Maybe it is time that more development by those working directly for some security/software agency instead of by contractors.
Maybe we should consider a modernized form of the draft, where nearly all people spend a couple of years doing public sector service. I'm not just talking troops, but people working on various community projects, infrastructure development, and software development too. And end unemployment pay for doing nothing. Even the unskilled could be put to some constructive use. A bunch of excessively costly government employee and contractor positions could probably be avoided. (And those who do work in government jobs shouldn't be paid more than what our enlisted men get. It's bankrupting our cities, states...)
If not tied to hugely expensive contracts, it should be feasible to develop several competing approaches for software and pick from the best, or make the best from the work of several. And to whatever level is feasible, software should be open source or at least shared and improved by collective efforts of multiple agencies. Avoid costly license agreements. And where there have been some, the contractors should be held accountable for the costs of failures.
How far into the past do we have to go to punish people...
DNA can be thought of as just more cookies...but they only go so far. Do you know where your atoms have been?? Were you once part of a hostile volcano or an exploding star?
IBM sold their laptop division, now living through the Chinese brand Lenovo. Maybe it's time for the search or better yet the OS portions of Microsoft to be sold too?
France's going to be selling nuclear power to Germany for the rest of our lives.
How much of the power is projected to be bought? Citations please. Are you basing that on any actual data or just assuming it to be true?
If the people of Germany really want to support maximal development of renewable energy and not see any unfair competition that gets in the way of that, perhaps they'll pass legislation that requires contracted sources to FULLY insure to cover costs of potential future damages. The cost of insurance that would cover anything that could happen might be prohibitive. Perhaps the nuclear industry should insure itself, so the cost of a serious accident would be spread out over all of a nations nuclear utilities, manufacturers and parent companies including globally for multinational corporations. If the risks are truly near zero, the stockholders should have no objections. If risk is covered well in advance and spread out, the industry should be able to survive. If there is no cross-border liability arrangement, additional separately itemized liability fees should be charged to the end-users. If the companies were held more responsible, they'd certainly have motivation to be very serious about safety. When inspections of companies show neglect, increase the share that they must set aside as part of the widescale insurance pool. Make it so most of those huge executive bonuses and a portion of the the larger retirement packages is conditional, falling back to a trust fund that's part of the insurance. Also, tax profits from the companies stock in a way that the tax rate is high, with the extra held in escrow not refunded for seven years and only them if there are no pending industry liability or negligence issues.
Not requiring the industry to be fully prepared to cover extreme damage that may occur is an unfair competitive advantage for nuclear power. Renewable sources are more attractive when the distortion of actual competing power costs is removed.
SF is proud to buck the federal govt...and is a sanctuary city....so, I guess you basically can legally get an illegal alien to live with you...but you can't go get a fucking dog???
You'd might be surprised at the alternatives some politicians come up with.
Some beginners did pretty well with Hypercard 20 years or so ago. At least it allowed people with no programming background a path to get some things done while learning in the process. That practical application motivated some people that would have never thought of programming otherwise.
I really wish Apple would re-invent Hypercard for modern consumers and education. The current App Store rules wouldn't allow anyone else to do it.
Out of the box thinking to get that housemate that doesn't have a fracking clue to save water:
Remind them that the cancers from radon gas in tap water generally aren't from drinking it, but instead come from inhaling the gas released while taking a shower.
In licensing IE to ISPs for the install packages people used to set up net access, MS required the ISPs to include features in the web pages which broke other browsers.
By pushing non-standard behavior, MS effectively broke other browsers. MS used dirty tricks.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
MS also strong-armed PC vendors, preventing them from shipping other browsers.
There are a couple of other browsers available for iOS, including iCab.
But can it do something useful for business, like burn corporate logos into the surface of the moon?
As for patrolling borders, it might be viable as a game. Add web interfaces to the cameras and lasers and people would PAY to patrol the borders.
Making conflict of any kind profitable is a slippery slope. Next thing you know we'd have politicians advocating slavery, even sex slaves. That isn't possible, is it???
All that happens is that the more that they do stunts like they've been doing recently, the quicker the governments around the world tighten their grip on the rest of us and make us all suffer under a virtual online police-state.
With that it mind, it is probably fair to wonder if some governments might foster some attacks for that reason or to discredit any apparent social statements being made. Some may consider some targets unexpected. PBS???
I hope it's a bit more defined than that, because getting infected with a virus could lead up to a $3700 USD fine if it isn't.
It wouldn't be fair to judge a law based on a brief summary. Also, some of the reporting out of Japan occasionally loses something in the translation.
The events of this year have given many of us an opportunity to contrast some other cultures with our own.
This story surprised me in revealing that Japan had apparently gone this long without law covering some of the things that have happened. Perhaps the attacks on Sony play a significant role in driving the change. This also pushes Japan towards what some other countries have been doing in international agreements (also covering potentially invasive things like dealing with P2P issues)
It was news to me that Japan has constitutional protection of privacy of electronic communications. A law that opens the door to invading that, even with good cause, is a major change for them. Privacy is taken very seriously in Japan. I didn't realize how seriously until I saw a story which mentioned that the electric utilities didn't do background checks on employees (not officially anyway), because they were invasive of privacy.
I think it would be shortsighted to view this as a story that is simply about malware. The bigger social issues of constitutional protections and privacy are worth a close look. 9/11 had a significant impact on important regulations in the U.S. It seems that the attacks on Sony may be in part driving some changes in Japan. Cross-cultural issues of interest go beyond malware and practices of managing power plants. We shouldn't forget to step back and see the wider social issues tied to these technology-related stories.
When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst in Berkeley and demanded the distribution of food to the poor, Reagan joked, "It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism."
Let's hope that governments and others don't do much with those nasties.
Reagan quote is from The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California). March 14, 1974
Why can't they be much cheaper? These vendors got the OS for free. Most won't do huge ad campaigns. The CPUs cost far less than x86 Intel chips. It's not like the displays are made of anything extraordinary. With competition and SOCs, these could likely be in the price range of netbooks. Of course the margins would be fairly thin, but when they're Windows-netbook-like commodities without the price of Windows, that's how anything that isn't the hottest stuff should be priced.
Hopefully seeing that the losers don't make any money will motivate companies to put out better products. Maybe someone will actually be smart enough to leverage the power of the user community, and release the full source so others can help polish/innovate to the next level.
The lack of support for old Android products is shameful. Even if there is too little RAM to use the latest version of Android, all vendors should still have provided updates for things like security issues. Some units are being treated like they're disposable. They should be priced to match.
And with some vendors putting out models that are a bit quirky or are otherwise duds, the previous generation models being cleared out ought to be dumped at really low ($100 - $200) prices.
If Google is making ad money off of the OS, perhaps some hardware vendors should consider asking Google to pay them to use it? Maybe Microsoft shouldn't be the only one to pay to see its OS and search product installed?
MS used undocumented OS features in Office, leveraging their OS to advantage in selling a separate expensive app suite which was in direct competition with third party products in a standard category of user app software.
In this case, the app, which broke stated rules in using a private API, clearly was treading in areas relating to core OS functionality. Users must not be subjected to modifications that may break when the OS is updated. A syncing utility can strongly affect network traffic, device speed, bandwidth costs, battery life, local or remote data loss or corruption... (error handling must account for many possible situations). Clearly such sensitive areas are appropriately controlled by Apple in order to uniformly achieve optimal performance.
Apple is not selling a competing app. Some of the things Apple has developed or enhanced have been made open source in the interests of advancing the art, and can actually be used by competitors. I believe a couple of those technologies would be called on by a well written syncing utility. Bonjour a service discovery protocol, and launchd a unified, service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, applications, processes, and scripts. Obviously Apple started working with syncing many years ago.
Apple has promoted open-standards and has put a great deal of effort into Webkit, an open source browser technology that is widely used (in Apple's Safari, and also on Android)
There are people that look for excuses to bash Apple. This isn't a situation where that is appropriate. Someone submitted an app that broke rules, and now some whine about the consequences. It's destructive and distracting enough when political parties banter over nonsense. Shouldn't people with some technological understanding attempt to rise above that sort of thing? Time to move along...
Who else other than MS and Netflix, who's using silverlight?
Unfortunately NHK still does. But as a workaround, the news and some of the other programming is carried on livestation.com (flash to the desktop, h.264 to iOS)
At about 180 Watts power consumption, streaming tv with an Xbox 360 is not environmentally responsible. In comparison the Apple TV uses about 3 Watts (and at 10 Watts an iPad even has a display).
Power consumed becomes heat which is one reason the 360 has so many heat-related hardware failures. Using a desktop PC as an alarm clock works too, but it is too wasteful to consider...
Yes, of course, no one in their right mind would ever consider allowing critical systems to trust any data that matters from potentially creaky, cranky, or otherwise afflicted PCs regardless of the OS. More detail would be redundant.
Hardware failures are something that I'm sure is planned on, not something to be denied. Things like metal migration in semiconductors and dried out electrolytic capacitors are examples of long-term failure that don't show up in burn-in or as infant mortality. Good luck in finding a PC power supply that would be trustworthy after 40 years without maintenance. Redundant or stored identical spare supplies would tend to suffer from the same ailments. I'm sure they'd be freshness dated. Transistors do well but some fail. (of historical interest, some older germanium transistors would short out from tin whiskers growing inside even when not in use, see NASA analysis http://www.vintage-radio.info/whiskers/ )
It's easier to trust someone that has designed a system and expects, accommodates, and acknowledges failures than someone who claims they've built something that won't fail in 40 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Try digging in the junk bins at thrift stores or recycling centers for a USB model?
t's far time we strengthen our armed forces by...
Maybe it is time that more development by those working directly for some security/software agency instead of by contractors.
Maybe we should consider a modernized form of the draft, where nearly all people spend a couple of years doing public sector service. I'm not just talking troops, but people working on various community projects, infrastructure development, and software development too. And end unemployment pay for doing nothing. Even the unskilled could be put to some constructive use. A bunch of excessively costly government employee and contractor positions could probably be avoided. (And those who do work in government jobs shouldn't be paid more than what our enlisted men get. It's bankrupting our cities, states...)
If not tied to hugely expensive contracts, it should be feasible to develop several competing approaches for software and pick from the best, or make the best from the work of several. And to whatever level is feasible, software should be open source or at least shared and improved by collective efforts of multiple agencies. Avoid costly license agreements. And where there have been some, the contractors should be held accountable for the costs of failures.
How far into the past do we have to go to punish people...
DNA can be thought of as just more cookies...but they only go so far. Do you know where your atoms have been?? Were you once part of a hostile volcano or an exploding star?
IBM sold their laptop division, now living through the Chinese brand Lenovo.
Maybe it's time for the search or better yet the OS portions of Microsoft to be sold too?
More details on the amounts/effects of China reducing rare earth exports:
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110705p2a00m0na017000c.html
France's going to be selling nuclear power to Germany for the rest of our lives.
How much of the power is projected to be bought? Citations please.
Are you basing that on any actual data or just assuming it to be true?
If the people of Germany really want to support maximal development of renewable energy and not see any unfair competition that gets in the way of that, perhaps they'll pass legislation that requires contracted sources to FULLY insure to cover costs of potential future damages. The cost of insurance that would cover anything that could happen might be prohibitive. Perhaps the nuclear industry should insure itself, so the cost of a serious accident would be spread out over all of a nations nuclear utilities, manufacturers and parent companies including globally for multinational corporations. If the risks are truly near zero, the stockholders should have no objections. If risk is covered well in advance and spread out, the industry should be able to survive. If there is no cross-border liability arrangement, additional separately itemized liability fees should be charged to the end-users. If the companies were held more responsible, they'd certainly have motivation to be very serious about safety. When inspections of companies show neglect, increase the share that they must set aside as part of the widescale insurance pool. Make it so most of those huge executive bonuses and a portion of the the larger retirement packages is conditional, falling back to a trust fund that's part of the insurance. Also, tax profits from the companies stock in a way that the tax rate is high, with the extra held in escrow not refunded for seven years and only them if there are no pending industry liability or negligence issues.
Not requiring the industry to be fully prepared to cover extreme damage that may occur is an unfair competitive advantage for nuclear power. Renewable sources are more attractive when the distortion of actual competing power costs is removed.
SF is proud to buck the federal govt...and is a sanctuary city....so, I guess you basically can legally get an illegal alien to live with you...but you can't go get a fucking dog???
You'd might be surprised at the alternatives some politicians come up with.
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/men-should-have-sex-slaves-says-female-kuwaiti-politician
Some beginners did pretty well with Hypercard 20 years or so ago. At least it allowed people with no programming background a path to get some things done while learning in the process. That practical application motivated some people that would have never thought of programming otherwise.
I really wish Apple would re-invent Hypercard for modern consumers and education. The current App Store rules wouldn't allow anyone else to do it.
Maybe someone can emulate it in Javascript?
smart fellers
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Spark_gap#Visual_entertainment
Out of the box thinking to get that housemate that doesn't have a fracking clue to save water:
Remind them that the cancers from radon gas in tap water generally aren't from drinking it, but instead come from inhaling the gas released while taking a shower.
http://info.ngwa.org/gwol/pdf/882546405.PDF
http://www.santamariasun.com/news/6651/frack-that/
Perhaps they could have found some other business opportunities instead?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/24/horse_oysters/
In licensing IE to ISPs for the install packages people used to set up net access, MS required the ISPs to include features in the web pages which broke other browsers.
By pushing non-standard behavior, MS effectively broke other browsers. MS used dirty tricks.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
MS also strong-armed PC vendors, preventing them from shipping other browsers.
There are a couple of other browsers available for iOS, including iCab.
But can it do something useful for business, like burn corporate logos into the surface of the moon?
As for patrolling borders, it might be viable as a game. Add web interfaces to the cameras and lasers and people would PAY to patrol the borders.
Making conflict of any kind profitable is a slippery slope. Next thing you know we'd have politicians advocating slavery, even sex slaves.
That isn't possible, is it???
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/men-should-have-sex-slaves-says-female-kuwaiti-politician
Yes, it is appropriate for us to remember these men, and others that went before them, like Bob Widlar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Widlar
5.0 is much better than 2.8 on resource usage and such ...
At 43.5 mb instead of 2 mb for the download, it sure doesn't seem that way. And they removed some features too?
Maybe someone will post hacks/patches to disable the auto-update?
If there's a FOSS collective working on a ready-for-the-masses replacement, I bet many would be willing to chip in with donations or free room...
All that happens is that the more that they do stunts like they've been doing recently, the quicker the governments around the world tighten their grip on the rest of us and make us all suffer under a virtual online police-state.
With that it mind, it is probably fair to wonder if some governments might foster some attacks for that reason or to discredit any apparent social statements being made. Some may consider some targets unexpected. PBS???
I hope it's a bit more defined than that, because getting infected with a virus could lead up to a $3700 USD fine if it isn't.
It wouldn't be fair to judge a law based on a brief summary. Also, some of the reporting out of Japan occasionally loses something in the translation.
The events of this year have given many of us an opportunity to contrast some other cultures with our own.
This story surprised me in revealing that Japan had apparently gone this long without law covering some of the things that have happened. Perhaps the attacks on Sony play a significant role in driving the change. This also pushes Japan towards what some other countries have been doing in international agreements (also covering potentially invasive things like dealing with P2P issues)
It was news to me that Japan has constitutional protection of privacy of electronic communications. A law that opens the door to invading that, even with good cause, is a major change for them. Privacy is taken very seriously in Japan. I didn't realize how seriously until I saw a story which mentioned that the electric utilities didn't do background checks on employees (not officially anyway), because they were invasive of privacy.
I think it would be shortsighted to view this as a story that is simply about malware. The bigger social issues of constitutional protections and privacy are worth a close look. 9/11 had a significant impact on important regulations in the U.S. It seems that the attacks on Sony may be in part driving some changes in Japan. Cross-cultural issues of interest go beyond malware and practices of managing power plants. We shouldn't forget to step back and see the wider social issues tied to these technology-related stories.
When the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst in Berkeley and demanded the distribution of food to the poor, Reagan joked, "It's just too bad we can't have an epidemic of botulism."
Let's hope that governments and others don't do much with those nasties.
Reagan quote is from The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California). March 14, 1974
What is it with press releases being passed off as news?
"News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity. ..." - Bill Moyers
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
US-Advised-on-using-Stuxnet-style-attacks-in-Libya
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_18263468
http://slashdot.org/submission/1647610/US-Advised-on-using-Stuxnet-style-attacks-in-Libya
Wall Street Journal (WSJ), a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Co., Inc.
Somehow it doesn't seem right not mentioning that the owner of the WSJ and DJ is News Corp (as with Fox)
Why can't they be much cheaper? These vendors got the OS for free. Most won't do huge ad campaigns. The CPUs cost far less than x86 Intel chips. It's not like the displays are made of anything extraordinary. With competition and SOCs, these could likely be in the price range of netbooks. Of course the margins would be fairly thin, but when they're Windows-netbook-like commodities without the price of Windows, that's how anything that isn't the hottest stuff should be priced.
Hopefully seeing that the losers don't make any money will motivate companies to put out better products. Maybe someone will actually be smart enough to leverage the power of the user community, and release the full source so others can help polish/innovate to the next level.
The lack of support for old Android products is shameful. Even if there is too little RAM to use the latest version of Android, all vendors should still have provided updates for things like security issues. Some units are being treated like they're disposable. They should be priced to match.
And with some vendors putting out models that are a bit quirky or are otherwise duds, the previous generation models being cleared out ought to be dumped at really low ($100 - $200) prices.
If Google is making ad money off of the OS, perhaps some hardware vendors should consider asking Google to pay them to use it? Maybe Microsoft shouldn't be the only one to pay to see its OS and search product installed?
Why should Apple be different?
Because the situation is completely different.
MS used undocumented OS features in Office, leveraging their OS to advantage in selling a separate expensive app suite which was in direct competition with third party products in a standard category of user app software.
In this case, the app, which broke stated rules in using a private API, clearly was treading in areas relating to core OS functionality. Users must not be subjected to modifications that may break when the OS is updated. A syncing utility can strongly affect network traffic, device speed, bandwidth costs, battery life, local or remote data loss or corruption... (error handling must account for many possible situations). Clearly such sensitive areas are appropriately controlled by Apple in order to uniformly achieve optimal performance.
Apple is not selling a competing app.
Some of the things Apple has developed or enhanced have been made open source in the interests of advancing the art, and can actually be used by competitors.
I believe a couple of those technologies would be called on by a well written syncing utility. Bonjour a service discovery protocol, and launchd a unified, service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, applications, processes, and scripts. Obviously Apple started working with syncing many years ago.
Apple has promoted open-standards and has put a great deal of effort into Webkit, an open source browser technology that is widely used (in Apple's Safari, and also on Android)
There are people that look for excuses to bash Apple. This isn't a situation where that is appropriate. Someone submitted an app that broke rules, and now some whine about the consequences. It's destructive and distracting enough when political parties banter over nonsense. Shouldn't people with some technological understanding attempt to rise above that sort of thing? Time to move along...
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Launchd
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Bonjour_(software)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Webkit
And what if someone is offended by seeing someone of very low/high weight?
Who else other than MS and Netflix, who's using silverlight?
Unfortunately NHK still does. But as a workaround, the news and some of the other programming is carried on livestation.com (flash to the desktop, h.264 to iOS)
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/09_04.html
At about 180 Watts power consumption, streaming tv with an Xbox 360 is not environmentally responsible. In comparison the Apple TV uses about 3 Watts (and at 10 Watts an iPad even has a display).
Power consumed becomes heat which is one reason the 360 has so many heat-related hardware failures.
Using a desktop PC as an alarm clock works too, but it is too wasteful to consider...
Yes, of course, no one in their right mind would ever consider allowing critical systems to trust any data that matters from potentially creaky, cranky, or otherwise afflicted PCs regardless of the OS.
More detail would be redundant.
Hardware failures are something that I'm sure is planned on, not something to be denied. Things like metal migration in semiconductors and dried out electrolytic capacitors are examples of long-term failure that don't show up in burn-in or as infant mortality. Good luck in finding a PC power supply that would be trustworthy after 40 years without maintenance. Redundant or stored identical spare supplies would tend to suffer from the same ailments. I'm sure they'd be freshness dated. Transistors do well but some fail. (of historical interest, some older germanium transistors would short out from tin whiskers growing inside even when not in use, see NASA analysis http://www.vintage-radio.info/whiskers/ )
It's easier to trust someone that has designed a system and expects, accommodates, and acknowledges failures than someone who claims they've built something that won't fail in 40 years.