This is not about *requiring* more technology. It's about off-loading processing to a gpu that can handle these particular tasks far more efficiently, while freeing up general processing time. I fail to see anything negative in this.
It's called the Jevon's paradox. In short, the off-loading of work to the GPU will mean that more CPU cycles will become available to do more things. The result will be that developers will think of new, more interesting ways to use those available CPU cycles. The net effect is that the effective requirements of at least some web sites will actually increase. Whether technological improvements as a whole across all devices actually counter this increased demand of resources or whether general hardware requirements to surf the web will increase is simply unclear.
This doesn't mean I think efficiency gains are bad, per se. But, it's naive to believe that the marketplace of consumption won't change as a consequence of improved efficiency. And I find it highly unlikely that mobile devices will improve in the way you suggest because co-opting the intended purpose of hardware tends to be a good deal less efficient than a custom built device. Quite simply, I don't see there being much room for energy efficiency hardware acceleration on a mobile device for web browsing without, as I noted, some sort of html5/javascript/canvas chip. Yes, perhaps a GPU could be added for that purpose, but I'd imagine more would be gained through a faster and more efficient CPU as a rule. Even then, the cost for a mobile device might be significantly greater, the energy demands might be notably greater (even 10% might be considered a big deal), the actual development and deployment time may be years from now, and any hardware produced might be static enough that it won't function very well by the time it's released because effective standards might have changed.
So, unless you know of a current development project or projects to incorporate html5/javascript/canvas functionality at a reasonable cost (ie, where say 85% of current mobile devices today could incorporate the technology with perhaps only a 5-10% increase in price of the device) on mobile devices, I'm not sure where this belief that such technology will expand out widely is imminent. So, there's certainly some room to be troubled by moves towards even greater hardware acceleration on the desktop.
Quite simply, html5, canvas, and javascript are likely to require a lot more CPU/GPU power than the current web platform (indirectly, actually, from a lack of consideration by many developers). In the long term, "slim" web sites are likely to be favored, but even now some very "fat" web sites are favored because of what they offer (Facebook). In the mean time, mobile devices which have very inferior CPU/GPU power for battery life reasons and which are already quite behind in support of web site support in general are only likely to get worse if more "fat" sites are developed. I simply do not have your optimism that html5 will be a common thing on mobile devices in any meaningful sense. Maybe if there was a power efficient html5 chip (like an mp3 chip), I'd feel different.
Having said that, I don't think "fat" sites are inherently bad or shouldn't be developed. But, is it any wonder when people start using various devices to surf the web and access has greatly opened up that they'd fear the sites they often visit may become effectively inaccessible because developers seem to focus too much on cool technology and not enough on widespread availability? Perhaps if mobile subdomains were a common enough occurrence and not merely a mostly laughable suggestion there'd be more faith in what developers will actually do with the new technology. As it stands, it doesn't seem requiring more technology is currently the path to a solution, though.
I feel sad about it when hardware acceleration is needed for rendering, what, websites.
Boo hoo. Have you seen what's capable with HTML5, Javscript and canvas?
Note that the GP was talking about *needing* hardware acceleration. Ie, the issue isn't that people can come up with and use HTML5, Javascript, and canvas for interesting and innovative things. It's that it seems that many (if not most) websites are moving toward requiring those sorts of features, which limits who can actually use the web or where it can be used.
It's downright stupid to have certain things done using a general purpose processor when a GPU is sitting there unused.
Granted. But, a piddly smartphone probably doesn't have a spare GPU sitting unused in any meaningful sense (that is, it's unlikely the GPU would actually speed things up if it were treated like some sort of CPU; and presumably any possible smart mappings of windows to textures or sprites is already being done).
Why do I get the impression that a subset of slashdot users wished things would remain unchanged from 1998, back when hate for Microsoft was warranted and their ability to hand code crappy html was relevant??
One, yes presumably a subset of slashdot users wish things would remain unchanged from 1998 (it'd only take one person on slashdot to make that true). Most people, though, I think, just want it to be the case that 1998 bleeding-edge computer technology was sufficient to simply browse the web in a sensible fashion (ie, to do email, browse for information, and do banking and other services). The fact that what was 1998 bleeding-edge technology is now closer to smart phone technology just means people want to be able to use their smart phone to browse the web. Quite simply, it's unlikely smart phones will ever approach anything close to desktop cpu power (the battery demands would be pretty insane) and be widely accepted, so any steps towards requiring modern desktop cpu power just to do casual browsing is frowned upon by a lot of people who'd rather move towards even more inclusive use of the web, not less.
Two, crappy HTML has more to do with bad design and very little to do with actual HTML standards, having Javascript, etc. Yes, a more limited standard does mean there's certain designs you can't do and at some point in very limited circumstances it really does interfere with an ability to make an acceptable design for certain content. But, the vast majority of the time it's simply people not knowing how to design well or being given directions on what to do. Btw, the problem of crappy HTML design is still one today. Portals in general are still rather guilty of overloading content on a page which is clearly bad design.
In short, it's rather silly try to conflate a desire to have more openness with some longing for a simpler time. It's not nostalgia of a "better" web that drives such consideration. It's the pragmatic desire that the web doesn't degenerate into something that's totally unusable except for a relatively small selection of computing devices purely because website designers are more obsessed with having eye candy than actually providing a useful experience to potential viewers. Beyond that, it's generally stupid to do things to limit potential customers (presuming, of course, that viewers are some sort of customer).
more "Japanese are unique" idiocy to justify racism and discrimination in Japan.
You know, that's the funny thing. If you want to justify your discrimination, the last thing you want to do is make yourself out to be unique, different, or special. After all, mobs tend to want to punish the minority (Frankenstein's monster, for example). But, then, I guess, it's all about the short-sightedness of only considering a very limited geographic area or limited biological selection (after all, bacteria as a grouping have a lot more basis to be all discriminatory, so the whole search for medicines to fight them off is rather crazy if you support such ideas).
Of course, like you note, it's really more about a justification than a rationalization. It rather makes one sort of wish that laws and social mores were less about "justice" and more about rationality--not that changing the word being used would really change the results for people with an agenda and a desire to paint something else for their actions since their agenda alone is so distasteful that they're unwilling to just be brutally honest about it.
Yea...not so much. What you're talking about is "sales tax", and even if you removed all exceptions under "sales tax", you're still stuck with the clear problem that (1) it unfairly punishes sellers that focus on many small sales, (2) it unfairly punished buyers that need to make any small purchases, and (3) it does nothing to stop people from just bulk purchasing things so they only every make one "transaction" per month or year (which will only further encourage conglomeration and other creative tax dodging).
In short, there's a reason there's a focus on income and not transactions when it comes to taxation.
Really, this is "FEMA is responsible for the black helicopters" territory.
No. I was merely stating the conflict of interest that you chose to ignore. It's not complicated. It does surprise me a little that you can comprehend how Bush could use the threat of terrorism to push his agenda, but you can't seem to comprehend how someone can use AGW to push their own agenda.
If AGW is a byproduct of US government funded research, then 9/11 is a byproduct of US government funded terrorism. If the legitimate problem of AGW is being abused by politicians for their own agenda, then the legitimate problem of 9/11 is being abused by politicians for their own agenda. Now that it's out in black and white, while not offer some gray opinion on just how twisted the truth has been spun by politicians and exactly where things actually stand.
I fall into an odd category. I believe GW exists. I don't believe there is evidence which supports man is the sole cause.
It all comes down to two points. One, the effects of GW on humanity is generally bad. Two, reducing CO2 release (or sequestering sufficient carbon to counter that release) will slow, stop, or reverse GW. So, who cares whether you firmly believe man is the "sole" cause? I'm more concerned with an agreement on pragmatic action.
PS - Man isn't believed to be the sole cause by most climatologists. Man just happens to be a very, very significant contributing factor.
Clearly [insert company who off-shored work to China]'s don't respect a country's right to manage their own laws. If I ran a country, and enacted some laws, and law a company refusing to follow my laws in my country, yeah I'd ban them, of course.
A country's laws, and culture, are their own to set, and not to be controlled by any outside nation. Sure we'll make exceptions for real human rights like food and water and torture. But censorship of illegal material and such doesn't come anywhere close.
*Of course, the nice irony is of course that China has a horrible record when it comes to "real" human rights--as if there were fake human rights.
I wouldn't really call it a paradox. If five kids are beating up on one kid, then that tends to represent five parents who will vote for a School Board that will hire teachers that will let their five kids do as they please; meanwhile, the one kid with their one parent will be in a much more difficult position of trying to convince other voters that it's worthwhile to protect their one child through some sort of administrative action instead of leaving it to the child to defend himself/herself, under some belief that it builds character or it's a necessary life skill to fend for oneself amongst one's peers.
In short, a complacent democracy tends to allow those who have some sort of vested interest to have their way. Of course, as you sort of note, possible lawsuits from those five parents is a pretty good extortion (aka bullying) against a populace who hates higher taxes. But, then, one could argue that bullying is allowed to happen in general because the child's peers aren't willing to be involved either in defending, even in a slight way, a random peer. My point is, bullying is just a rather good example of parental and child behavior being similar and a rather large problem with democracies in general.
Of course, once a parent perceives a "real" threat against his/her child, they're quite willing to act. So, teacher/administrator action is much more scrutinized. As much as hyperinflating an issue is a bad thing, inflating the importance of peer bullying in actual causing real harm and being a real threat isn't a bad thing. However, there's certainly a lot of communities who aren't really structured with that sort of consideration of protecting the group to protect one's own.
Then you're an idiot who didn't separate your software properly into layers and should learn, or get out.
It's funny you say that because a lot of the time it's little glitches in IE that end up giving a user remote root. A large part of the problem is users running IE as root. But, even in environments where a program is given limited privilege, either support libraries or the OS itself has various bugs that allow first remote exploitation and then further privilege escalation. Jpeg, mp3, and zip have proven to be capable carriers of exploits precisely because of the issue that either the official support code or a common library contained an exploit; this has occurred with Windows and Linux (and I'm pretty sure Macs too). Meanwhile, Windows and Linux systems generally trust a locally running program (Windows because for the longest time programs were already root and for Linux because most users run trusted, free software) and not nearly enough effort has been put into prevent privilege escalation to root.
I understand your example, but the ultimate fear you're expressing about "the unknown" isn't warranted. Software is complex and can lead to unexpected problems. But worrying about every single minor bug possibly being a major one is just silly if you understand how the system interacts with itself. That's why good software is developed in layers. If you've really got a system where a UI glitch leads to a root exploit, time to throw away the whole application and start over.
Well, given that basically every commonly used OS has had such built-in "minor" bugs and Windows, Linux, and Mac programs are now being built so that lots of minor bugs are turned into simple DoS attacks (by basically reducing every possible buffer overflow into a program crash), your analysis basically amounts to scrapping all modern OSs and starting over. While I rather applaud the goal and have called for it on various occasion, I do find it a bit humorous that you seem to be calling out an individual developer over the point instead of just leaping to the end conclusion.
The simple point is, development tools and the OS are simply not designed from the ground up aiming for any sort of correctness. A large part of this is that such work is very hard, generally unrewarding, and most developers consider languages that strive to aid in correctness as cumbersome or useless. Even developers who would qualify as good architects are rarely respected enough to be listened to and are generally unwilling themselves to put in the effort to do the right thing when pushed to develop something as quickly as possible.
To extend the analogy, most development projects are closer to shanty towns created from the available materials. Is it any surprise then that most software is so horribly defunct? To me, pointing out the economics of "perfect" software is very much a strawman. People don't generally want perfect software (or perfect buildings, for that matter). People generally do want software (and buildings) to be resistant against foreseeable dangers (fuzzing attacks and earthquakes). Coming in later and attaching make-shift braces to software/a building might be better than nothing. But the mentality that everything can be fixed later or worked upon later because perfect software is unobtainable really doesn't excuse not putting in the 20% or 50% more effort in design to make a system that doesn't have to be constantly updated.
When people know too much about the algorithm, they can game it.
Same reason why credit scoring company wont release their algorithms... Well, they might have further economic motives for that, but still if I knew exactly how the algorithm for my credit score worked, I could certainly dramatically improve my credit without doing anything that actually show I'm credit worthy...
The fundamental problem is that such algorithms are based on taking a small bit of information and extrapolating a result from it. It's fundamentally the reason why benchmarks are often both gamed and a very bad way of actually understanding the products being measured. The answer to the problem has consistently been shown to be not to withhold information about the way a benchmark is made, since invariably people will find a way to reverse engineer the algorithm and game it anyways; the answer is to further refine the benchmark to take more and more samples until the point that even if the benchmark is incomplete at measuring things, anything that tried to game the benchmark would still be very close to meeting what the benchmark is meant to represent.
AFAIK, that's primarily what Google has done with the page ranking algorithm. If Yelp is really worried about having a good review system, they should focus less on trying to hide how their algorithm works and more on improving their algorithm to guarantee it works. In the end, they'll remain ahead of any competitors so long as they can maintain a consistent lead on quality through such efforts. Any other mindset really is based in a belief that one has some sort of monopoly that can't be replaced. It's one of the reasons why complacent middle management, which is primarily a byproduct of large corporations, kills most corporate monopolies.
I'm not particularly interested in hearing what people believe, I'm rather more interested in cold, hard facts and forming my own opinion. Neither Fox or CNN are sufficient for this purpose.
Omitting bias from a news report is impossible. There is no such things as "just the facts", even in plain text.
I believe that you're biased in that presumption.
Consider the following:
"Pelosi wants to raise taxes on anyone who pays taxes"
vs.
"Pelosi wants to eliminate Bush's tax cuts"
Both are facts. Both have a bias.
You left out "Pelosi is a saint" and "Pelosi is the devil". And let's not forget, "Pelosi is neutral".
The only hope is to get both stories and make up your own mind. No network gives 100% fair coverage.
Life isn't fair. So? Trying to argue that two sides need to be presented to reach a conclusion is a middle ground logical fallacy. Instead of focusing on the two sides of whether red light has a shorter or longer wavelength than blue light, it is the job of journalists to try to be as factually accurate as possible and to explain where and how their facts may be incomplete. Simple bringing in two people with an opinion is simple laziness and does little to nothing to inform anyone of anything except that those two people have certain views.
Fox will have two conservatives and a liberal to debate a topic. CNN will have three liberals and one pseudo conservative to debate a given topic. MSNBC will have three liberals and a picture of a conservative's head on a SS uniformed mannequin to discuss a given topic.
If I heard an actual debate on Fox, CNN, or MSBNC on any topic of real depth I'd be outright amazed. Of course, a real debate would stretch on for hours, so I don't really think they'd be willing to allocate the time. Nah, let's just have a few people talking loudly at, not to, each other over whether violet or blue flowers look better.
Stewart himself points out over and over again that TDS is comedy.
True, but for the majority of the audience, it is their primary "news" source.
Which goes to show you, people would rather laugh at comedy and get a little news than watch "news" and have dark laughter that the "news" is presented as something respectable.
Fox News bills itself as, well, news. Then again, why am I saying anything who says O'Reilly gives liberals a fair shake?
First, Bill O'Reilly is a commentator, not a news anchor. If you want to call Bill O'Reilly or any of the other FNC commentators "news", then shouldn't you do the same for Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews (who got a tingle up his leg from hearing Obama speak)? Why are not you not here screaming about how unfair MSNBC is?
Funny. Plenty of people do. 24/7 news channels are quite horrible precisely because they aren't 24/7 news. They're one to two hours of news and 22 hours of fluff to fill air time. Having said that, MSNBC/CNN both have the same issue as Fox News even when they're covering actual news: sensational focus on fluff news.
Next, I have never, EVER seen a conservative on Olbermann's show. I see several on O'Reilly every night. HERE is a video of a liberal on O'Reilly that, strangely enough, is not shouted down. (That must not be a real video, since you believe that it never happens). Can you find an Olbermann video of a conservative? No? I guess you have to admit that FNC is more "Fair and Balanced" than MSNBC.
If FNC has dog *and* cat shows, it's more "Fair and Balanced" than Animal Channel? Well, who the fuck cares. I just want FNC (and MSNBC and CNN) to do decent journalism.
Oh, and HERE is a story about Bill O'Reilly "blasting" Laura Ingraham. Laura is a conservative and O'Reilly was defending Michelle Obama. Have you ever seen Matthews, Olbermann, or Maddow (a feminist) stand up for Laura Bush over the objections of one more liberal than they are?
Personally, I wouldn't care if Bill O'Reilly were a saint. Political commentary shows are almost entirely sensational claptrap designed more to anger or energize the watchers than to engage in actual discussion. But, then, that makes perfect sense: discussion that resolves issue is relatively boring while a few people shouting their own personal views, no matter how offensive they might be, is at least interesting from the "traffic accident" aspect of it. They're really no better than daytime talk shows.
In short, I'd like to see actual news on News Channels.
Yeah.. that's it. We'll just ask for ID cards proving citizenship before we shoot back at someone.
If they are on US soil, I would agree.
That's funny. I don't recall police ever doing an ID check before shooting back. No, if you're being shot at, you can claim some level of self-defense. There's nothing about a drone hit-list that's "shooting back".
A US citizen in a foreign country that is hanging around with enemy combatants that the US military thinks might be doing bad things is fair game. I don't care if they are a news reporter either. Those are the risks one takes in a war zone.
Funny. I thought the whole point of the ACLU FOIA request was to see if those US citizens were actually "hanging around with enemy combatants" or not. Or does being in a "war zone" mean the US military can summarily execute any and all civilians, US or otherwise, as it pleases? Btw, as much as it's a functional war zone, it's not actually a declared one. So, even if you recognize that the military does a lot more leeway in summary executions in a war, it's not very constitutionally clear whether the military's actions are legal.
War sucks... it's even worse when the enemy doesn't wear uniforms and hides like cowards among the civilian populations, using women and children to hide behind.
It also sucks when drones are used to simply kill women and children because someone in intelligence made a mistake. The sobering fact should be one reason wars should be ended as reasonably quickly as possible.
If someone shoots at American soldiers on foreign soil, then goes into a civilian population center, he just put his family and friends at risk. Whether that person is a US citizen or not, I hope a predator drone puts a missile right up his ass.
Imagine if we had that same mentality about criminals firing on police in the US. You do realize, btw, that we're trying to root out an insurgency, right? Pressing into civilian population centers and mowing down innocent people to kill one insurgent will, in the long term, make the civilian population not trust us, rely on us, or be willing to support our actions. It is not different than if police in the US were to behave as you suggest. If the goal of the US were merely to kill all the "bad people" in the region, without regard to civilians, we should have wiped out the entire population a long time ago. And given that "bad people" are in the US region as well, it'd be high time for the US to execute a little bit of suicide on itself.
Clearly that's irrational and speaks more of grand, generalized anger. It's no way to succeed at the task at hand, however, which is to help create stability in the region. Gun ho executions aren't the answer.
Your snail mail enjoys no protection if, as on a postcard, there is no attempt to shield its contents from public view.
Right. If I put the postcard in my window for the public to see, I don't enjoy any protection. Once it's in the mail box, though, there's no real public to view it. Now, perhaps some person in public will stalk that postcard trying to catch glimpses every instance it might be made somewhat available to the public to view (which may be never), but this of course doesn't translate into being able to order the mail carrier to let you see the postcard, breaking into the mail box, or walking into the post office sorting room to look around.
In short, even if you were to make the analogy of an unencrypted email being like a postcard, I don't see how you'd be able to reasonably view the email anyways. After all, it's not like the police are standing inside an ISP's lobby and catching the contents of an email off the reflection of a receptionist's glasses as the email is delivered. This is all about ordering people to disclose information that otherwise isn't public.
When you die, you belong to no one. While you're alive, you can't transfer property rights over your body (one living person can't own another living person) and when you're dead you're not alive to agree to the transfer. Things like wills are constructions of the state to enforce property rights after you're dead. To that end, the state has a lot of power to possess things when you're dead. The fact that a vast majority of people might in fact want to put your body to good use when you're dead is, at least from a moral perspective, a good basis for supporting opt-out systems, anyways. It's not like, after all, you can't say "no" (and yes, clerical errors will likely occur, but there's no way to get around that since you'll be too dead to answer).
I'm inherently suspicious of anything designed to be opt-out...
And exceedingly suspicious of any opt-out program designed to take property away from me or my kin.
Then you must free very suspicious of the legal system in general. Not only can it take your property, it can also take your liberty or your life. There's no real way to opt-out of it except leaving the State (and even then, extradition can get you); but, then, leaving the State also protects you from the opt-out donor system.
If you don't know, your corpse belongs to your estate unless it goes unclaimed for a certain period of time,
at which point your corpse belong to the State (and the remains are useless for anything besides an anatomy lesson).
And estates are a by-product of State law (or a family with a lot of guns and a willingness to defend the property). This is, fundamentally, no different than estate tax laws. If you're really against the whole concept of your corpse being possibly used for organ donation, feel free to vote against it and opt-out if a law pass. But, if the vast majority wants an opt-out system, you don't much standing to complain, really.
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease is tantamount to implying they will be having sex. Vaccinating very young girls, therefore, is absolutely abhorrent and -- to conservative Christians, in particular -- only underscores the moral depravity of modern society.
Now, just to be clear, the reason you want to vaccinate girls against HPV is not to keep them from getting unsightly genital warts when they go out having sex with strange men while they're in primary school. The reason you vaccinate them at a young age is because they're not having sex then, and a vaccine only works before you catch the disease. (Some studies suggest that up to 90 percent of the adult population carries some form of HPV.) And the reason you vaccinate them at all is not to enhance their sex lives, but because if they do catch a certain form of HPV it can lead to papillomas that can be very hard to detect until they turn into cervical cancer, which, if not detected, can kill them stone dead. In other words, this is a vaccine you give someone as a girl to aid her chances of living to become an old woman.
It's an interesting point, but I think you're blaming the wrong element. To demonstrate, think of a medical procedure called "circumcision". There have been various studies done that shown, among other things, the lack of a foreskin decreases the chance of contracting HIV and virtually eliminates the risk of penis cancer. In short, the reason newborn males should have part of their body removed--clearly a much more invasive procedure than an injection--is to improve their further sex life.
No, that's really not it. The issue is two fold.
One, conservatives are conservative. That means, if a man and his father were circumcised, their child should be too. If any group tries to counter their claim with some rationality of the questionable nature of their actions, they'll fund research to justify their position. If the research is fruitless, they'll still claim their ends.
Two, many people are incredibly risk aversive. At the same time, these people rarely have a good understanding of the actual rate of risk and how to actually be risk aversive. So, they'd rather avoid vaccines to avoid autism than take an HPV vaccine to avoid HPV. Or, they'll be dreadfully fearful of terrorists instead of pushing for higher car safety standards. In the end, the people who speak loudly enough make it appear that whatever it is they're talking about much be important or their message wouldn't be heard so often.
Personally, I'm general against forced and/or routine circumcision or HPV vaccination. The actual risk of penis cancer or cervix cancer in the general population is quite low. The benefits of lower STD contraction don't seem very compelling either. The HPV vaccine seems more justifiable, given that in no way could the act be seen as a form of mutilation, but in both cases it would seem the best course of action would be to leave it to individuals (ie not parents, politicians, etc) to make the decision. Doctors might provide valid reason for the procedures (higher penis/cervix cancer rates in the family that imply a specific benefit), just as currently doctors will at times prescribe birth control bills.
In short, it's a great thing that the HPV vaccine exists just like many other vaccines and medicine exists. That doesn't mean there's a particularly good reason for widespread use upon all populations at all times. Now, if this were all part of a campaign to eliminate HPV worldwide (and not just a country-wide thing, which is sadly how many marginal-complication diseases with vaccines go), it'd be a whole other thing. But, the money could be better spent, in all likelihood, in slightly increasing the effectiveness of airbags. That is much more likely to aid a girl in her chances of living to become an old woman.
The thing that everyone has forgotten here is what is best for the general public - the ones who aren't interested in tinkering with their computer and who just want to get onto the web.
Tip #1: Don't use a computer. Computers are Linear Bound Automatons, which grant them far too much computational power to be considerable to a no-fuss appliance.
Tip #2: Don't use IE. Even if IE is more secure on average, it's still a larger target because of market share. Hence, there's more fuss with using IE.
Tip #3: Don't use Windows. See the note about IE market share and fuss.
Tip #4: Don't use the web. The web is inherently full of things to fuss over. Yes, this rather goes against the point about what the general public wants, but obviously the general public in choosing a computer is already making bad choices; if we're thinking of "what is best", we really have to throw out the general public's stated wants and get back to their underlying desires. So, more mail shipments of journals, magazines, and videos. Also, more phone use would be wise.
Sometimes the patient might want to stop, because they feel they are causing you trouble and wasting your money (i.e. the patient is your mother or father or husband).
Yes, this is a problem with any sort of expensive care, especially the long-term kind.
You however must show them you love them...
Yes, that's always important.
...and keep on trying. This will make it worth in the end.
I'm going to have to go with no. In the end, it is not your position, my position, or the loved one's position to choose how or if a patient should continue treatment. It is the patient who will have to live with the consequences of their choices and to take away those choices with a mantra that one must "keep on trying" regardless of the futility of the action condemns people to situations where they are forced to endure needless suffering to placate the wishes of others. If it is wrong to coerce or steer people to give up, it is certainly as wrong to coerce or steer people to keep on trying.
So, it is quite amazing that humanity has effectively wiped out small pox and there are efforts to wipe out polio, yet there's some supreme denial that we could ever hope to have a computer ecosystem that approaches that sort of environment with malware presuming just reasonable efforts.
Small pox and polio were arguably a survival of the species threat. A compromised machine sending out v1gr14 spam doesn't evoke the same, "Oh crap, we're going to DIE if we don't get this taken care of." level of response.
As devastating as polio was, it was never a "survival of the species" threat. Flu regularly kills many more people. No, the reason polio was targeted was because of its debilitating effects on survivors that had neurological infection. In fact, small pox was likely targeted for a similar reason (facial scares were common in many and like polio, there was a small chance of adverse secondary effects; in smallpox, those secondary effects were blindness and limb deformity)--of course, the existence of an effective vaccine for 99% of strains help. Of course, for polio the "March of Dimes" actually started *before* a vaccine was created. It took the disability of a president (FDR) to push a business-type man to really see the polio thing through, not simply as a program to create a vaccine (which was being researched regardless) but as a means to eliminate the disease across the whole US.
Btw, the really bad part of infected machines has more to do with copying a person's financial records, not the possible spamming. Perhaps that will motivate people to push for an actually secure system.
As others have pointed out, the issue with security and OS design comes down to cost. It involves a VERY LARGE number of production systems. Microsoft can't pull an Apple and just yank the plug on their 3% of the market and then release OSX and force everyone to buy their applications over again. Instead the best that we can hope for are incremental upgrades, and in the absence of upgrades, alternatives and better ways of doing things (in the form of Linux or what have you). Take a look at IE8 running on Win7 with DEP and ASLR. Will someone eventually break that combination of technology? Of course they will. But you can see the improvement. TFA this discussion is part of is about IE on XP. We might as well be crying about Netscape on Win95. Stop the presses! "Glitch found in 8 year old OS running legacy, depreciated browser!" It just re-enforces my statement about malware targeting. They go for the low hanging fruit. They go for the most widely adopted technologies. There are way more XP and IE6/7 boxes than there are Win7/IE8 boxes.
I see, so what you're saying is Microsoft couldn't release Win7/IE8 to improve security because people are still using Win XP/IE6? No, Microsoft can't "force" people to upgrade their systems. But, clearly, if Microsoft doesn't even bother to make a secure system, then it's quite impossible for people to upgrade to a Microsoft-produced secure system. Yes, people will still choose to run insecure systems. This whole discussion isn't about the fact that XP boxes can be infected (as ridiculous as the mentioned defect is). It's that Win7/IE8 isn't a secure OS/web browser. Yes, DEP and ASLR can help things (btw, IE8 under XP runs with DEP too), but they're merely stopgaps. So is OS X.
Yep, that link proves my point about DEP/ASLR in Win7/IE8 being a stopgap.
The last time I personally saw a compromised Windows server in the real world was in 2004. It was a NT 4.0 SP6a machine. A client, despite being told not to, setup an unsecured wireless access point. They were next door to a Starbucks. It lasted a little more than a week before some exploit code blue screened it. On the workstation front
They think malware and other system compromises are an inherent aspect of owning a computer.
They are. In the 1990s, despite "Windows boxes in the internet" (if you had a SLIP connection), all of the exploits that I saw were targetting SunOS and BSD. They were going after Apache. When Aleph One was writing about buffer overflows, do you think he was working with Windows apps?
So, because in the past there was malware, inherent there must be malware. Hmm..I guess small pox and polio are just things we'll forever have to deal with*.
Computers are insecure. Networked computers are even more insecure. Windows is the low hanging fruit. I know it sounds tired, but if Linux had the same market share as Windows, you'd see the same kind of cat and mouse game going on between security researchers and malware programmers. If you put Ubuntu 9.10 on 80% of computers connected to the internet, and loaded it up with the 10 or so typical apps that people use (word processors, web browsers, Flash, etc), within six months you'd see vulnerabilities popping up left and right.
Oh, I have little doubt of that. Computers are insecure because we accept that. Linux might be more secure but in many ways it's only marginally so. A Unix-clone is no more the salvation of computer technology than the malware ridden SunOS you mentioned before. The fact that OSs are generally written under a bad design is the fundamental problem, but it's not really an insurmountable one.
At the end of the day, it's all software running on an x86 processor. All it takes is one lazy coder, one tired QA guy, or one bad library and you have a zero day exploit. Computers need to execute code. You can only run so many checks on any given input. You can only limit the functionality of a module so much before it becomes useless. You can only bug users with "Are you sure you want to run this?" prompts so many times.
It's funny, but that's precisely the reason why secure software is possible. The x86 processor is a known device. The software running on it is known. The chance of cosmic rays changing software is known and compensable. As you note, the current structure of development is focused on it taking but one lazy coder, QA guy, or ancestor code from libraries for something bad to happen. Yet, odds are good that most programs do not to be written in turing complete languages. In fact, technically, software isn't written on turing machines. Quite simply, there are various design decisions that can reduce much software as automatically provably correct and the vast majority that cannot be automatically proven correct can be either manually proven correct or tested with sufficient tolerance by sufficient numbers of people that actual bugs in the software and the design are so remote that, while not a non-issue, would not be remotely in the field of "computers are insecure".
If you want an idea of a secure operating, turn your web browser security settings to Prompt/Ask. JavaScript, HTML, XML, EVERYTHING set to prompt. Spend a week browsing the web in that configuration. Let me know how you like it.
Now, this is some truth to this. Having a secure computer is near worthless if the user has no value to keeping the system secure. Yet, clearly, the issue is that users cannot reasonably associate one's actions with harm. This is in vast part because the things that software done is significantly hidden and unreversable. To make an analogy, it would be like being the guard at a prison and having merely the capability to allow or deny a person without being able to search them at any time, generally witness their activities but only the results at the end of the day, or readily revert the damage a visitor might do. Clearly, the granting power to the user cannot simply be allow or deny. Perhaps there are many who do not care or wish to c
No, the really funny part is how she twists a few statistics. Once she interjected some Iraq/Afghanistan veteran murder stats and interjected "[inasmuch] as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders", she calculated "about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35". Of course, silly her, she didn't do the same stat stat shift on the verteran numbers to show "about 8.6 murders per 100,000 male veterans" and inflates the ~3.9 to ~7.2 adjusted non-veteran to non-adjusted veteran murder rate to "about 10"; meanwhile, it's closer to ~3.45 to ~6.3 adjusted non-veteran to adjusted veteran murder rate which is about 6, actually. Of course, all the numbers show that 99.9945% of even the "high" murder non-veteran male aged 18 to 35 group don't murder. I'd presume her later "single mother" stats are just as fucked up given she seems to phrase things the same.
In short, instead of making up factor (1; young males) and factor (2; D&D players) and presuming it has to be one of those things, why not, you know, look at the actual group you're talking about to see if you're just outright wrong about what factors are actually involved. Btw, for all I know, D&D users murder are at a much higher rate than the average population. But, then, I'm more interested in what percentage of murderers are D&D players vs how many D&D players are not murderers, not some comparison to the general population which tends not to be killers.
Linux users complains boils down to "It's not fair that Windows is successful."
But, that's the thing. Linux users don't complain that Windows is successful. Linux users complain that other people are effectively locked into Windows due to Microsoft's various tie-in tactics and hence Linux users have to fuss with Windows, directly or indirectly, as a by-product.
The same argument could be made about Google, except the tie-in tactics are generally not nearly as forceful (there's been less by-outs or banning of services). To that end, yes, I'm one of those people who call out Google when they try to force tie-ins instead of merely providing them. But, then, I'm one of those dirty/. Linux users. It couldn't be at all possible that I'm skeptical of Microsoft, especially when their claims seem to amount to merely the complaint "It's not fair that Google is successful." Generalities of evilness or goodness don't tend to win me over.
Yes, older thermometers are less reliable and hence temperature data has to be corrected for just like things like urban island effect has to be corrected for today.
And apparently my joke went over your head. Yes, of course the ice core data is used by AGW proponents (and climatologists in general). The seeming discrepancies in the ice core data, at least in recent time, is well accounted for in models, actually; I don't mean fudged, btw--things like the Medieval Warm Period occurring in Greenland and/or Europe doesn't mean that it was a global event (Souther Hemisphere data indicates it wasn't). It very well might have had to do with the North Atlantic Current.
The real question to ask is, why is it that current models only map well to current temperatures when man-released CO2 is a significant component in the noted global warming; that is why don't things like methane, natural CO2, solar variance, etc account for nearly all the warming?
Slashdot Mirror
It's called the Jevon's paradox. In short, the off-loading of work to the GPU will mean that more CPU cycles will become available to do more things. The result will be that developers will think of new, more interesting ways to use those available CPU cycles. The net effect is that the effective requirements of at least some web sites will actually increase. Whether technological improvements as a whole across all devices actually counter this increased demand of resources or whether general hardware requirements to surf the web will increase is simply unclear.
This doesn't mean I think efficiency gains are bad, per se. But, it's naive to believe that the marketplace of consumption won't change as a consequence of improved efficiency. And I find it highly unlikely that mobile devices will improve in the way you suggest because co-opting the intended purpose of hardware tends to be a good deal less efficient than a custom built device. Quite simply, I don't see there being much room for energy efficiency hardware acceleration on a mobile device for web browsing without, as I noted, some sort of html5/javascript/canvas chip. Yes, perhaps a GPU could be added for that purpose, but I'd imagine more would be gained through a faster and more efficient CPU as a rule. Even then, the cost for a mobile device might be significantly greater, the energy demands might be notably greater (even 10% might be considered a big deal), the actual development and deployment time may be years from now, and any hardware produced might be static enough that it won't function very well by the time it's released because effective standards might have changed.
So, unless you know of a current development project or projects to incorporate html5/javascript/canvas functionality at a reasonable cost (ie, where say 85% of current mobile devices today could incorporate the technology with perhaps only a 5-10% increase in price of the device) on mobile devices, I'm not sure where this belief that such technology will expand out widely is imminent. So, there's certainly some room to be troubled by moves towards even greater hardware acceleration on the desktop.
Quite simply, html5, canvas, and javascript are likely to require a lot more CPU/GPU power than the current web platform (indirectly, actually, from a lack of consideration by many developers). In the long term, "slim" web sites are likely to be favored, but even now some very "fat" web sites are favored because of what they offer (Facebook). In the mean time, mobile devices which have very inferior CPU/GPU power for battery life reasons and which are already quite behind in support of web site support in general are only likely to get worse if more "fat" sites are developed. I simply do not have your optimism that html5 will be a common thing on mobile devices in any meaningful sense. Maybe if there was a power efficient html5 chip (like an mp3 chip), I'd feel different.
Having said that, I don't think "fat" sites are inherently bad or shouldn't be developed. But, is it any wonder when people start using various devices to surf the web and access has greatly opened up that they'd fear the sites they often visit may become effectively inaccessible because developers seem to focus too much on cool technology and not enough on widespread availability? Perhaps if mobile subdomains were a common enough occurrence and not merely a mostly laughable suggestion there'd be more faith in what developers will actually do with the new technology. As it stands, it doesn't seem requiring more technology is currently the path to a solution, though.
Note that the GP was talking about *needing* hardware acceleration. Ie, the issue isn't that people can come up with and use HTML5, Javascript, and canvas for interesting and innovative things. It's that it seems that many (if not most) websites are moving toward requiring those sorts of features, which limits who can actually use the web or where it can be used.
Granted. But, a piddly smartphone probably doesn't have a spare GPU sitting unused in any meaningful sense (that is, it's unlikely the GPU would actually speed things up if it were treated like some sort of CPU; and presumably any possible smart mappings of windows to textures or sprites is already being done).
One, yes presumably a subset of slashdot users wish things would remain unchanged from 1998 (it'd only take one person on slashdot to make that true). Most people, though, I think, just want it to be the case that 1998 bleeding-edge computer technology was sufficient to simply browse the web in a sensible fashion (ie, to do email, browse for information, and do banking and other services). The fact that what was 1998 bleeding-edge technology is now closer to smart phone technology just means people want to be able to use their smart phone to browse the web. Quite simply, it's unlikely smart phones will ever approach anything close to desktop cpu power (the battery demands would be pretty insane) and be widely accepted, so any steps towards requiring modern desktop cpu power just to do casual browsing is frowned upon by a lot of people who'd rather move towards even more inclusive use of the web, not less.
Two, crappy HTML has more to do with bad design and very little to do with actual HTML standards, having Javascript, etc. Yes, a more limited standard does mean there's certain designs you can't do and at some point in very limited circumstances it really does interfere with an ability to make an acceptable design for certain content. But, the vast majority of the time it's simply people not knowing how to design well or being given directions on what to do. Btw, the problem of crappy HTML design is still one today. Portals in general are still rather guilty of overloading content on a page which is clearly bad design.
In short, it's rather silly try to conflate a desire to have more openness with some longing for a simpler time. It's not nostalgia of a "better" web that drives such consideration. It's the pragmatic desire that the web doesn't degenerate into something that's totally unusable except for a relatively small selection of computing devices purely because website designers are more obsessed with having eye candy than actually providing a useful experience to potential viewers. Beyond that, it's generally stupid to do things to limit potential customers (presuming, of course, that viewers are some sort of customer).
You know, that's the funny thing. If you want to justify your discrimination, the last thing you want to do is make yourself out to be unique, different, or special. After all, mobs tend to want to punish the minority (Frankenstein's monster, for example). But, then, I guess, it's all about the short-sightedness of only considering a very limited geographic area or limited biological selection (after all, bacteria as a grouping have a lot more basis to be all discriminatory, so the whole search for medicines to fight them off is rather crazy if you support such ideas).
Of course, like you note, it's really more about a justification than a rationalization. It rather makes one sort of wish that laws and social mores were less about "justice" and more about rationality--not that changing the word being used would really change the results for people with an agenda and a desire to paint something else for their actions since their agenda alone is so distasteful that they're unwilling to just be brutally honest about it.
Yea...not so much. What you're talking about is "sales tax", and even if you removed all exceptions under "sales tax", you're still stuck with the clear problem that (1) it unfairly punishes sellers that focus on many small sales, (2) it unfairly punished buyers that need to make any small purchases, and (3) it does nothing to stop people from just bulk purchasing things so they only every make one "transaction" per month or year (which will only further encourage conglomeration and other creative tax dodging).
In short, there's a reason there's a focus on income and not transactions when it comes to taxation.
If AGW is a byproduct of US government funded research, then 9/11 is a byproduct of US government funded terrorism. If the legitimate problem of AGW is being abused by politicians for their own agenda, then the legitimate problem of 9/11 is being abused by politicians for their own agenda. Now that it's out in black and white, while not offer some gray opinion on just how twisted the truth has been spun by politicians and exactly where things actually stand.
It all comes down to two points. One, the effects of GW on humanity is generally bad. Two, reducing CO2 release (or sequestering sufficient carbon to counter that release) will slow, stop, or reverse GW. So, who cares whether you firmly believe man is the "sole" cause? I'm more concerned with an agreement on pragmatic action.
PS - Man isn't believed to be the sole cause by most climatologists. Man just happens to be a very, very significant contributing factor.
Clearly [insert company who off-shored work to China]'s don't respect a country's right to manage their own laws. If I ran a country, and enacted some laws, and law a company refusing to follow my laws in my country, yeah I'd ban them, of course.
A country's laws, and culture, are their own to set, and not to be controlled by any outside nation. Sure we'll make exceptions for real human rights like food and water and torture. But censorship of illegal material and such doesn't come anywhere close.
*Of course, the nice irony is of course that China has a horrible record when it comes to "real" human rights--as if there were fake human rights.
I wouldn't really call it a paradox. If five kids are beating up on one kid, then that tends to represent five parents who will vote for a School Board that will hire teachers that will let their five kids do as they please; meanwhile, the one kid with their one parent will be in a much more difficult position of trying to convince other voters that it's worthwhile to protect their one child through some sort of administrative action instead of leaving it to the child to defend himself/herself, under some belief that it builds character or it's a necessary life skill to fend for oneself amongst one's peers.
In short, a complacent democracy tends to allow those who have some sort of vested interest to have their way. Of course, as you sort of note, possible lawsuits from those five parents is a pretty good extortion (aka bullying) against a populace who hates higher taxes. But, then, one could argue that bullying is allowed to happen in general because the child's peers aren't willing to be involved either in defending, even in a slight way, a random peer. My point is, bullying is just a rather good example of parental and child behavior being similar and a rather large problem with democracies in general.
Of course, once a parent perceives a "real" threat against his/her child, they're quite willing to act. So, teacher/administrator action is much more scrutinized. As much as hyperinflating an issue is a bad thing, inflating the importance of peer bullying in actual causing real harm and being a real threat isn't a bad thing. However, there's certainly a lot of communities who aren't really structured with that sort of consideration of protecting the group to protect one's own.
It's funny you say that because a lot of the time it's little glitches in IE that end up giving a user remote root. A large part of the problem is users running IE as root. But, even in environments where a program is given limited privilege, either support libraries or the OS itself has various bugs that allow first remote exploitation and then further privilege escalation. Jpeg, mp3, and zip have proven to be capable carriers of exploits precisely because of the issue that either the official support code or a common library contained an exploit; this has occurred with Windows and Linux (and I'm pretty sure Macs too). Meanwhile, Windows and Linux systems generally trust a locally running program (Windows because for the longest time programs were already root and for Linux because most users run trusted, free software) and not nearly enough effort has been put into prevent privilege escalation to root.
Well, given that basically every commonly used OS has had such built-in "minor" bugs and Windows, Linux, and Mac programs are now being built so that lots of minor bugs are turned into simple DoS attacks (by basically reducing every possible buffer overflow into a program crash), your analysis basically amounts to scrapping all modern OSs and starting over. While I rather applaud the goal and have called for it on various occasion, I do find it a bit humorous that you seem to be calling out an individual developer over the point instead of just leaping to the end conclusion.
The simple point is, development tools and the OS are simply not designed from the ground up aiming for any sort of correctness. A large part of this is that such work is very hard, generally unrewarding, and most developers consider languages that strive to aid in correctness as cumbersome or useless. Even developers who would qualify as good architects are rarely respected enough to be listened to and are generally unwilling themselves to put in the effort to do the right thing when pushed to develop something as quickly as possible.
To extend the analogy, most development projects are closer to shanty towns created from the available materials. Is it any surprise then that most software is so horribly defunct? To me, pointing out the economics of "perfect" software is very much a strawman. People don't generally want perfect software (or perfect buildings, for that matter). People generally do want software (and buildings) to be resistant against foreseeable dangers (fuzzing attacks and earthquakes). Coming in later and attaching make-shift braces to software/a building might be better than nothing. But the mentality that everything can be fixed later or worked upon later because perfect software is unobtainable really doesn't excuse not putting in the 20% or 50% more effort in design to make a system that doesn't have to be constantly updated.
The fundamental problem is that such algorithms are based on taking a small bit of information and extrapolating a result from it. It's fundamentally the reason why benchmarks are often both gamed and a very bad way of actually understanding the products being measured. The answer to the problem has consistently been shown to be not to withhold information about the way a benchmark is made, since invariably people will find a way to reverse engineer the algorithm and game it anyways; the answer is to further refine the benchmark to take more and more samples until the point that even if the benchmark is incomplete at measuring things, anything that tried to game the benchmark would still be very close to meeting what the benchmark is meant to represent.
AFAIK, that's primarily what Google has done with the page ranking algorithm. If Yelp is really worried about having a good review system, they should focus less on trying to hide how their algorithm works and more on improving their algorithm to guarantee it works. In the end, they'll remain ahead of any competitors so long as they can maintain a consistent lead on quality through such efforts. Any other mindset really is based in a belief that one has some sort of monopoly that can't be replaced. It's one of the reasons why complacent middle management, which is primarily a byproduct of large corporations, kills most corporate monopolies.
Omitting bias from a news report is impossible. There is no such things as "just the facts", even in plain text.
I believe that you're biased in that presumption.
You left out "Pelosi is a saint" and "Pelosi is the devil". And let's not forget, "Pelosi is neutral".
Life isn't fair. So? Trying to argue that two sides need to be presented to reach a conclusion is a middle ground logical fallacy. Instead of focusing on the two sides of whether red light has a shorter or longer wavelength than blue light, it is the job of journalists to try to be as factually accurate as possible and to explain where and how their facts may be incomplete. Simple bringing in two people with an opinion is simple laziness and does little to nothing to inform anyone of anything except that those two people have certain views.
If I heard an actual debate on Fox, CNN, or MSBNC on any topic of real depth I'd be outright amazed. Of course, a real debate would stretch on for hours, so I don't really think they'd be willing to allocate the time. Nah, let's just have a few people talking loudly at, not to, each other over whether violet or blue flowers look better.
Which goes to show you, people would rather laugh at comedy and get a little news than watch "news" and have dark laughter that the "news" is presented as something respectable.
Funny. Plenty of people do. 24/7 news channels are quite horrible precisely because they aren't 24/7 news. They're one to two hours of news and 22 hours of fluff to fill air time. Having said that, MSNBC/CNN both have the same issue as Fox News even when they're covering actual news: sensational focus on fluff news.
If FNC has dog *and* cat shows, it's more "Fair and Balanced" than Animal Channel? Well, who the fuck cares. I just want FNC (and MSNBC and CNN) to do decent journalism.
Personally, I wouldn't care if Bill O'Reilly were a saint. Political commentary shows are almost entirely sensational claptrap designed more to anger or energize the watchers than to engage in actual discussion. But, then, that makes perfect sense: discussion that resolves issue is relatively boring while a few people shouting their own personal views, no matter how offensive they might be, is at least interesting from the "traffic accident" aspect of it. They're really no better than daytime talk shows.
In short, I'd like to see actual news on News Channels.
Perhaps you should watch "To Be".
That's funny. I don't recall police ever doing an ID check before shooting back. No, if you're being shot at, you can claim some level of self-defense. There's nothing about a drone hit-list that's "shooting back".
Funny. I thought the whole point of the ACLU FOIA request was to see if those US citizens were actually "hanging around with enemy combatants" or not. Or does being in a "war zone" mean the US military can summarily execute any and all civilians, US or otherwise, as it pleases? Btw, as much as it's a functional war zone, it's not actually a declared one. So, even if you recognize that the military does a lot more leeway in summary executions in a war, it's not very constitutionally clear whether the military's actions are legal.
It also sucks when drones are used to simply kill women and children because someone in intelligence made a mistake. The sobering fact should be one reason wars should be ended as reasonably quickly as possible.
Imagine if we had that same mentality about criminals firing on police in the US. You do realize, btw, that we're trying to root out an insurgency, right? Pressing into civilian population centers and mowing down innocent people to kill one insurgent will, in the long term, make the civilian population not trust us, rely on us, or be willing to support our actions. It is not different than if police in the US were to behave as you suggest. If the goal of the US were merely to kill all the "bad people" in the region, without regard to civilians, we should have wiped out the entire population a long time ago. And given that "bad people" are in the US region as well, it'd be high time for the US to execute a little bit of suicide on itself.
Clearly that's irrational and speaks more of grand, generalized anger. It's no way to succeed at the task at hand, however, which is to help create stability in the region. Gun ho executions aren't the answer.
Right. If I put the postcard in my window for the public to see, I don't enjoy any protection. Once it's in the mail box, though, there's no real public to view it. Now, perhaps some person in public will stalk that postcard trying to catch glimpses every instance it might be made somewhat available to the public to view (which may be never), but this of course doesn't translate into being able to order the mail carrier to let you see the postcard, breaking into the mail box, or walking into the post office sorting room to look around.
In short, even if you were to make the analogy of an unencrypted email being like a postcard, I don't see how you'd be able to reasonably view the email anyways. After all, it's not like the police are standing inside an ISP's lobby and catching the contents of an email off the reflection of a receptionist's glasses as the email is delivered. This is all about ordering people to disclose information that otherwise isn't public.
When you die, you belong to no one. While you're alive, you can't transfer property rights over your body (one living person can't own another living person) and when you're dead you're not alive to agree to the transfer. Things like wills are constructions of the state to enforce property rights after you're dead. To that end, the state has a lot of power to possess things when you're dead. The fact that a vast majority of people might in fact want to put your body to good use when you're dead is, at least from a moral perspective, a good basis for supporting opt-out systems, anyways. It's not like, after all, you can't say "no" (and yes, clerical errors will likely occur, but there's no way to get around that since you'll be too dead to answer).
Then you must free very suspicious of the legal system in general. Not only can it take your property, it can also take your liberty or your life. There's no real way to opt-out of it except leaving the State (and even then, extradition can get you); but, then, leaving the State also protects you from the opt-out donor system.
And estates are a by-product of State law (or a family with a lot of guns and a willingness to defend the property). This is, fundamentally, no different than estate tax laws. If you're really against the whole concept of your corpse being possibly used for organ donation, feel free to vote against it and opt-out if a law pass. But, if the vast majority wants an opt-out system, you don't much standing to complain, really.
It's an interesting point, but I think you're blaming the wrong element. To demonstrate, think of a medical procedure called "circumcision". There have been various studies done that shown, among other things, the lack of a foreskin decreases the chance of contracting HIV and virtually eliminates the risk of penis cancer. In short, the reason newborn males should have part of their body removed--clearly a much more invasive procedure than an injection--is to improve their further sex life.
No, that's really not it. The issue is two fold.
One, conservatives are conservative. That means, if a man and his father were circumcised, their child should be too. If any group tries to counter their claim with some rationality of the questionable nature of their actions, they'll fund research to justify their position. If the research is fruitless, they'll still claim their ends.
Two, many people are incredibly risk aversive. At the same time, these people rarely have a good understanding of the actual rate of risk and how to actually be risk aversive. So, they'd rather avoid vaccines to avoid autism than take an HPV vaccine to avoid HPV. Or, they'll be dreadfully fearful of terrorists instead of pushing for higher car safety standards. In the end, the people who speak loudly enough make it appear that whatever it is they're talking about much be important or their message wouldn't be heard so often.
Personally, I'm general against forced and/or routine circumcision or HPV vaccination. The actual risk of penis cancer or cervix cancer in the general population is quite low. The benefits of lower STD contraction don't seem very compelling either. The HPV vaccine seems more justifiable, given that in no way could the act be seen as a form of mutilation, but in both cases it would seem the best course of action would be to leave it to individuals (ie not parents, politicians, etc) to make the decision. Doctors might provide valid reason for the procedures (higher penis/cervix cancer rates in the family that imply a specific benefit), just as currently doctors will at times prescribe birth control bills.
In short, it's a great thing that the HPV vaccine exists just like many other vaccines and medicine exists. That doesn't mean there's a particularly good reason for widespread use upon all populations at all times. Now, if this were all part of a campaign to eliminate HPV worldwide (and not just a country-wide thing, which is sadly how many marginal-complication diseases with vaccines go), it'd be a whole other thing. But, the money could be better spent, in all likelihood, in slightly increasing the effectiveness of airbags. That is much more likely to aid a girl in her chances of living to become an old woman.
Tip #1: Don't use a computer. Computers are Linear Bound Automatons, which grant them far too much computational power to be considerable to a no-fuss appliance.
Tip #2: Don't use IE. Even if IE is more secure on average, it's still a larger target because of market share. Hence, there's more fuss with using IE.
Tip #3: Don't use Windows. See the note about IE market share and fuss.
Tip #4: Don't use the web. The web is inherently full of things to fuss over. Yes, this rather goes against the point about what the general public wants, but obviously the general public in choosing a computer is already making bad choices; if we're thinking of "what is best", we really have to throw out the general public's stated wants and get back to their underlying desires. So, more mail shipments of journals, magazines, and videos. Also, more phone use would be wise.
Yes, this is a problem with any sort of expensive care, especially the long-term kind.
Yes, that's always important.
I'm going to have to go with no. In the end, it is not your position, my position, or the loved one's position to choose how or if a patient should continue treatment. It is the patient who will have to live with the consequences of their choices and to take away those choices with a mantra that one must "keep on trying" regardless of the futility of the action condemns people to situations where they are forced to endure needless suffering to placate the wishes of others. If it is wrong to coerce or steer people to give up, it is certainly as wrong to coerce or steer people to keep on trying.
As devastating as polio was, it was never a "survival of the species" threat. Flu regularly kills many more people. No, the reason polio was targeted was because of its debilitating effects on survivors that had neurological infection. In fact, small pox was likely targeted for a similar reason (facial scares were common in many and like polio, there was a small chance of adverse secondary effects; in smallpox, those secondary effects were blindness and limb deformity)--of course, the existence of an effective vaccine for 99% of strains help. Of course, for polio the "March of Dimes" actually started *before* a vaccine was created. It took the disability of a president (FDR) to push a business-type man to really see the polio thing through, not simply as a program to create a vaccine (which was being researched regardless) but as a means to eliminate the disease across the whole US.
Btw, the really bad part of infected machines has more to do with copying a person's financial records, not the possible spamming. Perhaps that will motivate people to push for an actually secure system.
I see, so what you're saying is Microsoft couldn't release Win7/IE8 to improve security because people are still using Win XP/IE6? No, Microsoft can't "force" people to upgrade their systems. But, clearly, if Microsoft doesn't even bother to make a secure system, then it's quite impossible for people to upgrade to a Microsoft-produced secure system. Yes, people will still choose to run insecure systems. This whole discussion isn't about the fact that XP boxes can be infected (as ridiculous as the mentioned defect is). It's that Win7/IE8 isn't a secure OS/web browser. Yes, DEP and ASLR can help things (btw, IE8 under XP runs with DEP too), but they're merely stopgaps. So is OS X.
Yep, that link proves my point about DEP/ASLR in Win7/IE8 being a stopgap.
So, because in the past there was malware, inherent there must be malware. Hmm..I guess small pox and polio are just things we'll forever have to deal with*.
Oh, I have little doubt of that. Computers are insecure because we accept that. Linux might be more secure but in many ways it's only marginally so. A Unix-clone is no more the salvation of computer technology than the malware ridden SunOS you mentioned before. The fact that OSs are generally written under a bad design is the fundamental problem, but it's not really an insurmountable one.
It's funny, but that's precisely the reason why secure software is possible. The x86 processor is a known device. The software running on it is known. The chance of cosmic rays changing software is known and compensable. As you note, the current structure of development is focused on it taking but one lazy coder, QA guy, or ancestor code from libraries for something bad to happen. Yet, odds are good that most programs do not to be written in turing complete languages. In fact, technically, software isn't written on turing machines. Quite simply, there are various design decisions that can reduce much software as automatically provably correct and the vast majority that cannot be automatically proven correct can be either manually proven correct or tested with sufficient tolerance by sufficient numbers of people that actual bugs in the software and the design are so remote that, while not a non-issue, would not be remotely in the field of "computers are insecure".
Now, this is some truth to this. Having a secure computer is near worthless if the user has no value to keeping the system secure. Yet, clearly, the issue is that users cannot reasonably associate one's actions with harm. This is in vast part because the things that software done is significantly hidden and unreversable. To make an analogy, it would be like being the guard at a prison and having merely the capability to allow or deny a person without being able to search them at any time, generally witness their activities but only the results at the end of the day, or readily revert the damage a visitor might do. Clearly, the granting power to the user cannot simply be allow or deny. Perhaps there are many who do not care or wish to c
No, the really funny part is how she twists a few statistics. Once she interjected some Iraq/Afghanistan veteran murder stats and interjected "[inasmuch] as males commit nearly 90 percent of all murders", she calculated "about 30 to 55 murderers per 100,000 males aged 18 to 35". Of course, silly her, she didn't do the same stat stat shift on the verteran numbers to show "about 8.6 murders per 100,000 male veterans" and inflates the ~3.9 to ~7.2 adjusted non-veteran to non-adjusted veteran murder rate to "about 10"; meanwhile, it's closer to ~3.45 to ~6.3 adjusted non-veteran to adjusted veteran murder rate which is about 6, actually. Of course, all the numbers show that 99.9945% of even the "high" murder non-veteran male aged 18 to 35 group don't murder. I'd presume her later "single mother" stats are just as fucked up given she seems to phrase things the same.
In short, instead of making up factor (1; young males) and factor (2; D&D players) and presuming it has to be one of those things, why not, you know, look at the actual group you're talking about to see if you're just outright wrong about what factors are actually involved. Btw, for all I know, D&D users murder are at a much higher rate than the average population. But, then, I'm more interested in what percentage of murderers are D&D players vs how many D&D players are not murderers, not some comparison to the general population which tends not to be killers.
But, that's the thing. Linux users don't complain that Windows is successful. Linux users complain that other people are effectively locked into Windows due to Microsoft's various tie-in tactics and hence Linux users have to fuss with Windows, directly or indirectly, as a by-product.
The same argument could be made about Google, except the tie-in tactics are generally not nearly as forceful (there's been less by-outs or banning of services). To that end, yes, I'm one of those people who call out Google when they try to force tie-ins instead of merely providing them. But, then, I'm one of those dirty /. Linux users. It couldn't be at all possible that I'm skeptical of Microsoft, especially when their claims seem to amount to merely the complaint "It's not fair that Google is successful." Generalities of evilness or goodness don't tend to win me over.
Yes, older thermometers are less reliable and hence temperature data has to be corrected for just like things like urban island effect has to be corrected for today.
And apparently my joke went over your head. Yes, of course the ice core data is used by AGW proponents (and climatologists in general). The seeming discrepancies in the ice core data, at least in recent time, is well accounted for in models, actually; I don't mean fudged, btw--things like the Medieval Warm Period occurring in Greenland and/or Europe doesn't mean that it was a global event (Souther Hemisphere data indicates it wasn't). It very well might have had to do with the North Atlantic Current.
The real question to ask is, why is it that current models only map well to current temperatures when man-released CO2 is a significant component in the noted global warming; that is why don't things like methane, natural CO2, solar variance, etc account for nearly all the warming?