.
But the problem with this sort of thing is that even though the birds killed in other ways is several orders of magnitude greater, people can understand thousands easier than millions.
It's too bad the report doesn't actually bring up the actual magnitude of the problem. IMHO, it's sort of dishonest to not do a comparison so people can see how little impact the windfarm actually has. Of course, that might be construed as having an opinion...
> My fan here has one so I can't put my fingers in.
If you put screens around the turbines, that'll just be an attractive nusiance, and you'll get sued by people who try sticking their hands or heads into the fans. We're better off with turbines that are only dangerous to birds.
So can I deduct the cost of energy on my tax return?
They weren't looking for geeky. Just cool and expensive, which pretty much rules out a Segway.
So, perhaps the researchers who studied the statues should collaborate with the chicken researchers. Maybe the pigeons were avoiding the statue because it was ugly. I'm sure there's a grant in there somewhere.
on how you define smart. Just memorizing stuff doesn't make you smart, being able to synthesize stuff and use the information that they have memorized does. My computer has gigabytes of stuff memorized - better than a human probably, but it's still not smart.
If a cabbie knows the names and places of every street, but still doesn't know the shortest way through the city during rush hour is he/she still smart? (Of course this may be dependent on their honesty as well. Long taxi rides aren't cheap.)
The computers or the places?
Maybe so, but remeber a corp is only interested in one thing: the bottom line. The minute that they see profit to be made or it becomes cheaper to open up the logs, they'll do it.
It's a rare company that won't sell out its customers, and telecoms aren't renowned for their ethics. Slamming, routing dirty tricks, crappy service, etc.
So, what if an ISP has a policy of trashing any logs with personal information? Maybe this is a selling point for smaller ISPs. They could track traffic for performance purposes, but once the info's in the DB, trash the data.
I can see the ad now: "Use PrivCorp ISP. We don't care what you do, and the RIAA won't find out either. You just need to pay by the meg."
I think it's mostly a human interest story with a very misleading title. It's sort of like some kid creating a 4 bit microprocessor with a magnifying glass and a soldering iron. He wins the science project, but he didn't do anything really new. The cool factor is there, but ultimately, it doesn't matter too much.
On the other hand, you can't deny the coolness factor. Wish I'd had that sort of support when I was a kid. My mom said I read too much science fiction and told me to go outside and get some exercise.
Thanks. That's what I thought I remembered from physics, so long ago...
You're not out in left field, but there is the concept of constants vs. variables in languages. Constants typically are set off in some fashion and they literally cannot change, while variables can change. Using your example, you would declare G as a constant if you were going to stay on planet Earth. You might declare G as a variable if you wanted to move from Earth to a planet with a different gravity. Of course, since 1G is usually seen as a standard unit, you could express the G as a constant and then express the gravity of other planets as x*G to get the gravity in terms of Earth. So, it'd probably be better to declare it as a constant and have variables for the actual gravities. (Even Earth's gravity varies slightly from point to point. I think)