All guns are legal when they're manufactured. Gun control legislation, among other things, restricts the number of weapons that can be stolen and used illegally. Fingerprinting a terrorist as he enters the country, on the other hand, does nothing whatsoever to discourage him from carrying out an attack.
How, pray tell, would fingerprints distinguish a legal visitor who wants to go to disneyland, and a legal visitor who wants to hijack a plane and fly it into a building?
Well, they wouldn't, of course. But the second time that guy tries to enter the country to hijack a plane -- we nab him!
I couldn't agree less. As Guillermito says himself:
It's so easy to impress judges with heavily connoted words like "virus", "pirate", "terrorist", "hacker", and it's so difficult on the other hand to explain the scientific method and the deep curiosity that makes us analyze how software works and find their flaws... Words, knowledge, and information: the defense I prefer.
The courts could swallow this guy up: force a settlement and a non-disclosure on him and we'd never anything more about it. And this crucial issue -- that it's allegedly illegal to demonstrate security flaws -- would fail to achieve public recognition. Companies would continue to market security products that aren't actually secure, and their customers (including government departments!) would remain at risk.
I remember when I worked for HP, about 8 years ago, seeing an announcement that we and several other *NIX vendors were going to develop a single, standardized Unix... with SCO.
For the life of me I can't remember what the project was called. But it's clearly not happening any more. Instead, HP is selling Mandrake, and SCO is suing its way into oblivion.
I despise seeing the Nvidia logo on game intros and thought a lot less of Valve when they endorsed ATi
I'm very happy for id and Valve to run their little GPU sponsorship deals. It means they have more money for games development that doesn't have to come out of their customers' pockets.
But it only takes one hacker to unleash something like MS.Blaster, MyDoom or SoBig.
I take the point that more people know about a security flaw after a patch is issued, but this doesn't seem like a quantity issue to me. The issue is one black hat writing a really vicious exploit that goes around the world in half a day -- and the sort of people that do that, I would have thought, are in communities where they are likely to hear about security holes ahead of the general public.
Get a clue. Just because you can write code doesn't mean you understand economics.
Linking to capitalism.org to define the word "economics" is pretty funny. That site unabashedly argues for laissez-faire capitalism not on the basis that it's good for society, but rather because it's good for people who make a lot of money.
The anti-trust page that you link in particular to contains arguments that would frighten the hell out of any mainstream economist. Despite what capitlism.org says, anti-trust laws are about preserving competition, not "punishing businesses for being successful." Because it's competition that makes businesses give us good products and services, not the generosity of their hearts. You don't need to look any further for an example of this than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, which improved in leaps and bounds right up until it killed Netscape, at which point all significant innovation halted.
And what's with the Henry Ford analogy? It makes no comparative sense whatsoever.
The point, for those who missed it, is that competition currently encourages several different anti-virus manufacturers to continually improve their products. If Microsoft gains a near-monopoly, that incentive mostly vanishes.
During the last Sobig outbreak, I recieved over 100 bounces per day from a single ISP in New Zealand. I e-mailed them to stop, pointing out that Sobig forged its "From" header.
They apologized and informed me I wouldn't receive any more bounces -- because their servers would now silenty delete all e-mail from my account.
I wanted to write back and point out that (a) this didn't help all the other people they were bouncing Sobig too, and (b) I might actually want to e-mail someone using them as an ISP one day -- but I couldn't, because they had blocked me.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but this is silly. Lots of security tools "artificially induce" inefficiency.
That's a good point, but it remains true that MS is indeed proposing to artificially induce inefficiency--and, by definition, that's an expensive solution. You don't do that unless you're all out of ideas.
From the article:
"Microsoft's idea is to shift this cost burden from the recipient to the sender, which in itself seems like a reasonable sentiment."
But the truth is they're not shifting costs at all. They're introducing new costs, targeted at the sender.
But as the grandparent implies, the sender still isn't made to do anything. Rather, the client refuses to accept mail unless it complies with this protocol.
Which begs the question: how is something like this ever going to reach critical mass? Because if you're an early adopter, you're bouncing back e-mails to servers that don't yet comply, so don't perform the validation, so you never get your e-mail. You bear a high cost for other people's non-adoption.
This seems like something you want to adopt once everyone else has, but not before--which means it has a very low chance of getting widely adopted in the first place.
If France and Germany had had their way, there wouldn't be ANY contracts to award in Iraq, so I don't know why they think they are entitled to some now.
Forget about what France and Germany are entitled to; it's what Iraq is entitled to. It's Iraq's money. So why can't it select the best bidder at the best price, regardless of which country it comes from?
Everyone knows it would be wrong to invade another country, seize its money, and take it home. But apparently it's okay to invade, bomb their cities, and tell them they can pay whoever they like to rebuild, so long as it's us.
[bush@iraq/usr/local] rpm -ivh opensourcesoftware-0.1.i386.rpm error: Failed dependencies: personalcomputers.so.4.1.2 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1 electricity.so.0.9.6 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1 domesticlawandorder.so.1.0 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1 [bush@iraq/usr/local] rpm -ivh democracy-1.0.i386.rpm Segmentation fault: population not formatted for democracy-1.0
This is very similar to a story a few days ago about Destra Music, the first online music retailer in Australia. Destra turns out to not really be a retailer: when you visit their site, it asks you to select from 9 familiar bricks n' mortar retailers. Then you're taken to that retailer's "store," which is identical to the other 8 retailers' stores except for the logo and theme colours. That is, instead of a single ITMS or Amazon-style store, we have 9 cloned, prefab stores.
What benefit does this hold for the consumer? The only one I can think of is that people who have particularly warm fuzzy feelings about one of these retailers can choose them over the others.
The real reason behind it, I suspect, is channel management. The record industry doesn't want to upset the retailers, so they're helping them remain at the cyber-storefront -- even though the retailers have no expertise (or real interest) in online sales, and nothing to offer of any benefit besides a logo.
The Destra Music site is awful -- it looks like a 16-year-old kid whipped it up in his lunch break. And it will probably stay awful, because none of these 9 retailers have any incentive to improve it -- why bother, when your competitors are using the same software?
Prefabricated music stores might work out well for LoudEye, just like Cisco did pretty well out of the tech bubble. But the consumer doesn't need a proliferation of near-identical stores.
Rule #1 when playing with your partner is always play co-op. Otherwise you discover that, just like the movie War Games said, nobody really wins.
Age of Empires and Age of Kings went down very well in my house (playing co-op vs the computer). So did Diablo 1 and 2. My girl hates shooters too, but for inexplicable reasons she has become deeply obsessed by Battlefield 1942. I just have to remember to always play on the same side.
I certainly don't think it's easy to make something entertaining and effective, but enough commercials have done it that it's obvious that it's not impossible.... Remember the infamous Big Brother Apple commercial that started the whole Super Bowl commerical stuff?
No fair using the Apple/1984 commercial as an example--that's the most famous ad in history! Any company would love to produce an ad that memorable.
But we're not getting dumb, annoying ads because companies and ad agencies are lazy bastards who can't be bothered making anything interesting. Tens of billions of dollars are spent developing, test-marketing, placing and measuring the effectiveness of today's TV ads.
They're 95% dreck because it's so difficult to be entertaining without reducing the effectiveness of your sales message, not because nobody's trying.
But it's hard enough to make a TV show entertaining enough to last more than a season. The reason we don't see a lot of ads that are both entertaining and effective at selling a product is that the two are very close to mutually exclusive.
What we will see, though, is advertising that wriggles deeper into TV programming. Product placement is one way; banner advertising is another. I'm not sure if this is happening in the US, but in Australia TV stations will sometimes briefly scroll ads along the bottom of the screen. Annoying? Oh yeah. But pretty hard to ignore. And impossible to fast-forward.
Criminal 1: I worked for guy who ran an ISP who had a customer who set up a site that had some links to another web site that stored some files that may or may not have infringed copyright law.
Criminal 1: You BASTARD!
Re:Absolutely not, the UN is a flawed organization
on
Imagine A UN-Run Internet
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Since the UN is the closest thing we have to a world government -- and since the non-American population of the world (there are a few of us) would like some say in what's being done to our planet -- it's not very helpful to suggest the UN needs to be "smacked down." Demonizing the UN reduces the likelihood we'll ever it become a true global democracy.
But other than that, you're right. While it sounds as if it would be more globally democratic to have the internet (or anything else) run by the UN, as opposed to unilaterally, it only sounds that way. The vast majority of countries (arguably, all of them) are less free and democratic than the US. It's in all our best interests for it to retain control over the net, even those of us the US government doesn't represent.
I can't help but wonder if RH's decision is another example of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80:20 Rule, gone feral. As everyone probably already knows, this states that a minority of input produces a majority of results -- as applied to business, it means that 80% of your profits usually come from 20% of your customers.
Sometimes businesses (or, rather, the consultants they hire) get so caught up in this idea that they don't think through its consequences. All they see is the potential to cut that slab of un- or less-profitable business.
So they do... and when the dust settles, they discover the Pareto Principle still holds. Eighty percent of their profits are still coming from 20% of their customers -- only now that 80% is less than it used to be.
The lesson here is not that it's always wrong to cut unprofitable products or markets, but that businesses need to realize it's often impossible to neatly excise the part of their business they don't want from the part they do.
This guy needs to read up on economics. It's yet another scenario based on the erroneous assumption that there is a fixed number of available jobs in the world. There isn't.
Agriculture used to employ more than 80% of the workforce. In Western countries today it's more like 2%. Seventy-eight percent of the population is not out of work.
People argued against feminism because they thought if you let women into the workforce, there would be twice as many people for the same amount of jobs, so unemployment would top 50%. Didn't happen.
Some people still argue against immigration thinking that every new person who enters the country and gets a job must take it from someone else, so leave them unemployed. Doesn't happen.
Most people reading this forum are probably doing jobs that didn't exist 50 years ago. In 50 years' time, if robots are doing all manual labor, we'll be working hard at something else.
Slashdot Mirror
All guns are legal when they're manufactured. Gun control legislation, among other things, restricts the number of weapons that can be stolen and used illegally. Fingerprinting a terrorist as he enters the country, on the other hand, does nothing whatsoever to discourage him from carrying out an attack.
Well, they wouldn't, of course. But the second time that guy tries to enter the country to hijack a plane -- we nab him!
I couldn't agree less. As Guillermito says himself:
The courts could swallow this guy up: force a settlement and a non-disclosure on him and we'd never anything more about it. And this crucial issue -- that it's allegedly illegal to demonstrate security flaws -- would fail to achieve public recognition. Companies would continue to market security products that aren't actually secure, and their customers (including government departments!) would remain at risk.
I remember when I worked for HP, about 8 years ago, seeing an announcement that we and several other *NIX vendors were going to develop a single, standardized Unix... with SCO.
For the life of me I can't remember what the project was called. But it's clearly not happening any more. Instead, HP is selling Mandrake, and SCO is suing its way into oblivion.
Plus every HP Mandrake PC comes with free indemnification against SCO lawsuits!
I'm very happy for id and Valve to run their little GPU sponsorship deals. It means they have more money for games development that doesn't have to come out of their customers' pockets.
But it only takes one hacker to unleash something like MS.Blaster, MyDoom or SoBig.
I take the point that more people know about a security flaw after a patch is issued, but this doesn't seem like a quantity issue to me. The issue is one black hat writing a really vicious exploit that goes around the world in half a day -- and the sort of people that do that, I would have thought, are in communities where they are likely to hear about security holes ahead of the general public.
Linking to capitalism.org to define the word "economics" is pretty funny. That site unabashedly argues for laissez-faire capitalism not on the basis that it's good for society, but rather because it's good for people who make a lot of money.
The anti-trust page that you link in particular to contains arguments that would frighten the hell out of any mainstream economist. Despite what capitlism.org says, anti-trust laws are about preserving competition, not "punishing businesses for being successful." Because it's competition that makes businesses give us good products and services, not the generosity of their hearts. You don't need to look any further for an example of this than Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, which improved in leaps and bounds right up until it killed Netscape, at which point all significant innovation halted.
And what's with the Henry Ford analogy? It makes no comparative sense whatsoever.
The point, for those who missed it, is that competition currently encourages several different anti-virus manufacturers to continually improve their products. If Microsoft gains a near-monopoly, that incentive mostly vanishes.
During the last Sobig outbreak, I recieved over 100 bounces per day from a single ISP in New Zealand. I e-mailed them to stop, pointing out that Sobig forged its "From" header.
They apologized and informed me I wouldn't receive any more bounces -- because their servers would now silenty delete all e-mail from my account.
I wanted to write back and point out that (a) this didn't help all the other people they were bouncing Sobig too, and (b) I might actually want to e-mail someone using them as an ISP one day -- but I couldn't, because they had blocked me.
From the article:
But the truth is they're not shifting costs at all. They're introducing new costs, targeted at the sender.
But as the grandparent implies, the sender still isn't made to do anything. Rather, the client refuses to accept mail unless it complies with this protocol.
Which begs the question: how is something like this ever going to reach critical mass? Because if you're an early adopter, you're bouncing back e-mails to servers that don't yet comply, so don't perform the validation, so you never get your e-mail. You bear a high cost for other people's non-adoption.
This seems like something you want to adopt once everyone else has, but not before--which means it has a very low chance of getting widely adopted in the first place.
Forget about what France and Germany are entitled to; it's what Iraq is entitled to. It's Iraq's money. So why can't it select the best bidder at the best price, regardless of which country it comes from?
Everyone knows it would be wrong to invade another country, seize its money, and take it home. But apparently it's okay to invade, bomb their cities, and tell them they can pay whoever they like to rebuild, so long as it's us.
[bush@iraq /usr/local] rpm -ivh opensourcesoftware-0.1.i386.rpm /usr/local] rpm -ivh democracy-1.0.i386.rpm
error: Failed dependencies:
personalcomputers.so.4.1.2 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
electricity.so.0.9.6 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
domesticlawandorder.so.1.0 is needed by opensourcesoftware-0.1
[bush@iraq
Segmentation fault: population not formatted for democracy-1.0
This is very similar to a story a few days ago about Destra Music, the first online music retailer in Australia. Destra turns out to not really be a retailer: when you visit their site, it asks you to select from 9 familiar bricks n' mortar retailers. Then you're taken to that retailer's "store," which is identical to the other 8 retailers' stores except for the logo and theme colours. That is, instead of a single ITMS or Amazon-style store, we have 9 cloned, prefab stores.
What benefit does this hold for the consumer? The only one I can think of is that people who have particularly warm fuzzy feelings about one of these retailers can choose them over the others.
The real reason behind it, I suspect, is channel management. The record industry doesn't want to upset the retailers, so they're helping them remain at the cyber-storefront -- even though the retailers have no expertise (or real interest) in online sales, and nothing to offer of any benefit besides a logo.
The Destra Music site is awful -- it looks like a 16-year-old kid whipped it up in his lunch break. And it will probably stay awful, because none of these 9 retailers have any incentive to improve it -- why bother, when your competitors are using the same software?
Prefabricated music stores might work out well for LoudEye, just like Cisco did pretty well out of the tech bubble. But the consumer doesn't need a proliferation of near-identical stores.
I guess a few bugs still need to be worked out.
Rule #1 when playing with your partner is always play co-op. Otherwise you discover that, just like the movie War Games said, nobody really wins.
Age of Empires and Age of Kings went down very well in my house (playing co-op vs the computer). So did Diablo 1 and 2. My girl hates shooters too, but for inexplicable reasons she has become deeply obsessed by Battlefield 1942. I just have to remember to always play on the same side.
No fair using the Apple/1984 commercial as an example--that's the most famous ad in history! Any company would love to produce an ad that memorable.
But we're not getting dumb, annoying ads because companies and ad agencies are lazy bastards who can't be bothered making anything interesting. Tens of billions of dollars are spent developing, test-marketing, placing and measuring the effectiveness of today's TV ads. They're 95% dreck because it's so difficult to be entertaining without reducing the effectiveness of your sales message, not because nobody's trying.
But it's hard enough to make a TV show entertaining enough to last more than a season. The reason we don't see a lot of ads that are both entertaining and effective at selling a product is that the two are very close to mutually exclusive.
What we will see, though, is advertising that wriggles deeper into TV programming. Product placement is one way; banner advertising is another. I'm not sure if this is happening in the US, but in Australia TV stations will sometimes briefly scroll ads along the bottom of the screen. Annoying? Oh yeah. But pretty hard to ignore. And impossible to fast-forward.
Criminal 1: What are you in jail for?
Criminal 2: Murder. You?
Criminal 1: I worked for guy who ran an ISP who had a customer who set up a site that had some links to another web site that stored some files that may or may not have infringed copyright law.
Criminal 1: You BASTARD!
Since the UN is the closest thing we have to a world government -- and since the non-American population of the world (there are a few of us) would like some say in what's being done to our planet -- it's not very helpful to suggest the UN needs to be "smacked down." Demonizing the UN reduces the likelihood we'll ever it become a true global democracy.
But other than that, you're right. While it sounds as if it would be more globally democratic to have the internet (or anything else) run by the UN, as opposed to unilaterally, it only sounds that way. The vast majority of countries (arguably, all of them) are less free and democratic than the US. It's in all our best interests for it to retain control over the net, even those of us the US government doesn't represent.
I can't help but wonder if RH's decision is another example of the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80:20 Rule, gone feral. As everyone probably already knows, this states that a minority of input produces a majority of results -- as applied to business, it means that 80% of your profits usually come from 20% of your customers.
Sometimes businesses (or, rather, the consultants they hire) get so caught up in this idea that they don't think through its consequences. All they see is the potential to cut that slab of un- or less-profitable business.
So they do... and when the dust settles, they discover the Pareto Principle still holds. Eighty percent of their profits are still coming from 20% of their customers -- only now that 80% is less than it used to be.
The lesson here is not that it's always wrong to cut unprofitable products or markets, but that businesses need to realize it's often impossible to neatly excise the part of their business they don't want from the part they do.
Or this is the first step before removing the document altogether. Then there will be no Google cache proving it existed.
Author Max Barry of Jennifer Government fame has an article on his site that takes these ideas further, extrapolating the file-sharing trend to its logical(?) conclusion: the end of copyright as we know it.
Interesting to see another content provider on this subject... like Card, he doesn't seem especially worried about people pirating his books.
So look out for that seal, kids: it's your guarantee the product is so dangerous the manufacturer couldn't get product liability insurance!
This guy needs to read up on economics. It's yet another scenario based on the erroneous assumption that there is a fixed number of available jobs in the world. There isn't.
Agriculture used to employ more than 80% of the workforce. In Western countries today it's more like 2%. Seventy-eight percent of the population is not out of work.
People argued against feminism because they thought if you let women into the workforce, there would be twice as many people for the same amount of jobs, so unemployment would top 50%. Didn't happen.
Some people still argue against immigration thinking that every new person who enters the country and gets a job must take it from someone else, so leave them unemployed. Doesn't happen.
Most people reading this forum are probably doing jobs that didn't exist 50 years ago. In 50 years' time, if robots are doing all manual labor, we'll be working hard at something else.