The vast majority of people today simply neither want nor understand privacy.
Actually, I can see Facebook changing this. Once enough people have been horribly stung through not caring about privacy, I would think that would change.
Around the timeframe discussed in the article, the company I was working for had IBM desktop PCs. We had exactly the same problem in a few models - faulty capacitors caused them to fail early. The solution was easy - replace the motherboards.
However, there are two major issues at stake here:
1. How Dell handled the issue as a whole. According to TFA, they tried to hush it up. Anyone with half a brain in the IT industry at the time could see exactly what was going on, quite how anyone at Dell concluded that they could succeed in a cover-up is beyond me. 2. How every major vendor handled dealing with individual customers. At the time, more than one company had a very strict policy that their helpdesk staff wouldn't deal with issues concerning more than one system in a call. It's one thing to have to put the phone down and call again when you've got two or three systems to get a tech sent out for and once they're done they're done, it's quite another when you've got a few systems failing every damn day and your own IT staff are spending more time on the phone to your vendor to get a tech out than they are on the phone to your own staff they're meant to be providing support for. Ideally you'd want to arrange to identify every affected system in the business and get motherboards in all of them replaced, but this generally takes a certain degree of negotiation because no vendor wants to pay for this (even if the buck stops with them).
It took us some serious discussion with IBM (probably helped by the fact that our parent company spend £several million/annum) to get every motherboard replaced, knowing Dell I wouldn't be surprised if few if any of their customers succeeded in getting this done.
We already know that your children can't possibly fall into the fourth set, and so looking at the sets it appears that the probability should be 1/3. But this misses one minor point - you've added an extra set which only makes sense if you wish to attach significance to the order in which the children were born (Sets 2 and 3). But as soon as you do attach that significance, the information you are given in order to establish the probability of any particular outcome (eg. the boy is older) allows you to eliminate two sets rather than just one.
IME, when it's a relatively small sum of money most companies will write it off when the person who's involved has died. Life insurance is generally used for those things that are so big that it's utterly unreasonable to expect that (eg. a mortgage).
True, but in this context my guess is they're websites for relatively obscure government services which only get a few hundred people requesting information per annum anyway. It makes far more sense for such obscure services to either be axed altogether or for their websites to be all lumped together in one big portal - it honestly wouldn't surprise me if these websites are so expensive because each and every one of them is hosted on a dedicated box complete with separate backend database server, some sort of middleware application server, guaranteed bandwidth of at least 100Mbps and at least three separate very expensive commercial applications covered by 24x7 support contracts. When frankly, all they need is a dozen pages on a wiki with limited write access somewhere.
(What "declared redundant" is British for what us Americans call "laid-off"? I guess that's the point...)
"Redundant" in employment terms means "your job doesn't need to exist any more, so we're getting rid of it". That might be because you have two people doing much the same thing but the workloads dropped, it might be because you're outsourcing a function or it might be because the employee works for a subsidiary company that's being closed down. There are all sorts of legal hoops that have to be gone through, though - the concept of at-will employment simply doesn't exist in Europe (and frankly, some of the things I've heard about people being fired for in the US scare me. Exactly how many companies have "you must grovel properly" as an unofficial job requirement for all their staff?!).
Having said that, IME most businesses pay little more than lip-service to their legal requirements so they've got something to point at if they're taken to court.
The burden of proof for such civil suits is "balance of probabilities". I guarantee you they would make a big deal of your sign ("why did you feel the need to put up a sign? you said yourself your bands don't play any covers, what are you hiding?"), and you'd wind up spending a lot of time in court defending yourself.
It's all very well talking all gung-ho "let them sue me" on/. but most business owners tend to be rather more pragmatic. Going to court isn't going to pay your bills, and paying a lawyer to go on your behalf is going to add substantially to your costs - for most small businesses, it'd probably add more to their costs than they can afford.
I can, actually. Change the definition of what constitutes "a work protected by copyright" so that it only covers works where a particular set of rights are reserved as a minimum, along with the option to obtain those rights through a traditional contract where there is a meeting of the minds and some sort of consideration.
Everything that doesn't come under that heading is not protected by copyright and so is essentially public domain. The output of the likes of the MPAA, the RIAA and artists under the umbrella of ASCAP would almost certainly be already covered, but anyone using copyright to do things like distribute work relatively freely yet guarantee a few basic things like attribution would suddenly find that their work became rather too free.
I don't know. On the other hand, the industry has gotten a lot better at reusing connections and being backwards-compatible. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.1, I believe. Serially attached SCSI uses the same connection as SATA. We haven't moved beyond 24 pin motherboard power connectors for ages. The new SDXC standard still accepts regular SD cards. The examples go on and on.
So does the testing if you want to be sure your Super Whizzy USB 6.0 port actually works with USB 1.1 products. How many manufacturers do you reckon are likely to do that if and when we eventually find ourselves with a USB version 6?
Except historically, it's not been character encoding that's the problem. It's been lifespan of suitable media reading equipment.
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media. There are one or two companies around that specialise in getting data from old media onto newer media, and they charge an arm and a leg. There's a reason for this.
Guarantees a wave of US-based businesses looking at how they can avoid being subject to it, just as likely.
I can see lots of companies re-structuring their affairs so - legally - the US company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a company based somewhere else entirely. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if any company doing that took it one step further and made sure the parent company was in a country with surprisingly favourable tax legislation.
This is one of those "let's ask for something absolutely absurd, then when it gets thrown out we can offer a compromise that sounds more reasonable but in actual fact is all we ever wanted in the first place" things.
The reason I think this is twofold:
1. VoIP. Many organisations would be unable to make phone calls.
2. Globalisation of the economy.
There's no earthly way the business interests in the US would stand for this, and you'd have to be such a mouth-breathing moron to think they might that it's doubtful you'd remember to get up in the morning. Far more likely this is going to get bargained down to something like "no net neutrality".
- The law of unintended consequences (something that politicians the world over seem incredibly slow to grasp) - Electronic financial transactions. - Corporate globalisation and the internet's role in enabling that.
Actually, one quarter (49/200) of the root DNS servers are in the US. I checked last Friday, after this discussion came up elsewhere. The remainder would be congested, but probably able to stay upright.
Regardless. shutting down "access at the ISP level" is pretty much a meaningless statement. Specifically, it says, "private companies -- such as "broadband providers, search engines, and software firms -- immediately comply with any emergency measure or action"
Search engines. That means that google and yahoo will shut down--worldwide.
I wonder how likely it is Google would re-structure their business to be able to avoid this?
Broadband providers. ISPs. Companies that aren't ISPs buy their access _from_ ISPs. This isn't just Joe down the street and Susie's Bead Shoppe, it's major oil companies and banks.
What about international shipping companies that coordinate through the internet? Trains? Airlines? Stock markets? All of it will grind to a screeching halt, with massive economic damage over the next weeks or months or years. The rest of the world _will_ survive a 'loss of the US' on the internet, although not without collateral damage.
I'd add hosting companies to that, a lot of organisations worldwide host some or many important systems on an outside company that has its servers in the US. Though this has not historically been something the US has cared about.
But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result.
If you're collaborating on something that, say, will eventually become a document, it's next to useless because you still need to re-write the fruits of your labour into that document. With a Wiki, that's a non-issue because you're working towards the final version.
More useful would be real-time collaboration integrated with Google Sites and Google Docs.
On the third point about the elderly, of course nobody is giving them the Soylent Green treatment, but we do have something that's almost as bad. They end up in shitty state-run nursing homes, being abused by badly trained staff. Don't be poor and old in the UK because the government will sweep you under the carpet and call it "progress".
Don't get me started on that. My own grandmother was a bed-blocker herself for a while, and IMO care for the elderly is one of the biggest clusterf*cks in UK society today.
Mercifully, she had the money to pay for her own nursing care and relatives to ensure it was drip-fed into the system as appropriate. Without the money, she'd have been in a far worse home and without the relatives, there's a good chance the government would have just stepped in, seized the lot and she'd have got the care they saw fit to give her. I'm a bit more concerned about my mum, who is in that awkward middle position of having enough assets that she won't be given much free but doesn't have enough to guarantee high-quality care for any length of time.
I don't know if you're actually in the UK, but a lot of people reading/. are in the US and will make assumptions. It's probably worth explaining a few things now.
While it would be true to say that - by and large - if you're seriously ill you will be well looked after, there are all sorts of caveats:
If you might (note: might. Not will) benefit from a particular treatment which is very expensive, but there's a much cheaper treatment available which isn't quite so effective, there's a good chance you'll get the cheaper treatment. Even if it's for something really serious and most people would take every option available, even if the benefit was small. There are hundreds of drugs on the market for which this is exactly the case, though the ones you see in the news are generally for something serious like cancer.
If leaving it for a while is not going to kill you and it requires individual attention (eg. surgery), you'll go on a waiting list. In fact, if the doctor isn't particularly worried there's a good chance you'll go on a waiting list just for a diagnostic procedure. There's nothing stopping you buying private treatment as a one-off or - if you're insured - having your insurer cover it, but if you buy it as a one-off it'll be damn expensive, and many insurance policies don't cover diagnostic procedures.
We have a big problem - and there's no nice way of saying this - with elderly people. Current technology is very good at keeping you healthy way longer than would have been even thinkable 40 or 50 years ago, unfortunately it's not very good at doing so cheaply. From here, it looks like the media in the US are convinced that this problem affects any nationalised healthcare system (it probably does) and that any nationalised healthcare system will solve it by taking little old ladies out in the middle of the night and shooting them, and if one of those little old ladies is your granny then so be it (Can't say I've ever heard of this in any sane country).
Healthcare is administered regionally by what are called trusts, and every healthcare trust has a finite budget. Some of them spend this budget on fancy buildings, some spend it on fancy equipment, some spend it on employing as many staff they can get. Few, if any, have the money to spend it on all of the above, and quite a few seem unable to find a happy medium.
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The vast majority of people today simply neither want nor understand privacy.
Actually, I can see Facebook changing this. Once enough people have been horribly stung through not caring about privacy, I would think that would change.
Around the timeframe discussed in the article, the company I was working for had IBM desktop PCs. We had exactly the same problem in a few models - faulty capacitors caused them to fail early. The solution was easy - replace the motherboards.
However, there are two major issues at stake here:
1. How Dell handled the issue as a whole. According to TFA, they tried to hush it up. Anyone with half a brain in the IT industry at the time could see exactly what was going on, quite how anyone at Dell concluded that they could succeed in a cover-up is beyond me.
2. How every major vendor handled dealing with individual customers. At the time, more than one company had a very strict policy that their helpdesk staff wouldn't deal with issues concerning more than one system in a call. It's one thing to have to put the phone down and call again when you've got two or three systems to get a tech sent out for and once they're done they're done, it's quite another when you've got a few systems failing every damn day and your own IT staff are spending more time on the phone to your vendor to get a tech out than they are on the phone to your own staff they're meant to be providing support for. Ideally you'd want to arrange to identify every affected system in the business and get motherboards in all of them replaced, but this generally takes a certain degree of negotiation because no vendor wants to pay for this (even if the buck stops with them).
It took us some serious discussion with IBM (probably helped by the fact that our parent company spend £several million/annum) to get every motherboard replaced, knowing Dell I wouldn't be surprised if few if any of their customers succeeded in getting this done.
It's playing games with words and attaching significance to two sets that in any practical case I can think of would be considered one.
The argument is that if you were to consider it as a set, there are four possible ways for your children to be distributed:
1. (Boy, Boy)
2. (Boy, Girl)
3. (Girl, Boy)
4. (Girl, Girl)
We already know that your children can't possibly fall into the fourth set, and so looking at the sets it appears that the probability should be 1/3. But this misses one minor point - you've added an extra set which only makes sense if you wish to attach significance to the order in which the children were born (Sets 2 and 3). But as soon as you do attach that significance, the information you are given in order to establish the probability of any particular outcome (eg. the boy is older) allows you to eliminate two sets rather than just one.
Remember, the zero percent chance of sunshine is a bonus to nerds who prefer damp dank dark basements to ply their neferious trade.
They might be a bit disappointed to discover that very few UK houses have basements then.
IME, when it's a relatively small sum of money most companies will write it off when the person who's involved has died. Life insurance is generally used for those things that are so big that it's utterly unreasonable to expect that (eg. a mortgage).
Quite the reverse; IME anyone who writes absurdly complicated prose is almost always trying to hide the fact that they're a total moron.
Unfortunately that would make ensuring the batteries are a proprietary spare part rather harder.
True, but in this context my guess is they're websites for relatively obscure government services which only get a few hundred people requesting information per annum anyway. It makes far more sense for such obscure services to either be axed altogether or for their websites to be all lumped together in one big portal - it honestly wouldn't surprise me if these websites are so expensive because each and every one of them is hosted on a dedicated box complete with separate backend database server, some sort of middleware application server, guaranteed bandwidth of at least 100Mbps and at least three separate very expensive commercial applications covered by 24x7 support contracts. When frankly, all they need is a dozen pages on a wiki with limited write access somewhere.
(What "declared redundant" is British for what us Americans call "laid-off"? I guess that's the point...)
"Redundant" in employment terms means "your job doesn't need to exist any more, so we're getting rid of it". That might be because you have two people doing much the same thing but the workloads dropped, it might be because you're outsourcing a function or it might be because the employee works for a subsidiary company that's being closed down. There are all sorts of legal hoops that have to be gone through, though - the concept of at-will employment simply doesn't exist in Europe (and frankly, some of the things I've heard about people being fired for in the US scare me. Exactly how many companies have "you must grovel properly" as an unofficial job requirement for all their staff?!).
Having said that, IME most businesses pay little more than lip-service to their legal requirements so they've got something to point at if they're taken to court.
The burden of proof for such civil suits is "balance of probabilities". I guarantee you they would make a big deal of your sign ("why did you feel the need to put up a sign? you said yourself your bands don't play any covers, what are you hiding?"), and you'd wind up spending a lot of time in court defending yourself.
It's all very well talking all gung-ho "let them sue me" on /. but most business owners tend to be rather more pragmatic. Going to court isn't going to pay your bills, and paying a lawyer to go on your behalf is going to add substantially to your costs - for most small businesses, it'd probably add more to their costs than they can afford.
I can, actually. Change the definition of what constitutes "a work protected by copyright" so that it only covers works where a particular set of rights are reserved as a minimum, along with the option to obtain those rights through a traditional contract where there is a meeting of the minds and some sort of consideration.
Everything that doesn't come under that heading is not protected by copyright and so is essentially public domain. The output of the likes of the MPAA, the RIAA and artists under the umbrella of ASCAP would almost certainly be already covered, but anyone using copyright to do things like distribute work relatively freely yet guarantee a few basic things like attribution would suddenly find that their work became rather too free.
Hang on a minute, you sound like you know what you're talking about. WTF are you doing on /. ?
I don't know. On the other hand, the industry has gotten a lot better at reusing connections and being backwards-compatible. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 1.1, I believe. Serially attached SCSI uses the same connection as SATA. We haven't moved beyond 24 pin motherboard power connectors for ages. The new SDXC standard still accepts regular SD cards. The examples go on and on.
So does the testing if you want to be sure your Super Whizzy USB 6.0 port actually works with USB 1.1 products. How many manufacturers do you reckon are likely to do that if and when we eventually find ourselves with a USB version 6?
Except historically, it's not been character encoding that's the problem. It's been lifespan of suitable media reading equipment.
I defy you to find a cheap, easy way to read 50 year old media, even if the media itself is in pristine condition. Hell, I'll even make it easier for you and set the limit at 30 year old media. There are one or two companies around that specialise in getting data from old media onto newer media, and they charge an arm and a leg. There's a reason for this.
Guarantees a wave of US-based businesses looking at how they can avoid being subject to it, just as likely.
I can see lots of companies re-structuring their affairs so - legally - the US company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a company based somewhere else entirely. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if any company doing that took it one step further and made sure the parent company was in a country with surprisingly favourable tax legislation.
This is one of those "let's ask for something absolutely absurd, then when it gets thrown out we can offer a compromise that sounds more reasonable but in actual fact is all we ever wanted in the first place" things.
The reason I think this is twofold:
1. VoIP. Many organisations would be unable to make phone calls.
2. Globalisation of the economy.
There's no earthly way the business interests in the US would stand for this, and you'd have to be such a mouth-breathing moron to think they might that it's doubtful you'd remember to get up in the morning. Far more likely this is going to get bargained down to something like "no net neutrality".
You'd have to explain quite a few more concepts:
- The law of unintended consequences (something that politicians the world over seem incredibly slow to grasp)
- Electronic financial transactions.
- Corporate globalisation and the internet's role in enabling that.
Actually, one quarter (49/200) of the root DNS servers are in the US. I checked last Friday, after this discussion came up elsewhere. The remainder would be congested, but probably able to stay upright.
Regardless. shutting down "access at the ISP level" is pretty much a meaningless statement. Specifically, it says, "private companies -- such as "broadband providers, search engines, and software firms -- immediately comply with any emergency measure or action"
Search engines. That means that google and yahoo will shut down--worldwide.
I wonder how likely it is Google would re-structure their business to be able to avoid this?
Broadband providers. ISPs. Companies that aren't ISPs buy their access _from_ ISPs. This isn't just Joe down the street and Susie's Bead Shoppe, it's major oil companies and banks.
What about international shipping companies that coordinate through the internet? Trains? Airlines? Stock markets? All of it will grind to a screeching halt, with massive economic damage over the next weeks or months or years. The rest of the world _will_ survive a 'loss of the US' on the internet, although not without collateral damage.
I'd add hosting companies to that, a lot of organisations worldwide host some or many important systems on an outside company that has its servers in the US. Though this has not historically been something the US has cared about.
If you listened to all the fanboi rumblings, you'd have given up years ago and bought an abacus.
You know, we have all these fancy filtering and tagging things but outside of IT, I don't think I've ever seen a single one used.
The only thing I have seen used is folders, but then the end-user almost invariably moves email into folders by hand.
They never had any entitlements to begin with ;)
I wouldn't quite go that far:
http://www.dataliberation.org/
But Wave is a particular issue because it's not supported for data export right now.
But what you wind up with is something that looks like an interactive chat session - you can put together ideas that way but there's no structure to the end result.
If you're collaborating on something that, say, will eventually become a document, it's next to useless because you still need to re-write the fruits of your labour into that document. With a Wiki, that's a non-issue because you're working towards the final version.
More useful would be real-time collaboration integrated with Google Sites and Google Docs.
On the third point about the elderly, of course nobody is giving them the Soylent Green treatment, but we do have something that's almost as bad. They end up in shitty state-run nursing homes, being abused by badly trained staff. Don't be poor and old in the UK because the government will sweep you under the carpet and call it "progress".
Don't get me started on that. My own grandmother was a bed-blocker herself for a while, and IMO care for the elderly is one of the biggest clusterf*cks in UK society today.
Mercifully, she had the money to pay for her own nursing care and relatives to ensure it was drip-fed into the system as appropriate. Without the money, she'd have been in a far worse home and without the relatives, there's a good chance the government would have just stepped in, seized the lot and she'd have got the care they saw fit to give her. I'm a bit more concerned about my mum, who is in that awkward middle position of having enough assets that she won't be given much free but doesn't have enough to guarantee high-quality care for any length of time.
I don't know if you're actually in the UK, but a lot of people reading /. are in the US and will make assumptions. It's probably worth explaining a few things now.
While it would be true to say that - by and large - if you're seriously ill you will be well looked after, there are all sorts of caveats: