When I engage in such shenanigans, I don't think of it as denial of my age. I look at it as an attempt to correct my age. I understand that reality thinks I'm getting older, but reality needs a reality-check.
What would you do if someone else started giving out your email address?
That happens to everyone, dozens of times. That's why so much spam is sent to everyone: your email address is passed around on lists.
The only difference is that your case is (probably) less nefarious. It's being done accidentally.
Nevertheless, one easy solution is to treat it as the mundane, typical every-day case: just ignore or filter out the unwanted replies. If the other person is doing it as a mistake, they'll probably eventually stop doing it, after noticing that all the stuff they sign up for, they never get the click-this-to-finish-your-registration emails.
You make a case for why the first amendment is a bad idea and ought to be repealed. I understand. Gun control advocates make a pretty good case for why the right to bear arms should be infringed. I'm sure people in law ernforcement can give some excellent reasons why the 4-6 amendments really ought to go, as they're making their jobs harder and you less safe.
For every amendment in the Bill of Rights, I bet you can make some pretty damn good arguments for why we would be better off without that amendment limiting the power of government. Think of the tax money we're wasting on military bases when we could just force homeowners to quarter soldiers.
Yet, for whatever reason, these damn amendments, which limit the power of our government (WTF, how can that possibly be a good idea if you're trying to make a good government), are still on the books! Why haven't we repealed the Bill of Rights yet? Wouldn't it be easier and more efficient, if we could eliminate all these things which waste the courts' time? Wouldn't this case have been handled much more quickly, if the appeals could have just explained, "The government can do anything it wants, so therefore of course this law is legal"?
All I can think of, is that some weirdos in the past placed these seemingly-arbitrary limits on the powers of government, because they had a totally different idea of what makes sense. Were they trying to optimize some other value? Could it be that they thought there might be more important things than worrying about whether or not a suspected criminal might find out that someone suspects? I can't imagine what.
It's all so mysterious! As Yangs, I think we ought to just stick to memorizing our holy words, and get rid of all these silly constraints on effective governance.
Now we just need Google to update the Chrome extension policy...
No.
If the software in question ran outside of your browser, you would have immediately seen how silly this whole situation is, and how inadequate your proposed change is. So, ask yourself: what if the new version of a thing had adware, but that this was Python, or Thunar, or mpv or Apache or...
We are fundamentally mis-handling how we get browser extensions. Google should have no say and no power in this, unless people just happen to think they are great repository maintainers.
We should be getting browser extensions from Debian or someone like that.
I had the impression that in TFA, the disputed documents were printed papers themselves, not files; their claimed physical age is what was used to give them an air of authenticity. Perhaps not?
I have an ASCII file that was created back when I was in grad school. I open it in my favorite text editor and issue a print command. The default font chosen by the text editor did not exist back when I was in grad school. Does it mean the text file did not exist then?
It means that the printout you hand over, wasn't really printed back then. You tell someone "ho ho ho, behold this physical piece of paper that I printed in 1989 on a HP Laserjet II!" You get a rusty key from somewhere, and then pull (with a stylish flourish) a dusty cloth off of an ancient filing cabinet. "How about that, the key still fits after all this time." You open the filing cabinet and it creaks, as though with great age. "Let's see, where would my old document be? Nope, this is the Declaration of Independence. Nope, this is the original handwritten manuscript of 'Macbeth.' Ah, here it is: METALLICA.TXT in the top line, and a 1989 date next to it, and you know a timestamp is very hard to fake! This paper has been lurking unseen in my filing cabinet all this time, waiting to once again be greeted by the harsh florescent lights of the 1980s but is now strangely bathed in LEDs, the likes of which people back then, could not imagine. Feel the history! But first, put on these latex gloves because there is no telling what will happen to this ancient paper after having been in storage for so long." But they call you on it, if they have a trained eye.
They probably looked at the paper with great scepticism, due to your strange speech beforehand and the overdoing of theatrics. Who says "behold?" And am I really supposed to believe that since the filing cabinet is old, it must be dusty even though everything else in the room has been cleaned at least once since 2013? You should introduce documents more casually in my stories than you did in that one. No wonder you got caught!
[Just imagine] If half the people of China said something like 'I've had enough of this b.s.!' and started burning down police stations and stuff. A bloody revolution to be sure, but what if China became the new leader of the free world? What if democracy, at least by the standards of the supposedly freest nation currently in the world, was in place in China?
And if you feared that happening, what would you do about it? Today's idea: install Great Firewall to control most peoples' media, and by extension, their thoughts.
I thought VPN is encrypted pretty much by default already, making it hard to detect.
You meant: making it easier to detect, right?
For all the plaintext connections, you can examine them and rule them out. (Countermeasure: hide your steganographic VPN here, so it gets ruled out. Downside: low bandwidth.)
Then all the remaining connections, you can't look at the contents but you can see if they happen to just keep talking to this one possible-VPN-endpoint all the time. Ah, this guy seems sshed to his linode all the time, constantly trafficking? That's probably a VPN. At this point you can bring in the $5 wrench to confirm/disprove the hypothesis.
Did the users type in their user name and password when they clicked the like button?
Don't be absurd; they didn't do anything so relatively anonymous as merely typing their name and password and DoB and SSN and uploading their scanned retina image. The user sent a unique key that Facebook had offered them earlier, and that the user stored on their computer until the time came to send it back to Facebook along with their favorite URLs.
And what's this nonsense about clicking the like button? The user sent this information to Facebook in order to request that the like button be displayed!
I share your distaste for my government doing this.
BUT I FUCKING LOVESOMEONE ELSE'S GOVERNMENT DOING THIS!!
The market "votes" on cheap-vs-good the same way that Americans vote for who should be president: most people lose and don't get what they want. The nice thing about Europe doing this, is that maybe products will start to exist to be imported, so that Americans can start to vote for their favorite. And Europeans who vote for cheapness over repairability can import American (Chinese) stuff too.
And people don't even need to "vote party line." Maybe my next Widget Type A might come from Europe (because I really like my Type A widgets to last) whereas I still buy the American style Widget Type B (because the next Type B widget is going to blow away this generation's crap). As far as I'm concerned, everyone wins.
My understanding is that the great hope behind the minimum wage, is that labor isn't a particularly large fraction of a business' expenses. There are other expenses besides labor, so if you raise the cost of labor by n%, you're raising the total cost of a widget or service by less than n%.
This viewpoint is endangered, though, if you think that the cost of everything is 100% someone's time, even if a lot of it is indirect (e.g. you're paying miners in your electricity bill, your insurance payments contains the overhead of the insurance business which hires people to figure stuff out, etc). Everything is made out of humans' time. But even so, I guess a minimum wage advocate would say that some of these jobs already pay more than min wage, so whatever expenses flow from these jobs don't increase. (e.g. your insurance payments don't go up, because the insurance adjustors' salaries don't go up, because they were making more than minimum.)
People in higher-paying jobs should see their expenses go up, but can sit and take it without having to ask for a raise. Presumably their lowered prosperity is counter-balanced by a lower crime rate or other benefits of a safety net.
Ummm... I logged out of Facebook. How is that not an expectation of privacy?
Because you (well, your agent: your computer) kept going to the extra trouble to send additional data to Facebook, even after you logged out. If you had expected privacy there is no way you would have kept sending them data. Ergo, you didn't expect privacy.
I can tell the you're going to make a very critical marketing decision based on whatever answer some random Internet person gives you, so good luck!
I hope you get your answer, and that it's accurate! If you are thinking of making a plastic iPhone holder or an app that tells you whether reddit is up or down at the moment, and there is a 402 million person market for it, your development expense may be justified, but if there are only 216 million possible customers, you're never going to make back your investment. This is important. Godspeed on finding out this number-of-users stat!
I would argue that finding a way to reduce the payroll tax as such without reducing the effectiveness of government services rendered is a form of technical progress
So you're saying that if you can eliminate an expense (tax) for free (i.e. without it being a tradeoff that comes with a downside) then it's all upside. I don't think any person would argue against you on that.
I worked out how to improve our social security structure and remediate many of the problems with modern welfare with a sharp reduction in individual retained taxes, a 0.9% marginal reduction in payroll taxes, and a 2.5% marginal reduction in business income (profits) taxes. Tax cuts across the board, while providing broad coverage for the welfare and security of the American people in the lowest and middle classes.
Wow, cool!!
Hey, by the way, were you able to do it while also creating the above huge and extremely difficult condition?
It seems that if we're going to play businessman and economist, it might be more challenging and interesting to talk about the harder problems, instead of the absurdly easy ones, such a proving "a good thing without a bad thing is a net good thing." Still, I suppose it's possible you have presented the proof in a more modern and accessible way, which people might prefer over the ancient Greeks' coverage of the same subject.
Your penultimate paragraph is a lot more interesting (oh, you tease, you!!) than the rest of the post that you wrote about fundamentals of addition and subtraction. It looks like you suddenly switched topics, but I guess the whole point is that you're trying to hint that you were able to provide the no-downsides condition! You solved one of the hardest government policy problems of the modern world? I'd think a polymath would want to expand on that, even if just for the bragging rights.
It's time to stop teasing. Indulge yourself, and let Slashdot be the forum in which you seize your place in the history books. Go on!
You could simply unclick the checkbox in settings that enables this feature
The people who use the convenience of a fully-scripted browser to trick adservers into thinking humans clicked the ads, are probably not going to opt to forego that convenience.
To use an absurdly extreme example, you're saying, "bank robber, you could simply deposit money into the bank and then make normal withdrawals instead of robbing." You should expect most bank robbers to decline your suggestion, and I think the people who commit click-fraud will be similarly uninterested in your "don't do that" advice.
Tell me more. I can think of some things, and yet when I imagine these data center computers (anyone else get it yet? I don't work in a data center!) I mentally picture most of them as having nothing plugged into their PCI-e slots.
Ok, I picture one that has a bunch of SAS adapters plugged into there, and runs a fuckton of disks or SSDs. But then the others just use those disks over the network or storage network.
I maybe picture one that has some amazingly fancy network adapter in it.. and a bunch of others on that network, which don't have that fancy adapter.
I maybe picture a highly specialized rack, used by some particular company, which might all have GPUs in there. And who maybe comprises 1% of the data center computer market.
After that my imagination runs out of steam, unless it's the most obvious thing (but somehow this just doesn't sound right, maybe that's my mistake): they're all using their own M.2 SSDs. I guess I can believe that. Is that it?
That's my question: what are data centers doing with all that PCI-e? What's the situation, what's the common application, where you'd walk into a data center and see most of the computers using their PCI-e, and the owner or user is really happy that the new generation has more lanes than the older one?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying I don't know, and it sounds to me like something that wouldn't happen, unless it's SSD. Hmm. It's for hooking up SSDs, isn't it?
English accents are for villains and comedians. Oliver fits with that, and if the comedy thing doesn't work out, America will accept him trying a second career, of evil.
they're aimed at the incredibly powerful data center market... Each CPU will also offer 128 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 support -- enough to connect up to six GPUs at x16 each with room left over for I/O support.
Seriously, I just don't know: why would a product targeting data centers, make a big deal about connecting GPUs? Are a lot of them really doing that, or are they using the great I/O bandwidth for something else (what?) or does this usually go greatly underused?
(Yes, I realize there are applications for GPUs (other than rnedering graphics, of course!) but I wouldn't think it'd be a significant fraction of the data center market. How wrong am I?)
And the neat thing about Mars, is that whatever people go there, will decide to not allow political corruption. Because they'll be too cool for that sort of thing.
If you're already physically within US jurisdiction, then throwing a VPN into the mix doesn't make your situation any worse (except for stuff like speed and cost).
Sure, there will be coffee machines that are connected to the internet you can buy, but there will be a ton of people that don't want them and want a normal coffee machine.
Yes, but those people won't necessarily buy what they want, especially if the sticker price isn't any different (and computers are dirt cheap). They currently buy internet-connected TVs, you know. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg on people making sacrifices and tradeoffs. People do it all the time.)
Slashdot Mirror
When I engage in such shenanigans, I don't think of it as denial of my age. I look at it as an attempt to correct my age. I understand that reality thinks I'm getting older, but reality needs a reality-check.
That happens to everyone, dozens of times. That's why so much spam is sent to everyone: your email address is passed around on lists.
The only difference is that your case is (probably) less nefarious. It's being done accidentally.
Nevertheless, one easy solution is to treat it as the mundane, typical every-day case: just ignore or filter out the unwanted replies. If the other person is doing it as a mistake, they'll probably eventually stop doing it, after noticing that all the stuff they sign up for, they never get the click-this-to-finish-your-registration emails.
You make a case for why the first amendment is a bad idea and ought to be repealed. I understand. Gun control advocates make a pretty good case for why the right to bear arms should be infringed. I'm sure people in law ernforcement can give some excellent reasons why the 4-6 amendments really ought to go, as they're making their jobs harder and you less safe.
For every amendment in the Bill of Rights, I bet you can make some pretty damn good arguments for why we would be better off without that amendment limiting the power of government. Think of the tax money we're wasting on military bases when we could just force homeowners to quarter soldiers.
Yet, for whatever reason, these damn amendments, which limit the power of our government (WTF, how can that possibly be a good idea if you're trying to make a good government), are still on the books! Why haven't we repealed the Bill of Rights yet? Wouldn't it be easier and more efficient, if we could eliminate all these things which waste the courts' time? Wouldn't this case have been handled much more quickly, if the appeals could have just explained, "The government can do anything it wants, so therefore of course this law is legal"?
All I can think of, is that some weirdos in the past placed these seemingly-arbitrary limits on the powers of government, because they had a totally different idea of what makes sense. Were they trying to optimize some other value? Could it be that they thought there might be more important things than worrying about whether or not a suspected criminal might find out that someone suspects? I can't imagine what.
It's all so mysterious! As Yangs, I think we ought to just stick to memorizing our holy words, and get rid of all these silly constraints on effective governance.
No.
If the software in question ran outside of your browser, you would have immediately seen how silly this whole situation is, and how inadequate your proposed change is. So, ask yourself: what if the new version of a thing had adware, but that this was Python, or Thunar, or mpv or Apache or ...
We are fundamentally mis-handling how we get browser extensions. Google should have no say and no power in this, unless people just happen to think they are great repository maintainers.
We should be getting browser extensions from Debian or someone like that.
Whoever writes the EME plugin has all the attack surface that they could ever want.
It has fewer vampires than you get with shallot routing.
I had the impression that in TFA, the disputed documents were printed papers themselves, not files; their claimed physical age is what was used to give them an air of authenticity. Perhaps not?
It means that the printout you hand over, wasn't really printed back then. You tell someone "ho ho ho, behold this physical piece of paper that I printed in 1989 on a HP Laserjet II!" You get a rusty key from somewhere, and then pull (with a stylish flourish) a dusty cloth off of an ancient filing cabinet. "How about that, the key still fits after all this time." You open the filing cabinet and it creaks, as though with great age. "Let's see, where would my old document be? Nope, this is the Declaration of Independence. Nope, this is the original handwritten manuscript of 'Macbeth.' Ah, here it is: METALLICA.TXT in the top line, and a 1989 date next to it, and you know a timestamp is very hard to fake! This paper has been lurking unseen in my filing cabinet all this time, waiting to once again be greeted by the harsh florescent lights of the 1980s but is now strangely bathed in LEDs, the likes of which people back then, could not imagine. Feel the history! But first, put on these latex gloves because there is no telling what will happen to this ancient paper after having been in storage for so long." But they call you on it, if they have a trained eye.
They probably looked at the paper with great scepticism, due to your strange speech beforehand and the overdoing of theatrics. Who says "behold?" And am I really supposed to believe that since the filing cabinet is old, it must be dusty even though everything else in the room has been cleaned at least once since 2013? You should introduce documents more casually in my stories than you did in that one. No wonder you got caught!
Do they pay you the $1200 right when you take it, or do you have to use it continuously and they pay you over the course of a whole year, or what?
And if you feared that happening, what would you do about it? Today's idea: install Great Firewall to control most peoples' media, and by extension, their thoughts.
You meant: making it easier to detect, right?
For all the plaintext connections, you can examine them and rule them out. (Countermeasure: hide your steganographic VPN here, so it gets ruled out. Downside: low bandwidth.)
Then all the remaining connections, you can't look at the contents but you can see if they happen to just keep talking to this one possible-VPN-endpoint all the time. Ah, this guy seems sshed to his linode all the time, constantly trafficking? That's probably a VPN. At this point you can bring in the $5 wrench to confirm/disprove the hypothesis.
Don't be absurd; they didn't do anything so relatively anonymous as merely typing their name and password and DoB and SSN and uploading their scanned retina image. The user sent a unique key that Facebook had offered them earlier, and that the user stored on their computer until the time came to send it back to Facebook along with their favorite URLs.
And what's this nonsense about clicking the like button? The user sent this information to Facebook in order to request that the like button be displayed!
I share your distaste for my government doing this.
BUT I FUCKING LOVE SOMEONE ELSE'S GOVERNMENT DOING THIS!!
The market "votes" on cheap-vs-good the same way that Americans vote for who should be president: most people lose and don't get what they want. The nice thing about Europe doing this, is that maybe products will start to exist to be imported, so that Americans can start to vote for their favorite. And Europeans who vote for cheapness over repairability can import American (Chinese) stuff too.
And people don't even need to "vote party line." Maybe my next Widget Type A might come from Europe (because I really like my Type A widgets to last) whereas I still buy the American style Widget Type B (because the next Type B widget is going to blow away this generation's crap). As far as I'm concerned, everyone wins.
My understanding is that the great hope behind the minimum wage, is that labor isn't a particularly large fraction of a business' expenses. There are other expenses besides labor, so if you raise the cost of labor by n%, you're raising the total cost of a widget or service by less than n%.
This viewpoint is endangered, though, if you think that the cost of everything is 100% someone's time, even if a lot of it is indirect (e.g. you're paying miners in your electricity bill, your insurance payments contains the overhead of the insurance business which hires people to figure stuff out, etc). Everything is made out of humans' time. But even so, I guess a minimum wage advocate would say that some of these jobs already pay more than min wage, so whatever expenses flow from these jobs don't increase. (e.g. your insurance payments don't go up, because the insurance adjustors' salaries don't go up, because they were making more than minimum.)
People in higher-paying jobs should see their expenses go up, but can sit and take it without having to ask for a raise. Presumably their lowered prosperity is counter-balanced by a lower crime rate or other benefits of a safety net.
Because you (well, your agent: your computer) kept going to the extra trouble to send additional data to Facebook, even after you logged out. If you had expected privacy there is no way you would have kept sending them data. Ergo, you didn't expect privacy.
And if you're slightly more intelligent, you can guess the units from the context so you know when someone is using metric and when someone isn't.
I am personally so amazingly intelligent and my units inference algorithm is so reliable, that I even use it on all my Mars probes!
I can tell the you're going to make a very critical marketing decision based on whatever answer some random Internet person gives you, so good luck!
I hope you get your answer, and that it's accurate! If you are thinking of making a plastic iPhone holder or an app that tells you whether reddit is up or down at the moment, and there is a 402 million person market for it, your development expense may be justified, but if there are only 216 million possible customers, you're never going to make back your investment. This is important. Godspeed on finding out this number-of-users stat!
So you're saying that if you can eliminate an expense (tax) for free (i.e. without it being a tradeoff that comes with a downside) then it's all upside. I don't think any person would argue against you on that.
Wow, cool!!
Hey, by the way, were you able to do it while also creating the above huge and extremely difficult condition?
It seems that if we're going to play businessman and economist, it might be more challenging and interesting to talk about the harder problems, instead of the absurdly easy ones, such a proving "a good thing without a bad thing is a net good thing." Still, I suppose it's possible you have presented the proof in a more modern and accessible way, which people might prefer over the ancient Greeks' coverage of the same subject.
Your penultimate paragraph is a lot more interesting (oh, you tease, you!!) than the rest of the post that you wrote about fundamentals of addition and subtraction. It looks like you suddenly switched topics, but I guess the whole point is that you're trying to hint that you were able to provide the no-downsides condition! You solved one of the hardest government policy problems of the modern world? I'd think a polymath would want to expand on that, even if just for the bragging rights.
It's time to stop teasing. Indulge yourself, and let Slashdot be the forum in which you seize your place in the history books. Go on!
The people who use the convenience of a fully-scripted browser to trick adservers into thinking humans clicked the ads, are probably not going to opt to forego that convenience.
To use an absurdly extreme example, you're saying, "bank robber, you could simply deposit money into the bank and then make normal withdrawals instead of robbing." You should expect most bank robbers to decline your suggestion, and I think the people who commit click-fraud will be similarly uninterested in your "don't do that" advice.
Tell me more. I can think of some things, and yet when I imagine these data center computers (anyone else get it yet? I don't work in a data center!) I mentally picture most of them as having nothing plugged into their PCI-e slots.
Ok, I picture one that has a bunch of SAS adapters plugged into there, and runs a fuckton of disks or SSDs. But then the others just use those disks over the network or storage network.
I maybe picture one that has some amazingly fancy network adapter in it .. and a bunch of others on that network, which don't have that fancy adapter.
I maybe picture a highly specialized rack, used by some particular company, which might all have GPUs in there. And who maybe comprises 1% of the data center computer market.
After that my imagination runs out of steam, unless it's the most obvious thing (but somehow this just doesn't sound right, maybe that's my mistake): they're all using their own M.2 SSDs. I guess I can believe that. Is that it?
That's my question: what are data centers doing with all that PCI-e? What's the situation, what's the common application, where you'd walk into a data center and see most of the computers using their PCI-e, and the owner or user is really happy that the new generation has more lanes than the older one?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm just saying I don't know, and it sounds to me like something that wouldn't happen, unless it's SSD. Hmm. It's for hooking up SSDs, isn't it?
A Slashdot advertising client, apparently.
English accents are for villains and comedians. Oliver fits with that, and if the comedy thing doesn't work out, America will accept him trying a second career, of evil.
Seriously, I just don't know: why would a product targeting data centers, make a big deal about connecting GPUs? Are a lot of them really doing that, or are they using the great I/O bandwidth for something else (what?) or does this usually go greatly underused?
(Yes, I realize there are applications for GPUs (other than rnedering graphics, of course!) but I wouldn't think it'd be a significant fraction of the data center market. How wrong am I?)
And the neat thing about Mars, is that whatever people go there, will decide to not allow political corruption. Because they'll be too cool for that sort of thing.
If you're already physically within US jurisdiction, then throwing a VPN into the mix doesn't make your situation any worse (except for stuff like speed and cost).
Yes, but those people won't necessarily buy what they want, especially if the sticker price isn't any different (and computers are dirt cheap). They currently buy internet-connected TVs, you know. (And that's just the tip of the iceberg on people making sacrifices and tradeoffs. People do it all the time.)