Suppose you harvest an acre of hundred-year-old trees, and you plant three acres of trees. Next year, you harvest a second acre of hundred-year-old trees, and plant three more. In thirty-three years, you will have cut down 3,300 acre-years of growth. You will have replaced it with 1680 acre-years of growth. Not even counting the fact that you've destroyed 33 acres of quality second-growth forest and replaced it with 99 acres of farmed forest.
So when you hear "we plant three for every one we cut," just bear in mind that the person saying this to you is definitely trying to deceive you. There is no other possible motivation for that statement, because what they cut is in no way comparable to what they put in its place. They are mining the forest, and leaving you with the tailings.
If they were planting real second-growth forest, and if they were going to be around for a hundred years, then we could talk about environmental improvements, but that's not at all what this guy is talking about. Or if they were planting barren fields and harvesting the trees years later when they'd grown enough, you could say that they'd planted a crop and harvested it. But that's not what they said, and it's not even close to what they're doing.
Five years ago? Are you kidding? It takes trees more like 40 years to grow to anything resembling maturity, and if you see a tree that looks old, it _is_ old--that gnarled old maple tree out in front that they had to cut down was at least 100 years old, and probably more like 200. In five years you have a sapling, not a tree.
You kind of missed his point. Once an algorithm has been worked out, it's usually pretty easy to see how it works, or at least comparatively easy. So the first producer pays for the innovation, and everyone benefits.
This is a real problem. However, when you solve it with a government-sponsored monopoly on your discovery, it creates a host of new problems. And there are other ways to solve this problem that don't create that same host of problems. After all, as a previous poster pointed out, Einstein managed to figure a lot of cool stuff out, without having the ability to patent it. Who paid for that work? Why did he do it? Not because he was expecting to get rich, clearly.
Patents are a government-granted monopoly. To be exact, they are actually the complete anti-thesis of capitalism.
Not exactly. They are the exact antithesis of a free market. They are a form of market regulation. But they are an example of capitalism, since capitalism is the system of owning things, and exchanges based on that ownership. Increasing the scope of things one may own, therefore, increases the scope of capitalism.
It's unfortunate that it's so common to conflate "free market" and "capitalism." The two are related in a paradoxical way. A free market isn't regulated, but no such market can exist, since you can't own things without some kind of legal structure that says that you own the thing. Without that structure, at best you can possess a thing; you can't own it. And of course in that scenario patent and copyright can't exist--you can only have in your possession things that are excludable and rivalrous, but you can own anything the law says you own.
So in a free market, there are actually very few things you can exchange, and therefore very little capital.
What I don't get about this is that not only does the article imply that people still use VCRs, which seems implausible, but that those same people also have cable, which is absurd. Don't comcast subscribers have high speed internet? Why not just watch this stuff at your convenience on Hulu, and stop paying those remarkably high cable TV bills for, mostly, a ton of crap you never watch?
Costs are quite high in places where there is no well-regulated market. Regulation is what allows us to make money. Without it, you get guys with guns entirely in control. In the other direction, when regulations exist and are enforced arbitrarily, you get corruption. There's a sweet spot in the middle. It's just as important for people to argue in favor of good regulations as it is for people to argue against bad ones, and it's as important to argue against regulation as it is to argue against corruption. The idea that some set of laws will produce a perfectly-running economic engine is naive--what keeps the economic engine ticking is us doing our best to understand what's working and what's broken about it, fixing what's broken, and encouraging what's working.
So when you come in with the idea that any regulation is bad, you're not doing that. When you come in with the idea that all regulation is good, you're also not doing that. When you come in and study the situation, and think about it critically, and debate it open-mindedly with people who don't agree with you, that's when you're doing your part to make it all work.
This is why people should be allowed to vote on discretionary budget items. What a Christian is saying when they oppose embryonic stem-cell research is, "I think that this is immoral, and I do not want my tax money to be spent on it." I feel the same way about war, and would really like to be able to say to the government, "you may not spend my money killing people."
Others feel that war, or embryonic stem cell research, or whatever, are good things and would vote to spend their money that way. But because right now all the money comes out of the same pot, and nobody gets to say "don't spend it this way," anybody who is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, or war, has to demand that the research, or the fighting, simply not be done at all.
It's not that their wishes trump yours. It's that because it all comes out of one pool, the decision has to be all or nothing.
Actually, I think these studies are useful for the opposite reason: they force us to really think about our convictions, and not base our convictions on flimsy assertions by third parties about things we have not ourselves experienced. Suppose someone tells you they remember their previous life. Suppose someone else tells you they met God during a near-death experience. Do you have any basis at all for trusting one assertion over the other? *That* is why this research is interesting--if it demonstrates that near-death experiences are simply physiological phenomena, then maybe people will look deeper for the truth, and not accept the superficial comforts that these stories provide. Of course, for people who aren't inclined to do that, if you take away the only story that gives them comfort, and leave them with nothing to take its place, are you really doing them a favor?
Word. The Buddhists in India actually had a big debate with a certain Hindu sect back around the sixth century A.D. about the question of whether the mind continues after death. Members of this particular sect claimed that there were no future lives. They further claimed (and the Buddhists agreed) that it was impossible to develop great compassion in a single lifetime. This is a big deal to Buddhists, because you have to develop great compassion to reach enlightenment. The proofs of future lives that follow in this debate are interesting, and as far as I know pretty much the only serious debate in the historical record about whether or not there are future lives. However, ultimately these proofs depend on accepting as axiomatic certain things which I think would be uncomfortable for a typical modern scientist, so ultimately they are more interesting as a way of understanding the thinking that leads to a belief in future lives than they are useful as falsifiable hypotheses.
Huh, I thought the Domesday Book was better. But yeah, Passages wasn't bad. Willis points out one of the key problems with this kind of research, though--there's actually no reason at all to assume that the "near-death" experiences people report has anything to do with dying. You can't ask someone who has actually died what it was like, because they are dead. If they've gone to heaven, or to a new body, or just vanished like the data on your hard drive after a head crash, there's no way to definitively prove it.
The research is still interesting, don't get me wrong. But I'm not convinced it's going to make anyone's life better--in a way, being able to be aware that we are dying without being afraid of it can be a positive thing, however it's accomplished. It's a lot more constructive than the usual reaction to death, which is to pretend it's something that happens to other people, and then to live our own lives as if we have unlimited time to waste.
If you live in the house, and you're paying the ISP bill, then they will argue that you should be able to say who you think might have pirated the movie if it wasn't you. You could argue that because you had an open WiFi, you have no way of knowing, but that hasn't been a winning strategy so far. Furthermore, civil suits don't require proof beyond a shadow of doubt - they just require a preponderance of evidence. So if they can say that it looks pretty clearly like it was you, and you can't really refute that, you're at the mercy of the jury. And juries in these cases haven't been merciful.
What you are saying is that you don't agree with what the law says. I don't either. But the way to fix that is to fix the law, not to argue with trolls who think copying is the same thing as stealing.
The IETF slides said out of 600m customers, 470k would lose connectivity. You're right - that's about.07%. I did the math in my head wrong. And in case you think I'm defending this, I'm not--IMHO, those.07% should fix their damned routers. But it's not my decision, and the people whose decision it is have said that they would rather completely hose IPv6 connectivity to them for all customers of any ISP that has broken customers than risk breaking.07% of their customers.
Expect this story to change as IPv6 takes over. If this doesn't prevent it from taking over.
It's the ISPs who are *trying* to roll out IPv6 connectivity who care about the whitelists. Other ISPs are indifferent, because their customers won't be affected.
This isn't strictly true, although it's mostly true. The reason it's not entirely true is that if you have a lot of users of a single IP address, you start to run out of ports. The port space is only 64k, and there are a lot of applications that use multiple ports. Facebook and google maps are pretty notorious, for instance. So if it's just you behind the NAT, it's no problem, but if you try to cram 100 users behind a NAT, that's only 64 ports per user, and at that point you start to see problems.
Right now most U.S. ISP users don't see this problem, but some do, and there are other places in the world where IPv4 addresses are scarcer; these places are seeing problems as well.
You personally are most likely to have seen this problem because a lot of NAT devices have limited memory, and follow fairly aggressive heuristics to purge disused ports. So if you have an ssh connection open and idle, a lot of NATs will just forget about it after a fairly short period of time. The way you experience this is that your ssh connection gets inexplicably dropped. It wasn't the host on the other end: it was your NAT.
If it's got enough computes and actually does what he wants, that's good advice. It's got no moving parts, so dust getting inside it is probably okay, although you'll have to be careful of the screen - I'd use screen protectors religiously, and only change them when you're in a steamy room after showering (I know that sounds weird, but it really does help). The good thing about this solution is that you can keep a couple of keyboards around so that when one of them gets too crapped up to use, you can swap in another one. You can always repair the crapped-up one in your copious free time, but it's good to have spares.
On a similar note, if you need more power, it sounds like HP is coming out with a tablet soon. It would have the same advantages, although you'd probably want to order it with an SSD rather than a spinning hard drive. It would also run windows, so if you're locked in to that solution it might be a better choice for you.
Having said that, I've been working with Macs in a desert environment for a long time, and the worst that's ever happened to me is that the keyboard got squeaky after a while. I don't know if that's because the mac keyboard is better, or I'm better at protecting it, or we don't have as much airborne dust as you do. Probably the latter, in which case my advice might not help that much.
You might want to reconsider that. My wife and I use Yelp on the iPhone as one of our primary sources of information on how to get stuff we need when we're on the road. If you're not in Yelp, you're probably missing a lot of walk-in opportunities. If you're doing well on local advertising and reputation, great, but if you'd like to have more new customers, Yelp is actually a good way to make it happen.
The problem with services like Yelp is getting good information out of them--unfortunately, the main motivation people have for writing reviews on the web is that they are pissed off, and so that tends to work against any place that ever has a pissed off customer, which is pretty much every place. So we tend to look for patterns in the bad reviews to see what they tell us, and also patterns in the good reviews to make sure they're not fake. It's worked out pretty well for us.
Comcast is doing an IPv6 trial right now. Freenet in France has had IPv6 running using 6RD for quite a long time now. You can get IPv6 tunnels from Hurricane Internet and Sixxs. If you are interested in IPv6, go start using it. Don't just sit there on your (no doubt svelte) ass!:')
I want an IPv6-only connection. I want one that works. Because then I can have a global IP address that's reachable, and then I can do peer-to-peer protocols. This is much better than IPv4, where mostly my devices are behind a NAT, and peer-to-peer requires clever device-specific hacks to punch holes in the NAT. This reduces reliability, and in a lot of cases makes simple protocols that ought to work fail. I can't do iChat video with my dad because he's on the far side of two layers of ISP-inflicted NATting. And no, he can't change providers - what they have now is orders of magnitude better than what they had before my mom and several other members of the selectboard in her small town organized a local wireless ISP using an antenna at the top of a local mountain. If they had IPv6 that worked, it would be *much* better.
The problem is that right now IPv6-only connections don't work, because not enough stuff on the network is reachable. That's changing, and this is part of the change. At the recent IETF, there was a v6-only network with a 6to4 NAT, and it worked pretty well, although it turned up a few bugs in a certain vendor's IPv6 stack.
Actually it's not the ISPs they're referring to who have their heads in their asses. Indeed, I don't think anybody has their heads in their asses on this one--each side of the discussion has legitimate points. From the perspective of IPv6 deployment, the whitelists suck, because mostly they prevent people who are trying to use IPv6 from using it--you have to be on the whitelist before you can get AAAA records from these online services. It's very hard to get on the whitelist, and very easy to get knocked off of it.
ISPs who are deploying IPv6 want to just get the AAAA records, and not have to jump through hoops to get on a whitelist. But the providers worry about people who have crappy home gateways that fall over and die when they get AAAA records, and also about people who have devices on their networks advertising IPv6 connectivity, when they don't actually have it. One presentation in that meeting set the number at about.8% of users, which they felt was too many.
Personally, I think they should just turn on the AAAA records and let the customers who have broken routers see that their routers are broken and fix them. But it's a rough tradeoff--IPv6 has at times gotten a bad rep for being the cause of network problems, and so network no-nothings tend to tell you "IPv6 is the problem" when in fact it's bad code on embedded devices that's the problem. Since disabling IPv6 "fixes" it, IPv6 gets the blame. That's the rationale for the whitelists, and as much as I hate them, I can't say that this rationale is completely wrong.
You're kidding, right? Those are the details that an identity thief needs to impersonate you. Social engineering is a well-understood art, and the people you do it to are still living in the 20th century and don't realize that everybody's birthdays and relationships are effectively public knowledge, so if you can give them that information about a person you want to impersonate, they will believe that you are that person and then give you the information you need to get the other details.
Some institutions are starting to wise up to this, but it's hard to know which institutions you do business with are wise to this, and most people don't check, even if they are among the very small percentage of people who realize they should. Do you know what your bank's information protection policy is, what an employee has to do to get fired for violating it, and whether or not that policy is actually enforced?
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you harvest an acre of hundred-year-old trees, and you plant three acres of trees. Next year, you harvest a second acre of hundred-year-old trees, and plant three more. In thirty-three years, you will have cut down 3,300 acre-years of growth. You will have replaced it with 1680 acre-years of growth. Not even counting the fact that you've destroyed 33 acres of quality second-growth forest and replaced it with 99 acres of farmed forest.
So when you hear "we plant three for every one we cut," just bear in mind that the person saying this to you is definitely trying to deceive you. There is no other possible motivation for that statement, because what they cut is in no way comparable to what they put in its place. They are mining the forest, and leaving you with the tailings.
If they were planting real second-growth forest, and if they were going to be around for a hundred years, then we could talk about environmental improvements, but that's not at all what this guy is talking about. Or if they were planting barren fields and harvesting the trees years later when they'd grown enough, you could say that they'd planted a crop and harvested it. But that's not what they said, and it's not even close to what they're doing.
Five years ago? Are you kidding? It takes trees more like 40 years to grow to anything resembling maturity, and if you see a tree that looks old, it _is_ old--that gnarled old maple tree out in front that they had to cut down was at least 100 years old, and probably more like 200. In five years you have a sapling, not a tree.
You kind of missed his point. Once an algorithm has been worked out, it's usually pretty easy to see how it works, or at least comparatively easy. So the first producer pays for the innovation, and everyone benefits.
This is a real problem. However, when you solve it with a government-sponsored monopoly on your discovery, it creates a host of new problems. And there are other ways to solve this problem that don't create that same host of problems. After all, as a previous poster pointed out, Einstein managed to figure a lot of cool stuff out, without having the ability to patent it. Who paid for that work? Why did he do it? Not because he was expecting to get rich, clearly.
Not exactly. They are the exact antithesis of a free market. They are a form of market regulation. But they are an example of capitalism, since capitalism is the system of owning things, and exchanges based on that ownership. Increasing the scope of things one may own, therefore, increases the scope of capitalism.
It's unfortunate that it's so common to conflate "free market" and "capitalism." The two are related in a paradoxical way. A free market isn't regulated, but no such market can exist, since you can't own things without some kind of legal structure that says that you own the thing. Without that structure, at best you can possess a thing; you can't own it. And of course in that scenario patent and copyright can't exist--you can only have in your possession things that are excludable and rivalrous, but you can own anything the law says you own.
So in a free market, there are actually very few things you can exchange, and therefore very little capital.
What I don't get about this is that not only does the article imply that people still use VCRs, which seems implausible, but that those same people also have cable, which is absurd. Don't comcast subscribers have high speed internet? Why not just watch this stuff at your convenience on Hulu, and stop paying those remarkably high cable TV bills for, mostly, a ton of crap you never watch?
Costs are quite high in places where there is no well-regulated market. Regulation is what allows us to make money. Without it, you get guys with guns entirely in control. In the other direction, when regulations exist and are enforced arbitrarily, you get corruption. There's a sweet spot in the middle. It's just as important for people to argue in favor of good regulations as it is for people to argue against bad ones, and it's as important to argue against regulation as it is to argue against corruption. The idea that some set of laws will produce a perfectly-running economic engine is naive--what keeps the economic engine ticking is us doing our best to understand what's working and what's broken about it, fixing what's broken, and encouraging what's working.
So when you come in with the idea that any regulation is bad, you're not doing that. When you come in with the idea that all regulation is good, you're also not doing that. When you come in and study the situation, and think about it critically, and debate it open-mindedly with people who don't agree with you, that's when you're doing your part to make it all work.
Trust, but verify.
This is why people should be allowed to vote on discretionary budget items. What a Christian is saying when they oppose embryonic stem-cell research is, "I think that this is immoral, and I do not want my tax money to be spent on it." I feel the same way about war, and would really like to be able to say to the government, "you may not spend my money killing people."
Others feel that war, or embryonic stem cell research, or whatever, are good things and would vote to spend their money that way. But because right now all the money comes out of the same pot, and nobody gets to say "don't spend it this way," anybody who is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, or war, has to demand that the research, or the fighting, simply not be done at all.
It's not that their wishes trump yours. It's that because it all comes out of one pool, the decision has to be all or nothing.
Actually, I think these studies are useful for the opposite reason: they force us to really think about our convictions, and not base our convictions on flimsy assertions by third parties about things we have not ourselves experienced. Suppose someone tells you they remember their previous life. Suppose someone else tells you they met God during a near-death experience. Do you have any basis at all for trusting one assertion over the other? *That* is why this research is interesting--if it demonstrates that near-death experiences are simply physiological phenomena, then maybe people will look deeper for the truth, and not accept the superficial comforts that these stories provide. Of course, for people who aren't inclined to do that, if you take away the only story that gives them comfort, and leave them with nothing to take its place, are you really doing them a favor?
Word. The Buddhists in India actually had a big debate with a certain Hindu sect back around the sixth century A.D. about the question of whether the mind continues after death. Members of this particular sect claimed that there were no future lives. They further claimed (and the Buddhists agreed) that it was impossible to develop great compassion in a single lifetime. This is a big deal to Buddhists, because you have to develop great compassion to reach enlightenment. The proofs of future lives that follow in this debate are interesting, and as far as I know pretty much the only serious debate in the historical record about whether or not there are future lives. However, ultimately these proofs depend on accepting as axiomatic certain things which I think would be uncomfortable for a typical modern scientist, so ultimately they are more interesting as a way of understanding the thinking that leads to a belief in future lives than they are useful as falsifiable hypotheses.
Huh, I thought the Domesday Book was better. But yeah, Passages wasn't bad. Willis points out one of the key problems with this kind of research, though--there's actually no reason at all to assume that the "near-death" experiences people report has anything to do with dying. You can't ask someone who has actually died what it was like, because they are dead. If they've gone to heaven, or to a new body, or just vanished like the data on your hard drive after a head crash, there's no way to definitively prove it.
The research is still interesting, don't get me wrong. But I'm not convinced it's going to make anyone's life better--in a way, being able to be aware that we are dying without being afraid of it can be a positive thing, however it's accomplished. It's a lot more constructive than the usual reaction to death, which is to pretend it's something that happens to other people, and then to live our own lives as if we have unlimited time to waste.
If you live in the house, and you're paying the ISP bill, then they will argue that you should be able to say who you think might have pirated the movie if it wasn't you. You could argue that because you had an open WiFi, you have no way of knowing, but that hasn't been a winning strategy so far. Furthermore, civil suits don't require proof beyond a shadow of doubt - they just require a preponderance of evidence. So if they can say that it looks pretty clearly like it was you, and you can't really refute that, you're at the mercy of the jury. And juries in these cases haven't been merciful.
Actually, if you live in the U.S., you've committed a felony. I'm not saying that's right, but that's what the law says.
What you are saying is that you don't agree with what the law says. I don't either. But the way to fix that is to fix the law, not to argue with trolls who think copying is the same thing as stealing.
The IETF slides said out of 600m customers, 470k would lose connectivity. You're right - that's about .07%. I did the math in my head wrong. And in case you think I'm defending this, I'm not--IMHO, those .07% should fix their damned routers. But it's not my decision, and the people whose decision it is have said that they would rather completely hose IPv6 connectivity to them for all customers of any ISP that has broken customers than risk breaking .07% of their customers.
Expect this story to change as IPv6 takes over. If this doesn't prevent it from taking over.
It's the ISPs who are *trying* to roll out IPv6 connectivity who care about the whitelists. Other ISPs are indifferent, because their customers won't be affected.
This isn't strictly true, although it's mostly true. The reason it's not entirely true is that if you have a lot of users of a single IP address, you start to run out of ports. The port space is only 64k, and there are a lot of applications that use multiple ports. Facebook and google maps are pretty notorious, for instance. So if it's just you behind the NAT, it's no problem, but if you try to cram 100 users behind a NAT, that's only 64 ports per user, and at that point you start to see problems.
Right now most U.S. ISP users don't see this problem, but some do, and there are other places in the world where IPv4 addresses are scarcer; these places are seeing problems as well.
You personally are most likely to have seen this problem because a lot of NAT devices have limited memory, and follow fairly aggressive heuristics to purge disused ports. So if you have an ssh connection open and idle, a lot of NATs will just forget about it after a fairly short period of time. The way you experience this is that your ssh connection gets inexplicably dropped. It wasn't the host on the other end: it was your NAT.
If it's got enough computes and actually does what he wants, that's good advice. It's got no moving parts, so dust getting inside it is probably okay, although you'll have to be careful of the screen - I'd use screen protectors religiously, and only change them when you're in a steamy room after showering (I know that sounds weird, but it really does help). The good thing about this solution is that you can keep a couple of keyboards around so that when one of them gets too crapped up to use, you can swap in another one. You can always repair the crapped-up one in your copious free time, but it's good to have spares.
On a similar note, if you need more power, it sounds like HP is coming out with a tablet soon. It would have the same advantages, although you'd probably want to order it with an SSD rather than a spinning hard drive. It would also run windows, so if you're locked in to that solution it might be a better choice for you.
Having said that, I've been working with Macs in a desert environment for a long time, and the worst that's ever happened to me is that the keyboard got squeaky after a while. I don't know if that's because the mac keyboard is better, or I'm better at protecting it, or we don't have as much airborne dust as you do. Probably the latter, in which case my advice might not help that much.
You might want to reconsider that. My wife and I use Yelp on the iPhone as one of our primary sources of information on how to get stuff we need when we're on the road. If you're not in Yelp, you're probably missing a lot of walk-in opportunities. If you're doing well on local advertising and reputation, great, but if you'd like to have more new customers, Yelp is actually a good way to make it happen.
The problem with services like Yelp is getting good information out of them--unfortunately, the main motivation people have for writing reviews on the web is that they are pissed off, and so that tends to work against any place that ever has a pissed off customer, which is pretty much every place. So we tend to look for patterns in the bad reviews to see what they tell us, and also patterns in the good reviews to make sure they're not fake. It's worked out pretty well for us.
Comcast is doing an IPv6 trial right now. Freenet in France has had IPv6 running using 6RD for quite a long time now. You can get IPv6 tunnels from Hurricane Internet and Sixxs. If you are interested in IPv6, go start using it. Don't just sit there on your (no doubt svelte) ass! :')
I want an IPv6-only connection. I want one that works. Because then I can have a global IP address that's reachable, and then I can do peer-to-peer protocols. This is much better than IPv4, where mostly my devices are behind a NAT, and peer-to-peer requires clever device-specific hacks to punch holes in the NAT. This reduces reliability, and in a lot of cases makes simple protocols that ought to work fail. I can't do iChat video with my dad because he's on the far side of two layers of ISP-inflicted NATting. And no, he can't change providers - what they have now is orders of magnitude better than what they had before my mom and several other members of the selectboard in her small town organized a local wireless ISP using an antenna at the top of a local mountain. If they had IPv6 that worked, it would be *much* better.
The problem is that right now IPv6-only connections don't work, because not enough stuff on the network is reachable. That's changing, and this is part of the change. At the recent IETF, there was a v6-only network with a 6to4 NAT, and it worked pretty well, although it turned up a few bugs in a certain vendor's IPv6 stack.
Yes, a cookie that says you get your connectivity through an ISP that's on the whitelist. Ooh, scary! :')
Actually it's not the ISPs they're referring to who have their heads in their asses. Indeed, I don't think anybody has their heads in their asses on this one--each side of the discussion has legitimate points. From the perspective of IPv6 deployment, the whitelists suck, because mostly they prevent people who are trying to use IPv6 from using it--you have to be on the whitelist before you can get AAAA records from these online services. It's very hard to get on the whitelist, and very easy to get knocked off of it.
ISPs who are deploying IPv6 want to just get the AAAA records, and not have to jump through hoops to get on a whitelist. But the providers worry about people who have crappy home gateways that fall over and die when they get AAAA records, and also about people who have devices on their networks advertising IPv6 connectivity, when they don't actually have it. One presentation in that meeting set the number at about .8% of users, which they felt was too many.
Personally, I think they should just turn on the AAAA records and let the customers who have broken routers see that their routers are broken and fix them. But it's a rough tradeoff--IPv6 has at times gotten a bad rep for being the cause of network problems, and so network no-nothings tend to tell you "IPv6 is the problem" when in fact it's bad code on embedded devices that's the problem. Since disabling IPv6 "fixes" it, IPv6 gets the blame. That's the rationale for the whitelists, and as much as I hate them, I can't say that this rationale is completely wrong.
You're kidding, right? Those are the details that an identity thief needs to impersonate you. Social engineering is a well-understood art, and the people you do it to are still living in the 20th century and don't realize that everybody's birthdays and relationships are effectively public knowledge, so if you can give them that information about a person you want to impersonate, they will believe that you are that person and then give you the information you need to get the other details.
Some institutions are starting to wise up to this, but it's hard to know which institutions you do business with are wise to this, and most people don't check, even if they are among the very small percentage of people who realize they should. Do you know what your bank's information protection policy is, what an employee has to do to get fired for violating it, and whether or not that policy is actually enforced?
do you vote for them, I meant to say. Sigh.